Contributing

I logged into Myspace recently and I had a friend request. I always find these friend requests interesting because I am not listed under my actual name. Its usually not someone who could have clicked through and found my profile either. Maybe I should send these people a message and let them know that they found the wrong "Dre McCracken" and that they should add the other listing for that name.

I was also thinking about "contributing to society". What is enough? People have a wide range of opinions on this issue. I think that one thing is for certain: If you "invent the wheel," thats pretty much as good as it gets. I dont mean this literally, but some equivalent. If you "invent the wheel", people have to give you your due respect and call it a day. How can a person top this aside from "inventing yet another wheel"? And so my quest to "invent the wheel" begins...

Documentaries

Recently I was watching a documentary on one of those channels that only shows documentaries. They always seem to have some documentary about Albert Einstein's dating life or the evolution of cats showing. I saw one documentary that actually seemed interesting so I decided to watch. It was about Ancient Egypt and the building of the pyramids/ mummies.

The most interesting thing was that there were so many "near as we can figure"s and "we really don't know how they did this"'s in the documentary. This led me to wonder about these questions and similar mysteries that remain unanswered: Is it that we really can't answer these questions or is it that most people who have the aptitude to figure these things out are not interested. I know a lot of brilliant people who might want to watch a documentary and get the answer to these questions, but have no desire to do what it takes to join a project where people are attempting to answer these questions...

Blow-Outs

Earlier today, I was playing an NBA basketball videogame. This game saves my season so whenever I decide to play a game I just play the next game on the schedule. I am pretty good at this game so I generally win the game in blow-out. Occasionally, I play a game that is a blow-out even by blow-out standards: The game that I played today was one of those games.

My team scored at will in the most remarkable fashion that I have ever seen. I literally scored at will no matter what type of play I was running. The interesting thing about it is that when I looked at the score, I expected to see more points scored and a wider margin of victory. This wasn't the case: My team scored less points than it does on average and won by a smaller margin of victory than usual.

This made me think about real basketball games and how this idea might apply to other situations. There's two types of blow-outs: There's the blow-out where one team beats the other team by a huge margin...Then there's the blow-out where you put Shaq in a point guard so that he can get a quinteple-double. The second type much worse...

Sitcoms

I was thinking of when I used to watch situation comedies while I was growing up. It has been years since I watched television regularly. I watch television occasonally, but I never keep up with storylines. It was rare that I liked a situation comedy when I was younger. The comedy in so many of them was based on putting the main character(s) in an awkward or humiliating position and having the audience laugh at them while they try to get out of the mess. While watcing thses types of comedies, I found myself feeling angst for the character(s)more than laughing. I alway wondered if other people reacted to those types of shows the same way.

New Emotion

I have been thinking about something interestng lately. There are people in the world who are literally incapable of feeling the full range of emotions that other people feel. From what I understand, there are numerous ways that that this can occur. This led me to think about somthing different. Are there people in the world who can feel emotions beyond what other people can feel? If not, is it possible that people would develop new emotions that are not present in the future?

If people who have emotions in addition to what most other people have exist, how would we ever become aware of it? Could a person who didn't have the newly developed emotion(s) fathom that someone had an emotion that they didn't? Would the person who was capable of experiencing the new emotion ever have any sense of being different from everyone else? Also, it would be interesting to see how it is determined that a new emotion exists. Would a someone be able to look directly at the person with the additional emotion(s) and determine that that person had more emotion(s) than a normal person? Or is it possible that it would be determined by deduction: By looking at behavior and reasoning backward to the fact that some new emotion must have caused it. I need to move soon: With nothing to do my mind wonders to such topics...

The Mysterious Pop-Up

I am the type of person who is often lost in thought. When I am in the middle of something, I am often thinking of something else in the back of my mind. Occasionally, something random will happen that clears my mind. Something that I have always found interesting is the types of things that clear my mind completely.

I had one of these mind-clearing occurrences recently. While surfing the web, I went to a webpage and a pop-up showed on my screen. It might seem weird that a pop-up caused me to pause and cleared my mind completely, but there was somthing different about this one. I have four pop-up blockers running on my computer at once. I can't remember the last time that I had seen a pop-up before that one. Does using four pop-up blockers prevent pop-ups better than one? Does it make it easier for pop-ups to get through somehow? I haven't been the ame since...

360 degrees

I have become very cynical since I moved back to Michigan. At some point in the not-so-distant past, I wasn't cynical at all. This is not a significant thing: A lot of people face situations that make them more cynical. The interesting thing about it is that I am so cynical that I might not seem cynical at all anymore. Its as if my cynicism has taken me around the block and back to my original position.

Today I received an anonymous letter in my e-mail box that said that I should leave the city where I live immediately and that I was in danger. I could have easily been alarmed at receiving such a letter. Instead, I agreed with the letter and started packing my bags. Better advice was never given by a stranger...