Shadowlessness

I have decided to change my all-plain-text email policy and give HTML emails a try. This is mainly due to bad right-to-left support in plain text email messages (or in Thunderbird?) but there are other reasons. I will give it a try and in a few weeks decide whether I like to make it permanent or not.

I don’t know why I feel so shitty about it, like I’m cheating on my significant other or something!

When I was young, maybe in my early teens, I used to think that what gave the human brain its advantage (over synthetic computation machines) was its speed. I used to think that the brain processed information with a throughput and latency that was far superior to machines and that was why computers couldn’t duplicate the more complex tasks that every human does every second. But of course this was completely false. In terms of sheer speed of processing and signal transmission, human nervous system and brain fall much short of any computer.

Later on, I arrived at the concept that it was the inherent parallelism and emergent mechanisms that are going on in our brain that give it its superiority. The billions of neurons on our brains all are working in parallel (well, not all obviously, but each subsystem seems to be massively parallel) and many of them are actively selecting and routing and inhibiting and amplifying the signals that come their way so new, probably non-deterministic and previously untried, methods are emerging and falling all the time. As an interesting side note, it seems to me that our brain is quite good at data parallelism, and really bad at task parallelism! A corollary of this concept could be the idea that human brain is also very small for the computational power it has (I don’t think it is.) Anyways, while this parallelism might very well be a great feature of human brain, it’s probably not the most important or amazing. After all, the whole Internet is a parallel machine (for some loose definition of the phrase) that probably has more computational power than the whole human population combined by several orders of magnitude (haven’t done the math; don’t bug me about it!)

In the first years of college, I was introduced (a tiny bit more properly) to the fact that human brain reconfigures itself on the fly. Through a process and under rules that might very well be quite simple and even trivial to understand, it reinforces some paths and connects and creates others. This still counts (for me) as an important feature.

Very recently, I’ve started to realize the most amazing feature of the human brain is its energy consumption! There’s all this stuff going on in there, with all these capabilities, and it consumes, what, 100 watts? 200? (again, haven’t done any research or calculations – please illuminate me if you know.) That’s not even enough to power a half decent GPU these days. Am I too wrong?

It’s amazing how fast a bunch of otherwise respectable people (!) go through a bottle of otherwise ordinary scotch!

As you may know, I have sold my soul to the Prince of Darkness and got a Kindle. Now I want a Samsung Galaxy Tab, but I have no soul(s) left to bargain. Any suggestions?

Where there were twenty-something, now there is one less.

I saw my left hand burning tonight. It was engulfed in blue and yellowish flames of naphtha. I would have watched and enjoyed the sight much more if my right hand hadn’t been aflame before with my Zippo in it and I hadn’t thrown it into a glass of water!
You see kids, there is actually no way of putting out a Zippo if it’s out of the case, say for refueling. I would really have liked to stop and take a picture for demonstration purposes, but saving a drowning Zippo is much more important.

and with my cellphone, no less! \m/

“Oh God!”
“Smith will suffice.”

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

This, of course, applies specially to the “Black Label”. However, only those who know what I’m talking about can possibly know what I’m talking about!

- This is boring.
- Yes, it is. It’s all boring.
- Except the bat. He is not boring.
- Not all the time though. He gets boring sometimes, with his ethics and stuff.
- But he can be very entertaining too.
- Agreed!
- I’m bored!
- Yeah, we are. I wonder what happens if I shoot that guy.
- Hehehe! We got him in the gut!
- Yeah, we did. His stomach acid must be gushing out onto the rest of his organs. Imagine the fun in there!
- But why did I shot the man who was supposed to open the safe for me?
- Who cares?! Let’s kill someone else too!
- Let’s throw the gun in the middle of the hostages and see what happens!
- Oooh! Look at them going for it.
- Look at that idiot henchman of mine mowing them down with his Uzi!
- This is entertaining!
- Yes it is. Yes it is.
…

Tonight was the first time ever that I drank alone. I was, am, in a very bad mood. I sat on my couch and downed a third of bottle of whiskey, and then I cooked for myself too (that’s almost another first.) No matter how hard I try to forget what I did that led to this evening, I can’t.
I’m sitting here, alone, and I am sinking. I can’t stop crying. Remorse is not even an option. Even death is not an option.
I realized tonight that I am a real asshole. Not a lazy guy, not a very bad procrastinator, not a liar, not a completely useless person, not a drama queen; a real asshole and a very bad human being.
I think I need professional help. Shit. I do.

I am walking on asphalt, on an endless field of black asphalt, when out of the black black sky, a single bolt of lightning hits me.
My eyes are the first things that explode out of their sockets. My hair catches on fire. My brain evaporates instantly, and the high pressure mixture pours out of my ears and nose. The skin on my eyeless face melts off. My skull shatters. My jaws spasm so hard that not only I bite off my tongue that is caught between them, but also most of my teeth are crushed to bits. My blood boils in a flash and my heart explodes inside my chest along with most of my major veins. The liquid in my stomach and my intestines flash boils too and burns through my abdominal wall. Almost all the muscle and flesh and sinew in my body are busy tearing themselves off from the rest or trying to burn. Some of my bones dry out in the space between two seconds and get ground into a thousand pieces. The skin, flesh and tissue of my extremities melt and my fingers and toes (not to mention the rest) are fused together in a shapeless lump. My feet have already turned to liquid wax and are spreading on the ground.
The charred wreckage that once spent his nights trying to optimize his assembly code remains there under the black black sky. Good thing I didn’t have my laptop with me, or the fall could have scratched it.

It’s that damn Gates’ birthday again.

Running away is a solution to many things. Giving up, throwing in the towel, passing the buck, unshouldering the burden, admitting your incapability, playing dead…
It’s a perfect solution for mediocrity, isn’t it?

If you thought that was the rant, you’re sourly mistaken. Here it is.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Nothing real, just a wild and fantastical fantasy. Suppose you are standing on the edge of a rooftop, contemplating jumping down. As long as you haven’t jumped, the choice is always yours. You can jump, stay on the edge or move back. It’s not like you can’t jump two seconds or two hours later. If the situation changes, you can always weigh the odds again and make a more suitable choice.
But what if you jump? You make a choice and you jump. I think that’s the best choice you can make; the most logical. If you stay on the edge, or you move back, the edge and the jump will always be there, tempting and tantalizing. Why defer the choice?
Some might say because it’s a final choice and because you will always have the option, you can postpone it for later. It’s not like the edge is going anywhere, right? Wrong. I say you should always jump the first chance you get, because once you jump, there is no going back and there is no more choices. Why would you postpone a move that solves your dilemma so quickly? How come people (including myself) defer such obviously logical choices for more than a single second?
I like these kind of choices. I like changes and commitments that you cannot revert. They simplify life so much.

I think it’s kind of funny, I think it’s kind of sad,
The memories in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.

That’s not about death of course. It’s about giving up in despair. It’s about indecision and inability to deal. It’s about petty problems that prove impossible for weak people.
It’s about me.