Category: Communication

Practical Approaches To Impractical Imperatives 1: “Grow Up”, Part 1

arthurhovinc

In a conversation with my dear friend B tonight, I had an idea for a writing project. This idea will probably take my whole life to complete, but I’m willing to work at it for that long; it would be something I would have liked to read, and I hope it benefits another reader or two. What is the big idea? Take completely impractical imperative commands that others give me and work out practical solutions to them.

Here’s an example impractical imperative: “You have no tact. You need to grow up.” (Someone actually told me this.)
How does one just “grow up”? How does one acquire said tact? Someone already “grown up” and with tact can demand this the same way someone with a job can say to the homeless, “You need to get a job. Stop begging.” In other words, the advice dealer forgets or ignores the toil involved with acquiring the state he or she is in.

Allow me to offer another take on this. What does it mean to “grow up”? In this case, it means to be sensitive to the discomfort others might feel with the things you say or do. Does it benefit you at all to “grow up” if you are having more fun playing around? There isn’t a direct benefit to you, but you may be unfairly judged just for being silly in a professional environment. But there is a practical approach that allows you to show your true self, while also being sensitive to what others might find uncomfortable or inappropriate. In the best case, everyone can enjoy each other and be themselves. In the worst case, you can just agree to respectfully not associate.

A Win-Win Approach to “Growing Up”:

  1. Around others you don’t know well, start slow. Small talk is all right as long as it is not faked. Imagine turning on your TV or car stereo at full volume. Pretty startling, right? Approach with this perspective if you would like to get to know someone whose perspective may not be as open as yours.
  2. Listen actively to these others. What was interesting about their weekends? What gets them excited or makes them laugh? If you hear something from them that actually interests you, ask some open-ended (“how”, “why”, “in what way”) questions about it. Take notes if you need to. If you don’t find anything to talk about, you can always gracefully and honestly exit with, “All right, I better be going,” (for when you can actually walk away) or “Thanks for sharing.” (for when you have to remain seated around them)
  3. When you feel like being silly, use some subject matter that the others find amusing, and that you also like. Note: If there isn’t common ground, you can keep dialog to, “Good morning, Sharon,” and NOT talk about something you don’t care about; feigned conversation is not pleasant for anyone. If you and they find logical fallacies funny, tell some stories or draw some pictures showing this. Tell some honest stories that have ridiculous endings, leaving out explicit details that may rouse discomfort; people are generally drawn to honest and funny stories.
  4. To support the points above, practice being very honest. This means to note when you stretch the truth or outright lie, and ask yourself why you didn’t tell the full truth. What emotion caused you to withhold what you really thought? Examine the emotion and ask if it can be resolved another way. For instance, you may lie about your vacation because someone else’s sounds more impressive to you. You might feel insecure that you didn’t have the resources or time to enjoy such a vacation. But you can approach another honest way. Ask open-ended questions on the other person’s vacation when you would instead lie about yours. Maybe you’ll learn a tip on booking a cheap flight. Maybe you’ll get some ideas of how to have the same, fun experience at a fraction of the cost, like enjoying a local bed & breakfast as a getaway. At the worst, asking open-ended questions here about things that actually interest you is a great way to connect with someone, and the connection can help to build a nice relationship.
    I would advocate 100% honesty with a muzzle on difficult topics around those who may be sensitive. If you are always honest, realistically saying when something will be done and showing up when you say you will, the others will develop respect for you. This respect makes your silliness tolerable. People begin to trust you, and with this trust built, they are more likely to want to know who you really are, silliness and all. They may even drop their own guard. I have personally seen this happen with a very reserved and conservative coworker (and you should know by now I’m not very conservative), where we now can both laugh about my secret cookie and cake binges even though I eat vegan most of the time.

The imperative to “grow up” can feel very restricting, but you don’t need to ignore your youth. If you are sensitive and honest, the true state of being “grown up”, you can at best be your silly self, and at worst respect and be respected.

