Respect and shooting laptops

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Not a conservative thing to do. Not good and proper use of handguns and laptops and fatherly authority.

By now I guess most people have seen the video of this guy in cowboy hat shooting his daughter’s laptop. (Or possibly the laptop he lent her, she was just 15 so probably could not afford her own.) I am not sure I even need to link to it, but hey. Here’s one copy, for as long as it last.

Now, some of my friends are conservatives, and I’m not ashamed of that. But I am ashamed that they so quickly side with this guy. I can see why, in America: There this total war or ideology, where the liberals and conservatives generally disagree on everything. If they were to agree on anything by now, one of them would need to quickly change their mind! One of these things is that liberals want law-abiding people to not have guns, so of course when conservatives see this guy has a gun and ain’t afraid to use it, they assume he is one of them.

Let us call him on that.

See, I grew up around guns. OK, those were rifles, but that doesn’t really make things better. We learned to use them while we were still growing up, and to maintain them, but we also learned something else: We learned to respect them. Guns are not can openers. They are made for ending lives. Handguns, of course, are specifically made for ending human lives (although they can also be used on rabid animals). Rifles can also be used for hunting, but the point still stands. These things are specialized bringers of death. As such, they command a particular respect. Life is sacred, certainly human life is. A tool for taking life earns a kind of “mirror” sacredness from this. It is something you treat with respect. You use it for practice, and if the Light is merciful, that is all you will ever need it for. You don’t use it interchangeably with any random tool. Unless you lack respect. This guy does that.

This point is important. What he does shows a lack of respect. A lack of keeping things to their proper use. That kind of respect, or knowing what is proper, is what being a REAL conservative is all about. Bringing handguns into a family dispute is very far from proper. So no, he did not point it at his daughter. Seriously, that’s setting the bar really low. Like in the grass somewhere. You have to be pretty inbred to do that and tell the world, since you’d get hauled off by the sheriff the next day. So, shooting office equipment is pretty much as far as he can get away with. In any case, it is not proper, it is not respectful toward the power and purpose of a weapon.

But if you don’t get that, let us continue with his next disrespect, which is for the value of useful things. Rather than just confiscating the computer, perhaps formatting it, perhaps selling it, perhaps giving it to charity or whatever, he thinks it is a good idea to destroy it. To teach his daughter a lesson. Yes, and what is that lesson? That he is willing to completely destroy what he has invested money and time in? That is a very useful message for a kid to hear, given that there is nothing parents have invested so much time and money in as their children. I am sure she is thrilled to know that. But let us get back to the “useful thing” part.

Let’s say she had been driving a car recklessly – would it be OK to take a sledgehammer to the car and reduce it to rubble? To send her a message?

If she’d sneaked a boyfriend into the house and made out there – would he set the house on fire, to teach her a lesson?

Destroying perfectly useful things is disrespectful. Of course, he could probably afford it, given that they had hired help in the house and such. I am sure he could afford it. So if you could afford another house, would it be a good idea to set fire to one of them? I don’t think so. It is what we used to call “wanton destruction”. It is disrespectful to those who made a useful thing, and it is disrespectful to those who could have used it. I know people these days are throwing away stuff, but conservatives usually try to have a yard sale or flea market or something. Just destroying them is more of the hip urban lifestyle.

I don’t really need to point out that belittling his daughter on YouTube was disrespectful to her. At least she deserved it. After all, she started it! But… a father sinking to the same level as a 15 year old, having to make sure everyone knows that he got the last word, that he is The Man – that is not dignified. Sorry man, but that is beneath you as a parent. If you filmed it and showed it to your daughter, OK. But having to compete with an underage girl for status is… well, not conservative. It is not dignified, it is not proper. If this guy has any living parents, I hope they don’t have Internet access. This is just embarrassing.

See, respect is not something you can take. It is something you get. You cannot make people respect you except by living with integrity, by being a honest and righteous person. What you’re doing is intimidation, not the same thing.

