Facebook Changes

I have heard much noise about how the changes on facebook are hated.  Honestly, I did not even notice.  Do you know the reason?  It is because I rarely am on facebook for any real length of time.  I think the people who are most up-in-arms about it are the ones that are addicted to it.   You may say that you cannot be addicted to facebook, but I disagree.  I think the definition of addiction is spending more valuable resources(e.g. time or money) on an activity or pursuit that is useless or debilitating than on useful activities.  Well you say, I only spend 60% of my free time and my free time is only 8% of my day, so I am only spending ~6% of my time.  I would argue that, the non-free time is already spoken for and therefore is out from under your control.  That makes 60% of your free time, 60% of the time you control.  Not that facebook is entirely useless, I use it to keep track of family, friends and acquaintances too, but I do not spend the majority of my free time in it.  

My First Thought

Well, Hello World :)  I am starting this blog after playing with twitter and finding the character limit very, well, limiting.  You can follow my twitter account "StevePlate".

My Interests... I enjoy reading books about humans.  That is, I like reading Psychology/self-help, Philosophy, sociology, but my main fascination is with the inner workings of the brain.  I have been studying artificial intelligence(AI) and books on brain structure.  Some study AI for the purpose of using AI to solve complex problems.  Those that study AI for this reason, use AI because, by definition, AI's purpose is to simulate human thought patterns and, since we are the smartest form of life on the planet, they assume that a simulation would be good at solving problems.  I do not believe that using crude simulations of our brain function will be able to do anything but solve crude problems that would likely have much simpler solutions.  I will discuss that in more detail in a future post (i.e. you will have to come back :) )

My Current Book reading is: The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah.  An interesting read that examines the philosophies around identity and culture focusing on the paradoxes involved in governing it.  I am about half way through and I will say that he could use a better editor.  Watch for future post regarding this book.  While reading this book I paused to read another short book(Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates) that I found entertaining but was disappointed in the wishy-washy conclusion.

My background is in computers and engineering, currently working as a Business Intelligence Engineer.

Thanks for reading this far, I hope you come back for my next post!

Steve