Whoa. what a mindblowing thought process.

I've been reading stuff on everything2 and it's been blowing my mind. So I started off just randomly browsing, but then I found some cool stuff about Snow Crash, and neurolinguistic hackers, which I aspire to be one of. So after looking at that stuff, I found some stuff about mindblowing numbers. Sure, normally I wouldn't think numbers to be mindblowing... but whoa. Consider: omega_null, The first transfinite ordinal. If you wrote down all the natural numbers on a piece of paper and asked, "what comes next," the answer would be omega-null. I mean whoa. what kind of crazy number is that?

Even crazier is aleph_null. The first transfinite cardinal. A collection of objects with cardinality aleph-null is the smallest collection such that there are not enough natural numbers to count them all. Whoooaaaa... I can't even begin to conceptualize this number. So anyway, in the meanwhile I was still looking at stuff related to "reality hacking" so to speak, and found some interesting ideas like zenarchy and the like, but I also found some stuff about the turing test, which I can relate back to neal stephenson again (author of Snow Crash), who wrote Cryptonomicon, another fantastically awesome book. See, then I read about this Eliza program, which basically did rogerian psychoanalysis on people, except, it didn't really accomplish anything, and the whole idea of this is kind of crazy to me.

Back to crazy numbers. So what's the smallest number, greater than zero? Well, you can't really do that either. I mean, it'd be the same as something like the limit as X approaches zero from the positive side of X, however, we usually assume that to resolve to zero. Of course, this infinitely small number can't be definitely defined because if it was, functions wouldn't be continuous, math would break down and the universe would collapse into a singularity.

Of course, that didn't strike me as quite as interesting as omega_null, but whatever. I mean, isn't there not a limit to real numbers? So why would they have omega_null? But I don't really know any numbers beyond some small number of power of ten, but blaarggghhh. Enough thinking for today. Back to writing a play review, or wasting time, or something.

Today in English class, one of the guidance people at our school came in, gave each student a folder with various things such as their transcript inside, and proceeded to give a presentation on colleges. I am now convinced that I have fucked myself out of even the option to going to many of the colleges listed in the "most competitive" category of the list she gave us. Furthermore, if I don't get my act together this year, I'm betting on ruling out the next category down in competitiveness too. What the hell am I doing with my life? Of course, then she says we don't have that much to deal with and we haven't experienced much seeing as we're only 16 or 17. Of course, although this may or may not be true, the distinct impression I've gotten from school, and the apparently the scant few things otherwise that have affected (affect not effect Tyo...) my life is that I could be making a genuinely huge impact on my life depending on how I choose to act on the information with which I've been provided.

But whatever. I've got an article to write on a Track that apparently very few people care about, although those that do, care a lot. I can't be sure, but I'm betting to the point of gruesome violence.

I've got another thing I'd like to complain about. Mr. Murphy. As much as I like his classes, I'm forced into complaint because of my poor performance in all regards. Point 1: English: For the first half of the term, during the commodities project, he decides to pile on the work, and get everybody screwed on stuff like the Awakening. (Wait, was that last term?) Then, now that it's over, and we've all got shitty grades, he's refusing to give any decent number of quizzes and/or homework assignments. Yes, this is a request for more work, because more work means more points, and more points means more opportunities for me to save my shit grade.

Point 2: Journalism: How is it that I got 4 articles to write for the paper, however I don't know how to, nor do I want to, write any of them, a column about whatever, a sidebar to nathan's caffeine article, an article about a new track that's being built in town, and finally, of all things, I have to write a fucking play review. But I can't complain. Because if I do, my grades gets further fucked. You see, we were picking articles over the course of a few days. On day 1, we choose all the news, op/ed and feature articles (the interesting ones...). Then, the next day, we do A/E and sports, but he also announces on day two that we all need to have a minimum number of articles. So I get two articles I don't want to do, and I'm not allowed to dispute them, for fear of an F on any of them, which counts for 100 points a pop. What the fuck.

And finally, point 3: English: Reading requirements. I'm not feeling very encouraged to do much reading outside of class these days. Due in part to incredibly large amounts of work, the fact that there's nothing school-related to be gained, and I can get more fun for less time by using computer games or T. V. I mean, reading is great, I'm a big fan of a lot of books and genres of literature, however in order to save my grade, I instead have to read many books for class, and class extra credit, ruling out me reading other good books. It sucks. ARRRRRGGGHHH. i want to read books I want to read, as opposed books I have to, and I should get something for that too, considering how few people read for leisure, so it seems.

And please, please please, leave some sort of comment, because I have nearly lost faith that anybody actually reads this page anymore.

I'm quite irritated with timezones. I mean, let's consider the fact that on multiple occasions, I've met people from timezones quite far from my own, and it's made prolonged communication quite difficult. For example, even California (and areas north and south of it...) is kind of far off. I'm not going to call there because it costs a lot, but here's the real problem. There is really one good real-time communication method available to me, and that is online "chat" such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). Anyhow, the main point here, because I'm too lazy to articulate and go into detail, is that I can't talk to people on the west coast, and in other continents. Because of this, I may talk a lot during weekends when I'm awake at some ungodly hour, however during the week, I pretty much lose contact entirely. Sure, email is an option, but a tedious medium for communication, given that AIM is an option. Anyhow, I propose the creation of an Artificial Sun such that somehow it could be orchestrated that the entire globe has daylight at the same time, and night at the same time. Everybody could be on the same timeschedule, and it would be good.

On another note, I've also noticed that I'm very bad at interacting with people. When I'm presented with an option to talk to somebody, and it's somebody I don't really know that well, I'll decline. However, if I'm talking to that person online, I'm infinitely more open. why? I think it's because online, I can control who I am. I can look at what I'm about to "say" and make sure i'm happy with how it comes across. This isn't real. This is fake. I am controlling who I am, and if it wasn't somebody who I knew in person, I'd be just as easily able to create the image of a person whom I'm not. It's frightening and empowering at the same time.

Well, back to presenting a false image of myself to the world, so that when they finally do speak to me in person, I'm often quite the different person.