Most Intelligent Creatures?

Did you ever stop to think what, exactly, you were ‘supposed’ to be accomplishing with your existence…? For that matter, did you ever even wonder why you felt that something was ‘supposed’ to be accomplished? I mean why is it that we, as intelligent (supposedly) creatures, even let ourselves think that certain activities are more noble than others? Is this really the case? I actually believe that this is the case; however I’ve begun to question the reasoning behind all this. I think that the only thing that anybody is ever actually able to strive for is happiness – anything else would be rather counter-productive … now, wouldn’t it?

Bottom line here is that we’re only going to exist for an extremely brief period of time. I vaguely remember hearing something about the entire existence of human beings thus far being pretty much inconsequential – something like a mere fraction of a second if the existence of the universe were compressed to a single, 24 hour day. If you then understand that the average lifespan is a mere fraction of total human existence, it becomes pretty clear that one human being’s existence is darn near close to nothing.

Interesting? Sure, I think so. Pretty much meaningless? Yep.

Why I believe this to be meaningless is pretty easy to explain. After all, the incredibly small ratio of human existence to complete existence in no way changes the fact that I exist. Although I am aware that my existence has a currently unknown expiration date, the fact of the matter remains that I do currently exist. Not only that, but I – being a true atheist – honestly believe that there will be nothing (at least for me) after I die. I have absolutely no delusions about any form of after-life. I can very easily remember what it was like to not exist – the few billion years that passed prior to my birth – and I can just as easily imagine what my non-existence will be like after my death.

Many people have decided to believe in one of the many many religions that have been created as a justification for their existence; however believing in set of rules in no way makes these rules valid. All it does is give people a completely irrational sense of superiority over anyone who chooses not to believe in that person’s chosen rule-set. The result of this ends up being justification for causing pain (and, more often than not, death) to fellow humans that happen to exist in the same time-frame that these believers do. This is absolutely asinine.

I’m lead to wonder what this world would be like if these religions were never created. What would the world be like if everybody understood that decisions made were only based on reality – if people understood that the only consequences they would ever have to face were going to be realized during their life – if the whole concept of owning up to one’s life in an effort to get accepted into a magical wonderland after one dies was seen as the nonsense that it actually is? Anarchy, perhaps? But why is that?

I suppose it’s just human nature. I find it rather interesting that, as humans, we so easily will turn on our neighbors in an effort to better our own lives. It’s a bit selfish, don’t you think? Or is it more of a sign of our ignorance? We are the self-proclaimed “most intelligent creatures on our planet” but is that actually the case? I’m reminded of what Douglas Adam’s wrote as the first paragraph of chapter 23 in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book:

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.

Interesting, huh? Suppose the dolphins are correct. Wouldn’t we actually be much better off if everyone could just get along and try to enjoy what little time we are given? I really do think so. Sure, we wouldn’t have all the technological advances that we currently have but would we really need them? After all, you really wouldn’t miss them if they never actually existed…

The funny thing about it is that we would still have the desire to create. We seem to be unable to live in a world without trying to improve it. The flip-side to this, of course, is that we would actually be unable to live in this world without our creations – we have (as has been postulated in many sci-fi stories) become slaves to our own creations. What would you do if you were unable to go to the grocery store to get food? Suppose the electricity was no longer conveniently supplied… The water, the gas… The saddest part about these speculations is that I know what would happen – people would start to turn on their neighbors. The whole idea of “dog eat dog” would ring truer than ever and only the strongest will survive. Intellect will mean very little and pure strength would be king.

Am I saying that we need to throw away technology and return to a simpler time? Hell no – it’s far too late for that… Throwing away the religions, however, might not be a bad idea. We’ve accomplished so much as a species yet we seem to be completely unable to let go of these archaic belief systems that have become absolute truths to so many people. Why, exactly, is that? I believe it’s because many of us need a reason to live and these religions appear to give just that. The fact that all of these religions were created by man in an effort to control man just doesn’t seem to be acceptable to many.

My proposal to everyone is that we let go of these religions. Face the fact that we’re only going to be here for a rather limited time and try our best to get along. Let’s take some advice from the dolphins and learn to just muck about in the water (and on land – there’s one advantage that we do have) having a good time.

bis später,

Coriolis

The Art of Thought

When I was a kid attending elementary school the whole concepts of art and science where pretty well defined for me – art was what we were learning between 10:00-11:00am and science was from 12:00-1:00pm. There were many other fields of study (math, English, literature…) but art and science were their own, separate sections.

