Now that my office environment has been de-cluttered and re-arranged, I feel supercharged to establish a new world order for myself. I feel a lot more capable now of studying and executing some stuff that is very abstract, and demands an extra heightened and sharpened degree of focus.
I just completed the first learning module from a Java programming manual today. My ultimate ambition is to get some sort certification for it, and pad up my resume a bit. It was the cheapest hobby/interest, skill building exercise that I could think of doing to keep me out of trouble from now until the end of winter. I do reasonably well at translating languages, solving decryption and logic puzzles, so I thought the natural and practical thing to build on from these talents is programming. Right now, I thought that the creative side of this writing exercise would help me wind down and decompress after this lesson of processing nebulous terminology, and blowing out the cobwebs, and knocking the rust off of some long unused mental faculties. I'm hoping that nothing in there seized up too much. I blame too much over-interfacing, and having to constantly dig into the heads of people who are so illogical, void of common sense, who regularly obfuscate information, and just are lacking in normal language skills, for any weakness I'm having in being any more proficient at this new project. Dealing so directly and purely with matters of logic and the accuracy involved in programming is a welcome change, but it's also almost a shock to the system as I sit down and get fully engaged in it, compared to what I regularly deal with. It is, however, just the kind of exercise that I need to do to achieve some sort of balance.
In part of the first exercise there was some examples about how the programming language could be used for guiding a exploration probe on Mars, or something, using OOP (Object Oriented Programming) through creating instance and class attributes and methods within a single inheritance hierarchy. Sounds like Martian, doesn't it? If you have no programming experience, it surely would. This mode of empirical experimentation I'm in, thoughts of Martians, and the coming of Thanksgiving (October 8th here in Canada), and the consequently discounted turkeys in grocery stores, all coalesce to remind me of a story about pornography that still makes me laugh.
I forget the name and date of the documentary that was aired about this subject, but the scenario was this. The blurb I saw on it was about the mating habits of turkeys, and how easily tom turkeys could be brought to sexual arousal with the simplest of stimuli.* Scientists were testing turkeys in a lab with cardboard cutout pictures of hen turkeys. The subject male turkey would fluff out his chest and tail feathers, gobbling up a storm, strutting and circling the photo, and then he would actually try to mount it! Apparently, it's not even necessary to have the whole picture of the female turkey to get the tom turkeys excited. The experiments showed that even when just a picture of the hen turkey's head was pasted on a stick, is enough for the males to still willingly resume trying to court the thing and screw it silly. Oh sure, we could sit here and laugh about how friggin' stupid a creature like a turkey is for doing this. However, the researcher chimed in with a bizarre, yet insightful observation. He stated it as something like: suppose the Martians landed somewhere at night, and then went around peeking through windows to get a first hand account about the behaviours of humans, and chanced upon watching some guy getting freaky with his junk while staring at some pictures in a glossy magazine, or at pixelated lights on a screen. People in this case, aren't that much bloody brighter than turkeys. I would assume that the same kind of conclusion could be arrived at by the Martians if they caught sight of some guys using a laser pointer to tease their cat into chasing a dot of light around the house, laughing like crazy at this simple-minded reaction of this animal, and then sitting down on a couch afterward . . . to play video games**. Not a real difference between the two cases. Therefore, we are far from being a species that should be ridiculing or judging the entertainment behaviours of other animals, especially when it comes to sex. All higher animals use some means of artificial sensory stimulation. It's called play.
Then again, if the abduction stories are true, the Martians shouldn't get a too sanctimonious either if they are still continuing with all that alleged anal probing business.
*- Why they were conducting this research is beyond me, since for the most part, commercially raised turkeys today are the result of artificial insemination. The damn things are being selectively bred to be so big that they seriously risk injuring or crushing a hen turkey if they mounted her, hence this option. There is actually a job out there, as I discovered on Dirty Jobs, on the Discovery Channel. If you ever thought that your job sucked (snicker), just think of these poor bastards.
** - Sorry, but using a controller to chase or shoot at what amounts to points of light on a screen amounts to something not much different than a cat chasing a red laser dot around. We just have a more sophisticated means of doing it. Relax gamesters, I do this too, but I fail to see the appeal of using a whole day of doing it like people do.
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