Random thoughts on selling prices

The problem with capitalism is that it attempts to abstract all experiences and human conditions in terms of resource ownership. The problem with meritocracy is that it lends credibility to the idea that your deserve the resources that you own.

What if prices were all suggestions and you pay any price you think goods are worth, but you'll be taxed for whatever you underpay, measured according to your earning power?

That means a cup of coffee can be marked $1 no matter where it is sold, but you're free to pay $3 if you really enjoy it, and your taxes suggest that you pay $6 if you earn 6 times the average salary, or you can overpay someone else instead. Your quality of life cannot be improved by increasing consumption, but rather by the choices you make.

Would it work out?

The nominal value of money would lose its current meaning, but isn't it how it should be?

Anxiety is the state of being perpetually distracted by the future.

The value of history isn't in learning from mistakes but informing us no society is an absolute truth, that we're free to make new mistakes.

Replace censorship with Equal Voice Opportunity, where you can make your case against any motion. Censorship is simply coward denial.

perseverance is mostly consistent self deception. the hard part is outdoing yourself in being increasingly crafty and naive at the same time

Perseverance is choosing to presume that something is impossible, and then believing otherwise.

The root of all evil

I think one way I am able to accommodate the idea of race and culture is the idea of indoctrination. Indoctrination into a specific paradigm constructed by the characteristics of the language the culture feeds you.

Some people swallow it whole, others improvise. But I think it's not possible to truly be unaffected by the languages you speak, no matter how little you may know your second or third languages. I think races and cultures change as they merge. Nobody can really so called preserve one's culture, The very thought of wanting to preserve ones culture I think is a sign that one has had some kind of global influence.

Race and culture are therefore approximations, not prescriptions. But when the approximation is too far off, why do people still want to try to fit in?

I think the answer lies in power. I think the acceleration of the development of language is driven by the greed for power. Through language , you can make people think in a certain way, use them to your advantage, and make them desire to be thus used.

Culture is the root of all evil!

India

That soft orange glow
Quite readily made me forget
That heat and madness
That was Delhi, my first taste of India.
For long days
Was a very short time; not enough
To get accustomed to how meals are served, much less
To understand how food tasted to the locals.
I still have no idea how this great country works, it is as if
Chaos were its expression of order.
However things seem to fail randomly,
Thehy seem to get their act together -
More or less.

I remember the driver's nonchalant replies,
Softly insisting on his own recommendations;
The way how a small door along a dusty avenue
Can open up to a chic cafe;
The way homeless children came by to sell you goods
While your car is stuck in the jam.

I recall how nobody seems to stop to notice
When the lights go out abruptly halfway through dinner;
And I remember the taste of that desert served to me:
Almost sweet, almost warm -
That in-between, unsettling to  me,
Seemed to be a soft-spot I couldn't detect.

Looking out from my window seat,
I see an India expanding under me -
Its network of household lights
Glowing in a soft orange
Like Earth's own magma.

Culture

Culture, to me, is simply a way of life, testified by those for whom it worked, to be effective ways of surviving through specific situations in their times. These situations may be external, such as earthquakes or the ice age, or internal, or "cultural", arising out of simply subscribing to the very paradigm the culture presents.

This way of life is typically accumulated through trial and error, similar in spirit to scientific methods - except that those who failed either died from their failure, or were rendered unable to testify by mechanisms built into the system to protect itself.

As such, it is difficult to gauge the value of subscribing to a culture. Situations in which prescribed solutions are effective may or may not happen again, or in cases may not happen often enough to justify the inconveniences of situations internal to the culture. Mechanisms built into cultures to preserve the culture may work positively or negatively when encountering situations not addressed by the culture. Maybe in done cases, the culture may "cause" more problems than it addresses. More often than not, internal issues form most of the experience of subscribing to the culture, thus you need to be "inside" to really "understand".

Whichever the case, while science gives verifiable explanations for its ways and religion gives explicit internal explanations, cultures don't offer any. Probably strategic I think - in that it's targeted to become your basic assumptions with which you explain everything else. In that way, it'd take you a long time before you figure out that you can question culture, just like you can question any philosophy, science or religion.

A different kind of money

Is it possible to trade privacy for freedom from corruption? I don't know much about economics, but let's just imagine this - a world where moral high ground is the dirtiest taboo, and everything is transparent.

Imagine a world where all currency is digital, secured via quantum cryptography, and processed on a global cloud that makes all transactions searchable. A world where it is not banks are the ones issuing legal tender notes based on complex mathematical models - currencies are personal credits, issued by individuals, each credit being a promise to fulfill a unit time of work. Credits rise and fall in buying power, based on the value put on the individual's work. You can't issue more credits than the hours you have in your predicted lifespan. When you're down and out, agriculture is your fallback plan - at the bottom line, one credit is an hour on a farmer's hand, harvesting the crop from the earth.

Since there is no universal currency, companies cannot simply pay you, but have to secure the credits of individual service providers. Goods have no inherent value, tangible goods are just a means of securing somebody's services.

What would such a world be like?

Is heaven an idea to which we try to match reality, or a reality to which we try to match the idea? Do we assume we understand it perfectly, or is five sigma good enough?

Before trusting logic, ask the intuition.

Before trusting intuition, ask the heart.

Before trusting the heart, ask the body.

Before asking the body, first check if the logic is valid in the first place.

Running

Thought this up when I ran my 20 minutes today.

Running is a state of being. You can be running for something, or running from something. Or you could always be feeling like you're running late. Or running out of time for that matter. Or you could be running into something or somebody, or running a race that will never be finished, or running on borrowed time. I guess we all do a little of each of these at one time or another. But what I'd like us to remember today, is that feeling of being totally free. That feeling that you can never be stopped - nor will you even want to slow yourself down. That feeling you feel when you decide to forget everything, and pour yourself into the moment. That moment you are not running for, or running from, or running on, or running into anything, but simply, just running. That for all the moments that must pass us by, there could be one in which staying on the moment where nothing matters, is all that matters.

the fundamental difference in the attitude of science and that of art - if i might attempt to make a distinction, is that the mind of science lets go of the present to take hold of the eternal, knowing that the present is in the eternal, while art, is letting go of the eternal to take hold of the present, knowing that the eternal is in the present.

if life is about the experience - then hey, there's nothing to lose!

dignity is invented by humans for the living. decay is the shizentai of nature.

i think religion is an idea on which we weigh all our sensory perceptions in order to transform them into a congruous system of experiences, in order to derive a method of thinking about things, a system of thinking that can be made to stay constant in a world of chaos.

based on this definition, let me speculate:

1. this method of thinking is what human beings have chosen through natural selection, to deal with the ever-changing world. perhaps, in the past, there was some kind of evolutionary pressure for human beings to come to rely on this systematic method of thinking, and subsequently develop a huge brain. or is it the discovery of the bone marrow that gave human beings a big brain, and that propelled them to use the big brain to their advantage?

