Favorites Page

A REAL LIFE EXPERIMENT

Featured Articles

Because I don't have enough skills to edit the html of this thing, I decided to just make a post on the better (more "accessible") parts of this blog. Of course there are the tags (which i really really want to turn into tagclouds but can't) at the sidebar which will help you navigate by topic and there are archives there too if you want to see what I've been up to chronologically. These are all basic and I wish I knew how to manipulate the damn code so I can make it into something nicer. Sadly, I lack the time/patience/knowledge for it. Anyway...

Can somebody please teach me how to incorporate the following into their appropriate image (as a text box) when the mouse pointer is hovering said image:

Dealing With Heartbreak: The Real Way To Mend A Broken Heart
There are a lot of sites on the web offering advice on how to do this. They practically all say the same old thing! Here's a new perspective on the matter--backed up by modern understanding.

Greatest p4p MMA
Let's settle the score once and for all, Fedor vs Anderson (Silva) for the title of Greatest p4p!

The "Welcome Travelers From The Future!" Day Experiment
Participate in the greatest experiment this side of time-space. If we pull it off, it will be nothing short of historical. No joke.

What Guys Really Go For In Girls
Looks, body, or something deeper? What is it?

Greatest Pound-For-Pound MMA Fighter: Fedor Emelianenko vs Anderson Silva

Cry Havoc!

WHO IS THE GREATEST POUND-FOR-POUND MMA FIGHTER IN THE WORLD?
[page 1]
<1> <2> <3> <4> <5> <6>

Let's get right to it.

Who is MMA's best pound-for-pound fighter? It all boils down to these two. Is it the Russian powerhouse, Fedor Emelianenko or the Brazilian dynamo Anderson Silva?

While either fighter surely has his legion of fans behind him--each side eager to prove that their man (or "GOD!") is the best--the dispute is still open to contention. Anderson and Fedor both have shown tremendous skill against competition and not too many weaknesses, making them tough to compare intelligently. Fans are then left to arguments of personal taste whenever the topic of best MMA fighter p4p comes up--the winner being decided by sheer conviction.

Now I'm sure that you, by virtue of the fact that you're reading this, have your own answer regarding this matter. I have mine as well. But let's put that aside for the meantime. This post is entitled Fedor vs Anderson after all; and I'm here to try to do just that in a manner rarely ever done. That is, intellectually and without bias. (Well, I hope.)

Welcome to the Greatest Pound-For-Pound MMA Fighter Ever Match-up. The main event: Fedor Emelianenko vs Anderson Silva, this consisting of three (3) rounds with the following parameters:

Round 1: Absolute (real life)
Round 2: Pound-for-Pound, in theory (if they had been naturally of the same weight)
Round 3: Pound-for-Pound, in practice (what P4P really is)


Let's get it on!

The Tale of the Tape: NEXT PAGE>>>

Anderson Silva Entrance Theme
(DMX - "Ain't No Sunshine")


Fedor Emelianenko Entrance Theme
(Era - "Enae Volare Mezzo" )

The Tale of the Tape: NEXT PAGE>>>

The "Welcome Travelers From The Future!" Day: A REAL Time Travel Experiment (I'm Not Kidding, Read On)

An Introduction (Be Patient)

Our culture has been pondering and fantasizing (if you're that kind of person) about time travel ever since Samuel Madden made an angel the first literary agent of time travel in his novel Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. H.G. Wells then popularized it more than a century later with The Time Machine in 1895. Other notable authors and their works then followed after, expanding and elaborating on the entire concept, exploring theories and potential problems until it graduated into other forms of media. From Isaac Asimov's 1955 classic, The End of Eternity to the epic 1985 action-adventure comedy Back to the Future to the gamut of today's modern interpretations of it, time travel has become one of the most readily understood and accepted plot devices in fiction and science fiction.

Somewhen between Samuel Madden and Adam Sandler, science caught up. Einstein's theory of relativity gave scientific credibility to the otherwise eagerly generous postulating of fiction. Time travel became scientifically plausible. But what's really weird and unusual about this whole affair is though time travel has been in the minds of our scientists and the general population as a plausible reality for close to three generations, we still don't know if it is actually doable. This is only because we haven't tested the hypothesis yet. Not really.



My Friend & The "Welcome Travelers From The Future!" Day

I had a friend once who, slightly frustrated about how scientists and smart people were dealing with the matter, put forward the idea of The "Welcome Travelers From The Future!" Day. This was how it happened.

[dramatization]

"Why not just, you know, have a Time Travel Day?" said my friend from out of the blue, partially to himself. We were in our high school classroom.
"Huh?" I said, "What?"
"Time Travel Day. People meet up from everywhere and then they wait for time travelers from the future to arrive," he continued.
"What?"
"People agree on a certain date and then they just gather and wait...for the time travelers from the future. They can have banners and stuff, 'Welcome Travelers From the Future.' And a stage. Or something."
"..."
"People just have to agree on the date and the time and then we'll finally know if there's such a thing as time travel."
"..."
"And then, you know, we can just get back to our daily lives knowing we tried. No matter what. Right?"
A pause.
"Yeah...But there has to be enough people who know about it for it to work."
"Yeah."
And then the bell rang and everything was pushed back to the subconscious and my friend and I went back to school mode and the grind of everyday life and then it's suddenly today and me writing about my friend's idea. And it's been years since that conversation.


