tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68998842131779136922024-02-20T05:32:24.022-08:00About Death, a Singularity or NothingStefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.comBlogger14125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-51024163227589922392028-08-04T14:24:00.000-07:002017-12-04T13:46:37.050-08:00Home<table>
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Nature is weird</h2>
The coolest top 10 chart!
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... the one of newly discovered species
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The Rich, the Poor, the Stupid
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<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-rich-poor-stupid-part-1-few-words.html">
<b>Part 1 - A few words about about the socialists</b>
and why the world <i>poor</i> has been abused into meaninglessness
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<b>Part 2 - coming soon</b>
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Before, they were cool
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The brighter side of famous mass murderers
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<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2012/06/forwards-and-backwards-of-time-travel.html">Time Travel</a></h2>
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The golden rules of time travel - apart from "don't kill your grandfather", which you probably already know (unless your grandfather is Hitler, in this case do kill the mutherfucker!)
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<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2012/05/short-treatise-on-speciesism.html">Short Treatise on Speciesism</a></h2>
<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2012/05/short-treatise-on-speciesism.html">
On the tough issue of what living organisms is it morally safe to eat<br /><br /><br />
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<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2012/05/how-not-to-love-your-children.html">
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<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2012/05/how-not-to-love-your-children.html">How not to love your children</a></h2>
<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2012/05/how-not-to-love-your-children.html">
The paedophile's dream job and why child porn should be legal<br /><br />
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<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2012/10/floating-cities.html">Haven't those people who draw floating cities heard of the laws of physics?</a></h2>
<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2012/10/floating-cities.html">
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How could it work? It's either resting on long pillars, hanging from above or somehow supressing gravity.<br />
Read now and get a bonus solution that involves all the nukes in the world!</a>
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I don't always write film reviews...</h2>
But when I do, it's about something epic
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Hugo in 3D FTW
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<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2010/06/strange-beasts-and-big-ones-too.html">Strange beasts (and big ones, too)</a></h2>
<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2010/06/strange-beasts-and-big-ones-too.html">
Do you know which are the bigest animals on earth by most definitions? Some contestants are definitely weirder than what our planet would wish to admit<br /><br />
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Funny in the Head</h2>
Modern society, with it's complex machines and speeding cars generates a constant supply of damaged brains attached to intact bodies, which reveal some interesting phenomena
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2010/05/politics-dirty-business-or-science.html">Politics - dirty business or science</a></h2>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2010/05/politics-dirty-business-or-science.html">
The difference between the right and the left and what is libertarianism<br /><br />
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<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2010/04/madness-of-nuclear-disarmament.html">The MADness of nuclear disarmament </a></h2>
<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2010/04/madness-of-nuclear-disarmament.html">
Could the world actually be a better place is the US and Russia are armed to the teeth with nukes?<br /><br />
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<a href="https://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2010/04/time-management-is-no-joke.html">Time management is no joke </a></h2>
<a href="https://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2010/04/time-management-is-no-joke.html">
How to get shit done instead of wasting time reading stuff on the internet<br /><br />
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<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2011/01/botnet-wars.html">Botnet wars </a></h2>
<a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.de/2011/01/botnet-wars.html">
On the zombie hordes that are filling your inbox with spam<br /><br />
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</tbody></table>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-23812875087065143222014-05-24T03:57:00.000-07:002014-05-24T04:06:32.807-07:00Nature is weirdI think I'll be looking forward to each year's <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140522-top-ten-new-species-2014-biodiversity/" target="_blank">Top 10 Species list</a> the way normal people look forward to the world cup or Hunger Games' new season. It captures the usual fascination with nature with a depressing hint about how little we actually know about the planet we live on. On the brighter side, if we keep on discovering these weird critters every year then imagine what kind of oddities await us.<br />
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Another thing I like about these lists is that they provide ample material for an interesting, informative <a href="http://xkcd.com/214/" target="_blank">wiki spree</a> - I believe everyone who's landed on this page for some reason and has kept reading past the first sentence knows what I'm talking about, the frantic clicking and reading that consumes the time planned for productive activities but also makes you a richer person. However, sometimes you actually want to do it, you open an article of interest and follow the links but somehow it doesn't take you anywhere exciting; you might be even tempted to think that you've already read all the cool stuff on wikipedia - there is simply nothing to grab your imagination. Not about time they release the top 10 new species list though - it's guaranteed to deliver an inspirational reading... and sometimes, to prove that the Flying Spaghetti Monster must have been smoking something.<br />
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This year's list, for example, contains a microbe that apparently grows mostly in space labs, a 5cm long single-celled organism and a land speed record holder - a snail that only moves a few millimeters per week (this must have been a very patient researcher).<br />
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<i>And also this thing, which was named after the crown prince of Netherlands, for some reason. Not sure if that's honouring or mocking the monarchy</i></div>
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It also opened my mind about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_fly" target="_blank">fairflies</a> - a family of wasps that rarely exceed a millimeter in size. Gosh, now I can't shake the feeling that these guys are all around us. Maybe I inhaled one just now! They also look pretty eerie, which most things do at this scale, actually:<br />
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<a href="http://wellcometrust.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/fairfly.jpg?w=600&h=420" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://wellcometrust.files.wordpress.com/2010/09/fairfly.jpg?w=600&h=420" height="224" width="320" /></a></div>
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Fairflies demonstrate nature's miniaturization prowess at its finest - they contain the world's smallest insect and they can fly. It's a pretty interesting little "mechanism" - how does this bugger manage to fly around with these eyelashes for wings?!<br />
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Further, I learned what's a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid" target="_blank">parasitoid</a> - it's a parasite that actually kills its host. OMG, so now that's something more terrifying than parasite, I didn't realize that parasitism was the milder form. This includes relationships like <a href="http://www.cracked.com/article_19384_the-5-creepiest-ways-animals-have-mastered-mind-control.html" target="_blank">zombifying</a> a host and taking control of their motions like a puppet. They also have a terrifying picture for this:<br />
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Female_Apocephalus_borealis_ovipositing_into_the_abdomen_of_a_worker_honey_bee.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Female_Apocephalus_borealis_ovipositing_into_the_abdomen_of_a_worker_honey_bee.png" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
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Did you notice it? Yeah, look again - there is this tiny puppet master taking control of its victim. The process is called <i>ovipositing</i>, which is science's euphemism for <i>impregnating a poor bee with your hell-spawn and turning into a zombie</i>. And do you know what the result is called? But of course it's a <b>zombee</b>! I think that's going to be my word of the week. Zombee! Beat that, Hunger Games! I'm pretty sure they don't have zombees in there.<br />
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Thanks for sharing this moment of appreciation of nature at it's weirdest with me. Now that I've seeded your reading list (and nightmares) with some materials I guess it's finally time to start doing something productive... or maybe read about how a single-celled organism can be 5cm long, we'll see.Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-10780315749660967442012-10-01T14:36:00.001-07:002012-10-01T14:44:02.240-07:00Floating Cities<img width="690px" src="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/avatar2small.png"></img>
The portrayal of floating and hanging cities has always held some majestic, captivating appeal, at least for me. The idea was recently made popular by Avatar but it is by no means new. It might have been mentioned as far back as Homer's Odyssey but our ancient greek translaters can't seem to agree on whether the island floated in the sea or in the sky. In any case Guillivered travelled to a land called Laputa that did float in the sky, we didn't need to translated that one!<br/><br/>
Today the awe was rekindled by <a href="xkcd.com/1115/">xkcd</a> and the subsequent discovery of this <a href="http://fredericperrin.com">Frederic Perrin</a> guy who doesn't even have his own Wikipedia page, the poor soul.<br/><br/>
He seems to be <i>the man</i> for floating cities:<br/>
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Perrin's illustrations are quite cool, as well as various others I have seen. What bothers me though is how this thing would work.<br/><br/>
I see three options:<br/>
1. Resting on long pillars that extrude high in the sky<br/>
2. Hanging from something up above<br/>
3. Floating in the absence of gravity<br/><br/>
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1. Resting on long pillars
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This option gives us a plausible back story - the civilization has had to abandon the convenient, low-lying areas due to, for instance, pollution, and has built structures raised high in the sky. More importantly, this explains the vertical orientation of cities, with water falling down and trees growing in one direction - which would not be the case if we were in a situation without gravity.<br/><br/>
With enough population, technology and raw material it's entirely feasible to build a suburb 1km high in the sky - it will definitely be easier than Burj Khalifa, that has to have inhabited floors and sophisticated elevators all the way through.
