aliens

Just about every popsci show I've seen in the last few years favors the idea of aliens being everywhere. I'm sick and tired of hearing "reputable scientists" utter the stereotypical sentencte: "The Universe is probably teeming with life". Just because a lot of extrasolar planets have been found lately and just because alcohol's been found in deep space (along with other organic chemicals such as aminoacids) and just because bacteria can live everywhere on Earth doesn't mean that life just appears everywhere there's water and heat. And then becomes intelligent. A few decades ago you didn't see this almost-consensus that aliens must exist with high probability. Now everyone's being disgustingly optimistic about "not being alone in the Universe".
There are a lot of problems with the whole extraterrestrial life issue.
First, you can't do statistics on a sample of one. Therefore, you can't scientifically predict anything about life elsewhere. If we were to find life on Mars or Jupiter's moons or wherever, we'd have a sample of 2, which would still be insufficient, but a lot better than 1. To be pedantic, we don't even have a clear, universal definition of life, or a clear method to identify it; we can only speculate that if it existed, it'd be similar to what we see on Earth because the physics and chemistry are the same everywhere.
Second, we are very limited in our capabilities to detect extraterrestrial life. Radio searches have so far yielded nothing and I personally doubt they ever will, because radio "leakeage" from aliens would be too weak to be detectable. The whole "our TV shows have already reached dozens of stars" is bullshit, the signals are too weak to be detectable. A 100 kilowatt radio source on Earth would shine just about 10^-24 watts of power on a generous alien antenna (one square kilometer) placed not very far away (10 light years), for the same reason that distant stars appear so dim to us. If that antenna were connected to an incredibly sensitive receiver, say cooled to a tenth of a degree above absolute zero, the electronic noise due to thermal motion would still be 1000 times stronger. They could probably barely receive Morse code, which takes a lot less bandwith than human speech. Ramp up the distance to 100 light years and the signal gets 100 more times weaker. So in order for the aliens to hear us, either they'd have to have incredibly advanced receiver technology, or our beam would have to be focused and directed towards them. We're faced with the same problem when trying to detect alien radio signals. We could probably detect a signal if it was being intentionally broadcast, but we haven't yet. This raises another problem: how many times, and for how long, did we transmit such signals into space? Not that many, not that long. Maybe the aliens are doing likewise.
What other means of detection could we use? Take artificial lighting for instance. City lights on Earth can be seen from space, and they have a very distinct spectral signature. Aliens would possibly also use artificial lighting at night, but light has the same problem as radio signals. Maybe if we had a telescope powerful enough to see planets around other stars, we'd be able to detect these hypothetical lights. At least we'd know what to look for, given that aliens would probably see in the same frequency range as we do, because their eyes or whatever they have would adapt to the spectrum of their star, which would be similar to ours. If we watched the planet from the right angle, we could possibly even see these lights turning on in the evening and off in the morning. The total power coming out of our lights is much bigger than the power from our radio transmitters, so things might be the same on their planet. Light is also easier to detect than decoding radio signals.
Another thing that comes to mind are nuclear explosions. Any sufficiently developed aliens would do them, even if just for testing. They would be strong enough to be detectable, but did we ever see any sudden flash of light near a star? Did we ever look for one? I have no idea.
Finally, contrary to what some may think, there's not a shred of physical evidence that aliens have ever visited us. That might be due to the difficulty of interstellar travel, but nonetheless it hasn't happened.
So yeah, even if aliens exist, they can't get to us and we can't get to them. Relativity, which is pretty much proven to model this world correctly, while not forbidding faster-than-light travel, predicts that such travel would result in grandfather paradoxes and such. We also can't talk to them, because information, however we send it, radio, lasers, X-rays, whatever, only travels so fast. Maybe in a "parallel reality" we could, but not in this one. So there. We are alone.

taxi

I was in a cab one night and I glanced over the driver's dashboard, where the display was showing the total distance the car had traveled. It was about 170 Mm. I suddenly realized that such a distance is similar (of the same order of magnitude) to the distance to the Moon, or to one light-second (approx. 300 Mm). To realize that, during the course of a few years, a car can travel one light-something, where that something fits on the usual human timescale, is wonderfully mind-warping.

