She hung up the phone and I listened as, in a twist of irony, the dial-tone harmonized perfectly with George Winston’s “Living Without You” playing in the background. I listened until the tone stopped and the busy signal took over, beeping a relentless rhythm against my tired eardrums. I wondered if I would ever understand love, why it makes us do what we do, what it should be like, who are models of it, or even something as deceivingly simple as its definition.
The people on the island of Pingelap have a genetic propensity to the extremely rare condition of complete colorblindness. In a lush tropical world exploding with every color in the spectrum, they are left without the ability to perceive anythings other than shades of brightness. In his book Island of the Colorblind, author Oliver Sacks outlines the way the island people describe their world with a vocabulary limited to a world of grays. No matter how vividly these people paint their linguistic pictures, they are still missing an entire dimension of the thing: its colors. I believe humans are the same way with love. No matter how many books, sonnets, poems, and songs we push out into the ether in bursts of lovesick creativity, we still miss entire dimensions of our feeling … we simply can not see.
It would seem that our inherent inability to understand or describe love imbues in it a sense of mystery. The bitter and the ignorant masquerading as wise pretend they understand, saying “love is chemical,” “love is what we think we feel when we are under the influence of a more basic instinct,” or, gnerally, “love is defined as X.” Much like guidelines of morality, love is by its nature, underdetermined. It has to be. Otherwise, we would have some sort of rulebook, and the preposterous idea of “love schools” would be a reality. Love is tough (note that, I didn’t say “defined by” ;).
I don’t understand what love is. I can not see some of its characteristics. My best hope is to, like the people of Pingelap, paint the best I can with a limited palette.
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.
A Man Using Computers to Hear Music - A great story of the very real ways advances in technology can benefit those who depend on them for their senses. I would imagine Stephen Hawking’s setup has improved by orders of magnitude over the years.
What in bloody heck is this - I ended up on this page when I used google images to search for “voting icon.” You see, I’m looking for ideas for the icon you’ll be able to click to vote a user’s comments up.
Anyhow, from what I can tell this is a page of thousands upon thousands of random images. Let it load for about a minute or two and start scrolling … it’s absolutely endless.
Hilarious Hitachi Press Release - Who knew that hard drives could rock like this? Seriously, visit this link and do not stop watching until you get to the disco portion. Brilliant.
Michael Jackson. A Star Tribune review of a local opera. The musical group Barenaked Ladies. How could these topics be anything but non sequiturs in a stream-of-conscious rambling? I did not know either until about ten minutes ago. That’s when I decided to write this post instead of simply linking to the Star Tribune’s review of an opera about a man called the “Elephant Man.” He lived in the mid 1800s and had an extremely rare genetic disorder called “Proteus syndrome.” He is pictured at right. More on that picture in a second. You see, I was reading that opera review, and frankly could have cared less about the actual opera … I was fascinated about the real story of this man who was shunned from society and what disease he actually had. Towards the end, the review finally mentions this man, Joseph Merrick. It says he died simply by laying flat; the weight of his head broke his neck. It was three feet around at time of death.
As I’m poking around the internet, I see a picture of Michael Jackson in a music video, dancing next to a claymation of the elephant man’s bones. The proportions are bizarre. You see, Jackson wanted to buy the bones for $1,000,000 from the British museum they are displayed at, but was turned down. The music video is poking fun at Jackson’s publicity problems with this. Anyhow, as I was reading this, suddenly a scrap of a Barenaked Ladies song popped into my head, “mmm all those crazy elephant bones.” Holy cow. That song actually mentions the elephant man by name, “If I had $1000000 (if I had $1000000) / I’d buy you John Merrick’s remains (all them crazy elephant bones).”
I think I will take a researching break for a while … sometimes the truth is too weird.
More photorealistic’ness - This is more stylized than that picture in the link I just posted a few weeks ago … but seriously, computer generated animation is looking better everyday.
Stadium Arcadium is good - It would seem from the reviews that the Pepper’s “Stadium Arcadium” is a pretty darn good album. An excerpt from this great Rolling Stone review:
” Much of the credit for the album’s depth — and the swelling, ever-morphing, headphone-candy arrangements that boost every track — goes to the band’s not-so-secret weapon, John Frusciante. It’s been clear since his return to the band on 1999’s Californication that Frusciante came away from his near-fatal heroin addiction with new musical superpowers, and they’re in full bloom on Stadium Arcadium. … after 2002’s By the Way, the band’s least funky album, the bassist finally cuts loose again here, reasserting himself as the best non-hip-hop reason to buy a subwoofer.”
