I've always wanted to make a list and I've finally found an excuse to write one. The following fifteen restaurants are some of the best restaurants in LA.
MEXICAN
1) Chichen Itza. 3655 S Grand (37th and Grand) South LA/USC Area
This food doesn't **** around. Instead of fish tacos, they have shark tacos. Instead of jalapenos, they use exclusively habaneros. The food is quite affordable, very good and offers unusual dishes. The restaurant is hidden inside a small mall which houses a Oaxacalifornia restaurant among other things. The mall is called Mercado Paloma I think and is next to the DMV.
2) La Cabanita, 3447 N Verdugo Rd, Glendale
This restaurant also offers authentic and unusual dishes, although they are slightly more pricey than average. This restaurant has pozole and nopal (cactus) tacos.
3) Cactus Taco, 950 Vine St Hollywood
Cactus taco does not serve cactus tacos, but is still better than average and is open until 4 AM. What makes this place really special is that it attracts the weirdest people in LA, if not the world, on a daily basis. This includes the man who acts like a cartoon character and rubs his hands together saying 'mmmmm' while staring at the condiments bar. Then there is the guy who cuts in front of you in line and asks for a landline angrily. The weirdness usually borders on sketchy so you should probably go in a large group, even though the restaurant isn't even in a bad area. Free radishes.
4) Taqueria Chihuahua 1909 Lincoln Blvd, Santa Monica/Venice Area
This place serves really good and affordable average tacos. They have good jamaica juice as well.
5) Tacos Baja Ensenada 5385 Whittier Blvd East LA
This place serves some of the best seafood tacos in LA. They have cahuamante, a dish which is supposed to be made out of sea turtles, but since that is illegal, it is made with stingray. Good prices and good, unusual dishes.
FRENCH
6) Cafe Beaujolais 1712 Colorado Blvd Eagle Rock
This place serves escargot. I only know of three French restaurants in LA so there is not much competition. The other in Silver Lake is called Taix but isn't really French. The third pretentious place is located in Las Feliz has overpriced and not very good food. The waiter routinely attempted to one-up my pronunciations of things until I stopped going there.
KOREAN
7) Ka San Korean BBQ Inc 3115 Foothill Blvd La Crescenta
There are very many very good Korean BBQ places in LA, but this one is good too. It is also in the middle of nowhere, which is particularly good when you also happen to be in the same middle of nowhere. It is definitely the best in La Crescenta.
CHINESE
8) Ocean Seafood Restaurant 747 N Broadway, Chinatown. Dim Sum
This is some of the best seafood dim sum authentic Chinese food in LA. The waiters bring food on trays which you can choose if you like. Lots of very good dumplings.
THAI
9) Kinaree Thai 1253 La Brea Hollywood area
This place is very good. There is a restaurant a little bit south of it which has four times as many reviews and a perfect rating but I haven't been there.
VIETNAMESE
10) Pho Saigon 3831 W 6th Street Korea Town
This place is affordable, open past midnight and has good food. Like the Thai restaurant there is another much more popular restaurant a few blocks east with even better reviews, but I haven't been there.
JAPANESE
11) Mishima 8474 W 3rd St
This restaurant offers curry's, stews and rolls. The service is very good, the food is good and it is very well priced. One of the best restaurants overall in Los Angeles.
12) Asahi Ramen 2027 Sawtelle Blvd West LA
This restaurant serves real ramen (a noodle meal adopted by the Japanese during WW2 from China). Supposedly it is good to eat when you drink because of some nutrients or chemicals in it.
13) Izaka-ya (8420 W 3rd St) , Katsu-ya (11680 Ventura Blvd)
These restaurants are really popular. The second one is so popular that I've never been inside. I've never waited the hour and a half it takes to get in without eating somewhere else. The first one is popular too and I've actually been able to find a table there. I know that it is popular because the 35 year old woman who is always in the same place as I am is there. Let me explain: I probably go out to a bar or restaurant once a week or once every two weeks. However 75% this woman is there too. Given the size of LA this woman is either stalking me or goes out every single night to multiple places. I have reasons to believe the latter is true, however these reasons are not very polite to discuss.
