The Owl God Demands Sacrifice

I don't know if I should put this in writing lest my current or future employers track this down, but I just spent the better part of the last 3 days watching all the zero punctuations to date. It is through this venture that I learned that the Internet is a very clever tool. A tool to separate idiots from their money. With this in mind, I think it's high time that I came up with a clever idea to cause people to give my massive amounts of currency (preferably via the internet, so that I could work from home). Here are the tentative steps of this play:

(1) increase the traffic on this website
(2) begin exploitation of traffikers

The brilliance of this plan is in the phrasing since no one will care if you exploit a traffiker because hey they're traffiking something (in this case themselves). Please list any exploitative ideas here so that I might steal them and deftly implement them.

Delta W Over Delta T

Mondays are like the paparazzi if you're famous. You know they're there and you know they are coming, but you would never guess they would come so fast, so effectively, and so ruthlessly.

And yet there is nothing to be done about it. Well that's not entirely accurate. Every problem has a solution and if your enemy is time (or in this case dates) then just destroy the clock (or in this case calendar). Let get out of the world of time. Stop working and stop living by dates. Then mondays become sunny days which are ultimately much better. How much of their lives has the past three generations thrown away cooped up in their offices? Too much I don't doubt it. So much time lost exploring the outdoors or spending time with their families and loved ones. In the name of what exactly? Money. It's more than that though. It's power. Marx was wrong when he said religion was the opiate of the masses. It's power or the illusion thereof. Religion is just one road to it. It's power over death, over the unknown. Capitalism gives power through monetary means. Power over fellow men. Both systems give the potential for power too. Meaning in both religion and capitalism, power is promised to the people. It is achievable if only they follow a set of rules. Whether its attaining atonement or climbing the corporate latter.

Prove or disprove that point. Power is the opiate of the masses and all societal institutions are designed for the consolidation or dispersion of power. By that I mean, if people aren't in a position to wield power they are cowed by the promise of it one day (or I suppose to be more Machievellian cowed by the fear of the power). At worst this is a new way of stating some old ideas. At best its a new way of thinking about the world (at least its new to me). I mean the assertion is obvious, people crave power. My question is does motivation explain broad scale behavior at a nation-state and institutional level?


Back to small scale applications
Clearly, I'm not happy with the way I'm going about achieving power. Fueled by greed, I can't be bothered to take the long way (long working hours) of achieving power. I also can't think of any thing that would short circuit the system and propel me straight to the top. One option (and I want to say only other option left) is to redefine my worldview in such a way so that the power I have is more meaningful. Ie say fuck it leave this boring job and go do something cool and support myself through whatever means. The power that would bring is freedom, power of action. I guess it is not so much of a redefining as it is a summoning of courage to burst from the mold I've been forced into. The fear that keeps me rooted to my seat even now is the fear of failure or in these terms the fear of becoming powerless. O what a to-do.

On a final note, I just looked up the scientific definition of power because I was curious. Change in work over change in time. Meaning, scientifically, to be powerful you have to do more work over less time whereas all I want to do is less work over more time. Interesting.

and once again I am beaten to the punch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_(philosophy)
One day I will have a thought and it will be truly original

I can do anything that I want cauz look

So like undergrads everywhere, graduation scares the hell out of me. I don't know where this sentiment came from but I feel like I've heard it expressed in different places. The one that comes to mind is fight club.

You are not snowflakes.

Not everyone is an astronaut when they grow up.

I keep trying to write this post and keep thinking to myself, "Fuck, Fuck fuck fuck fuck".
Really, this is coming down to the existentialist point of what is the point? Which is a very good question.

I mean you keep coming back to the same question of why why why why why?

So there i sit in an office, unhappy and for what? For what exactly? Well the short end answer is money. I need money to do cool things. I never understood people who traded away their happiness for money. All the grad students who have no free time and get no personal enjoyment out of anything. Sure some people enjoy being a lawyer or a doctor or find their studies compelling, but I feel like the large majority don't. My question is why doesn't it bother them but it bothers me. The constant work, the feeling of being a drone. i mean what exactly is the point of all of this. "Life is what you make it make it good."

