Little Black Book

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lost in translation is love
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Tomorrow i go to Amanda’s birthday party, and the next day Mary comes home. The day after i study for my GRE and visit with Lydia. The wednesday i take said GRE and shove it up the asses of those involved in the testing process…. i hate tests btw…

Wednesday is also the day of my semi-longterm involvement with this strange woman who calls me lovah. A full three weeks of togetherness… This isn’t the first time we have done this whole normal relationship thing… on a whole the long term visits work out well.. the first week is bliss and then there are spastic fights about the necessities of “alone time” followed by the all to passionate recollected “together time”…

We are celebrating christmas eve on the thursday and on friday we wake up and open presents i believe… I will be giving Mary her present the night before Christmas Eve… I hope she likes it…

i know you could care less….

man she is grading papers so i am talking to you… this is the crux of my situation.
Continue reading “presents and parties…”

being and time by martin heideggar was sitting on the shelf of eastern religions in barnes and noble… right between idiots guide to buddhism and the art of happiness by the dali lama… clerk/customer comedic act or ignorance?

no one will ever know…

i’m strangely tired tonight… been all over the city, doing all kinds of things… ate with mom, dad, amanda, and trey for supper. We went to bennigans…

Mary is going out tonight so i think i might just head to sleep… seeing as we can’t really talk…

i almost purchased another present for her… can’t wait till christmas is over so i can stop feeling this urge… or at least stop justifying the urge by the time of the year…

Here is a series of news bulletins that i found interesting to pass on to Trey and anyone else who happens to read this and enjoys video games…

– Anarchy Online is now FREE for a whole year! wooot. Download the client at funcom’s website create an account and let it go for a whole year… 2006 you have to start paying… this is interesting.

– You can also get into some interesting ghost-related conversations with Dawn Star and other students at the academy, foreshadowing later events in the Spirit Cave and the game’s overall story. Mind you, some of that dialogue will have to be subtitled, due to the game’s frequent usage of a fictional language created by Asian linguists.

– Nintendo Dual screen (DS for short) will be able to play movies and mp3s… interesting little application. It is going to compete with the psp being released by Sony.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=581&e=1&u=/nm/20041215/tc_nm/tech_japan_nintendo_dc

enough…

In other News i thought i should mention this.
– NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe is leaving to teach at LSU.

– In one of the most comprehensive studies that plants in the Northeast are responding to the global warming trend, Cornell scientists and their colleagues at the University of Wisconsin found lilacs are blooming about four days earlier than they did in 1965. -> CNN.

– Men are about to go extinct.. no honestly read this.. hehe (it is simply a potential.. i’m joking.. just read the story– and Mary… kiss my ass… here is the article… so now you and your skeptical beliefs can take a hike… i swear some people won’t even let you bring up a talking point without putting you to the torture systems to find out the sources and validate the potential truths.)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4225769

– Phones might be able to be used on airplanes. Not sure this is a great idea because i will put my phone next to my speakers and i hear the clicks and sounds coming from the speakers… hmm wonder what would happen to planes…
Continue reading “nothing important… some of the news is game related…”

If i get World of Warcraft for christmas i might have to decline going to new york with Mary. Girlfriend versus video game…

hehe she would kill me… specially since i’m relying on her to get it for me… if she doesn’t get it for me i won’t get it i don’t believe…

it is official… ebay is selling WoW collector’s edition for 150$ and higher… holy sheet….. expensive… after christmas i’m going to have to save up some money… if there are any left of course..

an interesting interpretation of the changing climate in the Ukraine.

I think my descriptions were vague… and misleading so i re-edited them…

two factions fighting for power,
Faction number 1:
Candidate: Viktor Yanukovych
allegidly corrupt and previous administration. Atheistic in religious leaning. *important* This faction is openly and heavily supported by the russian government. On the election day, Putin was recorded as giving his congrats to this faction’s candidate.

Faction number 2,
Candidate: Viktor Yushchenko
They are allegidly the victims of a corrupt and oppressive conspiracy to fix the elections. Video tape were released by our media about the surrounding events and much was made headlines about their corrupt elections. There has been heavy involvement between American agencies in support of this faction’s election. All involvement is covert. i.e. the american government has not claimed to support this side politically, but our government organizations’ actions speak differently. This faction’s religious leaning is a revitalization of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

my point?

The Cold war was not too long ago. With the dissassembling of the USSR, the belief is that there is no threat. The reality still exists that nuclear warheads exist in large numbers within both governments. Putin has recently been heard giving very coarse analyses of american involvement overseas, not surprising of course since it is the fashionable thing for a foreign/non-american country to do these days.

All of this information was obtained from a PBS newshow called the newshour. I watched it a little bit ago. My professor of anthropology told me not to long ago that we should keep an eye out for this part of the world because there is a religious background that might make it more then what it appears to be. He has a tendency to boil down every conflict to a concern for religion. He might have a point, but he also might be failing to recognize the cause. It could be the fact that religion is caused by the same thing that causes war, individuality.

