Dao

In the beginning there is dao. Then perfection was invented. Perfection gave birth to imperfection. But both perfection and imperfection are dao.

Knowledge, Intuition, Experience

Knowledge, Intuition, Experience

No, experience doesn't allow you to skip steps. Intuition comes close by letting you take calculated risks when skipping steps. Experience on the other hand, lets you run through the steps so fast that you're done before someone can spell out all the steps. But knowledge through analysis, that's what allows you to skip steps.


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Pre-Scientific Remedies

There are products that don't claim any effects.
And products that imply without claiming.
And products that claim without backing it up.
And products that back it up with folklore.
And products that back it up with positive user endorsement, ignoring the negative dataset.
And products that back it up with endorsement from researchers of dubious bias.
And products that back it up with dubious research.
And products that back it up with fake research papers.
And products that back it up with real research results.
How do customers choose between these products but try for themselves?


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知之为知之。不知为不知。是知也。
true knowledge is admitting both what one knows and what one doesn't.

聞くは一時の恥、聞かぬは一生の恥。
admitting ignorance is a temporary embarrassment , feigning knowledge is a lifelong shame.

Admitting knowledge is honesty... and feigning ignorance is? Probably profitable!?

Thoughts about war and tradition

Thoughts about war and tradition

The strength of a select, cooperative few is power, the strength of the diverse non-cooperating multitudes is resilience. And evolution is the dialog between them.

Power is always attacking resilience head on and resilience never fights back. It holds on until power runs out of steam.

And so we always have war and peace, the age of power and the age of resilience. Sometimes we have both at the same moment, in the same place.

In peace we build up and pile up all sorts of walls against enemies that do not exist. In war, the few come together and tear down the walls they can. And when we continually get the most diverse of people to build up walls that are strong in the most unique ways and then get the most powerful of people to tear them down, what we have left, is that which cannot be taken down.

Tradition and heritage is thus time proven. Except that the speed we build up and tear down isn't linear but exponential. Tradition isn't entirely about preserving what the dead have left us - it isn't carved in stone. Tradition is always in the making. And in the age, more so than ever.


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Is being a housewife a real job?

Is being a housewife a real job?

My short answer: it is a calling, not a job.

The female pronoun is consistently used below but only for convenience. Similarly, housewife should be interpreted also to mean house-husband.

The debate has been going on forever, but here's my take on the conditions it should satisfy in order for her services to be evaluated to be worth as much as services provides on a professional basis.

1. Do the customers have the freedom to comment and freely criticize on the services provided? Are customers allowed to compare the service of providers of similar services as an evaluation of the services?

2. Is it a monopoly? How are the conditions regulated?

3. What is the penalty for performance that does not match up to the customers' expectations?

4. Who is the employer and who are the stakeholders? How do they evaluate her performance?

5. Are services provided performed to the highest possible standard achievable, or is there any grounds to suspect negligence?

My conclusion is that being a housewife is more like a vocation or calling, like priests and activists. It is a noble role, but the services do not qualify to be rated in monetary terms; a housewife deserves to demand to be provided a standard of life that is worry-free so she can focus on the calling. And since it is a calling, all rewards should come from the providing of the service. Any additional material or monetary rewards should be received in exchange for a "real" job that she must perform outside this calling.


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4 kinds of people

I think there are 4 kinds of people. Those who have a need to know and are able to learn (scholars), those who have a need to know but do not have the ability to learn (believers), those who do not have a need to know but have the ability to learn (evangelists), and those who do not have a need to know and do not have the ability to learn (non practicing believer) . 

Lottery

aka The Power of Personal Testimony

Q: Let's say there's a 3-digit lottery for one million dollars every week, in a country of 3 million people. I set up a fortune telling web site called lucky-number.com and give out lucky numbers. It's free, but if you strike it a second time, you have to give me a 20% cut on your second winning. That's just 200,000 out of your 2 million. Fair? Do you think I can make any money?


Disclaimer : I'm sorry if I did my math wrong!

A: Firstly, given that numbers are given out evenly, every week 1 out of every 1,000  will strike lottery. Thus the chance of anyone striking using the given number is 0.001. Let's call these numbers 1,000 and 0.001 n=1000 and p=0.001.

We always give people a second chance when they don't do well. That is, that they need to lose twice in a row to stop buying - meaning unless they lose the first 2 times consecutively, they will end up trying at least 3 times. So we first consider the following scenarios:

(win, win, win) 
and believe that the site is true
 The possibility of striking (win, win, win) is p³, which means 1 out of 1,000,000,000 people will get this. since we have only 3 million people, let's assume this does not happen.

(win, lose, win) or (win win, lose) or (lose, win, win) 
and conclude the site is mostly right 
People who experienced (win, lose, win) and (win, win, lose) and (lose, wine, win) will conclude that the site works most of the time. So the probability of people thinking that it mostly works is 3(p²(1-p)), meaning 1 out of 333,667 people will feel that the site is useful. That is 8 people in 3 million!This means we would get either 8 times our 20% cut which is $1.6 million by the 3rd draw!

(win, lose, lose) or (lose, win, lose) 
and conclude that the site changed their odds from 1 out of 1,000 to 1 out of 3.
The probability of this is 2((1-p)²p), meaning 1 out of 501 people will come to this conclusion. For a population of 3 million, this is 5988 people!

So now we have 8 people convinced that the site is mostly true, and 5988 people who are not totally convinced, but "feel good" about the site.

Now, let's say each person is directly connected to 10 other people, and they tell these 10 people about their lottery. And their up to their friend's friend trust what they said - beyond that it's too far away to be trustworthy. Let's call this number c=10.

So many people can these 5996 people reach?

So we have friends who number 5996c and friends of friends who number 5996c², and if we include the initial 5996, this is a total of 665,556 people. In a community of 3 million, this is 22%. That means 1 out of 5 will feel good about the site! If you're connected to 10 people, it means you will know 1 to 2 persons who feel good about the site!


