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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI&feature=player_embedded

Apparently photoshop is now being developed by, literally, wizards.  This shit is amazing.

We bustled into the hall among the hordes, getting as close as possible.  The music comes on, and the opening electric guitar riffs are accompanied by a tangible charge in the air.  Everybody's a part of it, and the aesthetic of it all is overwhelming.

That, right there.  What is that?  I've come to think of rock music as some sort of super-taproot into human spirit.  Nothing in my life gives me overwhelming goosebump epiphanies except rock'n'roll.  It's not just me, is it? 

tl;dr tell me about the things that fuel your epiphanies.

http://www.popsci.com/node/45064/?cmpid=enews041510

"Cocaine is a hell of a drug, but getting shocked with a Taser while riding high on methamphetamines probably beats any white-knuckled cocaine experience hands down. And that's exactly what happened to some lucky sheep in a new study that tested the effects of Tasers on meth-addled targets, funded in part by Taser International. "

Isn't it great to be a human?

FROM SCRATCH.

I think a lot about where we came from.  We all come from a very long line of organisms that have, by various means and methods, gotten their shit together at some point, at least long enough to make more of themselves.  Many of my ancestors were mutated in some way, if not most of them.  They were all lucky enough to have the right kind of mutations.  I don't have any pronounced mutations that you can see without a gene sequencer, but isn't every gene essentially an institutionalized version of some earlier mutation?  In a way we're each a culmination of untold billions of mutations.   That's kind of cool, huh?

Moderates are more dangerous than extremists. That's the basic claim of Dr. Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail". Aside from the fact that this claim originates from a man whose reputation is beyond reproach, this basic idea has exceptional merit that extends well beyond the scope of his struggle for equality. In politics, moderation or "centrism" is, to state it simply, the belief that the best stance on any issue lies squarely in between both extremes. But this approach is non-idealistic, and lacks any real convictions, and puts one in mind of realpolitik. I would argue that the strongest position in politics is one that makes bold claims based on sound ideological principles. In the case of white moderates in Dr. King's letter, the moderates were mere quislings. In the case of moderation in the political arena, they are treacherous opportunists. To make your political judgments based on a "happy medium" between the most outlandish of extremes of an issue is to say "I do not care about the issue, I care only about settling the controversy." It implies lack of involvement, and it relegates control of what rhetorical frames are used to the people whose views are possibly too extreme to reconcile with your own. No, politics is not the arena for lukewarm compromise. I would rather have a 100% American War Machine or a socially progressive pacifistic nation than suffer the torment of crippling indecision. In my mind the downfall of our political system is that the duality of politics, along with the plurality voting system are coinciding to make consistent decisions impossible. What I mean by the duality of politics is probably obvious to you. You cannot look at any instance of politics without seeing an example of it. Red vs. Blue. Liberal vs. Conservative. Democrat vs. Republican. Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice. The list is tiresomely binary. What I mean by the "plurality voting system" is possibly less plain to see, since so few American citizens have ever considered it. Why do we only allow one vote per person? In a nation where every decision is made on the basis of some ideological polarity, why must we choose between one or the other? It is the "false dilemma" writ large. Do you want to pay for health insurance, or do you want an economic recession? Do you want to have your baby, or do you hate God? Perhaps you have noticed these sub-textual arguments in the news and other media, as I have.

Have we even stopped to think about the very basic - and very frightening - question: "Why do we even have political parties?" In a system where each person gets only one precious vote to choose their leaders, yes we do need parties. A hypothetical example: if my main political motive is gun rights, but I don't necessarily mind either way about abortion rights, why not pool my votes with the anti-abortion people? They vote gun rights and I vote pro-life. I stand to gain more votes for my cause, and I don't lose anything I didn't already care about. Also, the might of a political party makes it hard to vote for the candidate you want, rather than voting against the candidate you don't want. In other words, we vote "yes or no" to each candidate, and so each candidate will have a number of votes ranging from 0% to 100% of the population, and the person with the greatest percentage of approval wins. It is a system that is naturally more inclined to yield elected officials that more people are happy with. For example, in election '08 I would have been very proud to vote for Dennis Kucinich, but I knew two things: Firstly, that he was very unlikely to win, and secondly that if the Republicans won, I would have to leave the country, never to return due to the catastrophe of Sarah Palin. So, scared of a crazy idiot vice president, I voted for the guy most likely to beat McCain, President Obama, who isn't exactly liberal, despite his opponents' spin. From a game theory perspective, political parties make a lot of sense. But people have become attached to politics that are "color-coded". Perhaps cognitive dissonance has changed their minds about those other views that come prepackaged with the party they chose. If I don't like taxes to begin with, I might become a Republican. But with time and exposure, I might start to "buy in" to the other ideals of Republicanism, since they come as a package deal. It's part of how we think, speaking from a cognitive science perspective. But what if we didn't have to band together like wild animals to fend off ideological bogeymen? Would we need political parties? No, but how could that ever happen? It turns out that there is a different voting system, called "approval voting", that lacks the pitfalls of our plurality vote. It is exactly the same as our current system, but for one detail: You can vote for whomever you approve of, no matter how many people you approve of. It may seem unfair, until you start thinking about it: If everyone has unlimited votes, it fundamentally changes the dynamic of our democracy. Since our government is based on representation, it is essential that the people who represent us are accurate depictions of our attitudes and beliefs. This way, one need not play games with color-coded politics. If a candidate shows themselves to be of good quality, one can support them without worrying that one is wasting a vote. This is one likely cure for the blight of moderate positions, because when we vote for the people we really want, instead of against the people we don't want, we are no longer compromising. And when nobody has to compromise, everybody wins. Approval voting would be conclusively more likely to mitigate the ill effects of centrism, while striking a balance of desirable traits in our electorate.