2. yes, this systematic method of thinking has taken many names - logic, reason, religion, science, hope, faith, philosophy, superstition, maths.... but let me propose that it is all the same thing. it is not the only way for a
species to survive, but it is what our species has chosen.

3. maybe, just maybe, religion in its most primitive incarnation, was what made the human species different from all the other species on earth today. we define "success" in our own terms and think that we're the most successful species on the planet.

4. but for all our progress and technology, perhaps we're not really any "better" than all the other species. just "different". until we are able to simulate all evolution and work ahead to wipe out species that don't work well for us, the same rules of the game still apply to us.

5. The environment can also change drastically - it has happened before. Environment change, perhaps, is not so much about the health of the earth, as much it is about how incapable human beings are, to live in a climate that is dramatically different.

spiral 4

spiral 3

spiral 2

spiral 1

A.

1. The brain is whatever we make it practice to be.
   It takes in input as stimulus and the survival demands we put 
   on it make it what it needs to be.

2. I think we have 5 senses because the brain is an error-prone 
   device. having more input signals to the same reality 
   balances out the errors. this changes the brain from being 
   error-prone to being error-resistant, but it also adds new 
   dimensions to the brain. 

B.

see in your brain, and it's imagination.
touch in your brain, and it's empathy.
taste in your brain, and it's memory.
smell in your brain, and it's nostalgia.
hear in your brain, and it's conviction.

※肯定的に自分を評価して変化＝REVOLVE、否定的に自分を評価して変化＝EVOLVE

words. make them count.

there are words in silences, as there is music in silences. words start to count when you start to really hear what's in the silences, because silence is not the absence of sound, but the breath that we breathe into every word we write, every song we sing. making someone speak before his breath, is not communication. only when you let him breathe his breath into his words, are his words connected to him.

life is not about winning the fight or rising above the fight:
life is the fight, and the fight is life.

being alive is about being in a constant war against decay.

dying is the unseen part of living. my guess why the earth is not one single life-form but divided into individual creatures is so that each creature is the growth endpoint for its own cancers.

nature is neither kind nor unkind.
nature is the so far the only proven way how things can sustainably work.
and in this proven way, you are to fight - or be the endpoint of your own decay.

we find comfort in numbers because nothing distracts us from life like counting.

2 million years into the future.
i hope human beings and all our civilizations can be gone by then.
and i hope whoever takes over, is better at giving way.

are human beings obsessed with being human, or is that what all species do?

how i see it is that human beings can't quite come to terms with their desire to own the earth and all that is in it - yes, they split the earth amongst themselves, but they're struggling to find a basis, for why they are not the same as "mere" animals, and why they rule above them.

it's an eternal struggle, trying to forget that we were once part of the food web - that being attacked and eaten by an animal, is a natural occurrence - more so than dying in a traffic accident. it's a struggle, trying not to imagine that another species can take over the planet in a way were are unable to prepare for. we think viruses as bad things, that they are not forms of life - and do not want to consider that they may one day become a life on their own right.

but let us consider this.

we human beings have chosen to have longer lifespans, so that individually we get to live through more. we focus our progress on our intellectual and technological dimensions. but do we not remember, that species that evolve, do so by dying, and giving way to the next generation? something tells me that we're resting on our laurels, and all other species are evolving ahead of us. we find other ways to deal with evolutionary pressure so our bodies do not change. is "technology" really where we should place our bets? but then again, we don't think of "us" as a species - we think of us in terms of individuals, families, countries. there's always a "them" every time we think of ourselves as "us".

let us consider this.

that each species is simply an expression of life. that in every situation, there are more than one way to walk through it.

i hate the saying "let us agree to disagree". i think it's more like every expression of life has its own grammar that makes it exceedingly difficult for one to really understand another in a deep way.

i think we should instead say, "let us admit that we cannot understand how things work out for you". and i think that applies to other all other species we share this planet with. that we cannot begin to understand how they live through all the recent changes we humans think of as "progress".

let us consider this.

homosexuality and euthanasia receiving mainstream attention is a manifestation of evolutionary pressure - that we human beings are getting over-populated. and i think it will only be intensified when medical science goes on to its next step, when we can fix problems at genetic level, and when people are able to live so long - they refuse to die.

let us consider this.

that the very fact we need to even think about pollution issues, is an evidence that we are overpopulated.

if we were suddenly one-tenth of our population on earth, we could still be living the same way, and we would have cut 90% of our emissions.

let us consider this.

that life is as much about the dying, as it is about the living.
gods do not die, but they do not live either.
the only thing that lives and does not know how to die, is cancer.
and yes, we're the most cancerous species on earth.

Suppose we have four currencies:

E$, for the amount of effort a person puts in,
V$, the value of effort delivered,
P$, the perceived value of a product,
M$, the amount of compensation one gets for the effort, and

And suppose it takes M$20 to make a decent living in this country, where

Andrew in an unskilled worker. He puts in E$20 every month to deliver V$20 of work a month and gets by with M$20 every month. To his boss, Andrew's work in worth P$20.

Benjamin is a semi-skilled worker. He puts in E$10 every month to deliver V$20 of work a month. To his boss, his work is worth P$20.

Charles is a skilled worker. He puts in E$20 every month to deliver V$60 of work a month. To his boss, his work is worth V$60.

Andrew, Benjamin and Charles work for Daniel. Daniel is a management-level worker, and puts in E$10 every month to deliver V$5 of work to coordinate Andrew, Benjamin and Charles. Together they deliver a total of V$300 a month. To Daniel's boss, this work is worth P$300.

Edna is an investor. She puts in E$10 of work every month to deliver V$1 of work every month. Andrew, Benjamin, Charles, Daniel and Edna together deliver a total of $V301, but by strategically positioning Daniel's work, she can deliver a product to 10 people, to each of whom the product is worth a value of P$400.

How should society compensate Benjamin, Charles, Daniel and Edna for their contribution?

why do the days feel so long and yet the years so fleeting?

i think it is a flaw in the human memory, that it is selective, and selects at a level that is not directly accessible to what we can consciously process, such that we are able to recall only key events, and not the in-between periods that really run the hours by.

i think it is another flow that we tend to have a bias, to remember the good or the bad things. based on general or first impressions - conclusions jumped at without proof. and i think this memory helps people come to terms with life, and help them think that everything is worth the sweat, blood and tears.

Life is about finding all the wrong answers to all the right questions.

Sketch: The adventures of Noko Chan
G'day! I'm Chiku-nii! Ya havin' fun? Let's hold hands and play together!

