Critique

At this point all you're doing is marketing

Some may say since the force that compels us to seek patterns are so strong, then we must be adept at finding them. But one should guard against such reasoning as “being adept” could be only one of many reasons we seek patterns. Yet the KQ “How adept are we at finding meaningful patterns?” is too substantial to overlook. In Michael Shermer’s TED talk “The pattern behind self-deception”, he states two types of errors humans are liable to make in the search for patterns. A Type I error, or a false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not (finding a nonexistent pattern), while a Type II error, or a false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is (not recognising a real pattern). An example of a Type I error is the pigeon in the box experiment as conducted by B. F. Skinner. Skinner put a pigeon in a box and it has to press one of two keys. The pigeon will try to figure out what the pattern is, and if you give him a little reward in the box — if you just randomly assign rewards such that there is no pattern — they will figure out any kind of pattern. And whatever they were doing just before they got the reward, they repeat that particular pattern. That's called superstition, and is something most of us are liable to, where we believe in good luck charms and associate certain attributes with dates such as friday the thirteenth being an unlucky date. To sum up, humans are not that adept at finding patterns as we have the tendency to believe in superstition that is connected to the supernatural or AOK of religion.

A counterclaim to this is that humans are adept at finding patterns because of the countless theorems mathematicians have discovered. An example is the fundamental theorem of arithmetic which states that “every integer greater than 1 either is prime itself or is the product of prime numbers, and that this product is unique, up to the order of the factors”. To elucidate this theorem, we will look at the numbers 2, 4 and 30. The theorem states that every number has a unique prime factorisation, which means that it is composed of a unique set of prime numbers. For the number 2, its prime factorisation is just 2 as it is a prime number itself. For the number 4 and 30, their prime factorisations are 2×2 and 2×3×5 respectively. The factorisations are unique as only these numbers have the number and order of prime factors when arranged in ascending order. This theorem is a great discovery and not obvious, but requires great perception and familiarity with various mathematical ideas. The theorem has led to the concept of the lowest common multiple which is useful in maximising efficiency such as being able to send a space probe to Mars that covers the least distance possible. Although we think of distance as static, this is not the case for outer space as the space probe would be under the influence of gravity of all the planets in the solar system. According to Oxford Dictionaries, a theorem is defined as “a general proposition not self-evident but proved by a chain of reasoning; a truth established by means of accepted truths”. From this definition, it is clear that it is no mean feat to discover theorems. Consequently, it implies that humans are adept at finding patterns.

If in religious knowledge systems we are incompetent at finding patterns but in mathematics the contrary is true, what then is the verdict to the answer of the aforementioned KQ? It can be said that we are adept at finding meaningful patterns if we work hard as one is only competent in finding patterns in mathematics if one dives himself deep into the ocean of its knowledge. For those who easily believe in superstition without the need for evidence, it is them who freely indulge in believing their made-up patterns.

We have identified that there are many reasons in wanting to search for patterns but one of the basis is for easing men’s life and inflating his ego and outwardly appearance. We have also determined that humans are adept at finding patterns if they put in the effort or else, their efforts to find patterns would most likely be like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. With this knowledge in mind, we must strive to search for meaningful patterns as they are the doorway to an easier life of regularity. But careful we must be towards being too routined by patterns for the flame of creativity and curiosity which fuelled us to find the patterns in the first place will be doused by our own actions, or inaction in the case of not realising this fact

The truck slammed on its breaks. There was a barricade rising through mist. Rolls of tires and red clad children emerging. The truck stopped close enough to see them clearly. Two figures began walking forward looking at them through windows. The right window lowered and Gluos’ head stuck out as he leaned on the horn and yelled, “get the fuck outa the road.”

He pressed into the horn for several more seconds as the pair bracketed the vehicle, Assistant rolled down her window and accepted a thin red scarf from a youth. The other walked up to Gluos now gripping the steering wheel.

“My name is Colum,” he said to Gluos while moving closer to whisper, “and we’ve been watching you.”

“You know it's nothing special to look away from the stream.”

Colum grinned, “it’s child's play.”

“You going to let me get on with this then?” He nodded up the road.

“We can’t stop you.”

