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Oh, the Japanese.
For once you have tasted flight
you will walk the earth
with your eyes turned skywards,
for there you have been
and there you will long to return.
-- Leonardo da Vinci
The wonderful Language Log alerted me that there is a project to translate Bible into lolcat. It's a wikiproject so it needs volunteer involvement. It looks like most of the good parts of the book are translated. My lolcatese is mediocre at best and I am not active in this community, but it struck me that the translated texts are very good. They bring in the lolz.
1. In teh beginnin Invisible Man was invisible, and he maded the skiez and da earths, but he did not eated it.
2. The earths wus witout shapez and wus dark and scary and stuffs, and he rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
3. And Invisible Man sayz, i can has light, and teh light wuz.
4. Teh Invisible Man sawed teh light, to sees stuffs, and separatered the light form dark and stuffs
5. And Invisible Man sayed light Day and dark no Day. Teh evning and morning was teh first day.
6. And Invisible Man sayed, letz tehre be teh ceilings of waterz, with waterz up n waterz down.
7. And Invisible Man doed the skiez with waterz down and waterz up, and stuff.
8. And Invisible Man sayed, letz up be teh firmmint, so evning and morning was teh twoth day.
9. And Invisible Man gotted all no waterz into ur base, so no waterz wus not wetted
10. And Invisible Man called no wather Earths, so tehre.
Favorite Quotes:
Job 1: Then teh Invisible Man sed "Okai, u can take his bukkit, but no hurtzing Job hissef." And then Saitin went awai.
Psalm 23: When I wuz walkin thru dis scary valley Im sayin "me feelz no evil" cuz teh invisible man iz beside me pokin mah side wif hiz stix an it mak me so kumfy
Book of Revelations: Teh revelashunz of Baby Jesus, what teh Invisible Man geif him to show hiz homiez what iz comin. Teh Invisible Man sended hiz angel to Mr. John.
Book of Revelations: Teh Invisible Man sez "I be Alpha. Also, I be Omega. An I alwayz been an I alwayz will be. Also, I be very strong! Grrr!"
Well, if they allow me to order at the quantity I want, I won't need any toilet paper at all this year. THANK YOU YAF!
This is a movie companion to Klein's book. She collaborated with Alfonso Cuaron, director of Y Tu Mama Tambien, on it.
Ry Cooder once said Dark Was The Night--Cold Was The Ground was the most soulful, transcendent piece of American music recorded in the 20th Century. Unearthly and music of the spheres were common descriptions long before both became fact when it was included on a golden record was affixed to the star bound Voyager space probe...
Ry Cooder himself has made Dark Was The Night, a touchstone in his recordings, from a first take on his first album to, more famously, an atmospheric distillation of it for the opening theme of Wim Wender's Paris, Texas, which made a sonorous single string slide guitar played in Open D tuning to denote the vast American landscape a convention in subsequent road movie soundtracks--think Thelma And Louise, for example. And, to continue the cinematic tip in these words about the wordless Ouroboros, let us note also The Soul Of A Man, in which Wim Wenders has Blind Willie Johnson recounting his life and times from between the stars.
Link.
1x11 - Haven - this is the famous episode where Enterprise comes across a planet inhabited by beautiful blonde people - a "perfect" race? Maybe too perfect. Their justice system sentences Wesley to death. In a subplot, Enterprise encounters their god, which is actually a sentient starship from a super-advanced race that lives in another dimension. It becomes apparent that the "god" will punish the Enterprise crew if they just willy-nilly break the laws of Haven, and it also becomes clear that such action would also violate the Prime Directive. What to do? Faced with death of Wesley Crusher--the Chosen One--and annihilation in the hands of "god," Picard makes a speech and rescues Crusher. The speech pleases god, apparently, and he does not strike him dead.
keywords: utopia, justice, reason, courage, rescue, ethical dilemmas, prime directive, superadvanced races
1x12 - The Big Goodbye - first of many tributes to Raymond Chandler. Picard relaxes in the holodeck in a program that replicates the 1930s milieu of a Chandleresque author's novels. The plot is just a second thought of course to the idea of an immersive fictional environment. Its fine attention to detail pleases Picard so much he takes Data, Doctor Crusher and a guy I will call Cannon Fodder, with him the next time. In a subplot, a subspace phenomenon causes the holodeck to malfunction trapping Picard and others in the story. Cannon Fodder gets too wise on a gangster boss and gets shot. They try to get out of the situation by explaining the characters that they are just part of a story and not even real. Bad idea. They decide to test this by shooting the doctor. But before anything bad can happen to the main cast, the order is restored. When the characters step out of the holodeck, they evaporate like water from a kettle.
