Polemie.com

About two months ago, I deleted my Facebook profile. What began as a time-off is now evolving into something constant. I’m certainly not regretting this decision in the slightest and am chuckling every time I spot that famous hue of blue. Yes, I get to chuckle a lot.

I’ve asked a simple question to a handful of friends and wasn’t surprised by their nonchalant responses. “Why are you on Facebook?” The answers reflected the virtues of the network. Friends want remain in contact, even without text messages or calls and because communication is eased up by the fact that nearly everybody you know had an account. People are on Facebook because people are on Facebook.

Personally I think that it’s a great service for staying in touch with your actual friends, those who matter in your life, especially if they live abroad (most of my friends do) and now that I’m away from the network, I miss seeing what they’re up to. But Facebook’s advantages don’t outweigh the drawbacks and compromises they bring with them. I used to visit Facebook on a daily basis, sometimes even more than that – whenever a notification popped up on my phone, bling, I’d check it out.
More often than not, I did not care much for what I read. I don’t need to know when some aquiantance of a friend comments on a photo I uploaded a year ago.
There’s an unbalance between the ease to stay in touch and the 13-year-olds talking about their pets. I’ve been told to simply delete the annoying ones and keep Facebook for my close friends, or to create a second account just for private stuff, but that doesn’t solve the problem.

The new Timeline feature is beautiful. It’s useful, original, well-designed and even inspirational.
But there’s one vicious catch to it. Timeline intruduced the possibility to create pre-Facebook entries, to document your own birth or the retrieval of your favourite lost toy, accurately to the minute. Beautiful, yes, but would you invite a mere aquaintance to your house and show him your baby-albums over some coffee and cookies? Probably not. The comparison is slightly exagerated, but if you think of it, how many people are you really **friends** with on Facebook?

You’re probably aware of Facebook’s privacy policies (or the lack thereof) and although I have nothing to hide, I don’t feel comfortable giving them my phone number and the rights to all the pictures I take. This isn’t a sudden realisation. Back in 2008 or something, when the first wave of “everbodies” got an account, I was quite late into the game. A friend actually set up a profile for me and all I had to do was use it. I did take it and remember asking myself “so why do people sign up for this?”.

I didn’t get it back then. Soon though, I moved away and began enjoying the tangibility of my remote friends. Everybody was just a click away. This was probably the best time Facebook has ever had for me. Every now and then, I’d deactivate my account until my anger towards the service calmed down. But this back and forth ended when I finally got a smartphone at the end of 2010. Before that, my computer was my only medium of online communication but I now realised that the smartphone began to evolve into a medium of real-life communication too. Instead of calling someone up, they’d get a wall post, and since everybody carried their facy phone whith them at all times, they’d receive a notification and would reply almost instantly.
Little by little, I began to notice that most communication happened through Facebook. I’d befriend any contact from school and it soon became evident that this wasn’t in fact helping me to connect with the friends in my life as advertised, but was rather drawing out real interaction.

I observed the people at my school, sitting at tables with their laptops, browsing through endless streams of news and pictorial entertainment, the sound of the chat would be a constant reverbation and “hey, check your wall!” made Sentence of the Year.

I was in a dilemma. I felt uncomfortable every time I tapped on the f-icon but was amazed by the handiness of the omnipresent network. It created fast, free and reliable ways of comminucation at the cost of giving up your data, addiction and being a major source of procrastination.

Towards the end of 2011 the majority of my friends had smartphones, allowing free communication through apps more stable and trusted than Facebook’s, and without the distraction. The blue colossus still was a highly-used way of socialisation but its uses were slowly taken over, one-by-one, by other mediums. Twitter, iMessage, WhatsApp, even Email!
Then, at the end of December, I announced my conclusion with Facebook, which pleasantly resulted in more reaction that I’d thought.

A lot of thinking went into the decision of deleting my account. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised how silly it is to make a big deal out of a virtual existence.
The sole reason for me to keep my account, I reasoned, was for my close friends and family members to stay up to date.

I’m glad that I now manage without the countless annoying notifications, the impossibility of timely deleting embarrassing pictures, the fleeting definition of friendship, the stupid mentions in awkward posts, the pathetic statuses in capitals and the ever increasing amount of brand presence occupying the wall instead of witty and personal stories.
I miss the feedback about my activities, the extremely amusing conversations in comments, the silly pictures, the horribly disgusting frapes and even the moments of disappointment when some idiots were taking horoscope quizzes or posted their farmville highscores. It was fun while it lasted but I’m thankful it’s over.

Take my hand, stop stalking your exes and join in on a journey far away from the creator of careless exposure.

Anyone who has been involved with website creation or photoshop has heard of hexadecimal colour codes, but I haven’t yet met a soul able to explain something like #1589FF to me. In this entry I will try to pass along some fundamental understanding in number systems and therefore hex colours.

I have been complaining about my course more than once, I know. But the beginning of the second semester brought something fantastic, or rather someone. In a new class, Electronic Engineering, John Stonham is lecturing with passion and ingenuity (more on that another time). His lectures are inspiring and taught me something I had wanted to learn a long time ago, but never got around: binary coded decimals.

