truth or dare - readers' answers

1/Dec/97

Plant is our enemy. True or false?

False as though we act like it is. We would surely look like their enemy.
Kenji

2/Dec/97

The future is more influential to you than the past. True or false?

It tends to be true. I always think about the future. But at the same time, I think it's wasting my life if I restrict my behaviour today for the sake of tomorrow which is in fact uncertain to happen.
Kenji

3/Dec/97

Parapsychology is a science. True or false?

True, as long as it applies the scientific methodology to understand parapsychological phenomena. Science is how, not what, to think.
Kenji

4/Dec/97

Killing can be a way of communication. True or false?

True. It cannot be a way of communication for the ones being killed, but killing can be a message to the others including the killers themselves. For example, A virus can tell people that it is harmful by killing some, and at the same time it gets to know it has to change its genetic formula because killing hosts isn't a good idea for its own survival.
Kenji

5/Dec/97

Economy is an artistic problem. True or false?

True. Economy is how people spend money, which is dependent on people's desires. To compose people's desires is an artistic problem. That is why advertisement is so important for capitalism.
Kenji

6/Dec/97

Blind people can enjoy TV game STREET FIGHTERS. True or false?

Truth. They might not be able to enjoy the game itself, but they may as well enjoy other elements, such as music, of the game.
(translated from the original Japanese text.)
HirotaYoshiyuki

True. I had a chance to listen to a blind gamer's presentation at a conference on entertainments for disabled people, and he said STREET FIGHTERS is easy to play comparatively because the sound effects can act as a guidance. The sound varies for each action in this game, as opposed by VIRTUA FIGHTER in which it doesn't. In this way, he said, STREET FIGHTER is more real.
Kenji

7/Dec/97

Your brain does not define you. True or false?

True. At molecular level, immune system only can define me.
Kenji

8/Dec/97

Criminals lack sense of reality. True or false?

False. Rather, they have different senses of realities.
Kenji

9/Dec/97

For every 3 points not on a straight line, there is a circle running through all of the points. True or false?

True for Euclid geometry. However, the geometry is unreal, and exists in our brains only. In this sense, the statement is false.
The proof that it is true for Euclid geometry follows: if the points are not on a straight line, a line made of all points equally distanced from adjacent two points must cross another of these. With the crossing point, one can make two isosceles triangles sharing a line. Which means the crossing point is at the same distance from all three points. Therefore the crossing point is the centre of the circle we are looking for.
Kenji

10/Dec/97

Being equal weakens humans. True or false?

We cannot escape from our relationship being high and low or a master and a slave in our conscieousness. If there can be equality, that means we have no longer ability to compare. I say "no longer" because equality must originate from comparing. But defining superiority in intelligence or perceptivity does not necessarily mean defining strongness of a human, unless one can make intelligence or perceptivity a power. And I know no one who does not make intelligence or perceptiviry their power.
(translated from the original Japanese text.)
Mayumi.M

True, as that opposes natural selection.
Kenji

11/Dec/97

Immortality is easy to achieve. True or false?

If you say renown can survive even after one dies, then it's possible to achieve immortality albeit it's not easy. However, renown can only survive with a help of existence of people remembering about the one. As the civilization will inevitably end one day, even renown is not really immortal.
Kenji

12/Dec/97

A human being is an accessory to his or her intestine. True or false?

This is how it looks when we first appear to take a form in the uteri.
Kenji

13/Dec/97

Coolness can be scientifically understood. True or false?

There may be a coolness-neuron in each brain of ours, but how it is programmed must vary. The mechanism of feeling coolness can be understood by a scientific method, but what becomes cool will remain unpredictable.
Kenji

14/Dec/97

Ethnic dance has more soul than ballet. True or false?

False as it cannot be proven. One certain thing is that many ethnic dance has more information than ballet.
Kenji

15/Dec/97

Mass media died. True or false?

It is becoming more and more true to me. I don't believe in the languages used in mass media. I can now see the individuals working in the media and how they are or aren't intelligent. I'm beginning to see less significant differences between them and myself as a producer of contents.
Kenji

16/Dec/97

An art should surprise people. True or false?

True for me at least. For me, an art is a brain teaser in a more literal sense.
Kenji

17/Dec/97

A computer virus is a hint to understand the origin of life. True or false?

I think it's true. A computer virus (especially in the form of an e-mail warning for a virus), or in fact any kind of viruses show how it is possible for a non-living material to form a self-duplicating object with a help from a medium.
Kenji

18/Dec/97

The reason for happiness is always a chemical substance. True or false?

