2011: Year of the Gnat

26 nov 11

I need some good synonyms for "ethos." I've been using that word a lot lately, because it's central to so much of what I talk about: human psychology and behavior, and what the individual thinks about the universe -- his or her portrait of it, and how this portrait differs from the portraits of other humans. It's something of a relativistic concept, and as such maybe isn't entirely science-friendly. Just imagine: everyone has their own mind, their own set of experiences, and their own ways of thinking about and integrating those experiences, and the world-views might not all be identical or even in the least bit similar -- we have no way of knowing, because everyone is trapped inside their own mind.

In fact, the whole notion of mind, "psychology," and consciousness produces skepticism and even outright hostility in those with scientific mindsets, I think simply because science hasn't (yet?) been able to approach these things on its terms of experimentation, observation, and measurement. So, the egoic solution is to discard these ineffable entities, because according to a scientific toolbox they don't exist. But obviously, they do. Neuroscience is the new frontier.

Thesaurus.com gives me, as synonyms for "ethos," philosophy, attitude, beliefs, code, culture, habits, ideology, mentality, mind, mindset, principles, psyche, psychology, spirit, traits, and values. They forgot "world view," or in German, "Weltanschauung." From Wicked-pedia:

A comprehensive world view (or worldview) is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirety of the individual or society's knowledge and point-of-view, including natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and ethics.

Yowza.

Judeo-Christianity has made short work of physical vanity -- that's now seen as not being a good thing. But Judeo-Christianity (or maybe we can include Islam and call it "desert monotheism" or "Abrahamism") has little to say about intellectual vanity, and intellectual combativeness. In fact, these seem to be encouraged as a "proper substitute" for the great sin of physical vanity, similar to the way argument and debate is encouraged in lieu of physical combat. Perhaps obviously, I don't see why thinking you're great because you're smarter than everyone is somehow more acceptable than thinking you're great because you're more physically attractive. But, I think in the West (or in the world...I have limited experience and psychic powers) intellectual vanity is seens as a preferable alternative to physical vanity. I might even go so far as to say intellectual vanity is encouraged. There are a lot of pricks in graduate school, let me tell you.

One thing that reliably drives humans nuts is unfairness -- other people being blessed with more than they have, when it's not the result of "hard work." People are even hesitant to attribute any success they have had to their own innate qualities -- even smart people say "I'm not smart, I just work hard!" This is a very American way of thinking, and may be a Western/American value more than a universal. The notion that some people are quantifiably "better" than others, even in some respects, is almost intolerable. This is an accepted part of societies that incorporate royalty, aristocracy, or caste systems, but in the USA there exists an ideal of equality and meritocracy: money, which theoretically anyone is capable of making if they have the proper innate qualities, determines worth.

But some people aren't capable of making money -- they don't have those qualities of mind, like a competetive nature, or intelligence, or whatever, that are prerequisites for it. How is this any more fair than being poor because you weren't born into the right family? It's the same thing: either you're born with advantages in the form of the right neurochemical configuration, or you're born into a royal family. I don't see an essential difference.

If you look past the intellectual content of people's words, you can see that it often exists as a form of fighting -- as a way to assert dominance over another. That's what people do, and that's why I often don't like them. "My goal is to make you feel small and myself feel big," the human says to the other human.

It's possible that I just hang around with or hung around with the wrong people, and that I need to be more selective about who I spend time with, and that I'm more sensitive to ugliness than most people. I should probably spend less time interacting on the internet. I've been trying, lately, to do this, except it tends to mean that I don't spend any time with anyone, for any reason, ever. This might be telling -- am I a true misanthrope?

The Wikipedia article on misanthropy is a comforting read; it makes me feel like I'm not so alone. I think I need to read more Schopenhauer -- playing his audio books some time ago, in spite of the weid narration (I remember the narrator affecting a tone that he must have felt communicated The Schope's essential pessimism -- the effect was something more like "bitchy"), I felt a kind of kinship and genuine understanding. He might be my literary hero.

We-as-humans derive our feelings about ourselves from our feelings about others, and our feelings about others from our feelings about ourselves; they are inherently conflated. This phenomenon is at the core of "projection," or the attribution of one's own traits to others. Projection is a useful tool, because humans are in fact fairly similar, and what's true of one (yourself) tends to be more or less true of another, especially when considering qualities of mind or other generalized traits.

