Self Perception vs. Perception of Others

Today's topic won't be about black holes unfortunately. Recently Brian has posted a comment on another blog post I had and he had asked the question, why do our own experiences come less naturally to us than the experiences of others? While Brian probable posted this question without thinking it would be answered, I will try anyway. This question bugged me for about 3 hours while I tried to come up with something. I guess I came up with something, although it may or may not be true, it's still fun to ramble about.

Humanity is naturally a curious race, according to science, we observe the world around us. It never mentions anything about self observation simply because it's harder. In the physical sense, it's easier to look at someone else's back instead of your own. It's always easier to see things about others, than it is to see things about ourselves. Mentally, it all has to do with bias. When we think about ourselves we have a bias toward ourselves. We either think we suck or we're amazing. Usually the in between is harder to come by, but it can happen. With this bias that we suck or that we're amazing, we tend to strongly lean over to one side of the topic. Also for ourselves, we don't have a rush, we know we will be with ourselves for the rest of our lives, because of this, people don't think about themselves as much as they think about others. If it's someone else, we tend to have much less bias toward them and it's easier to see all their faults and strengths without any hesitation, whether they see it or not. We also don't know how much time we will spend with others so we rush to see what we can pull from them. Lastly it's human nature to benefit ourselves, we seek others only to see how we can benefit ourselves, as a result we tend to judge others much more extremely than ourselves, we have the given that we already know ourselves so we don't tend to judge ourselves. Everything tends to tie back to our nature as animals.

Inability to Learn Consciousness

http://bigthink.com/think-tank/consciousness-the-black-hole-of-neuroscience

On the topic of consciousness, there's a real problem with how to physically explain exactly how it works because of the fact we don't understand how the physical brain works yet. We perceive it as neurons firing and chaining together. This is not always the case, there have been studies on active brains that show that quite often, one part of the brain will fire and dissipate, then as a result of that firing another part completely unrelated to that part will fire even though there is no physical connection to them. That is the problem that scientists face, why does that other part fire. I found this read bringing light to me on the actual history of consciousness. While I know a bit about it myself, the history was not in my understanding. I had thought that ancient societies had known about it. I guess I'm wrong since it was only ever created during the Reformation Era.

Relative Timescale

Time is something that everyone seems to treasure, it's something that allows people to get things done. We all need time whether we are having fun or doing work. It's something to take stress off of us, but what is time exactly. Seconds, minutes, hours, are all synthetic. Time is something man made on a scale that everyone can base their own relative clocks on. We all have relative clocks that run based on what ever they happen to run on, this is the reason for the difference in people's reflexes. They perceive time slower and are able to react faster. Although the difference between people isn't much it can make differences. Although time isn't exactly something that only animals can sense. 

According to some studies plants also have a "sense of time". If one were to observe plant growth you would notice that the plants grow based on their surroundings. Vines tend to feel around and then latch onto objects after they have determined that a safe object is there. Although this takes months of time. the perception of time in the eyes of plants differs from our own dramatically. Although the time I'm talking about now is only relative to the earth.

Gravity plays a massive role in time. You may or may not have heard of it but the more force gravity exerts, the slower time becomes. There is a famous experiment where two clocks which are in perfect sync are placed at different elevations. After a long period of time, the higher one starts running faster than the slower one only by a bit, but the difference becomes noticeable. The more gravity there is the slower time gets. If you are close to Jupiter or even inside, time will run slower for you than on earth, same with any kind of large celestial body. Black holes included. 

I hope to get these kind of posts out early every week or so. If I can't due to time restraints, than I might skip it or post later in the week. These posts will be me blabbering on and branching out further and further from the actual topic. It's kind of like surfing the web and clicking links, except it's all in my head. Topic for next week will probably be black holes. If you want to suggest anything you can leave a comment. No guarantee I'll chose your comment but it's worth posting it. I might get inspired. 

Clicking Links

Google Visual Assets Guidelines
Logos and trademarks seem to be extremely specific to the company that makes them. The simplicity of icons somehow makes it look even better. Although it makes me wonder what people can really do with this. If someone were to change this only slightly it could look very visually similar yet it would no abide to the guidelines. Would Google be able to sue them? It's technically not their own product, because it is different. Yet in this world it's quite hard to have unique ideas because of how many people there are in this world constantly spewing new ideas. It's like a race to the top.
The Alphabet
It seems that all original alphabets started off as pictures on the page to describe what was being seen. Although it's quite weird how we actually produced an alphabet. If you look at Chinese or Korean or Japanese, their written language is quite different. Each word consists of one or more characters that all stem from pictures of the objects. There is no alphabet structure in their languages.
Etruscan Tombs
These tombs are quite interesting, it's similar to some sort of world wonder except for that fact that it's not that largely publicized. For these tombs to be built over such a long period of time makes people wonder how they kept it up for so long, and weather or not they are truly related to each other. It could be a massive coincidence that multiple similar cultures set their burial grounds in these areas and all committed to some sort of games.