Now, to demand respect from others and not show respect where you should, that is not integrity. That is hypocrisy. You want to be respected but you don’t show proper respect for things and for people and for yourself. There is no denying that this girl showed a horrible lack of respect and propriety. And there is not much doubt where she got it from, either.

Writing and gut feeling

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My writing has dwindled after my dentist visit where I got the penicilline prescription. Both here and my fiction. It has not stopped entirely, but there is certainly not much of it and it does not strike me as inspiring.

Which leads me to wonder if my inspiration may actually be the collective intelligence of my gut bacteria, which I so callously sacrificed to try to preserve a tooth.  OK, that is absurd. But it would make a good sci-fi story, don’t you think? And there is probably already some guy making a you-tube video explaining it. If it is thinkable, it is on YouTube. Sometimes, it seems, even if not.

Less flippantly, I have read repeatedly that the gut is packed with neurons similar to those in the brain. This does not necessarily mean that it is actually thinking. It’s not like there is a pound of those cells or anything. A more likely explanation is that they are there to maintain the very delicate balance needed for the gut flora to thrive, or something. But in the face of penicillin, I am afraid there is not much it can do. At least I am eating mostly yogurt. Would that count as artificial intelligence? ^_^

Beautiful ordinary lives

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Couple with children in strollers

The Simerican dream.

This may surprise some, but perhaps not those who have read my ongoing autobiography. See, I came across this promotional video on YouTube, for the expansion pack The Sims 3: Generations that I have written about recently. Naturally I watched it in full-screen mode on my biggest monitor.

“Live life to the fullest” Sims 3 Generations trailer / YouTube.

By the end, where his life flashes before his eyes, tears were rolling down my cheeks. Not tears of sadness, really, or at least mostly not. It’s just that the little movie so beautifully sums up the life of 4-dimensional humans. What you probably call “ordinary people”, those who don’t live a purpose-driven life or have a mission on Earth or anything like that. You and me, we are to some degree outside of this: We have a detachment, like someone who act in a play and know it is a play. We can get impatient with ordinary people and they may always remain the eggs they threw long ago.  We don’t see the beauty of the merely human life because we only see bits and pieces of it.

So that’s what happened. Watching this, I suddenly saw the beauty of ordinary human life when seen as a whole.

There is a widespread belief that when you die, you see your life flash before your eyes. I have had a concept of how this works, but not why it would be a good thing. This little movie showed me that. Because there is a hidden beauty in the four-dimensional life (some lives more than others, admittedly) which cannot be easily seen as it goes on. In a way, it is like looking at a painting from the side. No matter how masterful the painting, if you see it almost completely from the side, you cannot see what it is supposed to show. When you move to stand in front of it, suddenly the beauty of it strikes you.

It is that way with life. Seeing it as it passes slowly by is like seeing a painting from the side, or to use another metaphor, it is as if you can only see the paint brush with the color that is on it right now, and your vague memories of what colors were on it before, but the canvas is hidden to you. But the canvas, the fourth dimension, is where the picture emerges.

How beautiful humans are, and this world in which you live!

You probably won’t have the same revelation even if you watch the same movie. I am pretty sure that wasn’t what it was meant for, either. But for me, each time I watch it, my eyes are filled with tears at the beauty and brevity of human life.

Sims 3: Imaginary daycare

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Sim children at day care

I made the day care provider female because I forgot that in this game there is actually sexual equality, so men are allowed to be surrounded by children not their own. Don’t try this at home, kids.

If you wonder where I’ve been the last few days, the answer is I have a new favorite game, as I mentioned, Sims 3: Generations. (Actually The Sims 3 is the game, which you must have first, and Generations is an additional expansion pack.) But more specifically, I’ve been playing a home daycare provider. It’s one of the most fun things I can remember playing.

