How's Your Kung Fu?
A while ago, a friend told me that I should always say, "My Kung Fu is the best," when asked. Kung Fu, I found out, is sometimes used among nerds to brag about computer skills. I thought it was a joke-- one more reason why nerds are nerds, but I got a Kung Fu T-shirt just for fun anyway.Well, this morning I was thinking about art and my interest in computation, which I regard as an art. I sometimes find unspeakable beauty, yet I have no way to convey or really describe that beauty to the uninitiated. Who would believe there was beauty in programming and machinery? In searching for a metaphore to accurately capture the essence of it, I thought of Judo.
A Judo master can take in a situation and immediately see it as a jumble of bio-mechanical force vectors. He knows that throwing his opponent with beauty is accomplished by very little involvement from himself. He just adds a small, nearly insignificant force vector to the picture by maybe sweeping against the opponent's foot with his own. Then as the picture unravels, we see that this little gesture, this minute force added to the larger picture, becomes the center of the picture and the whole thing unravels to show his opponent on the ground.
This is what I do in various forms... and, oh yeah, my Kung Fu is the best.
This reminds me of a scene in "The Core". It's not a very good movie, but it had some good moments. A team of teronauts have to drill into the earth to restart the core because it stopped spinning. They hire a computer expert/mad genius to "hack the planet"..He was supposed to make it so that no one could plug in any info online about what the team had to do. The computer guru had a certain software he created called "Kung Fu". He said "This is my Kung Fu. And it is strong."
(forgot to add this element) The Kung Fu stopped people from researching the project.
I haven't seen The Core, but I always enjoy Hollywood's rendition of hackers. They're just all over the board. I guess they get close sometimes, but I have yet to see anything vaguely realistic, especially when they divulge technical details.
What I find most enjoyable though is that the hackers are so frequently the "Deus ex-machina" lapdog of some master thief who can wield their computer genius by proffering hits of caffeine and pizza. I think they misunderstand the character.
/wield their computer genius by proffering hits of caffeine and pizza/
But that's how I control you, sweetcheeks.
:)
Here's something you might get a laugh out of: Computers in the Movies