In the last post I observed that there is a resurgence of faith all over the world. I think I got an explanation for this. The world around us is becoming more insecure and more uncertain. The easy access to technologies has bettered our lives, but at the same time it also made us feel insecure. I take mobile phone as a classic example. It has made communication easy. But also has created a lot of uncertainties. If I forget to take the phone with me, I feel totally lost. If my loved one is going somewhere and she fails to make a phone call as soon as she reaches her destination, I am tensed. Same is true with our jobs. We now have higher paying jobs doing interesting works, but no security. All these uncertainties pushes us to something that is certain, GOD. It does help. At least it gives us comfort through the crisis period. And that explains why it is becoming so popular, because IT HELPS.
There is another reason for this. The more prosperous we become, the more lonely we get. Poor people stick together. Rich people hardly do. So with increasing prosperity, the world is becoming more lonely. Lonely people are more insecure and hence turn to god.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Friday, July 20, 2007
God fights back
I read this bbc story where a 18 year old young lady says she is willing to die for her belief. More than that, she says she wants to kill others in a suicide bombing. For last few months, papers are all full of stories about terrorist attacks. While there are probably many motives behind these attacks, religion seems to be one of the running themes. And that’s not all, it could be just me, but it seems that more and more young people are turning to religion. Himesh Reshmiya, a popular singer and actor says that his recent success in his new movie has nothing to do with his talents or hard work; it’s all because of God’s good grace. And that seems to be the mood of many young people. It depresses me when I see that the society regresses to something that I find impossible to accept. Because I think that with time, people become more rational and less religious.
But then I thought that there is nothing new to it. Throughout ages of human history it happened many times, resurgence of blind faith and renunciation of rational thoughts. But the reassuring part is, in the end it’s always truth that prevails. God retreats to the dark corner of human ignorance and fear, where only he can live. In fear and in ignorance.
But then I thought that there is nothing new to it. Throughout ages of human history it happened many times, resurgence of blind faith and renunciation of rational thoughts. But the reassuring part is, in the end it’s always truth that prevails. God retreats to the dark corner of human ignorance and fear, where only he can live. In fear and in ignorance.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
A Note to Individuals Who Thinks that Their Religion is OK
I got this from Soham. I don't know where he got this from. I thought it should be publiehsed, before I loose it.
=======================================
A Note to Individuals Who Thinks that Their Religion is OK
You are wrong.
Now, I know what you're thinking -- everyone does it, a billion Chinese can’t be wrong, it makes us be humble and care about our neighbor and sure, there are people out there doing shitty things in the name of their religions, but their religions are different from yours, and, it's worth mentioning, worse than yours.
The problem, the one that you may not see, is not what your religion says, in particular -- although most likely, you believe in some pretty horrible things, like stoning adulterers or killing the children of your enemies or hating homosexuals or Jews or not touching menstruating women or having as many babies as possible. And if you don't it's probably only because you've decided which parts of God's word are good enough for you, and which parts aren't to be taken seriously, since they bother you personally, and that they can therefore be considered to have been mistakes on His part.
The problem is not what your religion tells you to believe, but how it tells you to believe -- that is, it tells you that you can -- no – must believe in the absence of the type of evidence that you're used to demanding out of life. In fact, your salvation depends on believing without evidence -- skepticism will actually damn you to hell for all eternity.
You: "Well, it looks like a dog and it barks."
Your Religion: "It's a cat."
You: "Are you sure? I think it's a dog."
Your Religion: "Do you want to burn for all eternity, smarty-pants?"
You: "Oh, right. It's a cat."
Now, let's not get into the fact that this is really, really
Undignified the fact that, if humans are different from, say, squid in any meaningful way (thinking-wise) it's in our capacity to think abstractly enough to perform complicated logical comparison and deductions. But you're going to chuck out what makes you human. That's fine. Whatever.
And let's not get into the fact that all the crappy stuff religion tells you is pretty crappy, or that it's all internally contradictory, or that most people aren't very meek or poor or any of those things, in spite of what their particular Book says.
