I think it would surprising some people for them to know I consume a lot of porn. I actually remember the first time I saw anything indecent on the internet. I was probably only 10 at the time, and was trying to get on the search engine Infoseek. I had mistyped the URL, however, and typed in “ifoseek” instead, which turned out to be some porn site. Much later I would classify this as an instance of cybersquatting, but I didn’t know any of that at the time. I remember fighting the urge to go back, but eventually I succumbed, and the whole world of online pornography opened up for me. For a long time I was ashamed of it, but in the last few years that changed. It might partially be due to the fact that the Internet being filled with porn is just widely accepted, and as well as the fact that a lot of people watch porn. I think part of it also has to do with me taking a more rational trend in life, and I critically pondered the question of whether porn ever actually does anyone harm. I concluded that, aside from cases where the actors are forced to do it (most prominently, child pornography), there is no physical reason pornography is damaging. As for the whole moral degradation argument, if you were one of those people who were surprised that I watch porn, maybe you should rethink the argument that porn makes men objectify women.

But I don’t want to spend this post rebutting the negative affects of pornography. Instead, I want to give a more personal account of pornography, and what I have learned about myself from it. Regardless of it’s influence on morals, I do think pornography often depicts humans as (shall we say) animals. That is, the plot of a pornographic movie, if there is one at all, tends to portray people as thinking of nothing but sex. There is no consideration of time, money, possibility of getting caught (unless that’s what the director wanted). This past statement, of course, is something I couldn’t have said even 3 years ago. In the early days I didn’t really discriminate, and everything explicit on the web looked the same to me. As I grew up and learned and thought more, however, this trait of porn became clear to me. I must say that there are times when mindless sex is exactly what you’re looking for, but most of the time nowadays I’m looking for something else: a connection.

My real problem with porn is that the actors rarely show concern for each other. Although the act of sexual intercourse requires another person, it is safe to say that both characters are more often than not only concerned with their own desires. If the actress gave a blowjob, it’s not to please the buy, but because she “likes it”. If I may, it’s the difference between being a friend because it keeps you from feeling guilty, and being a friend because you truly care for their feelings. Sex in the real world, I would think, is more about the other person’s desire. Both people may be horny, but there is the desire to make the other person happy first. In porn, these acts of “giving” seem forced, and are there more to satisfy the /audience/ than the /partner/.

Instead, lately I’ve been more attracted to amateur pornography. I don’t mean what professional studios label as “amateurs, but actual home made videos. Often these are videos that couples have filmed of themselves, probably for their own entertainment later. Because the actors are real people (not fake characters) with feelings for each other, however, these videos depict much more intimate acts of love making. And that’s what I’m looking for: the sense that what is shown is not simply two animals copulating, but two humans with emotions and an intellect. What they are doing is an extension of their love, because even a piece of cloth between their bodies is too much to bare. It is, almost by definition, a private moment, and therefore I also feel somewhat guilty about it’s distribution and consumption. But again, it’s (mostly) a victimless thing.

Given that it’s rather easy to spot whether two people like each other, I’m surprised that not more professional porn is done depicting this connection. The most obvious clue, I think, are the actors hands. Are they clasped and fondling (gently), or are they there just to hold the other person in place? Is the brushing of the hair to see their face better, or to give the camera a better angle? The face, too, is a big area, just because we are so good at reading emotions. And then, of course, the big orgasm thing – is there any involuntary movement?

I think the fact that I think in this way says a lot more about me than the fact that I watch porn. One last thing… you may comment that I’m looking for intimacy in the wrong place. I know.

My first instinct, of course, was to just search for “Northwestern University”, but it was quickly apparent that people who attend Northwestern don’t actually write “Northwestern”. Maybe this is due to the assumed common context of the tweeter and the audience (“grounding“); the reader knows the tweeter is at Northwestern, and since conversations try to maximize bandwidth, what is common knowledge is left unsaid.

The question then becomes: what terms would people at Northwestern, and only people at Northwestern use? That is, what phrases are semantically associated with Northwestern?

