Saturday 31 August 2013

A labour of love.

Ever heard of M. Scott Peck? He was a psychotherapist who wrote a book called 'The road less travelled'. It's a book about life, love and discipline (maybe some more stuff, I'm only half way through).

He talks at great length about spiritual growth and how only an action which enables or causes you or somebody to grow spiritually can be called an act of love. A labour of love is something which takes effort, but rewards you in kind. Something that you push all of your time into, but doesn't require any effort (something like television or in my case, tower defense games) is nothing but a time sink. It gives nothing back to you.

If it requires your effort, if it is an exercise of will then that is only half the requirements. At least, that's what M. Scott Peck says. He says the second requirement is that it somehow extends your boundaries. What I believe is that your boundaries are largely defined by the strength of your discipline and will, and by exercising your will, you strengthen it. In this way every act of discipline is an act of love. Love for yourself or love for another.

This blog is an exercise of will. I stumbled a couple of weeks ago when I did not post anything at all. The week before that I had written a blog entitled Gender roles in a broken world. It got just 7 views. I felt like I had failed because nobody had read my blog and this depressed me. I felt like my writing was not worthwhile and couldn't motivate myself to continue writing. I felt like I was not worthwhile and couldn't motivate myself to practice my guitar or my saxophone! It wasn't until two weeks later that I finally picked up the courage to write again and even longer before I picked up my instruments again. What I now realise is that my failure wasn't in writing a blog post which was not widely read, my failure was to let slip my discipline. To let such a thing as my number of readers affect me was to forget the true purpose of my blog, which is written for me.

I suspect everybody has their own reasons for writing. I write to solidify my ideas. To make sure that I understand what it is that I am saying and as a learning process. The reason I post them on the internet and show all my friends and family is so that I can stand by my beliefs no matter who reads them. I often write about overtly sexual or left-wing subjects. Things my parents and grandparents don't always understand or agree with. I sometimes write things which are overtly controversial like Was Adolf Hitler a Bad Man... Not sure how many friends that one bought me... but the fact is that my opinions and how I view the world is my ultimate labour of love, my search for the truth. It is this dedication to the truth that I will stand by my whole life if I can manage it.

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Sunday 25 August 2013

Robots will take over the world!

Give it 10 years and your breakfast will be waiting for you by the time you get downstairs. Your car will drive you to work and your cleaning lady will have found herself a new career.

There is a revolution coming and its name is robotics! We all know robots have been used on construction lines for years and years and we all know that a lot of people lost their jobs for it. It's only going to get worse. Whether it is Google's self driving cars or the creepy nurse's assistant, robots are increasingly able to work alongside humans. To interact with them directly and safely and this is really the key point.

Robots have always been able to do repetitive tasks but with the revolution in safety and the ability to understand their environment, robots have taken on new life and will begin to take on new roles. They are already being used extensively in the military for dangerous tasks such as mine sweeping and recon missions and there are future plans to use robots to repair nuclear facilities in ways that humans cannot without extreme risk. This is good.

There is however a more contentious result of the robotic uprising. As they begin to take over more and more roles that humans once will have filled, many people will be left jobless and without prospects. How can we resolve this? The only barrier I can foresee to this happening is cost effectiveness. But economically speaking, there is no reason for this to impede for long the march into the new reality that robotics will bring.

What sort of society will we live in, when half of us do not and cannot have jobs? There are only so many people who can work on maintaining the robots. Only so many people who can design and build them. What will the rest of us do? How will we survive without a paycheck and how will we stay sane without a job?

There are certain people who have foreseen this. Namely Jacque Fresco. In this video he talks about how humans will be displaced by robots and how they already are being displaced by robots (self-checkout anyone?). He also talks about what humans will be able to do in the future. How we will spend our time, how we will survive and how our quality of life will improve dramatically. If you enjoy your job (there are few enough of us that do) then there is no reason for you not to continue. Let's say you are a lumberjack and you absolutely love it. There is nothing in the world you would rather do! But there are all these robots who do the job faster than you! What are you going to do? Well... since you probably will be out of a job, like almost everybody, there is no reason you cannot continue to just chop trees down. You won't earn a wage from it but that won't matter. The move to a nanny state will become far more pronounced in the future as the money system collapses under the weight of robotics. (Nobody has any jobs -> nobody has any money -> nobody buys anything -> money itself is abolished under the threat of total and irretrievable economic collapse)

What we are talking about is not a restriction and it is not a loss. It is a massive gain. It is perhaps the greatest gain we have seen since the start of agriculture! We will get our freedom back! No longer strapped to a desk 8 hours a day, we can spend time with the people we love, with the things we love to do!

The future is bright! The future's robotic.

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Want to start programming?

I don't know who among you knows that I love to program.... but I love to program. And I think you might too.

Are you the sort of person who enjoys su dokus? Who is fascinated by Rubick's cubes and who loves puzzle games?