The point is that you believe it's a cat now. So what? Well, the 'so what' isn't that you're going to look like an idiot trying to make a golden retriever shit in a box, although you are. The 'so what' is that once you decide that it's OK to believe in the absence of evidence (or in the face of contradictory evidence) you've endorsed two related points of view:
No one in society has any responsibility to anyone else with regards to thinking things through. I believe my car's brakes don't need to be checked, even though I don't know for sure. Here, borrow the keys, you'll probably live. In one grand gesture, you've gotten on board with the idea that there is no such thing as negligence. As long as I believe a thing, even if a cursory look at the facts might convince a reasonable person of the opposite, well, hey, that's my right. It's ethical and reasonable. There's no need to look, no need to think. It's 10 pm, do you know where your children are? Nah, but I believe they're upstairs, and I don't have any responsibility as a parent to check.
No belief can be judged against any other. You believe that God tells you to love, I believe He tells me to fly a hot air balloon around the world. You'd like to tell me that I'm wrong, but you can't, because argument is about verifiable facts, or chains of facts, deduced logically from one another or derived directly from experience. By getting on board with faith, you've rejected argument as a meaningful activity, and rejected thinking critically altogether. You can no longer critically consider or compare ideas, since you believe that it's OK to have faith in spite of critical evidence. Got an argument against genital mutilation? Who cares -- you've already come out on the side of belief in the face of contradictory evidence. I agree. Where's my knife? Everything's OK with you, once you decide that you don't need to believe your eyes or your brain.
So there it is. I don't care if God tells you to suffer the little children, or feed the poor. If that's the only reason you've got for doing those things, you're a shitty person, and your beliefs do more harm than good. Your existence and your attitude demean you, and, much worse, help weaken two of the most important quantities in any society: our ability to trust that other people are telling us the truth and being responsible in their statements and thoughts, and our capacity as a society to look for answers using our brains and our capacities to reason from evidence. Those are all we've got, and once they're gone, society isn't doing anyone any good, since you can't trust its members to be responsible, and you can't rely on reason to dictate your course of actions.
And you, by tolerating religion, have taken a big fat dump on both of these commodities.
That said, every religion is fundamentalism.
It's worth pointing out at this point that a lot of what you hear about how the problem is 'fundamentalism' is bullshit. When people say this, they seem to be talking about something like XXXXTreeeeeme religion, that says completely crazy things.
The problem, as I've mentioned above, is that once you accept religion, in the sense that you've decided to tolerate (or even embrace) beliefs in the absence of justifying evidence, you've no longer got any rational or ethical basis for judging one doctrine against another. You've decided to take part in an occasionally comforting dance in which reason and evidence can't be used to judge ideas, and once you've done that, you've got no ground on which to judge anything to be 'fundamentalism', and even if you did, you'd have no grounds to judge that it was a bad idea, and even if you could say that it was a bad idea, you'd have no grounds on which to say that it can't be tolerated, since you've already decided that a rational case against an idea should not prevent you from believing it.
Here's how the discussion goes:
Me: "My book says that women who learn to read should be stoned to death."
You: "That's barbaric! It's bad for women, who have natural rights guaranteed by my constitution! It's unfair! It's cruel! Think about it!"
Me: "So what? You believe that Moses talked to an invisible man in space through a burning bush, and you're telling me that I can't believe what
I want because it doesn't make sense? Who are you to tell me I'm nuts?
Go to hell, infidel."
The only thing fundamentalist about fundamentalism is that what these people (whoever you decide is a fundamentalist) believe requires that they ignore the evidence of their senses and suspend their ability to reason -- it's not double-think, it's willful ignorance. And if you're a religious person, any religion at all that requires faith in the absence of evidence, you do this too. You have everything that's important in common with every other religious person in the world -- you believe what you want in spite of evidence for or against your case.
You are a fundamentalist.
To sum up.
To paraphrase someone who thinks about these things for a living, your immediate reaction to the assertion that your faith is unethical is something along the lines of, "No it's not. Some people's are, because they make you mean, but mine's about being nice." Your religion doesn't tell these maniacs what to believe. In the end, however, that doesn't matter, because your religion, like all others, does tell maniacs how to believe. It tells them -- you tell them, every time you do it, every time you tolerate it -- that it's OK to ignore evidence, it's OK not to exercise your capacity for logical deduction.
