wsfgythyd

in one hand, i hold a fresh-from-machine espresso in a paper cup. the other, a plastic bottle i just filled from the watercooler. condensation forms and fades in the dehumidified, conditioned air. conflicting signals, burn and freeze. imagined thermoelectric drift. i feel awake. 

strange dreams. a party, a relocation, old places, new faces... ever thought about how two familiar aspects of life can become bizarre if brought together? 

caffeine buzz. 

sometimes, the bkc stretch can almost compensate for the juhu bridge. but nothing can make the andheri bit of the w.e.h. anything other than the drive up to the gates of of the city of dis. 

i like early mornings. the time doesn't matter, it just has to be before it gets used by other people. before sunup, before rush hour, before office timings, before the movie start. on that side of reality opposite the langoliers, existence gets you high. little things. smells. highlights off chrome. sunshine.  

Spring Cleaning: Revolutions

Looks like the cleanup is going to happen the way it's always been happening while I was growing up - by taking each and every single individual item in the house, one by one, wiping it down, and popping it into a box. What's left over at the end of it all is dust, dirt, stains, junk, trash, and memories. 

Then all the boxes are picked up, moved a short distance, and as if by magic, a new life begins. One where all surfaces are clean, walls are painted, all your stuff consists only of working, neatly labelled items, and the air is full of pregnant possibility. There are no rules that say, 'put this here', 'this goes there', or 'this is out of place'. Everything is out of place, which is the best place to be in. 

The machine's been overhauled, lightly sprayed with oil, polished, put back together and is raring to go. 

Now I just need the boxes. 

Are non-vegetarians evil?

Had an interesting debate few days ago while tearing a chicken patty to shreds with my evil pointy teeth. A staunch vegetarian stared at me for a few minutes, a look of disgusted horror on his face, and asked me if I knew how chickens were ill-treated before being killed - their feet being burned off because of being confined among their own guano, etc. I told him that's why I didn't eat the feet, and he got up and left the table... but it got me thinking. 

Consider the chicken. It's the most populous bird on planet Earth. It has no talons, can't fly, is fat, slow, stupid. It doesn't breed fast, and isn't particularly poisonous or even particularly bad-tasting. By all logic, if left to itself, it would have gone the way of the dodo. Yet, among birds, it's a spectacular success - because it linked it's evolutionary success with humans. 

As a species, did it make the right decision - guaranteeing it's success as a whole, while sacrificing the lives of the individuals? For as long as humans eat chicken, and are sitting on top of the food chain, chickens will not be extinct. Nor will any other domesticated animal. Nor will the scavengers, the vermin. In fact, they will evolve along multiple lines, filling several ecological niches created by Man. 

So the question is - by guaranteeing it's success, by ensuring it's immortality as long as the (non-vegetarian) human race exists - are us meat-eaters evil? 

Spring Cleaning: Part 2

The Cupboard

Threw out a whole bunch of clothes - stuff I don't like, doesn't fit, is worn out, and even some stuff that's been lying there for a while... hey, if I haven't worn it for a year, I doubt if I'm going to be wearing it tomorrow. Ethnic formals wrapped in bags and shoved into deep storage. Ditto, sheets and blankets. Socks sorted by color into large ziplocs. Belts, handkerchiefs, and watches in their own individual plastic trays. 

The Den

Do I use even one of these 2 beds cluttering up the place? No? Then why not use one as storage space for the bike? Transfer mattress, dump all of R's gym stuff on the window-set and bike goes up on the box... immediate space. Need to dump some of that gym stuff, hasn't been used at all... 

But... it's feeling like a losing battle. No matter how much I try, the essential mess - the clutter still comes through. All the lofts and deep storage is stuffed to bursting, cupboards full, shelves full... and there's still, so many things everywhere... crowding me, disrupting... have to move on. Have to find a better way to deal with this. 

