Well, not exactly, but I couldn't resist the F.R.I.E.N.D.S quote.
I just discovered the precision zoom and ultra-macro focus mode on my camera (not my mobile phone camera, unfortunately), so here's a photo of a teeny-tiny carpet beetle (Anthrenus verbasci) that was crawling around my study desk a while ago.
He was ~1mm long. Don't worry after the photo-shoot, I set him free, much dazed, but alive and well.
In case you have a slow connection and the fancy fonts that i use on my my blog aren't showing up properly, I just have to clarify that no, I am not using comic sans for my post titles.
Sheesh. I nearly killed someone when they asked me why I was using comic sans. Check your internet connection, you scheisse-kopf!
Maybe I can eventually try for The Smiley Award. That would be cool to win!
PS- If you guys are interested in learning more about constructed languages, you can check out the Language Creation Society. There's really a lot of pretty good stuff out there that I would never have imagined existed, at least not at such a scale. Then again, I do live under a rock.
Today, while doing some research for an essay on Macbeth, I discovered this website, an attempt
to construct a non-human language, and I was hooked. This person is, beyond all
reasonable doubt, my new hero.
I have always been fascinated by languages, and have been
constructing them since I was a small child. Even before I began to formally ‘invent’
languages of my own, I would often speak (and still do, very often) in
gibberish tongues that tended to annoy everyone around me, especially my
parents, who couldn’t ever get a straight answer out of me. I would love to
play at speaking foreign languages, from German and French to Sioux and
Swahili. It tended to help that I was naturally adept at imitating accents.
My first attempt at creating a ‘language’ (if you could call
it that) was a simple code-based set of symbols to replace the letters of the
English alphabet. I didn’t work on any grammar, obviously, since I was... I don’t
even remember how old.
I have always been obsessed with the fantasy genre, and it
is from there that my fascination for constructed languages stemmed. Being born
in the mid-90s, I watched The Lord of the
Rings films long before I actually read the books, but was fascinated by the
various languages presented in the films. This inspired me to create my own proper
language. May, many half-heated attempts were made, from when I was about
eight, till I was eleven. That was when I actually managed to create a language
of any consequence. It was a hieroglyphic language, with hand-drawn symbols
representing entire words. I didn’t create a proper grammatical structure, but
I did compile a dictionary of about a hundred words. The language itself was
crude, and created on whim, rather than on an evolutionary structure as real
languages are, and, as I recently discovered while looking through my Class VI
school notebooks (in which I had created the language during boring classes),
contained words almost always ending in consonant sounds, particularly ‘-r’, which made the language terribly
monotonous and tiring to speak. Here’s a sentence in the language (which never
had a name): Denar raur duku masku dular!
('Give me more money!' Yes, some of those classes were so boring, we used to come up with gangster dialogue.)
When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I invented a script top
be used in a particular nation in a fantasy land that I had been working on for
about two years then (since November 5th, 2006, to be precise). It
was a rune script, created to be chiseled into wood or stone by the ancient settlers,
which evolved into the lingua franca of
the nation. I decided that I wanted to take this language seriously, and began
to invent its words and grammar by translating texts from English. This proved
to be extremely successful, and by the end of that school year, I had compiled
a dictionary of 269 words. It was around this time that I began to read a lot more
Tolkien, which inspired me to seriously consider working hard on my fantasy and
its language. Unfortunately, school was starting to become a lot more serious
at that point, and my dictionary remained stale at 269 words until very recently
(which is ironic, considering this is definitely the most serious stage of my education
till date). I had begun to work on my language again, but I will have to take a
sabbatical from that area of my life for now.
I had bought a book sometime, called How Language Woks by David Crystal, which I plan to red intensely
this summer. I will have to wait another month before I can actually begin to
work on my language and my ‘world’, but that makes it all the more exciting. At
least I have something to reward myself with after the dreaded board exams.
Maybe, after that, I’ll be able to share my world with you
guys right here, on this blog. Fingers crossed!