Mary and I were discussing the us -> them complex shared by every culture in existence. It hit me that this is simply a method of becoming individualized. Once we define ourselves we automatically define what is not us. It is common to use this understanding in creating immoral and moral actions. Why are blacks slaves? “They” are not “us”. objectification… this is all not new… but i thought it was interesting to re-evaluate the information about the Ukraine.

I keep getting swamped in quantum mechanics when i attempt to figure out if these guys are recognized as full of shit in the overall scheme of physics community or accepted as understood.

My current belief is like michael’s and others have said, they are credible in their field but their claims go far beyond their field’s expertese. When they argue points they cannot prove by qualifing them with, “just imagine if” and “what if” you see it become blatant.

I threw around the movie, “What the #$%^ do we know?” and Dr. Korcz read a review about it that claimed the movie was fiction. In fact he said that the review talks about how the people in the movie are actually actors… so my interest is perked…

but no such luck…

Amit Goswami, Ph.D
– taught at the university of oregon for 34 years..
– published many books but all titles have strange ideas behind them.
— The Self-Aware Universe
— Quantum Creativity
— Physics of the Soul
— The Visionary Window (Quest Books, 2000).
— He also wrote a textbook on Quantum Mechanics that is well regarded and used.
-His education was in India with a Ph.D. degree in physics from Calcutta.
of five books,

John Hagelin
-Ohh some controversy here… supposedly he claims to have authored the superstring theory… i guess oh well i’m grasping at straws on wonky websites… here is the url: http://www.trancenet.org/nlp/physics/index.shtml hehe yeah i know… go figure… I’m hot for controversy…
–

OHhhhhhh interesting little article from a website a little more credible then trancenet.org (hehe god that was a horrible citation)
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/archives/000083.html

CRAP i’ve stumbled on a nest of controversy.. and conspiracy theories…

this is kewl…. i want to know MORE! i’ll post more information when i can look at this more…

i had two hours sleep last night but i can’t go back to sleep for some reason… wierd… i think i’m literally suffering from insomnia… strange… haven’t had this in a while… it is like i’m biding my time for something to happen…

probably going to finish blackbeard tonight…

I’m at work and beside the actual labor when it occurs it is also just difficult to think… so many things interrupt me like the simple existence inside a house with three other men who range from variously different tastes… television screams from all directions…

i’m just tired… 5 1/2 days.. so it is not so bad…

Okay, i sat through the WHOLE movie. This is the kind of train wreck that happens when chemists and physicists and stuff try to do philosophy. Yeah, ok, there were a few parts that weren’t half bad. There were some really good quotes. Parts were very entertaining. Ultimately not a bad movie except it offended my sensibilities as a philosopher.

Basically, the thesis of the movie was that we are all ‘gods’ – that the mind is wonderful and mysterious and full of untapped infinite potential – that we alter our surroundings through thought alone – that we create our own reality. If we could only muster enough faith in ourselves, we could quite literally walk on water. The ‘science’ used to justify all this was quantum mechanics and biochemistry. As far as quantum mechanics goes, I just don’t see what that has to do with the layer of reality we experience on a day-to-day basis. So WHAT if subatomic particles are more like fields of probability than anything physical? So WHAT if they seem to go away when we’re not looking at them? (I mean, what doesn’t?) So WHAT if these particles may pop in and out of existence and we don’t know where they go or where they came from? I mean, sure it’s interesting, but we’re talking about subatomic particles, not my cat. If I had one. Which I don’t. So there. The way it’s presented in the movie, quantum physics allows us to transcend time, space, and substance or something.

The stuff dealing with biochemistry was not half bad, I think, although that’s not something I know a lot about. They explained the relationship between the brain and the cells, and about how patterns of behavior actually reinforce themselves through neurochemistry and other stuff. They had some neat little animated ‘cells’ that were quite entertaining – one of them danced and sang ‘Addicted to Love’ by Robert Palmer. There is a fabulously entertaining scene at a wedding reception with dancing and music and little animated hormones running amok. One of my favorites quotes from the movie is from this scene. A guy is complaining to a bridesmaid that she dipped her shrimp in the sauce twice, and she says, “I’m the sister of the bride – I can put my ASS in the dip if I want to!” Well, I guess you’d have to see it, but you probably shouldn’t bother.

In the middle of that was a complete excoriation of organized religion. There is no such thing as good and evil, according to the movie, just choices – so how dare those pesky religions coerce us into living any particular lifestyle by inflicting on us their system of cosmic punishments and rewards? Not so bad – I’m a recovering fundamentalist myself. Fundamentalist religion gets no sympathy from me. But I just can’t help thinking that if I CHOOSE to pick up an axe and start chopping everybody up, that would be really bad. Really. Even worse, what if someone else did it to me? Is that not evil, but simply a choice?

The movie had an uplifting, powerful, positive message. Too bad a lot of it was just plain wrong. I feel sorry for the unsuspecting public!

Oh, but here’s the scary part. At the end they provide citations. All the commentators explain their degrees and qualifications. They’re all highly educated folks and active in their fields. So, David, they were all supposed to know wht they were talking about.
Continue reading “This entry is my friend Michael’s review of “What the #$*! Do We Know””