Sifting Thoughts

            I recently had a discussion about honesty which resulted in the conclusion that saying the first thing that comes into your mind isn’t honest. This flies in the face of many common ideas, because what is honesty if saying the first thing to come to your mind isn’t the most honest thing to say?

            I periodically see a post show up on my social media claiming that a study found that people who swear more are more likely to be honest. The logical connection being made is clearly that people who swear are more likely to be spouting whatever is on their mind, and that’s honest. Isn’t it? Well, let’s take a closer look at that.

            When you stub your toe on something, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? Unless you’re a remarkably logical person, most likely the first thing on your mind in that moment is to be mad at the inanimate object you just stubbed your toe on, and be very angry at it for being there. If you were to shout out your anger at the object (as I’m sure you might), scathing it with the fury of the first thing that came to your mind, are you expressing your real and honest opinion on that object?

            Technically, the answer is yes; in that very specific and precise moment, those horrible things you shout at that poor innocent inanimate object are precisely what you are thinking about it. But, that opinion is fleeting and won’t last. It fades with the pain, leaving you feeling a little silly for shouting abuse at something that doesn’t even have ears – and which you probably put there in the first place. Unless you’re a remarkably stubborn person, you’ll most likely even admit to yourself that an inanimate object can hold no responsibility for the pain you just experienced. And, just like that, your totally honest response to stubbing your toes crumbles into meaningless lies that you spewed out in a moment of emotion. Your actual, honest opinion on that inanimate object and the part it played in causing you pain is the one that comes after letting the pain die down and taking the time to think about it.

            Now, naturally, there isn’t that much trouble with shouting at inanimate objects – unless, of course, it’s fitted with some very sophisticated Artificial Intelligence – but consider if it had been an impressionable child you’d tripped on when you fell and hurt yourself. Why you left a child lying on the floor is beyond me, but that initial, ‘honest’ response of yours could do everlasting harm.

            Let’s take a look at prejudices. These are ideas that we’ve been trained into believing, sometimes since childhood (possibly by having them shouted at us after having been tripped over). We look at someone, and we instantly make certain decisions about them based on how they look, how they’re dressed, how they move – anything. As an enlightened person, you are aware of at least some of your prejudices and know them to be untrue (and, frankly, in some cases, ridiculous. I mean, seriously, just because it’s a spider, it doesn’t mean it’s out to murder you). Yet, there’s that trained piece of your brain that throws the prejudice to the forefront of your thoughts. If you voice that prejudice, because it’s what’s right on your mind, you won’t be being honest – because your honest opinion comes after all that hard work you’ve put in to quashing that horrible prejudice (spiders are people too, you know).

            So, speaking what is on your mind clearly isn’t inherently honest. I would call it impulsive, and only honest out of happenstance or if the person you’re conversing with asked about the first thing that came to your mind. Honesty is what you get after you’ve taken the time to form well-reasoned thoughts.

            That, in itself, is something of a revelation, isn’t it? True honesty doesn’t come from impulsively speaking what you happen to be thinking; in fact what you say can become more honest by sifting it through mental filters before speaking.

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Journey Through Code

            Around a year and a half ago, I decided to take a shot at teaching myself programming. It was a decision a long time in coming, and something I hadn’t attempted since I was 16 or so – when the resources I found weren’t very good, and I quickly gave up on. However, I’ve always had a vague interest in programming – with a slight lean towards making video games – and I wanted to figure out if it was something I could do.

            So, I did some research into various coding languages and landed on a wonderful website for teaching C++, which is a low-level programming language (which means it provides very basic functionality, making more work for the programmer, but also giving far more flexibility and control over the program). Being a low-level language, that made it harder to learn, but it also meant I was being taught exactly how everything worked – something important for someone like me, who is very curious and wants to understand how all the pieces fit together.

            I was delighted to find that, not only did I take well to programming, but I thoroughly enjoyed it as well. The ways of communicating instructions to computers meshed with my own logical way of thinking so well that I felt I was made for this. However, the lessons only took me so far – and they stopped without teaching me what I really wanted to know, which was how to make a Graphic User Interfaces – basically, all the stuff people see on their displays and can interact with, rather than needing to type in specific instructions.