Yesterday's blog visitors:

109.78.1.x - Ireland. Eamonnw?
166.205.10.x - No idea. Someone near Wichita. Zeptar?
173.11.97.x - San Francisco. No idea.
208.115.113.x - Seattle. Smj? Davek?
66.249.67.164 - Googlebot.
66.249.68.139 - Googlebot (Googlebot desires no anonymity).
76.185.100.x - Dallas. Randy, certainly.

I tend to assume that most readers are from SDF, because they tend to have more of an interest in internet things than the general population of my Facebook friends, which is the other place I've posted a link to my blog. It was like dropping a Post-it note on the subway and hoping to start a new scripture-based religion. On FB no one pays attention to you or what you do -- it's a collection of people on soapboxes with megaphones going "ME ME ME ME ME" while ignoring each other; megaphones and earplugs would be a more complete metaphor. If you want to keep your burried treasure location a secret, just announce it on Facebook.

Admittedly, I'm extrapolating through projection here; in fact, I know of one person on Facebook who takes a different approach (posts nothing, but reads it pretty intently). I don't have good statistics, and I think it would be hard to get them, because you'd have to rely on self report, which tends to favor behaviors seen as moral or good ("why, of course I pay attention to other people's posts and am not a narcissistic attention whore!").

Every once and a while I log into Facebook -- the days of strict embargo have passed. But I still am leery of it and approach it with sort of a mild disgust as though I were picking up a rotting piece of fruit stuck to the bottom of the kitchen trashbin, just because the content is boring and vapid (sorry, humans), and because interacting with people too much puts me in a BAD MOOD. I don't post much anymore -- just occasionally comment on someone else's story. This blog is my new place for self-expression and general artistry. ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG ARTBLOG. Let's see you do that on Facebook!

I am a good and decent human being. Well, not really -- I just felt compelled to donate $20 to Wikipedia for some reason. I wonder if they keep track of donor IP addresses or implant a browser cookie so I'll no longer see Jimmy Wales leering at me, begging for spare change. If The Foundation explicitly offered that, they might get more money ("Shrink Jimmy's creepy closeup for only $4.99, or remove it entirely for $19.99!").

In other news, here's more fuggin' around with hex colors. As I said before, 80 is 128 in hex, and represents halfway from 0 to 256 in each color channel byte. So, I decided to play with some hex codes using 80 as one or more of the bytes, and see if I could produce any "fundamental" seeming colors. I got a "mathematical orange" (ff 80 00), and a "mathematical purple" (80 00 80), among other things. Remember: in order, the channels are R, G, B. So, it makes sense that, say, purple is red and blue turned up halfway, and green turned all the way down (red and blue turned up all the way yields the familiar computer-y shade of "magenta", or ff 00 ff).

I wonder if anyone is such a master at hex color that they can see a hex code and immediately visualize the color within some uncany degree of accuracy, like the guy -- I forget his name...the guy who switched to the evil "Agent Smith" side -- in "The Matrix" when he says "I don't even see the code anymore...all I see is: blonde, brunette, redhead." That could be me, man.

Rows 1 and 3 are dark and light versions of the RGB primary and secondary colors, respectively. Row 2 is populated by the fully saturated colors. In row 4, I was playing around with combitaions of some fully saturated channel, a halfway saturated channel, and an unsaturated channel. Row 5 I did a pseudorandom picking of letters from a-f and nubmers from 0-9 to see what that drew up (I quite like 97d6a4 -- a barely-saturated light grey-green). Row 6 was done to make the table square, and contains some progressing greys with a teensy bit more of red than green and blue (look at the numbers in the table cells), to make them "warm greys." If they had a teensy bit more of blue, they'd be "cool greys." For some reason yellowed greys and "greened" greys don't have a literary quality. Sickly grey? Ghoulish grey?

In still other news, this page is getting enormous. It's Saturday, so tomorrow I'll start a new page. Sunday is the day I start a new page on my diet, so it works out well in an OCD way. I like it when I'm in a better mood and I blog; it makes me seem like a more normal person. Maybe I should avoid blogging when I'm depressed or feeling bad, and thusly present my best face to the world.

