Church Visit

I had gone to the newly rebuilt airconditioned Church of the Holy Cross last Sunday at Clementi Avenue 1 for the evening mass. I walked in during a sermon in which the priest rebuked my fellow parishioners a lot for the way the attend the mass. I don’t remember everything, but he did comment on the following points:

• Dresscode: The engineer of the 156 billion light year wide universe cares a lot about what fraction of a tiny dot are covered from direct exposure to light. And he(?) is annoyed when it is not covered enough.
• Ayemen vs Ahmen: He(?) who knows the theory of everything and all of its predictions doesn’t understand wrong pronunciations and western accents.
• No one shouldn’t leave the church before the last hymn by the choir is finished:  Distances matter, even for an omnipresent being.

The rest of the mass was funny too. I liked the part where the celebrant asked us to raise up our hands, which I thought where purely arbitrary. I could imagine (like HG2G) a church in another part of the universe where they would raise their legs to point perpendicular to axial plane of rotation of their planet.

Update at Jun 1 3:43 PM: Christians who disagree with this post please check out 1 Samuel 16:7. This verse flashed into my memory when I was commenting on a couple of blogs.

Cube

This philosophical teleplay covers many themes such as, the nature of reality, individual versus scientific perception, self-reference, man’s relation to others and society, insanity, social projections, and race relations. It originally aired on NBC’s weekly anthology television show NBC Experiment in Television February 23, 1969. The production was produced and directed by Jim Henson, and was one of several experiments with the live-action film medium which he conducted in the 1960s, before focusing entirely on the Muppets and other puppet works. The screenplay was co-written by long-time Muppet writer Jerry Juhl (who also appears in a cameo). If you are interested, here is a yahoo group devoted to this film: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JImHensonTheCube/

more about “Cube“, posted with vodpod

Cartman Preaching

Cartman preaches like a child preaccher I saw on youtube. Very funny.

more about "Cartman Preaching", posted with vodpod

Spam Conspiracy Theory

Ever wondered why there is no spam in your Gmail inbox? It is because Big Google hires spammers to send specially designed spam that can be easily be resisted by GMail spam filters. They have prior knowledge of what kind of spam to expect.

Other web mail providers do not have such privileged information and will end up having less efficient spam filters and more spam.

Gradually customers will tend move from web mail services with more spam to services with less spam. And Google gets more customers to click on their ads. Profit!

Not so evil huh?

(I made up this shit. So if you choose to believe; May Occam’s Razor smite you down!)

ലിനക്സ് -ഇലെ യൂണികോഡ് ചെത്തായി!

ലിനക്സ് ഉപയോഗിക്കാന്‍ തുടങ്ങിയോടുകൂടി മലയാളത്തില്‍ എഴുതാന്‍ എളുപ്പമായി. യൂണികോഡ് -ഇല്‍ ഇപ്പോള്‍ കൂടുതല്‍ നന്നായി മലയാളം എഴുതാന്‍ സാധിക്കുനുണ്ട്. അതോ ചില്ലപ്പോ ഇതു ലിനക്സ് ചെയുന്ന വെല്ല പോസ്റ്റ് രേന്ടെരിംഗ് ആയിരിക്കും.

എന്തായിലും ഫോണ്ട് ഇന്സ്റ്റാള് ചെയ്യേണ്ടി വന്നില്ല. വിസ്റ്റ യിലും ഇതു തന്നെ. മാക് -ഇല്‍ മാത്രം ഇപ്പോഴും മലയാളം ശേരിയല്ല. ലെഒപര്ദ് ചില്ലപ്പോള്‍ എല്ലാം ശേരിയാക്കി കാണും.

I know a great shortcut through the Carbon Cycle

I like to think private transportation will become a luxury by next year at 10$ a gallon in the US. Blame it on the weakened USD or whatever, but it is undeniable that we are running out of oil. Oil is the fruit of the > 90% efficient hard-labour by plants and microorganisms which have been storing solar energy for billions of years just for spending it on the last 200 years of renaissance of our species. Everything we do from electricity, transportation, google, linux, medicines, textiles to plastics depend on oil.

Academic people are busy pretending to do science that gets them a PhD. Did you know that, biologists never wanted to publish 6 million genes in one article of Science? They still don’t. They love to brood over discovery a little bit by bit, making it happen at astonishingly slow rates. Being here at the centre of it all, I can say is that I don’t see any breakthroughs that really matters. People who dream like  Dr. George Church and Dr. Craig Venter are considered unmatchable in audacity.

A harvard professor recently bragged to me about how his student (from Computational Biology) got a fellowship at some Ivy League after he got an A at a level 5 (PhD level) module he took as part of an exchange program. It is all about prestige. Nobody cares about solving problems faced by our species. 

Add to this the massive rise of misinformation and superstition. Time wasted defending existing thesises. Government grant cuts and restrictions where real money & freedom is needed.

If it were not for the above listed problems I would be happily hacking away in a FOSS project. But the incompetence of humanity (mine included) calls for my contributions to the solution.

Hmm.. Here are my wishes. I want a heme based carbon dioxide sequestration technique that assimilates   faster than the oceans and feed it without storage to symbiotic colony of high yield methanogens and another organism (I havent figured out yet) to make methane from carbon dioxide.

That way we can make the ecology traverse a shortcut through the carbon cycle and supplement our dependence on fossil fuel.

 

Candy Bombers

In 1948, West Berliners were suffering and hungry, existing on food rations transported by trucks, trains and barges primarily by the occupying American forces. The Russians, trying to control the divided city, blockaded the transports on June 24, 1948, and American and British pilots risked their lives to airlift in 4.6 billion pounds of food and supplies until the blockade was lifted in May 1949. Pilot Hal Halvorsen won Berliners’ hearts by secretly dropping his and his buddies’ candy rations by parachute into the waiting hands of the city’s children.

Read The Book

Homeopathic Double Standard

How many of you will be brave enough to use a homeopathic contraceptive (if there was one)? Or perhaps an acupuncture/chiropractic contraceptive (if there was one)? None of you won’t do it even if you believe contraception is ethical. Because you are either pregnant or you are not! ROFL! Nobody can be half pregnant! HAHA!

My case rests.

My favorite Koan

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.
“What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.
“I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe”, Sussman replied.
“Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.
“I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”, Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
“Why do you close your eyes?” Sussman asked his teacher.
“So that the room will be empty.”
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Explanation: Just as the room does not become empty if we close our eyes, a randomly interconnected artificial neural network still has a wiring diagram; it is just that we don’t know about it. A randomly wired artificial neural network is not same as a neural network that dynamically rewires itself.

Randomness is our inability to predict the next outcome. Randomness is a measure of ignorance. The more random a phenomena may appear to you, the more ignorant you are about it.

Probability & Statistical Techniques are ways of acknowledging our ignorance and to use it to observe other predictable patterns in it.

The God Hypothesis is bad because it misleads us into thinking we know something that we do not. It makes us arrogantly escape the need to explain reality in anyway that may be beneficial to our survival. More likely than not, it is always better to know than to believe. It is always better to know there is a lion the cave than to believe there is one in the cave. So I urge all religious people to assume a methodologically naturalistic mentality to explain reality and not to shrug off and say “God did it”.

Lesson Number 93

Quitting while I am ahead is not same as quitting. Thats what I learnt for today. But I’ve got no reason to believe humanity is worth saving. Utopia is impossible. And everyone who wanted it ended up being evil or made evil of the followers.

I am going to wait for a reason to do this. Reminds me of Miss Prym’s story.