So the next time someone blows up a building, or shoots an abortion doctor, or prevents young girls from learning to read, in the name of
God, I hope that you won't get too self-righteous about it. In fact, you and they are peas in a pod. You enable this person to do what they do.
You promote in society a tolerance and understanding for this behavior.
Your failure is their failure. Your willing ignorance is their excuse.
Your desecration of society's respect for the truth, for our responsibility to be intellectually diligent, for judging what might be true against what we can discern with our senses to be true, your faith is the exact same thing that makes what they do OK. Your guilty pleasure, your insistence on ignoring what your senses and your intellect tell you removes you and helps remove society from any position in which it is sensible to pass moral judgment on anyone else for believing in the absence of evidence, and then acting on these beliefs, however loony, because you do precisely the same thing they do.
Your religion is everyone's religion, because you've rejected the validity of rationally judging ideas on the basis of our senses and minds. You do it. You OK it. You bring it on. Thanks a lot.
=======================================
A Note to Individuals Who Thinks that Their Religion is OK
You are wrong.
Now, I know what you're thinking -- everyone does it, a billion Chinese can’t be wrong, it makes us be humble and care about our neighbor and sure, there are people out there doing shitty things in the name of their religions, but their religions are different from yours, and, it's worth mentioning, worse than yours.
The problem, the one that you may not see, is not what your religion says, in particular -- although most likely, you believe in some pretty horrible things, like stoning adulterers or killing the children of your enemies or hating homosexuals or Jews or not touching menstruating women or having as many babies as possible. And if you don't it's probably only because you've decided which parts of God's word are good enough for you, and which parts aren't to be taken seriously, since they bother you personally, and that they can therefore be considered to have been mistakes on His part.
The problem is not what your religion tells you to believe, but how it tells you to believe -- that is, it tells you that you can -- no – must believe in the absence of the type of evidence that you're used to demanding out of life. In fact, your salvation depends on believing without evidence -- skepticism will actually damn you to hell for all eternity.
You: "Well, it looks like a dog and it barks."
Your Religion: "It's a cat."
You: "Are you sure? I think it's a dog."
Your Religion: "Do you want to burn for all eternity, smarty-pants?"
You: "Oh, right. It's a cat."
Now, let's not get into the fact that this is really, really
Undignified the fact that, if humans are different from, say, squid in any meaningful way (thinking-wise) it's in our capacity to think abstractly enough to perform complicated logical comparison and deductions. But you're going to chuck out what makes you human. That's fine. Whatever.
And let's not get into the fact that all the crappy stuff religion tells you is pretty crappy, or that it's all internally contradictory, or that most people aren't very meek or poor or any of those things, in spite of what their particular Book says.
The point is that you believe it's a cat now. So what? Well, the 'so what' isn't that you're going to look like an idiot trying to make a golden retriever shit in a box, although you are. The 'so what' is that once you decide that it's OK to believe in the absence of evidence (or in the face of contradictory evidence) you've endorsed two related points of view:
No one in society has any responsibility to anyone else with regards to thinking things through. I believe my car's brakes don't need to be checked, even though I don't know for sure. Here, borrow the keys, you'll probably live. In one grand gesture, you've gotten on board with the idea that there is no such thing as negligence. As long as I believe a thing, even if a cursory look at the facts might convince a reasonable person of the opposite, well, hey, that's my right. It's ethical and reasonable. There's no need to look, no need to think. It's 10 pm, do you know where your children are? Nah, but I believe they're upstairs, and I don't have any responsibility as a parent to check.
No belief can be judged against any other. You believe that God tells you to love, I believe He tells me to fly a hot air balloon around the world. You'd like to tell me that I'm wrong, but you can't, because argument is about verifiable facts, or chains of facts, deduced logically from one another or derived directly from experience. By getting on board with faith, you've rejected argument as a meaningful activity, and rejected thinking critically altogether. You can no longer critically consider or compare ideas, since you believe that it's OK to have faith in spite of critical evidence. Got an argument against genital mutilation? Who cares -- you've already come out on the side of belief in the face of contradictory evidence. I agree. Where's my knife? Everything's OK with you, once you decide that you don't need to believe your eyes or your brain.
