http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:Grafs&section=today deviantART RSS for by:Grafs en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:17:43 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/22404006/ http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/22404006/ Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:21:46 PST
]]> ~Grafs http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/16217441/ http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/16217441/ Wed, 02 Jan 2008 02:29:12 PST
]]> ~Grafs http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/13272353/ http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/13272353/ Sat, 09 Jun 2007 00:33:54 PDT
So in trying to figure out a "fix" - no matter how minor it may be - I think it is pointless to ask clergymen (of any orthodox religion) to question their methods and what they say. Their close-mindedness to alternative points of view and their self-righteousness shifts the balance of responsibility of thinking things through towards the listeners. So in this essay, my burden is to prove why we should do the thinking/why we should be critical to whatever we hear coming from "esteemed institutions" (of Christianity, Islam, etc.).

The primary problem that I have with many religious spokespersons is that they do not explain clearly why their belief holds value. That does not mean that they don't explain at all - it's just that oftentimes they liberally use unproven, unprovable, or arbitrary conditions, foremost of which is that "God says so". It is a very convenient excuse since they refer to 'faith' as their reason and invite you to 'take the leap' as well - thereby circumventing much of critical thought when it comes to assessing the stance/position/opposing sides of any debate. One should be wary of such invitations since it really is a distraction to thought: since you can't think about it, don't. It seems to me that religious spokespersons use this line of "thought" to people to get them to believe in whatever religious matter without having to explain... and them getting away with it.

There needs to be a counter-balance to this insinuation of "unquestionable belief". There is an urgent need for as many people to be able to spot the fallacies and arbitrariness that is being planted into the minds of people by orthodoxies, and how they get away with it.

First, the source of religious tenets - "holy" documents - are arbitrary in their "holiness". Divinities did not write these documents: human hands did. Assuming but not conceding that "divine inspiration" did help human hands write these documents, or assuming but not conceding that these documents are sincere, the validity of actions and statements made within those documents are severely weakened because of their inapplicability to today's world. Simply put: the times have changed. The situation today is radically and fundamentally more different than what was when these documents were written 2000, 500, or even 100 years ago, and as such the new complexity of the times naturally makes statements within these documents irrelevant.

There is of course the fact that orthodoxies interpret and REinterpret these documents to "suit the times". Therein lies ANOTHER layer of arbitrariness - the mere fact that these people do change these documents words and interpretative details does mean that these documents do not necessarily hold truths. Not only that, but the people who do make the interpretations and reinterpretations also suffer from mistakes, misconceptions, and the occasional myopia - and what makes it worse was that during the times when these mistakes were not corrected, dogma was Law, and the laity were heavily discouraged to question the text and interpretations. Furthermore, we can expect changes on the "official" interpretations sometime in the future, meaning these orthodoxies do make mistakes - mistakes that they have not yet seen, or more likely, mistakes that they do not believe that they've made.

Orthodoxies and religious groups are naturally "behind the times" in their perspectives. That is their conservative nature being manifested, but not only that, it is because these groups are prone to stay within their comfort zones of conservativeness that makes them less likely to consider newer perspectives and newer frames of thought. What makes this a "bad" thing is that older frames of thought take into consideration less factors. It's because old frames of looking at things come from "ye olde times" when, for example, electronics haven't existed, or world wars. So these "old-fashioned perspectives" can make its adherents cripplingly myopic.

]]> ~Grafs http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/13120390/ http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/13120390/ Mon, 28 May 2007 02:47:48 PDT ------------------------------------------------------------

We Are Insignificant.

A person - a normal person - is composed of 10 trillion or so cells, has a mass of roughly 70 kilograms, and occupies a volume of about one square meter. Humans have an average lifespan of roughly 80 years, and humanity, as a collective, has the ability to change only a single planet - namely Earth - and not a single human soul has ventured more than about 100,000 kilometers away, since the farthest out anyone has gotten to is the moon. Mankind has sent probes to as far away as the outer solar system - near the Kuiper Belt - but to distances that don't even come close to a significant fraction of a light-year.

Humanity is insignificant - moreso individuals - when viewed in the backdrop of a macroperspective that is unrestrained by the common myopia of looking at ourselves from only an Earth perspective. Yes, we are truly truly beyond microscopic in terms of the scale and significance of our activities here on Earth. Compared to the planet that we live in, humanity as a collection of bodies, are a few billionths in size and in mass, and have lived through a nearly nonexistent blip in the history of our solar system.

