Ramanujan Redux

Whenever you get the opportunity to finish something (a degree, a job offer, a market), finish the job. Do not worry about the friends and family you’ll leave behind by starting or finishing

Idleness will doom you. Don’t dawdle around. You’ll only waste time, or worse, lose your shot at opportunities you’ll always regret. Didn’t you learn anything from Mortal Kombat?

The NBA is inhabited by the land of giants. A tall man’s world. The land where seven-footers rule and no one else can match our strength.

Yet who has won the last four Finals MVPs?
2007-Tony Parker
2006-Dwayne Wade
2005-Tim Duncan (although you could make a case for Manu Ginobili)
2004-Chauncey Billups

These are guards moving past big men. They may be taller and stronger. But you are stronger in other areas.

As we see Chris Paul motor his way through the playoffs, forcing the defending champions to give everything they have to stay alive, you realize that you already have what you need. You may be a small man in a big man’s world, in business, in law, in sports. But it means only a little. You were born with your genetics. But you create your own will. You go as far as you choose to go.

Read this post by Razib this weekend, and it got me thinking, which is always a bad sign. It usually means something stupid’s about to come out of my mouth, so bear with me.

One thing that Razib points out is the fundamental difference between gender and genre. Males enjoy plot-driven stories, escapist fiction. We don’t want to focus on characters and their development, we want storyline and plot. Get to the point, get to the next point, etc. Women enjoy more of the character development stuff, the writing prose, etc. etc.

So I was wondering–is our interest in certain books wired into our own primitive desires? Do we like certain books because they fire up a part of our own evolutionary structure?

Think about it. Men enjoy plot-based books, with an aura of mystery but also of adventure and exploration. Books have the power to take us away. It takes us away from the burden of work and responsibility, provides us refuge from the toil we endure. We have traditionally been the ones to carry the load for our families, and while the gender gap has made dramatic shifts in the past 200 years, our brains don’t evolve nearly as fast.

Just like the supposed theory that our bodies have supposedly not caught up to agricultural products toxifying our body, our brains have not yet fully caught up to the idea that women can now bear equal responsibility, so it takes our own growth and development in life to adjust to this. Because of the growing amount of entertainment options in the Internet age and the relegation of books to a niche activity among the XYs, many of us never do.

Women, on the other hand, have traditionally been groomed to find mates. Unlike male, whose work, intelligence, wealth, and physical stature defined him, a female was traditionally defined by the strength of her partner. So it became important for her to find that character, and that required deep examination of human psychology to attract suitable mates. So isn’t it natural that females would enjoy books that involved deep character study and soothing words of comfort and seduction?

(Another possibility is that if females were not happy with the mates they got, they could dream up their ideal Cassanova to escape the doom and gloom of their situation. Hence the continuing popularity of harlequin novels for women in completely unsatisfying marriages.)

I’m not sure how far I’ve gotten, but the last work of fiction I read was Kafka on the Shore, and it touched me so profoundly because of how mystical and otherworldly it was. I felt like I was being transferred away from this world and into a dream. It was…liberating. I certainly felt like I was in another world, and didn’t have to worry about the one I was in now.

Sound familiar?

There’s my crock theory. Someone please tear it apart.

It’s a trivial thing, but it’s one of the many problems the Internet solves–finding information that wasn’t easily accessible in old media days, then having the means (iTunes) to build it up.

YouTube ad commericals are something I frequent when I like the music. Of course, finding the music attached to the piece is a chore, especially if it’s instrumental. But ask the commenters and they can help you find message boards that answer your questions.

I find this particularly effective. Thanks to commenters I found out that Massive Attack was in charge of the song for this chilling West Wing clip. That Dockers SF commercial is only catchy because it evokes funk from Marlena Shaw’s California Soul. Michael Jordan knows how important advertising is, so he mixes powerful music like Zero 7’s Red Dust into his commercials.

Internet communities have the power to relay information much faster to each other than ever before, to help move us and empower us in our regular lives. The next logical step in that progression? Relaying ideas to one another. That’s what blogs, discussion boards and social networks are slowly evolving into.

And what comes after that?

