Every single one of us can relate to being misunderstood.
We’ve all heard, “If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around, did it make a sound?“
There’s an extra layer to that, “If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody who MATTERS was around, then it did not make a sound”.
If you are not a person who people care about, you will not be listened to.
In a perfect world, all you gotta be is right, but that’s not all there is. There’s right, and there’s correct. ‘Right’ is subjective, just how ‘good’ is. ‘Correct’ means you adhered to logic. In a perfect world, right and correct should be the same thing, but this world ain’t perfect.
Aristotle came up with a structure of logic called ‘categorical’ that we use to come to conclusions. This structure comprised 2 premises, a general statement and a specific instance, and the natural conclusion of those 2 premises. The most famous one is:
All humans are mortal
Socrates is human
Socrates is mortal
As cut-and-dry as it is, this doesn’t mean that form of logic is the be-all-end-all for human knowledge. In my 3rd computer science post, I went through Boolean algebra. It uses this categorical logic for computers and robots. If A is B, and B is C, then A = C. This works wonders for math equations, but it can be myopic to apply this to everything, especially human situations. You can’t math-ify subjects with variables and ambiguities.
Even if you’re correct, like I said in my (TikTok) intro, they’re not gonna listen to your 30-page essay if they’re not obligated to. If you’re trying to convince somebody of something through logic, you can be making all these connections, deductions and well-structured arguments, yet that somebody’s only response is, “Man I ain’t tryna hear that shit!”… all that logic is gone. You can shame them, but that’s rarely going to work out for the better, so what do you do?
Meet rhetoric.
Everything I’ve read on this has been trying to tiptoe around this label, but I’m gonna give it to you for what it is.
It’s manipulation. It is. Even if you’re doing it ‘ethically’ or ‘for the right reasons’, you’re shaping their thoughts and feelings to make them behave a certain way, without them being aware of it.
In Ancient Greece there was a group called the Sophists. While regular school focused on logic and being correct, the Sophists taught you how to be right.
They taught you how to get people to trust you when you say the tree made a sound.
Of course there was controversy around them since people thought they taught you how to lie and deceit; hence the word ‘sophistry’. I just called it manipulation, so I’m not gonna say that’s incorrect, but all in all they were teaching you how to debate.
Problem is, most debates are doomed from the jump cause we forget we don’t all value the same things.
If I want to go to Mcdonald’s and you want to go to Burger King, somebody is going to not get their way. You can say maybe we’ll find a spot we both like, but that’s not possible in a lot of situations.
In that sense, why would we argue over directions when we got 2 different destinations in mind? See how dumb that sounds when taken literally? That’s what most debates are.
Some people will admit they’re biased. But even they recognize they won’t get far playing that card. You can’t run for political office or seek a position of power while telling everybody, “I don’t care about the greater good or what yall think is right. This is what I feel. So we gonna do what I feel and yall not gonna stop me.”. You’re not gonna get anywhere with that. So where do we go from here? This is what I plan to study.
Of all my philosophy posts, I had to trim this one the most. These are both big subjects and I had a lot more to say on them, but I didn’t want to overload this. This is only the beginning, we’re gonna dive into em.
You ever been caught up in life or whatever activity you’re in, and you just stop and look at your hands (or some people do this in the mirror) and think, “I really exist. I’m here. I’m built like this. I look like this. I have 5 fingers. Why do I have 5 fingers? Why is there a 5?”.
From the moment the first human realized this, philosophy was born. We all have a desire to understand. For those who claim you don’t, you do. You either don’t want to do the work to go about gaining it, and/or you’re scared of what’ll happen once you got it because it’ll change your perception of reality, which usually leads to unhappiness.
So this is our dilemma with human thought. We want to know, but we want to be happy.
Philosophy… attempts… to marry these 2 desires to make us feel whole as a person. Everybody’s lifestyle is their way of trying to achieve at least one of these 2.
I’m greedy. I want both.
So like I said I want to ultimately understand the universe and humanity. The hard and soft sciences.
I know there is no one answer. Even if there is, what am I gonna do with it? I still want to learn.
So first I wanna get this out the way: when it comes to your health, your safety, your family, finances, or your physical well-being, all that philosophy shit goes out the window. When it comes to your survival, you are not obligated to sit back and rummage your brain about the ‘greater good’. I ain’t saying that’s a pass to do evil, but you don’t have time for philosophizing when you’re basic needs aren’t even met. This is a first-world subject. I am extremely privileged I live in a place and time where I’m able to speak about this freely.
