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15.04.2008 - Poem: It Makes Perfect Sense (PDF).

05.04.2008 - Poem: The Scale (PDF).

19.03.2008 - The site was down for a while, and now I had to comment out everything in Photos, since I lost all of them somehow. Sometimes I erase files compulsively. It did not help that my spring cleaning coincided with my webserver crashing.

17.06.2007 - Poem: Asleep In The Machine (PDF).

19.03.2007 - A transcript of the diary of Eric Harris, commemorating his tragic death.

21.02.2007 - A press release about ARM technology.

13.12.2006 - The frames are gone. All old announcements removed, one new announcement added. This one.

Random Incoherency

19.03.2008 - Carry forward diet civilization / Bring along food trend
-chopstick inscription

10.04.2007 - Is the existence of spirits still a controversy? My be some will argue that they are not real, so let us address that. People who argue so do not understand that the existence of spirits is a semantic truism. Something is blocking them from understanding what a spirit is, even though the concept is not terribly abstract. A spirit is just an identified language game. From a holistic point of view, there is but one language game, namely, the one that we have played since we learned to speak; we can call that "the spirit of Humanity". But nothing precludes us from distinguishing certain sub-games within it and labeling them according to the contexts in which they appear or groups of people which engage in them. There is, for example, friendship. We are, generally, very keen at recognizing its manifestations. The spirit of friendship is just that: the game of friendship being played out.

It should be clear then that the existence of spirits is blatantly obvious, even though "existence" is a poor choice of a word. Since we talk of them as of processes, their status may be clarified by saying that they are "present" or "active" at certain times. In any case, there cannot be any doubt as to them being real: as real as the rising of your hand while you are raising it. The spirit of friendship, for example, is active whenever and wherever people engage in a friendly interaction. To say that there is no such thing as the spirit of friendship is to mean that there are no friends and no friendly acts anywhere, anytime. Even worse, it is to mean that there is no potential for such acts either, as no human mind has any knowledge of what it is to be a friend or skills which pertain to being one. But that is patently absurd, and people who would argue that there is no such thing as "spirit" do not mean that.

What do they mean then? I think that most of them make a category-related mistake. Namely, they think of "spirit" as of an object rather then of a process. The question about the reality of spirit, then, becomes an ontological one. This happens, at least in part, because many people these days are enamored by the spirits of rationality and scientific method, and the side effect of housing these is the fear of superstition (ironically, itself irrational). In my opinion, this fear is the chief cause of hastily classifying our question as the one about the actual existence of a platonic form. For a rational person, it is much too important to decide this question first, and to decide it in the negative. It, therefore, escapes his attention that spirits are very real in a different sense of the word and that the ontological question is nothing but a language trap. Unfortunately, the main result of this hasty analysis is the mental block which prevents the rational person from understanding what many other people are talking about. If someone says, for example, "and God revealed his will through the hand of the apostle", the rational person will not merely disagree with the statement, but will immediately discard it as a total nonsense, seeing no way to understand it at all.

And yet the statement like the one above is perfectly cogent and can be fully understood by anyone, regardless of personal beliefs and convictions. For God is, indeed, a spirit, and so his reality is beyond question. There is no way to deny that the the God-related language game is being played by great many people and on the daily basis. So pervasive it is, in fact, that even those who profess to be atheists are forced to learn some of its rules, just so that they can participate in the political play. (Note that there is no contradiction in their position, for they only reject God ontologically, never having considered the question about his status as a spirit.) So look again at our sentence: "and God revealed his will through the hand of the apostle". Would it still be nonsense if we said "and their ardent friendship inspired him to write at length"? In both cases we are to understand that a particular spirit is at work, and that this spirit is responsible for the things being written. As is always the case with spirits, we have to be careful when we separate causes from effects. A long letter is a manifestation of his friendship, but in some other context it might serve as a description of what a true friendship should be like. And even more consideration should be given to the context of a religious text: often, we need to understand such texts holistically. There, the spirit and its manifestations are presented in a continuous narrative. Attributing actions to the spirit is citing their cause, but at the same time also fleshing out the spirit itself by providing the rules of the language game and the context in which it is being played.

Finally, a reader might have noticed that after I accused him of sidestepping the question at hand by engaging it on the ontological grounds, I myself swept under the rug the ontological issue. Let me say, then, why I did that and why I consider the question of whether God, or gods, or friendship exist a moot point. What I care about are the pragmatic implications of my decisions. To bring an example out of the recent history, it is hard to deny that millions of Americans voted for Bush Jr. because it was in line with the will of God. Anyone who has any idea about the content of pre-election speeches by the clergy knows it to be true. That God's spirit moved millions of people to cast their vote in a particular way did not depend on the ontological status of God at all. God's form stands or falls together with any other platonic form, and if history is of any indication, discussing the merits of the Platonic world-view does little to settle the question. In fact, after centuries of sophistry this question is muddled more than ever, and only graduate students can understand its finer points. So, for the purposes of having a political impact (and by that I mean the politics in the widest sense of the word, not just the ones on the state level), or even a coherent political discourse, would it not be infinitely more effective to understand what the spirit of God is doing? Would it not be refreshingly unexpected and just plain wickedly cool for an atheist to make his mark by conversing with God himself, rather than by shutting out religious groups because of the lack of understanding? No amount of dialectical flourish will ever convince Christians that God does not exist, since that would be too inconvenient for playing their language game (just as no serious dent can ever be made in the platonic bastion of numbers guarded by practicing mathematicians). Actively participating in the game, on the other hand, may well result in the game changing its face or getting broken up completely. Would God still exist ontologically if Christians were no more? I say, it still would not matter.

