Never been one to let the carrier drop

After reading my last few journal entries, I can understand why you all think I’ve gone off the deep end.

If it’s any consolation, I seem to only blog when I’m contemplating things I shouldn’t be, imbibing things I shouldn’t be, or truly terrified about the world. But I’ll try and improve on the situation.. though I’m not sure what I’ll blog about.

I can’t fight the feeling that I have no real political power at all.. hey, a electronic voting machine network based on proprietary closed-source windows software, created by a public corperation in which the politicians own stock? Anyone see why I might feel that way?

I haven’t even been following in the world’s events – in some ways, I guess, I’m not really in the real world at all. Of course, who is, when it comes down to it?

Hope you all are well, LJ-friends, whichever of you are still reading my dreck..

Well, I return from rainforest #2, and now will spend a few days bumming around the east coast before flying back to Seattle for my regularly scheduled life.

Rainforest #2, aka the Mongahalia National Forest, had *lots* of rain. More rain than you could shake a soaked umbrella at. And not nearly as much interesting life.. lots of interesting bugs, but nothing mammelian. (Actually, technically I think they have bears but the bears have learned that it’s better to stay away from the people, and vice versa)

The idea found in this document has been grabbing my imagination lately. It’s so bizarre to think that, for example, the mischief committee CD that I recorded existed in the universe before I recorded it, lurking in the 180,000,352th digit of Pi and onward. 😉

It makes one really tempted to write software to search for contents in pi. What interesting secrets might lurk there?

One particularly interesting project would be to search for human DNA, expressed in binary form, inside Pi.. 😉

I came to a few interesting thoughts recently. At risk of eternal damnation – or worse – for saying them, but I’ll say them here anyway.

1) Creating a lifeform and then giving it a life of eternal damnation when it doesn’t like you is questionable behavior.

2) If the Christians are right, it’s very difficult to accept the concept of having children. I mean, eternity is a *long* time. Wish I’d thought of that earlier.

3) People would probably say that me thinking I can judge God is broken behavior. Well, yes, it probably is – I certainly don’t have any way to impliment my judgements. I continue to think that God is so much better than I think s/he is that I can’t even comprehend it. This is mutually exclusive with being a Christian.. or maybe I should say it’s mutually exclusive with *only* being a christian. I don’t know. Complicated thoughts abound.

4) It’s a beautiful world. And I have to give the author of the human DNA props – I mean, yes, it has bugs, yes, it could be better (looks out for lightning bolts) but still, it’s a better piece of code than anything humanity has written yet. I mean, contemplate it.. 12 gigabytes of machine code, that when expressed in a carbon based world, will result in a self-repairing, self-reproducing, self-aware entity that can do spectacular things.. it boggles the mind. I wonder if we’ll have compilers that target human DNA, a list of library routines inside it, etc, someday? One thing is for sure.. the high-level language you describe lifeforms in sure isn’t going to be procedural! 😉

5) One of the nice things about finally admitting that I am in fact a collosal screw-up in just about every category that is measurable is that it leaves me with nowhere to go but up.

6) Maybe.

7) MoooOOOOO!

I survived the Amazon. More later..

River dolphins, both grey and pink.. lots of them, and I got to handfeed a pink one a fish, which he snatched out of my hand. He had a lot of teeth.
Turtles the size of dinner plates
a very fat caymen
toucans
more birds in general than I could possibly list.
three toed sloths
green jungle monkeys
pygmy marmosets
howler monkeys
Pirannahs (I went fishing for them, too. Caught three using a cane pole!)
catfish (I ate lots of them, too)

All in all, a very satisfying vacation. On to phase two – temperate rainforests – after which I will resume my normally scheduled life.

I find the idea of time looping unusually unnerving lately.

Of course, then there’s my breif trip to schizophrenia-land, that I’m still trying to digest.

Basically, here’s the thing that gets me: Signals don’t come from nowhere. We had entire choruses of voices, a plethora of rhyming, singing not-so-fun – and the question keeps coming up – where did they come from? If my subconcious, how exactly did they end up formatted as words (much less singing) – and why could I sometimes ‘steer’ them by thinking about it, and other times not? And why did they hate me so much? Am I enslaving other people inside my own head?

[then there was the whole typing thing – and the one voice which predicted something accurately. I don’t know. Spooky.]