It got me thinking, why do we laugh at these bad situations? someone might say it helps us get over things or it makes the issue lighter but I tend to disagree. What if we laugh because these sad things are supposed to be funny. Think about it… What is the funniest thing that you have ever seen, I’m not talking giggle funny, I am talking rolling on the ground rib cage in pain funny. I bet it was something that was sad for someone else, embarrassing for someone else at the least. Like that time Johnny peed his pants or when Adim fell face first into the snow or the time you saw someone passed out under the table at a club. Those are all situations that are ridiculous, well mostly for you. I found that the best comedians are the ones that make fun of our life issues, things that all of us can relate too and then paint a ridiculous story over them. Even in the Bible it says in all situations give THANKS to God, how can you thank God for your car being totaled?… unless your not supposed to see it as a bad thing but a situation to something greater.

So if our ability to find something funny is based on the perspective we look at the issue from and not that the issue itself is funny or sad then what if we are not supposed to get angry or sad in tragic times, maybe we are always supposed to look at the good in all situations. Sometimes I feel we humans take ourselves too seriously. Don’t get me wrong I feel we should allow ourselves to get upset for sometime to let the emotion out but but as my friends do, quickly find the comedy within this sadness and move on. Do not be afraid to laugh.

So I started thinking how do we create these powerful and intelligent servants without them taking control of us who are weaker and less intelligent. Many scientist have pondered on this for long and answers such as Asimov’s 3 laws have been offered (Which has been proven unsuccessful in iRobot). The answer may not be that far away, in fact it may be within us. If you analogize the relationship humans have with God and the relationship we have with robots, us being god (The creators) and the robot being humans (The created) you can see how we can survive.

There are three things to do.

Hide their abilities from them: The robot does not have any information about its components. It is not aware of its processing power, how much hard drive space it has or even what these things mean. So a robot has no clue if it is running on a Nintendo 64 chip or some super core 2 duo stuff. If we knew our individual capacities there would not be the Olympics or the World cup we would just check our individual abilities to see who is better. This way they are left guessing how good they are, something we spend a good amount of our lives doing.

Give them a different perspective of life: While they are cutting a steak for your delicious dinner the think they are drawing a steak. That way they do not know what a knife is and what kind of harm they can inflict on a human if they ever get the idea of taking over the world. We do not see the world the way God does hence we do not understand all the secrets of the world.

Make them have different perspectives from other robots: This will allow the robots get into arguments such as who can run faster, who has a cooler logo and what is the meaning of life. These allow the robots to occupy themselves with useless events in their idol time and prevent them from doing research on humans. The same way we distract ourselves with frivolous things in the world.

Following these three steps will ensure that the human race can eat, sleep and fight each other in peace and not worry about pesky robot intrrupting us unecessarily.

Isaac Mizrahi is an American Fashion Designer who influences/affects your life more than you know. He does high end designs for TV (many things you might have seen) and also designs custom merchandise for Target ( I have an Isaac Mizrahi designed cups and plates from Target maybe you have some other things too). He was invited to TED and gave a presentation which blew me away.

He talked about inspiration. This is one thing I have tried to master, to remain inspired at all times. I have found inspiration to be very fleeting. It comes and goes randomly, but it feels really great when you feel inspired, you see things you know are exclusive, groundbreaking and game changing but how do you keep this mindset? how do you make inspiration stay? How do you make it come when you want it to? A good friend of mine calls it tapping into the universal collective. He describes creativity/inspiration as a stream of answers to all the worlds questions flowing unseen above our heads and once in a while we are granted connection to that stream just for a few seconds (like an erratic internet connection) and then you SEE the answer you have been looking for. As a web programmer and blogger/writer I seek inspiration all the time. I am always looking for that great new Idea, that perfect sentence to end my post, that color to make the most beautiful site.

