Jim Carrey - Eternal Sunshine

I watched the new movie with Jim Carrey. I must admit he has a charisma that makes any movie shine, even if the theme itself is not the most inspired. I do not know if this is the case.

The idea turns around a possible technique to erase our undesirable memories. Well, suppose that one day it becomes a reality and we have a girl tired of girlfriend's face looking for a clinic and asking them to forget it, literally. The consequences are not so difficult to imagine. From it I take three conclusions:

First: movies are currently making some sort of subliminal brainwashing, something that, without paranoia, would make a good theme for a movie about the fourth power and the media in general. Each film that suggests a plausible future reality is, even if unintentionally, preparing his audience for a situation when fiction one day will become reality. A movie like Signs makes that if a few years we contact aliens it does not seem so absurd. And not just Signs. Contact, Aliens, Enigma of Another World, and even not Independence Day and Men in Black do this: prepare humanity for the day of real contact. And they make that amazing discovery, such as spacecraft do almost daily in the sky, pass undetected because no dazzling from the movies' point of view. A computer like Hall 2000, from "2001: A Space Odyssey", makes our modern Pentium seem old valve radios, while even Bruce Willis in "The Siege" has not been able to prepare us for a September 11. But in general, the movies flatten the ground, leave the work more manageable.

In the field of medical advances, a highlight is Vanilla Sky, trying to prepare ourselves for the day of our immortality. And Tom Cruise tries again to prepare for the day that dominate the extra-sensory powers, in Minority Report. This, with Jim Carrey, try doing the same, though very quietly, very subliminally.

My second conclusion: that if one day we have available a feature like that, it would actually no use more than a cardiac defibrillator or a medical ultrasound  monitor screen. I do not know if normal people would want to forget something, even undesirable. Sure, there are traumas that must be forgotten, but what's the point you forget a bad relationship, a bad boss, a bad day? I think really, we are our memories, and not without reason that a blow to the head that makes one forget all that life is lived is a bizarre event considered of a medical point of view, and thus this citizen does not  has a personality, from the social point of view. He has a past, it is true, but only in the others  minds. He, from himself,  is a no one: a simple blank slate. We are what we are exactly because we are the sum of our good and bad memories. Who would not be surprised when you hear an old song, reread an old book, watching an old movie, meet a face long forgotten, travels back to the places long forgotten, rereads a yellowed forgotten letter in a drawer somewhere? Even a bad memory that will be remembered in these cases is still welcome. So...

I make my third conclusion: that our problem is not a  forgetfulness machine. This we already have: the time. Just wait and all will be forgotten sooner or later. Our problem is the opposite. We need a machine to remember. We need to dig deep into our minds and find out, put saved forever all what a day we live, even if when we put saved on a sheet of paper, in a journal, in a speech with our grandchildren and even in our blogs, why not? Imagine the day when we have a remembrance machine. Sit back, pay your session and have good memories! And save them on video! Show the world what you really lived!

When this day will come?

Questions that do not want to shut up

I wonder:

After all, what is the purpose of a blog?

What are people willing to take a blog seriously?

What is the time required per day to make a default blog a custom, cool and attractive blog?

And then, if it is much visited, what to do with the thousands of e-mails of praise, congratulations and criticisms?

What aspires a blogger?

Is the only purpose of a blog the fighting for fifteen minutes of fame and then a count of page views great and sad?

What have we really important to add to the world, and in particular to the Internet?

It's worth the effort to spend hours every day browsing for new pictures to the blog, new ideas for the blog, new contacts for the blog, new disclosure about the news of the blog, new animated gifs again and more and more disclosure?

Can someone in good conscience really believe that a blog be a source of fame and money?

Why to think that someone who has to manage his own blog, and everyone have your on the Internet, may be interested in reading other people's blog, your direct and immediate competitors?

Who may be curious to know what goes on in my life, except those who know me personally and also know everything that is on my blog, because they live here beside me, watching things happen in real time ?

A blog generates more questions than answers.

Alright! What's matter is experience. I think ten years from now we will remember blogs as things did not work, like cars that could fly, or as small dinosaurs, fossils, which have evolved to better and more efficient forms of virtual communication. I hope that blogs evolve, because the way they are today, seem to me something without identity, without purpose, without personality.

And a photolog, then? Where does it end?

I, Robot

I just watched the movie "I, Robot."

Movies about scientific fiction are special cases. Moreover, cinema is a case apart, I think. It is paradoxical that a science fiction movie can make a real fact seems to be fiction, and thus, make that fiction resembles fact. I'll try to explain.

