Mixed feelings

Another crisis our generation had to have, meet the new kid in the block, the ebook.

Will printed books survive?

Likely for a short while, unlikely in the long haul.

I now own a Kindle as I no longer have space left in our apartment to put new books in. Unfortunately the ebook has no personality but admittedly it is incredibly practical.

English is my second language so the online dictionary is a blessing, just point your cursor and there you go, the word is translated. Everything is so much easier, taking notes, bookmarks, searching, reading on the train, packing, unpacking, and the fact that I can sync with the Kindle desktop application on my Mac, these are all fantastic stuff. I can't tell you how much my reading efficiency increased. I can even read while I am standing in a crowded train as my ebook is extremely light and well designed to be held with one hand.

Alas I hate to see bookshops disappearing as for me a library or a bookshop is the warmest place on Earth. There is definitely an intimate sensation of proportionality tied between an author and its work when you touch and browse a printed book, certainly amiss in ebook form. And how we would come into terms of losing such a wonderful experience I don’t know but this is a reality we will have to live with I am afraid.

Evocom

I have been quiet for a while totally immersed myself into evolutionary computing.

I have developed a computer program named evocom to solve The Eight Queens Problem. I have also written a paper quantitively analysing and demonstrating fundamental aspects of biological evolution.

You can download evocom program and related paper at:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~coruh/evocom/

I have used great open source tools and free products in my work. Here they are:

• TextWrangler : A brilliant text editor for Mac. Simple, fast, reliable, user friendly, got syntax-coloring.
• Python: Mac comes with Python, free to download for Windows at http://www.python.org/
• LaTeX: LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.
• TeXShop: Award winning LaTeX editor for Mac, robust, simple, easy to use, reliable.

Al fresco lunch with my special tuscan penne marinara

Ok. Forget politics, worries of the world, economic downturn, religious terror, the social network or retirement plans. Today come with me to wonders of Italian cooking.

First of all you may not be an Italian but always remember this “you can pretend to be an Italian”. There is nothing in this Universe to prevent you from being childishly obsessively crazy about life, love, good food and good wine. Your choice.

The recipe I am going to disclose here is a variation using my favorite basic ingredients, pasta, tomato sauce, and prawns. You can experiment with various combinations of this terrific theme.

Your pasta can be penne, spaghetti, fusilli or fettucine. My personal preference would always be penne. Penne has this robust working class persona and embedded manhood which I find natural to express with my style.

The tomato sauce has to be cooked slowly with passion, full attention, and love. I learned how to cook a variation of tomato sauce from my Sicilian friend Mario. According to Mario tomato sauce is the heart and soul of a great Italian pasta dish. Cooking good tomato sauce deserves time, intellectual investment almost to the extent of exhaustion, and passion. You lack any of these and your dish will be ruined.

Prawns should be fully thawed, sexy, and marinated overnight with herbs and olive oil. Use your imagination on herbs. But they need to be Mediterranean herbs, such as basil, theme, or mint. Do not ever use Asian or even Moroccan herbs especially coriander (my personal enemy). Red chillies are OK.

Background:

Open yourself a good red (cabernet merlot or cabernet sauvignon). Air for few minutes, smell half deeply, feel human, and try enjoying the first sip around and under your tongue. You need to be happy while cooking Italian. Start rolling a Luciano Pavarotti or Cecilia Bartoli loud in the background.

Ingredients (for two):

Organic penne pasta 250g.
Largish fresh green prawns, full thawed, preferably marinated overnight with herbs 250g.
2 soft biggish, juicy trust tomatoes.
1 table spoonful of tomato paste.
Half a glass of your red wine.
Good olive oil (abundant).
2 pieces of large firm garlics.
half lemon juice, optionally its skin rendered in fine stripes.
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.

Start with tomato sauce. Crush tomatoes in food processor, add one crushed garlic, crush a bit more and stop. In a saucepan put abundant olive oil to cover the base, add tomato garlic mixture, add red wine, start with high heat, but don’t stop watching.

Meanwhile start cooking your penne in abundant salty boiled water. You must aim firmness but penne should be swollen at the end about double of its original size. This process should take about 15 minutes with organic good brand pasta (you must count after you put your pasta in and after boiling starts again).

If your tomato sauce started sizzling add tomato paste, evenly combine with sauce, and wait until the sauce starts sizzling again. Then reduce heat. Keep it simmering for half an hour at least, lid open. Always remember to keep an eye in the sauce (don’t leave your kitchen or start your second glass;) It should be simmered and saturated slowly reaching to a dark lusty color at the end but it shouldn’t be too dry. Stir often enough with love and passion. Keep an eye on tiny bubbles. Keep lava bubbles popping like in the mouth of Mount Vesuvius.

Start cooking your prawns in the last 10 minutes. In a saucepan put some olive oil, add the remaining garlic piece crushed, add lemon juice, keep stirring and heating this sauce in high for a few minutes. Join prawns to the sauce, keep the heat high and keep stirring until lots of maddening fumes turn up (prawns got angry;) Reduce heat, cover the lid and leave it like that for another 5 minutes. Cook your prawns with their own steam (don't waste ocean's natural iodine flavour). But don’t overcook them otherwise they’ll be too firm.

Drain your pasta well (never ever run cold water through it, horrible Turkish tradition). Oil the base of a pan, put and stir your pasta back into the pan.

Make sure you topped up your and your partners’ glasses with red.

On beautiful white plates put some pasta. In the middle put about 2-3 full tablespoonful of tomato sauce. Finally pour over prawns and about a spoonful of juicy lemon flavored prawn sauce. Salt and ground black pepper to taste.