Let's say these 665,556 people decide to buy a 4th time.

(win, lose, lose, win) or (lose, win, lose, win)
Those who struck 1 time the first time, would have to pay us if they strike this time - the 5988 people who stuck (win, lose, lose) or (lose, win, lose). What's the odds?  (2((1-p)²p))p, that is one in 501,001. Bingo. We have another winner. Add $200,000

Unfortunately this doesn't grow our "feel good" crowd. But still, with some optimism, we would have collected $1.8 million by the 4th draw, all by giving out random numbers!

Moral of the story
1. Personal experience does not constitute statistics
2. Don't take information second hand.
3. Almost All isn't anywhere near All. When you listen to a testimony first hand, don't skip the details cos that's where the devil lives!

What is God? My take

What is God? My take

I think human beings are at the top of the pyramid very largely because of persistence, which comes through working hard at something though logic says that it is just impossible. This form of self delusion we prefer to call hope or faith or believing in oneself taken to the extreme IMHO is what birthed religion, which crystallized in the form of God. Subscribing to the concept of a real God then allows the everyday man to invoke a deep conviction in the realizability of his desires, and that conviction drives him to make his dreams real. In that sense, God is a kind of technology, ready for direct application by anyone who chooses to invoke it.

Consider asking another question. What is the Internet? Is it a specification of any framework that can support something like facebook and Google? Is it the collective sum of servers running it? Is it the tcpip stack? Is the Internet still the Internet if the middle layers are swapped, or if it interfaces with other networks by way of SDN? Is it still the internet if it gets fragmented into two or more disjoint networks? Which disjoint fragment will become the internet? Is it still the Internet if I use a quantum network to steam real time content from my brain? Will my brain become part of the Internet? Or is the Internet defined to be the sum of everything accessible from - the Internet?

I think the Internet exists in a real sense because we as a global community has come to a consensus of its existence. And this consensus of its existence is essentially what makes its existence real.

We tend to think of God as a person, so defining God as a non-person becomes somewhat heretic, but wait, what about the Internet when non-human AI interacts as much as human beings on the Internet? Will your brain be as much part of it as the non-human counterpart? Will it be then fair to say that the Internet is both alive and not alive?


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Privacy

on privacy

another daydream post. i'm not an expert.

i read somewhere that the concept of privacy is a recent invention, and that people nowadays don't think of wanting to preserve their privacy, rather, they consider it as asset to be trade-able for goods or services, which might imply that the concept of privacy as a kind of personal freedom in the so called "traditional" sense, may already be fighting its last fight.

i have previously read of a few viewpoints on why you need privacy which i shall summarize briefly below:

1. Nobody is perfect. Given the correct conditions, some law can always be used against you, even if you think you have nothing to hide.

2. Knowledge is power. Knowledge of who you are and what you do (1) psychologically give people power over you, causing you to act differently by knowing that you are being watched, and, (2) gives people a means to social engineer a situation into deriving some advantage off you.

3. Victimless crimes are committed in private when people are experimenting or trying to sort things out and figure out their lives, and that ultimately leads to progress of the individual or society as a whole.

but i stopped to think today.

Human society has so far been in its nature once which is close-knit, where people are deeply involved, interacting which each other in ways that are beyond what the law provided clear-cut rules for. There always are people who want to get into your head or your pants to get something out of you so that they can gain some kind of advantage, or so that they can "help" you. Everybody always needs everybody's help so that the "greater good" is finally achieved.

Such an environment keeps society together. Put it in other words - society is self-perpetuating through the deployment of mechanisms such as the use of power to directly or psychologically affect or limit any actions to modify it. I say "deploy" because I think the State consciously created these mechanisms ether directly or indirectly. And given free rein, this mechanism can be exploited, perhaps, to the point where society is perpetuated for the sole purpose of perpetuation, such that individuals are continually born into the society, work for the society, but derive no innate pleasure or advantage from doing so.

The concept of privacy to me, is basically saying "beyond this line, I can manage on my own". Which means, privacy for me, is that line we draw to say, okay, this is as much you (society/State) need to be bothered about.

What if, the mechanisms that perpetuate society, do not work anymore?

What if one day, someone doing a term in jail is viewed at with the same attitude as someone who paid a speeding fine? And nobody would care less if who you slept with as long as you are doing a great job as the president?

How would privacy change?

Of Adam and Eve and Marrying Cousins

Of Adam and Eve and Marrying Cousins

Disclaimers: I'm not a creationist. Neither am I an expert on the game of life. This is not a paper, just a kind of mental scribbling aka daydreaming.

One of the problems I had with the Adam and Eve story was that of inbreeding, that inbreeding raises the possibility of recessive traits appearing, lowering the average survival ability of the population in general. How do cultures that practice reproduction with relatives survive? Does inbreeding mean that you end up with an inferior culture?

Enter: the game of life.

If you're unfamiliar, the game of life is simulation "board game", formed with a grid like a chessboard, where you place pieces that either "grow" or "die" according to rules as simple as the following set (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life, where "cell" refers to a square on the board):

1. First you start with a starting configuration, where you mark certain cells as "live". All other cells are dead.
2. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
3. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
4. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
5. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction. 

That's it. And just depending on the initial squares, the game can keep running for thousands of generations. You might want to try out some configurations on the wiki page at http://www.julianpulgarin.com/canvaslife/and see it for yourself.

What does this mean to me? That while inbreeding is the causes of a lot of genetically-based disability, it is not in itself fatalistic. But rather, whether or not we end up with an end-game where everything dies or everything keeps on growing, or everything is stabilized, depends also on the starting configuration - and that starting configuration, must be instantaneously created or there must be one instant where the starting configuration became true.

That is to say, if the creation theory needs to be true, it is not just the mechanism that needs to be proven, but that the starting configuration needs to be found. So maybe, just maybe, just because God created Adam and Eve, doesn't mean he didn't also create Adam and Steve.

Common sense

Common sense: a habit or protocol people are obsessed in propagating because of a perceived benefit derived through a mechanism or reason considered taboo.