When watching a science fiction movie, I see four interesting things:

First: that the creators of science fiction movies really can make the future look incredibly different and wonderful, at least at the time the movie is playing. Of course, when it is released, the movie with futuristic scenes is what best portrays the future for your exact present. After a few years, if we watch the same movie, we will probably see that the future he promised did not materialize, or that promise was absurd, or ridiculous, or too advanced, but at launch, they actually manage to capture our best expectations about the future.

Second: that although they concern the future, that future, however far in the time that is, it is still too close to that we will see it materialized into reality. There are scenes in movies that take place in 2020 and we think that they actually become fact in 2020, then a wonderful future awaits us, but in real life things are much slower. Movies that show things in 2020 show us, in fact, things that will occur only in 2200. We always get a slight feeling that, over the years, the movie promised good things too much, too soon, to be possible, and we feel a certain frustration. But we can only see it after a long time the film was released.

Third, the cinema industry, by itself, was never considered as part of a possible future. We do not do fiction about the movie industry, and therefore do not feed expectations about its future, but this future came: fifty years ago nobody could imagine the advances that the graphics computer  and special effects would be achieved. Watching a fabulous fiction movie is also attend to this present. After all, the movie was made just now, and it is real. It was possible to do it! Behold the future becomes the present!

And finally, fourth: we do not even realize it, that the future has arrived, at least in certain areas. We do not have a lot of men in space, but we have the Internet, computers, e-mail, cell phones, the special effects in theaters, and not even realize it. And we have popular cars!

 

And why do not we realize this?

 

I think because we are mired up to our necks in all this thing we call technological development.

 

To be frank, we are undergoing the biggest revolution that humanity, the planet, the cosmos has ever seen, and even have awareness of the scale of this revolution. The size of the thing is fantastic, and Will Smith is just part of the process

Where does it end?

Communities

I keep me busy with Orkut. I know I could be part of a lot of friendship groups and sites and newsgroups on the issues I've been looking for, but in Orkut this thing is easier. We have to admit, he is a well organized site.

I've been looking for ideas to build my new personal page, and I'm looking for ideas to develop my war game. And I've been racking my brains to adjust my accounts in Money, and I'm willing to buy my first car! Ah, now it go!

I have been also reading about money. Nothing too deep. And I'm continuing the registration of my books.  Already 78 of them are registered! But I have more than four hundred!

And I have eaten lots of vegetables and fruit. I have to maintain weight. And speaking about to be fit, I signed up a group of nerdy friends. I know that I should be a nerd. They speak my language and I speak to them. Sure, I'm too old for certain activities that adolescents nerds engage, and I do not have more passion for collecting things, and I'm not see a thousand times the same movies and series , but generally, I am a real nerd. And I'm glad I've been psychologically well balanced since I decided to take seriously my things that need to be taken seriously. But I have some doubts.

 

First: what do I do that has value to the world?

 

Second: where I actually want to get?

 

Speaking this way, I look like Stephen Covey!

One thing is certain: the nerds will rule the world!

Envying Bill Gates and Bertrand Russell

I'm reading "The Conquest of Happiness" by Bertrand Russell. A delightful book, written in the 30s of last century, but amazingly refreshed. Were set at that time, at least in the United States, the foundations for the current century XXI, of Bill Gates. What Bill Gates has related with it?

Well, there is a chapter in the Russell's book in which he comments about the envy we feel we can not have what others have. I have a couple of feet, but the neighbor has a pair of s and a pair of shoes. And other has legs, shoes and a car, used to neither to spend your shoes nor to do not tire your feet. And another has a private jet, to no waste time traveling by car. And also, at the end of the line, he, himself, Bill Gates, that if is not the most envied man in the world, is one of the most. To be precise, is not the man who is envied for what it is, but his fortune which is coveted by size it is, even though, according to the very billionaires say, nothing you can buy in the world today with a fortune of a billion dollars can not be bought by one who is only ten million. In short, very rich people admit that no need so much money to have almost everything that money can buy, except some irrational extravagances. So why would we want so much money? And why so much envy and greed?

I, for my part, realized a long time, and Russell had the same opinion forty years before I was born, that the best that money can buy is time and security: just that I had enough to not need more work and live in relative safety, and it would by enough. Why?

According to my calculations, a citizen with two or three million dollars can live happily forever... if so, why would we want more?

Segundo meus cálculos, um cidadão com dois ou três milhões de reais pode viver feliz para sempre... se é assim, por que queremos mais?

