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.