Sketch: The adventures of Noko Chan
Hello, my name is Noko Chan. As you can see, i don't have a mouth. that is why I have to put into writing everything I want to say so badly.

happiness is a chemical reaction.
and i think it can be created when one dwells on the idea of being free.
but i think the same mechanism that causes one to dwell on the idea of being free, can be manipulated to cause one to feel otherwise.

therefore it would be good risk management
to be part of multiple models that potentially causes one to feel freedom.

that would mean that it could be advisable to form multiple sub-identities, each with its own history that explains its existence.

one example could be:
1) identity at work
2) identity when alone (eg religious/political affiliation, social cause)
3) identity at social settings (eg, family, friends, strangers, neighbors, overseas)

i do not believe there is any system that merits our total trust that it is complete good-willed in making us free - all systems need a self-preservation mechanism that works for itself. each system tries to be complete within itself, so that it denies the existence of other systems. yes, they try to be in harmony, but is that really the case? and let us not forget the human ability to "empathize", forming pre-conceived ideas that are derived from a vicarious experience, potentially creating among participants a reality that didn't initially exist.

wait, there is one other system that is less prone to such weakness.

it is one's basic perception.
to be in the present, hearing the sounds, smelling the scents, feeling the physical heat or pain or pleasure - and resisting trying to interpret any of them. this leads one to a model of explanation of reality that "it just is" - and experiencing the freedom would be dwelling in this state of "just is"-ness. Because this is based on your own perception, you can tweak it to your own advantage.

but the difficult part is resisting the temptation of interpretation.
human beings as a species have chose cognition and reason as its means of coping with change. this choice i think, is an effect of the mechanisms that works out for the self-preservation of the life of the human species - which of course, never promised to be kind to the individual.

happiness is a chemical reaction.
and i think it can be created when one experiences freedom.
and i think this experience of freedom can be created
with a memory that causes one to dwell on the idea of being free.

when one takes the reality around him for granted, there is no reference point as to how freedom can be measured, except with a further release, or a new captivity. but when one learns a version of history that explains what took them where they are, one now has a mental model to measure out just how free they are.

this memory could be one's personal history, one's inherited "traditions", history of the region or country or the world. or this memory could be a myth, a legend, a religion, a story that explains how the world got to be. whether or not such a story is real impacts only how believable the story is. once one is able to subscribe to the story, how much truth it has is practically irrelevant.

is this then simply a lie?
well, yes, because happiness is just a chemical reaction.

at this point, all the obsession
our current civilization has with "truth",
seems somewhat laughable.

happiness is a chemical reaction.
and i think it can be created when one experiences freedom.
which means that it must be

1. experienced, not just owned
2. a release from something

following which we might also say that it

3. does not imply that the release must be permanent
4. lasts as long as the experience of it

marriages could be a model for continuous release and return to restriction, with the couple reinforcing each other about their experiences of release.

"joy" as some religions like to differentiate from "happiness", could be a mental strategy that allows one to experience the freedom beyond the duration of a physical event. rituals and anniversaries help to keep experiences fresh. "hope" - could be a mental strategy that causes one to continuously experience a freedom by postponing its realization indefinitely into the future. In this case while the freedom itself may not be real, but the experience of it can be.

which means that religion could be a viable technology to create happiness without energy consumption. but religion, when institutionalized, is responsible for its own energy costs.

isn't there a way we can continuously experience freedom without all the tricks?

Q: does the lack of sufferring imply happiness? does dettachment mean being without a point of reference?

A: not happiness in terms of the fulfillment of desires, but an absolute peace from extinguishing desires - a happiness based on freedom from the burden of desires ... detachment means to be able to see the world without the illusions that we contruct for ourselves in our perceptions of reality - the point of reference is the fundamental natures of all things

Q: but does reality exist without perception? without language, without the idea of color, without the idea of taste? is it possible to be truly without attachment, or is the state of being without attachment a constructed reality that is based on the less volatile nature of things?

Does consciousness exist? Why is it different from gravity? Can consciousness not be the name we give to a phenomena which is in fact not something that originated from within us, but the sum total of all the chemicals and energies that are acting on us all the time, whether or not we can sense them?

If a ball rolls down a hill, it takes its path according to how gravity works on it. Why is the ball, which seems to have chosen its path, not conscious as we think we are?

Viruses mutate all the time in response to their surroundings. The are able to adapt without needing a neural network based brain. Why are viruses not conscious?

Can the "self" be an internal "gravity" no different from an external "gravity", that interact with each other such that we need to differentiate the inner gravity from the external gravity, thus resulting in the phenomena we call self-consciousness?

Can't we as a species consume less? Make goods last longer. Lower GDP. Limit mass production capabilities. Limit the use of mass media for marketing. Make it unfashionable to follow trends. Raise the personal cost of social actions that translate into high environmental costs in the short or long term.

One asks, and another answers.

But the answer never satisfies the asker
Not as much as the question satisfies the answerer.

The answer is not the goal, but the question is the beginning -
It is not how it ends that matters.

It is not what you think,
But the journey that I would take with you with the question I ask
Either with words, or without -
That sends you off to a journey of seeking.

I am tired of seeking answers; it is questions that now I seek.

The right question at the right time
Could be enough
To make all answers right.

The more industries develop, they figure out ways to satisfy the same desires and needs with minimal hard costs. I would like to see how sexual services can be virtualized to a point where the senses cannot tell the difference between real and simulated sex. Then sexual workers will not anymore need to prostitute their bodies - they will only need to prostitute their identities for money.

More than that, it would be interesting to see how patents would work in such a world!

Ah well, that being said, patents are exactly how thinkers prostitute their ideas...

Organizational Knowledge

i'm not a politics geek, but i think democracy has two major pitfalls:

- in democracies with a good mix of political parties - ideologies not being able to run their full course, because the population gets fickle about the ruling party because of how their policies affected them in the past few years;

- and in democracies where one single party runs the show - tweaking of policies that result in the party garnering too much power, weakening the power of the voter (who are, again, fickle), and turning against the original ideology it was built on.

why can't we have multiple ideologies coexisting, linked together via a minimal set of pre-agreed ("universal") protocols that allow them to interface with one another but beyond which they can run their own show? members of each group - or "tribe"? - are allowed to freely move between tribes - but tribes may require a minimum membership time-span of perhaps 10 years.

in doing so, those in power in each tribe will be forced to remain faithful to the ideology they represent because they are constantly serving a changing demography of voters.

and in doing so, ideologies can run their full course, towards disbandment, or towards a balance where its members grow at a stable rate, remain at a stable number, or maintain an effective balance between outgoing and incoming members.

wouldn't this be a more accurate articulation of our claim to this planet we share and right to be different?

i think that i am. but chances are i am not who i think i am.

Science is leaning that no matter how different we are, we're all basically the same animal. Culture is pretending that we aren't.