There were only two that I could think of:

• “Dillo Day”. It turns out that no other university in the world has a day in honor of armadillos (or whatever the reason NU actually has a Dillo Day). Of course, this only works when Dillo Day recently happened or is going to happen soon
• Norbucks. This actually makes a lot of sense, since it’s a portmanteau of Norris (University center) and Starbucks. By itself, either word is common, but this combination makes it unique to Northwestern.

Can you find any other phrases which are unique to Northwestern?

I am someone who needs things to do to be satisfied. It can be school work, or being with friends, or sinking into a good book. The first I’m done with, by definition; the second I don’t have that many of; and the third I have a nagging feeling is not constructive enough. Paul Graham says of reading, “Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there’s no test of how well you’ve read a book, and that’s why merely reading books doesn’t quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you’ve read to feel productive.” That’s why I use book darts, to keep track of stories which I find inspiring and sentences of succinctly expressed great ideas. I write the quotes down afterwards, and they may eventually find themselves in blog posts – as the ones from Closing the American Mind did.

I’ve always thought that the greatest contribution of religion to personal life is that it gives people a purpose. I believe in creating that purpose myself instead of having it be prescribed, and so perhaps it’s strange that I don’t like free time. But I don’t think that’s a fair description of myself; it’s not that I don’t like free time, but the promise of more, better things to do in the future makes this period of relaxation boring. In two weeks I will be in LA, once again interacting with the smartest kids in the country and the world. In three months I will be in Ann Arbor, naively eager to contribute to the compendium of human knowledge. It is in comparison to these sights and sounds that this period of nothingness seems dull.

I was once asked whether I will miss Northwestern. As a rather unemotional person, I replied that I don’t think I will. “Missing” is not the right word to use. I am certainly sad to see friends depart, neither of us knowing when we’ll see each other next. I also know that I have fond memories of my time at Northwestern, and will sometimes reminiscence over them. But I believe I have a bright future, with the great opportunities for happiness (and disappointment as well, I suppose). The past has shaped who am I; now let me shape the future.

What I’m saying is that I would rather have graduation done with, then jump on to the next thing in my life, than to waste a week waiting for things to catch up to my enthusiasm.

I guess I’m an impatient person.

Keep it classy.

Bloom’s basic thesis is that the modern drive for openness and tolerance takes away the individuality of cultures and of people. By asking students to be open to different ideas, everything becomes relative to students, and therefore unimportant. They are equally passionate – or rather, equally dispassionate – about everything. They do not argue for a way of life, and do not see things above money, happiness, and life. In Bloom’s words, “they do not drink the spirit of life, but prefer the water of the crowd.”

Bloom’s explanation of this is the lost of the classics: people are not reading great books anymore, and therefore do not experience, through the characters in the book, what it means to sacrifice their lives for a cause, or to struggle through truly difficult circumstances. They do not have anymore what Bloom calls “wisdom”. The Bible is one of Bloom’s classics, and he writes,

“With [the Bible's] gradual and inevitable disappearance, the very idea of such a total book and the possibility and necessity of world-explanation is disappearing. And fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise – as priests, prophets, or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine. Contrary to what is commonly thought, without the book even the idea of the order of the whole is lost.”

Personally, I’m not convinced that students are truly lost without the classics. I do, however, agree with Bloom’s general belief that today’s students are lacking something. I’m not sure there’s a word for it, but it encompasses the desire to keep learning, the desire to be convinced of something and to work to proof or defend that conviction. Bloom uses this anecdote to illustrate what students are missing, and how modern education are failing to help students regain that drive:

I once had a debate about education with a professor of psychology. He said that it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his students. [...] I began to wonder what he replaced those prejudices with. He did not seem to have much of an idea of what the opposite of a prejudice might be. [...] Did this professor know what those prejudices meant for the students and what effect being deprived of them would have? Did he believe that there are truths that could guide their lives as did their prejudices? Had he considered how to give students the love of the truth necessary to seek unprejudiced beliefs, or would he render them passive, disconsolate, indifferent, and subject to authorities like himself, or the best of contemporary thought?

