Two Blogs in One.

Two things:

1.
I have renamed the blog "blue percent." I like that better than the overly wordy previous title, so it's a bit easier to refer to. The name comes from my feelings about one of our American colloquialisms that annoys me to no end: "110%"

The notion of giving 110% of your effort to something is a notion that some coach somewhere came up with to emphasize that their players need to give all that they have, and even more than they think they have. I'm sure that coach thought he/she was clever. The real problem (where it becomes annoying to me) is that the notion of 110% has now become the new benchmark for how much effort is expected from coaches. For someone to be giving 100% effort is not good enough. I have even heard coaches sometimes one upping the 110% and going with 115% or even 120%. That's a lot of effort.

The problem with this whole thing is that it is 100% irrational (or 110% irrational). By definition, 100% of anything is the most one can give of something. if we are going to start requiring more than that scale, suddenly our the parameters that we are using to judge by make no more sense. Why not give 100,000,000% or even (wait for it)... blue %. The second we step outside of the mathematical limitations set by measuring something by percentage, we have eliminated all logical understanding of what is being asked of us, and by that standard, blue percent makes as much sense as 110 percent.

end diatribe.

2.
I was cleaning out the cat litter today (irrelevant to the point I'm about to make), and I started thinking about how much the younger generation is taught to view everything as have a subjective bias, and that there are little more vestiges for objectivity. I think the internet has a lot to do with this.

I came to this conclusion when I was thinking of reading up more on the creationism/evolution debate. I have pretty comfortable conclusions on this (I don't think that the two need to be in competition, and that ultimately they are fairly symbiotic - God uses evolution as a means of creating things), but I was wanting to learn more about the arguments for both angles.

I first thought of getting some books on the subject, but then thought that I'm sure that the internet has some valid resources. The problem with the internet is that it is hard to discern whether a source is "valid" or not, meaning that internet sources often have dubious sources, or no sources at all. The material found therein is basically subjective to that particular person's point of view. It is all too easy to put material online (case in point - this blog).

Books always felt like they had to go through a more rigorous process to get published, that the "facts" in a book had to go through more people's scrutiny before they were printed. Now, I'm not naive enough to believe everything that I read in books, as I know that there are plenty of completely false things and shady facts printed in books. by and large, though, they felt more trustworthy.

As we as a society are becoming concurrently more paperless and more skeptical, and emphatically encouraged to be both, I wonder if we will ever be able to recapture that sense of validity and concreteness in the things that we learn.

Our inherent need to learn more and understand the things around us is being corroded by a doubt that has now been cast over any piece of information that we have been given. Perhaps nowhere is this more prevalent than in political media, where two people can argue diametrically opposing points, citing "hard facts" that are immediately dismissed without regard by the other side. No evidence is needed to dismiss said facts, we can just assume that there is a bias, and that's good enough for dismissal.

The whole thing is eroding our ability to communicate, to have any common ground, and ultimately, our ability to actually learn anything concretely. When everything is an abstract, how can you build any sort of foundation?

The X-Files perhaps summed the duality of this human nature struggling against our cultural conditioning in two of it's most notable catch phrases:

"I want to believe."
"Trust no one."