after the ultimate boredom

After the supreme boredom at MASTER IN CAPACITY OF DATA LOG IN ADVERSE CONDITIONS TO CONCENTRATE BY A STATE OF EXTREME STRESS CAUSED BY INTRA AND EXTRACELLULAR ACUTE AGONY AND BOREDOM, and next to fading not finding more superlative words to lengthen the title of master (which is what they did with the subjects, shame they didn’t know then how to fill them), I began to wonder why architects do not take into account what will be a building destined to while designing it.
I find that window up there very nice, but not that much if they have to paint the glasses brown. Nor do I feel practical a reception glass turning into a mirror during the day (what happens in rehab Vilanova). And college classrooms with echo and reverb… I find it hard to believe with the amount of years Architecture grade lasts… I guess they have enough time to forget some on the way.

These days* I’ve seen that it was very long since I was so so so much bored. What is the time you have been more bored to death? Or what is the last time you have been ultimately bored?

 

*I wrote this in 2008, during my Master’s Degree. I had already forgotten how the hell … it was.

Syndromes in Journalism

That little can be trusted is vox populi, but it is also true that we believe anything we are told anyway. We should be cautious, thus there are several concerning syndromes in Journalism, increasing in number.

Worst of all, journalists themselves condemn the little or none professionalism from many of their colleagues. This is an example in Spain, but I don’t doubt it’s a general issue.

I don’t like statistics at all, the use of random numbers usually referred to partial studies with ambiguous questions or analyzing the wrong variables?  No, thanks. But I believe these percentages are pretty straightforward and do not seem “misunderstandable” or intentionally ambiguous. What they really are is alarming:

According to a report in December 2013 of the Asociación de la Prensa de Madrid, the “79,3% of polled journalists state having received some sort of pressure to modify the contents or orientation of some information. In the 76,1% of the cases this pressure came directly from their company“.

They make fun calling it Stokhcolm syndrome in journalism, due to those that believe that the “defense of journalism could be entrusted to the media owners”.*Munich, 2008.

However, there is another number even more worrying, which the vast majority of media decided to ignore:

The 56,4% of journalists (1.748 polled) only trust halfway in the information given by Spanish media and that the 6,1% does not trust at all.

The “higher rank pressure” is one of the harms of the profession, but not the only one. We also have the “syndrome of the new“, which I am not sure if it is a term widely spread or only used in the article in which I found it, but the concept is real:This new arrives, ready to conquer the world, thinking he/she knows everything, and usually mixing up immediacy with “mediacy” (one related with time and the other one with repercussion) and causing the inevitable consequences…

This last syndrome, the syndrome of the nes, would be opposed to the “impostor syndrome“. This is actually the one that I was going to talk about when I started this post. But, you know, when you start a search to contrast or find more information, you may find something you just can’t ignore… So I let’s leave this one for another post.

Original in Spanish

destiny?

For the use of incredulous, atheists and other sceptics, I am going to make up a new meaning for the word destiny.

The concept, actually, could also have its own name, that would be something like “Ialreadyknew” or “Ijusttoldyou”, and implies a relationship with our instinct.
We have to take into account that our mind, with the exception of cases of illness, is not malign. It does not try to harm us and does not omit information deliberately to our consciousness just to screw us. The instinct is nothing more than the means that our mind uses to transfer us the conclusion it reached after a series of calculus. The information that our unconsciousness keeps silent is that one that our conscious mind would not be able to process, so it avoids that we (rationally) keep spinning around uselessly to big loads of vast information, when the calculi have been already done and a solution is already been given (which, besides, is normally right). And sometimes we are so arrogant, that we fight this resolution expecting to use solely the logic, and forgetting how useless this action is, taking into account the amounts of information our reasoning ignores.

So, trusting your instinct is believing in yourself, thus there is more of yourself in your unconsciousness than in your contious mind, always stubborn in rationalizing things, searching for reasons or analyzing the possible consequences of every step, even with less data than unknowns. That would be blindly believe: not noticing that you lack of enough information to issue a judgement and expect to place your conscious reflection before your instinct, which gathered huge number of to-our-consciousness-invisible data before judging.

Then (here it comes, the new definition), the feeling that something occurred finally because it was destiny, is actually been caused by your mind, that is yelling “Ijusttoldyou”!, referring to what ended up happening in spite of your persistence; and you “Ialreadynew” that this was going to happen deep inside.

So, it will be better to stick to that sentence “listen to your instinct” (making a distinction between instinct and desire), thus it is smarter. And that is because it has more data, just that; but it is so nice, that in spite of smothering us with everything, it just points out the future outcome, to make it easy.

Original in Spanish

*Improve in English would be thanked.

**Image by John Kenn Mortensen