Keywords: holodeck, detective fiction, meta-story
1x13 - Datalore - this is the episode where we find out the background of Data. Positronic brains, created by a reclusive scientist, blah blah blah. Revisitng the planet of his creation, the crew find that it's devoid of all life forms. It seems a lifeform that feeds on life has wiped the planet of its inhabitants. (This creature reminded me of Galactus from Silver Surfer mythology.) They also discover Data's twin, who is called Lore--ergo, Data-Lore--disassembled in a cave. When he comes back to life, they discover that he is not like Data, but, as he puts it, he is better, more human, able to manipulate the human emotions for sinister intent. The unlikablility of Lore is multiplied when we find out that he had actually betrayed the humans to the life eating lifeform because they had deemed him too human. How monstrous! What follows is a charade in which Lore takes Data's place and manages to deceive everyone except Wesley who is specially attuned to Lore's odd behavior. Things get changed back and they don't get eaten by the lifeform. Themes of this episode are pretty similar to the first science fiction story ever--Frankenstein. The only difference is the effect for which they are played. Frankenstein is more sympathetic, and human in a good way, where Lore is not. In fact, the whole point of the episode is to make us like the other robot, whose schtick is that he is a robot who wants to be a human and yet he can't. Ironically, though, being a human suddenly does not look like such a good thing when you think about the Lores of this world.
keywords: conniving robots, creation, human nature
1x14 - Angel One - a mindblowing critique of sexism. Enterprise come across a planet in which the women are the men, powerful, aggressive and oppressive. If the last episode made you rethink the idea of being a human, this makes me rethink the idea of being a man. The plot is about a recovery operation - to recover the survivors of a human ship that was abandoned and they had landed in Angel One, where they are now being hunted unsuccessfull as "anarchists." The reason for this actually is because they are a form of political dissidents, asking equal rights and treatments for men. So, Riker, the resident hunk of Enterprise, has a big role in this episode. He woos and probably sleeps with the leader of the planet. Then, he persuades her to free the captured dissidents about to be executed. It seems they have their supporters among women of the planet. The women understand that a matriarchal social structure that puts one sex on the pedestal, and acts cruelly against those trying to change it, is not in line with fairness and equality.
keywords: sexuality, sexual politics, political activism, equality, justice, oratory, shipwrecked
1x 15 - 11001001 - I had a hard time understanding the logic of this episode. There are some aliens that communicate with each other in binary code? And their planet is somehow experiencing a buffer overload? So, they fake a critical event and abduct the ship, while Captain and Riker in it. Picard and the first officer are too occupied in the holodeck--again. They are being wooed by a very realistic lady named Minuet. She bewitches them and holds them till the ship arrives to the planet. Picard and Riker activate the self-destruct sequence and beam into the bridge, where they find the aliens incapacitated for some reason. They disable the self-destruct sequence and then they do something or other that fixes the situation. Aliens are revived. Everything is fine and dandy. It was just a misunderstanding. High points of the episode is seeing a spacebase for the first time (it's HUGE!!) and the excitement of the self-destruct sequence. In addition we are treated to a demonstration of the powers of immersive fictions.
keywords: holodeck, benign aliens, alien abduction, spacebase
1x16 - Too Short a Season - this episode is about an old admiral who takes a drug that reverses aging and becomes young again. But the side effect is that his cellular structure becomes unstable and by the end of the episode he will die. The bottomline, without putting too fine a point on it, is that to wish for eternal youth is folly. Wisdom of old age is far better than blah blah blah. I stopped paying attention when I saw that's where it was going. This is one of the less intriguing episodes with the more elaborate storylines. The plot features a hostage situation that turns into a rescue mission, which results from a ghost from the past when admiral violated the prime directive, but it feels contrived to prove the point they are trying to make-- that old admirals should stick to being old admirals.
keywords: lame episodes, miracle drugs, prime directive, revenge, hostage situation, rescue mission
Not only has he now become a Marxist--ironic given that he fought against Soviet Union in 1980s--but he also has praise for Chomsky, derision for Bush, and chastisement for the American people. Obviously, the Marxist in him did not just wake up with the marching orders in hand. The rhetoric is just a ploy to recruit dissatisfied anti-globalization activists and disaffected young people well-versed in anti-capitalist theory.
