You know what I really hate?

You DON'T? Are you BLIND? There's a whole SECTION for stuff I hate! Yes, anyway, what I really hate just at this moment is buggy browsers. But let's start at the beginning.

1. Where browsers came from
2. How browsers developed
3. The present and forward

Where browsers came from

According to all the Histories of The Internet that I just finished reading, the first web browser was created way back on or around January 12th 1992. Funny, isn't it, to think that the web didn't exist until then? Up to a year later, there were a grand total of 50 HTTP hosts -- so your bookmark file didn't have to be all that big, to tell you the truth. In September 1993, Marc Andreesen's brainchild Mosaic -- the first graphical web browser, the previous ones were text-based and command-based -- was released for Mac and Windows (it had been released for X-Windows, on UNIX, in January).

It's pretty obvious to me that that was when the "big boom" started... a timeline of the Internet will show nothing more than a hissing fuse of servers until then, when the 'net grew more than 340,000% annually. There was no warning, and little expectation, and absolutely zero preparedness. So I guess I can't blame the browsers for being so crummy, but maybe they could have used a little more common sense.

How browsers Developed

When baby Marc [Andreesen] started Netscape in 1994, he knew he was on to a good thing. The standard for web pages was HTML, which at that time was an extremely simple language that barely required a computer to interpret. With no standards body and nobody to stop him, he freely added to this language to give it to more capability -- and this was a good idea, and his innovations are the main reasons the web is so much fun. He created the ability to put images on pages, and the ability to make tables (still one of the cornerstones of all web design), and added all sorts of cool things like frames and forms and basically everything we now use on a regular basis in our websites.

However, he -- or Netscape in general -- began to get carried away. By late 1996, standards were forming, and Microsoft's horribly catch-up attempt at a web browser was on the horizon. There was also a group, the W3C, which since August 1994 had been trying to bring coherence to the language, and was beginning to suceed. Heady with being the market leader, Netscape continued to come out with new tags (or extensions to HTML) without notifying or consulting the public first. This led to such things as the unanimously-voted Most Annoying Tag Ever -- BLINK -- and widespread incompatibilities with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which through admittedly unfair marketing techniques was gaining ground. Microsoft, ever-ready to maintain its reputation as the quintissential Big Evil Corporation, was doing exactly the same thing, with fun and easy but technically irresponsible tags such as MARQUEE (which made a line of text scroll across your screen) and BGSOUND (which allowed you to add background sounds to your pages, subverting Netscape's pre-existent EMBED tag, which allowed you to embed ANY multimedia, INCLUDING background sounds, but which was harder to implement).

The incompatibilities worsened steadily into versions 3.0 of the browsers. People began to make double pages -- one version for Netscape, and one for MSIE. Or, worse, they would stick an obnoxious little "Designed for X browser" logo at the bottom of their page, as if alienating close to half your audience was somehow a loyal and worthy thing to do. If Microsoft wasn't so nasty, maybe this wouldn't have happened, and people would have tried to adopt both, but the Microsoft-hating loyal Netscape users started the custom, and newly-converted MSIE people struck back in kind. And, of course, Netscape didn't like Microsoft very much for giving away it's browser while Netscape was just climbing into the black with its $50 price tag. So the companies began to make incompatibilities on PURPOSE (all though neither would admit it) to force loyalties. This backfired, and instead everybody got really pissed off with them both, and demanded some order.

Any sane person would have seen that the best thing to do for version 4.0 in light of these events was for both companies to throw their weight behind the W3C, tell it come out with a standard version chop chop, and produce browsers to match. This didn't happen, for several reasons:

1. The W3C didn't have the confidence of anyone right then. They'd managed to go seriously astray in producing version 3.0 of HTML, which had been so completely unworkable that it had been totally abandoned. They were working on version 3.2, but it wasn't going to happen for a while.
2. NS and MS were in a competitive frenzy. They couldn't stand around waiting for W3C to blow its nose, far less make a standard, or the other would release version 4.0 first. And they hated each other's guts, so cooperation without a third party was out of the question.
3. Browsers based on a single standard would have to compete in other ways -- ease of use, reliability, speed of operation, price, and features additional to web browsing such as FTP, IRC, News and E-mail. This did not sit well with either company: both version 3.0 browsers were huge, slow, buggy pieces of shit, and their preliminary forays into versions 4.0 were equally bad.
4. Both companies were still operating under the ethos that He Who Makes the Best Tags Wins. This was, in fact, no longer the case. By version 4.0, just about anything was going to be possible -- people were able to do whatever they wanted to do with their documents. Getting them to do it reliably, on the other hand, and on both browsers simultaneously, was a task even God had only managed to do once, and he took it down because the page was boring. Additionally, new tags were becoming rapidly passé, with the technology diverging into HTML for logical structures, style sheets for presentation, and JavaScript (or, if you were a power-hungry evil monopoly, VBScript).
5. And of course, because everybody knows business people aren't sane. Don't you read Dilbert?

The Present and Forward

So the versions 4.0 of the browsers are a huge mess. They have advanced capabilities, but they don't work together, so it's still often necessary to make double-scripts and double-pages to get a site to work. And, as a web developer, that really, really, really pisses me off.

That's bile for now.

I'm finding it very interesting at the moment to think about what causes friends and friendships to form, to fail, and to last, because of what some of my friends are currently going through. It seems to me that there should be limited set of reasons why people like each other, and that these factors must be fairly understandable. If that's true, we should be able to predict who will like each other, and who won't, which seems really useful. And, like all my theories, I aim to form some kind of method of varying these factors to control the situation. Control freak? Me? Nah.

Let's split this topic up:

• What is a friendship?
• Why friendships form
• How friendships form
• How to maintain a friendship
• Why friendships stop
• How friendships stop
• How to keep the friends you want and lose the ones you don't, without hurting anybody's feelings. (aka: How to be a Manipulative Bastard)

1. What is a friendship?

This is important to define. What is a friend, and what is a friendship? Where does friendship start and stop -- i.e., at what stage from acquaintance to friend, and what stage goes past friendship to some other level?

Going solely on my own feelings, I'd have to say that a friend is someone you

1. know a bit about,
2. admire, and
3. care for.