The best part is many people would love to have jobs right now. If i had the choice between work and starvation or work and housing would that make it better. Would i enjoy work then and be grateful for the opportunity. Maybe it's because I still hold out the hope that there is something worth doing that I will enjoy doing. I don't know. (no one ever does)

I find interesting parallels to this situation I'm in (ie Routinely depressed to get up and go to work in the morning) and The Matrix. Free your mind, being the main point of that movie (well the first one anyway), is an excellent mantra. Once you free your mind you can do anything. The mind must be truly freed though. The mind be liberated from restriction, law, society, and morality. It must be subject to know will but its own. And then the mind can accomplish anything.

I say this because if my mind were free. Free from parents, free from money, I would be in Boston right now having a great time.

Neo is symbolic of this freedom too (well obviously). I mean it in the sense that he is only one. He is only one because so few people can accept the consequences of freedom. The abandonment of family and friends (though he has none which makes it easier). The merciless pursuit of the enforcers of the minds incarceration (agents). I mean if I tried to free myself from the American system I would face many problems. Food would be chief among them. How do u feed yourself with no job? ....Steal. Stealing is generally frowned upon thus a problem.

The opposition towards mental liberation is strong. Furthermore, most restriction to freedom enforces some kind of routine. Routine is the enemy of creativity the only weapon with which to free the mind. Basically when things go downhill they go downhill in a hurry.

The most annoying part about this whole debate is I cannot figure out if this is a legitmate concern or just something I need to get over. I seriously hope its not the latter.

Pretty much the truth

from Bill Simmons @ espn.com:

I woke up six minutes into "The Hills" and the Sports Gal refused to change the channel because Audrina slept in Brody Jenner's bed in Hawaii and Brody's Playmate girlfriend was furious about it. These are the moments when Bruce Jenner feels proud for all the sacrifices he made trying to win that Olympic gold medal in 1976. But this led to an awesome moment in Twisted Female Logic when Audrina's friend LC then blamed Brody for not sticking up for Audrina and siding with his girlfriend because it was Brody's fault that he didn't kick Audrina out of his bed because he was in a relationship and Audrina was single, so, really, it was up to HIM to do the right thing. No blame for Audrina for going after someone else's dude? Really, LC? I sided with Brody, the Sports Gal sided with LC, and I'm ashamed to admit we actually argued about this for 20 minutes.

My argument in three parts: (A) Audrina is a tramp, (B) all women are natural enemies even if they pretend this isn't the case, and (C) a single woman will always do whatever it takes to land someone as appealing as Bruce Jenner's untalented but handsome son, even if it means seducing him on a reality-TV show and promising secrecy with him even though that show will be airing two months later.

The Sports Gal refused to admit I was right and claims she knows plenty of women who wouldn't do this. When I asked her to name these women, she named a bunch of her married friends, which indirectly proved my point: nearly all SINGLE woman between the ages of 25-40 will do whatever it takes to land an appealing male, even if that means trashing whatever female code of ethics that allegedly exists. This is why woman don't trust other woman. This is why Hollywood makes movies in which Ali Larter tries to steal Stringer Bell from Beyonce. You never see a movie in which Stringer Bell tries to steal Beyonce from Omar Epps. Why? Because no guy would like that movie. It would just make us angry. We would sit there thinking, "That's not cool; this would never happen." But if I took the Sports Gal to see "Obsessed," she would say, "I can't believe Beyonce is letting this happen," or "I would have sniffed this girl out 20 minutes ago." In other words, SHE WOULD IDENTIFY WITH BEYONCE'S CHARACTER just because they're both women and they know how other women operate!!!!! You're damned right I had to use CAPS and three exclamation points. Sorry, I win this argument. I just do.

