TomRed's blog & stuff

I was out one time and passed my primary school, a lot of it is guarded by a massive wall taller than my >6ft self. Whenever I pass it I make a brief jump to see it as it sometimes gives me a rush of previously locked memories. I like having memories of experiences of me from the 1990s, because they were experiences of me in the previous millennium. That time I discovered something blatantly obvious, the distinction between this and the last millennium is an arbitrary line from the Gregorian calendar. I already knew this, but acted in a way that the two millennia were distinct and separate from each other as I never registered it being arbitrary.

There are more examples of me thinking like this, for example, there are only two (verified) males alive from the nineteenth century. I get frustrated at my peers for not swallowing the significance of this, but again, it’s arbitrary. Finally, for some odd reason I find 80 and above a good age to live to and 79 and below a bad age to live to (funnily enough I probably won’t even live to 80).

One other age/time/life thing I am weirdly interested in is something that’s not arbitrary. Take someone I admire, like Carl Sagan. He died in 1996 and I was born in 1993. I was three when he died, and for me I would be disappointed if he died in, say, 1992. The fact that we crossed paths, the fact that I was alive at a point he was alive (even though any influence I had on his life was negligible), I just like. The same goes for one of my great-grandfathers (my mother’s mother’s father). He died when I was about 7 months old, but when I found out that when I was born he was still alive, many years ago, I was pleased.

Where am I going? Not far, it’s just some (creepy) way of thinking, but if you’re into the potentially mildly interesting, I can put these thoughts graphically, into what I’m gonna call lifeline graphs.

Let’s take a hypothetical person, this person was born in the start of 1920 and died in the start of 2005, aged 85. This person, as us all, grew in cognition from the beginning of his existence for some years in the growing up phase and in his old age developed dementia where his cognition depleted until his death. For the sake of simplicity, let’s take the beginning of existence at birth (even though there’s some limited cognitive development in the fetal stage (I think), but a birthday is a lot easier to trace) and a gradual change of cognition from birth to 10 years old, even though it would actually be more fluid than this. For this hypothetical man (not James Doohan), dementia was developed at the beginning of 2000. From this, one can represent his existence graphically:

So you can easily see how his existence was at any point on the time axis, even though there is a fine line between life and death, though it is useful to see their cognitive ability (my point is that a vegetable is quite different from a person in their prime, but if you have cancer you’re still the same in mind).

But to summarise the ideas I brought above, and more, let’s throw in several of some real people (including myself) into one lifeline graph:

The time axis clearly shows when people lived, but just looking at the lifelines themselves brings certain points:
1. You can see when people were alive together, The Beatles were all alive together, in their prime. I was alive with my great-granddad and Carl Sagan in my babyhood.
2. Consequently, you can see when people were dead together. This doesn’t just mean any time after two or more people have died, like in 2005 for John, George and Ronald Reagan, but also in 1985 when John and I were dead (in other words, we were ‘on the same level’), even though some get angry at me for thinking of ‘death’ as simply not being alive, meaning any children of mine would get squandered out of this definition (as they are not alive, but not dead by the definitions of most). Nevertheless, if my children were put in the graph, you could see that at the time of writing both my children and my great-granddad were dead.
3. You can see where one’s life has been encompassed in another’s. John Lennon’s life has been encompassed by Carl Sagan’s, who in turn has been encompassed by Ronald Reagan’s, who’s been encompassed by Walter Breuning’s.
4. If many peoples’ lifelines were listed, you could see chains that never break, i.e. a no points where no one in the chain is alive.

Anyway, the point of this really, really long post was just a few thoughts and a somewhat useful invention of mine (unless some fucker made it first).

Finally, if you didn’t recognise the names of any of the notable people, here you go:
Carl Sagan (1934–1996) – American astronomer, died from a difficult battle with myelodysplasia.
Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) – 40th president of the USA, suffered with Alzheimer’s disease for the last ten years of his life (hence the fading lifeline).
John Lennon (1940–1980) – member of The Beatles, shot and killed.
Paul McCartney (1942–) – member of The Beatles.
George Harrison (1943–2001)– member of The Beatles, died from cancer.
Ringo Starr (1940–) – member of The Beatles.
Walter Breuning (1896–) – world’s oldest living man.

Did you watch South Park’s 200th episode and its successor? If so, continue reading. If not, watch the two then come back with an understanding of the context.

