That’s the cost of a bag of blood. Not from blood, drop to drop, as paid to the volunteer – no, not at all. It’s the cost of testing, shipping, partially salaries for the chaps and chap-ettes who handle things. Plasma costs $600+. Imagine that. Now, imagine not having health insurance or any governmental aid. Now, imagine being injured by the source of your choice (car crash, falling down the stairs, freak chainsaw accident). Anything that needs a transfusion.

Don’t you feel like running out to donate some blood now?

My new favourite Scrabble play ever!

Fascinating. So they’ve made a digital brain smarter than a cat, and they understand it even less than a real brain. Isn’t that great. Nice to see such a quick follow up to that other mouse-brain thing I posted some time ago.

http://arst.ch/a60

ArsTechnica – awesome geeksite. Looks like this will be one of those I can’t help going back to.

On gender roles being a social construct~ (invalidly argumented) comparisons

Why should a male be masculine and a female be feminine? The answer is in both nature and nurture – no one is ever raised environmentally unaffected, not even someone raised in a white box: that in itself is an environment, is it not? Similarly, no one escapes genetics. Talk to people who have sickle-cell anemia. Or cancer. Or baldness. Or two eyes, two ears, one nose and one mouth.

So why do people say “this is how a man should behave”, or “that’s so girly”, or “you should be more feminine”, or, “You’ll be a man, my son!”? Like the toilet argument, all this should be irrelevant. Referring to that article… this is the “serious argument” that post should have been.

But on the other hand, this has been sitting in draft mode so long I just feel the need to tack on unnecessary final paragraphs and banish it into the wide web.

Other social construct examples? Parental roles: biological inheritance from physiological characteristics of the sexes. Clothing, fashion: evolution of need for protection from nature. Modesty and other ‘values’? Prudishness? Justice? Equality? Capitalism? Socialism? Religion (a gold-standard paragon of constructs)?

Why do we adhere so? Unfortunately, it’s up to nature and nurture. Even the ‘individualism’ so touted by parenting manuals is just another limitation. Any interaction with any person forms a link that binds one to a standard of expected behavior. Imagine politeness. Now imagine some stranger you just smiled at in the street giving you an uppercut. What is to be expected? It is essentially impossible to be free from limits. Did the Buddha really do it? Perhaps mentally? Perhaps not. Recall the principles of moderation, the four Truths, the Eightfold Path. What is Right? Why adhere?

We are like a bowl of bubbles rising from a bubble machine sitting in the universe, holding up each other until we pop, new bubbles generated all the time, propping up, propping up. On occasion some bubbles float up and away, free from the miasma below, free for a second in the clean, beautiful air. Then the bubble pops.

Another one of my bathroom epiphanies.

All that you see, arbitrary statements, science, holy words, deepest math, most profound statements – boil down a life.

A life, reduced to a line.

One man, four hundred years ago, forty or fifty years of breath summarized in, “To be, or not to be”. Another – “I think, therefore I am”. More than two thousand years: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” One hundred and four years ago: “e = MC2″.

How does one sentence illustrate a human life – born, breathing, living, growing, loving, frakking, aging, dying? Apparently just like that.

“As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.”

On to the bracketed section of the post title.

There is nothing that you touch now that has not connected to a life. Even the tiniest grain of sand is linked inexorably to a life. Imagine a speck of a flake of a shell, on the bottom of the ocean floor, touched by bacteria, touched by the water that connects an infinite reservoir of life. The Earth. The galaxy. Everything connects. There is always a line.

So you are not alone.

Theme by the name of Tones from Belchfire, and wallpaper from the very beautiful artwork of Huke (or is that the character name?) courtesy of a fantastic waller at Animepaper. The picture looks nice and widescreen here thanks to my fancy external monitor. That green thingy is actually my desktop post-it thingy that I don’t really know how to hide yet.

Yeah, so I reformatted my laptop so it’s all nice and squeaky clean… But it still lags playing flash Tetris.

Well I’ve promised myself not to talk politics any more but as a joint actsci-finance major this is really interesting to me.

http://mt.m2day.org/2008/content/view/28036/84/

He certainly knows how to run a business.

Off a manga oneshot by Kotonoha (I love you so) and called, unsurprisingly, “The End of the World”, by Inio Asano.

The taskbar, etc. is Vendetta, by someone I don’t remember, from a site I barely recall. Actually I just wanted something black to go with the wallpaper. The gunnery doesn’t have anything to do with the manga.

Found something good -

Don’t fear god,
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure
(Philodemus, Herculaneum Papyrus, 1005, 4.9-14).

Fantastic.

Read the entire (Wikipedia) article:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrapharmakos>

and the one about Epicureanism

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean>

What’s interesting is what the Epicureans pursue – “to live free from fear”, and fear has many definitions – not phobias; and “tranquility”.

“Ataraxia”, cutting from the Wiki article – For the Epicureans, ataraxia was synonymous with the only true happiness possible for a person. It signifies the state of robust tranquility that derives from eschewing faith in an afterlife, not fearing the gods because they are distant and unconcerned with us, avoiding politics and vexatious people, surrounding oneself with trustworthy and affectionate friends and, most importantly, being an affectionate, virtuous person, worthy of trust.

So lesson learnt: stay away from annoying people and politics.