It's one of those ridiculous Sundays where folk music is playing in the living room and I sit here like an immortal wart on a stone toad. I'm-a not going anywhere. Oh, I guess I could be. Hmm. ("Hmm" is what you say when you're thinking as part of a sentence.) (Because it is more polite than pointing at your head with both hands and chanting "think! think! think!") Where could I be going? I could go to the new house of Kris, Brian, and soon Brandon. "King Zoo" it is called.
It is I... Sidney Feldman!-- GPB
Was reading "The Diamond Age" (Neal Stephenson) just a little while ago. I'm not done yet. I guess some would say that I AM reading "The Diamond Age". I'm not, though. It's way too hard to read and type different things simultaneously. Hell, it's pretty hard to read and type different things consecutively. In one exchange between characters, they discuss the difference between hypocrites. There's two kinds, at least, see? The kind that is insincere about his beliefs to begin with, and the more common kind who just makes mistakes. Hypocrisy seems to exist outside of moral concepts of good and bad, because it is just someone contradicting themself. I guess we figure that since mathematical proofs that do this are false , people that do this are also flawed in some way. Well, they're either insincere (Shocking! Insincere people in this day and age? Like, all those people who complain that no one knows the REAL them (for some reason, like maybe that people wouldn't like the real them.) (Aggravated by the fact that the subject wouldn't like many of their friends in the first place if they weren't also insincere in their words and actions.)); ...uh, they're either insincere, or they make mistakes (Humans! That make mistakes! blah blah blah)
You've got angst in your pangst! -- Kris
Either way that I look at it, hypocrisy doesn't really seem like such a big deal. So you said one thing but thought or did something else. That makes you a hypocrit. If that word wasn't so much fun to throw around, who would really care? Then again, who would really care about insincerity if they didn't have egos to hurt? Yeah, and while I'm at it, who would really care about torture if it didn't hurt? Mehhhr, and who would care about DUCKS if they didn't EXIST? Pah, abort.
I'm taking a shower now. (No, not RIGHT NOW. I can't do things in the positive NOW. Only the relative when.)
Soo. There's what you were given (genes.) and what you got for yourself (skills.), which to be proud of? Skills, eh? Because if you and your friend were going to a boat race and some uninterested third party provided you with a hydrofoil and your friend with an inner tube, you wouldn't have much to brag about at the finish line. Granted, SOME people would. Most people would take a lot more pride in, say, building their own boat. So, if it is possible to have a natural tendency to learn quickly, how are the quick learners justified in feeling any sort of pride in their ability? I mean, heck, it was just dumb luck that they were born with it. If upbringing has more to do with it than genes, you still don't have much to be proud of, personally. Chances are your parents didn't have any clue that what they were doing would make you turn out in certain ways. If they had a choice between making you grow up to be an independant thinker and making you grow up with a great deal of affection for your parents, which would they choose? I'm sure that when Uncle Eddie's parents abandoned him in China, they weren't trying to teach him independance.
Taking pride in your looks would fall under the category of "unwarranted", eh? Unless. blah blah workout blah blah plastic surgery, etc. What do people have to be proud of, anyway? You're a product of your genes and your environment. Luck? Free will? Ohhhhkay. I'm a very lucky person with lots of free will (boast boast). Wewww!
Information theory tells us that the more unexpected a message, the more information it contains. The most information is contained in completely random messages. (Not 'information' in the sense of 'insider trivia'. Information in the sense of raw data.) If we are expecting certain messages more often than others, we can devise a system in which all messages are assigned codes, the more common ones getting the earlier codes which consist of fewer datums. This is the idea behind Huffman compression, but I just wanted to say that a lot of the web wouldn't take up a whole lot of space when compressed that way. Hmm. Example, "Elly's slice of cyberpie". We would assign the entry about how we got an award today and how our webpage is still there the code "1". Then the one about bringing litigation to bear on some detractor would be "01", and so on.
So is that what I'm doing? Trying to generate random messages? Time to write a web-crawling dissociated press engine. Oo! Neat! I've been replaced with a robot and no one noticed!