Nowhere in the floating city fiction have I encountered a discussion on the technicalities of getting down to earth so I guess we're not dealing with a requirement for this to be efficient.<br/><br/>
There's no way to have rocks floating rocks in this scenario though, so it's ruled out for all portrayals that clearly show unsuspended bodies floating around. <br/><br/>
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2. Hanging from above
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With this scenario we're floating away from the realm of the realistic but it's still feasible in theory.<br/>
We might have a feasible designs of suspended superstructures - after all we have suspension bridges which have features raising higher than the suspended structure, with the bridge technically hanging from above.<br/> <br/>
But if we are looking at the suspended city scenario where the load-bearing structure reaches down to the ground I don't think that's fundamentally different than the 'resting on pillars' case - the more interesting thing here is to see what scenario would allow us to have a city ultimately supported from above. If we leave our imagination to run wild we can conceive some scenarios that can provide a setup for this configuration.<br/> <br/>
<b>Large artificial satellite</b>
Future technology can allow us to produce energy in low earth orbit that's not available on earth - for instance, without the interference of the atmosphere solar panels are more efficient and we can conceivably have a arbitrarily large self-sustainable structure in orbit - provided that we have the power to put it there; after all the only energy expense is maintaining the orbit.<br/>
When in geostationary orbit this space station will hang over a specific spot on the earth surface, so some structure could hang from it, barely dipping into the atmosphere, just enough to be able to collect oxygen for breathing.<br/><br/>
It can also work with other orbits but if it's moving too fast relative to earth (or whatever other planet it is implemented on) it won't be very practical and it will be windy all the time. <br/><br/>
<b>Natural satellite</b><br/>
In this line of thought, why not hang something from the moon, if we have enough material?<br/>
We are not quite lucky with the choice of celestial companions - we have only this moon, which is kind of a freak case in a universe where most planets either have lots of moons or are too small to have any. If we had one that's closer to earth it would be easier to achieve - but it also better be smaller because otherwise the tides are going to be massive. On such a satellite we can potentially hang something, and then we are faced with the same problem as with non-geostationary artificial satellite - it's moving too fast over the surface!<br/><br/>
Solution - nukes! If nuclear disarmament goes ahead both sides will be left with stockpiles of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads to be destroyed. How? Well, if we had a smaller moon nearby the nukes could have been used to slow it down to a geostationary orbit. <br/><br/>
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3. Floating in the absence of gravity
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This one seems to be the most popular scenario, probably because it allows for various expressions of artistic freedom without having to bow to the constraints of gravity. Also some representations clearly show rocks floating around, which can only happen with no gravity - even the microgravity of an asteroid will quickly pull these away.<br/><br/>
Although it's the most popular scenario the logic and physics don't quite fit - no matter how liberal use of the lack of gravity has the artist harnessed it still looks very much like our gravity-based society, with structures protruding mainly in the up direction, with some exceptions added for futuristic, outer space effect and to highlight the fact that there is no gravity. But if there is no gravity - there is not such thing as up! Why are then tree roots dangling down the bottom when there is no such thing as down?<br/>
Structures should be built mainly in direction orthogonal to the surface on which they lie, with one axis being preferred in order to make navigation and transport more efficient - and other exceptions growing in random directions for esthetic or specific practical reasons.<br/><br/>
Most art in this sub-genre is however representing the 0-g world as pieces of civilization that was once subject to gravity which have for some reason been lifted way up in the skies, or somewhere else altogether - the place was literally torn out of somewhere, hence the dangling roots. I wonder what back stories do authors offer in such cases. The only remotely plausible explanations are:<br/>
a) That society has invented some anti-gravity mechanism, allowing them to lift chunks of a city (along with random rocks!) off the ground and release them from the burden of gravity, preserving their vertical orientation for the sake of nostalgic looks.<br/>
In Avatar they say it's unobtainium in the rocks that makes them float - sounds more plausible, although only slightly distinguishable from floating by magic.<br/><br/>
b) This race has figured out how to transport these objects to another world, without gravity and presumably with enough breathable air so that they can float around without protective shields (or alternatively - without population, just floating about for the aesthetic effect)
If we decide to speculate on a fictional universe, or if we are optimistic enough about the technological advances of human society we might as well allow for anti-gravity or teleportation of large objects, which would make both options possible. The only way I can think of for this to happen without relying on technology that has been specifically ruled out as impossible by present day scientists however is to have some gravitation cancelling arrangement in the vicinity of the home celestial body of the civilization in question. The easiest setup to utilize will be a big natural satellite in a geostationary (or planetostationary?) orbit nearby - it will have it's own gravity and there will be a region where the two forces will cancel out - the L1 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point">Lagrangean point</a><br/><br/>
Speaking about sacrificing aesthetics for practicality, a society can also drill a hole through a smaller body - a satellite or asteroid - and house a floating city at the center of masswhere gravity cancels out. A body so small to make this possible is not likely to cling to an atmosphere thick enough to allow unshielded intelligent life. And the view is going to be terrible - a city floating in a large cave instead of the open skies; kind of defeats the purpose. Who would express that on any medium?<br/><br/>
<img width="690" src="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/perrin2-underworld-small.png"></img>
Pierre Ferrin, apparently!
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This reminds me, from today About Death, a Singularity or Nothing comes in HD! <br/>
I've always known that people are lazy and with short attention spans and are prone to freaking out when confronted with TL;DR. This made my writings in the tiny 400px columns of the old layout extremely scary. <br/><br/>
At first I thought it's a force of good - I'm prone to delving into too much detail, so I had something to make me cut out every unnecessary word. It still looked scary though and I have enough to say to keep the scroller tiny even with a fat column like that
Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-42328711038844745842012-06-01T18:10:00.000-07:002012-10-01T11:03:24.680-07:00The Forwards and Backwards of Time Travel<table>
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Time travel is a topic that has fascinated both the lay folk and scientists, fringe and real alike. Apparently it has also engaged Randall Munroe from <a href="xkcd.com/1063/">xkcd</a> to the point that he has drawn his best comic in a while.
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Time travel is generally believed to be impossible. Indeed, the hypothetical <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon">tachyons</a> may well exist, allowing - in theory at least - information to be sent <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyonic_antitelephone">back in time</a> - but that's nowhere near the plotlines that the concept has allowed Holywood to explore. The implications of time travel, if possible, are however so bizarre, such a rife source of paradoxes, that it has captivated science fiction writers, phylosophers and theoretical physicists to the point that the topic seems almost exhausted. Randall managed to squeeze some very fresh and witty humour out of it anyway and also the discussion that this sparked was another source of fresh insights.
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In order to provide some context to the comic, and to facilitate the enlightenment that ponder over the subject may bring, it's a good idea to put together the general principles of time travel, that have been pretty much agreed by most people in the field in their right mind.<br/><br/>
The obvious problem with time travel is that if you go back in time you can kill your father before he gets to screw your mother (sorry to remind about this, but your parents have fucked over a thousand times, no matter how hard it is for you to come to terms with the fact). If time travel is possible, then there are only a limited number of ways we can resolve this situation.<br/><br/>
<strong>Timeline preservation</strong><br/>
Everything you did to you parents has already happened by the time were born - so obviously you haven't managed to kill your father, even if you go back in time specifically to do that, if only to commit an extravagant suicide, flipping the bird on spacetime in the process. Maybe the doctors end up saving him but he's never told you the story? Maybe he had a twin?