Let’s start with the basics. There are many number systems. The most common one is our decimal system, from 0 to 9, but it is far from flawless. The problems with it become clear when trying to estimate results. If x≠1 then x can be anything else.
In binary, however, there is 0 and there is 1 and that’s it. This makes applications of the system easy, short and understandable. If x≠1 then x=0. Boom.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the hexadecimal system. You’ve probably already heard of it. The fundamental rule is to begin counting at 0. The prefix hex- means 6. Decimal is 10. Hexadecimal is 16. We, unfortunately, don’t have 16 symbols in the decimal numerical system. Therefore in hexadecimal we use 6 lettres from the alphabet to represent the missing values.

It’s rather straightforward. The “higher” the letter is in the alphabet, the greater its decimal value. A is 10, F is 15. So much for the numbers. How do we determine a colour based on this?

Well, the six-character hexadecimal code represents the hue of red, green and blue, RGB. You’ve heard of that too! If we take #1589FF as an example, the hue of red is 15, green is 89 and blue is FF. If we took the example #DEDEDE for example (grey), the values of red, green and blue would be equal, which would result in a greyscale tone. DE, being quite high in the numerical value table,  would give a light hue of grey.

You probably knew that #FFFFFF gave white and #000000 is black, but could you tell what #FF8800 is? Let’s figure it out. This unknown colour would have high red, medium green and no blue. What has kindergarden taught you? Mixing the primary colours (red, green and blue) gives the secondary colours (cyan, magenta and yellow). Now, if we had a colour palette and physically mixed red and green, we’d have yellow. If we now added more red (our red is FF, almost double the 88-green) we’d have orange, right? Right. #FF8800 is an orange.

So how can #1589FF be estimated without a computer? One may find it quite tricky to keep all the ratios in his head. You may know that a colour hue is measured out of 255. So what if I told you that each pair for red, green and blue have a value out of 255 and that it could easily be calculated by hand. You’d end up with a fraction for your final colour.

This has certainly helped me to understand something about numbers and although I can’t translate the joy I experienced while learning all these things (and more) I do think that this will allow you to quickly estimate a colour based on a hexadecimal code. Just keep in mind that computers aren’t traditional painting machines. Mixing a strong red, green and blue won’t give you white in real life, but rather a brownish tone.

After all, whether I like it or not, I belong back to London. As much as I’ve enjoyed the holidays it does feel good to fly back, to get back to my own room in that terrible, terrible accommodation, to get home. In a couple of hours I’ll have to get up and go back to my routine of lectures, cheap food, studying and feeling more comfortable speaking a foreign language than my mother tongue.

One of my favourite feelings is that of a plane’s takeoff. The accelerating velocity that steadily runs the plane over the runway, the suction from the pressure gradient on the wings lifting tons of steel, pushing this big crowded machine off the ground. 20 seconds of rumble, shaking the metal bird, and then suddenly you’re flying. This instant of weightlessness passes through your body, in the split of a second, you’re as light as a feather and yet weighing tons, held by nothing but nitrogen, oxygen and some particles of carbon dioxide.

Please put your seats into the upright position. We’re taxiing at about 250 km/h, the nose it angled at about 10° and the plane is lifting off, rising up to cruising altitude.

I’m increasingly starting to hate Mill Hall.

I want to love it. My parents want me to like it. I want them to think I’m happy. I want them to think I’m comfortable. I am, with living far away, in a strange place. But this place isn’t strange. It’s simply a shit hole. A horrific accommodation. You wouldn’t send your enemies to Mill Hall. It might be the halls, maybe it’s the entire course not offering anything else but physics.

My point being: I’m not happy. At all. My expectations aren’t met and even after more then three months it’s hard to keep the delusion up that one day I’ll miss this place. Sure, my flat mates are great and actually living here is fun. But Mill Hall is a disgrace, a waste of money and not inspiring in the slightest. It’s impossible to remain focused when trying to work and not a single week goes by without some incident; may it just be a plain fire alarm.

I’ve described what my idea of perfect living conditions would be. I’m not asking for much. Sure, other people would be cool but that’s not explicitly against those in my hall. I like the guys a lot. I want to meet more people, for the sake of meeting more people.

The entire building is disgusting. What wouldn’t I give to remove that carpet floor! You can tell the mites still spreading after generations of students, spots of old rotten fruit are clearly visible and the ex-tenants’ cigarette burns aren’t a pleasure to look at either. The shower clearly has never been aired before – the mould is a pretty good clue. Sitting on the bed is like squeezing a smoker’s lung. I don’t want to live in the dirt of other people’s disappointments.

On the other hand I don’t want to abandon what I’ve accomplished so far. I don’t want to disappoint my parents. I don’t want to be one of those idiots giving up on their studies in the first year. I don’t want to throw it all away. I’m lying. I do. I do want to run as far as I can from here. But honestly, I want nothing more than wanting to stay.

I’m still on holiday for a couple more days. Monday will be the beginning of a new project week, in essence doing the workload of four people by myself. I do not fucking want to go back.

I found this interesting article on wikipedia about movies set in New York which also gave a list of movies in which NY was destroyed and of NY in the future. So I made graphs out of the data. After a while I saw that the United States are making more and more movies and I thought “Aren’t they in horrible debt? How can they afford billions for the entertainment industry? Surely they must make massive amounts of money from it, or else I’d be a huge waste!”

I did some more research, looking for accurate data or every movie ever produced in the US and compare it with their debt. Just to put things into proportion. Hundreds of movies are made, but debt still increases. I would assume that Hollywood won’t save the government. The American Dream is only present in the american Dream Industry.