Consider for once that we are but mere quarks in the matter of the Universe. Our sun is but one of nearly a hundred billion analogous stars within the galaxy, and that our galaxy is but one of the estimated billions to quadrillions of galaxies that the Universe holds. Given that perspective - how special then do you think you are? How special is the human race when, for one thing, life on Earth is but a statistical probability borne by the fact that 1) because the chances of life to crop up on a planetary system is a fraction of a fraction and 2) because there are a billion billion billion planetary systems in the known Universe?

No matter what people think of themselves, they really are a nanometer shy to nothingness - their existences are as brief as the half lives of unstable elements, and their activities only go so far as to change one puny little planet in one puny little galaxy. Given the fact that people - individually or collectively - are next to nothing, I've had to answer certain questions: do people even realize this? And if they do, what do they do about it?

The answer to the first question is this: According to my observations, a figurative 99% of people don't even know about it. If ever they have encountered this idea, they wouldn't give a damn about it. (Which partially answers my second question.) If they do know about it, a figurative 99% of those people wouldn't care, ignore, or rationalize it away - slinking behind religion or philosophy to justify their importance to the Universe. However, the cold hard fact still remains that the Universe wouldn't even fart, blink, or even scratch an itch at us no matter what we've ever done. We haven't conquered galaxies; we haven't blown up stars; hell, we've barely been able to escape the pull of gravity in order to send messages in metallic bottles (or probes, telescopes, and sattelites) away from our planet or to play golf on the moon. But I digress.

People subconsciously do ask themselves if they are nothing. And they try their best to break out of nothingness by doing something - anything - to make their mark in history. Some make works of art; some make grand buildings; some make great music; and a select few psycopaths decide to just kill as many people to get into the record books (yeah, i'm talking about you Stalin). The problem is that the common understanding of one's significance is extremely arbitrary. You need other people as measuring sticks of your importance - like how many people try to mob you when you go to your rock concert, or how frequently do the paparazzi stalk you as you do your groceries. Some people don't go through this arduous avenue and simply gauge their significance by their contribution to society and the respect that is reciprocated back.

That's all well and good, but then again, that is my point. Your importance is gauged by society - but who then should gauge the importance of humanity? If it's us, then things become tautological, endless, and will lead us to a postmodern conclusion that it wouldn't matter to even matter. When you take away all the people in the world, the planet (solar system, galaxy, or universe) wouldn't even pause for a microsecond to give you due respect. If you get run over, the ground wouldn't even hiccup in mourning. You might say that we're really not even supposed to get the respect of the ground, the planet, the galaxy or the Universe; that the only people who we should be trying to get... ]]> ~Grafs http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/12959319/ http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/12959319/ Mon, 14 May 2007 21:27:15 PDT
The first step in any bug hunting situation is to assess whether or not you have the virus. First, check your thumb drive if it has the bug by going to My Computer, and RIGHT click on the thumb drive. If you see two Opens with one being "0pen" and the other being "Open", you know you've got kragdor in your system.

Next, check YOUR computer if it has kragdor by pressing ctrl+alt+delete to bring up the windows task manager. Click on the Processes tab, and click on Image Name to alphabetize all your system processes. If you see krag.exe, you surely have the bug. Click on krag.exe and end process. This just freezes the bug, but doesn't cure it: it will appear the next time if you boot up.

Curing the bug from the flash drive and the Desktop is very easy and very simple: just follow the steps that I've laid out.

The situation now is that you have a virus in your Desktop and your flash drive: the priority is to get the virus out of your flash drive first. Before doing this, disable krag.exe via the Windows Task Manager>rocesses>EndProcess procedure that I had explained earlier. This prevents krag.exe from reinfecting your flash drive.

Next, copy out all your files from the flash drive into your desktop. Then, go to My Computers and right click on your flash drive to bring up a menu. Select Format and click okay. This erases everything in your flash drive, including krag.exe. Now, load the files back in by copying and pasting. The flash drive is now sanitized, congratulations.

Next, its the Desktop's turn. One thing that the author discovered was that the location of the executible krag file is located within the Windows folder. Unfortunately, there is a complicated masking system which disallows the normal user to see the krag.exe file. The solution to this is fairly simple:

First, on your navigation window (where you see your files) look up at the toolbar. Select Tools, select Folder Options, select View, and search for the option "Hide extensions for known file types" and make sure it's unchecked.