I’ve since come to realize that the strictly defined lines separating these two principles are actually quite blurry. I’ve begun to consider whether the standard characterization of art (as defined by the various educational organizations) is actually missing the point. About a month or so ago I ate some philosopher stones (a variety of shrooms for anyone just joining this conversation…) and decided to record myself (I had a weekend to kill). Upon reviewing the video created, I heard myself utter the following phrase – “Thought is art.”

Okay, fine … so that’s not very awe-inspiring; however, what I was trying to express was, at least to me, rather interesting. The only problem is, when you’re tripping on shrooms, words are often hard to come by. In fact attempting to actually explain what you are thinking often interferes with your thought process and usually causes one to lose track of the subject – that’s the problem with psychedelics (such as shrooms). Since I recorded my trip, however, I am able to recall what I was thinking about.

I was actually contemplating life in a way. I was considering the idea that children are so easily taught new concepts while adults seem to have much more difficulty with this – “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks…” Why is that? The conclusion that I came up with is that a child’s mind basically accepts new information mainly because there’s really nothing much more it can do with it. Since a child has very few experiences to use as references, any new information gets absorbed by the child’s mind rather than being processed with respect to earlier experiences (as an adult does). Of course this new information then becomes a building block used as a keystone for that child’s knowledge base and, over time, becomes a part of the experiences used to process any new information received.

Being that I am an engineer and have basically decided to devote my professional life to the study of what essentially boils down to scientific systems, I then began to consider the human body as a system (which, of course, it is). The simplified view of this system is that inputs are taken in and processed – outputs are then generated. The most obvious outputs are various wastes although an easily overlooked output is actually thought. The funny thing about the output of thought is that it is actually not expelled from the system but is rather stored in the brain as another piece of the person’s knowledge. How a person chooses to express (or, as is often the case, to not express) this knowledge becomes the basis for that person’s behavior. It was then that I came to the conclusion that thought is actually art.

When a painter touches brush to canvas, he is expressing his knowledge. When a sculptor creates what he believes to be a finished piece out of raw materials, he is expressing his knowledge. When an architect completes a new design for a building, his knowledge has been expressed. You name the discipline and the bottom line is that anybody involved in it is expressing their knowledge. Therefore thought – the basis of a person’s knowledge – is art.

Yeah, I know, blah blah blah… Who cares? But isn’t that the whole problem? We should all care. If we continue to let the arts be systematically removed from our educational institutions (as is happening more and more these days) aren’t we doing a disservice to future generations? What we are doing is limiting the scope of education to what has already been deemed necessary for the current state of science as we know it. I wonder if including the study of arts could actually lead to more advancements in science as well. After all, the scientist working in his lab is also expressing his knowledge…

Some food for thought…

bis später,

Coriolis

It's only a hobby...

Videos, videos, videos … what a pain…

Okay, so I’ve done it again. I’ve got this bad habit of getting really involved in any “hobby” I decide to occupy my free time with. The hobby changes (collecting MST3K episodes, ripping my CD collection to my computer, organizing my digital photographs, poker, prostitutes, blogging, etc…) however I always go at it full force. One might think that the result of this would be my catalogue of skills continually growing although it most definitely doesn’t seem that way to me. To me, all it ends up being is more frustration. Whenever I set my mind to doing something, however, I set my mind to doing it right.

My latest pastime has been digital videos – high definition videos to be more precise – and this little hobby is proving to be a bit complicated… The plethora of usable codecs and programs available for this work is almost mind-boggling. Of course I am attempting to do this hobby on the cheap (well, cheap is subjective) and that, of course, adds to the frustration.

I began things by trying to do as much as I could with freely available software. It’s not that I’m unwilling to pay for quality software, however these days you’re basically gambling when you decide to shell out money for pretty much any commercially available piece of software. Sure, you can believe the sales pitches that are eloquently created by these corporations; however the question of whether or not the software will perform the way you are expecting is basically an unknown until you’ve purchased it. You can rest assured that, if the software has any weak points, the companies will do their best NOT to mention these in the sales pitches.

