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Archive for November, 2006

Rational Rose

November 29, 2006 edwinhere Leave a comment

I’ve been trying for some time to reason my way out the crush I had on Miss X. And I found my perfect reason: She is trying delegate the guilt of rejection to her parents. TADA! Actually I didn’t arrive at this belief myself. Monica helped me out.

Damn! the mind is like a Gordian Knot and you got to untie it without cutting it open. Mm…

In related news, a study just published in Evolution and Human Behavior by Sarah Hill, a psychologist at the University of Texas, Austin, show, and many women will attest, men tend to misinterpret innocent friendliness as a sign that women are sexually interested in them. The researchers reasoned that men who are trying to decide if a woman is interested sexually can err in one of two ways. They can mistakenly believe that she is not interested, in which case they will not bother trying to have sex with her; or they can mistakenly believe she is interested, try, and be rejected. From an evolutionary standpoint, trying and being rejected comes at little cost, except for hurt feelings. Not trying at all, by contrast, may mean the loss of an opportunity to, among other things, spread one’s DNA.

There is an opposite bias in women’s errors. They tend to undervalue signs that a man is interested in a committed relationship. That, the idea goes, is because a woman who guesses wrongly that a man intends to stick around could end up raising a child alone.

I guess that explains a lot of things that have been happening around in my life.

Categories: mind, my life

RE: More on Duality

November 28, 2006 edwinhere Leave a comment

[This is my comment to a post in a friend's blog. It was too long to be a comment so it is here.]

First, Let me tell you my assumption about what you mean by duality: The ability/tendency to differentiate between good and bad, the better and worser in everything. In more general words:

In a given domain of knowledge, dualism involves the existence of two fundamental principles (or concepts), often in opposition to each other. What precisely ‘dualism’ then entails depends on the context.

If I am right about your concept of dualism, read on..

Yes.. like you so eloquently put, good and bad (or benign & malign etc.) are illusions, they don’t exist outside our minds. But there is a purpose for these dualistic biases. But before I goto purpose please bear with the next 4 paragraphs of gibberish: (a.k.a the blind man’s view of the “elephant”)

The Elephant Is very like a rope!
Mankind’s neural nets are functionally similar because they spawn out of the same primordial neuron spawning stem cells in the embryo which are 98% similar to every other embryo’s neuron spawner s. Combine that with what you said about how each neuron and more complex neural networks act as classifiers: That could explain why the society has a general consensus on morality & preferences which leads to the illusions of economics & politics.

In fact just like how high-school biology is the act of knowing the facades of what makes life tick, economics & political science are just facades of dualistic classification in the neural levels.

While thinking about the “illusion of absolute duality” I am also reminded of an analogous phenomena called optical illusions: an optical illusion is not interesting simply because it causes everyone to make a mistake; rather, it is interesting because it causes everyone to make the same mistake. If I saw a chalice, you saw Elvis, and a friend of ours saw a paper carton of moo goo gai pan, then the object we were looking at would be a very fine inkblot but a lousy optical illusion. What is so compelling about optical illusions is that everyone sees the chalice first, the faces next, and then—flicker flicker—there’s that chalice again. The errors that optical illusions induce in our perceptions are lawful, regular, and systematic. There is a general consensus in the different ways the optical illusion appears to the people. They are not dumb mistakes but smart mistakes—mistakes that allow those who understand them to glimpse the elegant design and inner workings of the visual system.

In the same way, the illusion of dualism makes us reach a consensus in society on common things life like morality… although they are of no significance outside our minds, and outside the social framework. Of course, certain groups of similar people with different dualistic ideas exist… but their ideas vary in very negligible fashion. And these groups of people fight.. (e.g. religious conflicts) but that is normal.

– Blah Blah ends here. –
OK. Enough of dry polysyllables. So why do we have the illusion that there is good and evil outside our minds? Why is there a general consensus (as mentioned in the previous paragraph) about the dualistic concepts? There is only one answer I see fit: “survival”.

I hope you already know that survival-of-the-fittest is the only solution to many problems in the absence of a governing intelligence. I also hope that I don’t have to remind you that game theorists, evolutionary biologists & political scientists have mathematical proofs to the fact that altruistic “GOOD” traits aid survival in competition. This reality about our existence deludes us into thinking that GOOD & BAD (and other dualistic concepts) are absolute & universal.