INDIAN
14) Electric Karma 8222 W. 3rd St
This restaurant has a cool atmosphere and good food. Best of all is the extremely angry waiter. My girlfriend once asked for mango chutney and the man turned bright red and shouted "WE DO NOT HAVE MANGO CHUTNEY!!!!' This is truly exceptional service.
15) India's Tandoori 5468 Wilshire Blvd (Miracle Mile)
This restaurant has a good buffet, good prices, and very genuinely nice service.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The Tea Kettle Correspondence
It took some time for the press to ask the question which was on everyone's mind. In fact the question had festered inside the reporters' heads like a fish left out to become rotten in the sun. But the matter had no precedent leaving the propriety of inquisition of the president uncertain. On a particulate level, where each reporter would is represtented as a particle, each particle, or reporter if you prefer, hoped another reporter would have a substantial rapport with the president to break the precedent and report on the matter, leaving the other particles, or reporters of you prefer, relieved. It was in this way that the matter remained obfuscated, and the public became increasingly perplexed by the puzzle, and puzzled further that the reporters would not report on the matter, and that their letters to the reporters had gone unanswered.
However, the issue at hand or rather the issue that the issue had been eschewed at the hands of the press did not impress the public particularly; it had been years that their correspondance to reporters through calls, envelopes and letters, especially the latter, had been culled by the reporters to a shredder, or answering machine, enveloping their relationship in a saguine fog like bitter butter, but red. The public, which like an ocean, river or group of trolleys called transit, could be considered one thing comprised of many individual molecules or trolleys. Regardless, the public outnumbered the press, yet the weight of their inquisitions only succeeded in pressing the reporters to mollify the public with increasing mollifications, as though the public had sat on a balloon, which was the press. This was because, of course, the reporters did not know the answer to the question which was puzzling everyone.
As one can imagine, this was a frustrating moment for everyone. The press became upset with the public and the public became upset with the press. After over time the situation became increasingly awkward, with the public mumbling when they came across reporters at a restaurant, and the reporters failing to show up at press gatherings with the president altogether and eventually avoiding restaurants.
The situation was resolved when a sir by the name of Sir Fish, the same Mister Fish (the same Fish as Sir Fish (Sir Fish humbly prefers Mister Fish) who reported on the rogue drone, resolved the situation. This story that the reader began reading at the beginning of this story may not make a great deal of sense to the reader if, especially, or perhaps nonessentially, one is not familiar with that story of the sir Sir Mister Hamilton Fish (the same as Sir Fish and Mister Fish; Hamilton is Sir Fish's surname, Fish being a name the author uses to hide Sir Hamilton's identity; Sir Hamilton Fish is not based on any real Hamilton Fishes and any connection is purely coincidental; furthermore the author will use all these names of Fish interchangably to keep the story from becoming stagnant) and the rogue drone. If the reader is not acquanited with this story, which the reader should not be at the moment, as this is the first time the author has detailed the story about Sir Hamilton Fish (this statement is void if the author writes about the folliwng episode in a separate work and the reader reads that work before this story, or if he, the reader, or she, began reading this story in the middle; under the two previous detailed circumstances the author recommends you continue to read this story first, from the beginning, although, again this depends on what the author writes in the future and the nature of the narrative of the future work as the author is prone to forget things; furthermore, the author cannot be held liable for any confusion to the reader) and the rogue drone.
The story of Sir Hamilton Fish began back in the year 2010, a few months in the future of when this story was first written before subsequent revisions relegated it to the anachronistic status of most stories conveying the past from the present as though that author was in the past himself at the present moment, which as we can agree, he was not (or she) nor was the rogue drone.
The rogue drone episode was not so much a matter of a rogue drone but a prank drone gone rogue. This drone was sent into battle to find insurgent poppie growers by smelling nicotine and tracing these odiferous, or odoriferous, if you prefer, although I admit I prefer the former, farmers. The manufacturers intended the drone to spy on the insurgents or attack them, as you would expect a military drone to do, being drones built for a militaristic purpose. Yet the drone was not manufactured in the correct way at all, due to a few pacificist pranksters from Cal Tech, or MIT if you prefer. A couple hundred of these drones were released, and then to the drone control unit's bafflement, the drones disappeared from the control of the drone control center. The drones were missing for some time, and the army did not want to report what had happened to the press or public, because losing drones is an embarassment, especially to a drone control unit. However, they could not keep up the charade for long.
