Geek: Space consolidation
So the attempt to get rid of stuff continues. A bit more stuff made it onto ebay, for the first time, I'm getting non obvious tedius questions that would take 20min to answer (e.g. costs to ship to Hong Kong, Philliipines) in the end it's highly likely someone local will outbid them, so I"m reluctant to spend the time to find out as all these are one time sales, rather than a storefront. Ebay is a great example of setting the boundaries of onus.

Part of my project is getting rid of all CD's, VHS, and books I'm unlikely to read/need. Some are like my college textbooks. I kept them cause they each cost $150, now I wonder if I was going to relearn the material if there wouldn't be better online material, or software to do the same thing. I know from memory many of the examples in the book's answers in the back were either incorrect or left no explaination.

From practicing throwing CD's I no longer need into the trash with a high degree of accuracy from across the room, I'd make a great ninja, or perhaps I should start a office sport, mini-frisbee-golf using CD's. Some are games, like the old old Descent and MDK2, and Magic Carpet. Most of which play so blindingly fast on a modern PC to be unplayable, I can only hope they eventually make an emulator to slow them down! Though I rarely play video games these days, I'm reluctant to give them up. Two of them are audio: www.songmania.com (average guitar rock/folk, dylan and beatles influenced) and www.vyktoria.com like new age/ethereal plus guitar work. Neither were in the freedb database. The first one didn't make the "Do I like this CD enough to type in all the labels?" cut, the second one did.

LOTR Questions: Wizards and ringwraiths
Watching LOTR in the background, haven't watched it in awhile, and I've seen it many times, so all the inconsistencies are starting to pop up. I haven't read (or rather couldn't get into the books, despite trying), can somebody explain to me are the wizards human or not? Gandalfs fear of succombing to the ring indicates yes, but their immoratility and fighting style indicates no.

Secondly, how many of the ringwraiths are have supposed to follow Arwen (all 9?) the shots vary.

I also don't get if they are essentially immortal and dead, how one human could fight them off at weathertop, or outrun undead horses?

If Gandalf leaves after capture by Sauron on an eagle, how does he get his staff back? If Sauron has the power over the weather, why doesn't he attempt to kill gandalf then?

This level of questions, is why not being entertained is dangerous, and why some sort of entertainment is a requirement while driving to take up mental cycles wondering why the traffic sucks, and not while working.

Reading

Also I enjoyed reading this "The Planning Illusion" about the impossibility to top-down, centrally or before time, plan things efficently. This is the benefit of hindsight, e.g. Katrina, Iraq should have be better planned for, and this is the responsibility of the government, and we need a commission on this, and division on that, and ... why government/taxes rarely shrinks. What I also like about this, it the ability to mitigate crisis damage is based on the ability to improvise, in small groups. Which is bolstered by technology, which is one of the reasons why elite troops can be so effective in small groups against other larger groups.

This was also an interesting read on Thinkers versus Feelers in our society. It occured to me that Feelers tend to protect and unify the current tribe/society (for obvious reasons), regardless of that actual costs or practicality involved (social inertia keeping the status quo?). While I've been aware that thinking content and emotional content are separate channels of information that people process (e.g. it's not what you say it's how you say it), it never really occured to me that people will disregard one channel for fragments of the other. For example at work I noticed that people react differently to others in the break room, some people talking are smiling, even though semantically given a two talkers will talk about similar things, the emotional responses gotten will be different seemingly largly based on how much they smile. Sometimes listening I realize some people aren't talking about anything coherent, but they are both laughing and smiling to the point I think one could talk about *anything* and just say it in a particular way to keep the vibe up. Unfortunately I can't genuninely smile that much.

Anyway, Here's how I picture they might process a sentence visually:

"If you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down....but that would an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do."

I imagine most people who are strong feelers past the abort word (possibly the sentence) go into a blind/deaf zone and start with defense responses, filling that thinking/feeling channel with their own content (internal dialog) regardless of the overall content/message being delivered. To the point I bet one could test them and they wouldn't even hear the rest of the sentence. I wonder if a less dispassionate wording on the part of the speaker could overcome this, I know for sure getting a person into a playful mode would get past the defensive response.

Similarly the article points out that feelers are responsible for 'self-esteem' programs in our schools. Which had me wondering if esteem='your never wrong',and if left unchecked would resulting semi socialisitic, top down mediated state of mediocrity avoiding reality, rather than the decentralized figuring out of a pecking order with some winners and some losers, which ties in with the first articles points.