Yes, gas prices are very high. Gas now costs so much that it is worth more than some items we would normally consider more valuable. Good irony. Ha ha. You can stop now.
I am a child of the modern media, and thus difficult to shock. But when I hit Slashdot and came across a post proclaiming the death of comedian George Carlin, my jaw nearly hit the floor.
The denial phase was remarkably brief, and now, I am forced to admit that one of the greatest comedians of our time has died.
This may be a cliché, but I don’t care: the world is definitely a worse place now that George is gone. The rest of us are going to have to work even harder to counter-balance the tide of totalitarianism and cruelty here and around the world, adn without Carlin, it’s going to be even harder to keep a sense of humor about it.
R.I.P. George Carlin ( May 12, 1937 — June 22, 2008 )
“Shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits.”
Thanks to WordPress, I can be very cavalier about suddenly changing the theme around which TLOAMM (lovely acronym…reminds me of the sound I make between when I realize my curry is too spicy and when I actually start screaming) is based. For the moment, I’ve decided to go with a lovely, simple theme called “Garland.” If you love it or you hate it, let me know with your comments.
I’ve been writing since I was pretty young, and as I’ve gotten a general sense of the craft (how’s that for a snooty word?), I’ve noticed a few things. Here they are:
There are other things I’ve noticed, but these five are probably the most general and the most helpful. I hope this is of some use.
Author’s Note: Okay, this should have been published a week or so ago, but somehow, I managed to make it into a page instead of a post. Sorry about that.
Yesterday, I was thinking that I hadn’t actually written much of substance lately, so I thought I’d try an exercise I read about in some fiction writers’ book some years back. I looked around my office and tried to find inspiration in the random objects that were laying around. I tried to make a CD of the game “Risk” into something, but after a while, my eyes settled on a coffee cup sitting by my computer monitor.
And thus, The Unbreakable Cup was born. I really enjoy this kind of short-but-sweet story, mainly because my insomnia has shortened my attention span to just about that of a particularly hyperactive squirrel.
After I’d finished The Unbreakable Cup, I was struck by inspiration once more, this time in the form of a plastic cup I saw laying on my desk. The result was A Trillion Red Plastic Cups.
Enjoy!
In a very rare turn of events, I actually managed to see Iron Man while it was still in theaters. I’d been hearing good things about it, and since my father is still intent on seeing a lot of movies, I thought I might as well give it a try.
Not too long before I saw iron Man, I watched A Scanner Darkly for the first time. In addition to being a cinematic gem, I was fascinated by Robert Downey Jr.’s quirky style in that film. And, in Iron Man, I was treated to more of the same. Downey may very well have been the perfect actor to play the eccentric-billionaire-genius role, which he does with expertise and a kind of genuineness that’s hard to see in movie theaters these days. Watching the film, one gets the impression that his character really is a brilliant mechanical prodigy and weapons dealer.
The plot is full of interesting little details that make it better than the campy, somewhat clichéd thing it otherwise probably would have been. Like the electromagnet implanted in Downey’s character’s chest to keep the shrapnel out of his heart. The film is fairly rich with little personal touches like that which lend it an air of authenticity. In addition (spoilers ahead), Stark’s (Downey’s character) first rendition of the suit is a rough welded-together sheetmetal monster that looks (as much as is possible, I suppose) like a giant armored suit assembled out of spare parts in a cave somewhere.
This is the part where I usually say “Even though I liked the film, it had its problems.” Well, even though I liked Iron Man, it had its problems. There was a weird edge of unrealism to it, which may or may not have come from the adaptation from a comic book. And the actual plotline of the film itself, if you cut out all the little details which make it rich and believable, is really nothing but a series of meandering film clichés. Even so, Iron Man testifies to Downey’s acting ability, because the way he plays his role breathes life into a plot that we’ve all seen before. Even the stupid little jokes are funnier, just because Robert Downey Jr. has a weird sort of goofiness and hyperactive energy about him.
All in all, I liked Iron Man, even when it strayed into preachiness, even when it stumbled into cliché, and even when it meandered somewhat pointlessly. The special effects are pretty, the dialogue is fresh enough not to be boring, and even some of the more minor characters feel fairly real. A good film, and probably worth seeing, even if you aren’t a fan of the comic books.