The situation was at first quarantined in the mountains of Baluchistan, where people smoking cigarettes were startled by the approach of a flying robot. Then the robots spread all over the world doing the same thing. However, the incidents were so random and bizarre that the press would not believe the public, and the public did not believe the press. This was the beginning of the tensions noted in the beginning of the story between public and press, and which were resolved in this first scenario concerning drones by the Sir Hamilton Fish, who would later also resolve the second scenario, or should I say, might, for suspense purposes, resolve the second scenario, the second scenario being the primary matter described at the beginning of this narrative on page one (assuming this story does not appear in the middle of an anthology, and depending on how the admittedly unlikely publisher decides to number this book) before the later introduction of the rogue drones.
Sir Hamilton Fish, not a reporter by profession, but rather a person with a title, brought the press and the public together by refusing the robots a cigarette. The robot drone approached him, asking the sir to spare a cigarette in their normal noisome robotic voice. However, Sir Fish, a pacifist who never did like drones, refused the robot his cigarette, something no one had every done, because the drones were intimidating in the context of being in the same place together with the smoker as opposed to being in separate or distant places. The drone, therefore, was programmed to try a second strategy: to repeat the same question over and over again until the smoker relented. While the drone hovered there in the air, saying “do you have a cigarette to spare do you have a cigarette to spare do you have a cigarette to spare do you have a cigarette to spare do you have a cigarette to spare”, Sir Mister Fish was able to get his camcorder from his nearby country home and subsequently record the monotonous drone.
It was this evidence, played on the news, that reconciled the press with the public, allowing the public to think that perhaps the press was not crazy after all for reporting what members of the public said, and allowed the press to believe that perhaps not all public smokers encountered by drones were crazy after all either.
So it was this Sir Hamilton Fish that was famous for bridging the rift between public and press. He chuckled in his estate as the president gave speeches to an empty press room month after month, waiting for his chance to reconcile people and press yet again. Then on a nice day in March, he marched to the white house from his estate in London, and looked through a hole in the door, or window, where the president stood giving a speech. He waited until the moment when the president finished his speech and looked at the empty chairs, paused and then ritually asked, “any questions?”
Then Sir Fish swung open the door dramatically. “Mister President,” said Sir Fish, “Why is there always a cellist playing music behind you when you give speeches?”
But the president had memorized the one hundred and fifty three responses to any and all questions, and knew that although the eminent members of the press had vanished for a few years, someone would imminently ask him to answer a question, most likely in the future.
“What cellist?” asked the president.
“That cellist,” said Sir Mister Fish, equally prepared from years of preparation with a computer that listed all gramatically coherent responses the president might use as response (not realizing that there were only under two hundred possible statements).
“If there is a cellist here, he is in fact entirely unrelated to these press conferences or to my general appearances to the public,” denied the president.
The automatic camera which had relayed the speeches to the news and televisions in the absence of the press for a long time, was stunned at this confrontation. The public began turning on their televisions everywhere, and the press slowly began to return to the room, like melting ice cream going into the sewer.
“Well if there is no causal relationship between you and the cellist. Will you at least admit that there is an ontological element to the cellist in the room, and perhaps even that there is a strong physical and temporal correlation to the presence of both you, the president, and this cellist?”
The British wit of Sir Fish did not concern the president, although the president realized there was a true genius before him.
“No,” said the president.
“Well then, said Sir Fish, “if you remember, it was I, Sir Fish, that finally revealed your administration's deployment of pranked drones in the Baluchi region. Since I was right then, don't you think it is plausible that I am indeed correct again, now!”
“Not necessarily,” said the president. The showdown came to a standstill, and the entire press corps stood outside the press room nervously kicking each other on the foot and motioning with their eyes at the other reporters. There was silence in the press room where the president, sir, cellist and camera stood alone, and silence on the televisions. There was silence in the warehouses where the televisions had been manufactured and had long since been deserted, and there was silence in the space where the satellite rotated and revolved, sending the television message back to Earth.