I can't think of anybody I would classify as a real friend who doesn't meet all three of those specifications. I would classify any others as just "acquaintances" or at some stage in between an acquaintance and a friend. The only possible exception might be someone who meets (i) and (iii) but whom you don't admire, a "no-good" friend, but I'm prepared to demote such people as just acquaintances if there's really NOTHING you admire about them. Some might be losers in most aspects, but would nevertheless have some redeeming quality. Nobody has friends whom they don't admire for something. Maybe this has some primal evolutionary reason -- we make friends with people who have a skill or a quality we lack, thus by banding together the group is stronger. That certainly makes evolutionary sense, and I have repeatedly found that a great deal of human society can still be boiled down to evolutionary terms. This precludes the idea of "love at first sight" to a major extent, unless you're willing to classify what somebody looks like as "knowing a bit about them" which would seem like an overly shallow thing to do, and would lead to people falling in love with wax dummies all the time :-) (well, okay, no, because you'd probably ascertain whether the person was real or not from looking at them). Actually, it's quite possible that the third qualification is false: perhaps once one and two are met, three happens automatically? But we'll leave it in, because these items are not really distinct anyway: in order to admire someone you have to know about them, and once you admire them you may care for them. We were splitting up what was really a single concept to make it more understandable.

However, there is one qualification I overlooked initially:

4. the feeling must be MUTUAL.

Therefore, no matter how much your stalker loves you, you two aren't friends unless you have a thing for stalkers. I have a feeling -- nay, a certainty, since I came back and wrote this paragraph subsequently, having encountered a problem further down -- that this fourth qualification will be important later.

That decided, then, what is a friendship? It is not quite as anal-retentive to define this as it seems. In defining it, we can figure out by definition when it starts and when it ends. I would say that it begins and ends when the three qualifications I listed are met and subsequently no longer apply. That would mean that somebody who you love is still also your friend, which matches common sense. But how do you judge whether the qualifications are satisfied or not? I don't think there's any empirical way to judge whether you care for someone, and "knowing about" someone is equally fuzzy. But those definitions will do for now.

SIDE TOPIC: War & Peace

(can you believe this is a side topic?)

Incidentally to this topic, this definition of friendship is supportive of another one of my little theories in life, which is that it is impossible to hate somebody you really know. Perhaps I'm optimistic, but I think everyone must have SOME admirable quality if you just get to know them well enough. So while someone may have a large number of qualities you detest -- for instance, they might be a racist or a religious fundamentalist or something equally distasteful -- but once you understand WHY, you might not AGREE, but you will understand, and you will like them anyway because of whatever other admirable qualities they have. This is perhaps an obvious point, but not to everyone, and it's very important, because that would preclude war in the current Information Age.

Follow the logic to the conclusion, and look at past evidence: fights and wars throughout history have typically been between groups of people with different culture, a great deal of the time different languages, and even more often significant physical separation -- even civil wars tend to occur between inhabitants of a region, although there are exceptions such as those fought on a religious basis (but even then, different religions tend to ghettoize and cluster together, introducing a spatial separation. But at the heart of these reasons, the disputes are mainly fueled by a lack of UNDERSTANDING: misinformation and propaganda, for this reason, are such useful tools in war: rumours of false atrocities or disgusting practices like cannibalism or torture have been used time and again to boost morale in armies. Wars between America and the former USSR or Germany are ideal examples, as well as the Crusades: both sides in all three cases (except possibly the Germans considering the Americans) held glaringly false impressions of the others -- the Americans were considered decadent by the USSR; the USSR deemed totalitarian and soul-crushing; the Turks were infidels to the knights, and the feeling was mutual.

So with the current widespread availability of information -- and the truth is always more abundant than fiction when both sides are communicating fully -- such understandings are less likely. Spatial, linguistic and cultural differences are merely devices which inhibit this communication. Some might say that such wars in the past were based on ideology, not misunderstanding: but if you understand someone's ideology, their motivation for doing or not doing something, then you don't hate it, even if you don't approve of it.

2. Why and how friendships form

In defining the term, we also determined why a friendship forms: the qualifications are met. However, HOW a friendship forms is still to be decided. Let's look at each qualification in turn:

(i) knowing about the person

To get to know somebody, you have to find out about them. You find out from external sources -- everything from friends to the phonebook to the dating service -- but the richest source is the person themselves. You have to talk to them -- at length -- to get to know them. This is why the art of conversation is so valuable. So, if you're looking for advice on how to make friends, you have to be able to communicate.

As an aside, the method of communication need not be face-to-face conversation. Pen-pals have been getting romantically involved for decades now, forget just friends. And I know a number of people who have ten times as many friends online as offline, because they can write intelligently, just not speak that way. I've found this very interesting, and it was one of the reasons I wrote this. And of course, the information you find out doesn't need to be abstract -- physical information like the fact that the other person is a complete babe with really great skin and a killer smile, or financial information -- that their daddy owns 40% of Australia -- can be just as useful, and, provided you're evil and shallow minded (like me) then these may sway your opinion.

(ii) admiring the person

there's probably no way to CONTROL this, since what you admire is going to be a quality inherent within somebody. In a practical situation, you might steer the conversation towards things that you enjoy, or things that interest you. If they're interested in such things, and -- importantly -- are better than or close to equal to you in that field, or in a related field, then by the previously-mentioned evolutionary impetus you will probably find yourself admiring them.

(iii) caring about the person

as I mentioned, this is probably a result of the first two.

(iv) the feeling being mutual

This is very important to forming a friendship. See where that inserted paragraph came in? :-) It's all very well finding out all about somebody and finding out you like them, but if they don't know you exist then nothing's ever going to happen, and your one-sided friendship may turn to infatuation, stalking, long lonely nights developing hidden-camera negatives in your basement, and eventual institutionalisation. That's something to avoid, so you need to tell THEM stuff about YOU too. Again, the communication doesn't need to be face to face, or abstract.

And that's basically how friendships form -- can you believe some people do all that automatically? That's just weird.

3. How to maintain a friendship

Here I begin to enter I'm-bullshitting-you territory. I mean, how the hell would I know? But the purpose of these things is just to put across my untested theories, so why the hell should I care if it's accurate or not? Once we understand that, that's cool. See? Now you can't hate me :-).

