WTF

After reading this, I think I lost my faith in science. So, what they are basically suggesting is that we should play a game of cards as an experiment to determine, whether it is a good idea to power up a particle accelerator. That’s just fucking swell.

The moment we stop burning red-haired people as witches, people with different ideas as heretics, and putting people who claim the earth be round on the stake, we go off drawing cards to figure out what we should do. Well, at least we are learning from past mistakes, since drawing cards did work out pretty well in the past, didn’t it? There was no room for doubting back in the good old days, when we were still into the card game.

Of course, I do understand them worrying about being blown to bits, because of a petty experiment – oh wait, didn’t we already do that with those two Japanese cities a while back? - but drawing cards? Get a grip, man.

I may be missing some point here, but what they’re saying – correct me if I’m wrong – is that time traveler could come back and tamper with the tarot cards, so as to prevent the building of the particle from happening, right? Or that if the using of the machine were to be harmful to the world somehow in the future, the cards would tell us to “STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING, RIGHT FUCKING NOW, OR YOU’LL BLOW YOUR BRAINS OUT!” or something along those lines, correct? I don’t have a background in physics, but I’ve studied a bit of philosophy here and there, and I can’t help seeing a few holes in the plan laid out above.

First of all, so what if the world were to end the moment they fire up the machine? What, would the cards tell us, not to build the machine? Why? Do you honestly believe there to be some God-like force out there, who simply has nothing better to do than to keep us from blowing ourselves up, who would stop us from killing ourselves – like he has done so many times before. If so, are you sure you’ve found your right calling as a scientist? I’m sure the 700 club has some vacancies if you wish to reconsider. Or how about trying Creationist Science? A branch of science that hasn’t received the recognition it needs, and always in need of gullible pseudo-scientists.

Secondly, if we can pretty much rule out the possibility of there being a supernatural being – something I wouldn’t be willing to count on – willing to take on the task of acting as our guardian – something I wouldn’t want to inflict on anyone. Then how can we, for sure, know that the cards wouldn’t lie? Usually, when we draw cards there’s always a real chance of the pieces of inanimate cardboard paper,being wrong, but in this case it is as if such an option has miraculously made itself disappear completely. Maybe some time traveler would come back and tamper with the cards? A-ha, I didn’t know there’d be that much to devote for time exploration, while being pursued by numerous mini-blackholes, but I guess I’m wrong.

Thirdly. Have you ever thought about the possibility of our existence simply not amounting to any importance? Seriously, do you think a deck of cards could care less about some ape-hybrid exploding itself, or there being some magnificent reason for our us being in being, which would keep us from killing ourselves? Yeah right.

Any way you look at it, there’s a real chance of being sucked into a black hole, and there is a chance of us stumbling upon a new age in science. But thinking that a game of cards will help us decide is like playing Russian roulette, while thinking that something would stop you from biting the bullet before pulling the trigger, a manifestation of existential anxiety taken to whole new extremes.

Ok, so we can’t kill ourselves with atom bombs either if we follow the same train of thought, can we? Something would have stopped us from figuring out how to make such devices, if they could lead to the world being a lifeless rock, right? Or didn’t we just go through the proper channels when we were inventing the atom bomb? After all, I do think we forgot the ever so important drawing of cards procedure. What would science be without it?

To quote one Dylan Moran, from the Black Books:

I don’t know, it’s an impossible choice… I just have to hope that when I flip the coin it somehow explodes and kills me.

Last.fm Fails

If you are like me, you can’t stand the new look Last.fm has adopted. Last.fm used to be one of the easiest sites to use and to comprehend, but now just navigating about is a task few of us can manage.

And I know, this isn’t a new subject or anything that has happened recently to be blogging about, but in my defence I’d like to say that I actually started writing this blog entry already five days ago. But since then, I’ve been sort of busy, well, slacking about…

Disapproval of the direction Last.fm is taking things has already led to a few last.fm users taking matters into their own hands. They’ve formed a group called Bring back the old Last.fm and I would ask you to join it if you feel the same way about the matter as last.fm looks…

And since when has individuality been a quality to be avoided? Last.fm’s looks used to be original and fun, now they’re just a weird plagiarised version of myspace…

Wikipedia Compared to an Encyclopedia

Again this will be a post inspired more by will than skill. In other words where it lacks in actual information it makes up in sheer opinion. And when I use the word encyclopedia, I mean encyclopedia in the tradiotional sense of the word, for example, Encyclopaedia Britannica, a backbreaking piece of informative literature to drag about with you.

I know there has been a lot of criticism of Wikipedia, since anyone can go and edit it, which naturally tends to make the knowledge being offered biased to one direction or another, but that is also the case with every Encyclopedia – even with the ones, that aren’t open to be edited by anyone – because there is no such thing as neutral writing, there has never been, nor will there ever be. All writers lean towards one opinon or another even without realizing it, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Naturally with Wikipedia we are on a whole ‘nother ball court, since it can be edited by anyone as well as the malignant authors of drug companies, who may make the list of mentioned side-effects a tad bit shorter or find that the text doesn’t speak quite highly enough of the drug in question and correct the flaw. But it also gives way to the haphazard Wikipedia terrorist, who doesn’t quite share the view of science on evolution. These and various others are the viable flaws of Wikipedia, not to even mention the fact that most of the authors of Wikipedia are more connoisseurs than virtuosos of the matter being edited.