Sir Fish paced back and forth across the room smoking a pipe throughout this silence.
“Well then, if there are no more questions, I'll be on my way,” said the president finally. He began to leave the room, and the cellist stood up to follow. Noticing this trend, Sir Fish jumped with a thought of epiphany worthy of Archimedes but not relating to bath tubs, his hat flying into the air and then landing back on his head when he settled back on the ground, quadratically.
“Mr. Cellist,” said Sir Hamilton Fish. “Can you play Prokofiev's Opus 22, the one the president said was his favorite song during the election debate?” The cellist nodded. The president turned around.
“That is purely circumstantial.”
“Mr. Cellist,” continued Sir Mister Fish, “did the president hire you to play the cello during his speeches?” The president's eyebrows rose in alarm like the lid of a tea kettle under pressure. The cellist lifted his chin as though he was beginning to nod. Suddenly a person, suspiciously looking very similar to the vice president, circumstantially, shuffled his way under the stage curtain on his elbows and threw a garden snake at the cellist's heel.
“Ow!” said the cellist, distracted by the snake biting his heel, and stopping his chin gesture in mid chin movement, such that we will never if it was a nod or a shake, even if one suspected it was a nod since shakes tend to be horizontal, but not always nor conclusively. He dropped his cello and ran out of the room.
“Well, I suppose it doesn't matter anymore,” said Sir Hamilton Fish.
“I think we can agree on that!” said the president. The press cheered and ran into the room, breaking the awkward silence that had lasted several years. People watching television around the world stared at their screens in disbelief. The press lifted Sir Hamilton Fish and bounced him across the room on their shoulders, and then onto a boat and then around in circles until he arrived in England, and then back to his estate. There Sir Fish retired happily, both a celebrity and a detective, although never officially a reporter.
However, the issue at hand or rather the issue that the issue had been eschewed at the hands of the press did not impress the public particularly; it had been years that their correspondance to reporters through calls, envelopes and letters, especially the latter, had been culled by the reporters to a shredder, or answering machine, enveloping their relationship in a saguine fog like bitter butter, but red. The public, which like an ocean, river or group of trolleys called transit, could be considered one thing comprised of many individual molecules or trolleys. Regardless, the public outnumbered the press, yet the weight of their inquisitions only succeeded in pressing the reporters to mollify the public with increasing mollifications, as though the public had sat on a balloon, which was the press. This was because, of course, the reporters did not know the answer to the question which was puzzling everyone.
As one can imagine, this was a frustrating moment for everyone. The press became upset with the public and the public became upset with the press. After over time the situation became increasingly awkward, with the public mumbling when they came across reporters at a restaurant, and the reporters failing to show up at press gatherings with the president altogether and eventually avoiding restaurants.
The situation was resolved when a sir by the name of Sir Fish, the same Mister Fish (the same Fish as Sir Fish (Sir Fish humbly prefers Mister Fish) who reported on the rogue drone, resolved the situation. This story that the reader began reading at the beginning of this story may not make a great deal of sense to the reader if, especially, or perhaps nonessentially, one is not familiar with that story of the sir Sir Mister Hamilton Fish (the same as Sir Fish and Mister Fish; Hamilton is Sir Fish's surname, Fish being a name the author uses to hide Sir Hamilton's identity; Sir Hamilton Fish is not based on any real Hamilton Fishes and any connection is purely coincidental; furthermore the author will use all these names of Fish interchangably to keep the story from becoming stagnant) and the rogue drone. If the reader is not acquanited with this story, which the reader should not be at the moment, as this is the first time the author has detailed the story about Sir Hamilton Fish (this statement is void if the author writes about the folliwng episode in a separate work and the reader reads that work before this story, or if he, the reader, or she, began reading this story in the middle; under the two previous detailed circumstances the author recommends you continue to read this story first, from the beginning, although, again this depends on what the author writes in the future and the nature of the narrative of the future work as the author is prone to forget things; furthermore, the author cannot be held liable for any confusion to the reader) and the rogue drone.
