Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is the only value in passing the time as comfortably as possible? What should a story seek to emulate? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip?

[The Fault in Our Stars, John Green]

Before you write, before you speak, before you even think: you must establish one point of context. That is, abstraction. When you’re truly free to think as logically, as broadly and imaginatively as your endowed mind enables you to, there should be no boundaries, nothing irreverent or sacred above scrutiny. That is the naive but understandable way in which the rationalist and the realist perceive reasoning. But following this, all meaningful inquiry digresses into futile fundamentals—the point to it all. It is because of this that the inflexible classicist can’t find an answer to any question, because classifying and dissecting, while not above scrutiny, is above the limitations of the mind to comprehend. Humans are logic’s flaw.

When you answer any question, abstraction must be understood. It’s inevitable that we aggregate ideas into concepts and entities that lose the profound depth of detail but respect it sufficiently. Then this: what is value in design? How I hate to answer this question.

I read and criticize and adjust, and it still is true that truth in design is as mutable and transient as it is in art. As you can imagine, abstract fields in high culture are simply frustrating to reason. When you throw logic at it, the queries are overwhelming, yet I’m averse to relying on emotion. The provincial citizen scoffs at humanities and arts, but perhaps topics outside rational jurisdiction are just too difficult. They’re foreign, usually mistaken for inferior. Maybe reasoning just doesn’t apply in all cases¹.

In this last year of high school, I publish many things. Essays, lab write-ups, reports to colleges. I publish this blog. Among other things, letters and emails and club business are all published copy, and sometimes, it’s difficult to find the true goal in design. Recently, I’ve taken a more and more semantic approach. Meaning is king. My own blog has a rather simple design. Simple in aesthetics, that is. The mechanics behind the abstraction are quite complex. Like dime novels of past centuries, published content should move away from abstracted entities—categories, lists, collections—and toward formatting that is appropriate to the text². The gray horizontal rule above the post title. It’s a metaphor. Quite literally, you can go down³ the page and count the headings, the breaks, the references, as you would in a literary journal or newspaper. Each part of design should be used for what it’s meant. At least, that’s what abstraction suggests. You should see my Biology IA.

What if life had a save/load button? Just one save file. You can save and load anytime you’d like, but here’s the catch: every change is reverted, including your own memory. Would anything change? Seriously, you wouldn’t know how many times you’ve reset, you wouldn’t know the outcomes, but you would know when you last saved. Saving is conscious. At the end, it’ll feel like you never did reset at all. The problem with super-power speculation is, of course, they never come true and therefore aren’t practical. But with a little introspection, you can make this one come to life.

Like maybe, I’d find something exciting and dangerous like hang gliding off a mountain, and save right before I leave. Then, if I survive, I’ll continue playing. If I don’t, I’ll reset¹. But ultimately, there is no outside force playing our lives like a game. There’s no point in finishing earlier, later, or finishing at all. Instead, consider the practical benefits of such thinking.

See, it’s rare that making a decision is as simple as a yes or no. Small act, big deal, so we should take full advantage when such an opportunity presents itself. Time spent idle is time well spent. Opportunities wasted is cost. Under such thinking, this truth is more readily obvious when we need it the most. Pretend you really could go back and try again, whenever you’d like, and you lose both the anxiety associated with time, and the upsetting investment associated with quick-action yes-no opportunities. Think just enough, and this superpower could be yours.

The world around us is prohibitively-complex to fully discern. This fact is undebatable: there are examples everywhere. To compensate, human beings have to form generalizations, or heuristics, about decision-making. They are mental shortcuts that we use every day, without which we would not be able to keep up with demanding, fast-paced modern society. Historically, this ability to make quick unconscious judgments had been useful when aggressive reactions and the fight-or-flight response were necessary to outrun predators, to stretch the human’s physical ability to cope in times of stress. But in a protective, dominating, first-world country, heuristics play a different role.

When you investigate the cause of dispute and argument, it eventually narrows down to the fact that someone is wrong. Either there is not enough information available to reach an agreement, or cognitive biases overwhelm sense and reason¹. When we use our heuristics, we tend to focus on one determining element to make a decision even though the costs and benefits of decisions are never so simple². We find evidence of the legitimacy of our own actions when we see others following suit, rationalizing that someone out there must be an expert and must know what they’re doing, regardless of whether anyone has really reasoned out our social norms³. We misinterpret statistics that appeal to our emotions and poor understanding of numbers⁴.