Short of a miraculous change in the way American democracy works (or doesn't), what are the other options? America has always done democracy one way, and despite it's recent failings few will be amenable to a fundamental change in procedure. And many will say that, since approval voting is untested, it can't be trusted with anything as important as a presidential election. It seems to me that the only possible outcomes here are: We accept things the way they are, or not. If we are to reject the current state of affairs, how are we to go about it? Henry David Thoreau is one of America's most historically significant intellects, and in his essay "Civil Disobedience", he argues the need to hold personal conscience over the law itself. He claims that a wise man will not leave justice to the chance of a majority vote. Everyone is aware that certain laws and legislations are unjust. The question is not whether to try and change them, the question is whether we should obey them while they are law. At risk of using a slippery slope argument, I would say that to suffer injustice even whilst speaking out against it is to accept that it will never change. What congressmen need to know is that their laws are so unpopular that they may be voted out of office for supporting them. The best way to demonstrate that a law is unpopular is to disobey it in front of everybody, repeatedly, with complete conviction. I am confident that even basic laws such as theft and homicide would be repealed if enough people were to stand up against them in this way (Luckily, that is incredibly unlikely). Thoreau argues that in some cases the remedy is worse than the injustice, and that in those cases it is permissible to allow injustice. But many situation are remediable with a relative minimum of trouble. What, really, would we lose by ending the Iraqi occupation, or the Patriot Act? There are many arguments about this, but my answer is not very much. Thoreau's way of fighting these injustices would be to illegally resist these legislations. So far, voting against them has not borne any fruit, nor has speaking out against them. We are complicit in their execution because we allow it to happen at all. Is Thoreau wrong about civil disobedience?




People say this country believes in democracy, or that we are founded on principles of freedom, or variations on that theme. What people don't say is that this country is controlled by a binary electoral shenanigan propagated by an obsolete voting method that systematically marginalizes the interests of the majority to the benefit of preeminent economical powers. And they don't fail to say that because it's a cumbersome, rhetorically heavy-handed sentence, they fail to say it because it is a notion that is at best incompletely articulated by the prevalent voices of contemporary politics to this day.

I have recently discovered a means to cheaply mass produce very convincing fake cum. 

Any ideas on what to do with it as far as jakes/etc?

Hold up your left hand, palm facing you.  Look at your pinky.  Now squeeze it, feel the bones in there.  A bit too much pressure and they bend a little.  Especially that slightly longer one near the knuckle.  The feeling of frailty is ever-present.  Do you ever feel like a part of you is too brittle to keep?  Like a part of you is liable to break at any moment, and the only way to avoid inevitable crippling agony is to get rid of it for good?

I wish I could get a new pinky.

ITT we discuss various stress resistance techniques and methods.

My favorite: 

Imagination:  Especially for babies crying and shit like that, it helps to imagine someone you hate making those noises.  It makes you laugh, and once you've laughed at screaming babies, you'll never go back to gritting your teeth again.

IMAGINE

      If Hollywood did a movie about this forum, how would you cast it?  Doesn't have to be accurate, just satisfying.

but I don't have much engineering under my belt. 

First off:  The "Air Ray"

http://www.festo.com/inetdomino/coorp_sites/en/22ff224c0cba8e40c12572d60033d076.htm

It is a robotic manta ray BLIMP.

I want to invent one that is big enough for people.

Help?

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oavMtUWDBTM&feature=player_embedded#

http://www.gizmag.com/tag/tokyo+motor+show/

This accounts for at least seven million dollars of things I never new I couldn't live without.

It's got a 150-lb string. 

What should I do with it? 

Suddenly I am hearing people mutter about things that are "in name only" CONSTANTLY and it is driving me catshit.  Who did this?

Sometimes I'm daydreaming, and without even closing my eyes I can see whatever I'm imagining.

It is distressing.

Imagine, for a moment, a space station with artificial gravity.  It is large.  It contains two "tribes", each with their own ideologies, cultural habits, and beliefs.  Their beliefs are irreconcilable by diplomatic means, but for safety purposes no powerful weapons of war are available to the tribes.  They have only simple melee weapons.  However, they have access to very effective simple armor made with modern materials and methods.

ITT we design that armor. 

