Anime is awesome

I've always loved anime and the more I watch it the more I love it. Especially when I hear a good story.

Every time people talk about anime, mostly from Japan, I always say it has a quality about it that sets itself apart from the TV shows in america. People don't understand that, the way it is created is efficient and cheap. You can create elaborate sets that are believable as the rest of the show, and your characters can easily change costume, scene, or anything else without adding to the cost of the production. What this means, is movie like ideas brought to day time TV. Many interesting ideas can be played with and fleshed out over a long period of time.

A good idea of how the medium inspires a better story is comparing the limitations of reality TV. I love a good medical drama like House or Law and Order, but I don't see many of the shows working as well as they could. Which is why we have a lot of reality shows. They are cheap to make and provide the bare minimal in entertainment. It costs too much to make a major production like Lost, or The Fringe, which is why there are only a couple of such shows being aired in one season. It's expensive and the pay off might not be so well. Part of the reason the pay off is so bad is because the sets, actors, or story might not be believable or generally good without enough technology to make it so. So that means the story has to change and hardly ever in a good way.

Anime works because the medium itself is basically limitless in what it can portray and the many styles of artist expression available. In real life we have many physical things to worry about such as set location and costumes. But most importantly you have to worry about having enough technology to make everything fit with the story to portray what you want to say.

As for a medium for story telling; I want what can portray the story as best as possible.

Lost family

I lost a family member just a couple of days ago from what appears to be a doctor errors. From the loss of an important member of my immediate family, I usually find my self reflecting on the days afterward.

Many people make the death of a family member out to be a serious and sad moment in life. I really don't understand the feelings. I've lost other family members before, and it only felt like they've been living in another state for a long time and that I would never see them again. For me, that's not such a terrible thing. People leave you that you like, whether they be friends or acquaintances and you almost never expect to see them again once they leave. Once that happens they are pretty much dead.

The loss of my grandfather wasn't that big of a deal to me and I was really close to the guy. Sure I cried a bit after seeing him in the coffin but I don't feel a terrible emptiness. Most people at the funeral were pretty happy to see other family members and everyone else had a smile on their face. We all told stories of our grandpa and talked about what we have been doing lately. That's what I enjoy and thought a funeral should be like. To remember those who have passed, and push forward towards the future.

Plato and the ancients

I always find the old intelligent people of old such an interesting thing. For some reason I get this feeling that if you study their thinking patterns enough you'll be able to get a snapshot of genius and through that be able to replicate it in some way.

There was an article in the BBC news about how Plato had hidden his real thoughts and discoveries that were dangerous to the Greek religion at the time. This allowed him to preserve all of his knowledge without being considered a heretic. From this scientist have figured that Plato figured out the relationship between music and mathematics. I think this once again shows how religion can really fuck things up and keep us back in the stone ages. We could have been flying around in hover boards already but some religious lunatic had the nerve to say: "Sine and cosines defy the gods!".

Well I still love this article. It says so much about human creativity and intelligence. Being smart isn't the ability to sit down at a desk, and focus on a problem. Sometimes it's working on something else, coming back, and using your creativity to see things in a new late. Intelligence is as much writing a book as it is making equations for gravity and light/matter/mass interconnections. Intelligence is synthesis. Taking two ideas, mixing them and creating something different. That's what true intelligence is and why it's so hard to measure.

Synthesizing ideas isn't something that can accurately be measured right now. Much of it is objective, though some of it isn't such as creating the idea of capitalism. However synthesizing communism is brilliant still, though not the norm. Which is another reason synthesizing new ideas would be such a hard thing to measure.

If only there was a way to make such creativity accessible to yourself at will, society would probably be a lot better and so would everyone's lives.

Technological Singularity pt.2

When I wrote about a technological singularity previously I only spoke about what would happen at that single point at around the expected decade of 2050.

But what about before then? Well we can look at where current technology is leading us. Right now we are making more efficient touch screens and e-ink materials while also delving into nanotechnology more and more. In the computing field, there are many new possibilities and research being conducted. Efficient processors are being turned out that are slower but technologically superior to their faster predecessors. Computing at an even smaller atomic level with new forms of efficient logic gates can make computers more powerful and slower speeds with lower energy.

What does this mean for technology within the next 10 years? It means smaller computers. More touch screen capabilities with more power and less energy consumption. This mean new and cheaper ways to produce certain computing elements.

Outside of computers what's going to happen is a large revolution with new break throughs. In the field of genetics we have seen so much new advancement. Work has already begun on anti aging technology. HIV vaccines have been all over the news just recently. In 10 - 15 years we might come closer to stopping the aging process. By 10 - 15 years we might be able to slow the aging process enough to make people live a couple decades longer. Once again it's all a matter of time. We are getting closer and closer to important new discoveries each day that could change our world.

Technological Singularity

So for those of you who don't know. Ray Kurzweil, is a man who predicts that at about 2050 computers will be smart enough to change the course of humanity.

Yes I know it sounds sci-fi ish but it does make a lot of sense. I'm only in my 20's right now so I don't have much experience with history first hand. Because of my age I'm fairly limited with experience. But I can say that technology has changed quite a bit since I was born. As far back as I can remember, before cell phones were invented people used pagers or "beepers" as we called them locally. I'm still not exactly sure how they work but they were the top of technology a long time ago. Then cell phones became popular. Everyone had em and they were pretty big and the screens were all in black and white. Today, touch screen phones, with built in high resolution camera/video recorders, with various other technology such as built in voice recognition software that works pretty well, is a huge leap in technology.

