Another entry in my more personal journal. “Dysrhytmia continued“.
This is just harmless observations, it doesn’t get scary until Thursday.
Personal
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Author Archives: itlandm
Cute hiragana practice game
Darugo’s Hiragana Practice.
There are three versions of this game: One on the web (for free), one without sound for Android phones and tablets (also free), and one with sound also for Android (cheap). I have downloaded and tested the free version for Android. So far it works flawlessly on my Samsung Galaxy Note, which is something in between a phone and a tablet. I can imagine it being hard to draw on a small phone or a bigger tablet, but on large phones and the Note it works quite well.
The game lets you choose any of the hiragana (Japanese letters that stand for a syllable instead of a letter, such as “ha” or “chi”. Some syllables are just one letter, namely vowels and the letter “n”.) Once you have chosen one such letter, the program demonstrates how to draw it. Each letter is drawn in a particular sequence. Even if you make the final result look just right, it is supposedly considered a severe breach of etiquette to draw the parts in the wrong order. With calligraphy, an educated person can see this at a glance, so children are drilled to get it right.
After the demonstration, you get to trace the letter with your finger (or a pen, in the case of Galaxy Note) as long as you want. The program shows your lines in a different color than the outline of the letter, so you can see whether they match. You erase it between each time. When you feel confident enough to draw it, you get a blank page to draw it on. Well, more like a grid, but without letters. The program then checks that it falls within acceptable bounds. You can repeat this as well.
There is also an example word for each sign, with a cute childlike drawing. This is presented as the “backside of the card” so you don’t look at it while you are drawing. If you have the paid version of the app, you can hear the word spoken by a real Japanese girl. Or so it is said. I would not know. With there still being millions of Japanese girls, it does not seem impossible to get one to speak a few dozen words.
And this, dear reader, is where things get weird. This is a super cute app, and eminently suited for children in both its presentation and its basic task. It seems extremely child-friendly. But outside of Japan there are probably very few children who feel the need to draw hiragana, or even read them. Which makes me wonder if the app – or at least the one with sound – is aimed at some kind of pervert who gets ticklish all over at the sight of severely underage kids dancing and waving and saying cute things in genuine Japanese. There are rumored to be weirdos like that. Well, I suppose this is one of the more harmless things you can do if you have this mind defect. As long as it does not cause you to capture real Japanese girls and force them to draw hiragana. (Not counting school teachers, who are paid to do this.)
Anti-temptation of silence
“The silence is killing me” is the usual feeling among humans, so of course with me the opposite must be true: The silence is giving me life. But is that what I really want? I have to wonder…
You know that people have temptations, in which they are pulled toward something they expect to be pleasurable but their conscience says is bad. Light knows I have had plenty of that in my life, and almost certainly will continue to have for as long as I live.
But this is the opposite. A temptation toward something that is not fun but which appears to me as good and pure and praiseworthy. Unsurprisingly, such temptations are quite easy to resist.
The temptation started after I had gone through my archive removing buttpics. I had left some page (without said pictures) open, and looking at a nearby entry I saw my imagination of what my day would have been if it had been 1958 instead of 2008. One conclusion was that without computers and Internet, I would have spent quite a bit more time reading, writing, and praying. At least that is what I think now that I do have computers and Internet. But I also seem to remember that I did, in fact, do more of all these when I was young, before I became connected to the world via an AORTA – Always Online Real-Time Access.
The Christian Church of Brunstad, back in the days when it was even purer and more innocent than today, had a story circulating. I think it may not even have been one of the Friends it happened to, but perhaps some other serious Christian, of which there were perhaps more back then. A Christian man was buying a TV for the first time, when he saw the following text on the packaging: “Jetzt kommt die Welt ins Haus!” (Now comes the World into the house!) Immediately he realized the errors of his ways and undid the purchase.
It bears mention that the TV is now the rule rather than the exception in the Christian Church. Whereas in my home there is no TV, nor do I expect there to every be. Of course, I have the Internet, which is less brain-numbing but quite distracting.
So what I have been thinking since, is that perhaps I should try to establish a “computer-free zone” of time, perhaps on the Sabbath until sundown or something? First just to see for real what I would do. Would I actually spend more time reading and praying? Not writing, probably, since my manual typewriter eventually made it to its final resting place during one of the last couple moves. But my book backlog is still growing and could need some extra hours. Of course, reading the kind of books I usually do would probably inspire me to write. A lot. Still, it would probably be better than playing The Sims yet again. Not that there is anything outright evil about The Sims. But sometimes, not being evil is not enough. Or so I am anti-tempted to think.