I've seen lots of friendships break down recently, and analysing them I'd have to say it's because of the second qualification: when admiration in either party fades away, then the friendship breaks down. That's what makes friendships dynamic: to maintain the friendship, still using my evolutionary model, each side of the friendship must be better than the other with respect to at least one activity, or know more with about one thing, and the other party must be interested in that aspect, or the impetus fades. Since everyone is learning and improving (to a lesser or greater extent) all the time, the balance can shift and things go wrong. The same thing can happen if one of the parties is no longer interested in the aspect they used to admire -- when interests change, you may no longer care whether or not they're better or worse than you, and so the impetus again fades.

This is why a good strong friendship often has a strong competitive undercurrent which no one likes to admit to, especially if the two fields of interest are related. Sometimes, a happy compromise happens in which each party continues to improve in their field and yet be interested in the other's separate field: for instance, a singer and a songwriter, or some similarly complementary pair.

Therefore, to maintain your friendship you have to keep communicating, keep letting the other party know about the field in which they are interested, keeping them interested. And, of course, you have to be continuously improving and changing in that or another field. Everything else will take care of itself. Too often, in my view, people take relationships for granted once they're started, and so they quickly break down again. Now you know better :-) Finally, it's also important to know when to let a relationship go: if the person really no longer has an interest in your area, even though you're communicating well, then it's important to realise that and give up, to save everybody a lot of stress. The feeling has to be MUTUAL.

4. Why and how friendships stop

The previous topics having been completed, this is easy: if you don't do all these things I've been mentioning, then your friendships will break down and stop. Well. That was brief.

5. How to keep the friends you want and lose the ones you don't, without hurting anybody's feelings.

(aka: How to be a Manipulative Bastard)

So far most of what I've said has been talking about starting and keeping friends and friendships. Sometimes though, you have a friend -- old or new -- who you find you no longer have any interest in. What to do? Assuming you don't want to hurt their feelings, out of some kind of sentimental, illogical attachment, or just not wanting to be thought of as the evil manipulative bastard that you are, this can be difficult. If you DON'T care about their feelings, then it's easy, by the way -- you just stop communicating with them, and indicate that you don't want to hang around with them anymore. They'll be pissed, but you won't care.

If you do care, then, unfortunately, you have to do the same thing, but more subtley. I really can't think of an easy way. They still like you, you don't like them, but they won't go away. You can try deliberately boring them, but that's a bit on the bastard side too, and no fun for you either. So, all in all, honesty is best here, but they're still gonna be pissed.

Wasn't it disappointing to read all this to find that the most useful answer is the one I didn't get? Not half as disappointing as writing it, let me tell you.

What do I want out of life, how best do I get it, and what factors do I need to consider?

What I want out of life is happiness. This is always true, no matter how you look at it or reconsider things - everything boils down to a desire for contentment.

How do I achieve happiness? My first thought is that in the simplest situation, I should be able to become happy by fulfilling all my needs. But "needs" are fictional. What we universally classify as "basic needs" - food, water, shelter, et al - are what are required to stay alive. However, we do not "need" to stay alive, if you think about it. We want to stay alive. Therefore, almost any need we come across has a want at its heart. This is important to remember. It means that any "needs" you find defined by any source are essentially false. So, hereafter, "needs" and "wants" should be taken to mean essentially the same thing.

Now some people fool themselves into thinking that they should be happy once they have all their needs, and if, once they have all that they think that they need and are still not happy then they are greedy or malcontent. This is dumb, because what they think they need has been arbitrarily defined, either by themselves based on certain perceived criteria on their part, or, as is more often the case, by the combined pressures of society, and religion. Essentially, happiness is happiness, and if for some reason you want more than society has defined that you need, then it doesn't mean you're malcontent, it means that the needs you have defined are not complete. You can be happy by fulfilling all your needs, but first you must seek and define your needs, and everybody's needs vary. So to be happy, you have to be honest with yourself.

Now, thinking along these lines, it seems that your needs are defined and limited by how much you know: because, while you may not want everything, the more you know exists, the more things in that there are to want. What you want is a percentage, or in some other way related to, how much you know. Now, morality and to some extent religion define wanting all the desirable things of which you know as "greed" and further says that this is somehow wrong. This would be appear to be illogical in any case - how can wanting be wrong? It's just a thought. Surely it would be the acquisition and the means of acquisition which, if at all, would be "wrong" but my opinion is that this too is false. A basic human characteristic is desire, and in nearly all cases this desire seems to extend endlessly, defined by the level of knowledge for an individual. The only apparent exception occurs in the case of the "good Samaritan," the person who "lives to help others," and those who feel guilt through acquisition. In nearly all cases, again, these would appear to be cases of self-delusion, albeit in some cases admirable self-delusion - while doing good by the abandonment of worldly goods may cause happiness, it seems to me unlikely that this happiness would be greater than that obtained by fulfilling all one's needs. For some people, however, religious and/or social brainwashing will have made these the only ways to achieve happiness.

With analysis, it becomes apparent that knowledge therefore also limits one's happiness through interaction with the real world and by the fact that no knowledge is discrete. If for instance all somebody wants is good-tasting food within easy reach and a dry place to sleep, the knowledge required to remain constantly happy in that state is vast: one must learn farming, and all its inherent skills such as animal husbandry and/or agriculture, and one must have a knowledge of construction to the extent that a dry place to sleep can be maintained indefinitely. This knowledge leads on to other knowledge: how to make a comfortable place to sleep, how to get more food, how to store food so it doesn't have to be killed every day - these are all things that the previously-happy person will now become unhappy desiring. This same knowledge, in certain cases, will produce unhappiness another way, through interaction with the real world: if one lives in a swamp, or the animals you were farming die, one's knowledge of a dry place to sleep and easy-to-reach food makes one unhappy.

Think of a graph of happiness with increasing knowledge. At no knowledge, you want nothing and get nothing, so your happiness is total, or infinite, depending upon whether you think there is a limit to happiness. Ignorance is supreme happiness. Then, as knowledge increases, happiness decreases exponentially to some limit. Now, factor in the happiness obtained for a level of knowledge, assuming this arbitrarily to be a straight-line function of the amount of knowledge. Thus, although there is infinite happiness at no knowledge, there is also infinite happiness at infinite knowledge, and since no one has no knowledge, this is the only approachable point of happiness. It also suggests that there is a low point of happiness at one stage, when one's unhappiness due to knowledge of what one does not have is least balanced by happiness at what one does have. Experience shows that this happens frequently on a personal and even on a social level.

