on eternal recurrence and falling trees

Since I was otherwise preoccupied with grind-a-thon Disgaea yesterday (and today), I'm going to write about a couple of things today.

Obama won and while that is a triumph for smart people everywhere, the pessimist in me is bugging me about Nietzsche's eternal recurrence and Machiavelli's Il Prinsipe.)

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(I heard from Gino that) Michael Crichton died. He offered a different kind of horror (different from Stephen King): Sphere, Congo, The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, Lost World, and Eaters of the Dead, among others. Through his books, I learned about the Chaos Theory and the (fictional) Odd-man Hypothesis. Cheers to you, Mr. Crichton.

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Imagine your brain is a circuit board and certain emotions cause certain circuits to light up and some to turn off. Scientists have discovered that love and hate turn on two of the same circuits in the brain (and turns off judgement and reasoning). That probably explains why both extreme love and hate can lead to unhealthy fixations on certain persons. The scientists did note that between the two polar opposite emotions, hate is far more rational. Hate only turns off reasoning and judgement a tad bit, while love in comparison looks as if it ignores them completely. University College London professor, Semir Zeki explains:

"This may seem surprising since hate can also be an all-consuming passion like love. But whereas in romantic love, the lover is often less critical and judgemental regarding the loved person, it is more likely that in the context of hate the hater may want to exercise judgement in calculating moves to harm, injure or otherwise exact revenge," Professor Zeki said.

"Interestingly, the activity of some of these structures in response to a hated face is proportional in strength to the declared intensity of hate, thus allowing the subjective state of hate to be objectively quantified. This finding may have implications in criminal cases."

Makes sense, you'd need reasoning and judgement to properly plot the loathed person's downfall (or fall down a cliff). Crazy and ironic. How do you know you're not in-hate when you're in-love? I have loads of other questions stemming from this, but I'll tackle them some other time.

(Via JessicarulestheUniverse and Independent.co.uk)

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I have been told a good many times that writing as I have (and still am) will get me nowhere. Lately, I've been thinking about "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" but in terms of "If I write an article and no one reads it, does anybody give a flying fart?" Yes, it's one of those philosophically sarcastic days again. Ah, mediocrity.