Wow, big sprawling blog entry. I worked on it for two days, and I think this is the proper way to do it: have a night's sleep between starting an entry and posting it. I had been uploading entries in a rush before they were finished, and editing after the entry was posted. It's better to make sure it's finished.

I start new page now, in preparation for tomorrow, and upload this one.

25 nov 11

Blogging is kinda like making a zine: putting together text and images in a free-form way. Waah waah, who gives a sh*t. I got some new headphones. Man, what's wrong with me? I just don't feel like writing today. Maybe I'll just draw stuff instead. Hopefully I can do that.

I did the <img src=""> code first, and put it down four times. That means I have to make four images. Maybe tomorrow I'll feel more like blogging. It's not that I don't have any ideas, but just that I don't feel like doing it. I'm not sure why. I think the idea of people reading might be bothering me; I like to maintain some kind of artificial distance from and abstraction of whatever readers I might have. That's what creates the sort of public-private nature of a blog -- at least that's the way it feels to me: yes, it's on the www and anyone in the entire world can read it, but there's also an isolation in the absence of any real interaction with readers. It's this dichotomy that I like, and that keeps me sane and blogging; it's the old conflict of wanting privacy vs. Not wanting to be lonely. Blogging without comments is a good way to achieve or at least work towards that compromise.

When I feel that readers are "getting too close" it makes me want to not blog. It's almost as if I want people to peep in at what I'm doing and have their experiences, but I don't want to know about those experiences. I think it's a very good thing that comments aren't enabled on this blog. A few years ago I did a writing exercise that was based on interaction, and it was a lot of fun, but I burned out fairly quickly. It's much easier to keep up a blog, in which the product belongs entirely to me -- I don't owe anybody anything, and people are welcome to read it if they want to, but I don't want to hear about "my blog" in other places. I think this is what's been bothering me for the past two days, and in fact it always comes to this: my relationship with my readers, and what my writing does for them and to them and to that relationship.

I'm enjoying my new headphones, except that they hurt my ears and are a bit flimsy, difficult to adjust, and prone to breakage. Koss PortaPro is what I got. They're funny because they look like 1980's Radio Shak plastic electronic $4.99 junk, but in fact were around $50, and are consistently among the top reviewed moderately priced headphones on sites like CNET. Their retro-crap look serves in my mind as a testament to the designers "getting it right the first time" -- indeed, they've been around for a while, and their look hasn't changed (nor, I presume from this, has their inner workings or functional design). Truly a piece of culture.

I want to go for a ride today and play with my headphones and iPod and bike in the wild. I always say that -- that I want to go for a bike ride -- but I never do it. In fact, I demonstrably more want to sit around and blog and listen to music and eat food in my apartment all day, even though I haven't yet eaten today and I'm sort of enjoying the deprivation. I can feel my mind getting sharper and sharper as I starve.

I will not be another casualty of Marcel Duchamp and postmodernism. I refuse. That's not the way you do art. People in the art world are mostly brainwashed and reactionary, but at the same time they manage to make pretty good art sometimes. I think this happens because they subconsciously see through the lie of postmodern conceptualism, something that I just never admitted I wanted to do: instead I believed it and bought it, and tried to make work according to that ethos, which is a ruinous thing to do.

Instead, if you want to survive creatively and socially in the art world, pay lip service to relativism and nihilism and conceptual pranks and shitty, cobbled-together art, but then make art that's actually good and that looks good, and then somehow spin it so that this work that's actually the opposite of the postmodern/conceptualist/Marxist ethos instead seems to fit into it. Being a contemporary artist immersed in exhibition culture means, to an extent, being a liar. Art theory, as it is now, is diametrically opposed to art practice. Not only do "theory and praxis" not support, feed, and help each other, but they're actively destructive to each other. I ain't down with that.

