What's Been and What's Ben

There is an evil book out there called the Four Hour Workweek or something stupid like that. I shall forgo googling the exact name because this book is pure evil. It was brought to my attention through several conversations with potential lotophagi. The basic idea of the book is that you should create a life where you do four hours of work a week and spend the rest of the time on a beach. This is a dangerous idea based on resting on your intellectual property by draining just enough of your energy to survive. It sounds so tempting. But be afraid, it is the call of sirens trying to run your ship ashore with their seductive songs.

If you want to work four hours a week you hate your job. Good job. Since this book is targeted at professionals (scientists, engineers, etc.) the idea is that you go through all this training to find a trick to exploit in society to perpetuate your existence with no further work. Good job, Genius. By taking this path you have really just come to the conclusion that the metaphorical boat you spent so much time building should be sold for scrap. I love to do whatever it is that I do. To use a cliche, love what you do and you will never work a day in your life.

It is a waste of intelligence to work only four hours a week. It is just as morally irritating for a smart person to abuse their gift by thinking only as little as possible as it is for physically strong to make millions playing a sports game for a few hours a week or physically attractive people to make millions being a model. To me it is just as annoying. I see it more as a concession made out of the fear that if you try, you will never reach your vision of your full potential made all the worse by the fact that your intelligence indicates that it was a fully conscious decision. Too many smart people do not try because they fear defeat and thus skim through life without dipping down into the waters that can unleash their full potential (I’m extending the metaphor). It is an evolutionary safe bet that will ensure a life of relative mediocrity.

Endorsing the Four Hour workweek is sociopathic behavior. Everybody can’t do it. Why are you so special? It is the superman theory with clear sign of delusions of grandeur. It is legal but morally it is theft. Even if your cold heart bleeds no blood for the society that allowed you to act in such a manner, at least understand that personally it is giving up. In the words of philosophers Rob and Big, “DO WORK.”

Cliches are awesome. I hate to beat a dead horse, but they just help us understand things. Yes, they often take up more than their fair share of space. But would you really want to live in a world where there were not certain arrangements of words that provided a meaning that connected it to all the other times it was used. Do they not arise naturally? Misuse of cliches is a bigger problem in my mind. Definitions can blur. But what about the children? Cliches tell a story. Use the word “mull” without following it with “over” for a challenge. Also I refuse to put the accent mark on the word cliche. It is no more a special word than hubris.

I am sure you all know about the major address going on today. Not the state of the union from POTUS. This is from god or Steve Jobs as some call him. Apple just announced the iPad. It is a giant Ipod touch. Little has been so hyped since the segway came along to replace that messy walking thing. This sums it up: gizmodo’s 8 things that suck about the iPad.

It seems really cool and I will likely buy one or something like it. I am different from many other Apple users: I have no brand loyalty to Apple. I use apple for what I find useful. KAUST gave me an iPod touch as a signing bonus two years ago. I gave that one to my sister when I left for The Kingdom. I got a bigger one in Dubai because it was cheap and I find them to be an awesome tool. They make better hardware for some things than any other company. Nothing special. Steve Jobs is not actually god. He is a harsh task-master that has given Apple engineers a higher suicide rate than MIT.

I like the cheap 3G plan of $15 a month for 250GM a month or $30 a month for unlimited access from the Ipad. It uses an Apple A4 processor (a ARM processor with integrated GPU). The keyboard thing seems cool. $500 dollars as a base price for 16GB of storage. $100 extra for 32GB and $200 extra for 64GB. $130 extra for 3G. No camera.

Apple does some things I don’t like. They are into an ultra-proprietary format that only works with iTunes. I find it troubling that people worship the false god of a computer company that makes a good 30% margin on everything they sell. They also aim for the lowest common denominator with a user interface that I do at least appreciate I will still be able to use after having a few strokes.

The iPod is a nice palm pilot. It is nothing new. I had one in high school that would play music from an SD card and I could play games, read books (I read the 9/11 report on it), organize my life, and use it as a flashlight. My palm pilot even used a processor from the same line, ARM. It had the same general user interface with pages of lists of icons with applications (called apps in street lingo). The iPad beat Google Chrome OS to the punch.

250,000,000 iPods sold to date with 6,799,082,702 people alive.

Of course I will not go into the even worse working conditions experienced in the Chinese Foxconn Corp. factories to keep this product secret for months so that the spectacle would be grander and Steve Jobs would feel like a real man.

Everything for me now is a countdown to an ambiguous time when I hear back from Boulder. I don’t care about financial aid. The motto around here is “follow the drinking gourd” for a few of us. I am going to give my all to these last few months at KAUST and then move on, hopefully, to the University of Colorado at Boulder.
I was told during a lecture that the blind spot we all have in our eye is not due to the optic nerve, but from light interference. If you have a degree in optics I am sorry for the mental pain you are feeling now. It is like Lewis Black’s famous non sequitur, “it it wasn’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.”