After reading this story I was reminded of an AI koan in the Jargon File:

In the days when [Gerald Jay] Sussman was a novice, [Marvin] Minsky once came to him as he sathacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to playTic-Tac-Toe” Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how toplay”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?”, Sussman asked histeacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

The moral of this story is that randomized preconceptions are not the lack of preconceptions. You just don’t know what they are. The psychology professor is doing much the same thing. Simply by getting rid of what prejudices the students have which the professor can detect, doesn’t mean that the students don’t have any prejudices left. Worse, now no one knows what those prejudices are, and cannot act to instill a more useful set of beliefs. In computer science terms, the goal of initializing a neural network is not to get rid of any “preconceptions”, but to give it the best “preconceptions” for the the neural net to start learning with.

Students, following only the common and mundane goals of money, fame, “success”, are missing out from the greater enjoyment of life. Too few, and very often far too late, realize that they don’t like what they’re doing. “The most common student view lacks an awareness of the depths as well as the heights, and hence lacks gravity.” There needs to be some energy, some driving force, whether from the reading of the classics or from some other source to propel students above hoi polloi. Bloom at one point called this “indignation”. “Indignation is the soul’s defense against the wound of doubt about itsown; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. Itjustifies putting Socrates to death. Recognizing indignation for whatit is constitute knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience morephilosophic than the study of mathematics.”

But what can schools and universities do? “Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to see that completion.”

My favorite quote in the book simultaneously points out the problem and the solution:

The only way to counteract this tendency [that the here and now is all there is] is to intervene most vigorously in the education of those few who come to the university with a strong urge for the un je ne sais quoi, who fear that they may fail to discover it, and that the cultivation of their minds is required for the success of their quest. We are long past the age when a whole tradition could be stored up in all students, to be fruitfully used later by some. Only those who are willing to take risks and are ready to believe the implausible are now fit for a bookish adventure. The desire must come from within.

You know, even after spending some time looking on Google, I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer to this question. If I may, however, I would like to propose the following partial solutions:

• Swings and slides both offer the kid motion, and it’s faster motion than they at that age can acheive themselves. So it offers a novel sensation for the children.
• Along similar veins, at least the slide offers a new tactile experience as well. I can’t think of that much else where you can feel solid material sliding underneath your fingers.
• Slides and swings are usually located in playgrounds, where lots of children gather. The opportunity to play with other children form the last part of the appeal.

Some adults (like me!) still go and play on slides and swings, and personally I think it’s for much the same reason. Of course, as herion_e pointed out, there’s also the nostalgia for us, too.

Building on the last point above, this week’s question is: why do humans have social needs?

All of the programs mentioned above, however, are Bash scripts.

I’m actually a little sheepish about this. After all, Bash is not a real programming language, but just a way to automate a few administrative operations. There is no type system, no support libraries, no object oriented utilities.

I’ve thought about doing more things in python, but somehow there’s a barrier to entry to it. I reasoned that since what I do is mostly with text, it’s easier to read from files in Bash than in python (a single cat as opposed to open().read()). But really that shouldn’t be a problem. The output might be an issue too, if I wanted things in nice columns and what not. But then instead of column or paste I would just be using printf or equivalent.

I was digging around Paul Graham’s older essays, and I came across his one titled “Being Popular“. It’s about what he things makes programming languages popular. Most of the attributes in the essay don’t describe the Bash script very well, except for the section on Throwaway Programs. And that, I think, is exactly why I use Bash scripts so often.

Because I’m using Linux, a lot of my operations are done on the command line. I don’t just mean the crazy programmer things like compiling or system administration, but I mean every day things like moving files, writing essays, even reading a book. My volume control, in fact, is also a command line program (alsamixer; although now I have a keyboard shortcut for that and I rarely actually open alsamixer). Given that I’m in a terminal so often, Bash is practically always open for me.

It is precisely this always available attribute which makes me use Bash. As Graham mentioned, I don’t want to write something, then wait for it to compile, then run it to see if it works. Bash works as an interactive prompt, and I can type the whole program in “one line” and just run that. More that that, I can test things a lot quicker in Bash than I can in C or Java. Just open a new terminal (Ctrl-N) and I have a clean slate to test if a certain line of my program does what it wants. Python, of course, is also interactive, but it is unfortunately not as easily accessible from the desktop. I have to type a full 7 keys (P-Y-T-H-O-N-(enter)) to get to the interactive shell, and this slows down the entire process.

So until someone manages to use python as their main shell, I’m sticking with Bash.