I think there are a lot of people out there who would enjoy and benefit from learning programming and using it, both in their everyday lives and at work.

My job right now is to copy and paste data from one spreadsheet to another. I have to make sure that all the data is in all the right columns and that all the relevant data is present. Sounds boring, right? Enough to put you to sleep? Well I can quickly write a program that will do the job for me. Now it doesn't matter if they give me 10 spreadsheets or 10,000 spreadsheets. I can do them all with little to no effort because I have written to program to do it for me. Aside from this sort of application, you can just use it for fun, or use it competitively (CodeJamSome ChallengesProject Euler).

I'm not going to teach you squat about programming today. I'm going to leave that to you. I just want to show you how easy it can be to get started. I recommend Python because it is straight forward and easy to learn.

If you want to just jump right into the questions and learn it that way then by far the best place you can go is to LearnStreet. This is like programming with somebody patiently talking you through the process of learning to program. The code is all typed into the website so nothing needs to be installed. It does require you to sign up after the first few problems but it is definitely worthwhile.

The next best place to go is http://www.learnpython.org/. This website again requires no installation. Just go onto that website and type: print 'I am gonna be awesome at this'.upper() + "!"*5
The website is designed to teach you python in a modular style. You start with the basics and move on to the harder stuff. It's basically interactive reading.

You can also look at Dive Into Python for pretty much the same thing with less interactivity (read: no interactivity). For this you will need to install python. There is a blog dedicated to that here.

A great resource for you will be the Python documentation. Any programming language will have a documentation. It is like a dictionary for the programming language and it will have all the information you need. But, at the end of the day, the best place to look is always Google.

Good luck and happy coding.



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Friday 9 August 2013

Gender roles in a broken world.

There  is a wonderful documentary that you need to watch, and you can find it here.

The documentary is called The Codes of Gender and it breaks down the gender roles dictated by society and how we can see exactly what those roles are by looking at advertisements.

Okay, so what is a gender role? More importantly, what is a gender?

Don't make the mistake of confusing gender with sex. A person's sex is defined by their biology. Their gender however is societally imposed. In England and the western world, there are two main gender roles, male and female. The male gender role is one of a strong, dominant, active person. The female gender role is one of a weak, submissive and passive person.

Watching this documentary has caused me to look at again and really think about the type of man that I am, the type of women I am looking for and to compare this to how men and women are represented in society. To an extent, how they are expected to be and to behave.

I would argue that the greatest cause of misery and confusion is when a person does not fit into the slot provided by society. Maybe they have a few knobbly edges or sharp corners and they don't fit into the nice round hole that they are told to fit in. It seems almost juvenile and the answer most commonly given is that you should just be yourself. This is a naive response because the situation is not always that simple. What if I as an individual happen to like walking around barefoot? What if I hate shoes so intensely that if ever I wear a pair I break out in hives? Is it convenient to not wear shoes when out in town? Is it acceptable? What if I want to go to a nightclub?

There are a million situations comparable to this. Some more serious, some less so but the fact still remains that the rules that govern this situation are arbitrary. Why shouldn't I walk around barefoot all day? So long as I don't go on a building site I should be fine!

These arbitrary rules are laid down by society. Without them we would each be free to do exactly as we please. I will not accept the argument that all would be chaos because people are not chaotic. In general people like routine. People like simplicity and predictability (so long as there are interesting people about). Nobody wants to be navigating a riot on their way home and if there is a riot, then it must be for a good reason.

The Buddhists say that all life is suffering but I must disagree. Civilisation is suffering.

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Saturday 3 August 2013

That creative spark.

I've started writing my poetry again... well, actually I've started writing lyrics.

I used to write a lot of poetry a couple of years ago (over 200 poems). Here is one of my favourites. Lately however I have been feeling without inspiration. I have written some truly awful poems whilst trying to get back what I once had.

This stuff that I'm writing these days looks like my old poetry. The stuff I thought I had totally lost! It makes me wonder where creativity actually comes from. In this TED talk, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love talks about the creative genius, not as an individual, but as something which accompanies an individual.

A genius, in the original sense, is a spirit which accompanies an individual and supplies them with the right words at the right time, or points them towards the right colour for the next brush stroke.

I think that this way of thinking is shared by a lot of the greats. There are some people who have talent pouring out their ears. They get such a great deal of inspiration that they reason the only way it could be possible is if an outside force was helping them.

It raises the question of How can you push beyond your ordinary limits without some external pressure?

As a creative individual, how can you rely upon your creativity? What happens if it abandons you like what happened to Metallica?

I'm going to keep writing as if each blog post, each lyric, each line could be my last.

Oh and by the way, I kind of have a job now - so Friday is suddenly no good for me to post blog entries. Saturday is the day buzzword on this blog.

I'll see you next Saturday.

*******************************
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