            Some research taught me that these GUIs are extremely complicated to create, ad, as such, most programmers use pre-designed systems for designing them. This was disappointing for me, but I continued on with my learning experience. A random ad that had noticed how much programming research I was doing brought me to a site that offered me some free lessons in another language, Python, for the purposes of data science. I took to this new, higher-level programming language fairly quickly and easily, finding that different programming languages function in essentially the same way – you just need to learn the new keywords and syntax.

Then my father-in-law gave me a Raspberry Pi – a small computer designed for teaching programming and other computer sciences. This also had some functionalities that taught Python, including a built-in GUI system. I played around and learned with it for quite a while, but, again I felt limited. Then I came across code.org, which provided an excellent course in both computer science and coding with JavaScript – a higher-level programming language that is often used for web programming. The lessons also included an app-building program, which was great to learn with.

            I was coming to the end of those lessons earlier this year when something I’d been waiting for happened. Magic Leap released their standard developer kit. For those who haven’t been following my interest in Magic Leap, this is an augmented reality headset that’s being developed. Rather than forcing you to have a screen in front of you, it allows you to bring put interactive digital objects into the world around you. This can range from digital pets that wander around the room, to work screens you can place wherever you want and carry around with you, to... well, almost anything, really! I’ve been following the progression of this product for years, since I discovered it, and my interest in all the possibilities it offers was part of what resparked my interest in programming. And, while the product itself isn’t set to be released until later this year, they had now released everything needed to star programming applications for it – and I was now at least partially competent at programming.

            Needless to say, I immediately signed up, downloaded what was needed, agreed to all the non-disclosure and other agreements related to it (which, yes, I actually read), and happily launched it. The functionality I saw was really cool and exciting, but I also learned of another step I needed to take – this new technology was being combined with game-engines – programs that make it easier to build and create video games. It wasn’t necessary to use one of them, but it was strongly encouraged and would make life easier.

            And that’s what brought me to Unity, a system I was aware of because I’d played games made with it before, and that was, in fact, already on my computer because I’d considered learning it before. However, as excited as I was about learning how to work with Unity and Magic Leap, I had to hold myself back until I completed my code.org lessons – after all, what’s the point of learning if I’m just going to skip the last, and often most important lessons, just to move on to the newest, most exciting thing?

            And I finished those lessons this week. Now I’ve finally moved on to working with Unity, and I’m loving it! I’ve already made my first little game. It isn’t much – just a ball that you can roll around to collect floating boxes – but I made it myself! And while I did have a tutorial through the whole thing, the most important part to me is that I actually understood at least 90% of what I was doing – including writing code in C#, which appears to be the next language being added to my coding repertoire.

            So that’s my programming journey to date, and it’s very exciting. Where will it go next? Who can say? But you may eventually be seeing little games I’ve made, which will be fun, and when the Magic Leap finally comes out the augmented reality world won’t know what hit it (although, in all fairness, this could end up being because I won’t have learned enough by then and I won’t be sensible enough to let that stand in my way).

Check out my YouTube channel where I tell the stories of my D&D campaigns.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Expectations

            When selling products at shows, there is a distinct type of let-down felt when a usually successful show turns out otherwise. It is quite different from poor sales at a new event, where the success of the show is unknown, or somewhere where sales have been poor in the past.

            It all comes down to expectations. If you go into an event expecting success, the joy is less when you are successful and the disappointment worse when you are not. On the other hand, if you expect failure, you won’t be disappointed when you fail, and you’ll be overjoyed when you succeed.

            Looking at the end results of expectations, the next logical step is that it’s a good idea to always expect failure. After all, then you won’t ever be disappointed and you’ll be very happy if you succeed. However, there is a glaring flaw in that logic: your performance.

            If you go into everything expecting it to fail, you will put less effort into it. Worse, you’ll likely be unhappy, which will have a negative impact on everything you do. As a result, you’ll be less likely to succeed.