bits

I've had to learn the hard way that whenever you're taking a business trip (or a leisure trip for that matter) there are certain essentials that you have to bring with you, such as your towel. While having a laptop with your familiar environment and your favorite tools and music can make your life easier, it's not absolutely essential, given that you probably have an Internet-accessible box at home or at work. What is essential is a quick, straightforward way to get the job done. You need to be able to link your bits with their bits and measures. A simple way to patch your technological know-how into their system. Thanks to Microsoft et al deprecating "legacy" serial and parallel ports, now there isn't any simple, immediate way to interface stuff directly to a PC-class computer. You usually interface stuff directly to a microcontroller-class computer, but even that needs to be PC-linked to be programmed. So even if you're certain that you can find all the needed parts on-site, you still must always bring your own USB AVR programmer.

honk

I was relaxing in the bar, calmly enjoying my beer. Outside, the traffic was horrible. The intersection was almost blocked and the drivers were angry. A car blew its horn. I thought I saw the lights in the bar blink. It was obviously just a brain glitch. Surely the lights can't dim when a car is honking outside, can they? A great thought came to my mind. What if they actually could? I mean, when a lightning bolt hits a powerline or transformer station, the lights most certainly blink. They dim a little. The same thing happens when someone in the building is welding - the welder draws a lot of current so the line voltage decreases significantly. The question is, when a tram or trolleybus or even a train goes past the building, does it create enough of a disturbance for the lights to noticeably blink? In most cases, I guess it doesn't. But do the lights blink unnoticeably? Possibly. It's not necessarily an electrical disturbance that can cause the lights to blink. Air currents for instance do modify the light output of all devices, be them incandescent lamps, fluorescents, LEDs, whatever, simply because light output is dependent on temperature, no matter how slightly. Me shouting at the lightbulb can potentially alter its output. By how much, that's another discussion. It's certainly not noticeable, but is it measurable? If it's not directly measurable, is it at least statistically measurable? How many photons a second does a lightbulb's output vary with when a car honks outside? I don't know. Fewer than air currents cause? Electrical disturbances from people turning their TV on or off in the next building? I don't know. It's an interesting thought. My guess is about 5.

transformation

1. Yesterday police have turned decorative Christmas lights back on in major cities around the country under the slogan "drinking alters reality" or something like that, in an effort to reduce drunk driving.

2. Hypermiling (what?) can supposedly save gas and cash. Tune your car to use up less fuel, and drive less aggressively. Yeah, right. One problem is, in the U.S. at least, that a certain percentage of people feel that driving an efficient car is {lame, gay, laughable, whatever}. Who the hell cares about fuel. $3.61 per gallon? What the fuck is a gallon anyway? I drink water out of 2L bottles and don't know how much that is in gallons. I have no fucking feel for how much a gallon is, even though I know roughly how much a mile or an inch or a pound is. Anyway, Google knows, almost 3.8L. So what, $3.61 for that much petrol is expensive? Bullshit, here it's over one €vro per litre.

3. Fish eat, they digest, they crap, and other fish eat their crap and do the same. ("Dirty Jobs" on Discovery). Then the second group of fish are fished out after having fattened up, and sold as human food.

3. Hyperprogramming. Processors read programs and execute them over data, chomping it up according to the programs. They crap out new data and heat. Scientists are looking for new computing models and paradigms to help decrease energy consumption.

4. Pain. As years pass, pain settles down on the bottom of a lake, where it decays into mud. From that mud, beautiful water lilies grow and shine under a crescent moon.

wonders

I got pissed off today when I saw some newspaper publish a list of "seven wonders of Romania", built from the votes that people cast on its website. Besides there being lots more interesting stuff in Romania, like the Communist-built People's House, one of the largest buildings in the world, this whole thing is stupid. It's supposed to be inspired by this idea, but at least that one has worldwide coverage. So, let's start a harsh analysis of all that's wrong with these so-called "wonders", after which I will present my own view of what this world's wonders are.

Chapter 1. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

1.1. Great Piramid of Giza. Cool, impressive, durable. Appropriately called 'Great.' Questionable in utility, though certainly of great social impact. Built by workers using ramps, not by extraterrestrials, not by God. Wonderfully precise construction and alignment.

1.2. Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Kind of cool, unfortunately they don't exist. There is some controversy over them actually having existed in the past, but anyway, Babylonians were cool. Kind of. As cool as they could afford to be in those ancient times.