So there it is. I don't care if God tells you to suffer the little children, or feed the poor. If that's the only reason you've got for doing those things, you're a shitty person, and your beliefs do more harm than good. Your existence and your attitude demean you, and, much worse, help weaken two of the most important quantities in any society: our ability to trust that other people are telling us the truth and being responsible in their statements and thoughts, and our capacity as a society to look for answers using our brains and our capacities to reason from evidence. Those are all we've got, and once they're gone, society isn't doing anyone any good, since you can't trust its members to be responsible, and you can't rely on reason to dictate your course of actions.
And you, by tolerating religion, have taken a big fat dump on both of these commodities.
That said, every religion is fundamentalism.
It's worth pointing out at this point that a lot of what you hear about how the problem is 'fundamentalism' is bullshit. When people say this, they seem to be talking about something like XXXXTreeeeeme religion, that says completely crazy things.
The problem, as I've mentioned above, is that once you accept religion, in the sense that you've decided to tolerate (or even embrace) beliefs in the absence of justifying evidence, you've no longer got any rational or ethical basis for judging one doctrine against another. You've decided to take part in an occasionally comforting dance in which reason and evidence can't be used to judge ideas, and once you've done that, you've got no ground on which to judge anything to be 'fundamentalism', and even if you did, you'd have no grounds to judge that it was a bad idea, and even if you could say that it was a bad idea, you'd have no grounds on which to say that it can't be tolerated, since you've already decided that a rational case against an idea should not prevent you from believing it.
Here's how the discussion goes:
Me: "My book says that women who learn to read should be stoned to death."
You: "That's barbaric! It's bad for women, who have natural rights guaranteed by my constitution! It's unfair! It's cruel! Think about it!"
Me: "So what? You believe that Moses talked to an invisible man in space through a burning bush, and you're telling me that I can't believe what
I want because it doesn't make sense? Who are you to tell me I'm nuts?
Go to hell, infidel."
The only thing fundamentalist about fundamentalism is that what these people (whoever you decide is a fundamentalist) believe requires that they ignore the evidence of their senses and suspend their ability to reason -- it's not double-think, it's willful ignorance. And if you're a religious person, any religion at all that requires faith in the absence of evidence, you do this too. You have everything that's important in common with every other religious person in the world -- you believe what you want in spite of evidence for or against your case.
You are a fundamentalist.
To sum up.
To paraphrase someone who thinks about these things for a living, your immediate reaction to the assertion that your faith is unethical is something along the lines of, "No it's not. Some people's are, because they make you mean, but mine's about being nice." Your religion doesn't tell these maniacs what to believe. In the end, however, that doesn't matter, because your religion, like all others, does tell maniacs how to believe. It tells them -- you tell them, every time you do it, every time you tolerate it -- that it's OK to ignore evidence, it's OK not to exercise your capacity for logical deduction.
So the next time someone blows up a building, or shoots an abortion doctor, or prevents young girls from learning to read, in the name of
God, I hope that you won't get too self-righteous about it. In fact, you and they are peas in a pod. You enable this person to do what they do.
You promote in society a tolerance and understanding for this behavior.
Your failure is their failure. Your willing ignorance is their excuse.
Your desecration of society's respect for the truth, for our responsibility to be intellectually diligent, for judging what might be true against what we can discern with our senses to be true, your faith is the exact same thing that makes what they do OK. Your guilty pleasure, your insistence on ignoring what your senses and your intellect tell you removes you and helps remove society from any position in which it is sensible to pass moral judgment on anyone else for believing in the absence of evidence, and then acting on these beliefs, however loony, because you do precisely the same thing they do.
Your religion is everyone's religion, because you've rejected the validity of rationally judging ideas on the basis of our senses and minds. You do it. You OK it. You bring it on. Thanks a lot.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Intelligent design
Times of India news:
Dover School Board votes to include intelligent design into school curriculum.
I do not know much about the theory of intelligent design , neither did I waste any time trying to learn about it. I never read about theory of evolution after school. At that time I felt that this theory is quite sketchy at least the way it was taught to in those horrible books by even more horrible teachers in our rural school (One day our biology teacher told us that plants don’t need oxygen to breathe, they breathe corbon-di-oxide! I disagreed and so he threw me out of his class and told me that I can attend his class again if I can prove what I said. I did that the next day and was able to hear his invaluable lectures again. I asked another science teacher what is the substance in ashes. He said it is carbon. I asked then why doesn’t it get burned like the rest of it. No answer). I want to read about I sometime in the future. But right now my knowledge is very limited. Then why am I opening my big mouth about this controversy about which so many PhD’s have given their opinion? I have a few points to make.