My regular readers (if there are any still left) may have noticed that I’ve been quite inactive over the last few weeks. Well, I thought I ought to explain that. You see, last week and the weeks before that, I was laboring under a mound of late-in-the-semester homework and the preparation for final exams. And this week, I’ve spent most of my time decompressing and trying to deal with a strange case of insomnia that hit me out of the blue. I promise, though, that once I’ve got my head back together, I’ll be back with some more thoughts and speculations.
And many thanks to the readers who’ve stuck by me through my little random hiatuses (hiati?).
I’ve been noticing something lately, as I wander through various social groups and talk to people who seem to be the independent-minded type: nobody talks about revolution anymore.
I am not a child of the sixties. I’m a child of the nineties. But I’ve always admired the sixties- and seventies-era idea of getting tired of the way the current system works and trying to tear it down. Free love, free food, the careful and spiritual expansion of consciousness, all attempts to create a world that is better than the one the revolutionaries found themselves in.
What happened to that ethos? Although we are living in a time, it could be argued, that is just as unstable and unpleasant as the sixties, I have not heard a single young person even hinting at the idea of revolution. I haven’t heard anybody suggesting that this society needs to be changed. What I hear instead is talk of work. Of making money. I hear of drinking problems and parties and drug abuse. I don’t hear anybody trying to change the world, I only hear people trying to ignore it.
And I’m not saying that I’m immune from this. I spend a good deal of my day ignoring the world. I spend a lot of time trying not to think about $120 a barrel oil and genocide in Africa and cyclones in Burma and human-rights abuses here and abroad. Perhaps it’s a psychological defense mechanism. But it seems to me that a better way to solve the problem would be to return to the “hippie” ethic of trying to eradicate hate, to enjoy life, and to create a world that is more comfortable for everybody.
I haven’t really written anything of consequence for a while, and for that, I apologize. Let me explain.
For the last two or three weeks, I’ve been sleeping pretty damn badly. Every morning, at around 5 or 6 A.M., I find myself awake, and usually, unable to get back to sleep. I have no idea what’s going on, but with final exams looming, this is about the worst time that this could have happened.
The result is that I am completely and utterly exhausted. I feel stressed and moody, and generally just lousy. I’m hoping this will clear up in a week or two, and when it does, I’ll be back writing again. Until then, I may publish one or two of the posts I wrote but never released.
I can’t believe it. It was only a few months ago that I was celebrating my 5,000th view. I guess my intuition was right, people are more interested in blogs that actually talk about something interesting, rather than just blathering on about the weather. You’d think I would have figured that out before now.
Anyway, in celebration of my 10,000th view, I give you: every number less than or equal to 10,000, with the primes highlighted. Yes, I know I’ve done an image like this before, but I thought it would be fitting.
Many thanks to all of my 10,000 readers thus far, and thanks especially those of you who were nice enough to leave all those encouraging comments!
And here’s hoping for another 10,000!
No doubt there is going to be quite an outpouring of posts like this on all the nerd blogs all over the world, but I don’t care. It still needs to be said.
Today, Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most well-known science fiction writers and futurists of the twentieth century died.
I’m not going to launch into a long, sentimental retrospective of the man’s life. That’s what obituaries are for. I just wanted to say that he will be missed. A lot.
R.I.P., Arthur C. Clarke
December 16th, 1917 — March 19th, 2008
When I was in primary school, I hated math. It bored me to no end. To me, all it was was some heavyset woman making us do endless addition or subtraction or multiplication drills, for no reason other than the fact that we were ordered to. What was worse, all I ever saw of mathematics was a single, linear path. You started with a problem, and then you proceeded by the same old steps through the same old terrain until you found the solution. Even if the numbers involved changed, the methods didn’t, and after a few years, I started to realize that it was really all just repeating the same few problems over and over again, in different guises.
It wasn’t until I entered college that I started to re-discover the beauty of numbers and patterns (which the public school system had blinded me to, but that’s another post entirely). And today, I came to an amazing realization.
You see, I’ve been taking Differential Equations for the past few months, and it’s always struck me as the way math is supposed to be. Differential Equations is a class where it must be acknowledged that there are some problems we don’t know how to solve in the traditional way, or that we can’t solve at all. It’s the logical opposite of algebra.
You see, algebra was the first subject that really made me despise math. There was no freedom in the solutions: all you did was shuffle some numbers around, and eventually figured out the value of the variable in question. There was no room for beauty or creativity; it was just a very roundabout way of doing regular arithmetic.
