Project 365 – 30th August 2010

Day 211 – Truth

There are 16 million shades of grey
There is no black
There is no white
You have to draw your own line
It may or may not be straight
There are always mitigating circumstances
Judgement can only be based
On passed-down wisdom and self-experience
Stopping to take stock
Is not an option
You can never find yourself
You can only conform or differ
From each perceived image
The cataracts of common sense
Can never be removed
Focusing on reality’s a fallacy

-Gerald England

Project 365 – 20th July 2010

Day 170 – The Haircut

I haven’t done a self portrait in a while so I thought this might be as good a time as any with my new hair cut (which my drunk friend, who has never cut hair before, did on Friday night!). Yes I am a bit random, but it actually worked out quite well, thanks Chompy!

By the way for all the Flickr fans check out the new interface for viewing photos, they seem to be changing a few things there!

Quote of the day: If truth is beauty, how come no one has their hair done in a library?  – Lily Tomlin

Project 365 – 28th May 2010

Day 117 – Logical

We had a suduko/crossword fest on Thursday night in my house so obviously on the Friday I decided to photograph the remains! I actually don’t think there was a completed one to show for, although in our defence they were rated very highly. Particularly the one I spent a fair few hours on Friday doing, which was rated ‘Diabolical’! WHY did I even start?! In fact (and because I had to redraw it in my notebook plus I’m only updating this on the following Wednesday!) I was still looking at it on the train this morning thinking I could make the breakthrough in it! When will I give up!

I think in some ways its easier to give up in a lot of things than it is a mathematical puzzle. Maybe that’s why we like doing them, there IS a definite answer, no matter how long it takes to get to it,  it’s one of the few certainties we have. I remember looking up the ‘Criteria of Truth’ before for a college assignment and I was genuinely shocked at how little it seems to suggest we actually accurately know. You can think you know something but so little of our knowledge can be put through a verifiable test.  That doesn’t mean it’s not true, or that by believing it and it happening to be true that we have knowledge, or that we can’t make day to day judgements based on what we believe. I’m not relating to religion, which for all intents and purposes is supposed to be based on faith, not knowledge or proof. I’m referring to the day to day assumptions we make based on what we think we know for sure.

We believe that when we have certain experts in certain fields we can find the truth from them, but were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? We believe that if an idea works it must be true, but what if a doctor gives a patient medcine and that patient is cured by something else apart, the doctor will believe their medcine worked. We believe that the majority must be right, but Hitler initially rose to power by constitutional means. We believe in things lasting the ‘test of time’ but for how long did people believe the world was flat?

We believe that there are truthful, honest people, and there are, but to think that everything that comes from them will be truth is to ignore the fact that everyone is guided by their own subjective emotions, intuition and memory, subconscious thought and action. We barely know why we act like we do, and in the modern world, where technology is evolving faster than we are and time spent on self reflection can be measured by the money we’ve stopped ourselves from earning, will we ever know?

Quotes:

“You never find yourself until you face the truth” – Pearl Bailey

“For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it. For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it.” – Ivan Panin

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing” – Socrates

Now back to that suduko!