Dover school board members, who voted intelligent design into the school curriculum, said that they are not trying to promote religion. They want to promote free inquiry into an alternate theory. Fair enough. That is exactly what scientists want to do. They are also not claiming that the intelligent designer is God. According to their own testimony, all of them are deeply religious. So it can be safely assumed that they believe in the existence of God. So that leaves us with a creator and an intelligent designer for this universe. Being an IT slave, it seems me like a designer and a coder (God!). What a fantastic idea. It only lacks the analyst and the tester.
It is so obvious that the members are lying that we don’t even need to prove it, especially since this blog is a not a court of law. That leads me to my second point. The intelligent designer, who designed these school board members, wanted them to lie to spread this theory! I ask these board members do you really want to promote your God by lying, is your God so powerless. And if he has so little power is it worth worshipping him?
To those who want to undermine science and promote faith, I want to make an appeal. Think what science has done for you. Next time you turn on your light or make a phone call, imagine that these things were made possible because people refused to surrender to faith and dared to ask questions. They faced torture, they were killed, they burnt alive by people like you, but they refused to give up. They did not want money, women (most of them were men!), earthly pleasure; they wanted to conquer ignorance and fear. Most of them were did not want people to recognize them, but they did want people to recognize their goal, to know the truth and to dispel fear. Science does not promote hatred, it does not incite violence, and it does not provoke war. Science promotes freedom (freedom from fear, freedom from hunger, freedom from whims of the natures), it promotes justice, it promotes equality and it promotes happiness. Even after knowing all these simple things people choose to promote faith instead of science, I don’t know what to say to their designer or their coder. May be science should work a little harder to create tools that will make them understand this simple fact.
Dover School Board votes to include intelligent design into school curriculum.
I do not know much about the theory of intelligent design , neither did I waste any time trying to learn about it. I never read about theory of evolution after school. At that time I felt that this theory is quite sketchy at least the way it was taught to in those horrible books by even more horrible teachers in our rural school (One day our biology teacher told us that plants don’t need oxygen to breathe, they breathe corbon-di-oxide! I disagreed and so he threw me out of his class and told me that I can attend his class again if I can prove what I said. I did that the next day and was able to hear his invaluable lectures again. I asked another science teacher what is the substance in ashes. He said it is carbon. I asked then why doesn’t it get burned like the rest of it. No answer). I want to read about I sometime in the future. But right now my knowledge is very limited. Then why am I opening my big mouth about this controversy about which so many PhD’s have given their opinion? I have a few points to make.
Dover school board members, who voted intelligent design into the school curriculum, said that they are not trying to promote religion. They want to promote free inquiry into an alternate theory. Fair enough. That is exactly what scientists want to do. They are also not claiming that the intelligent designer is God. According to their own testimony, all of them are deeply religious. So it can be safely assumed that they believe in the existence of God. So that leaves us with a creator and an intelligent designer for this universe. Being an IT slave, it seems me like a designer and a coder (God!). What a fantastic idea. It only lacks the analyst and the tester.
It is so obvious that the members are lying that we don’t even need to prove it, especially since this blog is a not a court of law. That leads me to my second point. The intelligent designer, who designed these school board members, wanted them to lie to spread this theory! I ask these board members do you really want to promote your God by lying, is your God so powerless. And if he has so little power is it worth worshipping him?
To those who want to undermine science and promote faith, I want to make an appeal. Think what science has done for you. Next time you turn on your light or make a phone call, imagine that these things were made possible because people refused to surrender to faith and dared to ask questions. They faced torture, they were killed, they burnt alive by people like you, but they refused to give up. They did not want money, women (most of them were men!), earthly pleasure; they wanted to conquer ignorance and fear. Most of them were did not want people to recognize them, but they did want people to recognize their goal, to know the truth and to dispel fear. Science does not promote hatred, it does not incite violence, and it does not provoke war. Science promotes freedom (freedom from fear, freedom from hunger, freedom from whims of the natures), it promotes justice, it promotes equality and it promotes happiness. Even after knowing all these simple things people choose to promote faith instead of science, I don’t know what to say to their designer or their coder. May be science should work a little harder to create tools that will make them understand this simple fact.