They backed away from beside the truck. The third of their party, who was perched on the towering barricade, jumped off and away. The MOART squealed forward ramming the wall, tires tumbled, truck gained purchase on top and rolled over the pile of rubber circles. One of the youths threw a bottle as the MOART clambered over tires, it smashed on the roof. Gluos muttered, “mother fuck.”

There drove on, hands on the wheel. City all around. Blone below. Cruise missiles en route. Mayor’s hideout ahead. Gluos pressed down on the gas, cutting through fog, straight to the point on the map in his head, thinking of youths with faces of red.

In the gov district a launcher sitting in a parking lot fired a missile which had been designed at Wrathion Corporations and assembled in City by robots and people wearing hairnets working 3 hour shifts. It had been purchased by the Worldender government from a NorCon weapons brokerage, and set up last night. The disposable launcher spat out an eight and a half meter long missile with wings, vectoring turbo jet engines, and 500 pound conventional warhead. The CM-54 Scrub arched towards the Taipan and fell, steadied then coasted 4 meters above brown water at 1000 m/s. Mil sec scanners lost contact, until it arced back into the City. Rushing above streets, searing past windows, into a City square with mid-sized buildings and a MOART driving into the center.

The MOART stopped with a screech in the square facing the mayor’s hideout. Inside the truck Gluos put the sun visor down. Assistant said, “AI gives us 50 percent chance of being the target.”

The Scrub whipped its turbo jet, tilted its wings, and made a huge braking turn through the square slamming itself directly into a building that was still highlighted by the MOARTs windscreen as the Mayor’s hideout. All the windows in the building blew out, followed by an expanding fireball of exploding Scrub.

I embarrassingly tried to portray this used book store I go to. I suck shit at writing but at least I tried.

Figures danced, unclean and unshaven, around the labyrinthine wooden shelves, the door propped open with a single brick to the hot wet street. One shriveled lady fiddled with a radio set on top of a stack of lithographs while a younger man next to her with dusty clothes and a dusty face opened a roll of quarters into the register. The sound of coins filling the plastic interior of the cashbox coincided with the first bar of Mendelssohn's 'Reiterliede'. The shriveled lady, now satisfied with the functionality of the radio, returned to her perch on a tall stool behind the checkout counter. Her sedentary position obscured a few old engineering textbooks. The man began writing something with sharpie on a neon yellow strip of paper. The smell of yellowed paper was amplified by the fresh humidity, the stale nostalgic stench overwhelming any other odor. The lack of sufficient spacing between the roughened plywood bookcases could easily suffocate the claustrophobic. The languid browsers, perspiring in the wet heat of summer, stopped here for varied and distinct reasons, yet they all performed the same dance. Crouching to observe a heavy tome, head-tilting while perusing a wall of German plays, strategic movements neccessary to navigate the necropolis of a nearly dead medium of entertainment: these small performances were on display from all. And through this writhing pit of small-time commerce one could observe the behaviors displayed by drug addicts, neurotics, and the like. In the same way, this dusty hole-in-the-wall provides optimism and hope for those with a complete and irreversible addiction. And so the addicts will continue to dance.

pastebin.com/2cUJM9uj

A sleeping genius
Waiting to be told
His stories of nothing
Watch him glaze over the countless memory
of childhood and transition standing
on his own two feet

He stands there alone
His mind, a companion
but truly he's alone
Only the untold give him life
Meticulous, his worlds are perfect

I wrote this comic quatrain in a writing-meeting with friends. The subject of the poems was the guillotine. I will post the translation of the poem I wrote first, and then the Portuguese original.

The original is a quatrain of four equal rhymes – AAAA – and 12 poetic syllables per line.

Here the translation:

Who at one finger snap teaches the road to the afterlife?
Who makes of homicide an elegant ballerina?
Who tames in a gentle swan the beast of carnage?
It is the queen of France, the illustrious guillotine.

And here the original:

Quem num só estalo a estrada para o além ensina?
Faz do homicídio uma elegante bailarina?
Quem doma em cisne a besta da carnificina?
É a rainha da França, a ilustre guilhotina.

God, these critique threads are awful now. Everyone is just posting their shit without providing any critique for others. Which might be a blessing, actually, because most of this stuff is garbage. I usually give out a bunch of free critique, but I'm not going to bother with all of you that do not even show common courtesy.

Relax dude, I posted mine during a bus ride to work. I cant do a full critique right now, but i shan't let my dues be unpaid nor my unspoken ink be forgotten