Mind-Manual

Why We Want to Feel In Control

I would like to share some insights about human nature I’ve had recently:

Some people claim that a basic human need is to feel that you are in control. We strive to gain control and try to control our surroundings and freak out if we don’t have control. Say, you do something your boss told you not to do but you knew it was the right thing to do (and others would agree). I believe they’ll freak out because they believed they controlled you (if you had indeed done what they said previously) and now they don’t.

Of course, I don’t literally mean “control” you, though the term “boss” apparently derives from “baas” as in master, in a master-slave relationship. Simply knowing you is a form of control. That is, knowing that you’ll do what the boss wants is a form of control. That’s another reason that if you do something unexpected, the people around you will freak out, because you used to be a known element and you’re not anymore. Now you are unknown and uncontrollable, and there’s no telling what you will do.

That brings me to the reason I believe human beings try to control everything. I believe human beings have a psychological need to control everything around them (even if it is the superficial illusion of control through knowledge) because if you’re in control, you can’t get hurt. I believe that getting hurt, and the fear of getting hurt are a power that moves most human beings.

Being driven by an unsatiable need for control is not a great choice for a conscious human being. There’s a few ways around this: meditation seems to help me let go of my need for control, another way is to realize what you do have control over (such as yourself) and continually remind yourself not to let it extend outwards to trying to believe you control other people or your surroundings, yet another way is to focus on the end fear that is caused by this feeling of control: that something bad will happen. According to Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway, all fear is at it’s basis a fear that you won’t be able to handle it. Think about that, because there is much wisdom in those words. For example, say you fear leaving your job even though it’s unfulfilling because you might not find a better one. The underlying fear there is that you may leave your job, and never be able to find another one and you won’t be able to handle it. I believe that a sense of low self-esteem sets in once you’re at one job for a while, so you underestimate how well you can do outside because you feel down on yourself and question why anyone would want you or want to pay you for something. And perhaps you feel you can’t handle the rejection, or the feeling that you’re not good enough.

I haven’t gotten all the pieces of the puzzle yet, and I certainly find myself trying to control everything around me, or, more often, find myself disappointed because I thought I could control things around me. However, I thought I’d share this insight into the nature of humanity I had.

Main Points:

• To try to control everything around us is a human urge that can lead you to take foolish actions or making unconscious choices you may regret later.
• If you’re in control, nothing bad can happen. That’s the reasoning behind trying to be in control, and that is rooted in a fear of getting hurt or not being able to handle it, like almost all fears. You might get hurt and you won’t be able to handle it, is the key fear.
• This is not a great choice for a conscious individual, to be pushed by a drive to be in control. Rather, a conscious human being would make intelligent, conscious choices about their life, their feelings and their relationship to everything around them.

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I Crashed the Uncrashable Google Chrome

Google Chrome is the hot new Beta browser on the market. I downloaded this yesterday morning. The idea is that because each tab is its own process, if one tab crashes or breaks, the others are unaffected. Nope, I made everything crash.

Seriously though, I’m fairly impressed so far. I’d love to get some extension I use in Firefox into here and I like it. Perhaps now I can actually use an advanced browser to watch videos like YouTube!

So, give ‘er a download and post what you think!

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Japanese Art, Size and Status

Certain older Japanese art has a curious feature: figures such as Confucious and the Bhudda are portrayed as giants among the normal-sized people. This is not because the artists believed these figures to be larger than normal human beings, but to show their greater status.

Size or height also has interesting relationships within the human mind with status. For example, a psychology study had a person introduced to a class as a fellow student and the class was asked to record what they thought was the guest’s height. The same person was introduced to another class as a Professor’s Assistant (or similar) and their height was again recorded. Finally, the person was introduced to class as a full Professor and their height was estimated by the class. Guess how the height was found? As the person’s status went up, the height estimates also went up. I think the status-height link is one of the reasons people think celebrities are taller than they are and are disappointed when they meet and say, “I thought you were taller”.

While status can influence size, it goes the other way, too. Taller people tend to have greater status in society. While the following may be a case of a correlation doesn’t mean causation error, I believe that someone’s height causes others around them to perceive them as higher status, and with higher status comes greater benefits, including access to resources such as food and mating opportunities. For example, I recall the top 3 tallest members of indigenous tribes have 7 times as many affairs as the bottom 3 shortest people. One study I recall reading about suggested that for every additional inch of height a person has, they make an additional almost $800 dollars a year. Another thing is that taller people are grossly disproportionately respresented among upper management. Put another way: ”In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell says that 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs are 6-foot-2 and taller (vs. just 4% of all men).” More information about unconscious biases related to business positions are here, including that leaders are White, held by both White folk and non-White folk. Another post by the ever insightful Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) highlights the same issue here. Here’s an excerpt: “Hair and height are great predictors of future careers. If you’re a guy with a good head of hair, and you’re over 6’4”, you’ll probably have a career in upper management.”

