Now on to the real stuff

I went to visit the Georgia Aquarium yesterday, they have the Titanic in there, or so I hear. But when we got there There was a huge crowd outside waiting to get in and some loudspeaker voice squawking at it. It was like a cross between an airport and the steal-all-your-money, can't-win-the-big-stuffed-animals games at King's Dominion. But after we were part of the crowd and the loudspeaker was partially squawking at us, we found out that for some reason the doors don't open again for another 2 hours, leaving us an hour to see some Tiger Lily sharks and maybe half a blue whale.

So we went across the street to get hopped up on all the free coke we could drink/snort, but the deal was basically the same. So we went back to the parking lot where we haggled the lady into letting us park there for 8 USD instead of 10, and we asked her how to get to the Bodies Exhibit, and so like any parking attendant would, she led us to a shady warehouse and let us use her computer.

If you ever get a chance, go see Bodies.

Every time I try to create a new post, I have to figure out how to log on again.

It pretty much sums it up right there, but I never use my google acount for anything else so I'm constantly forgetting my password and having to reset it, just to forget the new one. Nothing like struggling for art... or to write about it... or just to write... or bitch about blogs.

Room Service

So I find myself in a hotel room for a month. At first glance, I say it's pretty damn nice. The best hotel room I've stayed in. But then I remember that I have to live here for a month and that all those things that you take for granted while your on vacation are really important for those guys who wear suits and go to the continental breakfast in the morning and read the paper they slide under your door and condition their hair with one-use bottles. Families only come to hotels for vacation 2 months of the year. They're built for the workaholic businessmen who live off of job training powerpoint conventions.

But enough on that. The first day I stayed here, when I came back, I was surprised -- and delighted -- to find that the room looked exactly like it had the night before. The bed was made and they even stood the card up next to the pillows. And the weird things they do to your toilet paper and tissues they did.

So before I left for the day, I figured I'd test just how detailed they are. Flipped paper cover off the mouth-wash glass, ruffled up one towel, left the other slightly askew, and hid the card in a drawer. Would they find everything? Would they find the card, or just place a new one?

No, I realized they are not robots with scanners. For some reason I expected them to catch everything, and they failed. I thought if I switched the two chairs at the table, they'd put them back, even though they are absolutely identical and only the chairs no their difference.

I jumped in too fast. Next time I'll ease them into it. Start smaller.

You and Me

I was watching the Discovery Channel or History or whatnot the other day and at first I thought it was just another repeat of some Nostradomus prediction special, but then I realized that it was a cannibalization of that terrible stock footage and built into something new -- more about a contemporary mathematician who has developed a secret algorithm to predict outcomes on mathematical terms, and his predictions seem to be 90% accurate according to his claims. Applying his formula backwards to various situations including the rise of Hitler and the second world war, his results were accurate to the outcomes.

The ability of robots to evolve and function based on random and chaotic actions I think is similar to that in a very lose way. I think much less separates our thoughts and our progressions and evolution from nonconcious systems than we think.

Just in terms of the amount of parallels you can find between your internal processes and the world that you suppose to be external. I am losing the sense of self that we briefly discussed today. Where do I end and the external world begins? I don't know.

My b log that I wrote last night corresponds frighteningly closely with some of Dean's thoughts in class, his mention of binary, while in a somewhat different context, I nearly wrote a blog about binary code, and Bran and Dean had a conversation over the aesthetics of bridges that Dean braught up in class, and just the night before, I was talking with Joe and some other people about the aesthetics of architecture in Europe versus America, and the main example of my thought was the bridge of Europe versus the bridge of America, and when Dean mentioned it and pointed in our general direction, I thought for a moment that he was referencing our conversation the night prior, which I quickly realized Dean was not a part of.

landscaping

Some time ago, a man's pick axe worked at chipping away the walls separating Good and Bad, Moral and Immoral, Meaningful and Meaningless. He thought for whatever reason that they needed to go. Either they were in the way,  or maybe he just thought they were ugly. But he hadn't had much training in the use of pick axes against walls, and he went about it in a rather haphazard fashion, and as a result of his work, all the walls collapsed together into giant heaps, clogging up the paths, and obscuring the horizons in mounds of rubble. If only those walls were still standing, he could look at the mess and view the present state as bad and chaotic and work to sort it out into a more harmonious and ordered landscape, but now that they're down, he no longer sees any advantage in harmony and order over discord and chaos, so he sits in the center, not working because there is nothing to accomplish. He views work as rests equal. He has no reason to work and no reason to rest but that resting is less tiring than working.

Here's to the man, and hoping he makes something cool with the rubble.