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It's time for another free thinking mind flow on human behaviors.

It never fails to fascinate me (and sometimes infuriate me) how hypocrisy infiltrates our daily lives. Human beings have a natural desire to feel wanted, to feel loved, to be listened to. Many times, people will go to great lengths just to satisfy that desire. Some cases are obviously more extreme than others.

Persuasion plays a huge role in this. Through persuasion, a hypocrite can continue to live a life that they want to live; however, when asked to stand up for something they should "believe", they'll immediately say anything that the angry mob wants to hear. Why is this? Why does this incessant belief come into play so frequently?

I believe it's because of the popularity factor. For many people that I've come to know, as they get more popular with friends and acquaintances, their ego begins to inflate. They become selfish and lose a desire to care for others. Their needs must be met first and foremost. They almost seem hurt when a situation plays out differently than they expect.

I know this is how it works because I've been there.

Many times.

And I'm sure it's far from over.

It feels good to be loved. It feels amazing to be wanted. To be needed. To help. And it's hard to draw the line in the correct area of sand. There is nothing wrong with being popular as long as you don't let it get to your head. The bigger your ego, the harder you WILL fall. This is emphasized for a reason. Everyone will suffer setbacks. Everyone will be struck down a peg or two in their life.

That is also human nature.

What we have to figure out is, first, how to prevent an overinflated ego, and second, if we do crash and burn, how to overcome it.

Again, there's nothing wrong with being wanted and being helpful. It's good to feel proud of your accomplishments. But when you make it all about you and don't thank the people who really matter for helping you out, you step just a bit further over that line; getting closer to the cliff's edge.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been given the opportunity to observe democracy in action. First hand. And it's not pretty. Listening to various sides of an argument trying to keep an open mind about action only goes so far. Many people I listened to had wonderful ideas in making a decision and coming to an agreement. But every single thought that I listened to had one major flaw. It didn't allow people to think for themselves. It used persuasive, and sometimes blunt, arguments to present the information. It relied on people's indecisiveness and apathy to succeed. And it worked. Which is where the problems started arising.

There was not an agreement reached. Only a conclusion. The voice of democracy sided with the majority.

Now, I'm not saying I have an answer on how to solve this. I have my own thoughts on the matter, but it heavily relies on people to think for themselves. To share unbiased information. To think.

I've often wondered why I like to think so much. I absolutely love information and knowing things. I've gone on several hour long walks this semester to try and understand how something works. Trying to understand the truth in the matter and not make it about yourself is the absolute best way to keep your ego from turning on you.

Once again, this post will be about the internet. But in addition to that, I'll also through in some thoughts about human behavior and the net's effect on how we react. Consider this: You're working with a few people stomping grapes to get the juice out that will eventually be used to make wine. The guy next to you hits the side of the bucket and falls several feet on his face. What do you do?

Well, obviously, you check and make sure the guy is okay.

Now watch this. Go ahead. I'll wait.






Did you laugh? Chuckle? Snicker at the commentary of the people in the studio? I did.

Why is this? Why do we laugh at pain in the comfort of our own home and yet in the presence of others feign sincere concern for their well-being?

It's because of anonymous. Anon started (and continues) from a website called 4chan. Their claim to fame is that they are the source of everything funny that comes out through the interwebs ... and to a point, this is true. Unfortunately, 4chan is not a safe place to visit. They use an imageboard type posting format where usernames are not required (and you are not allowed to register usernames anyway) and most users post as anonymous.

What this allows is people to revert back to a more primitive instinct and say and post things that they may not normally post in real life. It allows them to be more free with their language. It allows them to view content that a lot of people would consider vulgar and inappropriate. The story I'm going to summarize below can be read, in it's entirety, here. I warn you, it demonstrates a disgusting side of the internet.

Essentially, a girl, by the alias of boxxybabee, began posting a couple of videos for her friends on YouTube. 4chan found it and started making fun of her. Eventually, it got to the point where people were trying to find out all the information they could about her; personal information, in hopes to effectively ruin her life. They came near close to doing it, and it was only ended by a group of people going over the top in looking for her information, to turn people off on the whole boxxy incident.

