Note: This post constitutes a personal opinion piece. Comments, input and flames are welcome. =)

The World Cup is already over, and the on field battles have ended in a flutter of accolades and praises for the spanish team. However the storm seems to have migrated over to newspapers’ “opinions” section.

It seems to be a new fad for columnists to go on a Netherlands-bashing spree. Netherlands supposedly ‘strong hand’ tactics during the finals have been heavily criticized. In fact, the football match has been cast as a 21st century rematch of Hitler versus Eisenhower or Attila the Hun versus Alexander the Great.

The Netherlands were indeed rather physical, but well within the boundaries of the game. Howard Webb, the referee, did a good job of controlling the match too and the football played was still of the highest quality.

It amazes me how these ‘erudite’ columnists would harp upon this issue in such a whimsical manner.

In any case, Arsenal ftw!

Ahh, this is so meaningless. =.=

Found this essay on the Internet.

Ok, I wrote this. But who believes a transposition piece written by a 17 year old?

(Disambiguation: Idealism and realism in this post are not referred to in their philosophical sense)

Looking back at the cartoons from my childhood, I remember with a quaint fondness the devil and the angel. Whenever the main character is in a quandary, they will magically appear: fluttering, whispering, breathing life into insinuations and hoaxes.

I cant remember if I actually had two weird things flying around my head at that tender age, but as one ages, the devil and angel have been replaced with 2 distinct personae.

Let me illustrate with an example:

You walk past on old woman, a beggar by the roadside. Her face is gaunt and weathered while wrinkles crease her face, covered, like rough strokes hewn into a piece of dried wood. Unkempt long hair spills forth as two skeletal hands latch upon a red plastic cup, suspending it in mid air. You walk by and a thought sears through, a shriek of unacceptance of the situation. You want to help, to right the obvious wrongs. But as your next footstep crunches into the gravel, a sense of futility echoes: How are you going to help her? Does she even want to be helped?

By the time you finish debating internally, footsteps have brought you way past her.

When you first chance upon the situation there is a strong sense of idealism; the creation of the perfect form. But upon considering the situation one accepts that one has to be realistic in the ability to help, and thus one walks away. Without doubt, these two personae permeate our thinking, and play very much an important role in our daily interactions.

Of course it is not the purpose of this post to discuss the issue in its full length and breadth. However the individual is free to ruminate upon it in his or her on manner.

Finally, a quick thought and generalization on what happens if one listens to either persona. An idealist, (with much effort) would be more inclined to break through the self-centered norms society has constructed; while the realist would be acutely aware of his own needs and feelings.

What about the person that listens to both personae at the same time? I don’t know, but I am willing to conjecture that he will turn crazy, like me. But, wait, am I crazy, or am i just crazy over someone?

=)

The objectively neutral objects in our world, when coming into interaction with us,are instantly influenced by the paradigms which we live in, specifically, by our perceptions of stimuli. Take a spoon for example. Objectively it is a piece of matter, but our stimuli acknowledges and recognizes it as what we call, a ‘spoon’. And the usage of the term of ‘spoon’ conforms to Wittgenstein’s Law of Languages; the understanding that the piece of matter should be called a ‘spoon’ is limited to those who understand the same language as the ‘spoon’ caller.

Paradigm shifts are similar to Darwin’s evolution theory in the sense that both undergo the processes of natural selection. Science (or paradigms) is not evolving towards a specific target of complete understanding of the world, but rather evolving away from human’s primitive beginnings. Scientific progression is not already linearly set out in stone. Our understanding constantly increases, and is influenced by many practitioners within the paradigm, but there is no fixed course. It would be fallacious to claim that the science of mechanics was destined to progress from Aristotelian mechanics to Einsteinian and that the Newtonian leap was a irrelevant and predetermined part of progress. The same applies to Darwin’s theory on evolution. It will be clearly inaccurate to say that prokaryotes from 4 million years ago were already programmed to evolve into human beings.

Back to the ‘spoon’ ‘noumena’ : as the stimuli we receive regarding the spoon increases, our understanding of it improves too. We are able to gradually identify its colour, texture, surface, weight and et cetera. In scientific progressions, the same thing is also occurring. For a new paradigm to replace an old one, it must be able to fir more facets, more phenomena, and answer more anomalies. Thus as paradigms are constantly replaced, our scientific knowledge grows too.

Sidenote: Its ok to ignore this WoT post. Have really been thinking about too much crap today these few days.

This discourse assumes basic understanding of Kuhn, Kant, Wittgenstein and basic epistemology.

Been feeling not so good recently.

Found these stuff on the Internet though. It claims to be some sort of inversed, pseudo motivation-style posters. Sounds like another shifty marketing crap, but well, its entertaining.

Damn, they are really funny. (I cant stop laughing.) Just google up “demotivation”.