True. No one can deny that as they cannot feel happy without a chemical substance causing it.
Kenji

19/Dec/97

Colourful life is about economy. True or false?

True. If colourful life is a better life then it is because it's more everything. It has value. Which sounds capitalistic. Which is OK.
Kenji

20/Dec/97

Gifting is a way to control people. True or false?

It is obviously true for those who like to control others. It is also true, however, for those who like to give, because giving promotes his or her social status whether or not they are aware of it.
Kenji

21/Dec/97

Being digital is inherently impressionistic. True or false?

True. Digitizing is an approximation of the nature by sampling. Impressionism is also a sampling of the nature through the author's sensual filter. These two differ in the scale but not in the principle.
Kenji

22/Dec/97

Your whole life can be digitally recorded on a CD. True or false?

True. Digital recording is a sampling, and with a right sampling rate and data length, anything can be put into a CD. Say about 750MB of data can be stored in a CD and you die at the age of 100. Then you get 7.5MB for a year to record, that's about 21KB a day. Which is enough for one JPEG picture to be shot each day, preferably at the same time of the day (e.g. 12:00) for the sake of precision.
Kenji

23/Dec/97

Reading cartoons is a good way to build your ability to think. True or false?

True. Thinking can take many different kind of forms, imagining being one of them. Imagining is exactly the ability required for reading cartoons as you will have to make additional image in your mind to complete the movement between two pictures.
Kenji

24/Dec/97

Immunity against computer viruses can be made contagious. True or false?

True with vaccine programs made as viruses. It can also be applied to the types of computer viruses which require human interventions to duplicate themselves, education being the vaccine in this case.
Kenji

25/Dec/97

Chaos is not random. True or false?

True. Chaos represents the unpredictability nature of complex systems, but any systems are not really random as they have to function.
Kenji

26/Dec/97

TV has a right to mute dialogue in a cinema. True or false?

I believe this to be false.
Kenji

27/Dec/97

NYC is more real than Tokyo. True or false?

False. To the homeless in Shinjuku, Tokyo is very real in the sense of obtaining food and shelter. To the drug addict in Shibuya, Tokyo is as unreal as a fantasy. Cities and their realities are much the same the world over.
Jun

Having stayed in both places, I'd say it is true at least to me. My impression is that NYC is much wilder than Tokyo with real people living there, whereas in Tokyo I feel as though there's an unseen mist surrounding me which prevents me from seizing the reality. This mist thing is there to pamper Japanese mediocre citizens.
Kenji

28/Dec/97

You can sometimes tell the truth by falsifying. True or false?

True. It is possible to tell the truth by falsifying. You may not be telling the truthful answer to someone's question, but you are giving a true insight into your feelings by lying. The person who chooses to lie, or disguise their personality, appearance or nature, is actually telling the truth: by deceiving they are actually telling the truth about their neurosis and insecurities.
Kraig

True. A cinema for example can tell the truth by making a story up on the screen. However the cinematic reality is different from that of the real world, the director is always able to send a right message to the audience.
Kenji

29/Dec/97

WWW is capable of deactivating the creativity of the entire humanity. True or false?

True if the current idea of copyright will continue to be applied to the web. Take music for example. Today, originality of music in a legal sense lies in its melody. Which is a combination of notes, and the number of combinations is rather limited. The web is a free space to publicize music, and with a mild computing power, you can put a large number of arbitrary melodies onto the web claiming the copyrights for them. Then it would be hard for composers to avoid conflicting.
Kenji

30/Dec/97

AIDS is likely to be cured by Oriental medicine. True or false?

False. AIDS is caused by a virus, which is semantically closer to Occidental mentality because it's caused by something comes from the outside. Moreover, the virus attacks the immune system of the host while Oriental medicine relies on the strength of immunity.
Kenji

31/Dec/97

Godzilla is a human. True or false?

Godzilla comes from a long tradition of monsters that are an extension of human fears about the instability of life. Human society from all over the world have stories and fables about monsters coming from the sky or sea to destroy them. It is the fear of the unknown.
In ancient societies human invaders often came from across the sea, from countries unknown. They spoke different languages and raped, killed and stole. They were destruction for the local inhabitants, who were often made slaves. Godzilla is human in that he is a metaphor for this.
The Vikings had a Godzilla type creature that they told stories about in 'Beowulf'.
However, Godzilla, and his type of Monster, are extensions of human fears, wheras the monster in Frankenstein, for example, can be seen as a dark human side.
Jun

True. Unlike Gamera, who represents the benefit of the Earth, Godzilla today is a giant human being behaving accordingly to some human logic.
Kenji