The proof? Artists all want Macintosh computers, because they're pretty. They want to live in pretty houses in pretty places next to "the shop around the corner" as opposed to a Wal Mart. They exert meticulous control over their vocal delivery to the point where it can be hard to believe anything they say, because it all sounds like a carefully sculpted performative lie. Have you ever been to an art opening and looked at the people in attendance? To say that they put some effort into how they look is a contender for understatement of the century. Clearly, artists are concerned with aesthetics. It's practically a tautology -- that's what they do for a living, for God's sake. But they have this background of text in postmodernism, Marxism, and Duchampian conceptualism that says "no no, you must'nt be concerend with aesthetics, because that's low or cheap or unworthy or represses the poor or something." And no, this doesn't apply to everyone who calls themself an "artist." It's just a trend or tendency I've observed.

What's doubly funny is that there's no practical difference -- difference in outcome -- from a postmodernistic rejection of aesthetics and a Protestant rejection of aesthetics. You can reject beauty for text and politics, or you can reject beauty for God (and what is God if not text and politics?); either way it makes for bad art, obviously, because the art doesn't look good anymore. That's what bad art is! Isn't this obvious? I recently was passed a link to a Roger Scruton BBC documentary on beauty and art's rejection of it (and how this is a bad thing -- how we need beauty). Funnily, he's pigeonholed as a "conservative philosopher." I don't even really know what "conservative" means.

My political instinct makes me want to approach art's war against beauty with "Here is a thing that everyone is doing wrong! I must change their behavior for the sake of a better society!" This is probably a bad idea; instead, I should only be concerned with how I can change myself and my own behavior. The political instinct -- that is, the desire to change others' behavior -- is facist. The first sentence of the Wikipedia article on fascism says "Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology." The important word is "authoritarian" -- seeking to tell other people what to do.

Anyway, either you make art or you don't, then either it's good or it sucks. I've been having this weird experience lately of imagining how nice it would be if there were a heaven -- if there was some kind of ultimate comfort and antidote/alternative to fear; a way to make the fear go away, forever. Maybe there is, but I haven't found it. I guess I could start believing in an afterlife -- choose to make that "leap of faith" (or self dellusion) for the purposes of my own mental health. It might almost be worth it, because imagining that there's a heaven (and that everyone goes to it) is more comforting and calming than almost any other thought. Is there some way to get this negation of fear without believing that you're going to spend eternity on a cloud, looking at God?

There is only one thing that I can think of that's truly beyond the measure of science: human consciousness. You can tell it falls outside that realm of the quantifiable by the fact that it's so hard to define, or even talk about. The best I can do is this sense, this feeling, that you're alive and aware of yourself and the world. A sense of self, maybe.

24 nov 11

Have you ever noticed the way some people write on the net, they do it basically without any punctuation at all, more specifically they write in phrases as if they were speaking, and then seperate them with commas, maybe sometimes periods, it's an interesting demonstration of how you can "talk" using typed text and not really be writing as in composing sentences, just because you can type and string words together into more or less intelligible sentences doesn't mean you can write, you you you you you, I'm talking about you, YOU

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So, this is probably quite disappointing. I guess I just didn't feel like blogging much today, so I turned it into an exercise in...something. I don't want to say dada or art. Who knows what you call this, and who cares. I'm watching carlito's way for the 9832759287th time. Oh, I have an idea what I'm going to do for next time, or maybe I'll just fill up a paragraph with it. Stay tuned. Maybe I'll do it above this paragraph just so as to confuse you.

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23 nov 11

I'm not sure I like the "everyman" nature of the web. It's too democratic. There's not enough elitism, and as a consequence not enough quality; anyone can make a website, which is of course not to say that they can do it well. But it's hard to judge quality when you're staring at a little screen, the same screen where you get penis enlargement spam and play Minesweeper; one site tends to blend into the next, and ranking sites according to "goodness" is sort of a specialized skill, not to mention questions as to whether you're judging information design, graphic design, standards compliance, or what.

I remember the dot com boom in the late 90's, where people who could get a grip on <tag>content</tag> markup were grinning ear-to-ear with the notion that they were empowered techies doing "web design," and later "web development." If you show someone your website, they look at it for 2 seconds and then say "OK NOW LOOK AT MY WEBSITE!" I want a hobby that's not so friendly to the hoi polloi, and that does not generate such an unattractive misguided elitism.

