About The Name

So I was reading about the history of the Beach Pneumatic, and then later I wasn't, and shortly after that I remembered that I had all these things I wanted to write down where other people could see them. Apparently this idea had been had before, because I noticed on the way in that a couple other people had set up blogs too.

So ignoring the fact that I'll never have any readers, I set about trying to think of a name that they would remember. And eventually I thought of 'Mnemometer' and it sounded kinda nifty so I kept it.

The observant among you will have noticed that both 'Mnemometer' and 'Pneumatic' start with consonant-n. This is a coincidence, and I didn't notice myself until I wrote the first sentence of this post.

Amaze your friends! Confound your enemies!

The homework for my stats class last night involved taking an ESP test and recording our results so we could analyze the distribution of binomial systems. So I looked through the page source and wrote the following bits of javascript:

ESP: The basic solver. Reads through the randomly filled array and sets each guess to the correct card.
Circles : Sets all the correct answers to the circle symbol, then sets all your guesses to the circle.
Six : Sets all the answers and guesses to the nonexistant symbol 6. The result is a page full of check marks next to empty places where teh correct answers should be.

Drag those links to your bookmarklets bar (only tested in Firefox, but a) they should work in IE, and b) why aren't you using Firefox in the first place?), go to the test page and click on the script of your choice. The proper cards should become highlighted. Enter your name etc. if you want to and then hit OKAY. (With Six, you get the added bonus of seeing the 'All guesses have been made' alert over obviously unguessed trials). Now show the results to the heathen unbelievers. Enjoy!

These are quite trivial little bits of javascript, but nevertheless I am very proud of them, just because I figured them out and made them work all on my own. I got to class early and showed them to my teacher ([Nobilg], for those of you who have read my previous posts) and he liked them too. We hatched a crafty little plot to, as my classmate Drew would say, "pull one over on" the rest of the class. When we made a histogram of everyone's results, I called out "23!" (I got two wrong on purpose), and showed everyone the results. One or two people started to almost believe that I had some sort of crazy computer-affinity-based ESP, and the rest were mostly quite confused. It was awesome.

Teacher + Livejournal = Followup

It's all settled down quite a bit, now. I've had two long talks and a number of emails with him, about the nature of teaching, and whether we are 'friends' or not. Clearly, we have a lot in common (games, game design, computers, logic/math puzzles, and much more) and we get along well, but it's not like I'd go hang out as his house on the weekends. His view of the matter, which I quite like, is that while I'm in school we are 'proto-friends', a sincere enough relationship but one that does not go much further than the school day, and which is not quite as open or reciprocal as a normal friendship would be. After I graduate, I become a possible regular friend, and we see how things go from there.

It is nice but rather odd to discuss one's friendship with an adult with that adult. One usually doesn't even discuss the nature of one's friendships even with one's closest friends, but it's even weirder when it's your teacher. This is probably a testament to just how repressed our society has become. I am happy that I live in a place and time where such boundaries can be and are broken.

The one rather sad thing to come of this is that a girl who I showed the Livejournal to has left our advisory group, in part because she no longer feels comfortable around that teacher, with whom she used to be quite close. Her leaving is also in large part due to some things he said to her before and after her Senior Speech (Everyone has to give one, of about five minutes' duration, about something they care about. Most are cheesy as crap, others are great. Hers was about determinism, and was, unfortunately, quite silly. Not only did she ignore Heisenberg et al, she drew some really quite absurd conclusions, or rather presented some absurd notions, about the nature of punishment in a deterministic universe. She is really quite intelligent, though. I was somewhat surprised.) bet you don't remember what I was in the middle of before that li'l parenthetical note, eh? So I'll break all grammatical conventions and start over. Her leaving was also in large part due to some things (not the least of which was about Heisenberg) that he said to her before and after her speech which were certainly not meant as harmful, but which she took rather badly. So it's not all my fault. But I still feel crappy about my part in it.

Look, it's pretty short!

It's so hard to keep things in perspective. Someone just told me that someone I like said something that could be construed as negative about me behind my back, and despite the hundreds of positive experiences I have had with that person suddenly I am filled with dread that they secretly loathe me. This idea makes no sense, but it is now a possibility, and it scares me way too much. I am one of the most rational people I know, and I think this has given me a very good taste of what other people go through over things like that. I've always been kind of scornful of other people's reactions to such things. Hopefully I will be less so now.

Teacher + LiveJournal = Confusion

I might as well admit it: I'm in high school. I know you can't tell from the elegance of my prose, but it's true.

AP Spanish lit is another thing I am in, but yesterday my teacher wasn't. She had a doctor's appointment and decided not to tell anyone. So we all showed up and screwed around for twenty minutes and then left. During those twenty minutes, we got to talking about various teacher's websites (you can visit http://skynelson.com for a taste, but I don't recommend it), and someone mentioned that the pit beneath the trap door that is the link above was "almost as bad as [name omitted because I like the guy]'s porn."