See, cognitive generalizations can be BAD! Yet some people do like to live every day relying only on their heuristic ability. Here is the problem: finding our own mental biases is difficult and slow, and in some situations, generally unacceptable to society. I explain it to myself with virtual machines in computer programming.

Our most frequent and useful decisions are processed in machine code–it is interpreted directly by the brain and we are never aware of it. We’re not aware that we’re thinking. How can we know that we’re thinking when thinking of thinking is thinking itself? In contrast, guarding against cognitive biases and errors in judgement require virtualization. A virtual machine is a computer that is running inside another computer. Each of the parts of a computer–processing, memory, disk i/o, graphical output–are simulated. It is always slower than an actual computer because there is an extra layer of machine in the way, but virtual machines can do two things a normal computer can’t. First, you can inspect a virtual machine as it’s running, pause it, slow it down, and advance it step-by-step. Second, you can simulate all kinds of different scenarios on a virtual machine.

In our brains, “virtual machines” provide higher-level cognitive functions like compassion, empathy, and social awareness. When you predict your dad’s response to something you’re about to say, or when you imagine how your best bud must be feeling, you are simulating them in your brain. The simulation is much slower and nowhere near as complete as the original person, but it serves a purpose and enables us to think things we couldn’t otherwise think.

So heuristics are fast but shallow, while advanced cognition is slow but profound. There must be a compromise between being too rational and ignorance, and only by keeping this balance can we.. maintain the peace? improve the world? Maybe nothing at all. It’s simply important to realize how much better social interaction becomes when you throw more brain at it.

Tell me, every time there is new technology, are there not always people who oppose change? They said television would distort reality. They said mass communication would saturate and destroy our minds. They said transportation would make us provincial and narrow-minded. And they keep saying it and fighting it, completely disregarding that centuries of change have on average improved our standard of living. I suppose it makes little sense to the rationalist how some people can continue fear mongering nonsensically when scientific progress is only the continuation of what has been occurring for millenia. On the other hand, technology is used in weapons for warfare. It is abused and used to avoid human contact, to connect the world in a most asocial, secluded, and apathetic display of conceit. These two sides of technology¹ obscure its true nature and breed haughty ethical arguments about continued human progress. The contenders will create classifications and rules to determine when technology is good and when it isn’t. In the end, nobody can conclusively decide, and time is wasted trying to determine the impossible. However, I have a different perspective. You can never decide if progress is beneficial or detrimental because it is neither. Progress exists indifferently: the problem is mankind. Science moves forward, yes, but humans don’t. We don’t mature. We just don’t learn, and this is why we have problems with technology. Internet video can be used for mindless Chinese reality TV, or it can be used to spread culture and replay lectures². You can assume the worst about a sms, or you can realize the limitations of texting and respond maturely. Problems with technology lie with the people. As a species, humans are not ready for the pace of technological advancement. Does that mean we should stop pushing science forward? Absolutely not. Regardless of all philosophical and ethical perspectives, if mankind on Earth hopes to improve given the experience of the past million years, it needs to learn to use technology appropriately: passionately to seek to understand it and to keep it within the context of its purpose. Based on the past, this is likely not to happen, and we’ll all be doomed. But who knows?