This is awesome because:

1) SCA heavy combat is awesome, but I feel that it could be more awesome without technological/period restrictions

2) If someone designs armor that I could feasibly construct, I will give it a go.

3) It's fun to design armor.

We play with fire here, Roger.  The reason I keep coming back here, despite being burned a few times, is because other forums play nice.  Sure, we see a few live cremations from time to time, but it is purifying.  We eat garbage and shit glass.  Well, a vitrified silicate with some heavy metals in it, at any rate.  And what we produce is truth.  I've been burned, but I'm not on fire.

That's just it though.  I want to be on fire.  Running, screaming into the night bear hugging passers by and sharing in my immolation.  I've began to like it.  What this place needs isn't more kindness and tolerance.  Look what tolerance has done to Britain!  They had to apologize for putting  puppies in the newspapers! And now that corporations have human rights, we have more things to burn on our list than we ever have before. 

A few problems arise when one considers making a giant robot.  They're easy targets, and no amount of armor can save it from conventional anti-armor weaponry.  Even bog-standard AP RPGs could thwart amounts of steel plating that would be ludicrous on a walking robot.

So how does one make a giant robot that is tactically feasible?  It's an interesting gedankenexperiment. 

My original idea was a combination of various anti-missile countermeasures, as well as putting a small nuclear power plant inside it.  If destroyed, it makes everything radioactive.  But, for 'ethical' reasons, this idea is undesirable.  So I figured, why not use a thorium nuclear reactor?

Any of you spags read this wired article?


So I figure that would more easily fit inside my giant robot, and provide enough power for an anti missile laser system, as well as enough extra juice to power a gigantic fucking cattle prod, which would rule (let's face it).

On top of that, I think the rest of its armaments would just be machine guns and cannons, and lot of them.  Conventional stuff just works well.

Posit:  All human experience can be described with broad enough statements, and these statements can be formulated in a way that is relevant and useful. 

Attempt #1:

All decisions can be made in seven breaths or less. 

All behavior is derived from imitation of others or by extrapolating/mutating known patterns.

Breath control is the key to a great deal of human nature.

Hell is other people.

The human condition*.




* Being the set of all conditions and experiences that are uniquely human.


This needs improving, and I could use an outside perspective.

Corporations are people now, which sounds like bad news, right?  Wrong.  It means that there is now a precedent for corporations to be psychologically evaluated and 5150'd, or put on death row.  This is inherently a good thing.

ITT we plot to put this on the ballot.

When I first saw Zardoz it was pretty trippy, but then I watched it again soon after, paying less attention to the hilarious spectacles.  There's actually a plot going on, and it makes sense.  It's easy to miss though, because the entire time a younger sean connery is running around being an uncivilized maniac, which makes it basically worth the hour and a half.

Writing this as I watch scene by scene, so bear with me.  The intro with the floating head gives it all away.  The plot in a few words, is that in some distant future a false utopia has come to pass, isolating itself from the barbaric outsiders and manipulating them for its needs.  The inhabitants of this utopia are functionally immortal, due to their technology that allows perfect resurrection.  One of the citizens of this utopia, hundreds of years old, grows cynical of the whole charade and wishes to die, but is not allowed to do so.  Every attempt to die ends in his resurrection by his overbearing peers.  The society is collectivistic to the point of hyperbole, such that it is common practice for large groups of them to enter "Level Two" together, which appears to be a transcendent hive-mind entity.  Zardoz, the one whose job it is to manipulate the barbaric outlanders, schemes to bring about his own death by bringing an outlander into their civilization and trying to naturalize him.  He knows, however, that this outside influence will bring about the downfall of their civilization, with his swarthy and brutish ways, allowing him a final death.  Part of the reason he manipulates the barbarians is because the utopian civilization is ideologically atavistic and anti-civilization, and his mission is population control.  He tricks them into thinking he is a god, a floating stone idol that spouts decrees and piles of guns, urging them to slay those who reproduce.  Think of him as an extreme (read: awesome) version of planned parenthood.  The other motive to the deception is to obtain food, in the form of offerings. 

So as I mentioned, the "utopians" (as I will sarcastically call them) keep "Zed" (Sean Connery) for various reasons.  Some want to study him for science, check his genes for mutations, examine his psyche as it relates to his sociological conditions outside, etc.  Some are just bored.  Others want to see more of his memories.  He begins to pollute their collectivist lifestyle.  His barbarism, and their complicity in it, call their societal ideals into question. 

It is amusing to note that in this society, people do not age unless they are convicted of a crime, and negative thoughts are a crime.  Criticizing the society is also a crime.  Those who commit crimes are aged.  A few months a misdemeanor, that sort of thing.  Eventually you get so old that you become senile and mad, and are sent to a carnival with other mad old people.  They never let you die, you just keep getting old.  They're called renegades.

The other way to go out in this society is a disease called apathy.  Scores of people just sitting with blank expressions, not thinking or doing anything at all, and it's creeping through the utopian society.  Interesting.  You either go renegade or become apathetic in the end.  Isn't that how it is with us, through subtler?

