Well, it was a long time in the process, but I have finished an analysis for Patrick Bateman from Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. This was a paper written for my psychology of personality course.
The goal was to examine a real or fictional person from two competing personality perspectives of the eight that we covered in our coursework and reading. I chose to look at Bateman in three ways. The first is to describe his personality more fully from an abnormal point of view using schizotypal and borderline personality disorders. I then did a more detailed theoretical analysis using general psychoanalytic theory and then using a novel application of self-actualization from humanistic psychology.
I just reformatted the paper to appear in a more journal like format, and is hopefully a bit easier to read using two columns and with single spacing.
This paper is my first major work for my PhD program in Clinical Psychology through Walden University. I have written plenty of other papers, but this is the first that really let me dive into theory and produce work that was an original synthesis of other research. Overall, because it was a paper for a class with some specific requirements, it straddles the line between giving extra description of theories to demonstrate understanding and also in using jargon from both the psychology and literary fields. So it might seem to drag in some areas and then plow through others. But, hopefully it will be a decent read overall.
A 15 year project has now created truly synthetic life. That being a 1 million base pair chromosome that can self replicate and which the scientists understand the purpose of each set of DNA information, what it produces, etc.
Not only that but the genetic code includes a watermark which includes direction on how to decode the watermark into English from the base pair sequences, 46 names of people responsible for the genetic code and project, a website address for the organism, and quotations.
You are not here to receive this letter. Some days that makes me very angry. Other days very sad. Still two years after you left this life I fight a struggle with emotions, healing, and understanding. I have had the great fortune to have excellent friends help me at every stage of this process.
Your last wishes to me were that we hold no memorial for your passing. You wished to fade away from memory. We soundly ignored that. You are worth being remembered by each of us who are left behind. At that memorial I read an abbreviated version of this observation about life from Bill Hicks:
The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while.
Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, "Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, "Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." And we…kill those people.
"Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real."
It’s just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok… But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want.
It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money.
Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love.
The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off.
The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.
Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.
That passage means as much to me today as it did two years ago. Life is a ride, and we can change the ride for the better.
We had our won roller coaster of ups and downs as a family. Few times were easy. It was real, it was fun, and sometimes not real fun. And I am thankful for every moment of it we had.
Thank you for everything you gave me, I love you, I miss you.
The digital world is an interesting phenomenon. The process of converting to a paperless office has brought this to full conscious awareness. I am notoriously bad at organizing and tracking paperwork, mostly due to the volume of things to track. We are increasingly in need of aids to manage the data that comes through our mail slot.
I want to emphasize: The amount of physical data we receive often exceeds our cognitive abilities to track and organize it.
I have mountains of paper, receipts, rental statements, insurance invoices and payments for both car and home, taxes, property taxes, financial aid documents for my graduate program, software serial numbers, and the list goes on. It is quite impossible for me to memorize any of this information in a way that is useful, and even file folder organization does not provide a way to organize the information to make finding any one document a simple matter. A conversion to digital records provides a layer of abstraction that creates a useful way of managing the data.
Digital conversion abstracts my documents into searchable text that can be indexed, searched, and retrieved in an almost limitless number of ways. A database has no need to have a memory, it can simply query vast numbers of records at a speed which to human perception is instantaneous. However, this data is fragile. My vital records are reduced to magnetically stored 1’s and 0’s. These are not any less fragile than the physical documents, but there is the implication that redundant co-location of this data is necessary so that the information is not lost. Such a loss would be near devastating if physical records are destroyed. Previously, if paperwork had become lost, there was some chance of finding it had been misplaced. Disruption of digital data can mean real total loss of that documentation.
Now examine other parts of life and the many layers of abstraction. I have a bank account. There is money in that account, but if I were to ask to see the physical currency backing the amounts in my accounts I would simply be greeted by a number on a screen that was generated from a database. The majority of that money has come from checks from my property management company, I have records of these checks but the currency they represent is also existent entirely as points in a database. One misplaced decimal and I can grow by orders of magnitude or have my financial ability crushed. We are assured that there are rigorous safeguards and audits of data to insure that mistakes do not occur. In the majority of cases these safeguards and trails of digital records work brilliantly, but errors do occur. Even one error in a million is a high rate when you consider the billions of transactions that occur daily.
We must begin to ask what the reality of our work, income, accounts, and information is based upon. We are physical being who increasingly interact with each other through abstractions in data. To what degree do we know that our digital interactions are with other people? To what extent are we cruel to data in ways that we would never impose on flesh and blood?
