Well, of my 3 taks I'm gonna start off with the 3rd one. Bullshit. Let me talk about one of the biggest pieces of bullshit I've dealt with in the last year or so.
The iPhone.
Did you hear the choir of angels? Because that's supposedly what you are supposed to hear any time you mention an Apple product. You know, 'cause they were sent by God almighty himself to bless us.
Ok....Let me take a step back. As you can tell I have some problems with Apple, but I want to talk about this product in as even and as fair of a form as I can.
The Good:
Its neat as hell. I can use it as one of the best MP3 players on the market. It has a very easy to use interface. The last phone I had I only discovered it had MP3 player abilities when I was returning it (to get the iPhone actually). Most phones have all their functions buried so deep in a million layers of menus that you will never see them. The iPhone doesn't have that problem at all. I figured out almost everything about it in a day or two.
That's really the one thing that the iPhone does incredibly well. Access. Anything that you want to do (*and can do) is easy to do on the iPhone. Texting is a breeze. The visual voicemail is wicked cool. The contacts list is great.
All in all if it was just about this it would be the best purchase I ever made.
But it isn't, and its not.
The Bad:
Just because you have the access doesn't mean what you are accessing is worth a damn, however. Aside from the MP3 player, most of the functions on the phone have a lot of problems. Voicemail and text messages show up a day after I get them. Texting doesn't allow MMS (seriously wtf was apple thinking with this one). Phone calls are.....
Let me take a second to say that if it wasn't for how terrible the phone itself is I would love the iPhone. Dropped calls, terrible reception, and oh yeah, they shaped it like a bar of fucking soap. Good call there.
Anyways....there's a cool looking movie on. adios
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Mission Statement
The first thing to do with any endeavor is to figure out exactly what it is you wish to do, and why? That's my question here, and one I hopefully will answer properly. This is my mission statement.
My main goal is to become more proficient in writing through practice. Just by writing I will get better at it. Hopefully. But even if not, I'm doing something more productive with my times than drinking, smoking, and watching movies. Hopefully. However, while it's my main goal, it doesn't give any real direction, therefore secondary goals must be set.
One thing that has always bothered me to no end is the absolute horror of pseudoscience that has been raging through mankind for....well forever. In the past it was more excusable, because they had no real understanding of the universe around them, so they made guesses at what they were really seeing. Its not a stupid thing to have done. Many of our current sciences actually have roots in these old guesses. For instance, the search for the atom. Not the atom that we think of now, but the one of the early Greek and Indian philosophers imagined. The indivisible particle. So, while in history people have had some severe pseudosciences, they can be more excused.
The pseudoscience of today, however, has no such excuse. They write their diatribes of ignorance on computers and webpages using technology derived from principles that can disprove their own diatribes. The source of the ideas can no longer be attributed to simple ignorance as the fruits of modern science are seen around us every day. If Hippocrates were to be alive today, he would not stick to his belief in the four humors. So why do people still grasp at thesis that any adequetly educated person could disprove? My belief is fear. Fear that there is no longer a curtain behind which the benevolent puppeteers controled the strings, caring for us when our own time on the stage is over. Another possible cause is a general distaste for the apparent "coldness" of modern science.
Let me say that scientists haven't removed the curtain. They simply moved it farther back. There are still unkowns out there. The universe is magnificintly blinding in its beauty. Appreciating this beauty makes people realize how warm and magical science really is. But its not an easy trek to the cliff, only few people ever make it. We know their names, Newton, Feynman, Oppenheimer, Hawking, and Einstein. Few of us will ever make it all the way to that cliff, but the trek itself shows us things itself. The only requirement is effort.
Anyways, I'm ranting. I will be focusing some time on the many percieved pseudosciences out there. I say percieved because there really is an amount of elitism in the scientific community, and while many if not all of the various pseudosciences out there do have as much value as a bucket of dog shit, some of them may be something very very important, and ignoring the possibilities based only on our own percieved authority without proper examination is a terrible road to go down. One that eliminates our right to judge.
This examination of pseudoscience will also get into conspiracy theories as well, because the logical process used in both is remarkably similar.
A second discreet task I will preform here is to try and methodically examine politics. This is a task almost no one does. The fact that we all watch pundits, and no one watches c-span should say something about this. I have the luxury of being an independent and not being as emotionally tied to either party, but I am by no means saying this will be an easy task.
Finally, I'm just going to talk about stuff I like, stuff I don't like and all the things in between.
So, to wrap it up, here's the setup
Mission: To write for the sake of improving my writing ability.
Secondaries:
-Discuss Pseudoscience and Conspiracy Theories.
-Discuss Politics
-Bullshit
My main goal is to become more proficient in writing through practice. Just by writing I will get better at it. Hopefully. But even if not, I'm doing something more productive with my times than drinking, smoking, and watching movies. Hopefully. However, while it's my main goal, it doesn't give any real direction, therefore secondary goals must be set.
One thing that has always bothered me to no end is the absolute horror of pseudoscience that has been raging through mankind for....well forever. In the past it was more excusable, because they had no real understanding of the universe around them, so they made guesses at what they were really seeing. Its not a stupid thing to have done. Many of our current sciences actually have roots in these old guesses. For instance, the search for the atom. Not the atom that we think of now, but the one of the early Greek and Indian philosophers imagined. The indivisible particle. So, while in history people have had some severe pseudosciences, they can be more excused.
The pseudoscience of today, however, has no such excuse. They write their diatribes of ignorance on computers and webpages using technology derived from principles that can disprove their own diatribes. The source of the ideas can no longer be attributed to simple ignorance as the fruits of modern science are seen around us every day. If Hippocrates were to be alive today, he would not stick to his belief in the four humors. So why do people still grasp at thesis that any adequetly educated person could disprove? My belief is fear. Fear that there is no longer a curtain behind which the benevolent puppeteers controled the strings, caring for us when our own time on the stage is over. Another possible cause is a general distaste for the apparent "coldness" of modern science.
Let me say that scientists haven't removed the curtain. They simply moved it farther back. There are still unkowns out there. The universe is magnificintly blinding in its beauty. Appreciating this beauty makes people realize how warm and magical science really is. But its not an easy trek to the cliff, only few people ever make it. We know their names, Newton, Feynman, Oppenheimer, Hawking, and Einstein. Few of us will ever make it all the way to that cliff, but the trek itself shows us things itself. The only requirement is effort.
Anyways, I'm ranting. I will be focusing some time on the many percieved pseudosciences out there. I say percieved because there really is an amount of elitism in the scientific community, and while many if not all of the various pseudosciences out there do have as much value as a bucket of dog shit, some of them may be something very very important, and ignoring the possibilities based only on our own percieved authority without proper examination is a terrible road to go down. One that eliminates our right to judge.
This examination of pseudoscience will also get into conspiracy theories as well, because the logical process used in both is remarkably similar.
A second discreet task I will preform here is to try and methodically examine politics. This is a task almost no one does. The fact that we all watch pundits, and no one watches c-span should say something about this. I have the luxury of being an independent and not being as emotionally tied to either party, but I am by no means saying this will be an easy task.
Finally, I'm just going to talk about stuff I like, stuff I don't like and all the things in between.
So, to wrap it up, here's the setup
Mission: To write for the sake of improving my writing ability.
Secondaries:
-Discuss Pseudoscience and Conspiracy Theories.
-Discuss Politics
-Bullshit
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