Tower Of Babel

Mine was pretty decent still. Friday night was fucked, actually, but the rest of the weekend was pretty irie. So what made Friday fucked up? Well, Friday, Natty and I went clubbing, in an after, after work sort of way. All my co-workers who we were to be hanging with for part of the nite left as work was finished, but Natty and I had to set MBJr. up with a sitter, a process that took about two more hours, so we were already several drinks behind them when I bucked them up finally at “The Office” (a local bar and lounge). I should have realised that I would never be able to catch up.

I was past hungry by the time we got there, so we ordered some of that overly oily chicken wings and fries that they serve there. The gas in my system combined in a less-than-optimal way with the liquor and the oily food and so I wasn’t feeling 100% from early o’clock! Then we left “The Office” and went to “DLK” - the same bar by Dump Road where I was ganged some time ago. The place did ram! Nuff nuff ppl, all crowding the place and outting on some dancing. Natty and I stood up in a corner sipping on our drinks and watching the people. As I stood there watching them dance and have a great time, I realised that everybody else was having a blast and I was not.

That pissed me off and so I left with Natty, hoping to join up with HER crew. We went by “Harry’s Bar” and we realised that her crew never made it at all. The vibe was just absolutely absent. I didn’t even finish the drink I got when I went in. About half way through, I just put that sucker down and Natty and I left for home, where I lay down in my bed and fell instantly asleep.

Saturday and Sunday were cool though. I decided to do some work on a website I have been loafing on building, then I linked up a woman I used to work with and did some work with her on some code she couldn’t get working. After that I linked up with the guy I was doing the website for and showed him the pages. We spent some time going over it, then we drove up and down taking a few pictures to use to create a banner for the site.

After that, I went home and did some more work on the code I was helping the lady with. A substantial amount of that code is now written. As a result of my efforts with the code , I had to muck around quite a bit with SQL Server 2005 and I must say I learned a lot! I got a lot of things worked out and configured with the SQL Server software loaded on Compi as well, so that was irie.

In the evening, I set up this redundant PC I picked up from work for fifty bucks, then I loaded it up with Ubuntu Server. That was interesting as well. I now have a nice little LAMP box to fool around with. This is great! I plan to use this box to get more familiar with PHP coding and MySQL databases and perhaps with some Java coding as well. We shall see if I ever find the time! ??:

I guess if I spend less time blogging and more doing this coding / database / web app work, I may learn something and may even create something interesting. Perhaps I may even become worthy enough to at least grovel at the feet of one such as Owen or Taylor. If the stuff I develop is good enough to sell, that would be irie too!

On Sunday, I did a bit of reading of a novel, (Jean M. Auel’s “The Valley of Horses“), I watched the final 24 CD I had to watch, thus finishing up the third season finally, and then I went to the Gym. (that was irie, I love how I feel after the workout). We went out to Canton Restaurant for a great lunch, then we came home. I lounged around until dark descended, then we went for a drive around East End and North Side, then back to Bodden Town, just to get out of the house. Later on that night, I configured an FTP server on the Ubuntu LAMP server and ftp’ed over some web pages to it, just to see how well it served up the pages. It was great.

There you have it. A great tech weekend! I haven’t done something like that in a long time. Perhaps that is why it was so much fun!

Did I manage to keep you here or did I bore you to tears?

Well, for those of you still here, check this out:

I really thought I would see some of my fellow blogger’s comment on that scientist type, James Watson, who passed some incendiary racist comments about blacks in an interview with a British newspaper.

He said that he was inherently gloomy about the prospects of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.”. He went on to say that while he hoped everyone was equal, “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.”. I think he went more in depth than that, but you get the idea. If you want more, go to CNN.com and do some reading. Here is one of the articles posted up there.

In the fall out that followed his explosive statements, his talk at a museum was cancelled and he flew home in disgrace. I believe he has even been demoted or something like that at the lab where he works! That is all very well. Some upstart scientist chats some fuckery and then has to pay for it. Serves the fassy right! Racist mofo! Why should we really care anyway?

Well, these comments are made interesting by the fact that the scientist in question is one of the big shots in DNA research! The man is a Nobel Laureate! He is one of the two guys credited with discovering the structure of DNA (the famous double helix), to rass!

I was talking to a girl at work about this fellow Watson and do you know what she told me? She thought he should be killed! I thought that was a bit over the top. “Cho, look pon dis picture of the man! He is probably becoming senile!” I exclaimed. After all, this man is making such incendiary comments without so much as a shred of evidence. He talks of studies, but he doesn’t list them, or at least, these newspaper articles don’t list them. “Should he be killed for being senile?!”, I asked. “YES!”, she declared emphatically.

And I can understand why she feels that way, to a point!

So what conclusions are we to draw when such an eminent scientist says something like this? I, for one, think that this is a very interesting question! Are we really all created equal or aren’t we?

Recently, a blogger bredrin (Fiyah) wrote a post about the seeming superior performance of blacks in sports. I must admit, the post made me somewhat uncomfortable. In that post, he seems to assert that environmental conditions may well be responsible for this “superiority” of blacks in sports…. a Darwinist sort of view, I guess, environmental factors result in only people who best fit the environment surviving, resulting in some people being able to run faster, and in yet others being able to run longer distances, etc. He does suggest that these superior physical characteristics may be mutually exclusive from a scenario where one set of people might be said to have superior brian power, but if we buy into this line of reasoning, might we not also ask the question, “What environmental reasons have we identified that assure us that people who are physically separated by great distances from each other will either retain similar mental capacities or will develop similarly with regard to their mental capacities?

Is it not at least possible that people who are physically separated and are exposed to different stimuli may in fact develop different mental capacities? Why not? Is it not possible, for instance, that Blacks could actually be smarter than Whites, or that they could indeed be less intelligent, as suggested by Watson?

Trust me, I don’t like this line of reasoning at all. Me nuh love it! That is why when I read Fiyah’s article, I didn’t feel comfortable. And look at the depth of feeling such a suggestion can cause! This girl who I spoke to about Watson, the one who cried so hotly for his blood, she is a CHRISTIAN! She is a woman of sunny disposition, who when she smiles, everyone has to smile with her, so powerful and infectious is her smile! And yet, she would clamour for his blood. Can you imagine if after a few years, a bunch of these eminent scientists working on the Human Genome Project come out and suggest something similar and they put forward something that they say is proof!

This is dangerous stuff, I think! Powerful, and dangerous! I really hope we have some black people taking part in that whole Human Genome business, lest some white scientists try to pull the wool over the eyes of black people, thats all!

Hey! You want some other interesting reading? Check out this post on the Jamaican Rock scene by Marlon James, or read up on the exciting near-sexcapades of Gooders Girl.

TTYL.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 10:47 pm and is filed under How Awful?!, Interesting Stuff, Thoughtful, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.