Varii

The powers that be have decided that I should not sleep tonight. Aside from that, I also had to finish this post.

First, I would like you to observe the right side of this page. Specifically, notice that the Links section has been updated. There are two new links in it: Lumea lui Naspa Rau and Survival Guide to Homelessness.

The first of these pages contains ironical articles of some guy. While I do not agree with everything he says, I must say that I agree with many of the things there. Asides from these, he is very funny. The second page is here mainly for inspirational purposes. While I have never been homeless myself, I was able to understand from this guys posts, the way in which this experience might change you. Also, it makes you wonder about a lot of the wrong things in this society in which we are living.

I especially liked one of the comments in which one person there says that the current lifestyle is more of an "Active Laziness". People everywhere work, sleep, eat, and do nothing more beside these basic activities. The high-point of their day is probably when they get laid. They often identify themselves with their material possesions or with their jobs. However, aside of this jobs and aside these material possesions, they are often very shallow. Einstein once said that "Culture is what remains after you forgot everything". It is somehow the same here.

Here I get to the second point of this post. The ideal man. It is a common assumption these days that you should specialize in order to be successful. This can be contrasted to the Renaissance period where you should have been a generalist.

Nobody can deny that from an economical point of view, this seems to be the case. The better you know about something, the more you are likely to be paid. However, specialization is reducing your being. While it does make you more knowledgeable, it offers less and less ground for developing new ideas. I reckon that John Carmack once said, while working for Doom 3 that he has been reading books on psychology and genetics, and various other matters. He added that they cross-bred and this gave him some ideas with regard to the engine of his game.

It is said to say, but if you look at the society, some of its tendencies are contrary to the profit of the individual. For example, society needs specialized individuals who know one particular thing very well. The individual on the other hand is generally interested by many things. Mind, to be kept sane and fit, needs change. It is almost the same as with a muscle. If you only use it in one way, it will grow up to a point and then stop. If you use it in multiple ways, it will grow even more, and become more powerful (and thus more useful even to your day to day activity).

Thus, I consider it imperative for the modern person to learn and instruct himself even more than the Renaissance man. I do think that this should be done even at the risk of being shallow in some of your areas of knowledge. For example, you will probably see no use to the previous article about ancient Egyptian. For me however it was quite useful. Letting aside the cultural value, the exercise of memorizing stuff about hieroglyphs took my mind from some of my problems. Also, it was a mental exercise very different in nature from those that I generally do. And of course, I received quite a lot of visitors because of this new article :).

I will probably write another article about hieroglyphs if I feel like some of these days. However, I don't expect it to be ready sooner than Sunday.