A Secant Discussion

    If you were to take out your intestines and stretch them out across a football field, you would die. Similarly, most animals will die if disemboweled, a notable exception being the sea cucumber, which will regurgitate its innards to deter predators in an annoying fashion. There are times in a sea cucumber’s lonely life in which it asks itself “What purpose do I serve here, in this big boundless blue ocean, if not to spew my intestines upon curious crabs and crustaceans or cuttlefish who consume my kind continuously and callously throughout the countless centuries?” The response is usually something along the lines of “Oh silly me, I’m an sea cucumber and that is my only means of defense because I can’t do much else except wiggle away at approximately one centimeter per second in which time any remotely intelligent sea creature will quickly devour me and savor my delicious cucumberness.” Most sea creatures do not prey on sea cucumbers, however, because sea cucumber intestines are a major strangulation hazard, instead choosing to prey on less repulsive animals such as krill or small fishes, which in turn eat smaller plankton which eat algae, which doesn’t really care what eats it because it’s general abundance guarantees its survival.

Survival is a very important concern amongst animals, because if they did not make more animals, their species would go extinct, which apparently does not fare well for most species. Giant Pandas (as opposed to their diminutive relatives, small Red Pandas) apparently have no concern for the continuation of their species, and do not mind becoming extinct. Their digestive systems evolved to digest meat like other ursines, but Giant Pandas insist on consuming solely bamboo, causing them to spend 12 hours a day eating bamboo, digesting less than half of what they consume. Giant Pandas also do not actively mate in captivity, preferring to abstain from continuing their species, much to the exasperation of their caretakers.

Zoos in China and other hosts of Giant Pandas earn exorbitant profits in the display of the obdurate species driving itself in a metaphorical boat on the road to extinction. Boats don’t often drive on roads, unless the roads are flooded, but in that case they would still be floating above the road; some boats are fitted with wheels and motors that allow them to drive on land but rendering them completely useless in water, defeating their purpose as anything other than novelty cars with really bad fuel economies. Sometimes people make ridiculous modifications to their property, such as adding wheels to boats, but most sensible members of society prefer to keep their outlandish ideas to themselves for fear of criticism. Some great thinkers (and some not-so-great thinkers) expressed their then-outlandish ideas and revolutionized the world: Alexander Graham Bell would never have dreamed his telephone would be globally recognized as an indispensable means of communication.

The telephone (and telephone wires) eventually led to the invention of fiber optic cables, (magical) glass filaments that transferred information as light at the speed of light (surprisingly not the speed of sea cucumbers) around the world to computers and servers, a massive international information exchange that allows people to upload, download, load, unload, reload, and do all sorts of things to loads of data, even read blogs about silly things like intestines and disembowelment.

Books

I enjoy reading; I have been an avid reader since I started elementary school. Text can entertain, educate, delineate --  literature is a multifaceted preservation of knowledge, a medium of fantasy, a container of vast worlds hidden within strange black symbols pressed onto smooth paper, or stored within the electronic minds of computers and materialized on glowing screens of light and glass. Novels are a special kind of writing, stories, glimpses into the enigmatic minds of other people, manifestations of tales trapped in the imaginations of multitudes of human beings. Whether a book is a biography or a fantasy, a mystery or a science-fiction thriller, it holds between its covers a new story, memories and dreams to be discovered and absorbed by readers around the world; novels can transcend cultures and languages, tales can become legends that enthrall generations of readers.

Not all people appreciate literature, some find perusing written work tedious and dull. Some of my friends, fairly smart people, despise reading: they enjoy other activities, such as sports, art, or browsing the internet. I agree that reading can be quite boring at times, but when I find a good book, I am enthralled for hours until I finish it. Reading isn’t just absorbing information; it is delving into the intricacies of literature, from minute details to grand plots, the quirks of quarks to the tales of empires past. Reading is and always will be on of my favorite activities.

This Blog Has a Misleading URL

A short warning before any further posts:
    At the time of this blog’s creation, I intended to discuss in depth various college majors, their applications in the real world, benefits gained from them, and other various reasons to enroll in a major. However, I have since decided that such a method is not very suitable to choosing a major; picking a major should not be a weary, analytical process of elimination, the only conclusion to be gained from that would be that every major is terrible. I now believe that deciding on a major comes from self-reflection, from an internal decision that comes with time. It would be wonderful to decide on a major through a blog, through careful analysis and observations posted on the internet, but I realize that such a method would be tedious to execute and would make for very dull reading. In the end, this blog will not as much of a blog regarding college majors as it will be a (perhaps humorous) source of musings, writings, and pieces of short fiction, all regarding an arbitrary range of topics varying from philosophy to quantum mechanics. The link, in hindsight, should have been some ambiguous name that does not define any content at all, as opposed to a name that actually alludes to some topic that might be contained in this blog, but after a while, this blog may in fact be about college majors and the benefits of choosing one. For now, this is an Eclectic Collection of Thoughts.

Solipsism

    Solipsism is the idea that only your own self is sure to exist, that the world outside of yourself is only known to you through your senses; it is the idea that only you exist, and that the world is a figment of your perception. This raises some interesting questions: how do you differentiate reality from a fantasy created by false senses, colors, smells, sounds, textures, phantom feelings fabricated by your brain, a virtual reality that is your only reality? How do you know without a doubt that the warm sun on your skin, the smell of freshly mowed grass, the sound of birds chirping in the early light of dawn are real? Your world is generated by your senses, your reality is woven from the information you get from your senses. The truth is, there is no way to prove that your world is real, that you are not just in a dream, a fantasy, trapped in a world fabricated by your subconscious. You could be only a brain suspended in a liquid-filled tube, connected to electrodes feeding you false sensory input to create a computer-generated world, perfectly convincing to you; you would not know better, you would be only a brain in a jar.
    A dilemma is now present: if the world around you is not real, the landscape and people just phantoms in your fake world, what is morality to you? You could kill a man, rob a bank, but how would that matter? Any action of yours should not have any real effects, because you inhabit a world only known to you, the only thing you can trust to be real yourself. You could do anything without consequence, without fear of retribution, or so it would seem. At the same time, you could be paranoid and analyzing the situation too deeply and only be acting on a false notion, and you truly are living in a real world, filled with real people. After all, could not every person make the same argument that his or her self is the only real one? It is much less maddening to accept that you are not the only real person in this world. But there will remain a quiet reminder, a shadow of a doubt, a small voice in the back of your head asking you, “How do you know for sure?”