omouse’s blog

The two things in the title of this post are unrelated.

Haruki Murakami

I was reading a few Haruki Murakami stories again. One of them was about the 1960s and about a man who was hard-working, an excellent student, a natural leader. However, he always felt alone until he stumbled upon a girl in school that was just like him. This was during the 1960s, the era of free love and all that, which figures into this story. This couple never went very far though they did remain a couple for many years. The girl was traditional and would wait till marriage and she had this idea of marrying an older man and not having a career after doing so. This was contrary to what the guy thought the future would be...he thought she could do much more than that. It's a strange story and I'll maybe try to find a few quotes that I like from it.

The more interesting thing I read was actually a dialogue between Haruki Murakami and another person. I think the other person was a psychologist or a writer, I'm not exactly sure. In any case, they discussed individuality and the responsibility of the individual to the group(s) they're a part of. Apparently in Japan the students needed to be explicitly told that they had to be more individual and act on their own, while in America, the students took that idea for granted and never had to be directly told. The implications of this are that Americans feel like individuals and they drift from group to group and this is accepted but in Japan, an individual will be seen as anti-social for not acting like a group member and not showing up to enough group meetings or whatever.

What really interested me was when Murakami discussed marriage. He asked the other man if marriage could be a form of mutual therapy,

MURAKAMI: There’s something I wanted to ask you: Do you think marriage is, in a sense, kind of mutual therapy?

The man replied that marriage is like that and that it's like digging a well. He said that it cannot survive on romantic/passionate love alone but needed something more. People who marry, divorce and then marry again could be afraid of digging a well, of doing the hard work necessary for the marriage to survive due to the misconceptions they inherit from their parents, the media, etc. He says that,

In the old days, marriage was just two people cooperating. If they did that until they died, then it was considered to have been a good marriage. These days, people want to understand one another, not simply work together. But if you want to understand one another, you have to dig a well.

It's very interesting to think about because I know a few people who around my own age that are already married. But I also know many more people who are either single or are in medium-term relationships (meaning more than a few months but less than a year or two). Some people think they won't ever get married now and the very thought of it is senseless to them, because what do they have to gain aside from tax benefits or whatever other monetary benefits there are? Then there's the trouble of maybe having to change your last name and other things like that. So what's the point?

I'm undecided on the matter for now. It's still nice to read what others have to say about it, especially if they've been married for a while and especially if they've thought about interactions between groups and individuals in different societies.

Pinball, 1973

I also started reading Pinball,1973 which is also by Haruki Murakami. It's supposedly about the guy who invented pinball but it's also about the narrator who starts a translation service with some bottles of bourbon and desks and 10 dictionaries. I didn't get too far into it but so far it's entertaining. It's great how the narrator described the administrative assistant they hired as a nice girl with long legs but an annoying habit of whistling and humming Penny Lane 20 times a day while working.

Club Of Rome

The Club Of Rome is an independent organization that takes the long view of things. They look at long-term impact of human actions and look at all the interactions (economic, political, etc.) that make up our globalized world. Right now I'm reading their 1993 report called The First Global Revolution and the main message, as I've seen stated elsewhere, is that the enemies of humans are humans. We're destroying our own environment through careless planning and they proposed that to unite as all against a common enemy we need to unite against ourselves in a sense,

The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.

I'll dig up some quotes once I get through more of the report. It's around 180 pages which isn't a heavy read. I should be done reading it within a few days.

Re-arranged bookshelf

Today I moved all the DVDs from one bookshelf to another. I cleared out the top of the bookshelf and I'm going to move all the board games and other things down to the basement. I haven't touched any of them for more than a year, so it's definitely time for them to move.

The amazing thing is that almost all of my DVDs fit on the top shelf! Same with all the other books I have. I'm going to get rid of a few, but the bookshelf has a lot more room now :-D

Squirrel lounging

Also, I saw a squirrel lounging around on my balcony. There are one or two that keep coming back, it's really cool to see another animal relaxing and just taking in the scenery haha

I went up to my cousin's cottage last week and then stayed over at his house from Thursday till Sunday. We played a ton of video games, and the amount of junk food consumed borders on criminal. All that Coke, ugh. It tastes great, but thinking about how many cans we drank...yuck.

At some point on Saturday, my cousin passed out on the couch so I had about 4-6 hours of uninterrupted reading time. I read the final chapter of The Basics of Philosophy where Bertrand Russell explains the value of philosophy. He says the value is in the expansion of the thoughts that the mind has. Normally we are concerned with day-to-day affairs which is all well and good, however we find that this can prevent us make further leaps in knowledge.

I'm still not done reading that whole book and I think a re-reading is needed to properly understand it.

Also in that time, I looked up random things on Wikipedia. I fell into the trap of following links but! I actually found useful ones that led back back to authors whose books I have read. From that Wikipedia adventure I learned that some books by Richard Powers and Neal Stephenson can be classified as hysterical realism. It is also known as maximalism and it "is a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization and careful detailed investigations of real specific social phenomena." Both of those authors do much research into what they're writing and it shows. What I love about both authors is that I can easily understand the detail. Powers and Stephenson have both been computer programmers at one time or another and I can parse their technobabble with no trouble.

