As time draws on my thoughts become more scattered. I find myself more and more distracted with anything other than doing real work of any kind, whether that be so called work work, writing in this blog or even doing anything else that I am responsible for or a course of action I have wanted to pursue. It is very distressing yet I can’t help myself. It has taken a whole weekend and a slew of internal excuses for me to even update this blog. I’m sick. I hurt my back on Saturday. The world is getting more and more messed up. Apparently, the internet isn’t fostering democracy and freedom as many of us geeks had hoped. Perhaps all of these excuses are a smoke screen for the one thing I’m afraid to admit to myself: I’m a fraud who doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.
Monthly Archives: March 2004
BannedMusic.org
At the end of February I participated in some digital disobedience regarding Grey Tuesday, where an album remixing the Beatles White album with Jay-Zs Black album was illegally hosted for download despite the threats from EMI (the holder of the White album copyright). Well, the good people at downhillbattle.org (who organized the original protest) have launched a new service called BannedMusic.org which hosts other disputed ‘illegal’ material.
I for one applaud their digital dissobedience as the current system is in need of radical change and only radical actions will bring the inequities therein to light. What inequities? Music is constantly changing, remixing and sampling are the new expression of creativity. You might argue that remixing is in fact not creating something, just ‘stealing’ someone else’s material to make something else, but in fact the art of sampling creates a whole new form of music that in many ways surpasses the original. If nothing else you should download the Grey Album to hear what I’m talking about. It’s stunningly original and quite a piece of musical wonder.
So check it out, download some of the albums (they’ve integrated bitTorrent – schweet!) and protest our current laws! Change is a Good Thing.
Evolution, revisited
Courtesy of spurl, I found this link of 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. This is what I would consider a definitative list of the major arguments and subsequent refutations of creationists in their battle against logic and rationality. Bookmark this. Keep it handy every time you approach a creationist. This knowledge and our common usage of it are the only things that can beat the black beast that is creationism into submission and back into the primitive subconscious from which it arose. If there is one dividing line between people, this is it – the assertion that we are divinely created, that we are too complex to have evolved without some intelligent design. To me, if you don’t believe in evolution as a fact then you are a luddite. Your perception of the world is irrelevant because it is tainted with a colossal misunderstanding that is absolutely fundamental to the appreciation of the human experience that is our life. Understand it, appreciate it, welcome it or be damned in my eyes.
Value Choices in the pursuit of Quality
(This is a rehash of a comment I made in my lame lame lame rant. Wally felt it was post worthy.)
I think it’s a given at this point in time to believe that everyone has their own unique point of view in this world, and that they are going to try their hardest to align your perception with theirs, as that seems to be a trait that humanity shares in common. If everyone has a unique perception then that must mean that we all have relative perceptions to each other. The problem with being introduced to all of these relative perceptions is that there is never any Truth, it’s all variations of the Truth. Does that make our goals in life to piece together as many shards of true perception to complete oneself? Or is that a misnomer, oneself. One – the great divide between Eastern and Western Philosophy. Bhuddism teaches us that we are all one, that there is no self, that the Universe is an interconnected complete network. Christianity and Islam tell us that we are individuals who will burn in hell or bum around in heaven. There’s still the element of continuing consciousness, eternal perception.
Spurl
Sometimes I hate Kuro5hin.org, sometimes I love it. An article was about to get dumped from the edit queue (K5 is a user contributed news community) when I happened upon it. spurl.net/ has created a tool that is exactly what I’ve been looking for as a hardcore net junkie. You could say it’s an advanced bookmarking service, but in reality it will hopefully also be an archiver of the internet if it ever takes off. It’s really funny because I’ve been contemplating developing a tool that is spookily similar to what spurl is all about. I’m definately going to have to get in touch with this guy and see if any of my ideas would help his idea out. Anyways, go to the site, sign up and start spurling.
Yeah ok, I know nobody is going to go but hey, you never know. If his project takes off it’ll only boost my ego for having thought along the same lines. At the very least it would be very interesting to see what everyone else is reading.
Iran Revolts!
You won’t see this in the major media, but sections of Iran are revolting and throwing out the sham electoral candidates. Check it here:
Breaking News: Unrest and clashes continue in N. Iran
Let’s support these freedom fighters! Link to the board, show your praise!
Let the wild speculation commence…
Nasa has scheduled a news brief about an unusual Solar Object.
The discovery of a mysterious object in our solar system is the topic of a listen-and-log-on news briefing on Monday, March 15, at 1 p.m. EST.
What could it be? I wonder if it has anything to do with the dark spots around Jupiter. Let the speculation commence!
Lame lame lame.
