Hello, World.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Moral Rapelling?
General Feelings:
Climbing Trip:
Rapelling
Have you ever walked off the side of a cliff? Literally, just walked off. I mean, sure, I was on a rope. Sure, I was on two ropes even. But the fact is, neither of them were taut while standing straight up. In fact, neither were taught until I was a foot down the rocks and standing parallel to the ground. A shorter safety would have been nice here. The idea of having that 4 feet of no rope terrified me. It took me about 15 minutes to actually start my rapel off. I managed to cut my 4 feet down to a couple of inches by stepping down and using an arm to lower myself down - no free fall, but no supporting rope either.
Why'd I do it? Why didn't I just walk down? Aside from TS's encouragement, the reason is for the experience. I like doing things. I like having experiences. I slept in a hammock above a black widow's web...well where was until I knocked it down while setting my hammock up. It was an experience. Ok, that was just a stupid move, but it was late and I didn't feel like moving. I rapelled down a rock face for the experience. I conquered my fears of it. Or better yet, I began to conquer my fears. To add to the fear, I rappelled down on anchors that TS and I set up together (mainly TS). That's an experience I've only dreamed of having. I did a Tarzan swing on the rope later that day just because I was scared to do it. It was an experience. It wasn't particularly dangerous, but it felt good knowing I can do it and knowing I have done it.
Sometimes I wonder if I like doing these things so I can claim I've done them, or if I like doing them for the sake of doing them. I sure hope its the latter. Is this blog my sick, self absorbed public journal? Possibly. I prefer to think of it as my way of communicating with the world, keeping my memories, and at times (now) learning about myself a bit. Admittedly, knowing its public makes it easier to write some things. The audience is a motivation of sorts. I think my reason for liking experiences is because experiences are memories. Time spent making memories is time worth having.
On the note of memories - I want to be more proactive. I want to do more. I feel as if in the past few months I've gotten better at this. I've coded for fun, I've climbed, I have an internship and a research set up. I've organized travel plans. I want to get good at being proactive. TS kind of inspires me on this one, he has such an exciting life because he doesn't waste a minute of it. I want to always be making memories.
Conversation with AB
Does absolute morality exist? Absolute Morality only exists if there's some universal standard of what is evil. The very fact that there's no common agreement implies no absolute morality. Event horrors (Holocaust) had/have supporters -->no absolute morality. Morality is defined by logic, empathy, and sympathy.
If you can empathize with another being, you naturally shouldn't want to do wrong to it. IE if you can empathize with Fred, you can logically prove its immoral to mistreat Fred. But not everyone empathizes equally. In fact, empathy is deeply personal. What's a person? My empathy is defined by what? By my free will? lol. Must be by my past interactions...what does this imply? Certain situations cause lack of empathy to develop? Granted, this assumes there's no "soul" and that humans realy are living chaos theory (still not certain how I feel about that). ¶ 10:41 PM 0 Comments
- Optimistic about school. Speaking with TS this weekend made me realize something - I can get A's in school. He said one thing in particular that made me feel really good and just reminded me that I can do well in school, "You were always good at tests". I haven't felt like that since high school. In fact, its been the opposite since then. No need for that to be the case though. Time for me to start getting A's again.
- Excited for Australia.
- failed at H Bridge circuit design (barely tried, better with IC any ways)
- soldered up H Bridge IC (key is to hold the heat still and move the solder)
- created worling circuit!; circuit broke 10 minutes later...
- verdex pro connects with Tweener, but not with new cable
Climbing Trip:
- went to Pilot mountain with TS and VT
- learned how to set anchors for top roping
- bought shoes after doing a 100 footer barefoot (ouch!)
- I cut really easily and was asked by multiple people if I was ok/what happened - maybe I'll wear pants next time? Also, I looked really filthy/manly/war veteran like (awesome!).
- Make a computer flash card program with a GUI
- Finished the bowling program.
- Chapel Hill is awesome, but need to be 21.
- Math 103 is very interesting. I'm really glad I got to relearn it.
- Party with TS and AB was good; had fun meeting people. Looking forward to getting good at clubbing/barring in AU. Not sure why but its a skill I really want to have. (I want to be the best meeter of people in alllll the land!)
- I want to run a half marathon at some point in my life.