「和」と「無」は、共存できるものかな？

like the rain like the sand
like the mud like the wind
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the life like the death
like the deafness like the storm
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the rising tides like the new moon
like the earthquakes and cosmic radiation
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the ox-bow lakes like the fossilized amber
like the air making way for a falling leaf
you are a natural phenomenon.
like making friends like being lonely
like feeling nothing when your mind is busy
you are a natural phenomenon.
like war like recovery
like rising powers and dying species
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the changing generations that evolve to survive
plants, animals, bacteria or virus,
you are a natural phenomenon.
like gravity like sound
like weight like music
you are a natural phenomenon.
like greed like poverty
like joy like frustration
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the moving air like the still water
like the food web that balances itself
you are a natural phenomenon.

is shame an antifeminist invention created to distract people from men who cannot come to terms with their sexual desire?

time is everything
because one life is all that we have that
still matters to us
i am here and now
life is not a relay race
within my own lifetime i need to experience
the vast expanse of time
digitized into mere volumes that fit so easily into my attache
speed is crucial because
i need to make time in order to
fill it up with even more high-paced activities
i need the density to match up to my intensity
it's just that time,
as measured not in heartbeats
but in logarithmic man-seconds,
happens to be the flavor-of-the-day dimension
to measure up how full a life
i have lived till the end.

peace is not the opposite of war, no, never.
peace, is the equilibrium between destruction and rebirth, between war and rebuilding.
when there is widespread peace, it simply drives the war and the rebirth into smaller quarters, until it's totally contained within ourselves, until we have no words, no weapon, and no energy, to express the pain that is capsuled within us.

Even after they're gone
Their blogs continue sucking power into servers
To remain online. And they stay
On our list of friends on Facebook, always,
So near, they don't die;
Where in a different age,
They would not have been more than a weak glow in the abyss of our memories
Even as we strain to keep together
That distant warmth which is the ghost of their existence -
But now they're always with us. And we can always
Send them messages and happy birthdays,

Even after they're gone.
They're always there in the online world, but
Ever too shy to return
Messages, pokes, or accept
New friends; perhaps they are just too busy; perhaps,
In another world,
They have a life.

Even after they're gone,
We think only of those
We think of; We forget those we forget -
And we are distanced from
Our grief, which we no longer know how to contain
Within us; we are forced to learn to forget
What it meant to remember.
How do we light a candle for someone
Who is always present on our desks?

Even after they're gone,
We now have the technology
To keep them alive in our shared consciousness.
We can no longer feel the shape of the wall
That stands between Us and Them -
Or remember that we too will, in all likelihood, cross over,
To leave behind a people
Who will never learn
When to hold on,
And when to let go.

Life is a series of over-corrections, because you're always wrong.

S: That's an overly pessimistic thought.

Just thinking about how we are always so obsessed about "learning" from our experiences, and how society does not agree with people who "just do not learn".

S: care to explain who this nebulous 'society' is?

what i mean is that theres nothing inherently wrong with people who make the same mistakes break the same laws and cause the same distress on those around them all the time. i have a colleague who is not very lets say inspired at his job. my boss thinks that he needs to grow. i think if not learning anything can still earn him a salary its a fine strategy.

S: I am surprised this is coming from you - it departs from your typical idealism

atypical is where i'm trying to go. i've always embraced change, cos i think change is inevitable and for me coming to terms with change is the most appropriate response - but there's always been this line i wouldn't cross - a part of me i wouldn't let go and allow it to change. i'm realizing that in order to embrace change, i need to be able to let go of even that part of me that thinks exactly that.

isn't the dictionary in our age, a fucking fine democracy?
you do not elect people to choose the words to put in them -
it is not in the interest of those who rule the book to rule our lives.
instead, they simply document how we consistently use as words;
failing to do so would render the dictionary less useful.
yet, as open it is, at the same time, the dictionary has the authoritative say as to
what words we prefer children to or not to be taught.

i think it is exciting, because in the democracy of our time,
we look down on people who break the law - yet it is the very action
of these people that end up in landmark cases that change the law.

the dictionary, instead, rewards those who dare to challenge the times.
it recognizes them as trend setters.
it recognizes the fact that it is the times,
that must decide for itself what is right, and what is wrong.

but i have only one issue with it.

that the dictionary is necessarily biased towards the society that creates it - to those who do not write their own dictionaries, it is an authoritarian state.

yes, there is Wikitionary, but are we ready to teach our children the words we really use and who we really are?

The Artist responds to a world of infinite detail to create lofty ideas, while the Scientist responds to lofty ideas to create a world of infinite detail.

And as they say. the devil is in the details.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” (The Arts, Picasso Speaks, 1923)

It is the theory that decides what we can observe....(Albert Einstein)


The Consumer gets caught between both and sees nothing but the truth - even when it is a lie.

now i know why people who cook don't really eat all that much of what they cook - cos
eating starts from the cooking; cooking starts from the eating. cooking is like a process you get to know the ingredients, imagining their taste, and experimenting to understand the taste better, so by the time the cooking is done, putting it into the mouth is just part of the whole process of tasting the food.

the law isn't perfect. and the only time it is made a little nearer to being perfect, is when people break it. teaching people that breaking the law isn't an option will result in the law not representing the will of the people, which is really what makes the law, legitimate.

i like music. it helps me believe that somewhere deep inside, i have always known where i came from, why i am here, and where i am going. and the best part is every song i listen to makes me believe its a different place.

ぐちゃぐちゃだけどかがやきたい

Patriarchy exists because its perpetrators, being men who are highly logical, come to the correct conclusion that women are able to outperform them in ways that are not easily measurable; while at the same time being equally highly self-serving, come to the incorrect conclusion that women will edge men out of the picture when they are in control.

sitting in front of the computer looking at the world scroll by

No doubt climate change is being effected by our race as a whole - but I'm not sure if whatever change we bring can even put a dent into the earth's well-being as a whole, since climate change, IS a response to our actions. Whether or not that response will favor human beings, of course, is another story altogether.

1. facts exist only in the languages they are expressed in.

2. for some, science is a collection of facts. but science is always updated, corrected, and overturned. nothing is totally correct; yet nothing is totally wrong. i would like to say that science is a collection of verifiable opinions - verifiable only if you speak the languages of logic and mathematics. if you do not, it would be simply another way people try to rationalize the seemingly chaotic world around us.

3. some people like to liken science to religion - but that is not quite accurate, because science is one of the few disciplines that allow you to verify its opinions, not through unconstrained experiences, but controlled experiments. any argument you want to put through will need to be accompanied by reproducible observations.

4. fortune telling may not be a science but it does not mean it is not a worthy art. just because it is not accurate does not mean it is not effective.

5. no man is an island. everyone is a universe in his own right.

6. the body is like a whole world on its own, closed from the outside, following its own path of evolution. it is in such a closed world that people are made. if we all came from such different worlds, why would we naturally speak the same language?

VIRTUAL REALITY

I don't really take photographs. You should have seen this in real life, cos it's like the room that is packed behind the window, looks like it is part of the real reflection on the glass. For a moment, the real looked totally virtual and one wonders what is really behind that glass.

Meaning, to me, is the word used to refer to the relationship between an entity and a framework that perceived to exist because of the way it can describe the tangible manifestation of an arbitrary phenomena.

This in no way implies that there is a causative relationship between the substance of the framework and the manifestation of the said phenomena, but the perception of such a framework is essentially what gives birth to meaning, which in turn validates the belief in the existence of the framework.

For example, words have meaning because we perceive the existence of language, which in turn is a description of how people string symbols/sounds together toward a certain end. In effect, words are not used because of the particular meanings they have; instead, words have their particular meanings because of the ways they are perceived to be used. That to me describes perfectly how the process of compiling a dictionary is basically a process of documenting how words are used in society.