Yeah. That’s me. Lame. Why? Burnt out a bit. Perhaps I’m thinking too much. Perhaps I’m just lazy. I’ve been working pretty hard on a project for work and that’s eating up a lot of time. TV’s been cutting into my ‘creative time’ as well. Stupid TV. Turn off the brain, listen to what we say, believe what we want you to believe. I want to do more with my blog but I don’t know what, I want to do more with my life but I can’t make a decision. So I wait. Maybe I’m waiting for coincidences. Maybe I’m waiting for a sign. Maybe I’m waiting for the sake of waiting. Maybe I’m waiting for nothing at all. I feel like I’m in a rut, like I’m spinning my wheels too fast in the snow and going nowhere. It’s a slippery time right now, these ‘times of change’. The world is changing, forces seem to be realigning themselves. Freedom and Democracy are being packaged, shipped and sold at discount prices in your local Walmart. Truth is relative to the perception of the individual. There are no black and whites, everything is grey. Is that idea now becoming too simple? Are there any absolute truths anymore or is it all in the eye of the beholder? I don’t know anymore. I used to think I knew all the answers but now I doubt everything I’ve ever thought. Not for any particular reason, just an overwhelming sense of uselessness. What can one person really do if they can’t change just one other person’s mind?
For me, that’s where this is all coming from. If I can’t change just one persons mind, what is the point of it all? Do I even have a right to do that? Do any of us? What gives any of us the right to change a persons mind about any subject at all? Isn’t it a form of rape, of domination? A battle of the wills? A contest in depth of belief? Instead of a higher form of truth all that is emerging is a victor. That isn’t Truth, that is someone’s perception of the truth. If there are no gauges for truth then the aspiration of a higher truth becomes warfare between wills.
I can’t abide by it. It doesn’t seem right or fair that there is no absolute truth, and yet everything that I’ve read on the Internet tells me that every single one of us out there has a unique perception of the Truth and many of these perceptions are diametrically opposed to each other. Who’s right then? Whoever has the stronger will, the greater belief? It’s a circular loop. Truth is defined by the strongest will. The strongest will is based on the deepest belief. The deepest belief is learned from the dominating perception of the Truth. It never stops, it never starts. Yet this cycle seems closer to finding an answer then when the first homo sapiens huddled around a fire grunting the truths about the universe around them. Somehow in our endless domination of each other we’ve evolved societally and mentally to the point where we are today, with all our fucked up problems, with our nukes and global warming, with our religious disharmony, with our obesity and energy addictions.
If all of this truely is an experiment, if there is some god up there looking down on his children, I would surmise that he/she considers this grand experiment one great big colossal failure, a massive SNAFU of biblical proportions. I hope, I dream for humanity to remove their collective heads from their collective asses to wake up and understand the impact our lifestyle is having on our future lifestyles. The future lifestyles of our children, and their children. Many think it’s too late, many don’t care, many are waiting for Rapture to wisk them away to a fantasyland heaven and out of the hell we’ve created. Sitting around on computers debating it endlessly isn’t going to solve the world’s problems, but then what should we do? How do we stop this massively destructive, endlessly polluting, and terrifyingly brutal world from continuing on it’s ravaging course? I just don’t know. I don’t know what to do. And so I wait. Maybe I’m waiting for coincidences. Maybe I’m waiting for a sign. Maybe I’m waiting for the sake of waiting. Maybe I’m waiting for nothing at all.
New Technologies
This idea is only going to get better and better with time: Radio Vox Populi. Really, the only way to explain it is to just check it out. It’s a little rough around the edges but like I said, it’ll just get better.
Consciousness
Here’s my foray into the art of meta-blogging. I found motime linking to me in my referral logs today, and at first I wasn’t overly impressed. Yet another blogging company, I thought. Looking a little deeper though I found a nice little newbie service for blogging. I figure this is a good thing because we do need more people blogging. I know a lot of people think there’s too many blogging out there as it is but I figure that when this phenomenon takes off – and I believe it will – there will be fundamental shifts in the global consciousness. As you may or may not know I am a firm believer in a global consciousness. I believe that if complexity leads to consciousness, then increasing that complexity leads to increased consciousness.
But then what is consciousness?
I’ve started to read an interesting “Research Paper Abstract” by a Mr. Chris King entitled Fractal Neurodyamics and Quantum Chaos : Resolving the Mind-Brain Paradox Through Novel Biophysics. This paper (courtesy of Wally) was written in 1996 and although it is extremely technical and I barely understand it, there are parts coming through that resonate with some of the things I’ve been saying. In particular this stood out (emphasis added):
2.2.1 Complexity : Consciousness as a property of complex computational systems. One common idea about the emergence of mind is that it is somehow a product of the very complexity of the brain. However neither computer circuits nor artificial neural nets are ascribed to possess the attribute of mind in addition to their functioning at any given level of numerical complexity.
Complexity is the root of consciousness. All else is just levels.