1.3. Statue of Zeus at Olympia. Also impressive, also busted.

1.4. Temple of Artemis. Busted.

1.5. Mausoleum of Maussollos. Busted by God by means of an earthquake, trashed by European Crusaders later.

1.6. Colossus of Rhodes. Busted, God, quake.

1.7. Lighthouse of Alexandria. See above.

So the Great Pyramid clearly wins, given the fact that all other six have been destroyed, mostly by nature. So what does this mean? Well, I guess there are earthquakes in Egypt just as there are in the rest of the world, not to mention eroding sand storms. But the Pyramids were simply better engineered than all the other stuff. So this brings me to my point: dude, why call them wonders when they didn't even manage to survive a few millenia? I mean, sure, they were elaborate and cultural and shit, but the pyramids, in their exterior simplicity, as well as their huge scale, simply rule. Besides, all these seven Wonders are so Europe-centric. Well, Europe and some few thousand miles below. This is absolutely wrong. There's no mention of Indian temples, no mention of Chinese stuff, and certainly no mention of South American shrines.
So in this sense, the New Seven Wonders of the World might be seen as a correct initiative. So, here's:

Chapter 2. The New Seven Wonders of the World.

2.1. Chichen Itza. See Great Pyramid, the same also applies here. Too bad they killed people there. There's culture for you. Sure, you can have great mathematics, great astronomy, great engineering, great poetry even. But that doesn't help at all if you kill people and more than 90% of your population is illiterate slaves. (Was that the case? I don't know, it's just for the sake of discussion. But they did sacrifice people.)

2.2. Christ the Redeemer. No comment.

2.3. Great Wall of China. Impressive, useful, great effort, good results, quite durable. Too bad so many people died building it, but those were tough times. Visible from space, just as many other buildings are. Invisible from the Moon.

2.4. Machu Picchu. Cool, ignored until relatively recently by Western historians, just as all of ancient South America, see Chichen Itza.

2.5. Petra, Jordan. Wh'ever. Call me uncultured.

2.6. Roman Colosseum. Oh yeah! :) Quite unimpressive I might say, having visited it. Very famous of course, objectively quite fine architecturally, and of course very durable. The fact that it's a wreck is due to repeated theft, not its construction. So yes, it has its merits. Its purpose however makes me point you to the comments on 2.1. Of course, me being Romanian and thus of Latin descent, I must say I'm quite ashamed of my ancestors. I don't care about their philosophers and poets, in fact Asian philosophy and poetry kicks Europe's butt with indescribable force and depth. I care about the Romans violently conquering everything and amusing themselves with organized bloodshed. I despise the Roman Empire and its heritage.

2.7. Taj Mahal. Correct.

2.8. The Great Pyramid, again :) Yes, I know that makes 8 not seven. Honorary Candidate.

This is already better than the classic Seven Wonders, but misses a point. These are all ancient! I mean sure, they're great, or at least 5 of them are, and of course, newer buildings such as the Eiffel tower were included in the polls. The truth is, modern humans are driven by Capitalism and thus by utility, rather than the desire to build something Great, Really Great, like the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall. There's no point now in employing so many resources. I mean, one really can't compare the Eiffel tower with those ancient Wonders that were build with much lower technology, and that's because it's... small :) Sure, it's nice, it's important, it was pioneering, but it's small. So, these 7-8 wonders are wonderful and even greater than more recent buildings, but they're still ancient. Their relevance today is only historical. Here is my list of modern wonders that really count, stuff that has been shaping our lives since its discovery. Stuff that's been building modern culture.

Chapter 3. The Real Wonders.

3.1. The Flushing Toilet (of course) and Hygene in general. Not invented, but nonetheless made popular, by a guy ironically named Thomas Crapper.

3.2. Medicine. The discovery of bacteria, which is life not mentioned among that created by God in seven days. The discovery of antibiotics, anesthetics, et cetera et cetera et cetera. This did absolutely nothing but double our average life expectancy.

3.3. Freedom of, and from, religion. Freedom of speech and thought. And democracy in general. Imperfect as it all might be, at least it exists in theory, and in practice in some form or another.

3.4. The Integrated Circuit, first imagined by others, but designed to be economically manufacturable by Robert Noyce on Jean Hoerni's planar process. Saying that the influence of the IC on modern society is enormous would be a gross understatement. Every electronic device, computer systems included, the Internet, banking, wtf, the whole economy and all our comfort depends on high-performance integrated circuits.

3.5. The Internet. I can now talk to people on the other side of the globe and share ideas, and I can learn a lot of stuff that others care to publish. In view of this, Free Software and Free Documentation share the award.

3.6. Nothing. Everything stated above is simply much too great to place near anything else. Science. Let's say Science in general. It's been already mentioned 3 times though :)

3.7. No. I can't think of anything comparable in greatness or relevance to hygene, medicine, freedom, the IC, or the Internet and its associated freedoms.

There. Think about how the Rhodes Colossus and the others make your life so much better than ancient Romans' and shut up.