It may have already succeeded, as is plain in the case of the 27 year old German man, recent convert to Islam, apprehended earlier in the week for planning a massive operation. I wonder how Osama's other opinions will shape the upcoming presidential election. He says that the Democratic Party has not done enough to get U.S. out of Iraq (what else is new?) and urges American people to pull on their leash--oh, and to give up on the capitalist, corporatist system (bad...bad).
If there is any touchstone to the public opinion, it's that the American people will do the opposite of what Bin Laden tells them to do. I think he may even cause voters to harden their opinions about the war, giving Hillary a trump card and weaken the hand of Obama, who is the more forceful one in his position.
Could it be that Osama hijacked Obama's candidacy today? Was that what he wanted all along? Sure, a US retreat will be interpreted as a victory for Al Qaeda, but he enjoys nothing more than sapping the power of US in Iraq. As long as US is mired in a losing war, it cannot find where he is hiding and he can go on taunting this country.
(One thing I noticed about Google Booksearch is that its results are very rough, inaccurate and incomplete. When I queried "Haruki Murakami" or "Lolita," the results that it returned were not very relevant. For instance, not a single hit for Lolita the novel, even though there was one for Lolita the screenplay. And Murakami, it was even worse. Some of his more obscure novels are totally missing. That's probably why it's still in beta.)
This is far from the first implementation of this concept. The so-called "web-based virtual bookshelf" has been used in many a web community out there, including ones I like, such as Shelfari. But having this thing integrated with Booksearch makes a good research tool even better, and gives an easy way to keep track of books you want to check out later. It would have been really kickass if you got better results out of it.
Fight Club vs Al Qaeda
In some ways the idea of mayhem in Fight Club illustrates this idea that nihilism is rooted in social pessimism and revenge--the world is going to hell, we're being lied to, and you got nothing to lose.
Tyler Durden: Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
And...if i were not so lazy, I would put a quote from an Islamist philosopher like Ahmad Fardid, or Al-Quds. Both ideologues saw Westernization as a menacing development. They are the Tyler Durdens of Islam.
Compared to these, Alevism is a benign, humanistic philosophy, rooted in the shamanistic traditions that predate Islam. Its attitude to future is positive, and epistemologically it could be considered positivistic--but that's true in practice only, as it's still a very mystical tradition. It's adopted today as a philosophy more often than as a religion, and the Alevite community in Turkey are big in left-wing politics, adamant about social justice issues, and considered fervent defenders of separation of mosque and state. Kind of like Jews in this country.
"The stranger who resides among you shall be to you as the native among you." -- Leviticus 19:34 (http://bible.cc/leviticus/19-34.htm)
It is really difficult to find a character in popular cultures of the West and the Islamic world who can speak against this kind of nihilism.
Beautiful. Just...I wanted to leave it at that, but I cannot resist talking about its good aspects, like the way it toyed with the conventions of happy fairy tales, hinting at times that it might abandon the fairy tale storyline, before reverting again to the happy conventions. How wonderfully well the story dramatized its conceit (lover = fallen star) which is much older than Shakespeare. And on and on.
I know he took a lot of flak for this role but Robert DeNiro is simply amazing as Captain Shakespeare. He was already my favorite Brazilian air-conditioner repairman, so he didn't have to work too hard to earn my respect, but the campiness of his performance really snatched me out of my seat and roflroflrofl. Well done, sir!
And cannot forget those airships and flying pirates!
This story almost makes me want to believe in romantic love. Almost.
Picard's Dematerialization
All this rumination is a preface to a Star Trek episode. Last night, I watched the fourth episode of TNG. A typical scary-alien, abduction plotline. In the episode, a lifeform that consists of pure energy and leaches on the bodies of humans abducts Picard. It has him take the ship near an energy cloud and finally his body is transported to its center. When the crew come to their senses, they fix on the location of Captain's molecules and transport him back to the cargo bay successfully. He has lost none of his character, not even his accent, even though his molecules had been scattered in space and pieced together literally out of nothingness. What does this suggest? Was Picard's identity somehow coded in the atomic, molecular level? Even his accent?
That would be a radical departure from our knowledge of human identity today, which seems to be fixed by a volatile memory, i.e. unplugging your brain from its power source eradicates all that it contains. Star Trek, on the other hand, is suggesting that there is a part of ourselves that is permanently stored in a non-volatile hard drive, located god-knows-where--maybe Q knows where. This part of Picard's identity is then able to bootstrap the rest of his material being.