Thus, the way to be happy is to get as much knowledge as possible.
But what form of knowledge? And what about:

• Power?
• Money?
• Acceptance?
• Love?

How do they factor in? Are they all knowledge?

This clearly requires a lot more thinking about. Maybe one day I'll do it.

How?
How can you do it?
How can you?
You who know the creation of new life as a chemical reaction you can draw,
You who can show every step of the way to build up the very substances of our flesh,
You who have seen the thoughts in our minds modelled as random interactions of simple systems on a computer still harbour such thoughts?
You who know the basis of our bodies, minds and souls to be as simple at their heart as an apple falling from a tree,
still find it necessary to believe in an explanation for the lights in the sky?
Does all of this mean nothing?
Can you discredit every original thought in the last thousand years as steps in the wrong direction and not know in your hearts you are making a mistake?
Why can't you remember that not everything your mother said was true? Why can't you believe that when you believe so much else?
WHY?

I just had an insight. It's been an awfully long time since I had one, or any kind of creative thought at all for that matter, since I've been out of school and my brain sensed that ceasing to function no longer brings any kind of meaningful retribution. It came when I did something I never expected to do: I turned off a Madonna song on the radio (which is odd enough) to listen to the sound of the rain on the roof (which is much more odd).

Doesn't the phrase along bring to mind the most wonderful of all feelings, the warm, snug feeling of being in a nice warm bed in a nice cool room and the sound of the rain outside? It is distinctly a Caribbean, tropical experience I think, for nowhere else do you get such a vast prevalence of galvanised roofing in housing combined with the large, heavy droplets of warm tropical rain. And the reason the feeling is so good is also very hard to explain: I feel it must have something to do with a desire to be back in the womb, a trait I frequently recognize in myself and one I think we all share deep down.

But the point was, why did I turn down the radio in order to listen to a sound so distinctly trivial? It was -- I check my clock now -- a few minutes before midnight, and I was about to go to bed. The radio was on, and it was playing Beautiful Stranger, which doesn't get nearly enough airplay despite the fact that DJ Richard Graham says "Yeah, baby, yeah" every ten second nowadays. I could listen to the rain any time, Madonna only until it dropped off the heavy-rotation list, but the compulsion to turn it off was too strong to resist, and as the rain starts again now I remember why. It's because that easy, constant, surrounding sound of real rain falling is so natural and above all so REAL.

Not for a long time will the best stereophonics be able to mimic the sound of rain falling, because it is one of very few sounds that actually does happen on all sides of you at once, not just giving you echoes. It's that surrounding that makes rain so psychologically comforting. But also rain is natural: it is not like a song or even an instrumental piece, it is the perfect random white noise, with no thoughts behind it, no direction, no hidden motives, no message. There is nothing to listen FOR in rain, it doesn't care if you listen or not, it is simply there to be listened TO. And even though on the face of it you could say that you could listen to rain anytime and it would always be the same. At any other time, the temperature, cloud height, humidity and wind speed could all be different, and the drops would never be the same size or speed, and they would never hit the same exact spots in the same order they did before: every fall of rain is a once-in-a-lifetime, personal experience -- because the rain sounds different depending where you are. Madonna, on the other hand, though famous for quick changes in character, will always have the same recording to play over and over again.

Which means I'll turn my word processor off now, and get back to my personal performance of cumulo-nimbus in concert.

It upsets me to realise that I am only really creative when I am unhappy. It's as if I can only create positive things when given negative input. This is doubly annoying in that it means I can either be creative or I can be happy but not both, and more importantly that I can be creative for only a limited time. This is because creating things, more than anything else, makes me deeply and long-lastingly happy. So the more I create, the happier I will become, and the slower I will create more. Realising this, of course, makes me very unhappy, but I doubt that mere frustration is enough to make me unhappy enough to create. So what is the solution?

I always thought that what encouraged creativity was empty time to think, because I would frequently get my best thoughts just as I went to bed, or even in the middle of the night, or on vacation in a peaceful spot. But this was not really the case; the quiet times were when I *created*, but I got the *ideas* while annoyed and uncomfortable and unhappy the rest of the day, these things stimulated me such that I could create easily as soon as I had a moment. So my most creative moments, logically, were during school and even more so during exams, since I hated my school with a passion and exams were even furtherly stressful. This was also why, when faced with what I thought would be a very creative time, a totally empty and unscheduled year off, I entered a complete dry spell. Without stimulation -- without STRESS -- I had nothing to drive creativity, no negative to work against. I require resistance, or I don't move.

So how am I to keep myself maximally creative when everything is under my control? The secret is to find something to oppose. A goal is not an opposition, it's false self-generated opposition. I need a challenge, but more than a challenge, a challenge that taunts me and tells me I can't conquer it. A job would provide the kind of stress I require (not to mention the monetary resources I enjoy when I have them), but is this really the best way? I need that source of motivation other self-motivated people have. Most of these people have deep-seated insecurity or some kind of childhood trauma as their source, or at least chemically-driven mania from hormonal imbalance. I can't get these things for myself, obviously.

Incidentally to this, this theory would explain both the motivation to suceed which I used to possess and which failed me in form four or so, as well as the huge burst of creativity I experienced during my six month period of depression. It would also help to explain the enhanced motivation and creativity of homosexuals everywhere. There is nothing inherent in homosexuality that would make us more creative, but it is the stigma and the pressure of being a homosexual in today's societies that makes us creative. Strange to think that acceptance would rob us of the one great quality that many use as an argument for it.

What just REALLY pissed me off: people who miss the point of art. In any form.

I just saw a segment on VH1 in which 15 people consecutively failed to realise WHY Alanis is naked in the "Thank U" video. What is WITH these people, are they RETARDED? Thank you is all about the change in her attitude between the albums... she was bitter and unhappy before, but after the huge success of the first album she felt sort of guilty and fake, and she didn't like that, so she decided to be even more honest in the second album, showing that she really wasn't as extreme as that, that she has a softer side, that sometimes things are her fault and not somebody else's. The nakedness is a symbol of her new honesty, I mean, surely that's obvious? She's certainly not trying to be sexy -- what with stringy hair, pale skin and thunderthighs -- so there's gotta be some other reason, right people? But nooooo, people see naked and they think she's trying to be a slut. It pisses me off.