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My 10 star hotel rating standard

My 10 star hotel rating standard

For each star, you experience...

1 star
Daily life of factory worker

2 stars
Daily life of an office worker

3 stars
Daily life of a manager

4 stars
Daily life of a CEO

5 stars
Daily life of a CEO in an MNC

6 stars
Daily life of the son of a CEO in an MNC

7 stars
Daily life of a King

8 stars
Daily life of a princess

9 stars
Daily life of a deity

10 stars
Daily life of ... Shiva?



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If religion were an escalator...

If religion were an escalator...

Some people will insist that you must stand on the left.

And others who think you should stand on the right will quarrel for all eternity with you.

But basically both believe that if you don't get one the escalator you will never get there.

Then there are those who take the elevator and they quarrel about whether you should stand at the sides of the lift instead.

And there are those who don't give a damn which side you're standing on.

And those who are strict on following whoever is in front of you, whether left or right.

And there are those who will stand right in the middle, and those who stand exactly out of line.

In some cultures there are protocols where you should stand - your personal belief is irrelevant.

But no matter what your belief, everybody takes the stairs when the escalator is getting serviced.


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A study on the provability of life after death

I'm not an expert, but is it possible for a study along the lines of the following pseudo-paper prove whether or not life after death exists in a meaningful way?

Abstract

A study on the provability of life after death

Introduction

1. We are born into this world without memory of what was before life, and we do not spend our time lamenting about what we might have done before life as we know it started.

2. If life after death exists, and any memory of life before death does not survive death, life after death would be the same as life before death - ie, we would not spend time lamenting about what life before death might have been like, but rather just go on with whatever existence that may exist.

3. As such, if a soul that survives death exists, the existence of memory would be pivotal to whether we need to be concerned about life after death.

Nomenclature

4. By "memory" I mean all reference points that the soul may use to identify itself, toward the result of formulating what the self is. For most practical means, I construe this to be synonymous to the ability to remember, but do not at this stage want to preclude the possibility of there existing elements that contribute to the concept of self-identity outside the bounds of this ability.

5. By "soul" I mean a consciousness that is able to separate itself from other consciousnesses  beyond death.

6. For the soul to exist in a way that is meaningful to our current existence, either memory must exist, or something else that is able to pin-point our current existence must exist. Let me call this "Identity". To limit the scope of this study, the consideration of complex memories and complex Identities shall be omitted. That is to say, the concept of Identities and memories that merge or otherwise get transformed after death, shall at this stage be assumed not to exist.

7. By "surviving death", I refer to the immediate retainment of memory after an individual's death, as opposed to there being an instantaneous process of off-loading one's memory into another realm after death. If the latter were true, it would be possible to destroy a soul through the instantaneous destruction of the body, unless the nature of our existence prohibits such a process because of limitations in how we are able to access the mechanics of time.

Hypothesis

8. Therefore, I hypothesize that to prove that for life after death to exist in a meaningful way, we have two basis to prove: (1) whether or not memory survives death, and, (2) whether or not Identity can exist outside the flesh.

Methods

9. If memory can survive death, it should be possible to formulate a technique to transplant memory. And since we are interested in the immediate retainment of memory after death, there must exist a location to which memory continually being off-loaded to when one is living. Quantum entanglement is one possible method, but there may be other methods not yet discovered.

10. If Identity can exist outside the flesh, cross-transplating whole organs, including the brain, or portions of organs between two individuals could be done to verify if there is any correlation between Identity and the physical body.

NOTES

1. All religions just assume that the self/soul exists, and builds theories around that to reinforce that believe. Why don't religions explain more about whether the self/soul exists, since that is the basis on which all life-after-death theories stand?For me, I draw a line between the "meaningful" and "de-facto" self. Maybe the examples below sound childish but...
[de-facto self]
If we recycle a magazine into a toilet paper, it's still the same paper, but what the paper used to be would not be relevant to the toilet paper, since what the magazine was like is irrelevant to the toilet paper. In this case, the self may exist (same pulp that made the paper), but I wouldn't care about it since there's nothing I can do about it.
[meaningful self]
But if we recycle a magazine into a child's art project, it would mean a lot, because the child would use the magazine because of its colors and pictures. In this case, the nature of the magazine is brought into its after-life as an art project. If it's possible for science to establish anything about life after death, this would be the once that is worth studying....

    Hey I'm now working with quite a few japanese and wanted to check back with you on their culture. Would it be true to say that trust is hardwon with Japanese, more so than other countries? I'm finding myself acting as a bridge between my japanese and American colleagues - they can't understand each other. Would you also agree that the Japanese mindset to solve a problem is to consider all the situation in entirety, before they will commit to a solution, rather than to move forward with part of the information? My american colleague is trying to understand why a japanese colleague seems unwilling to trust that we will make the best decision, and wants all the information to be laid out as well

    Trust takes a long time to build and Japanese base the game on mutual trust rather than clearly spelt out rules. Decisions are made by spending lengthy amounts of time through long meetings in which people communicate their total sum of feelings rather than personal opinions.

    Once trust is established, people move on without questioning minor details, but that can sometimes result in unclear objectives with which results can e measured against.

    Americans think in layers, Chinese think in units, Japanese think in clutters.

    Americans can for eg just consider the design side or just the environmental side of things

    Japanese think as far as their personal abilities allow them to

    Get your American colleagues to drink with your Japanese colleagues.

    It helps build an impression of mutual trust.

    Americans build know-how into formal systems, Japanese build it into the company culture. Get your american colleagues to communicate their passion not just their proposal.

    For Americans, a solution is as good as its possibilities, for Japanese a solution is only as good as its implementation.

    Quite enlightening. No wonder Japanese make such good designers but not so good innovators.

Breathe

Words are the poets desperate struggle to hold on to the moment that held him like a wild flower to the face of a cliff.