If this hypothesis is true, then maybe some sort of 'preemptive temporal natural selection' never lets people with such a tendency come about, as they have already killed themselves 'hyper-already', backwards in some higher dimension?<br/><br/>
<strong>Multiple/branching universes</strong><br/>
There is also a solution to this conundrum that will allow you to kill your father. Maybe you just jumped into (or even created!) another spacetime when you pulled the trigger on your dad. It is conceivable that all possible universes exist, with your father dying in countless ways and you time machine just jumped into another one, where he happens to get killed by his time-travelling brat. You might as well stay and live in his time and have a fulfilling life there. You'll be an alian from another universe but no one will know it, and hey - this will be an universe where your parents have never fucked!<br/>
Hell, you can even date your own mother without the nasty age difference that bugged Oedipus and you are pretty much guaranteed to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_sexual_attraction">be able to get laid with her</a>, no matter how hot she's been in her time. <br/><br/>
<strong>Back to the comic</strong><br/>
Looks like the multiverse where the comic is set obeys to the first rule. The way I interpret it, it's not like the Black Hat Guy was dumb enough to kill Hitler in 1949, just before he commits suicide. It's more like Hitler was killed by BHG in the first place but he was cunning enough to make it look like suicide. <br/><br/>
<strong>Why Hitler?</strong><br/>
Popular culture seems to associate time travel with <a href="http://www.tor.com/stories/2011/08/wikihistory">killing Hitler</a> quite often. A jewish conspiracy, some will be quick to exclaim, but Hitler is indeed easy to take for an epitome evil, having perpetrated the most meticulously organized mass murder. He can quickly be identified as the most easy target to make this a better universe in one go.<br/>
Or can he? What could Stalin have done if Hitler wasn't around to oppose him? The soviet crimes against humanity account for tens of millions of lives - but that's only in the soviet-dominated areas. What if they have managed to spread their rule of murder across a much bigger part of Europe?<br/>
Also, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_by_population">wikipedia list</a> of mass murders reveals some shocking facts. The observation that there are cities in China that you've never heard of with more than 10 million ihabitants is curious - but bloody conflicts that took the lives of more than 30 million people - that's mind-boggling. Why havent' we heard anything in school about this? I mean, WTF, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Lushan_Rebellion">An Lushan rebellion</a> wiped out something like 15% of the world population at the time! And what about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion">Taiping Rebellion</a>, which was as recent as the 19th century and the upper estimate of the death toll goes to 100 fucking million! This simply boggles the mind.<br/><br/>
And now on international summits them whiteys keep talking about this 'human rights' thing. At no time in Chinese history, it seems, were millions of lives too high a price to pay to stay in power - and now G8 are bitching about thousands being killed in Syria. Of course Beijing is not going to object - this would mean that they agree that such a thing is wrong, as if they won't kill thousands of theirs any time of the day. And Moscow seems to be on the same bandwagon.<br/><br/>
<strong>The Friesian School on Facebook</strong><br/>
Now, away from mass murder, back to time travel - this fertile ground for paradoxes (like pretty much anything else) has been <a href="http://www.friesian.com/paradox.htm"/>eloquently addressed</a> by my guru Ross Kelley. As you can see from the last link his website is pretty decrepit, although it contains priceless analysis and opinion on pretty much any issue imaginable. He's never published a book, he's seldom posted in journals - he's agregated his life's work in this dodgy website, which actually contains tons of pure gold! It is, indeed, poorly presented and poorly organized but in terms of content it offers a lifetime of occasional reading. As there's pretty much no straightforward way to approach it, I just created a <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Friesian-School/301941826562309">facebook page</a> to occasionally post the gems I've spotted there over the years. Like it, and you'll get regular pieces of enlightenment on this confusing and overly complex world.<br/><br/>
If you're eager to start exploring, you might as well pick a topic of interest and delve into it right now! Some essays may be quite long and dry, with countless facts and graphs, but every once in a while you'll be struck by the sheer amount of sense this guy makes!<br/><br/>
<a href="http://www.friesian.com/science.htm">Science</a><br/><br/>
<a href="http://www.friesian.com/econ.htm">Political economy</a><br/><br/>
<a href="http://www.friesian.com/religion.htm">Religion</a><br/><br/>
<a href="http://www.friesian.com/philhist.htm">History</a><br/><br/>
<a href="http://www.friesian.com/ethics.htm">Ethics</a>, <a href="http://www.friesian.com/history.htm">Philosophy</a> and <a href="http://www.friesian.com/epistem.htm">Epistemology</a>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-83572636525205499202012-05-08T12:30:00.001-07:002012-05-09T05:00:27.527-07:00Short Treatise on SpeciesismStilgar from the <a href="http://sietch.net/">sietch</a> got me thinking about this one - how do we get to decide which animals we can kill, legally and uncontroversially. The <a href="http://www.lex.bg/bg/laws/ldoc/2135579104">Bulgarian Law for the Protection of Animals</a>(in Bulgarian, <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lex.bg%2Fbg%2Flaws%2Fldoc%2F2135579104&hl=en&langpair=auto|en&tbb=1&ie=windows-1251">translation</a>) was soon posted, exposing flagrant speciesism deeply rooted into the bulgarian legal system.<br/><br/>
Now it's clear that such legislation raises more questions than it answers and it's bound to have critics. Humanity should be allowed to kill certain animals e.g. ones transmit diseases but on the other hand some are creepily similar to us to be used for cruel entertainment. There has to be a line somewhere - but how do we define it?<br/><br/>
The classical school of thought here, advocated by luminaries like <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3034502.Douglas_R_Hofstadter">Douglas Hostadter</a>, dictates that we should rate animals by intelligence and the most intelligent should be deemed closer to us, and thus - not eaten. This has also a lot of anecdotal support - quite a few vegetarians eat fish for example, for plenty of reasons, with "because they don't think" being one of them. Indeed, the more sophisticated nervous system an animal has - the closer to our experience of pain and distress it should be able to experience. Some problems arise though with the lack of reliable measure of intelligence - no one has managed to have a chimp and a dolphin play a game of chess yet, so we get to choose from the different sets of superficial criteria that give us different results. And of course the line has to be arbitrary - there is no such thing as universal maximum edible intelligence (this would make old people legal).<br/><br/>
There is also the competing measure - cuteness. Kids nowadays grow up with children's books and films with super cool talking farm animals that don't stink even the slightest bit; kids can more easily imagine them being friends rather than source of food and stench. And with the rise of the internet with its feline obsession and <a href="http://boingboing.net/2010/08/24/internet-finds-cat-t.html">vigilantism</a>, cats became a no-no (sorry Alf). So, by natural selection optimizing for the cuteness factor some animals have found a new evolutional niche. This makes good sense - they live off the human society, which is profoundly stratified by physical appearance in many ways - better looking people of all sexes get a disproportionate amount of all the benefits, why should we then not discriminate against animals in the same way?<br/><br/>
What we are seeing now is actually an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race">evolutionary arms race</a> for a part of humanity's waste resources between stray dogs and our anti-cuteness defence mechanism - the cutest of dogs have better chances to survive and produce progeny, thus cutifying their kind. If they do well maybe one day they'll achieve the level of protection that cats now enjoy and survive.<br/><br/>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-28609067263108300572012-05-04T05:26:00.002-07:002012-05-04T07:16:11.354-07:00How not to love your childrenThis <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17740146"> BBC story about the Interpol child porn caches</a> reminded me about the <a href="#sympathy">sympathy</a> I hold for paedophiles, but let's explore some of the implications of this article before delving into that.<br /><br />First of all, the Interpol unit that combats child abuse must be the dream workplace for, well, paedophiles. Can you imagine, the collection of all CP seized anywhere in the world, ever - something so illegal that the mere sight of the CP image I accidentally landed upon on /b/ once made me consider throwing my laptop in the nearest river before the feds<a href="#ft1"><sup>1</sup></a> come - constantly at your disposal. And not only that, but your job involves sifting through millions of depictions of children being abused. I won't be the least bit surprised if they actually hire paedophiles on purpose - think about it, will anyone who's not a sick pervert agree to work such a job? We're talking about someone who has to not only view all those pics and films but recognize the children in them and given a new image - to determine if he's seen this child somewhere in the pile or it's fresh material. I can't see a more efficient way to do this apart from having a devoted person go over<a href="#ft2"><sup>2</sup></a> the images time and time again until he knows their faces (and bodies) as if they were his own children (which he has probably also screwed). But yeah, that's of course necessary as child abusers need to be caught before they get a chance to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritzl_case">father 7 children with their own daughter</a>.<br /><br />Which brings me to my next point - shouldn't, then, child porn be legal to posses and share, in order to generate more exposure and improve the chances of those degenerates being caught? Why do we have to rely on just the perverts that Interpol has hired to catch fellow perverts? The argument against this is that it would maybe encourage more people to produce child porn as, with the urge to throw laptops in rivers taken out of the equation, there will be much more demand? I don't think that's bad - I don't believe that CP producers are just attention whores who normally don't abuse children, but "hey, I can get millions of views on porntube.com, why not rape some minors." I'm convinced that CP is made by people who like screwing children in the first place and this just gets compounded by the natural urge to do home porn that every sexually healthy individual experiences. So if they want to film themselves committing crime and let it circulate online - well let them do it and have the hordes of semi-perverted online vigilantes and super-advanced dick-recognizing software catch them - there are so many subtle accidental tell-tale that might reveal the victim or abuser's identities or at least the location.