With the NBA Playoffs in full gear, roundball fans are always reminded in commercials of the greatness that once graced the NBA every season. Michael Jordan graced the league for fourteen spectacular seasons of dunks, fallaway jumpers, game winning shots, and championships. He exemplified the winning attitude that all human beings hope to adopt.

Yet one reason he was so brilliant was how easy he made it look. We glossed over the physical punishment that a 6′6″ guard took driving to the hole in a tall man’s world and focused on the breakaway slam reels. For over a decade the NBA has suffered from this me-first type of play, with everyone subconsciously believing that by taking the toughest shots possible, they could be like Mike. And of course, they can’t and couldn’t. People forget all the hard work it took for MJ to be MJ.

Arguably there have been more talented individuals out there, before and since. But no one else put the work in as much on the court as he did, for individual and team. And it shows with the six rings.

But it was never just about making the impossible easy. Let’s listen to the words of the man, shall we? (Click on the link to watch the video).

1. It’s Not About the Shoes

Just like in Fight Club, your possessions do not define you. They are rewards for hard work and accomplishment, not a shallow display of your own self-worth. Unmerited rewards lead to emptiness inside. Your actions are what is substantive. Their impact will last far longer than your shoes.

2. Not Meant to Fly

There are those among us who say there are limits to what they can accomplish. These people are a nuisance. Get rid of them, extirpate these undesirable qualities within yourself, and start learning to break limits before the burden of age catches up with you.

3. Challenge

Sweat hard when you’re battling. Make sure you’re dead tired when you walk out of your workplace. Exhaustion shows how far you’ve pushed yourself in pursuit of your passions. Make sure you rest only when your efforts hinder rather than help.

4. Michael vs. Mia

Once you become one of the best, challenge yourself against the best, or those who share your goals and desires. Their attitude towards work and success is infectious. Let it become the only disease that you never want to heal.

5. Nothing but Net

Challenge yourself in every facet of life, even if it means absolutely nothing in the long-run. It makes life more exciting, more thrilling, more exhilarating. Oh, and put a Big Mac on the line for the winner. (more…)

One of the many things that’s amused and alarmed me is how the iPod generation grows and grows.

Not that the iPod is a bad thing. It’s a great study tool, it’s a great mobile music kit, it’s great for workouts, it’s great for alone time, it’s great for college rave parties, or whatever general students enjoy. Pick your spots and it has its uses.

But more and more often…I see more and more people tuning out the world and tuning into their Top 50 mixes. And I wonder why people automatically place those earphones in the moment they walk outside. Is it a way to escape from saying “Hi” to a stranger? Or avoid meeting the greetings of that girl or boy who attracts you across the street? Or just avoiding the relaxing randomness of life and keeping things safe, simple, and boring?

This is what worries me. That a generation with so much promise and hope is going to tune out the world’s problems and focus solely on their own.

Why do people use their iPods so much?

What’s the next step for the Internet? We’ve reached stagnancy. Information is organized pretty well, we can track people with RSS.

Managing that chaos might be the next step. What if there was an application that tracked all your conversations (blog comments, message board responses, Facebook wall replies, )? CoComment tried it but the format was too cumbersome. Email can track some, but not all of these things. Could there be a Google Conversations in the future that manages our outreach and our communities so we don’t lose track of the open conversations we have on the Internet?

The benefits of such a program are tangible: It avoids the cumbersome nature of clicking back page after page after page. It centralizes the flow of conversation while decentralizing the conversations itself.

Friendfeed is the primitive form of such conversations, but it only deals with some programs and not all. Twitter deals with this on a micro level, but it’s me-centric. Me me me me me. What needs to be emphasized is US so that people don’t feel like they’re floating on an iceberg.

A message board is the perfect example of loose collaboration. People have ideas, other people respond to them. However, there are so many things we’re interested in that it becomes difficult to find every board every day. Message boards are still very insular in that sense–a conversation application that emphasizes each other rather than ourselves.

A big problem with the Internet today is communication. People are still ensconced within their own bubbles that it’s hard to cut through the noise and keep in touch with people.

Just a thought.