Pictures and Sentences

So I finally imported all the pictures on my camera to the computer. But first things first, I need to explain my new experiment. You're going to have to earn looking at these pictures. A week or two ago I put up my thing about thinking and how you already know what you're going to think, do you actually need to think in complete sentences, etc. Now I want to try applying that to my speaking. Because for the most part, I feel like the second halves of sentences can be extraneous, their content being obvious from what was said at the start. Obviously in some cases, like if you're going to say, "but", and then add a thought in a different direction, then you would need to finish it yourself. But I feel like other than that, people could hold entire conversations that were still coherent without ever using complete sentences. Is this a perverse idea? It seems different in nature to me from IM-speak or abbreviations or things like that, but maybe it's only more extreme. In any case, it will probably entertain me if I actually do it properly because I'll be forced to always actually think about what I'm saying so that I can make sense and will stop talking when the rest of the sentence becomes obvious. Although I'll probably need to explain what I'm trying to do to people, otherwise they might get really frustrated. It could be interesting to discover how few people, notice, however, because I think there's a natural inclination to be predicting what other people are going to say before they say it, so they might just start talking as soon as I pause for long enough. One last thing, is that I'll be curious to see, especially if I don't tell people about what I'm doing, is if they're able to just start saying their own thought after I pause, or if they'll have to finish my thought for me. That would cool to find, if it really bothered people to leave the thought hanging, even if the ending were obvious. So that's that.Oh, that's just my mom, filtering her brain. Don't mind her.Here's my fish tank. It's hard to photograph well. But here's a close-up of some of the fish, anyway.The bigger ones are Green Cobra Guppies, and the small orange one is an Endler's Livebearer.

That's the freakish, horrifying lump on my chin. Thankfully, most of it turned out to be dried pus! So it's much smaller now.

To end on a nicer note, here's that picture of my moustache I've been promising for so long. I know the suspense was deadly.Also some things I'm excited about: my treasure chest is actually starting to look like a chest and not lumps of wood. Maybe I'll take the camera to the woodshop tonight and take some photos of it only half-done, plus some action photos. Maybe. Also, there's a new Terry Pratchett, which I will read soon. And finally, I just ordered some books by Stephen Potter, called Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, Oneupmanship, and Supermanship (in a collection), that are his satires on people's competitiveness, and what they're about seems pretty evident from the titles. But the basic premise is that if you're not one-up on someone, you're one-down. I think they should be pretty funny. And if they're not, that's okay, they'll still be my new guides for how I will live my life.

Self-Repair

So I am currently back at home, awaiting my dentist appointment tomorrow. Scarlet took a tumble on Friday, and so i had to get stitches in my chin and i chipped a tooth. For a while, I looked truly gnarly. Fortunately, I didn't actually take any photos, so few will know just how much like a hobo i looked. Especially when I still had a fat lip. All in all, quite a surreal experience.

In math today, we talked about how much of a revolution to conversion from a geocentric to a heliocentric solar system was. I argued that it wasn't that extreme, considering that the idea had already been floating around for thousands of years, all of the observations remained the same, and the math was pretty much the same as well, between Copernicus and Ptolemy, including diagrams. People in my class were pretty salty about this, because they wanted to make a big deal about the religious aspect and humans no longer being the center of the universe. But I stand by it. It seems like it was more of a revision than a revolution. A revolution would be something like Lavoisier or Harvey or Lobachevsky, that would remain significant even when taken out of context, whereas it seems like Copernicus wouldn't have been shocking if it hadn't occured during Christian-dominated times. I'd say this is because those other examples relied on fundamentally different methods, observations, and hypotheses, whereas Copernicus only changed the last bit. Hypotheses are always changing, but the other parts seem like they generally stay more consistent.
I was also reminded how difficult it is to truly have an original thought. Copernicus is generally known as the inventor of the heliocentric system, but it had in fact been thought of thousands of years prior to that. I feel like that's probably true for a lot of different "discoveries", where either I personally am unaware of the true originator, or the world as a whole has forgotten them. And while on the subject of discoveries, I was again fascinated by how frequently several people discover the same revolutionary idea at the same time. Like Newton and Leibniz with calculus to give a more famous example, or Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who I would be really surprised to find most people know about. I suppose that happens because it's the natural next step in the thoughts process, so why wouldn't two people both take that step, and it would be a reinforcement of the idea that they had taken the logical next step. It's still pretty cool, though.
In final science news, some physicists are actually claiming that the reason the particle accelerator in Switzerland isn't working is because the collisions are causing particles in the future to come back in time that interfere with the machine. I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or not, but mainly, I don't believe it. Let's pop a quick intervention on those scientists for being so crazy. And once again I recommend people check out wired.com, it's got some really cool articles up about spiders, day-dreaming, and Earth-twins.