<br /><br /><a name="sympathy" ></a><br />Now what do I mean by sympathy - don't get me wrong, I certainly don't approve child abuse! I agree that it's a deplorable crime and perpetrators should be put behind bars in order to discourage other enthusiasts. They are, however, sick people with a psychological disorder that has directed their natural sexual desire towards a target on which society won't let them act. Indeed, traditional morals in most cultures teach us that sexual desires are not such a big deal and individuals are expected to single-handedly resist these temptations. I, on the other hand, am willing to stick my prick in the traditional morals' bigoted, hypocrite mouth as my sexual desires are extremely hard to resist (especially when there is no good reason to do so). If I lived in a universe where no woman is willing to have sex with me and no prostitution exists, I would either be a rapist or an extremely sad and troubled person - and this is pretty much the choice that paedophiles face. The ones that have either low libido or strong moral code somehow manage to abstain and desperately try to persuade themselves that chicks with tits are actually better - the rest end up abusing children. It might be brutal and repulsive but at least it's understandable. <br /><br />Now back to my previous point - better availability of child porn will give these people a way to relieve themselves of these desires without hurting anyone. <a href="http://www.law.stanford.edu/display/images/dynamic/events_media/Kendall%20cover%20+%20paper.pdf">Studies</a> <a href="http://www4.cema.edu.ar/pjae/m/121Wongsur200605">have</a> <a href="http://prospectjournal.ucsd.edu/blog/index.php/pornography-may-have-postive-social-benefits-so-dont-ban-it/">shown</a> that there is an inverse correlation between incidence of rape and availability of pornography, so there is no reason why this shouldn't be the case with child porn. Now I'm not saying that we should legalize screwing children for the production of CP (as is the case in many countries - paying for sex is only legal if there is a camera filming the process) - but tons of material already exist, why not let perverts jerk off to it rather than rape your children? Also, what about digitally produced child porn that doesn't involve any real children? Technologies need to improve just a tiny bit more in order to allow life-like films to be produced digitally for low cost - I can't wait to see what possibilities will these open up for the porn industry! But apart from proliferation of kinky practices, this will also make the streets safer for our children!<br /><br />I have a lot more to say on the effect of sexual attraction on society so I'll be posting more on the topic in the future - hopefully taking equally controversial stance. I had other things in mind for this article but I might as well do some useful work instead - but if you have any comments and ideas about related topics that needs discussion make sure to drop a comment here or speak up in some other way. Wish you all a nice weekend with sex so kinky that will put the digital porn of the future to shame!<br /><br /><a name="ft1"></a><br />1 - even though I actually live in Europe (as can be deducted by the spelling of paedophile I've used)<br />2 - or more suitably - come overStefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-49275475576633954982012-02-26T09:15:00.008-08:002012-02-26T11:22:14.502-08:00I don't always write film reviews, but when I do...... it's on the day of the Oscars and about a film that deals with the early history of Cinema. And is not The Artist. And just by coincidence - it was the only film I could see in original language yesterday night in Cologne (WTF Ze Germans - most of you speak perfect English?).<br /><br />First about this film review business - I was hesitating at first because I watch an awful lot of films, I get impressed by many of them and if I start writing review I'll swamp the little meaningful<sup>[citation needed]</sup> content that I've managed to generate. But then the first article I posted here, about <a href="http://deathasingularityornothing.blogspot.com/2010/04/madness-of-nuclear-disarmament.html" target="_new"> nuclear warfare</a>, was largely inspired by a film, and given that today is the night of the Oscars I was bound to make an exception. I settled on posting only about films I rate with 10 on IMDB, and only if I manage to squeeze some stuff from my agenda along them ;-)<br /><br />And I had absolutely no idea that it's about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_M%C3%A9li%C3%A8s" target="_new">Georges Méliès</a> and didn't realize the proportions of the cinephilic handjob I was about to receive. At first I was like, yeah, starts cool, Sacha Baron Cohen is hilarious (I didn't like him in an 'evil' character but at least he got laid in the end), Ben Kingsley is quite believable as usual, portraying his character at different ages in the flashbacks, and just loved the way they've superimposed his face on historic pictures :-D<br />But what really got me excited was getting most of the references to cinema pioneers and obscure old films I've recently seen. <br /><table><tbody><tr><td><br /><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010323/" target="_new"><br /><img src="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/cesare2.png" width="262" height="222"/></a> <br /></td><td> <span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">----</span><br /></td><td><span style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Buttons"><span class=" down" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link"></span></span><div style="spacing:10px 10px 10px 10px"><br /><br/><br />E.g. this handsome lad was shown for just a split second but Cesare - Dr. Caligari's Somnambulist is easily recognizable (especially if you've seen the film just three days ago)<br /><br/><br />(image: little-miss-nothing)<br /></div><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Then it got even deeper than that! The super-realistic recreation of the 1910s studio with all its workings is guaranteed to cause <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=brain%20boner" target="_new">mental arousal</a> and send shivers down the spine of every old film buff, leading to the ultimate culmination - the 3Dfied versions of the classics, on which I can only say:<br /><br /><table><tbody><tr><td><br /><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000417/" target="_new"><br /><img src="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Le_Voyage_dans_la_lune.jpg" /></a><br /></td><td> <span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">----</span><br /></td><td><span style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Buttons"><span class=" down" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link"></span></span><div style="spacing:10px 10px 10px 10px"><br /><br/><br/><br/><br />Take that, flat moon<br /><br/><br/><br/><br />(image: wikipedia)<br /></div><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />I wish the people that made these film were alive today to see what has become of film making - with voice, with colour, with 3D. And while on the topic - I have a word for the 3D critics that of headaches or whatever other excuses to accept the fact that films are changing. I guess some people complained of headaches when the character started talking. I think most 3D hating stems from some misconceptions. The most common one is failing to distinguish between the concept and current technology, which indeed is imperfect. Indeed, on 3D, at least the ones I've seen - some fast movement gets blurred and the whole experience requires more effort to consume, leading to feeling of tiredness. But that's just present-day technology, it's going to get way better. <br />Further, 3D doesn't have to be about whooshing past buildings, soaring for the sky, plunging to abysmal depths or whatever - very subtle scenes with little to no falling can be much more visually expressive in 3D. <br /><br />And yeah, I cried. I had to remove my 3D glasses to wipe my face three times. To my masculinity's defence I must say that it's quite a different situation when you lack the social inhibition involved with presence of other people (the other visitors in the theatre don't count, they are far enough and don't notice you at all, unless you masturbating loudly <a href="http://vimeo.com/12486190" target="_new">or something</a>) <br /><br />I haven't yet seen The Artist, so I'm not in a good position to comment on <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970179/" target="_new">Hugo</a> in light of the Oscars ceremony that will start in several hours. The Artist is expected to grab more statues and it probably deserves them - I can't wait to see it and I'm sure I'll love it. And yet, I'm Expect Hugo to remain closer to my heart as The Artist deals with the early years of Holywood - which I see as a commercial enterprise that has creates countless good films but not so many great ones, and for me Europe is the cradle of cinema. I'm giving it 10 stars on IMDB.<br /><br />By the way, I was thinking about an IMDB sync application, that posts updates on social networks when you rate or comment on a film. There is no official one and I haven't stumbled upon a 3rd party app. If there isn't one I might as well write it. Drop me a line if you know of such an app or if you also think it's a good idea to have it and let me know you'd expect of such an app.Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-13606111435921455662011-10-21T12:41:00.000-07:002011-10-23T13:42:47.840-07:00Before, they were coolYep, the grammar is correct, today the topic is people who used to be cool but later turned out to be monsters. Of course this thing is inspired by the very recent demise of <a href="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/gadd_dead.png">the good colonel</a> but it has a deeper background in my fascination with the lives of powerful leaders slash mass murderers.<div><br /></div><div>It's not that I respect them - quite the contrary, I'm utterly disgusted by violence and repression of basic liberties - but I find it truly amazing how some people start from a humble background, rise to immense power in time that's not enough for some of us to even get a degree; then they commit unimaginable atrocities and fall only to be committed to history. </div><div>Then, in our history books, we try to memorize the number of casualties caused by each major conflict or unscrupulous regime, and quite often don't even realize that each one of these twenty million had a story, had a family, had someone who loved them and probably didn't even get to know what exactly happened to them... which is probably better, as most died horrible deaths.</div><div><br /></div><div>But anyway, I know that most people appreciate the full extent of the brutality of genocide. What people very rarely take into account is that those same people that committed those unspeakable acts were, at least for some time, considered pretty cool and universally liked. Think about it - you can't get the resources to slaughter millions without having a unique charisma to drag your whole nation into the particular variety of sick shit you happened to be keen on. So, I have here a bunch of people who's dark side you know plenty about, but I want you to meet them before, when they were cool... and I have a picture of each one to help you out.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Muammar Gaddafi</b></div><div><br /></div><div>Of course that's the hot topic this week and I'm going to start with him. He's the easiest one anyway because I don't need to give you any background, you're probably hearing too much about him already. I'll just show you this picture:</div><table><tbody><tr><td><br /><img src="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/gadd3.png" height="262px" width="172px" /> <br /></td><td> <span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">----</span><br /></td><td><span style="display: block;" id="formatbar_Buttons"><span onmouseover="ButtonHoverOn(this);" onmouseout="ButtonHoverOff(this);" onmouseup="" onmousedown="CheckFormatting(event);FormatbarButton('richeditorframe', this, 8);ButtonMouseDown(this);" class=" down" style="display: block;" id="formatbar_CreateLink" title="Link"><img src="http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif" alt="Link" class="gl_link" border="0" /></span></span><div style="spacing:10px 10px 10px 10px"><br />It's a widely known fact that this guy only feels secure when he's surrounded by 200 <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/images/331706/0_22_122107_QaddafiGuards02.jpg">female personal guards</a> from his elite squad - what I didn't know until recently is that when he was younger he actually resembled someone I know who's nickname translates loosely to English as 'the handsome one'. I mean, look at him, he does look like a 70s film star.