A quest for meaning, a search for answers, the pursuit of life, beauty and humanity in an inhumane world. *Edit* Do no Harm.
I was thinking about writing about the mad cow controversy, but then I realized that there's not really that much to talk about. The North American Beef Industry is *fucked*.
instead I started thinking about Christmas and family, and how bizarre my family is compared to the rest of the world. You see the strange thing in our family, the dirty, dark little secret that nobody wants to talk about, well spill the beans - there are none. There are no black sheep (well, beside me and one of my cousins - we're crazy!). There is no drama, no controversy, no embarassing uncles, no children in jail, no freaks (but plenty of geeks). We're having a family reunion next year and so far out of 70 people only three can't make it because their kid is in a world diving competition. Everyone else *wants* to come. Strange, huh?
It's hard for me to understand another's perception who comes from a family that is messed up. This is my weakness and probably why I believe there is always hope for humanity. From my perspective everybody *can* get along, and have a fun time as well.
I took the holidays off from blogging to relax and enjoy the holidays, but I'm going to get right back into the swing of things - big changes are coming soon!
I had a very upsetting experience today. I was over at my buddies place shooting the shit, talking about games when his girlfriend and sister came home. After smoking a bit of pot, we were just getting into an amusing conversation when Erin, his sister, got up and headed for the stair well. At the third or fourth step she started collapsing. What probably happened over the course of 30 seconds felt like a lifetime as I watched somebody die right before my eyes. She started convulsing, not in a particularily violently way but more of an ending, the last throes of a mortal being. As her now ghastly white face came to rest on the step her eyes revealed her death, it was her eyes that went blank, it was her eyes that made us realize that this was something of deadly seriousness.
Panic.
We all knew that there was something terribly wrong so her brother called 911. As he was talking and we were trying to move her body to the floor I noticed her eyes move. Slowly she came back to us. It took some coaxing but eventually she was with us again. By this time it was too late to cancel the firetruck and ambulance, so the next hour was one of dazed confusion, emergency response men, oxygen tanks and a calmly talking paramedic. She went to the hospital and I watched the house... Eventually they came home and Erin was shaken, but fine.
The official report was fainting due to some alcohol, a little pot and maybe not enough to eat. I've seen people faint before but not like this. Fainting doesn't explain how we all knew, how the first thing on our mind was calling 911 so that she could be resuscitated before it was too late. She may not have died, that's a possibility, and as we didn't taker her pulse we can't ever truely know. As far as I'm concerned though she wasn't and then she was, a true disaster turn miracle, and just in time for Christmas.
I think that we can safely say that our new robot overlords have a good sense of musical timing and choreography.
Everybodies favorite search engine Google will be releasing a new tool soon: Google Print. I happened upon it while checking out Bloogz, which seems to be driving a lot of traffic to my site. Either that or it's a really crappy program that keeps showing up in my referral logs. Anyways what's interesting about this google print is that it's basically the same service Amazon was offering earlier but has seemingly since taken down - the ability to search for text within books. So while amazon has launched a product search in competition with Google's Froogle, Google has shot right back with a venture into the online book selling market. Very interesting. I wonder how long it will take before Amazon removes google's quick search from their site and all out war is declared. Enter in the third contender Microsoft and you've got a real battle royale brewing. I suppose in our capitalist society we, the consumers benefit from this competition, but I have a feeling that before this 'battle for control of the internet' is over many, many innocents will have perished in the slaughter. There can be only one! :)
I love music. Maybe not as much as Wally, but at the same time I do appreciate music and what it does to people. I've never contributed to the musical world ever though, having absolutely no technical talent, however on Saturday Wally and I set ourself a goal of making a song in an hour, which we did. Sure it took another hour to clean it up and add a little snaz, but I'm very impressed with the results. Although Wally did most of the work I really felt that it was a collaborative process and we together produced this musical 'sketch'.
Check it: wally_glutton_and_chef_quix-4.mp3
I like it, but then that may be narcissism.
I was reading some of the fascinating comment in the 21 grams thread and just had to respond with a full out post. I love this stuff. I live and breath this stuff when I'm not conquering the galaxy or making crappy webpages. So after taking my sweet time coming up with an intelligent response I figured I'd do the lazy repost for all of you not following that thread. Be aware that we're discussing the philosophical nature of souls, so some may not want to tread. ;)
<metanote> First of all I'm hugely impressed with the talent that's on display in these comments. Obviously I've attracted an introspective group willing to explore different thoughts and challenge existing notions. I can't begin to describe how much enjoyment I'm getting out of blogging. I see a lot email addresses though, I wish some of you guys had blogs of your own that I could read. If nothing else you could join my forums if you wanted to converse with each other in a more communicative format. Trust me on this, forums are da bomb for indepth conversations. There's nothing like a good long conversation, slowly digested and analyzed over the course of days and weeks. It's somewhat like these comments except much more organized.
