Wednesday, June 20, 2007
In New York
I'll be in New York until Saturday evening for a little something Google has planned. Looks like going to the World Finals has its perks.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Random ramblings...
So I've had one of the most amazing holidays ever - and I squarely blame it for all the difficulty I'm experiencing in getting out of the vacation mood. My parents and sister came over to the US, and we've basically been all over the place. Three days at Disney World, followed by Washington DC, New York, New Jersey, Niagara...and loads of shopping, of course. It was one hell of an experience, and certainly a vacation to remember.
Since I'm not taking any classes this summer, I'm busy studying for the PhD qualifiers coming up at the end of Fall, as well as getting some practice done for the next ACM regionals (and World Finals, hopefully). Life is good.
I've recently been playing Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy to pass the time. Now I've always thought the lightsaber really is 'an elegant weapon for a more civilized age', and this game finally gave me the chance to be a Jedi.
You won't believe the fun you can have deflecting blaster bolts back at your assailants and taking down a dozen opponents with a few well placed slashes and spins (or just pushing them off ledges with the Force). Ah, the carnage...very satisfying. 
As anyone reading this might have figured, I have absolutely no issue with violence in video games (and besides, Jedi Academy doesn't even have blood - lightsabers cauterize as they cut, so limbs can get sliced off without any splatter
). Violence and aggression is an inescapable part of our simian ancestry, and modern society rarely has enough outlets for it. I strongly recommend violent video games as a prospective outlet.
There is an amazing sort of beauty to lightsaber combat, even though the games don't make it look that much like the movies. I'm particularly fond of what I term the 'samurai' lightsaber style, in which I basically wait for the enemy to attack, step slightly out of the way and then strike, timing it exactly to go through the opponent's guard. It took some time, but I'm now pretty good at dual saber combat. I've always had a thing for fighting styles that use two swords - Miyamoto Musashi himself did it with his Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū style, and it's just cool. With lightsabers, it gets cooler, because wielders tend to spin their sabers a lot, and it looks cooler when you're spinning two at once and ending with a double slash.
Another thing I do is watch the incredible comedy of Eddie Izzard. It's a very different sort of comedy from what you normally see - it's a sort of Monty Python meets stream-of-consciousness monologuing, with a bit of mime and cool sound effects. This is one of my all-time favorites.
For the last couple of days, I've been watching videos from Beyond Belief 2006. I've only watched about 3 hours total, but these are some of the smartest and most insightful people around, and it's just incredible to listen to what they say, and often, how they say it. I'm slightly fascinated by the art of holding an audience spellbound, and I figure watching some examples of it will help - at least on a subconscious level.
So far, the most interesting talk was by Neil De Grasse Tyson, who made some amazing points. What interested me (aside from the humor) was the novel angle from which he approached things. There was a little section of his talk called 'Naming Rights', and he used that to point out that things are usually named by the people who get there first - and those blokes are the ones who (at that point in time) have a sort of culture of excellence in that particular field.
For instance, a lot of the heavy elements in the periodic table have names associated with the United States - Americium, Californium, Berkelium - and all because they were discovered in the US at a time when there was a great deal of emphasis on that sort of thing among physicists in the US, and they got there first. The constellations have mostly Greek names, because they were the first to stick their myths in the patterns you could see in the sky. Two-thirds of the named stars have Arabic names, because the Arabs catalogued them during the Golden Age of Islam, among a gazillion other achievements. Life was good for them until about the 12th century, when a fellow called Al-Ghazali wrote a scathing critique called The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and effectively destroyed the Muslim world's one chance at a philosophical and spiritual Rennaissance.
It's rather sad to note that if the ethos of the time had encouraged skepticism, freethought and unfettered rational inquiry a bit more, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in right now. It took the other two Abrahamic religions half a millennium before they managed to start looking upon religion with a certain degree of irreverence, which is a very underrated achievement. Religion is fine, as long as it isn't taken too seriously, or interpreted literally.
I've always had issues with the more ridiculous aspects of religion - miracles, revelations, prophets, gods - the usual supernatural garbage that comes with all religions in some form or the other. I guess it's appealing to a basic flaw in human reasoning processes - and one which isn't all that benign. Tyson pointed out one sad effect of it when he showed several religious referents in the work of Ptolemy and Newton and Huygens. And without fail, whenever they would start praising something as the incomprehensible work of some creator(s) or what not, that's where they would stop discovering and creating. And then a century later, someone without 'God on the brain' would come along and take over from where they left off, and then God would vanish from that particular domain as well. Newton was able to figure out the motion of the planets, but he stopped at the question of why it was stable. This is where he invoked God, and that was it. God wasn't anywhere in planetary motion - that was understood. When people understood things, God would vanish from the picture.
It's almost terrifying how religiosity stopped the greatest genius in human history. It wasn't even an insoluble problem - Laplace came along and figured out that problem by inventing perturbation theory - something that should have been child's play for Newton, in view of what he did.
Divine explanations aren't really explanations - they're just a sort of agreement to stop thinking, wrapped up in flowery language, self-congratulation and a sort of righteous humility that is thoroughly misplaced, and rooted in insufferable arrogance.
"Right, we've understood all this, but here's a question that no one can figure out - and no one will ever figure out. Yayyyy, God."
If that isn't arrogance, I don't know what is. And on top of that, it usually accompanies mythologies that imply humans and Earth are somehow central to the universe, in terms of purpose and importance. Yeesh.
