Ninth Post (late night ramblings)

A few days ago I had a sobering experience that reminded me just how quickly a good day can turn into a bad day. One moment everything is going your way and within seconds your mind is fraught with fear and anxiety, completely forgetting the safe feeling of security you just possessed. It makes me wonder about the validity of things that you feel. How real are they if they can be overturned and forgotten in mere seconds. Anyways, it's been a while since I've had an experience like that, and since I've been having terrible luck ever since.

The picture up top is a funny interpretation of the free will/determinism issue, and has absolutely nothing to do with anything I was saying earlier. I just found it amusing. (FYI Wikipedia has an excellent entry on free will if anybody is as crazy as me and likes to read that kind of stuff.)

The picture on the left is interesting to me because this seems like exactly what happened. To anyone unfamiliar, Sisyphus was a dude who stirred up some shit and got punished by the gods. They gave him the task of rolling a boulder up a hill and then they'd push it down so he would have to start over again (not sure what he did but that punishment is pretty hilarious). So basically, a Sisyphean task is one that is impossible.

A lot of people have been saying that Obama has not done anything yet, to which I reply with the following graph. Now, I don't really like discussing political issues, but every once in a while something worth mentioning comes up.
I'd like to end this blog with a video interview of one of the coolest thinkers of our time. Richard Feynman is a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and is amazing at explaining complicated concepts in simple everyday terms. Here is one that particularly caught my attention because he was basically unable to explain magnets and the magnetic force, and he gives a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why.



Okay that's all I have for now, its 3:30am and I want to sleep. Peace out internet.

PS. This is kinda cool
Onion News Story: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

8th Post (The Dude won!)

It's been a while since my last post (due to schoolwork/chronic laziness), but it has since come to my attention that I have at least 1 devoted reader, so I will try to keep these posts as regular as a well functioning colon.

Lots of things have happened since my last post, but first thing's first. Congratulations to Jeff Bridges for FINALLY winning an Oscar for The Big Lebowski. The Dude lives on!

As I've mentioned before, I have a procrasination problem, and I've been using this very true picture to motivate myself
Anyways, now that we've got the pleasantries out of the way, on to more stimulating crap. I saw another fascinating Ted Talk that I just had to share with you guy(s).



In this video, Daniel Kahneman (from wikipedia: "notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology.", so you know he's one cool Jew.) talks about our experiences vs. our memories. He explains that there are two separate selves, the remembering self, and the present self (who only exists for about 3 seconds at a time) and the discrepancies between experiences and our memories of them. An interesting point he brings up is the lack of reason for how much weight we put on our memories, when in reality we spend much less time remembering something than actually experiencing it. Seeing as he is an economist first, these ideas must have come from an economical point of view, yet its very interesting to see his breakdown of our psychological processes and mannerisms with regards to something as fundamentally important and scarily uncertain as memory.

Before I finish, I wanted to remind people just how sexually kinky the Ancient Romans were. Most people probably don't realize that Ancient Romans were much more open sexually than today's culture, (for example, they had no problems with gays, but I guess today that can just be blamed on religion. Which btw leads to stupid shit like this) which is interesting because it begs the question "Why?".

Okay I'm done for now internet, see you next time.

***Bonus Picture: (I know you'll appreciate this Anton)

PS. This is kinda cool
Potential Tax Revenue From Weed Infographic