Writing on the unwritten rules,
Art

Legacy Blog 13: O l w (One letters words, in Lesser Speech)

arthurhovinc

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

We dive further today into the concept of HyperWords. These are not the same as hypertext, which many of you nerds out there use to make your profiles pretty. Hypertext is, AT MOST, a 3.1-dimensional idea (i.e. its boundaries start to break into other space, which is also discussed here today). As for the said topic, how can something like Identitiy be written in these HyperWords? What are HyperWords? Why is the W capatialized?

We shall tackle those in reverse square order (in this scenario, object 3 becomes object 1, object 2 becomes object 4, and object 1 becomes object 9). Keep in mind these lists start at 1 to avoid any confusion. Lists, as a RULE, start at 0. Why? Well, it’s a rule, so obey it. Then again, we just said we’ll start at 1 (well, actually at 3, but you get the idea), so we’re breaking rules! Note I did not list 9 elements. I toy with you reader. The transformation (1., 2., 3.) –> (9., 4., 1.) is a perfectly reasonable move as long as we understand what we’re talking about. We could say (1., 2., 3.) –> (cow., sheep., fish.), but that’s just stupid. A fish isn’t a barnyard animal.

Returning from that tangent back to topic 1 (3), the W is capitalized because HyperWords need a significance beyond hyperwords. We could have HYPERWORDS, or HYPERWORDS, but HyperWords will do for now. Our notation from previous entries tells us contructs have the form A and Construct. We do not want to confuse ourselves. Also, HyperWords looks cool.

HyperWords may not come of to you and me as written words, but they share the same purpose. Join me, reader, in asking what a word really is. You might say this post is written is words, and you give your response in spoken or written words. That’s fine if we want to define “words,” but what is a single word? If you say a word is a string of symbols or an emitted sound from the vocal cords with a meaning given by a reader’s or speaker’s mind, you’re getting closer. Very warm. We should consider another property about words: their infinitude. Transifinitude, really. You may say, reader, that sldkfjloksagaoioihilgosah (pronunciation is uncertain) is not a word. That isn’t true. You simply can’t place any meaning to it. Neither can I, so don’t get out your handkerchief yet. A is a word. B is a word, etc. Aa is a word, Ab is a word, etc. Eventually sldkfjloksagaoioihilgosah is indeed a word, when the right combination of English symbols is reached. We should not forget that there are more words than anyone could ever understand, even the greatest linguists, as long as we do not associate meaning to them.

4 (2) and 9 (1): HyperWords define your meaning as soon as you do. In other words, they have no meaning until you give them meaning. How can this be? Most humans can’t speak until age 2. How can they live two years without meaning??? A human processes HyperWords as soon as he/she has a working brain. Unfortunately, I can’t write a HyperWord out for you (I would need nine dimensions of computer screen to do so), but I can give you a mathematical model for one. Each written word is a string made of symbols. The symbols have a ciphertext numerical equivalent; in standard form A = 1, B = 2, etc. Notice how strings essentially occupy one dimension, in that we read them from left to right or right to left. I challenge anyone not familiar with written Arabic to try to write right to left in English so that the final product appears the same as if he/she had written it from left to right. Although words written on paper appear in two dimensions, humans don’t read them in two dimensions. To be super-technical, words appear in a very small third dimension, too, in both written and spoken form. Spoken words are just wave equations. We can create two integrals then for “written” and “spoken” HyperWords.

newEquationsForBlog

Note that (1) is for the written, and (2) is for the spoken.

(The reader should note that gestures are words by definition. That integral is similar to the integral for the spoken word, but we shan’t mention it today.)

In this way, we can find HyperWords that describe Indentity. Both Hyperwords and Identity are Ninth-Dimensional Constructs. The Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh, in conventional spatial-temporal theories, are the final boundaries for any and all matter and energy. You may shift them to Twenty-Fourth, Twenty-Fifth, and Twenty-Sixth if it suits your theory better. Notice the word “loop” in the integrals. They are not conventional integrals—rather they are summing up all the infinitesimal self-reference cycles in every spatial-temporal dimension. By self-reference cycles I mean every single neural impact on a human’s mind caused by the word. Let’s return to the point about being meaningless until age 2. The child brain still processes words, which make self-reference cycles. By inter-dimensional wave transfer, these reference-cycles define Selves all the way into the Ninth, and encompass all Presence of the thinking human below. (To keep your head fresh, Presence is the higher-dimensional equivalent of mass.)