Friday, November 11, 2005
My correspondence with Paul Davies
The attached paper by me deals with precisely this issue. It was recently published in the journal Complexity.
PD
>>> 05/11/05 9:51 PM >>>
I am not a scientist or a scholar, just an inquisitive man who likes to ask questions and know new things. I enjoy reading your books because they seem to answer my unasked questions, at least try to answer. I have a question. Please do not hesitate to ignore this email if you are busy doing something important. My question can wait.
From your book "The Mind of God" it seems to me that you subscribe to the idea that our mathematical model describing the universe works the way it works because the physical world allows it to work that way. I do not know why (probably influenced by your book), but I also like to think that way. It seems wired to me that mathematics should have an independent existence. After all it is only in our brain where mathematics works and our brain is very much dependent on the physical world.
So it seems to me, as you suggested in your book, that our counting system works because we have discrete countable objects to begin with. A natural consequence of our counting theory is the process of exponentiation and this particular mathematical tool works so well with many things that we do. But it does lead us to absurd numbers with no physical significance. For example a number like 9 to the power 9 to the power 9 to the power 9 can hardly have any physical significance, yet they look perfectly normal, even innocuous to us. Is there a contradiction here? If so, where can I find more material that deal with this issue in greater detail, accessible to a man with limited knowledge of physics and mathematics?
Regards,
Subhendu
PD
>>>
I am not a scientist or a scholar, just an inquisitive man who likes to ask questions and know new things. I enjoy reading your books because they seem to answer my unasked questions, at least try to answer. I have a question. Please do not hesitate to ignore this email if you are busy doing something important. My question can wait.
From your book "The Mind of God" it seems to me that you subscribe to the idea that our mathematical model describing the universe works the way it works because the physical world allows it to work that way. I do not know why (probably influenced by your book), but I also like to think that way. It seems wired to me that mathematics should have an independent existence. After all it is only in our brain where mathematics works and our brain is very much dependent on the physical world.
So it seems to me, as you suggested in your book, that our counting system works because we have discrete countable objects to begin with. A natural consequence of our counting theory is the process of exponentiation and this particular mathematical tool works so well with many things that we do. But it does lead us to absurd numbers with no physical significance. For example a number like 9 to the power 9 to the power 9 to the power 9 can hardly have any physical significance, yet they look perfectly normal, even innocuous to us. Is there a contradiction here? If so, where can I find more material that deal with this issue in greater detail, accessible to a man with limited knowledge of physics and mathematics?
Regards,
Subhendu
Pleasure
I was travelling through the Sahyadri Mountain and I was awestruck by the beauty of the mountains. I was thinking what makes a thing beautiful. Sometimes symmetry makes something beautiful. For example, the geometric design of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London makes it beautiful. But in case of mountain that is not true. It is also not true that just because it is different from my everyday sights, I tend to like it. Because on my way I saw many places that are different from my everyday places. I did not find them beautiful.
If we take it a step forward, we may ask the question what is pleasure. Why certain things like listening to music or having an orgasm are so pleasurable. What electro-chemical reactions take place inside our brain so that we feel pleasure? If we can precisely find what which reactions are pleasurable, we may be able to recreate those reactions in our brain artificially and hence can have those pleasures without actually doing the activities. That way we can get rid of most of the human sufferings. For example, I assume Hitler used to get a lot of pleasure by killing the Jews. But that was not funny for the Jews. If we could artificially simulate that pleasure in Hitler’s brain, then he did not have to kill the Jews! Now science has already found ways to have children without committing the ‘original sin’. Then we can even get the pleasure of orgasm without doing the ‘sin thing’. That way we can all go to heaven and have two fathers together, earthly and heavenly.