In that respect, with regard to identity and other questions of human existence, it's sobering to realize that the myth of Star Trek is inches away from the myth of Christianity. That's not a bad thing, though, because there is a mystery at the center of human existence that myths can speak to, unlike science and modernism. But, at some level, you just have to dismiss myths, especially when they begin to control your everyday actions. Myths should not take control of our lives. They should give us directions. That is all.
Difference is sad. Being different puts you in the margins. Sometimes literally, you are on the sidelines, at a football game. Or, you can't get access to the right places, you get picked on in school, or maybe you feel like you don't fit in because you don't like Kanye West. It's like, maybe you are different but that is not a bad thing. It gives you a better perspective, and that is not just another cliche. Really.
I feel strongly that feelings of difference should be celebrated, nurtured, developed.
Props to:
Also, when is Charlie Kaufman coming out with a new movie?
This is not bad. IT could be better, but I'm not the one to quibble.
It always bothered me that Star Trek would need a judgmental, finicky, capricious, almost omnipotent character like Q. He terrorizes Captain Picard and his crew, "testing" them, but actually challenging them to violate their basic principles. It's all a bit Old Testamenty. The Chosen People with a sense of destiny and a mythic curmudgeon over their heads like Yehovah, the Jews and the Enterprise crew have...something in common.
I have a love-hate relationship with Q. I re-watched the first episode of TNG, "Encounter at Farpoint," and noted that Picard and his crew showed admirable restraint in the face of his provocations. He killed one of the crewmembers (confusingly, not a redshirt), and put four others, including Picard, Counselor Troi, Lieutenant Yarr and Data, on trial, with the foregone conclusion that they were to plead guilty of the sins of the human race, thus showing why he is such a hateable guy.
In the episode, the crew tricks Q with a legal chicanery into giving them a chance to show their integrity. They have to proceed with their encounter at a planet named Farpoint where they face a pretty huge challenge, and they pass the test, so Q leaves them alone.
But a book I read about Star Trek showed that USS Enterprise actually violates the Prime Directive dozens of times during the course of the series. So, the "trial" in the first episode is not so unfounded, after all.
My psych teacher would say Q is a bold dramatization of the superego. A cruel and capricious master, who puts roadblocks around his puppets, just to watch them trip over. He sets the frontiers that they should not pass and takes pleasure from punishing them when they do. "Thou shalt not eat from the Tree of Knowledge." "Thou shalt not violate the prime directive." And, of course, this wouldn't be so ironic, not to say contradictory, if it weren't for the motto "to boldly go where no one has gone before." It's a human conundrum, one that a machine like Data often fails to appreciate. How do humans reconcile the courage to go into desolate and uncharted places with the limitations placed on their ethical conduct?
The mystery of Q is the mystery at the heart of Start Trek universe, that makes the series extraordinary, fascinating and still relevant to people in the real world, and, for better or for worse, most of us fail the test of Q.
While I find the test itself a bit problematic, I wouldn't question the notion that without that test, we wouldn't be truly human. We have to answer to an invisible master--call it god or conscience. For me, it's conscience.
One theme of More Sex is Safer Sex is that some of those disconnects between private and public interests are surprising and counterintuitive. Casual sex is one of those examples. If you are a recklessly promiscuous person with a high probability of HIV infection, you pollute the partner pool every time you jump into it — and you should be discouraged, just as any polluter should be discouraged. But the flip side of that is that if you are a very cautious person with a low probability of infection — and a low propensity to pass on any infection that you do have –then you improve the quality of the partner pool every time you jump into it. That’s the opposite of pollution, and it should be encouraged for exactly the same reasons that pollution should be discouraged.
Wow. And I don't mean that as a compliment.
The new rules codify an uneasy partnership between the Department of Homeland Security, which enforces the immigration laws, and the Social Security Administration, which collects identity information from W-2 tax forms of about 250 million workers each year, so it can credit the earnings in its system.
Mark Hinkle, a spokesman for Social Security, said the agency expected to send out about 140,000 no-match letters to employers this year, covering more than eight million workers. After the rules are announced, the agency is anticipating a surge in requests from employers seeking to clarify workers’ information, Mr. Hinkle said.
Social Security issues letters only to employers who have more than 10 workers whose numbers do not match, when those workers represent at least one-half of 1 percent of the company’s workforce, Mr. Hinkle said.