The four stages of freedom

The four stages of freedom

Ignorance, Knowledge, Control, Release. Ignorance, because you don't know what freedom is. Knowledge, because you can change what your have pinpointed to be binding you. Control, because you have learnt how to make the rules work for you. Release, because the captivity doesn't matter anymore.

The four stages of freedom

Ignorance, Knowledge, Control, Release. Ignorance, because you don't know what freedom is. Knowledge, because you can change what your have pinpointed to be binding you. Control, because you have learnt how to make the rules work for you. Release, because the captivity doesn't matter anymore.

CVEH1001

Human Vulnerability Advisory CVEH1001 memory injection displacing pointers to statistically significant events.

Learning

Learning unleashes your potential. Public schooling constraints it into a certain mould that fits the society that funds it.

Inclusion

Can you be inclusive without being exclusive, and still run on the same resources? Where's the line between prioritization, privilege, and discrimination? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush - what if you're a worm trying to deal with the bird in the hand?

One World

One World

Even if the people stand together, countries as single entities will always stand divided, not because of religion or beliefs or political thought, but because of conflict of interests, which they disguise under various skins. The idea of the world standing together as one can only happen when all nations manage to perceive a common and serious threat. I'm not saying that this threat is china.

The problem with science

The problem with science is that whatever it has no tools to formulate a hypothesis that it can attempt to prove or disprove, it labels it "unscientific". Can we all that anything other than arrogance?

If you want discipline,
Keep record of only the wrongs
And folklore will follow.

If you want technique,
Keep record of both rights and wrongs
And knowledge will follow.

If you want courage,
Keep record of only the rights
And hope will follow.

Subjects that should be taught in a global curriculum:

1 Arithmetic and statistics

2 Computer Programming and human resource Management

3 Physics and Geometry

4 Law and politics

5 sociology and religion

6 mother tongue

7 second language

8 standardized world history

There was a time when being able to speak and write flawless English, or Chinese, or Japanese, or whatever language, was the highest skill one needed to prove one's abilities to be ensured a high social standing and a comfortable income. In those days, it made sense for society to reinforce to value of language, and for the individual to invest much time an energy into memorizing the nitty gritty details of the rules of language as set out be the elites. But let's face it. Those days are over.

Perhaps the most dangerous idea that human beings invented, is that of opposites - that opposites are identical to negations.

Four there will always be: the governor, the architect, the merchant, and the citizen.

Aka the politician, the engineer, the businessman, and the voter. T

Aka the negotiators, the dreamers, the witty, and the innocent.

Aka the scheming, the fools, the liars, and the stupid.

If an infinite loop has already been running for an infinite amount of time, can we say that it doesn't have a beginning?

「人並み」を人生の平均値と思われるのは、バブルです。本当の平均値は0です。だから人生はどうにかなるものです！

Women are not inferior to men. They have simply outsourced the less important bits of life to men, and made them think it's all that matter.

人之初、性本irrational.

Boys use words to express
Girls use words to exclaim
Men use words to explain
Women use words to evoke

Who am I?

Who am I?
In usernames and passwords
Do we not answer ourselves every day?
Why do we pretend that philosophy is a discipline only for quiet personal contemplation?
Aren't we in an age where it is everywhere?
Don't give in to those in power.
Being human is just a protocol
To serve you to the beast
And crunch your bones in your sleep.

I believe in total free speech - that you're free to express any opinion. But I also believe in the value of the social etiquette that's been repeated since forever in geekdom : Don't feed the trolls.

Life is like a treadmill when the only way to get somewhere, is to make that same journey that gets you nowhere over and over again.

Life is the process of fighting death.
The young and the old, the newborn and the dying, we all live the last day of our lives over and over again, whether we realize it or not - just that all the time we manage to postpone death. Every single day is a bonus, every single day a second chance. Nothing is ever too late, and never too early. Why are we always so tempted to think that death is so far away and focus on the dying breath when it is constantly just one night away?

tradition. religion. ideology. nationality. language. science.
what is it that we gained in exchange for such a host of divisive paradigms that try to arrive at the same conclusion through conflicting nomenclatures that give people in power so many ways to play their political games?

Maybe the reason we think extremists are beyond reason, is that we are afraid their reasons may be compelling, and are not ready to allocate them our patience and resources to hear them out?

We quarrel not because we're so different, but because we're so alike.

The problem with the word tradition is that it is a word. By making it a word, we strip it of its fluidity. There are no dying traditions. Once you call it tradition, it's already dead.

Random thoughts on selling prices

The problem with capitalism is that it attempts to abstract all experiences and human conditions in terms of resource ownership. The problem with meritocracy is that it lends credibility to the idea that your deserve the resources that you own.

What if prices were all suggestions and you pay any price you think goods are worth, but you'll be taxed for whatever you underpay, measured according to your earning power?

That means a cup of coffee can be marked $1 no matter where it is sold, but you're free to pay $3 if you really enjoy it, and your taxes suggest that you pay $6 if you earn 6 times the average salary, or you can overpay someone else instead. Your quality of life cannot be improved by increasing consumption, but rather by the choices you make.

Would it work out?

The nominal value of money would lose its current meaning, but isn't it how it should be?

Anxiety is the state of being perpetually distracted by the future.

The value of history isn't in learning from mistakes but informing us no society is an absolute truth, that we're free to make new mistakes.

Replace censorship with Equal Voice Opportunity, where you can make your case against any motion. Censorship is simply coward denial.

perseverance is mostly consistent self deception. the hard part is outdoing yourself in being increasingly crafty and naive at the same time

Perseverance is choosing to presume that something is impossible, and then believing otherwise.

The root of all evil

I think one way I am able to accommodate the idea of race and culture is the idea of indoctrination. Indoctrination into a specific paradigm constructed by the characteristics of the language the culture feeds you.

Some people swallow it whole, others improvise. But I think it's not possible to truly be unaffected by the languages you speak, no matter how little you may know your second or third languages. I think races and cultures change as they merge. Nobody can really so called preserve one's culture, The very thought of wanting to preserve ones culture I think is a sign that one has had some kind of global influence.