The Experiment Proper

This shouldn't be too difficult. If we can agree on a time and the place then it should work. If enough people take the initiative to make sure that it becomes a global event that will be remembered well into the future then we take away the possibility that the would-be time travelers don't know about it.

I'll set the date. Let's set it approximately one year from now so the news can spread and we can all make preparations. There can be a big supporting social event just in case our time traveling visitors fail to make it for whatever reason (impossibility/great risk of disrupting something important). There can be a big social event just for the heck of it.

Organize yourselves. You can tell people you know, people who can spread it to other people better. Friends, family, the media. While we're at it, let's see just how much power this Web2.0 thing can generate. Make sure to post regularly--once every two weeks?--on your blogs about the upcoming event. It can be about anything about it. Scientific background. Ethical issues. Concerns. Speculations about the result of the event. Preparations.

Make the initiative yours. Make blogs. Make music. Make movies. Anything to keep the hype up. Remember, the world has to know it for it to work. And we have everything we need to make the world listen.

I'm serious about this guys. So, in the spirit of fun, curiosity, discovery, participating in something bigger, doing something unprecedented in scope and scale, and grabbing an opportunity that doesn't come too often, I hereby declare January 1, 2010 "Welcome Travelers From The Future!" Day!




Wait up!

Vote on which timezone to use. State your case and submit your proposal on when exactly "Welcome Travelers From The Future Day!" should be. Myself, I'd want it to be according to my timezone (for obvious reasons) but that may not be the smartest way to go. For example:

• Maybe we should consider global availability to witness the event in unison.
• Maybe we should have a sponsor country.
• Maybe we should consider until everyone's gone through their New Year's celebration.
• Maybe we should make it the New year celebration.
  
• Maybe we should make it coincide with some sort of global phenomenon.

I don't know. What do you guys think?

***

Now that it's been more than a month since I first posted this, maybe it's time you checked out related posts and some campaign material. Help me spread it around. =)

Fathoming The New Human Civilization

Wikipedia defines technology as "a broad concept that deals with a species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its environment." Strictly speaking then, technology has been present in human beings as far back as they, as a species, have been able to use their immediate environment to serve their purposes.

Examples of the earliest forms of technology can be wooden branches used as crude extensions of the arm or maybe even the skin and fur of animals to serve as heat regulators for our ancestors. All across human history, we see the progress of the genus homo from bipedal ape to modern man. Truly, the contrast between the Stone Age and the Modern Age is confounding. But the Modern Age without the internet seems unfathomable to us now. And it's only been around twenty years. How can man do so much in relatively so little time?

Of course now, we think nothing of this simply because we understand the world in the present. We immerse ourselves everyday with the technology at our disposal and while it advances in our midst, we hardly really notice; at least up until retrospecting.

We apply many labels to the umbrella term Modern Age, in an attempt to put structure in the way our civilization moves ahead. One of the most popular is the title Information Age because it describes most precisely the fact that information is so readily available for anyone with an internet connection.

Note the emphasis: anyone with an internet connection. While on the surface, the statement speaks about inter-connectivity and predicts and proves the mechanics of greater globalization, it also implies discrimination of those without an internet connection. This statement speaks volumes about how our civilization functions in the present.

Ironically, the Information Age is already a couple of years behind us in that it fails to properly describe what is now happening to our civilization. True, this new age (if I may be so bold as to claim its existence) is built heavily, fundamentally upon the Information Age. But that is the way with all technology and advances.

What we are experiencing right now is what can be most accurately described as an age of reintegration. And what is oddest about it is that it is no longer so much built upon physical technologies such as the nanorevolution and "environmentally-aware" revolutions going on around us. Rather, it is hinged upon the development of ideas and the sharing of values over a network that encompasses, Internet willing, the entire world.

Thus, your photoshopped pictures can be transmitted around the globe via internet-powered devices and people Stumbling onto it, finding it interesting, will give it a thumbs up consequently fueling the activity all over again. Thus, and in the same manner, personal movie reviews will reach total strangers from the opposite end of the globe and it will help them decide whether to watch the movie or not. Thus, blog posts about anything at all, upon being deemed worthy of the initial attention, will spread and influence individual minds, and eventually actions.

New global cultures have formed entirely out of the internet solely through this process. The internet is now a means of connecting ourselves; not just with cold, hard information and statements of facts, but with and through subjective values. Whether the value itself is accepted by the community is of course of no certainty, but the phenomenon of communication and expression as a real phenomenon is undeniable.

Indeed, this heightened level of expression itself is gradually proving the presence of a unified body of people, linked by the internet. Word of mouth for example, the oldest means of affecting influence, has finally caught up with physical technology. This means that the inherent value of a good idea, no matter how small, has once again been put at a premium simply because it can spread to everyone like a viral meme. Once substantially prolific, the humble idea can easily become the new standard. And there lies its power.

While this is widespread knowledge and more or less obvious, the implications, I think, are not. Potentially, we can again apply all the "old rules and values of the community" to our situation--albeit in a more complicated manner due to all the changes that occurred between then and now--because there is a similar Oneness now in our context as there was then. Creation and creativity turns the great overmind that is the world wide web. In this new Age of Reintegration we have, truly, the makings of a global human Community.

To test this theory (because it is, in spite of all my hubris presenting it, just a theory) I'll share with you a practical application of it. But not now because this is tiring. =)

[I apologize if I appear to jump from one premise to another. It was a spur of the moment thing that urged me to write my thoughts, just so they're written. Don't forget to check out my other posts.]