If we do not perceive that there is a valid order in the way words are used, such as in the case of a community of learners new to a language - then there is no perceived language for the community to validate. But if the community is perceived to speak a particular creole of a language, then whatever original usage of words by the community, defines the creole.

So if the framework is virtual and exists only as an abstraction of a different reality, then the framework does not in a real sense exist - and cannot form a reference point from which entities can derive a relationship. Which means that there is no meaning.

Thus, meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!

I think Kanji is the perfect imperfection.

I was looking at the character "美", designed in a logo with all four horizontal strokes of equal length. Why do we not write them with equal lengths?

I know there will be many explanations, but maybe one of them would be that, to make for strokes of equal length look beautiful, they must be perfectly equal; otherwise, the closer you get to them being equal, the more obvious how unequal they are.

And as long as they are not perfectly equal, the effort to make them equal and the subsequent failure stands out. Making them not equal from the beginning results in a more acceptable result.

So Kanji were not designed for perfect strokes. In fact, I have been finding of late that print characters which strokes are very well weighed, lack character. After trying to write kanji characters that have - character, I came to a conclusion. That beautiful kanji handwriting is not getting all the strokes well weighed, but getting away with getting them decidedly off balance. Which means that within the inequality of the strokes, there has to be a certain visual justification for its imbalance. This visual justification causes they eyes to see the imbalance, yet forces the mind to interpret it as a balance, resulting in the "character".

That being said, in order to understand what strokes can justify imbalance, and what just makes the imbalance worse, one needs to first know what the character would have looked like if it were perfectly weighed.

And since every character is different in its spatial composition of strokes, every single character needs to be learnt one by one.

And that, is where the art lies.

Watched Albert Bartlett's video about exponential growth.

Here's what it is in simple terms:

Let's say you have 1 million dollars.
You put it into investment which earns you 7% extra every year.
How much money will you have after 10 years?

The answer is 1 x 1.07 x 1.07 x 1.07 x 1.07 x 1.07 x 1.07 x 1.07 x 1.07 x 1.07 x 1.07, which is just a little under 2 million.
Yes, at 7% a year you can double your money in 10 years.
The same growth applies for resource consumption.

Since the video tells us to do the math and not take figures for granted, I went to try on my calculation on compound interest and this was the result:



Which allows me to conclude several things:

1. If we interpret the graph as resource depletion, it would be a representation of how long the human race to continue existing and stay in the game, given the rate of growth he is pursuing. Of course the only way to stay in the game forever with a constant growth would be a rate of 0 growth. Otherwise, we will need to match growth with recessions in order to have a net 0 growth.

2. If a stable civilization would require lifestyles to remain consistent over at least 1 lifespan (70 years) to ensure continuity, we're looking at something much smaller than 1% growth.

3. If it takes 1000 years for resources to be replenished, we can deplete up to half of all available resources at a growth rate of 0.069%, after which we will need to have another 1000 years of decline at the same rate.

4. Interest on savings is somewhere between 2% to 4%, which means it takes 17 to 35 years to double. If interest is nearer the 2% end and inflation is nearer the 4% end, prices would have overtaken you in the 17th year of your 35 year savings plan.

5. If we have growth rates over 2.3%, resource consumption doubles twice in each generation, which would probably make tradition unnecessary since situations would have changed beyond recognition. Every generation would have to invent its own lifestyle, since what took the father one lifetime (70 years) to master, would take the grandson just his first 17.5 years to master - which is by current standards, high-school.

perhaps the greatest evolutionary advantage of society is not so much logistical but emotional, not in that it feels good, but that collectively the awakened mind can be taught that death is not an option; that the desire to survive is not something to be questioned. perhaps it is this advantage that allowed this race to so take over the earth?

perhaps world peace is only possible when it co-exists with an invisible world war, operating at a nano scale through information and technologies that are potentially able to disable peoples and countries to the extent where a conventional warhead is no less destructive than a nuclear warhead.

The 3 R's are said to be Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

But I think it's more lip service than anything. Cos to really think about ecology, one would need to consider all the factors involved in the reduction, the reusing, and the recycling. No one formula can fit it all.

I believe that the true answer to ecology lies in another set of 3 R's:

Reduce, Reduce, and Reduce.

Reduce Consumption
Once food is bought and cooked, it doesn't matter if you actually finish eating it or you throw it away. Once you have bought it, you are already responsible for having created the demand for that item. And it is demands that drive industries, and industries that really suck up resources. Yes, granted it will drive down the GDP. But GDP is by no means a measure of what makes living worth the while. If we want to really think about ecology, we need to re-access what we think will make our lives worth the living.

Reduce Advertisement
There will always be those with opinions and those who just follow. Advertisements are what make the latter follow, creating market demands where there is none, fulfilling desires that do not really exist. It creates profit by making people pay for what they do not really need, justifying resource usage through an artificially created demand. it's called "market trends", but if it were not advertisement, trends would have been very different. Digital electronics, luxury goods, branded goods, foreign goods - if the demand for these can slow down, "market trends" could possibly better reflect what people actually need to have, than what industries need to sell.

Reduce Population
I think the key factor to our collective environment footprint is simply our population. If we could cut population by 50%, we would cut emissions by 50%. Yes, it would cause a lot of social distress in the short term - but that is the same pain, we are currently inflicting on the environment! A larger population makes it necessary for structure in society, and therefore makes it more possible for people to exploit both the work force and the environment more systematically. If we simply had less people, the environment would probably be more forgiving. A smaller population does mean that we can specialize less, and our sciences would not be able to advance as quickly - but i think we've reached a level of specialization that has removed us too far from what is real - that isn't a problem in itself, but the fact that real-world limitations exist, is. If we had a smaller population and our current society can continue into such a world, we can put more of our energies into agricultural and medical sciences instead of military technology and consumer electronics, into solving social and existential problems than twittering and stock exchange.

And yes, it would mean that I should reduce my blogging too.
But for me, writing is part of the bare minimum that i need to stay alive.

The downside to any system is vulnerability to exploitation.

That would apply to computer systems, systems of reasoning, judicial systems, political systems, philosophies and religions, sciences and arts. In short, everything. Systems necessarily require that we take a certain approach to categorize and rationalize phenomena so that at various levels of detail, it becomes possible for one single person to grasp - or rather, to think that he can grasp - the whole picture. This would necessarily imply that the way we look at the whole picture, may or may not be in line with the "certain approach" used to form it. When it does, we become heroes of the system, allowing us to make it better by searching out inconsistencies. When it doesn't, we become the inconsistencies - we reveal how the system is incomplete, but the system is unable to come to terms with us, because it is unwilling to acknowledge that someone abused the system to create such systematic discrimination, or that the inconsistency does not lie in us, but in the system itself.

We have thought that a system of checks and balances would help to steer systems, but after half a century of democracy, corruption hasn't gone away.