Spring Cleaning: Part 1

The Blog Sidebar

Gone. The malfunctioning blogroll, the useless subscribe options, the ads, the logos, all the cool cute stuff. I don't miss it. I barely remember what was there or why I even had it... mostly useless. Some experiments, now dead and done. Mostly, extremely cringeworthy.

Haloscan

What started this? I think it was - Haloscan. After two or three years of ignoring buggy code, I finally got down to it and wiped it. Lost some comments, but who cares.

I felt light. I felt... freed.

Torrents and Games

I left the PC off last night. Ferelden can take care of itself for a while. No torrents either. I've barely started seeing the stuff I've downloaded. What's still coming in, can wait a little longer. In fact... maybe I should just leave it off.

Went for a walk instead. Listened to music. I like this feeling.

Life is too complicated, too messy. The circumstances will color perception. The junk outside will infect my mind. Has infected my mind.

It's time... to exorcise.

Spring Cleaning

I, am in, a spring-cleaning mood. 

I usually let it finds its outlet in

• Cleaning up my room
• Getting the bike serviced
• Formatting my hard disk
• Updating my CV
• Changing flats
• Going on a holiday

But this time... I want to do more than just that. I want to do all of the above. And more. 

Dangerous times. 

Feel... heavy. Weighed down. Too many things. Too much to worry about. 

Ballast. 

The trick to never have any regrets is to never look back. If I take an axe to the ropes now... I will need to remember this. 

If, of course, it comes to the axe. I need to backup first. 

What the hell - it's good Feng Shui anyway. 

Watch this space. 

Some more lucid-dreaming experiments

An interesting discovery - While I know that falling asleep in partial light triggers longer, more vivid and better-structured dreams (with correspondingly far high chances of taking control), it appears that the light needs to be present only at the point of falling asleep; yesterday's experience couldn't have been longer than half an hour, yet the memory lasted far longer. 

Which raises an interesting point - after the REM phase, what is the mind doing? Building dreams triggered off in the light-triggered REM? For the entire night? Or is the REM phase the start and finish of the dream, with the mind switched off for the rest of the time? That won't explain the intermeshing of the real world into dreams - like alarms, people shaking you awake, other noises that awaken you, or even the screaming nightmares at 3 AM (long after REM is done)... or are these cases of an REM phase restarting, or persisting? 

Needs more research. 

An interesting aside - videogames (or any kind of games) are naturally predisposed to be dream-matter because the subconscious recognizes the rules it plays by - and superimposes those rules, controls, and imagery (skins, if you will) in a manner that I guess is very similar to what the games themselves use - databases, scripts, CSS and skins. 

Last night, for instance - was a dream about what combination of tactics in my Dragon Age characters would work best in various combat situations. The healer at a distance, pumping up the fighters; the tank to distract unwelcome attention from the healer; the mage to target and incapacitate the bosses temporarily while the weaker enemies are disposed of, etc. And since a videogame is essentially an artificial-reality construct, it was a dream about a dream. 

And the game in question is about a main character who's been trapped in a lucid nightmare herself; so it's a dream of a dream of a dream. LOL. 

funny no more?

I was reading some of my earlier blog posts.

I was funnier then.

:(

The Fermi Paradox: Peeing in the gene pool!

Did I just answer the Fermi Paradox?

To summarize - the Drake Equation is a calculation of the likelihood of existence of intelligent, non-human life in the universe. A lot of assumptions, a lot of guesswork, but considering that our galaxy alone has over a hundred billion stars, very, very likely.

The question therefore was - if they're out there, why haven't we met them yet?

The Fermi Paradox is the addition of one more factor to the calculation - an unknown quantity as of right now - which prevents the existence of intelligent life.

And I think I just got what it is. It's evolution.

Or rather, de-volution.

Think about it. Right up till the Industrial Revolution, people would die of stupidity. The environment was hostile, and resources were limited. If you couldn't take care of yourself, and weren't an asset to the community, you would die and nobody would be able to - or want to - save you. Your stupid genes would leave the gene pool. Humanity would get a little bit smarter, evolve some more.