Basically, the religion of peace is on its time of the month again and has again displayed its title as the motherlord of artistic criticism. To protect the legends that make South Park, the Internet has uptaken a safety in numbers approach to depict the prophet Muhammad in creative ways, ergo Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, ranging from the intentionally offensive to intentionally inoffensive. I’m not a fan of freedom of speech, if I came into power tomorrow there will be a lot quotas on speech but that’s a different story. However, when an ideology comes to take this fundamental human right away from us with the threat of random violence, that’s when I get mad.

Ladies(?) and gentlemen, let me give you exhibit A:

This is Muhammad, this is my impression, this is suspiciously similar to the 4chan face. Don’t be a pussy, make your own.

As some of you may know, I’m interested in longevity. I’m not too bothered about my personal lifespan, though it does prevail in my daydreamt thoughts time to time. I use Wikipedia as my guide to keep an eye on current supercentenarians (i.e. anyone above 110), especially Walter Breuning, the world’s oldest man. Kama Chinen, who I’ve monitored once in a while for some time now died yesterday, aged 114.

So what? She was 114 (a few days away from 115 as a matter of fact), why should anyone care? Well, it’s not so much the person themselves I care about (except from Walter Breuning), it’s the fact that we’re losing years of the nineteenth century faster than we’re gaining years of this crappy century. I don’t know about you, but I like to live in a world where I can still say “there’s someone alive that was born in 18XX”.

Anyway, 1895 is gone and we’re on 1896 now, and I will be pissed when this one goes too. I’m talking in terms of the verified though as there are a few disputed claims, but whatever.

That’s that, but did you know that the world’s longest recorded lived organism was 250 million years old?

Who is our hero? Who changed the world and enabled us to make our own choices in life? Who restored our liberty? It has been revealed.

I think this is a rather beautiful application of technology, it’s well done and you can put yourself in the photo. I don’t know why they went to all that so we’re convinced to pay our Swedish broadcasting fee… Can Gordon do something like that for our TV licence?

Procrastinating time, yay! Perfect time to write a post. Anyway, my music taste has developed from ‘random songs/pieces of music’ to anything that was played on Capital Gold from about the mid-’90s to now (notably the Beatles) in the last year or so. There’s a property about music that I’ve noticed that I think is in women, this is by no means an absolute for me, but I might be on to something…

Let me throw in a couple of examples, take these two versions of Let It Be:

I believe the first one was released, and the second was another take used in the Let It Be film. You should note that the first one has been through a lot of editing to add some sound effects, make sure all the voices sound immaculate and whatever while the second is kind of ‘raw’. Now, leaving the video aside, I prefer the second one. The same goes for Radio Ga Ga compared with the Live Aid live version:

The sort of perfection that these excellent musicians aim to achieve turns me off, but why? And why do I prefer live/raw versions where they struggle and can forget words? I think it’s because I find flawlessness plain, and I just like the small imperfections that bring these gods back down to Earth.

Where am I going with this? First, let me warn the 0.5 females that read this blog to go away for the remainder of this post, I don’t know what pisses them off but I better play it safe. Anyway, I think I can say the same about music for women (generally). Supermodels and celebrities just don’t give me the ‘boing’ downstairs as they do to my male counterparts; make up and photoshop just turns me off. To be honest, however, I think it’s a matter of beauty amplified by compatible personality, but to me beauty does not have to be high, it’s just the foundations for me to admire character (but I know less about women than I do about politics).

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS PHILOSOPHY, DO NOT READ IF PHILOSOPHOBIC.

For those of you uninformed, I don’t believe in God. Some people have taken surprise and almost offence to hear such a conviction, and a while ago I’d be among them. However, I believe this is justified; it is not a stupid rebellious desire or any of that teenage bollocks, it’s a philosophical conclusion, and I would like to clear up why I hold this lack of belief. As kind of mentioned: this is a philosophical and slightly scientific sketch, where I intended to include religion as a major component as that’s where the idea of God is highly relevant, but fuck me, it’s long enough as it is.

Let me start by giving two propositions:
Proposition 1: I don’t believe in God.
Proposition 2: I believe there is no God.
Notice that I used proposition 1 in the opening paragraph (I referred to lack of belief as opposed to a belief in no God). I believe these two differ greatly, especially when debating, and can be explained as follows: a baby does not have a belief in God, but it does not have a belief that there is no God. This shows the importance of language, another importance of language is to define ‘God’. The range is immense, from la-di-la pantheistic nature concepts (i.e. ‘nature is my god’) to anthropomorphic religious supreme beings. For simplicity, let’s refer to ‘God’ as a higher intelligence, which should include deistic concepts as well as religious concepts (basically it should agree with most believers’ views).