13.03.2007 - He speaks of himself in the third person: how else can he understand himself? He pats himself on the back: how else can he love himself?

Do you think that he is a great person? You are his enemy. Do you think that what he did is of value? You are his enemy.

Do you think that he aspires to be a David facing a Goliath? He is less than that. He is nothing, the emptiness, facing the being. He is victorious without having an interest in winning.

21.02.2007 - Recently, somebody told me on Slashdot: "And I'm really not going to take moral lessons from a homophobe." (He was likely alluding to a rant of mine which he did not care to read.) I was about to retort by saying that (1) I am not a homophobe, which is evident from the fact that I drool on myself when women are making love to each other, (2) me being a homophobe does not hamper my ability to give a valuable moral lesson on a matter of copyright, and (3) I was not giving a moral lesson. But then I realized that the man's statement was perfectly sound. You see, he was saying precisely that I am a homophobe and that I am not worthy to give moral lessons. These were not connected in his mind to anything that I was saying or to each other, but, for better or worse, everything sounds logical when said in English (or any Human language), even though the intensional meaning is purely emotive. Also, that guy is a dickhead.

26.01.2006 - When a human makes a mistake, it immediately pours massive processing power into either formulating arguments about why it's not a mistake or finding someone else to blame for it. Machines tend not to do this. -ENOENT

23.11.2005 - I have not yet finished reading the English translation of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, and I never learned any German. Still, I am pleased to announce that I have made my very own complete, unabridged translation.

Philosophical Investigations

By Ludwig Wittgenstein

Fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, Tractatus sucks, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools, fools...

06.11.2005 - Tokay truly is the royal wine: it is strong enough to stir up love in a boy, and sweet enough to cure it in a girl.

02.11.2005 - There are 3 cats living in this house. I have heard that they have proper names, but I gave them my own names, corresponding to their distinguishing features:
Cat,
Red Cat, and
The Cat I haven't Met.

12.10.2005 - Degrees of sarcasm:
(1) People find you funny.
(2) People find you offensive.
(3) People find you genuine.
(4) You find yourself genuine.

10.05.2005 - Sara Rettus, a philosophy student, made a bet that she can spend one class period without arguing with one of her peers, a staunch utilitarian. She lost the bet by saying "If I kick you in the face, will it maximize the utility?"

05.05.2005 - Algebraic topology is a branch of mathematics where they take geometrical problems which we cannot solve and turn them into algebraic problems which we cannot understand. -Maurice Stanley

20.04.2005 - You would not like a carpenter who uses a hammer to drive his arguments into your skull; a mathematician who uses logic in a conversation is not very different.

12.04.2005 - The more you run, the less you walk. -Annie Bao

22.03.2005 - An authentic answer to a question "Are you modest?" is always a lie.

08.03.2005 - When you cross the edge of the existing universe, the latter becomes slightly bigger. In the same manner, knowledge is born. Humanity (together with its implements) is the universe, and the knowledge is created rather than discovered. An individual starts out as a student, and for a long time she does nothing but discover the knowledge which is possessed by others. But when there is nothing more to learn, she becomes an artisan. This is the limit of knowledge. She is. An artist is the terminator. The limit is always here, always well-defined, and yet one can always go over the edge by creating something new and thus becoming the edge.

19.02.2005 - A person of good taste knows that few things are as aesthetically appealing as a nice piece of pie. Well, good journalism is like slicing a pie, and the result is always mouth-watering. Rather than to serve a paper-thin, two-dimensional image of current events, a superior journalist cuts through the thickness of history. She notes tendencies and makes connexions between past and future. She coats events with historical contest. My first encounter with this kind of journalism was Feminine Mystique, and since I read it, I am convinced that this is the right way to write.

12.01.2005 - Humans are inherently flawed and prone to make mistakes. It is only a matter of time before they make the biggest mistake possible -- they will find this flaw and correct it.

22.07.2004 - This is old, but I just realised that now I actually have a place to publish it.

class God * i = jesus->getParent();

14.07.2004 - When a good student learns, her faith is challenged. An excellent student learns to challenge her faith.

08.03.2004 - I've been told a stupid joke today (nothing new here), but, as a result, it dawned on me that I am well justified in calling my guitar my girlfriend. Bella always wears a G-string; white, most of the time, but when I'm in a fancy mood, it could be black or pink.

08.02.2004 - My site is up.