April 2012
2 posts
Glass
It’s interesting to think that at every moment of every day things pass through our bodies. We’re like pieces of glass through which the radiation begotten by the birth of the universe passes with the greatest ease and at such speed as to never notice having traversed the ends of our bodies at all. We exist in a cacophony of infinitesimally small spears piercing us in every direction...
Torture
It occurred to me recently that work still feels like work. A long time ago, work must’ve really felt like work—because almost all of it required actual perspiration no doubt. What does this mean for the future then? Will we control most things with mental sensors? Will we ever look back and see people sitting at computers, banging away at boards full of buttons, bent over for hours at a...
March 2012
3 posts
Crazy
Before we go on thinking that our personal views (political, social, etc.) constitute a bastion wielding and protecting the truth, consider your own intellectual frailty. Why do we ask people to read our writing and tell us how to make it better? Why is it that an entrant company without a particular expertise in the existing field can end up trashing the incumbents in their markets? Why is it...
Vision
One day we’ll say. Remember when nothing was recorded? You couldn’t watch everything you did yesterday. You couldn’t watch every moment of your 5th birthday party. You couldn’t get a live stream of any place on Earth—just a three-year-old static picture of it. Remember when you didn’t know where your friends were? Remember when you had to manually “Shazam”...
Beweaned
One clear indicator that religion has been the cause of civilization—that it has systematically worked to distinguish us from animals; that it is a clear window into the future; that it has led to the edification of humans beyond what our limited logic could have provided us with—is the emphasis it has placed on cleanliness. Every religion has its own guidance on cleanliness (this includes things...
February 2012
18 posts
Supersport
I was listening to an All Things Digital interview with the head of YouTube, Salar Kamangar, and he said something very interesting in regards to interactive video. He used the example of a football game, and said, imagine being able to choose the helmet-cam of a certain player and watch the game from their perspective. Pretty interesting, but fairly predictable. But then he said something that I...
iPad 2S
@vahidyamartino Think about it from a consumer point of view. If it looks the same it’s called the same. If it looks diff. it’s called diff.
— hdediu (@hdediu) February 21, 2012
I think S is a perfect fit for this product: Screen (Retina Display), Speed (A5X, LTE?), Siri. That’s my guess. (My response to Horace Dediu’s speculation on the new iPad’s name, and his...
Refjection
Whenever I contemplate color in the natural world, it always strikes me as disingenuous. We tend to think that the things that have a certain color are embodied by the qualities of that color and vice-versa, when in fact, as you probably know, the exact opposite can be said to be true. Take plants for instance. Bright-green grass has caused us to associate the color green with vitality, growth,...
Lost
I don’t want to be a leech on society. Which is why I’d be perfectly happy if all of the lost coins in the world magically went into my bank account. Excess food (that’s still good but will go to waste at a future time)—I’d live off of that. Lost property—don’t mind if I do. I’m actually quite curious as to how many people all of the lost and wasted things in...
The Greatest Generation
The greatest generation. I already know which one it will be. It will be the one that must say goodbye to Earth involuntarily. It will be the last one that remembers what it was like to live in the place that created it. It will be the one hoping that all of its preparation for that inevitable day had been sufficient for its continued survival. It will be the one accustomed to incredible hardship...
Blindsighted
Could sight be blinding us? It’s an odd question I know. But perhaps you’ve heard the following, “What do blind people see when they dream?”. It’s a fascinating question, one that I’ve tried to understand. Ultimately however, you realize that if someone has been blind their whole life they don’t see anything in their dreams, but rather they feel things,...
Only
Ever wonder if you’re the only actual person. Everyone else is just a prop—scenery to sustain an illusion. I used to have flashes of that when I was younger. Not so much now. It becomes incredibly obvious that it can’t actually be the case, because everyone around you is so relatable. Everyone is like a version of you. So it must not be true, right? I mean, you’re reading this...
“Humans are wholly forgetful beings.”
Underworld
I sometimes wonder, as you may have, if we are looking in the wrong place for intelligent life. What if it’s right under our noses. What if there are places beneath Earth’s crust that are capable of supporting life? It’s possible. I suppose we’ve offhandedly discounted the notion of there being ‘intelligent’ life there because we have no further to look that to...
