Frank Nasser

I've just re-read the book "Free Culture" by Lawrence Lessig.

There's nothing I can add except: READ IT if you care about who owns your ideas!

Oh, and by the way: It's free!

http://www.free-culture.cc/freeculture.pdf

"As an adjective, chronic can refer to a persistent and lasting medical condition". (Quote from Wikipedia).

In my opinion, when the medical world calls a disease "chronic", or even "uncurable" it is rather an attempt to cover up their lack of knowledge by giving it a name. A bit like calling a door "un-openable" if you don't have the key for it.

Maybe, if we forced the doctors to say "the human race is regrettable still too stupid to know how to deal with this", some so-called chronic diseases would become curable a lot faster.

I have the priviledge of knowing the world of hard science very well, and at the same time having been cured from a "permament disease" through the means of alternative treatment.

This leaves me in a funny situation...

Being a scientist, I would never claim that a few "miracles" can be a proof of anything except dumb luck. And I totally acknowledge that the world of alternative medicine is infested with frauds and people that are cunning enough to make profit on other people's misery and desperation.

However, having having suffered from a disease that the western medicine considers "curable" only by surgical removal of the defect body part, and which is being "treated" with experimental drugs that have "heart failure and sudden death" among one of the "very rare" side effects, I've seen the worst side of the western medical science as well. And I tell you: There is room for improvement!

Seriously, if someone is bleeding from their intestines. How much arrogance does it take to tell that person: "there is NO proof that your symptoms have anything to do with what you eat. So just take your symptom-relieving medicine, and keep eating exactly what you have always eaten. We'll remove your intestines later."

I mean: Intestines <-> Food ... No proof of connection, really?

I think: Western medicine is great for many, many things! Man, we have eradicated smallpox, we are on the way with polio, and we are capable of putting a body part back on the body after it has been ripped off!

But western medicine is being crippled by its own arrogance! And even worse: The medical companies are expoiting this to an extent that makes even the worst witch-doctors totally harmless in comparison. At least those witch-doctors aren't being supported by every covernment in the world, having children being brain-washed into believing that their method is the right one.

I could go straight into conspiration-theory mode from here. But I guess I'll save that for another post.

Life is a Telephone!

Deep, isn't it? You can chose to dial 112 (or 911 or whatever) any time for free, you can type in a random number and see who picks up, you might run out of credit if you make international calls too often, you can hang up if you don't like the conversation, and you must turn if off whilst flying, because otherwise it might interfer with the instruments in the cockpit.

Life is also a highway, a roundabout, a colour, a noun, a washing machine and a drink. In fact, the only thing what has every come out of all these tatty analogies is a proof that all these things being equal to life, they must also be equal to eachother. So, in fact, life is the only thing there is.

And if you still haven't realized that I am being rather ironic, you probably should go away and never come back.

We probably all know the experience of déjà vu: It's when you experience something, and you are struck by the feeling that this has happened to you, in every detail, once before.

Apparently the phenomenon is caused by our memory working faster than our conscionsness (researchers haven't worked out the details yet, but it seems quite logical): So the experiences are stored in the memory before we become aware of them. And therefore every experience we become aware of match an experience that is already stored in our memory.

However, this morning I had a rather interesting variation of that experience:

I was riding my bike on a very cold morning, on my way somewhere when the déjà vu kicked in: Suddenly everything leading up to this moment, everything that happening in the moment and all my thoughts about it seemed to have happened before, either in a dream, a previous life og a long time ago... -Textbook déjá vu, one would think.

But then the weird thing happened: I realized that I was having a déjà-vu. And even that realisation fitted my apparent memory from the "previous" experience. So, in other words: I remembered that all this had happened before, and that LAST time it happened, I ALSO had remembered that it had happened before...

Luckily, it seems that the brain has a built-in security mechanism for this situation. After around 100 recursions, I stopped thinking that it was interesting, and I went on with some other thoughts.