There are many misconceptions about the internet. One of the largest is that there are no secrets on the internet; no matter how hard you try. The simple truth is that once something is posted online, it's there forever. In addition, even with proxy filters and bouncing your address off of different servers, to someone that is dedicated enough (not necessarily with a powerful machine), you can be found and tracked down in the real world.

Remember, the cyberworld is a mirror representation of our real world. Metaphorically, of course. There are all different types of people; good and bad. It's fascinating to watch the creativity of the internet spring to life. Maybe, if I can come up with a decent plot, I'll write a short story that focuses on this. Just beware of the dangers of the net. They're more serious than the mainstream media understands right now.

One of the other crazy ideas I run back to time and time again is how the brain works. Let it be known that I am fascinated by the unconscious mind and the power that your subconscious has over your body. Granted, I know very little neurologically on how the brain actually works, but I like to think of it in terms that I can understand and that make sense.

I can see the mind as a massive database of information. Like a huge SQL database. That's constantly being queried by experience in order to retrieve, add, and sometimes, delete information.

The way my mind usually works when I'm talking with people is that I will take in the information they are giving me and cross-referencing it through my massive index of possible responses in order to present the correct one. This is so that when someone asks you what the color of the sky is, you don't respond with "Apple".

Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on how you look at it), my index of possible relevant answers includes information that I've seen on the net or stories that I've been told or life events that I've been involved with. Many times while I'm talking with friends over instant messaging, I'll recall a comic that I read that appropriately applies to the situation. It's useless trivia, but it's fun to include anyway.

Now that's the simple version of my cross-referencing brain. I've been known, on several occasions, to completely change the subject based on running through a process.

For example: A friend tells me about the homework he's got due the next day. I'll be thinking about possible homework I might have and suddenly remember a really easy assignment I had in one of my classes that day. Thinking through this situation to see if it would be worth sharing, I recall that during this class, I had been searching for a design that I liked and stumbled upon a nifty picture that I'm now using as a wallpaper. I then share this with my friend.

In terms of how your mind determines reactions based on experience, consider your mind like a big search engine. You're presented with a situation that you have not experienced before. Google Mind kicks in and you immediately search your database for answers to this situation, turning up no exact responses, but you do get several close matches based on similar experiences. You can then run through those responses and develop your own to add to your massive database and, hopefully, learn from in the future.

It's pretty astounding to me at how well and quickly the mind works and also how we're incredibly helpless when the brain fails us for whatever reason; whether it's a temporary amnesiac attack, or some other important function. Our minds are incredible tools and we should continue to try and learn and fill them with information that can help us in the future.

Every once in a while, I'll come up with (or borrow) some thought on an alternative view of something in our environment ... or, at least, how it works. The case tonight is going back to 2006 where Senator Ted Stevens referred to the internet as a series of tubes. He was trying to explain net neutrality and the issue of clogging up the "tubes" with excessive downloading of whatever.

Many people gave him flack for this statement. Mostly because he seemed incredibly ignorant on how the internet works. Someone on his staff sent him "an internet" that got clogged up in the tubes for several days. Calling the email an internet is what made the statement about the internet being a series of tubes even more hilarious.

Now, follow me for a second. He's not too far off. The basic way the internet functions is as follows:

You want to go visit TheChrisBrewer.com and see what all the fuss is about. You log onto your client (in this case, your machine) and open up a web browser (Firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc.). In the address bar, you type www.thechrisbrewer.com and hit enter. At that point, your client sends out a broadcast message asking for something to tell it where this site is physically located.

Consider it even more simply. You are wanting to go to a friend's house (James) who lives across town. You first walk outside your house and ask "Where does James live?". No one will probably respond, or they will reply they don't know.