The problem is that we do not have these two or three million, or shadow of it. If we had a tenth of that value, here in Brazil, we would be lucky people. So the problem is not the jealousy, but the misery.

It reminds me of a story I read in in a old Reader's Digest magazine many years ago, when I was a child, and that has affected the way I see the financial world and life. I should was twelve, thirteen years old, not more. And the magazine was old, very old, from the fifties. A cousin of my mother, well off, had in his basement a cardboard box the size of a refrigerator completely full of old Reader's Digest magazines, probably from the forties to the most recent time, in the early eighty. He left me to play comfortable with it all, and in them I read an article with a strange name: "Have you seen arusty clip?"

It was a text that said that probably we never saw rusty paper clips because they have a so derisive value  that are discarded before to rust even by time and use. This text told me something today lost its importance, it is the habit of using in fact what we have. The text tell about a pair of leather sandals that the owner used comfortably for decades, although occasionally a band unstick and he became to repair it. Nothing during that time was done that these leather sandals  loses its real utility, and beyond that, beyond its usefulness, there was no reason to replacing it, exchange it, throw it out the other younger. Nothing that new could offer the old no longer offered. Finally, the text has taught me that we should use things, rather than just have them by the desire to have them.

Many years later, I discovered I assimilated that text so deeply. I have personal items that simply are with me, in use, for decades. A pair of glasses that I bought ten years ago, was only now retired, a few days. My contact lens is almost six years! My PC is a Pentium II 266! And I have no car ... in a city like Goiânia, where there is a car for every two inhabitants, I am a rare case. Simply I live without cars.

After, I came to confirm this way of life when I read that "there are two objectives to be achieved in life: first, to get what you want, and then enjoy what you got. Only the wisest conduct the second" a thought by Logan Pearshall Smith, who I do not know he is, but whose sentence is in "the University of Success", by him, himself, Og Mandino. I know that quote phrases is easy, but I see it as a challenge rather difficult to be achieved.

 

I think we live in a world of excess in every way. All excuses to consume wantonly are just it: excuses. I do not believe in asceticism, in detachment, in the abandonment of our lifestyle, but I think mindless consumerism is a bullshit. We should only consume once we reflect on the very real need to realize that consumption. We should only buy more clips after our old clips were too rusty to be useful.

Speaking about consumption and even about recycling, and about old and good things, I'm listening to "Music of the Gothic Era" from Deutsche Gramophon collection, one that appeared in magazines a few years ago. Yes, I bought a hundred fascicles, patiently. I knew I had something to be consumed for the next hundred years. I do not regret it.

Studying classical music involves studying its real history. You take an ordinary book on the history of music and see that before Eminem and Skank (a terrible brazilian band) came many good composers. Most better than Eminem and Skank.

In this historical context, the collection of the Deutsche offers, first, in chronological order, a CD of Gregorian chants.

The Gregorian chants came before the gothic music. And before Gregorian chants there was music, but there is nothing in the collection period prior to the Gregorian chants. Maybe a CD with Greek music is a good way to complete this pre-Gregorian, but there is nothing from Greeks in the Deutsche collection. Moreover, Deutsche, for market issues, have not released the the fascicles in a historical-chronological order, so that if we are listening to CDs in the order they were released, we ran without a comparative reference between the various styles of the time and the various composers, and works of these composers do not know what it was composed at the beginning or end of their careers, which is not very good in terms of learning and appreciation of works of art. The correct, in my opinion, is always to study what we hear. So, a book of history of music and an Internet search on the works of a particular composer are fundamental things to do if we want to appreciate classical music.

Yes, gothic music, with five hundred years old or more, are good to hear. Very good. Pairs and trios of voices that make the mind fly to the realms of Peter Pan, castles and forests, innocence and purity. Art is it: a millennium does not make it worse or better than modern art, just different. And if it is good art, is still worthy of being consumed. Bertrand Russell, a great philosopher, logician, mathematician and writer, is also still worth reading. He, who, wise, learned to live up to its 98 years old. Someone who lives so long and teaches  how it's can be done can not be overstated. And to think that a Gothic music cd costs a few dollars and a book by Russell, no more than a cd, and I feel privileged again, and doubly: first, to be able to dispose of the necessary money to by to myself these wonders of art, and second, and more importantly, by being able to enjoy the pleasures of art, and feel happy to do it, though I do not have a billion dollars.

I doubt that someone with just money and nothing else is able to make this money turn into pleasure and satisfaction the way I make with mine .

Now, I envy Bill Gates less.