Now, I knew something of this already. [Nobilg], my stats and computer science teacher, had an old personal website, which he had censored after kids at his old school found it. There was nothing too terrible on it, just some descriptions of sex games and a dead link to a porn site, but that's plenty nuff to get you fired some places. His version of 'censoring,' though, involved commenting the objectionable parts out in the html. So I found it all last year, was like, "huh." and didn't care overmuch. Still, I was surprised other people knew about it, and it sounded from what she said that there may have been more to it than what I'd seen. So I googled "[Nobilg]" +porn, and boom, there was his livejournal. Which had nothing to do with porn, really, he'd just used the word.

He had been very, very careful not to use his name anywhere in the body of his posts. But he'd posted a link to a personal essay type thing he'd written about Burning Man in which one of the characters used his name. So we started reading his livejournal. Excerpted from his list of self-descriptors:

kinky
bi
poly
left-leaning
radical
slut

I happen to know that not all of those actually apply to him, but still.

At lunch, I continued to read. It got much, much worse. He described a sex party in moderately graphic detail, mentioned being stoned, etc. He also posted some great poetry and an awesome short story he wrote. Overall, great stuff, but not so much when it gets into the hands of the school community at large. I showed it to a few close friends, but not many. Andrew Fischer, a kid my class, decided he needed to go run and tell [Nobilg] right away, which was annoying, but in the end prolly for the best. He told some people who had overheard that it wasn't him, and then came out to ask me about it. I showed him, and he went and deleted his livejournal. After that we talked, and then the dean of students talked to me, and the magnitude of the consequences of my distributing it further were impressed upon me.

It was an interesting experience. It was fascinating to read all the stuff he wrote. He has always been almost closer to a friend than a teacher, and this certainly hasn't changed that. If anything, we might become closer because of it. To me, it wasn't that big a deal, really - I half suspected it all anyway, and I had read the stuff on his old site. So more than anything it showed me how he was as a person, with his friends, outside of a school setting, which was valuable and interesting. I hope it leads to more discussion and good times, and that nothing bad happens...

I feel like all of that was more plot summary than analysis. I didn't say much of what I wanted to. So here's some more:
The line between teacher and friend is a weird one at my school. It is very liberal, very informal, and very good, so there is a lot of one on one work and little bland lecturing and busywork. And the teachers are mostly awesome people. As a result, many students becomes quite good friends with one or more teachers. But there are certain places teachers just can't go. And there's always this tension between being informal and having fun, and it being the teacher's job to keep the kids in line (and not show favoritism). Anyway, i don't know if I'm getting anything useful across, but it is something I think about a lot.

The Point is a Secret. SHHHH!

I am too wordy. I wrote a 1092 word article which a commenter (Holy crap holy crap I have an audience!!!!11won ) basically distilled into one sentence. Yes, I said lots of other stuff in there. In fact, I think most of what I said was relevant and interesting, though there was some repetition. But who wants to read 1092 words about what I think? Even if it is interesting, who has time? I need to organize my thoughts more efficiently, and weed out the slightly-less-necessary points.

So it kinda looks like I'm basically saying you shouldn't read my blog.

Hm.

Religion - Holy Crap!

Because I hate doing things I need to do, I decided to read some random people's blog posts. After all, if people like me don't read random blogs, how is anyone ever going to find mine? One annoying answer to that questions is "By being spammers", as I just found out when I got my very first blog comment - Not only did Mr. Anonymous promise to make my computers more secure, he wanted to talk to me about furnaces! Isn't that sweet? I should probably turn that spam-detecting thingamabobber on.

So anyway, I clicked 'Next Blog' five times. One was porn. One was a girl from Singapore who didn't understand why the newspaper 'only' gave Deuce Bigalow 2 1/2 stars. And three were Christian people.

Now, I don't want it to sound like I'm prejudiced, but I think I am. Granted, there are some religious people that I respect and like. However, these tend to be the ones that say they are religious while secretly being closet rational people. It's just all so hypocritical. I am really quite an accepting, loving person, but deep down inside I can't find much but derision and pity for religion and its adherents.

I am having trouble organizing my thoughts, because they keep branching. A list of the things that I want to talk about:

* Buddhism's response to theism, and how true it is.
* The divide between people like myself and religious people
* The distinction between people and their religions, and when it's blurred.

I'll just do them in order, cause I can't think of a better way.

The Buddha, as I understand it, basically felt that all forms of theism were a natural human reaction to the bleakness of a 'pointless' existence. He said that God was an idea that people cling to out of fear, both of themselves and of the unknown. I cannot overstate how true I think this is. I'm not a Buddhist, for many reasons, but this and several other Buddhist philosophies ring truer than anything else I've come across. It is so amazing to think of how powerful our subconciouses are in this light - we are so, so afraid that we can invent and sustain belief in absurd notions of miracles and destinies and so forth, to the point where such belief is a commonplace, accepted thing.