Anyway, after the dot com crash around the year 2000 or 2001 or whenever it was, that everyman culture of the web got strangled a bit, which is sort of a fun thing to think about if you like to see people fail en masse. There were jobs to be had as "web designers" in the 90s, which meant that the "designer" could code html or just point-and-click in Dreamweaver. Then, after the market dried up the way it did, the designers became developers, and people working on the web were expected to be programmers. As far as design -- well, have your programmers do it, or copy some other site. It's not rocket science.

As far as I know, today there's a small market for pure web designers who are happy earning $20k a year, but they have to be really good, and might be more inclined to call themselves "front end developers" or Javascript/HTML/CSS coders with some Adobe software skillz0rz. To be honest I don't think I'm stylish enough to be a "web designer" -- there's a certain "look" that the hip websites have that seems to elude me. My design tends to amount to boxes with single-pixel borders, the Verdana font, and link background colors that change when you hover over them. This is the extent of my genius. I have an incomplete knowledge of CSS, and almost no knowledge of Javascript although I took a class in it once. Sort of sad. The world of technology just moves too fast for me -- I can't learn quickly enough to keep up. I think it's best that I look elsewhere for jobs.

Came across this article via my usual googlings. I don't think it's revolutionary or anything -- it basically takes a middle path between total fat acceptance and fat hatred, and says what most people know already: no, it's not ok to hate fat people, given them subpar medical treatment, not hire them, etc, but at the same time it's important that obesity remain in focus as a global health problem. Sure, good. Got any other whoppers (no pun intended)?

Anyway, reading it was depressing because it reminded me just how much the world does, indeed, hate fat people. The biggest impacts (GET IT!?!?!?!?!) are in being hired and finding a romantic partner, both of which are severely damaged by fatness and societal attitudes towards fatness. I don't care as much about the health issue, because we're all going to die anyway and most likely be miserable and in a nursing home for the last 10 years of our lives no matter how healthy we are at our prime. Sounds morbid and awful, but it's true: we all die alone.

Basically, what this all means is that I have almost no chance at happiness while I'm fat. And, I stand a fair chance of being poor or even homeless, since no one will hire me. You might say "that's not true, people get hired because of their qualifications, and not how they look." That's an incomplete picture: first of all, people get hired through some combination of appearance and qualifications, and if marketable qualifications are lacking (as they are in my case) then appearance becomes even more important. Plus, many people are not hiring now-a-days.

Basically, I'm screwed. Nice knowin' ya. Here's a thing:

Another thing:

22 nov 11

I think my blog is going well. I've been able to get back into the swing of it, and it's nice to get the regular writing practice, although the old issue of "what is it scrupulous and good to post for the entire world to see, and what is not?" remains. At least Randy will benefit from having some additional entertainment, while in the meantime lynch mobs arrive at my home with torches. Right, Randy?

For the past two weeks I've noticed palpitations, surging, fluttering, and variable rate/intensity in my heartbeat. Finally I decided to see a clinic doctor about it, who told me to get an EKG, which I did last Thursday.

I had a little scare last night: I got a call from the clinic doctor telling me that last Thursday's EKG was "irregular" and that I should go to the emergency room to get another EKG, because what he termed "inferior wall changes" could be heart attack-like activity. I did this, taking a cab to the hospital and fantasizing about not having long to live. My assessment was "life has been a mix of ups and downs."

There, I was faced not with an unbearably long wait, but with some sneering and grumbling from both a doctor and a nurse, along the lines of "this is not serious...why are you here and burdening the taxpayer?" But, I think the blame for alarmism was put most squarely on the clinic doctor who had sent me to the ER -- the ER doctor questioned whether or not the clinic doctor even looked at last Thursday's EKG, and speculated that he may have been out of EKG reading practice even if he had. Could be -- I don't know. But I think there's some general contempt focused on walk-in/urgent care clinic doctors by hospital and family practice doctors, at least in Canada; they're seen as fast, cursory, and maybe not that smart; in a lower league.

There's a doctor shortage in Canada, and it's hard for anyone (although I suspect that the rich have some secret way of doing it successfully) to find a general practitioner to see for checkups and just to have an ongoing care entity that is familiar with the patient's body.