The story of Sir Hamilton Fish began back in the year 2010, a few months in the future of when this story was first written before subsequent revisions relegated it to the anachronistic status of most stories conveying the past from the present as though that author was in the past himself at the present moment, which as we can agree, he was not (or she) nor was the rogue drone.
The rogue drone episode was not so much a matter of a rogue drone but a prank drone gone rogue. This drone was sent into battle to find insurgent poppie growers by smelling nicotine and tracing these odiferous, or odoriferous, if you prefer, although I admit I prefer the former, farmers. The manufacturers intended the drone to spy on the insurgents or attack them, as you would expect a military drone to do, being drones built for a militaristic purpose. Yet the drone was not manufactured in the correct way at all, due to a few pacificist pranksters from Cal Tech, or MIT if you prefer. A couple hundred of these drones were released, and then to the drone control unit's bafflement, the drones disappeared from the control of the drone control center. The drones were missing for some time, and the army did not want to report what had happened to the press or public, because losing drones is an embarassment, especially to a drone control unit. However, they could not keep up the charade for long.
The situation was at first quarantined in the mountains of Baluchistan, where people smoking cigarettes were startled by the approach of a flying robot. Then the robots spread all over the world doing the same thing. However, the incidents were so random and bizarre that the press would not believe the public, and the public did not believe the press. This was the beginning of the tensions noted in the beginning of the story between public and press, and which were resolved in this first scenario concerning drones by the Sir Hamilton Fish, who would later also resolve the second scenario, or should I say, might, for suspense purposes, resolve the second scenario, the second scenario being the primary matter described at the beginning of this narrative on page one (assuming this story does not appear in the middle of an anthology, and depending on how the admittedly unlikely publisher decides to number this book) before the later introduction of the rogue drones.
Sir Hamilton Fish, not a reporter by profession, but rather a person with a title, brought the press and the public together by refusing the robots a cigarette. The robot drone approached him, asking the sir to spare a cigarette in their normal noisome robotic voice. However, Sir Fish, a pacifist who never did like drones, refused the robot his cigarette, something no one had every done, because the drones were intimidating in the context of being in the same place together with the smoker as opposed to being in separate or distant places. The drone, therefore, was programmed to try a second strategy: to repeat the same question over and over again until the smoker relented. While the drone hovered there in the air, saying “do you have a cigarette to spare do you have a cigarette to spare do you have a cigarette to spare do you have a cigarette to spare do you have a cigarette to spare”, Sir Mister Fish was able to get his camcorder from his nearby country home and subsequently record the monotonous drone.
It was this evidence, played on the news, that reconciled the press with the public, allowing the public to think that perhaps the press was not crazy after all for reporting what members of the public said, and allowed the press to believe that perhaps not all public smokers encountered by drones were crazy after all either.
So it was this Sir Hamilton Fish that was famous for bridging the rift between public and press. He chuckled in his estate as the president gave speeches to an empty press room month after month, waiting for his chance to reconcile people and press yet again. Then on a nice day in March, he marched to the white house from his estate in London, and looked through a hole in the door, or window, where the president stood giving a speech. He waited until the moment when the president finished his speech and looked at the empty chairs, paused and then ritually asked, “any questions?”
Then Sir Fish swung open the door dramatically. “Mister President,” said Sir Fish, “Why is there always a cellist playing music behind you when you give speeches?”
But the president had memorized the one hundred and fifty three responses to any and all questions, and knew that although the eminent members of the press had vanished for a few years, someone would imminently ask him to answer a question, most likely in the future.
“What cellist?” asked the president.
“That cellist,” said Sir Mister Fish, equally prepared from years of preparation with a computer that listed all gramatically coherent responses the president might use as response (not realizing that there were only under two hundred possible statements).
“If there is a cellist here, he is in fact entirely unrelated to these press conferences or to my general appearances to the public,” denied the president.
The automatic camera which had relayed the speeches to the news and televisions in the absence of the press for a long time, was stunned at this confrontation. The public began turning on their televisions everywhere, and the press slowly began to return to the room, like melting ice cream going into the sewer.
“Well if there is no causal relationship between you and the cellist. Will you at least admit that there is an ontological element to the cellist in the room, and perhaps even that there is a strong physical and temporal correlation to the presence of both you, the president, and this cellist?”