            Ah hah! says Logic. In that case, expecting to succeed should make you more likely to succeed! And yes, that is true – but only to a certain degree. The sad truth is that it is far easier to fail than succeed. Yes, you’re more likely to succeed if you’re expecting success, but there are too many elements outside your control for that alone to lead to success. In other words, by expecting success, you are setting yourself up for that special kind of disappointment while stealing the joy from your success.

            It is far better to approach things without any expectations at all. Or, as another way of looking at it, with curiosity. I wonder how this will turn out; let’s find out! You keep an open mind, striving for success while leaving yourself open to the joy of achieving it. And if you’re headed for failure, well, just make the best of the situation and try to mitigate your disappointment.

            Having expectations doesn’t help with anything. It’s just our way of trying to predict the future, which we really can’t. Or, if you can, you really need to invite me to a racetrack some day.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

What Makes Morality?

            I got myself to thinking about morality and how right and wrong can be determined. For most of my younger life, I had a very clear idea of what was right and wrong. Even when I reached the age where black-and-white thinking shifted to contain a lot of grey area, I still easily determined right from wrong.

            As someone on the hyper-rational end of the spectrum, I always figured that morality was something determined by logic. After all, if we are to believe there is some underlying, universal truth about what is right or wrong, then we must be able to follow the logical path to discover why it is right or wrong.

            How, then, is it possible for different people to have such varying rule as to what is good and bad? Some comes from external guidance – with religions or trusted people dictating right and wrong – but even without those, most people have an inherent sense of morality. Put someone in a situation or give them a scenario and, without even thinking, they can tell you what they think of it based on their moral compass.

            Which means that a person’s morality is dictated not by logic, but by emotion. Now, it is obviously tempered by their upbringing and life experiences, but the root of all morality lies in emotion.

            This actually makes a lot of sense, because logic doesn’t know morals. Logic can be used to prove a great many things – I have the ability to logically prove that there is nothing wrong with using humans as lab rats, but that doesn’t mean that it is right. That’s something that most people’s morals will immediately tell them is wrong. That decision is also logical, however that logic is built on a foundation of how we feel when confronted with that scenario.

            So I must determine that there are as many different moralities in the world as there are people. What does this mean for the underlying universal morality? Does it exist, and we have yet to find it, or are we simply deluding ourselves into thinking there is such a thing as right and wrong?

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Just Blame the Romans

            With autumn now in full swing, naturally I’m thinking about other seasons. Which led me to an ever-recurring question of mine: why does the new year start in the middle of winter?

            I mean, really, it makes no sense at all. What’s so special about that specific time of year? Nothing at all. Why doesn’t the new year start weeks earlier, during the winter solstice? That at least has some logic to it: the transition from the longest night of the year, after which each day gets longer and longer. That seems like a nice, optimistic way to start a year.

            Or, better yet, the first day of spring. Spring is when all the plants are coming back to life; all the animals are coming out of hibernation. It’s the time of new life and beginnings – doesn’t that sound like the perfect time to start a new year?

            Seriously, sometimes human decisions make no sense.

            I decided to look it up, just in case there really is a good reason for this nonsense. There isn’t. The only excuse we have is that when Julius Caesar fixed the calendar so it theoretically correctly calculated the length of the year (1000 years had it out of sync by a week), he decided to start the new year at the ancient Roman feast to Janus, the two-faced god of doorways and beginnings. I guess that made sense for the times, but you’d think we’d have updated our system by now.

            It does show us another example of how much the Romans impacted modern society. From now on, whenever something about the way the world is run makes no sense, I think I’ll just blame the Romans.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

Also, make sure you check out my wife's blog and her life coaching website.


If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.

Thought Exercise

            I've always wondered about the thought exercise suggesting that reality is just a figment of each individual’s imagination; the idea that there isn't any proof that anyone outside yourself exists.

            I think, therefore I am.

            I look at the world, though, and see plenty of people just as sentient as me. Unless, of course, I bestow that sentience upon them.

            I think you think, therefore I think you are.

            Hmmm...

            Then I look at all the people who express ideas that don’t contain so much as an ounce of logic. That’s enough proof for me.

            I couldn't possibly think of an idea as stupid as that, even in the pretence that I was thinking on behalf of a figment of my imagination, therefore you are.

            Problem solved.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.