The gap is filled with walk-in clinics and hospitals, and patients doing exactly what I did: notice some problem, self-diagnose on the internet, go to a walk-in clinic, and get shunted off to a specialized facility, pharmacy, or hospital for treatment. This sometimes works out fine, as it's essentially the same thing family practice or GP doctors do with their patients -- and in that case, I mean "patient" as "someone in their ongoing care, such that the ongoing nature of the care is a beneficial part of treatment."

But other times, like perhaps in my case just yesterday, the diagnostics and treatment directives coming from clinic docs are maybe not all that great, and other facilities are left to either pick up the slack or say "what are you doing here in the first place?," as they inferred last night at the hospital with their dirty looks.

I don't have any solutions.

Bottom line is I don't think I have any serious heart trouble, and neither does the ER doc.

More RGB/hex stuff: I was talking yesterday about grey scales and how they work with hex. To recap, in hex color designations there are three hexidecimal numbers that determine how much red, green, and blue goes into a given color. To get a shade of grey, the three numbers must be the same; equal amounts of primary colors in an additive color model like RGB results in chromatic desaturation. I talked about 010101 being the darkest grey next to black, and fefefe being the lightest grey next to white.

What this means, among other things, is that there are only 256 shades of grey representable in hex. Again, I don't know how this corresponds to a monitor's ability to display, and I'm even less certain about the human eye's abiltiy to distinguish colors that finely gradated.

Below is an image of 8 shades of grey, decreasing in lightness from top to bottom: dedede, dddddd, dcdcdc, dbdbdb, dadada, d9d9d9, d8d8d8, d7d7d7. Each band is about 45 pixels high, or about a centimeter on my monitor. I wouldn't say I can clearly see the demarcations, but I can see them; try playing with your scrollbar and watch for the moving lines.

This image represent the limits of hex notation to produce color gradation.

THE MATRIX HAZ U

21 nov 11

I like hex color codes, and RGB color theory. One way of representing the millions of colors displayable on modern computer monitors is with base-16 numbers, using three 2-digit slots containing a number between 00 and ff (00, 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 0a, 0b, 0c, 0d, 0e, 0f, 10, 11, etc) for 256 (starting the count at 0, not 1 -- computers do this) possible values in each slot (256*256*256 values altogether, or 16,777,216 colors representable with hexadecimal notation, although I don't know if my monitor can actually display that number, or more, or less -- there's no way for the human eye to tell). On the low end is black, or 00 00 00 (no red, no green, no blue). On the high end we have white, or ff ff ff (all red, all green, all blue).

In a greyscale, the same number is used three times, and instances of it cancel each other out chromatically to produce a completely desaturated color of some lightness between 100% (white) and 0% (black) -- also known as a "shade of grey." The only hex notational requirement is that our shade of grey designation consists of the same number, three times:

Moving away from achromaticism and on to some saturation, let's try and create a hex designation for the color "olive," which I talked about a few pages back, from what we know about it. In an RGB environment, olive happens when red and green are mixed at 50%, with no blue. So, that would be 80 (hex for 256/2), 80, 00. Let's try it on the background of this paragraph...yep, it worked. Olive is slightly closer to black than white in terms of lightness (the last byte is 00, or all the way down), so let's use white text for readability. We are masters of hex!

Red, or ff 00 00 (red channel all the way up, green channel at 0, blue channel at 0).

Green, or 00 ff 00 (red channel at 0, green channel all the way up, blue channel at 0). Even though 00ff00 is closer to black than white in lightness, black text is more readable in it, at least on my monitor. In fact none of these medium-lightness colors are great for a text background -- for readability you need contrast, like the tan page and black text I use for my blog under normal circumstances.

Blue, or 00 00 ff (red channel at 0, green channel at 0, blue channel all the way up).

Yellow, or ff ff 00 (red channel all the way up, green channel all the way up, blue channel at 0. With RGB, the more colors you add the lighter it gets, so we definitely need to switch to black text here. "Red and green make yellow" is a weird concept for someone raised on RYB (red yellow blue) theory in elementary school, but hey -- what's true is true, for some given environment.

Cyan, or 00 ff ff (red channel at 0, green channel all the way up, blue channel all the way up).

