mental manifestations

Bad things happen, and people always need to ask why. No one ever has a good answer. Instead, the best people can come up with is just about any external factor they can think of. Everybody wants to put the blame someplace else because they themselves cannot begin to understand what was going on in someone’s mind at the time. People can never truly understand someone on a mental level, which is why they try to rationalize someone’s rationale by pointing the finger at some environmental agent. Sometimes it doesn’t matter why it happened. This freaks people out because when bad things do happen, they don’t know how to respond to it. This leads to correlation implying causation which is not always true.

When I heard about the Virigina Tech massacre, the only thing I could feel was a bad feeling. It’s the kind of feeling you get in your gut when you know something is just not right. I knew people would try to find blame. There always has to be a reason for everything. I would probably guess these people think things happen for a reason. They don’t know how to explain it themselves because they would never be capable of doing something like that.

Strangely, all I could think of was when Anakin Skywalker swayed to the Dark side. No one really questions why he became a Sith Lord and why he terrorized the galaxy. They just accept the fact there is The Force. The tricky part about this is that in the Star Wars universe, it makes sense (i.e. it’s logical) because of that context though it’s really a matter of faith.

People may need a logical response for the Virginia Tech massacre, but logic can also dictate that pointing the blame isn’t going to fix anything. The faithful way of looking at it is to just accept it for what it is. Having no reason sounds like a cop-out, but that is where I stand on matters like these. There are too many factors to consider. There is no way to perfectly predict the future and prevent events like this from happening again (even if you had computating power beyond the capcity of the entire human race or had precognizant oracles). I am also entirely sick of using scapegoats (especially if it’s something stupid). What happened can’t be undone, but there has to be a better way to cope than sticking a finger at someone and waiting for it to be broken.

Back when I was in the 7th or 8th grade, I would listen to the radio sometimes when I did my homework. Some of the songs were catchy and some weren’t. Anytime my family went to Borders Books & Music, I’d go look at the CDs in the music section. I would just peruse through the aisles looking at the various cover art until I found an artist that I had heard on the radio. I would go through the artist’s discography until I found one that contained a song I had heard on the radio. My next few moments would be spent looking at the tracks and wondering if I should buy the CD or not. I had not heard any of the other artist’s songs before and it seemed silly to buy just one CD for one song and a whole bunch of others I hadn’t heard. I almost always put the CD back into the shelf, and then I would continue on looking for another artist I recognized and repeat the process all over again.

I wanted to have music, but I didn’t want to pay for the songs I didn’t want. The songs I liked came from all different artists. My idea was that kiosks should be set up in Borders (the thought of putting in other places hadn’t occurred to me at the time) where people could scroll through a library of songs, pick the ones they liked, and have those selected put onto a CD. People would be charged just one flat rate price for each custom CD that they created.

It was just an idea at the time.

If only…

It’s a late Friday night, and I just came up with a crazy idea.

Run image algorithms on all the pictures on Hot or Not and find trends in faces that yield a particular score.

My friend only had one response for me: “Thesis!”