P.S. :D :D Just as I was proof-reading this post, a senile old lady was speaking on TV on "The Critical Eye" claiming that God built the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge :) Dude, we build skyscrapers and tunnels and hydroelectric dams and launch rockets and send ships outside the solar system, but our ancestors couldn't have moved some blocks of stone to build some pyramids and a stone circle. That's not only stupid, but insulting to humanity as well.

grandiose bullshit medley

This is going to be a masterpiece of crap.
It all started today around 4:30 am when I was watching Zone Reality. I'm starting to like channels like Zone Reality more and more each day, in contrast to some channels I grew up with like Discovery. I learned English mostly by watching TV. Cartoon Network and Discovery. Now that cartoons are translated and spoken in Romanian, I don't watch them anymore. I can't imagine a bigger step to dumbing down the infant population than translating cartoons to Romanian and dubbing them over. I --- learned --- English --- from --- cartoons - you-fucking-idiots. But of course, it's cooler to learn it from multi-k$ courses. It's not cool when a high-school student argues with his teacher over the existance of the word "informatics". On the other hand, English words are penetrating common Romanian in a very annoying fashion. I mean, we have native words for 'job', 'rating', 'poll', to 'apply' for something, and so on. But no, we don't use them anymore. 'Cause it's not k00l, you know, not modern, not trendy. But people that have some kind of authority and influence with the masses don't concentrate on this. No, they dub over Western cartoons so that in the end we don't know how to speak neither proper Romanian, nor proper English. We're losing both our culture, and a proper coverage of Western culture. We're defacing our own language AND getting less and less proficient with international languages such as English. Which I learned from cartoons and perfected with the help of some good teachers. And why all this? So that some incompetent translators and lousy actors can get paid for it. Ok, maybe they're not all incompetent and lousy, but when someone says "about 10 miles" and you translate "about 16.1 kilometers", you can be called anything but competent. (For example.) Happens everytime with movies. At least they are only subtitled, for the moment. There are bigger xenophobes out there who dub even these over. How stupid need you be to dub a movie over? Are your viewers so illiterate / incapable of distributed attention to just read the subtitles? Sheesh. On the up side, my cable company now broadcasts cartoons in two languages and my tv tuner can decode both. So now I can watch cartoons like they were created. With all the untranslateable language puns and twists in place. But most TVs don't have that feature, so the vast majority of children are deprived of the benefit of learning the most important international language, the language of the Internet, in a natural fashion. Instead, they hear their parents 'apply' for a 'job' that will bring them some more 'cash', without understanding where those damned words come from. It's a double-fucking-paradox. It seems that everything was better when I was younger and that everything is getting worse by the minute. I learned a lot of stuff from Discovery as a child. Now I only see cars, muscle cars, hot rods, cars, some more cars, a little more cars, then some remote-controlled cars, and cars. And the 104th re-run of How It's Made episode 5 on both Discovery and Discovery Science at the same time. Oh, and Romanian commercials featuring female voices with over-emphasized bass and either skinny or dumbly-monotonous male voices. No wonder people download shows over the Internet. Oh well. At least I got to see a documentary about Death Row on Zone Reality. To be fair, I've seen similar ones on both Discovery and National Geographic. Bottom line is, in the U.S., the most 'democratic' and 'free' country in the world, more than 100 people were sentenced to death and then acquited following appeal, in the last 30 years. Well. Either some of those are criminals that were wrongly acquited and are now living among us^H^Hthem, or some of them were wrongly convicted in the first place, or some of the other thousands that had their sentence carried out were wrongly murdered by the state. Or all 3 choices. Why the fuck do I wear a Texas t-shirt? Because they have a town called Corpus Christi there? Fuck. No, because my mom gave it to me and it's nice, but hell. Dude. The State murders people. Probably. I have no direct evidence, I can't tell that for sure. But most probably, the state kills innocent people. What the fuck. That's wrong, dude! The death penalty should be abolished. And prison security increased, and more resources put into re-habilitation programs. But hell, what do I know. I know nothing. The state doesn't really care that much about the security of its citizens, or the rehabilitation of criminals, or the killing of innocent people. It cares about its image. It needs people to still find it acceptable and respect its authority so that the economy works as a whole and some_kind_of_average(people, mood) equals "everyone's happy". But the people that are unlucky enough not to afford good a good defence attorney, or who are otherwise unlucky, don't really count. Nor do the people that work at NASA doing leading-edge research, that are required to allow severe intrusion of their privacy for 'national security' reasons. Oh well. Maybe they will succeed with their lawsuit. But why the hell am I defending NASA? I mean, they blew up two shuttles and killed two crews even if they were warned about the severe problems they were having. I'm not defending them, in fact screw them, I'm defending human rights. Fuck it, not only does the Church / do the Churches try to control every aspect of everyone's sex life, now the state is questioning people about it. By the way, there's nothing in the U.S. constitution that prohibits the state from controlling its citizens' sexual behavior. Or so I understood, I'm no expert. All in all, until a few years ago it was illegal in many U.S. states for two people to engage in 'sodomy', 'actions against nature' or other vague words meant to refer anal or oral sex. In some cases it was between homosexual men, in other cases it extended to heterosexual couples as well. Around 2000-something these laws were finally overturned in some supreme court. Dude! In the third millenium and the 21st century (which BTW if you don't count years from zero and you don't because there were no computers and addressable memory then, starts in 2001 and not in 2000 like everyone said), people can't have anal sex in the United States of America. Cool. Read Wikipedia, then check with more 'reliable' sources if you don't believe me. Well. At least there's free speech. Kind of. For now. For instance, I don't know if I can dump all this putrid bullshit on a server