It’s not surprising that online security is a commonly misunderstood and confusing topic to most people. Our news media throws around big words like cyberbullying and cyberattack, so much so that laymen are discouraged from sorting through the madness themselves. But honestly, it may not be their fault. Computer security has only recently become relevant to the average person because so much of our lives have moved onto the Internet. Whether or not humans are prepared to handle the gradual eradication of human interaction is a different matter. As for now, I just want to explain the nature of security and its relation to what happened in 3rd period today. See, the Internet is inherently insecure. Each request you send goes through several computers, all of which can read or alter the data if it wants to. Originally, when networks were used for sending messages from place to place, security wasn’t necessary. Now that we’ve got things like private email and online banking, transnational organizations have created infrastructure to make the Internet somewhat more safe. When I say transnational, I mean that the US (and US corporations) invites a couple of its buddies to watch it make all the decisions. For secure websites like Gmail, there are two goals of security: making sure nobody but you can read what you send/receive, and making sure that you really are sending/receiving data from Google. People who want to sound smart call these encryption and authentication, respectively. Essentially, Google leaves their own little watermark on every package of data that they send. Your internet browser can tell that they are indeed unaltered content directly from Google because the watermark is intact¹. Typically, your computer and Google can talk to each other securely without anybody eavesdropping. Now, our school network is a bit different. To make sure students aren’t screwing around on the Internet, they have to check the contents of every page. But because encrypted traffic is unreadable, Webwasher has to take a different approach to this. Instead, Webwasher has to impersonate Google, and every other banking, e-commerce, or secure website on the Internet. Encryption exists, yes. But computers on our school network set up a secure connection with Webwasher first, who then communicates with websites on the internet on your behalf. In this way, Webwasher can still filter out bad content and things. Normally, web browsers would not tolerate this. They would recognize that Google’s usual watermark is distorted and apparently fake. They are supposed to reject the page and warn the user that something is wrong. Webwasher’s solution to this? Compromise the browser. Internet Explorer at school is installed with Webwasher’s certificate, so that it trusts all the traffic from the impersonating man-in-the-middle attack. In their defense, Webwasher says that they use this pervasive method to stop “malware that uses SSL to communicate” and “secure web proxies”. They also say that they get rid of the traffic after they’re done filtering it, so nobody can look at it. This kind of thinking is certainly flawed in grouping websites like Amazon and Google with malware and proxies. Whether the school knows about this, I don’t know. Whether the traffic is really destroyed, I don’t know. It’s not illegal either: you signed an agreement with the school letting the district “access, review, copy, and store” any information, secure or not, that you send over their network. But I think it’s fair to let you know, accessing the Internet at school does not give you the same end-to-end security as doing so at home, or even public places like Starbucks does. It’s very much possible that schools keep records of your email and social networking passwords, for who knows what. Please think about it.

You can read more about their explanation here. I found this a bit ironic: “Legitimate certificates can be acquired easily by criminals, causing Web users to erroneously believe the information they provide is secure.”

When we were passing around Ms. Crisci’s yearbook photo in ToK, I noticed it came from a website for her high school graduating class. Now that college applications are building up and the dreadful day we graduate is getting closer, one of these website things sounds really good right now. Apparently, their webmaster has my ip on a blacklist, so I had to look at it through a proxy. They’ve got yearbook photos, a blog, obituaries, a forum, photos, and some other stuff. Yearbook photos, I understand. But it looks like they inputted them one at a time into WordPress or something. They must have had a really small graduating class. I don’t suppose our class is close enough or small enough to do that, but we’re not so favorable to tedious work either. Blogs are usually great, except for stuff like this. See, blogs are either for news or narcissism. Both of these are better handled with social networking and instant messaging and emails¹. It doesn’t make sense to use a blog for this. Instead, a site like this should be a memorial². It’s to commemorate a group of people who grew up, somewhat in the vicinity of each other. No blog. Obituaries.. that’s simply depressing. I hope nobody from our class is picked off any time soon³. A forum is likewise useless. It just isn’t the correct media for this sort of thing. Photos don’t belong here either. Well, this website looks like it hasn’t been changed in a year. So what really could go on a class memorial website? See, the class website appeals to the human need for security. None of us want to believe that soon this group of students will leave nothing behind. That’s why we do class projects like the horseshoe and the awning, and powerpoints and yearbooks. It’s not like our class is greatly interwoven or tightly knit. It’s not like its students share anything in common other than their birth year and their hometown. But this is something we’ve got to have: a mustangs2012.com. It should be a great endeavor in user experience design and unconventional layout. It should be future-proof and built to stand for decades. It should involve the greatest number of people possible, all contributing content: pictures, writing, semantic documents. It should grow subdomains like trees grow leaves. Subdomains for IB⁴. Subdomains for memorable class periods. Subdomains for teachers and clubs and social circles. You know what, there is so much talent and greatness in our grade that needs to be expressed. It needs a memorial sculpture set in stone, if not for our bonds, then for our vanity. This is our last year to make this possible. If we can get a diverse team of brilliant people, we can make something happen.⁵