To wrap up, we should address the last (first) point addressed. The signals that make up the Internet move though the connection wires at about the speed of light. At that velocity, matter and energy starts its breakage into the Fourth, but won’t complete. If you were an Internet transmission signal, you would feel like Tyrannosaurs tore you apart about 1000 times (the amount of times it happens when people own The Lost World: Jurassic Park on video). With that, reader, I bid you good day.

This is a Blog

arthurhovinc1 Comment

Hello Hello dear readers! Dr. Poo is vacationing in South Africa over the summer to prepare for his lectures on the fascinating properties of the Universe in the fall. I haven’t written a blog in well over a year, and I thought it was the time to release some brand new ideas to you, my loyal public. Keep in mind that the ideas in this particular blog have little to do with theoretical physics and more to do with how we interpret the things we see, which will be a valuable knowledge for you all this fall. I hope that you enjoy reading this blog, stop to think about the ideas presented, and question those same ideas. Enjoy!

* * * * *

Not too long ago I met a printer named Hubert. Even though he was pretty quiet at our first encounter, I was sure that he was a good guy. Several days later, my friend Erin, companion of this printer, came to me with a problem. She needed to print out a report for her class, but Hubert had delivered what appeared to be utter hogwash. I took a good look at the gibberish Hubert spewed and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. There was no clear indication of what each of the symbols meant on its own, what each string of symbols meant together, or even which way I should read the text! I brought it home, put on my brown Henschel Deerstalker hat, bit down on my pipe, and began my investigation.

Each string of symbols had the form of Fig. 1.

Fig. 1: A string of symbolsFig. 1: A string of symbols

Since I could identify each symbol to some human use, I identified this typeset as Unicode 5.0, which includes almost every typeset language and many strange characters like the ones seen in Fig. 2.

A chart of miscellaneous symbols in Unicode 5.0Fig. 2: A chart of miscellaneous symbols in Unicode 5.0

I visited the Unicode website to see if there was any underlying meaning of these symbols (since most of them looked like the ones in Fig. 2!). You can see from the figure above that there is a sequence of numbers assigned to each symbol. I took that into consideration and mapped each sequence of numbers to English letters and proper punctuation. (I made the assumption that Hubert wanted to communicate in English since Erin’s paper was in English.) The As and Bs and Cs and so on are hexadecimal numbers, if you haven’t seen them before, and they map to 10s and 11s and 12s and so on. I tried out the scheme, and much to my dismay the only English word I could make out was “a”, which isn’t much of an English word. I tried taking all the 26s that appeared in the chart (which was part of the number key to every symbol!) to be Zs, like in the mapping 1 -> A, 2 -> B, and so on, but then it just sounded like Hubert was sleeping. I attempted every deviation from this cryptology scheme, such as 1 -> B, 2 -> C, and so on; 1 -> C, 2 -> D, and so on; and so on. It looked hopeless.

The best scheme I came up with was to ignore the 26 and assume it was just the symbol that said, “This is a character,” much like the 0x in a memory address and its contents on your computer. Memory addresses and their contents on your computer look like 0x8130 and 0x00000005, respectively, where the 0x just means, “This is a hexadecimal number.” After applying that idea and cycling through the cryptology, I finally made a significant word out of Hubert’s rant. “Anatomy”. Granted, it was in the middle of two other words that made no sense at all, but it was the best I came up with. That scheme also produced really cool sequences of letters that I don’t remember offhand, but they were something like, “Anyuuuuleoyuuuucszluop::”. I delivered it back to Erin, totally convinced Hubert was speaking just nonsense, with the exception of “anatomy”. There was nothing more I could do.

Could there be more meaning to Hubert’s message? Could I have overlooked the simple idea that there might be another decryption scheme that shows his words were just the words of Erin’s paper? Why would I assume Hubert was even trying to say anything at all, when it could have just been a huge error in his hardware?

Continue reading “This is a Blog” →