There are two forms of exploitations - internal and external. Internal from those who are in line with the system, and external from those that the system works against. Both ways require an intimate understanding of the system. And both ways need to play the "game" as set by the system to come into conversation.

What about those of us who don't want to play the game?

Is there a way to opt out of the system?

Leaving a religion at some point in history must have been unthinkable.

As must be leaving a country.

Is it possible for a society to offer alternative societies for people to live in, if they decide that the main machinery cannot understand them? What are the sub-societies that are present in the big machinery of society?

Perhaps it is in this lack of alternatives that organized crimes and underground societies exist. In this light, the underground society is but a mirror-image of the high society, which too, uses the society for its selfish gain.

What if we established a world order where society and non-society exist side by side? In between countries, we have a stretch of territory that is no man's land, where every man lives for himself.

but even if we were to separate order from anarchy, those who live in the wild, will find ways to organize, so that he can too, exploit a new system. order and chaos are two sides of the same coin. remember that the outlaw knows the system as well as the governors. of course, if there were a limitless supply of territories, people can keep on moving out and refuse to be part of such systems. but we live in a closed world.

What we need then, is not a system, but a framework where different systems can exist together, allowing people to move from system to system. War and peace and everything in between, would exist at the same time within such a framework.

While such a framework too, will suffer the same problems, but I would like to think that such a system could possibly give people enough systems to work with, that it never becomes necessary for anyone to want to opt out of the whole framework altogether.

random

The Tech Industry

The internet has always held a certain intrigue for me in the way websites both growing and abandoned exist side-by-side, allowing it to be instantly both a market and a museum. One click, and you are in center-stage; another, you're in a ghost-town. It has been so from the time of Geocities, up to the time of blogger. But Facebook is the first site that recolored that landscape for me - it does essentially the same, except what it does it to is not places, but people.

As Facebook plays a bigger part in our social lives, sooner or later we have messages that will never get replied, pokes that will not be returned, and friend requests that cannot be accepted, not because someone isn't approving of us, but because someone just isn't there anymore.

Just as the internet has abstracted physical distances but not excused us from the realities of energy consumption, I cannot say if Facebook has de-anthropomorphized death, or made it more personal.

MY VIEW OF THE WORLD Part II
The Frontline of the World

Language forms the basis for abstract thought. While I do not think that it is the only possibly way for abstract thought, it is the tool human beings have chosen.

We tend to say "the language of art" and "the language of science" - where do these meet?

Language provides two features - one to refer to concrete entities, and another to denote the intangible relationships between these entities. The former puts entities into our cognition, while the later gives form to the abstract. Let's call the former the "concrete" function of language and the later, the "abstract" function.

IMHO, "Art" tends to use the concrete to explain the abstract;
"science" tends to use the abstract to explain the concrete.

"Art" relies on experiences as proofs of the abstract. It is subjective and local. It keeps track of the material surroundings, in order for us to enrich our immaterial being.

"Science" relies on hypothesis and theories as proofs of the concrete. It is universal but removed. It builds not the world, but a representation of the world, in order for us to access our material world.

Which is to say, while "art" has always been depicted to dominate the "spiritual" realm, I would say that "art" is how we access the "spiritual" realm through the physical world, while "science" is how we access the physical world through the "spiritual" realm.

And I think some languages are better suited for science, while others are better suited for art.

Firstly because the vocabulary each language provides, limit what we can in the first place, perceive.

The cultural backdrop surrounding each language then builds up what we can reason.

Certain ideas are more difficult to explain in certain languages than others.

The same idea, may in some languages be expressed as a noun,and in others, as an adjective or a verb.

The form these ideas are expressed directly affect the complexity of the idea to the speaker, and that in turns limits the complexities of the acrobatics we can perform juggling it in our mind.

For me, Japanese is an art language. Nouns are preferred over verbs. There seems to be an obsession to noun-ify everything, and place it firmly into the perception. How the relationships between these nouns are expressed, on the other hand, is often ambiguous.

English, on the other hand, is a science language. Existing nouns are modified with adjectives, but these phrases do not always become an atomic idea in the mind. This makes it necessary for a lot of ideas to be explained, since something that cannot be represented as one single word is difficult to be treated as an endpoint in an argument.

For example "correct answer" is an atomic word 正解 in Japanese, and thus cannot be further broken down. In English, we can extend it into a new idea such as "correct non-answer", which might be used to describe an argument that is in itself correct, but does not address the key issue. Such a development would not arise from "正解".

In English, words like "shooting star" and "living room" are not handled the same way in the mind as "growing economy" and "dining experience". Partly it is because the former is used often enough that the mind groups them into atomic ideas, but also because the two words that form each of the former, mean something quite different from the phrases they form when put together. However, English as a language does not offer a grammatical construct to differentiate between the two.

Japanese however, does. A non-atomic idea would be "流れる星" (star which is shooting) while an atomic idea would be "流れ星" (shooting star). The former is an adjectival verb + noun, whereas the latter is one single noun. Noun-ifying ideas is a cultural obsession, and used in marketing and popular culture.

Chinese used to have this capability but, unfortunately, it is defunct in contemporary Chinese. For example, the atomic word "然" meaning "as it is" or "as so", is coupled with "自" meaning "self" to mean "natural" (自然=as it is itself), and paired with "必" meaning necessary to mean "inevitable" (必然=necessarily so). But a phrase such as "非然" which in classical Chinese means "not so" (非=not), no longer makes any sense in contemporary Chinese. This makes it necessary to rote-learn all the phrases that are acceptable in the Chinese language; the meaning of individual Chinese characters do not necessary have real applicative value to the speaker.

Which is to say that not all languages are equal, when judged in the light of specific applications. But I think their diversity represents the diversity of human thought, and that in turn, is a key to the resilience of the human species, in a snake-eat-rat world.

MY VIEW OF THE WORLD

Given an idea

how do different cultures interpret and absorb it?

AMERICAN

Layers. Each idea is dissected and fit into a specific layer, allowing entire layers to be moved freely. Interfaces between layers are standardized so one can ignore the small details and think about it at an abstract level, making way for scalability.

JAPANESE

Craft. Drop the idea anywhere you want, but make intelligent, consistent connections so that the whole picture is connected. Mastering the details is the bottom line, and everything is seen through the tinted glass of the nature of these "consistent connections". Very painstaking, but it creates people who are highly skilled at handling a wide array of ideas. Of course, ideas not consistent with the nature of the connections used, will not be connected - not that they are rejected - let's just imagine they don't exist.

CHINESE

Structure. Drop it anywhere you like, as long as it fits into the grid. Highly scalable and able to absorb any kind of ideas. The whole picture is so colorful and exciting sometimes you forget the rigidity behind the grid.

Wider European

Interest groups. Similar ideas are tightly knit together, but different ideas simply exist side by side. Of course that leads to an imbalance in powers - it's not the raw numbers that matter; it's the representation that counts.

INDIAN

Let it be. Similar ideas form groups naturally. Different ideas form their own relationships. There's no one single idea that binds everything together. Diversity is the key factor of resilience.