And of course, this is just one symptom of a wider problem. People miss the POINT of songs so often! "Hook" (by Blues Traveller) is a sarcastic song about the way people don't listen to the lyrics of songs and just like, duh, the hook, and yet I've actually HEARD people saying they don't like anything except the hook in that song! Dammit, that's annoying! It just gets me angry to think how often the real messages in songs and art must be overlooked -- does this happen all the time, or are these just isolated examples? I would have chosen the latter before, but after those 15 idiots on VH1 I'm not so sure. VH1 has some kind of show like that, doesn't it? It puts groups of people to watch and comment on videos, and they always get them amazingly wrong? Housewives watching rap videos and preschoolers watching romantic videos and stuff like that.

It makes me think there's no POINT in creating anything original. Since the meaning seems to lie more in the observer than the artist, the only people who will understand are other artists. And then, who knows if its the real message? I often think I must be reading too much into a song -- finding more meaning than they probably put in there. Is that worse than missing the intended meaning? It makes creativity seem such a sham. Which pisses me off, because I love to create stuff, and now it seems there's no point.

Oh well, that's my bile for today.

I had forgotten what it was like to be closeted. I had forgotten, for a while, the motivation which had overcome even my greatest fears and my worst paranoia, back then, to tell people I was gay. I'd grown accustomed to the too-easy company of my friends, the way coming out to the latest person had just become an amusing game, which I'd promised to myself it would never be.

I remember now the pain and the frustration and the constant nagging feelings of inferiority which drove me so close to tears and worse time and again before the bubble of friends had grown large enough to be constantly comfortable. I'd forgotten the way the guilt rises unbidden in your mind at every mention of the same sex and pools in your head, literally weighing you down. The genuinely painful feeling of gazing at a gorgeous man while pretending to be looking elsewhere. The way of being constantly vigilant for suspicious glances from him and others, of watching yourself for a telltale gesture or a too-long glance in the long direction. Also the insidious feelings of shame when you lie and look embarrassed at the most innocent question from another about the direction of your affections, even though intellectually you know it is their fault and not yours that keeps them from knowing the truth. The literally claustrophobic sensations when the conversation turns to areas in which your knowledge is unKnowledge, facts you shouldn't know and can't tell, experiences you can't talk about, opinions you cannot back up without giving yourself away. I'd forgotten the way frustration becomes an oil that thickens the air and impedes your movement and chokes the vitality slowly out of you, like drowning in thick fog.

I feel now, briefly recloseted by a boatload of ignorants, exactly as I felt more than a year ago when nobody knew. It's as if my months of depression had never happened, the constant affirmations had gone unnoticed, the wonder of acceptance had never been experienced. The affirmation has to KEEP happening. In order to feel truly normal, or at least stable, you need tacit acceptance every day, and no amount of internal affirmation and self-acceptance will do.

This is not true, of course, for every condition. But in the specific case of homosexuality, the influences are all negative, the assumptions ALL lie in the opposite direction, there is not just a lack of acceptance to pull you into society but a measure of intolerance pushing you out of it at every second. And now that I have been out, I cannot remember how I ever managed being "in". It is an abhorrent, degrading experience to deny yourself at any time the feelings and expressions which the majority of humanity takes for granted so often. Which is why as soon as I am able I will out myself further, I will help others out themselves, I will fight with every weapon I can find the forces which keep the closets closed. I will not have myself recloseted again until they shut my coffin's lid.

I believe that science fiction is basically the only type of fiction worth reading. To see why, you have to go back to basics. Why do we read anything at all? I can think of three reasons:

1. To inform
2. To entertain
3. To "enlighten"

"Enlightenment" sounds fairly pretentious, but what I mean by enlightenment is "giving new ideas". Something that merely informs you is not quite the same: a newspaper informs you about the latest developments in the world, but in a framework you understand. A physics textbook, on the other hand, would enlighten you: you'd gain a whole new concept of the way the world worked, a fairly fundamental new way of thinking about something.

All fiction is meant to entertain. But science fiction is the only genre which enlightens you. Read a suspense novel and you get a mental maze: complicated, but nothing conceptually new. Just because you can't find the way out doesn't mean it's not basically the same as all other mazes, everywhere. Worse again is straight fiction. Straight fiction is basic fiction: stuff that sounds like real life, but never really happened. These are novels filled with different combinations of the same events, endlessly retold. The names are different, the location changes, the combinations of character traits are different every time, but it's the closed variety of a kaleidoscope -- merely the same pieces shaken into a different pattern.

But science fiction is different. Good science fiction feeds you concepts you would never have thought of otherwise: even if completely impossible physically, they give you mental images that are totally new to you -- new forms of life, new ways of looking at the universe, new ways of thinking about life, fundamental questions on the order of "why are we here?" are the bread and butter of well-written science fiction. The most fundamental question fiction can provide is, perhaps "why am I unhappy?".

But why then does science fiction have such a frequently bad reputation? Why do people tend to think about science fiction as not "real" reading? The problem is that science fiction is a relatively young form: basic fiction has been around for thousands of years (starting with the Bible, if you ask me...). Science fiction, on the other hand, was unknown until the nineteenth century and didn't really attract many authors until the early 20th. So while straight or basic fiction has been around long enough to produce some shining examples -- the prettiest kaleidoscope combinations -- science fiction was still finding its feet, and people were comparing the two.

Of course, there is no denying that there is a lot of bad science fiction: people retelling old stories using new words; knights in armour replaced by heroes in shining space suits. But there is also a vast body of worthless fiction. Well-written science fiction is still better than well-written fiction.

