Faith in Man

Almost every time we go anywhere we drive by a church that has a sign that says "It is better to trust in God than put your confidence in men" and it offends me. It provokes me. I want to run in there and yell "You put your confidence in men every time you go on an airplane or use tap water! You're insulting thousands of years of brilliant human engineering, it's not God lifting the airplane or cleaning your drinking water it's the hard work, blood and tears of generations of amazing people!"

If there's anything you *should* do it's put your confidence in humans. We've gotten where we are together, and that's what we should celebrate and be proud of and use as inspiration for our future.

Cocoon

The German woman who was kidnapped and kept in a guy's basement for 8 and a half years was just on Skavlan, you can see it on SVTPlay tomorrow probably. Strange somehow. Seeing her there, talking about it, its unimaginable what she went through and yet - she looks just like a normal woman.

We all do. Or, I should say, we look simply like people. It's so easy in movies or comics where people wear their scars or their powers on the outside, but that's not how it works in the real world. Or is there such a thing? If you looked properly into her eyes, would you see the pain she went through, would you see that thing they speak of in literature, where a person has gone through a great deal or seem older than they are? I think, to be honest, that that is only imagination, finding patters because we expect them, like seeing Jesus in a patch of dirt.

I think the patterns it makes is not in our faces or in our eyes or burned into our skin; it's softly ground into our person, into our behavior and characteristics, like a complex, three-dimentional puzzle by our gestures and our voices and every muscle that moves. They study brains to see if they can read the memories there, if like the rings of a tree one can read the history of a human in the mosaics of neurons, and perhaps. Perhaps that twitch is crafted to cover up a different twitch spawned long ago because of a mishap, and perhaps the story is written in our brains. But rather than that,

it is a wonder, isn't it? To be surrounded by all these people, to be enveloped in all this history, the pain and the laughs and the fortunes. The way the old woman by the bus stop hunches her shoulders, the corner of the mouth of the cashier, the hitch at the end of specific words when the tourist asks you for directions. It is all a part of their history, like hieroglyphs of their lives, that although we can't read them clearly, they all together form the weave that is the fate of our world - the past, the present, the future.

It is overwhelming. I saw this woman speak of her story, and all of this sort of washed over me, and I realized, it's not strange that I'm sometimes reluctant to go outside, to be among people even if I don't have to interact. They are interacting with me, all of them, with every movement and every glimmer of their eyes. I'm in a constant flow of information, like a million radio waves in foreign languages passing through me on every frequency, from every direction. And filtering it out is such a painful process, in many different ways. For who wouldn't want to try to understand the history of everything?

Artificial Intelligence

There are so many things I wonder that begin something like this:

I wonder what people would do if X happened,
or
I wonder if it would be possible to make people do X if you did X,
or
I wonder if Love's school politics would actually work on kids,

and many more like it. But human experiments, aside from being a tad bit difficult to organize without time, money and say, expertise, are highly immoral and make people upset. And I see the sense of this.

But! If we actually manage to create artificial intelligence on the same level as the human mind, then we can do all these experiments and finally find out what...

... wait.

Dammit.

The felt knowledge

I want to know the world.

See, the only way to understand people is to know them, slowly, over time. Seeing them in different situations, learning when they lie so that you can get to the truth. Peeling off one layer at a time until you one day realize that in any given situation you can predict, no, you can feel what this person would do. And then the deed is done. You know someone.

Normal social situations are stressful because I have no whish, no desire whatsoever to reduce people to what they seem in such shallow come-togethers. In these situations they are merely part of the decor, obstacles that I interact with with the same enthusiasm as I interact with a toaster. Not until I know I will meet them often or have met them often, do I translate them into humans and begin breaking them down into what they really are.

I can't know everyone. I wish I could, I wish I had the time and energy to meet and know and break down and understand every single human; it is fascinating, and an exhilirating pleasure to realize that I have reached the goal with even just one. And also always a disappointment because the objects of my fascination never seem to understand the greatness of it. But it is great. And it's impossible. So I pick them carefully, like choosing the right book from the library, and some are chosen for me. And the rest I have to leave as decor, as toasters.

Such a waste of humanity and me.

Picking up on K

Watched the documentary about dog breeding that Kristin has linked. And let me tell you. If The Sims didn't convince you, this is actual, real life proof that humans, on no level, should ever be given the powers of the gods. That show-version of German Shepherd isn't a German Shepherd, it's a real, man-made mutant freak of nature, and it has to suffer from it. And give me a gun and let me shoot the bitch that thinks putting down healthy puppies because they miss the right fur mutation on their backs is perfectly sensible. Mutations are mutations for a reason; they have no evolutionary advantage so they never become the standard. Until we start fucking with them and produce animals who by all rights should all be put down at birth out of compassion. No. Give me a working dog or a mix.

I saw the awesomest dog, on that note. Head shape and tail like a (healthy) shepherd or a spitz, (sharp, I mean) but size like a Saint Bernhard. And white. I wonder what it was? It looked very fluffy and cozy. If those are mixes or sensible animals I would want one. Although it would probably fill up an apartment real good :P