The agency cannot verify which mismatches came from immigrants who presented false Social Security numbers when they applied for jobs, he said. Mismatches also occur because of clerical errors, or when workers marry and forget to inform Social Security that they changed their names. Several federal studies in recent years have found significant error rates in the Social Security database.
Source: Nytimes.
What am I going to do if more than half percent of my company's employees have mismatched SS numbers? How am I going to explain myself?
I sort of have a plan. But I don't know if it will work. I may have to quit this job if there is a request for clarification. My option then would be to find a job at a company with fewer than 10 employees.
On a tangent, I totally should delete this journal. The reason being that I lost my first job when my employer discovered my journal. I have a fear. I may have said too much about myself already and I'm fearful someone will connect the dots to me.
Weird to think that I am putting up with all this uncertainty. I could probably marry a US citizen and that would save me. But who am I kidding? I can barely put up with myself. How am I going to put up with another person in my life? Maybe it's a chickenshit excuse but taking that route would add even more uncertainty to my life than the current situation. At least, I know that even if I lose my job I can easily get another job--there is so much demand for programmers. The future of immigration in US lies in fruit pickers, day laborers, and web rats like me.
But I'm better now. I got better largely by helping other people. No matter how bad it gets for you, you can't buy goodwill. Nor can you force it out of your son. Hear me, dad? Probably not.
Also felt good to come on the subway across some bratty Turkish kids who were making fun of me, not realizing I understood them. I waited for my moment as they professed disbelief at my hat, my reading style and then jumped in with a ton of attitude. "Oh, you never saw a guy reading with a pen in his hand, did you?"
Them: scream. Some pull newspapers across their face to hide their shame.
Me: you didn't think I look like a Turk, did you?
Them: no...I, I didn't. I apologize, really.
Me: ha. You must not be from Istanbul.
Them: no, we are from....
...and they went on to count these small towns (not even cities, excepting Izmir) I'd never heard (again, excepting Izmir). We had a nice little chat after that. I got to know a lot about the roving brats.
All this should put aside my sadness. I haven't been feeling very accepted at the office recently. It's hard trying to be different. Until you are accepted, you have to grind your teeth and accept the isolation, hoping people will find something unique or different about you and come over. Until that happens, though, it's kind of lonely.
This ad caused a huge stir when it was aired in the Turkish television last week before the elections. Some stations refused to air it because it made "radical" claims like equal rights, constitutional protection and democracy. But the real reason it offended the Turkish establishment was the sight of a woman in a headscarf, and the fact that she was being shown as fashionable and modern. It's shocking to me that the Turkish establishment would find it so hard to comprehend that a woman wearing a headscarf can be just as fashionable, cool and beautiful as the trendiest of trendsters in Turkey.
I grabbed this beautiful shot from a favorite site of mine, Istanbul Streetstyle.
( Read more... )
I think these women have just as much right to wear their own choice of clothing in Turkey as this guy, who probably is now the living proof that Ataturk should have cracked down on sombrero hats before he outlawed the fez.
The midtown Manhattan is in disarray this morning as the hazmat crews rush to clean up the asbestos debris on the sidewalks. I couldn't get past the police cordon to see the ruckus but what I saw yesterday was astonishing. Do you see, people? Do you see what happens when you condemn the steam power into slavery in your underground factories? This:More about the explosion here.
I had a very hot sex dream about Michael Moore last night. He rubbed his hairless body all over me as we had missionary style sex. (I'm totally straight about this...as much as I think I can be.)
Later, I was so discombobulated that I spent four hours cleaning up blurriness in a few image files, before realizing that it was just a dead bug stuck to my monitor.
Frickin' hey.
An Old Aesthetic for New Technology
A touching commercial from Germany.
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!
yanked from ectoplasmosis.
Sometimes I have to step out of the imaginary frame of mind in order to take in how things can look absurd within the context of other things more real than they are.
Am I saying that everything is a little imaginary? Maybe it is. Yes, I think Dick Cheney is more real than a unicorn, but Dick Cheney has a some kind of a creature in him, too.
Why does that make me so wound up and crazy, though? I'm on the verge of tears and cannot concentrate on anything. There are things I need to synthesize but I cannot make sense of the words in front of my eyes. What is happening? Please make it stop.