Less playful?
I wonder if this is the image I project these days?
It is not just the buttpics that seem out of place. Reading some of my old attempts at novels, I can’t help but think they are less decent than I would like to write now.
On the other hand, they are a lot more fun to read. The indecency, such as it is, is mostly humorous and pretty harmless by modern standards. (Although by the standards of St Teresa, it is probably extremely sinful and would cause her to pray loudly for my soul for many hours, if she thought it could be saved at all. Actually I have known some people like that. They belonged to the Christian Church popularly called “Smith’s Friends”. I would not be surprised if they were actually saints too.)
Anyway, the wardrobe malfunctions and misunderstood double entendres are only a small part of what makes these writings fun. The best part is the dialog, which is probably subconsciously inspired by my own childhood. The rapid, deadpan banter between us boys was amazing and hilarious, and even now in our adult life we can impress people with our improvised comedy show when we get together. Â I can’t say I have seen or heard anything like it, although some Japanese comedy comes pretty close. So that is something I like to weave into my stories. Or liked to.
I am not sure I can do that anymore. Reading it, I feel like I could not possibly write anything like this again. The playful “voices in my head” – inspirations, though-clusters – have largely moved out and given room for more mature, wise, spiritual voices. OK, “more” does not really say much in this context. But anyway, I am not sure I can be funny anymore.
I may have grown up, finally. Except I still play either Sims 2 or 3 pretty much every day. And sometimes even City of Heroes. There is a new “Issue” – a free expansion – rolling out in the coming week. Belatedly it introduced soloing Incarnate (endgame) content. When I heard of it, I thought: ‘Too bad they didn’t do that before I started taking my life more seriously.’ I would probably have played it day and night, even a couple years ago.
Ah, I wonder who I will be in the future, if any. Probably not a comedian, but there are other forms of happiness. I hope I can find some way to share those.
No more buttpics
After conferring with God, I have gone through the archives and removed almost all the buttpics. I think I got nearly all the photos, there are a couple mostly blurry pictures from games and such left. These photos served their role in the past, but they are not fitting now. And I need to be merciful to people who may be sexually affected by butts. It happens, and they should not be needlessly dragged into temptation when coming to a place like this. I have to become more merciful over time. That is the way.
The pictures are still there, I only added a .b at the end of the filename, so historians of the future can still find them if they deem it important. Somehow I don’t think so, though.
(And before new readers let their imagination run wild, there was always some degree of clothing. Usually day clothes.)
Why are Christians stupid?
Also, let us not forget the tendency to see the stupidity in people who are unlike us. This is an automatic psychological mechanism to make us feel smarter.
I have met a number of interesting people on Google+. This social network is particularly well suited for meeting people you are NOT already friends with, unlike a certain other social network. It has more of a sourdough effect, growing through contact – you see someone comment something sane on a friend’s post, and you can start finding out more about them (in so far as they allow it). So due to my nature, I have added a bunch of intelligent, curious people to my list of acquaintances. They are almost all atheists, either missionary or functionally. But why are atheists generally noticeably more intelligent than Christians?
The answer is, “because you live in a Christian country”. Most English-speakers do. And in such a country, most people are raised as Christians, in theory at least. (The behavior they actually see while growing up may be somewhat different from the creed. As Mitt Romney’s guardian spirit says in The Next President: Americans worship Mammon, but officially they worship Jesus Christ.) If you don’t have more intelligence than you need to hold a job, you probably don’t spend it on being contrary. You go with the crowd, and stick to interests that are less abstract. Â So the people who break out tend to be the smartest ones.
It is easy to test this, because there are countries in which it is not normal to be Christian. In Japan, for instance, only less than 1% are Christians (although some attend Christian rituals in addition to those of other religions – church weddings are popular, and Christmas is almost universal.) You don’t see Japanese suddenly convert to Christianity simply because they are stupid. Clearly it is not the stupidity that does it.
