The patriarch game
I want to share something cool with you, but to get to it you’ll have to agree to wade through a really nerdy preface with me. Deal? Sweet.
Eric Chu and I were talking a while ago about how one could, with the magic of signal processing, model a person as a simple impulse response system. The theory was that, given a known initial state, a person's impulse response could be used to predict the behavior of that person. Though this idea has a few minor problems (People are pretty clearly time variant, only a gifted few approach linearity, and what would an ideal impulse be, anyway? I had some back and forth about that with Mickey in Alaska. Ask him to tell you about it some time.) it provides a useful model for thinking about one's own reaction to the world around. That is to say, I feel that the vast library of impulse responses I have collected throughout my lifetime makes in me an excellent predictor of my own response to new inputs. Inputs unencountered can be approximated as a composite of previous impulses with known responses, and thusly one can predict one's own reaction to pretty much any new situation.
No really - I'm serious. And I'll tell you why. I saw my dad on Tuesday.
Well, not really. But there was a guy at RUF who reminded (if that's the right word) me very much of my dad. He (the RUF-goer mysterious) didn't even really look terribly like him (the loved paterfamilias). He just, I dunno, was reminiscent. And what is creeping me out is that that made me, well, joyful. Weird, huh?
This really bothers me because it is an entirely unexpected reaction. Working my theoretical, subconscious impulse-composition magic, I would expect myself under the circumstances to feel interest, not happiness, and certainly not something so exotic as joy. And yet there it was. In all its pseudopsychoanalytical glory, and in response to something as bizarre as seeing someone who for some inexplicable reason made me think of my father.
The question then is, what does this say about me personally? Because apparently I don't know myself near as well as I had hoped, and that in the end is what is both awful and exciting.
Music of the moment: "Ghosts" by Sleeping At Last. I love drummers who do creative things with six eight.
[Editor's note: After posting this I discovered that this excellent song is available for free download from PureVolume.com]
Chamra/Guspa ratio (CGR): 0.8
Eric Chu and I were talking a while ago about how one could, with the magic of signal processing, model a person as a simple impulse response system. The theory was that, given a known initial state, a person's impulse response could be used to predict the behavior of that person. Though this idea has a few minor problems (People are pretty clearly time variant, only a gifted few approach linearity, and what would an ideal impulse be, anyway? I had some back and forth about that with Mickey in Alaska. Ask him to tell you about it some time.) it provides a useful model for thinking about one's own reaction to the world around. That is to say, I feel that the vast library of impulse responses I have collected throughout my lifetime makes in me an excellent predictor of my own response to new inputs. Inputs unencountered can be approximated as a composite of previous impulses with known responses, and thusly one can predict one's own reaction to pretty much any new situation.
No really - I'm serious. And I'll tell you why. I saw my dad on Tuesday.
Well, not really. But there was a guy at RUF who reminded (if that's the right word) me very much of my dad. He (the RUF-goer mysterious) didn't even really look terribly like him (the loved paterfamilias). He just, I dunno, was reminiscent. And what is creeping me out is that that made me, well, joyful. Weird, huh?
This really bothers me because it is an entirely unexpected reaction. Working my theoretical, subconscious impulse-composition magic, I would expect myself under the circumstances to feel interest, not happiness, and certainly not something so exotic as joy. And yet there it was. In all its pseudopsychoanalytical glory, and in response to something as bizarre as seeing someone who for some inexplicable reason made me think of my father.
The question then is, what does this say about me personally? Because apparently I don't know myself near as well as I had hoped, and that in the end is what is both awful and exciting.
Music of the moment: "Ghosts" by Sleeping At Last. I love drummers who do creative things with six eight.
[Editor's note: After posting this I discovered that this excellent song is available for free download from PureVolume.com]
Chamra/Guspa ratio (CGR): 0.8