Class
A thought occurred to me on my walk to work this morning. I was passing a long line of cars stopped at a light. I saw a bunch of faces I had never seen before. I wondered what we might possibly ever share in common. Then it occurred to me: Just like in high school or college, we belong to a certain ‘graduating’ class, as it were. We are the humans that were here on Earth at this moment...
Space Time
A friend of mine brought this up and got me thinking: When we eventually live on different planets, keeping track of time will be a nightmare. Even assuming that we develop faster-than-light communication, there would still be problems. Imagine if you wanted to talk to someone in another galaxy. How would you know when that person is awake? I think one possible solution is that people would simply...
xt-s asked: I saw your answer about running out of original ideas. As a writer I've learned that originality doesn't exist, we've reused stories since the beginning of time, we can only make something unique. A story about a talking dog in a space is unique but the individual components aren't. There are stories about talking animals, stories about space, etc, but together they make...
Anonymous asked: In Star Trek when one is transported their molecules are broken down and then reassembled at the destination. What happens during transport? You're no longer human during the process, right? Your form has been dematerialised. So are you "dead"? What happens to the soul? If there's a mistake and they can't rematerialise you, you're gone forever.
Silver Screen
One of the things I catch myself thinking about from time to time is, what would I look like in a movie? How big or small would I appear. Would I look better or worse? If I put on a personae could I be just as convincing as most actors on any given scene? That’s one thing I’d like to see before I died. What I’d give to see what I’d look like on the silver screen…
Anonymous asked: What do you think about the possibility of humans running out of original ideas? As in, a future author would not be able to write a book that had not already been written, or a future inventor would have nothing left to invent.
Anon
I think about this all the time. Who invented the joke I just used? Who was it that made up that saying I’ve lived with my whole life? Who wrote that jingle that everyone knows? Who came up with that example that always gets used? It’s such an interesting thing to me. Could we even ascribe credit to one person? Could there have been two people that thought of it, if not simultaneously,...
January 2012
23 posts
Anonymous asked: What do you think people would do if the Sun Just disappeared tomorrow? What would you do?
Twinsies
Maybe you’ve thought of this. Ever wonder if there’s someone out there in the world exactly like you? He or she would have almost your exact same brain, but you’d look different. What if there was one for every single person. What if we all had brain-twins. Well, surely someone would’ve found their twin by now, and shown this to be true right? But what if the universe has...
danceinthemomentwillyou asked: Hello Vahid! I mainly came here to thank you for sharing your most interesting thoughts with all of us. I am a devoted follower of your blog. But since I'm here, I would like to hear your thoughts on the creative process. How do you motivate yourself? Where do you find the ideas, how do you continue on to evolve them to become something great? -- by Anna Liisa
Resell
I was on Facebook, and one of my friends asked the following question:
If one buys something, and re-sells it for a greater price in order to make monetary profit, is that just?
To this I responded as follows: I think a good example of this might be if someone gave you a gift, like let’s say an MP3 player or something, and you already have one. If you give it away, then I think you...
themindink asked: What if our reality is actually a dream and our dreams are reality?
Milestones
I think some people think that science in the end-all. That somehow all knowledge of reality will somehow collapse into discoverability through the use of this tool. But maybe this is where an examination of our past would be helpful. Maybe if we looked backwards in time, we could see that what science really is, is a milestone amongst many other milestones. Let’s look back to when we as...
Assemblers
Computers have certain outputs which are very rudimentary compared to what we can image. We’re most familiar with the screen, what you’re looking at now. Then there’s sound through speakers, electrical signals through wires and radios, and with the assistance of a printer, a printed page. These are necessary, but so far not very exciting. So we thought, hey, let’s extend...
Thank You
I just wanted to thank everyone who has taken some time out of their days to read Nine Thoughts and reblog and ‘like’ posts and even contact me through the ‘Ask Me Anything’ function. It’s been a little over five months since I started the site, and it has gone far better than I had imagined. And I know that I sometimes talk about stuff that may not interest you, but...
