2011-07-14 - Random Quotes

So the other day I decided I’d try and post at least one new post every week. That should give me 8 posts every two months which is good enough to archive. This decision seems to be problematic as I had a hard time actually getting myself to write this week. . So instead of trying to come up with something interesting I am going to find random quotes on Wikiquote and make comments about them.

“The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.” Arthur Koestler

I find this to be a very interesting quote. It’s funny on a simple level because “ha ha people are dumb” but it also seems to have a deeper meaning. The weird thing is that people don’t really know how to use their brains. Think about it and then tell me how you made yourself think about it. The brain is a collection of neurons controlled by a series of chemical interactions. That part of the brain is fairly well understood but the mind itself created out of this is a mystery. The main issue with understanding the mind is that you have to use the mind in the process of understanding something. Now I’m not sure if that’s what he meant but it’s an interesting idea none the less.

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.” Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia is a great place to learn about things and to spend hours looking up random things but it is not the ultimate repository of knowledge. For starters the vast majority of human knowledge is lost to time. One simply has to sit in on a debate about historical events to realize that we have forgotten a great many things. Some of them weren’t recorded, others were lost and still others were destroyed. You can’t have the sum of human knowledge because you don’t have access to all of it to record it. Secondly people have always had access to the knowledge that was there. It might have required a bit more work to go to a library or a museum to learn about things but there is nothing on Wikipedia that one could not learn from some other means. If it were the case that Wikipedia had knowledge that didn’t exist somewhere else then the writer couldn’t have learned it to record it.

“Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it, merely to show that you have one. “ Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th earl of Chesterfield

I like this quote. Wear your learning and keep it with you but don’t show it off just for the sake of it. There’s a time and a place for everything including a time and a place to share what you have learned. You may even want to share what you have learned on Wikipedia since that’s where the sum of all human knowledge is shared. Of course if you learned your knowledge on Wikipedia you may want to double check it before you go using it in public. It’s probably right but maybe you read that article on the one day someone put a silly update on it. It is also not advisable to hide what you have learned. If you know something and a situation could benefit from your sharing that knowledge then you should. Knowing what time it is can be helpful; knowing that you have a nice watch isn’t really.

2011-07-03 - The Unknown Citizen

My first memory is of waking up in the middle of a sidewalk without any idea about how I got there. I don’t remember anything about my life before that sidewalk. I started walking as if I was meant to. I started drinking the coffee I had in my hand even though I don’t remember buying it or even picking it up. I walked up to someone and they started talking to me as if we were long time friends. I don’t remember ever seeing him before but felt compelled to continue the conversation. Someone ran between the two of us, stopping the conversation and spilling my coffee. I looked after him for a few seconds before I began walking again. I didn’t even feel the slightest bit of remorse for the loss of my coffee or the conversation. I just walked away from them. After a few short blocks the world started to fade. Blackness filled my vision and I fell asleep.

Soon I awoke again. I was walking down a different street in a completely different part of town now. A man ran up to me and punched me in the face. It was the same man who ran into me the other day. I got up and tried to run away but he pulled out a gun and shot me in the leg. I fell to the ground helpless. He shot me a few more times before running off. I lay there in a pool of blood unable to move. I could hear the distant sounds of gunfire and sirens. Although I could see the firefight right in front of me it seemed miles away. The man who shot me was now in a shootout with the cops. He seemed to take dozens of hits but didn’t fall; he just kept running and shooting. An ambulance came and paramedics tried to save me but before they can finish my world fades again and I go back to sleep.

Soon I awoke for the third time. I was now in a strange part of town with no knowledge of how I got there. I didn’t appear to have any injuries and there were no bullet wounds to commemorate the previous day. I was driving my car down a street. I knew it was my car but I didn’t remember buying it or ever driving it before. In my rear-view mirror I could see a reckless driver coming up behind me. He was crashing into other cars, crashing into the walls, crashing into street lights and road signs. His car was missing the hood and it looked like there were bullet holes in the side. I tried to swerve out of his way but he ran into the side of my car. I looked over at him only to realize that this was the man who had shot me. Why is he here? I tried to think but as he faded into the distance so did the world around me. As he disappeared over the horizon I fall asleep again.

I awoke for the fourth time after what seemed like forever. Again I was driving but it was a different car in a different part of town. What happened to my old car? Before I could think too heavily on the subject I was violently pulled from my car. It was that man again, he was stealing my car. I stood up and watched him as he did a 180 in my car and started ramming an upside down car a few metres away. He seemed to be trying to flip it over. Why does this man keep appearing in my life? Why do I seem to be jumping from place to place with no memory of anything between them? Do I only exist when he is near me? Why does he keep hurting me? I can only stare at him as he gets out of my now damaged car and gets into the one he just flipped over. As he drove away I wonder what will happen the next time I see him. My world fades to black, I fall asleep again.

Today I awoke to blackness. The word uninstall seemed to hang in the air though I couldn’t hear or see it. I write this story down in a notepad in the hopes that someday someone will find it. I know that soon I will fall asleep for the last time.

- The Unknown Citizen, Liberty City, GTA

2011-06-26 - Manners

Thank you for reading this post about manners. How did that make you feel? Do you feel warm and fuzzy and a part of something? If so, why do you think I’m an arse? I mean I shouldn’t have to say “thank you”, it should be implied. You should just generally assume that I am thankful to you for reading the gibberish I put on the internet. It would be really silly of me to write stuff and post it publicly if I didn’t want people to read it. It would also be silly for you to be reading my stuff if you didn’t at least sort of like me. Now “Please” is even worse than “thank you”. Did you know that “please” has no actual meaning? It is simply a modifier to make the request polite. Why can’t we just assume people are making a polite request? If they weren’t making a polite request they’d probably sound a lot more forceful and demanding and such. They’d say something like “GIVE ME SOME BLOODY FECKING MILK OR I’LL CHOP YOUR DAMN HEAD OFF”. In some cases saying “Please” and “thank you” isn’t even a good way to show gratitude. If someone buys you a boat saying “thank you” hardly covers the size of the matter in question. Freaking out and jumping around and being completely speechless would actually say more than these so called manners.