The British wit of Sir Fish did not concern the president, although the president realized there was a true genius before him.
“No,” said the president.
“Well then, said Sir Fish, “if you remember, it was I, Sir Fish, that finally revealed your administration's deployment of pranked drones in the Baluchi region. Since I was right then, don't you think it is plausible that I am indeed correct again, now!”
“Not necessarily,” said the president. The showdown came to a standstill, and the entire press corps stood outside the press room nervously kicking each other on the foot and motioning with their eyes at the other reporters. There was silence in the press room where the president, sir, cellist and camera stood alone, and silence on the televisions. There was silence in the warehouses where the televisions had been manufactured and had long since been deserted, and there was silence in the space where the satellite rotated and revolved, sending the television message back to Earth.
Sir Fish paced back and forth across the room smoking a pipe throughout this silence.
“Well then, if there are no more questions, I'll be on my way,” said the president finally. He began to leave the room, and the cellist stood up to follow. Noticing this trend, Sir Fish jumped with a thought of epiphany worthy of Archimedes but not relating to bath tubs, his hat flying into the air and then landing back on his head when he settled back on the ground, quadratically.
“Mr. Cellist,” said Sir Hamilton Fish. “Can you play Prokofiev's Opus 22, the one the president said was his favorite song during the election debate?” The cellist nodded. The president turned around.
“That is purely circumstantial.”
“Mr. Cellist,” continued Sir Mister Fish, “did the president hire you to play the cello during his speeches?” The president's eyebrows rose in alarm like the lid of a tea kettle under pressure. The cellist lifted his chin as though he was beginning to nod. Suddenly a person, suspiciously looking very similar to the vice president, circumstantially, shuffled his way under the stage curtain on his elbows and threw a garden snake at the cellist's heel.
“Ow!” said the cellist, distracted by the snake biting his heel, and stopping his chin gesture in mid chin movement, such that we will never if it was a nod or a shake, even if one suspected it was a nod since shakes tend to be horizontal, but not always nor conclusively. He dropped his cello and ran out of the room.
“Well, I suppose it doesn't matter anymore,” said Sir Hamilton Fish.
“I think we can agree on that!” said the president. The press cheered and ran into the room, breaking the awkward silence that had lasted several years. People watching television around the world stared at their screens in disbelief. The press lifted Sir Hamilton Fish and bounced him across the room on their shoulders, and then onto a boat and then around in circles until he arrived in England, and then back to his estate. There Sir Fish retired happily, both a celebrity and a detective, although never officially a reporter.
Corporate Job Questionnaires
Corporate Job Questionnaires
I've been applying to dozens of jobs, and many of them have fifty question or so long job questionnaires. They include such tough questions as "do you like to steal things?" and "do you like other people?" So I decided I wanted to start my own business with my own questionnaire. If you're interested in the job, you can take my questionnaire and send it back to me. Please be mindful that skipping a question will automatically disqualify you from the job. Information about the job will be available after signing the appropriate documents.
1) How much do you like to work?
a. Very much but I have a problem with lying
b. I do not like to work
c. Not at all, it makes me miserable
d. I do not work, even when employed
2) If you could steal anything from my store, what would it be?
a. A cake
b. A camera
c. A television
d. Empty boxes and paper weights
3) How many times a week do you engage in criminal activity, particularly theft?
a. 1-2 times a week
b. 3-6 times a week
c. 7-10 times a week
d. I'm so busy stealing I have no time for anything else
4) How would you describe your relationship with other people?
a. Uneasy
b. Involving mutual suspicion
c. Hateful
d. I do not relate to other people
5) Why should I hire you?
a. Because no one else wants to work for you. (Note: This is the wrong answer.)
b. I'll clean your house and wash your car daily for no charge
c. I'll pay you instead of you paying me. I will also shop for you.
d. Both (b) and (c).