Add to that the fact that I don’t know what is actually “required” when initiating a new hobby and purchasing software that may or may not fulfill my unknown requirements makes spending the money even more difficult. I guess it all comes down to pre-purchase research. In the case of digital video processing, there is a lot of information available – a bit too much, actually… It ended up that I was basically trying to make sense out of what are usually very subjective personal opinions posted by people that seem to be members of various camps that agree with that person’s opinion. For example there is most definitely an Xvid camp as well as a DivX camp and, since Xvid is an open-source codec as opposed to DivX’s codec for purchase (at least the DivX Pro version which is needed for encoding), information obtained from members of either of these camps often turns into nothing more than a political argument justifying the person’s decision to join whichever camp he decided to go with. I guess this justification makes people feel better but it sure does muddy the water a bit for new hobbyists…

As far as what I am doing, I think I’ve figured out a usable solution with the software titles that I have purchased. I’m still playing around with various tweaks on the multitude of settings available in these tools in an effort to get as close to perfection as I can; however I am now able to create what I believe are valid 1080p videos. Whether these will be usable for anything but viewing on a computer screen is still an unknown (I haven’t purchased a high definition TV yet); however I’ve decided that I really don’t care. I’m sure that I’ll be able to convert them in the future if the need presents itself…

Of course the videos that I have been creating are apparently extremely illegal and that brings up yet another issue that’s been bugging me – I’m not supposed to use music without paying royalties to the large corporations that seem to think they have the right to charge me to use the music that I, in my opinion, have already paid for. Don’t get me wrong here – I completely understand that artists deserve to be paid for their work (as far as production corporations, not so much…); however I don’t quite get why they need to be paid multiple times. I purchased the damn CD but I guess that’s not enough…

And yes, I realize that somebody could extract the music from one of my videos and obtain a copy of the music without paying the artist(s) who created it but that’s just the way it is with today’s technology. If you want to get technical about it though, somebody extracting the music from one of my videos wouldn’t actually be getting the same song that they would by purchasing the CD – they’d be getting an mp3 (a lossy compression algorithm) version. Granted the difference in quality is pretty much inaudible to human beings however it is not (bit for bit) identical to the CD version that I purchased.

And why is it only the audio energy spectrum that we need to pay for? A visual artist (painter, sculptor, architect) also spends a lot of effort in making his creations; however anybody can easily take a picture of said creation without any worries. Oh wait, never mind, I guess it would be insane to think that somebody would actually own the rights to a visual image (and I’m not speaking of the actual painting – or whatever … I’m speaking of the light energy that is created by the art’s existence); however we seem to think that somebody can own the rights to audio energy. It’s the same thing – just different wavelengths…

You see I’m of the opinion that once art becomes energy it becomes just another part of reality. The fact that this energy can be captured and stored in a way that it can be recreated at a later date does not change the fact that what we are actually talking about here is energy. Restrictions are often set to make clear storage of this energy difficult (you’re not allowed to videotape movies or bring recording devices to concerts) in an effort to keep the commercial media that is available to clearly reproduce this energy valuable; however technology is winning that battle. In today’s digital world, where pretty much anything can be represented by nothing more than a long string of 1’s and 0’s, it’s becoming easier and easier to store this “art energy” in a way that is clearly reproducible – and easily exchangeable.

Hell … the artists should be happy that I chose their work – it clearly demonstrates that I appreciate the work they did in creating it. I’m basically saying that I like their art so much that I am willing to include it in my creations. Or is the only acceptable way of showing appreciation paying them? That’s not art – that’s business…

bis später,

Coriolis

Brand New Crap

So what the hell is up with all these PC manufacturers squeezing as much crap (and crap is the best way to describe it) as they can on – what are supposed to be – brand new computer systems? Whatever happened to the days where a purchased computer was basically no more than the hardware and an operating system? I, for one, liked it that way. You bought your computer and populated it – on your own – with software that you either needed or wanted. It was great because you knew exactly what was on the machine at all times and were usually at least somewhat aware of any interdependencies between different pieces of software. But I guess those days are long gone…

Now for me, at least, this really isn’t an issue. I build my own personal computers and can easily just install an operating system to get me started. However, when the inevitability of working on (or helping upgrade) a friend’s or family member’s PC pops up, I need to deal with the crap that these manufacturers seem to think people just can’t live without. And, from the looks of what’s always on these boxes, the average person just can’t live without hundreds (slight exaggeration) of very unstable demo versions of programs that they can, for a price, upgrade to the just as unstable full version. I mean what are we? Lemmings?

I suppose the reason that I have decided to write about this is because I have basically spent a large majority of the last three days setting up a brand new desktop (HP Pavilion a1612n) and notebook (Lenovo 3000) PC for my parents. You see my parents are from a time where computers were very large, very complicated pieces of machinery usually housed in some secret governmental location that required a team of highly educated scientists to derive the product of two hexadecimal numbers – and the best they could get was an approximation due to the limited significant digits available. To them (my parents, that is…), this is still the case. They just haven’t come around to realizing that the home PCs of today are designed in an effort to be usable by pretty much idiots – otherwise known as typical Americans. I don’t know … but I can guarantee that the crap that is being pre-loaded with these machines sure isn’t helping this matter.