Essentially, size and status are correlated in our minds because of a heuristic (mental shortcut) that says they’re porportionally related. I’d imagine this has some evolutionary root, potentially because taller/bigger people have an advantage in fights and hunting, as well being able to run faster. Another possible reason (though not mutually exclusive with the first), is that height is a sign of better nutrition, so it might suggest the ability of that person to feed themselves in the past, either by simply being higher status and thus being given more of the food, or by hunting it by themselves.

Author’s Note: This is the sort of blog post that I thought this blog mighe be about. Interesting facts and theories tied together. Essentially, if you enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, you might enjoy my blog, was the idea. How did you like it?

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MySQL Troubleshooting

Looks like this is becoming a habit: I’m learning programming stuff and getting frustrated at annoying things and when I solve them I want to share it with others so others don’t have to go through my frustrations.

This one is related to MySQL with PHP programming. Some general tips:

• Development on your computer is a good idea. A great portable server is XAMPP and it comes with Apache, MySQL and phpMyAdmin. The windows version is here.
• Use phpMyAdmin, it’s awesome.
• For long queries, it’s very helpful to output them, so write and echo $query; and be happier.
• After outputting the queries, if you’re having errors, copy-paste them into an SQL box at phpMyAdmin, it will give you slightly better error reporting.
• Watch for commas, especially when putting in many fields. After outputting the query that’s going into the MySQL engine, you can see commas more easily.
• The line numbers at the end of errors are stupid, ignore them. Look at the query code that says the problem is at. In general, error reporting in MySQL is crap.
• Single commas are wonderful for use inside the double quotation marks of your actual PHP variable definition. If you use double quotations throughout, you would have to escape each one and that’s no fun.
• sprintf is also great for generating formatted strings, in the example at the end, I use it to keep my code neater. Basically, the placeholders in the string that’s the first argument (%s) is replaced by the other arguments, in order.

Some misc. troubleshooting:

MySQL queries generate errors!

MySQL query entries need to be sanitized to prevent things like slashes or quotation marks from messing up the query. So, for that, use mysql_real_escape_string. This one is recommended over the mysql_escape_string function, so use the “real” one.

You get this error: “You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘desc, prog_title) VALUES(’ABS201Y1′, ‘Intro Abor Studies’, ‘blah blah’, ‘Aborigi’ at line1″

You’ve done everything you can but you can’t figure it out. This one pissed me off like no tomorrow. Turns out, that “desc”, one of my field names is actually a function of MySQL. When I created the query to insert data into that field, I didn’t use quotation marks around it. So, in general, make sure you’ve got quotation marks around your field names, and try not to name your fields after functions.

Here’s an example of a pretty good query I stole from somewhere and used in my program:

//MySQL - insert everything into courses table
$query = “SELECT * FROM courses WHERE code=’”.mysql_real_escape_string($courseCode).”‘;”;
$mysql_result = mysql_query ($query)
or die (”Error in query: $query. ” . mysql_error() .”\n”);

if (mysql_num_rows($mysql_result) == 0) {
$q_insert = sprintf(”INSERT INTO courses”.
“(’code’, ‘name’, ‘descrip’, ‘prog_title’) VALUES(’%s’, ‘%s’, ‘%s’, ‘%s’);”,
mysql_real_escape_string($courseCode), mysql_real_escape_string($courseName),
mysql_real_escape_string($courseDesc), mysql_real_escape_string($progTitle) );
echo “\n”.$q_insert . “\n”;
$mysql_result = mysql_query($q_insert)
or die (”Error in query: $query. ” . mysql_error() .”\n”);
echo “mysql courses rows: ” .mysql_affected_rows() . ” rows affected.”;
}

HTH!

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Gender Differences

One thing that fascinates me is the attraction between the various genders of our species. Gender identities are also very interesting to me. I just finished reading Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent. Norah Vincent pretends to be a man for about 18 months, and the interesting thing isn’t that she passed convincingly but her insights into the male gender. I highly recommend it as a fascinating and often entertaining read.