Rapelling
Have you ever walked off the side of a cliff? Literally, just walked off. I mean, sure, I was on a rope. Sure, I was on two ropes even. But the fact is, neither of them were taut while standing straight up. In fact, neither were taught until I was a foot down the rocks and standing parallel to the ground. A shorter safety would have been nice here. The idea of having that 4 feet of no rope terrified me. It took me about 15 minutes to actually start my rapel off. I managed to cut my 4 feet down to a couple of inches by stepping down and using an arm to lower myself down - no free fall, but no supporting rope either.
Why'd I do it? Why didn't I just walk down? Aside from TS's encouragement, the reason is for the experience. I like doing things. I like having experiences. I slept in a hammock above a black widow's web...well where was until I knocked it down while setting my hammock up. It was an experience. Ok, that was just a stupid move, but it was late and I didn't feel like moving. I rapelled down a rock face for the experience. I conquered my fears of it. Or better yet, I began to conquer my fears. To add to the fear, I rappelled down on anchors that TS and I set up together (mainly TS). That's an experience I've only dreamed of having. I did a Tarzan swing on the rope later that day just because I was scared to do it. It was an experience. It wasn't particularly dangerous, but it felt good knowing I can do it and knowing I have done it.
Sometimes I wonder if I like doing these things so I can claim I've done them, or if I like doing them for the sake of doing them. I sure hope its the latter. Is this blog my sick, self absorbed public journal? Possibly. I prefer to think of it as my way of communicating with the world, keeping my memories, and at times (now) learning about myself a bit. Admittedly, knowing its public makes it easier to write some things. The audience is a motivation of sorts. I think my reason for liking experiences is because experiences are memories. Time spent making memories is time worth having.
On the note of memories - I want to be more proactive. I want to do more. I feel as if in the past few months I've gotten better at this. I've coded for fun, I've climbed, I have an internship and a research set up. I've organized travel plans. I want to get good at being proactive. TS kind of inspires me on this one, he has such an exciting life because he doesn't waste a minute of it. I want to always be making memories.
Conversation with AB
Does absolute morality exist? Absolute Morality only exists if there's some universal standard of what is evil. The very fact that there's no common agreement implies no absolute morality. Event horrors (Holocaust) had/have supporters -->no absolute morality. Morality is defined by logic, empathy, and sympathy.
If you can empathize with another being, you naturally shouldn't want to do wrong to it. IE if you can empathize with Fred, you can logically prove its immoral to mistreat Fred. But not everyone empathizes equally. In fact, empathy is deeply personal. What's a person? My empathy is defined by what? By my free will? lol. Must be by my past interactions...what does this imply? Certain situations cause lack of empathy to develop? Granted, this assumes there's no "soul" and that humans realy are living chaos theory (still not certain how I feel about that). ¶ 10:41 PM 0 Comments
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Climbing, Meetings, and Robots
It was incredible! I only got to do three runs, but I had an incredible time. I really hope I find a climbing club or something of the sorts in Australia. My first two runs I did pretty well on - all fun and games, no fear. My last one, which was aptly named "The Unnamed", was a different story.
The goal was to climb the 100 feet up and stay at the top to avoid needing to hike back to the parking lot. A long story short, I did it. But it was quite the struggle. This has happened only once before, but apparently sometimes while I climb I get really irrationally scared. This was one of those times. It didn't help my mental game that our rope had an easy 3-5 feet of stretch in it and that it was my belayer's first time (although he did perfectly). I remember climbing and asking every 30 seconds, "You got me?" Iwanted to be on belay as tight as possible, which is the opposite of what I normally want. I don't know why I get scared sometimes, but it sure doesn't make the climbing any easier. (Side note: terrible use of but by me just now, I didn't contrast anything there.) Since it was such a long climb I took a few breaks on good ledges/at the belay's expense. Unfortunately when you're scared a break is the equiavlent of hugging a big rock. About 15 feet from the top, I cut my knee and left a blood trail going up - it was pretty cool to look at while I rapelled down. Felt like I had left my mark on the rock. Also, I'm pretty sure that blood trail helped the next climber find how to get up.
After the climb, ZC, AB, and I all went to Waffle House where we had the most intelligent conversation Wa Ho has ever seen. Between the car ride and that dinner AB managed to blow my mind by convincing me that free will doesn't exist, or better yet, that free will is a ridiculous concept.
