Augmentation

I read a lot of science fiction. One of the common things that pop up in many stories is enhancing peoples strength, speed, reaction time, and mental abilities. For me augmenting peoples mental abilities is the most fascinating. Contrary to popular belief people use 100% of their brain. Sometimes they use it badly but they use it. If we could tie a vast library of knowledge directly into our brains we could do more. Of course having access to information and being able to use it are two very different things but still imagine how life would be different if you had direct access to all the information you could ever want. Being able to quickly look up traffic laws. Being able to do math in your head because your extended memory had a built in calculator.

Of course I wouldn't want to be the first guinea pig to get the system. And I suspect any hardware breakdown would send the user directly insane. But still it would be cool. We need cool. The world needs cool.

But if I can't have direct brain augmentation I will settle for a very smart robot that follows me around all day and answers questions. That would be okay I guess.

Problem solving

Problem solving is what I do. It is what I do for a living and what I do as a hobby. One of the most difficult things I have to deal with is people who don't want solutions to their problems. I give them a solution, explain it, they acknowledge that yes this would solve their problem, but they do nothing. Why would you not want a problem solved? It is difficult for me to understand and very frustrating.

Reality

Several years ago somebody told me "perception is reality". I did a search on that phrase tonight and found a bunch of contradictory uses for it. What the person saying it meant by it was that it didn't matter what the reality of the situation was, it only mattered what people perceived it as being. So if people saw you as a good person you were a good person, if they saw you as evil then you were evil. What the real situation was or what you felt didn't matter.

To me that is a lot of garbage. Reality is reality. Now I know that in one sense we never experience true reality since everything is filtered through our senses and our past experiences and I won't argue with that. What I argue with is that what people think is more important than the truth. At on time everybody on the earth knew the world was flat. That didn't make the world flat. Reality is still reality.

My opinion on perception is that people need to hold off judgement until they have more facts. People who make snap judgments based on superficial evidence are just being stupid. You should have real facts to base your opinions on.

What brought this quote to mind is something I read in a book, "to him intent is reality". The person intended to be somewhere so to them they were already there. I have met a few people like this. They intended to show up at work on time so to them they did, regardless of what the clock said. They intended to spell check their work so to them they did, the errors appeared by magic. Again, reality is reality. Planning to do something isn't the same as doing it.

People and titles

Long ago I had a high school teacher who coached minor sport. Regular students could call him Mr. Smith but the students he coached were required to call him Coach Smith. I forget his real name, it isn't important. The important part was that this guy loved the title of coach and forced the students to call him that, as if the title made him important.

This particular teacher wasn't the worst teacher I have ever had, as a teacher he was okay. As a person he was a shmuck. A braggart, a blowhard, somebody who thought he was important and couldn't understand why people didn't treat him as royalty. The students he coached said he was an ass and a horrible coach, but he loved the title.

I have never understood the fascination people have with titles. Titles are just words, they don't make you important. Albert Einstein was a genius in his own right, he didn't require people to call him Mr. Genius Einstein. Yet I see people all the time who love to hear people repeat their title to them. Love to hear people call them sir or mister. I wonder where their parents went wrong and why they never learned self esteem.