<br /></div><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div style="font-weight: bold;">Stalin</div><div><br />This guy killed, starved to death and in various other ways caused the deaths of > 20 million people, but yet, can you tell by this picture?<br /></div><table><tbody><tr><td><br /><img src="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Stalin.jpg" height="231px" width="172px" /> <br /></td><td> <span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">----</span><br /></td><td><br /><div style="spacing:10px 10px 10px 10px"><br />I mean, WTF? Here he looks as if he's the first hipster, wearing a keffiyeh before Yassir Arafat was even born!<br />Looking at this one, I can't help but assume that he had the top coiffeurs from all distant corners of the USSR maintaining his trademark moustache in his later years (there probably were a few that refused his generous offer, and he had to have them killed so that no one else has them)<br /></div><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br />I remember visiting the house next door as a kid - they had Stalin's portrait on the wall. Who's this person - I asked once. That's uncle Stalin, he's a very good man.<br />A few weeks later I uttered this phrase in the presence of my parents. WHO TOLD YOU THAT they both yelled at the same time. Walls emerged between our yards and I was forbidden ever to set foot in his place again.<br />As a student I told this story to a friend. Interesting thinking - he concluded - if Stalin, who killed millions, is a very good man, then how good is someone who's killed merely thousands?<br /><br /><div style="font-weight: bold;">Lenin</div><div><br />My impression is that Lenin never was the attention whore that Stalin became at his height - that's not backed by any serious research but this picture definitely supports it:<br /></div><table><tbody><tr><td><br /><img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Lenin_05d.jpg" height="217px" width="172px" /> <br /></td><td> <span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">----</span><br /></td><td><br /><div style="spacing:10px 10px 10px 10px"><br />You can't really imagine this humble boy to be the beast that Stalin was, can you? All he is guilty of is devoting his life to impose a utopian system that eventually didn't work (and never could've - but reasonable economic theories were - although invented by that time - not very popular) and cost the lives of millions. But hey, it was all driven by good intensions!<br /></div><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div style="font-weight: bold;"><div>Osama</div></div><div><br /></div>It's sometimes tempting to feel sympathetic to Osama Ben Laden, too - he was a fervent follower of a holy (albeit nonsensical and atrocious) cause, a leader of his people, lead a humble lifestyle in hiding - and he killed merely thousands (which, compared to Stalin, makes him a very very good man)!<br /><br />Further, when you see this picture you're likely to laugh even if you had loved ones killed in 9/11:<br /><br /><img src="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/like_this.jpg" height="291" width="420" /> <br /><br /><div style="font-weight: bold;">Hitler</div><br />I had to include Hitler in this post as he's probably the most well-known mass murderer, and by all means the most systematic one - yet I found it pretty hard to find him cool in any way, except for the widely known and over-exploited fact that he applied (unsuccessfully) to an art academy. But wait a second...<br /><br /><table><tbody><tr><td><br /><img src="http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00039/F_200705_May07ed_img_39143a.jpg" height="233px" width="172px" /> <br /></td><td> <span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">----</span><br /></td><td><br /><div style="spacing:10px 10px 10px 10px"><br />His failure to get admitted to The Academy of Fine Arts of Vienna for two years in a row might be well known - but not so much is the fact that he was sporting a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handlebar_moustache">handlebar </a>that will only be matched years later by Salvador Dali's!<br /></div><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div style="font-weight: bold;">Che</div><div><br />For a change, we should take a look at Che Guevarra, who doesn't exactly fit in the category presented so far but is anyway well worth mentioning. First, he is generally accepted to have played for the good guys - the fact that some nations have been struggled ever since to get rid of the same good guys didn't prevent the politically-dissilusioned (and dissoriented) youths of the 90s to revere him.<br />Another interesting aspect of his case is that he changed images quite wildely:<br /></div><br /><table><tbody><tr><td><br /><img src="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/che2.jpg" height="236px" width="172px" /> <br /></td><td> <span style="color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">----</span><br /></td><td><br /><div style="spacing:10px 10px 10px 10px"><br />Here is what he looked like at 21, studying medicine, before the commies poisoned his mind. It took him just <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318462/">one motorcycle trip </a>to turn into the savage revolutionary that we're so used to seeing on teen's t-shirts.<br /><br />Then, it took just a few successful revolutions to turn him into this:<br /></div><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><img src="http://www.bassheads.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/che.jpg" height="314" width="420" /><br /><div><br />Luckily for his devotees, he died before being able to become currupt by power and have more of these cleanly shaved pics to dilute his public image that he fought hard to establish. This is no joke, there are some many pictures of Che, you wouldn't believe it - images.google.com gives us 2.8 million pics for "Che Guevara" and merely 1.7 for "Marlon Brando" - who's fucking job was to have pictures of him taken (and hell, was he good at it) and lived twice as long.<br /></div>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-25514224674023871092011-01-28T07:41:00.000-08:002013-06-27T09:39:01.770-07:00Funny in the Head<div><div>I find it amazing how humanity ventures mind-bogglingly far into outer space, recreates history as far back as like 14.7 billion years ago and whatnot but still we know so very little about some aspects of ourselves. </div><div>A typical example is our loose grasp on the functioning of the human brain and scientist' pathetic attempts at explaining the weird (and if you are cynical enough - hilarious) things that can go wrong with it.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><b>Studying the Brain </b></span></div><div>A good start of getting introduced to some lesser known brain malfunctions is taking a look at the way our brains work was studied. It was known to man that the brain is responsible for thought as far back as Hippocrates. How did he get this insight, you may wonder. Well, it's very simple - he observed the problems that people with brain damage are having.</div><div>What some might find even more puzzling is that an ancient form of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanation">cranial surgery</a> has been performed since the Neolithic (end of the stone age, 9,000 BC) - people then believed that drilling holes in the skull relieves the pressure inside the head and cures certain diseases, and somehow managed to do it with their primitive tools.</div><div><br /></div><div>It turns out that this field advanced significantly with the industrialization of the world - and that's quite a straightforward relationship. The machines - and especially vehicles - are a steady source of humans with damaged brains and occasionally - with intact bodies. Studying these cases gives scientists an opportunity to study what exactly goes wrong with people with specific parts of their brains damaged and to thus infer what these parts might be responsible for.</div><div>At first they found it puzzling how people with what appears to be severe brain damage were able to get on with their lives surprisingly well. Take a look at this, for example:</div><br /><div> <img height="234px" width="172px" src="http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/2951/gage4.jpg" /> <img src="http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/347/gage2.jpg" /><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>So, both the guy and the rod are the same on both pictures, and surprisingly enough, the one on the left is done later. This guy (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage">Phineas Gage</a>) had his head literally impaled on the rod and not only survived but became sort of a celebrity.</div><div><br /></div><div> People with this kind of injuries, however, experience certain changes that reveal a lot about the function of the affected areas. Of course it didn't take scientists long to figure out that they might as well inflict this to animals and they diligently destroyed various parts of a wide range of animal brains and observed how animals reacted. Animal rights activists will probably find this extremely objectionable but one might argue what's a reasonable price tag for obtaining the knowledge about how our brain works. I personally will probably place it higher than experiments on animals and lower than actually destroying parts of people's brains.</div><div><br /></div><div>But anyway, let's not cut any animal's brains for now (unless it's for culinary purposes) and instead take a look at some intriguing conditions that occur naturally. Popular culture has formed vivid (although not scientifically correct) images of some "mainstream" diseases, like schizophrenia, insomnia, paranoia, etc. but there are some rare cases that are even more curious:</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><b>Unilateral Neglect</b></span></div><div>This is defined in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilateral_neglect">wikipedia </a>as "a deficit in attention to and awareness of one side of space", i.e. people either fail to percieve or ignore, or maybe just don't care about their left or right side.</div><div>It has different forms - ranging from rejecting the existence of one's own side of the body (resulting in patients complaining about a dead man's leg being stuck under their blanket) to inability to percieve anything on their, say, left hand side. </div><div>When some people with this condition are presented with a picture they can only perceive its right hand side. And it's getting even weirder - when they are presented with a well-known image, e.g. the face of a relative, that is turned upside down - they still only see the right side, although it's technically on their left, where they are expected to ignore everything. So this gives us an important clue - when we see an image that we recognize as upside down our brain rotates it first before starting to process the information. And no, this is not an excuse to upload sideways and upside down images on facebook - you'll still look like a moron if you do.