What is free will? I tried answering by saying its the ability to make your own decisions; if my life were a series of if trees, each branch taken at any point would be decided completely by me. I always have the ability to choose which branch. AB argued that each branch could be decided in one of two ways (his wordings been changed to make it make sense...): 1) Uniform Distribution (or perhaps some other form of distribution 2) Chaos/Determinism.
In order for there to be a free will, there would need to be some form of "will". What's a will? Does it make decisions? Does it do so based on past experiences? Hmmm, this sounds like chaos. Maybe its just a uniform distribution, like a computer's random number generator...doesn't make much sense to me/not a convincing argument.
The last option is maybe it's neither; maybe its true randomness. Only response to that: Shit. That would imply that all of our actions are random! IE cause and effect no longer existed. Nothing we did had any direction/repercussions/effects on our future actions! This is even less convincing than a distribution.
In other news, I'm questioning my belief in Deism after this one...maybe I only hold onto it because I refuse to believe that enough/complex if trees can model human life (aka human life is chaos).
In other, other news, chaos theory is awesome and I've always referenced it in these conversations in the past but didn't know its name until this blog post.
Adios, World.
DJ ¶ 7:46 AM 0 Comments
- General Feelings: Great week, got lots done
- Busier = better
- RoboCup Progress: going great!
- Found a 14.8 V to 5 V regulator with 5 A of output (for cheap! but lots of external circuitry)
- Set up equations to define Kicker Circuit.
- Became a respectable member on the GumStix forum.
- Learned lots about how to use GumStix - mainly we just need more cables.
- Drove a motor with a square wave (aka PWM)! Now need to use an H Bridge and do it...
- Other: Not much programming (no time)
- Started tutoring Multivariable Calculus - good fun to learn again. I made the mistake of not preparing for one of my sessions and failed at Double Integrals. I've since reviewed them - they're easy. Also a good source of extra cash and motivation to wake up early.
- Hoping TS manages to visit me with a crew next week!
- I love outdoor climbing!
- Nailed my discussion with Professor KC - looks like I'll have a decent Biofluidic chip lab to come back to in January.
It was incredible! I only got to do three runs, but I had an incredible time. I really hope I find a climbing club or something of the sorts in Australia. My first two runs I did pretty well on - all fun and games, no fear. My last one, which was aptly named "The Unnamed", was a different story.
The goal was to climb the 100 feet up and stay at the top to avoid needing to hike back to the parking lot. A long story short, I did it. But it was quite the struggle. This has happened only once before, but apparently sometimes while I climb I get really irrationally scared. This was one of those times. It didn't help my mental game that our rope had an easy 3-5 feet of stretch in it and that it was my belayer's first time (although he did perfectly). I remember climbing and asking every 30 seconds, "You got me?" Iwanted to be on belay as tight as possible, which is the opposite of what I normally want. I don't know why I get scared sometimes, but it sure doesn't make the climbing any easier. (Side note: terrible use of but by me just now, I didn't contrast anything there.) Since it was such a long climb I took a few breaks on good ledges/at the belay's expense. Unfortunately when you're scared a break is the equiavlent of hugging a big rock. About 15 feet from the top, I cut my knee and left a blood trail going up - it was pretty cool to look at while I rapelled down. Felt like I had left my mark on the rock. Also, I'm pretty sure that blood trail helped the next climber find how to get up.
After the climb, ZC, AB, and I all went to Waffle House where we had the most intelligent conversation Wa Ho has ever seen. Between the car ride and that dinner AB managed to blow my mind by convincing me that free will doesn't exist, or better yet, that free will is a ridiculous concept.
What is free will? I tried answering by saying its the ability to make your own decisions; if my life were a series of if trees, each branch taken at any point would be decided completely by me. I always have the ability to choose which branch. AB argued that each branch could be decided in one of two ways (his wordings been changed to make it make sense...): 1) Uniform Distribution (or perhaps some other form of distribution 2) Chaos/Determinism.
In order for there to be a free will, there would need to be some form of "will". What's a will? Does it make decisions? Does it do so based on past experiences? Hmmm, this sounds like chaos. Maybe its just a uniform distribution, like a computer's random number generator...doesn't make much sense to me/not a convincing argument.
