At the moment I am reading "How to write history that people want to read" by Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath. I am also browsing through "Essential English Grammar" by Ron Simpson.
I intend to learn more on good writing and improve quality and readability of my articles.
I have plans to make my Turkish blog "Evrim Olgusu" (The Fact of Evolution) accessible should the planned restrictions on Internet access by religious Turkish Government goes ahead in August 2011.
"Evrim Olgusu" has enthusiastic followers who are looking forward to read unbiased translations and articles on Evolution. I see them as bright stars against a dark backdrop of religious ignorance. They are the only hope we have to educate wider audience on Evolution in one of the most ignorant countries where Evolution education is systematically censored.
I am also working on a Mac project called "Logonbox". Like its predecessors "Zippylock" and "Skeinforce", Logonbox will be a password management utility program, much simpler to use and web enabled. Logonbox will be available in Apple App Store later this year.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Drop your sandbags
Liberation came when I decided to quit Facebook.
What started as a simple desire to share ideas, talk about progressive politics, and in between share a few jokes or youtube links in a virtual world came to an abrupt end.
My interest to Facebook started to feel like as if my body was stuck under a pile of colossal machinery designed for self gratification.
I don’t intend to put down people who use Facebook. I think everybody must have different reasons and capacity to commit their time and energy into it.
What I naively expected was intelligent conversations -no pun intended-.
Instead what I ended up having were some ‘Like’s, ‘Hahaha’s, ‘LOL’s and plenty of nothing. People did not bother to respond or interact as much as I wished them to do so.
Frankly writing on blank whitewash walls in a prison cell would have had the same effect.
Well, this must be the way Facebook works then. People share shallow sketches of their boring life -mine included-, and great majority of users seem hardly capable of putting their energy into anything other than sharing a few photos or videos someone else made.
I now regained time, momentum, focus, control, vitality and desire to pursue my private projects.
Strongly recommended..
To liberate yourself, drop your sandbags.
What started as a simple desire to share ideas, talk about progressive politics, and in between share a few jokes or youtube links in a virtual world came to an abrupt end.
My interest to Facebook started to feel like as if my body was stuck under a pile of colossal machinery designed for self gratification.
I don’t intend to put down people who use Facebook. I think everybody must have different reasons and capacity to commit their time and energy into it.
What I naively expected was intelligent conversations -no pun intended-.
Instead what I ended up having were some ‘Like’s, ‘Hahaha’s, ‘LOL’s and plenty of nothing. People did not bother to respond or interact as much as I wished them to do so.
Frankly writing on blank whitewash walls in a prison cell would have had the same effect.
Well, this must be the way Facebook works then. People share shallow sketches of their boring life -mine included-, and great majority of users seem hardly capable of putting their energy into anything other than sharing a few photos or videos someone else made.
I now regained time, momentum, focus, control, vitality and desire to pursue my private projects.
Strongly recommended..
To liberate yourself, drop your sandbags.
Friday, May 6, 2011
The Why Question and Arrow of Time
I have a mechanical engineer friend who is often called to diagnose and deal with problems at various sites across the country. He works for a recycling company which has plants in various locations. I am on the other hand a software engineer. We are both experienced folks who have some quarter a century experience in our pockets. We often have lunch together and exchange stories about engineering.
The business my friend works for is specialised to process scrap material obtained from breaking vehicles (cars, trucks etc) into pieces. They have sophisticated equipment to separate and sort scrap material according to their type (aluminum, steel, plastic) and weight.
Recently I have realised emergence of a remarkable pattern between his stories and mine. My friend mentioned he had been called on to diagnose a problem which was about a conveyor belt malfunction. Apparently the conveyor belt in question had excessive dirt cumulated on it. The foreman and workers rather than investigating the origins of the problem (why excessive dirt appeared at the first place), devise instead patch up solutions to clean up the dirt and this caused other structural problems on the belt.
In software engineering too when we have a tough problem, a crash without a stack trace, or an odd looking problem such as identical pointers appearing twice in a hash table thereby causing an infinite loop, some engineers cannot just wander off from their conventional comfort zones but instead remain stuck in the area where they first observed the problem. They automatically think an infinite loop is indicative of a problem right there. Similar to conveyor belt problem adjusting the hash algorithm to detect identical objects and handling the error at that point will not fix the originating problem. This approach will also make the algorithm needlessly complex and perform poorly.