OK, this surprises even me. It seems rather out of character. Of course, my character in the game is not suited for this, since he is a loner, and gets a mood boost from being completely alone, and a negative mood from having a crowd around. (A crowd being more than two other people, it seems.)

So I made this woman who is family-oriented, nurturing, friendly, charismatic and good. (I’ve only ever used the last for my own character, and I’ve stopped doing that after some more self-reflection.) Still, the fact remains that I as the player of the game enjoy it greatly.

Day care is kind of fun. Each morning from Monday to Thursday  (not Friday for some reason?) people show up and dump toddlers on your floor.  You don’t need to go to work, you can run around in your underwear and make pancakes until the last minute. When the kids show up, you feed them and change their dirty diapers, play with them, cuddle them, teach them to walk and talk if you feel like it, or just watch them play with their toys. There are no stomach flues, nobody bites each other or pulls each other’s hair. That said, it is pretty hectic.  But then at sunset, the people show up again and whisk away the children, so you have the evening for yourself and can sleep all night.

It may not sound like fun – it does not really read like fun, I admit – but I really enjoy it. Being surrounded by kids is something I … well, I can’t say I miss it since I don’t really think about it normally, but it was something I enjoyed when I was young. In the Christian Church of Brunstad, there used to be lots and lots of children. I think there may still be more than average, but back then it was more family-centric than the Catholic Church. (That is also one reason why I could not fit in, as I would never have a family of my own.)

In the secular society of Norway, arguably the world’s second most feminist country after Sweden, men are watched carefully when they spend time with children, as it is assumed that they will try to have sex with them. There is a lot of writing in the newspapers when this happens, and sometimes when it is just suspected as well. Fathers are generally allowed to be alone with their own children, but once the parents break up, it is not unheard of that the mother argues for sole parental rights on the grounds that a man can’t be trusted around children.  Unfortunately with the sad state of humanity, this is probably often the case as well.

Anyway, in real life I am not going to quit my job as a software call center problem solver to re-educate myself for day care. I think most of my midlife “crisis” is over by now, and it seems to mostly have caused a new interest in books of timeless wisdom and metaphysics. But kids are kind of fun, in their own way. At least imaginary ones. Also, if computers could convey smell as realistically as they do sight and sound, I might have second thoughts about being surrounded by simulated toddlers!

Sims 3: Generations

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Teenagers quietly reading books in the game Sims 3.

In a rare coincidence, three teenager simultaneously free from mood swings! From left Didrik Itland, Cosmo Trismegistus and Amorita Trismegistus. All of these are imaginary characters and created by the game, by the way.

I spent much of the day playing games. I’m not proud of it or anything, but I’m still like that much of the time. I grow up, it seems, but slowly. In any case, why not share my experience with the curious visitor.

Some days ago I bought two more expansion packs for The Sims 3, namely Generations and Pets. These are old enough now to go for half price. To be honest, I only bought them because the newer versions of user-made game worlds require them, specifically this time Meadow Glen Updated. Meadow Glen was my favorite world, more so than the ones that came with the game. But the version I had did not have the buildings of the Late Night expansion, or even Ambitions. The available version required the other two I mentioned as well. So do other game worlds of good repute, such as Union Cove.

Anyway! I disliked the Pets expansion to the original The Sims, and barely tolerated the one for The Sims 2, so I generally avoid keeping pets in The Sims 3 even when I have that expansion. It pleases me to see raccoons appear, though. Some of my best friends are Raccoons, albeit in a spiritual sense. I think of tipping the trash can as “the sacred ritual of opening the ever refilling Heavenly Bread Basket”. ^_^

Generations, on the other hand, is an expansion that does not really have an equivalent in the first two series. Both Sims 2 and 3 are already generational: Sims start as someone’s pregnancy, become babies, toddlers, children, teenagers, young adults, adults, elders and ghosts. Adults can have children (and so can elder males), and the cycle starts over again. So why make a whole expansion pack out of it?