I was thinking today that this has been a crutch with me. At one time I believed that despite external differences there was an essential similarity between me and everyone else. But this stopped making sense the more I thought and observed myself from an outsider's point of view in the round. That means, I looked at myself living not only in a pastiche of those moments of high drama and triumph but also the low points of defeat and humiliation. And more importantly I stopped viewing those low moments as isolated cases but as the normal state of things, while the golden moments became isolated. That is not distorting the facts, but looking at them realistically. It should make you more motivated to fix the flaws if you can be realistic about them, but the truth is it can also deepen the divide between you and the rest of the world. In my case, my sense of alienation became a self-sustaining circle. The more I thought I was apart, the more I stopped making an effort to adapt and change, evolve and thrive. I do just enough to survive.
The offshoot of radical difference
1. Ayn Rand -- selfish and good. OMG, that is soooo radical! Watch out Nietzsche! (Rand always wanted to surpass Nietzsche in a typical case of anxiety of influence.) It's an unusual notion that selfishness can be synonymous with good, but it's really not that uncommon. Every egomaniac believes in his own goodness. That is not radicalism, but kind of self-serving, self-regarding mania. Props to Nietzche for at least moving beyond self-interest, which Rand never could.
2. Plato -- selfish and evil. The persecution of Socrates prompted Plato to declare war on democracy and what he saw as the essential ugliness of human nature that gave rise to it. He believed that only a dictatorship of philosopher kings would create a country where people could be forced to treat each other with kindness and decency.
3. Aristotle -- some evil, others good and could be even better. Aristotle basically created an ethical system that was governed by the golden mean, and his ideas offered a practical course in ethical behavior. This means that every human being is capable of goodness inasmuch as he lives by the golden mean. However, he also thought that only the upper class male Greeks were capable of this; everyone else was evil.
4. Hobbes -- purely eeeeevil. Hobbes basically thought every man he met would steal his lunch money. To stop the war of all against all, he argued for a strong monarchical government, even though he basically said the divine right of kings was probably bullshit. That was probably the most cynical line of reasoning in world history until the Bush administration gave us the unforgettable line: "the proof could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Before there was an internet and activist blogging, the elites thought that they could get away with the lies.
5. Nietzsche -- you gotta be kidding me! Nietzche wanted to move beyond good and evil. He believed that thinking in terms of good and evil had sank us into a morass where we kept trying to guess the mind of god. As long as we insisted that there was an "essential" part of us, then we had to have account for it by searching for transcendental origins. And that usually meant God. Do we have an essence? If we do, where does it come from? Where does it go after we die? To say that there is an essence is basically the same thing as saying there is a god. But "our existence," as Sartre said, "precedes our essence," and Nietzsche believed in this as well. We are atoms in search of our way in a very lonely universe. There is no god, there is no essence. There is only us.
Another thing that strikes me is how often this question gets asked and answered in the politics, and it's not really being answered at all. The answers are given symbolically. That is probably the effect of our advertising culture--yet another type of cynical manipulation, which I am okay with.
1. Epiphanies as a literary technique. James Joyce to Scrubs.
2. Logical reasoning. Must use it more. Mind is mushy. Needs structure.
3. Nietzche's and Derrida's critique of logocentric thinking. Logic is just an invention. It does not lead to Truth. "Nothing exists, if it exists it cannot be known, if it can be known, it cannot be communicated." Breaking down the link between binaries is their task. Destroy the center, leave it empty. Search for a logos leads to aporrhea--"waylessness." This is a greek word Derrida coined, clearly an allusion to Eastern concept of Tao, or the Way.
4. Logic is necessary even if it is an invention. It helps us formulate a tentative kind of truth in human sciences. When it goes too far, as it does in logical positivism, Catholic dogma or dialectical materialism, it becomes a justification for tyrannical suppression of thought, not an agent of thinking.
5. Constraints are necessary and vital.
6. Doing something for the first time can be scary. The way to conquer the jitters for me is to consider that I'm not the first person to do this. Not being the first to face up to new challenges is a truly emboldening realization. That means I don't have to feel insecure. I'm not breaking a new path here but only seek the foot trail left by others. Not being the only person facing up to the challenge makes this feeling even stronger.
7. Learning by doing also covers thinking. When I am trying to learn something new, if I don't repeat that new concept to myself in my mind, then, it does not stay there. That is the practical aspect of thought. Even though it is a purely abstract, invisible thing done in solitary isolation, it is not a passive activity. I have to repeat new ideas to myself and connect them to other ideas that I already know and succinctly explain them to myself. Finally, I need to practice imagining that I am explaining the ideas to others in realistic situations. This last step is the most crucial, as it indicates the highest level of understanding.
Oh, man. One of my favorite blogs is coming to an end. Table of Malcontents shall cease to be in two weeks. This is so weird and sad.
