To choose is to be ready to face the consequences of the choice.

Facebook. A nifty site where you can give your personal information and store it in some publicly accessible servers. It is generally thought of as a positive thing.

Wikileaks. A project that shares information that is meant to be secret. Military secrets, political affairs, boring reports. Often thought of as a negative thing.

The difference between them? One is mostly input (you give information to it), the other output (you get information from it). But privacy is not the main concern of most people. If it were, Facebook would be an abandoned desert wasteland similar to Orkut. It is consent that makes Wikileaks worse than Facebook. Wikileaks shares information that was originated by people who do not want it to be public, often obtained by shady means. Facebook shares information that people have given it willingly for the sole purpose of letting other people know something. Yet Facebook is the thing that has influence on us directly. It is what potential employers can check to get an impression of you, it is what new acquaintances see and make judgments by, it is what your parents might stumble upon, it is a place where you can be bullied publicly. It does that because we want it to.

Sure, one might argue that Facebook is pretty much obligatory, because how else could you stalk/keep up with people from around the world? The continuing success is caused by previous success. With the rise of FB-chat, the much-beloved Windows Live Messenger network has suffered the loss of many users, thus bringing about the annihilation of the protocol. By that I do not mean the basic IM-protocol (that allows you to chat), I mean the Messenger-specific protocol that allows IM communication through Microsoft's servers in the manner it has worked for so long. Instead, we now (or starting from April 8) we are stuck with a closed protocol (Skype-specific), which is not supported by most freeware IM clients (Miranda, GAIM and Kopete to name a few). To make matters worse, there is not a single IM client for Windows Mobile (a Microsoft product!) that would support Skype (an another Microsoft product!). There used to, but it was pulled due to some issues. Back on the subject, these changes in protocols and products cause people to jump ship and use alternatives, one of which is Facebook. And that is where the vicious circle appears: to be able to communicate with people from around the world, you need to use Facebook, because the people from around the world use Facebook to communicate with other people from around the world who use... you get the point. To leave would be to leave behind numerous contacts, because while you might have other available communication channels, you will hardly keep up with all of your friends without a live feed. It would be cumbersome and time-consuming. And at some point you will forget to check up on how a certain German-speaking ping-pong player from Russia or some pizza-loving Portuguese guy is doing. You will drift apart. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, is very difficult to assess. So it is generally thought of as an experiment better not done on yourself and your friends. And thus Facebook will continue to have active users.

Wikileaks, on the other hand, relies on information obtained from and sorted by a handful of individuals. Resources are scarce, which is why it is less heard of than some anonymous hackers, who remain active despite the efforts of law enforcement officials. Because they are anonymous, anyone can join them unofficially, which makes taking down the original group even more difficult than it already is. Wikileaks is not anonymous, because secrets generally have few people involved in them. It's why they are secrets - they are not shared with others. So if there are ten or so people who know a secret, and it becomes public, then it is certain that one of those people shared it whether knowingly or not. But the pool of suspects is extremely limited. If two secrets come out, the suspect pool shrinks considerably. And with the leak of the first secret, all of the people entrusted with the secret will be under heavy surveillance, many possibly (and likely) interrogated, etc. Internal Affairs will drill until they either find the leak or a scapegoat. Either way, getting caught is highly probable, which is why not a lot of people volunteer to give out classified information. And that means a drought of information for Wikileaks. The less informants they have, the less more are willing to turn in evidence, because while two informants can cover for each other, a single informant must stand along. Thus, it lingers between life and death, struggling to survive. Those random anonymous hackers however don't appear to be going away any time soon.

Secrets are difficult to keep, but in some circumstances even more difficult to share. Secrets are but information that you are prohibited from sharing with others. If the information is indeed shared, it's betrayal, a negative action. But if you can coerce people to share personal information about themselves, then you can use it however you wish, and the people will be glad of it. Because they have gotten to share the name of their cat, which happens to be the password for the e-mail account they have shared. Because they got to upload pictures of their new credit cards and any information pertaining to them. Because they got to share some feelings or comments that make them sound... like not the sharpest tools in the shed. The way people think about sharing information is not so much about the type of information being shared, it is about whether or not they have given the consent for it to be shared. As long as they have only themselves to blame, everything is quite alright. Which is incidentally why people keep using Chromium.