Is it good? That’s a common question when picking a place to eat. It has become an idiom, almost. But the question is really moronic if you think about it. Why on earth would you ask if a restaurant is good? That’s like asking a student if he’s smart, or an employee if he’s competent. This sort of dogma is built into our language and culture, and it takes a clever mind to avoid them, which is why most of us don’t bother. But what if we did? Could we build a world where the ingenious reassessment of cultural idiosyncrasies would be an indicator of class, where the comments on my final grade calculator¹ would be an unacceptable embarrassment to all society? You know, when I read about global consciousness and existentialism and models of utopia, they start building on the illusion that every human being on this planet has both the socioeconomic wellness and intellectual passion to foster thinking. But in fact, that’s untrue for a disturbing number of people. A common motif in several books: an educated man has retired in the midst of conflict, and wonders “why both sides didn’t simply communicate with each other and solve their problems”. It’s nice to think that talking around is enough to solve most of the world’s problems, but it isn’t. There are many cases where the interests of two groups conflict irreconcilably and no amount of talking is sufficient. Most of the books I like take a transcendental stance on this issue. They encircle the idea that there is no best state of mind that philosophy can provide. It is good to be aware of the world and participate actively to change it. However, it remains that there are an insurmountable number of problems and difficulties for people of all kinds². No universal perspective, unqualified rationalism, or utopian dogma can fulfill what thinkers desire in an all-encompassing philosophy. They say that it can be beneficial both to romantically accept the existential importance of every detail and flaw of every entity, and to think critically and skeptically of everything. But whatever you choose, it is not of consequence, and it is of consequence. Eventually, all thought dissents into two categories: of scornful sadistic³ speculation, and of incurable idyllic insanity. But with this mindset, we can continue living appropriately among those who don’t have the same philosophical ideas as we, while knowing that they have no need for our ideas anyways. This is what knowledge I’ve gathered so far in seventeen years of existence, and my thoughts on a specific question asked last Wednesday lunch.

It concerns me how often that we are discussing in ToK when somebody precludes an argument with some nonsense conjecture that goes along the lines of nobody knows why we do those things, we just do them. It is especially convenient with topics like human behaviors and black holes and morality, because you can dismiss things that you don’t understand. But we can explain those things with science. See, there’s a difference between knowing how to calculate the Schwarzschild radius and being aware that somewhere in the past, physicists have formed a working theory for black holes. On the opposite side, some areas of science are not as developed as they seem to be. One of the goals of a scientific education is to enable you to see through the magic. I ask people about this often. How can we know what the core of the Earth is made of, or how old the planet is? How do we know the surface temperature of Uranus? Why do we have pictures¹ of exoplanets and their stars²? And how did we come up with the molecular structures of so many compounds? As you learn more, you realize that technology, as quickly as it advances, is so cruelly restrictive when it comes to science. It seems that people generally don’t know the limits of human knowledge³. They underestimate it in some areas, and blow it up in others. This negatively affects how we argue and reason because we can’t reliably determine what we do and don’t know. The point of knowing, to a more educated degree, how much progress has been made in mankind’s pursuit of knowledge creates not only a more reasonable and comprehensive foundation for argument, but a passion for learning everything you don’t know. You have to know there is something to know before you can know it. Actually, this sort of behavior is common outside of class too. It’s on conservative news stations all the time.

Get rid of the clock on your taskbar. It will be life changing. I’m not even joking. That was the best on-a-whim decision I’ve made in a whole hour. It was the highlight of my frigging hour, or perhaps not. I can’t be sure how long it’s been, now that I don’t have a stupid clock anywhere on the screen. You know what, put a sticker next to your computer desktop clock, and every time you glance down to look at it, you’ll see the sticker and remember what I’m saying here. It’s absolutely ridiculous how much I used to check that thing. I checked it more than I check Tumblr or Google Reader, and I’m checking Tumblr right freaking now.

When I’m doing homework, I give myself breaks at the even time intervals, to sort of celebrate passing a checkpoint. Like if it’s almost 4:30, I’ll go play guitar for a while, and if it’s 5:58, I’ll leave to go play outside because the sun’s about to set. I get so sick of seeing those stupid numbers, I feel like the mentally-unstable grandma in Requiem for a Dream. I get all antsy and distraught about how fast time is ticking by. Disregard everything. Do something that totally goes against your better judgement. Make sure it’s something you don’t want to do, not something society doesn’t permit you to do¹. Rebel against the machine! Screw the system! ¡Viva la Revolución! Remove that oppressive ticking clock! But you can still wear watches, those are cool.