Life is, among other things, a process that resists anything that negatively affects its sustenance so that it can transmit digitally encoded information called genes through time. i.e. A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg. A life-form is better at the life if it can survive longer. In other words, survival is the only absolute “good” and death the absolute “bad”.

HENCE, I like to think that people tend to think in a dualistic fashion – always classifying things into 2 opposing entities/ideas of which one is preferred because “EVOLUTION” wants us to do it that way so that we choose the better option and hence survive.

(Digression: Which is the reason why I like to fantasize that a superior intelligence deliberately messed with our ancestors and taught them about non-existent Gods, religious laws that crudely re- enforces altruistic traits of evolving humans, so that we make it till the advent of self-augmenting, self-immortalizing technology and the advent of people like Richard Dawkins who would free us from the delusions that took us here in the first place without destroying ourselves.)

What next…?
So what next? Like you said, do we have to, in some way, break(augment, gradate) out of dualism, the intrinsic need of our minds to classify, and see things as a whole instead of good and bad? Should we keep deluding ourselves? Has evolution run out of tricks? Can we keep ourselves alive by applying reason instead of blindly abiding by altruistic prescriptions of evolution, economists & religious leaders?

Well… I don’t know. The answers are debatable.

Categories: Uncategorized

Why I like her…

November 25, 2006 edwinhere 2 comments

There has been some “controlled” publicity to the fact that I’m still having a crush on someone I met long before. Contrary to what my close relatives and friends have to say about this, I don’t think that it is just a “crush”. I have reasons.

But before that, I have to let you know something which has been a secret until now. Please bear with me as I elaborate:

I have always known that me and my Dad are losers. Losers; as in people who always do the wrong thing and embarrass themselves. But what I hated about people I knew (my mom especially) is that they strived to “demostrate” to us that we were good for nothing. My mom used to tell me: “Don’t be like you Dad!” when I do something that the people don’t like. Here is the little secret I want to let you know: I don’t want anyone telling me or implicating the idea that I’m a predisposed loser because I know that… I know fully what I am, and how bad I am at it.

But I met this girl, lets call her Miss X, and she never talked down to me. Miss X never tried to prove that I was a loser, like everyone else did. She just tried to be very formal and female… Female; as in being humble and bold only when necessary. Although I started liking her I thought it premature for my age and hoped that it would wear out.

Those feelings were under control & a big secret for a long time, until recently, when my friends and I finished our diploma and got jobs. Suddenly, everyone who I used to talk to and hang out with left to work in different companies. I was lonely in my cubicle with neigbouring cubicles filled with 50 year old PhD professors who just thought about office politics had never heard of anything new or hip. My employers hadn’t yet figured out what to do with me so I asked them to let me sit with the interns so that I could feel more at home with the young people and they agreed. But the junior interns were too busy with work and few in number (because they were from December batch) and everything started to get boring.

I tried exercise, blogging, reading wikipedia, solving the rubik’s cube etc. But those things wouldn’t cure my lonliness. I started clinging on to old memories and started having reveries about Miss X, whom I could not forget. And when the obsession started getting out of control… I couldn’t kill it. So I emailed her hoping to get rejected(more probable) or accepted by her and there by free -ing me from a longing for reciprocation. I was not afraid of the distress which would accompany me if she rejected me because I believed that irrevocableness was conducive to the synthesis of happiness. I also believed that although some permanent situations were definitely prefered to others, nothing deserved to pursued with an ardour that would kill the future tranquility of my feeble mind.

But when I got the reply from Miss X, I figured out that she had drafted an extremely diplomatic reply: “I will basically follow only what my parents say and dont intend to involve in any relationships.”. Although that sounded like a rejection, many Hindi film fans I know think different. They think that I should try talking to her parents because she could have said : “I don’t indend to involve in any relationships with you” – but she didn’t. I don’t think life is like a hindi movie and I don’t want people to forecast my future like one. But these hindi film fans have raised my hopes once again.

Adding to the “unecessary” complexity of the problem (is there a problem?) I also know that she drafted her reply within 23 minutes, which is supicious unless she is extremely brilliant OR she is type of person who gets fan mails.

I don’t know what to do. I need a rational & verifiable reason to do what I must do which is not bound by certain social constraints or religious dogma. I am really in a dilemma.