Magenta, or ff 00 ff (red channel all the way up, green channel at 0, blue channel all the way up). Again, in this case it seems like black text would be more readable, because ff00ff is closer to ffffff than it is to 000000. But again, on my monitor white text looks better. Your mileage may vary.

Boy, that looks awful -- really garish and distracting. Fully saturated colors are dangerous, design-wise. If someone wanted to do a conceptual art piece about RGB color and did everything in these six -- the RGB primaries and the CMYK primaries -- it would probably not do so well aesthetically.

I've been having happy-sad dreams lately. Last night I dreamed I had some kind of fulfilling, challenging career with some social status attached to it, although I don't remember what it was; doctor or surgeon, maybe. And, the night before last I dreamed I was falling in love with some girl, even though she was not "classically beautiful." I was surprised to find in the dream that I found her to be beautiful, even though her face was a bit odd. I remember inspecting it and touching it, and being surprised to find how nice it was. It may have even changed shape when I looked at it more closely. Then I wake up to my world in which I am not a surgeon and have no partner. I wish it were the other way around, and I was dreaming about being fat, poor, lonely, unemployed and without prospects, only to wake up and say "Thank God it was only a dream."

Oh, one more thing I want to do: squint at a block of medium gray (808080) next to a block of alternating black-and-white pixel pattern, and see if they look the same. They should.

They don't; alternating pixel pattern is significantly lighter. Oh well. Monitors will be monitors.

20 nov 11

I screwed up. I should not have studied art, or, at the very least, I should have studied something like graphic design or animation and taken a software/tools-intensive, pre-professional approach (maybe I can still do this). Good thing it was effectively free, or I'd be really pissed off. But you know what the funny thing is? I don't regret getting my MFA; it was a good and necessary experience in a lot of ways. For one thing, it improved my writing. And, I think it improved my artwork, or planted some seeds there that will continue to grow if I keep practicing. So it wasn't a complete waste, although it could have been done a lot better.

However, I'm done with school, at this point. No more, ever, unless it's something like a weekend class on building a birdhouse. For one thing, I'm too stupid for it. But more importantly I don't think it would do much good. Some people are saying that the days of the public research university are coming to an end, and that those credentials are going to mean less and less as time goes on. I can only hope this is the case, because it's really a big "good old boys club" scam: frat brothers hiring frat brothers, essentially. "Oh hey! I see your parents paid for you to drink beer and have sex while learning to dress, groom, talk, act and think in a uniform way, in a celebration of upper middle class whiteness, for four, or five, or ten years as well! Here's $50k a year!"

I would have been good at a job like social worker or HR director; maybe I can still sneak my way into this field. I need to stop saying "I don't like people," because 1. It's not true, and 2. It effectively shuts down every option in almost any scenario; it's a destructive thing to say. It's true that I sometimes find it hard to get along with and talk to other people without feeling afraid, anxious, self-doubting, self-hating, or just vaguely uncomfortable, but it's not accurate to say that I hate them. I'm not sure I "hate" anything, or that anyone is really capable of "hating" anything. I will go out on a limb and say that life is less pleasant for me than it is for a lot of other people in similar circumstances.

Let's ask the question "What makes a good person?," and let's be as hard-nosed, scientific, and simple-minded about answering as possible. First of all, there's the three-pronged model I introduced on the last page: beauty, kindness, and intelligence; rank a given person from 1-10 in these three categories, and then give a composite score.

But, there is always the old Forrest Gump maxim of "stupid is as stupid does": what about what a person has achieved, what they have done with their life, apart from their innate qualities? I think this must be at least important in determining worth. So, you'd rate a person from 1-30 on how well they've gone about living a goal-oriented, achievement-based life -- questioning whether or not they've lived up to their potential. Then, the final score is out of 60 (qualities + achievement): 1-20 = bad, 21-40 = ok, 41-60 = good. We can convert it to into a score out of 100, in order to assign letter grades to people. That's my method. Now, to put it into practice.