6) State the political philosophy which most closely matches your own:
a. Communism
b. Fascism
c. Socialist totalitarianism
d. Theocracy
7) I keep on pinching you for no reason. What do you do?
a. Hit me
b. Ignore it and keep on working
8) Imagine I keep on calling your current manager and asking him to give me dirt on you. What would he or she do?
a. Say good things at first and then eventually give in and tell the truth
b. Say bad things about me immediately
9) Do you believe in trees?
a. Yes, I live in one.
b. No, they do not exist
10) What did you think of this survey?
a. It reminded me how terrible a worker I am
b. It was very entertaining and reminded me how terrible a worker I am
1) How much do you like to work?
a. Very much but I have a problem with lying
b. I do not like to work
c. Not at all, it makes me miserable
d. I do not work, even when employed
2) If you could steal anything from my store, what would it be?
a. A cake
b. A camera
c. A television
d. Empty boxes and paper weights
3) How many times a week do you engage in criminal activity, particularly theft?
a. 1-2 times a week
b. 3-6 times a week
c. 7-10 times a week
d. I'm so busy stealing I have no time for anything else
4) How would you describe your relationship with other people?
a. Uneasy
b. Involving mutual suspicion
c. Hateful
d. I do not relate to other people
5) Why should I hire you?
a. Because no one else wants to work for you. (Note: This is the wrong answer.)
b. I'll clean your house and wash your car daily for no charge
c. I'll pay you instead of you paying me. I will also shop for you.
d. Both (b) and (c).
6) State the political philosophy which most closely matches your own:
a. Communism
b. Fascism
c. Socialist totalitarianism
d. Theocracy
7) I keep on pinching you for no reason. What do you do?
a. Hit me
b. Ignore it and keep on working
8) Imagine I keep on calling your current manager and asking him to give me dirt on you. What would he or she do?
a. Say good things at first and then eventually give in and tell the truth
b. Say bad things about me immediately
9) Do you believe in trees?
a. Yes, I live in one.
b. No, they do not exist
10) What did you think of this survey?
a. It reminded me how terrible a worker I am
b. It was very entertaining and reminded me how terrible a worker I am
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Dialectic Illusion
Think of a translucent square: Half of the square is blue, half of the square is red.
Now add a swinging pendulum behind the square. When the pendulum is behind the red half of the square, it appears red. When the pendulum is behind the blue half of the square it appears blue.
The pendulum (when powered by a perpetual larger energy source) is a temporal, rhythmic, cyclical agent. When we extend this analogy to real life, we find that our semantic system and our personal and scientific system of epistemology is biased in favor of mapping things in the dialectic of red or blue, instead of as a dynamic system. The underlying system is often hidden and unknown, ignored or under stressed.
But what kind of systems? Pretty much all systems which self regulate, which are all repeating currently functioning systems. This includes somatic self-regulation of chemicals, non-organic systems such as the motion of planets , and human systems such as traffic and business schedules.
I am going to use a human system to demonstrate this abstract idea. Human systems are generally concentric (in the sense that they correspond fundamentally) with nature and organic self-regulating systems, despite the visual disconnect of an innocent looking sycamore tree planted in front on a concrete, graffitied wall. This is because what we create comes from the same organic processes mandated by our genes, and genes underly the rest of the organic world. Essentially a building or a highway is as much of a phenotype as eye color.
This specific example I am going to use is based on the analogy of the pendulum, but it takes the analogy further and has implications for sciences, especially for those which rely heavily on statistical methods.
Imagine a normal city block with lamp posts lining the avenue. Now imagine the sun rising and falling each day. The lighting of the lamps is set to compensate (or regulate) the amount of light on the avenue. Thus, at night the lights go on. At dawn, the lights go off.
The timing of the lamps, however, is not perfect. This is essentially because the rising and setting of the sun is part of a greater system, one which not only includes the spinning of the Earth, but also the mechanisms which operate seasons. Therefore, the subsystem of the coping light mechanism is almost always slightly awry.
Since a compensatory system is dualistic, the two opposites should also match each other's form, while each system may have components which have their own properties:
TURN the stove ON
Turn THE STOVE on
While the message is the same, the sizes of the different letters differ such that there is a slightly incongruence in length.
I call this slight and almost constant disunity the Transparent Dystemporal Effect. This arrhythmia is like the sliver revealed of an opaque circle which sits behind another circle, and reveals information about both circles.
So what is the significance of this? The revealed sliver is not something that goes unnoticed in scientific research as it is very prominent. Instead it is constantly misconstrued and misused in our analytical processes.