And for the subject as a whole, you should not MAJOR in philosophy. There’s too much out here in the world to look into. That’s like people who spend all day in the gym. It’s cool to do it but to make it your life is a betrayal to actual experiences. Make sure you go outside and actually use this, don’t spend all day thinking. Now let’s get to it.
My main source for this was the book Dream of Reason by Anthony Gottleib. I’m glad I read it because it saved me time from bouncing around on different philosophers trying to figure out what they mean. It gives you a bird’s-eye-view of the subject.
I first noticed the book only goes through Western philosophy. Compared to Eastern philosophy, it seems more about building yourself. You have to do the work to become good. Eastern seems to take more of a ‘just let it be’ approach, which I don’t see as much different from religion. Not saying it is all about that, that’s just my current impression of it.
The book did focus a little too much on history instead of the actual branches, but it was still a good primer for all this.
I see why people don’t like the subject cause most philosophers just sit around all day mentally jerking off without actually doing anything. I want to see how I can put this into practice.
And as I go through these, understand there is no the answer to all this. I’m just laying out how we’ve gone about trying to find them. It’s still up to you on what you choose to believe.
So this was the hardest of the philosophy branches for me to break down. I said it’s the nature of being; what makes a thing a thing.
The book didn’t break this down as much as I was hoping it would. All it talked about was ‘the soul’ and Aristotle’s 4 causes which I found too impractical; translating it to real life doesn’t leave me with anything but, “ok, and?”
So the best I can do for now is attempt to tie it into things we deal with every day.
Languages have metaphysical qualities to them. Irish and Scottish don’t have a word for ‘no’. Eskimos have 40 different words for snow. Some languages don’t recognize purple as a color. Some see blue and green. Even if it seems like they’re just noises you make with your mouth, these affect our perception of reality. It ties into how a culture may do certain things.
Cars are a metaphysical factor of urbanism. They’re one of our most private spaces. We talk to ourselves in the car. We sing out loud knowing we can’t sing. People use it for ‘that’. Or if you live with a lot of people you might sit in the car when you get home to get that last bit of alone time.We can say they’ve brought us closer to each other. A friend who lives 10 miles away is long distance if you’re on foot, but nothing when you have a car.
On the other hand, car culture
*depressing rush hour traffic* *cartoon of roads taking away from cities*
Or what smartphones have done to us socially. With social media, instant access to video cameras and web searching. Just like with cars, we can say they’ve brought us closer together, we can talk to somebody on the other side of the world, but they also separate us. If you feel out of place in a social situation, you retreat to your phone.
Personal identity is a timeless metaphysical concept. Especially now with gender dysphoria and transitionings. Some people don’t think male and female suffice to define who you are as a person. Masculinity and feminity are major ones. What makes a man? Not a male, but a man? Same goes for women. Race identity is one. That phrase “Too white for the black kids, too black for the white kids”. Even if you’re not biracial, some people don’t feel like they’re truly their race or heritage if they don’t have certain interests.
Abortion is a metaphysical issue. Some people see the fetus as a life, some see a clump of cells. Neither are exactly wrong.
End of the day, metaphysics is about what a thing does for us as humans. Animals don’t waste time thinking about this because they gotta worry about survival.
So as an individual, I’ll admit you don’t stand much to gain from thinking about this. This is more for producers who create the things we use and live with. So politicians, lawmakers, sociologists, urban planners, marketers, or even physical builders like architects, engineers, inventors, etc.
In terms of where to go next with this… again I don’t like Aristotle’s 4 causes so I’m not gonna read his book on metaphysics.
I care about this so much because I want to be a filmmaker, and to make a film, you’re reconstructing reality. But to recreate reality, you must first understand it, which is physics.
I’ll be doing a brief science series on physics, and in that I hope to get a better understanding of how to tie this into humanity. You can’t use this by itself, it has to be tied into something practical.
In this experience, we seek pleasure. Happiness and pleasure sound the same, we assume one will lead to the other.
The philosophy of hedonism is about the pursuit of only pleasure. If you make yourself feel good, your soul will follow.
Pleasure is objective, like the body, but happiness is subjective, like the soul.
