Ray Bradbury said, ""

Why my blogging has been so sparse

Put simply, my soul was crushed for well nigh five months.

More elaborately, my relationship turned sour as my fiancee became increasingly emotionally abusive, manipulative, and aggressive.

 I don't know why I allowed her to treat me like a dog for so long, but I broke up with her last week, moved out, and am starting anew. I think I learned a valuable lesson: when everyone warns you about someone, it is probably a good idea to look at the situation objectively rather than with the optimism of love.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at March 25, 2007 08:38 EST | Permalink | comments (4) |
introspection

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Pseudo-random Morning Thoughts

There is much wisdom in this squirrel.

Do you think my sister might be morbid? I think it's rather healthy to broadcast the global threat dirty hippies pose to hygeine and the fabric of civilization. Oh, they're zombies...

Non-euclidean geometry wouldn't have quite the mind-crunching effect Lovecraft attributes to it. Anyone who has ever looked at convex/concave mirrors or worn someone else's glasses after wrestling them away from the victim, has seen triangles the sum of whose angles does not equal 180 degrees without going mad. At leas perceptibly. *Shudder*

You really want to mess with someone's sanity? Really want to drive their thoughts into shuddering confusion? Don't bother with non-euclidean geometry. Instead,  show them to the nearest liberal arts department.  What Lovecraft fantasized Peter Singer can accomplish.

Julio Pino is merely a logical consequence of the well-known "banality of evil." Sure, he's a jihadist bent on destroying western civilization, but I'll bet his closet contains many tweed coats with leather elbow pads. And I'll bet Peter Singer doesn't adorn his home with a single mobile made from fetuses. 

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at March 13, 2007 03:41 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, beauty, blog nocturne, introspection

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Edison's weekly production goal

The Isiah once told me of Edison's weekly production goal: "one new gadget a day, and a miracle every week."

What if you applied this in everyday life? Once a day learn something new, useless, and guaranteed to bore everyone around you. Think something that will cause people to blink and back away from you.

Once a week, learn something that will allow you to beat an opponent like a baby seal in an argument. Have a thought that could lead to millions of dollars or deaths.

With only one page a day, the complexity of Jewish law can be comprehended in only seven years. Surely thoughtfulness in any other subject is bound to be easier to achieve in the same time.

If you fail to produce outstanding results, you simply become a compendium of useless information and endlessly fascinating to yourself. If you succeed, you've got it made. What's to lose?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at March 12, 2007 18:27 EST | Permalink | comments |
philosophy, introspection

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Provisional blogging

I have many things going on right now, and thought I could squeeze in a little blog catharsis among them. Not alot, but enough to prove to my arch-nemesis that I am not living in a pit in someone's basement.

Why not list a brain-fart I had this morning?

In the style of Scott Adams' "philosotainment," I woke up today thinking about a rough 'personal information entropy.' Suppose you have two people: one a hermit whose life is predictable and routine, the other an adventure-seeker who for one reason or another is constantly being thrust into new situations. About whom will the proposition, "I am looking for a new job/ taking up a new hobby," carry more information? Is not the situation analogous to the information content of a coin toss with a loaded coin and a fair coin, respectively? With the former person, the proposition contains rather little information ( i.e. capability of surprise); with the latter, the possibilities are boundless and hence more uncertain.  Some people do seem to be more entropic than others, that is, their current situation yields less predictive information about their future. This seems almost a truism. We all apply some form of Bayesian inference that tells us that Bob's life will be more turbulent than Jim's, that Bob will be more likely to die in a Mexican prison than Jim, etc.

Now, what if this rough inference could be mathematized on the basis of a finite number of decision events? Not the little, arbitrary decisions about which no one could calculate (choice of toothpaste, etc), but  the major decisions for which two or more avenues were available to him and information exists as to which was more likely.  Would you be able to make more rigorous that gut feeling that "he'll divorce her in five years" or "he'll file for bankruptcy with the way he's spending'?

More relevantly, what if this brain-fart is not the product of a viciously abcessed tooth which has been keeping me up for the past three days? Maybe there is nothing more to it than an agitated mind.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at March 06, 2007 06:50 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
philosophy, blogging

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