the same

Each perception is unique and we often perceive others through the prism of their projected qualities and defects.

That is, we have a (more or less) clear idea of things we like and don't like, and use it to look at other people, through it. We don't see what others are, just the things we admire in ourselves - reflected in them, and things we are afraid to admire in ourselves - reflected from them back to us. We call these qualities and defects, and the process of doing so, is usually called judgment.

I've been struggling with this as of late, as there is one person that causes a somewhat strong reaction in me. That is, there is one person I keep having a mental dialog with, one person I keep seeing as twisted, one person I cannot bring myself to accept, to let them be.

I've been trying to stop this, repeatedly with little or no success, as (in the abstract) I realize that nobody can be that evil;

I've told myself for a while now, that any issues I have with others, I have with myself, that any conflict I have with another, I must first deal with within myself. yet this only lead me on a fast road, to nowhere.

Then, yesterday I realized that there is no fundamental difference between us. He's not stronger, cannot dominate, cannot impose, cannot lie, cannot give me my reality, unless I allow him to: whatever he does I can undo, whatever view he has is his view and not mine, whatever power he has I also have.
On the other side, whatever quality I have he also does, whatever deeply-human issue I struggle with he also encountered, or if he didn't he will. Just give it time.

I was just demonizing him somehow.

In the end, we just deal with it differently and that's all there is to it.

We are all the same.

100 years forecast

I found this linked on reddit and thought it humorous (if maybe plausible). If someone wants credit for it, drop a comment.

through the weekend

Some impressions from the weekend:
- it's easy to enter the Alpha and Theta frequency bands of the brain;
- extra-sensory perceptions use the right side of the brain; as such, you cannot look for (worded) information while in a trance (doing that usually yields false information - things from your subconscious); instead look for sensory perceptions: taste, images, smell, noise and so on;
- it's nice to take a bath in the sea in the evening;
- you can use subtle, unconscious changes in your body's behavior to get answers you don't consciously have; a pendulum works by exploiting this.
- visualization can prepare you for facing a new situation and preparing to go through it, almost as well as going through it for practice. This is one of the roles dreaming fulfills.
- it's easy to analyze the symbols in your own dreams, but that interpretation doesn't apply well to others.
- if you do too many things through the weekend, you miss the opportunity to rest.

running

from the beach party

Two pictures I managed to (somewhat) salvage, from the beach party with A - the rest of them came out completely unusable :(

Are we measuring time, or defining it?

On the morning of the first of January of this year, around five thirty AM to be more precise, I was on my way home, from the New Year's party, when it struck me how artificial the delimitation of days is and how this perception breaks the actual continuity of our existence (it's a perception I have relatively often, when I remain awake through night fall and am not terribly busy with something specific).

I wrote this thought down, and came back to it from time to time. Nowadays (that is, after thinking about it some more), I see a clear distinction between the natural delimitation, a delimitation that doesn't break continuity (like light and shadow cast by the Sun) and the artificial delimitations we all make: instead of seeing our continuous existence, "flowing" from one "present moment" to the next "present moment", we see ourselves having a discrete existence, composed of different episodes, disconnected, discontinuous.

Instead of seeing the continuity, we see "day", "week", "Monday", "last year", "during lunch break", "when I exited the office building last evening", et caetera.

It's a useful abstraction, enabling everything from business contracts to most technology, to weekend plans, to cookie recipes.

It's still an abstraction though, and as useful as it is, it can be equally useful to look behind it.

When you try switching back from a discrete perception to a continuous one (that is, if you actually do try), you start seeing lots of other illusions you cling to, constructs relying of other constructs, things we all accept as "in the nature of things" ...

Lets take age as an example.
We have a minimal age for legally drinking, you can be too old or too young to behave in a certain way and your rights vary depending on what age-group you happen to find yourself in.

Age as a measure though, is not telling you something specific about a person. If anything, it's actually telling you how many times the Earth rotated around the Sun, since that person was born. Thus, age is an affirmation about the Earth's movement, giving that person's existence as a reference point, and not an affirmation about that person itself.

Further more, it seems that time itself is an illusion.

Clocks don't measure time; they measure themselves.
        hairy university professor with young girlfriend, The Man from Earth

To that regard, I found an interesting article on the nature of time itself, that directed my thoughts to a different perspective: the article argued that time, in a scientific context, cannot be perceived as an orthogonal dimension but is in fact, always expressing a measure of movement (one second being, for example defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom).

It's an interesting read, if you have the time for it (pun intended).

So in the end, do we measure time, or define it and cling to our definition?

Randy Pausch's Last Discourse

So ... the guy knew he was going to die and came here for talking about childhood dreams.

Absolutely inspiring.

Dear EA,

... you had me at 'Hello!'

In other words, I want this game!

Last Time in Clerkenwell