Not so with calculus. Not so with differential equations. You see, in calculus, there is more freedom. You’re usually not searching for a number, but for a function. And whether or not you can find the solution depends on how creatively you can construct and reconstruct the problem. For example, in order to find the area under the curve defined by y = exp(2x), when x varies between -1 and 1, you have to use an integral. But you can’t just integrate right away. First, since there’s only a fairly small types of integrals that can actually be evaluated, you have to rebuild the problem from the ground up. Usually, this particular problem would be solved by saying that u = 2x, which turns the problem into the one of integrating y = exp(u), which is solvable.
That’s why I’ve always loved calculus: there’s always room for creativity and exploration. And the more complex the mathematics, the more ways there are to solve any given problem.
Thinking about all of this led me to an epiphany while I was walking home from my philosophy class: once you get past arithmetic, mathematics is not about doing the same thing over and over to slightly different problems in order to get slightly different answers. In fact, most problems don’t have a single answer. For example, take Schrödinger’s Equation, which is the basis of most of quantum mechanics:
What the variables represent isn’t terribly important. What’s much more important is what the equation represents. If this were an algebraic expression, it would simply represent an answer that you haven’t found yet. But Schrödinger’s equation, and other equations like it (such as the Einstein Field Equations of general relativity), they simply represent constraints that select certain solutions and correct, and others as incorrect. They’re not number just waiting to be found, they’re more like intelligent little computers that decide what is real and what is not, mathematically.
To understand what I mean, consider a much simpler differential equation (and please forgive the ugliness of the notation, but I’m working from some pretty severe graphical limitations):
y’ = k * y
This is not just a number in disguise. Instead, it’s a pattern that any function f(x) must fit in order to be called a solution of the equation. Contained in that tiny equation is the “truth filter” that passes through any exponentially growing or decaying solution. Likewise, Schrödinger’s equation is merely a filter that determines whether or not a given function can occur in real life or not. According to Schrödinger’s equation, electrons can change energy levels and emit photons, and particles can occasionally jump through barriers.
That is the true beauty of mathematics: every equation, every principle, every theorem is nothing more and nothing less than a little filter that produces reality from all the infinite possibilities inherent in the universe. Mathematics is incredibly intelligent in that regard, a perfect structure that selects real reality from the infinitude of possible realities.
And that is why I’m a math major.
As a card-carrying nerd (all right, so there is no card, but there should be), I am obligated to wish my readers a happy pi day. Today is March th 14th, which means that the date is 3-14. To commemorate the occasion, I present to you: all the digits of pi that I have memorized:
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820(974?)
Okay, so it’s not much, but I occasionally forget my own telephone number, so it’s quite a feat as far as I’m concerned.
Pi has always been one of my favorite mathematical constants. It’s probably the most abstract. What pi is to me is the perfect expression of the structure of mathematics, a sort of symbol for the deeper order that lurks beneath the foamy surface of our universe. Pi is built into the structure of everything, from the geometry of spacetime to the fluctuations of quantum mechanics, and I have a hunch that it will appear in some form at the intersection of the two. I like to think of it, if you’ll forgive the theological reference, as God’s Rivet, the little pin that holds everything else together.
So, happy pi day.
And also, happy birthday Albert.
And I hope you’ll all join me in my Ultimate Pi Day celebration on March 14th, 2015, at 9:26 and 53 seconds (AM or PM, your choice)!
I went into this movie not expecting much. I’ve seen a lot of the older movies about the stone age, and none of them have impressed me either in storyline or in scientific or historical accuracy. The “prehistoric” genre has a tendency towards cliché and unoriginality.
On the whole, however, I was pleasantly surprised. 10,000 BC thrusts you into the world of Dalay (or Delay…I don’t know), a hunter of woolly mammoth for his tribe. As a result of a prophecy of some sort, he finds himself wandering through the wilderness, beyond the borders of the tribe’s tiny known universe. There’s a lot of action and adventure along the way and good things happen and tragedies happen and then it all gets wrapped up by the ending.
All in all, it’s a very atmospheric movie, seemingly filmed partly in that same beautiful stretch of New Zealand that served as Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films. The tribe’s social organization feels genuine, as does the technology and the characters’ daily lives. I also like the fact that, when they encounter other tribes, none of them speak the same strangely-accented English that Dalay’s tribe speaks. It’s a refreshing change from films where everybody speaks English, although, in this film, apparently everybody else in the world speaks a common language, which seems rather odd.
The film starts to lose me when the characters walk over a snow-covered mountain range to find themselves in a rainforest, and then only a few minutes later, in a desert. I’m not certain, but it seems unlikely to have those three climes so close together. Even so, the environment is used to good advantage throughout the film, and they manage to make even the desert look pretty, in a desolate sort of way.
