Sparticus

I'm getting really tired of privacy issues on the internet. Being in a position where I may one day be working with minors I hear a great deal of conflicting instructions, but the one I am going to talk about is the issue of being somebody.

We talk a lot in the Education Department about being a person, being relatable, being careful, being conservative, being experimental, being professional, being ourselves, and so on. So, where does that put me? Am I supposed to be careful of every little thing that I post on the internet? I haven't got any posts of illegal drug use, pornography, hate crimes (at least I don't think my "People I Hate" segments are considered hate crimes) or illegal activity (someone took down the picture of us walking left out of a parking lot that had a Right Turn Only sign), so what's the big deal? Sure, I drink and I swear and I make the occasional wild accusation, but the people that don't do that kind of stuff are the people who hide the fact that they do. So, should I join the conservatives and the cowards and try and erase my existence on the internet? I have two problems with that.
1) I'm not that good at the internet. It'd be like trying to clean up an oil spill with my bare hands.
2) Fuck that!
Why should I spend the time and effort to make myself digitally invisible? Why should the only information be an e-portfolio? Should I make all of my friends and colleagues sign confidentiality agreements before I act like myself? If we're going to let our potential employers dictate how we act, then we let them dictate who we are. And if we all tried to present ourselves as hard working, innovative, creative, involved cardboard cutouts, then future employers will just have to dig deeper to find out who you really are.

Many of you may already know my opinions on public and even private surveillance, but for those of you who don't, here's the truth: we all do things we wouldn't want other people to see. We all do things that we think separate us from everyone else. But, when everyone is doing something wrong, who's to say that it is wrong? If we were all seen as ourselves, then all the 'unacceptable' things that we do would be entirely normal.

So wouldn't it be great if we all let ourselves be who we are? What are our future employers going to do? Not hire anyone? The problem is, "I am Sparticus" doesn't work in this case when some people don't participate. Those people are fake. But maybe that's what you have to do to play the game.

A limited access to the internet

I would blog more if I could blog from anywhere. It seems like 140 characters is too short for a complex thought, but sometimes I have complex thoughts while I'm at work (sometimes). I think it feels weird to write a blog post on a piece of paper and then transcribe it to the internet later. It kind of loses the point of what most blogs are about: venting on the internet.

I don't think I'm alone on this, but I feel like the future isn't coming fast enough. There hasn't been a scientific development where our generation has been able to say "no fucking way!" Maybe we're spoilt, and when something comes up like a touch screen handheld media player that can access an entire world of information from satellites we only think "hey, neat" or "if I don't have that I will be unpopular." Sometimes, I'll admit, we can really sit down and be wowed by the world we live in, but for the most part, where the fuck is my reliable voice-to-text app that will let me remotely update my blog from my lunchtime musings? Or a printer that can withstand more than the movement of it's own printer head without breaking, for that matter.

Thinking Room

When it comes to thinking, I do the most when I'm in the bathroom. But tonight I was in bed trying to sleep and I got some pretty crazy thoughts.

In descending order order of occurrence:

1) Fine! I'll sign up for twitter.

2) "Up where they walk, up where they run, up where they play all day in the suuuuuun!" Fuck, I need to watch the Little Mermaid.

3) When we talk about the speed of light and that nothing can go faster than it, we fail to consider what the speed of light really is. We often think about it as about 300 million meters per second. We say "about" because we think that we don't know what the exact number really is because light moves to fast. But consider this:
We know that light cannot escape the Schwartzchild radius of a black hole. At this point, gravity is greater than all things, one of which being the momentum of light. Light must necessarily have a mass and therefore momentum (or analogous properties) if it is to be affected by gravitational force. To put plainly, light is slowed down to the point that it cannot escape a sufficiently dense mass.
We also know that light is bent by the gravitational force of all massive objects, notably stars. When an object's trajectory is changed it undergoes an acceleration. Acceleration is a vector. For example, when you jump up and down, your velocity is altered by the constant acceleration downward. For every moment in time, you can calculate your new instantaneous velocity by combining your last velocity and your acceleration. There is a point where your speed decreases so much that you stop. Like light at the Schwartzchild radius, you cannot escape the gravity of the Earth.

Now, we can conceptualize what happens when an object like a person slows down. A car travelling at 50km/h decelerates (or negatively accelerates) to 20km/h. We can imagine a car that was travelling fast, is travelling slower, and even a car that is stationary due to an acceleration causing it to have a velocity of zero.

Here is my main point: What the fuck does slow light look like? We imagine things like light turning into longer waves, like radio waves, when they are subject to a black hole. If gravity changes only the frequency of light, then how does it also alter its velocity in the case of gravitational lensing (where light bends around massive objects)?


Shit like that just blows my mind, man. I'm sure someone has it all figured out, but it still keeps me up at night.

Facebook: The Social Radar System

I've started to notice the total absence of sociability on the Facebooks. It has started to become a weird combination of two things:

1. a training blog
2. a voluntary low-end spy system

It seems we only use it to either post shit we find, think, or feel, or we're scouring it for what other people think, do, or look like. We very seldom talk to anyone other than a forced "It's been a while."