The last option is maybe it's neither; maybe its true randomness. Only response to that: Shit. That would imply that all of our actions are random! IE cause and effect no longer existed. Nothing we did had any direction/repercussions/effects on our future actions! This is even less convincing than a distribution.
In other news, I'm questioning my belief in Deism after this one...maybe I only hold onto it because I refuse to believe that enough/complex if trees can model human life (aka human life is chaos).
In other, other news, chaos theory is awesome and I've always referenced it in these conversations in the past but didn't know its name until this blog post.
Adios, World.
DJ ¶ 7:46 AM 0 Comments
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Duke Summer Days: Part 4
Ok, so second post of the day - this one will outline the 4th week of my Duke Summer experience. I started a new post because after advice from M.S. and reading a few other blogs I want a new format...more outline, with real text only for stuff people will want to read. The outline will likely be just for my memories.
The idea is...DJ Sharkey's How To's. In life there are so many things that are so simple to do, but hard to get a foot in the door for. For example, traveling - the first time is a scary experience. Web programming-how do I learn the difference between PHP and HTML in human terms? Camping - what do I need? I don't necessarily expect my website to be widely used, at first I just want it to be posting on my own, but maybe eventually I can have it be a wiki format (hmm starting to sound oddly like wikihow...but I'm sure I can differentiate somehow, if only by providing useful information). Scratch that last line, I just read wikihow and it looks really similar to what I was talking about. Hmmm, maybe a site I'll use more often? None the less, I want to make this site. By the way, my love of documentation kind of inspired this one...kind of a documentation on my life. ¶ 4:59 PM 0 Comments
- General Feelings: been very tired/haven't wanted to work out too much/kind of bored...think I'm getting over it though...just making me even more excited for Australia though!
- Need to be more proactive...why haven't I gone camping yet?!? Why haven't I rented a bike from the outpost?
- RoboCup Progress: Used machine shop! Awesome! Know how to use a lathe and a milling machine!
- Learned a lot about voltage/power/voltage regulators. Might even do something cool soon!
- RoboCup taught me some things about myself: 1) I love documentation...on everthing.
- Other: -Fell in love with the show weeds (watched like 2.5 seasons in 3 days, including staying up until 4:30 AM with A.P. watching and being late to work the next day due to watching). Climbing at Pilot Mountain tomorrow with Z.C. Want to go camping really badly.
- Began working on coding (something similar to this http://tralvex.com/pub/bowling/BSC.htm). Want to be able to do it in Java, C, C++, and something I can put on the web (a combo of html + php + javascript+ajax...gotta learn them all better to know what to do) A.B. is helping me learn the languages. The program was Dad's idea.
- Climbed at wall today = so much fun!
- Need to learn HTML/CSS...typing in this smart text box or whatever it's called doesn't work, I can't even indent my outline.
- After reading J.S.'s blog - I want to go to Kenya so bad!
The idea is...DJ Sharkey's How To's. In life there are so many things that are so simple to do, but hard to get a foot in the door for. For example, traveling - the first time is a scary experience. Web programming-how do I learn the difference between PHP and HTML in human terms? Camping - what do I need? I don't necessarily expect my website to be widely used, at first I just want it to be posting on my own, but maybe eventually I can have it be a wiki format (hmm starting to sound oddly like wikihow...but I'm sure I can differentiate somehow, if only by providing useful information). Scratch that last line, I just read wikihow and it looks really similar to what I was talking about. Hmmm, maybe a site I'll use more often? None the less, I want to make this site. By the way, my love of documentation kind of inspired this one...kind of a documentation on my life. ¶ 4:59 PM 0 Comments
Duke Summer Days: Part 3
So I accidentally took a week off from blogging...oops. No need to fear though friends, I will fill you in on all of the wonderful details of my life right here.
Home - this is a prime example of why I should blog more often...next to no memory of what happened at home. Friday night, I got in and went out to TF's house to watch the game; standard night, nothing to exciting. Saturday afternoon and night? I've got no idea. Sunday night - JD's place with the crew and then off to Ybor for some clubbing. At the club, JLand I were a team...we did terribly. I remember I tried dancing with this one girl and she said no. Nothing special there - the special part was I saw her waiting for a cab later that night and I really wanted to go up to her and ask (in a totally not creepy, I'm over it, purely informative kind of way) "why didn't you dance with me? what could I have done differently so you would've? Unfortunately (or Perhaps luckily) JL wouldn't do it with me. I still think its something I want to do some day.