When my sister and I were little, we made a pact not to tell on each other, like ever. It’s not like we went out doing bad things. The extent of our transgressions was playing on the computer and television after 9:00. Later on, we agreed that the standard response for covering for each other was “I don’t know”. It wasn’t always smooth. We argued about matters of great consequence, things that reasonable adults would never understand. And it soon became obvious to both of us that threatening to break the pact quickly shut either of us up. Neither of us ever did, well most of the time anyways. I don’t know if she remembers it at all, but this pact was a powerful foundation for siblings and a great teacher for cooperation. It sure was important to me. The thing is, when you cover for somebody, do you tell them? She stuck up for me plenty of times. When I couldn’t explain the B on a math¹ test, she redirected the conversation elsewhere. I don’t know how it worked exactly, but in my head, Mommy was the enemy and I had one unlikely comrade to depend on. It never occurred to me that those grades didn’t count for crap, that the yelling might have been a bit beneficial. Back then, school was war. I tried returning the favor when she took the heat, but it never really worked for me, probably because I couldn’t talk loudly enough to surmount the yelling and noise. So I just kept to the I-don’t-know’s to score points on out little balance of favor². Now we’re a bit older, and I this stuff still happens regularly, but it’s become so second nature that I don’t remember any of it. Gradually, I notice that the cashing in favors doesn’t happen as much. We never talk about the times we cover up the truth for each other. On one hand, you never get to find out all the nice *ahem* things that your ally does for you, but similarly, doing your “good” deeds when nobody’s looking can be self-validation that your motives are truly selfless. Maybe if we all take time to think about all the potential favors for you that you’ll never even hear about, we can relieve some of the depression. I’m glad they won’t bother reading anything with big English words, or our secret would be spoiled. Haha.

The clock that runs the bell system at school is wrong. It’s accurate to 4 decimal places, but still loses slightly more than a second every day. This pattern has consistent since I noticed it over a year ago, even on weekends and holidays. But occasionally, the clock jumps forward and overcompensates for the lost time. These haphazard corrections usually occur after vacation breaks or on late start days. The facts stop here, and the speculation begins. I refuse to believe that such a distinguished school cannot keep an accurate clock. The only explanation is... conspiracy! But seriously, there could be something going on here. I know that I have heavy confirmation bias when I say this, but I am confident that somehow, this marginal error in timekeeping has intentionally been left uncorrected because of something related to tardies. I’ll repeat the facts again: the ringing of the school bell occurs earlier and earlier every day. On certain days, it can ring a whole thirty seconds before NIST reports the correct time¹ at which it should ring. However, on certain days, this error is overcompensated for and the bell rings right on time, if not after the correct time. On days with high rates of tardies, a late coming of the bell can cut down on the number by offering a generous extra minute to get to classes. It just so happens that late start days² are the target of both these time corrections and an overt effort by the school to enforce tardy sweeps. I suppose it’s gray at the very worst, and ultimately, it is an effort to benefit students. I suppose then nothing needs to be done about this. What a useless conspiracy theory.

It was such an idyllic scene outside the MPR today at 4:46pm. It was still raining slightly and I had my umbrella out. The umbrella blocks the upper part of my field of vision, restricting the foveal viewport to bounce around the boundaries of the lower latitudes in such a way that, when the veil is finally lifted, the extended range appears foreign and startling. Here around me existed a number of characters whose traits could be summarized in the color blue, deep with compassion and kindness. Perhaps this perception was one of circumstance—relative and not absolute, that is. But no matter, it remains that this was not an atmosphere of competition nor indifferent apathy. It was brotherhood in its purest sense, if the word can be applied to more than the masculine. Man with his technology—cell phones and heptagonal deflector shields¹—against the world? N0, not the world. Not nature. There was no enemy here against which this brotherhood stood. It simply existed, because the circumstances of the past led it to exist at this place and time. Existing because it exists. That is the best kind of mood there is.

No other situation could have better accommodated the arrival of the news that Steve Jobs had died. I supposed platforms like Twitter were specifically designed for such a situation. During the AP crisis, it was also there. I don’t think any other platform could be so appropriate and brilliantly designed for this unique role. The idea is that tweets are so integral with picturesque scenes like this one. This characteristic is especially important, as they do not immerse the user in another world as most social networking platforms do. Essentially, Twitter holds a small niche, but it is so irreplaceably apt and correct for these non-ordinary days. If only it had more penetration and reach in our community, or if only our community was more aware of the appropriateness of social media, something like this could undergo the network effect and really change the entirety of how human beings² experience the extraordinary. I’m sorry that in this, my topics are so eclectic and my diction, so obscure, that hardly anyone will understand it. He was an icon of our age and it’s difficult to see him go.