backlog

I finally took the time to go over my photography backlog ...

Landing

Taken upon landing on Larnaca Airport, tonight at eleven.

Paying attention

A squirrel I shot in Moldova, on Sunday morning.

Last day in Budapest ...

... Hotel Budapest, that is.

We're still going in office today, still working, but today evening we'll be on the plane back to Cyprus.

It's been nice (with all the tension that being with customers usually brings forth for me): I've actually managed to squeeze some hours of light for myself and took some squirell pictures (of all things).

I will try to process them and post them online in the next few days.

Now, I'm waiting for J to come downstairs, for checout. My luggage is near me (well, my backpack and camera bag), in the hotel lobby, as I'm writing this.

The hotel was very nice and I had the opportunity to enjoy some "bad weather" that I started missing while in Cyprus; actually, it was enough that I no longer miss it :-\.

Other impressions ... other impressions ... the food is similar enough to Romania that it got me to miss it. It's weird: I'm not a patriot in any sense to speak of, but I got a sense of home here that I don't usually get when going in Romania: the climate is similar, the food is ... almost the same, and the air smells like rain; on the other hand, the people seem more open than in Romania. Maybe that's why I enjoyed myself (I find the people I usually meet on the streets in Romania to be usually tense, not smile enough and always focusing on the empty side of the glass).

All that aside, I can't wait to get back to Limassol.

On Mind and Suffering

Most human suffering comes from being trapped in the jail of the mind. We are confused by the map and can't find the territory. Like Alzheimer's sufferers, our brains missidentify our surroundings and we become lost and confused. We have concepts that don't fit reality and reality that doesn't fit our concepts. We get further into the soup by trying to explain why the pieces don't fit. Then we make matters worse by trying to get ourselves and others to straighten up and fit in. We end by telling some kind of story that builds a case for ourselves, and trying to put on our best face so we can convince others we are the model for what fits, good and not bad, right and not wrong, capable, adequate to the task and so on.

Brad Blanton, Practicing Radical Honesty

traveling again

Well ... I'm traveling again. Tonight I'll be on my way to another country, carrying a ton of hardware with me, to give to a client.

On the good side, I'll be taking my camera along, I'll have a pool in the hotel, and it's a new country to see.

On the ... other side, I might not have time to enjoy the hotel, no time to take pictures and probably not enough time to see the county.

TED: Jonathan Haidt: The real difference between liberals and conservatives

This is one of the most insightful speeches on politics and spirituality I've ever seen.

lenovo; now with more ... err ... something?

thinker vs. dreamer

When it comes to knowledge, there are two paths you can take: the one created in ancient Greece, and the one developed in ancient India. That's it. The rest of them, are either derived systems, or similar in nature to one or the other.

The Ancient Greece path to knowledge is the path of the thinker. It is that of logic and measurement, of deduction and step-by-step reasoning. It is about creating a cohesive mental model of the world and "running simulations" inside that model, then, adjusting the model (and deepening understanding).

The Indian school, is that of intuitive knowledge, the path of the dreamer. It is about contemplation and visualization, about looking at things without taking them apart, about sudden flashes of understanding, being in the now; about seeing the flow without interrupting the flow, about dismissing all mental simulations and seeing the world as it really is.

The two schools correspond to the types of knowledge controlled by the two hemispheres of the brain: you have the left-side of the brain, the logical side, and the right side, the intuitive one.

For us Westerners, it's difficult to grasp the oriental path, as our entire education process skips over the capabilities of the right side of the brain. When taught, you are given information, dates, numbers, sentences, the how-to of doing things, methods and rationales.

The intuitive side is completely ignored. You will have a chance to develop your intuitive side if you're arts-oriented as a career, but even then, intuition and intuitive knowledge is not explored as a path to understanding, but merely develops as a side effect.

More than that, some right-sided brain activities are seldom spoken of in polite company. You will get one reaction if you speak of the scientific process and a completely different reaction if you speak of the state of inner peace obtained through deep meditation; if you get to claim that this clearness of mind brings you closer to reality, depending on your audience, you might even find yourself in trouble.

I believe it is very difficult for us ("us" meaning westerners) to understand how far the intuitive mind can go; it is very easy to state that "well ... you can tell if your significant other is cheating on you", or to generalize this kind of statement to affirmations like "intuition is just the mind coming to a conclusion without being consciously aware of all the clues it has available". Unfortunately, that just a rationalization of intuition, and as far as understanding goes, it just scratches the surface.

To understand how deep the intuitive mind can go, one has to actually go with it. We don't do that though. We keep shunning it, dismissing it, even though clues to the abilities of the intuitive mind are there.

Out of the top of my head:

Wade Davis spoke of a people in the Amazon rain-forest, that were locating particular plants, "because the plants told them where they were". We have no idea what that means, but rush to consider such people "primitives".

Meditation has noticeable effects in people suffering from lots of things, from ADHD to epilepsy. It also has effects on attention span, and attention distribution and is among the most useful tools in reducing stress. Efforts to understand what is happening in meditation are being made, but it's a fringe effort, virtually unknown. Meanwhile, the stigma is there.

To pull an Argumentum ad Auctoritatem, here's a quote:

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Albert Einstein

That's all I had to say about it.

For now.

I'll probably say more about it, later.

on drm aka spore failed

I've read all kinds of rants online about Digital Rights Management, or DRM for short. Two things I got impressed about regarding this, were a slashdot signature (that said DRM is managing your digital rights in the same way a jail manages your freedom) and the idea that DRM is basically an anti-feature (concept best explained here).
More than that, vendors endorsing it risk burning themselves by quietly selling DRM-embedded products, as potential customers automatically vote against it, with their wallets. You can bet your customers will not make an informed decision, but that only works for short-term gains, as customers have a long memory.

Today it's the first time I've seen an expression of the second part of that, in the amazon comments page for the game Spore; Spore was a much awaited game, promising the kind of game-play change brought forth by Black & White or Doom. Unfortunately, it comes with a DRM saying the game is not yours; you pay 50$ for it, then are allowed to reinstall it three times, before they pull the plug on you.

In short, you RENT it for up to three uses, for 50$. to give a comparison term, I bought The Orange Box online, through Steam, for less. That comprised three games, all of them excellent, that I'm still enjoying. More than that, I've reinstalled my system a few times, and whenever I reinstall Steam, the games are available to me (and already payed for).

On Amazon's page for the game, all comments I've read state clearly that paying 50$ for basically renting the game is not worth it, especially when you have no control over the renting agreement.

There may be comments I haven't read on the site, but still, the message is pretty clear:

EA, stop treating potential customers as pirates!

First, you will loose sales.

Second, locks are there to keep honest people out. Using the DRM conditions you use, is just bringing pain to potential customers.

If you really want to use an online distribution platform, for heaven's sake, use Steam (or something similar).

Third, if you're hell-bent on renting the game instead of selling it, state so clearly on the box.

I'm tired ranting ... back to work :)

a commercial about nothing?

smile

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!