Race and culture are therefore approximations, not prescriptions. But when the approximation is too far off, why do people still want to try to fit in?

I think the answer lies in power. I think the acceleration of the development of language is driven by the greed for power. Through language , you can make people think in a certain way, use them to your advantage, and make them desire to be thus used.

Culture is the root of all evil!

India

That soft orange glow
Quite readily made me forget
That heat and madness
That was Delhi, my first taste of India.
For long days
Was a very short time; not enough
To get accustomed to how meals are served, much less
To understand how food tasted to the locals.
I still have no idea how this great country works, it is as if
Chaos were its expression of order.
However things seem to fail randomly,
Thehy seem to get their act together -
More or less.

I remember the driver's nonchalant replies,
Softly insisting on his own recommendations;
The way how a small door along a dusty avenue
Can open up to a chic cafe;
The way homeless children came by to sell you goods
While your car is stuck in the jam.

I recall how nobody seems to stop to notice
When the lights go out abruptly halfway through dinner;
And I remember the taste of that desert served to me:
Almost sweet, almost warm -
That in-between, unsettling to  me,
Seemed to be a soft-spot I couldn't detect.

Looking out from my window seat,
I see an India expanding under me -
Its network of household lights
Glowing in a soft orange
Like Earth's own magma.

Culture

Culture, to me, is simply a way of life, testified by those for whom it worked, to be effective ways of surviving through specific situations in their times. These situations may be external, such as earthquakes or the ice age, or internal, or "cultural", arising out of simply subscribing to the very paradigm the culture presents.

This way of life is typically accumulated through trial and error, similar in spirit to scientific methods - except that those who failed either died from their failure, or were rendered unable to testify by mechanisms built into the system to protect itself.

As such, it is difficult to gauge the value of subscribing to a culture. Situations in which prescribed solutions are effective may or may not happen again, or in cases may not happen often enough to justify the inconveniences of situations internal to the culture. Mechanisms built into cultures to preserve the culture may work positively or negatively when encountering situations not addressed by the culture. Maybe in done cases, the culture may "cause" more problems than it addresses. More often than not, internal issues form most of the experience of subscribing to the culture, thus you need to be "inside" to really "understand".

Whichever the case, while science gives verifiable explanations for its ways and religion gives explicit internal explanations, cultures don't offer any. Probably strategic I think - in that it's targeted to become your basic assumptions with which you explain everything else. In that way, it'd take you a long time before you figure out that you can question culture, just like you can question any philosophy, science or religion.

A different kind of money

Is it possible to trade privacy for freedom from corruption? I don't know much about economics, but let's just imagine this - a world where moral high ground is the dirtiest taboo, and everything is transparent.

Imagine a world where all currency is digital, secured via quantum cryptography, and processed on a global cloud that makes all transactions searchable. A world where it is not banks are the ones issuing legal tender notes based on complex mathematical models - currencies are personal credits, issued by individuals, each credit being a promise to fulfill a unit time of work. Credits rise and fall in buying power, based on the value put on the individual's work. You can't issue more credits than the hours you have in your predicted lifespan. When you're down and out, agriculture is your fallback plan - at the bottom line, one credit is an hour on a farmer's hand, harvesting the crop from the earth.

Since there is no universal currency, companies cannot simply pay you, but have to secure the credits of individual service providers. Goods have no inherent value, tangible goods are just a means of securing somebody's services.

What would such a world be like?

Is heaven an idea to which we try to match reality, or a reality to which we try to match the idea? Do we assume we understand it perfectly, or is five sigma good enough?

Before trusting logic, ask the intuition.

Before trusting intuition, ask the heart.

Before trusting the heart, ask the body.

Before asking the body, first check if the logic is valid in the first place.

Running

Thought this up when I ran my 20 minutes today.

Running is a state of being. You can be running for something, or running from something. Or you could always be feeling like you're running late. Or running out of time for that matter. Or you could be running into something or somebody, or running a race that will never be finished, or running on borrowed time. I guess we all do a little of each of these at one time or another. But what I'd like us to remember today, is that feeling of being totally free. That feeling that you can never be stopped - nor will you even want to slow yourself down. That feeling you feel when you decide to forget everything, and pour yourself into the moment. That moment you are not running for, or running from, or running on, or running into anything, but simply, just running. That for all the moments that must pass us by, there could be one in which staying on the moment where nothing matters, is all that matters.

the fundamental difference in the attitude of science and that of art - if i might attempt to make a distinction, is that the mind of science lets go of the present to take hold of the eternal, knowing that the present is in the eternal, while art, is letting go of the eternal to take hold of the present, knowing that the eternal is in the present.

if life is about the experience - then hey, there's nothing to lose!

dignity is invented by humans for the living. decay is the shizentai of nature.

i think religion is an idea on which we weigh all our sensory perceptions in order to transform them into a congruous system of experiences, in order to derive a method of thinking about things, a system of thinking that can be made to stay constant in a world of chaos.

based on this definition, let me speculate:

1. this method of thinking is what human beings have chosen through natural selection, to deal with the ever-changing world. perhaps, in the past, there was some kind of evolutionary pressure for human beings to come to rely on this systematic method of thinking, and subsequently develop a huge brain. or is it the discovery of the bone marrow that gave human beings a big brain, and that propelled them to use the big brain to their advantage?

2. yes, this systematic method of thinking has taken many names - logic, reason, religion, science, hope, faith, philosophy, superstition, maths.... but let me propose that it is all the same thing. it is not the only way for a
species to survive, but it is what our species has chosen.

3. maybe, just maybe, religion in its most primitive incarnation, was what made the human species different from all the other species on earth today. we define "success" in our own terms and think that we're the most successful species on the planet.

4. but for all our progress and technology, perhaps we're not really any "better" than all the other species. just "different". until we are able to simulate all evolution and work ahead to wipe out species that don't work well for us, the same rules of the game still apply to us.