On a more positive note---
I discovered an awesome film last night. It's called Dark City (1998!) and it's uber-cool in that Blade Runner kind of way.
That is the cold, brutal rule of our modern world. I don't want to play this game. I don't want to hear about their boyfriend troubles or how much they love to eat good food. I can't accept the rule that says the only way I can say hi to someone who works in a cubicle ten feet from me is to make awful smalltalk, but I can't help feeling bitter and rejected for being excluded anyway. I don't know what it is... I'm not cool enough to be content to remain an outsider. It's the Woody Allen in me. I want badly to belong, even among people who are my polar opposites. Deep down, I have a sense that if they indeed accept me the way I am, I can stop being the way I am, and instead be smug and confident the way they are. But if they were to accept me, I would eventually come to my senses and realize there is nothing wrong with what I am, but there is something very wrong with them wanting me to be one of them. I should consider myself lucky, therefore, that this social minuet went no farther! Knowing what I know about myself, I don't need to feel the sting of rejection, but maybe some relief. This realization I hope will be enough to clear away those painful thoughts. But if it doesn't, I can still take comfort from the fact that I don't derive my self-worth from other people anymore. The only thing that can make me happy these days is knowledge, education, greasemonkey, Firefox and science. Unlike most people, I'm not pursuing pleasure, but happiness. Not the trivial facts, but the essential truths. That is my task, and I should feel no shame or regrets about it, no matter how many rejections it gets me.
Once
Not since "Before Sunrise" have I seen such a flawlessly executed tribute to transient infatuation, mutual obsession and bittersweet awakening that comes with practically inevitable separation. "Once" is a gem of a movie, and it made me realize that even though life may not have one big Meaning, its "meanings" are so fluid and collusive and open ended as to be truly beautiful. In spite of what my pride tells me, seeing how two people changed each other in a truly meaningful way made me sense that this is how we find our way in life. Not from individual choice made in isolation, but from strangers in stranger circumstances: haphazard, unpredictable, they lead us in a new direction that will reframe our cynicism and give us second chances in life, love and friendship.
I mean, yes, I want to accomplish a given task as fast as possible and if that means part of the job needs to be offloaded to an outside company, what is wrong with that? It's done all the time, and it's called outsourcing. Jeez. They discuss it openly at business meetings and we know they are mapping out how they will outsource our jobs, too. But when I happen to mention that I want to go outside of our slow, cumbersome and extremely useless system and do it with an independent provider, the warning flags are raised. Ohhhh, you're going to do it in the slow and plodding way, you corporate drone you because we said so.
Had I been more argumentative, the co-worker would not want to help me out again. But if I don't accept his shitty suggestion, he will label me as unprofessional. I can't imagine how this dilemma could be saved by common sense. God. This company and the ossified mentality that some people here seem to share completely disgust me.
Two people who used to say hello to me every so often started snubbing me. That's totally fine. I never cared for their self-absorbed little cliques anyway. Never wanted to be one of them. But fuckin' hell, show some common courtesy and return the hello of a sensible, decent person trying to remain courteous and polite.
I told myself I wouldn't let myself get stressed out by these people today. Lucky me. It didn't work. Once the immigration bill passes--and it has to--I'm so getting out of here and into a job that doesn't require so much social interaction. Made up my mind: I'm going to work at a small office; never showing up to a corporate office ever again, unless it's Google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_a
But it'd be a really cool safety feature if Google makes it universally available to everyone. GreenBorder not places your browser in virtual machine sandbox, and thereby protecting you from unauthorized intrusions, it also gives you the option to delete all private info from the browser or to add extra layer of protection for extra-sensitive, for instance, monetary transactions. Besides being so damn protecting, it also looks so neat and environmentally conscious--in other words, kinda like me.
Something that combines two of my favorite things: Star Trek and Steampunk.
This guy got 97 from his term report by dubbing his schoolwork over longwinded 70s-era porn. Now that is kewl.
Ever since I left college, I have not tried to find and correct contradictory signals. The reason for that is acceptance. I came to terms with dissonance, impurity, whimsy of human spirit--and realized that consistency is not the driving force of life. (Or so I say to myself; actually, I realized that I don't have the capacity, means or the will to live a consistent life.) Living consistently without contradictions might lead you on a successful path, as it does if directed towards business and crafts, or it can lead to arrested development. As much as I enjoy Holden Caulfelds of this world--and certainly I enjoy them a lot, not even counting the TV show "Arrested Development"--I find that one has to be vigilant about wrinkles, but ultimately unbothered by them. That is, if you care to be adaptable. Because of the way our minds work, we cannot choose between chaos and order, and that's why it makes sense to keep to the same path. If we stop to think it rather than embracing it, we will never start moving again.