Second, go back to C:\ and right click on the empty space and create a text file. Name it "Krag.exe" and click on okay. This is NOT Krag.exe the virus; this is Krag.exe the useless file. Copy the new Krag.exe and paste it within the Windows folder. Overwrite the old real Krag.exe virus with the new, inert, and completely friendly Krag.exe file-which-is-really-a-text-file-with-nothing-in-it.

Third, pop open a can of beer or wine and celebrate in your triumph as you've just ridden yourself of a potentially debilitating krag.exe virus.

Fourth, if you liked this post, please spread the word and link it back here. Thank you for your time, and thanks for trusting this guide to exterminating the computer virus called Krag.exe

]]> ~Grafs http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/12138969/ http://Grafs.deviantart.com/journal/12138969/ Sun, 11 Mar 2007 04:03:04 PDT
A Very Personal View

My “today friends” talk about movies, TV shows, love lives, and funny everyday events. All the while, I vacantly stare upward at the rotating ceiling fan. Not quite noticing the concrete and metal, I try to envisage the world as Neil Armstrong would have seen it from outer space. I’d then switch to how Henry Kissinger from his political lens, Milton Friedman from an economist’s point of view, or Michel Foucault from the social scientist’s perspective. Then, I’d even try to think how Will Wright, Chris Taylor, Phil Harrison, Tim O’Reilly, or Steve Jobs would see this world we live in, as a place of opportunity from the bountiful future.

There is a seemingly invisible barrier that separates me from the rest of my “new friends” here in college, and I know that it is there. I sometimes cannot relate with the topics that are discussed, since I have not watched, heard, seen, or thought about that certain something that is on everyone else’s mind. If I brought up what was occupying my mind, my “friends” would just nod their heads, admit they cannot relate, and switch the topic back into something most probably unimportant however it interests them.

Here is my dilemma: how can I justify bringing up topics that I feel are revolutionary to a group of people who choose to be apathetic and myopic? Can I accept the fact that maybe these “new friends” that I have are predestined to be complacent and that I cannot do anything about it? Can I bring myself to shake these young men and women from their blissful stupor, even though it flies against the face of etiquette; in respecting a person’s decision to be blissfully comfortable with the status quo?

It wasn’t always like this. In high school, my “yesterday’s friends”, though a relaxed and even more entertaining bunch, were much more motivated and ambitious. Needless to say, we would spend most of our lunch breaks talking about geopolitics, advanced technologies, and the future. After graduation, some of my old friends emigrated to study elsewhere. Mostly alone, I then comforted myself by the thinking that college—the Ateneo in particular—had a greater density of intellectuals, so my thinking would truly constructive. I had hoped to find a think-tank, but as it turns out, my thoughts have become my own burden. It had become a silent mark of alienation and difference that put me in an inescapable ideological exile; a technocrat amongst epicureans.

“Despair” fits as the description of choice for what I am feeling. Gnawing at my subconscious is the thought that I may well be rendered impotent by the end of my stay in college due to the intellectual stagnation and lack of ambition that has swallowed up the college campus. Also nibbling at my innards is the likelihood that the rest of the wide world shares these attributes. One must understand that any effort to change a setting for the better can be easily undone by any level of resistance by the greater majority, especially if the majority were a self-indulgent mob. Democracy is its own demon when the mean and mode citizen is of dubious worth.

The basic fact of life is that when complacency and stagnation are widespread, you either change before it is too late, or one courts disaster. The problems of the status quo are numerous, and definitely insurmountable by the efforts of any group of people unless they can muster and motivate enough of their fellow humans to act. I could write a complete essay enumerating the problems that we face. For the sake of this essay, I think it will suffice for me to say that we have problems of the environment, of intercultural tolerance and openness, of resources, and of resource inequalities.

Those are, however, very macroscopic global issues. There are also more specific difficulties that face the Philippine youth (if not now, then in the near future): stiff employment and capital competition from the Chinese and Indians. Kids on this side of the South China Sea most often fail to consider the challenge posed by a more globalized employment market, and thus the ambitious dreamers of China and India have not only their competitive (wage) advantage, but also a more philosophical/ideological/cultural advantage of entrepreneurship and hard work.

So then what are the chances that this generation of people would make sure that there will be a future for the unborn? What are the chances for my “new friends” to live in enduring and virtuous prosperity in a hypercompetitive future when they cannot even find it within themselves to overcome arbitrarily-tagged “obstacles” such as schoolwork? How will the majority of today’s Philippine youth cope against their cheaper and more motivated counterparts from China and India? I honestly thin... ]]> ~Grafs