Thing is, happiness means different things to different people. You can’t argue with any of them because we can’t tell other people what’s best for them. A lot of the time, we barely know what’s best for ourselves.
Lifting weights. It hurts in the moment, but to some of us that’s the pleasure. It’s a form of masochism. Even if you’re in the ‘hurts’ camp, the stimulation of the muscles and their growth is a form of pleasure, whether it’s the physical strength or the aesthetic benefits. Some people find lifting to be a spiritual endeavor. Outside of the physical factor, they feel tranquility from it.
On the other hand, if somebody drinks and smokes every day, there’s no doubt they’re full of pleasure, but would you say they’re happy?
Or like the ‘1 cookie now or 2 cookies later’ social experiment. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when you take a child, sit them at a table, and put a cookie in front of them. You tell them, you can eat this cookie now or whenever you want, but if you wait 10 minutes, I’ll give you another one, so you’ll have 2 cookies. Do that, and walk out of the room. There’s usually a camera set up to record them too. Most of the time, you’ll see the kid get agitated and start fidgeting over the temptation of that one cookie.
The kids who were able to wait for that second cookie are said to be more successful in life because they know how to delay gratification. Ima sound like a self-help guru for a minute, but that’s where a lot of life’s greatest pleasures are. I mentioned lifting weights as one. Working to make money is the one we all do, most people don’t enjoy work. Me reading and doing these studies can be boring. I’m not always having the time of my life reading these subjects, but the knowledge makes it worth it in the end.
To that point, our pleasures adhere to our bodily senses, yet a lot of them are hostile to our souls. That’s why if we say a person is superficial, we’re saying they focus too much on the outside and what feels good in the moment. We’re criticizing their soul, or lack thereof.
Problem is, we can’t really articulate what the soul is. So we don’t have much of a reason to care about it.
So it really comes down toyou can either feel good on the outside or the inside. Of course we want to try to get both.
The whole necessity of philosophy is to stop the soul from being anchored down by materialism. The more somebody seeks pleasure in outside things, the more unhappy they tend to be on the inside.
On the other hand, I don’t think monks have it all figured out. Their answer is to not indulge in anything and just stay ascetic. I think that’s disrespectful to the creator to completely deprive yourself of life’s joys. If that’s how you choose to live as a human, I would’ve just made you an animal for all that.
People-pleasers take abuse from the outside and may tell themselves they’re happy on the inside, but if you’re submitting to all that abuse, then you lack self-respect, which is on the inside.
Or even the one that I’m dealing with, would you rather be liked or be right? To me being liked is pleasurable, while being right can lead you to happiness. Some may disagree and say it’s vice versa.
Like any philosophy, there is no answer for this.
I ain’t gonna spend too much time on this. All in all, most religions state that our souls will be judged in the afterlife. Even if they have different version of how that’ll happen, it’s still likely to happen. You don’t have to believe that if you don’t want to.
So outside of all the other branches, we inherently know that philosophy is about right or wrong.
First off, I’m not about to waste time picking apart the differences of morality and ethics. Either way we’re analyzing what it means for a behavior to be good or bad. So I may use them interchangeably.
There’s two approaches to this. Moral absolutism and relativism.
Absolutists are absolute. “You did wrong no matter what and you must be punished for it. What I can respect most is they want to avoid double standards.
Relativists approach it with a “Well it’s only bad if you see it as bad. Try to look at it this way”. They’re trying to be compassionate and empathetic which I also get.
Neither are that ideal. Those examples are the extreme versions of them. Absolutists don’t know how to adapt and consider context. Relativists like to move the goal posts and change things to fit what they want it to mean.
I don’t respect relativists because they never apply it to themselves. It’s always if someone else gets hurt we’re supposed to step back and try to be understanding. When it’s them who gets the short end of the stick now there’s no question the offender should be punished.
Absolutists can do this too, but in my experience it’s relativists who like to switch up when it benefits them. Either way very few people are that black & white with their values.
I know I seem biased towards relativism, I’m just concerned that if we all have our own meanings of what is right and what is wrong, and we live our livesand make decisionsthat affect other people based on those meanings, then we all just live in our own personal dictatorships. It’s one giant war of ‘my feelings are more valid than yours’. I gotta say this is probably the main reason we have the law, but even that’s not exempt from it.
Every culture, religion, and individuals have their own concept of morality, but overall, they always fall under one of the two. Even if they claim to be in the middle, they’re at least leaning to one side.