This society has studied sexuality extensively, and has come to the forgivable conclusion that erections are a response to violence stimulus.  They have found that immortal utopians, no longer needing to reproduce, have become utterly impotent.  They understand the medical process of erection, but fail to grasp the stimulus-response in psychological terms.  The punchline is that he finds the researching woman erotic, which confuses and embarrasses her.  They are an impotent society.

Eventually they decide that Zed has to be destroyed, as he comes to represent a mirror through which they see their worst failures.  A few of them try to protect him, and then it gets trippy.  Long story short, the last half hour is a confused affair wherein Zed becomes more intelligent and perfect than any of them and destroys their corrupt society, freeing them from immortality and making off with one of their women. 

In retrospect, it was a deeply sucky movie because it attempted to critique and satirize everything about everything, but ending up as just a lot of hippie-ish rubbish. 

Okay, first thing's first.  I've set my life goal.  I'm currently working on it.  Said goal is to research and develop machine consciousness.  It means a lot to me, but the reasons are for another thread.  This is a subject I ponder about as often as one could sanely ponder anything.  It consumes me at the expense of my being able to talk about other subjects competently.

Okay.  So, machine consciousness.  How hard could that be?  Sometime last year I found out about a guy named Chalmers, who has caused me a great deal of discomfiture.  He has described a problem with consciousness that supports his brand of dualism.




I hate dualism.





Here's a brief on Chalmers' hard problem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness


SEE THIS

WHAT DO

...Is lame and silly, but I think it would be a good idea if there were some way to browse PD on a small screen. 

While I'm daydreaming, this would allow me to find new threads and responses by topic in a minimal interface, and read threads post by post without constantly resizing and scrolling.

If someone knew how to make this happen, they would be really sexy.

That new film by Terry Gilliam* with Tom Waits as the devil.  

The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus.


Why are you still here?  Go see it.





*Of course there is a dwarf in one of the lead roles.  It's Terry.

I am often arrested with gripping visions of things that, in the moment, I am sure are the most excellent thing possible.  Later I rediscover the notes of these ideas scrawled into paper pads and backs of envelopes, and realize that they are only awesome if you abuse drugs.  I will post some of them here, feel free to post yours.

Metal Skeleton Metal:

A genre of metal that is so damned metal that it can only be properly performed by animated skeletons made of steel.

Sure is name-change out today.

Recently started taking chewables for acid reflux and tylenol for sinus headaches.

In one decade I'll be on a colostomy bag and dialysis.  Fuck this.

This is not new, but it was recently brought to my attention.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/23/AR2007032301589.html

During the divisive War of 1812, a livid woman famous for her long hair rode to the White House, stood in her carriage, let down her tresses and proclaimed that she would gladly be shorn of them if they would be used to hang President James Madison. That anecdote, from Catherine Allgor's biography of Dolley Madison, shows that today's theatrical anger is not without precedent. But now there is a new style in anger -- fury as a fashion accessory, indignation as evidence of good character.

Under the headline "San Franciscans Hurl Their Rage at Parking Patrol," the New York Times recently described the verbal abuse and physical violence -- there were 28 attacks in 2006 -- inflicted on parking enforcement officers in a city that has a surplus of liberalism and a shortage of parking places. Parking is so difficult that George Anderson, a mental health expert, has stopped holding lectures there because his audiences arrive seething about their parking frustrations. Anderson represents the American Association of Anger Management Providers.

Of course. San Francisco, a showcase for expressive individualism, is full of people bristling with rights and eager to rebel against oppressive authority, but having a hard time finding any. The only rules concern parking.

No wonder Americans are infatuated with anger: It is democratic. Anyone can express it, and it is one of the seven deadly sins, which means it is a universal susceptibility. So in this age that is proud of having achieved "the repeal of reticence," anger exhibitionism is pandemic.

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There are the tantrums -- sometimes both theatrical and perfunctory -- of talking heads on television or commentators writing in vitriol (Paul Krugman's incessant contempt, Ann Coulter's equally constant loathing). There is road rage (and parking lot rage when the Whole Foods Market parking lot is congested with expressive individualists driving Volvos and Priuses). The blogosphere often is, as one blogger joyfully says, "an electronic primal scream." And everywhere there is the histrionic fury of ordinary people venting in everyday conversations.

Many people who loathe George W. Bush have adopted what Peter Wood describes as "ecstatic anger as a mode of political action." Anger often is, Wood says, "a spectacle to be witnessed by an appreciative audience, not an attempt to win over the uncommitted."

Wood, an anthropologist and author of "A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now," says the new anger "often has the look-at-me character of performance art." His book is a convincing, hence depressing, explanation of "anger chic" -- of why anger has become an all-purpose emotional stance. It has achieved prestige and become "a credential for group membership." As a result, "Americans have been flattening their emotional range into an angry monotone."

Wood notes that there is a "vagueness and elasticity of the grievances" that supposedly justify today's almost exuberant anger. And anger is more pervasive than merely political grievances would explain. Today's anger is a coping device for everyday life. It also is the defining attribute of an increasingly common personality type: the person who "unless he is angry, feels he is nothing at all."