As an example of the madness, check this out… My father is really into the whole mp3 sharing scene – and I mean really into it! (Don’t worry, he only shares public domain songs – wouldn’t want the RIAA on his ass…) In fact all he ever does on his computer is partake in some sort of never-ending quest to find pretty much every song ever released on any media (assuming, of course, that it was a song from the 50’s or 60’s). He’s been able to acquire a rather astounding number of these little treasures in the last 6 years with his old computer (a 2000 model Compaq Presario) however that machine was so screwed up that it was becoming damn near impossible to use. The solution – buy a new computer! This we did – along with a notebook for my mother to play her games on in the living room…

Okay, so we (my parents and I) headed out and purchased basically the cheapest computer that we could find that I thought would be sufficient to keep my parents happy for as long as possible. We chose the HP Pavilion a1612n. It’s decent – an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual processor with more bells and whistles then my folks will ever need. The main thing was that it came with a 19” LCD monitor and the old Compaq monitor that they had was basically burned out. We purchased the computer and brought it home. It was then that I started setting the thing up for my dad which basically meant removing all the unneeded (and completely unwanted) software from the machine and transferring the literally thousands of mp3’s from the old box to the new one. No problem. Finding all of the mp3’s in the myriad of folders and subfolders that my father had managed to use over the last 6 years was a challenge; however the files were found and transferred. Now the resistance to change that is my father needed to be dealt with. My job then became making this new machine act exactly (well, as close to exact as I could get) as the old one did. This created a bit of a problem…

For the last 6 years, my father had been using Adaptec’s Easy CD Creator 4.x for burning his mp3’s to audio CDs. He wanted to continue using this software (software that we still had the source CD for) on his new machine. Unfortunately, this software doesn’t even install on an XP-based system. No problem … we headed out again in an effort to find a version of the same software that would work on the new system and purchased roxio’s Easy CD & DVD Burning software. (There was a much fancier version that included a bunch of features that would never be used for something like $80 but we decided to purchase the Easy CD & DVD Burning package and save ourselves $50…) I figured that this software should do the trick and would be the closest to the old Adeptec software that my father was comfortable with. Cool … problem solved … or so I thought…

After getting the software home and installed, we quickly ran into a bit of an issue where “no compatible drives were found”. Great! Now I needed to figure out why this software wasn’t working… It took me somewhere on the order of 6 hours or so to finally figure out the maze that was the roxio support webpage and successfully find the patch required to get this software to play nice with the drives. The worst part was that it wasn’t even a patch included on the list of patches for the software we were attempting to fix – it was a patch that I located in the “Ask RoxAnn” knowledgebase. I suppose roxio can make more money by hiding the actual patches that work – frustration is a great way to get your customers to shell out more money for software they don’t actually need; but it sure seems to me like it would be better for the consumer if good support was given on software that they were actually planning on using…

But I digress. This issue, although frustrating as hell, isn’t really the main issue I wanted to address. Although the Easy CD & DVD Burning software was a pain; it did not come pre-installed on the machine. We actually purchased that little problem… There were, however, several other programs already on the machine that would burn audio CDs – just not exactly the way my dad was used to. And as I have said, when he gets a procedure figured out that works for him, he’s very unwilling to change it. I need to get back to my main topic and bitch and moan some about all this extra crap…

Removing these little jewels basically becomes a full time job for a few days. For the desktop system, I guess it’s not really that complicated – just time consuming… However the notebook PC that was also purchased was a bit more complicated. There was so much crap on that machine (mostly security based “enhancements”) that removing unneeded stuff gets a bit tricky. I mean the way the computer came configured required two passwords to just log on. How stupid is that? Not only that, but I seriously doubt that my parent’s computer is going to be the target of any complicated hacking scheme. I mean why do my parents need to set up extensive encryption techniques in order to play silly little casino games (no real money involved)? It’s not every laptop that contains important, top-secret corporate information. Some of them are just toy boxes.

It seems to me that these computer manufacturers might want to consider creating computers that come pre-installed with nothing more than the operating system. Not everybody has thousands of digital pictures and videos that they want to turn into Hollywood-quality movies that can bore even the dullest person to death (I know … I’ve made a few…). Some people just want to play games (or collect mp3’s…). It’d be nice if these computers also came with a button that can be selected to remove all the unnecessary crap. That sure would make my life easier…

bis später,

Coriolis