5. The environment can also change drastically - it has happened before. Environment change, perhaps, is not so much about the health of the earth, as much it is about how incapable human beings are, to live in a climate that is dramatically different.

spiral 4

spiral 3

spiral 2

spiral 1

A.

1. The brain is whatever we make it practice to be.
   It takes in input as stimulus and the survival demands we put 
   on it make it what it needs to be.

2. I think we have 5 senses because the brain is an error-prone 
   device. having more input signals to the same reality 
   balances out the errors. this changes the brain from being 
   error-prone to being error-resistant, but it also adds new 
   dimensions to the brain. 

B.

see in your brain, and it's imagination.
touch in your brain, and it's empathy.
taste in your brain, and it's memory.
smell in your brain, and it's nostalgia.
hear in your brain, and it's conviction.

※肯定的に自分を評価して変化＝REVOLVE、否定的に自分を評価して変化＝EVOLVE

words. make them count.

there are words in silences, as there is music in silences. words start to count when you start to really hear what's in the silences, because silence is not the absence of sound, but the breath that we breathe into every word we write, every song we sing. making someone speak before his breath, is not communication. only when you let him breathe his breath into his words, are his words connected to him.

life is not about winning the fight or rising above the fight:
life is the fight, and the fight is life.

being alive is about being in a constant war against decay.

dying is the unseen part of living. my guess why the earth is not one single life-form but divided into individual creatures is so that each creature is the growth endpoint for its own cancers.

nature is neither kind nor unkind.
nature is the so far the only proven way how things can sustainably work.
and in this proven way, you are to fight - or be the endpoint of your own decay.

we find comfort in numbers because nothing distracts us from life like counting.

2 million years into the future.
i hope human beings and all our civilizations can be gone by then.
and i hope whoever takes over, is better at giving way.

are human beings obsessed with being human, or is that what all species do?

how i see it is that human beings can't quite come to terms with their desire to own the earth and all that is in it - yes, they split the earth amongst themselves, but they're struggling to find a basis, for why they are not the same as "mere" animals, and why they rule above them.

it's an eternal struggle, trying to forget that we were once part of the food web - that being attacked and eaten by an animal, is a natural occurrence - more so than dying in a traffic accident. it's a struggle, trying not to imagine that another species can take over the planet in a way were are unable to prepare for. we think viruses as bad things, that they are not forms of life - and do not want to consider that they may one day become a life on their own right.

but let us consider this.

we human beings have chosen to have longer lifespans, so that individually we get to live through more. we focus our progress on our intellectual and technological dimensions. but do we not remember, that species that evolve, do so by dying, and giving way to the next generation? something tells me that we're resting on our laurels, and all other species are evolving ahead of us. we find other ways to deal with evolutionary pressure so our bodies do not change. is "technology" really where we should place our bets? but then again, we don't think of "us" as a species - we think of us in terms of individuals, families, countries. there's always a "them" every time we think of ourselves as "us".

let us consider this.

that each species is simply an expression of life. that in every situation, there are more than one way to walk through it.

i hate the saying "let us agree to disagree". i think it's more like every expression of life has its own grammar that makes it exceedingly difficult for one to really understand another in a deep way.

i think we should instead say, "let us admit that we cannot understand how things work out for you". and i think that applies to other all other species we share this planet with. that we cannot begin to understand how they live through all the recent changes we humans think of as "progress".

let us consider this.

homosexuality and euthanasia receiving mainstream attention is a manifestation of evolutionary pressure - that we human beings are getting over-populated. and i think it will only be intensified when medical science goes on to its next step, when we can fix problems at genetic level, and when people are able to live so long - they refuse to die.

let us consider this.

that the very fact we need to even think about pollution issues, is an evidence that we are overpopulated.

if we were suddenly one-tenth of our population on earth, we could still be living the same way, and we would have cut 90% of our emissions.

let us consider this.

that life is as much about the dying, as it is about the living.
gods do not die, but they do not live either.
the only thing that lives and does not know how to die, is cancer.
and yes, we're the most cancerous species on earth.

Suppose we have four currencies:

E$, for the amount of effort a person puts in,
V$, the value of effort delivered,
P$, the perceived value of a product,
M$, the amount of compensation one gets for the effort, and

And suppose it takes M$20 to make a decent living in this country, where

Andrew in an unskilled worker. He puts in E$20 every month to deliver V$20 of work a month and gets by with M$20 every month. To his boss, Andrew's work in worth P$20.

Benjamin is a semi-skilled worker. He puts in E$10 every month to deliver V$20 of work a month. To his boss, his work is worth P$20.

Charles is a skilled worker. He puts in E$20 every month to deliver V$60 of work a month. To his boss, his work is worth V$60.

Andrew, Benjamin and Charles work for Daniel. Daniel is a management-level worker, and puts in E$10 every month to deliver V$5 of work to coordinate Andrew, Benjamin and Charles. Together they deliver a total of V$300 a month. To Daniel's boss, this work is worth P$300.

Edna is an investor. She puts in E$10 of work every month to deliver V$1 of work every month. Andrew, Benjamin, Charles, Daniel and Edna together deliver a total of $V301, but by strategically positioning Daniel's work, she can deliver a product to 10 people, to each of whom the product is worth a value of P$400.

How should society compensate Benjamin, Charles, Daniel and Edna for their contribution?

why do the days feel so long and yet the years so fleeting?

i think it is a flaw in the human memory, that it is selective, and selects at a level that is not directly accessible to what we can consciously process, such that we are able to recall only key events, and not the in-between periods that really run the hours by.

i think it is another flow that we tend to have a bias, to remember the good or the bad things. based on general or first impressions - conclusions jumped at without proof. and i think this memory helps people come to terms with life, and help them think that everything is worth the sweat, blood and tears.

Life is about finding all the wrong answers to all the right questions.

Sketch: The adventures of Noko Chan
G'day! I'm Chiku-nii! Ya havin' fun? Let's hold hands and play together!

