Water fountains are really, really gross

Slimy, moldy, rusty, too small, not a powerful enough stream, too warm, and generally just disgusting. Water fountains repulse me. I wrote a post once about things that will be different 40 years from now. Well, here's another thing: water fountains won't be so disgusting. The current ones will be proven to be extremely effective at transmitting diseases and will be discontinued. Modern water fountains will one day be looked upon in the same vein as we look upon people in the 1700s defecating in a hole. Gross.

The only person that we can prove has rational thought is ourself

Looking at myself in the mirror the other day (um... I mean, while I was flossing), I realized that I will never truly be able to prove that anybody else is capable of complex thought. Nobody can show with certainty that they aren't the only people in the world that can actually think. Interesting dilemma for a person. A couple of points that I drew from it:

1) It could be useful in rationalizing racism. The more people look like us, the more likely we are to believe that they are capable of complex thought (or really, any thought at all), because they look like the only person we have ever seen engaged in complex thought (ourself, in a mirror). The less people look like us, they less we believe that they are able to think about things.

2) Realizing it opens you up to your own narcissistic tendencies. All of us have looked at other people and judged them. I know I have. However, somewhere in the back of my mind, I was probably also judging them because I subconsciously didn't believe them to be capable of thinking. But really, they have been thinking about all of this stuff. Any judgment that you can make about a person is undoutedly a million times more complex than you first judge it to be.

Quote of the Day

Never has there been a good war or a bad peace.

-Benjamin Franklin

Can we all agree to leave Iraq now? We could be out of there in three months easily. Let's make it happen.

Ever wanted to be a genius?

Super interesting article here about people who are widely considered to be above and beyond the ordinary in their fields, or "geniuses." It discusses how one reaches such an elite platform. As the article says,

The book essentially tells us to forget the notion that "genius", "talent" or any other innate qualities create the greats we call geniuses. Instead, as the American inventor Thomas Edison said, genius is 99 per cent perspiration - or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration. Examine closely even the most extreme examples - Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Stravinsky - and you find more hard-won mastery than gift. Geniuses are made, not born.

The article goes on to explain various examples of successful people that achieve amazing things, and the common denominator is insanely hard work. Even Stephen Hawking, who is in a realm where one would assume natural intelligence trumps all, was an average student until he began to work obsessively on one topic, and devoted his time to his craft.

While this gives hope to many who wish to achieve widespread success, it comes with a certain caveat. It takes away an excuse, a barrier.

It is much less damaging to the psyche to be able to say that someone is simply more intelligent than you than to have to admit that you were simply outworked. It's easier to blame something on that you have at least no conscious control over--your genes, which control things like your IQ--than something that you at least theoretically have control over--how much effort and time you are willing to spend on a certain subject. This is a sobering thought to the many of us that likely will never be considered geniuses.

Purchasing qualities

I said earlier that I would post how my new possessions at college (fridge, new clothes, blender, carpet, etc.) would make me feel. I would argue that they really have made me happier. While I tried my best not to have a confirmation bias while I was conducting my quasi-experiment, I am now more convinced that having a certain amount of money to spend on useful possessions really can make the average person happier. A fridge has allowed me to drink chilled beverages when the weather is hot (which happens, never), and the blender allows me to make protein shakes which will should help me reach 250 one of these days.

The idea that you can buy a certain amount of happiness (I just bought the #1 doctor recommended "Chloraseptic" to help fix my sore throat--essentially instant bliss) has led me to question some of the other sayings about what you can buy and what you can't buy. The first one that popped into my mind was the saying that "you can't buy freedom." That's a joke. Freedom is one of the simplest things that you can buy. If you have enough money, you have the freedom to not work, you have the freedom to travel the world, you have the freedom to spend money pursuing your own projects. You can absolutely buy freedom.

True, I don't think that you can buy friendship. I don't think you can buy sadness, and I don't think you can buy laughter. You can buy things that will make you laugh, but you have to want to laugh in order to be able to.

But I think that it is fiddlesticks when people say that you can't buy short-run happiness, or when they claim that you can't buy freedom.

Can possessions make you happier? A case study.

My parents came all the way out from California this weekend to spend some time with me and see what the campus is like, but mainly to do my laundry and buy me things for my room.

Anyway, the laundry ended up making my life easier, but what I didn't realize was how many things they were going to buy for me/bring for me. My room is much more decorated, I have more lights, I have a blender, I have a printer, I have a fridge, and my wardrobe is now expansive. Anyway, this is a great oppurtunity for a case study. Will these "material" possessions, things that I have proven I could live without (as I have been doing it for a month), make me happier?

Results to come in a few weeks, along with my thoughts. I will try to be an unbiased as possible and to analyze the situation from as objective of a viewpoint as possible, but I must admit that I would prefer to be happy than not to be happy. It should be interesting.

Informative article about Grigori Perelman, the man who refused the Field's Medal

The Field's medal, according to wikipedia, is the "noble prize" of mathematics, only awarded once every 4 years to 2, 3, or 4 mathemeticians. Anyway, this article from the New Yorker describes the reasons that Grigori Perelman refused it. One reason, as the article quotes Mikhail Gromov (another Russian mathmetician), "the ideal scientist does science and cares about nothing else." Another reason that Perelman refused it appears to be that he was upset with the mathematics community because they were not being "honest" and playing politics instead of doing math. By turning down the award Perelman (who lives with his mother and is unquestionably strange--he lets his fingernails grow without trimming them, for example) is giving up financial gain as well as an oppurtunity to be recognized for what he has done.