Anyway, I'm going to stop ranting now. Richard Dawkins is coming up next.
My parents and sister came over to the US, and we've basically been all over the place. Three days at Disney World, followed by Washington DC, New York, New Jersey, Niagara...and loads of shopping, of course. It was one hell of an experience, and certainly a vacation to remember.Since I'm not taking any classes this summer, I'm busy studying for the PhD qualifiers coming up at the end of Fall, as well as getting some practice done for the next ACM regionals (and World Finals, hopefully). Life is good.
I've recently been playing Jedi Knight 3: Jedi Academy to pass the time. Now I've always thought the lightsaber really is 'an elegant weapon for a more civilized age', and this game finally gave me the chance to be a Jedi.
You won't believe the fun you can have deflecting blaster bolts back at your assailants and taking down a dozen opponents with a few well placed slashes and spins (or just pushing them off ledges with the Force). Ah, the carnage...very satisfying. As anyone reading this might have figured, I have absolutely no issue with violence in video games (and besides, Jedi Academy doesn't even have blood - lightsabers cauterize as they cut, so limbs can get sliced off without any splatter
). Violence and aggression is an inescapable part of our simian ancestry, and modern society rarely has enough outlets for it. I strongly recommend violent video games as a prospective outlet.There is an amazing sort of beauty to lightsaber combat, even though the games don't make it look that much like the movies. I'm particularly fond of what I term the 'samurai' lightsaber style, in which I basically wait for the enemy to attack, step slightly out of the way and then strike, timing it exactly to go through the opponent's guard. It took some time, but I'm now pretty good at dual saber combat. I've always had a thing for fighting styles that use two swords - Miyamoto Musashi himself did it with his Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū style, and it's just cool. With lightsabers, it gets cooler, because wielders tend to spin their sabers a lot, and it looks cooler when you're spinning two at once and ending with a double slash.
Another thing I do is watch the incredible comedy of Eddie Izzard. It's a very different sort of comedy from what you normally see - it's a sort of Monty Python meets stream-of-consciousness monologuing, with a bit of mime and cool sound effects. This is one of my all-time favorites.
For the last couple of days, I've been watching videos from Beyond Belief 2006. I've only watched about 3 hours total, but these are some of the smartest and most insightful people around, and it's just incredible to listen to what they say, and often, how they say it. I'm slightly fascinated by the art of holding an audience spellbound, and I figure watching some examples of it will help - at least on a subconscious level.
So far, the most interesting talk was by Neil De Grasse Tyson, who made some amazing points. What interested me (aside from the humor) was the novel angle from which he approached things. There was a little section of his talk called 'Naming Rights', and he used that to point out that things are usually named by the people who get there first - and those blokes are the ones who (at that point in time) have a sort of culture of excellence in that particular field.
For instance, a lot of the heavy elements in the periodic table have names associated with the United States - Americium, Californium, Berkelium - and all because they were discovered in the US at a time when there was a great deal of emphasis on that sort of thing among physicists in the US, and they got there first. The constellations have mostly Greek names, because they were the first to stick their myths in the patterns you could see in the sky. Two-thirds of the named stars have Arabic names, because the Arabs catalogued them during the Golden Age of Islam, among a gazillion other achievements. Life was good for them until about the 12th century, when a fellow called Al-Ghazali wrote a scathing critique called The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and effectively destroyed the Muslim world's one chance at a philosophical and spiritual Rennaissance.
It's rather sad to note that if the ethos of the time had encouraged skepticism, freethought and unfettered rational inquiry a bit more, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in right now. It took the other two Abrahamic religions half a millennium before they managed to start looking upon religion with a certain degree of irreverence, which is a very underrated achievement. Religion is fine, as long as it isn't taken too seriously, or interpreted literally.
I've always had issues with the more ridiculous aspects of religion - miracles, revelations, prophets, gods - the usual supernatural garbage that comes with all religions in some form or the other. I guess it's appealing to a basic flaw in human reasoning processes - and one which isn't all that benign. Tyson pointed out one sad effect of it when he showed several religious referents in the work of Ptolemy and Newton and Huygens. And without fail, whenever they would start praising something as the incomprehensible work of some creator(s) or what not, that's where they would stop discovering and creating. And then a century later, someone without 'God on the brain' would come along and take over from where they left off, and then God would vanish from that particular domain as well. Newton was able to figure out the motion of the planets, but he stopped at the question of why it was stable. This is where he invoked God, and that was it. God wasn't anywhere in planetary motion - that was understood. When people understood things, God would vanish from the picture.
It's almost terrifying how religiosity stopped the greatest genius in human history. It wasn't even an insoluble problem - Laplace came along and figured out that problem by inventing perturbation theory - something that should have been child's play for Newton, in view of what he did.
Divine explanations aren't really explanations - they're just a sort of agreement to stop thinking, wrapped up in flowery language, self-congratulation and a sort of righteous humility that is thoroughly misplaced, and rooted in insufferable arrogance.
"Right, we've understood all this, but here's a question that no one can figure out - and no one will ever figure out. Yayyyy, God."
If that isn't arrogance, I don't know what is. And on top of that, it usually accompanies mythologies that imply humans and Earth are somehow central to the universe, in terms of purpose and importance. Yeesh.
Anyway, I'm going to stop ranting now. Richard Dawkins is coming up next.
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