Machines. Machines everywhere.

Namshubs.

They are mindhacks from the Sumerian culture, neurolinguistic programs that use language as a medium and the human brain as the target. Basically you read them, and they imprint a pattern in your brain. They are designed to create some kind of change in your psyche, and have been a subject of accusation for the Babel. A program, Enki's program to be more specific, was written on a clay tablet (well, what else are you going to use in Mesopotamia?). When people read it, it was in Sumerian, it messed up their linguistic centers. The Sumerian language practically disappeared, and other, very different languages took over. Sumerian was a functional language, the new languages were more abstract. The nam-shubs no longer worked in the new languages.

Neal Stephenson brought out this myth, or rather this collection of myths (the story has been retold in many cultures) in relation to a new language that has become rather widespread. A functional language by all accounts, which is why it might be vulnerable to neurolinguistic programming. To be threatened by this, the potential victim has to understand the language, have it hardwired into their brains. The language must come naturally to the person, to have those linguistic centers open to attacks. This is the case with many programmers. Stephenson used binary as the main example, because it could be displayed as a bitmap - it's just a lot of ones and zeros. Someone fluent in binary could easily interpret the information on a screen and have his mind hacked, while other people would just see white noise. Ones and zeros have been important symbols in history, because binary systems are the easiest to understand. Life and death, the earth and the sky, Heaven and Hell. Thus they offer a plethora of possibilities, and all they need are two different characters. That's why they are perfect for information relay.

But why limit oneself to binary? Sure, knowing the ones and zeros is not that difficult, but it would be impractical to actually learn to read code written in binary. We have artificial operating systems to take care of that, so nobody would have to feed the information to the processors a single bit at a time. Those days are way behind us. Which means binary does not actually have much ground, even among programmers and hackers. It is much easier to write code in C (C# or C++) or XML. Yeah, you could do with Python, Java or Pascal, but those are nowhere near as friendly to the user or the machine. But in all these cases, the commands, the bits of data have a meaning for the programmer/enthusiast/whathaveyou. The person reading it has an understanding how every tiny character works, how it makes a difference. Each of these possible pieces of data have a spot in the person's brain, linking it to other neurons. You might look at an 'if' command, and cheer up. You might look at a 'case' command, and feel warm and fuzzy. That just shows which links you have with the data. But as long as there is an understanding of the data, the basic brain architecture won't be that different. And that means it is hackable.

The brain is basically a computer. The nerves are wires, ganglia are controllers and/or device-specific drivers, the brain itself a motherboard, with gray nuclei working as, well, nuclei, core processors. To use the processors, there has to be input, something that activates the receptors. It could be something a person feels or sees. The signal created is sent to ganglia where the information is relayed to the next neurons. Those take it right up (or down) to the nuclei respective to the type and the location of origin of the input. Then the nuclei process the information. Our thought capabilities enable us to use data we gather in real time and compare it to data received before. In other words, if the input is a script, a bunch of commands to be executed, out nuclei will understand those orders as long as we have them in our memory.

Generally, that will have little to no effect on the mind. That is because the brain is still widely considered to be a mystery. We don't know what out 'Language of Eden' works like, we don't know how information is translated and processed. And that will keep us safe for a few decades at the very least. But the possibility is there, and it sounds pretty intriguing. A chance to reprogram a person to be a genius or a madman, who could pass this up?

At the very least, we might be able to eliminate the need for Harlem Shaking...

I am your destiny.

What do Dirk Gently and Doctor Who have in common? Douglas Adams for one, but that is not the one I mean.

Holism.

It is the belief that everything should be approached as wholes, not just a sum of the pieces that put it together. It is the belief that everything is connected to everything else. It is the viewpoint that things happen because of (sometimes far-fetched) links to previous and/or future events, or in other words time is not a direct continuation from cause to effect, but more of a timey wimey wibbly wobbly... stuff. While that may be a bit hard to believe, one mustn't forget that it is basically the same as predestination, which many do believe in. It is a way of saying that everything must be just about right in relation to one another. A single abnormality, and a pathology emerges, similarly to chaos theory.