Categories: Uncategorized

Kids say the darndest things

November 23, 2006 edwinhere Leave a comment

I found these bad analogies written by high school students on the internet. My favorites are in italics:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Categories: nonsense

[United States] Police suck…

November 21, 2006 edwinhere 1 comment

Mostafa Tabatabainejad an Iranian American student in UCLA was electrocuted by the cops using a tazer 5 times because he did not have a student ID with him. You can see the video here.

If you listen to the video, after the first electrocution he stopped resisting, the cops on the other hand continued to tazer him because he wouldn’t (in their eyes) stand up despite police protocol being very clear that it can take 10 – 15 minutes for a suspect to get over being tazered.

The second time was questionable, the third, the fourth and the fifth equals them going after him and attacking him. Add in more than one witness being threatened by the cops for filming and or asking their badge number (which by law every cop in the entire country MUST do regardless of who they are and whatever the officers claim)and its quite clear the officers where untrained in a potential riot situation, or where out for blood after the students started questioning their motives and thought that the easiest way to scare of the gathering crowd of 40-60 people would be to torture the suspect in front of them.

US Police sucks! With that said, I must also add that these are bad times for all light-brown colored people [like me]. Actually incidents like these involving police happen everywhere.

I have always been a victim of “random” checks by the Singapore police.. may be because, I look like an Afghan. That is OK with me… because these men are doing it for the greater good of mankind. The problem happens when you forget to take your ID with you, and you didn’t shave your 3-day beard (that makes me look like a fucking terrorist!). To add to the irony, most policemen are ex- high school bullies. They are not just good at being bullies but they were born for this. I mean.. think of it.. What else could a bully want other than a licence to bully people? It is like having kryptonite! So these policemen try to intimidate me hoping that I would retaliate..

Fortunately for me… I’ve been brainwashed by nonsensical doctrines of my faith. Christianity is an interesting religion in that if you adhere to it “fully” for 15 years.. you will end up being a loser all your life i.e. You will prefer subjection to authority, self-deprication to self-exaltation, nerdiness to hunkiness, introversion to extroversion, foolish hope to self-reliance etc and everything else that would make you inferior from an evolutionary standpoint. [BTW, most of the so-called christians unlike me are just pretending to be people of faith so that they get best of the both worlds, see this]

Where was I?.. OK so when the police intimidated me I did not retaliate. I just subjected myself to their authority.

  • [Initial questioning]
  • Police: [In a suspicious tone] Why do look like you are afraid? What are you hiding?
  • Me: I don’t know what I am afraid of.
  • Police: Where do you live?
  • Me: [I am stading near the Block 322] I live in this block [points fingers to the building and says] – #04-154, Block 322.
  • Police: No you are lying! This is not Block 322!
  • [Policemen looks around and sees the signboard that tells him it is indeed Block 322]
  • Me: [empathetically] Yes it is Block 322!
  • [I try to get a look at his badge, so that I can file a complaint.]
  • Police: [In an angry tone] Hey! Hey! Look at me in the eyes when you answer to me! What is your religion? Where are you from?
  • Me: I am from India. My FIN is [FIN number].
  • [The police go to their car and cross checks the number with their database and lets me go].

In case you are wondering why I prefer step-motherlands to my motherland after all these experiences… I should tell you that, I’ve had many worser experiences in my motherf****ingland. But more on that in my future posts.

Categories: Uncategorized

So many things happening

November 20, 2006 edwinhere Leave a comment


It is getting very christmassy here. Orchard Road is unbelievable, the highest Christmas tree is about 3 floors high and it is indoor.

In other news, the secret Santa of Kansas city has revealed his identity: Larry Stewart. He is a 58 – year old cancer patient who made millions in the cable-TV and long distance telephony. He started giving money to randomly selected people on the street since the Christmas of 1979. You can read about him here.

This is to all those people who told me money can’t buy you happiness: BZZZ! TADA! Money CAN buy you happiness! Muwahaha!

Categories: my life, philosophy

What evidence should God give?

November 17, 2006 edwinhere Leave a comment

The unshaken ideological fanaticism shown by atheists would have been an unshaken faith in God if Jesus had left some evidence for his Godliness. Although atheists are the minority, I’m sure Jesus would leave the flock to get the lost sheep.

I’ve been thinking about the type of evidence Jesus could have given so he could simultaneously achieve his mission objectives (i.e. dying for our sins, making people repent for their sins.) and give evidence for the people of today.