What about “You’re welcome”, it has no meaning either. It is simply the ritual reply to “thank you”. In fact it actually sounds rather impolite. It sounds to me less of an acknowledgment of gratitude and more of a command. YOU are welcome and you don’t have a choice in the matter. Welcome in other contexts usually means some sort of occurrence is acceptable to continue. You are welcome to come in; you are welcome to give your opinion. These sentences serve as a kind of approval of the course of action that another person seems to be going down. If you apply this idea to the “thank you” response it sounds like that person is welcome to continue praising you. It sounds very narcissistic in that context, like “Yes, I welcome your gratitude”. Now you could always use the more humble “No problem”, or “It was nothing” replies but apparently some people get offended by those. You just did something for them and they are offended at how you replied to their thanks? They’re the ones without manners.

Now that’s not to say you should never use “please” and “thank you”. I use them quite regularly with people I don’t know. If I’m going out for supper I will say “please” when I ask for something of the waiter and “thank you” when they provide it. They don’t know me and therefore I have to make it apparent that I am grateful and polite through my speech. If you don’t know the person you can’t really make assumptions about them and so they are required to state clearly their politeness or non-politeness. This makes sense and is the only context where people should use manners. Should they be forced to use manners in these situations? Hell no, if you don’t use manners on your own accord to show you are polite then you aren’t and you shouldn’t lie to people. After you get to know someone a bit you can start slowly lowering your use of polite modifiers until they are completely gone and it is simply implied.

In closing, forcing people to use manners is very rude.

2011-06-16 - A Few Simple Facts

It has come to my attention that some people don’t know a few simple facts about the universe they live in. Now I’m not sure why they don’t know them, maybe they just haven’t come across them. I take it as my duty though to ensure that people are away of these things as they are very interesting.

1. Lava is made out of burnt maple syrup. Deep inside the earth lives a small green man named Fred. Fred spends his days eating pancakes, and nothing else. Now I don’t mean he doesn’t eat anything else (Although he doesn’t) what I mean is that he doesn’t do anything else. He spends his mornings eating pancakes, he spends his afternoons eating pancakes, he spends his evenings eating pancakes, and he spends his nights eating pancakes. To support this habit Fred bought two machines. The first uses trans-dimensional energy to make pancakes out of bits of lint. The second machine makes maple syrup out of the toxic waste created by the first machine. The pancake machine flips a new pancake onto his plate every 56.7 seconds while the syrup machine continuously pumps syrup on to the plate. This way he gets a new pancake just as he finishes the last one and they are always covered in fresh syrup. He doesn’t have a very large plate though so a lot of the syrup flows over the edge and on to the floor. It drains down into the planets core through a series of tubes where it is burnt and after some more tubes it eventually floats up into the earth’s crust. Technically this means that magma is burnt syrup but magma isn’t actually a thing and the entire world is lying to you. It’s all lava and all lava is maple syrup, burnt maple syrup from Fred the guy living in the centre of the planet.

2. Monkeys have been to mars. During the 1950s many nations were trying to get into space, but they were unsure of their equipment and didn’t want to risk actual human lives. In order to test the technology without using people they sent up monkeys instead. Since monkeys are similar to humans they could show how a human may react to space without putting a human in space. On the 14th of May 1957 a group of interested monkeys showed up at a Russian Space Scientist meeting and through an exquisite display of feces throwing they asked if they could join the project. The lead scientist urinated on a copy of Daisy monthly in reply to signal that they had decided to go with chimpanzees instead of monkeys. The monkeys were very disappointed and decided that they’d make their own space agency. Calling themselves the Solar Rejects they set up a small base on a small island near Singapore and proceeded to build their own space rockets. After several marginally successful tests they finally came up with a design for a fully functional interstellar craft. They took off on the 18th of July 1969 in their ship the S. R. Russia can suck it. After a successful mission to mars they went back to their lives as Shakespeare impersonators, content in knowing they were better at astrophysics and space engineering than chimps and humans. The ship is currently sitting in a parking lot near Moscow where people routinely mistake it for a sandwich shop.

3. Frogs are hyper-intelligent space aliens. The Frogger Empire was the most powerful empire in the all of everything. It spanned more than 14,000 galaxies in over 5000 dimensions and had a nice cottage in the cottage dimension. They had developed every technology there was to be developed and knew everything there was to be known about everything. God once took a trip to a Frogger daycare centre for slow children and lost a game of 5-space Chinese checkers (The Chinese in question being from a small purple planet near Alpha Centauri), that’s how smart they are. With all this knowledge and skill the life of a frog became very hard to deal with. If you know everything, what more is there to do with your life? Many races have reached this point in their development and the majority of them all went on to develop some way of ascending into pure energy. The frogs on however were so advanced that they realized that would simply make the question what more is there to do with your endless life of pure energy? Instead they decided to go down a few pegs. They built a giant machine that would remove every bit of knowledge they had about anything. The machine them transport them on to a series of nice planets to start over as primitive animals. The machine self-destructed soon after the procedure was complete taking a rather boring bit of the Andromeda galaxy with it. Earth was one of the planets chosen, and the frogs we see today are the descendants of these hyper-intelligent space frogs who gave up their hyper-intelligence so they could have a decent boring life.

Now you know.