LOLZ

from greg easterbrook page 2 on espn.com (image of starbuck deleted to protect the eyes of the innocent):

Series Finale of "Battlestar Galactica" Complaints: In the final episode of this six-year television project, the survivors of a nuclear attack against a distant star system destroy the stronghold of the evil cyborgs, thus winning the war, then fly their fleet to Earth, arriving 150,000 years ago. Finally we know when the events of the series were taking place. Landing on the African veldt at a time when Homo sapiens idaltu was learning to use tools -- we see a hunter-gatherer party in the distance -- the 38,000 remaining members of the Kobol society vote to scuttle their super-advanced starships into the sun and forsake technology. They vow to stop building factories and cities, and live as simple farmers: One character declares that science always leads to war, and they must not infect Earth with that dark impulse. The result is that the civilization Galactica represented fades from history. Long before our forebears began domesticating wheat by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, all knowledge from the 12 worlds of Kobol had been lost.

This is the concept for a great, even moving series ending. Instead the ending was frustrating and perplexing. There's never any convincing reason why people arriving at a verdant planet aboard faster-than-light starships would decide to give up all technology and learning. Would you vote to surrender the ability to make power generators, steel plows and antibiotics? I especially didn't buy that having enduring awful suffering to reach a safe destination, the last of an old, proud civilization would agree to adopt a subsistent lifestyle and gradually die off, leaving no trace they ever existed. If they left no record of themselves, the billions who perished in the nuclear cataclysm at their home planets would be forgotten. The finale also was a letdown from a storytelling standpoint. In a two-hour, 11-minute finale of a series that set television's record for total air time devoted to exposition, at the end, precious little was explained. The show generated 74 episodes of encyclopedic detail about characters' backstories and dating histories, and how participants in a space war behaved during battle, then told almost nothing about what happened once the battle ended. I would have liked some denouement on what occurred in the characters' lives beyond the first few days when they arrived at Earth and wandered awestruck through its meadows. A lot of storyboard was left on the table -- central character William Adama's eventual death on the African plain, for instance, or whether trying to influence the development of Earth's culture by communicating with early humans would do more harm than good. The latter is the core question of all legends and scripture about contact between God or the gods and early man. For a series that devoted substantial dialogue blocks to pseudo-theology babble, a chance to take a crack at a genuine theology question was whiffed.

The reimagined "Battlestar Galactica" was well above the norm for television, outstanding in some respects. The scene in which Adama makes, alone, a final nostalgic flight from the abandoned smashed-up battlestar, while flashing back to the moment he almost quit the military for a cushy defense-contractor job -- if he'd done that, no one would have survived the nuclear attack -- is as near as sci-fi comes to art. Look closely: As Adama, piloting a fighter, circles the once-mighty starcruiser where he spent his adult life, silently regarding the ship, the serene Earth revolving in the background, on his craft's windshield a faint reflection can be seen of the fighter's battle-management display, no longer needed but still scanning nearby space for targets. And it was nice that after episode upon episode of unremitting slaughter and pessimism, the final 40 minutes showed the survivors in a peaceful setting, released from their personal demons. But that 40 minutes was the most interesting sequence in the series. I would rather have seen more of the series spent on what happened at the end, less on long-running "Battlestar Galactica" kill-timers such as visions involving ruined temples. It's as if the scriptwriters just could not function without a stereotypical good-versus-evil combat plotline to hang the action on.

[+] Enlarge

Gregg DeGuire/WireImage"Is that a 'Battlestar Galactica' script in your pocket, or are you glad to see me?"

And now the incredible series finale of "Battlestar Galactica" complaints:

• Early in the series the 10-foot-tall Cylon battle bots were depicted as having such strong armor it was impossible to kill one without explosives. In the final battle, small-arms fire not only kills them easily, they go flying backward when hit.