FRENCH

Egality. Let's abstract it up to a level where everything looks the same, then we can give everybody the same rights.

ENGLISH

Anything that doesn't look like the French will do.

「縁」

If you toss a coin once, you will get either a head, or a tail.

If you toss it twice, maybe you can get both a head and a tail, but there is still a big possibility that you end up with all heads or all tails.

If you toss it three times, you get a better chance of getting both heads and tails. The chances of getting all heads or all tails is much smaller, but the distribution is memoryless.

And if you can toss it an infinite number of times, you will get both heads and tails.

And that is to me what evolution is. A near-infinite number of attempts at life, so that we cover just about every permutation possible, effectively lowering the risk of extermination by an acceptable threshold of threats. Okay "every permutation" is a exaggeration, but that is the basis of why i believe a property of the world is its immense richness.

Within this richness, is it possible to match one animal/person to another such that they function well together? If I have a sample set of 20 people, I can't say for sure. But if I am given the theoretical infinity, then yes.

Is the theoretical infinity possible?

In the macro scale, yes. But on the micro scale, no.

On the macro scale, we see it in nature, how certain species form symbiotic relationships with another. Given enough time, the species works out what it needs.

But that process is not worked out by one generation, or for one creature.

Which is to say, if you ask me if you will meet the person of your life, I will say, maybe yes, maybe no.

But if everybody can reproduce an infinite number of fuzzy copies* of themselves, the possibility becomes very high, and all that is left is for those copies to meet.

And that chance of meeting and forming a meaningful relationship, on the basis that a theoretical infinite number of variations are available, creates the situation where the two persons/creatures can decide to make something out of it.

This is for me, the definition of 「縁」.

*I think this is the mistaken basis why a lot of people want to have children, and have their children be similar to themseles. Cool it, let nature do its work.

It is such a beautiful night tonight.
The rain has stopped
And the trees are rustling over a new gossip in the wind.
From my balcony
I can hear leaves being dragged along the ground by the breeze
Dancing to the mood, though not the rhythm
Of the crickets' incessant calls.
One has to wonder
Whose work it is that the crickets manage to so bring to life
Breathing a tranquility that is not silence into the night sky
Still tinted with a hint of pink.

Further away, I hear cars driving by
Not the roar of rush hour
But rather like the song of the crickets
Whose voices, each singing a very short counter-melody,
Weave together a complex polyphony that is at the same time intriguing and quiet.
It must be the eighteenth day of the lunar calendar;
It's strange to see a moon halfway to a half moon
Look so beautiful against an uncertain blue.
I am tempted to think it impolite to stare at a moon
Changing out of her ceremonial robes, but she sits unmoving, brighter at one edge,
Like a raw tear-shaped gem, back lit,
Adorning the Autumn sky.

There is something about the song of the crickets
It's the loudest thing I can hear tonight
Except when it is interrupted by the occasional hum of vehicles a distance away.
Yet, unlike the soft but insistent mumbling of the rotating electrical fan next door,
The more I try to follow the most identifiable melody and put myself into its sound
The more my ears tell me that I don't hear anything at all.
I was taught to identify instruments when listening to an orchestral work
But this night is full of sounds I don't know how to identify
But I suspect this is what a twenty-four bar rest really sounds like.
I can hear my neighbor packing something into a bag,
And it brings to me memories
of Grandma, packing things on a night
Just days before the Lunar New Year.
Like a nostalgic scent
Reconstructing in my mind a memory I did not see with my eyes
For a moment, part of me, is not quite here.
From time to time, the wind would be strong enough
To make the wind chime ring
Once, Twice, like a clock
Announcing the passing of an hour
As irregular as our memories that mark the years.

Autumn is just an idea
not so much of a season
as it is a period of change between Summer and Winter
which anchor the chain of fleeting moments that just happen to lie in between
just as how Life happens between the two perennial mountains of Birth and Death.
we always use the four seasons as an analogy for Life,
and choose Death to be its opposite.
But if Birth were to be the opposite of Death,
Life would be one single season of change
the next season would seem convincingly its purpose and destination
we forget that all four seasons
inextricably must happen at the same instant, somewhere out there
somewhere out there
someone is born
someone dies
and someone arrives
without having to try

i think one amazing thing about the body is that it was built to live, and built to die. That in the same body was a full package that included what was needed to do cell division, organ formation, puberty, recovery from sickness, reproduction, aging, and death - and every single function is a wonder. every function brings with it not just a biological process, but also a psychological process. the way our bodies change directly affects the way we think, and therefore the way be see the world and make decisions.

i think that this is nature's kindest invention. so that in our youth we will go out and do all sorts of reckless things and push our limits, and when our strength slows down, we change and desire different things. it helps us live our age. i think being able to live one's age is a great gift, because no matter how fast our brains can work, we take time to adjust emotionally. Living our age allows us to adjust bit by bit as our bodies change through its seasons.

simple, isn't it? the toddle ready to walk, the youth ready to run, the adult ready to fly, the wise ready to teach, the aged ready to encourage, and those at the end of the road - ready to die.

Yet one whole lifetime, is sometimes not enough for some of us to learn.

contentment<-reconciliation<-issue<-QUESTION->seeking->answer->satisfaction

Capitalism is beautiful in that it sums up all organizational objectives into the optimization of one single variable - profit.

Profit can be affected by costs, access to supply and availability of demand. Demand drives the demand for demand - and causes marketing and advertising to stimulate, as well as create demand. This causes a lot of people to want things they don't need. This excessive consumption is what causes a strain on the natural balance of things around us - the main one being the Environment.

I think stimulated demands are not healthy. Neither for the planet, nor on a personal level. People end up spending their lives chasing things that they don't really want. I think it is fair to win over a competitor's market, or to open up a new market with a new product that answers an undiscovered need. But to create a desire for a good where there is no real need, is plainly profiting on the goodness of the earth.

There is just so much resources on earth. If someone needs to get really rich, someone's gotta give. And now Nature's giving, and giving too much.

in the game of life,
nobody, has too much too lose.
that's what the floods and earthquakes,
wars and diseases,
recessions and loss,
remind us - that we are mere nothings
putting our everything against a constantly changing world
to stay alive.

Where does the Wind come from?
Where does he go?
He picked up momentum for a little while
and I felt his coming.
When he dies down,
Is he dead?
Is the Wind now, and the Wind later
the same Wind?
How can I tell?
You point to the leaves that were moving in him,
But they're not moving now.
I call to memory of his scent in my mind -
the smell of grass, of the sea, of wood, of pastry -
I can almost smell it now, but I cannot hold him in my hand -
Neither now that he is gone, nor then when he was here.
He comes, he goes, and I let him pass,
Like the shadow of a cloud crossing a river.
How do I begin to explain to you that he was here?
He is only as real as
the experience of that moment
I felt him near.

To err is human.