And this blog is making me freaking smile non-stop too. (Goes-to-the-toilet-with-an-upset-stomach-after-laughing-too-much.)

On a controversial note, these games are much better than FFS or MouseHunt. At least they require you to use your brain and possess eye-hand coordination.

I was called on by certain people to defend that statement, so I took the liberty of actually playing MouseHunt (MH) for a try!

For those unfamiliar to MH, it is a Facebook application accessed through your FB account. Pitting you against fellow hunters throughout the Mouse realm, this is how it is played:

First, you get a weird mouse trap. The above one apparently throws the mice to a distance some 5000 meters away.

Next you buy a cart-load of cheese, and wait for mice to come nibbling at it.

Some of the mice that I have caught. (Yeah, joking, dream on. =.=)

After one week of MH, I must admit that is indeed quite an addictive and enjoyable game.

However, I still stand with my previous statement: MouseHunt doesnt need brains or eye-hand coordination.

4.0 out of 5 stars for this game.

Remember when i wrote some time ago about the book I had ordered via Kinokuniya? It finally arrived!

(Popper = The author’s name. This is not some weird post about poop or toilets.)

Why do books grow thicker and thicker?

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes- Oscar Wilde.

I wonder which holds true to my exam this time.

Recently, PacMan, one of the earliest games around, celebrated its 30-years anniversary.

In conjunction with that, Google changed its start up logo to a flash version of PacMan.

The “I’m feeling lucky” button was replaced with “Insert Coin”. Hit that button, and the flash game of PacMan would start.

I think everyone has played this game before, but well..

You control the yellow-coloured PacMan. As you walk around, your goal is to consume all the tiny yellow dots which gives you points. After the whole map’s yellow dots are consumed, the next level will automatically start.

Ghosts

Along the way there are power ups to help you. The huge yellow dots allow you to become invincible, and gain the ability to eat of those hungry ghosts that are hunting you down. On the other hand strawberries give you extra points.
Keep away from the ghosts as they coming into contact with them will cause you to lose lives.

Other than PacMan, there is another good time killer game, Space Invaders.

All you have to do is spam the spacebar, which will cause the green “spaceship?” at the bottom to release a “particle beam?” which annihilates the ugly aliens. Nuff said.

On a controversial note, these games are much better than FFS or Mouse Hunt. At least they require you to use your brain and possess eye-hand coordination.

I dont know why, but I am extremely partisan-ed against vegetarians.

Hey, come on, its these vegetarians that are being so damned biased towards plants.

What’s so wrong with plants? They convert carbon dioxide into the air, they convert solar energy into chemical blocks that other organisms can use, they keep the ecosystem alive!

Thus, how can you vegetarians attempt to take a higher moral ground by claiming that by not eating plants you are acting all holy and compassionate?

How Cruel!

You get bored with eating all those leafy stacks and end up creating fake animal meat using sugar and preservatives.

Any decent nutritionist would tell you that a vegetarian diet is not what the human body was made for.

O Holy vegetarians, stop lying to yourselves! The plants out there are suffering! If you do not want to harm anything I would suggest dining on air, its nourishing (especially at those highly polluted areas).

(Btw, I dont eat vegetables. I guess thats a holy act of mine.)

Everyday we get swarmed with people (media, elders, parents) claiming that the 21st century is the age of moral degradation. They go on to take a higher moral ground by claiming that teenagers of the yesteryears were much more caring/ understanding/ virtuos/ etc.

This is nothing but incorrect and fallacious thinking.

If their claims are true, if we extrapolate the “yesteryears” time line 40 years back, teenagers of that time must be living saints. Individuals with paragonic virtues and indelible social records.

But looking at past history, that is definitely not the case at all!

The 1970s saw teenagers and youngsters marching into the streets for anti-war causes. Hooliganism (this isnt actually bad), protesting were the highlights of the day. The century’s worst serial rapists: Jerry Brudos, Cedric Maake also made their name during this decade. But the elders of today compare us with them, and call us morally degraded!

Protests in the 1970s

Ok, maybe they meant another 40 years back.

1930s and you are stuck right at the beginning of world war two. War, famine, starvation, widespread deaths, maybe these are the recipes to creating morally good teenagers.

If you look at the speeches of old, you will find politicians, teachers, society’s elders berating the teenagers of their time for being morally degraded. It seems like teenagers have become the easy scapegoat or punchbag for these disgruntled people.

Bush =)

They look at the youngsters of today, turn green with envy at their pulsating energy and exuberance and bellow out discriminating polemics and innuendos in the parlance of a lunatic who doesnt even understand the semantics of his words.

There is absolutely no point in calling the teenagers of the 21st century morally degraded (and dont bother retorting something stupid involving the Internet).

Thats all, thank you.