Sketch: The adventures of Noko Chan
Hello, my name is Noko Chan. As you can see, i don't have a mouth. that is why I have to put into writing everything I want to say so badly.

happiness is a chemical reaction.
and i think it can be created when one dwells on the idea of being free.
but i think the same mechanism that causes one to dwell on the idea of being free, can be manipulated to cause one to feel otherwise.

therefore it would be good risk management
to be part of multiple models that potentially causes one to feel freedom.

that would mean that it could be advisable to form multiple sub-identities, each with its own history that explains its existence.

one example could be:
1) identity at work
2) identity when alone (eg religious/political affiliation, social cause)
3) identity at social settings (eg, family, friends, strangers, neighbors, overseas)

i do not believe there is any system that merits our total trust that it is complete good-willed in making us free - all systems need a self-preservation mechanism that works for itself. each system tries to be complete within itself, so that it denies the existence of other systems. yes, they try to be in harmony, but is that really the case? and let us not forget the human ability to "empathize", forming pre-conceived ideas that are derived from a vicarious experience, potentially creating among participants a reality that didn't initially exist.

wait, there is one other system that is less prone to such weakness.

it is one's basic perception.
to be in the present, hearing the sounds, smelling the scents, feeling the physical heat or pain or pleasure - and resisting trying to interpret any of them. this leads one to a model of explanation of reality that "it just is" - and experiencing the freedom would be dwelling in this state of "just is"-ness. Because this is based on your own perception, you can tweak it to your own advantage.

but the difficult part is resisting the temptation of interpretation.
human beings as a species have chose cognition and reason as its means of coping with change. this choice i think, is an effect of the mechanisms that works out for the self-preservation of the life of the human species - which of course, never promised to be kind to the individual.

happiness is a chemical reaction.
and i think it can be created when one experiences freedom.
and i think this experience of freedom can be created
with a memory that causes one to dwell on the idea of being free.

when one takes the reality around him for granted, there is no reference point as to how freedom can be measured, except with a further release, or a new captivity. but when one learns a version of history that explains what took them where they are, one now has a mental model to measure out just how free they are.

this memory could be one's personal history, one's inherited "traditions", history of the region or country or the world. or this memory could be a myth, a legend, a religion, a story that explains how the world got to be. whether or not such a story is real impacts only how believable the story is. once one is able to subscribe to the story, how much truth it has is practically irrelevant.

is this then simply a lie?
well, yes, because happiness is just a chemical reaction.

at this point, all the obsession
our current civilization has with "truth",
seems somewhat laughable.

happiness is a chemical reaction.
and i think it can be created when one experiences freedom.
which means that it must be

1. experienced, not just owned
2. a release from something

following which we might also say that it

3. does not imply that the release must be permanent
4. lasts as long as the experience of it

marriages could be a model for continuous release and return to restriction, with the couple reinforcing each other about their experiences of release.

"joy" as some religions like to differentiate from "happiness", could be a mental strategy that allows one to experience the freedom beyond the duration of a physical event. rituals and anniversaries help to keep experiences fresh. "hope" - could be a mental strategy that causes one to continuously experience a freedom by postponing its realization indefinitely into the future. In this case while the freedom itself may not be real, but the experience of it can be.

which means that religion could be a viable technology to create happiness without energy consumption. but religion, when institutionalized, is responsible for its own energy costs.

isn't there a way we can continuously experience freedom without all the tricks?

Q: does the lack of sufferring imply happiness? does dettachment mean being without a point of reference?

A: not happiness in terms of the fulfillment of desires, but an absolute peace from extinguishing desires - a happiness based on freedom from the burden of desires ... detachment means to be able to see the world without the illusions that we contruct for ourselves in our perceptions of reality - the point of reference is the fundamental natures of all things

Q: but does reality exist without perception? without language, without the idea of color, without the idea of taste? is it possible to be truly without attachment, or is the state of being without attachment a constructed reality that is based on the less volatile nature of things?

Does consciousness exist? Why is it different from gravity? Can consciousness not be the name we give to a phenomena which is in fact not something that originated from within us, but the sum total of all the chemicals and energies that are acting on us all the time, whether or not we can sense them?

If a ball rolls down a hill, it takes its path according to how gravity works on it. Why is the ball, which seems to have chosen its path, not conscious as we think we are?

Viruses mutate all the time in response to their surroundings. The are able to adapt without needing a neural network based brain. Why are viruses not conscious?

Can the "self" be an internal "gravity" no different from an external "gravity", that interact with each other such that we need to differentiate the inner gravity from the external gravity, thus resulting in the phenomena we call self-consciousness?

Can't we as a species consume less? Make goods last longer. Lower GDP. Limit mass production capabilities. Limit the use of mass media for marketing. Make it unfashionable to follow trends. Raise the personal cost of social actions that translate into high environmental costs in the short or long term.

One asks, and another answers.

But the answer never satisfies the asker
Not as much as the question satisfies the answerer.

The answer is not the goal, but the question is the beginning -
It is not how it ends that matters.

It is not what you think,
But the journey that I would take with you with the question I ask
Either with words, or without -
That sends you off to a journey of seeking.

I am tired of seeking answers; it is questions that now I seek.

The right question at the right time
Could be enough
To make all answers right.

The more industries develop, they figure out ways to satisfy the same desires and needs with minimal hard costs. I would like to see how sexual services can be virtualized to a point where the senses cannot tell the difference between real and simulated sex. Then sexual workers will not anymore need to prostitute their bodies - they will only need to prostitute their identities for money.

More than that, it would be interesting to see how patents would work in such a world!

Ah well, that being said, patents are exactly how thinkers prostitute their ideas...