While holism has been considered to be a bit out-dated and silly, it is making a comeback in medicine. For a while now medicine has concentrated on researching and curing the illnesses. And in the search for the ultimate cure, the patient has become an object, just something to poke sticks and needles at, something to be fixed. But a disease is not just local to a knee or an eye, it has immense psychological effect, and so does the cure. Placebo pills have healed people of numerous ailments, and the same improvement-boosting effect can be achieved by moral support. Keep the patient happy and there is a greater chance for a speedy full recovery. When it comes to exterminating evil-doers, hearts and minds matter more than bombs and guns. A person willing to be healed has better chances than that who believes that their time to die has come. Positive bias has been proven to work in everyday life, and it works when you are in trouble, be it illness or injury.

Holism is actually quite simple to comprehend. An event, no matter how small, that we encounter, changes us. A small influence can have enormous effect on our futures, because everything in the whole wide Universe is connected. We are all connected biologically, chemically, and atomically. We are just specks on the large scale, which is why we are vulnerable to tiny abnormalities. It's just what and who we are.

"So me and mine can lay down and die so that you can live in your perfect world?"

There are always casualties of progress.

"We cannot simply kill you, someone would take your place. That is the problem with creating martyrs."

People die in the name of change, trying to teach the world something. Often they are first tortured in order to coerce those people to stop making ludicrous claims. But they have found it important that the Earth is indeed round, that it orbits the Sun, that people have the right to choose what they believe in. Most importantly, they have found it important to stay true to themselves, whatever the cost. Some become more famous, some we hardly ever hear about. Unfortunately, martyrs are not the only casualties of change.

"I suppose your father lost his job to a robot. I don't know, maybe you would have simply banned the Internet to keep the libraries open."

It is a kind of natural selection - whoever cannot keep up with the changes, does not make it. Whether we are talking about the collateral damage of some bloody revolution or just the natural development of technology, someone always gets stepped on. Someone becomes redundant, someone's contribution to society becomes inconsequential, someone will have to respecialize to stay afloat. You have to keep up with the times, use modern technology to aid you in your work. Otherwise you risk becoming obsolete, which is what often happens to the elderly. Pretty much every employee is now expected to know a thing or two about using computers, the basics of office software, get along with Windows. Being obsolete means being inefficient, and employers tend not to keep inefficient staff around for very long. Granted, there are numerous exceptions, but that is not the efficient way to do things.

Changes in our everyday world do not come without hurt. It is a cruel, but necessary process. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. To move forward, to change the world for the better, you have to make sacrifices. Because while we can never know what the future brings, we know that it is always born in pain.

"Very sad life. Probably will have very sad death. But at least there is symmetry."

"Save a life, save the world."

It is a saying that originates from the well-known fact that Adam is our great forefather that engaged in... whatever it is when you reproduce with your own rib. Killing a man at that point (or to be more precise, THE man) would've destined the whole species to nonexistence. Thus, save a life, save the world, save the future. Save the species.

It is also a saying that has meaning in modern times. Chaos theory is a famous phenomenon that merely states that changing even the smallest detail in our timeline compared to what is 'supposed to be' has disastrous consequences. This applies to the present as well. You don't know what a person is bound to do in the future. You don't know how the mere existence of a single particular person affects people around him or her. You don't know the effects of not saving a person on yourself. If you have a chance to save a person, you would probably regret not doing it. Alas, there is a chance that saving a life does more harm to the world than it's worth.

"I did what I did because all life is sacred. But if the object of my reactions does not share this view I fear I served the present by sacrificing the future."