All those flaws are something real encyclopedias lack – or for the very least ought to lack. And for scientific texts you should never look for a sanctum in the hands of connoisseurs, but instead throw yourself into the safety of backbreaking literature.

But there is one area of interest Wikipedia might have covered better than any other medium. That area being the world of contemporary knowledge, since there is always some fan of a particular field, willing to contribute an article to Wikipedia when ever something ground breaking happens. This very likely also the case with some of the popular culture, for example, the literary world, excluding Harry Potters and Lords of The Rings, which have so many fans that there are probably terrific flamingwars about whenever some trollish creatures, finds its way to the editing board. Not to even mention articles about bands such as The Ting Tings, which have probably been filled with utter propaganda, since the day they were created…

So even though Wikipedia lacks a bit in the pedancy of normal Encyclopedias, it still has some good qualities. For example, being the ultimate place to waste a whole night of sleeplesness on…

The Pool of Human Knowledge

Au Lecteur

First and foremost I’ll have to warn you – the reader whose existence I doubt – that I am again blogging about blogging or blogging about how I think blogging ought be carried out. Typical, eh?

Adding to The Pool of Human Knowledge

It is solely my own opinion that you oughtn’t just blog about something you read somewhere and then slightly summarizing what you read and throwing in a link to the site you read that something from, without adding anything and simply reinstating something already told somewhere else – this is something that even I’ve been guilty of doing. But instead – keep in mind that this is just my two cents on the matter at hand – you should offer a new perspective on the thing you read from somewhere else or perhaps combine the knowledge you have gathered from various sources giving you a more neutral view on the matter – thus “adding to the pool of human knowledge” and not simply throwing in something that is already there.

If everyone were to just blog about something they heard on Fox News, without even attempting to bring about something that they themselves have come up with, the Blogosphere would be filled with pulp in the worst sense of the word in no time. And that is not what blogging is about, is it? To have a blog is to have the possibility to be a critic of the world around you, why not taking advantage of such an option, if it is offered to you?

Update: Updated: Nasa’s unveiling something

Apparently NASA is supposed to unveil something today that they have found out as the result of 50 years of work. People are already wondering on Reddit what this something is and throwing their own theories out in the open… Could it be an alien race, dark matter, finding out that the universe runs on perl or that I’m making an idiot out of myself trying to act as if my blog was ever even read…

Update:

Nasa just put a link to a live audio stream on their site. The actual “media teleconference” as they call it is supposed to start at around 1 p.m. EDT meaning around -4 GMT…

Currently Nasa seems to be just testing whether their systems are functioning via playing some classical music…

Oh and just to throw a bone for all you conspiracy theorists out there: does it sound like a coincidence that Vatican announced earlier this week that believing into extra terrestrial life forms is not against the views of the church )

Update:

All they found was a supernova…

Note to Self

Never, ever convince yourself for weeks that there’s still plenty of time to start reading a 860-page novel, and then find yourself the night before the deadline when the book is supposed to be read, reading on page 412…

It NEVER works out, ok…

The Plato’s cave we live in

 Have you ever thought about who it is who decides who decides what is important enough to put into a newspaper? On what basis does that person decide that this is something that the people will want to know and this isn’t?

Have you ever thought whether what you hear on TV or Radio really is true? Just because the whole of mainstream media is sticking with the same story, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it would be true…

If you start actually thinking of the way we gather information from the world around us, you may notice that there’s something fundamentally wrong about it. We never actually find out anything for sure, we just assume what we hear to be true, because it correlates what other sources are telling is. What that means is that we are the prisoners of Plato’s cave and the media is the system creating the shadows that represent what’s going on in the real world, on the wall of the cave.

That’s kind of concerning isn’t it? Especially if we live in a country where the government controls the media.

And think about the power that just one journalist has. By simply changing the way he uses the language, he can make the whole story seem different from what it really is and make people take the sides he wants them to take on the issue at hand.

What if someone wants us to stay ignorant about something going on? They could just fill the news with stories that aren’t actually the most important, but instead the kind of news he doesn’t mind you knowing.

This sounds like wild conspiracy theory, but think about it. It wouldn’t take too much to control an entire nation if someone was actually willing to. The Internet naturally makes it more difficult, since people can now spread information themselves, but the information those people can spread is just what their governments didn’t mind them knowing in the first place…

If you didn’t know anything about the Plato’s cave before you started reading this post, you may want to catch up on it. That way this post might actually make some sense to you. Assuming that it makes any sense in the first place, which is quite doubtful…

School and me.