The TV show The Good Place attempts to quantify it with a point system. You gain points for doing good and lose points for doing bad. Even with that, the show acknowledges that has some flaws.
The main factor was intention. Some seem to think as long as they mean well, it excuses the end result of what they did.
And this gets into the famous phrase ‘the ends justify the means’. I generally agree with that, but if the means caused further damage, you didn’t solve the problem, you just exchanged it for another one. You’re setting your house on fire to kill a spider.
So you see there’s a whole ping pong with this subject. And it’s frustrating because it rarely leads to an answer. Even now I still don’t have one. I’m not about to waste my youth pondering about it unless I’m trying to make a decision.
And that’s it for now. I’m not getting back into this until I pick up a subject I can apply this to. That’ll likely be law or A.I. Outside of those, I already have a copy of Nietszche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra which I only picked up because I want to understand what the Ubermensch is supposed to mean. So I may get into that soon.
This is the most burnt-out branch of philosophy so don’t spend too much time thinking about it. Go outside and touch grass.
My fellow young people, I want yall to be honest with me and yourselves. When an elder is lecturing you on something, how much of that do you actually take away? For me it’s like 10% My boss was talking to me for 3 hours yesterday. And I was listening, I didn’t just tilt my head to the side and placate him with, “mmhmm, mmhmm, you right”. And he’s one of the least long-winded elders I know. I retained about 70% of what he said.
What he does differently, is he doesn’t just stand there and drill facts into my head, he asks me questions. And I do the same back to him.
He’s told me multiple times I come off as very intelligent. While it’s flattering, I told yall in my disclaimer I’m not that smart, at least I don’t see myself as such. He mainly saw that I like to pick things apart and deconstruct them. I’ve been told I should be a lawyer or therapist because of . this. It’s a style of questioning called the Socratic method, by yours truly, Socrates
I wish I had more time in these so Ima have to bottom line this. He didn’t believe he had all the answers, he just wanted everyone else to realize they don’t either. He wasn’t a know-it-all who took a side in every debate, he would pick apart your side to get you thinking if it’s really valid?
Thing about him is, he didn’t write anything himself. Everything we know about him is from other people.
So in terms of who exactly he was, it’s blurry. He was born in Athens, Greece around 469 BC. He didn’t have an actual job so he was a bum by today’s standards.
Around 399 BC, he was put on trial for 2 specific charges. Impiety, meaning he refused to believe in the god he was supposed to believe in, and ‘corrupting the youth’. That second one is very interesting. It ain’t like he was some maniacal cult leader telling the kids to run away from their parents and come drink his kool-aid. All he asked them was, “Whatever it is you believe, explain why you believe it”. Apparently that was the worst thing you could do the kids.
There was also the tense political climate since they were coming out of the Peloponnesian war and he had associations on both sides, so it was a little more to it than just him, but overall, the people were sick of him. In this trial he had a famous speech called the ‘Apology’. I’m not getting into that for now, he was just defending himself and his mindset. He was sentenced to death by majority decision, by forced consumption of poison.
He was killed for trying to get people to think. Again, there were complex political tensions at that time too, but that is pretty much the ‘threat’ the state believed they were neutralizing.
Despite my praise for him, I’m not saying this is the only way to find knowledge. It’s cool to expose someone else’s ignorance, but we don’t gain much knowledge from it either. It’s good for pointing out the gaps, but we still got to fill in those gaps too.
I know I missed a lot with this. His Apology could be a whole post itself. This is mainly setting the foundation for my concern with the public education system and the current pedagogy we’re using to teach our kids. I would really like to know why his trial isn’t a regular part of the history curriculum.
I kinda know the answer, and I’m sure yall do too, but I want to be able to put an explanation behind it outside of just stating it. Moving on.
In Plato’s Republic, he details a man who is the perfect ruler. The philosopher king, a man who holds the wisdom of a philosopher, with the grit and influence of a king.
I like this subject because this gets into the whole ‘nerd and the jock’ dichotomy.
I remember overhearing this guy on the phone, I don’t know what the other person said but the guy responded:
“Yeah but that’s for guys who read books all day. I’m just a regular guy who’s into sports”
And I thought to myself, who says you got to be one or the other? I watch highlights in between my studies. I go outside or to the gym and train for whatever I’m into. Nobody’s struck me down for doing both of those.
