Social Constructs

On gender roles being a social construct~ (invalidly argumented) comparisons

Why should a male be masculine and a female be feminine? The answer is in both nature and nurture – no one is ever raised environmentally unaffected, not even someone raised in a white box: that in itself is an environment, is it not? Similarly, no one escapes genetics. Talk to people who have sickle-cell anemia. Or cancer. Or baldness. Or two eyes, two ears, one nose and one mouth.

So why do people say “this is how a man should behave”, or “that’s so girly”, or “you should be more feminine”, or, “You’ll be a man, my son!”? Like the toilet argument, all this should be irrelevant. Referring to that article… this is the “serious argument” that post should have been.

But on the other hand, this has been sitting in draft mode so long I just feel the need to tack on unnecessary final paragraphs and banish it into the wide web.

Other social construct examples? Parental roles: biological inheritance from physiological characteristics of the sexes. Clothing, fashion: evolution of need for protection from nature. Modesty and other ‘values’? Prudishness? Justice? Equality? Capitalism? Socialism? Religion (a gold-standard paragon of constructs)?

Why do we adhere so? Unfortunately, it’s up to nature and nurture. Even the ‘individualism’ so touted by parenting manuals is just another limitation. Any interaction with any person forms a link that binds one to a standard of expected behavior. Imagine politeness. Now imagine some stranger you just smiled at in the street giving you an uppercut. What is to be expected? It is essentially impossible to be free from limits. Did the Buddha really do it? Perhaps mentally? Perhaps not. Recall the principles of moderation, the four Truths, the Eightfold Path. What is Right? Why adhere?

We are like a bowl of bubbles rising from a bubble machine sitting in the universe, holding up each other until we pop, new bubbles generated all the time, propping up, propping up. On occasion some bubbles float up and away, free from the miasma below, free for a second in the clean, beautiful air. Then the bubble pops.

Reduced to (or: You are Connected)

Another one of my bathroom epiphanies.

All that you see, arbitrary statements, science, holy words, deepest math, most profound statements – boil down a life.

A life, reduced to a line.

One man, four hundred years ago, forty or fifty years of breath summarized in, “To be, or not to be”. Another – “I think, therefore I am”. More than two thousand years: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” One hundred and four years ago: “e = MC2″.

How does one sentence illustrate a human life – born, breathing, living, growing, loving, frakking, aging, dying? Apparently just like that.

“As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.”

On to the bracketed section of the post title.

There is nothing that you touch now that has not connected to a life. Even the tiniest grain of sand is linked inexorably to a life. Imagine a speck of a flake of a shell, on the bottom of the ocean floor, touched by bacteria, touched by the water that connects an infinite reservoir of life. The Earth. The galaxy. Everything connects. There is always a line.

So you are not alone.

Fresh Desktop

Theme by the name of Tones from Belchfire, and wallpaper from the very beautiful artwork of Huke (or is that the character name?) courtesy of a fantastic waller at Animepaper. The picture looks nice and widescreen here thanks to my fancy external monitor. That green thingy is actually my desktop post-it thingy that I don’t really know how to hide yet.

Yeah, so I reformatted my laptop so it’s all nice and squeaky clean… But it still lags playing flash Tetris.

RPK and Cost Financing

Well I’ve promised myself not to talk politics any more but as a joint actsci-finance major this is really interesting to me.

http://mt.m2day.org/2008/content/view/28036/84/

He certainly knows how to run a business.

New Desktop – The End of the World

Off a manga oneshot by Kotonoha (I love you so) and called, unsurprisingly, “The End of the World”, by Inio Asano.

The taskbar, etc. is Vendetta, by someone I don’t remember, from a site I barely recall. Actually I just wanted something black to go with the wallpaper. The gunnery doesn’t have anything to do with the manga.

Tetrapharmakos (On Epicureanism)

Found something good -

Don’t fear god,
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure
(Philodemus, Herculaneum Papyrus, 1005, 4.9-14).

Fantastic.

Read the entire (Wikipedia) article:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapharmakos>

and the one about Epicureanism

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean>

What’s interesting is what the Epicureans pursue – “to live free from fear”, and fear has many definitions – not phobias; and “tranquility”.