This made us all so smart over time, we became the the masters of the planet. The process took three billion years, but here we are.

And since we're the masters, we control everything. We can kill lions, great white sharks, rhinos, elephants, blue whales. We even kill them by accident, without meaning to and often without even noticing. In hundreds and thousands. It's genocide, an extermination all the more criminal in it's being accidental. If an animal competes with us for a resource, god help it. It's already extinct.

And with all the resources we now have, what do we do?

We create ideals.

Ideals of altruism. Of helping those less fortunate. Of charity. Social security.

All this makes people who were otherwise scheduled to be chucked out of the gene pool, are now allowed to hang around and contaminate it.

Think about it. How can you ever deny someone the right to breed, no matter what circumstances they are in? It goes against every ideal of liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy, enlightenment, emancipation, and personal freedom. It creates stupid children of stupid parents who are allowed to survive and breed. It creates a world where higher levels of intelligence marks you as different, strange.

Outcast.

Intelligence = success? In some ways. Short-term ways. Success in your own lifetime, maybe guaranteeing your children's. But long-term success? Like preserving ecological diversity, not poisoning the oceans and filling the atmosphere with carcinogens?

Nope.

It's just not good business sense.

So we continue to get dumber and dumber. Intelligent content dies, starved of audience and thus, money. Content gets dumber, making people dumber, and it's a vicious cycle that ends with an idiocracy.

And that's the missing link, the answer to the Fermi paradox. Any civilization which is smart enough to be the masterclass on it's planet creates in the process a situation which leads inevitably to it's own stagnation and destruction.

A few generations down, someone will hit a nuclear button and some of them will still fly. Not enough to kill all life 22 times over. Maybe just once.

And sometime, somewhere, yet another someone else will look up at the silent, starry sky and wonder why they're alone in the universe...

almost 4 months.

nothing to say? not really.

too busy to say it? kind of.

bored of blogger? maybe.

maybe I owe an update. 2009 - a look back - coming in 29 days.

Meditative Motorcycling

Biking is an experience deeply similar to meditation.

Think about it.
When you meditate, the most critical thing - the essence, really - is to empty out your mind completely, let go all the thoughts buzzing around in circles over and over again as if on rails, and give those tracks a chance to relax from the load, rejuvenate, free-associate again. I developed a technique - as every thought appears, I would just imagine it whooshing away into the background behind me, leaving my head clear again. Once you've treated it that way, it's easy to take everything as it comes, and literally leave it behind you. After a while, nothing new comes, and there's just the sound of your breathing and a warm, deep-brown empty room.
When you're on a bike, it's like that. Everything comes at you from the vanishing point, roars past in the reflected echo of your own engine, and disappears forever. Nothing is permanent except the road, the hum of the engine, wind and sunshine. Riding is automatic; you don't need to see. Everything happens by touch and physical memory of control positions and sequences. And it's ingrained, not needing thought. Reflex. It's like breathing, like heartbeat.
The road is Life. Events come and go, but you steer around the blocks and bad spots, slowing down and speeding up, looking for that break in traffic, those smooth stretches. Friends keep pace with you on their own bikes, sometimes coming near, sometimes far away, on the same road and the same journey but entities by themselves. If someone crashes and burns, he's left behind very, very fast, the pain forgotten in surprisingly short time. If someone skids and falls, he loses a little time, but catches up again soon. Sometimes, if necessary, you interrupt your own journey, stop and help... but in the end, we all move on.
The past is visible, but it takes an effort - of thought, of that impulse to look down at the rear-view mirrors. Mostly it's automatic, just to judge things coming from behind... but sometimes you want to look back. Don't look back too long, though, or something coming up ahead will smash you into pulp, unaware.
At it's core, it's being completely free. Your body, your machine, is doing what it's supposed to do. Your higher mind is at liberty to think, to dream, to go down whatever mental lanes it wants, explore uninterrupted trains of thought. To enjoy the pleasure of pure, uninterrupted thought, and no-thought, just sensation. Disturbing elements literally get whipped away in the slipstream.

