Pure randomness

As I sit in the Mendi Labs (or more colloquially, the Dungeon) this morning, with nothing currently else to do (can you believe that) I've decided to make a couple of rather laconic, random points about my observations.

Hard drive space is relative. When we get a new hard drive we never think we'll use up all of it, but we do. It's because we think in terms of how much space we have available and tend to use compression, especially lossless and also pure formats, and create an entire catalogue if we wish, with double redundancy. That's how I manage to use up about 75% of my 4.5 TB. In fact 75% is a reasonably stable point at which you start thinking about space.

Not mine but apparently the best predictor of pro-weed opinions is pro-premarital sex opinions.

You can find inspiration in anything if you know where to look.

Write.

The world is a pretty ridiculous place. Gone are the illusions of childhood in which the world is orderly and contained, a closed-loop as it were. The place is completely dysfunctional.


Aspiehood brings a surprising sense of egotism. how can we make this a good thing? I only started noticing the world around me at about 13 or 14, as in becoming really cognisant of its multiplicitous, hypercomplex nature.

The internet would always emerge, given sufficient advancement in technology. The military would never be able to suppress it (or indeed any technology) forever. The internet will continue expanding as long as computers exist. For then there will be hard drive space (secondary storage) and someone else, somehow, somewhere, will be able to access it in virtual form, but that delivers, in effect, a perfect digital copy to the receiver. The internet will always be rebuilt.

And that is awesome.

EDIT:

I've been thinking about technology a lot lately, and how systems often seem to be let down thanks to bottlenecking somewhere. That leads me to think about bandwidth limits on broadband networks.
<30 minutes pass>
I've just spent the last half hour trying to find out UCT's bandwidth backbone. The best I have managed to infer is that it is currently 1 Gbps and that it may be updated at the end of the year. Some campuses are subdivided, I think Hiddingh is allowed 20 Mbps for example. But with four thousand plus connection nodes, and given that perhaps 60% of nodes could theoretically be using it simultaneously, you have, say, 2400 users. The resulting bandwidth is still 833 Kbps, not bad at all for peak usage of a connection in THIS goddamn country.

I love how everything is a metagame inside my head.

I'm very interested in days and their length and sunlight hours and equinoxes and other weather intricacies like the midnight sun, and how large a degree is in which part of the world.

It links to my love of temporal systems and understanding them.. how long does an ant live? Is its time of life related to how long it sleeps? As humans, we may sleep 8 hours at a time, given a standard life of 72 years, that's 631 152 hours, so each sleep might be 1/78894th of your life (0.00001%). A male ant lives, say, 3 weeks. For it then, each sleep would last 18 seconds, and their idea of a day would be 54 seconds, and a single calendar day would feel like 3 and a half years to us.

Speaking of which, I think I'm going to celebrate New Years 2012 on 1 January 2012 at 18:00 - that is only when 2012 actually begins. Because a year is actually 365.25 days.

INTERSPERSED EDIT (or META-EDIT): Another thing spoken about is the true realisation of what capitalism is really doing. My contention is such: The World Bank, IMF and WTO have well and truly fucked Africa up. Truly and absolutely. Consider this for a moment: How can the financial system, the capitalist system have ANY legitimacy if IT OWES MORE MONEY THAN IT HAS??? Please for the love of god can someone actually fucking realise that this is solid proof that the capitalist system has NO basis in real money and value, BECAUSE OWING MORE THAN WHAT EXISTS violates the zero sum game required for economics to have ANY parity whatsoever! Now, back to Africa. I hold the extremely firm contention that Africa will NEVER be OK under the capitalist system, and indeed will only get worse. And I say that Africa is a good place to start the revolution. We are less indoctrinated in capitalism. (That said, we will have to work hard to explain that we are not proposing communism or state socialism either, as those are just as bad). If you think about it, the only more monstrous thing that the colonial powers could do than massacre millions of Africans is reduce hundreds of millions to starvation and suffering for generations to come. People knew this was going to happen since the mid 1800s if not earlier. YOU FUCKING ECONOMY-IMPOSING PIGS. If anyone deserves hell, it's the likes of you.

Now imagine talking about all of this in the space of half an hour on a spring afternoon.
ADHD indeed.