Borders of irrationality

This is from a local newspaper North Shore Times:

“ORTHODOX Jews in St Ives could be freed up to leave their homes on the Sabbath and other holy days if a proposal to create a religious zone ringing the suburb is approved by Ku-ring-gai Council.

The Jewish community wants to create the zone, known as an eruv.

Once physically inside this zone, orthodox Jews would be able to do otherwise forbidden activities such as pushing and carrying objects including car keys and tissues.

The plan requires the installation of 27 poles of 6m height and connecting wires.”

Richard Dawkins said "Tradition has its place, but not where factual knowledge is concerned." and continued:

"There are many ways in which people differ from one another by virtue of traditions handed down through the generations, and these are often admirable and worthy of respect. But there is a qualitative difference between a cultural tradition and factual evidence, and we should not feel obliged to respect, or encourage the perpetuation of, beliefs about reality which we know to be untrue, simply because they form part of a tradition, even an ancient tradition. When you put it like that, I find it hard to imagine how any person of goodwill and intelligence could seriously disagree. Yet because it is usually not put like that, there are many people, even non-religious people, who have been duped into confusing the ‘cultural tradition’ side of religion with the ‘statement of facts’ side, and endowing both with the respect due only to one."

But do we need walls, wires to divide the greater society we live in based on irrational belief systems and do we have obligation to respect such nonsense even though they may merely be seem cultural elements of a tradition?

Original news link

About a mouse

I have owned a Mac computer for a year now. My Mac came with a pointing device which Apple called “the mighty mouse”. The most distinctive feature of this device is its trackball’s silky sensitivity. The small trackball on the top moves in all directions and it responds to your fingertip’s faintest movements.

Yet to my sorrow the mighty mouse is far from mighty and it has a miserable design fault. After a short period of normal usage the trackball fails to move your mouse pointer on the screen (usually scrolling down fails).

As I was told by an Apple ‘genius’ later on, apparently the tiny gap around the trackball periphery sucks the smallest dust particles and in time they clog the trackball's gear. Within a month or so the mouse starts to fail in responding your fingertip’s commands. The mighty mouse turns into an ugly ordinary mouse.

The Apple guy whom I saw months back recommended to turn the mouse over and rub it against a piece of paper on a hard surface. So in a number of occasions I followed his instructions and the mouse recovered OK but only temporarily.

Over a week ago the mighty mouse failed for good, and despite my cleaning attempts it did not recover. In desperation I tried to open the mouse but instead broke plastic bearings around the rim and failed to fully open the lid at the back.

Frustrated I took the mouse to the Apple store in Chatswood, expecting some sympathy as I had an extended warranty worth of $268. I was refused to be looked at as I had to make an appointment with the ‘Genius Desk’  first (Apple calls their service people by that name).

I've made an appointment and a few days later I visited the same Apple store for the second time. This time ‘the genius’ turned the mouse over and rolled it on a paper, made some star and eight movements for about two minutes or so. And voila! My mighty mouse plugged in a MacBook test machine worked.

After mentioning him that I tried to open the mouse for a good clean up the genius said “I know. I noticed your mouse lid is broken. Your warranty is void.” I mentioned I did not really care too much if my warranty was void on a $69 mouse as at that point I just needed a functioning mouse. The genius recommended me to buy the new $100 wireless mouse.

Oh the wireless...

I said I found wireless mouses frustrating too as you had to change batteries every now and then. These were my last remarks. I walked out the store.

Don’t get me wrong I am in awe of everything Apple does. When I look at Apple products I can’t help but murmur “it’s a beautiful thing”.

However in this instance Apple failed to deliver the user experience they are so proud to fulfill.

First of all ‘the might mouse’ design is faulty. My work PC is a Windows machine and I have been using its mouse, oh I have forgotten, for so long, and never had to clean the damn thing. It just works.

So from my perspective compared to an ordinary PC mouse, Apple’s mighty mouse fails to deliver in a mighty way.

Secondly I can’t help noticing how we intelligent people in minority have to suffer from collective stupidity of majority opinion.

It appears that wireless mouse and wireless keyboard is nothing more than a marketing gimmick and majority has swallowed it. This was a foolish idea, it still is and it continues to frustrate many users like me.