That type, infatuated with anger, uses it to express identity. Anger as an expression of selfhood is its own vindication. Wood argues, however, that as anger becomes a gas polluting the social atmosphere, it becomes not a sign of personal uniqueness but of a herd impulse.

Once upon a time, Americans admired models of self-control, people such as George Washington and Jackie Robinson, who mastered their anger rather than relishing being mastered by it. America's fictional heroes could be angry, but theirs was a reluctant anger -- Alan Ladd as the gunfighter in "Shane," Gary Cooper as the marshal in "High Noon." Today, however, proclaimed anger -- the more vituperative the better -- is regarded as a sign of good character and emotional vitality.

Perhaps this should not be surprising, now that Americans are inclined to elect presidents who advertise their emotions -- "I feel your pain." As the late Mary McGrory wrote, Bill Clinton "is a child of his age; he believes more in the thrust-out lower lip than the stiff upper one."

The politics of disdain -- e.g., Howard Dean's judgment that Republicans are "brain dead" and "a lot of them never made an honest living in their lives" -- derails politics by defining opponents as beyond the reach of reason. The anger directed at Bush today, like that directed at Clinton during his presidency, luxuriates in its own vehemence.

Today, many people preen about their anger as a badge of authenticity: I snarl, therefore I am. Such people make one's blood boil.

What are your thoughts?  I personally enjoy the medium of apoplexy and polemic, but reading this makes it seem impotent and cheap.

I've been researching social psychology, and working on ways its concepts map to the human condition.  Ask me anything.

The "human condition" is a poet's way of referring to "the mess we're in".  It's the unique quality of being human in a world full of humans, and the nice and not-so-nice things about that.  We're probably the most fortunate of all species on earth, being very smart, tool using, socially motivated creatures living in an age of unparalleled technological luxury and relative ideological freedom.  But despite this privilege we're also very discontent with life.  We find ourselves searching for some kind of transcendence or epiphany, something "higher" to aspire to.  For too long scientists in the media have demurred to men of faith to address these questions.  We cope daily with conflicting emotional values.  We're social creatures, but not in the normal sense.  Other social creatures in the animal kingdom lack individuality.  While we are doubtlessly happier to exist as a part of a group, we often feel estranged or unwelcome in our chosen circles, and in addition to that we all belong to several overlapping social circles which require great social cunning to navigate, as well as a deeply reflective mind in order to resolve the identity crises they can cause sometimes.  On top of this huge mess, we are gradually becoming aware that we are part of social scenes that we were never aware of, or hadn't previously fathomed.  We're all citizens of nations, but a nation is so large that evolution has lapsed in providing us a way of truly comprehending this.  And beyond that, we are coming to understand, through the molasses flow of historical trend, that people of other skin colors and walks of life are also part of a supertribe we belong to, commonly referred to as the human race.  People mostly agree with this, but do we understand it?  It doesn't seem likely.  The human condition is a subject of stultifying immensity, so perhaps we can take it down a peg or two with the application of social psychology's findings.  How does Social Psychology apply, and how we can make advantageous these observations?  

Part of the condition in question is our identity.  The first thing an amnesiac might ask is, "Who am I?"  How do we gain identity, and what does it mean to us?  We're born to certain parents, who raise us to certain standards and expose us to certain influences as we mature.  And we make friends and acquaintances along the way, and we meet their friends and acquaintances and throughout that we're trying to appear normal, we want to look good, and seem smart.  It would seem that we learn these things by mirroring others, acquiring mannerisms and behaviors that allow us to participate in social exchanges.  As "Social Psychology" [1] says of conformity, "...the more important a decision is to us, the more we will rely on other people for information and guidance."  Humans universally cherish their individuality, and America especially has a strong cultural norm for nonconformity.  If one were to blatantly conform in America, they would be openly mocked.  Yet conformity prevails even here more subtly.  Our society divides itself into genres and subcultures that are outwardly diverse but individually limited to certain expressions.  There are different cultural expressions for boys and girls, rappers and rockers, goths and metal-heads, and so on.  It gets complicated fast, but the basic nature of it is that despite our normative lip-service to individuality, most people conform to a complex matrix of sociological influences based on things they have largely no conscious control over.  And this is in the best of cases; Sometimes we must wear uniforms, which have been experimentally shown to diminish our sense of individuality.  But, what constitutes a uniform?  Dictionary.com defines it as "an identifying outfit or style of dress worn by the members of a given profession, organization, or rank", by which may we infer that any mass-produced article of clothing is a uniform?  Or does that go too far?  Perhaps clothing is diverse and "role-neutral" enough to not affect us in the way lab coats or prison guard costumes do.

