Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

Men don’t understand women.

Most of my gender freely admits this. We don’t, what you do makes no sense to us. What is far less commonly realised however is that women don’t understand men either. This comes to a head with flirting.

First of all, if you think you’re being subtle about it, you haven’t a chance in hell of us noticing. It’s never going to register on our radar, not one bit.

Secondly, if you think you are being obvious, you’re not. This might register as possible subtle flirting to us. Then again it might not.

What women don’t seem to understand is that anything short of “hey, I like you. In that way.” is considered subtle. Anything else we could simply be misinterpreting even if it registers as flirting so put together the general obviousness of men together with the suprisingly fragile ego and fear of rejection and you can go as far as to pull us as we’ll still debate whether you actually like us.

There is also the issue that flirting from a girl’s perspective is quite ambigious. Something that one girl does to flirt, another girl will just do out of routine. Some girls just have naturally flirty personalities. Close and personal dancing is something some girls do with everyone. It’s not flirting. Making jokes about you and me hucking up – I do this with most of my female friends, it’s not flirting.

Finally it’s also worth considering that every action you take it thrown into the debating ring when a guy is trying to work out if you are in to him or not. This includes how often you accept invites to come out, what reasons you give when not coming out, how you phrase it, how you act when you do come out, etc. Also it’s usually an assumption that you’re not into them so sending any kind of mixed singles won’t keep a guy interested, they are more likely to conclude you’re not into them and move you into the dreaded friend category.

To conclude my 2 cents, if you think you are being subtle you aren’t going to get noticed, if you think you are being obvious you are being subtle and if you are just honest and let the guy know, he may actually realise you’re into him. We’re scared, pessimistic, conservative thinkers and you really need to realise this and re-align this phase shift. Happy boyfriend hunting.

Having had a few interesting conversations over the past week I felt it important that I note down my recent thoughts on the subjects we had discussed. I then promptly forgot what I wanted to say. This post then forms the jigsaw pieces that I can still remember from the original post I had envisaged.

The debates, at least the ones I want to discuss revolved around the idea of the scope of science. This is something that has also just crept up in the book I am currently reading, The Dawkins Delusion. While the debate on the meaning of life itself is not the same debate as whether science has a scope or not but is often hauled up as an example of a question that is best left to philosophy because it is outside of the scope of science.

This proposal relies on how you define the meaning of life however. Do you take the scientific meaning of life (why we exist from a Darwinian perspective) or do we look for something, and I use the term loosely, deeper, something that cannot be found in science but requires us to look somewhere else, for example philosophy.

If you take the former approach then the question is fairly simple to answer. Life seems to be created to reproduce and continue it’s own existence, this is certainly true on a genetic level. The purpose of life is to create more life. Of course it would be, otherwise life would not be so successful and would eventually die off.

If you take the latter approach to the question then perhaps it would be out the scope of science. How can what most people would describe as the cold touch of empiricism and rationalism provide an answer to such question as what is the purpose of my life? Therefore if this is true, a case can easily be made to suggest such questions are indeed outside of the scope of science.

However, this position has a problem. Because of course, there is no meaning of life. Such questions cannot stand up to attacks from common sense because there clearly isn’t a universal meaning of life. We’re not going to get to the end of the game and find out that we achieved or failed to achieve the stated goals (unless you expect your death to consist of you waking up in some kind of Back to Reality senario to find you only scored 4%).

After all, how could such a universal constant be applied? Any such meaning of life must be subjective, even if on a society level it would still be human created. After all, if not it would have to be applied to all living things. How is a plant supposed to achieve it’s full potential? How are dophins with their conscious minds but lack of schools of philosophy supposed to work out what it is?

If it is subjective then obviously it has to real meaning because we can change it as we see fit and has only the significance we grant it (and may choose to grant it none).

There is of course one exception to the rule here, and that concerns theology. If indeed a religion is right (or even the idea of theism is right even if all major religions are wrong in their own special way) and there is a God who created human beings for a purpose then there could well be an objective, universal, meaning of life.

Such an idea however is purely a theological question and not a philosophical one. Therefore it would seem unjust to have such a connection develop between philosophy and the meaning of life. It would also seem a waste. Surely the time of philosophers could be used to develop our knowledge about, and I again use the term slightly loosely, real things. Then again, perhaps they do, and like most of society I have simply been impressioned with a pattern of philosophy trying to answer the meaning of life when in fact no philosopher is actually concerning themself with such a question. I suspect however that this is not the case.