Fish

So, I finally got my fish, and they are all really awesome. Except for the two that have died already. But I'm pretty sure I didn't kill them. They were both happy and swimming around, and then I woke up two mornings ago and one of them was stuck in the filter intake (which most research I did said meant that it was sick to begin with). And then this morning one of them was just belly up at the bottom of the tank. So I'm not really sure what's wrong, but the rest of them still look happy and awesome, so I'm not too worried about it. Unfortunately, fish tanks don't photograph too well, especially when your camera is running out of batteries. But when I get new ones, I will definitely put up pictures of the tank and my moustache, which is definitely still going strong. The end of the competition was last week, and I think it's hilarious that still no one has shaved, because they're all too happy with their 'staches. Also, props to Mark, who tells me his whole house is bullish in facial hair.
In other shopping news, I had an awesome Long Weekend, I got lots of sweet clothes and room decorations from Unique Thrift. I also found out about miracle fruit, which is this berry that makes things taste sweet, so now my roommate and I are going to buy a miracle fruit plant. It's pretty much perfect, because it goes well with pickles, which are the only thing in my fridge; grapefruit, which I eat every morning at breakfast, and limes, which I just bought a bag of. I'll send out invitations to my miracle fruit tasting party soon.Also, last night was the seminar on Caesar and Cato the Younger, during which I was struck once again, as with Federer and Nadal, by the two types of greatness. Butch and Sundance are also a good example. The basic premise is the same as the Shakespeare quote, "some are born great, some achieve greatness..." Caesar was born to due great things, and Cato had to work his ass off his entire life to do anything. That's why we want to be Caesar/Federer/Sundance. We wish we were entitled to greatness like them, that it was our inevitable destiny and that it would come easy to us. We have mad respect for the Catos/Nadals of the world, but it's rare that someone has the willpower like them to hoist themselves up to greatness. Granted, Caesar did have to work hard, and Cato had a natural determination, but the distinction is what is interesting. I might write my sophomore essay on this idea, but I'm not sure if there's enough there, or if I would want to use Cato and Caesar as my basis. Just an idea, at the moment. In other updates, I have started a woodshop project, I'm about a third of the way through making a miniature treasure chest. Additionally, I made bread over Long Weekend and my roommate's sister is here visiting and she brought his bread-making stuff with her, so we'll be making bread like crazy. Plus I want to make borscht sometime. Also, check out these amazing microscope pictures from Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/photomicrography/all/1
And this quite hilarious video. Guaranteed it will make your day better:

Tarzan

"Tarzan had become an omnivorous reader, and the world of possibilities that were opened to him in this seat of culture and learning fairly appalled him when he contemplated the very infinitesimal crumb of the sum total of human knowledge that a single individual might hope to acquire even after a lifetime of study and research."

So I've been re-reading Tarzan of the Apes and the Return of Tarzan, and they are still really good books. Additionally, I put in that quote from Tarzan because it's basically word for word what I said at one point in my Freshman Essay, as an argument for immortality. A whole lifetime could be devoted to one single field, who wouldn't want to repeat that over and over again with new fields? Or I guess you could just Wikipedia it and die happy, you fat loser.
I've realized that I don't like paintings or statues when they're of people. They just kind of creep me out. Especially when they're really ancient. I think part of it is that they never really look like people, but they're close enough that it's disturbing. Also I think old things have just started boggling my mind. Like that Euclid had written his Elements 2500 years ago, and yet we still learn the same geometry today. It's hard for me to wrap my brain around the idea that some 18 year old 2000 years ago looked at this manuscript and learned the same thing that I did. It's the same as when I walk around campus and think about how old the buildings actually are, and how people were walking through them 200 years ago. It doesn't make me feel insignificant, rather I'm sort of proud of how I'm in the same place as all these other people were, it's just hard to fully understand how something as stupid as the building is still around when everything that makes it interesting, like all the people who were in it are all gone. I was talking to my mom about this and she shared the sentiment, saying that it's weird for her to have all of her mom's old clothes. She doesn't want the stupid clothes, she'd much rather just have her mom around. So in that sense I don't think it really is that comforting to know that we can make an impression on people even after we die with what we leave behind, like buildings or writings or photos or anything like that. I'd infinitely rather just be around myself.
Anyway, it's Long Weekend tomorrow, which is crazy, I can't believe we're this far into school already. More importantly, it means the moustache-growing contest is over. I'll have pictures up tomorrow of how it looked at the end. I'm not sure if I'm going to shave it, I might let it ride, or let me beard grow out to accompany it, we'll just have to wait and see. Oh and by the way, the final dye count was 3 times. The roots kept growing out blonde again...

Thinking

Charlie looks really pissed that this guy distracted him while he was thinking.