I'm not saying that I'm an advocate for keeping connected with Facebook. If I was I'd be Facebooking all the time and making lots of comments and plans and keeping in touch with all the people from way back when like we always say we will but never actually do. Now I'm finding myself, however, having to keep my head down on the old Facebooks. I suppose it has happened a few times in the past, but it's just an odd feeling. I don't know what is wierder, feeling like I have to keep off the grid or wanting to be on the grid.

For those of you who remember the disasterous Jenn-Charlotte situation, I contemplated quiting the Facebook then. I'm starting to think that it's a not bad idea. Granted, it is a way for people to inform me of things that are happening and for me to look at what other people are up to, but maybe it's time to step up the sociability and kick the network out of this social network. If I want to know how someone is, I should have to try some form of active communication to find out, rather than reconstruct a plausible timeline based on cross referencing photos, comments, and statuses between a number of friends and even friends of friends...

Then again, part of me really likes that. It's like playing Detective. Social Detective. Only like an 8 year old because you don't want to talk to people.

Playing make-believe is fun.

The Internet: TV of Our Times

Our children will be defined unlike ourselves. Where we define ourselves from the decade that influenced us the most at the youngest age, our children will be defined by the state of the Internet. Children may one day be recognized by association to a meme. In their teenage years they will regale the wonders of yesteryear that were the events almost self propagated by the Internet; because when you think about it, our children will be the Internet. They will be the creators, moderators, lovers, innovators, and, God willing, destructors of the Internet.

Maturation

I must be getting old.

Remember back in the day when you were a teenager and the most important part of a sexy dream is that you totally boned someone? Sort of like how the most important part of a sex scene in a movie was the fact that you saw boobies. But as we grow older we refine our tastes and understand that sometimes less is more. Sometimes an implication is better than a statement (or visual statement, as the case may be). We even come to realize that not getting what we want is often more enjoyable than getting it right away. We no longer have a need for the gratuitousness of sex (on a side note, why is the word "gratuity" used for tips? Shouldn't it be gratituity? I henceforth will object to paying gratuities on the basis that it is completely unnecessary).

I'm not going to go into details about this dream I had. Though I'm sure it is inferred that is was a particularly good dream, I assure you that you assume too much. It was good in the sense that a cup of tea is good compared to the goodness of a Dirty German (French Toasted Cheese and Bacon Pancake Sandwich grilled in Maple Syrup. Don't ask why it's a called that, I don't remember). Again, it wasn't gratuitous.

Some might say that it is boring or sad to have the realism of a dream be not in the vividness of boundless experience but rather in the modesty of situation. While some people have dreams about flying or superpowers or whatnot, I have dreams about attending lectures, volunteering to speak at a seminar, and all my real relationships being exactly the way they are in real life. But in the end, there is always something to be learned, something to be taken away and even shared here on the internet with the people who are even just curious about what I have to say.

From this dream I have learned this: It feels better to be wanted than to be had.

Maybe you can apply this to your lives. I know, much to my chagrin, that I can.

Dear Playstation

I'm sorry that I was so prejudicial towards you in the past. We haven't always gotten along and I know that is mostly my fault. The truth of the matter is you are the most awesome thing in the entire world and I've had more fun with you than I have on just about any other game system.

Your sleek new design, albeit inconvenient, demands well deserved attention. You don't stand upright and you negate the ability to pile anything on top of you; you have forced me to rearrange my desk and use a large portion of it simply to have you, but you are worth it.

PS3, you do not look better than my 360. You don't have the classics of the Wii. You will not play the PS2 games of many years' past. Your controller design is unchanged from an imperfect design. Why do I love you, you ask?

Free downloadable demos.

I was never the kind of guy who downloaded demos for my PC, but this is because my PC is used for so many other things. It has videos and word processors and design programs and entire games loaded on to it that never look as good as they could and play rather choppily. For a machine that cost two grand, my computer started to suck awfully fast.

But you, Playstation, are, by definition, designed for playing. And so I play. Some of your demos are not fun at all (Condemned 2, although scary, was hard to control and all too easy to get killed by something you couldn't see. Maybe your demo shouldn't be the level where your character is drunk. Maybe I just think 1st person shooters are lame). Some of your demos are so fun that I want to buy them when I otherwise would not (X-Men Origins was beyond fun, Wet was surprisingly entertaining, Conan is a $14.99 discount buy). This last point is the most brilliant marketing strategy ever, especially for a more consumer conscious culture.

I don't want to take a $70 risk on a game that I don't know that I will like. If I were to buy Conan at its opening price, I would be disappointed and be less likely to buy a new game before I let it become preowned and dropped in a discount bin, or if it was a good game, wrapped in a "classics" package 3 years later. I would not buy X-Men, but now probably will. I would not even consider Wet, though now I will shop around for it. And I wouldn't have bought these demos if they hadn't been free, either.

This is why I love you, Playstation. I love you in the worst way. You make me want to spend money on things you've shown me I will enjoy, and I thank you for it. I see the marketing plan and I don't fall victim to it, I support it.



Thank you to those of you who made me buy one.

Creeping

It is so much harder to do when your intent is honest.

And to think that once I found out a girl's name, address, probable vehicle colour all from a phone number I found on the ground once. Now all I have is a name and I can't seem to find her. All I want to do is talk to her; maybe find out why she's been gone.

But I guess in today's society we just can't take the chance that good people are out there.