The murder rate – and to a lesser extent the violent crime rate – in the United States went down in 2009. This makes no sense because during a recession one long-held fact was that crime went up. Instead it went down. Is this Obama-related? What else has changed?

Question 1: Did Noah literally gather two of every species on the planet, put then in a boat, and survive a flood all within a human lifetime? (this includes rare butterflies from the Amazon that surely could not survive a flood)

Question 2: If you heard God (a burning bush, booming voice from the sky, etc.) telling you that it was God’s will to kill every member of your family, would you do it?

If you answered no, they you do not really believe in God.

Some people think wearing your swimsuit is considered naked. I belong to the camp that believes wearing only socks is a tricky gray area. Naked to me means nothing.

I grew up watching Letterman because Leno seems like a made-for-family sell-out and my parents watched Letterman. I transitioned to the Con-zone (Conan O’Brien) in middle-school, Stewart in high-school, and Colbert in college. Today I watch Stewart/Colbert every day and catch Letterman and O’Brien when I can. I have missed about a dozen Colbert Reports in five years and my facebook picture is me next to Colbert’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.

Too much talent, is that a problem? This all started two decades ago when Johnny Carson retired from NBC’s Tonight Show after becoming the king of late night comedy/talk shows. David Letterman was after him on NBC and was supposed to be the successor. Carson wanted Letterman, but the network wanted Leno because of focus groups. Letterman goes to CBS where he has since hosted The Late Show at the coveted 11:35/10:35c time slot where he competed with Leno. Letterman gets replaced by Conan O’Brien at the 12:35/11:35c time slot. This is how things functioned until Conan got sick of being the super-late-night guy and was getting really good offers for millions of dollars to go to FOX or other broadcast channels. So NBC promised Conan he would have The Tonight Show in five years because Leno’s star was falling. Leno agreed with it. Five years later (a year ago) Leno was doing really well and doesn’t want to stop doing late night. NBC gives Leno at 10/9c time slot to keep him from going to another network. Leno, Conan, and Fallon all do poorly as does the NBC network in general. The network wants to move Leno back to 11:35/10:35c and Conan to 12:05/11:05c. Conan says he won’t do it. NBC owns the Winter Olympics and so they won’t have late night shows after this week. Now Conan will be forced out and can’t make fun of NBC executives. The entire things has broken down by lines of who watches who. It is a cultural issue.

I don’t like Leno. He is funny, but too white-bread. He appeals to the everyman, which annoys me. Letterman and Conan are counter-culture and provide humor to people with college degrees who laugh at references to Greek pays. It is a strange situation because of how the broadcast networks cater to different audiences. NBC is my favorite because it is TV for smart (educated) people; they have the lowest ratings, but get the same money from advertisers because smart/educated people have more money on average. CBS is the Suburban network that for the first few decades of televisions was just about the only network that has since shifted into complacency and formulaic shows; they are for people who go to church for the social side and nod their heads. ABC is the sugary network meant for a dream of America that never actually existed; they are sentimental and for people who go to church and believe what they hear. FOX has no soul, would steal heart medication from their mom to make a few bucks, and can be fun to watch; they get huge ratings, but poor people watch it for explosions, spectacle, and near-nudity.

For my non-American readers, when I mention the times as 11:35/10:35c I mean it airs in all US timezones at 11:35 except central time (my home timezone) which is at 10:35. So East Coast and Central zones air at the same time and Mountain and Pacific air on two and three hour delays, respectively.

I have decided in the aftermath to do the worst thing I can to NBC. From here on out, I will only watch their shows online where they make a fraction of what they do with a typical broadcast. Television executives are worthless human beings. On top of this I will watch Conan where ever he shows up.

This is the next step the hallowed history of SNL spin-off movies that have brought us Wayne’s World that catapulted Mike Meyers into be giant green monster with fellow former SNL alum Eddie Murphy. I love Will Forte’s character MacGruber, the loser variant of MacGyver – a man who can save the world with a paper-clip, half a No. 2, and some ABC gum (already been chewed). Check out clips online of MacGruber and the movie trailer on youtube.

Bless Denver’s airport for having free wireless, albeit crippled by ads. Boulder was wonderful. After a few months in the desert it was nice hanging out with Rose Alumni. It was in the 40’s and sunny all but the day I left. My applications are done. They have a big star on the side of the adjacent mountains. The sun is insanely bright. The University of Colorado at Boulder campus is beautiful even though the engineering buildings are concrete and the electrical engineering has no bathrooms. Everybody was so nice from the students to the faculty to the homeless man on the street to man behind the bar (I guess that’s kinda his job). I ate what I would almost call too much bacon over break as I had it at least every other day. It was surreal sitting in on an actual optics class with wavefronts.

I almost never left. Seriously. there was a job I had an okay chance of getting just outside Boulder that would have started immediately. It dwelled in my mind for a while, but I will stick it out for the next semester and hopefully get some sort of grand life lesson before going to Boulder.

Best Film 2000-2009: Adaptation