for the past several weeks i stoped watching tv. i got a new job that i like & that keeps me away from ugly, sad news. i refuse to take mental part in politeconos’ (read politicians’ & economists’) war of the worlds. in words of the jedi: may the force be with us all
back to Doris. i ‘m very fond of her voice. are you?
rain symphony consisting of 10,211,326 drops by Yugo Nakamura
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Albert Einstein
this quote by Albert Einstein should be taken with care. a legend has it that Einstein gave this advice to overly concerned mother who wanted for her son to become a scientist, just like he was. i guess his advise to ambitious, unnecessarily concerned mother was all that he could think of.
i didn’t quite talk till i was around 4 years old cause i didn’t feel the need to talk to others. my grandpa was scared that i might end up being deaf- mute so he would take me with him to hang out with his old friends that laughed, made jokes, played cards, drank, simply enjoying life. he wanted me to react to those sounds sensations and i absolutely loved being with him.
my brother and i were raised to take care of ourselves cause mum had to work and had no time to read us stories. instead, she initiated our own love for reading by ordering beautiful fairy tale books from germany or scandinavia. she was head receptionist and thus lucky to have acquaintances that could bring them for us (at that time no amazon,com was available). i remember my father telling me couple of years ago how much he missed an ukranian fairy tales book that belonged to his dad. as he put it, “the illustrations and stories in that book was something most beautiful i have ever seen & read.”
for a long time i was shy to admit i love fairy tales cause that was not cool. and cause they all had happy endings. but i wasn’t a fan of happy-go-lucky disney’s type of stories. as a kid, my favorite fairy tale was “the little mermaid”, written by my favorite tale writer hans christian andersen. “the little match girl” or “the ugly duckling” remained buried deep in my heart, even now more than 30 years later.
a few years ago, during my courses of contemporary theories at the academy of fine arts, i was shocked at feminists’ view on fairy tales, especially the ones i mentioned above. several female professors named h.c .andersen to be a chauvinistic, perverse writer cause they believe he purposely represented females in a degrading manner. i had to react to this irrational conspiracy attitude and defend it with the evidence of own life’s experience. i find it sad to see how people lose their creativity and heart’s passion once they enter the world of dry academical, snobbish intellectualism. i guess that’s why they can’t become crazy scientists or artists.
fairy tales are beautiful. they discover us the other, mystical side of life that presents itself as help in most difficult situations. through fairy tales, a person develops empathy, creativity, sensitivity, ‘skills to think & survive’, optimism…and often, she/he can break free from the touch of so called reality.
and now i ask you, what is reality? is it the horror presented on the tv or on web sites? is it the trick called fear that most people fear? is it the meaningless engagement in everyday’s rutting? is this reality really the reality of no exit by j.p.sartre?
no. it’s not. persons that claim otherwise didn’t read any fairy tales. their hearts and brains have shrunk to a size of a bean, preaching you that very little is possible.
are we, my brother and i, more intelligent cause of excessive reading of fairy tales? my brother became a surgeon specialist that deals with cancer diseases. i got two opposing ma degrees. personally, we don’t consider this to be a sign of intelligence. the sign of true smartness is the emotional intelligence that helps both heart and brain to work in balance and at its best. this sort of intelligence saves own and the lives of others, even in most difficult life situations.
“humor uses shadows to turn the light on.” miljenko smoje
“no person should ever forget its roots cause roots are important.” martina gulan
what is the art of balance?
to live passionately and to survive rationally.
– why you struggle at indoor tournaments ?
– sun is energy.
“There is something that makes me even happier than being number one and that is the process, the effort, the path taken to get there.”
“I can’t believe I watched someone win 9th Grand Slam.” Mats Wilander
i love tennis and play it recreationally since i was a kid. some of my close friends went into professionals and achieved excellent results so i know how much hard work, discipline and sacrifice tennis requires. personally i consider tennis to be the toughest sport there is: you must be an outstanding athlete and a ‘chess genius’ at once. plus it is an individual and not a team sport.
why post on Rafael Nadal? in my toughest life situations i love to watch his matches and try to learn his way of ‘not giving up’.
a few weeks ago i wrote about A.I. and how its hard core supporters don’t appreciate fragility and weakness of our biological bodies. unfortunately, the upcoming human nature learns only to see and to desire instant results by having no interest in testing, pushing own physical and mental ‘limits’. yet our ancestors did exactly that: in the absence of marketing and nano-chips, solely the DNA was at their disposal demanding major upgrades.
the human body is a beautiful and an enormous potential that is yet to be discovered by every individual. watching Rafa playing makes me feel as witnessing a great samurai or a gladiator fighting but with a huge important difference > Rafael is not acting and does not have stunts. he is indestructible but also deeply vulnerable. no one would ever say that he is driven by a feeling of inadequacy, yet his motivation still remains a mystery.
i’ve wished he won Roland Garros for the 9th time maybe more than he himself. he entered my dream night before the match and we played some tennis. he was smiling, looking joyous, telling me he’ll win.
as mats said, i’m glad i watched a part of sport history being written. gracias y felicitaciones Rafa!
Charlotte Benjamin, 7 years old, in January 2014 wrote a letter to Lego company:
“..there are more Lego boy people and barely any Lego girls.”…
“…all the girls did was sit at home, got to the beach, and shop, and had no jobs, while the boy figures went on adventures, worked, saved people, and had jobs,…they even swam with sharks”.
