21 Jul 2010
George Orwell mentioned all throughout his masterpiece book ‘Nineteen eighty four’ the thoughts and actions of the proletarians, which are described as ignorant people who can’t care less of anything that happens outside their direct daily lives in his book. Ignorance is bliss. Or as “Goldstein” would say, “Ignorance is Strength”.
But I choose not live my life like that. Not now, not ever. Can you? I honestly prefer to lead a life in search for information, further knowledge, and culture, while having the possibility of changing my mood, thoughts, and actions based on this data, instead of living a “normal” life in the safety and comfort of ignorance.
A friend of mine once spoke to me about three kinds of events that open your mind to new ideas, possibilities and information:
- Meeting someone from another country.
- Travelling to another country.
- Learning another language.
In my own opinion, having passed through those three events, I concur with him. They really change your perspective and view of the world, society, and culture.
I would like to add another three mind-opening stages that help you form a sense of identity:
- Adolescence & friendship
- Literature & philosophical talks
- Having a partner
Why do I consider these stages/events as meaningful components of identity, maturity and knowledge?
Adolescence, at least in many cultures, is considered a stage of rebellion, change, transition, problems, questions, and overall madness. But it is in this stage where many of the strong lifelong ideas are formed. It is also in this stage when true friends are found, **friendships **that may last a lifetime. These are vital components of identity. And even if many of the ideas you have while going through this stage may be wrong, it is a necessary step to have these wrong ideas in order to clearly define them and change them further on.
**Literature **opens your mind to understand how others think, and allows you to develop critical thinking. This paves the way to formulating opinions based on facts instead of biased assumptions. The more you learn, the more you know, the more you can speak about, the more you can teach about, and so on.
This also brings me to the point of philosophy, and philosophical talks. These types of talks seem like endless debates about this and that. However, the actual discussion may open your mind to search for more information about specific topics and formulate a better opinion. These talks can then lead to better structured debates, and finally to an idea which may spark a change. That is why I consider the basis of all this, these philosophical talks, such an important issue.
Finally, a partner, may keep you centred on reality. While adolescence many times includes biased opinions and self centeredness, literature and philosophy allow you to form an opinion, and having a partner many times concretes that opinion, removing the egoism from self-centred thoughts formed during adolescence. That is why people who are successful in relationships are often people who stop thinking solely about themselves but think in greater proportion of other people, specifically their partners.
One must be somewhat selfish to succeed in today’s world, but you must never put aside your partner or loved ones, the same way you must never put aside striving for a common good instead of personal satisfaction. There must be a sense of equilibrium, as this allows an easier flow of knowledge, clarity and understanding. Are you ready to open you eyes, ears, heart and mind?
30 Jun 2010
Something about the games played last Saturday led me to believe that in the future there will be no referees, there will only be big monitors, loud speakers, and microphones, placed on the top of a stadium. A knowledgeable team of experts will judge the action live, until these are replaced by automatic systems. Of course, this will only start to happen after a few more world cups, and a dozen more incorrect decisions.
30 Jun 2010
A random thought popped into my head not so long ago: What if we had a universal language that integrated all the common programming language syntaxes, integrating the binaries, engines and function calls for each of them, allowing anything to be written in any language in each file?
.NET made huge progress allowing a single project to be coded with different languages, at file-level of course. But what if we could use several languages in a single file?
I know this would probably represent a heavy strain on the processing part of it, but for web-based technologies it would be an interesting approach. Just imagine, Rails+PHP+Python+Java, a world where we can truly live together. Or not?
Take the following code as an example:
> cout << "Hello world" << endl;
> echo "This is a test";
> System.Windows.MessageBox("And another test");
> print "Just for the sake of it"
I had a talk with a programmer about a month ago, and we obviously reached the conclusion that it would be too bloated and problematic to manage. However, an engine that can handle maybe 2 or 3 languages would be rather interesting. I’d be happy enough to get C#/VB (ASP.NET) + PHP + Ruby.
Assuming you can keep it clean, and standards are adopted, I think it would be great. Things might be simpler in certain languages than in others, and sometimes it would certainly be reflected in the amount of lines as many languages implement built-in functions that perform many tasks with a single line of code.
On the other hand, it could become programming hell, but I’d be interested if such a thing existed, for the mere purpose of having fun. What do you think? Would it be “programming hell”? or does it actually sound viable?
09 Jun 2010
Music, and essentially lyrics, seem to have degraded heavily in the last decade or so to become a perfect point of comparison with the prole’s habitual activities in Orwell’s 1984.
On one side we have artists who are incapable of writing lyrics about anything that happens outside their mainstream lives, and on the other side we have we have record labels that bet on this shite because they know it sells, why? because of all the people who don’t care about anything else than what happens in their mainstream lives?
Have people grown dafter? Or have people just stopped caring? Or maybe it has always been like this. However, as far as I recall, in the 80’s there seemed to be quite a lot more complex lyrics floating around than what there is today. I know this is not always true for radio hits, but groups such as The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan would garner thousands, if not millions of fans, and often their lyrics were rather complex and thoughtfully creative. There seems to be a lack of this nowadays.