located here. I probably can, because I hate inciting to racism, violence, underage sex or stuff like that and therefore I don't do that. On the other hand, I hate the Church(es) for example. They passed some law here that don't allow you to offend religions/churches/whatever anymore. There are laws like that in many 'civilized' places around the world, and ultimately, they're probably good. But I still hate religion and the churches that enforce it because, apart from their distorted vision on physics and biology, they are constantly trying to control people's sex lives. Dude! In Christianity I think it all starts from Mary. She supposedly gave birth to the Son of God without prior sexual intercourse with a male, which is of course the natural way of creating children. No, the Holy Spirit couldn't have entered a body created from human flesh through normal, God-created sex. It had to enter an unfertilized egg and fertilize it. Dude. Why? Because the Church says that sex is impure. It's dirty and it's a sin. By making Mary a virgin and also making her the mother of the Son of God in the stroies, the Church has a really strong argument against sex. I so fucking hate that. Ok, I fucking understand that when there were no doctors and no condoms, sexually transmitted diseases mandated that people have as few sex partners as possible in order to limit transmission. You couldn't teach people that, so the saints / enlightened dudes / whatever told it to them in a form they respected. And there are a lot of social reasons for which the religious dogmas and norms around the world are the way they are. So yes, religion has always had its good parts. And it still has. And we need a certain degree of stability in society. But it's the twenty-fucking-first century now and times have changed and some traditions need to die and religion needs an upgrade! Free Love! But no, I'm telling total bullshit here. A lot of dudes are trying to bring their own 'upgraded' religion and mostly all they've come up with is crap. No. Things are good just the way they are. Let them evolve. No. We are surrounded by crap. But hopefully I can say all this. I don't know. If it's not allowed, I don't care, I can delete it. I can even apologize. My mind will still be free. Hopefully. I could then probably disperse this stuff over some underground networks, but I'm afraid few people care about this so then I won't. I heard the news this morning: Chinese authorities launched some kind of 'virtual cops' that look like policemen and are embedded/overlaid in web pages and are clickable. With more and more computer scientists and hackers in the U.S. refraining from publishing cryptographic research for fear of the DMCA (even its name sounds horribly stupid), and with the possibility of limiting the cryptographic strength of Internet communication between private users by law, how much til the formerly free world becomes an Orwellian nightmare akin to a living dead machine with money instead of blood and brain-numbed human beings instead of cells? Will I need to go deep into the mountains to teach my children technology, for fear of being traced by Big Brother? I certainly hope not. I mean, scientists and hackers are doing reasearch in order to discover better protection algorithms, while crackers are cracking the weak algorithms unhindered and gaining profit from it. The former are prohibited by the DMCA to work on certain systems and topics, while the latter do it anyway because they don't go public, they don't write their names on scientific papers and publish them, they work underground. You could hypothetically define a "protection bit" and set it to "one" in a music file and write some software that doesn't allow you to copy it. No encryption no nothing. If someone writes a new software that simply ignores that bit, that's illegal. If someone publishes the location of that bit in the file so that anyone can set it to zero again and use the original software to copy the files, that's illegal. Well, actually it's probably not. That's an extreme example just to get the idea. There need to be "reasonable measures" in place, but they don't have to be strong or secure in any way. There's justice for you, sawing off its left hand and right foot. Oh, and just to complete the puzzle of the world falling apart around me, let's check this out. Some blokes at MIT made a system that transmits energy without wires. Oh wow. Now I can power my laptop without plugging in the power cord, I can get power wirelessly. Woooooooow. And it's called "WiTricity" Wooow that's so Coool. Big fucking stale bucket of crap. It's old technology, in fact it's more than a hundred years old and it was invented by TESLA, the same guy who invented the method used everywhere in the world to carry electrical energy from the power plant to the consumers! And it's based on the work of a lot of guys that did physics and maths and philosophy a hell of a fucking lot of years ago when people still thought that God was angry when lightning streaked across the sky. But Tesla was just a madman born a few hundred miles from where I live who did some weird stuff in his lab. He's not MIT, he doesn't do overrated Media and AI (childish people and stupid robots) and he doesn't market WiTricity. No, he's just smart and plays with resonant circuits. It took more than 100 years after the brilliant mad genius patented the stuff to "imagine a future in which wireless power is feasible". Hey, let me tell you something. There is no wired/wireful electricity. Electricity is fields. It lives in space-time. It needs no wires. It's wireless by nature. 'Electrical' energy flows around the wires, not through them. They just guide it by means of mobile electrical charges. So take your WiTricity and you know what to do with it. At radio frequency of course. To their merit, they acknowledge the technology and concepts as being old, but with no significant past interest. Well, that's the problem. We're so profit- and instant-results-driven that we forget what progress is. And that's why, when all my high-school friends were going to MIT and other famous schools in the States to learn science and engineering and lots of humanities, I stayed at the Bucharest Polytechnic drinking beer in The Jack till morning, hacking hardware and coding software. And speaking English on the 'net. Because that's what the Net is all about. Fuck internationalization, double-fuck i18n, if it's Global it has to be English. I hate it when I google something technical like hacking the Linux kernel and the top two hits are in Japanese. Or German, or Russian, or Polish, or Czech, or Portugese, or Romanian so that nobody gets offended. Of course, I'm wrong, I know. I should disable non-English results. I can't afford to do that, what if I miss something? I also know I'm a hypocrite, for I also discuss in Romanian on Romanian forums, but that's somehow wrong too. It's knowledge lost to a minority, globally speaking. The Net should be global, international, thus English.