Well, it is probably not the biggest expansion pack ever made, but there is a scattering of interesting stuff throughout the sims’ lifetime. Children have more things to do, like tree huts, sandbox, invisible friends and after-school activities that can improve their skills and let them socialize with other kids. Conversely (and ironically in the extreme), if you really don’t want to have the kids around the house, you can sign them up for boarding school! They will gain various benefits, depending on the type of school. Ideal if you dislike children. (Or your sim does … “dislikes children” is an actual trait which sims may have, for instance if they grow up badly at some stage of their younger life. Or if you pick it for them.)

With teens there are even more after-school activities, and even go to a school dance, which mercifully takes place offscreen with only text messages shown. When the parents are away, the teens can arrange parties.  They also wake up some days in a rebellious mood, and will wish to play pranks, snub someone, end friendships, cut their hair or sneak out at night. Probably even more, I generally ignore these wishes. Pranks are not easy to ignore though, because the teen will do some of them on their own if you don’t keep an eye on them.  Once again, you can spare yourself the pain by sending them to boarding school. They will gain skills and hopefully also get traits appropriate for their education. On the other hand, when you keep them at home, you have more control over what they learn, they may even contribute a little cash from part-time jobs or painting, writing, gardening etc. And they can learn to drive a car, a rather amusing experience. Be sure to visit the bathroom first!

Once your sim is an adult, life is more normal. That is, unless you decide to take up a career in daycare. The only new career in the expansion, it is possibly the most demanding of them all (point for realism there, I’d say). Parents come and drop babies and toddlers at your door, and you try to keep them reasonably happy and ideally make them like you, so you can earn money and make progress in your career – so even more parents will drop even more children at you! Not for the faint of nerves. You eventually get school children as well. Ideal for people who really, really want to have lots of friends. Well, if you succeed.

There is a new “Nurturing” trait that lets you interact better with children, your own or others. There is also a lifetime happiness reward that make you better at child care. Even so, I don’t see this being a big hit. I recommend all girls in the civilized world to play it by the time they reach biologically fertile age though.

Death is rarely a welcome friend, even to sims, although some meet their end more stoically than others. Luckily for them, unlike us, there is a lifetime reward that freezes aging, so they just don’t get older. It takes a lot of happiness and should probably only be used if you play some kind of supernatural character (like, say, Hermes Trismegistus…), as it messes up the whole generational thing. Of course, you could stop all aging in the game already in the basic game, but what this reward does is let one sim remain young (or old, perhaps more likely) while everyone passes them by.

Actually, even if your sim does not have enough lifetime happiness before they are old and gray, do not despair! There is yet another lifetime happiness reward that can reset your age to the first day of young adult. If you live long enough as an elder, you should be able to get it, unless your life is miserable indeed.

But wait, there is yet another way to get the youth elixir! You can make it with the chemistry set. Messing with it long enough will let you discover a number of elixirs, from the utterly useless (like stink bombs) to the miraculous (youth elixir, and the elixir that can make an imaginary friend real).

Oh wait – imaginary friends. Yes, they are here for the first time ever. It has become a tradition to include a “supernatural” creature in each expansion. (World adventures had mummies, Ambitions robots, Late Night vampires,  and Pets has unicorns.) The imaginary or invisible friend is however not absolutely certain to appear. There is a only reasonably good chance that a new child – born or adopted – will get a doll in the mail. If they play with it a lot, it will become an invisible friend when they grow up from toddler to child, or soon after. They will now play tag and pillow fights and sometimes talk together. When the child is the selected character, this looks normal enough, except the friend looks like a big rag doll. When you have selected anyone else in the family, however, the friend is invisible and the child seems to behave rather insanely. (I am one to talk, comments a voice in my head.)