The nerd-jock thing is kinda real, but I think we take it too literal like it’s impossible to have the best of both worlds.
The nerd is intellectually brilliant, but is lacking in everything else. No social skills, physically weak, and in a lot of cases mentally weak too, he’s easy to manipulate.
The jock is physically strong with decent social skills, but intellectually, I’m not gonna go to the extreme and say he’s a dumb brute, but he may not be the brightest in mental fields.
In that parallel, the philosopher is the nerd. He holds wisdom and intellectual aptitude, but his physical and social ineptness hinders him from applying this wisdom. It never materializes, so it’s nothing more than an empty opinion.
The king is the jock but he’s actually superior in this sense. A jock just plays sports, the king has military experience. I like this because it shows he’s no stranger to violence and conflict, and he’s good at managing risk, which is extremely important in a leader. His only bad side is he may underestimate the importance of looking deeper into things and dealing with the abstract. Like if he’s heading the making of a policy and you try to advise him to look at the human, metaphysical, or spiritual side of things, he might roll his eyes and dismiss you. Running a war and running a society aren’t the same exact thing. They may overlap in some ways but you’re not deploying soldiers to neutralize other humans, you’re creating and maintaining a way of life. And this is not at all saying that nerds are the most morally upright people, so it ain’t just about that.
We need to be both, especially us men. Get out of that high school mindset. Reading books don’t make you a dork and moving your body and learning how to influence people doesn’t make you a dumb jock. The perfect man is the one who can do both, and only he can be the best leader of our free world
Past the king himself, Plato also details his idea of a perfect city-state. It has a 3-class hierarchy. Rulers, the politicians, ideally the most competent people available. Protectors, basically security, military, law enforcement and legal officials. And producers, the citizens, the working class who keeps society running.
One major factor of this concept is the protocol for the rulers. They’re not allowed to own private property or any luxury goods. I like this because it would weed out a lot bad actors and theoretically minimize corruption
This is extremely idealistic. There are too many variables to cut and paste this into the modern era. But I still believe we should be trying to make some semblance of this
Most of this will be surrounding ancient Greece. To answer the big question of why were they so prominent in building civilization, they just wrote things down, that’s really it. And they had people to preserve their writings and translate them so they could be passed down. There probably were more advanced civilizations out here, but they didn’t preserve anything, so nobody cares.
So I got this little theory about where the idea of deities, gods, and higher dimensions came from. It’s a half-joke but I still think there’s truth to it. I don’t think it was consciousness, or existentialism, or morality, the afterlife or anything like that… I think it was just bad weather.
Imagine being the first person to witness a thunderstorm. You might’ve seen rain, but to see the sky roaring at you, flashing lights, and to see that light travel to the ground and set a tree on fire right in front of you, I’d get on my knees and start praying to the sky too.
Now that we understand the weather better, we don’t do all that. But we still recognize it comes from something bigger than us. And on the serious side, a lot of ancient mythological beings are based on natural happenings.
So this is where science and philosophy are 2 sides of the same coin. Science we try to understand how it works. In philosophy, we seek why it works this way.
Science, as we know it today, was launched from the idea of atoms. We still can’t say who finally ‘proved’ it because even now it’s still not that proven, but Galielo is the earliest example of experimenting with them.
But he was in the late-1500s. Almost 2000 years before that, way farther from him than he is from us, Leucippus and Democritus were the first to theorize about atoms.
I’m not getting into the differences between their theories. But overall, they believed that every physical thing in this world was composed of atoms. And all of our senses are based on our interactions with these atoms; including the soul.
Past that, I would say music was the first natural phenomenon where we merged grounded numbers with the abstract sensation of hearing them. You can argue this for any medium, but music is the only art that’s undeniably a science too. Music is numbers. If you pluck an open string on a guitar, it plays a certain note, but if you hold the exact midpoint of that string, it plays that same note an octave higher, which makes that a 2:1 ratio. This extends to all the advanced chords too. There’s a whole branch of physics that quantifies sound.
The Pythagoreans were the group to work with all this. Numbers were their forte. They were the more respected philosophers of this time. Compared to the others who just sat in the house pondering all day, they went outside and tried things
Their name is most familiar with the Pythagorean theorem. This is responsible for most of our engineering, computers, even GPS satellites and robots. So to their credit, these are one of the few philosophers whose work we can tie to real-life accomplishments. We can point to a physical thing and say, “they are the reason this was possible”.