Beyond identity, we have good and evil:  A dichotomy that we have culled from our own feelings and their conflict with life and social norms.  On the one hand we have "good", which is the side of benevolence, fairness, equity, justice, and moral conduct.  Social psychological research has revealed that almost everyone wants to be perceived as being on the side of what they perceive as "good".  On the other hand we have evil, which is a faction that lurks somewhere on the edge of tangibility, where bogeymen are hiding razor blades in apples and impurifying our precious bodily fluids.  Almost nobody you will ever meet can honestly say that they actively conduct themselves in a way that is "evil", except in jest (in fact there is much comedy about this, because the idea of being intentionally evil is absurd in the extreme).  I mean to illustrate that evil is not the romanticized condition of gleeful moral turpitude that we see in television (and other children's diversions), it is that which we call "other", the feared out-group.  Those bad-smelling people from the other tribe who dance around the wrong kind of fertility totem, to put it one way.  But social psychologists have found that we humans are much too prone to assuming that another person's behavior is because of how they are, as opposed to their situation.  Evil seems to have an evolutionary role however, in that without a way to characterize a person or behavior as completely unacceptable, it is impossible to sanction antisocial behavior.  Interestingly, if you were to go to Google and start typing "Hell is", the first thing that Google will blithely suggest is that Hell is other people.  Jean Paul Sartre, not a social psychologist but a celebrated French intellectual, was the first person to make this statement in his 1944 book, "No Exit".  It is interesting that he should think so, especially at the time of it's publishing, because people will generally not experience or think anything evil except in the presence of other people.  Evil is somehow fundamentally connected to situations with more than one person, which is where social psychology becomes useful.  In his famous Stanford Prison Experiment, Dr. Philip Zimbardo showed us that a situation, not a person's character, is what can bring about evil behavior.  All of the world's villains and tyrants are not evil but products of evil circumstance.  Thus passes the glory of righteousness.  It is with this knowledge that we can confront true evil for what it is:  Not a malefic pariah, but mere complicity of circumstance.

Which brings us to the subject of free will.  It seems obvious and intuitive that we have a rational faculty which allows us the unrestricted ability to make any choice which we deem appropriate.  However, social psychology destroys the tidiness of this idea with a large body of research.  For instance, reactance theory provides that, when a person's freedom of choice is impugned in any way, we enter a state of reactance.  This state is characterized by resistance to perceived authority, disobedience to instructions, and uncooperativeness. Furthermore, social psychology provides us with the concepts of automatic and intentional thinking.  It could be argued that our intentional thoughts are, in many ways, of free will.  The same could not be easily argued for automatic thinking, which is characterized by complacency, heuristic thinking, and unintentional by definition.  In this mental state, we rely on various stereotypes and schemas, which are often misleading.  Furthermore, our free will is harmed by a host of cognitive biases, unavoidable malfunctions of our objectivity and accuracy, such as the "mere exposure effect", which directly causes us to like things more as we are exposed to them.  And there are probably more cognitive biases yet undiscovered that will further reveal how limited our freedom of choice truly is.  So how do we reconcile these things with our deeply felt apprehension that we have free will?  The answer is disappointingly simple.  The only solution is to exercise our intentional thinking as often as possible.

Another aspect of our human condition, in a yet wider scope, is the meaning of life.  One can find hints about the meaning of life in advertisements, because sadly we do not live in a world of reasoned and thoughtful consumption.  For instance, I recently noticed that the vending machine near the library advertises "Life Water", which is bottled water with vitamins, extracts, and cartoon lizards.  The water is purported to, as the advert said, "Enlighten.  Energize.  Challenge.  Calm."  That sounds amazing.  I've never felt challenged and enlightened at the same time, nor energized and calm at once, either.  A social psychologist would smell an appeal to automatic thinking here, given that the quoted text was below the sight line, and the ad implies an impossible state of being.   Social psychology has experimentally proven that materialism does not make us happy, so instead we seek the immaterial.  A curious element of human nature is the near universal wish to be more than human, or to be in contact with something better altogether, such as a god or a higher state of being.  All cultures seem to have this kind of expression.  Priests and expert practitioners of various religions seek truths and powers that are normally beyond grasp.  I think this is all in search of something called "meaning".  Meaning seems to be a nonphysical, nonphenomenal abstract concept meant to give purpose to existence.  When we're born, we become awake to find ourselves suddenly but not so suddenly inside a reality that's existed for over 13 billion years; It is as though we're stepping onto a stage that popped into existence for no reason and stood empty for billions of years, and we're our own audience and something big is supposed to happen, right?  Just thinking about it is vertigo-inducing.  Does life mean anything?  An article on social psychology research in existential themes that I found, written by Koole, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski, stated that people believe their lives have meaning more strongly in response to recollection of a grave incident, references to death and mortality, and verbal challenges to their life's basic meaning[2].  By inference, a person who is unworried by death and mortality is therefore less likely to feel that life has meaning.  The meaning of life is somehow related inextricably to the fact that it ends, as Kafka once somberly observed.

The extent to which social psychology can help us come to grips with the human condition is not fully explored here, but the research opportunities are vast.  Perhaps by better defining the human condition in philosophical terms, then addressing those definitions with data from rigorous scientific research, we can one day understand what we are and where we're headed in the grander scheme of things.  Perhaps we will one day find a scientifically supported ultimate meaning of existence.  For now, it is enough to have begun investigating some of the questions of human experience under the lens of psychological sciences.  Although I have proven nothing concrete in my research, I hope to convince you that the field of Social Psychology can be applied to some of the deeper questions of what it means to be human.