A more relevant example is my native Norway, which used to be a Christian country, in theory. Actually, it still is according to its constitution, but people just politely ignore that now. The elderly are often still Christians, as they were raised that way. But from my generation (around the age of 50-60) and downward, it is more like 10% who are Christian. Most people are agnostic or rather, they are atheists but don’t stir up trouble about it. So does this mean that 90% of the Norwegian population is as smart as the smartest 10% of the US population? Well, Norwegians may think so. We tend to have a ridiculously high self-esteem. But judging from such factors as the frequency of very high education, we don’t excel. Clearly the loss of religion does not come from a sudden surge of intelligence, and neither has atheism made us geniuses.
On the contrary, we are now in a situation where stupid people just accept atheism without thinking, and mindlessly parrot atheist fantasies that are at odds with science. For instance that millions died in the witch hunts (the actual number is a few thousand, not that this is not enough) or that Christianity caused the Dark Ages (the Germanic migrations did, whereas Christianity provided the last refuge of literacy during that time), or that Christians burned down the Great Library of Alexandria (burning it down was a fairly regular occurrence, even Julius Caesar did it according to Plutarch, and later so did Aurelian; its final destruction happened under Islam. While Christians destroyed the temple, contemporary pagan scholars make no mention of books being destroyed. Nobody knows where and when they met their end.)
Stupid people tend to have a stupid understanding of religion. And so do most smart people, because it is not really something they think a lot about. The main difference is that they don’t just do whatever their parents did, but try to create an identity of their own. In this generation, in English-speaking countries, atheism is often a part of that. In the 60es, Hinduism and Buddhism were popular. Who knows what it will be next time. Happy Science, perhaps? It certainly seems to be a hit among the upper classes of Japan, as a religion that subtly implies that intelligent people are spiritually superior, born to rule and that it is for the best of everybody that they control the power and money in society. I guess we could be worse off than that.
Cause, reason, purpose
“I am glad I studied so hard.” Yes, your studies were the cause of your success. But that does not mean your success was the purpose of your studies. Perhaps you studied because your mother was always making sure you did your homework, while you had no understanding yet of how important it was. As we become aware of purpose and aspiration, we become free agents to an ever higher degree. This freedom is itself a source of joy. We are willingly stretching toward the future, rather than being pushed blindly onward by our past.
In my previous entry I showed how time is actually hidden to our senses, but is reconstructed in our mind to such a degree that we are honestly convinced that we experience it continuously, despite the evidence of our senses.
To continue this topic, I want to bring up something strange and disturbing. It deals with how we, at least in English, merge two very different concepts – two almost opposite concepts, in a sense – into one. And then we apply them where they don’t belong. Or at least that is a strong tendency.
***
If we look at our own mind, we can see that we have reasons for everything we do. Well, sometimes they can be hard to see afterwards, but generally we always have a reason. However, this word “reason” actually hides two very different concepts. These will become obvious when we look at the line of time that stretches through our life.
The first reason is “cause”, as in cause and effect, causality. It can be said to push us from behind, from the past, into the future. “I started eating because I was hungry” is an example of this.
The second reason is “purpose”, which pulls us from the future toward a goal there. “I stopped eating after one small portion because I did not want to get fat” is an example of this.
In practice, however, we don’t really differentiate between the two. We may not even be sure ourselves which was which. You may say you ate because you were hungry – a cause from the past – but didn’t you actually eat in order to stop feeling hungry, a purpose that was still in your future at the time?
The answer in this example is pretty obvious because dogs, garden snails, even amoeba will happily start eating when hungry. It does not require any awareness of purpose. In so far as there is a purpose, it is not in the animal doing the eating, but is somehow imposed on it without its will. The creature does not reflect on this and then come to the conclusion that, on the whole, eating is better than this gnawing feeling of hunger, so it would be best to take action. Â It happens automatically. But in the opposite case, when we choose based on purpose, we don’t have the same enthusiastic support from our instincts. I am sure you can testify to this from your own experience.
But even though this particular case was pretty easy to solve, we can often kid ourselves if we are really motivated to do so, and see a purpose in what was a cause. This is particularly easy for ourselves, but as children we are even more slippery than that.
It is perfectly normal for a child to attribute purpose to lifeless things. Particularly if they move, but even if they just stand there, as long as they somehow get in our way. It is not uncommon to see children get angry at furniture. And pets, who admittedly have their own will, are suspected of quite convoluted plots.
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Once we grow up, it seems to me that people tend to favor either causes or purposes, depending on their attitude to religion, and regardless of whether each particular instance is a cause or a purpose. Let me explain.