</div><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span"><b>Alien Hand Syndrome</b></span></div><div>This is a neurological disorder, the sufferrers of which poses no control over one of their hands (or some other body part occasionally - not counting the penis, that's another phenomenon that's much more common). </div><div>In much the same way that some of the science fiction from the past predicted the world that we now live in, Kubrick predicted this condition with <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/">Dr. Strangelove</a>. In this cult film (one of my favourites) the character with the same name is a weapons science consultant for the US military with a rather naziish look and a hand that occasionally does the nazi salute seemingly out of his control.</div><div><br /></div><div>Incredible as it may sound, this later turned out to be a real desease and there are people who's one hand appears to be totally "under alien control". To make things worse, there are a lot of documented cases of the alien hand being really counter-productive like stubbing out one's own cigarettes, doing the classical "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovlCZvQGntU">stop hitting yourself</a>" bully manoeuvre, spontaneously undressing or slapping a colleague's butt. It kind of has the "coolness" factor of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourette's">Tourette's</a> but instead of swearing you are allowed to actually touch!</div><div><br /></div><div>Tourette syndrome is also a curious case but it was made well popular by South Park so I'm assuming you've heard about it and won't cover it here - after all I don't take seriously people who haven't seen all South Park episodes.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now back on the AHS - it's a reasonable thing to ask who then controls the alian hand (if you don't buy the story with actual aliens with remote controls slapping people's butts with your hand)? It turns out to be your other hemisphere! It's like each of your hemispheres has a separate consciousness and usually the left one is dominant and has the final say. Sometimes, however, the right hemisphere takes a hold on a limb and decides to disobey the ruling elite - and you definitely don't want any democracies and shit like that in the way you rule your body parts.</div></div>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-71408529441673734902011-01-12T12:09:00.000-08:002011-01-13T01:17:05.592-08:00Botnet Wars<div>Spam is an inherent part of our online lives and its impact has some weird implications.</div><div><br /></div><div>First, a few words on how spam works. Masses of infected computers form <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnet">botnets,</a> which are controlled by spammers. These formidable armies of zombies have been proven to number up to 30 million computers:</div><div><a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/26/bredolab_botnet_takedown/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/26/bredolab_botnet_takedown/</a></div><div>and who knows how big they actually get.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, аll those people that have tried to search for porn with google and have clicked on all the links, and as a result have loads of porn popups opening all the time are part of the botnets. When someone is unknowingly taken to the dark side it can be less obvious sometimes and quite likely some of you are sending spam right now, and in any case all of us have done so in the past. </div><div><br /></div><div>A BBC article got my imagination running while I was hanging proper stoned at a long queue at the post office last week (the usual mess that we get when there is 5cm of snow in London - delays that outlast the snow!):</div><div><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12126880">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12126880</a></div><div>So what happens is that suddenly there is a drop of 50% in global spam levels, but still experts detect that the botnets are alive and well - they just aren't sending spam! So, my stoned head was thinking, what the hell might they be doing with all this computing power in their hands? This is no joke, this is no <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@Home">SETI</a>, these are a hundred fucking million machines that are responsible for the spam that each and every one of us receives every day (indeed, you might have good spam filters and not have it in your inbox but they are still wasting your provider's resources). They could be predicting the global warming, looking for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson">Higgs</a>, running a simulation of WWIII or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster">FSM </a>knows what?</div><div><br /></div><div>Unfortunately, it turns out to be a lot less exciting :-( It appears to be just a marketing technique - 64% of email spam is about medical products which I guess are not much sought after around the holidays - actually all the spam that disappeared was v1agra and the like (probably in some rough correlation to the peak of cocaine usage), all the rest was still going, and it all went back to normal on 10th January:</div><div><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/10/email-spam-record-activity">http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/10/email-spam-record-activity</a></div><div><br /></div><div>So I guess spammers aren't taking over the world after all.</div><div>Not this time, at least.</div>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-19823745286777119792010-06-05T11:00:00.000-07:002012-10-10T13:42:12.614-07:00Strange beasts (and big ones, too)So which animal do you think is the biggest?<div><br /></div><div>Some may say it's the elephant but I guess people that dumb are not likely to end up reading this. Most will agree it's the blue whale, which is a perfectly valid answer. However, the true geeks may instead reply with "what exactly does 'the biggest' mean? by what measure?". Which is, in this case, a very good point.</div><div><br /></div><div>It turns out that if you take length into account, the title is disputed between two species, none of them being the said ocean-dwelling trip-loving mammal.</div><div><br /></div><div>Most biologist agree that the longest animal is, guess what, a jellyfish! The lion's mane jellyfish's (<i>Cyanea capillata</i>) tentacles can get up to 35 meters long. It's diameter is mere 2.5 metres, rather slim, compared to the blue whale, but still a hell of a jellyfish - definitely not one that you'd like to encounter when swimming, unless you're in a later stage of scuba diving freakness. It's actually totally unlikely as the most formidable specimens live in the ocean depths far north. Thus, they are quite elusive but some remarkable ones have been photographed:</div><div><br /></div><br /><div align="center"><br /><img src="http://i36.tinypic.com/ou6vs5.jpg" /><br /><br /><img width="400" height="300" src="http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/photos/lionsmane2.jpg" /><br /></div><br /><br /><div>Although I hate close encounters with even modestly sized Black Sea jellyfishes, I will be thrilled to see one of these beauties... from a safe distance (although actually they are not deadly).<br /></div><div><br />Some may wonder why the hell would a jellyfish, be it a 2.5 metres wide one, need shitloads of 30 metre long tentacles. In fact, they need them for feeding and these beasts sure need a lot of food as they grow to these formidable sizes in less than a year! Its life cycle is annual, much like peas and weed.</div><br /><div><br /></div><div>And if you think that this is weird, just wait and see who's the other contestant for the title "longest creature ever to walk/crawl/swim the earth/oceans". It is, in fact, a worm! A worm less than a centimetre thick! The bootlace worms (quite understandably called <i>Lineus longissimus</i>) have been measured to grow to 30 metres, and are believed to be able to get to 60. I'm pretty sure this thing has never seen most of it's own body!</div><div><br /></div><div>After a storm in 1864, one of these creatures measuring 55m was washed ashore. However, their bodies are quite elastic and under extreme circumstances can stretch up to 5 times their original length, so it's a bit tricky to measure and thus the title is disputed.</div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"><br /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre">O</span>n pictures the beast looks more disgusting rather than impressive, I hope that leaving them for the end won't ruin your fascination with the powers of mother nature:</div><div><br /></div><br /><div align="center"><br /><img width="400" height="300" src="http://www.carolscornwall.com/On%20the%20Beach/Worm-Lineus%20longissimus12-03-09.jpg" /><br /></div><div aligh="center"><br /><img width="400" height="300" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2177/2169551899_0667313f6c.jpg" /><br /></div>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-56237611898738827462010-05-11T17:38:00.000-07:002012-10-10T13:38:55.691-07:00Politics - dirty business or science<div>The topic of politics never ceases to be current but around the British general elections it's getting even more attention than usual. Debates come and go, some people try to evaluate policies, others have firm voting decisions based on questionable foundation but most don't give a fuck. Until recently I was part of that group as well. However, as I see no point in being in a majority (there are enough people there already, right) I got interested in politics. The matter turned out to be interesting and quite complicated.</div><div><br /></div><div>As we all know, democracy is not perfect but it's superior to all other systems we've tried by any reasonable comparison. And by reasonable I mean one that is based more on quality of life rather than military conquests. Despite their flaws, democratic societies never had to erect fences to keep their people in ;-)</div><div>And believe me, I have thought a lot about what kind of system would be better and I don't even know why I'm doing it as a lot of people much smarter than me have pondered about this problem for quite some time. Neither them nor I have come up with any solutions and we can only hope that one day we'll have a superior form of government, some system of power distribution that in hindsight will seem to be a simple and obvious solution and yet, much like inventing the wheel, it will take us ages to actually figure it out.</div><div><br /></div><div>But I'm not suggesting we should just accept our imprefect system and wait for the next one to be invented - democracy in the way it's being applied currently is far less perfect that what it might be. One obvious problem with democracy is that government's need to be popular to get elected and stay in power. And I'm not even talking of the ridiculous amounts of money and energy that are spent on election campaigns - that's the inherent cost of maintaining a democractic system. Even governments that have the popular support to rise to power can't afford to establish policies that are efficient but unpopular. Unfortunately the masses don't understand macroeconomics and plenty of other issues so well so they often support policies that are actually not good for them in the long term. I'll give my humble support for democracy by being vocal about such unpopular opinions that could end up on politicians' agendas should they receive some more attention, but more on this later.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are lots of examples how policies that make sense never get passed because they are unpopular, I'll just remind you about a few of them and maybe write in more detail about others in a later post. A classic example is the debate regarding Marijuana prohibition - it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol, still most governments prefer to leave a multi-billion market (e.g. £3.5 bln a year in the UK - http://www.ukcia.org/culture/users.php) in the hands of the mafia, only to be re-invested into killings, teenage prostitutes and other much less tolerable activities.