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nuggets of joy
Aug. 31st, 2003 01:38 amPeople suck. People don't know nothin' bout 'nothin -- we haven't studied our environment, haven't really taken the time to grok anything, especially not other people... we don't understand anything we talk about, and yet we go about bandying about hearsay as if it was Gospel Truth. We don't think about what we're saying. We don't know what it is we're saying in the first place. We're so eager to make people think the same thing we think, or at least repeat the same words that we repeat (because somebody we once thought was important told us to think that, explicitly or not -- "dude, you weren't raised to believe that (insert some deeply held conviction here)... I can't conceptualize that!!") that we're willing to squabble 'til we're blue in the face, or just go kill people.
Nobody thinks. We just rearrange prejudices. There's no "think". We can manipulate symbols. We can only hope that our inevitable species-ending catastrophe comes soon and won't take out too much else of the world with us...
Having gotten that out of the way...
Up until that started coming out, I was in a really good mood, actually, and I have been, for a while yet :) I came back from a Cimmy-visit-trip to South Carolina early this afternoon. We'd hung out with her friend Jessica, who's pretty cool, and who apparently did this massive hike across much of Spain back in January, which I would very much like to do One Of These Days. Apparently Carlos, who's a super-cool Erskine professor (whom I've met -- he gets high approval ratings) has done this a few times, and he takes students with him. I wonder if he'd mind if a Techie came along. And we went to Wal-Mart at about midnight-thirty. And we looked at home furnishings and Godzilla DVDs and danced in the aisles.
Yay :)
Coming back was an adventure in linguistics and anthropology... I stopped in this Subway somewhere in northern Georgia, and what turned out to be this enormous tribe of extremely Southern people were in there, playfully pestering the Subway staff ("I want an 8-inch sub..." and "Gimme three inches of steak, three of chicken...") in the thickest drawls I've heard anywhere... pretty crazy. I didn't realize they were all together until they all filed out at once. One of the gentlemen in the group was looking at my shirt and inquired "Disco Dinner?" (the shirt reads "Diner", pretty clearly)... very, very exciting. I hung out and had some coffee and read some AI in that Subway for a while.
This afternoon, I was mostly just picking at my AI homework -- I got a good chunk of that done, which is good, considering it's due on Tuesday. This is the funkiest class I think I've taken, ever. Ah! On that note... you can get the whole of Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition online, and it's mad useful, but probably only for me, because nobody else cares. But Lisp is freaking crazy, and I want to drink it down much more deeply than I have.
On Thursday, I hung out with this fellow Ben, who's pretty cool -- he's in my Computing and Society and Prob/Stat classes. He saw me doing some juggling outside the C&S classroom and came by and we had a juggling bonding moment -- he's got some pretty slick contact juggling skillZ but doesn't know how to toss-juggle yet, so we're going to do a juggler-trick exchange.
Um, and that's about that. Well, no, it's not. But this is where I'm stopping. I know you guys don't read any of this anyway :)
Nobody thinks. We just rearrange prejudices. There's no "think". We can manipulate symbols. We can only hope that our inevitable species-ending catastrophe comes soon and won't take out too much else of the world with us...
Having gotten that out of the way...
Up until that started coming out, I was in a really good mood, actually, and I have been, for a while yet :) I came back from a Cimmy-visit-trip to South Carolina early this afternoon. We'd hung out with her friend Jessica, who's pretty cool, and who apparently did this massive hike across much of Spain back in January, which I would very much like to do One Of These Days. Apparently Carlos, who's a super-cool Erskine professor (whom I've met -- he gets high approval ratings) has done this a few times, and he takes students with him. I wonder if he'd mind if a Techie came along. And we went to Wal-Mart at about midnight-thirty. And we looked at home furnishings and Godzilla DVDs and danced in the aisles.
Yay :)
Coming back was an adventure in linguistics and anthropology... I stopped in this Subway somewhere in northern Georgia, and what turned out to be this enormous tribe of extremely Southern people were in there, playfully pestering the Subway staff ("I want an 8-inch sub..." and "Gimme three inches of steak, three of chicken...") in the thickest drawls I've heard anywhere... pretty crazy. I didn't realize they were all together until they all filed out at once. One of the gentlemen in the group was looking at my shirt and inquired "Disco Dinner?" (the shirt reads "Diner", pretty clearly)... very, very exciting. I hung out and had some coffee and read some AI in that Subway for a while.
This afternoon, I was mostly just picking at my AI homework -- I got a good chunk of that done, which is good, considering it's due on Tuesday. This is the funkiest class I think I've taken, ever. Ah! On that note... you can get the whole of Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition online, and it's mad useful, but probably only for me, because nobody else cares. But Lisp is freaking crazy, and I want to drink it down much more deeply than I have.
On Thursday, I hung out with this fellow Ben, who's pretty cool -- he's in my Computing and Society and Prob/Stat classes. He saw me doing some juggling outside the C&S classroom and came by and we had a juggling bonding moment -- he's got some pretty slick contact juggling skillZ but doesn't know how to toss-juggle yet, so we're going to do a juggler-trick exchange.
Um, and that's about that. Well, no, it's not. But this is where I'm stopping. I know you guys don't read any of this anyway :)