This remark never fails to piss me off: "Get a life". Well, not that I really get angry any more, but I would rather that the expression disappeared and never came back.

Here's an example:

I work in a technical high school, where some of the employees (very much including myself) tend to be rather nerdy about such things as language, computers and science.

Admitted, it can sometimes seem a bit ridiculous to the outsider. And also, a few of these employees (not so much including myself, I try to believe) have rather narrow fields of interest which is often interpreted by the crowd as having low social skills.

Anyway, one morning I found that someone (presumably one of the less nerdy employees) had taken a comic strip from a newspaper and put it on the pinboard of the teacher's room. The comic itself was rather stupid, degrading, offensive and agressive. I'll have to explain it in order to make my point:

Picture 1: Showing a typical nerdy computer scientist (fatty with bad clothes and thick glasses) talking to a non-nerdy secretary-type woman with huge boobs at a party. He starts to explain some progress that he has recently done with some computer-related work. This explanation is clearly very boring in the ears of the big-boobed woman.

Picture 2: He finishes his explanation with a happy facial expression. Woman looks very bored.

Picture 3: Woman starts leaving, saying "excuse me, I have to go and count the cars in the parking area."

End. -No more. Nothing.

Now, in lack of anything amusing in the actual cartoon (and trying to avoid the realisation that this is the level of "fun" concieved by the crowd) I naturally looked for something else to think about.

So, it turns out that the cartoonist is clearly non-nerdy himself (I'll assume it's a he, based only on the fact that the majority of cartoonists are male). The "long, complicated explanation" in the first two pictures is actually complete nonsense, and not even a very technical level of nonsense. Just a lot of words that the cartoonist thought would sound "difficult and nerdy".

One of those expressions was "the matrix". Now, this word is quite funny in danish. To understand why, you need to know a little bit of how nouns work in danish:

Danish language does not have a definite article (such as the english "the"). Instead the indefinite article is normally added to the end of a noun in order to make it definite. For instance: "A horse" in danish is "En hest" ("en" being one of the two indefinite articles). Hence, "The horse" is simply: "Hesten".

Now, "A matrix" in danish is: "En matrix". Normally, the definite form ("the matrix") would therefore be "Matrixen". However, this noun is IRREGULAR, and the correct definite form is actually: "Matricen", honoring a tradition of transforming "x" into "c" when conjugating nouns
with foreign origin. Everyone who has ever worked with the word "matrix" knows this.

Now, the cartoonist, being stupid, did not know this and used the word "matrixen" which sounds just ... well, stupid.

So, I decided to move the attention away from the low level humor of the cartoon itself, making a small hand-written correction on the cartoon, explaining that "en matrix" is actually called "matricen" in definite form in danish.

My purpose with this was to:

1) Point out the humor in the fact that the cartoonist pointed a finger at a type of people, but ended up pointing four fingers back at himself.

2) Add a bit of self-irony, hinting that several of our collegues (including myself) are actually very nerdy and do speak the REAL version of that nerdy-talk that the cartoon was about.

A few days later I found that someone else had added a comment to my correction, saying: "Få dig et liv!" -- "Get a life!"

What does this mean? Well, obviously the person commenting did NOT think my correction was funny. In fact it had seemed offensive to that person. I have quite an elaborate theory about what would cause another person to be offended by the correction (and generally, why language corrections tend to piss people off) but I'll save that for some other post. But I am sure that the person has completely failed to realize my motives explained above.

And then the reaction "get a life"... Clearly, this means:
"get a life THAT IS EQUAL TO THE LIFE OF EVERYONE ELSE"
, and:
"STOP FINDING THINGS INTERESTING THAT OTHER PEOPLE DON'T UNDERSTAND!"

All this agression probably comes from a very deep level of conscience. -A very sad one too, because it has it's roots in the same thing as religious fanatism, mob behaviour and racism: The fact that it's easier to control and exploit people if they all think exactly the same. And somehow that's what the crowd really wants: To be controlled and not ever think anything.

What a waste of good souls!