Category: personal AnGoL

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Shooting Stars

This made me reminisce the time I went to a beach somewhere in Quezon province. I vividly remember my friends being amazed at how many shooting stars we were seeing each minute it was around 1-5 shooting stars per minute. I told them that in the province it was normal to see that many shooting stars. Someone countered that he was also from the province but he never noticed. I countered back with , because you never looked, and he realized I was right. Most people just don’t notice, some people don’t spend the time looking out to the stars or even smelling the flowers and all the other cliches. It is said that cliches are
from Jason Kottke here:

Enlightened
posted May 23, 2008 at 10:56 am

At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population had abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that only ended with the dawn of space exploration.

That’s Carl Sagan in Contact from 1985. The effects of light pollution were documented in the New Yorker last August.

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I Dont Have The Time! part 1

I used to watch hours upon hour of television, back in college I used to record the shows I wouldn’t be able to catch using my now wrecked but still loved and remembered VCR that allowed me to watch the telenovelas shown during class hours and to watch ABS-CBN (Pangako Sa Iyo, etc) whilst I recorded the GMA7 shows(mostly Kung Mawawala Ka).  The VCR allowed me to compress 5 hours of television into roughly a little below 3 hours (damn those commercials).  I wasted a lot of time then. So the article below hits home hard. do read the whole article.

Excellent read on Cognitive Surplus.

by Clay Shirky from here:

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

………

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.


And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.


Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

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Delusions and Inaction

Often times we want something to be true, we want our world view to be the truth when it would be infinitely better for us if we accept and to just try to change the world we know. It is of little use to keep on pretending about something when it limits our actions on making our aim to be reality!
from Eugene Wallingford’s blog Knowing and Doing
But my favorite passage came near the end, in response to the question, “Do you believe in magic?”

Hopefully I’m a nice guy, but I’m a really grumpy scientist, and in the end, I’m a reductionist. So if you can show me, [I’ll believe it]. As a scientist, I have to be grumpy about everything and be able to be willing to believe anything. … If you care what you believe, you should never be in the investigative fields — ever. You can’t care what you believe; you just have to care what’s out there. And when you do that, your bandwidth is as wide as that sounds, and the rigor … has to be as narrow as as the biggest bigot you’ve ever seen. Both are resident in a scientist’s mind at the same time.

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What Once Was Stupid To Me!

I got an email from a friend on a research about longterm effects of sugar replacements (aspartame research here) on mice. One of the things that struck me about the research was that the author was going against established, testing practice, and did not use genetically close mice as test subjects, His rational was that it is not life like so why should he experiment on just one type/set of genes. i didn’t understand his reasons well, and judged his research with a little more bias against his methods. I think I finally understand what he was trying to say.
from here:
Like what? Alan Kirman, of the Univerity of Aix-Marseille, France, a much-decorated veteran; and Robert Axtell, of George Mason University, an up-and-comer; laid out the case for a point of view known as “agent-based” modeling. They describe this as a “bottom-up” approach to thinking about economic phenomena, made practicable by modern computers, in which people are heterogeneous and react directly with each other; in which their information is local and their behavior governed by rules of thumb; and in which the aggregate behavior of the system emerges from behavior of individuals rather than a “representative” agent.” Simulations of this sort by Thomas Schelling, which had formally identified the “tipping point” phenomenon (a fairly concrete discovery, after all) and elucidated mechanisms that give rise to residential segregation, had been laboriously worked out on a checkerboard in the 1970s, Axtell noted; with today’s models, 5 million more intricate calculations can be performed in an instant.
With new tools and ever more powerful computers and algorithms at our disposal it is really a shame that advanced techniques in doing experiments and simulations would take a long time before gaining widespread use. It saddens me to think how many lives could have been saved if different fields just communicated more often. Lets just blame our overspecialized world!

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Road Less Travelled and an apology

I may be day dreaming, I may be rewriting my story I may be delusional, I’m not really sure. But I’ve always tried to take the road less traveled. I apologize to the people who  are hurt along the way. I ask forgiveness for causing you pain, Not for what I have done, but the pain it caused you. I never meant to hurt anyone. It just had to happen the way it did!
Road Less Traveled
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth
Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference
– Robert Frost

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Longing For May 12!

May 12 is a red calendar day for me. Back to everyday blogging, back to java (goodbye C#, joke lang , C# I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship, Java, C don’t poke C#’s eyes!)

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Short Rant 20080412

Read this article on the newsweek site about the world’s superclass. link here
What hit me the most were the spelling errors and some of the nuances it lacked.
As someone who writes for himself , I’ve been at odds with the rewrite rewrite advice you often get from successful writers, I simply lack the time. But when I read stuff from people who are paid to write, who have editors, fact checkers and, other quality control people helping them, this really irritates me!

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People Want You To Care (Wise Words 2008 03 30)

from Seth Godin’s blog:
Do you know what most people want? They want you to care.
I’ve been wanting to rant lately with the the present
Lately this has been on my mind a lot. I’ve always been more aware than the next guy, add to this the fact that I am a self assessed half-assed know it all (KIA for short) that I engender the mockery of some of my friends on a majority of times. I have this trouble of thinking that the problems of most people are just easy problems to solve. My awareness allows me to see that a problem exists and my arrogance is making me believe that If it was me I’d have no problem at all.
The fact is that most of the time what people want is someone to fawn and adore them and a small percentage of the time they want someone to really care. It’s like (this is such an issue for me that I am having trouble composing my thoughts, to prevent a rambling post I think I’ll cut this up to smaller more focused posts.)
But that really isn’t the truth. The truth is that like love, people who really care for you are hard to find. In my life I could count probably less than the sum of the number of fingers and toes that I have, and I am 24 years old, meaning I spent a lot of my years (whole years maybe more) without finding people who truly care.  And I think that I maybe a little below average here but not by much (I Hope!), What am I intimating but not quite saying? People have spent boatloads of there time with people who mostly don’t care and when you spend so much time with people who dont care you tend to forget how much more satisfying it is to be truly cared for and we begin to believe the fake caring/fawning/adoration/fame that is given us is the same as the one we are searching for.
In terms of diets or food and nutrition we have been eating junk food for too long that we have forgotten how much more nourishing and sating real food is.
What does this mean fore us ? That we should not settle for anything less than what we really need. We must resist taking the easy path we must persevere for only that way may we reliably find what we are looking for.
The nourishment of the soul and hear that seeks to be loved / cared for so much.
(too be continued….)
Wise words indeed.

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Good People Dont Need Resumes (take two)

Follow Up to: Good People Dont Need Resumes (my take)
The fact that in our country the resume is still very important for a lot of jobs even if they barely look at it, or that good people are still required to do this mind numbing task is a good opening for people to do things differently. Be the change. If we want people to judge us by the things we have or have not done then start doing this to ourselves. Judge our lives with what we have or have not done, not through wortless job titles or descriptions but through the websites, programs, designs, writing we have done and not through the high fallutin words that describe resumes in the words of steve yegge wankers.