i, rome

if you're interesting in learning ancient roman history in a fun way, check out the HBO series Rome (torrent), and Robert Grave's famous novel I, Claudius. together, they give a great overview of the roman empire from Julius Caesar to Nero

i had thought both would be 'heavy', but they are really just so wonderfully entertaining

how it is with James and me

[me to james]: so let me summarize. my nothing is your three .. my three is your four .. and my four and five are 'codes' which combine to form your five ....
[thinks] ... [laughs]: yes

ittwas i

welcome to a new segment, ittwas (invite trevor to write about something)

Reena is writing an essay and wants my support (as opposed to my help, which would be difficult to give to a non-first-year psych major)

she writes:
... it's kind of a fun topic to write about, i'm just a procrastinator by nature so i haven't started yet. your writing clearly isn't gonna help mine, so this is obviously for interest's sake only, but ... define your social location and how it shapes your ideology. please & thanks :o)

well, first of all, i realize that psychology has very specific definitions, so i'm sure 'social location' means something very succinct ... and something completely un-intuitive, if my experience in the field tells me anything

but to improvise .... my social location: well it's kind of strange, because sometimes i feel like i'm in the centre of everything, and other times i feel like i'm completely on the fringe .. socio-locationally speaking, that is

so i'd say my position is just like that of the edge of the universe .... there is no edge of the universe, so you could argue that it's a combination of both the end and the beginning and/or the centre
(to quote a favourite band: the universe is shaped exactly like the earth, if you go straight along enough you'll end up where you were)

yeah, so that's my social location ..... either that, or matriarch (the world sipping from my proverbial teet but i feel so used?)

how does that shape my ideology? fuck! even if i tried to answer that, what would it mean?

i·de·ol·o·gy [ahy-dee-ol-uh-jee, id-ee-] –noun.
1. the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual

oh, i like the "etc."

so how does my social location shape my belief system?
well, there is actually some correlation between my stated social location and my belief system, in that sometimes i believe in people, in humanity; believe in their capacity to love and to grow; believe in my own capacity to love and to grow. and other times i fucking hate people; think they are useless and mean ... sometimes i fucking hate myself

fin.

feel free to submit further ittwas requests! ;)

potential ... lol

introducing: iPhone

Apple recently posted a guided tour to their new iPhone ... what a magnificent little device!

how i use my iPod. part 1

i maintain a playlist called new and underplayed. i place most of the new music i download/burn onto this playlist, and also occasionally add an older album or song from my collection.

there are then three paths a song can take. either i:
- delete the song from my iPod completely
- delete the song from the new and underplayed playlist, but keep it on my iPod (delectable collectables)
- or i listen to the song until it’s play count hits 10, at which time i deleted it from the playlist

by this time, the song may have received a rating from * to *****

there are those who call me .. organizmo?

if you play my iPod on shuffle ...

... you have a 3.3% chance of hearing Billy Corgan

(i have 8175 songs, at present)

my next read

Critical Mass: how one thing leads to another
by Philip Ball

Publisher description:

Are there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out what kind of government was needed for a stable society. His approach was based not on utopian wishful thinking but rather on Galileo's mechanics to construct a theory of government from first principles. His solution is unappealing to today's society, yet Hobbes had sparked a new way of thinking about human behavior in looking for the "scientific" rules of society.

Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, and John Stuart Mill pursued this idea from different political perspectives. Little by little, however, social and political philosophy abandoned a "scientific" approach. Today, physics is enjoying a revival in the social, political and economic sciences. Ball shows how much we can understand of human behavior when we cease to try to predict and analyze the behavior of individuals and instead look to the impact of individual decisions-whether in circumstances of cooperation or conflict-can have on our laws, institutions and customs.

Lively and compelling, Critical Mass is the first book to bring these new ideas together and to show how they fit within the broader historical context of a rational search for better ways to live.

Library subject headings for this publication: Sociology, Human behavior Philosophy, Physics Social aspects

proud?

i am the number one Google result if you search for the words:

run your course my feverish child

i'm not sure how i feel about this ...

hereis an intereting wikipedia entry on:

(my) vaporizer

Perpetual motion?

the first law of thermodynamics (which states that energy can not be created or destroyed in a closed system, only transformed) may have been broken by an Irish company, who claim to have invented a motor which is more than 100 percent efficient; that is, it produces more energy than it consumes!

the age of cheap plastic robots ...

Lore's observations never fail to amuse

clickable ...

did you know that you can click on any pic on this blog and be taken to more information?

you did?! how smart are you!? ;)

these made me laugh ...

Jon Stewart on net neutrality and online gambling

ouch!

conan o'brien vs. the bear?!

this is hilarious ... a site which invites users to submit drawings of conan o'brien fighting a bear!



("send us your artwork! do it and we'll be your friend! we might even give you free napkins and toothpicks!")

file sharing - a childrens book

click for the full story ... quite amusing

my plight?

and now ...

BrokeBack Mountain in 30-seconds re-enacted by bunnies