With this definition of God, I uphold proposition 1, and to an extent proposition 2. The reason why is that, I think, to argue for a proposition’s truth, I believe you must supply positive evidence for that proposition to change the current status on the matter from ‘not knowing’ to ‘true’ (not necessarily 100% proof). A failure to provide evidence isn’t positive evidence against it, the status on the matter will remain as ‘not knowing’. For example, explaining matter using atomic theory requires positive evidence for atomic theory to be accepted as true and a failure to do so does not mean that matter is not made of atoms, you just simply don’t know yet. To summarise this really, really confusing paragraph by quoting Carl Sagan, ‘…absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’ I stress the difference as I have to justify the propositions differently to justify my view.

Now, proposition 1. I have not seen positive evidence for the existence of God. I am well aware that there have been traditional arguments, and though tempting to tackle them one by one, I shall forward to you someone much greater than I am, and may even call him God. That man is Bertrand Russell, and this is his essay (the focus relevant to here is the existence of God part and following subtopics, as mentioned, this blog post is not really focused on religion).

Now, proposition 2. This is where evidence that there is no God has to be found. This is a more difficult task, especially if I am to be consistent with my previously stated method of acquiring knowledge. Say if God exists and is just a higher intelligence, without being specific, as this intelligence did not necessarily create the universe, isn’t the centre of morality, and so on, there is pretty much no evidence for this being. However, there isn’t evidence that this being does not exist, with a lack of evidence each way, we simply don’t know, but just don’t believe because there is no evidence for it. This is why I cannot fully be with proposition 2. However, if this is the sort of compassionate intelligence that created us intentionally, cares for us, and so on (give and take qualities), then the evidence for proposition 2 comes round. The sort of evidence I mean here, and to be brief, is the problem of evil, and applies to concepts of God that are meant to be all powerful and benevolent. Just to give one example, if this God is compassionate and cares for humanity, or life in general, why create us through the long, painful process of evolution? And an important point is, religious God generally come into play with such traits.

So my focus is on proposition 1, if my justification for it is accepted alone then that’s my justification for simply not believing in God. To be honest, I am slightly uncomfortable when asked about my position in a single term, as the terms surrounding it are rather inconsistent (for example, agnosticism refers to knowledge, atheism to belief, but are used on some sort of one-dimensional spectrum).

Well there you have it, I hope this makes a morsel of sense, and half a morsel of interest.

For all the Mac users out there that can relate to this:

Then, thanks to the kindness of a certain Mr Rodgers, there is a program that can disable your internet for a time up to 8 hours unless you restart, called Freedom. It has been seemingly helpful for me, nevertheless I still make silly mistakes in my homework:

I’m a dog person. Dogs require maintenance, are a bit dangerous, smelly, outdoor creatures but are man’s loyal and best friend. Cats, however, may be more domestic, independent and cleaner (with the exception of presenting bird corpses as gifts), but are too intelligent and evil for their own good. Nevertheless, my journey home from school has changed my negativity towards them.

I was walking home, and not far from it, but saw a small head pop out of an entrance to a front garden. Instantaneously I knew it was a cat, and in my curious inspection I noticed that it was a rather small cat. My worry commenced when I realised that it had no obvious form of identification, many high-pitched ‘meows’ directed at me, and did not appear to know its surroundings as fluently as its elder counterparts. I knew something was certainly wrong when it didn’t just run away from me like every woman I have ever loved, as most cats do. It actually followed me. My conscience made a cameo appearance in not letting me leave this being roughly equivalent to a crying toddler.

There were few people entering homes that I could ask whether or not they knew of the owner, and I got no confirmation. I was contemplating to use my mobile even though I’m in Edmonton, but considered to urge it to follow me home and see what I can do there. Eventually, someone was entering their home near myself and the cat realised the situation and we agreed that she take the cat in, and perhaps call the RSPCA. If anything new happens, I’ll spill.

Why did I spend three paragraphs elaborating on a story about a lost cat? I don’t know. My life isn’t exactly eventful, and situations like this make me ponder and ask myself ‘did I do the right thing?’

Sequel to How I’m going to die…

No one seemed to notice the typo in WV#65. Not good enough.

Deduce the explanation for yourselves.