Patch up fixes without understanding the root cause often result in expensive technical debt to cumulate which will cause more problems down the track.
Lateral thinking is a mindset, it is about asking the question ‘why’ and it is about the courage and ability to reverse the arrow of time.
The problem with the conveyor belt is not the dirt cumulated it is ‘why’ the dirt cumulated.
The problem with two identical pointers stored in a hash table is not an error with hash algorithm, it is ‘why’ the same object stored twice further back in history.
Lateral thinking is about going back in the history (time) and locality (belt’s location, program’s stack trace) and replaying cause and effect game in reverse direction.
Perhaps going back against the arrow of time is counter intuitive for most. Perhaps humans have evolved to go along with the arrow of time for pragmatically solving immediate problems with high survival value and only few have capability to rewind their thoughts back in history.
Could this be the fundamental reason why so many people find it hard to understand evolution. Reluctance, lack of resilience or inability to ask and track back the ‘why’ question.
The business my friend works for is specialised to process scrap material obtained from breaking vehicles (cars, trucks etc) into pieces. They have sophisticated equipment to separate and sort scrap material according to their type (aluminum, steel, plastic) and weight.
In software engineering too when we have a tough problem, a crash without a stack trace, or an odd looking problem such as identical pointers appearing twice in a hash table thereby causing an infinite loop, some engineers cannot just wander off from their conventional comfort zones but instead remain stuck in the area where they first observed the problem. They automatically think an infinite loop is indicative of a problem right there. Similar to conveyor belt problem adjusting the hash algorithm to detect identical objects and handling the error at that point will not fix the originating problem. This approach will also make the algorithm needlessly complex and perform poorly.
Patch up fixes without understanding the root cause often result in expensive technical debt to cumulate which will cause more problems down the track.
Lateral thinking is a mindset, it is about asking the question ‘why’ and it is about the courage and ability to reverse the arrow of time.
The problem with the conveyor belt is not the dirt cumulated it is ‘why’ the dirt cumulated.
The problem with two identical pointers stored in a hash table is not an error with hash algorithm, it is ‘why’ the same object stored twice further back in history.
Lateral thinking is about going back in the history (time) and locality (belt’s location, program’s stack trace) and replaying cause and effect game in reverse direction.
Perhaps going back against the arrow of time is counter intuitive for most. Perhaps humans have evolved to go along with the arrow of time for pragmatically solving immediate problems with high survival value and only few have capability to rewind their thoughts back in history.
Could this be the fundamental reason why so many people find it hard to understand evolution. Reluctance, lack of resilience or inability to ask and track back the ‘why’ question.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Conjecture
In recent years a new breed of urban muslim prototype emerged who sometimes call themselves “purists” (eg. “only-koran” movement in Turkey). They refuse late day interpretations of Koran (hadis-i sherif), claim Koran is highly metaphoric and shouldn’t be taken literally in today’s terms.
Rather than questioning validity of their own religious belief system they conjecture and henceforth seek wider acceptance in intellectual and academic circles of urban societies they are part of. Elbow to elbow with intelligent design movement in the West, their retrofitting of god and religions on the facts of evolution should be seen as last minute desperation of saving what has already been lost, religions' credibility.
Living species evolve not as a result of design but via natural selection on random (probabilistic) variations. It does not make sense for a deity to press the button in a stochastic process.
Every human being starts their life with approximately 50 of 3-billion base pairs in their genome mutated randomly. It is preposterous to think that an intelligence could have foreseen, and controlled evolution of 3-billion base pairs of human genome from its single cell origins over billions of years and over entire generations of species they evolved from.
Even if you insist that there lies a super computer that designed "evolution", you should philosophically ask "what for?", "is it you say in order to create us, carbon-obsessed species which emerged from single cell organisms eventually falling into each other's throat for they can't agree on which one of them deserves the never-seen super computer's attention?". And undoubtedly your next question should be "who designed the super computer and why?"
There is nothing remotely special about us humans nor there is a universal reality we can attach our existence onto. There is no evidence that there is more to our physical existence. Believing that we have 'soul' beyond our physical capacity is nothing more than wishful thinking. Our consciousness evolved to make different models, in order to make sense of what is surrounding us. We have not one but many models and related definitions of realities. At times human beings made models of presumed realities -fantasies- that do not exist or cannot exist.
Whereas many of our scientific models, the theory of evolution, special relativity, gravity, quantum mechanics are working, supported and tested by evidence i.e. they allow us to make useful predictions about respective realities, religious models do not propose testable realities but instead they conjecture our existence upon insensible fantasies including the delusion that they can be compatible with science.