So what did I do apart from fall asleep in front of my biology text book today? I looked through the wrong end of my telescope and found out that the magnification is powerful enough to see every pixel on my screen in detail! Woohoo. :|
I also took loads of photos of the sky. Bangalore's having a brilliant spell of exceptionally good-looking skies this week. Here are some of my photos:
I really need to invest in a good camera.
Wow, this has been a pathetic post. Well, at least I'm sticking to my promise of regularly updating this bog.
Bleargh. Ciao.
I finally found the videos of the Indian National Youth Orchestra's performance at Chowdiyah Memorial Hall last May. Watch out for the last piece of the evening, an orchestral rendition of the Rajasthani folk song, Pallo Latke.
So I introduced my family to the magic that is 8tracks a few
weeks ago. Since we have a desktop with a reasonably good sound system, we
often spend our dinner-times jamming out to some vintage 80’s MTV stuff. I had
recently stumbled upon the penultimate playlist- 1,992 80’s pop and rock songs,
everything from The Cure to Bruce Springsteen- so, naturally, I had to turn it
on during dinner last night.
The problem was, of
course, that with a virtually unlimited stream of music from an era when every
song was electrifying, enjoyable, or bearable, and nothing less, it became
rather hard to turn it off, and considering the fact that I had a Biology
practical exam the next morning and I hadn’t once practiced a single floral
diagram, turning it off was something of a necessity. Billy Jean was blasting
out across the living room when I made a deal with 8tracks. I would turn it
off, I said if any song except Take On Me, by Aha, probably the most 80’s 80’s
song out there, and one of my all time favourites (along with Africa by Toto,
and… oh forget it, they’re all genius), came up next. It was a pretty good deal
for the machine- one song in nearly two-thousand. The odds don’t get much
better than that.
I nearly died (of a combination of hypertension and eyes
nearly popping out of my head) when the last notes of Michael Jackson’s classic
faded out, and were replaced by the rhythmic bass and snare of, you guessed it,
Take On Me, by Aha. One in two-thousand. Mind you, there’s absolutely no way to
predict what the next song on a fresh 8tracks mix is going to be, nor is there
any way to control the order, as a listener.
You might call this some form of telepathy. Here
is an interesting blogpost I found, explaining the rational side to the
‘supernatural’ phenomenon of telepathy. While the logic seems sound (I haven’t
even graduated high-school yet, how would I know), and I have had several
similar experiences over the course of my lifetime, it doesn’t explain what
happened last night at all. Oh, I forgot to mention this, but this is probably
the third or fourth time something like this has happened to me, but this time,
it was different in the fact that in all my previous experiences, the second
parties have been live radio stations, controlled by human radio jockeys. If
what the above article details is to be taken as true, and humans collectively
are, in fact, a literal bio-electrical network, all my previous experiences can
be explained, since both the radio jockey and I are both definitely and
completely human.
8tracks, on the other hand is not. 8tracks consists on an
endless number of ‘mixes’ created by its users, containing a number of songs
chosen by them in an order they decide, but when you play a mix, it’s the website
that plays song after song in the predetermined order, no humans involved at
that precise moment when I so desperately willed Take On Me to play next.
In 1996, when the supercomputer Deep Blue defeated
then-reigning world chess champion, the Russian Garry Kasparov, he remarked
that the computer displayed “human” intelligence.
Was I, in fact, communicating telepathically with the
website? This
article talks about a ‘telepathic’ computer that can ‘read your mind’. Hardly
related to what happened with me, since my computer and the website haven’t
been designed to perform that function, and have no way to do so, but it does
open up the realm of possibility whereby telepathic communication between man
and machine becomes possible. Have we so integrated machines and computers into
our society that we have been able to unconsciously allow them to become part
of the aforementioned hypothetical bio-electrical network of the human brain?