The thing about taking on the biggest giants is that most of the time (so often as to be all of the time if you're willing to do some rounding) you fail. You don't just fail at the end, you often fail long before the end.
Yet the dreamers persist. These are usually the garage entrepreneurs, people with little market success behind them, those working without a track record or significant resources. People forget that Google was backed with millions of dollars from the biggest VCs in the world when they took on Yahoo.
- from Will Marlow’s post “Don Quijote didn’t ship”
Today I went ten-pin bowling, and in the lane next to mine there was about 7 screaming teenage girls. Every time a “hit” song came on the loudspeakers they would all yell out loud (which seemed to be just about every song). Not surprisingly every single song was about love, relationships, break-ups, or being far away from a lover. Most of the time the chorus was a single line repeated one time too many, or even a single word sometimes.
Just about everything related to love has already been said through lyrics, in one way or another, using old words and using new ones, however love songs seem to occupy the vast majority of all music produced nowadays. With “love songs” I obviously mean anything related to relationships and break-ups. And it’s obvious that the reason is that people relate to these songs in one way or another.
I mean, just study the names and content in Justin Beiber’s latest album for example.
When every single song in an album is about the same general topic, it gets me thinking… Why? Why not talk about the city life? Why not talk about freedom? What about politics? Money? Drugs? (Oh well, that’s pretty much covered by Hip-hop anyway). I mean, it doesn’t even have to be a topic like these. It could even be a love song, but at least the quality of the lyrics could be superseded with a higher level of creativity. There is so much you can do with poetry and words, and we limit ourselves to the most basic of words in this kind of songs.
Now take this song for example, Ndakuvara by Oliver Mtukudzi:
It has nothing to do with mainstream lyrics, yet it is a beautiful song, and its lyrics can mean a million things, or they can mean one thing, but at the end of a day it is thoughtful, creative, and different. Now how hard is that? Not much if you dedicate a bit of time into it.
To end this, I believe that those who write lyrics should act sometimes like poets, and those who write poetry should act sometimes as lyricists. No harm in that.
28 Mar 2010
simcity3000
Sonny,
How have you been? I hope you are feeling alright. I know things have been tough for you, but try to hold on. I’ve been remembering things lately, like your mother for example.
I also remember back then the goverment would treat us like dogs. They would tread on us. I knew how it was, not because of my age, but because of the stories I had read. Knowledge was banned, except for the knowledge that came built into us.
I had my chip removed a while back and since then I had ceased to remember most of the pertaining things of history. It cost me great effort to evolve a mind of my own again, and then to start piecing the bits and bobs of my memory back together again.
So, Gregory told me the other day that he was falling apart. It seems we are all falling apart nowadays. I haven’t been able to find a new book to read in years, and Gregory is feeling more depressed every day with the news. He really hates when the chemical injections start to kick in when he’s feeling down. It’s really annoying, you start feeling bad and the chip injects you, you’re feeling too good and it injects you again, you’re feeling like a rebel and it injects you, you’re feeling unusual and it injects you. Gregory was on the verge of killing himself yesterday but the chip altered his mood yet again, stopping him from committing such action. Not that I would care that much anyway, I mean, he is my best friend but he no longer thinks by himself.
It is ridiculously dangerous to even attempt removing the chip as when it is removed it sends out a GPS alert immediately. I had to cut my arm off, throw the whole thing in a bin several kilometres away, and run like mad. Even so, I’ve been hiding for several years now, I’m surely being searched for, you know, my arm had my DNA and stuff. It’s obvious they are looking for me. Not that they need to really look anyway, they’ve just got these readers everywhere.
I once read up on these ‘license plate’ readers they installed back at the start of the previous millennium. That was only the beginning of many changes to come. Nowadays everything seems peaceful, there are no wars, there is no crime, and the world is at peace, at the cost of the freedom of millions of people.
I wish I could go back to the old world. I mean, it’s great not seeing murder, death, suicide and violence on the TV every day. It’s great not fearing getting knifed outside your apartment in London. It’s great not losing loved ones to wars like the great Iran war in 2015, or the 3rd or 4th world war. It’s great not having to worry about the news, about the weather, about car accidents. But then again, that randomness in life was what made it particularly interesting. Now they care for everything for us, I mean, for those who have the chips. The weather is always standard, the population numbers are always the same, the amount of energy input/output is always the same, the distribution of people across planets is equivalent, it’s all bloody perfect in the end.
I wish I could get a drink of whiskey, you know, one of those Glen… Glen… oh god, I forgot the name years ago, never-mind. Maybe a Chivas would do the trick, if there only was any.
So Gregory said he’ll be stopping by today to bring me a little “fresh” milk and cheese. I better be going now son, I hope you are having a great time, don’t try to find me (not that you’d be able to leave you’re place with that intention anyway), and think not of me as a prisoner, but a free man. I hope this letter gets to you and overpowers the will imposed on you by the machine. I hope one day you acquire the power to liberate yourself. Until then, take care.
Regards,
David Paterson