Category: Uncategorized

Read the previous post (below) before reading this.

Sound is so cool. Consider the fact that sound is a byproduct of things that are already useful to us. They’re transfered to us through vibrations in the air, water, or even metal. I heard a great segment on NPR today:

http://www.npr.org/2014/02/19/279628642/one-mans-quest-to-find-the-sonic-wonders-of-the-world

You can listen to the whole show (which is about 40 minutes long) or just read the highlights and listen to the samples. It’s incredible that there are sounds that can only be heard in specific places in the world, or sounds that are hard for us to hear because they’re out of our hearing range or are only emitted underwater.

Now consider the fact that we’ve built our language by skillfully making use of important materials around us, employing them for their lesser purpose.

It’s absurd. What even.

Take a quick step back from society and think about language.

If you’ve done any lip sync work / animation, you’ll know that most of the words in the English language are made up of six mouth shapes. The language that’s spoken by millions of people around the world is based on memorizing specific patterns of mouth shapes, pauses, and varied amounts of volume.

It gets even crazier when you think about how we found it necessary to turn spoken language into written language. We assigned specific symbols to specific sounds, then we learned to pass it around. When you move your eyes over these symbols, your mind converts them to sounds that you hear in your head. Some of us have reached the point where we can glance at a word’s whole and grab an emotion from it. Or a meaning that’s completely different from someone else’s. Or a connotation.

The human brain is incredible. We’re able to take these noises, decipher them into meanings, and produce them into symbols and shapes on paper or on the internet. Most of the time we’re able to listen to and interpret these noises while making them ourselves, oftentimes while doing completely different things.

I dunno. Maybe it’s just me, but if someone told me that a planet of six billion beings was thriving by making gutteral noises out of their food-holes, I’d be pretty darn skeptical.

Should we be punished for our mistakes?

This is a question that came up to me while thinking about a traffic accident. In the case of a traffic accident, there is a 100% chance that somebody is at fault. The laws of the road were written in such a way that, if everybody abode by them to the letter, there would be no accidents. What if both people are at fault?

Consider this situation. A man is driving 60 mph on a 40 mph-road. There is another man 100 feet down the road who wishes to make a left turn on to the road. He misjudges the timing and distance of the car that is hurtling toward him and pulls out onto the road. Both cars are demolished. Who is at fault?

The word “mistake” implies that whatever unfavorable result was the cause of an oversight, misjudgement, or some otherwise inevitable or unstoppable force that caused us to make that mistake. Knowingly committing a fault is not a mistake. But since the man who tried to make the turn is the one who made the mistake, he is technically the one at fault, right?

Well, sort of. They’re both at fault, but our instinct tells us that the man who was speeding is the one who needs to be punished, and not the man who pulled out. Truthfully, they body need to be punished.

How can we learn from our mistakes if we aren’t punished by their results? There are many situations where people make mistakes and don’t learn from them because they don’t feel the fire that would have burned them. The people who choose to make bad decisions are likely to be those who haven’t learned from their mistakes.

Mistakes are inevitable. It’s a fact of life. But in many cases, a few more moments of observation or thought can save you from making that mistake.

Make mistakes. Unless they are avoidable.

</thoughts>

Addendum: my blog turned five years old a week ago! Happy birthday, blog. I’ll be taking it to kindergarten this year. In all honestly, I’m surprised I’ve been keeping up with this thing. Thanks to everybody who’s stopped by.

There’s a hotly-debated question that goes something along the lines of, “is life circular or linear?” Discussion of this question will always lead back to the arguer’s outlook on life which may or may not been influenced by their religious background and/our upbringing (I’m speaking specifically about the Hindi concept of reincarnation). There’s no definite answer to this question, because most of the time, when a person reaches the end of their life, they’re not around to be able to answer any questions about it.

Everything in life is cyclical. There’s the process where water in the ocean evaporates, turns into clouds, dumps on the mountains and then flows back to the ocean. There’s even the life cycle, where a child is born, grows up and has a child, which then grows up. Et cetera.

The human body goes through a daily process of doing the same thing; you eat three square meals a day, drink plenty of water, and the process will continue. Some people have a monthly cycle.

We humans make schedules so that we repeat the same things every week, sometimes every day, and because our bodies are on this cycle, we have simply found it more convenient to plan our time out likewise. We’ve even built our societies around this notion. We’ve created places where we can go every day to repeat the same mundane tasks. It’s called “work.”

But a life itself isn’t cyclical. In fact, a life is very much linear–there’s a definite start and there will be a definite end. No part of growing up will repeat itself. You simply grow old and die. However, the cyclical nature of life is what drives us to continue to the end of our lives with much more growth than we would have. The set schedules of eating, working and learning helps us to refine a process where the end goal is to be the best person you can be.

I suppose the same thing could be said about history–history won’t repeat itself because of its accelerated speed. A speed which is continually pushed by technology and the people who are on the daily grind, striving to make the world a better place.

I wonder if it’s possible for life to move so fast that it collapses on itself.

That would be a sight.