I also read some interviews with Richard Powers and what I found most thought-provoking was his idea that novels should be more willing to tackle and incorporate technology into them. His other ideas are about context and the intermingling and intermixing of concepts at different levels. He wanted the reader to have as complete a context as possible which is why there is a lot of (somewhat) technical detail [emphasis mine],

...[my books] work by saying you cannot understand a person minimally, you cannot understand a person simply as a function of his inability to get along with his wife, you cannot even understand a person through his supposedly causal psychological profile.

You can't understand a person completely in any sense, unless that sense takes into consideration all of the contexts that that person inhabits. And a person at the end of the second millennium inhabits more contexts than any specialized discipline can easily name.

We are shaped by runaway technology, by the apotheosis of business and markets, by sciences that occasionally seem on the verge of completing themselves or collapsing under their own runaway success. This is the world we live in. If you think of the novel as a supreme connection machine -- the most complex artifact of networking that we've ever developed -- then you have to ask how a novelist would dare leave out 95% of the picture.

Powers can cleverly craft a phrase that evokes wonderful imagery. He did this insanely well in The Time Of Our Singing when he describes the music produced by the characters.

Moving on, I also checked out Thomas Pynchon's work Gravity's Rainbow. The idea of layered stories and doubt and recursion and all sorts of useless significance intrigues me and I think I'll try and read the book soon.

Tonight (Sunday night/Monday morning) I did some more digging for information and here are the current tabs I have open in Firefox:

• Where Have You Gone Bell Labs, about the disappearance of American research labs, the decline of long-term strategic thinking
• In-Game Advertisements, this doesn't bug me too much but I fear it won't reduce the cost of video games much at all, it'll just be extra gravy/profit for the publishers
• Business Guys On Business Trips, a webcomic about the bullshit and lies told by businesspeople. Mostly deals with people in advertising, marketing, or website design.
• Intertwingle, an essay by Jamie Zawinski about a design for an information database with the target audience being people who have lots of mail
• Everything is Miscellaneous, blog about various web-based collaborations. so far it seems to be full of articles related only to Wikipeda.

• PLATO, a computer system mentioned by Richard Powers, Ted Nelson, and others as a great example for the design of learning systems. I'd like to get my hands on the source code of it, or at least the reference guides and manuals for the PLATO systems of the 80s.
• Avatar, a text-based computer game that seems to be the first of its kind?
  
• TUTOR, a computer programming language made for computer-assisted instruction. Basically a way to code up lessons and things. Apparently you could hook into a voice and music synthesizer to add another dimension to the learning. The language let you ask questions of the user and expect particular answers. I'll need to read more and see if there are any currently existing systems that can do this.

The INS and DEL elements in HTML are little-known and little-used. By using those tags, I figured that I could store all of the changes made to an HTML document within the document itself. Then the browser just has to display the latest changes!

HTML Version Control Screenshot

I just realized that I'm blogging on two separate blogs again. Here is the personal stuff for the most part, and the professional (-ish) programming stuff can be found at SweetFriday.

The Big U

It was amazing! I actually managed to stay up for more than 24 hours. There were some points where I thought I would pass out but I didn't. I think it was the combination of resting my eyes for a few minutes, watch movies at a loud volume, drinking loads of coffee (and a bit of beer) that kept me going. Oh and the snacks every few hours.

Apparently this month is National Poetry Month in the United States. I haven't written a proper poem since a few months ago when I wrote a somewhat-Sonnet. It was missing a few syllables in some lines, but it was in the structure of a sonnet. I tried writing a 2nd one after, but was stuck on a few ideas for it.

Anyway, I'm going to try and catch up, write as many poems as I can and see if I can fix up some old ones. I have no idea why exactly I stopped writing either!

In other news, I'm writing a blog post about Magritte and Seaside, which is a web framework for Smalltalk. I had to use it for class and it wasn't bad and I thought I should warn others of any potential trouble with it or with the good points of it, heh.

I've taken a break from the rest of the world for the last few weeks. Aside from seeing Watchmen on Friday, I haven't done much at all. No writing, very little programming, but there has been lots of thinking.

EVE Online
I've signed up for the game EVE Online, and damn it's fun. I haven't played such an in-depth RPG in a long time. I'm going to sign up for a month and see if I like it well enough to consistently play it. I sometimes play Guild Wars too but I find the Guild Wars world to be boring in some respects...there isn't much of a market for trading, and the item upgrade system isn't any good. The PVP(Player vs. Player) in Guild Wars is also very scary, with you having to figure out the best combination of skills to use. The story is the typical fantasy story too: kingdom under attack, fight to save it, etc. etc.

What I like about EVE is the space story. It all takes place in space, and it's just you and your ship. No tedious walking around, but there can be a lot of warping/jumping with your ship.

The nifty thing about EVE Online is that you can actually change the game world. I read that some alliance of corporations (guilds in other RPGs) took over a large area, striking down players foolish enough to enter, and they setup a lot of their own space stations. Currently there's some sort of war occuring between a few of the empires which also limits which areas of the universe you can visit safely.

Ideas
Yesterday and today I have been thinking about online tutoring software for programming/writing tutoring that would let the tutor go through the code/essay with a student whenever they're both available and over the Internet. I would love to have this because some students live quite far away and it can be such a pain to travel.

Wrote some notes down for the essay on recipes/software/songs that I started writing a month or so ago. I should really buckle down and starting writing the code to support the ideas in it, and get some other people to take a look and see what they think of the ideas.