• For the climactic confrontation, Galactica discovers the location of the cyborg stronghold, a mega-enormous starship perhaps 50 miles long. The vessel is parked just above the event horizon of a black hole. If you were a malevolent life form whose continued existence hinged on protecting a mega-enormous starship, would you position the ship directly above a black hole -- where, during a battle, it might fall in? Which, needless to say, is what happens.

• Galactica and the civilian vessels she is protecting wander space for years looking for Earth, while suffering regular attacks and having no repair facility or supply depot to call at. Yet they never run out of food, fuel, ammunition or medical supplies, and Galactica's stores contain a seemingly inexhaustible quantity of whiskey.

• The recurring visions characters experienced -- such as a foretelling of five glowing people on a balcony, realized at the culmination of the last battle -- could have occurred only if some higher being already knew Galactica's future. If some higher being already knew the future, why did they have to go through all that?

• Numerous studly males wander the corridors of Galactica, but the attractive women have little interest in them. The space babes have the hots for a nerdy scientist and a 60-ish balding colonel. TMQ has long contended that because many Hollywood scripts are written by guys who always flunk out with girls, cinema often depicts a reality in which good-looking young women crave sex with geeky, overweight or aging men. Talk about science fiction!

• In the very last scene, set in the present day, two never-explained supernatural manifestations reflect that a girl brought to Earth aboard Galactica became Mitochondrial Eve. Clever touch -- we all carry a bit of DNA that evolved on a distant planet. But this plot twist means a gentle child of a futuristic space-faring culture, or at least her immediate matrilineal offspring, grew up to have sex with cavemen. Doesn't sound likely. The final subplot "arc" involved a succession of bloody battles over the girl, who had a human father and machine mother, and was kidnapped by the Cylons' sinister leader. Several times it was declared that without the hybrid child, the human race would fall extinct. Why? There were 38,000 survivors when Earth was reached -- ample men and women to begin populating a world. That any one child was crucial to reproduction was illogical, to put it mildly.

• Setting foot on Earth, Adama marvels it is "1 million light-years" from home. The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across, while the next closest galaxy, Andromeda, is 1.5 million light-years distant. If you traveled 1 million light-years in any direction from Earth, you'd end up in the intergalactic void: the worlds of Kobol either were much closer to Earth than a million light-years, or much farther away. Considering dozens of people worked on the Battlestar series for six years, couldn't someone have fact-checked basic astronomy references? (This recalls the first "Star Wars" movie, which drew groans by referring to a parsec as a measure of time rather than of astronomical length.) Plus, previously viewers were told that Galactica had outdated engines capable of traversing only short hyperspace distances, and that structural fatigue from repeated passage through hyperspace restricted the ship to moving no more than a few light-years at a time. A few episodes before the finale, Galactica arrived at a planet described as 2,000 light-years from its home star system. So how, in its final leap, did Galactica travel 998,000 light-years?

• Throughout the series, the Baltar character conversed with a spirit-image of the Caprica character, and vice versa. In the finale, the Baltar and Caprica avatars appeared together to the flesh-and-blood Baltar and Caprica. Then in the very last scene, Baltar and Caprica were seen conversing in present-day New York City -- actually, present-day Vancouver, British Columbia. Anyway who were these beings? There were references to crew members believing angels were aboard Galactica. If angels intervene in the mortal world, why didn't they prevent numerous human tragedies? And were the spirits walking the Vancouver streets at the conclusion the same ones who appeared in the far past during the show, or angels of the flesh-and-blood Baltar and Caprica, by then long since dead? The beings simply were never identified. To have a central running plot element never explained is a cop-out. But quite a handy deus ex machina gimmick for scriptwriters who have dug themselves into a ditch.