Finally I like stirring pasta with sauce thoroughly before eating (my wife doesn’t), the choice is yours.

Mamma mia! Buon appetito!

The Grand Design

This is a popular science book from renowned physicist Stephen Hawking with a righteous agenda, and that is to take on strong anthropic principle.

Being a popular science book doesn’t mean this is beginner’s stuff nor you need to be a physicist to digest it.

However to get around comfortably you need to have consumed considerable hours digging other popular science books, or surfing Wikipedia on things like special relativity, general relativity, double-slit experiment, quantum physics, string theory, m-theory, and multiverses.

This book ties them up to a big picture and if you are lucky enough to be an open-minded person then you may have your ‘aha’ moment.

And your ‘aha’ moment may as well be the realization that god is not required to create the Universe, your dog, trees, the can of red-kidney beans on the kitchen table and everything else you see or you don’t see around you.

“The strong anthropic principle idea arose because it is not only the peculiar characteristics of our solar system that seem oddly conducive to development of human life but also the characteristics of our entire universe.”

This book challenges the strong anthropic principle with the multiverse idea.

“The multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine-tuning. It is a consequence of the no-boundary condition as well as many other theories of modern cosmology. But if it is true, then the strong anthropic principle can be considered effectively equivalent to weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat -now the entire observable universe- is only one of many, just as our solar system is one of many. Many people through the ages have attributed to God the beauty and complexity of nature that in their time seemed no scientific explanation. But just as Darwin and Wallace explained how the apparently miraculous design of living forms could appear without intervention by a supreme being, the multiverse concept can explain the fine-tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the universe for our benefit.”

To some these may seem preposterous claims as no one witnessed evidence for multiverses. But our limited observation capacity is precisely the problem here. Multiverse idea is strongly linked to quantum theory. At quantum scales our observation interferes with the history of events selected. According to Feynman, a system has not just one history but every possible history.

“The histories that contribute to the Feynman sum don’t have an independent existence, but depend on what is being measured. We create history by our observation, rather than history creating us.

When one combines the general theory of relativity with quantum theory, the question of what happened before the beginning of the universe is rendered meaningless. The idea that histories should be closed surfaces without boundary is called the no-boundary condition.

We must accept that our usual ideas of space and time do not apply to the very early universe. That is beyond our experience, but not beyond our imagination, or our mathematics...One can also use Feynman’s methods to calculate the quantum possibilities for observations of the universe. If they are applied to the universe as a whole there is no point A (that it all started), so we add up all the histories that satisfy the no-boundary condition and end at the universe we observe today. In this view, the universe appeared spontaneously, starting off in every possible way. Most of these correspond to other universes. ” 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book I hope you too. It is exhilarating and full of trademark humor from Stephen Hawking.

Links:

Michael Shermer on Model Dependent Realism

No one is born with a religion

We are about to fly to the country I was born. It is a long and torturous journey, about twenty-four hours, in a cramped airbus seat.

Life is beautiful and cruel at the same time. Somehow before long flights I review my life. Our genes strive to leave a legacy of some form. What would be my legacy.. In case..

At this point in my life I am happy and content. Thanks to my ability to reason and my early realisation that you should not expect too much from life.

In fact this is almost what you really need in life as a precondition of everything else. A ‘reasoning’ mind. A ‘conscious’, ‘skeptical’, ‘inquisitive’ mind free from delusions.

My political identity is shaped by fairness, enlightenment values, and atheism.

I don’t have any problem with people who believe in a deity (or deities) and who express a peaceful, tolerant and humanistic interpretation of their religion.

This sort of personal engagement, equivalent to believing star signs or fortune telling does not irritate me so long as tolerance remains mutual even though I find the basis of their faith irrational.

My problem is with religious indoctrination of children. But before making my point we need to look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) Article 18 and 19.

Article 18
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

No one is born with a religion.

Religion is a byproduct of human mind probably emerged early in human evolution. Our brains are wired to misinterpret natural phenomena we don’t understand in order to classify ‘the unknown and dangerous’. Humans developed rituals in the hope of controlling natural catastrophes. The Gods or the God emerged as the focal point of such misinterpretations. ‘The God’ became a black hole for everything that cannot be understood.

The core Enlightenment values that started to emerge in the 17th century have been questioning of traditional institutions, customs, and morals, and establishing a strong belief in rationality and science.

Today religions, their arcane and narrow view towards human condition, their pathetic deficiency in quest to understand and explain the rules of the Universe and the origins of Life on our planet have made them largely outdated and irrelevant in everyday life.

Besides their diminished role religions continue to remain however powerful and overly protected by identity politics in developed and developing nations alike.

No one is born with a religion.

Yet children all over the world are indoctrinated and brain washed from infancy.

Be it a Taliban run Madrasa in Afghanistan or a so called Faith school in a Western Democracy children are systematically brain washed in little or no regard of historical, social and scientific contexts and with complete disregard of other religions, faiths or the Theory of Evolution to explain the origins of life and nature. I see this in the lightest of terms a form of ‘child abuse’.

UDHR Article 18 warrants the ticket to ‘teach’ religion. But Article 19 at the same time warrants the right to freedom of opinion. Therefore no one should have the right to take away freedom of opinion from children.

In my view in the core of our moral responsibility lies our obligation to teach our children ‘the complete picture’.

And the complete picture will not be ‘complete’ without objectively teaching other religions, their history, their legacy, Atheism and the Theory of Evolution so that children can have their opportunity to compare one to another and perhaps learn to tolerate each other’s views in due process.

My legacy is ‘freedom of choice for our children’.

No one is born with a religion.

I ask you to stand by me and get my message across to stop abuse of our children with subjective religious indoctrination.

For peace and for a better world.