</metanote>
I've spent a great deal of my life thinking about the nature of the self. We are all individual creatures, each unique in his or her own way. To me, that infinite uniqueness becomes an almost spiritual sensation, a transcendation of understanding that while One can sometimes be the lonliest number, it can also mean unity of individuals, a system of unique chaotic patterns interfering with each and creating more chaos that passes through some 'big admittance matrix in the sky'. It keeps raising the bar. That's why new connections between people are what stimulate and vibrate this living network that we call life. It's all about individual moments of epiphany and sharing it with others.
What does make it interesting is that I believe science is also throwing out some interesting and fundamentally challenging questions to our perception of the world. Dark energy and dark matter are the 'premier' questions of our time from an 'underlying fundamental unknown' perspective. As energy that we cannot observe and matter that we cannot measure but comprising the majority of the universe, this presents an incredible dilemma to physicists who are trying to model this new meme into their equations of the universe. it just doesn't seem to fit with pure objective science.
I think there's a possibility that dark energy ties into spirituality. I believe that dark energy is attracted to complexity which is a product of the evolution of life. Look at our brains. What has been the long running theme of evolution as time has progressed here on earth? Ever increasing complexity. Complexity is a gateway to consciousness; consciousness leads to awareness of self; awareness of self leads to the awareness of other selfs. When you perceive at a fundamental level that everyone else around you is a completely seperate and unique entity you make stronger connections with them that leads to ever increasing complexity.
The thing is though that dark energy has mass, and it is measurable. I suggest that if there is a loss of mass associated with death of a person, that loss is due to the cessation of activity between the neurons in their brain. This complex activity I believe is the 'magnet' for dark energy. As the activity stops, the dark energy leaves the body. Perhaps this dark energy is an individual soul, perhaps it's some kind of perceptual energy that allows us to observe the universe, I don't know. But I do like to speculate, and I do love a good discussion.
Yesterday was my birthday and for the first time in years I managed to get myself quite drunk. The venue: a bar with the basement taken over for a work christmas party. The people: good friends in the service industry. The kicker: the 'speakeasy' room where for the first time in months I was able to partake in the holiest of ceremonies - an indoor cigarette and a pleasant joint. There was a vibrant atmosphere, possibly due to the illegal nature of the festivities, more likely than not though the casual camaraderie between people who have to deal with other people for a living.
I quite enjoyed myself and as I mentioned before, managed to get quite drunk in a short period of time. This is an unusal activity for me because for the last three years I've been trapped in the suburbs, forced to drive myself and my friends around as we hit the town. The responsible citizen that I am usually requires a limit on alchohol intake. So it was a rare treat to be able to get smashed and not have to worry about a thirty dollar cab fair.
In other news, I've decided that I'm going to have to redesign my site and add a righthand sidebar to keep track of hot topics, otherwise known as pieces that I've written that are still generating quite a lot of comments. This would also allow me the opportunity to really start piling on the links - I am a man of habit and would quite enjoy having all of my daily links in one place.
In the meantime, I'll simply present some of these pieces:
*clears throat*
Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday dear Cheffy, Happy birthday to meeeeeee.
(I apologize for this crappy entry - I promise I'll start delivering on the goods again)
Even though I try to avoid politics on the basis of principle, I sometimes get drawn in by the cacophony of praise that Mr. Bill Whittle receives every time he writes some pro-America / pro-republican / pro-war litany on his e..e..e.. site. I'm not sure what I'm going to comment on his current piece but I can only hope that it will draw much ire from the legions of cronies who blindly follow the slop bucket of rhetoric dispensed from e..e..e... These threads often go on for days, I just hope I'm not too late. I am probably being a bit harsh really, there is some interesting perspective presented, and obviously there is a large percentage of people able to elucidate their opinions in a clear and logical (at least from their perception) manner.
In other news, I attended my dads Phd candidacy today which went very well. I would talk more about it except that I don't think many people are interested in harmonic domain analysis of power systems elements with non-linear or repetitive switching compents (Yes that is the title). I can't say that I understood all of what he was talking about but I take comfort in knowing that I wasn't alone... I'd say my dad's a bit of a crazy genius, he's sort of invented some new math involving matrices to analyze systems purely in the harmonic domain. I don't doubt he'll be in a signal analysis textbook someday. But enough of this for now.