People who are strongly against religion tend to believe that there can be no purpose. The universe is determined from the start, the effect of one cause is the cause of the next effect, an endless chain of reaction like falling dominoes. Humans are powerless to stop this, because we are matter like all other matter, and follow the laws of matter. We are made of atoms, which follow quite simple rules. Therefore the same applies to us.
Conversely, those who are strongly in favor of religion tend to think that everything happens for a purpose, and this purpose is the reason why the things happened in the first place. The roof tile fell down to teach me a lesson. Since everything has a purpose, the cause is irrelevant: God is every cause, and studying laws of causality is a kind of blasphemy.
I believe these intense opinions come from a lack of understanding of the time axis.
The problem with them both is that they are contrary to observable reality. There can be no doubt that causes and purposes both exist, because we can directly observe them. Even if we manage to define one or the other out of existence, that does not change reality. It will be there despite our protests.
Think of water. It consists of hydrogen and oxygen, and without the both of them it would not exist. Remove all the hydrogen from the water and there is no water anymore. But that does not mean the properties of water are simply an average of the properties of hydrogen and oxygen. When things combine, at different levels we get changes that we call “emergent behavior”. Molecules are different from the atoms that make them, but cannot exist without them. Cells are different from the molecules that make up the cells, but cannot exist without them. And so on. Â You cannot predict from an existing lower level what the property of the next level will be. It is not possible. Only when the combination has occurred can you say what it ended up being.
In the same way you cannot define purposes in terms of causes, but this does not mean there are events that have no cause. It is just that at a certain point it makes more sense to define the event by its purpose rather than by its causes, since the causes are no longer obvious but the purpose is. Again, compare this to insisting to talk about hydrogen and oxygen whenever we mention water. You don’t need to remind us what water is made of. At some point it makes more sense to focus on its properties as water, OK? And likewise the fact that water is thoroughly different from hydrogen and oxygen does not mean that it must necessarily be made from water atoms. It is a matter of what level or domain we look at.
So if you have a mental mastery of time, and are able to look forward and backward, you will be able to seamlessly look at causes and purposes without getting needlessly confused. I wrote out some theological implications of this, but did not publish this. Religion has great power to wound or to heal; one like me should not wield it casually. But see if you can remember that the “reason for” an event can be a cause, a purpose, or both depending on who looks at it and from what perspective. Causes shove us forward from the past, purposes pull us toward our goals in the future.
The fourth dimension: Time
Thanks to the mysterious power of the human mind, we are able to remember the past and even anticipate the future. Although the latter in particular is sometimes … not exactly … exact.
In order to consider the things that may go beyond time, we should first consider time itself. It is a fascinating phenomenon. We all know it, or that’s what we think. But do we really?
The world that we live in with our senses is a 3-dimensional world. We do not actually sense time, we reconstruct it by intuition. This is an important point for what I am trying to show, so please let me give it some time…
When I look at my computer screen, I cannot see it as it was an hour ago, or how it will be an hour from now. In fact, I can only see it as it is in this particular moment. Likewise when I hear something, I can only hear what sounds hit my ear at the moment. When I touch, I can only touch what is there right now. I cannot actually feel time. But thanks to memory, I can create the illusion of seeing time. By combining sense images from short term memory with newly arrived sense images, the brain constructs the illusion of movement and change, in other words the work of time.
But of course this illusion is not a delusion. Time really exists. We may not be able to sense it directly, but we reconstruct it inside our mind. What we perceive as time with our mind is very similar to the actual dimension of time that exists in the outside world. Or at least this is what almost all of us agree on. There are some scientists who think that time does not really exist, but they don’t have much effect on our actual thinking, since we all know from experience that time is real.
One time you have too much time on your hands, feel free to Google “Does time exist?”
If there is a consensus, it is that time certainly exists for humans, and presumably for the expansion of the universe and the increase of entropy, but laws of physics otherwise work just fine both ways. Entropy is a fancy word for “less order”, so perhaps we perceive time because the content of our mind becomes more and more messy?
In any case, the fact remains that time is real to us humans, and furthermore, it is useful. Thanks to our mastery of time, we can make cakes, and many other useful things. Â Making cake requires not only ingredients, but also time.
