Discoflamingo13's Journal: "Number Three"

A long day when you write three things down in your journal, and you don't remember most of them by 9 at night. I know I said several important things, but I can't remember what they are in exact detail. (But the nice thing is I get to read them again and remember)

Today in combinatorics we had a beauty contest - for proofs of Turon's theorem. That is to say, which proof was most elegant and aesthetically pleasing. It's one of the weirdest arguments you'll ever get into with somebody else saying things like "well, I like the way Peter's proof wore the inductive hypothesis, but it was just clunky on Gitch's proof." Like an inductive hypothesis is a mink, or something. Yeah, I'm already tired - if you couldn't tell already.

I don't think I have the ability to be mad at somebody for something right away. Hell, I didn't stop talking to Kale (who is, for the record, the only person I've ever told I would never speak to again until they cleaned up their act) for more than three years. Lately, well, I don't know. I do what I do - and some people handle that, and others don't.

There are few people who will seek me out if they haven't seen me lately. I'm here - that's where I'll be, if you ever decide that you miss me. The workload right now, whether or not I'm doing it at any given moment, feels like a giant load of something heavy above my head - so I'm afraid to move too much, or say too much, no matter how badly I want to talk to somebody, or how much I wish they missed me.

Sometimes, I get really annoyed when people start griping about logic. Logic is fallible, and can be misapplied in dozens of ways. It's a stupid way to live your life- that's why we're human. If we were only logic, we'd be machines, but we have emotions, and reasoning that extends beyond the bounds of logic. Hint: What does the set of all x such that x is not in S look like? Some people blow this off as a bullshit paradox, but it has serious problems. Is the opposite of falsehood always true? Is the negation of a truthful statement always false? As a hacker, you learn to think in shades of grey, not black and white. It's the system's job to behave in black and white, and the hacker's to see the world as shades of grey. It doesn't matter if you're hacking Wittgenstein or a Linux box - it's the same principle.

Language sucks for communication - but we still want to do it anyway - why is this a problem? When you pour a cup of milk in a bowl, did you pour exactly a cup of milk? No? Does it matter? NO? Well, there you go.

I'm just tired and grumpy, and sick of hearing people blather about logic and language and the failings of human reasoning, and wanting everything to be perfect. The world is not perfect, nor does it have that potential - it can be better than bad, and most of the time it downright sucks for everybody involved - and trying to make it perfect doesn't do anybody any good, because it's too much to chew on at once. Logic is a tool - if you live by logic, logic lives by you, and it leaves room for precious little else. Think of memes - think of Zen. But most importantly, think outside the binary operations. That's what consciousness is - that's why G&#246del's Incompleteness Theorem only applies to machines, and not to humans. Free. Your. Mind.

If you want to bring a centipede to a crashing halt, ask it in which order it moves its legs.

You don't need a lid on a basket of crabs. If one tries to climb out the others will pull it back down.

Don't be so proud. You are not an intelligence until you pass the Turing test.

The great mass of men lead lives of quiet domestication.

The blind man looking in the mirror cannot see he has no eyes. So what?

--- Selected Sayings of Solomon Short (aka Robert Heinlein)

not to intrude...

[avatarofchaos]

...but to ignore the fact that humans strive for system in which life can be viewed as something more than simply getting by is asking for people to become something little more than machines. and sometimes the only way to look at things that are too complicated for you to see in the eyes of sanity is black and white. people want to be right, but by createing a right, they have created a wrong, which at one time may have just been a choice. in the middle of the blackest times, you can imagine somethings that are in the most brillant light, and somehow, you can keep going.

so i guess what i'm saying is that the reason people want there to be perfection, is that most minds aren't ok with hopeing for what they will eventually get. without something to strive for, they will never get out of bed, never try to make anything else better, and never ever take the chance of being hurt to step out of thier shell in fear of making the pain worse and falling from the best they can achive.

sorry this is a little rambley, and kinda wierd, but yeah. be happy

Re:not to intrude...

[Discoflamingo13]

You don't intrude, and don't apologize for silly things. It's unbecoming on you ;)

Striving for a system where perfection is possible is fine with me - it's something human beings do very well. Life is not simply getting by - it is an experience, a challenge, a yadda yadda yadda, etc. If I told you what life means to me, I wouldn't go to school tomorrow, and not because I'd be dead, but because I'd be at this keyboard still typing away. When capstones are over, boy howdy is that what I'm gonna do!

Thanks for talking to me, though, no matter how long it took to parse what you just said. It gets lonely here, all the time.