The film loses me even more, though, as it plunges into a series of strange semi-spiritual “spirit-guide” sort of side sequences, which seem to me not to add anything to the film but to allow them to hack together a happy ending. It all seems rather unnecessary, and did a great job of keeping me distracted from the main plot.
That aside, though, the film rapidly degenerates into a slag heap of sentimentality, clichés, and overwrought action sequences. About halfway through, it seems that the creative members of the writing staff went home, and from then on, 10,000 BC follows the standard cookie-cutter action movie plot almost to the letter. Also, there were some sequences that looked to be copied right out of 300. Now, it’s possible to copy from or pay homage to a film without looking pathetic, but that’s not the case here. Here, it feels more like sycophantic desperation to soak up some of 300’s impressive success.
In the end, though, it’s not a bad movie. The various tribes feel authentic enough, and the casting and writing were done competently enough that they really feel like different cultures with different traditions. The landscapes are pretty and, in general, it certainly feels like prehistory, which is fairly impressive, considering the difficulty of making a movie about a period with no historical record on which to base the plot. Perhaps, in light of this, some of the historical inaccuracies can be forgiven (unless, that is, you’re a hardened and obsessive science nerd, like me). The plot’s not much to speak of; it’s basically standard adventure movie canon, with some interesting extra bits tacked on. But still, you have to admire the filmmakers for being bold enough to build a film around such an innovative historical setting, even if the story does fall flat in the telling.
Final Judgment:
* * * * * * ~ ~ ~ ~ (6/10 asterisks)
Most of the time, I hate the Internet, because most of the time, it’s merely a conduit for people telling me I need to buy a new cell phone or enlarge various parts of my anatomy. Sometimes, though, I love the Internet. Sites like Wikipedia seem to be bringing about a cultural revolution. So much information, right at our fingertips (how’s that for a well-worn cliché?). A shining example of that kind of encyclopedic accessibility is imdb.com, the Internet Movie Database. Nowhere else can you find such accessible and detailed information on any movie or actor or director or writer you’re interested in.
Case in point: one of the greatest mathematicians of modern times was Paul Erdös. He was the second most prolific mathematician in history. And he is credited on imdb.com, for an almost-unknown forty-five minute film about himself. Unbelievable.
By now, dear reader, you’re probably wondering just what the hell I’m driving at. Well, the previous two paragraphs were a long-winded, roundabout way of telling you that, sometimes, the Internet allows neat little serendipitous accidents.
One such accident is my finding out about the movie Interstellar. Scheduled to debut in 2009, interstellar is, and this is a direct quote from imdb, “An exploration of physicist Kip Thorne’s theories of gravity fields, wormholes and several hypotheses that Albert Einstein was never able to prove.” What’s more, Kip Thorne himself is credited as the creator of the film’s story. I still fondly remember reading Thorne’s incredibly accessible book Black Holes and Time Warps. It was funny and richly informative, and if Interstellar is anything like Thorne’s little explanatory vignettes in that book, then it’s going to be an impressive film.
What’s more, Steven Spielberg is listed as the film’s director. I’ve always been a great fan of Speilberg’s films. Most of them are at least competent, and many of them are classic. And even if Spielberg’s sentimentality kicks in on this film, he’ll be counterbalanced by writer Lynda Obst, executive producer of Contact, which is arguably one of the most realistically compelling science fiction films of our time.
And that’s all I know. Since it isn’t, as far as I know, even in production yet, there’s not much to know. Still, for a geeky fan of hard science fiction (such as myself), Interstellar smells of a great film. It may in fact be one of the first films to competently handle the subject of wormholes.
I wait with breathless anticipation. (How’s that for a melodramatic conclusion?)
I don’t like films about corporate intrigue, generally speaking. Most of them are either so slow that I don’t bother to follow the plot, or have been so artificially inflated with action sequences that I can’t tolerate what plot there is. This was the same sort of problem that I had with Syriana (and yes, I know that’s not really a corporate espionage film, but I’m making a point here!): the plot was too fast, too disjointed, and too confusing.
Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton is one of the few exceptions I’ve seen. Starring George Clooney, Michael Clayton is a story of the life of…well…Michael Clayton, a professional sweeper of corporate problems under the corporate rug (or “fixer”, as they call them). After being sent to control the ravings of another mentally-unstable fixer who decides to go on a personal crusade against the company he’s currently “fixing” for, Clayton comes to some realizations about his job and just what he’s gotten himself involved in.