Older
I don’t really listen to ‘They Might Be Giants’, but they have one of the most memorable lines of any song I’ve ever heard. It’s funny and true and it puts my mind in a strange state of contemplation. I think you’ll like them too:
You’re older than you’ve ever been, And now you’re even older, And now you’re even older, And now...
Resource
Do you ever wonder how many Edisons and Einsteins and Picassos and Jobs’ the world misses out on because of world poverty and social bankruptcy? These individuals are the exceptions to the rules that stipulate that life is difficult, you must conform, you must take what you’re given. We don’t think of the minds of others as precious resources, like plants, that if well-tended...
Specktacle
Air. It’s a given. Which is why we don’t think much about it except when it’s howling quickly by and knocking things over. But even in an absolute state of stillness, it is very powerful. Let’s say you’re at Fenway Park. The fastest pitcher in the world is gonna try to strike you out, only, the baseball is replaced with a grain of salt. He hurls the thing as hard as...
Something Is Rotten
It’s one of those disappointing things you learn at some point in your life, but there really are only a few memorable and worthwhile stories in existence, and they’re simply told over and over again in different ways. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember when it first occurred to me that the Lion King was the story of Hamlet. I’m probably not the only person...
Collapse
For those of you that like sports, and even for those of you that don’t, I think I’ve found an interesting way of describing its appeal on various levels. For some people, the appeal lies almost purely in the ‘ticker tape’, that is, in the analysis of statistics, in informed speculation, in valuation and causality. For these people, it’s like reading the tire marks. But for most of us, the...
Textbook
So Apple today revealed that they have an ‘education’ announcement to take place in about a week in New York City. It’s been widely speculated that this pertains to textbooks, and it is also understood that Steve Jobs was intimately involved with the project until his last days—education has always been a place in which Jobs has wanted to innovate. The following is pure...
Batteries
Our brains are like batteries that charge themselves on the passage of time, storing events which are otherwise lost forever. And just like batteries, our brains let us selectively capture and discharge what we’ve captured onto the future. I guess in that sense we’re also like nets cast on the flow of time, filtering out the gold and letting the river water pass through us. And this is...
Ultra
Ever wonder if each of us humans are just the atoms that make up some universe-sized creature? Take our physical bodies for example: if you zoom way way in on any part of us, you’re just gonna find tiny particles floating around in seemingly complete randomness. Only when you zoom out do you realize that these atoms and molecules make up a human (whose consciousness is completely independent...
Multiple
An interesting thought occurred to me while I was staring out of a taxi window a few days ago. As individuals, we aren’t organisms, because we can’t reproduce on our own. Each of us is half of a multiple-personality organism that has two completely separate parts that can—for the most part—function completely independently of each other, one man, and one other woman. And even then the...
Favorites
What makes something our favorite thing? I think we’d like to think that our favorite things are those that objectively deserve the most merit. But that can’t actually be it, otherwise most people would like the exact same things (and consider them to be their favorites). Instead, there are so many factors to consider: our biology, upbringing, culture, specific life experiences,...
Twenty Twelve
The funny thing about the most important events in history is that when they happen, they come and go, and no one bats an eyelash. Not until decades, or even centuries after these events are they recognized. For example, the declarations of prophethood by Christ and Muhammad were on days which the people (or even the historians for that matter) of their respective times would not have thought...
December 2011
15 posts
Prime
You’ve seen them before. Videos of children using iOS devices. They have no trouble tapping, and swiping through content. They can navigate through games and other interactive applications. And I guess this makes them prime candidates for technology testing, doesn’t it? They have within them the basic human mind, but freed from prejudices, recognition of particular symbols, and learned...
Five By Five
I apologize, but unless you listen to the shows at 5by5.tv, you will most likely not enjoy the following, but otherwise, you might get a kick out of these observations.
EVERY ‘BACK TO WORK’ EVER
Merlin: Hello?
Dan: HI, AUM MERLIN MANN! I LIVE IN SAN FRANCISCO AND I’M FANCY COOL ‘CAUSE I’M MERLIN MANN!
Merlin: Hi! Can I aks you a question? Can I aks you another...