• Then there's Starbuck. Ace pilot Kara Thrace is taught a mysterious melody as a child; as an adult, endlessly draws a mysterious mandala; is the subject of mysterious prophecies by sundry clairvoyants; halfway through the series is visited by a spirit who tells her she must die to fulfill her destiny and commits suicide by flying her space fighter into a mysterious energy vortex that looks exactly like the mysterious mandala. Her fighter explodes and her corpse is found. Two months later she returns, resurrected, and even has a brand-new ship in factory-fresh condition. The guidance device on her mysterious new fighter leads the fleet to Old Earth, a cyborg planet obliterated by nuclear war. A spirit-image of her dead father reveals that the notes in her childhood song can be converted into numerals. In the finale, as Galactica is about to fall into the black hole, she realizes the numbers are hyperspace coordinates; she punches them into the stardrive and Galactica materializes above our world, saving the day. Standing on the lush pastures of ancient Africa, Kara declares her purpose is complete, and vanishes into thin air.

None of this is ever explained. "What am I!" the resurrected Starbuck shouts in torment at several points. Viewers never find out; we don't even find out where her brand-new spaceship came from. Even if, as the Greeks believed, the gods toy with mortals for amusement, Kara Thrace was the cheapest cop-out in the history of screenwriting. Here, series producer Ronald Moore admits to Newark Star-Ledger reporter Alan Sepinwall that Starbuck and the angel characters made no sense. Never explaining them kept the show interesting right up to the end, Moore contends. It's a lot easier to be a television producer if you can create mysterious paranormal characters that keep viewers watching for six years awaiting the explanation, then not be bothered producing the explanation.

we've gone round in circles lads back on the boats

I am thinking myself into circles right now. But heres another cool idea. humans as computers. Basically humans are a function in the comp sci sense of the word. They are passed data (sensory experience, previous knowledge), perform computations, and generate output (our lives). Thats kind of a cool way to think about it right? is thinking about it this way helpful in any way? idk i think its basically another way of stating the transformation idea but i'm going to stop thinking right now because I'm getting myself confused.

On the plus side I went home this weekend. It was warm and full of friendship and good times and an 10 mile hike. There are 17 + 31 = 48 days until I go home for the summer. /sigh

0 days and this morning.

We are going in the wrong direction

... do not under any circumstances ask for directions.


So after reading some thoughts from my New York counterpart, I thought I'd explore some consequences of my n-dimensional to x-dimensional mapping theory (where n > x). There are at least 2 important mappings (and as always probably more). First there is the mapping of the scientific world ie the real world into the sensory world of human experience. This definitely happens. The easiest examples are things like sound and light. There is a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum we perceive. (roughly wavelengths 400 nm - 700 nm). The rest of the information in the spectrum is lost (to our senses).
Second there is the mapping of the possible to the realm of experience. (ie the life is this mapping).

...

Okay, so I started writing about the second mapping and as I was writing I had to do some serious thinkin to sort out my thoughts. I want to make some statements about whether this mapping is one to one or onto or anything like that but I ran into a wall. Basically, I need to do some research before I talk anymore about the mappings. The question I have right now is say you have two groups of numbers: A and B. You can only look at the numbers in B. You know some kind of transformation takes place between A and B. It might be one to one and onto for all you know. However all you can do is look at the numbers in B, so what can you know about A? That is the question.

This question rests on all kinds of suppositions. Most notably that if something is true mathematically it will be true everywhere. This seems like an okay supposition because as far as we know math is not limited by dimensional experience. Meaning math theory can explain things in higher dimensions that we could never comprehend. That last sentence is definately true, but I dont know to what degree. If this supposition is true then this whole thinking about reality as a transformation from one set to another is perfectly valid. This is good because this is a helpful way to think about things.

The second major supposition is that there is some reality beyond human experience which the sensory perceptive complex that is the human mind transforms into our percieved reality. (That is to say that we are in a cave, and there is a "real world" outside). However, my transformation theory accounts for this. The transformation I'm so concerned with could turn out to be a transformation that is one-to-one, onto, and empty. That is to say it does nothing. Given x it returns x. (I think that this is unlikely at this point but it is possible).

So there it is. Man, clearly I am going in the wrong direction here. In conclusion we dont see all the colors that exist and humans experience what they experience. Man it sure took a lot of time to say nothing.