Here is an example: to our sense, there are two binary times of great darkness: after dusk when the city lights have not come on soon enough, and before dawn when the city lights turn off too early. In this situation, where the systems are quite obvious, people would generally not make the mistake of creating a No Light time which occurs at regular intervals. They would also not make the mistake of thinking that this process occurs only in a single situation; it is clear it occurs once when the sun goes down and once when it goes up.
However, if the system is hidden then the opposite occurs. Colloquially, extreme dark and extreme light might become opposites. The concept of the binary system is unfolded (meaning there is only one system where there should be two), bent or muddied.
Scientifically, too often these salient features guide our understanding in the wrong way. The binary system is replaced with a single, twisted system, and the continuum behind the earth's movement around the sun is ignored.
This should wreak havoc on a science which relies on statistics. One should not attempt to correlate these false prominent traits with other traits, or delve into their distribution within a population. Since two very similar traits are more likely to be one and the same, the statistical victory of high correlation may actually lead astray. Attempting to understand a group of hidden systems, such as in psychology, using a method which is completely blind to distinguishing the systems which it is attempting to understand is a bad idea.
While binary opposites which occur at temporally predictable intervals can be misused, when perceived and applied correctly this Transparent Dystemporal Effect has great potential. It is from these unbalanced double binary opposites (noon and midnight and before dusk and before dawn), which upon inspection, both scientifically and semantically, inherently cause contradiction and blurred precision of meaning, that we realize that two overlapping, self-regulating systems exist. It is through the poor focus of our lens which occurs when we ignore a dimension of a dual system, that makes the meaning of a single world blur and self-destruct. But it is through this contradiction or blurring that we become aware of our broken lens and the possibility of an extra dimensional system.
But how precisely can we spot this effect and use it productively?
One way is that we can see this contradiction because there is a blot on a system which should function on a continuum.
In our example, ignoring interfering subsystems such as weather or city light pollution, the amount of light in the sky should work like a pendulum: It should get brightest at the center point of the day, gradually get darker, get darkest at the center point of night, and then gradually get lighter. This is an important distinction: the validity of mechanisms we perceive on a gradual continuum (such as heat and cold, which are then defined by dynamic processes such as the movement of molecules), versus the questionable validity of those which we still look at dichotomously or which reveal dialectic contradictions and are adjectival phenomena, generally lacking in a dynamic explanation. (An example of the latter is the contradiction of light waves versus light particles, and although I know nothing about physics, it seems like these clues pointing to double systems could transcend temporal dimensions and measurement.) These levels of understanding are embedded not only in our science but in linguistics. Simply through our categorization of grammar, the status of a theory, be it adjectival-dichotomous, adjectival-continuum, or verb-dynamic, we are able to get a sense of the depth of our scientific understanding.
To conclude:
When a bi-polar blot appears, as when it gets darkest immediately before the sun rises and after the sun sets(as a function of the slightly dysfunctional self-regulating system), but there is only a single brightest time of day, nature provides a crucial alert signal to scientists.
Our natural language structure catches these instances equally well. When a word becomes blurs or clashes with its own meaning, a two-part self-regulating system may well be present.
By using calculus (instead of statistics) to capture the temporal rhythm and variation between factors this effect also generously gives us much more potential information about the properties of the two compensating systems, the dynamics thereof, and a clue to the third mechanism, which is necessary to activate the dueling systems.
Perhaps by tracing a single self-regulating system, which must have inherent and predictable parameters, one can then move on to the mystery third activator which is part of another system, and then move on from there like a zipper on a chain. The inter-dependence of multiple self-regulating systems may be a key in the unravelling and distillation of the ingredients therein.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
International Observer Premise
Dear readers,
This premise of a website, or blog, is to inform and contemplate an interesting concept in a way to communicate to readers, thereby they make their own impressions. While any of the said things here are questionable in their presentation or content, nonetheless I encourage each of you to read the premises of each article of this website in the following order:
1)
2)
3)
etc.
As most of my premises and postings will follow this order, it is necessary for you to be alerted to this sequence as failure to comply will lend to chronic mishaps or miscommunication.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)