Why don't some of us feel the need for such inventions? I don't know. In my case, it's largely a matter of upbringing and environment, as it is with most people, I expect. But my parents, while not religious exactly, are certainly more spiritual than I. And how did the divide come about in the first place? Did some people just never feel the fear? I myself feel none of it. I believe that life is as meaningful as we make it, because we invented meaning in the first place. I don't need the reassurance that someone up on high thinks I'm doing the right thing, nor do I even feel the need to always do the right thing. I believe in leading a mostly virtuous, generous life, and I do, but there is always room for some fun, some mischieviousness, some intentional stupidity. Since I am held to no one's standards but my own, as long as I feel okay with what I'm doing, nothing's wrong.

(This doesn't mean at all that I don't care what other people think. Of course I do. How I feel about my actions is in large part influenced by the expectations and reactions of others. Nor am I saying that I simply believe everything I do is right - I don't, and I feel really, really bad when I mess up. There was this one time, when I was like eleven, I was at the library with a good friend of mine. This little kid, maybe six, was using the computer with his mom, and his time was technically up. Adam and I wanted to use the computer. Adam asked them to leave, and the mom said they were just finishing up this thing, and the kid looked really sad, but Adam kinda threatened them a little, told them the rules, and so she took her kid and told him that they'd have to do whatever it was some other time, and it was obviously really important to him, and they left, and I didn't say anything. I seriously could almost cry right now, it's that painful.

(And there are a few other things like that from my life. Once or twice a month, I'd say, I think of them and am just shot through with pangs of regret. Most of them are things the other people involved almost certainly don't remember/care about. But still I want them not to have happened so badly... )

I have my little philosophy, other people have theirs, but from a zoomed-out POV, it seems like there is really one clear dividing line separating people's thoughts about life, and that is religion. I think I have a decent idea of why so many people are on the other side of that line, though it continues to be rather hard to swallow. But will I ever know what to do about it? On the one hand, I know it is terribly counterproductive to spout hate at every faithful who walks by, but at the same time, listening seriously to them feels sort of like hosting a debate featuring Holocaust Deniers. I am at a loss as to how to deal with these people on a day to day basis.

Which, amazingly, leads me quite nicely to my last topic. How much is a person defined by their beliefs? I have met people and liked them both before and after I discovered they were religious, so obviously it's not like the two worlds are under some sort of apartheid. But I have also met a lot of religious (especially Christian) people whom I simply cannot stand. They're just so... stupid. I'm sorry. I am. I hate that I feel that way. But it's so true. And it's usually very directly because of their Christianity. Either they are arrogant and holier-than-thou, or they have no idea why the are Christian, and simply put all their blindest faith into a God they know nothing about. Are these people bad people? Can I help them? Does arguing with them help? How does one go about changing someone's mind about something so ingrained and illogical? I really want to know the answers to these questions. When I figure them out, I'll let you know.

del.icio.us add.icti.on

I think I have it.

del.icio.us is exponential. So is the internet, but not in such a consistently fascinating manner. On random web pages, there are lots of links to places you don't want to go. On del.icio.us, there are nothing but links to places you want to go and links to places with more links to places you want to go. And those places also have links to places with links of places you want to go. It's beautiful, but it's scary too. I am already aware of enough regularly updated internet content to keep myself busy for life. For ten lives. And yet I always want more. Things I care about start dropping off the end, as what little free time I have is sucked towards the new and away from the old. Not to mention the real-world responsibilities that get shoved into the corner. Which reminds me, I really shouldn't be writing this.

So why do I want to discover new things when I have so many old ones? I suppose because the thrill of discovering a specific wonderful thing for the first time can never be repeated, no matter how great that thing continues to be. But at what point do we draw the line between consistency and discovery? Can we ever be satisfied only by the discovery of the new? If I spent my online life doing nothing but following del.icio.us backlinks, would that life be a good one? If I never used a service more than once or read more than one blog entry from any given author, would I be happy? I think not, and to prove it I can show you my core list of sites I check every day. But how do I decide who is on that list? Often it seems to come down to which places I remember to go regularly. Which seems like a fine solution, because what better criteria for memorability can there be but remembrance? But then one day I'll remember a great comic I used to read and go, "Why did I ever stop reading that? It's just the sort of thing I need!" But then I'll be daunted by the backlog of archived material and never get back into it.

But if I read/watched/listened to everything I love regularly, I would never have time to find anything new. And oh boy do I love finding new things. I don't know the way out of this vicious cycle. But I expect I'll find it somewhere here.