beauty

Every now and then I have an argument with a friend or acquaintance about mixing maths and art, logic and emotions, understanding versus feeling and so on. I tend to get upset when people try to separate these, especially when they do it very vocally and categorically. Every now and then people tell me things like: don't describe autumn and spring using sines and derivatives; music is for feeling, not understanding; once you understand something you're unable to see its beauty anymore; and so on. The last one is even described in a poem by an interesting guy called Blaga, who also wrote that heaven is lit by the flames of hell - which is both a nice image, a nice idea, nice philosophical reference and so on.

A few years ago, someone showed me how to awake feelings through music. He said that music is mathematics and showed me how the sequence and combination of certain notes evokes certain feelings. I didn't fully understand the mechanics of this, because I'm not very musically literate, but I certainly got the idea. The guy expertly confirmed something I was already suspecting.

There is beauty in mathematics. There is beauty in physics, biology, psychology, just as there is beauty in art, history or philosophy. There is a great deal of beauty in computing, and there is a lot of philosophy there also. There is a lot of philosophy in every science, and there is beauty in thought.

There is beauty in engineering. A skilled engineer can recognize an elegant solution to a problem when they see one, and that evokes certain positive feelings. Good engineers are creative. They just work on a different level, not with words and colors but with nuts, bolts and electrons.

Take the human body, or the body of any living thing for that matter. One can't start to really see its beauty until one dissects it, studies it under the microscope, studies its functioning in greater and greater detail, until finally realizing that what they see is an incredibly complicated and finely-tuned machine! That is true beauty, and it's no wonder that many feel that our bodies are the careful work of a highly skilled engineer. Some call the engineer God, some call it Evolution. This makes it even more beautiful. Some even say that God engineered humans by means of evolution.

It doesn't even matter, for our minds are too small to comprehend God if "God existed". This is a reason why beauty will never fade away, because the more things we learn, the more things pop up that have to be studied and learned. But not before being perceived, felt. Our minds are small and our souls are primitive. Cosmically, we are but ants. And there is infinite beauty in the Cosmos.

So even if we accepted that understanding destroys beauty, that wouldn't be a problem. But understanding does not destroy beauty. I understand rainbows quite well but still find them beautiful. Especially similar phenomena that happen at night when the moon is full. I understand why I see the moon the way I see it, but I still find it very beautiful. And this could go on for days.