Not just humans, actually, all life err,
because mutation and evolution results in fiercer genes.
Error tolerance is a fantastic feature of our DNA.
But perhaps rather than saying that we were built FOR error, maybe it is more accurate to say that we were built WITH error.

It is not so much an effort or "correctness" that led to success - but rather, whatever happened to happen, happened because it is the inevitable. Whatever didn't happen, didn't happen because it not happening is also an inevitable.

Between the happening inevitable and the non-happening inevitable, we have enough life forms and variables to go around. This richness is the very essence of our world.

Our survival is simply proof of our diversity, because in diversity we create enough randomness to ensure that something survives.

The only time the word "normal" can mean any sense at all,
is when it is referring to the Gaussian distribution.

Being "normal" under the non-mathematical definition only means that you have inherited a more proven set of genes.

Which means that you are not going to push any frontiers.

Which also means you are largely unnecessary for the process of evolution.

Why are we so obsessed about being "normal"?

It is our weakness that makes us so.

We like to think about a model being that defines what "normal" is.

And we like to put everything else either "above" or "below" the "normal".

We admire those who are not normal, only when they happen to be in the "above" group.

When some choose lifestyles that belong to the "below" group, we look at them with disgust and fear.

The Gaussian Normal on the other hand, is incomplete without the full distribution.

It would not be Normal otherwise.

Yes, it means that the people "above" and the people "below" are part of what makes everybody Normal.

G/R/R/A/A/C/C/E/S/S is a color only when you put yourself in the center of the world.

Come to terms with it.

Diversity is the new Normal.

Grab youtube media

#!/bin/perl 

$0 =~ s:.*/::g;
while ($ARGV[0] =~ /^-/) {
        if (($ARGV[0] eq "-h") || ($ARGV[0] eq "--help")) {
                print "Usage: $0 URL ... \n";
                print "Grab youtube media\n";
                exit;
        } else {
                $0 =~ s/.*\///; 
                $ARGV[0] =~ s/^-*//;
                print "$0: invalid option -- $ARGV[0]\n";
                exit;
        }
}

use File::Spec::Functions qw(rel2abs);
use File::Basename;

use lib dirname(rel2abs($0))."/lib";

use LWP::UserAgent;

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $u;
while (@ARGV) {
        $_=shift;
        ($i) = /v=(.+)/;
        $content = $ua->get($_)->content;
        ($title) = $content =~ m/<title>(.*)<\/title>/s;
        $title =~ s/[\r\n \t][\r\n \t]*/ /sg;
        $title =~ s/^\s*|\s*$//g;
        $title =~ s/ /_/g;
        for ($content =~ m/l_map": .+(?:%2C)?5\|(.+?)\|/) {
                $u = $_;
                $u =~ s/%(..)/chr(hex($1))/ge;
                $u =~ s/\\\//\//g;
        };
        print "Getting ${title}_$i.flv...\n";
        $ua->get($u, ":content_file" => "${title}_$i.flv");
}

Imagine, if we could really resize media.

We can decide to watch it as a 2-hour movie, or get it automatically set into a short story. Or we could resize the short story into a photograph with a short caption. Or translate it into a poetry in another language. We can decide how many words, how many photographs, how many videos, how many minutes, how many stanzas, the media should be presented with. Resize-able media relieves a message from having to be restricted to one single form.

I think it is important to be able to communicate what we have to say. But even when we are ready to tell, the world is full of people who are not ready to know. But if resize-able media were possible, then they could choose the version of the story they are ready to hear, and take it with them, until they are ready to see the whole thing. We don't really see people for who they are too much of the time. Not because people don't tell, but because we don't want to know. The people we think we know, may turn out to be not who they are altogether. Resize-able media would, at least, remove the confrontation from the honesty. I hate the idea of living a lie, but I can't come to terms with telling people what they do not prepare themselves to hear.

Things would be so much simpler if people could just have an open mind and always choose to face reality.

Unless we manage to survive on supplements and eat only portion of plants that can grow back, eating more often than not involves us taking a life to stay alive.

That's one way of looking at it.

In the food chain, plants make food and animals eat plants, sometimes plants digest or make use of animals - but whatever is at the top of the food chain finally dies and its body decomposes, giving itself back to the soil. Plants then absorb the nutrients from the soil. At each state of the process, different life-forms act as stewards of the "material" on which life runs. What we call "life" could be just a perceived manifestation of the continuous cycle than runs through the whole food chain. Just like a jar of soil and water when shaken settles into layers - neither the soil nor the water need to "think" about what to do; it happens because the soil, the water, the jar and the Earth all agree that that is the way of things that rises out of natural ease.

That is, until the modern man comes into the picture. The modern eats everything, but in the end when he dies, his body is burnt up and put into a container, so that nothing returns to the soil. "Natural" is hardly an apt description for the modern man.

[fork 1]
Some decide that they should not eat at the expense of another life. Some define for themselves whatever they think is "natural". For me, I think the only things that are "natural" are natural selection and random mutation. In the modern context, this natural selection and random mutation is best seen in the way language evolves. Maybe that could imply that one single person can never be "natural". "Natural" is whatever that happens to happen, when viewed from the collective consciousness of the entire species, food chain, or ecosystem. Man's "un-natural-ness" becomes "natural" when taken into the context of the Earth's history.

[fork 2]
"Natural" and "artificial" in this case could be an analogy for "analogue" and "digital", for "being" and "doing", for "feeling(receptive)" and "thinking(creative)". Modern man prefers "digital", "doing" and "thinking". I would like to think that sufficiently advanced "digital" technology approaches the analogue, an identity based solely on "doing" is also a way of "being", that there is a way of thinking that is indifferentiable from feeling, and that the artificial when taken far enough, approaches the natural.

[fork 3]
Now say, is it possible to create a machine, that can absorb minerals and synthesize sugars, amino acids then proteins, and go all the way until it becomes flesh-like substance that can form a diet that sustains human life, all through made-created autonomous processes? Would the medium of such processes be subject to man's own discourses and receive objections because it could be called "life"?

[wait]

Which is why when I eat, I give thanks, eat my meat, and shut up.

If who you perceive yourself to be is who you physically are, then you are just too lucky. Be happy, but be thankful. You would be a sunshine for those who are struggling.

If you can align who you perceive yourself to be with your physical self, then you have done well. You would be an example to those who are trying.

But if you can't change who you perceive yourself to be, move on - you don't have forever. If you spend your whole life trying to change how your perceive yourself, you're not going to have any time left to achieve anything. Some people decide to change their physical selfs to match how they perceive themselves. They took a stand in life, and stepped forward. It is great courage, and they will be an inspiration.

Whoever you are, move on and come to terms with yourself. If you have been through the struggle and finally come back home to yourself, you would have learned the gifts forgiving and accepting. You would be a great encourager and healer.

If you can't come to terms with who you perceive yourself to be - whatever you achieve in life, at the end of the day, could come to mean nothing to you. Perhaps you would be a hero. Perhaps the world would know you - but what would it mean, if at the end of a whole lifetime, you never got the chance to get to know yourself?

Pattern 25