Incidentally, that table also served as the perfecting of my table design. Here's the CSS followed by the HTML:

.line {
border-collapse: collapse;
border-width: 1px;
border-style: solid;
font-size: 10px;
font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
padding:15px;
text-align:left;
background-color: #F1F8A6;
}

Th.top {
border-collapse: collapse;
border-width: 1px;
border-style: solid;
font-size: 10px;
font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
padding:15px;
text-align:left;
background-color: #EBB5B5;
}

Th.left {
border-collapse: collapse;
border-width: 1px;
border-style: solid;
font-size: 10px;
font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
padding:15px;
text-align:right;
background-color: #91C5DB;
}

Th.corner {
border-collapse: collapse;
border-width: 1px;
border-style: solid;
font-size: 10px;
font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
padding:15px;
text-align:left;
background-color: #000000;
}

<table class="line">
<tr>
<th class="corner">&nbsp;</td>
<th class="top">Me</td>
<th class="top">Someone I know</td>
<th class="top">Someone Else I Know</td>
<th class="top">Still Someone Else I Know</td>
<th class="top">One more</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th class="left">Beauty</td>
<td class="line"><p>2</p></td>
<td class="line">8</td>
<td class="line">9.9</td>
<td class="line">3</td>
<td class="line">4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th class="left">Kindness</td>
<td class="line">3</td>
<td class="line">6</td>
<td class="line">8</td>
<td class="line">7</td>
<td class="line">7</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th class="left">Intelligence</td>
<td class="line">7</td>
<td class="line">6</td>
<td class="line">6</td>
<td class="line">4</td>
<td class="line">9.9</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th class="left">Achievement</td>
<td class="line">11</td>
<td class="line">29</td>
<td class="line">25</td>
<td class="line">15</td>
<td class="line">20</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th class="left">TOTAL</td>
<td class="line">23/60, or 38%. A solid failure as a human being...a low F</td>
<td class="line">47.5/60, or 82%. B</td>
<td class="line">48.9/60, or 82%. B</td>
<td class="line">29/60, or 58%. F</td>
<td class="line">40.9/60, or 68%. D</td>
</tr>
</table>

On second thought, maybe the best way to go about this is just to look at someone's salary. I like that, actually...perhaps salary, IQ, and body mass index. Somehow these might be combined to yield a percentage average. If you're retired, use your most recently earned salary. If you're unemployed, take a 0.

I would try to come up with the formula now, but unfortunately my IQ is too low, so I'll just go to Wendy's instead and increase my body mass index via a ~*SPICY CHICKEN COMBO*~ (860 calories with substituting a large chili for fries, 2 packages of crackers, and a Diet Coke).

I mentioned in (I think) yesterday's entry that humans, in their emergence from the order Primates, may not be a good evolutionary choice. Funnily, today, I read Steven Hawking more or less echoes my sentiments. His central point is that if humans are going to survive, they need to explore and colonize space. I think this is overstepping his analytical powers a bit; basically, he sees some irresolvable problems with humanity, such as it is (he names aggression and selfishness, which are similar to a thirst for power and malignant narcissism, which I discussed the other day), and then he states that there needs to be some radical change if we're going to "make it," or evolve, or whatever.

I don't think the radical change necessarily has to be colonizing space -- in fact, this seems stupid and like outdated sci-fi; AI/nannite cyborg technology is a much more likely scenario for the posthuman. I think Steven Hawking has gotten a pass lately on many of his more out-there ideas (this isn't the only one -- he said a while back that we should avoid beaming signals out into space so as to avoid attracting the Romulans) because of his can-do-no-wrong status in contemporary Western culture. Whatever...I'm sure he's still smart and insightful. But fanboys -- if there are any left -- would be well-advised not to take Hawking's word as gospel; when he says stuff like this he's not doing science, but rather using the bully pulpit to spread his own social critiques and speculation, and maybe getting a little carried away. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Basically, Hawking and I say, we suck as a species, and our suckiness is going to be our undoing. It seems to me that his is a case of the universe solving its own problem, and isn't something to worry about. Either we're great and we live on throughout the aeons, or we suck and die out; no big issue either way.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, another one of these Carl Sagan-esque popular science advocates who doesn't actually do any real science, worries that we might be too stupid to understand the universe. This is another angle by which we might meet our ultimate failure. Between being too stupid, too aggressive, and too selfish, there really isn't much hope; this planet full of hairless monkeys might not amount to anything after all.

Right now I am happy eating my gourmet olives.

What I can offer is an end to suffering.