Rather than questioning validity of their own religious belief system they conjecture and henceforth seek wider acceptance in intellectual and academic circles of urban societies they are part of. Elbow to elbow with intelligent design movement in the West, their retrofitting of god and religions on the facts of evolution should be seen as last minute desperation of saving what has already been lost, religions' credibility.
Living species evolve not as a result of design but via natural selection on random (probabilistic) variations. It does not make sense for a deity to press the button in a stochastic process.
Every human being starts their life with approximately 50 of 3-billion base pairs in their genome mutated randomly. It is preposterous to think that an intelligence could have foreseen, and controlled evolution of 3-billion base pairs of human genome from its single cell origins over billions of years and over entire generations of species they evolved from.
Even if you insist that there lies a super computer that designed "evolution", you should philosophically ask "what for?", "is it you say in order to create us, carbon-obsessed species which emerged from single cell organisms eventually falling into each other's throat for they can't agree on which one of them deserves the never-seen super computer's attention?". And undoubtedly your next question should be "who designed the super computer and why?"
There is nothing remotely special about us humans nor there is a universal reality we can attach our existence onto. There is no evidence that there is more to our physical existence. Believing that we have 'soul' beyond our physical capacity is nothing more than wishful thinking. Our consciousness evolved to make different models, in order to make sense of what is surrounding us. We have not one but many models and related definitions of realities. At times human beings made models of presumed realities -fantasies- that do not exist or cannot exist.
Whereas many of our scientific models, the theory of evolution, special relativity, gravity, quantum mechanics are working, supported and tested by evidence i.e. they allow us to make useful predictions about respective realities, religious models do not propose testable realities but instead they conjecture our existence upon insensible fantasies including the delusion that they can be compatible with science.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Best things in life
Did you know that Steve Killelea is Australia's largest individual donor of overseas aid.
Steve has successfully floated two companies, which he started from zero, and gained international recognition as a global philanthropist.
He is an IT entrepreneur who floated his company, Integrated Research in 2000, picking up $85.9 million. He also placed a good portion of proceeds -$45 million- in a charitable foundation. Unlike some entrepreneurs he didn't name the foundation after him, he simply called it The Charitable Foundation.
Steve has about 30 aid projects under way at any one time, and he donates roughly $5 million a year.
He is a powerful, fit, yet, down to earth, peaceful man.
Literally. As he invented the Global Peace Index.
"Peace is good for business" is his mantra.
The idea is if we can measure peace we can then focus on areas of improvement much easily, plan, channel and prioritise our efforts in a more rational and effective manner. As the peace index improves the economy improves as well. This is I think one of the most innovative ideas of social entrepreneurship.
I don't know you but personally contributing to peace gives my life the most meaningful dimension. And I think this is really where Steve is coming from. As Derek Sivers once said:
"Best things in life aren't things."
On a personal note I am fortunate enough to know Steve as I have been working in Integrated Research for 12 years now.
Links:
The Global Piece Index Map
The Global Peace Index Vision
The Charitable Foundation
An interview with Steve Killelea in Diva International
Steve has successfully floated two companies, which he started from zero, and gained international recognition as a global philanthropist.
He is an IT entrepreneur who floated his company, Integrated Research in 2000, picking up $85.9 million. He also placed a good portion of proceeds -$45 million- in a charitable foundation. Unlike some entrepreneurs he didn't name the foundation after him, he simply called it The Charitable Foundation.
Steve has about 30 aid projects under way at any one time, and he donates roughly $5 million a year.
He is a powerful, fit, yet, down to earth, peaceful man.
Literally. As he invented the Global Peace Index.
"Peace is good for business" is his mantra.
The idea is if we can measure peace we can then focus on areas of improvement much easily, plan, channel and prioritise our efforts in a more rational and effective manner. As the peace index improves the economy improves as well. This is I think one of the most innovative ideas of social entrepreneurship.
I don't know you but personally contributing to peace gives my life the most meaningful dimension. And I think this is really where Steve is coming from. As Derek Sivers once said:
"Best things in life aren't things."
On a personal note I am fortunate enough to know Steve as I have been working in Integrated Research for 12 years now.
Links:
The Global Piece Index Map
The Global Peace Index Vision
The Charitable Foundation
An interview with Steve Killelea in Diva International
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