04 November, 2010

I hate myself.

I hate myself. 

I hate myself for working towards a goal I can never achieve. It is so obvious that I have no chance in hell, and yet I still work towards that goal unrelentlessly. I must be retarded or something. But even knowing this does not stop me. I still work for a future vision of myself that can never occur. I vie for a fictional woman I will never win over. I admit this to myself, and yet I still try. Why? What is so special about one woman? Could not I find dozens just as good (and in real life, to boot) elsewhere? Why bother myself with such a fruitless endeavor when I could instead enjoy my life as it is in the here and now? And yet... She has captivated my heart, and there is nothing I can do. I don't want to love her. I wish I didn't love her. But I do. 

::sigh:: 

I used to use Geoworks back when I was in elementary school. It was a nice little operating system. It did what I told it to do. But more importantly, it taught me a lesson that I will never forget. 

Interestingly, it only taught me this lesson earlier today. You see, Geoworks refused to save word programs as text files. It wasn't a big deal to me back then, but I remembered this inadequacy as I sat, filling out a form earlier today. The form asked dozens of yes/no questions, and I answered no on each and every one of them. But because I filled it out, I have an appointment with a counselor on the morrow. Today was the last straw. I can take no more. Yesterday, I could at least try to deal with my pain, but now... Now I am lost. Yesterday, I could at least talk to myself, but now, that luxury is gone. Today, I can no longer save as a text file. 

I hate myself. ::sigh::

24 March, 2010

Waking Up


My body seems to have some sort of mute-filtering system. As I woke this morning from a dream of P in a faraway high school, I slowly became aware that my dream was in fact a dream.

I was in bed, still dreaming, and processing the facts of the dream as I lay there. Specifics on the dream are unimportant; like most recurring dreams, while it has great meaning to me personally, it would be extremely boring to have to read through on this journal.

At first, I started to hear the light snoring of my partner. She is next to me, I thought, enjoying her own personal dreams while I awake from mine. Whole seconds pass while I run down the last aspects of my dream, when, suddenly, I am bombarded with an influx of sound. The TV is on.

For a number of seconds after waking, but before waking fully, I was aware only of the sound of her light snoring, and not at all of the blasting sound coming from the tv. It was only less than ten seconds, but still: somehow my brain had been completely filtering out the sound of the television so as not to disturb me during sleep.

I am impressed.

03 March, 2010

The Sun is Green


Okay, so the sun doesn't look green. But appearances can be deceiving. After all, everyone knows it's not yellow, even though that's the color that schoolchildren always use in drawings. Common wisdom says it's white—but what is white?

Click to enlarge.

White light is the combination of all colors of light. The sun is white because it emits all colors of light in our visible spectrum. Yet this brings up a question we rarely think about: is white a color?

If white is the combination of other colors, and black is the absence of other colors, can they really be considered colors at all? It's hard to answer this, because it depends on your definition of color. Color is defined so loosely that speaking clearly about it is almost impossible. It is better to speak of hues, such as red, green, purple, and orange. White is not a hue; rather, each hue can have a lighter tint or a darker shade to it. Orange, for example, is my favorite hue, but only when it has a particularly light tint to it. Dark orange shades seem like an entirely different color.

Of course, "white" is a term which corresponds to some sensation in the brain which we usually call color. But when looking at the different tints and shades in the image above, it becomes easy to see that white light is in fact some hue or combination of hues that has very low saturation and a very, very light tint. And if this is true, then the only question becomes whether sunlight contains one or more hues in greater concentration than the others.

In fact, sunlight does just that. The wavelength of sunlight varies throughout the visible spectrum (and more), but it is highly concentrated at the 500 nanometer wavelength: green.

Notice the peak at 500 nm.


So although sunlight appears white, the main hue it is consisted of is green. It just happens to be a very, very lightly tinted green of almost no saturation. Oh, and some other colors thrown in as well, but in far less of a concentration.

20 February, 2010

Professional Philosophers on Twitter


Twitter is a great place to find stuff you're specifically interested in. And since philosophy is one of my great loves, you can rest assured that my twitter feed is filled with philosophy-oriented tweets.

To aid in my search for great philosophic inspiration and discussion, I created a couple of twitter lists that make finding great content that much easier. The first is a list of people interested in philosophy — the list is large enough that it becomes a bit unwieldy to browse thoroughly, but you can definitely find a few gems in there from time to time.

The second list, however, is a bit more useful. My Academic Philosophers list has only those people actually working in the field, or those in grad school who are aiming at that profession. At first glance, such a list might be seen as elitist, but in actuality it is a good resource for reaching out to the academic philosophy community.

If you qualify for the list, but aren't yet on it, please feel free to @reply me with a request; I'm @EricHerboso.

Finally, Insurance Rescues Eric

Fire damage is limited to my roof.

A fire in the apartment above mine caused many of my possessions to get wet from excess sprinkler water. Thankfully, most of my stuff is okay, barring items left carelessly on the floor, such as awithings wifi scale and a first edition voltaire bio from the late 1800s.

Though everything is ultimately replaceable (even the first edition is not too terribly rare), the lost items that have affected me the most are surprising to me: power cords.

My iphone and my macbook are both fine, but the cords which power them are ruined. This has made it extremely difficult to go online, except in spurts when I get a spare charge from the iphone car charger, because snow has prevented me from being able to go to a store to replace the cords. As a result, I've had to go through a form of internet withdrawal, and trust me when I say it is not pretty.

Has both "with almond"
& "contains no nuts" text on back.


This entry, in fact, is being written by pen, and will only be transcribed later to my blog. Life without internet here is unexplainable. I cannot read, for my books are still in my room, while I'm stuck in a hotel for the next week. I cannot really write, for I only have scraps of paper that are quickly running out. So boring is my non-internet existence right now that I only find delight in reading all thecomplimentary soap packaging at the hotel.

I seem to remember, back when I was young and my experience of the internet was mostly confined to AOL 1.0 chat rooms, that tv was a good way of whiling away the time. But since the dawn of napster (and now btjunkie), I have become accustomed to the miracle of zero commercial interruptions, and this experience has made tv watching completely unbearable to me. Even if a story starts to interest me, the first appearance of commercials makes my body seize up w/ irritation. Just thinking about it is making my spine shiver. Ugh.

Without Applecare, this costs $76!

Thankfully, Applecare has come to my rescue. Although I do not think that technically my power cord should be covered in this situation, the kind Apple rep I spoke to over the phone took pity on me and expedited a replacement cord free of charge. Now if only the snow would let up enough to allow the mail to come through unmolested.