That's just one point of view. I am becoming a person who is slowly becoming adept. Managing the little things don't seem so difficult anymore. In the corporate world, there is little difference between not being adept and being inept. Only a few years ago, I could fully believe that there was no situation in which I would feel out of place, and I don't know if that meant I necessarily fit in there. Before I started growing attached to things I wore and the habits I picked up along the way--like sitting in front of a computer screen and typing away in piddles and plops--and before people started throwing real tasks on my shoulders, not just busy-work, there was no way to see myself when I looked into the mirror. I had no identity, and therefore no reflection, and therefore, again, no doubt in my mind that tomorrow I could wake up and become somebody else. The human chameleon. Because, once you sense the awesome amount of knowledge around you, and not have to carry any of it, your first thought is that it must be in other people and you can expeditiously become them. Then, if you get past that attitude, you realize that if you are seeking knowledge, you are not creating it. It is not true to say there is only x amount of knowledg in the world and it's located at...you name it--Mecca, Jerusalem, India, comic books, movies, a research university, or other people. This can be just an innocent admission of insufficient self-esteem, a yearning for more experience, or it can be a form of greed--to see all, to be all, to devour all, and to conquer all. Yet you cannot have it all.
If the dream of man is to be god, the dream of god is to be man. That is what our stories teach us, and it is our oldest myth, but it is enduring because it is a reassuring thought, because a casual glance around me shows the upward thrust of ambition and success is often menacing. I sometimes pity them because by the time they attain their ambitions, they will lose things far more enviable, like simplicity and quiet. But when I think about that a little, I know that this is a lie. The attainment only fuels more ambition, more power, more glory. Ego is insatiable. It's after the race, the journey--not the destination. Powerful people live this truth, and, if you asked them, they sense they are envied for their success. Therefore, they make up these stories about the longing for anonymity and quiet, and myths about gods who become mortal. I heard that all the US presidents at one point repeated they missed being just ordinary citizens. The exception is probably Bill Clinton. Even though he said something like that recently, without saying he missed his life before fame struck him like a bolt of lightening, he could be the most unapologetic about being a success. The rich and famous can never be ordinary again. They either keep being that way for the rest of their lives or they become has-beens, because celebrity in our culture doesn't have a switch button.
It takes a lot of effort to deny that, and to live without contradictions. That's why it's not plausible to think consistent people are not inconsistent. Jack Wlech is not always consistent and neither is Holden Caulfeld. They are strategically inconsistent, unlike me, who is only lackadaisically consistent because I cannot afford to be a slack off.
Anyway. I am shrugging this off in 3.....2....1.
An early animation by Sylvain Chomet, the synaesthetic animator behind "Triplets of Belleville" with a unique perspective on life. Americans are fat. French are rude. Pigeons are terminally obese. And yet, these stereotypes don't do justice to this short.
It must be true, then. There are no stories in the world that have not been told on The Simpsons. South Park even dedicated an episode to illustrate that point. Most stories go to The Simpsons, and many come out of it. It's an inevitable circle just like life and death, and the migration of the tropical birds and the envious emus that waddle south every year.
Wanted! Someone all suspicious hanging about with this bag in the New York area.
In August 1960, the U.S.S. Seadragon became the first submarine to surface at the North Pole. During their visit, the crew laid out a softball diamond with the pitcher's box at the pole.
Captain George P. Steele later claimed he hit a fly ball at 4 p.m. Wednesday that wasn't caught until 4 a.m. Thursday.
from Futility Closet.
Whaddaya know? An actual Victorian house...that moves. That text on top says Neverwas Haus. Clever!
More here: http://laughingsquid.com/maker-faire-20
When, more than 70 years ago, William Beebe became the first scientist to descend into the abyss, he described a world of twinkling lights, silvery eels, throbbing jellyfish, living strings as “lovely as the finest lace” and lanky monsters with needlelike teeth. “It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived,” he wrote in “Half Mile Down” (Harcourt Brace, 1934). “I would focus on some one creature and just as its outlines began to be distinct on my retina, some brilliant, animated comet or constellation would rush across the small arc of my submarine heaven and every sense would be distracted, and my eyes would involuntarily shift to this new wonder.”
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