The reasons why wireless mouse and keyboard is a bad idea are:

1. You have to bear the stress that any minute batteries can go flat.
2. You have to keep a spare pair of AA batteries around (you normally won’t).
3. You have to consume a bag-full of batteries every year and pollute the environment needlessly whereas your desktop machine through its USB port could have easily powered your mouse for nothing.

I now use a $20 ordinary Windows mouse on my Mac. The mouse has a cord, it works and I am happy.

Fundamentals

I returned to fundamentals. I started to follow computer science (CS) courses at MIT. 

MIT has a great program called MIT OpenCourseWare and it is free. Lecture videos are available from uTunes. uTunes is embedded iTunes portal which makes it easier to collate course material in one place.

The following snapshot shows a portion of my desktop.

I have course video at the top, a Python script edited with iMac’s Pico editor in the middle, and the output screen at the bottom. I also have course presentation in pdf document form and browser windows in other areas of my screen. 

It is great fun, probably more fun than sitting in a classroom. I can pause the video and do a bit of programming or research on the web then get back to course. 

It is also a fantastic activity to return to fundamentals of algorithms. Being a seasoned programmer allows me to focus purely on mathematics and analysis of algorithms.

My long therm objective is to study evolutionary algorithms and perhaps write a program to simulate evolutionary systems.

Piazza

This photograph was taken in September 2003 somewhere in Umbria. We were walking through the alleys and narrow streets of this beautiful hilltop town since midday.

Then as the sunset started to gradually embrace rooftops, buildings, and streets beneath something magical happened.

Suddenly, as if responding to a mysterious call people started to pour into streets in their best outfits. It was an amazing sight. People standing, chatting, walking, greeting each other, individuals moving from one group to another. A wonderful human foam erupting and flowing everywhere.

Pay attention. There are no advertisement posts, no interfering commercial garbage, no hideous shop signs, no one is using mobile phone, no texting. Just people facing people.

So people’s attitude towards architectural and spatial settings is as important as their attitude towards each other. Italians know how to live and don’t let disruptive commercialism to take over their most precious everyday event, Piazza.

People genuinely facing and communicating with each other without letting anything getting in their way. They are simply experiencing being human in an embracing social fabric.

‘Piazza’ is a public square where people at any age gather just before sunset, and talk, gossip, fall in love, laugh and in general ‘feel’ human again. Piazza is the heart of Italian society. How much I envy them.

Scale matters

Ever since looked down from a high rise building, watched pedestrians and cars lazily moving, but somehow skillfully avoiding each other just like ants?

If you stop and watch an ant colony they too seem busy yet not panicking, some carrying their cargo into tunnels, others returning to take more, again skillfully avoiding each other.

It takes only going up about ten floors or more in a high rise building to realise how insignificant human scale becomes with collective scale emerging in its grandeur.

From this height that guy crossing the street becomes like an ant, his complex frontal cortex¹ setup, his desires, thoughts, worries and joys, his career, personal finances, kids, wife, boss, lunch, friends, next summer holiday, aging parents etc simply vanish.

Collective consciousness mercilessly takes over, averaging his behavior, and reducing the man to a crawling creature.

“Look at'em Dad!” cries a five year old. “They're like ants!”.

Zooming in and out of scales may change your perception, your views about life, the universe and yourself. You may start to think for instance maybe after all we are exaggerating our role in the universe.

About the time we evolved to have a sufficiently large frontal cortex we must have discovered that we were not going to make it here on earth indefinitely.

Hence  somewhere along the line of homo sapiens evolution our collective consciousness created a fictitious after life. We invented gods and religions of various forms to secure and extend our life span. A delusion that blinded our species for generations to come from making sense of scale transitions.

We wishfully think we are intelligent enough to deserve a purpose behind our own existence. Perhaps our chauvinistic attitude and megalomanic admiration upon our own species grew with our intelligence, a misfire of some sort.

Whereas from evolutionary perspective systematic delusions often work against mother nature’s tendency to favor a particular species.

We are so much obsessed with regarding ourselves as the most admirable, beautiful and intelligent of all species ever existed, so much so that, we ignore other scales and other metrics.

The chances are we may be ‘intelligent’ but we may not be as ‘successful’ as other species. Our species may not be able to survive despite our ignorance so long as we keep misinterpreting the scale of our own importance and undermining the impact we inflict on this planet.

Looking down at gigantic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico from space should convince us how vulnerable and ‘unsuccessful’ we may be as species.

Scale matters.

References:
1) Frontal cortex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontal_lobe