A car, now... a car is different. All along, you're aware of the metal shell around you, the controls in front of you, in your field of vision. Wind is cut off, sounds muted, sun dimmed by the windows, smells lost in the air-conditioning. You're always careful, avoiding scratches, bumps, and dents. It's too overt a reminder of your own body, your mortality, your place in life. Traffic is a limiting factor, not a minor obstacle easily bypassed. The rat race, with all the other strugglers around you, physically limits your journey. Sure, you can carry a larger load - luggage, co-passengers, music, all the other paraphernalia of life - but there is a price you pay. The soul will always be aware of the body it inhabits and the pathways it must travel.
It can't ever fly, free in the sun, alone and one with the world around.

Time Travel. It's possible.

But the traffic is always one-way.

In.com introduced a feature that they're downplaying - maybe unintentionally - as a simple boss-impresser and never-forget-a-date-again feature only - the delayed send feature on their email. But Futuremail had it right the first time - it's possible to send a message across time.
Unfortunately, everyone wants to talk to the past. They remember all the wrong choices, bad decisions, all those times when, if only they knew then what they know now... but think about it. Would you want a stranger telling you how to live your life, all the time? Not just any stranger, but a patently loser-type stranger, stuck in a life he hates? Telling you to take choices for reasons you don't believe in, or - and be honest - have already decided about, one way or another, and resent having these decisions questioned?
Manu drew an interesting analogy with life as a tree - read it here.

On the other hand, it is possible for you to talk to your future self. Every mutual fund you buy, you're effectively gifting some cash to your future (lock-in period plus) self. And every credit card swipe is cash borrowed from that future self, with questionable returns. No wonder most of us want to rethink decisions. Every photo album, diary, forgotten trunk in the attic, is a message.

Why not use this? Let's talk to our future selves. The people that matter. There are things we want to tell them. Remind them about what we want them to achieve. Remind them of the time when they were young, and had dreams. Let them realize those dreams are achievable.
Send a mail to yourself for your next birthday. Say what you want to do. See how it feels.

So long, and thanks for the all the memories

"The evil that men do lives on after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
Not always. Sometimes, the good is stronger.
The flesh is weak. It falters, makes mistakes, falls short of living up to the immortal perfection of the soul.
The flesh dies.
The soul lives on.
The soul is what gave us the music. Gave us the memories. Gave the background score to some of the best times of our lives. The music is something that will always be with us, will always be remembered.

The music will always live on.

Rest in peace.

still down with the sickness

the body works in mysterious ways, it's adjustments to perform.
will someone please tell me what does a healthier lifestyle have to do with an excruciatingly painful blocked ear? New cilia growing in the esophagus decide that the best way to celebrate their existence is to forcibly shove all possible phlegm from sinuses into the nearest Eustachain tube? Is this some kind of internal Pink Chaddi campaign?
This happens every time I try to go healthy; catastrophic breakdown. It's like how BC's body reacts to holidays and half-days, or even leaving from office early. I don't get the message.
I need some Blood Music noocytes. Existing systems for internal performance management and KRAs have gone for a toss.
Or maybe I have them already. I wish they'd get a move on, then. This intermediary crap is buggy.

The weekend's score -
C: C-
W: D
F: C+

motivator...

be careful what you ask for.
you just might get it.

yesterday's score:
C: C+
W: B+
F: B-

if you don't succeed the first time...

try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try...
Again.
I'm trying to kick it again. And this time it's not a phase-out; let's try going hardcore. Complete cold turkey. And a generic health / food / workout program as well. Crank it up. Go quantum.

Now I just need to find a motivator...

yesterday's score -
C: F
W: D
F: C-

thinking it through...

Watched a very interesting movie yesterday - The 11th Hour. watch it whenever you get the chance. Informative, eye-opening - and very, very scary.

