I'm from Torrance, CA, a suburb of Los Angeles. Big Lakers fan. My family is from London, England.
I debated whether or not to put this under the projects tab, but decided that this pursuit isn't official enough to be listed under projects.
I've been interested in this ever since I suffered a bad shoulder injury while playing basketball, and then was able to talk to some friends who were an assortment of athletic trainers, physical therapists, and grad students in kinesiology. What I found was that I really really enjoyed talking to them, because they helped me understand the body as a structure, after which we were able to exchange our knowledge and learn a lot from each other.
Recently I made a short video giving a basic introduction to understanding your musculoskeletal system through the lens of structural engineering, which you can find here.
This is very much a work in progress, so if you have nay suggestions, please feel free to contact me through any of the means listed on my resume!
Philosophy in a way is a bunch of glorified self help books. However, there's much more reasoning involved in it than a bunch of feel good quotes. Philosophy in that way becomes not so much about how to be a good person, but how to be a good thinker. Only if you find a train of solid reasoning that concludes it's better to be a good person, then you should be a good person. See the difference? Luckily for us, and everyone around you, many philosophers have a million reasonings on why you should be a good person. Even the Hedonists like Epicurus reason that it's better to be kind.
But that's beside the point. The real value behind philosophy is how studying it and engaging with it trains you to think creatively as well as rationally, as well as the many things you can learn from hearing what some of the smartest and most painfully self-aware people throughout history had to say.
This book is really Socrates at his best. Plato was living in a time where many of the actions of the Athenean democracy made him feel disillusioned with the people and government.("Ahem, for one, the execution of his teacher, Socrates.") Gorgias isn't so much a hard critique of democracy, but more a smooth analysis of illogical aspects of human nature that make democracy difficult.
The book is a dialogue between Socrates and Gorgias, as well as a few of Gorgias' students. Gorgias was a sort of politician/lawyer figure in Athenean democracy who taught his students the "art" of rhetoric. That is, to be able to take any postion in an argument and win over the masses. Socrates critiques Gorgias as teaching his students a powerful skill with no regard for morality. Socrates argues that Gorgias doesn't teach his students how to argue in a way that gets to the truth of something, which would be best for everyone involved, but he teaches them how to "win", and accumulate power for themselves.
This book is really classic Socrates. He doesn't shove his conclusions down anyone's throat. He merely asks people questions, and eventually the truth is found through a series of premises that people agree upon.
The biggest takeaway however is the insight into how Socrates thinks that enables him to find the truth of matters. He reasons that it is "better to lose an argument than to win one." If you lose, you're a better person, you've been righted, but if you win, you gain nothing. This, as well as his assertion that he knows nothing, are what make Socrates the skilled reasoner that he is, as they remove bias from his reasoning and make him always a learner.
During the 20th Century, many philosophers sought to answer the growing occurrence of nihilism they saw in people throughout the world. Religion didn't hold the weight it used to in the minds of the masses, and many lived unable to deal with the objective meaninglessness of life. Camus called this the "absurd." It's kind of the feeling you get when you see a picture of Earth from space and the feeling of panic you might experience when you think "oh my god we're all just monkeys on a rock."
"The Plague" isn't so much a hard reasoned train of logic like other philosophical works. It's a work of fiction about a town in France in the 1940s that becomes overwhelmed with the Bubonic Plague. The real genius and compassion of Camus is the implied recognition of all these people's actions as resulting from how they choose to deal with the absurd. They're all forced to confront it, death and danger is on their door, and yet they don't behave nearly as rationally as you'd hope.
I'd recommend reading Camus' other work "The Myth of Sisyphus" before reading this one to get a better understanding of how Camus thinks and what he champions as an adequate response to feelings of absurdity.
If you've seen the recent movie "Don't Look Up" with Leonardo DiCaprio, it's striking how similar it is to this work. Of course it's not copying anything. These works are rooted in observations of reality.
I do Stand Up! I'm not trying to go anywhere with it, it's just a fun thing to do. Laughing is a good feeling, and making someone laugh is almost as good as that. I've been doing shows here and there around San Diego for free, mostly at Mad House Comedy Club.
I've been playing chess for about a decade now, and I haven't improved much. I won 3rd place in a chess tournament at my elementary school. Doesn't sound so impressive until I say that my opening was to zig zag my pawns across the board. I retired after that and only play for fun, usually on Chess.com. My peak rating was somewhere in the 1800s, but that was over a century ago so I don't know the exact number.
I've played a lot of sports over the years, and I still play basketball often, but the sport that's really mine is Tennis. I played 4 years in high school, mostly singles on varsity. It's a great way to let some energy out and stay active and have fun.
I've been skating since around the same time I started playing chess. It's been a while since I learned any new tricks, but I'm good enough to make it a fun and expressive form of transportation. Although, as I've gotten older and bigger and the falls start hurting more it's harder to keep going for anything flashy.