There's a general misconception that seems to be on the rise with the general public in regards to violence and video games. Let me clarify this: I believe it's a misconception, but I have no actual proof besides some thought experiments and some violence statistics. Well, actually no links to speak of, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that violence is in a decline over the past decade, something around 13%. That's pretty significant if you think of them as numbers and not just a percentage. Say there were something like 10 million violent crimes in 1993, and in 2003 there were 8.7 million - 1.3 million less instances of needless pain, anger and sorrow. Yet if a kid picks up a rifle and starts picking off people in a manner that's characteristic of a video game, suddenly video games are causing violence in children.
Something's not right here.
I suppose if we are to examine this issue, we should have a better understanding of what violence really is, and why it occurs in our society. There are all kinds of violence - domestic violence, pyschopathic violence, religious violence, patriotic violence, bar fights, road rage to name a few. There is a common thread throughout all these forms: they are predominately initiated by men. Sure there are instances of violence from women but statistically the vast majority comes from the male half of the population. Why is this?
I believe that violence is a genetic leftover from our animalistic evolution, pure and simple. There is a case for nurtured violence - abuse by parents, teachers, clergy, etc. However the common theme of male tendancies towards violence is what I consider unifying evidence of a genetic predisposition. Women are abused probably as much as men yet that does not seem to carry over (as much) to new generations violent women.
The evolutionary path that humanity has taken was wrought with the need for hunters, protectors and warriors. In order for us to have gotten to this point in time now our tribal nature and hostility towards strangers was a powerful evolutionary tool - it allowed dominate genes to reproduce, it contributed to the tribal society which allowed specialization of tasks by different people, it created a sense of safety and security in a wild and dangerous world. So there's no arguing that we as people would be where we are today if we hadn't used the violence inherint in the male half of humanity to allow us to grow, evolve, learn and provide us enough spare time to contemplate ourselves, our surroundings and our place in the world.
That violence that helped us so in the past has become a hindrence in the present. We are living in an increasingly smaller society where our scope of tolerance and understanding of the rest of the world is ever decreasing with it. As more and more people are crowded into smaller and smaller areas friction from close quarter living can be a frustrating experience for many men. Violence is the natural result of these conditions, but violence is not tolerated in our society. Violent people become ostracized further feeding their anger and hostility towards the world and the people around them. They see people who are different and automatically create antipathy towards them. They see their girlfriend being chatted up and they automatically bring up the defences and muscle the would be suitor away in the only way they know how: violence.
So if violence is genetic and inherint in the male half of humanity, how do we get rid of it in order to meet the standards of the society that we live in? Well I believe it's already taking place, the violent agression that has dominated many male's for the entirety of human civilization is slowly being siphoned away into a harmless, digital domain: video games.
Surely violent men aren't a seething, unending cauldron of potential violence? If a man is violent does that mean he is violent from the time he wakes up until the time he goes to sleep? I believe that men have a figurative bucket of violence in their genetic makeup that can be emptied by violent actions. Why not dump it into a video game console? Can you substitute a visceral, real violent act for a harmless digital one? I believe you can.
I think back at how many times I've killed someone in a video game. How many times has a head exploded in the goriest detail in the sight of my digitized assault rifle? At least 6447 times. Do I ever have an inclination to witness that event in real life? Absolutely not. Today I was playing a game called Black and White where you are god, you have people worship you and you also have a servant creature that you train to do your bidding. I was feeling a bit put out so I started slapping it around, and you know what? I felt better afterwards. I cannot speak for everyone else though, but I believe that I'm not alone. I figure that there are a lot of people out there who ordinarily (ie pre-video game era) would have had violent tendancies but have since substituted the actual act of violence itself for virtual killing, goring, slaying of hundreds of different people, races, nationalities, animals and various fictional creatures.
Some video games are non violent, but most video games have some element of violence, whether it be the graphic depiction of gunshot wounds to fender benders in a racing game. All of these events siphon off that inate violent nature in men and make them more docile, less willing to actually extert real violence. I think that although you may have some school shootings influenced by video games (and even that's a stretch - I'd say the easy access to actual firearms is a much more likely culprit), the 1.3 million (in our theoretical example) less violent acts by far makes up for it.
So to all you lawmakers, you congressmen and MPs, you parental associations and religious groups, please leave video games alone. They're helping us males vent our frustrations and our angers in a fashion that leaves nothing but a few thumbs hurt.