In a way, it is the age-old question of capital punishment. Execution as a form of punishment is quite brutal, but is it really the wrong way to do things? Sure, life imprisonment does not sound dandy, but if you get comforts like TVs, Internet and whatnot that some prisons allow, then it does not sound that bad. Sure, you only get visitors at preset times and often not at all, but you can still live your life. And if there is an economic downturn you might be set free due to overpopulated prisons. Sure, it is not exactly rainbows and blue skies, but it is not exactly hell either. But it is very taxing for the society to keep you alive, to keep you fed, to keep you healthy. So life imprisonment is not 'sentencing someone to live', it is sentencing someone to remain a burden to the society.

There are concerns about how certain can you really be about someone's guilt. Stick an innocent man in jail, find out he is innocent, and you can release him. Kill him at first and there is no going back, resurrection is a long way off. There are concerns about how serious an offense has to be to merit the death penalty. There are no clear boundaries, which is why it is better off to keep the death penalty off the table as a whole.

There is not perfect, elegant solution to punishing people for crimes. Law and justice are determined by the collective sense of morals of the society. Culture is a huge influence. But one cannot ignore that every punishment has its downsides. It is never punishing just an individual, it is always punishing the society that raised the offender as well. It is of the utmost importance that life is preserved, but there ain't just the one way.

"Time not important. Only life important."

The mind is more powerful than the pen.

What makes us intelligent?

While this blog may be named 'Intellectual mindlessness', I believe intelligence itself has not been a subject of pondering so far. However, it is a part of a person's psyche, it apparently shows how logical the person is, and whether or not he or she has a good memory. That is generally the case when one thinks of IQ tests - they are not just testing logical derivations, they also test cultural knowledge. That is the reason why there can't be a standard test for everyone in the whole wide world - cultures differ from one another. Even in small areas it is difficult to create a test which would assess only the person's cleverness. People are taught different algorithms, different ways of thinking. A test that focuses more on 3D mental projections has to undervalue the ability to see through simple puzzles. Overeducated brains often have difficulties with the simplest of tasks that children can solve without any problems. Intelligence comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.

Nowadays, the memory part of intelligence has met with a huge setback - the infamous Internet. People tend not to memorize data that is easily accessible because it is not worth the effort. Sure it might take two minutes to check it, but that also means your memory has to be burdened less. In a way, a person's knowledge is as great as the Internet's. It often takes more time to try to recall something than check it from the great tube system using nothing more than your personal cell phone. Because so much information is at arm's length, we know more, and because of that, we know less. We no longer need to memorize everything we need to know, we can let some servers do it for us.

It is the same as cooperation. Transactive memory is a concept conjured up by Daniel Wegner about three decades ago, and it is a type of hive mind. It is a phenomenon that people who work in a group or in pairs for a long time develop a sort of shared memory. "A transactive memory system consists of the knowledge stored in each individual's memory combined with metamemory containing information regarding the different teammate's domains of expertise". It explains why it is so efficient to have a long-term team as opposed to constantly alternating team members. And it expands a person's ability to store and access information, much like the Internet does.

People become more intelligent when they work together. People's knowledge is expanded by artificial databanks filled with binary data. But even these phenomena have their limits. A group of people the size of a country can hardly work together efficiently, even a hundred politicians is often enough to cease any kind of cooperation. And cat videos hardly increase our mental abilities. The only thing that we can change significantly is how we use the knowledge that is at our fingertips. How do we make logical conclusions using the data we have, what we decide to do after having assessed the information, how do we make connections between different phenomena. We need to learn to think, because that makes us wise.

Via Tjadens

Papa keep preaching.

Are popular scientists modern day preachers?

We've all heard of Bill Nye (the Science Guy), Richard Feynman, Harold Kroto and Neil deGrasse Tyson. We've listened to their talks, we've heard their opinions on physics and the world, we've seen countless quotations attributed to them. They are really like the MacGyvers of today, attempting to popularize science among youngsters. Just with less action and more enthusiasm.
But just like MacGyver, they do not limit themselves to chemistry or physics, they wander into the realm of philosophy. They show us dreams of the possible, they give us images of what is from a different perspective. It is not just the perks of being smart that they demonstrate, they use simple analogies to explain mindboggingly complicated processes, and by that they inspire greatness. They really are geeks.