http://www.palantir.com/
There is a nice theme going on here, the cause can make most people want to help. The website gives off a professionally simplistic look. This will help people not feel overwhelmed and easily navigate the site. On the main page there's a nice news feed which should be crucial to sites like these. It also has a nice user interface design, also very simplistic. Sometime simple is the best way to go.
Technology
This brings a good point about how technology can benefit and harm. Although this seems obvious, the technology to hunt down criminals can be used unintentionally to harm innocent civilians. The thing is that there are no rules on the internet. The internet is too new to have based laws to protect people on the internet. Right now there's only surveillance but there is no protection against criminals.
Toy Decapitation
Somehow I ended up here at this gruesome tale. I guess it relates to technological harm, although not exactly in the way I thought about it. It kind of shows that people need to take risks to do things they love to do, yet those risks can lead to serious disasters even if all safety precautions are looked into.
RC Helicopters
Personally I had no idea that these toy helicopters had this much professional qualities around them. I had known that some of the high end toy helicopters included a nitro type thing, yet I didn't know there were so many developed tricks to flying them and maneuvering them. From the previous article the man seems to be an expert in this field and when looking at these maneuvers they seem very difficult to pull off or illogical.

11 Tips
This site doesn't provide any negatives about crowd funding, although to be honest maybe there are no negatives. I would find that hard to believe though because of the fact that almost everything will have a negative side to it.Sometimes it just takes time to find out what exactly that is. This site also doesn't provide many details into how exactly money funding works and how the sites that host the crowd funding actually make money.
http://www.sec.gov/News/PressRelease/Detail/PressRelease/1370539807423#.UjSJ-sakq18
SEC seems to have a hard job. They have to deal with these types of things everyday. I guess that's what the government is for in America, I suppose that communist or authoritarian governments would have much less trouble because of total control over everything.

KickStarter
Kickstarter has a really nice site. Everything is nice a modern looking with easy readable stats on recent projects and popular ones before you even need to click them. This could incite people to support something if it looks really good or really popular. I've heard of Kickstarter numerous times before where independent companies advertise brand new games or products. The scale of the difference of these products is immense.
Planetary Annihilation
This game seems to have been extremely popular among everyone. This indie game was created by such a small tiny company that only started recently. It's amazing what kind of ideas people can take and morph into something so amazing that everyone wants it. I guess this is the point of original ideas now. Taking a preset concept and warping until it's different enough to be called unique.
http://lukeplunkett.kinja.com/
It's someone else blog, he appears to be a gaming commentator and something like that. He talks a lot about games and stuff. Although even though it's just gaming he seems very serious and he even talks about the small parts of gaming. I guess that makes him an expert right? He talks about good soundtracks about computer parts and stuff like that
Arma III
This game has recently revived some really big popularity. The Arma series seems quite nice, it's made to be a sort of super realistic. This one seems to be really over the top. The creators of Arma 3 had gotten arrested for espionage on another government while working on the Arma 3 game. They needed reference images of a military base for their newest release. The graphical quality of this game just becomes ridiculous at this point.

Blog... What?

The concept of a blog is fairly new to me. As an assignment I will probably find this quite tedious though, if I were to keep a blog running, it would probably a weekly past-time. Maybe it would be more than once a week, but I guess I won't know for a while. What do I intend to talk about on this blog? What ever comes to mind will commonly be the topic of discussion. Weather it range from a extremely controversial moral topic, to a simple question elaborated in an esoteric way, I don't care. Although the question I pose today might be a little off topic from the ones I describe, I hope people get an idea of what they are in for.

Fractals

Fractals are quite interesting originally when I first discovered this topic, yet I never expected them to be present in the real world on any kind of scale. I thought it was simply a man made mathematical thing. http://fractalfoundation.org/2009/11/fractal-globules-in-dna/ shows how DNA uses fractals to properly fold upon itself without interfering in anyway. It's quite amazing that something can naturally form such a shape that has no knots at all. Honestly things that are natural are much more interesting than what people produce, and what we do produce that is beautiful is almost always based on something in nature. Modern architecture revolves around the idea of observing nature and producing a structure based on that.

Artist's Bio

Darren Ling is a writer that attempts to specialize in philosophical fields indirectly. As a 16 year old he writes stories with meanings that all tie into a bigger picture. He has been influences by many people and that has shaped the way he is. He gives no credit to one specific person for the way he is now. Although he delves into the deep end of philosophical and questionable topics, his experience as a writer is rather limited and produces an amateur piece most of the time. His goal is only to write and express his inner thoughts. He seeks to influence others in a good way, he doesn't wish to end up influencing others in a negative way. He wants others to think. With these unusual terms in mind, he continues to write.