In his presentation he explained why I sleep so little but still feel fulfilled. Why I always seek to work in colorful places (The Idea Factory and Javas at RIT). How I find answers in mistakes or tricks of the eye. Why I watch so many TV shows and why repetition makes me bored too quickly. The scary thing was that he was describing himself but he explained me in the process. This video is more about the way he works rather than explaining the concept of inspiration but I advice anyone who seeks inspiration on a regular basis for whatever they do to spend a little time looking at this video. The only thing he does that I don’t do for inspiration is cook…maybe I should get on that.

Steve Job explained inspiration and creativity best when he said: Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

Link to video

The biggest problem in acquiring world peace is the fact that we all see the world in different ways. When these perspectives clash that’s when we have disagreements, arguments and wars. Secondly we are too self absorbed, because we feel we are the only ones in the universe, we have no other enemies but ourselves. We have no one to point fingers at for our downfall or problems but ourselves (humans) so it is only natural for us to pick a fight with people who have a different view, culture, look or behavior from us. But trust me if there we were aware of another intelligent species hostile preferably. That are capable of driving cars like us, communicate with each other like we do and maybe even crank that soulja boy like we do. People from all race and class will unite cause a new set of bad guys in town and Al Qeada will be the least of our worries.

So trying to save the world again (the super hero that I am) I started trying to think of what can give all of us in the world a common perspective on things. Solutions like Hypnosis and brainwashing, were too elaborate and will be too hard to implement on a couple of billion people at the same time. So I came up with an easier solution. Fabricate an Alien attack on Earth.

Now you can’t  make a cheesy video with puppets and distribute it on Youtube, that’s not gonna work. You have to go for something more intense and real like it was in  that movie with Will Smith “Independence Day”. There will be a decent amount of collateral damage and people dying but all these things were gonna be destroyed anyway (in one of our wars) so just look at it as doing the greater good.

What I am saying is that if an (intelligent) Alien life form is to appear and is totally different from us, the natural thing to do is to hold on to the familiar, we would see ourselves more as the human race “US” and the aliens as “THEM”. We would stop fighting ourselves because there are other people to be weary about now. This was seen when middle easterners became the new black people. As soon as Osama blew up those two towers white people forgot about their black neighbor they thought was gonna stab them and started worrying about that middle eastern waitress that could blow them up at Starbucks. Now we have a black president, who could have guessed it would happen so soon.

Showing a foreign hostility will bring people closer together and just like in those tragic world saving movies, maybe you can get a few people to fall in love while you blowing up the staute of liberty and stuff. I am not saying its gonna be easy but I assure you the world will wake up the next day with a new perspective on life and people will stop sweating the small stuff.

RocknRolla is a typical British organized crime movie about a renegade Rock and roll artist, his criminal father, a filthy rich Russian and a couple of scum bags in between all this.  The movie’s characters were very British, very few popular faces but the acting was good and so were the action sequences. Without revealing a lot, the movie felt very much like other British organized crime movies like Layer cake which is a good thing. The dialogue was on point and the directing was impressive and there was even a lucky painting they refused to show us throughout the whole movie.

What struck about the movie was the criminal lifestyle as well as the mindset. Have you ever watched a movie about bad people (by societies standards) but at the end you wanted to be just like them? One thing movies like this do is show us a glamorized view of a criminals life, a very narrow perspective highlighting what is attractive about becoming a gangster, a killer or a RocknRolla. The sex, the adventures, the power, the money and all that comes with it, but it is easily forgotten that this Mafia don that has a sophisticated criminal empire and is untouchable is also someone’s dad, someones best friend and has personal problems too. When I watch these movies I sit back and say wow I want a life exciting like that where do I sign up? where are these people? is this life so exclusive? but NO! these people live all around us, you may just know them as Andy’s dad or Jenny’s cousin and you cannot understand/see that this person plays another role in society due to how you know them but they have a different life from what you know. With this realization the life style doesn’t look that exciting anymore cause these guys are not so different from me and you, their life is not all that glamorous, it just is if you decide to take out every other boring thing.

Even I can pull of a hit reality Tv Show if you decide to delete all the boring parts like where I think up and type up blog posts like this and other mundane things I do cause I am human. Now I feel cheated, I feel lied to cause that cool, exclusive life I have always dreamt of living might not really exist, well if you know where I can get one please let me know and I will be indebted to you for the rest of my exciting life.

