I’m having dinner at the German Restaurant. The appetizer is mayonaisse and egg salad wrapped in a thick slice of ham and the Chicken Kiev is dripping with butter. It is druglike good. In passing I make a joke about guns and Ravana says he would seriously like one. Tell him the usual about that making you more likely to get shot but then he tells us a story. Apparently a colleague is at home, washing his car at one in the morning. The gate is open. A van pulls up with four or five men. He tries to close the gate but the men force their way in. They beat the man senseless and leave him in the driveway. The house is full of women and children. The men go inside, rob the house and rape his 13 year old niece. Thirteen year old. They steal the car and leave. His sister’s wedding is the next day. I put my fork down cause I suddenly feel like crap. Some things do make you want to get a gun.

For all the fuss and poetry and conversation, the few things that people across cultures can understand is sex and violence. We can fuck and we can kill each other. If you’re looking for a rule-set that governs humanity, the two biological constants are reproduction and death. If you think about all the social functions that you get off your ass to go two, the two big ones are weddings and funerals. You don’t (at least I don’t) even understand why you’re there, but you go. People spend hideous amounts of money with no measurable return. Why? I’ve been going to a bit of weddings and funerals and I do wonder. What I wonder more than anything is why nobody else seems to wonder. Like, how do people just know that these things are important?

I’m about as productive as the government so I took a seven hour lunch and drove Electra around. She’s chasing some kite for the Bacon Lettuce and Tomato and we ended up at this lesbian’s house. I can’t remember names cause I initially didn’t care, but it turned out to be innaresting. There weren’t dildos under the cushions or anything, but they are organizing a Pride week sometime and there’ll be rainbow kite flying thing. More interesting was what she said about women in SL (and Greater Pakiland) having to deal with harassment daily. Like catcalls, car horning, getting flashed, jerked off on, and at the worst, molested and raped. And married to people they don’t like, getting beaten, etc. I normally wouldn’t think about it, but it’s getting so that I can’t get drunk without raising money for battered women, or have a glass of wine on Tuesday without ending up at random houses. Anyways, I’ve been watching a lot of zombie movies and I have a theory.

There’s a culture of systemic violence in Sri Lanka here that I find entirely alien. I’ve honestly never been in a fight before and I can count the times I’ve lost my temper on one hand. Everyone here, however, has a story of some ass-kicking – either delivered or received. The fights usually have a kernel of fuck-all at the center – they’re ultimately for group loyalty more than any tangible reason. What I find more disturbing is that the same mentality seems to pervade Sri Lankan political and social life. This isn’t my observation, but it is telling that the electoral process often boils down to the same rush of raw numbers as the typical bar fight. This whole bleeding blue and black (or green, or red) drives society much more than any rational economic model of behavior. Sri Lankans won’t fight for love, money, or reason, but they will break a bat over someone’s skull for school, party or racial loyalty.

Barely touched a computer for days. She told me bout an aunt that has no sense of smell and consequently can’t taste anything. I remember learning that apples and onions taste pretty much the same without your sense of smell. This made me think about sex. To quote a recent NYTimes article on gaydar – ‘Using a brain imaging technique, researchers have shown that homosexual and heterosexual men respond differently to two odors that may be involved in sexual arousal, and that the gay men respond in the same way as women.’ This study, like every study on pheromones, is qualified with the usual ‘but smell isn’t important to humans’. Which would seem true. However, if you if you consider taste to be part of smell, then it makes a lot more sense. Foreplay – from kissing to Condoleezza – is all about taste. If you taste a person then you’re mainlining pheromones.

Lies: In life and, yes, work I’ll sometimes white lie what the person wants to hear. I’ll say that I’ve done something I haven’t, or that I didn’t do something, or that I know nothing about that. For example, last year I knew I lost a semi-important TPS report, but when asked I simply said I did not remember. That was a lie. Why did I do that? Jokes: I’ll often say the stupidest thing that comes to mind as a joke. For example, in response to the 100-meter law I said that we should all wear scuba gear and move to the mountains. I didn’t mean it. That was me lying about my opinion, but it crossed a certain threshold and it’s considered a joke. What is the threshold?

Google is getting smarter and smarter every day and it’s coming closer to the Holy Grail of AI – natural language processing. Google can already spell better than I can – and it doesn’t hesitate to correct me. Also, it has a rudimentary historical knowledge. These are the results from Osinga’s Google History project. I asked it to guess the year of Kennedy’s death:

By JOHN TIERNEY Published: April 20, 2004 (New York Times) LOS ANGELES, April 16 — The political consultants discreetly observed from the next room as their subject watched the campaign commercials. But in this political experiment, unlike the usual ones, the subject did not respond by turning a dial or discussing his reactions with a [...]

I’ve been researching Phantom Limb Pain. I’ve been using this image of Beowulf ripping off Grendle’s arm to represent it. For more info, this Ramachandran article is an excellent discussion. Most (80-90%) people feel a phantom of an amputated limb after it is gone. Lord Nelson thought this was evidence of an immaterial soul. It is more likely your neural representation of the limb continuing to exist even after the limb does not.

1. Conciousness is more a process than a product. Jaynes, de Chardin, Tipler, Bucke and KurzweiI have argued that consciousness is evolving, i.e. I have a different conciousness than Skhul 5 (A human fossil from 90,000 years ago). Furthermore, my children’s idea of conciousness will be almost unrecognizable to me. In that sense consciousness in [...]