42

A photo showing the number 42.
Photo by Mark König on Unsplash

They say the number 42 is the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. So as I celebrate my 42nd birthday, I wonder if the next 364 days work their magic and fulfill their promise. Unfortunately, my obligatory research on how Douglas Adam chose the number has already burst my bubble:

It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought ‘42 will do.’ I typed it out. End of story.

So much for the pandemic ending soon.

Most of what you read on the internet is written by insane people

So Reddit consists of 97-99% of users rarely contributing to the discussion, just passively consuming the content generated by the other 1-3%. This is a pretty consistent trend in Internet communities and is known as the 1% rule.

This reddit post is both funny and thought-provoking that you can’t help wonder—is it possible that the virtual world we see is shaped only by a small percentage of internet users?

I don’t know how that author identified the most prolific reviewer at the time but I found one reviewer with 20.8k reviews since 2011. That’s just under 3,000 reviews per year, which comes out to around 8 per day. This man has written an average of 8 reviews on Amazon per day, all of the ones I see about books, every day for seven years.

The only explanation for this behavior is that he is insane. I mean, normal people don’t do that. We read maybe 20 books a year, tops, and we probably don’t write reviews on Amazon for all of them. There has to be something wrong with this guy.

If we consider the implications on politics and how we see real-world social issues, we just might be doomed for a long time. So much for hoping that the 2022 Philippines presidential elections will be one not ruined by fake news and false propaganda.

Goodbye, 2020!

Burn 2020, burn!

We’re into the last hour of 2020 here in the Philippines, and just couldn’t resist a quick blog post to send it off and forever etch into memory how terrible the year was. The internet will forever remember it, certainly.

Here’s to a hopeful new year for all of us.

Victory is the child of struggle…

Filipinos don’t realize that victory is the child of struggle, that joy blossoms from suffering, and redemption is a product of sacrifice.

— Jose Rizal

Today we Filipinos commemorate our Independence Day, a good time to remind us all to protect our freedom and fight for our rights. And if you have 15 minutes to spare, listen to this podcast to understand the possible threats we may have to face if we fail to let our voices heard.

When life throws you lemons…

(Random incoherent thoughts)

I haven’t blogged in a long time, despite this constant longing to share my thoughts on everything that has been happening in the past few years. I used to see this blog as my personal journal, a place where I can speak of things that might be of interest to my sons when they’re old enough to see the world with grown-up eyes.

But life got in the way.

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On the first of October…

I remember looking at you through the nursery window, overjoyed yet afraid of the overwhelming task of raising another boy in this ever-crazy world. I wondered how I’d want you to be both similar and different to your Kuya Mikku—and you gladly turned out that way.

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