Citations

1. Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert (2007) Social Psychology 6th Ed, New Jersey, Pearson

2. Sander L. Koole, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski (2006). Introducing Science to the
Psychology of the Soul: Experimental Existential Psychology.  
Current Directions In Psychological Science, V. 15, No.5, pages 212-216.
Retrieved from http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118000080/home?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0

I wasn't here for a while, something like half a year.  You people write a lot of good things, I spent many hours over the last day just catching up.  There is a tone, though.  This group has developed a writing style scaffolded around the more memorable voices and figures, and it's developed it's own cultural freight.  I'm pleased about that and it's about time this thing felt, in the common parlance, legitimate.  But I feel that something is missing from the cultural tapestry, after reading some of the choicer dialogues of the last few months.  The concept of horrormirth originated here, as far as people who give a damn can tell, and I notice a lot of horror and less mirth.  I sense that maybe you people have kept writing about the things you see, doing what you do (and doing it well), but maybe you've forgotten that this shit is funny.  You know what I mean.  It's not comedy, it's tragedy.  To me that's what it was always about.  Society is choking on a torrential deluge of the unwholesome effluent of unwell minds.  That's the punchline sans joke that we live every day.  There are other people that notice this, we're not unique in that quality.  We're unique in that we can take a joke from Eris.

I'm not saying lighten up, I'm saying at least smile while you say this shit. 

[love]

This is a lighthouse.  Your call.

I focus on myself a lot and I focused so hard that I started noticing something.  When I'm not completely immersed in another person, I start reacting to them like they were a black box. 

People are utterly knowable, though.  The price is putting oneself aside.  There isn't a better word for it than love, but love isn't quite right because life isn't nice like that- you've got to give someone such complete attention that something like love happens if you ever want to understand them.

I've only ever understood people I loved-or hated.  Everyone else is a mystery.

Something I believe is that if you took a completely true idea and put it into words, the words are automatically less true than the idea, and being tied down by words, the truth of it dies.

That's why you have to be paying so much attention to a person that language is just a secondary channel.  When you're reading their eyes, posture, smell, and patterns is when you can really hear them. 

Because when people talk about themselves they're making things up.  I'm making this up as I go.  It's all wrong even now.

But you can fix this, and I can maybe tell you about it.  You've got to really get into people to get them at all. 

Words are weapons.  Words are lies.



Mix your signals carefully. 

An eye is upon you.

I probably could have done this a lot better.

Do you understand?  Blink twice if yes.

All across America in 2008, people had been ranting and generally paying an inordinate amount of attention to the Democrat Candidate's skin color. In the primaries he was called a "long shot" candidate by some because he wasn't an elderly white guy like the rest. Interestingly, Obama's campaign has gotten more attention because of his race than any other factor. He's supremely likable as a person, and has a good speaking voice. He seems aware of the world around him, and he's not a vaguely reptilian old white guy.  Things have been bad.  This country is still hung over from what is being called the worst presidency ever.¹

If there are people seriously saying we live in a "Post Racial America", their voices are lost in a sea of rebuttal. If you can, search Google  for "we are living in post racial America" and you will see five pages of not a single person saying so. Google isn't definitive, but it's good for reading trends. Every article I read refers to "the absurd talk about post-racial America."²  The serious lack of people actually professing that we are past race leads me to suspect that reactionaries invented it as a straw man argument.  That we are not living in a Post-Race America is a commonplace observation.  That there are people who truly believe it is the real myth.

It's a great thing that the United States has finally matured enough to elect minorities.  It is not such a great thing that we are not by any stretch leading the way in this.  Other countries have opened their highest office to women and minority alike for some time.  While Obama's election is a good thing, it's bittersweet.  Why is everyone so shocked and apprehensive?  If we're an enlightened society of freethinkers, why are allowing racial tension a voice in modern politics?

While I admire the hopeful Progressive naivete in suggesting that Obama's election might herald a Golden Era of political colorblindness, I can't buy it.  This last election was a farce; The choices were to waste our vote on a long shot 3rd party candidate, a couple of average seeming Democrats, or a nearly dead Republican and his horrifying VP. The office of the President is as much a figurehead as it is a position of power, and the only suitable option was to at least restore America's dignity with someone who didn't giggle and stutter on stage.



1) Tom Head. "Worst. President. Ever?"
<http://civilliberty.about.com/b/2008/12/26/worst-president-ever.htm> December 2008

2) Fred McKissack. "We still aren't in a post-racial society"
<http://www.progressive.org/mp/mckissack110508.html>  November 2008.

http://www.livescience.com/health/081022-erased-memories.html

Scientists have successfully selected and safely erased specific memories in a mouse's brain, leaving others intact, it was announced today.