While he has been made fun of in some arenas, his reasoning appears to me to be pure and well-intentioned. The problem that he helped to solve, by the way, The Poincaré conjecture, has been unsolved for 106 years and is invaluable to the field of mathematics. It will likely help many other scientists solve problems in their own respective fields.

There's some quality about keeping your head down to your work that I respect a great deal. Keep doing what you do, Grigori. We'll try to stay out of your way.

Music accompanied by news

New stations need to stop playing dramatic music in the background when they discuss stories. CNN, Fox News, and many others are blatant violaters of this rule. We don't need you guys to cue the music to tell us how to feel, and hearing string music in the background while missiles are shot at people trivializes the issue. This just shows how most news stations are just out to get ratings and feed off of people's emotions. Maybe that is the way to make the most money, but I personally lose massive respect for these "serious" news stations when they use flash and bang techniques to try and tell us how to feel. The News Hour with Jim Lehrer is one noted exception, which I appreciate greatly.

Ways to offset the fear of death

I believe that each of us has a fear of death not because, as Dumbledore puts it in Harry Potter, "we fear the unknown," but instead because evolutionarily we have been programmed to fear death so as to help our survival and increase the chances that we will reproduce and continue the species. Thus far we have come quite a long way in our evolution, but we still have not learned how to become immortal, meaning that at one point each and every one of us will face death. We should all expect to die.

But that doesn't mean that we have to fear death. There are a few ways that we can overcome our fear of death or at least quelch it slightly:

1) Curiosity: one way to overcome the fear of death is to actually look forward to it because we wonder what will happen to us once we die. While this can be brushed aside and simply be looked at as foolishness, the fact remains that there is really no way to know what we will experience after we die. Will there be some sort of afterlife? Will we regain a former conciousness and be able to look back upon our life and the decisions we made before starting a new one (that would be sick)?

2) Single-mindedness: If we can remain very focused on whatever we plan to accomplish in life, then I believe that we can mitigate the fear of death. People that strive very hard for a goal don't care about their death because they don't have enough time to ponder it. I would say that this is a risky strategy because once you do begin to fear death it could consume you.

3) Belief in an Afterlife: Pascal's Wager aside, believing in an afterlife of any kind (religious or otherwise) in which you retain your worldly conciousness is certainly something that could mitigate your fear of death, although it undoubtably requires a certain number of leaps of faith in order to do so, since there is by definition no way to prove the existence of God. It seems that more people radiate towards this as they become older, but certainly not everyone. This also can be somewhat dangerous to other people. For instance, some young men believe that suicide bombing gives you a first class ticket to the best form of afterlife. That is a scary thought, for this world, and that version of the next.

4) Apathy: Some people seem to just not care (or maybe not believe) that they will one day die. Much like how the last belief has more old people, this belief seems to have more young people. I would argue that this can lead towards some rash decision-making.

There are certainly others, and I will add them if I think of them. Ultimately this stuff doesn't matter too much, because we're all going to die anyway.

Integrity

During my US History Through Film class today, my teacher posed a question: would you sabotage somebody else's chance of getting into college in order to get yourself into the college of your choice?

I myself said no. Perhaps it is because I have already dealt with the stress of colleges while many other students are just deciding or still on waiting lists; perhaps it is because I am going to a place that I legitimately consider my first choice. Perhaps I'm just that morally good.

But many other students did not feel the same way, one even claiming that she would sabotage "up to five people" in order to get her way. Others concurred because "the decisions are so random anyway."

However, as soon as the teacher offered the hypothetical that that student would know that you had done the act, people began to change their minds completely. There was only one student who still said that she would do it. Surprisingly, people were much more shocked towards this claim than towards the original claim that she would sabotage somebody. "Have you no feelings of guilt?" yet another girl inquired.

Apparently, social scorn is highly accepted to be much more important to people than their own feelings of guilt. This is applied economics at work: people will act in their own self-interest unless there is an incentive in place against them.

Of course, the people who act the same whether or not anybody knows what they have done have what is known as integrity. It is the most interesting quality that a person can have because almost by definition nobody will ever find out about it (unless it is sorely lacking). I don't really know where I am going with this but I'm posting it anyway!

One Thing I Hate/One Thing I Love

This is my new kind of post. I'm going to do this everyday except for the days when I don't.

I hate: When you call someone's cell phone and they obviously have caller ID and know that it is you, but they still answer with a innocent, "hello?". Come on, don't play so hard to get. Gimme a, "what's up big man?", jump into a conversation, "can you believe the Texans took Williams over Bush?", or at least admit that you know it's me ("what's up A-Money?"), saving us both at least ten seconds and valuable energy.

I love: When you turn on the TV in the middle of a sports game and the first thing that you hear the announcers say is, "In case you're just joining us, here's a recap of the games most important plays...," especially if it is not at a time when they would expect you to turn the TV on (i.e. at the half hour/hour mark, after another game ended, etc.). I am unable to quantify how happy this makes me. And yes, this is yet another example of why I watch way too much television.

My Thoughts on Tap Dancing

It is extremely hard to be good at it. I have been looking at some tap dancing videos on the internet over the past few days, and I am literally amazed at some of the moves that they are able to do. Of course, if I didn't tap dance, I would probably never know how hard the moves were and I would most just judge the people on how much noise they made.

All I am really doing is making the obvious point that everybody knows already: the more that you know about something, the more you appreciate it.

So the next time that you bank on tennis or golf or meditation before you even try it, sit back and think about whether or not you know enough about the subject to really comment on it. Yeah, I'm talking to you, Andy.