In The Beginning with nature

The Lightness of Human

An ex-friend used to laugh because I used to be mildly Pangloss-leaning. I never did put it that way back then, and I certainly don’t identify with that description now, but that was the category he chose to box me into. I’m assuming he didn’t know many categories.

See, while reading Candide, you meet Pangloss, a character who very much enjoyed employing the – in my current opinion – truism “the best of all possible worlds”. My friend thought it was hilariously cute that I agreed with Panglosse’s wording. He didn’t understand, however, that I upheld the accuracy of that phrase not because, a la Leibniz, I thought that out of all the original possible worlds – worlds that were somehow already extant even though God allegedly created Heaven and Earth – God chose the best one available (because he LOVES you) and gave it to YOU. YOU, his SON…

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The interesting world of Frequencies

The Lightness of Human

Here’s a cool graph:

http://xkcd.com/1331/

That graph makes me feel things. Disregarding the funny parts (“A Sagittarius named Amelia drinks a soda” whaaaaa!) this is one interesting piece.

Though, I’ll add as an aside, the funny parts are equally interesting. Here I am wondering how he got that Amelia frequency. He probably made it up. But what if he didn’t, you know? And if he didn’t, how did they measure that? Man, I love this comic.

Going back to my initial thought: this makes me feel things. The birth frequency drives me crazy. I have decided I’m going to be an evolutionary dead-end. It’s insane how many of us there are. Check out the world population clock, last time I checked it there were 7,222,185,535 Homo sapiens according to it. That was around 8:20am PT on March 26th, 2014. Does it terrify you how much that number has…

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True Detective – Season 1 Episode 8 – Form and Void

Ah! The closing of the first True Detective chapter. I think it odd that it ended the way it ended. I understand this story relied strongly on Cohle’s development, so his personal growth sealed the end, yet I was disappointed, similarly to Cohle, that no one else was caught for the crimes against the children.

I get that the world doesn’t work as neatly as that, and the Tuttle name was powerful enough to extricate itself from whatever nastiness its holders bathed in. Still, I wish some dirt had stuck to the name, but most of all I wish we had learned more about Childress himself. Why he adopted the mythology, what made him the way he was. I wanted to know more details about what went on inside his head. I will echo Cohle when I ask “why the antlers?”

Either way, I’m glad Cohle found a soothing place in his mind. Although I didn’t think it was likely that a person as negative as he could have a change of heart as easily as it was portrayed, I’m content that he did. Content because I liked him deeply, and I wished him happiness, as oddly as that might sound given that he’s a fictional character. Yet, it is only with fictional characters, after all, that we can develop such a close connection in less than 8 hours because they, unlike the real among us, enjoy less privacy and the cameras often show us their true self uninhibitedly and without shame.

All in all, I loved this show and I’m looking forward to Pizzolatto’s next project, though next time I would like to know a little more about his antagonist from the antagonist himself. I loved Cohle’s exploration of his own philosophy, and I was looking forward to Childress speaking about his.