The film is executed incredibly. At times, it’s so well-written and well-acted that even the incredibly boring office scenes become exciting. Director Gilroy certainly has a gift for pacing as well, ensuring that no scene is uninteresting. Even if it would be under normal circumstances, Gilroy somehow manages to add a detail, or a character, or a voice-over, or sometimes just the right piece of music to prevent the action from stalling.
This may be because Michael Clayton is a character-driven film, a precious rarity in modern cinema. The characters are all fairly well-defined, even those that make only a single brief appearance. None of them feel like cardboard cutouts. One gets the impression that they all have problems of their own, even if those problems aren’t explicitly handled in the actual movie.
The plot, too, is masterfully composed. Most movies of Michael Clayton’s sort — and here again I refer to Syriana as a reference point — have a tendency towards plots with incredible complexity. It’s hard to squeeze a broad-ranging, international, lifelike series of events into a few-hour movie, and the result is often that the scene transitions are so choppy and hard-to-follow that the plot baby is thrown out with the runtime-reduction bathwater (and yes, I know that’s not exactly an intuitive analogy, but give me a break, I’m tired). Michael Clayton, however, manages to make the plot make sense. Being a child of crappy action movies, I’ve always had a bit of difficulty following complex plots, but Michael Clayton conveys plot with enough clarity and simplicity that it made sense on the first viewing.
Regular readers of my movie reviews know what comes next: the complaints. That’s one thing I’m good at: finding fault with movies.
First of all, as tight and well-constructed as the plot is, it still manages to meander at times. There are some scenes which don’t make sense, or seem utterly random. It’s almost as though there was a bit of backstory written into the original script that ended up on a cutting-room floor somewhere. This lends parts of the movie an uncomfortable senselessness, which may actually have been intentional, considering the kind of senseless malevolence many corporate entities engage in, but when it comes to films, I give nobody the benefit of the doubt.
Also, the film is depressing. Of course, this kind of film is bound to be, but there’s just a certain darkness to it so that even in its brighter moments, it only ever manages to break even, emotionally. This is good, of course. This is what a good film is supposed to do, create an emotional atmosphere, but it means that Michael Clayton can be hard to watch if you’re in a bad mood. Then again, the air of doom that the film constructs fits so well with the overall storyline that I think I can forgive it for being depressing.
All in all, an excellent film. Probably one of the best of 2007. I’d say the best of 2007, but it has to compete with films like Sunshine, and I’m a huge science fiction nerd.
Final Judgment:
* * * * * * * * ~ ~ (8/10 asterisks)
For a while, I’d actually allowed myself to be lulled into a false sense of security, into thinking that technology wasn’t as buggy and corruptible as everybody’s always said. Well, my blissful ignorance is over, and until I can get it to a repair shop, my computer is little more than a very effective paperweight. The end result is that I’m not going to be able to post with any regularity for probably at least a week, unless I can find a repair shop that’s open on Sunday.
Sorry. I guess that’ll teach me to trust a surge protector…
All right, as promised, I’ve finally figured out a way that people can download SimHeart to play with it themselves. Many thanks to the folks at NetLogo for automating so much of the process, and thanks to MediaFire.com for the free file hosting.
The file is kind of large because, in order for it to work, I had to put a bunch of Java modules into the folder with it, but it shouldn’t take too long to download, even over a slow-ish Internet connection. When you’ve downloaded it, you’ll need to extract the file to your desktop. I recommend an unzipping program like WinZip or WinAce. The program should (major, major emphasis on should) work on Macs and PCs, but I make no guarantees.
To run the simulation, go into the folder into which you’ve extracted SimHeart, and double click on the HTML file there. It should open up in a new window, and you should see the simulation screen. If you don’t, either you don’t have an up-to-date version of Java, or something went wrong in the download process, or I made a mistake zipping the files. If you checked the previous two things, please leave a comment and describe the problem, and I’ll try to help, although I make no claims to be very good at this kind of thing.
Also, I must provide the obligatory legal disclaimer: I take no responsibility if this file somehow damages your system. To my knowledge, there is absolutely nothing in the file that should do so, but you never know, something might have gotten corrupted or damaged along the way. Also, this software is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be taken as any form of medical advice. I’m not sure why anybody would, but you never know.
Download SimHeart 2.0 here.