At this point, your client will receive a response from your router (or modem) saying "I don't know. Here, ask the ISP's DNS servers and see if they know. (In our real life example, that would be going to the phone book and looking up his address) If those DNS servers don't know, they will tell you to ask another DNS server and another and another until someone replies with "Oh, that's easy. thechrisbrewer.com is at 75.119.202.121"

Now that the client knows where to go find TheChrisBrewer.com, it can send packets to this address requesting a copy of the information the website stores. To make a long explanation shorter, this is where the analogy of the tubes comes in.

Every machine connected to cyberspace has a limited speed in which it can transmit data out and receive data in. This speed is known as bandwidth. It is limited by the ISPs corresponding to how much you pay them and how much their equipment can handle (whichever is more limited). Within businesses, and many homes, the speed in which computers can talk to each other is usually around 1Gb/s. That is fast. However, this doesn't translate very well in the internet.

If, for example, you have a 3Mb/s internet connection coming into your home, and you begin downloading 4 different ISOs of linux simultaneously, you would most likely max out your bandwidth and browsing the internet may be a lot slower than you're used to. In the same way, if you have a tube and your pour 4 different elements through the tube simultaneously, you would have a lot less space in which to pour a 5th element in. That tube is clogged, so to speak.

Senator Stevens may not realize that in a small scale environment, his metaphor makes sense. The internet is a series of interconnected "tubes" that transmit data between the two endpoints via may routes and hops along the way. When a massive amount of data is pushed through a particular segment of the tube, the router will have to work harder to process and pass the information through to its correct next hop. The more amount of data sent at once, the longer it will take to arrive (even though this is usually milliseconds of time).

All in all, I understand a way the Senator Stevens's statement can be used and I have imagined a physical representation of that as I wait for pages to load or daydream or whatever. It's something worth thinking about. in the next few days, I'll share another analogy/metaphor that I've had in my head for some time now that's just as strange.

One of the things that I love about the Internet is its amazing ability to contain just about anything anyone would like to search for. Are you looking for a Japanese Chin Puppy Female for sale in Nebraska? Google can help you out.

How about an article on Jurva, Finland? Wikipedia can help you out there.

Anything on random letters randomly typed on the keyboard in Google? Oh, yeah.

I like to refer to the Internet as a massive database of information. We, as users, are its editors, constantly adding to the humongous index of user data and opinions. Think about it. Wikipedia contains information on nearly every subject of interest a person can think of. When someone brings up a new concept to me through instant messaging that I don't readily understand, one of the first places I check is Wikipedia.

Another way to look at the Internet is as an extension of our brains. I've already talked about our intellectual part of the massive cyber-brain of encyclopedic data. One of the other portions of this "brain" would be entertainment. This includes the streaming video of Hulu and YouTube as well as online games and puzzles. The combination of these allow us to, on demand, satisfy a lust for entertainment.

The opinionated and decision-making center of the "brain" can be found in news sites, social news submissions sites, and blogs, such as this one. This is the location where many people can submit their own thoughts and spins on an idea in hopes to persuade someone in the real world to see the same way. It's this mass of information that I usually find most interesting. It's stalker-esqe in a way how I like to find out what's going on in people's lives. What they believe in. What they think. Blogging has turned the normally private life into a voyeuristic public life.

Think about it. Everything that is blogged on the internet can essentially be seen by everyone. The general rule is that once it is published online somewhere, it is online to stay. You will always be able to find a copy of it somewhere. One of the uses of blogging is to documents inner-feelings or day's events, such as writing in a journal or diary. The key difference is that the world has the key to your diary and many people like to peep inside on a regular basis.

I find this all fascinating. It can seem creepy when you delve into it deeply and try and understand it all, but I absolutely love the sharing of information on the Internet. I feel that it is, to a point, more useful in sharing knowledge about our day-to-day lives than some classes in school. Granted, an education all through college does provide a lot of insight over our life, but it is life experiences that truly teach us. And the internet, in providing an outlet to share those experiences, allow other people to get a general idea of these same experiences that will ultimately shape their lives.