So I realized today while I was zoning out instead of reading Lucretius that most of the time when I'm thinking, I'm really just waiting for the words to form in my brain, when I already know what they're going to be. It's like when you're having a conversation with someone who talks really slowly, and you can predict where they're going, so you just have to wait for them to finish their sentence. That's really weird for me to understand, though. It only happens when I'm thinking in words, but that's pretty much all the time, except for maybe when I'm thinking about to do when I'm playing sports, or something like that. What's extra weird about it is that I realized I can skip ahead to the end of the though when I'm only at the beginning of the sentence, because obviously I know what I'm going to say already. I guess it'd be stranger if I didn't know what I was going to say.
But the whole concept of knowing what I'm thinking before I think about it (in coherent phrases anyway) just raises a whole lot of questions for me, especially when I realize that I can skip the coherent phrases part. It's seems as though when I'm thinking, it's basically like I'm talking to myself, just not out loud. So the biggest question for me is, am I wasting a lot of time thinking sentences all the way through when I already know where they are going? Obviously it's worthwhile if I'm having a conversation or something, but could I train myself to think in shorthand? And then the question that that leads me to is: would I even have enough to think about, if I were constantly abbreviating my thought process to the essentials? Or would my head just be empty more often. (Go ahead, make your jokes about how it's always empty) It seems like it'd be a hard experiment to do.
Now here's what's really weird, is that I just wanted to talk about how I wonder whether or not my thought process is affected by carrying through the words to the end, because that's what leads me to new thoughts, is the phrasing/word choice or whatever of the old thought. And then I got distracted by my roommate and had writer's block/forgot what I wanted to say or whatever, and I couldn't figure out how to put it into words. In my head the phrase "I wonder if" just kept repeating. So I'm not sure if that invalidates what I've been saying this whole time, or not. Because on the one hand, I did know where I wanted to go with the sentence, whether I could put it into words or not, but maybe that's the value of actually talking to yourself in your head, so to speak, as it forces you to actually think it all the way through. I feel like that helps you remember the thought, for one thing, like writing it down.In conclusion, I'd like to point out that Aristotle says all the gods can do is think about thinking. You might think I'm about to say that makes me a god, but I don't want no part of that shit. It hurts my brain. Also, this might have been really boring to other people, so here's something everyone should find cool: hyperthymesia. 4 people in the world have this condition, it's having a super memory, so they remember every detail from every day, and it usually activates at around age 12. http://blogs.static.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/34971.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia.

What is laughter?

so today i rediscovered the joy of inventing new types of laughter. the highlights: the noise you make when you're about to sneeze, repeated over and over again, or wheezing like mary poppins when you lie down on her. the other fun new game that we came up with is pretending that people are laughing when they make random other noises. like if they sneeze, just get really angry and say, "what are you laughing at?", or if they yawn, then act really nervous, and ask them "what's so funny...why don't you share with the rest of us". or if they start coughing, tell them to calm down, it wasn't that funny, they're acting hysterical. the possibilities are endless, really. and hilarious because they're confusing.
also, i'm approaching critical mass with the things stored in my cell phone. i have filled up my note to self voice memo function, and so i've had to switch to typing things into the notes section. i've decided to start carrying around a small notebook and pen, so that i can remember everything. other cool things i've found out recently...they can take fMRIs of your brain, and use a program to create a picture of whatever you were just looking at. crazy. also, some other crazy people have made a cloth entirely from golden orb spider silk. it took them four years, but it is really gorgeous. i couldn't find any pictures of it, but you can find them in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/arts/design/23spiders.html.

PayDay

I just got my first paycheck...and it is awesome. I'm not sure why I got it on a Thursday, but I won't complain. Now the test will be if I can manage to actually cash it and not then just spend it all. The problem is that I'm never counting on getting the money, so I view it as net positive, and then I see no reason not to go back to even. So I end up spending huge wads. But, I don't really have anything I want to buy right now, so I think I'm safe. Also I'm pumped that my roommate got certified to take out sailboats by himself, so now we can cruise around the Bay whenver we want and he can teach me how to sail.
We had first acapella practice on tuesday, that was also pretty cool. I think certain voicings could be upgraded, but I won't name any names. Let's just say one person was laughing through the entire thing, so their part wasn't as good as it could have been. I also have actually managed to get the tennis tournament started, so I feel really productive. I haven't decided on what to make in the woodshop yet, and my friends aren't really helpful, all they've said so far is "wooden pants".
I've decided to call shenanigans on depression. I don't understand how that's a thing. I don't mean like, chemical imbalance clinical depression. Just general depression. It seems like at the root of it, it has to be self-pity, and that just doesn't fly. I finally finished rereading Scaramouche, and it was still awesome, of course. I think I just can't resist characters like him, or Cyrano, or Popeye, or Captain Blood. That can't be unique, though, who wouldn't like to be someone who's good at everything they do/a total badass?
I don't really have anything else to say, except that it definitely doesn't feel like it has been a month at school already. But that's a good thing.
Oh, also that I've gotten a decent number of compliments on my mustache. By which I mean only that people have asked me if I'm growing a mustache, but that's still a step up from before. I don't have any pictures of it