Well, yes and no. Yes because the possibility of artificial
intelligence has long been looming, and no because even the possibility of
human-to-human telepathy is merely hypothetical. What may seem uncanny, as was
Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov, is in fact simple action out of analysis of
observed facts and logical reasoning.
But, since my mind that desired a song that I wanted to hear
had not converted that desire into an input into the website via typing in the
search bar, that thought remained only in my nervous system. There was
absolutely no way to put that desire down as a hard fact for the website to
analyse and act accordingly in response, since, as I mentioned before, my
personal computer was not built with the capability to read my neurosignals.
Yet, the next song that came on was the song I wanted to hear.
What I have overlooked in my logical flow up to this point,
is the fact that, as its website claims, 8tracks is “internet radio created by
people, not algorithms”. So there was in fact a human involved in my
experience. It wasn’t just a computer. So the possibility of telepathy is still
open for discussion, right? The fact that the mix I refer to was created on the
28th of January, this year, ten days before I even became aware of its
existence, poses a metaphorical dead-end to that line of argument.
Maybe not. I found this on an internet forum:
“I cannot prove that any of you exist outside my mind. Just like none
of you can prove that I exist outside of your minds.
Consciousness can be boiled down to this: "me" and "you."
In this case, "you" represents anything that cannot be identified as
"me." Without "me" there is no "you," as there
would be no "me" to even conceive of "you."
So you are all constructs of my mind. This is not where it ends though, as I'm
just a construct of the mind of whatever consciousness happens to observe me.
Now, we've established that "you" only are because of "me,"
and essentially, this reality I exist in exists within me. This is always the part
where I get stuck though.
My vocabulary is not advanced enough to speak the language of creation.
Okay, look at it this way: True it's all very circular and dependent on the
concept of infinity, but if I exist in a reality that exists within me, and you
all exist in a reality that exists within me, and the same can be said of each
and every consciousness in existence, then what are we conscious of?
We're only conscious of ourselves, nothing else. We are one
consciousness, continually segmenting and experiencing itself.”
The most obvious bells ringing on your head will probably
point straight to Jung’s concept of synchronicity.
Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident
occurrences of acausal events."
Here’s an example from Jung:
“A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in
which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream, I sat
with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a
gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the
window-pane from the outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in
the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab one finds
in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia
aurata), which, contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt the
urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment.”
All too familiar? In formulating his synchronicity principle, Jung was
influenced to a profound degree by the "new" physics of the twentieth
century, which had begun to explore the possible role of consciousness in the
physical world. "Physics," wrote Jung in 1946, "has
demonstrated...that in the realm of atomic magnitudes objective reality
presupposes an observer, and that only on this condition is a satisfactory
scheme of explanation possible." "This means," he added,
"that a subjective element attaches to the physicist's world picture, and
secondly that a connection necessarily exists between the psyche to be
explained and the objective space-time continuum." These discoveries not
only helped loosen physics from the iron grip of its materialistic world-view,
but confirmed what Jung recognized intuitively: that matter and consciousness
-- far from operating independently of each other -- are, in fact,
interconnected in an essential way, functioning as complementary aspects of a
unified reality.
The belief, in a nutshell- suggested by quantum theory and by reports of
synchronous events- is that matter and consciousness interpenetrate.
I should probably stop now. This looks to be very open-ended, and is full of
arguments based solely on hypothetical evidence. More importantly, I have
satisfied myself to dwell on Jung’s concept, which makes the most sense by far.
For now. Maybe in a few months, I might have something more to say, who knows? Maybe
we’ll have another post like this, which, I must admit, is so very fun to
write, by this August. If not, well, I just hope that my radio-telepathy/uncannily
regular mingling in synchronicity/whatever continues. If you haven’t
experienced it before, it feels utterly brilliant.
Take my word for it.
If anyone has any (interesting) opinions on the whole thing, do feel free to comment. Ah, who am I kidding, nobody reads this blog.
As a reward for anyone who read this post right through to the end, here's Synchronicity II by The Police.