“Ataraxia”, cutting from the Wiki article – For the Epicureans, ataraxia was synonymous with the only true happiness possible for a person. It signifies the state of robust tranquility that derives from eschewing faith in an afterlife, not fearing the gods because they are distant and unconcerned with us, avoiding politics and vexatious people, surrounding oneself with trustworthy and affectionate friends and, most importantly, being an affectionate, virtuous person, worthy of trust.

So lesson learnt: stay away from annoying people and politics.

One more thing…

“Total views: 10,001″

WtF?

Cool.

Thanks.

I don’t think I know you.

You probably know me.

And maybe a few things you didn’t want to know.

That’s nice.

Cheers.

On Blogs

I wanted to try to register a new blog today. I thought that if the name could be taken, I’d use it to be frank and angry and a jerk proclaiming jerkiness to the world jerkily.

But the name was taken. So naturally I looked it up, and saw that the blog had been deleted. No more content. Maybe the chap was angrier than me.

Which does lead to the point of the post. Someone was bugging me to write something, so I will. Doesn’t it seem like blogs have now moved into the mainstream so heavily that it feels like no one blogs any more?

But I follow oodles of blogs, so that’s not quite true. Still, I get the feeling blogging’s rather dead-ish.

In any case, the name I wanted to register was “existentialrage.wordpress.com”. Look it up in the address bar, if you want. It’s dead, D-E-D. Might be an interesting philosophical statement, but I can’t be bothered. So much for my attempt at jerkness. Maybe if I get angrier I can think up an even better name, but few things are as great as existentialism. Teh ais, maybe. But “tehaisrage” can’t be a good name for a blog, can it?

Back to blogs. It seems like all organizations have to have one. Makes sense. It’s easy and free. Little upkeep, and can be as dead as you want it to be (or otherwise, of course). It seems like a whole truckload of celebrities have them. It seems like a whole oil-tankerload of emo teens have them (sorry emo teens), and likewise for emo working adults, and emo preteens, and emo college students (like me). But I still get that vibe, that it’s rather “out” now. Out of the mainstream, even. I dunno.

Short, easy, lazy, fun. That’s what I think hits the top of the Internetz now. Twitter – short and easy. Youtube – easy, fun and lazy. Facebook – short, easy, lazy, fun. Google – easy, easy, easy, easy. You get the idea.

By the way, tried doing a post on some other blog using Blogger recently, and was struck by (honestly) how crappy the interface is. WordPress is great.

Young and Malaysian?

I need your help!

Click

Update – Aug 19: Thank you to everyone who responded. You can read the full report at http://tinyurl.com/ymreport

Ghost in the Shell Theories

Cybernetic bodies are fine and all, but from watching GiTS it appears that the cyberbrains are easy enough to duplicate, and to hack into… So basically the brain itself becomes no different from a computer hard drive, information in the brain becomes obsolete; personality can be changed just using the skills of a hacker. And when the mind can be copied and edited to make a new ‘personality’, what use will there be for ‘original’ human minds? Doesn’t that mean (theoretically) with technology’s progression we are making ourselves more and more unnecessary?

Brilliant article on the WSJ the other day (today is Saturday, July 18th, so look back the past week for it) about a bunch of scientists being able to replicate/ model some mouse neurons. Apparently they have a cluster of live mouse brain cells kept alive in some test tube and hooked up to a bunch of monitoring devices. And then they have a massive supercomputer doing the modelling, which apparently is rather accurate. There is a reference to a neural equivalent to a Mexican wave, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

That’s awesome.

Soon we will be able to doubt, with better efficiency than before, what is real and what is not; whether what we see is what others see; if what you know today was really what happened yesterday; if what you think (s)he thinks is what (s)he thinks he thinks… et cetera, so on, and whatnot.

Moving a little bit too far from the topic, however. Will attempt to stray back.

So, how long before a full human brain is modeled by computer? Will consciousness arise? Interestingly the article does touch on the issue, but I don’t remember a conclusive stance. Them scientists don’t know either. Is consciousness merely an aspect of the physiological brain (cells and all), or something deeper? That’s what they ask, and what I would certainly be interested in knowing. What kind of limitations would a digital brain possess? How about its memory capabilities? Will they let it sync with the Internet? Will they call it CADIE? Will it become the Puppetmaster? Will it destroy the world, or destroy itself?

Excellent building blocks for a SF novel, if you ask me.

Edit 23 July 09 – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8164060.stm – 10 years only! Let’s keep tabs on this one, eh.