Never been one to let the carrier drop

After reading my last few journal entries, I can understand why you all think I’ve gone off the deep end.

If it’s any consolation, I seem to only blog when I’m contemplating things I shouldn’t be, imbibing things I shouldn’t be, or truly terrified about the world. But I’ll try and improve on the situation.. though I’m not sure what I’ll blog about.

I can’t fight the feeling that I have no real political power at all.. hey, a electronic voting machine network based on proprietary closed-source windows software, created by a public corperation in which the politicians own stock? Anyone see why I might feel that way?

I haven’t even been following in the world’s events – in some ways, I guess, I’m not really in the real world at all. Of course, who is, when it comes down to it?

Hope you all are well, LJ-friends, whichever of you are still reading my dreck..

Well, I return from rainforest #2, and now will spend a few days bumming around the east coast before flying back to Seattle for my regularly scheduled life.

Rainforest #2, aka the Mongahalia National Forest, had *lots* of rain. More rain than you could shake a soaked umbrella at. And not nearly as much interesting life.. lots of interesting bugs, but nothing mammelian. (Actually, technically I think they have bears but the bears have learned that it’s better to stay away from the people, and vice versa)

The idea found in this document has been grabbing my imagination lately. It’s so bizarre to think that, for example, the mischief committee CD that I recorded existed in the universe before I recorded it, lurking in the 180,000,352th digit of Pi and onward. 😉

It makes one really tempted to write software to search for contents in pi. What interesting secrets might lurk there?

One particularly interesting project would be to search for human DNA, expressed in binary form, inside Pi.. 😉

I came to a few interesting thoughts recently. At risk of eternal damnation – or worse – for saying them, but I’ll say them here anyway.

1) Creating a lifeform and then giving it a life of eternal damnation when it doesn’t like you is questionable behavior.

2) If the Christians are right, it’s very difficult to accept the concept of having children. I mean, eternity is a *long* time. Wish I’d thought of that earlier.

3) People would probably say that me thinking I can judge God is broken behavior. Well, yes, it probably is – I certainly don’t have any way to impliment my judgements. I continue to think that God is so much better than I think s/he is that I can’t even comprehend it. This is mutually exclusive with being a Christian.. or maybe I should say it’s mutually exclusive with *only* being a christian. I don’t know. Complicated thoughts abound.

4) It’s a beautiful world. And I have to give the author of the human DNA props – I mean, yes, it has bugs, yes, it could be better (looks out for lightning bolts) but still, it’s a better piece of code than anything humanity has written yet. I mean, contemplate it.. 12 gigabytes of machine code, that when expressed in a carbon based world, will result in a self-repairing, self-reproducing, self-aware entity that can do spectacular things.. it boggles the mind. I wonder if we’ll have compilers that target human DNA, a list of library routines inside it, etc, someday? One thing is for sure.. the high-level language you describe lifeforms in sure isn’t going to be procedural! 😉

5) One of the nice things about finally admitting that I am in fact a collosal screw-up in just about every category that is measurable is that it leaves me with nowhere to go but up.

6) Maybe.

7) MoooOOOOO!

I survived the Amazon. More later..

River dolphins, both grey and pink.. lots of them, and I got to handfeed a pink one a fish, which he snatched out of my hand. He had a lot of teeth.
Turtles the size of dinner plates
a very fat caymen
toucans
more birds in general than I could possibly list.
three toed sloths
green jungle monkeys
pygmy marmosets
howler monkeys
Pirannahs (I went fishing for them, too. Caught three using a cane pole!)
catfish (I ate lots of them, too)

All in all, a very satisfying vacation. On to phase two – temperate rainforests – after which I will resume my normally scheduled life.

I find the idea of time looping unusually unnerving lately.

Of course, then there’s my breif trip to schizophrenia-land, that I’m still trying to digest.

Basically, here’s the thing that gets me: Signals don’t come from nowhere. We had entire choruses of voices, a plethora of rhyming, singing not-so-fun – and the question keeps coming up – where did they come from? If my subconcious, how exactly did they end up formatted as words (much less singing) – and why could I sometimes ‘steer’ them by thinking about it, and other times not? And why did they hate me so much? Am I enslaving other people inside my own head?

[then there was the whole typing thing – and the one voice which predicted something accurately. I don’t know. Spooky.]

Browser tabs are great. Browser tabs are wonderful. Could we please have the ability to bookmark a entire tabset?

S.

thanks to seeing this

I recently tried out Archy (here) and I have to say, for a peice of software that is supposed to be simplifying the user experience, this does a amazingly good job.. of complicating it.

I could probably go on for a couple of days about why this is *not* how to design intuitive user interfaces, about how this is about the worst example of a ‘human-friendly’ program I’ve ever seen – but I won’t. I thought about emailing the authors and telling them they’d failed miserably at their attempt to make a human-friendly program – but I decided not to. Let them figure it out. They will, about the first time they watch a new user try and use their software, and compare it with a new user trying to use a regular windows program.

I’d like to see a attempt at a new user interface that’s *really* new.

But then, I’m still anxiously awaiting my first chance to do a direct neural-computer linkup. (aren’t we all). Not that my brain would have any idea what to do with the information it received…

On another topic..

Lust is a sin. We’ve all been told this.

My current concept for our creator is sort of like a computer programmer – he wrote our DNA, in whatever language one uses to write humans. I imagine it was rather a lot of work. He included lust.

He* can not possibly blame us for something glandular that he wrote in.

* = or She, or It, or They..

As a little voice inside my head once told me, the problem with contemplating God.. is that I can’t do it justice.

Looking around – and even if we restrict the world to three dimensions and say this is all there is – God is too large and too complex for me.

At this point, I geniunely wish that I could return to either A: not thinking about the problem at all or B: thinking about it in the sense that I can abstractly bandy it about and not get eternally tormented for it.

I need to get to sleep.

I just thought that I’d post that I’m not dead.

I’ve been making some changes in my life. I expect to make some more. There’s something seriously wrong with my life, and I haven’t yet figured out what it is. (One possibility is the Phoebe-shaped hole is still making itself known.. five years is a long time to live with somebody.. )

I don’t really feel that my future is secure. I’m scared for it, in fact.. with the number of natural disasters that could occur (the Tsunami was a big reminder that God is not universally on the side of the humans), the number of artifical disasters that could occur.. the whole world economy seems so fragile, like it could come unglued at any time. And yes, humans would adapt, but..

I don’t even really know what I’m scared of. Or what it is that I need to change. I’m acting like I’m stuck in the Indigo Girls song Closer to Fine – I’ve tried reading the Bible (only to be horrified.. there’s a lot of scary things in there. The book is not for kids – I can’t understand why my parents hid the Heinlien but not the bible.. if I’d ever actually read it when I was a child, it would have given me nightmares for *months*.

And yet – we don’t even know what it’s a history *of*. It scares me – why does somewhere between 35 and 70% of the world think this book is a accurate portrayal of God?

Perhaps this is what happens to people that makes them turn conservative as they grow older? The knowledge of how small they are, of how much they don’t know, of how fragile and temporary the soap bubble might be?

Why do so many think we’re immortal? What is it that everyone can see that I can not?