Organizational Knowledge

i'm not a politics geek, but i think democracy has two major pitfalls:

- in democracies with a good mix of political parties - ideologies not being able to run their full course, because the population gets fickle about the ruling party because of how their policies affected them in the past few years;

- and in democracies where one single party runs the show - tweaking of policies that result in the party garnering too much power, weakening the power of the voter (who are, again, fickle), and turning against the original ideology it was built on.

why can't we have multiple ideologies coexisting, linked together via a minimal set of pre-agreed ("universal") protocols that allow them to interface with one another but beyond which they can run their own show? members of each group - or "tribe"? - are allowed to freely move between tribes - but tribes may require a minimum membership time-span of perhaps 10 years.

in doing so, those in power in each tribe will be forced to remain faithful to the ideology they represent because they are constantly serving a changing demography of voters.

and in doing so, ideologies can run their full course, towards disbandment, or towards a balance where its members grow at a stable rate, remain at a stable number, or maintain an effective balance between outgoing and incoming members.

wouldn't this be a more accurate articulation of our claim to this planet we share and right to be different?

i think that i am. but chances are i am not who i think i am.

Science is leaning that no matter how different we are, we're all basically the same animal. Culture is pretending that we aren't.

「和」と「無」は、共存できるものかな？

like the rain like the sand
like the mud like the wind
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the life like the death
like the deafness like the storm
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the rising tides like the new moon
like the earthquakes and cosmic radiation
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the ox-bow lakes like the fossilized amber
like the air making way for a falling leaf
you are a natural phenomenon.
like making friends like being lonely
like feeling nothing when your mind is busy
you are a natural phenomenon.
like war like recovery
like rising powers and dying species
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the changing generations that evolve to survive
plants, animals, bacteria or virus,
you are a natural phenomenon.
like gravity like sound
like weight like music
you are a natural phenomenon.
like greed like poverty
like joy like frustration
you are a natural phenomenon.
like the moving air like the still water
like the food web that balances itself
you are a natural phenomenon.

is shame an antifeminist invention created to distract people from men who cannot come to terms with their sexual desire?

time is everything
because one life is all that we have that
still matters to us
i am here and now
life is not a relay race
within my own lifetime i need to experience
the vast expanse of time
digitized into mere volumes that fit so easily into my attache
speed is crucial because
i need to make time in order to
fill it up with even more high-paced activities
i need the density to match up to my intensity
it's just that time,
as measured not in heartbeats
but in logarithmic man-seconds,
happens to be the flavor-of-the-day dimension
to measure up how full a life
i have lived till the end.

peace is not the opposite of war, no, never.
peace, is the equilibrium between destruction and rebirth, between war and rebuilding.
when there is widespread peace, it simply drives the war and the rebirth into smaller quarters, until it's totally contained within ourselves, until we have no words, no weapon, and no energy, to express the pain that is capsuled within us.

Even after they're gone
Their blogs continue sucking power into servers
To remain online. And they stay
On our list of friends on Facebook, always,
So near, they don't die;
Where in a different age,
They would not have been more than a weak glow in the abyss of our memories
Even as we strain to keep together
That distant warmth which is the ghost of their existence -
But now they're always with us. And we can always
Send them messages and happy birthdays,

Even after they're gone.
They're always there in the online world, but
Ever too shy to return
Messages, pokes, or accept
New friends; perhaps they are just too busy; perhaps,
In another world,
They have a life.

Even after they're gone,
We think only of those
We think of; We forget those we forget -
And we are distanced from
Our grief, which we no longer know how to contain
Within us; we are forced to learn to forget
What it meant to remember.
How do we light a candle for someone
Who is always present on our desks?

Even after they're gone,
We now have the technology
To keep them alive in our shared consciousness.
We can no longer feel the shape of the wall
That stands between Us and Them -
Or remember that we too will, in all likelihood, cross over,
To leave behind a people
Who will never learn
When to hold on,
And when to let go.

Life is a series of over-corrections, because you're always wrong.

S: That's an overly pessimistic thought.

Just thinking about how we are always so obsessed about "learning" from our experiences, and how society does not agree with people who "just do not learn".

S: care to explain who this nebulous 'society' is?

what i mean is that theres nothing inherently wrong with people who make the same mistakes break the same laws and cause the same distress on those around them all the time. i have a colleague who is not very lets say inspired at his job. my boss thinks that he needs to grow. i think if not learning anything can still earn him a salary its a fine strategy.

S: I am surprised this is coming from you - it departs from your typical idealism

atypical is where i'm trying to go. i've always embraced change, cos i think change is inevitable and for me coming to terms with change is the most appropriate response - but there's always been this line i wouldn't cross - a part of me i wouldn't let go and allow it to change. i'm realizing that in order to embrace change, i need to be able to let go of even that part of me that thinks exactly that.

isn't the dictionary in our age, a fucking fine democracy?
you do not elect people to choose the words to put in them -
it is not in the interest of those who rule the book to rule our lives.
instead, they simply document how we consistently use as words;
failing to do so would render the dictionary less useful.
yet, as open it is, at the same time, the dictionary has the authoritative say as to
what words we prefer children to or not to be taught.

i think it is exciting, because in the democracy of our time,
we look down on people who break the law - yet it is the very action
of these people that end up in landmark cases that change the law.

the dictionary, instead, rewards those who dare to challenge the times.
it recognizes them as trend setters.
it recognizes the fact that it is the times,
that must decide for itself what is right, and what is wrong.

but i have only one issue with it.

that the dictionary is necessarily biased towards the society that creates it - to those who do not write their own dictionaries, it is an authoritarian state.

yes, there is Wikitionary, but are we ready to teach our children the words we really use and who we really are?

The Artist responds to a world of infinite detail to create lofty ideas, while the Scientist responds to lofty ideas to create a world of infinite detail.

And as they say. the devil is in the details.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” (The Arts, Picasso Speaks, 1923)

It is the theory that decides what we can observe....(Albert Einstein)


The Consumer gets caught between both and sees nothing but the truth - even when it is a lie.

now i know why people who cook don't really eat all that much of what they cook - cos
eating starts from the cooking; cooking starts from the eating. cooking is like a process you get to know the ingredients, imagining their taste, and experimenting to understand the taste better, so by the time the cooking is done, putting it into the mouth is just part of the whole process of tasting the food.