Reading my feeds this evening I stumbled upon this which has two interesting parts.

1. The article talks about legally dividing by zero. Which is a bit of a in joke – but see: I told you so.

2. Discusses non-displayed human emotion.

Through out last year, in light of Prue’s departure among other things, I had several conversations about … my lack of emotion … I hate putting it that way but I don’t have anything better. Out of all that has been said and done two comments stick in my mind:

… you would do the same in any other situation …

It’s not that you don’t feel; but you control how you react to the feeling.

From the article:

Quite a few psychologists now think that the rational mind cannot exist without an underlying emotional mind. You have to be committed to being rational. Only then can you override your fervent desire for certain things to be true, and accept that they’re not.

While I wouldn’t go as far as to say: if you can’t override emotional desire you don’t have a rational mind. I would generally say I agree with the proposition. And could cite experiences from over the last 11 months that would lend weight to the argument.

However given the passage of time my grief has run it’s course. Well and truly run it’s course. I now have been sitting here for 15 minutes trying to find some form of emotional passion. I realise that this is not empirical but I can’t come up with anything. Which is not to say I’m dispassionate about everything. I can come up with lots of things I’m passionate about. But they’re all intellectual passion. I also know I have emotional passion … I have been in love; tangoed with lust* and constrained rage.

These things you feel in your heart. I mean literally in your chest. I don’t know how but I do know.

* By lust I mean desire for things to be the way you want them to be.

So what do I think the sum of human emotion is? 42.

Yes just like the Ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. Human emotion, when classified, has an equally meaningless answer. But not because the question isn’t a question. Continuing with the HGTG themes: Space is big… if you take everything that happens in the universe of someone’s life and then multiply and factor that out to include everybody’s life. Then the sum of human emotion is incomprehensibly random. It may very well be 42. Or 28372072857287213412120072341234. It doesn’t matter.

The point here is that a persons response to a situation, including how passionate that response is, will always be contingent on the sum of that persons experiences. Life is chaotic (or at least random). We have no control over what tomorrow brings. We get by through pretending our planning or easy going nature will keep the unexpected at bay. We respond instinctively: emotionally, intellectually, dispassionately whatever your experiences have, thus far, trained you to do.

When I felt rage I felt completely out of control because of it. Only for a few seconds and then the sum of my experiences, which have conditioned me to control passion, caught up. I felt out of control because it was new. My experiences hadn’t dealt with it before.

Aside from the tragedy involved, it was exhilarating experiencing something new, a change! Change is often something cited when discussing how people cope. Some are afraid, others are not. I view change optimistically. I think that lets me go into it with my eyes open. So far I’ve been lucky; others though have been burnt and well “once bitten, twice shy” is apt.

I believe that the comments about being non-human come about when our experiences are too narrow. And often will come from people who have vastly different experience to our own. They have no way to “put themselves in our shoes”. When our experience is narrow we always respond the same. No matter what. It is easy to fall into complacency. Life gets comfortable; the road while still unknown can usually be predicted; and we are always involved in the same scenarios. Some may refer to this as being stuck in a rut. I don’t like the negative connotation. It’s no better than implying someone is not human.

If only we could all experience something new everyday …

I am a little bored; and very hot. In search of something to do: Something, productive, to do. I decided to come back to the blog. This will be my grand 7th post for the year. Wow going strong. Which has made me start to consider the foot print I have made, or has been made for me, in the vast interwebs. A few years back, circa 2001, a Google ego search was pretty pointless, but now it can be an interesting thing to do.

For example my name is used for page rank boosting. For those who care I realise that search algorithms are much more complex. My point is simple: the foot print is more like graffiti – all over the place – some good and, well… you get the point. And finally: impossible to eradicate. There is also a prominent GCC mailing list post that is totally misleading bordering on stupidly wrong. More generally, people have covered the web with information. And as my grand total of 7 posts would seem to indicate. Often interest in maintaining that information dies. Thus the information is left to it’s posterity. Whatever that may be.

What follows is just random things I remember. If you want the references look them up yourself.

2008 has been the year we’ve seem explosive growth in the micro-blog (i.e. Facebook / Twitter); the call for “death of blogs” / “long live the blog”; chrome; increased censorship debate; ongoing and expanding delivery of the OLPC; daily mashups helped along by hosted libraries and apis; the smart phone; and so on… We have sufficient disk space to store it all. Search will continue to develop as our gateway to the info. Eventually we may even get a semantic web.

However, what is the ongoing point of dead (i.e. unmaintained) information? What is it’s posterity? Some would argue, as evidenced by the NASA lost ability to read tapes farce, that the posterity is in the accessibility. Others perhaps would lean towards Catch-22: Why not?

Both are valid. But both ignore that it’s not 1300 anymore. You can’t know everything. So I wonder: Are we going to end up with billions of “Fermat’s Last Theorem”-esque pieces of information? Probably. Does it really matter? Probably not.

And so, finally, back to this blog: What is it’s posterity? Hopefully being relevant enough to keep useless information out of the way. But, just as in life, you live for the day, the information here was, is and future posts will continue to be, relevant for their publication date. If you’re reading this in December of 2108: Sorry but I probably can’t help you. Not unless I live to 124. And hey that’d be another piece of information. Because, at least officially, the oldest living person to date is 122. How ironic