The erasure can be done while a mouse tries to retrieve an individual memory, said Joe Z. Tsien, brain scientist and co-director of the Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine.


Sholy hit.

Intelligence seems to be, on a mechanical level, a brute force decryption of reality.  Whatever that is.  Brain components don't behave intelligently, and they weren't designed by an intelligence. 

Computers, having been created by intelligences, rather than exhibit more intelligence as one's intuition presupposes, exhibit rather a certain perfection of stupidity itself.  Programmers understand what it means to write instructions that are impossible for computers to misunderstand. 

Nobody seems to really know what intelligence is.  Everyone seems to know what stupidity is.  Logic isn't intelligence, it only works when knowledgeable and well-reasoned entities arrange it properly.

My feeling on the matter is that human intelligence is a liar and a theif, and if strong AI ever occurs, it will be an off-brand reinterpretation of human cognition.

I say our intelligence is a liar because our brains misinterpret with reckless abandon in the name of self-interest.  It is a thief because we are not able to generate our own information.  We are born with the blueprint for cognition, and perhaps even "genetic memories", and from then on all we know is what we experience.  Every original idea bears the indelible mark of everything we've recorded in life.  Humans and computers are similarly affected by GIGO.

But the really good things in life aren't reducible.  Love, hate, food, sex, life, death.  Emotionally charged abstracts created by a textured matrix of neuro-physical and neuro-electrochemical mentations make up our Platonic ideals, complex ideas, poetry, et cetera.

It's those things that we seem to need emotion to help us decode the significance of; Some ideas seem out of reach of logic, and require emotional energy to help us ascertain what is important.

Apparently necessary disclaimer: Extemporaneous thoughts on intelligence, not that I know much about it.

Because electricity is awesome.

http://jacquesricher.com/NEETS/

I'm guessing ECH has tried it, at least.



There are recipes everywhere online. 

What I did was use scallops and shrimp for the sauce, plated onto seashells with potato mash around the edges to increase sauce capacity.  The topping is bread crumbs and gruyere.  Good stuff.

http://www.elementfour.com/

A device that extracts potable water from thin air.

I'm skeptical, myself.  Anyone heard of these or seen them work?

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/

Fuck.

I want a SUMO.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3838721808955166856&vt=lf&hl=en

Why do people even use granulated sugar in cookies when powdered is so far superior?

Blend, say four habaneros into  two cups of simple syrup.  Boil for 20 minutes.

Pour onto EVERYTHING.

You will either die or literally get high on all the endorphins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPM52wi9jIM&eurl=http://www.chycho.com/

This topic has been moved to Operation Mindfuck.

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=16549.0

So I'm studying the manual to take my permit test today, and I keep seeing these profound little soundbytes in my pdf of the California Motorcycle Handbook.  So I saved them. 

In order to make safe decisions about how to handle trouble ahead, you must know what is going on behind you.

Wear brightly-colored clothing to increase your chances of being seen.

Maintain a space cushion around your motorcycle that permits you to take evasive action.

Actively search ahead, to the sides, and behind to help you avoid potential hazards.

Experienced riders remain aware of what is going on around them.

When you speed up to lose a tailgater, you only end up with someone tailgating you at a higher speed.

No matter how careful you are, there will be times when you find yourself in a tight spot.

Every curve is different.

Ride within your skill level.

If you are carrying a heavy load, lighten it.

Avoid unnecessary talk or motion.

Obtain a Travel Map.

Stay away from wild animals that are rearing young—or suffering from food shortages.

Resist the urge to pioneer a new road or trail.

all the ingredients are discretionary in amounts, but here it is

Sour Cream
Artichokes
Red Potatoes
Cherry tomatoes
Summer squash
Dill
Mustard powder
Beer
Spring salad mix
White onion
Salt

Pretty basic potato salad, but instead of a bunch of dairy you scrape off all the artichoke leaves into a bowl and blend it up with the sour cream and use that as the dressing.  I also sauteed the onions separately in beer, oil, and dill, and steamed the summer squash very lightly so it didn't turn to mush.

I used to have a bad habit of drawing on things, so I thought I'd share.

Ladies and gerbils, the end product of a habit that almost held me back in high school:



You're going to say it's anime style, but I can't help it.  I learned off of webcomics as a youth.

This concerns a phenomenon I've been observing for a while now.  For about three years now, ever since I really started exploring the deeper ideas this group is aware of, I occasionally find myself zeroing in on a thought or idea, really getting deep into it, and reality seems to fall away and I'll kind of find myself not quite hallucinating but very strongly visualizing something in my head, and if I'm not interrupted I'll get to a point where I feel like I've glimpsed something or other.  Usually just an insight about whatever it is I'm thinking about.  Sometimes it's really emotionally powerful and kind of overwhelming, but usually just when there's music playing, with a certain feel to it.  Anyways, I've only lately been able to really do it on command, so I thought I'd bring it up.  Does anyone else do this, or are my neurons misfiring?  Anything to add?

This topic has been moved to Think for Yourself, Schmuck!.

http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=16075.0

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

GO GO GO