The invisible friend will age up with you, at least to teen, possibly even longer, I am not sure. But at some point you get a quest to create the potion that makes it real, unless you have already discovered it with the chemistry set. Then the ragdoll turns into a normal sim the same age as your child. Once they reach the appropriate (?) age, romance can develop between the child and its former doll. I am not sure what to say about that! Well, apart from calling someone “doll” will never be the same again. Then again, kids today have probably not even heard that use of the word…

I could probably think of more if I kept at it, but I think this is plenty from me. It is just a game, after all… just a game… just don’t tell my sims that!

 

Heresies, heresies, heresies

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Will you separate your delusions and reality?

“But will you separate your delusions and reality?” That is what I mean by scanning for heresies. Heresies are delusions in the spiritual. 

I have enjoyed reading Schuon, but I notice one problem when reading someone so high, high above me: I can’t automatically scan for heresies, as I normally do.

See, one needs to be careful about what one feeds the soul. It is one thing when you know something is not even meant to be true, but when someone claims to tech eternal and absolute truth, it is necessary to scan for heresies. There are two different main types of heresies that I watch out for when reading religious or spiritual books: Universal heresies, and specific heresies.

By universal heresies I mean teachings that cannot possibly be true in any systematic religion. Transposing good and evil, of course, but also transposing cause and effect, important and unimportant. The latter of this triad can easily become established within a religion and corrupt it, as when a powerful faction of the Jews at the time of Jesus became obsessed with tithes and forgot righteousness and mercy. This is a risk even today. Any church that talks more about money than mercy should cause a well-read Christian to flee for his life, don’t you think?

But in addition to the universal heresies, a follower of a particular religion must scan for the boundaries of his own tradition. Certainly Schuon himself is convinced that there can be no piety outside of a sacred tradition. You cannot just mix and match from the spiritual supermarket, picking the parts you like from every faith on earth. Say you like Judaism but you also like bacon, so you pick the “no eating cows” from Hinduism to replace the “no eating pigs” from Judaism. That is not how it works. This is also a form of heresy. The different parts of each religion and tradition are made to fit together.

To take an example closer to home, when I read about reincarnation, this is not a universal heresy. It is an essential part of most religions (including esoteric Judaism, it seems) but is downplayed to almost nothing in Christianity. Jesus mentioned that “if you will believe it”, John the Baptist was the Elijah who should come. We know from the gospel that John advanced “in the spirit and power of Elijah”, in other words it was the spirit of Elijah which was reincarnated, not the personality and memories. Christianity has generally denied, or at least refused to mention, reincarnation of souls. And with good reason, for this is a topic easily misunderstood and which could easily dishearten people.

So when I read about reincarnation, if it is done well, it is not a universal heresy, but it is very much a heresy as applies to Christianity.  I have to filter out such things as applies to myself and the nourishment of my own soul, although it can be stored as a knowledge that is relevant to others. To use an image, having hands is very valuable and most monkeys have four of them, but on a human that would not be good at all! Even if something is good for others, it would be disastrous for us.

At the very least, going on about reincarnation in a Christian book would commit the heresy of making important something that is unimportant (to Christians). Right now, I could explain why it is unimportant to us specifically (and also to the Pure Land sect of Buddhism). But this is beyond my pray grade. If I write it down, I will not be allowed by my heart to upload this entry either, just like the one yesterday.

But there is also a third form of heresy, in a manner of speaking, different in nature from the first two. The first two, universal and specific or local, are heresies that could be transmitted to me from the author, who either is infected with them himself or has them slip into his book because he goes beyond his pray grade, as I am apt to do unless I catch myself. When one operates at the edge of what one knows, it is easy for something to slip in.

But conversely, when one READS at the edge of what one can understand, there is also the risk that heresy may slip in on OUR side. We take pride in being able to read high-level texts, but if we lack the knowledge base (and particularly experience), we may misunderstand what is said and not even notice. This is mentioned in the Bible, in the second letter from Peter, in chapter 3, about “our dear brother Paul”: “His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”

If Paul is dangerous to the “ignorant and unstable”, rest assured that Frithof Schuon is also. To mind come the awesome scientists, Marie and Pierre Curie, who discovered radium. They were fascinated by this new stuff and would look at how beautifully it glowed in the dark. Then they died horribly from the radiation. There is the risk that this could happen to me if I am careless with Schuon.