It got me thinking - let's look at the future, logically.
The Earth's ecosystems are collapsing under the pressure of human civilization. We use too many resources, generate too much waste. We do this because our culture has a built-in greed; a desire to have more things. We don't treat clean air, genetic health, fresh water, and a future as things. So, we have our cars, houses, entertainment, possessions, and desires that come at their expense. It doesn't affect us - yet.

Take this to it's logical conclusion.
The first world -
Will we, as individuals, choose a slower, less versatile, and more expensive car because it's electric? Eat premium, organic foods? Probably. Will large corporations do the same?
The developing nations -
No. They aspire to the first world. Making all the same mistakes, but at a scale several hundred times greater because of the populations.

The Earth will continue to warm. Ice caps will melt, forests will vanish, weather systems will collapse.
Flooding. Famines. Natural disasters. Plagues.
Huge losses of life.
Desertification.
Markets for the first world literally die, or slide into such a wretched condition they are no longer viable. Companies collapse.
Food supplies - and natural resource supplies - dry up.
Economic systems collapse in the first world.
As resources get more scarce, large scale wars will erupt over those few remaining resources. The first world will inevitably win, because they have greater technology. The third world will continue to subsist in unwanted areas until they die.
But the Earth doesn't differentiate on economic parameters. Living conditions will worsen equally everywhere. Developed countries may use tech to stave off the worst of it for a while - but that's expensive. Resources will continue to shrink to the point that wars will come to the developed countries. And plagues. And failing health - sterility. Drastic population decline. Coupled with a collapse in Law & Order. Anarchy.

Regression to self-sustaining systems. When large-scale systems fail, in an anarchic system, it's very difficult to rebuild them. But self-sustaining systems - unless seeded and very, very well-prepared - don't really use very high-end tech, or don't need it. A large global one must be technologically developed. A self-contained community need not be.

But even after a complete collapse of large scale systems, the Earth won't heal so fast. A couple of centuries, possibly millenia. Will unused tech be remembered until then?

This is, of course, assuming that life-sustaining conditions can survive. If the average temperature rises to over 250 degrees C, there's not much tech can do, in a failed economic system.

Space habitats? Unlikely. On Earth? Maybe. Sealed communities. Generation ships in the desert. Working on history's second terraforming project, trying to undo the inadvertent first.

And yes - 90% of all existing life on Earth will die. I really don't see any way that can be averted.

The Drake Equation states - mathematically - that intelligent life will arise, again and again, in the universe. Observed evidence shows there isn't. So there's some factor missing - either intelligent life doesn't arise so easily, or dies very easily. And I guess we can see why.

And as they said - this is our finest hour. We know we can beat this, solve the ecological crisis, develop spacefaring ability, and go out there. And find thousands of dead or barbaric civilizations, who couldn't do what we did.
It can be our destiny to be Gods. And if we succeed - but that's another story.

Read this. It's awesome.
Rare Earth Hypothesis
The Drake Equation
The Fermi Paradox

listlessness

'what's up,' they ask

somebody was biking through snow and hail
somebody was taking pictures
somebody was upgrading
writing
playing
traveling
chains and hooks, and a huge rusty weight on the other end
pinned like a butterfly on the board
dust settling, slowly, gently, and always
sick
tired
exhausted
i miss the crystal air
wings wheeling across a blazing, cool sky
stars come out

heaviness constant
dead zone
stagnant silence

'chal raha hai,' i tell them

Vote for the Vogons

Adsense used to come up with howlers pretty easily, since the only real reason to display an ad was whether someone's talking about the subject, rather than listening to what they're saying.
With SEM, the bar has just jumped a notch higher.

So as of today, the top 3 contenders for your vote (in the digital space) stand before you arrayed thus -



Am I the only one who is actually reassured?

Playing God

This was a completely random post, inspired by a friend's status update.

