the three generations of american otaku

oh, otaku is simply an anime fan.

in japanese it means obsessed. it was an insult for a long time, then they started wearing it proudly (prolly when the classic otaku no video came out)

i can subdivide american otakudom into a few categories:

children of the 70s: one word: yamato. maybe speed racer too. shitloads of nameless b-movies for kids ported over. these were the die hards who put up with the worst dubbing the world has ever seen. the uber nerds; noone and i mean noone gave a crap about anime. these people were often college students or children of people with access to tv equipment, and would trade tapes en masse. (the good old days of mailing someone 10 blank tapes and waiting)

children of the 80s (me): voltron, transformers, millions of nameless dubbed and sanitized for your protection, i realized i was an anime fan much later. part of the initial fun was learning all the shit i already like was foriegn and had alternate translations. we were predisposed en masse. the guy cartoons anyway. the west coast already had a scene, and as of 95 the east coast was just on the verge. the net's boom allowed formerly isolated fans (me, having moved to the midwest) access to the culture again. the tape scene moves online somewhat, and there are crappy .rm files of crappy old vhs tapes, but you could get what you wanted. oh and videogames did a lot to familiarize us with the east. the magical land where more came out first.

children of the 90s:
the masses. women first enter the scene in any numbers. (tho every female otaku has their right of passage when they see their first 300 pound hairy guy in a sailormoon fuku) predisposed by power rangers and a already strong 80s cartoons scene. cartoon network finally raises the baseline otaku level of the midwest. (and continues to). the exact same thng happened hand in hand with everyone's net-familiarity too. now the software release scene took on anime; what formerly was an organizational nightmare and equipment-prohibitive was now completely enabled by online chat and win32 videoediting software. plus advances in codecs, divx was to video what mp3 was to audio. so now a week after a series aires in japan, you have a near-dvd quality fan-translated (with an emphasis on literal or at least explained translations and swear words etc included, NO FUCKING DUMBING DOWN hallelujah). y'all are definetly the golden age of anime.

and who knows what the pokemon/yugioh generation'll think. they'll have what i wanted way back when: you don't have to explain a thing, it's common culture.

in my over-opinionated mind anyway ^^

the gap in quantum physics & relativity as a metaphor for the gap in boolean truth & morality

came accross an article, 'does god play dice?' that talks about the irreconcilability of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

i think it makes for a wonderful extended metaphor for what i last blogged about: the irreconcilability of simple logic (boolean truths) and morality.

some of my favorite parts:

on shared purposes yet no ability to meet in the middle:
"Just like all other successful theories of nature, the Standard Model obeys the notions of locality and causality, which makes this theory completely comprehensible. In other words, the physical laws of this theory describe in a meaningful way what happens under all conceivable circumstances... ....But how can we combine the Standard Model with general relativity? Many theorists appear to think that this is just a technical problem. But if I say something like "quantum general relativity is not renormalizable", this is much more than just a technicality. Renormalizability has made the Standard Model possible, because it lets us answer the question of what happens at extremely tiny distance scales. Or, more precisely, how can we see that cause precedes effect there? If cause did not precede effect, we would have no causality or locality - and no theory at all."

and realizing maybe the question is flawed:
"Asking both questions in quantum gravity does not appear to make sense. At distance scales small compared with the Planck scale, some 10-33 cm, there seems to be no such thing as a space-time continuum. That is because gravity causes space-time to be highly curved at very small distances. And at small distance scales, this curvature exceeds all bounds. But what exactly does this mean? Are space and time discrete? What then do concepts such as causality and locality mean? Without proper answers to such questions, there is no logically consistent formalism, not even a quantum-mechanical one."

