Random Ramblings of a Ravishing Realistic Retard(?)

On Technology:

I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. Its true. I've personally never found more joy other than the fact as to how much easier life has become by pasting my face to a computer screen for somewhere in the immediate vicinity of 6 hours a day. Now that I speak of it, it seems like a staggeringly large number. Its some time which can be better spent sleeping or, say, going on the hunt for Nessie(im sure Google with help speed up that process monumentaly).


On God-mongering:

I don’t like the idea of missionaries. In fact the whole business fills me with fear and alarm. I don’t believe in God, or at least not in the one we’ve invented for ourselves to fulfil our peculiar needs, and certainly not in the ones they’ve invented in America who supply their servants with toupees, television stations and, most importantly, toll-free telephone numbers. I wish that people who did believe in such things would keep them to themselves and not export them to the developing world. Something in the selling of religion is inherently disturbing. The fact that some person would go door-do-door selling a belief(i wont call it a faith, since that would be patronizing a non-existent entity) which he/she has either a. willingly accepted, b. has been told by parent/guardian/educator to accept or c. been forced into by some series of fortunate/unfortunate/non-relevant circumstances.

However that person may have come to follow his religion/belief/faith is his and his business alone. It, by no means, gives said person (missionary) to come parading his religion and trying to make a sale at my doorstep.


On Fears:

I've heard an idea proposed, I've no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It's an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this. The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It's often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey toward our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying "Jump!" and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, "For Christ's sake, don't!" In fact, vertigo is explained by some not as the fear of falling, but as the temptation to jump!

This idea in itself is amazing. The fact that the human brain can within a split second go on war with itself to such an extent as to cause physical discomfort leaves a lot of room for us to blame the world's problems on human error. Think about this for a moment and try and imagine, that if the brain is able to contradict itself, how many wrong decisions must a man make in a day, and how many of above mentioned bad decisions must have been of monumental importance to only affect one person, but also the world, and maybe history itself.

Maybe Napoleon felt a weird sense of "vertigo" when he stood at the brink of the battle of Waterloo.


On Media:

It's important to remember that the relationship between different media tends to be complementary. When new media arrive they don't necessarily replace or eradicate previous types. Though we should perhaps observe a half second silence for the carbon record. - There that's done. What usually happens is that older media have to shuffle about a bit to make space for the new one and its particular advantages. Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies - what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?

Generally, old media don't die. They just have to grow old gracefully. Guess what, we still have stone masons. They haven't been the primary purveyors of the written word for a while now of course, but they still have a role because you wouldn't want a TV screen on your headstone.


On Humans: (Quotes)

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

The great thing about being the only species that makes a distinction between right and wrong is that we can make up the rules for ourselves as we go along.





Epilogue:

It appears that i may have written several week's worth of blog-posts in one single blog. But I couldn't help myself, these ramblings have been in my head and written down wherever for a long time now, its been a long time coming and feels good to have in print. Or atleast in written base somewhere on the web.

P.S.> Sorry for the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. Its 3A.M. and my eyes refuse confuse the squiggly red lines and my brain gives it as much passing thought as a fart in a windstorm.


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Listening to: Audioslave - Show Me How To Live
via FoxyTunes

A wrong view of the world.

We all think that this perfect world is created with a perfect purpose and somehow we all have a part to play in this whole game called life, and that somehow, in the smallest way possible, our life has some meaning and each person has a central role in this whole drama of living and this amazing planet we call earth.

Somehow i believe we all are sorely mistaken. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. And to that effect our perspective is so skewed that we believe, we hope against hope that WE, nay "I", am somehow important. We believe that somehow we were meant to be here. We justify this logic by placing a phrase like "If the glove fits..." You have no idea how wrong we are.

. . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the center of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.

But keeping that in mind there's also the fact that the world is a thing of utter inordinate complexity and richness and strangeness that is absolutely awesome. I mean the idea that such complexity can arise not only out of such simplicity, but probably absolutely out of nothing, is the most fabulous extraordinary idea. And once you get some kind of inkling of how that might have happened, it's just wonderful. And . . . the opportunity to spend 70 or 80 years of your life in such a universe is time well spent as far as I am concerned.



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Listening to: Audioslave - Like A Stone
via FoxyTunes