More about speech recognition

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Pretending to think intelligently!

 That’s right! I just need to pretend to think intelligently! Just like speech recognition – it just pretends. And sometimes it slips badly.

It is true that I wrote yesterday’s entry with Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition, except for a few words. What I didn’t mention was all the corrections I made. When I say that the software has the capabilities of a young adult, this is partly praise for the software but also partly reflects my cynicism of the human race. Humans lose concentration, get distracted and make typographical errors; computers do not. Instead, computers completely lack the ability to understand what is said, so will without hesitation write the most insane things if that’s what your speech most sounds like.

I am sure most of my readers will get much better results from Dragon NaturallySpeaking (or other speech recognition) than I do. My Norwegian accent is quite noticeable, and my large vocabulary mostly comes from reading. There are, to put it bluntly, a number of words I use regularly which I can’t say for sure that I have ever heard spoken. English is my third language, and back in the 1970s even my English teachers did not actually speak English like a native. Well, they spoke it like a native Norwegian! Almost the only actual English I heard while growing up was pop songs. Perhaps as a result of this, I can sometimes reduce the error rate of my dictation by singing difficult passages. (I am however reluctant to do this if the neighbors upstairs can hear me…)

Another difference from most of you is that my voice gets hoarse* after only a couple paragraphs. (*And yes, Dragon of course wrote “horse” there originally.) I simply speak so little that my body can’t take the strain of speaking out loud for more than a couple minutes without a long break. This means I can only take a few phone calls each day at work, but it also means that dictating an entry for my journal takes much longer than typing it. Although I can actually speak more softly to my computer than I can to the customers, another bonus point for speech recognition over humans. But for most of you, this problem does not exist. Almost every human I have met seems able to talk continually for hours… ^_^

Finally, there’s the question of training. If you speak clearly and without too much accent, the software works OK right out of the box. But the more you use it, the more reliable it becomes. This was quite noticeable with version 9, which I used extensively. At that time, I had serious problems with my wrists. For this reason I found myself using speech recognition even though it was less than perfect (and less perfect than now, for certain.) After weeks of use, it actually started to get used to my pronunciation and my choice of words. I am sure the same would happen with version 10 and 11, but in the meantime my wrists have become much better, when my throat has become worse. (In fact, Nuance Communications claims that it’s learning abilities have been significantly improved. In my very limited experience, this seems to be true.)

So when you see the many YouTube videos of people using Dragon NaturallySpeaking quickly and perfectly, you should take into account that they have probably spent weeks training the system, in addition to having an almost perfect pronunciation. Even then, I would guess that some of those videos are not the first try, or perhaps even the second.

But under those conditions, the software is indeed able to take dictation faster and more reliably than the vast majority of human beings. Let’s face it: Even with an error or two or three, you would not be able to transcribe that fast unless you’re a highly trained professional.

I have dictated this entry as well, and with two space heaters humming loudly in the background. That we try to dictate this paragraph without making any corrections, just to show you the difference. My throat is starting to get sore, but on the other hand this to fairly long entries have given the software the charms to get better used to my pronunciation and vocabulary. As you can see, it still makes a number of mistakes. But at least it doesn’t make typos. Back when I included links to my year ago entries, I would lead to throw then after a year and almost without exception find several typos in them. Then the next year I would read through them again, I still find a couple typos. It is really hard to read what I have actually written, not what I intended to write.

Of course, this is true with speech recognition as well. And it can get even more creative with its arrows than typos. <– – Error included as proof. If you are dictating a business proposal, you should definitely either let it rest overnight and read it again in the morning, or let someone else read through it before you send it. Then again, that’s probably a good rule anyway.