If you already have the latest version of NetLogo installed on your computer, you can download the much smaller .nlogo file here. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you should go ahead and download NetLogo (you can do that here). Not only will it allow you to download a much smaller file, but NetLogo comes with a whole cornucopia of fascinating little simulations, and there are more you can download from the Internet.
If you have trouble with either of these files, please let me know by commenting on this post. If you don’t want to do that for some reason, send an e-mail to asymptote [døt] inverse [át] gmail [døt] com (Sorry about all the weird characters in there, but that account gets enough spam as it is, without ever having broadcast the address on the Internet, so I figured I’d better obfuscate as much as possible).
I’ll try to update the files as I revise SimHeart, but I seem to be at a point where there’s not much more I can do with it, at least not without rewriting most of the code. I’ll be sure to post updates as they come.
I’m a huge Hugh Laurie fan. My fandom began, as I’m sure it did for many people, with House, but in the few other roles I’ve seen him in, he was very good. So, he’s a good actor. What I didn’t know was that he can sing, too! Thanks to the Firefox plugin “StumbleUpon” (don’t get it if you don’t have it, it’ll suck all your free time away. It’s like a black hole for leisure! It’s hypnotic.), I ran across this video, courtesy of a blog called “TheScene.” See Hugh Laurie sing!
It’s hard to believe that there are many people who have not yet heard of Stanley Milgram’s infamous Obedience Experiment, but given the society that we’re living in, it seems vital that the public be informed on the nature of human obedience. So, as a public service, here is a brief synopsis of the experiment.
Stanley Milgram wondered how so many soldiers in World War II Germany had willingly taken actions that led to the death of so many innocent people. After the War ended, many of these soldiers claimed that they did so merely because they were following orders. Milgram decided to test this hypothesis.
He took a group of test volunteers and told them that they would be taking part in an experiment on the effects of punishment on learning. They were introduced to a “learner,” who would be strapped to a device that administered electric shocks. The volunteer was to read a pair of words to the learner. The learner would later be quizzed on the word pairs, and if their response was incorrect, an electric shock would be administered. Each wrong answer would lead to a more severe electric shock. The first shock was 45 volts. The shock machine had knobs which ran all the way up to 450 volts.
The thing was, all of that was a lie. The machine did not administer shocks. In fact, the “learner” was not another experimental volunteer, but a trained actor. Milgram’s aim was to determine how many people would, under the supervision of an “experimenter” who would urge them on, would reach the top of the voltage scale before their morality kicked in and they were unable to administer any more of the supposedly painful shocks.
Milgram estimated that a few percent of the subjects might make it all the way to 450, but most would be morally incapable of doing so. He was wrong.
Sixty percent of the test subjects made it all the way to 450 volts. Even when the “learner” cried out in pain, they went on; even when the learner complained of a heart condition, the subjects continued. Even when the learner fell eerily silent, and gave no response, many subjects simply continued administering the shocks, as instructed. When they complained that they were worried about the learner, the experimenter admonished them that the shocks were “painful but harmless.” When they said that they wanted to leave, the experimenter simply told them “The experiment must continue.”
And they listened. Many of them, who had been ready to walk out the door, sat down when the experimenter said this. And when they complained that they didn’t want to be responsible for causing the learner permanent harm, the experimenter informed them that they would not be liable. With this reassurance, the volunteers continued administering the shocks.
Although it has often been decried as terribly unethical, the Milgram experiment is a chilling reminder of human beings’ tendency towards obedience. Furthermore, it proved what many thinkers and rebels have been saying throughout history: only independent thought can set you free. Only those test subjects who were more willing to consider their own moral principles were able to simply walk away from the experiment.
Think about it.
Click this link.
Having been absent from my blog of late, I didn’t think to write anything about September 11th. I didn’t mean any disrespect by it, and here, belated, are my thoughts:
I believe that September the 11th is a very particular day. It is a day to remember the people in Pennsylvania, in Washington, and in New York. It is a day to honor lives lost, and to pay respect for the people who withstood the horrors of that day. I’m not going to talk about politics. I’m not going to talk about why 9-11 justified the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I’m not going to complain that it didn’t justify the wars, either. Because I believe that 9-11 should be one day bereft of politics. We should not spend the day talking about the threat from overseas terrorist, or government policies. It is simply a day to honor human loss. It is a day to remember those who gave their lives to save the victims of that day. It is a day to reach out and console our fellow people. It is a day to remember that we are all part of the human race, and we all share each other’s grief.