on supposing there are scales yet larger than considered:
"This leads me to an even more daring proposition. Perhaps general relativity does not appear in the formalism of the ultimate equations of nature. In making the transition from a deterministic theory to a statistical - i.e. quantum mechanical - treatment, one may find that the quantum description develops many more symmetries than the deeper deterministic description."
(i didn't really get into this before, but to extend the logic of the previous post, if boolean truth composes morality, the corrollary is morality composes god? and his truth can yet AGAIN be not noticably similar to ours, tho so comprised, on down to boolean truths at the basis. there's even a little ying and yang that could be interpreted from the quote above)

the last guy in the article makes an argument unlike the others, starting with considering maximum complexity. my fav line, speaking about schroedinger's cat, "A cat is, I submit, a classical object because it is complex enough to be either alive or dead, and not both at the same time". which, is especially interesting still going with the metaphor, because it is not the smaller scale that has the abiguity as it is in physics. instead, it's the larger scale, morality that we seem to be able to only resolve to a statistical likeliness at best... at least when it comes to dfining a comprehensive system.


physicists love it when you relate physics to beers:

the nature of scaling small and complex truths, Hinayana and Mahayana.

first off, bevets is a notorious member of fark, known for his debates on evolution and christianity, particularly that he elicits the magnesium-hot flames of die-hard evolutionists.

i just ran into his site for the first time, and i must say, his quotes are interesting and the discontinuous argument against evolution is swaying. (this is not what i want to get sidetracked into, but of course evolution's flawed, it's just our best guess of the moment)

anyway, i passed by another peice of his here: http://bevets.com/wrong.htm and tried to start a conversation regarding it. i failed, so here i'll fish for anyone else that takes interest.

specifically, what i nitpick, is is drawing a comparison between:
(1) two people arguing the sky is either blue or green (therefore, they're a, both right, b, both wrong, or c and d, either right) and (2) more complex moral problems.

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the major problem i have is that you jump from a 4-possibility truth
example to justice and morality. from two factors to near-infinite.
even keeping just within a mathematician's frame of mind, that is a
DRAMATIC increase of scale. the innumerable possibilities of life make
such a logical jump as feasible as asserting quantum mechanical rules
to elephants. the rules of atoms, though they make up elephants, are
amazingly incomparable. tin bars that make a toy bridge would bend
under their own weight if made at larger scale. moral truth, in short,
is not the same truth as in boolean logic, though so comprised.
universal truth, though composed of both boolean truth and (i'd say)
moral truths (at different scales)---again, strictly mathematically
speaking and if they are indeed comprised of each other--are at once
intricately related yet need not be noticeably similar. hence i cringe
when i read "assuming the bible is true". oy, moral truth is more
complicated than that, as millenia of mininterpreters attest to.

also, all of this rests on the abstractions of boolean logic, which
are essentialy ethereal and without form. fine for the catholic, a
little irritating to the mathematician ^_^

i don't have the year it would take me to write a peice satisfying
myself on truth, but i will mention something i read earlier today
that caught my interest: two buddhist terms, Hinayana and Mahayana.
Little boat and big boat. they apparantly have an analogy where buddha
is as a boat helping peopple cross a river to salvation. the littler
boat is used to describe the more centric philospophical buddhism, and
the larger boat refers to the more dogmatic and ritualistic buddhism.
it's a recognition that fewer of us will have interest and ability to
understand truth, and the masses are aided better by a simplistic
approximation. (er, i'd like to throw in that i mean 'masses' in a
statistically average way, because among other things, we're all
children once..) This page has a good explanation of the subject included as part of it's introduction for christians reading about buddha.

I can remember very similar thinking when i read of
the debates the american forefathers had while forming their new
government.

todo: research several quotes of american founders to back this up...

america's so boned

The congressional budget is currently largely passed already and subject to only limited revision. There's not much one can do anymore, but please, please, write your representatives a little note regarding this.

One googling, find a source to your liking, and you'll be sickened by the republicans using Katrina and Iraq to push their agenda of dramatically cutting social services accross the board from school lunches to PBS while simultaneously maintaining their gifting to the wealthiest in this country.