So, saying that feelings are somehow superior to logic and rejecting mathematical beauty simply leads to ignorance. It reminds me of an age not-so-long gone, an age of witch hunting, astronomer bunrning and other stuff. You can't praise the moonlandings, the microprocessor, the Internet, modern medicine, and not accept mathematical beauty. It's not ethical, not correct, not just. There is so much joy in discovering, in understanding, and there is so much beauty in the world on so many levels! The only thing I find no beauty in is dogma.

beer

Beer is good for your soul.

relativity

everything is relative, even this statement.
axioms are a product of the mind.
the mind can understand its own structure?
an idea or thought that defines its own structure?

i feel like feeling something but i'm not sure what. because i'm defective.

random facts

I ate a cheese sandwitch.
Last night the full moon was glowing red. As it rose above the horizon, it became orange, then yellow. It was beautiful. I admired the reddish full moon for minutes.
Somebody loves me.
Tiamat rules.
The Romanian Patriarch (Orthodox Church leader) has just died. Rest in peace.
The nation is supposedly mourning. I'm happy for him, he's going to Heaven.
I feel like slacking, drinking lots of beer, performing simple fornication and advocating free love!
There. I've provided you with at least three hours of Wikipedia reading material on totally unrelated topics. Please edutain yourself.

42nd post.

i am in love with myself.

the $2 handling fee does not include any tips or gratuities. gratuities accepted and appreciated.

i am in love with myself.

so much stupidity in the world. it's not even evil, it's just... hey God, i'd like to file a bug report! (xkcd.com)

i am in love with myself.

tonight i felt good for the first time in weeks. i felt really good deep inside. thanks shima.

but i still am, i really am -

i am in love with myself.

gone slacking. bbl.

wondering

i've got a blue crossover ethernet patch cable laying on my desk and now i'm noticing it's so sexy. i'm now holding the blue crossover ethernet patch cable and watching it closely. i'm squeezing its rubber connector covers. now i'm putting it back
and i'm wondering:
do they make these crossover ethernet patch cables automatically, or is there someone who actually inserts the wires in the connectors in the right order? 20 000 times a day? deep question, a lot of philosophical and sociological implications.

Coming Up on Ret's Blog: politics and morality! :D stay tuned.

beer

The dentist fixed my teeth, I had a nice walk in the park, dark skies, cold winds, beer with mr Wacky. Which reminds me. Some time ago, while working in the lab, I decided to inquire mr Wacky as to the possibility of having a beer with me that evening. So I opened the messenger window and just stood there questioning the wisdom of such a decision. I was after all, quite tired. And then mr. Wacky read my mind and asked me out for a beer in the same window, 1 minute later. Now that's cool. I have to research that some time.

insanity

i need sleep. i cannot sleep. can't remember anything. nothing makes sense.

oh yeah. now i remember.
take a look at what i found while browsing wikipedia.
it's a style of writing in which one refrains from using the verb 'to be'.
Now the reason why they gave it such an idiotic name, I can only take a wild guess at. Maybe it's like when you have a price P of 1.5 bucks for a bottle of beer, but then you go to the other bar and you have a price P' of just 3/4 bucks? I mean, would they be so stupid as to call such a nice idea simply 'the other E.nglish', or 'English version 2'? Oh, by the way, this blog actually uses Web 1.13. The 2.0 version is unstable and buggy. Don't buy that crap.
Apart from its absolutely ridiculous nomenclature, the be-less idea is very nice. Excuse me, I meant the idea fascinates me. It implies a whole new way of thinking about the world and it forces one to exercise care in writing. I have to think more before I write, and I need to acknowledge that my way of stating issues has a profoundly relative quality. Moreover, my way of viewing the world shows the same relativity and subjectivity, which of course I already knew, but have seldom expressed in practice. Philosophy apart, I really find it nicer to read, speak and also to write. Now to call it something worthy of referencing such a valuable concept. I suggest 'English without to be', which I find much more appropriate and self-explanatory. Also, if one were to use this scheme in another language, its name could be easily and appropriately translated.