The fundamental point is that if I wanted real life, then I would go outside and live my life. There's no point in writing fiction that's just like life anyway. In the realm of sci-fi you change the universe and guess the consequences; nothing could be more interesting. And the best of the best science fiction makes plausible changes: these are writers who looks at the way the world is headed and try and predict where it will end up. This is the most interesting kind of fiction of all, and mentally it helps prepare us for the consequences of our actions. Jurassic Park, to take a popular example, gave everybody their first taste of what the power of genetic engineering might be. The 2001 trilogy predicted a number of concepts of space travel that are still guiding people today. And amongst the countless novels about alien lifeforms, hopefully there is one that has successfully predicted what things really will be like when we meet aliens for the first time.

Needless to say, I can't wait.

This article is an adaptation of an impromptu rant I went into on a mailing list, hence the somewhat light-hearted and ever-so-slightly aggressive tone.

Science and religion are two systems with the same goal: to explain the universe. The most popular example of this explanation is that of perhaps the most basic question: where did the universe come from in the first place? Yes, this is a creationism rant guys, go grab your Bibles and come out fighting!

The reason why one particular system cannot currently win, and maybe why neither ever will, is because when asked "Why does the universe exist?" both systems say "because". The difference between the system is, religion expects you to be satisfied with that answer, and science doesn't. Let me illustrate in two interviews:

RELIGION:

Q: So where did everything come from?

A: It all came from God creating it.

Q: Okay then, where'd god come from?

A: He/She/It just exists.

Q: But that's lame!

A: You must have faith. Stop asking questions. Support our roof-repair fund. Don't have sex with other men. Wear funny clothing. Stop doing fun things.

SCIENCE:

Q: So where did everything come from?

A: It all came from a big bang.

Q: Okay then, where'd the big bang come from?

A: Well, we dunno. Maybe from a big crunch, but before that there was ANOTHER big bang... and, well, we're looking into it. We think we can find out one day.

Q: But that's lame!

A: We know! Give us more money and we'll see if we can get a better answer.

Both systems require you to have faith (and don't say they can co-exist, because REALLY they can't, and don't get me started on that one). One asks for your faith perpetually, the other one asks for it until they get an answer. For this reason, I put my faith in -- and my money towards -- science, not religion. And, for the stop-having-fun, warp-your-fragile-little-mind reasons, I also actively discourage religion in most forms. Religion is dumb, dumb, dumb. But hey! That's just my opinion. However, it will remain my opinon until you can prove I'm wrong.

The problem with religion vs. science is this: religion can be disproven by scientific means. In fact, this has been going on almost continuously since Galileo, but the Catholic church and others have managed to pretend that this is not the case. Unfortunately, science can also be "disproven" (although that is not strictly the word) by religious means -- mainly by saying "God HAS to exist because I believe in him"). Scientists, being scientific, will not accept that religious argument, and religious people, being stup.. sorry, religious, will not accept the scientific argument.

So the two are forever doomed to disagree since they are not even working in the same framework of reality. If you like, they are in the same X-Y coordinates, but are on different Z planes entirely. It looks like they're meeting, from above, but that's just not the case. This is why people who call themselves "religious scientists" crack me up.

< Seldo puts on shiny suit and goggles>
Okay, activate flamethrowers now...

Have you ever had a sitcom moment? I think you probably have.

It's a strange phenomenom of feedback from our own imaginations. Everyone already knows that humans learn primarily -- despite our best efforts at abstract education, almost exclusively -- from example, or at least practice. What we tend to forget is the range of things that we CAN learn, both consciously and unconsciously. We know we can learn facts and figures, we vaguely acknowledge that you can learn sports and other mechanical skills, and also that we can learn social skills. But we ignore that we also unconsciously pick up our entire repetoire of emotional and social responses to a very basic level; not just table manners and when to say please and thank you, but also subconsciously when it is appropriate to laugh and to cry, our sense of humour, our morals and our values. We tend to think that these things are very intrinsically personal, but this is just not the case. Racism, fundamentalism, egalitarianism, and democracy are all social habits that are not at all or at least not entirely instinctive, and we learn them.

And in America and cultures heavily influenced by American entertainment such as my own and, increasingly, the rest of the world, the continuing replacement of social interaction with televisual entertainment means that we learn our emotional responses not from other people, not the way people REALLY behave, but from television, specifically sitcoms which traditionally have dealt with interpersonal issues. These are emotional responses as we -- or rather, as the still religious-fundamentalist, puritanical and still heavily-censored American script-writers -- think they SHOULD be. This can make things very odd indeed: we have "sitcom moments" where how we act consciously conflicts with the way we want to.

For instance, I have witnessed a number of times the strange way Christmas has become treated. Previously, Christmas was a heart-warmingly hypocritical event, where family would sing hymns of peace and love and goodwill towards men while unendingly engaged in the same family feuds and squabbles that occupied it the rest of the year. Gifts would be given and rejected out of pettiness, and it all sounded, well, REAL. You can see people doing that. It's not nice, but it's believable. With the advent of sitcoms providing us with social cues, everybody tries to be friendly and peaceable and puts their grievances away, toasting each other and inventing traditions and like making eggnog for midnight. And the result is that everyone is miserable. We begin to dread Christmas and all our other holidays as dreadful constricting ordeals to be endured rather than a bloody good fight that everyone thoroughly enjoys as we used to.

And I think that's a shame. These "sitcom moments" are an insidious form of moral propaganda imposed upon us by fundamentalists and they rob us of our natural enjoyment of our lives. The next time you think "ooh, musn't say that, it's not the way to act really" examine it and make sure you REALLY think that, and not your TV.

How accurate, do you think?

Stage 1: Your first computer

You view your machine as an all-knowing, awe-inspiring electronic brain that you must be careful of and respect, and not subject to temperature changes of more than 0.1 degrees lest it decide to cease working its flawless technical magic. Every day is a day of learning and discovery as you learn of new things your computer can do that you never thought of before.

Stage 2: Your second computer

You loathe your first computer. It was a mistake to buy it from those people, it was underpowered and slow, the software was out of date and the monitor a bad choice. It didn't do nearly enough. This computer will be a huge improvement. You view your computer as wonderful toy, and you enjoy the feeling of power and control in mastering its every function. Occasionally it does odd or illogical things, but that's something to do with you, and not really its fault. You eat your first pizza in front of the computer.