The problem herein is that they are everywhere, and they keep saying the same. That makes them very similar to pious door-to-door 'faith sellers'. Sure, spreading one's religion is great, but stuffing it down others' throats is a bit over the line. One cannot ignore the fact that science bears strong resemblance to religion. The facts we've been taught have been the results of many people agreeing with each other on the topics, like preachers have discussed and agreed on questions of faith. People of authority confirming each other's beliefs, nothing more. The saying 'physics is great because it does not stop working just because you don't believe in it' is irrelevant, because it is the same with many religions. Just because you no longer believe a higher being exists somewhere and is observing the stupid things we do does not suddenly make it not be so. There may yet be someone or something peeking at us through either a really nifty eye or an advanced piece of technology. If you used to believe that everything falls down because God made it so, starting to believe in gravitons does not conflict with your original belief, and everything will continue to fall down.
The standpoints in science and religion change every once in a while. While we might no longer believe that Earth is the center of the Universe, we no longer stone, hang, or perform other life-ending acts of violence upon people that do. We are warming up to the idea of everything consisting of strings, and Catholic church is warming up to homosexuality. Even the topics that science and religion assess are the same, trying to lead us, humans, to a more harmonious coexistence with each other. It is not just 'strength through unity, unity through faith'. It is 'unity through like-mindedness'. While it might not sound as powerful, it is none the less the case. People who believe in the same scientific standpoints are more likely to get along peacefully than those who don't. Note the usage of the word 'believe', because that is exactly what we are dealing with - beliefs.

Popular scientists are modern day preachers. Unpopular scientists are modern preachers. It does not matter how many people listen to you, as long as you keep 'spreading the word', telling people what you find reasonable to believe in, you are a preacher of sorts. You might not be trying to convert people to religious sects, but you are trying to make them think like you. You are trying to change or enhance their beliefs and/or the way they think. The Aristotelean method of inquiry works so well because it is not just telling people what to think, it is telling them how to think. And once you have taught someone to think the way you want them to, you've spread your belief. And you will be a preacher.

Look closely enough and you'll see the Universe unfolding in every molecule, in every atom.

"Truth is fluid, truth is subjective."

What is truth, how can we define something to be 'true' or 'false'? A statement may apply almost every single time it is put to the test, but it only takes a single failure to prove it to be false. This is one of the reasons the Bible has been so popular - it is neither provably correct nor incorrect. Sure you might think Noah's Ark is a bit of an exaggeration, but it is pretty difficult to prove a flood did not happen or that there was a huge boat with lots of animals. The tower of Babel was a tower that would reach the skies, and it was not struck down by anyone. However, reaching the skies does not necessarily mean it was infinitely tall, it just meant that there was an image of the stars on top of the tower, symbolizing the sky. This sort of towers have been uncovered, which means that the tower of Babel is not provably false. Common sense dictates that the boat probably didn't house 2 specimens of each species in the world that would then lead the world to a massive case of incest, but then again, books are usually not meant to be taken literally. This causes further difficulties differentiating between 'truth', 'fiction', and 'lie'.

Scientific theories are generally thought of as 'true' once they have been proven to have sufficient basis. Newton's laws, while basic from current viewpoints, do in general apply. Once someone starts looking into quantum physics, one finds that some 'true' Newton's laws do not work. And yet, those laws are not considered false, they are considered incomplete. String theory is currently considered to be 'true' because it explains physics from Newtonian principles to modern discoveries, as long as we have 11 dimensions. It is 'true' because it makes sense, but until we actually see or detect the strings, it is not 'true' for certain. It is neither provably correct nor incorrect, until we find a method that shows us the individual strings and we understand how each string works individually and as a part of the world, or we find a method that shows us there is no such string. We don't know it to be 'true', we believe it to be. And some of us believe it isn't.

It is human nature to pick at things until we find something we do not understand. It is what drives scientific discovery, it pushes the boundaries of human limits. To claim a statement to be 'true' is to not observe it closely enough. To claim a statement to be 'false' is to find a single case where the statement does not apply. Some statements linger in between, true enough to be believable, false enough to be incomplete. The world is more than yin and yang, it is a mix between the two.