Rant 315 / I Don't Want To Be Good At Anything; I Just Want To Be Better Than Everyone Else.

Last night I decided to go to school between 6-7am today again. But it didn't go so well. I couldn't stop sleeping badly at night, and on this night, I went to bed at 12, fell asleep in an hour, woke up at 2am, managed to go back to sleep after a short trip to the bathroom, then woke up again at 4 but couldn't go back to dreamland.

Now it is going to be pretty obvious what state I'll be in in the afternoon. Freakin hell...







Transporter 3 isn't as good as the first movie of the series. Interesting, beats the last 2 movie I mentioned in the last rant. And this time, he just ignored all his rules.







So I've finally solved the Rubik's Cube that Ivan gave me as a birthday gift. Apparently there are many tricks that I can use to solve it. So I did use one and here is the completed cube.






Wonder when there will ever be an eng-subbed version of the 2nd Naruto Shippuuden movie, Bonds, out in the internet. DB probably will never do it. Maybe it will never be subbed.







Have you ever read about a situation in which the actual results were rather counter-intuitive? The first I came across was the Wiki article on the Stanford prison experiment conducted in 1971. It was very simple: a group of students stay in a prison for days, some playing as jailers while others act as prisoners.

Now all these volunteers didn't have any known psychological issues, and were specifically chosen for this lack. However, the experiment went in a very unexpected direction and the professor had to stop the whole thing before schedule.

Simply put, the students acting as jailers got into the role too smoothly, while the fake prisoners began to act as actual prisoners. One side got really sadistic while the other group just gave up and accepted the things that were being done to them. At first it was just "playing around" but eventually it became too real.

Surprisingly, though some of the prisoners tried to apply for parole (forsaking their pay), none of them actually tried to pull out of the experiment when their applications failed.

The links on the page then led me to another psychological experiment, aka the Milgram experiment.

In this case, the volunteers were being tested on how far they would go in obeying others. They were repeatedly instructed to apply electric shocks to a fake volunteer, who was really an actor. The voltage were raised gradually till it is 450V, at which point the actor would bang on the wall and scream at the actual subject. The actor would then appear to lose consciousness after 3 applications of 450V.

Apparently, over half the test subjects were willing to KO the "volunteer". They did not know it was all an act. Only 1 person out of the tested 40 was unwilling to go beyond 300V.

I can kind of understand the latter experiment. When I go into "obey" mode, I usually stop thinking. I'd leave all the decision making to the leader unless I'm forced to do it.

I used to think that all the responsibilities are borne by the leader because he makes all the decisions. When he makes a mistake, he gets the punishment. I've come to realize that this isn't true in the working world. Even if you did go by the book, the rules don't always cover your ass. This is certainly quite disturbing for me.