Memories coming in now - I went to ML's Bar Mitzvah Luncheon, where I hung out with DN, LJF, and JL. Good seeing people again, especially DN because it had been a long time since I had seen him. Went swimming with the kid (Jalyn) on Sunday afternoon. Monday was a family bbq, which I unfortunately slept through a decent portion of. Very disappointed about that. Monday night I went and visited Grandpa. Grandpa is insane! He entertained me with stories about his life for over an hour - he's done some crazy things in his life. Sunday night I went to Splitsville with Josh and his brother's bar mitzvah party - I spent most of the time bowling in weird ways
Wednesday JR flew in; we had a great time. Gardens lunch - lasagna cooking (delicous, fed me for like a week), cookie baking, Barnes and Noble reading, delicous BoneFish eating (although I wouldn't reccomend coconut crusted shrimp + bacon wrapped scallops ... need something that isn't sweet in there).
That weekend I drove JR down to Camp (I love that place), hung out for a few hours. It was awesome having a Tripod Reunion with RZ and ID. We giggled like a bunch of little girls, and I'm pretty positive that Isaac had a pair of my underwear from when I was 16. After Chatuga I went to CL's's place, had a good time, met his family and friends, beat him in ping pong (only once...he killed me every other time). Ate dim sum + chicken feet at some real dim sum place in Alpharetta area. I learned threethings: 1) Real Dim Sum places have food on carts and you point at what you want. 2) Dim Sum is all about Shrimp 3) chicken feet look like baby hands (horrifying revelation before I ate the chicken foot didn't let it stop me).
DJ, Out.
Bye World. ¶ 10:55 AM 0 Comments
Home - this is a prime example of why I should blog more often...next to no memory of what happened at home. Friday night, I got in and went out to TF's house to watch the game; standard night, nothing to exciting. Saturday afternoon and night? I've got no idea. Sunday night - JD's place with the crew and then off to Ybor for some clubbing. At the club, JLand I were a team...we did terribly. I remember I tried dancing with this one girl and she said no. Nothing special there - the special part was I saw her waiting for a cab later that night and I really wanted to go up to her and ask (in a totally not creepy, I'm over it, purely informative kind of way) "why didn't you dance with me? what could I have done differently so you would've? Unfortunately (or Perhaps luckily) JL wouldn't do it with me. I still think its something I want to do some day.
Memories coming in now - I went to ML's Bar Mitzvah Luncheon, where I hung out with DN, LJF, and JL. Good seeing people again, especially DN because it had been a long time since I had seen him. Went swimming with the kid (Jalyn) on Sunday afternoon. Monday was a family bbq, which I unfortunately slept through a decent portion of. Very disappointed about that. Monday night I went and visited Grandpa. Grandpa is insane! He entertained me with stories about his life for over an hour - he's done some crazy things in his life. Sunday night I went to Splitsville with Josh and his brother's bar mitzvah party - I spent most of the time bowling in weird ways
Wednesday JR flew in; we had a great time. Gardens lunch - lasagna cooking (delicous, fed me for like a week), cookie baking, Barnes and Noble reading, delicous BoneFish eating (although I wouldn't reccomend coconut crusted shrimp + bacon wrapped scallops ... need something that isn't sweet in there).
That weekend I drove JR down to Camp (I love that place), hung out for a few hours. It was awesome having a Tripod Reunion with RZ and ID. We giggled like a bunch of little girls, and I'm pretty positive that Isaac had a pair of my underwear from when I was 16. After Chatuga I went to CL's's place, had a good time, met his family and friends, beat him in ping pong (only once...he killed me every other time). Ate dim sum + chicken feet at some real dim sum place in Alpharetta area. I learned threethings: 1) Real Dim Sum places have food on carts and you point at what you want. 2) Dim Sum is all about Shrimp 3) chicken feet look like baby hands (horrifying revelation before I ate the chicken foot didn't let it stop me).
DJ, Out.
Bye World. ¶ 10:55 AM 0 Comments