One thing she mentions that stood out for me is how any sign of effeminity is crushed out by the culture of men. One way to explain that is by suggesting that anyone who was gay would thus be forced to at least hide themselves. My theory, though, is that this process helps men behave like men, especially around women.

One theory of attraction says that women emphasize features that differentiate them from men, such as clear skin, pouty lips, smallness, vulnerbility, etc. In the same way, perhaps, by forcing men to act like men–that is aggressive and not like a “woman”–men might train other men to behave in a way that will help them differentiate themselves from women.

Hmm, I’m not quite sure this theory works out, but it’s an interesting thing to consider.

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The World is Not Rational

Rationality is a lens we impose on the world. Take for example pages in a book I’m reading that say “This Page Intentionally Left Blank”. That’s a contradiction, because they have that written on them, so they’re not blank, but it says that they’re blank. It’s LYING TO ME! However, just because it’s a logical contradiction and a lie doesn’t mean that it ceased to exist.

And because we can understand this logical contradiction and likely not get fazed by it, I submit that human beings are also not entirely rational, though many of us endeavor to be.

I r prolly ramblin now. Cause I’m rambling man.

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There’s A Great Irony…

There’s a great irony in a dictator orating a speech on freedom on independance day.

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What if James Cameron Made Spider-Man?

Back in the early nineties, James Cameron (Titanic, The Terminator 1 & 2) attempted unsuccessfully to make a live-action version of Spider-Man. Later, of course, Sam Raimi made the current series of block buster movies.

You can get a look at the original scriptment (a treatment + story boards) here. A fascinating read, Cameron is an excellent story teller and I was gripped by even just this short treatment.

There is also this script, which seems to have changed radically from the scriptment, if they are indeed both by Cameron.

Cameron’s Spider-man is more like the recent The Dark Knight movie. It’s a dark film, where Spider-man’s confused by many things and it really is about him both growing up and growing into his powers and his responsibility. It really seems like he’s facing a villain who is insanely strong and there is a question of whether Spider-man can really beat him till the very end, which the kids call dramatic tension.

I’ve to say, even though I would have loved to see this get made, I’m kind of scared of it.

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Regular Expressions: How I Hate|Love Thee

I’ve spent a lot of time wrestling with regex for PHP (functions like preg_match, preg_replace, preg_match_all) in the last week. Regular expressions are a very powerful and compact way of searching through strings for certain patterns. They are also the most frustrating thing I’ve ever learned in programming. There are a number of tutorials and reference guides online, but while good for telling you the basic parts, don’t mention how the parts come together. I even looked in some PHP books and was disappointed. I found these two tutorials to be pretty good, but both left out two crucial trouble-shooting tips.

So, here’s my solutions to two major problems I had while learning this stuff:

1. Your expression matches and returns too much.

Say your expression is “/<b>(.*)</b>/” (meaning, capture everything between the <b> tags) and data is “<b>hey</b><b>blah</b>”. Simple as can be, except it captures everything all the way to very last </b>, so returns “hey</b><b>blah”. That’s because in PHP, regex is set to be “greedy” by default. That is, keep going till the very last possible match. The way to fix it is to add a ? in your regex so it now reads: “/<b>(.*?)</b>/”. The ? tells the preceding character to be “lazy” (not greedy), and will work for * and +.

2. Your expression doesn’t match or return anything, even though your expression is ridiculously simple.

I had a lot of trouble with this. You have to remember that the . matches any one character except newline characters. So, if you were using this pattern:

“/<b>(.*?)</b>/”

with this data:

“<b>

hey

</b>

<b>

blah

</b>”

and got no results, it’s because the . doesn’t work across newlines, and thus doesn’t capture anything. Annoying, however there’s a few ways to fix it. I choose to add a modifier to the end of the pattern, so that the regex engine will treat the whole thing as a single line (the output will maintain the newlines, just for regex, it’ll be one line). So, the fixed pattern looks like:

“/<b>(.*?)</b>/s”

Hope this helps.

I’ve been sorta MIA for a while. Like I’ve mentioned before, I left my last job and have been working on some projects and picking up some one-off paying gigs. For example, last week, I transcribed around 25,000 words in about 9 hours. That’s a lot of words to write. As you may have noticed I am no longer posting with my regularity here, and it will stay that way for the forseeable future. I’ll get back to regular posting at some point, probably, but perhaps at a new site or something. Cheers!

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Ironies

The irony about someone giving relationship advice is that to be able to get effective advice, you have to have had experience with a lot of different people. However, why would you want to take advice from someone who can’t keep a relationship together?

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