So back to atoms. At the time, it was still just another theory. A few centuries later it was condemned by the Christian Church because they thought it discredited God, like it was the antithesis to creationism. So this started this whole discourse of Atom vs Adam.
I don’t think they should’ve taken that to heart because religion is the human experience and science is the universe’s language, those are 2 different things. The Greeks touched on space and cosmology, but just like us, they couldn’t find an answer. Eventually this amplified with the separation of church and state that we have today
And that’s about it for now. I only get so much time on these. I’m gonna make a separate science post soon. I definitely want to explore more of this down the line.
I gotta say, I’m shocked at how much engagement my first post got on TikTok. I know this is a popular cert, but I didn’t expect this many people to be looking after it. I got more views on that post than all my other posts combined. So I want to thank yall for all the love
I’m using the 2023 Exam Training app. I paid for the pro version. There’s over 1400 questions on there, and I’ve already glazed over them once.
So to get this done, I’m gonna break it all down. There are 9 sections and 5-9 parts per section. So for myself, I’m gonna write all these questions down with their answers, and I’ll be researching each one so I’m able to speak about them casually and not just recite the answers like a robot. I’m not about to post all those questions on here. In these posts, I’ll be summarizing everything I learned from each section.
Storage Drives
Now, we all know that computers are meant to store information. Every PC, and MacBook up till 2016, uses what’s called a SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment). It’s not exactly the hard drive, it just bridges the drive to the computer. It’s technically an interface.
Hard drive and storage drive are used interchangeably. Basically, all hard drives do deal with storage, but they’re not strictly meant for storage either. We’ll get into that later.
The 2 most common types of drives are HDD (hard disk drive) and SSD (solid state drive).
HDD is the more traditional one. It uses spinning magnetic platters with an actuator arm that reads the data off these platters. Kinda like a record player, but it’s a little deeper than that. And SSDs use flash technology.
In terms of how they store the data, HDDs are sequential, and SSDs are random; one is in order and one isn’t. To me this is splitting hairs because in terms of accessing an image or document, it’s still the same thing. SSD isn’t random in the sense you have to scramble through everything to find what you’re looking for. The search function still works either way. It really comes down to how fast they can access this data, which SSDs are better at. An image or document won’t usually take much time to load up, so this probably pertains more to long videos or audio recordings; I have a musician friend who has a HDD with thousands of Logic plugins in it, and that takes a while to load up.
So it seems like SSDs are the move unless cost is an issue. Only thing about them is they have a certain amount of ‘writes’ they can do before they stop working. So just how a regular car can have its tank refilled as long as it works, an electric car will have a set limit of charges it can take. A gas tank can be maintained almost indefinitely, but when that electric car’s battery is done, it’s done.
Form Factors
Just how there are regular clothes, not all clothes fit the same person, physically or aesthetically. To find out how to match clothes to a person, we look at their physical characteristics: height, body type, skin tone, hair color and texture, etc.
This is what I thought a form factor was at first, a computer’s external physical characteristics like its color or screen. It’s really more about the internal layout, like a person’s muscle mass, bone structure or overall biological makeup. A computer’s form factor is the type of motherboard it has, type of expansion cards it takes. Or like all cars have an engine, drivetrain, and alternator, but they’re all set up in different ways.
I’ll have to unpack this more later, so for now I’ll just do the tidbits the questions took me through
So there’s an expansion bus called a PCI, Peripheral Component Interconnect. That was the original version, the modern one is a PCIe, ‘e’ for express, along with a mini version. It’s made to upgrade a computer’s capabilities. As to what those capabilities are, all I’m seeing is more processing power and wi-fi & Bluetooth connectivity to a computer that didn’t already have it.
So in car terms, it’s like taking an old 90s car and installing a touchscreen radio that lets you do modern things in it.
There are also different types and pin connectors for PCIes. For now I’ll just state, a mini PCIe Type III with a 52-pin connector is the most common type for a standard laptop.
There are different wi-fi network standards, all called 802.11 followed by a letter. 802.11 is just a naming convention by the IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The number doesn’t mean anything in terms of the system.
The most common wi-fi network standards are 802.11 a, b, g, n, ac, ax, and ay. We’ll unpack those later. The only main differences are faster speed, shorter range, and slower speed, longer range.