People call me lazy for from ditching from school every now and then, but there seems to be a slight lack of understanding between me and the people. People don’t seem to understand what school is like for me. I don’t know what causes this, maybe I am lazy, a possibility, which should not by any means be ruled out, but still I feel that there’s something inherently different in the ways I experience school and the way most of the people I know experience school.

School is the closest form to medieval torture to me. It is my kryptonite, my Achilles heel, Jack’s utter hatred towards society embodied. School is the reason I am depressed during weekdays, it is the reason I update my blog so rarely, it is the reason I detest the idea of ever finding a regular job.

When I arrive at a school, any school, my energy is completely drained within 15 minutes, my brain becomes a mash of pudding. I become anxious, uncreative, depressed, and overwhelmed by everything. And that feeling never leaves me after I leave the building. It stays with me for the rest of the day. When I arrive home, I spend the rest of the day in a vertical position, playing the guitar, doing stuff with my laptop, reading, and maybe writing, mostly of course just avoiding  doing the homework that was assigned during the day.

When I’m not in school, for whatever reason, I tend to feel fine. Usually it’s like finding out again that I actually am a person capable of feeling fine, every now and then, an ability I often forget during the week.

Being in a structured environment simply is not for me. I cannot stand being told how to think, what to think, what to do, how to do it, and when to do it. Not when it is done by people who get paid for it, that’s always a bad sign in my opinion. If the person is telling you what ever he is telling you for the money and not for the knowledge he wants to share you’re being screwed over. Since he isn’t doing his work for you, he is doing it for somebody else. Somebody wanted him to say those things. Of course it’s a good thing to be taught and to learn stuff, but you should still question everything the teacher tells you and not accept it blindly.

I’d say that going to school for me is like playing Russian roulette with my psyche. The chances of me losing my mind or descending to the depths of major depression are growing day by day and it’s just a matter of whether I get out of school before I have a nervous break down or whether I won’t. But you have to keep in mind that it’s after high school that the troublesome life begins, you’ve to start working to finance your studies and after that the working life begins…

Why artists prefer to sleep in?

Artists are usually associated with sleeping in – or that’s what I associate them with anyway. This association may have caused some people to think of artists as lazy, since they don’t even bother dragging themselves out of bed, until late into the afternoon.

But I think there might be more behind this sleeping in phenomenon than just common laziness, after all would you call a person who spends all their free time painting, writing, or composing a musical piece as lazy? I doubt not.

I believe that the reason why so many artists prefer to sleep in is because they spend their nights and late evenings creating art. After all the night offers a certain kind of safe haven, where there are less distractions than during the day, and no other people hassling about with their meager little business.

During the night the artiste can afford to be themselves, since there isn’t criticizing audience around preventing them from acting as they like. An author may for example try out his newly written dialogue out loud to see if it sounds the way he wanted it to as he was writing it.

Sleeping in has been seen as a faulty faculty to posses, one that is often connected with bohemians and other unconventional types. But that is due to people only thinking of sleeping in as a symptom of laziness and not seeing the amount of creative work that was accomplished during the night.

The Zen of Email

You are reading a website, a colorful bubble starts bouncing up and down, demanding your attention, like the empty needle of a heroin addict. You stop reading the website or whatever it was that you were just doing, and now give all your attention to figuring out what the colorful bubble on your desktop is, why is it bouncing up and down, and what the hell is it doing there.

This is what Instant Messaging, IM, is for most of us. We view it as a convenient way for staying in contact with friends we don’t see too often, forgetting the fact that IM can actually be a major pain in the ass. Have you ever noticed how you just sort of linger on there in front of the monitor, somewhat unconsciously and somewhat consciously, deciding to stay there for just a little longer, in case someone has to tell you something urgent all of the sudden.

Then at about 02:00 am. when the contacts from your contact list have finally almost completely gone offline, you can relaxand shut down the computer, and move on to other activities. Then there’s just one problem: you don’t have any time left, you spent it all making sure that no-one had anything utterly urgent to tell you. What are you going to do now? You had all sorts of plans for today: you were going to play the guitar, write a blog entry, invent a cure for aids, and maybe just maybe if you had any time left, watch Late Night with Conan O’ Brien.

This is what most of IM users are dealing with even as we speak. They are almost addicted on trying to stay online the whole day, leaving everything else undone. Maybe mankind is addicted to communication, maybe that’s why we like to spend all our time watching colorful bubbles hopping up and down, on our desktops, with ever increasing speed, or maybe we like to spend all our time sitting in front of the monitor hoping to see some bubbles jumping up and down, as if to justify our existence, make us feel worthy of existing. What ever the case may be, we can draw one conclusion from here: being online fucking sucks.

You can easily leave behind the trouble and heartache of Instant Messaging by using Email. You’ll still stay in contact with your friends and you won’t have to spend the whole day waiting to see some colorful bubble bouncing. Unless of course you keep your email open all the time waiting to get replys, in which case I’d suggest you get a life. That’s what I was planning on doing anyway.