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another example that might not be so classic but is a good one nevertheless, is the case with trade unions. This one gets me really agitated! For fuck's sake, people, trade unions were cool decades ago! They made sense during the industrial revolution, and in the communist states as well - but so did everything that takes even a miniscule amount of power away from the party. Nowadays, trade unions serve the sole purpose of generating ridiculous shitstorms when, for instance, big companies don't do well and need to lay off the least productive 10% of their staff. But no, the trade union won't let this happen! They threaten with strikes that might make the company go bust (or get bailed out) even sooner just so that same 10% of incompetent workers and outright lazy fuckers can get their salaries (on a minimum wage set by the union!) until their employer agonizes into bankruptcy.</div><div>And there is another important thing that the unions do - gain power. Little by littly they develop more and better tools to hold the employers hostage, until the whole thing scales way out of proportion, as in the case with British Airways cabin crew, represented by the Unite union, that happens to have 111 of it's members as Labour MPs! And while this travesty takes place no one seems to be seriously bothered, and people still percieve the worker unions as the good guys and the companies that pay their salaries as evil.</div><div><br /></div><div>By contemplating these two examples we get to the next big issue in politics - the difference between the left and right. The first example deals with a leftist policies - liberal political formations, at least in theory, should be more likely to support legalization, while the latter one represents more of a rightist case. This leads us to the fundamental changes differences that the left and right are supposed to have - the left support personal freedom (i.e. gay rights, relaxed immigration laws, etc) but restrict financial freedom (licenses, import/export quotas) and the right are vice versa.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is just in theory, however. In modern day politics the difference between left and right in terms of fundamental policies is kind of blurred, and sometimes even non existent. In the UK the mainstream parties' economic policies tend to gravitate around some form of neoliberalism. Tony Blair himself wrapped it up nicely - he declared that "we're all Thacherites now", even though he was a labour PM and Thatcher is a conservative pillar. When you take a look at the planned spending cuts ahead of the British general elections you can see a similar picture - Labour pledged to keep government spending more or less the same, Tories wanted to cut £20bln but finally settled on £6bln in the Lib-Tory coalition. Sounds a lot? Well, in fact it's less than a percent of the £2.674 trillion UK GDP, this could hardly count for a significant shift in policies. It's like subtracting £467.84 from the money I've earned in my whole life.</div><div><br /></div><div>So why are we witnessing this trend of narrowing the gap between left and right? I can think of two possible reasons. For sure there is an optimal set of policies that ensure best outcome given the current circumstances, and maybe the scientific basis of political decision making is advanced enough so they can actually define this set reasonably well. Or maybe they just figured out what sells well to the voters. In any way it's a combination of both.</div><div><br /></div><div>Even more bizarre is the case in Bulgaria - in 2008 the Socialist prime minister Sergey Stanishev introduced the 10% proportional tax - the lowest flat tax rate in the world! But how come, this is not "fair". I mean the socialist, take-from-the-rich-give-to-the-poor fair, not the everyone-gets-what-he-deserves fair - the meaning that comes much more naturally to me. It's funny how leftist campaigns abuse that word, it can imagine how appealing labour and lib dem pledges would be to this particular kind of old people in post communist countries that still support the regime, had they bothered to learn English.</div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe it seems that I'm supporting some right-wing political organization, so maybe it's about time to present my political views. I am convinced that there is an approach to politics that combines the best of both worlds, or at least gets rid of the worst. If we combine the economic liberty of the right (accepted as the right way to go even by some leftist leaders) and the personal liberty of the left (accepted as the right way to go by everyone in his right mind) then we may actually end up with a decent system. This is call libertarianism and I'll write tons about it in the future (not too much to get you bored with it - just enough so I convince you that it actually makes sense).</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm pretty sure that most people don't have a clear picture of what exactly libertarianism entails, and I guess that common gut associations label libertarianism as either radical or idealistic, such brands to exist. But the strain of libertarian society that I'm nurturing in my mind is rather pragmatic - it's about establishing policies backed by serious research, no matter the public opinion. I have delved into various fields as deep as I can, and if one could ever abstract from election campaigns and media shitstorms, and so far it appears that the liberal policies, in both personal and economic aspects, are actually the ones that make sense. Of course this claim needs the quotations and numbers to be credible and I definitely need to write a bit about it.</div><div><br /></div><div>As a conclusion, I'd like to present my guru Ross Kelley - the guy who opened my eyes about libertarianism, a geek rockstar and a party member himself. This guy is formidable - he's written tons of amazing essays on all topics you can imagine (and some more that you've never thought of), e.g. religion, history, feminism, Einstein's relativity, philosophy, politics. And the best of all -his writing style is witty,eloquent and easy going, won't scare you away with technobabble but ultimately will takes you to the hardcore concepts. Most of his work is published on a website run by him - The proceedings of the Friesian school, <a href="http://friesian.com/">http://friesian.com/</a></div><div>The website is not well organized, most of the time you can find what you need by clicking around but I suspect some of the gems can only be found through links within other articles on the site. This guy is so mind-bogglingly intelligent and well-informed and still he hasn't been elected. Still it's not so bad in the states - I don't think that either Bulgaria or the UK have a credible libertarian party. Maybe establishing one is my altruistic reason for existence but still it would be easier if someone else does it for me - when this day comes I'll switch my mind to a newer voting algorithm - "vote for the one you like most" instead of "vote for the one you dislike the least".</div>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-81078114361761396072010-04-26T14:57:00.000-07:002010-05-22T22:17:18.798-07:00Time management is no jokeI'm pretty sure the notion of time management is somehow vaguely defined for a lot of people, at least it used to be so for me. When I was first year in university not only the concept of systematic, results-driven time management was alien to me but not a single trace of time management was to be found in my activities.<div><br /></div><div>It's not just that I wasn't a natural talent in time management - I was, in fact, a disaster. Now that I think of it, I wasn't doing anything sensible all day and I had this mindset that I don't have enough time to get things done while actually I had all the time in the world; I was just wasting it. </div><div><br /></div><div>Somehow my life evolved dramatically over the next several years and now I'm entangled in a sophisticated web of projects and various activities, and somehow I handle it reasonably well. But now is not the time to brag about achievements as the post is not about me but the nature and benefits of time management. I'm just starting with a case study I know quite well ;-)</div><div><br /></div><div>Bear with me just a bit, I need to rant about what exactly time management is for some more and then I'll give you some practical advices. First and foremost, there is this misconception that systematic time management is for the kind of achievement freaks that try to either win billions, become heads of states or lead revolutions, people that harness enormous amounts of passion and energy to pursue overly ambitious goals. This is simply not the case. If you are the type of person that would rather prefer to work two hours a day and get stoned the rest of the time - good time management is the only thing that can allow you to lead this lifestyle sustainably. You know, kind of like the do-work-first-get-stoned-next thing but taken to the next level.</div><div><br /></div><div>Actually most time management gurus don't advocate zealous commitment to achievements but would rather advise to work reasonable hours and spend enough time with family, friends and the pointless activities you like doing. One of the giants on who's shoulders we stand is Randy Pausch, who has two remarkable lectures on YouTube:</div><div><br /></div><div>The first one is a talk he did when he was diagnosed with cancer and told he's got no more than 6 months to live and is called, as you might expect, The Last Lecture (74 minutes):</div><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo</a></div><div>The idea may seem depressing but this is one of the most positive and motivating things you can find on the internet.</div><div><br /></div><div>The other one is about time management. Although it doesn't cover the subject extensively it's very well presented and practically-oriented (76 minutes):</div><div><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTugjssqOT0</a></div><div><br /></div><div>I don't expect anyone seeing the two right now :-D but bookmark them for sure! If you don't use bookmarks - now's the time to start (or just write it on a sheet of paper, spray-paint it on the wall or whatever you do to store URLs)</div><div><br /></div><div>A classic example of the difference time management makes is in the "case study" supporting the Parkinson's Law (which states that <i>Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion</i>). Parkinson presents the following interesting case:</div><div>Consider the routine of an old lady that wants to send a postcard to her daughter.</div><div>She makes herself some tea, carefully unfolds the newspaper on a table, checks the forecasts and ponders on the decision whether to take an umbrella or not for some time. Half an hour is gone already. Then she spends some more time getting ready to go out, does her hair and in just ten more minutes she knows which coat she'll be wearing.</div><div>She then goes to the post office and discusses several options that she considers suitable for the occasion with the sales assistant, forcing the girl to carefully hide her boredom behind the iron mask of politeness. On the way back the old lady buys some crackers because she'll need them for her next task - writing the wishes! It will take here at least an hour and she could never endure it without some more tea and crackers. </div><div><br /></div><div>So... you get the idea, it takes her a whole day to send the damn postcard. Now imagine the city banker doing the same thing in a 15-minute lunch break. The savings from efficiency are just fascinating, and the power of procrastination even more so but more on this later.