Why did God place the Tree of Knowledge in such an easily accessible place? Why does He make it so easy for humanity to face temptation? Why does He, to put it bluntly, screw around with our heads with the whole issue of 'Does God Exist?'
The whole concept of Faith - believing in something greater than ourselves, moral codes, denying our natural instincts - raises some pretty deep questions. Foremost among which is that if He really existed, wouldn't it have been all too easy for him to completely and unequivocally answer all these issues once and for all? Why does He screw around with our heads?

I think there are 2 answers.

• The sociological answer: God does not exist. We created an anthromorphic personification of the needs of society, some rules to make sure society can survive, with guilt and fear as the stick and life beyond death and paradise as the carrot.
  
• The gaming answer: God does exist. He created the universe as a gaming map, laws of nature as game rules, and intelligence as a collective AI. He then created scenarios that unfold according to those rules, just to see what happens.
  Think about it. Ever played Red Alert? Or any RTS war game? Scenarios, rules, behaviors, certain responses to certain stimuli. Get too close to an enemy soldier, and he will shoot at you. Built-in speeds and firepower. Objectives and goals. But the fun comes from the randomness created when large numbers of these rules interact with each other. When you do a tank rush, are you really controlling each unit? No. You've just unleashed them. You can send a spy into an enemy base, but even though you have the power to make him invulnerable, and the enemy deaf, blind, dumb, and weak as kittens, would you do it? It takes all the fun out of the game.
  When a game protagonist plays with cheatcodes, he knows that God exists. God is stopping the bullets, letting him fly, achieving superhuman feats, untouched by fire, falls, teeth and claws. But is the gamer having fun? No. Fun comes with the unexpected. With setbacks. With risk. When you have something to lose, you feel that you have everything to gain. Winning is a rush. When nothing can kill you, you're just a rat wandering through an empty maze.
  

Maybe there were super-civilizations, masters of the Earth and all creation, intelligent, aware, kind, caring, responsible, in harmony with nature and with each other. Enlightened, perfect, and utterly, butterly boring. What more is left to achieve? A perfect civilization will never go beyond it's city, it's kingdom, it's planet at the most. Even planet is unlikely; they will be smart enough to control birthrate, eradicate threats, handle all contingencies. A civilization under constant threat of destruction fights, struggles, spreads, creates backup plans, fallbacks, contingency bases. DNA spreads. Launches generation starships, sets up lunar bases and buried bunkers with hibernating colonists. Reaches for the stars because the planet is on the edge, reaches across galaxies in the face of all-destroying interstellar war, slips into parallel dimensions when the fabric of this reality is likely to be torn.
Perfection is stable. Imperfection, combined with intelligence, explodes like a bomb across creation.
Sweden, with social security, order, sufficiency, and all amenities and comforts has a negative birthrate, because people have all they need. India, with it's near-billion starving and barely able to feed itself, has a population explosion.
A perfect, harmonious civilization, at it's pinnacle with no possibility of a fall, looks like a giant bulls-eye from space, with cosmic arrows all around pointing to it marked Asteroid Strike Here.
Innate imperfection. A flawed human being is unhappy, greedy, fearful... and drives ambition. Knows that life is unstable. Knows he is surrounded by other flawed creatures, by frightening randomness and intransigence. Knows he must amass resources far greater than his immediate need to prepare for this randomness. Establish his escape routes.

And for a gaming God, this is entertainment. Not perfection. Not stability. With an entire universe to explore, why would he tolerate a game protagonist who does not go beyond his own self? Wouldn't it be so much more fun to watch how the randomness manifests in extraordinary leaps of intellect, art, beauty, strength, achievement, skill, discovery... beyond even what He may have originally conceived?
When we do leave the planet, we will meet Others. They will be like us. They will be flawed. Galaxies will sparkle with a million wars, extinctions and escapes, dominions and insurrections, and everything else that is this infinitely varied, kaleidoscopic, random, churning, intoxication explosion called Life.

After all, anything else is so boring, isn't it?