Mobile Phones
Remember how if you had a Sprint phone, and you were going to a different carrier, you couldn’t transfer it over, the phone was only good for Sprint? That’s because Sprint was a Code Division Multiple Access carrier, a CDMA. The one that allows those transfers is the Global System for Mobile Communications, GSM.
These are cellular network technologies.
Supposedly CDMA had better coverage and call quality, which is funny because Sprint was notorious for having poor connection and dropped calls, and T-Mobile too for a time but they retired from CDMA.
It seems like the only thing it might’ve had over GSM was more ‘security’, less prone to interceptions. Unless you’re worried about getting hacked, that’s not really a concern for the average person. So it seems like it’s all exclusivity without higher quality. I’d like to learn more about this down the line because I’m wondering why is it even an option outside of a private organization that wants a closed phone system? Like how the cartel has its own cell towers.
So while those are cellular network technologies, there are also mobile network technologies, which still sound the same. Mobile network tech pertains to the generations or the ‘G’s’, like 2G, 3G, 4G, etc. 2G is the bare minimum for a phone, allowing calls and texts. 3G improved on call quality and enabled video calling, web browsing, and basic multimedia streaming. 4G introduced LTE Long-Term Evolution whose main improvement was high-quality video streaming like for Netflix and YouTube, and online gaming. 5G is the frontier of this tech now. I don’t know what else to say besides it’s faster but it’s supposedly making way for new technologies like augmented reality.
Next we have 2 concepts called MAM and MDM, Mobile Application Management, and Mobile Device Management. They’re pretty self-explanatory. If you built your own app, you’d have to do a lot of MAM to maintain it. MDM is broader for any organization that relies on mobile devices. Even like a small doctor’s office where all the employees use iPads.
Next we got different touchscreen technologies: Capacitive is the most popular one. iPhones, Androids, tablets, and touchscreen computers. It allows for multi-finger gestures, they’re a lot smoother and more responsive. Compare that to resistive touch which is more old school and industrial. Like ticket kiosks, parking meters, ATMs or POS store registers. There’s also Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) touchscreens. I’m having trouble understanding the difference between these and resistive outside of the way they’re made. Both are for more commercial or industrial uses like casino games, outdoor displays or those scanner guns they use at warehouses; their uses seem to be the same.
We all have an International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) which is basically your social security number for your personal phone plan. Your SIM card has this number along with all your phone identifications.
Displays
Most modern displays are LCDs, which is liquid crystal, but this is just for the screen. Most LCDs are lit by LEDs.
LED stands for light-emitting diode, which is basically a bunch of dots that light up. There’s an organic OLED that minimizes power and a quantum QLED with higher vibrancy and color
Past those you got special variations like In-Plane Switching (IPS), Vertical Alignment (VA) and Twisted Nematic (TN). They’re all still LCD screens with LED lights, but they have their own properties of response time, viewing angles, and contrast ratios.
Mail protocols
There are 2 main email retrieval protocols Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), and Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). An organization typically has a mail server, but some don’t. In short, POP3 is for a single device, so it’s faster and easier to access, and IMAP has multiple devices so team members can collaborate on the emails.
There’s a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) that’s used for sending. Whether you use POP3 OR IMAP, you need SMTP for a full cycle mail server.
And finally, there’s Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) that handles security and encryptions with the emails along with enabling digital signatures.
The ‘print’ function is the first that we learned. It shows the output of the work we did.
There are 60+ different functions in general Python. Not even counting the 3rd party libraries. We’re gonna build our way up to those.
So past ‘print’, we have the ‘len’ function that returns you the length of an element.
When I say ‘returns you’ that means it’s the information it’s giving you in response to your function.Using the function is ‘calling’ for it.
x = len("word")
print(x)
Output: 4
So if I put the ‘len’ function in front of a string with a 4-letter word, it’ll return in the output, 4.
If you’re doing multiple words, it counts those spaces too. So ‘hello world’ would return you 11. They’re both 5-letter words, but there’s a space in between.
We also have the ‘min‘ function, which returns the smallest value of an element.
print(min(34, 57))
Output: 34
It’s obvious for numbers, but it works with words too. It does it alphabetically
print(min("apple", "bear"))
Output: apple
And even though I just called them elements, the values inside of these elements, letters and numbers, are called ‘arguments‘. Any time you use a comma to separate a value, that’s another argument you’re adding.
Grant Abraham 