“make more Lego girl people and let them go on adventures and have fun OK!?! Thank you.”
Thanks to little Charlotte and her mum, Lego finally decided to launch female scientists series.
sometimes i wish i lived among robots. the stupidity of humans as a collective or as of an individual is often so overwhelming that it leaves one speechless. but then again, as an artist i find our stupidity to be very inspiring. i wonder what kind of art would i create if i would be living among robotic ‘gods’. would they perceive it at all cause it’s made by a plain human being – weak, prone to illness and death, the inferior one? i also wonder, would those ‘gods’ at least laugh at monty pythons’ jokes that mock our human behavior? or, would they even laugh at all?
Jon Stewart / Samantha Bee, Comedy Central, sketch with Ray Kurzweil
SB – …so we’ll have miniature robots in our bodies?
RK – That’s right.
SB – We’re gonna become perfect.
RK – Well, how would you define perfection?
SB – The ability to blowjob with your eyes.
RK – ?…
i’ve reread the book by ray kurzweil ‘the age of spiritual machines’ published in 1999. first time i read it i was inclined to the notion of ‘spiritual’ robots cause it went in line with my all time favorite movie blade runner. however, in 15 years since its publication the rapid exponential growth of information technology and the arrival of new technologies made me very skeptical towards A.I. i cannot help asking myself is artificial intelligence going to turn us into zombies and lead us to the greatest catastrophe a human has ever experienced?
mr. kurzweil and rest of A.I. supporters talk about eventually transcending humanity. they view singularity as the point at which machine’s intelligence begins to amend itself, improve itself:
“Anyone who is gonna be resisting this progress forward is gonna be resisting evolution and fundamentally they’ll die out.” Peter Diamandis
non worshipers of A.I. state the following:
“Machine’s intelligence improves, improves, improves until we get to a point where, well, it assumes control…The singularity is the point where humans lose control. ” Kevin Warwick, professor of cybernetics, University of Reading
A.I. fans refuse to accept the ‘imperfection’of our physical bodies. ray calls it ‘the tragedy of illness and death‘ and considers mortality to be a sickness:
“I have no great respect for biological body.”…“There’s nothing in our biological bodies or brain that we won’t be able to recreate and in fact enhance. We’ll create A.I. that are real people.”
ray’s book is provocatively backed up with scientific facts and poses a challenge to debate him. few scientist made excellent remarks concerning this issue:
Dr. William B. Hurlbut, neuroscience professor, Stansford University
“There are no bad genes good genes, there is a balance in genetics. We can do a lot of foolish things, trying to alter human begins to improve them. Then the result of that might be tragedy. Ray is a very interesting person, entertaining, a kind of a visionary. He’s not biologist however. And, I think working as a biologist he would be more moderate in his extinctions of extrapolations of the uses of our technology. Engineering a better human being is going to be a daunting task. We’ve had 5 millions years of field testing and that has filtered down the existence of an organism that is attuned to range of environments and range of talents and range of possibilities. To upset that balance by exaggerating some feature is going to cost us something too. We shouldn’t just arrogantly think we’ve transcended the wisdom of thousands of years of human experience.
“Death is not conquered by physical. Death is conquered spirituality.”
Hugo de Garis, Professor, Xiamen University, China
“Where am I critical on Ray’s point of view? Well, I think he’s a bit naive in a sense that he doesn’t give enough consideration to the possible negative consequences of these developments. …his reason for living is to create inventions that help humanity. His reasons deft, so for him to hear somebody like me saying these inventions may end up causing the worst war the humanity has ever had, freaks him out. He doesn’t want to hear such things.
“I’m known for the concept of ARTILECT (artificial intellect).
ARTILECT WAR theory: These machines might for ever reason wipe out humanity. There’s always that risk. Consider the analogy of the way we as humans beings look toward ants or mosquitoes as pests. We killed them and we don’t give a damn. Because we feel we’re so superior to them, they are so inferior to us. So, who’s to say that the ARTILECT which than becomes trillions of trillions above of human capacities may look upon us in the same way. We could never be sure. I predict there will be a major war in late 21. century between two human groups…The one way to assure that the risk is zero is that they never build one in the first place…But the second group for them it’ll be a sort of religion to build these things cause they’ll be God like. So you got here the source of a bitter conflict between these two human groups. Then with late 21. century weapons, you’re talking about major war that will not kill millions of people but billions. As a brain builder myself, am I prepared to risk the extinction of the human species for the sake of building an ARTILECT? Because that’s what is coming down to. Yup.
Dean Kamen, inventor
“I think the biggest implications of the singularity is that we don’t know the implications of the singularity”… When and if we reach the place where machine’s are more capable of things we call thinking, the consequences of that is, who is leading the world and which way it will be taken and how do we relate to that is hard to really understand.”
i was writing this post on singularity for several weeks now and yesterday ran into text that perfectly summarizes everything i was writing about. the author of the text is none other than ‘(im)perfect’ human brain – mr. stephen hawking.
mr. hawking, whose life relies on technology, states:
“A.I. could be our worst mistake in history”. part of the text is here.
Human beings are champions in clinging, worshiping and repeating the same mistakes. Einstein described that kind of behavior as insanity. Tesla also made a great remark: “One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”
sane or insane, we should not be playing with the fire unless we first master it and know how to distinguish it.
music composed and conducted by vangelis
LOVEution 