One of the primary justifications for NOT doing any mega- miracles in his time is that, if all people really start to think he is God, then they would not crucify him, which means he would not be able to die for sinners or make people repent for their sins.

But my feeble intellect tells me that evidences for Jesus’ godliness could have been given in such a way that he would still die for our sins AND leave evidence for post-renaissance atheists. Here are my humble suggestions:

He could have taught a second prayer to his disciples: a sequence of 30 numbers in their native language, which represent the 30 digits following the trillionth digit of the decimal expansion of pi. He could have commanded them not to change a single number in the prayer because this will be evidence for future generations of his godliness, and ask the prayer to be taught as a meme through the generations. He could have also added lines to the prayer in their native language about how this sequence of numbers would make sense when the circumference of a circle is divided by the diameter. And add another clause, something similar to Revelations 13:18: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the circle using circumference & diameter, the number is [the digits go here] “

Although I am not sure how efficient & noiseless would the transmission of this meme be through the generations, I am sure most of the native languages of his time (Bronze Age) had easily translatable words for the ten digits of base ten number system, words for circle, circumference & diameter.

I am also sure that just like how the Book of Revelations 11:10, predicted the future of mass media, Jesus could have foreseen the computers of today which are capable of calculating the trillionth digit of pi.

So why didn’t Jesus give a verifiable evidence in his time similar to mine, or something more better at turning the fanatic unbelievers of today into believers?

I am no pot to ask the potter the reasons for his choices but somehow “God works in mysterious ways” doesn’t sound logical to me here.

Anyway, I think that is what faith is all about. To have faith means to deny logic & reason, to deny the very same things that make us human. To have faith means to use logic & reason in explaining only the the things that are resonant with our inner beliefs about the universe.

Categories: faith

Dramatic Nightmare

November 17, 2006 edwinhere Leave a comment

I had the most dramatic nightmare today. It was apocalypse, and all mankind were going to drown in the rising waters. But a boat quickly came to the harbor, and there was a woman in it who would let people in if they answer a question. Those who got the answer wrong were decapitated by swinging a wrecking ball onto their heads.

But fortunately, me and my family – (mom, dad, bro, another girl & lots of crew) had a space rocket and we flew to the moon. We made a colony and I showed my brother tiny flashes of light on the lunar horizon. I explained to him that those lights were because of the meteorite rain making electrostatic discharges when colliding with the lunar rocks. The moon was not a pretty place to live, but it kept us alive.

All of us went to sleep. But I couldn’t sleep thinking about everything that had happened that day. Suddenly, I saw red light spot on the bedroom wall, presumably made by a LED laser. I quickly realized that someone was taking an aim at me with some kind of a gun. But then I found
that it was gun underneath my bed and the aimer was turned on and that was making those red spots on the wall. The gun was really cool… it was the best gun I’ve ever seen. I tried aiming and taking a shot.

The next day, the usual chit-chat started becoming a heated argument. All I remember is the girl talking something about her wanting to leave the colony, and exploring into deep space.. hoping to find another place to live.

Categories: Uncategorized

Keep out of reach of adults

November 16, 2006 edwinhere Leave a comment

Kids are tired of hearing adults say, “Why don’t you just try it? You can’t know you don’t like something unless you try it.”

Yes, they are tired of it.

I know the only known defense to the “try it” position. It’s guaranteed to work. And it goes like this:

  • ANNOYING PARENT:“Why won’t you try these peas? You can’t know you don’t like something until you try it.”
  • KID: “Why don’t you go out to the back yard, find a nice frozen dog turd and use it as a Popsicle? You can’t know you don’t like it unless you try it. Unless you would be willing to admit that there are some things you DO know you don’t like before you try them.”

Next week I’ll teach you how to spend all your free time playing video games and not taking out the garbage. If you feel that you love me now, you can call me Uncle Ed.

Categories: nonsense

KFC Company Logo from Space

November 15, 2006 edwinhere 1 comment

KFC recently built a large Colonel logo near Area 51 which can be seem from Google Earth. Actually, this is not such a bad idea; when the paranoids and UFO watchers check satellite shots of Area 51 they’ll see the KFC ad, and notice they’re hungry. Actually, Area 51 is probably near the top of the list of places people plug into Google Earth, so a lot of people are likely to see this.

Billboard on busy highway during rush hour, $5,000
Television ad during Superbowl, $1,200,000
Getting your logo on Google for free, Priceless

Categories: Uncategorized