Nobody likes to be buckled down by reason, yet expects everyone else around them to be. Ironic isn't it. I mean, nobody likes belligerent angry people, yet can somehow empathize if they can understand the reasons. For instance, look at how murder is instituted by the judiciary system. Consider the term, "crimes of passion." I mean essentially, its a term to describe, "oh well i sort of understand why he's angry, so he'll face a lesser sentence."

If you're happy because good things have happened to you, you're considered to be fortunate. If you're happy for no apparent reason, you're a crackpot. If you're angry for no reason, you're a psychopath. If you're sad for no reason, you're a maniac-depressant. Or for that matter, reasons others can't understand.

Yet should the reason be more important than the feeling to ourselves? Or rather do our feelings need to have reasons? Do we need to rationalize our emotions, or do they follow some non-linear path?

I know I personally struggle with this a lot, in the sense that I'd like to believe that my feelings are attuned to reason. As if there were some mathematical formula, where I could accomplish x + y and then take the whole root and end up with enough happiness to last me the week. I think I often look at other people who appear to be happy as well, and try to emulate their actions in the vain attempt to capture some of those feelings. A lot of time I find myself asking why I'm not happy, trying to almost argue myself into happiness. Look at all these things that should make you happy, what's the flipping matter with you?? Not only that, I'm also really bad and get easily confused about causes for feelings as well. For instance, someone could give me a gold watch and a pineapple as a gift and I would be ecstatic at the time, but then spend the next couple of months buying pineapples and then cursing the damn fruit for not making me happy. Do you know of any such pineapples?

Maybe my whole approach is wrong, and maybe there is some formula, but perhaps a more dynamic one. Instead of requiring an exact x, I need to add any letter after q. I find that happiness usually comes as a surprise and when I least expect it. The truth is, I know very little about my inner workings, and the harder I struggle to control it, the less things work out the way I want it to.

[ esca | 9:55 AM | ]

 

With Yao Ming lighting up the highlight reels in the US, reports say that China is now grooming some new 200 7-footers to be the next Yao Ming. Geeeez

That just sounds weird, sick, and laughable at the same time. Goes to show what 1.3 billion people can really do.

[ esca | 9:26 AM | ]

 

This stuff is amazing...

I was reading a newsletter for my company, and we've got sharks with fricking laser beams attached to their heads. We now have chemical lasers that can intercept airborne 30 inch artillery projectiles exceeding the speed of sound and disintegrate them. Oh yeah, slower moving short range rockets are no problem either. wowow

This is like game breaker magnitude. Something like this is going neceesarily revolutionize modern warfare. Projectile weapons? Gone...useless. They are talking now about refining the technology to produce higher energy output in both chemical powered laser form as well as electric solid state lasers. Capable of focusing heat and energy with pinpoint accuracy and unlimited range and ungodly speed...

Wow, this is the stuff sci-fi is made out of, except i guess its just sci now.

[ esca | 9:01 AM | ]

 

The Monkey's Dilemma

Take a group of monkeys and have them hammer away at typewriters with endless feeds of paper until the end of time, and they will eventually produce countless novels of fine literature of remarkable intrigue. No? Not possible? Can an infinite combination of random keystrokes and letters eventually produce a seemingly non-random arrangement of letters that depict grandiose tales of romance and epic battles and postulate interesting hypothetical questions like this?

As a software minded person, I know that any piece of data can be reduced to bits, one and zeros, seemingly meaningless directly, but meaningful in the whole. You can take any picture, and reduce it to bits. Can you take bits, and make it into a picture? Is it possible to start with those ones and zero and then construct images? Why stop there? Any data in this information based world is theoretically possible right? Given enough time, a computer generating random bits will eventually produce a vintage black and white video capture of Beethoven playing his fifth symphony. Yep, random + infinity could even rewrite history. Furthermore, data is also open to interpretation. Its conceivable that one set of data interpreted one way can have a totally different meaning another way. Who to say what is what?

Let's take a step back from the epistemology rhetoric and look at a real world example. I used to be a relatively big fan of R.E.M. I liked a lot of their songs for their music and melodies, and also for their interesting and off key lyrics. They made me pause to think a little and try to grasp their meaning. In their song, Night Swimming, it talked about taking your clothes off and going swimming at night, which made me think about conditions for revealing oneself to the world. It turns out in an interview, they said specifically about that song, that they had chosen most of the lyrics for phonetic reasons, and really had no intended purpose to the lyrics. That absolutely killed R.E.M. for me, at least the enthusiasm I had before. To have something which was previously meaningful, become meaningless? Actually it made me somewhat disenchanted about music for a bit, and I started listening to a lot of anime/asian music and techno at that time, for which I couldn't be betrayed by the lyrics again. Given that I either couldn't understand the lyrics, or that there weren't any.

A friend of mine was trying to say its ok so long as my interpretation of the song held true in my mind, and that music is intended to be subjective. Creative things are supposed to be open to a range of varying meanings depending upon the mindset of the person in question. Really? So which is more valid however? The actual object, or the interpretation, the expression, the manifestation of the object. I feel funny saying that a song inspires me to be open when the authors say that it is meant to sound pretty for the pop radio audience.

Random words clumped together in a melodic song that seem to portray a deeper meaning. Computers generating random bits to produce a picture of a monkey jumping on a typewriter. Monkeys jumping on typewriters to pose this question:

What is the greater farce? The monkey on the typewriter, or those of us who read what the monkey writes...

[ esca | 10:28 AM | ]