Stage 3: The road to expertise

You view your computer as a horrendously mismanaged, badly put-together box where nothing works properly. It's too slow, but there's nothing you can do 'cause you can't upgrade 'cause the people you bought it from were idiots and didn't leave any space. It was a mistake to buy it from them. The speakers are too small, and you don't have a ZIP drive. You envy others' machines. Your computer is always doing something stupid, it malfunctions every day and it is a hair's breadth away from complete shutdown. Nobody else has problems like these. You accidentally spill coke all over the keyboard.

Stage 4: It dawns on you

Having finally managed a workaround to upgrade your computer, you were forced to spend twice as much as you really needed to by making purchasing mistakes. You now view ALL computers as horredously mismanaged, cheaply manufactured and badly designed, inches away from complete destruction and in need of a total low-level design overhaul. The next time you buy a computer, you're going to take out a loan and buy two and hope you can salvage parts from one to make a single functioning machine. Your computer always does exactly what you expect it to do: it fails to function. You wish other people had problems like these, then at least you could do controlled experiments to find the problem. That's if your computer would do you a favour and fail to function in a logical and consistent way rather than doing something new each time. You consider watching TV instead. You intentionally pour coke down the disk drive.

Stage 5: True Expertise

You design your own computer using nothing but a soldering iron and a fifteen-ton block of iron. It is sentient, and live-in: it provides a kitchen with running coffee and coca-cola, and a small greenhouse growing pizza spices which it manages itself. Bill Gates sues you for copyright violation, claiming he's been living in it for years.

Yesterday -- that's April 4th, 2000, for those historians out there -- it was finally announced that Microsoft has been found guilty of breaking the law with it's monopolistic and generally evil acts. Now, I know most people won't care, but when has that stopped me mouthing off before?

The reason Microsoft needs to be stopped dead in its tracks is *not* because it is a monopoly: it can be a monopoly if it can manage it, which isn't going to be for much longer. However, it's unforgivable sin has been using its monopoly in the operating system market to totally ruin entirely separate fields of software with their own crappy software which nevertheless dominates, simply by being included for free. And I don't mean Internet Explorer; say what you like, Netscape really dropped the ball with Netscape 4.x, a buggy piece of junk with sketchy support for the most useful new standards. Internet Explorer isn't perfect, but it IS better than Netscape now. I'm talking about fields like web servers, database servers, web development, word processors, mail clients, newsgroup readers... an endless variety. In every field, the thoroughly buggy, badly-designed and feature-poor Microsoft versions of these products are either dominating or are far too well-represented for their real quality. If it's not predatory pricing and evil bundling scheme, it's flat-out lying about features, such as the infamous security rating of Windows NT -- it has a high-level security rating from an official source, BUT this rating only applies when NT is *not running on a network*! Microsoft promotional materials for NT4 are heavy on mentioning the rating, light on mentioning the caveat.

This is why all right-thinking people need to start lobbying for a harsh punishment. More than one punishment needs to be thrown in:

• Heavy regulation on what fields Microsoft can enter. Media domination is one area I'm scared of -- MSNBC should be divested, as well as any and all content-source acquisitions. A software company which offers Internet access and ticket sales should not be allowed to also run an Internet portal which recommends where people should get their internet access and buy their plane tickets. What the hell is a *software company* doing acting as a travel agent?
• This is mainly wishful thinking, but perhaps more rigorous adherence to international communication standards? Chief among these, they should NOT be allowed to create a mail client (Outlook express) which uses WEB MAIL, an inefficient and bandwidth-crushing bastardization of a useful technology, transparently with POP3 accounts.
• Open the Windows source. This will solve the constant problem of Microsoft giving its applications an unfair advantage over others by simply adding features to the operating system every time they think it convenient -- such as the user-interface changes they made to Windows 95 that coincide with the introduction of Internet Explorer 4. It will also expose every gaping hole and inefficiency in the operating system, which in itself will be enough to ensure that no company with half a brain will ever buy an MS product for a mission-critical application, ever again.
• Somebody needs to pay Marc Andreesen a whole load of cash. I mean, the poor guy. His whole budding empire was crushed by Bill. That's gotta hurt.

And that's basically my rant. I'll be honest, I don't like Microsoft. But if you're honest, you'll see I have extremely valid reasons for doing so.

Tonight's internal dialogue: world peace. Topical, eh?

Method of attack:

• The way the world is now
• How it got to be that way
• Is peace a good idea?
• Is peace possible?
• How can we achieve peace?

But I can't promise I'll stick to that; it's just an initial plan.

The way the world is now

As I sit here, one had to admit that the world seems pretty much doomed. The deluded and self-serving masses of the American Empire have been grievously stung by an unexpectedly deadly side-effect of the centuries-old conflict in the Middle East and have been convinced by the people who run their TV stations that the best way to cope with their grief and pain is to inflict as much grief and pain as they possibly can upon everyone else while singing the national anthem and putting flags everywhere they will stick. Pockets of pointless territorial violence continue to erupt in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Chechnya, basically everywhere in Africa, Columbia, Peru, lots of Central America, India, Pakistan and Indonesia. The only continents not affected are Australia and Antarctica, the latter because nobody lives there and the former because they don't let in anybody they might disagree with.

The highest level of pointless bloodshed is of course the middle east, where two groups of people with different and apparently incompatible ways of life are attempting to live in the same place at the same time without acknowledging the part that sharing must play in attempting to do so. Suicide bombers blow themselves up every day, helicopters fire missiles, bombs rain down, and people shoot at each other until they run out of bullets, at which point they throw rocks.

The situation simultaneously angers and depresses me, to the point that I can't work out if I want to nuke them all until they're a glowing puddle of molten rock or just sit and here and weep into my hands for the unending stupidity of mankind.

How it got to be that way

Forget Osama's childhood, forget the formation of Israel, forget Islam vs. Christianity. Why is the world so screwed? Because we as a species are fundamentally flawed. I [used to say] that conflict and war are entirely the result of miscommunication, or lack of communication, and that if people understood each other, then they would be unable to hate. While that is still true, I was unfortunately hugely overestimating the intelligence of human beings. People *can't* understand each other; they're built not to, and the reasons for this can be explained, as can so many things, in evolutionary terms.

