Swine flu? Bah. What about real viruses?

I’ve been extremely frustrated with my Internet connection for the last few months. Apple Care blamed the problem on my ISP, and my ISP told me it's a problem with my computer. To make matters worse, obtaining relevant support from tech guys is nearly impossible (most of them aren’t native English speakers and the ones that do speak clearly are incredibly incompetent). So when I finally got a guy on the phone last night who actually knew what he was talking about, I was incredibly relieved. After spending a long time troubleshooting, he informed me I probably had a virus causing a "DNS flood attack." Internet security has changed a lot in the past few years. Before, it was sufficient to not download strange files and avoid a pornography or gambling addiction, but now you have to worry about strange Internet security threats and your wife becoming addicted to online chess. There’s no telling what will happen in the next twenty years.

Column A and Column B

I recently took the GRE. Again. I think I was hoping that by some stroke of luck, the gods would show their favor and grant me the knowledge I needed to ace the darn thing without studying. You can imagine what happened. Returning from the whole ordeal quite frustrated, I was pleasantly surprised with the slightly vindicating lecture given in my Computers and Ethics in Society class on “The Orders of Ignorance.” I quickly concluded that, while I could feel the strain of first-order ignorance many times during the GRE, I was rarely allowed to show my capacity with second- or third-order ignorance problems, which meant that the test did not show a true characterization of my intellect.

Which is funny, now that I think about it...

In Thomas Friedman’s "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century" (which is neither brief nor a complete history), the author describes the “flattening” of the world as the product—and future—of the 21st century. With a thorough flattening, businesses will perfect the practices of outsourcing, insourcing, and off-shoring. Technology and businesses will spread to other countries in an entirely symbiotic relationship.

Why is this so funny? Well, let’s look at the future of the flattened world. If Friedman is right, the world is progressing on a course of ultimate flatness. Eventually, open-source software will rule, putting money-hungry companies like Microsoft into the dust. Outsourcing for super-giants like Wal-Mart will be taken to an extreme: having completely exhausted the supply of cheap labor in developing nations, they will turn to robotic labor, which is both cheap and entirely obedient. Because of global expansion and the need for a unified language, the "one tongue to rule them all" will incorporate major sounds from every culture on this planet. When everything seems like it’s running the smoothest, the South Africans will suddenly realize nobody can pronounce their favorite clicking words. The wealthy Singaporean doctors will realize they’ve been replaced in the operating room by a twenty-dollar automated surgeon. Soon even the open-source programmers formerly playing with projects in their "spare time" will realize that, upon loosing their day job at the industry giant, they’ve been forced to take three part-time jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds (the only company who refused to hire robots).

Looking back on this madness, the world will see that while standardized testing like the GRE has the intention of providing an even playing ground for everyone, it only serves the purpose of making everyone homogenous. What the world really needs is not an enormous department store selling everything as cheap as it can get. Nor does it want every computer be a Dell because they can ship them the fastest. What it needs, instead, is innovation. A grocery store that sells only eggs because that’s its specialty. A computer store that sells computers of such high quality it can only make a few in a year. And especially, the world needs individuals who, on occasion, can see how the information displayed in “Column A” really is greater than “Column B” even though the practice GRE says otherwise.

That’s why I’m going into academics.

"Shawty fire burning on the dance floor..."

Interesting. I don’t quite understand it, but just a few days ago, I found myself frustrated that my carillon professor had assigned me a very simple song. “Me? A Clement? Being assigned a piece I could easily perfect in a week? That’s it. I quit.” And I set the music aside. Frequently, I've noticed that when I have no desire to perform, I always do poorly. I was reading an article with the abstract topic of LINUX design and realized the quintessential characteristic for designing an impressive piece of software is motivation. Sure, you need to be able to conquer second or third order ignorance, but burning the midnight oil and waking up before your roommates on a Saturday morning will place you further in line than anything else.

Perhaps the reason my carillon playing went over poorly is that I'm just burned out with school. Homework and studying is almost too much for me. Reading something uninteresting is about as much fun as straining spaghetti noodles for a living: a lot goes through, and you get a little bit of money for it, but nothing ever sticks.

So how do I get the motivation?

MP3's are the devil?

All my life, I've been taught that any form of music sharing is illegal. Borrowing a CD from your friends, getting music from KaZaA, searching Google for (illegally) free songs, or even using the RealPlayer Downloader to rip flash video files from Pandora... All of these violate copyright infringement laws in some fashion. With this in mind, today marked the first time I've read an article that almost supports mp3 stealing. But here is where my story departs from the mp3-blogging norm. What fascinated me most was not the encouragement to steal (Orson Scott Card isn't exactly the most conservative writer, and I'm sure there are a million more left-wing articles supporting his stance) but our class's changed opinion about stealing. Everyone had licked their chops and devoured this "new" idea so thoroughly you could almost see Brother Card on their "evil record company"-smelling breath. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. How much are we influenced by what we read, listen to or view? And how often are we really in control?

Technology is not the devil

No, technology is not the devil. Or is it? One of Satan's greatest tools is deception. Like Nephi prophesied, "[a]nd others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security..." So perhaps Toyota's new flower, intending to "offset the CO2 created by its Prius assembly operations" is only a distraction. I can just picture it now. The huge Prius factory, pumping millions and millions of dollars into a "greener" facility, secretly plotting for world domination.

I guess in the wake of declaring in a mock trial that texting is the devil, I have become a little pessimistic. Or maybe the article claiming that text messaging "temporarily knocks up to 10 points off the user's IQ" has me wary of technology I once thought of as a harmless improvement.

Nope. The Prius factory is intentionally kept warmer in the summer. Case closed.