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Achmed The Dead Terrorist Carols

Pachelbel’s Canon in D Rant

“Here without you” acapella

In graduate school, you don’t receive a salary for teaching classes and doing research, you receive a “stipend”.

This is amusing because the only other time I’ve heard the word being used in any context was in my senior Japanese history course, where the Samurai warriors, we were told, received annual “stipends” from their Daimyo overlords for services rendered on the battlefield and elsewhere.

To put things in perspective, the Samurai, who were respected for their chivalry and placed at the top of the feudal Japanese social hierarchy (with the peasants, artisans, and merchants below them in that order), nonetheless lived very spartan and impecunious lives.

Incidentally, this is rather reminecent of grad school as a whole, where masters and PhD students technically exist in a higher academic strata than the undergrad masses, but get worked several times harder and paid miserably for research work that arguably goes further in establishing their daimyo’s advisor’s career than their own.

And as I weigh the pros and cons of getting a PhD myself, I can’t help but feel that going to grad school again is going to put me on the short end of a very long stick. It’d be at least 4 years of my life committed to solving somebody else’s problem before I can ever begin to broach my own.

Unlike the Samurai of old, you can’t just wander off to become a ronin (a masterless warrior). For better or worse, no such thing exists in the academic world.

So I’ve had friends asking me why I bothered to get a private domain name for something as trivial as a personal blog, as opposed to putting it on a free host like Blogger or Wordpress. The main reason is this: privacy.

If you’ve been online for any amount of time, you’ve probably realized that whatever you put on the internet is privy to anyone who has a computer and web access, which is to say a lot of people.

Now obviously a little publicity never hurts. But the problem is that bloggers often publish posts containing juicy bits of personal information without realizing their full ramifications. The longer you’ve been blogging, the most likely that is to be true. Remember that post you wrote years ago about your rancorous breakup with your ex? Your penchant for tongue piercings? Your profound antipathy towards zoroastrianism? Your future wife, grandson, employer and interns are all going to be reading that.

No worries, you say, because you can always just delete the blog. If you think that’s all it takes to erase yourself from the permanent records of cyberspace, you’re in for a surprise. Don’t believe me? Go to the internet archive and search for your site. You’ll find it there in its fully replicated glory, right down to the first month you started it.

The only real way to stop this is to tell archive.org to exclude your blog from the archives through the Robots.txt file on the root directory of your server, which isn’t possible if its hosted on a domain that you don’t have direct control over. Today, only archive.org keeps regular, time-based snapshots of internet, but in the near future search engines themselves will likely do so as well, thus multiplying the risks of the blog equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction manyfold.

We exist in 2 worlds - our physical world, and our digital world which consists of blog entries, facebook profiles, forum personas and instant messenging monikers. And soon enough, everybody is going to be googling everyone else. In fact, this is already beginning to happen. Your blog, in particular, is perhaps the most revealing - its like like an online tattoo of all your thoughts, intentions and memories.

Of course, there are some people who wouldn’t be the least bit bothered by this. Some might even take it in the completely opposite direction by using their blog to establish an online brand of sorts. But either path you take, you exercise far more control over the information you want (or don’t want) netizens to see with your own domain. And that, in my opinion, more than justifies 10 dollars per year spent maintaining it.

These are fundamental existential questions that have intrigued me for as long as I can remember, and ones that I want answers to (or at least some of them) before I kick the proverbial bucket. To quote a dream theater song, “where did we come from, why are we here, where do we go when we die?”

The catechisms offered by classical religions on the origins and purpose of life and the universe have never convinced me; the idea of an anthropomorphic designer is appealing and, altogether, a very human explanation of what we observe in the natural world. But science has showed us that there are other possibilities - equally human but far more compelling.

Take for instance the origins of our planet. Most of us don’t give it a second thought - the Earth is here just because it is. And while it is true that our planet has been around for the better part of 4 billion years, the details of its formation contains some rather interesting twists. Virtually none the solid matter found on the planet is native to the solar system. Heavy elements like Carbon (which is the building block of all organic matter), oxygen and Iron etc can only be synthesized via fusion reactions in stars much larger than our own sun.

Some billions of years ago and light years away from our solar system, there was a massive star that had exhaused its supply of nuclear fuel. As it finally collapsed and exploded in spectacular fashion, it returned most of its matter to back to the cosmos. In the depths of space, gravity condensed and stirred the stellar dust that gradually accreted to form the sun and planets of the solar system.

On earth, organic molecules which had been cooked and manufactured in the furnaces of stars slowly began the arduous process of natural selection. Initially, these molecules were clumsy and were only capable of making crude copies of themselves. These were not, by any standards, anything we could term “life”. After millions of years, these molecular machines became more sophisticated and better at copying themselves. Collectives of organic molecules evolved to single-celled organisms, which in turn gave rise to multi-celluar organisms that make up all the flora and fauna on the planet, including human beings.

From the dust of dying stars, to life. The take home lesson here is that we are all intimately tied to universe. Its easy to think you’re only been around for a “few decades”. But all of the physical matter that makes up “you” have been around since almost the beginning of time. In a very real way, we all are all literally made of star stuff. We are all stardust.

Increasingly, scientists believe that life is not unique on earth and that it may be very common across the galaxy indeed. It has long been known that the organic building blocks of life, complex amino acids, are virtually ubiquitous across the cosmos. So it appears that life itself is natural, thermodynamically and chemically driven process that happens naturally, given enough time for evolution to occur and according to estimates using the Drake equation, there should be many more intelligent, sentient civilizations in our galaxy.

That consciousness should arise is no accident, either. After all, there are plenty of creatures that go about their business like biological automatons without any real sense of self. So the real question that ought to be raised is: why has sentience evolved? What purpose does it serve, and how does it fit into the grand scheme of things?