My father had a computer at his office, it was running on windows 1998. I checked the technical specifications on it. The processor used in the computer was LESS powerful then the new snapdragon processor in the latest droid phone.

In 12 years, a powerful computer is now sold for the same price yet now it's small enough to fit in a phone.

Some people don't believe computers will someday be smarter then humans. In 2020 who knows how fast and powerful computers will be. But I would bet a large some of money that it would be able to fit in our cell phones and our technology will be fantastically cool by then. I would even venture to believe that 3-D technology will be in every household.

A technological singularity will come. Computers will be smarter then humans. It's just a matter of time.

Photography is not a crime!

I've seen it before played out in many youtube videos. Some "punk" kid video tapes a cop and the "heroic" cop punches the guy then cuffs him for being a "hippie with a camera". From then on the comments look mostly like "NAZI PIGS!" or "THEY SHOULD KILLED THAT HIPPIE PUNK!"

Well today I stumbled upon a site called Photography is not a Crime. It's got a lot of stories of people being arrested for simple photography. One story in Carlos Miller's site has a group of high schoolers getting in trouble for disorderly conduct after rapping their orders at a McDonalds.

There are plenty of other stories like that. Some people don't have much of a problem of course, but for people who make a living off of photography, getting man-handled by the police is probably a constant fear. Unfortunately it should be an irrational one but I guess that's not always the case.

Time wasters!

Youtube, twitter, facebook, video games, and various other interesting things always end up causing me to spend hours on end doing nothing and feeling unproductive at the end of the day. I should update my blog but I find myself sidetracked by a song I had stuck in my head which leads me to youtube, which in turn drives me to see if any of the people I subscribe to update. Shortly after I finish I might get distracted with something else that causes me to spend a few hours doing nothing.

I hate time wasters so much but they are so fun and interesting I just can't help it. Though it really does kinda suck that I start a bit of homework then end up getting side tracked only to not get much done after all.

So what works best to ride myself of time wasters or at least minimize their effects? First I try to cut them out of my life. Sure I'll go to youtube but I will only subscribe to 1-3 people and check back for updates when ever I have down time and feeling extremely board. It also helps to have some set things that you need to do during the day. Working out keeps me from using too many time wasters and simply using a lot of mental focus to keep on task also helps as well.

But I think the best thing about time wasters is that you never have to be bored, which I think is the problem. Get bored, find anti boredom. I guess if I just allow myself to be bored more often I won't be going to facebook so much. But it really is a human problem. We hate to be bored by nature. That's why youtube, blogging, and facebook are as big as they are.

Resting and working out

So I've tried this new idea for my workout. The idea is that some people end up hitting a wall when they work out and end up hitting the same number of reps and just can't seem to get any more. Well there is an idea that if you stop working out for about a week then get back into you can hit more weight and put out more reps.

Since I do bodyweight exercises only I can't really but more "weight on" in that sense. But I can hit more reps. When I waited for about 7 days before my next workout I ended up hitting an extra 14 pushups. My max increased from 17 to 20. My overall number of pushups went from 60 to 74. Thats a ridiculous increase.

However I also make sure I get good sleep and working on meditating daily to get the relaxation response going. Not only does the relaxation response calm the body and the mind, it might help the body recover more, especially along with taking supplements to aid the body in work out recovery.

The only downside to waiting 7 days is the wait. I normally work out 4 days a week so it felt weird not to work out. Secondly the pain of burning your muscles afterwards is pretty bad. Working out at a new level is pretty intense and extraneous on the body. I can see me taking a few months to get used to the new work out but I am more then satisfied with the results. But i guess one of questions some people might be asking is: Would I do it again? Yes I would, but not for another 3-4 months. It's something that can be and should be used sparingly. Otherwise I could see some muscle loss after such a long time.

Relaxation Response

The relaxation response is the opposite of the flight or fight response. Supposedly it works like this: If you meditate on a daily basis for only 15 minutes you can lower your blood pressure, heart rate, decrease oxygen levels (which helps live longer), decreases metabolism, and some other helpful effects. Most importantly, it keeps you calmer from doing it after so long.

I've already started meditation. Having many years of experience it didn't take me long to get back into it. There are a few methods I use depending how I feel. All of them require you to either lay down or sit down with your eyes closed of course. But the methods of focus are slightly different. For one I count from 100 to 0 with each count I breath. Another easy one is to count down from 10 to 0 then 9 to 0 until 0 is reached. One last method, is to simply just count your breath and focus on relaxing.

Enjoy!

Vuvuzelas!

If anyone has been watching the world cup then they know about the horns the people there blow called Vuvuzelas. They are pretty cool I guess, but I don't really watch sports at all so I haven't heard the awful power of the horn.

A lot of people don't like them because of the sound, obviously. But some people don't want them banned, which I agree with. The horn is a South African fad or a tradition. It kinda depends on who you ask. But either way I think it's pretty cool. Sure it maybe annoying but banning it would probably just piss off a lot of South Africans who aren't exactly a docile people when provoked. Especially in the racist society that exists down there.