I also suspect that this is the area that has made me feel a gap between philsophy and the real world. I have always felt the two are somewhat detached and this is a senario that demonstraits why fairly well. Presuming that the theologians are wrong, there is no meaning of life, it has no connection to the real world, no practical applications and ultimately no meaning.

But of course this is not true of philosophy of as a whole. It has great value in the subjects of how we reason and the trust we place in our methodologies (though I would be reluctant to add metaphysics to this list as most questions arising in this subject seem to be, like the meaning of life, either a question that is actually under the domain of a different subject or simply a non-existent topic).

To summarise what I think I’ve said in this post, the question of the meaning of life is either a question for theology or a question for science. Presuming the latter is true, it’s importance is greately over-valued in that the answer only serves to aid our understanding of biology slightly better.

8 days since I blogged last. That has to be some kind of record. I had a post lined up last Friday but after clearing my head with a walk through town I lost the motivation to finish it.

For weeks now, all I’ve been able to think about is sound systems. It sounds like a joke but it’s driving me insane. I can’t think about anything else. As far as I can make out it’s just my subconscience trying to avoid the subject of revision and Rich assures me that such obsessions are quite normal, explaining how they painted their entire house to avoid revision.

Yesterday I managed to briefly take my mind of it by updating the spec for my server. They seemed to have stopped doing the case I was going to get and the new one is missing a drive bay (it only has 11!) so I had to pick a better one. It also occured to me I was missing a heatsink which wouldn’t have been the best situation. Today I actually managed to get my ass out of bed with a promise of a breakfast and got some revision done. Attempts to sustain such work seem to be once again failing though.

Spending a string of continuous nights in front of my computer screen has unfortunatly acted as some what of a eye opener though. I’ve realised that I am exactly where I was 5 years ago. Sat in the dark, in front of a computer screen, promising myself I wouldn’t still be here in 5 years.

Everyone loves open source. Everyone being most of the hippies in SoC. Many people don’t. But that is besides the point. It’s being hailed as the next great shift or whatever, many people argue that everything should be open source. I recently ran into a major problem while thinking about this model however.

The bottom line is, proprietary software makes more money than open source. Yes you can sell support licences on top of that, it’s seperate from the product and indeed even Microsoft sell support licences on top of their proprietary products. It doesn’t make the money. Selling the software makes the money. And you can’t do this effectively with GPL open source.

So what, the corporations are just generating huge profits and can lose a bit of money anyway right? Well, take for example office software. Microsoft put $6,000,000,000 into research and development. That’s not just for office but that’s a massive figure – six billion dollars per year go into R&D. That is money spent on making their product better.

Do you think OpenOffice.org are putting those kind of resources in? Of course not, they don’t have those kind of resources. What OpenOffice.org have done is produced a clone, a bad clone, of MS Office. But without the money invested into R&D by Microsoft they wouldn’t have a fantastic office suite to make a clone of. They rely on the investment made by Microsoft in order to clone it for their open source version.

If everything was open source, who is going to be providing these kind of resources?

Seriously, porn is so bad. I mean, it’s cool and all for the naked women but from a film maker’s perspective it’s just jokingly bad. The editing is poor: they just fade in and out at various points ruining the continuity of the story. The dialog isn’t well thought out: they seem to be making it up as they go along and there are random pauses where everyone seems to be asking “what should we do now?”.

The scenes go on too long. I did not think it possible to reach a stage when I would think, “right, I’ve heard these girls fake sex noises for long enough” but apparently it is achievable. The acting is awful. In one scene they are supposed to be smashing up a car and yet they are waving round the hammers like dusters. Their fake sex noises leave a lot to be desired as well, when they remember to make them in between looking bored.

Where did the dildo come from? They are in the middle of the field, nobody was holding anything, they were naked so it can’t have been in a pocket or something. It’s inconsistent. The camera angles are poor, you can’t see enough. They use transitions. There is no conclusion to the story.

In conclusion, porn sucks. The adult industry should be ashamed they are turning out such crap. They do, because they know that guys tend to purchase with their dicks. But that doesn’t stop us critically analysing it with our heads. As the gender that funds almost their entire industry we deserve better. Is it really hard to have naked girls and good production values in the same film?