If we take it a step forward, we may ask the question what is pleasure. Why certain things like listening to music or having an orgasm are so pleasurable. What electro-chemical reactions take place inside our brain so that we feel pleasure? If we can precisely find what which reactions are pleasurable, we may be able to recreate those reactions in our brain artificially and hence can have those pleasures without actually doing the activities. That way we can get rid of most of the human sufferings. For example, I assume Hitler used to get a lot of pleasure by killing the Jews. But that was not funny for the Jews. If we could artificially simulate that pleasure in Hitler’s brain, then he did not have to kill the Jews! Now science has already found ways to have children without committing the ‘original sin’. Then we can even get the pleasure of orgasm without doing the ‘sin thing’. That way we can all go to heaven and have two fathers together, earthly and heavenly.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
About time
Of all the measurable quantities, time is probably the most abstract. Yet it is one of the fundamental quantities, like space and mass. The measurment of time would not be possible without periodic events. We measure time as a mapping from a set of periodic events to integers. As for example in Gregorian calendar, we map the event "sunrise on the day Jesus Christ was born on a particular longitude" to the integer 0, and each next sunrise at the same longitude as the successive integer. We then extrapolate this to the prior events as negative integers. Two interesting points are to be noted here. First, we take the biggest set of periodic events which repeat at the same rate and measure time according to their intervals. For example if we have 20 clocks, of them 15 are running at the same rate, then we assume that their intervals are even and the other clocks are "slow" or "fast". But we could as well choose the other 5 clocks as "good" and the rest 15 as "bad" without affecting any measurement.
Another interesting point to be noted is, initially time was mapped from discrete events to integers. Then we started to break them down to "fraction of an event", for example half a day, thereby mapping them to rational numbers. Then we extrapolated in to the extreme, to real number. In physics, when we think of time as a variable, we think of it as a continuos variable of a real number.
Another interesting point to be noted is, initially time was mapped from discrete events to integers. Then we started to break them down to "fraction of an event", for example half a day, thereby mapping them to rational numbers. Then we extrapolated in to the extreme, to real number. In physics, when we think of time as a variable, we think of it as a continuos variable of a real number.
A thought from 21 July, 2001
Last night I was watching a Playboy Playmate profile featuring a gorgeous twin from Peru. Man they were beautiful! They drove me crazy. Then came their mom for an interview. She was saying how proud she was for her daughters. I was thinking she can't be serious. Who will be proud of her daughter who takes off her clothes for money? Then I thought why not? If her daughters were singers or chess players, she would definitely feel proud of them. But that's exactly the same thing. Using your god given talent to entertain others. May be a singer or a chess player hones his talent a little. For some like Mozart, even that was not necessary. But so did these two girls. They kept their bodies trim and their beauty intact. So what's wrong in showing something so beautiful? It is our social stigma against sex which makes us think differently. In my opinion that stigma originated because we feel guilty to get so much of pleasure.
Opening remarks
So finally I opened an account! The main purpose of this blog is to record the flash ideas that I get from time to time. The other purpose is to express my outrage against irrationalism and pretentiousness. Yet another reason for this page is to post questions that keep vexing me, hoping that someone will answer them. So let me start with the last one first. Here is a question that is bothering me for last few weeks. If you know the answer, please let me know.
There are two iron platforms A and B. B is moving to the right along A with velocity v. Two events happen on two different places of the platforms that leave permanent marks on both platforms and send sound signals along the iron platforms. The marks on platform A are X and Y and marks on platform B are P and Q. Observers L on platform A and M on platform B monitor the events. L finds that he is exactly at the midpoint between X and Y. Also L received the sound signals from X and Y simultaneously. M finds that he is exactly at the mid point between P and Q. My questions are as follows.
Why shouldn’t M find the events at P and Q simultaneous, since the speed of sound is constant through iron and since M is stationary with respect to the iron media carrying on the sound signal?
There are two iron platforms A and B. B is moving to the right along A with velocity v. Two events happen on two different places of the platforms that leave permanent marks on both platforms and send sound signals along the iron platforms. The marks on platform A are X and Y and marks on platform B are P and Q. Observers L on platform A and M on platform B monitor the events. L finds that he is exactly at the midpoint between X and Y. Also L received the sound signals from X and Y simultaneously. M finds that he is exactly at the mid point between P and Q. My questions are as follows.
Why shouldn’t M find the events at P and Q simultaneous, since the speed of sound is constant through iron and since M is stationary with respect to the iron media carrying on the sound signal?
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