Go back to basics. Genes are genetically-coded algorithms for creating and managing biological systems. Memes are mentally-coded algorithms for managing biological systems. The genes and memes that survive are the most "successful", since they are propagated. It's important to note that "successful" is not the same as "good" (well, obviously, since it's arbitrary anyway), which is why the memes of thieves and cheaters are still around. And unfortunately, we are genetically coded to split into factions and fight.

I think this behaviour is likely to a gene -- or rather, a combination of genes, since it's complex behaviour. It's not a meme: it affects our thoughts, but it's an involuntary instinct, not something we're conscious of, even to the limited extent that we're conscious of other viral memes like religion. It's going to be genetically-coded instinct because it's been around for a very, very long time. This is because genes are more efficient than memes.

To put it in the terms of computer science, genes are compiled, not interpreted: they are built into the very structure of the organism. Instincts operate at a low level, where stimulus leads to a direct response, rather than stimulus being evaluated for the appropriate response first. And since they are not subject to radical change, they can be made very efficient over time. And given sufficient time in which to operate, natural selection will ensure that even minimal improvements are more "successful". By this same principle, given a long period in which it faces no major competition, an algorithm will trade the flexibility of memes for the efficiency of genes. This is what we have: an idea so basic that it has become an instinct.

The behaviour that these genes are coding for is in effect the operating system in which memes operate; a basic meme common to all other memes. It is the behaviour that says "this meme will fight with that meme by means other than natural selection". Memes are not always, possibly even usually not, survival-oriented. This makes natural selection a bad method for memes to rely upon, which is why memes supposedly spread by communication. But lots of memes, such as religion, have discovered the trick self-defense: viral memes such as religion in particular dig in at a very low level and prevent other memes from taking hold by rejecting conflicting ideas.

If this method were unchecked, viral memes would have already occupied every available brain and reached a standstill, spreading only by biological means as neither would surrender any ground. Why [viral memes do not occupy every brain] is another matter. But since viral memes cannot gain ground from each other directly, the only way to occupy more brains is to enhance the reproductive chances of its hosts. However, this would effectively render memes that did not center around reproduction as irrelevant. The solution to this for non-reproductive memes is not to limit the reproductive chances of other memes, thereby freeing resources for its own hosts to reproduce. Since other memes will not allow communication into their hosts, this limitation is instead very efficiently accomplished by methods not involving communication at all: namely, war. "Kill anyone who doesn't share this meme" is an enormously useful addition to any meme -- any meme which did not incorporate it would be swiftly made extinct by those that did. So we now have a gene (read: genetic combination) that says "kill people who don't have your memes".

The existence of this gene is most obvious in the conflicts between religions. But even in groups that share some memes, the gene operates to distinguish between the remaining differences: so you get schisms in religious groups, and wars over political ideology, and even violent arguments over theoretical points of science (although I can't think of a fatal conflict over science offhand, I'm sure it has happened or will happen in the future). These are not ideas that majorly affect ones reproductive potential, so they are fighting by other means. To put it another way, the evolving ecology of memes produced the viral memes with a very effective method of defence, which spurred others to develop a method of attack capable of defeating it.

So where does this leave us? We are genetically hardwired to fight over ideologies, no matter how trivial -- indeed, the more trivial (and thus less related to reproduction), the more that meme will find it necessary to use conflict as a method of ensuring its survival. So war is natural for human beings. Cheerful, huh?

Is peace a good idea?

Well, in evolutionary terms -- and you'd be a fool if you thought any other terms mattered -- the answer, sadly, is no. Evolution relies upon, or rather, is defined by continuous competition -- you can't have survival of the fittest if the less fit don't die. And conflict and war are part of that package. "Peace" would be a lack of competition, which would lead to slower development and eventual stagnation. So does evolution have to happen? Of course it does. Since we live in a world of finite resources, competition is inevitable, and evolution is an emergent process that comes from competition.

The only time conflict could be viewed as a bad thing in these terms is if it led to destruction of the entire species. Doomsday prophets aside, this is very unlikely -- but, importantly, not impossible. One day a Left-handed extremist might decide the time has come to deal death to the right-handed scum and slam an asteroid into the planet and kill everyone. Or if you want to deal with a multiplanetary society, imagine some kind of galaxy-spanning doomsday weapon and repeat the scenario. So some kind of balance must be found to allow competition within the population without threatening the population as a whole.

That would involve limiting conflict in some way, which could be described as "increasing peace". However, "limited conflict" is not "peace": what we have *now* is "limited conflict"; the whole world isn't threatened. How does one determine the optimum level of limitation of conflict? I can't address that now.

Is peace possible?

Total peace: no. "Limited conflict": yes, but see above for how enticing limited conflict is as a continued mode of existence.

So once again we reach the conclusion that life is a meaningless blip on the probability curve of the universe, that there are no answers and there are no solutions. Slit your throat now, or carry on, it makes no difference either way. Is this called "maturity" or something? How unendingly depressing.

How can we achieve peace?

See above. Fuck this. I'll just have to keep myself happy, and attempt to maintain limited conflict. Change of heading: How do we limit conflict?

In the long term, you can't. As populations expand, competition for resources will increase, and conflict will escalate. You might try to limit population expansion, but in evolutionary terms that [leads to extinction], since you will never convince everyone to do it since the advantage clearly lies in increasing your population.

Another way to limit conflict would be to increase the resources available. This can be produced in three ways:

1. Through increases in efficiency, e.g. that of matter-to-energy conversion. AKA: stop burning oil to boil water to move a turbine to create an electric field to power an electric stove so you can accidentally set fire to your oil.
2. To a limited extent, through resource recovery. AKA: recycle stuff. Mine the dumps.
3. Through reource acquisition. We already live everywhere on the planet, so this means going off-planet, colonisation being one of the best bets for doing this efficiently. Even then, expanding your territory infinitely to avoid competition for territory, you eventually hit Fermi's paradox (is that the right one?) where in order to maintain your expansion you have to be going faster than light.

Conclusion:

World peace is impossible. Multi-world peace is impossible. Conflict limitation is possible. The way to limit conflict is to develop faster than light travel, and assume the universe is infinite in size. You heard it here first. Oddly, that does make me feel a bit better: at least there's *something* you can aim for, rather than just wallow in hopelessness. Of course, that's enormously long term. In the medium-long term you have to develop interstellar colonisation techniques, and in the medium term you need to hope we don't blow ourselves up.