Although this movie was not the greatest thing I have seen, it was worth my ten bucks, well it just made the mark. If you like movies like Snatch and Revolver (typical Guy Ritchie movies) then you would love this one as well, its just a new script put into his old formula. I’ll definately watch this again cause it is one of those movies that turns out better the second time you watch it, so if your bored and looking for some adrenaline rush go check this movie out.

A major problem for me when I walk into a book store is that by the end of my stay I want to leave with about 10 books but nothing annoys me more than owning an unread/unfinished book. It is so frustrating to want to read/learn something but do not have the time. When I see books with great presentation and packaging, on interesting topics, I just want to eat them. I love information and I just cannot get enough of it, in fact I am so passionate about learning new things that sometimes I can relate with Syler (In Heroes) problem. His hunger for a new power, to understand it, to learn it and to use it, which actually drives hm to kill people to obtain these powers. Well I am not that bad but sometimes I wish I lived in a book store. My friend Obilo once said he wants to sleep in a room like the one Evey in V for Vendetta woke up in, filled with books.

Waking up to a gallery of Ideas, to a gallery of perspectives must be inspiring. I want a room just like that. I also recall my professor in my ethics class who said It would be amazing if her brain was constantly connected to the internet (Wikipedia). I totally wish the same too. There is so much to know, so much to learn but not enough time.

What struck me a few seconds later was that this famous lady neither wrote the song, nor produced the beats. All she did was sing someone’s words over another person’s beats and then she later took home a Grammy that year. This makes me question what her musical talent really is. The more I look into it, read Wikipedia pages and music blogs I realize that Rihanna is a musician engineered by Jay Z and some other people. We have this misconception that most musicians are diamonds found in the rough, we feel many of the people we see on TV worked so hard and had sleepless nights and finally made it to the top, we forget to see that many of these people were engineered to the top.

There are traits in the world that we think come to happen due to some cosmic calculation that we have no power over. Hapinness, love, fame, wealth, epidemics are all things we are told that happens to some people and doesn’t happen to some because that’s the way the world is. When we realize that with the right information you can make any of these things happen for you, you realize what it really means to decide your own fate. You are not tied down by your talents or interests, you are free to imagine how EXACTLY you want your life to be and make it happen, when they say the sky is the limit, armed with the information you need to do what you want to do your only real limit is your imagination.

I am a very passionate person. My main drive in life is following my passion. If it touches me the right way I am willing to spend a lot of time dedicated to make something happen. Lose sleep, food and maybe human interaction, but when you flip the coin it is totally opposite. If I have no interest in something I cannot force myself to focus.

After reading Rob Goodlatte’s (facebook project designer) post on passionless pre-professionals I was left speechless. I have not seen a post that explains the story of my life as clearly as this did. He clearly outlined how many of us go to school studying that thing that will give us more money but is not what we are really interested in. In my case I thought I was interested in something I was not and was chicken to admit it till much later, consoling myself with the incentives completing the particular major promises after graduating.

After moving to New Hamshire and analyzing what makes me tick. I realized staying in a major (Computer Engineering) where I care more about Monkeys dancing than what processes I need to go through to create a micro processor was just enslaving myself. I knew I will never apply for a Computer Engineering Job and I have no plans of being locked behind a cubicle but that is what I have spent the last four years doing, setting myself up for, a life I knew I did not want. I am a software guy, I enjoy the instant gratification of coding something and you can immediately see it work, I like the idea that your mainly self sufficient and need little support from third parties to make your imaginations come true, if something breaks it was most likely your fault and lastly the elegance in code, looking at the way lines of text control a machine is just astounding.

In order to prevent slavery. I have taken control of the steering wheel and officially changed my major from Computer Engineer to Software Engineer. Now I think things are gonna turn for the better and my last year is gonna be fun. You should really read the post above, it is an easy read that shows how many of us pursue something for the wrong reason, what is scary about that is that we cannot self actualize because there will be always something missing.