While I am baking a cake, the cake does not yet exist, except in the future and in my mind. I cannot see it, I cannot touch it, and I certainly cannot eat it. And yet the cake is not a lie! I am so certain of the cake that I will happily tell people about it and even invite them to come eat it, even though it does not exist. It is not a hallucination, it is anticipation. You may search all over the house and conclude that no, there is no cake. I am quite aware of that, thank you! That is why I am baking it! Your insistence that the cake is all in my head is scientifically true but quite irrelevant, since the cake will arrive in due time if you leave me to my baking.
In order to bring forth the cake, I must follow the law that governs time, which is the law of causality, the law of cause and effect. It is not enough to wish for cake, even wish very strongly. It is not enough to visualize the cake and think positive thoughts about the cake. The Law of Attraction does not attract cakes until someone bakes them. So even though the cake is all in my head, it must also activate my hands in order to become real.
In addition to anticipation, we also have memory, which is why we experience time at all. If we did not have memories, or if they were not conscious, we would not have a concept of time. By all account most of our furry and feathered friends don’t have much of an idea of time. They can recognize things from the past, when they see them (or smell them). But they show no sign of being able to travel in time with their minds. We, however, do this easily. I can close my eyes and wander through the house where I lived a year ago, even though it was razed to the ground late last summer. I my mind I can walk from room to room. Again, this is not a hallucination, even though the house certainly isn’t there. I am not even in the same spot where it stood. And yet I have no doubt to its reality. It is just that it was real in the past, not in the present.
By our mind powers of memory and anticipation we can travel in time, but only with our mind. Our bodies remain drifting on the time stream along with everything around us. Yet when we return to them, we can use the knowledge we have gained from our time travel to steer our bodies toward the destination we desire. Well, if we get it right, which we often don’t. The future is hazy at best. Still, with more and more experience (and purging our tendency of wishful thinking) we can get better at navigating through time.
So even though we cannot directly perceive time, much less travel through it, we can still reconstruct it with our mind and get a pretty good picture of it. That is pretty amazing! Humans are awesome. But it does not stop there. If I am allowed, I will go one step further and visit the dimension beyond time, which relates to time in much the same way that time relates to the other three dimensions. And same as for time, it will all be in my head – until I act on it, at least.
But for now it is sufficient for me to show the nature of time as relates to humans. If you can grasp this, you are close to wisdom. Conversely if you are wise (and some of you are), you probably already know this. More about this next time, if any.
So bright…
I kind of know that feeling. (Picture from the anime “Laws of Eternity”.)
I think there is a tendency, particularly for us men, to think of ourselves as “brighter”, smarter and more knowledgeable than others. This is usually because we easily forget our own mistakes, or explain them away, thinking that we had a good reason for them, or that someone else caused us to make the mistake, or that it would be unreasonable to expect this or that from us. When it comes to others, it is much simpler. They really are that stupid, or coarse, or lacking in character. Savages or degenerates, barbarian or superstitious, they are just hopeless and can’t be counted on. They are not like us.
So when I notice that almost everyone is ignorant and prefers to stay so, I have to wonder whether I am just caught in the same trap as the rest. Do I simply mistake my own collection of illusions for the Truth, and consider everyone else deluded? Certainly they would think so, and without a trace of doubt. In fact, the trace of doubt is one of the reasons why I feel that I have actually “seen the light” as the saying goes.
The other is that in many cases I have been where they’re hanging, I think I can see how they’re pinned. If I have not gone that far in their direction, I have been far enough to survey the terrain. The Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, is not something you casually overlook. Even if you have massive help fighting it, you can hardly avoid noticing it.
Also: When you dream, you do not know that you dream. Becoming aware of the dream is the beginning of waking up. Or in another metaphor, if all you know is night and twilight, the twilight may seem to be day. But once the dawn breaks, it is impossible to maintain that illusion anymore.
And the brightness is not one that conveniently shines only on everyone else. It also painfully drives home my own life up to now and various errors and omissions habitual to myself. And perhaps that more than anything makes it hard to write about, because writing is to hold judgment on myself. If I ignore that part, life will make sure to arrest me again.
In other words, I am surrounded by idiots, and so are the people around me. It is just that my foolishness is the opposite of what they think it is, by and large.
Although it is probably tilting at windmills, I am tempted to try to convey some of this brightness. Although today certainly did not do so.
Personal: My heart loves fat
At the age of 53, I should be grateful to have a beating heart at all. It is not that long ago that this was a perfectly normal age to die from heart failure. But I still wonder why my heart seems intent on stopping me from losing more weight? My heart loves fat!