The next thing I will talk about tonight refers to an advertisement for some cream that supposedly acts on the skin's DNA to reduce aging. I semi-like that commercial more than many others, however I must point out that, even if I lived in a society where men used face cream as often as women did, and even if I myself used face cream, I would most certainly NOT want it acting on my skin DNA to keep me looking youthful. For example, here's some stuff that acts on your skin DNA: mustard gas :)
Quoting: "The compound readily eliminates chloride ion by intramolecular nucleophilic substitution to form a cyclic sulfonium ion. This very reactive intermediate is particularly detrimental to cellular health as it has a strong tendency to bond to the guanine nucleotide in DNA strands. This leads to either immediate cellular death or, as recent research has found, cancer. Mustard gas is not very soluble in water but is very soluble in fat, contributing to its rapid absorption into the skin."
It causes painful blisters and may also cause blindness. That's cool! :D Reminds me of Dethklok episode 1. Yeah. There's some marketing for you.

my life has been saved

I am crazy. And sometimes I'm absent-minded. Everyone knows that. In chronological order since childhood and until recently, I've been in the emergency room for: swallowing mechanical parts, jumping off furniture head-first into an iron heater, beating up a cactus that had pissed me off, chewing on my fingertips, falling onto an iron spike on an abandoned construction site, taking a wrong step in front of my residence while being too fat, eating filth, walking past a newspaper stand which was covered with a sharp piece of tin hanging at my head level, and playing with high voltage. They wanted to operate on me at least 2 times but fortunately changed their minds. This may sound like a lot, but it's actually nothing. I met people that took real damage and are came out OK. Now, let's see what other things I did that could have ended very badly, but didn't. When I was a kid I used to stare into needles and razor blades. Bring them closer and closer, until they got blurry, and then even closer. And closer. I didn't have a criterion for stopping, and you can't really judge the distance until maybe you touch your eyelashes with your finger, given that the exposed part of the needle / blade is short enough, which it wasn't. Compared to this, the chewing of said blades into tiny pieces seems insignificant, but it's still worth mentioning. Wonder if I can still do it. I mean, there are people that put spikes through their arms, mouths etcetera, so... Then there's that time I grabbed onto a pipe and let myself hang above a 20-meter deep well, after a failed attempt of scaring everyone by grabbing onto some aerial power cables. The 3 times I wrecked my bike going down the hill don't even count. Maybe getting stuck on a mountain cliff in the middle of nowhere for almost 2 hours counts, but then again, maybe not. Before that I used to have absolutely no fear of heights. I could walk on a pipe crossing a deep valley. Which is just, because a cat can also do that, as easily as if the pipe was at "ground" level. Well anyway, that's changed, luckily, some may say. But I still want to do bungee jumping. Some years ago, some guys organized bungee jumping sessions early in the morning on some abandoned crane. Yup, in Bucharest one does occasionally find abandoned cranes even near the city center. I didn't go, partly because I didn't know who the guys were and where to find them (the legality of it all was probably dubious), and partly because I was too lazy to dig up said contact info. Or maybe God subconsciously suggested me to be lazy, just as he did when I got the idea of climbing up that crane alone, even without jumping. Like that dude that threatened to kill himself and got the Police, Ambulance and Firefighters busy at 3 am. Well, yesterday that crane fell, wrecked 6 cars and narrowly missed several people. Cool. Hey, what can I say. Thanks.

celebrate

one hour of blogging.
hooray.
think of where my light is. i think it's passing by Saturn right about now.
I love Neptune. Neptune is so far and mysterious. Uranus too. I know it's irrelevant. It's just random bits, man! look:
001001101010011000001110101001100111
011000100110100101100111011011100110
000001001111011001110110000001001001
11101111011010101110010011100000010011
100110101001100111011000100110101001
1001001110000001001001111011110110101
011100000010010110110100101101110011
0000101100010111000000100000101101000
0110011011101010011000000100111011101
111011001110110000001001011011010011110
00000100011011101010011001001110100111
100000010000100110101001101010011000
0011100000010001001110101001101100111
000001110101001101100011000101110000
00100111101100100111000000100010101101
010111011001110001011100000010010000110
000001000100011010100110101001100100
11100111010000000100010011101010011011
0001101010011010010110000011100010111
0000001001111011001100110000001000100
011010100110101001100100111000000100
110001101111011001110110001001101001011
000101110100101101111011001110110101001
1000100110000001000100011010011110000
00100100111101111011010101110000001000
110111010010110110011101001011000101
110100101100111011011100110000001001011
011010100110000001001001011001110110
0000010001000110101011101100011000010
110100001100100111010100110110011100010
11100000010010010110011101100000010011
10010000101110000101101010011000000100
010101101000011011000110110101100000010
0010001101000011001001110000001001000
01100111011000100110000001000100111011
110110110001101101011011100100000001001
000011001110110001001100000010001000110
101001101001011001110110111001100
00001000111011010010110110
0011010100110011101
0000000000
damn, i used 8 times more space than needed! chhh, what am i saying. more than 8 times.
and i also said or, not xor. big difference.