</div><div><br /></div><div>So how does time management help to get more things done? Basically, the battle with your time is led on two main fronts - organizational and motivational. </div><div><br /></div><div>I'll start with the less interesting one - the organizational front. It's about the how you schedule and prioritize your tasks and how efficiently you do each of them. Unfortunately there is no silver bullet in this aspect of time management (there is one for the motivational aspect so bear with me some more). You just need to analyse your activities and spot opportunities for improvement. Once you develop this mindset and attention to the efficiency of what you're doing these start to emerge. Some common examples include:</div><div>- Using two monitors if you work extensively on a computer, quite often while you're doing something you need to take a look at something else and the time lost in all the alt-tabs is just the start</div><div>- Getting a handsfree - while not do some routine tasks while on the phone with mum</div><div><br /></div><div>The list expands quite naturally if you foster a results-driven approach, which is not some fancy buzzword as it may sound but is actually a rather simple technique:</div><div>- define goals</div><div>- make plans how to attain them</div><div>- follow the plan firmly, update if necessary</div><div>- win or fail</div><div>- draw conclusions</div><div><br /></div><div>The last step is the the most often overlooked but it's very important. No matter if you win or lose, always look back and consider what you did wrong and what you did right.</div><div><br /></div><div>However, the first step is arguably even more important and getting it right ventures into the psychological aspect of time management. Altering your mindset is your strongest tool in achieving more and it's surprisingly easy to do it!</div><div><br /></div><div>Everything you do is committed, directly or indirectly, to some goal. Everyone has desires that keep them moving and guide their activities. Indeed, sometime iyou may feel that you're living day by day, but even then you're pursuing some goal, be it getting high all day, chasing girls around, frenzied dedication to gaming or even all at once. There is something that makes you feel fulfilled and you want to do it more and more. But sometimes it's way out of reach. Quite often, you need to go through hell to get it - do a boring job for years until you master it, behaving like society requires you, gradually turning from a rebel to a conformist or something even more frightening.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, if you need to crawl trough five football fields of shit (bonus points if you get film reference) there's only one way to do it and preserve your sanity in the same time - to have a clear vision of your <b>elevating goal</b> all the time and <b>exactly how each activity contributes to it</b>.</div><div>You need to know how every single piece of shit you crawl through helps you get the things you desire. This will not only empower you to break crawling-on-shit speed records but will make you feel much better and more motivated. </div><div><br /></div><div>Keeping the relevancy of your current task to your overall goal has one nice side effect - if no matter how hard you try you still fail to see how this particular task contributes to achieving your dreams, maybe it's just not worth doing? Sometimes it's hard, like cleaning you room and all this stuff you know you'll never need but somehow you feel attached to and don't want to throw away. But some of it has to go - that's an important part of time management, not only doing things right but doing the right things as well! I'm not talking about the things you really enjoy doing/having - just those that don't really matter but you normally won't bother to throw them out of your life.</div><div><br /></div><div>The best part is that once you get this goal-oriented thinking it settles firmly in your mind and it's a self-reinforcing loop - the more steps you take towards your goal, the more conclusions you make from your experience, the more motivated you become to advance even further. </div><div><br /></div><div>For a conclusion I think it's a good idea to mention the holy grail of time management - the todo list. It is somewhere between the psychological and organizational aspects because it not only helps make planning and execution more efficient but also reinforces the results-driven mindset.</div><div><br /></div><div>There are lots of approaches to keeping a todo list and which one is most suitable is highly individual but there is one golden rule about your todo list - <b>you must have it</b>, and you must keep it easily accessible all the time. Apart from the obvious benefit that it keeps you from forgetting things it makes it easier to arrange and prioritize tasks and most importantly - it enables you to keep track of progress. If you fail to accomplish your plan for the day - it makes it it easier to analyse why. If you did everything reasonably well, then you know about how much you can handle and will be able to do more realistic plans in the future.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is no best way to do a todo list - there are dedicated software applications, with reminders, tasks dependencies, etc. but something as simple as a text file or excel table can do the job equally well. Hell, even a sheet of paper can be used as a todo list; or if you fancy outdated data storage media so much you can even try carving your tasks in stone ;-)</div><div><br /></div><div>OK, enough for today... after all this post is not directly related to my primary goals. As a matter of fact, I'm using it as a tool. I like writing and I'm quite enthusiastic about establishing this blog but I have other, much more pressing things on my hands. But both this time and the last, I had a number of things to finish before I post. Having this immediate reward for being productive really makes a difference :-D if there wasn't this incentive I guess I would still be lingering halfway here in terms of progress.</div><div><br /></div><div>And for the most patient readers that are still with me - here's the other golden rule of time management - do the most unpleasant first! Once you eat the shit everything is sooo much easier.</div><div>And for the ones that read just the beginning and the end - I know you're cheating ;-) but don't worry, everyone does it. But seriously though, bookmark me and check it out some time ;-)</div>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6899884213177913692.post-57536729342849899722010-04-19T15:42:00.000-07:002010-04-20T13:35:56.460-07:00The MADness of nuclear disarmament<div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100415.gif"></a><div>It's kind of natural to get agitated about the issue of nuclear arms. And I felt naturally inspired to write about it by a compelling set of circumstances. With an ambition to start a controversial geeky blog I could hardly pick a first topic better than a threat that could wipe out the whole world, or at least as we know it.</div><div>And the moment is ripe to bring this issue to attention. Russia and the US finally signed another nuclear arms reduction treaty - <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8607985.stm">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8607985.stm</a>.</div><div>At the same time, the evil genius Zach Weiner from <a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/">SMBC</a> also addressed the the problem, albeit in a humorous way:</div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 238); -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: underline; "><img src="http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100415.gif" border="0" alt="" style="display: block; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 450px; height: 2938px; " /></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#0000EE;"><br /></span></div><div>At first sight, it may seem that the author has entertained the idea just for it's comic value but this has a much deeper meaning as will be revealed shortly.</div><div><br /></div><div>My fascination with the prospect of nuclear war actually started earlier. It was thanks to this girl that I had the delight to spend some time with, that not only was gorgeous but also fell asleep during <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/">Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb</a> for three consecutive nights, so guess what I did - watched it three times :-D it's not a film that you can stop and go asleep, no matter what. And it takes about three times to get both the bigger picture and all the little things.</div><div>As I understood later, Kubrick read 50 books about nuclear war to fully grasp the concept. I definitely haven't gone so far but still I got really excited about the issue and more importantly, I arrived at some conclusions that may now seam totally obvious but can be counter-intuitive at first.</div><div><br /></div><div>The most important one is pretty simple. Nuclear disarmament is dangerous. Here is why:</div><div><br /></div><div>At first one may wonder why do the US and Russia need so much nuclear weapons a make so much of a fuss about reducing it to 1500 warheads. After all this is enough to destroy the world many times over. </div><div>However, the nuclear peace worldwide during the cold war, and to a much lesser degree even now, was/is supported by the so called MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) strategy. The major nuclear powers (US and Russia) have nuclear arsenals advanced enough so that if one of the powers attacks first the other one has the capability to destroy the other entirely, this way discouraging the other to attack in the first place.</div><div>Yes, I'm totally serious - <a href="http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj97/win97/parrin.html">http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/apj/apj97/win97/parrin.html</a></div><div><br /></div><div>It's quite clear that the drama about the signing of the recent treaty is more of a diplomatic dance rather than serious strategic negotiations. But at some point one of the sides passes a critical point and longer possesses the coveted second strike capability. Some even think this has happened already, e.g. Keir Lieber and Daryl Press ("The Rise of U.S. Nuclear Primacy," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006) stated that "the United States could carry out a nuclear first strike on Russia and would have a good chance of destroying every Russian bomber base, submarine, and ICBM." Not everyone agrees but one of the sides will pass the tipping point sooner or later, and I'm convinced that the Russian side is more likely to do so first, knowing the chronic mismanagement that plagues the state-sponsored soviet-turned-Russian enterprises. </div><div><br /></div><div>Who passes the critical point first is not relevant - the big issue is the fragility of the balance should global tensions arise considerably to levels close to the ones from the cold war. And another big issue is that this strategy works only if in control of nuclear weapons are states with rational governments i.e. ones that are totally unlikely to undertake steps that will wipe their whole nations out.</div><div><br /></div><div>And some more controversy for the ending - what should we do if a nation or organization that does not qualify as "rational" is about to acquire nuclear weapons? I'd rather say that we need to stop them at any cost; being convinced pacifist, I would support a conventional military strike, given that it's practical for preventing such an outcome and there are not other options.</div><div>There are so many things that can go wrong with a non-democratic state with nuclear capabilities. Corrupt governments may fail to prevent terrorists from obtaining a bomb; hastily developed nuclear programs can be error prone - after all in 1983 the world was this close to a nuclear war because of a false alarm from the Russian early warning system that leads to an automated response. The colonel that deviated and stopped the attack - Stanislav Petrov, is widely regarded as preventing a war.</div><div>And this was a well-funded system developed by a team of leading scientists. Now imagine what the dodgy North Korean nuclear technologies are capable of!</div>Stefan Kiryazovhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08737755259551216058noreply@blogger.com1