Dangerous catch up game with terrorists!

Today I was stripped of my shaving cream and tooth paste when attempted to go through airport security! What a pain in the butt! I had a hunch that they are not gonna let them through but rather than asking a friend I thought to try it for myself. Usually when you ask people a question they feel obliged to answer even though they don’t know the answer!! So I said to myself may be a pressurized gel is different from just gel and may be it’s ok. Anyhow, my carry on was caught by the screening machine and I had to open my bag and expose my dirty laundry!! You say who cares? obviously I do!  Notwithstanding my story, I want to make a point that US government and perhaps others always seem to be behind the curve. They do catch up game with terrorists!! How? You very well know it. 9/11 had to happen before they decided that knives & box cutters are bad ideas on the plane. Thanks so much!! Then they waited for the shoe bomber (The guy who wanted to set off explosives in his shoe on the plane. If you saw the guy’s picture you never forget it!) before they decided to check people’s shoes when boarding the planes!! 

How about anti terror gurus predicting these things beforehand?!!

Ofcource after the latest attempt to use liquid explosives, we all have to live with the inconvenience of not being able to carry any liquid on board, including juices and drinks!! Aren’t you alarmed that whoever is in charge of safety seems to be lagging behind all the time and waiting for terrorists to come up with the idea first?!! Something is seriously wrong with this picture!! On the other hand if we are to extrapolate the situation pretty soon everyone is allowed to get on board only with underwear!!

Roulette, a Paradox in probability theory?!!

When playing Roulette there seems to be two competing, contradictory notions at work the same time. One says: The wheel does not have a memory so it does not keep track of the previous numbers and probability of each number coming is the same as any other regardless if it came previous round or how many times in past 20 rounds. On the other hand we know that there is a law in probability, called law of large numbers that miantains that the average value of many trials/outcomes has to approach the expected value of the distribution. In case of roullete the expected value is something around 18. So basically it says you can not have high numbers forever. In other words if you have had lets say 12 high numbers it’s inevitable that smaller numbers start to come. So can be said about red and black outcomes. So which one is it? No memory or memory.I have seen answers to this all over but I am not convienced yet!!

An eerie Mars surface!!

  Looking at the picture from Mars surface, quite, dead, pointless, inhabitable, inhospitable one wonders:

  If there was no intelligent life around what would be god doing in universe?

  There was no meaning to good and evil, no judgment or punishment to handout.

  Material/Physical world would just go along following laws of physics.

  Without intelligent life there would not be any point or meaning of creating universe.

  So does god created intelligence or vice versa?

  Just keep looking at the surface of Mars!! Universe is awfully quite! It’s just sound of Dick cheney grinding his teeth !!

Beach volleyball for world leaders!

  I remember vividly that scene. Arafat and Barak attending a peace summit in US. There came a time that they had to go through a door. TV cameras were witness to the generosity.”you first..no no you first ..please after you..”!! What? These guys would have killed each other hundred times over in any other circumstances, so why so respectful all of a sudden?!!

Answer, this is how humans behave!! The walls, the barriers, distances make for animosity and hatred. At a distance, beyond headlines everyone is an image just a name and usually an evil one. Shake hands, drink tea,  crack some jokes and everyone comes back to earth, human again.

We are all like that for most part. Without trying to trivialize the major crisis in the world and ignoring or down playing the suffering of some people I would like to forward the following idea in order to diffuse world crisis, at least the ones that are unnecessary and I believe most of them are!!

Ready? Every year set up a summit, say in United nations. Invite the heads of states, leaders, etc. Don’t let them sit stiff on their chairs and look at the world from their own egotistic, self righteous point of view. Mix’em up. Let them interact. May be do some karaoke, divide them into teams and let them play in a volley ball tournament. Just try to break the egos. Break the walls among them. Let them feel they are all humans. For example set up a beach volleyball tournament and let them compete for the seats on security council (swim suits are optional!!), seriously. Let them form a bond with each other. you see a world takes a sigh of relief when Bush and Ahmadinejad exchange high fives when they score a point against Assad and Olmer!!

Call me crazy, but I’ve seen enough homo sapiens in my life to know what to expect from them. Lots of  the dire problems we have in the world are rooted in ignorance. Lets break the walls. Lets stop being gods and be humans again. I am serious!!!

Why are we here, why now?!!!

The age of universe expressed in atomic units is very close to the ratio of electromagnetic to gravitational forces in the atom (both 10 to power 40). Is this a coincidence?

Astrophysicist Robert Dicke argued it is because of anthropic reasons. The age of the universe means of course the epoch at which we happen to be living. What determines that epoch? Life as we know it demands the existence of carbon and other heavy elements, none of which existed in abundance at the origin of universe. Instead, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen etc, were synthesized in the interiors of stars. These elements were then distributed through space as a result of supernova that destroyed the stars. Terrestrial type biology therefore had to wait for at least one generation of stars to live and die before it could start. At the other extreme, life would become problematical after several stellar life cycles due to paucity of suitable stars. Hence we would expect to find ourselves living at a cosmic epoch between one and several stellar lifetimes after the big bang.

Now, the lifetime of a star is determined by the physical processes that control the rate at which fuel is consumed and its energy flows away into space. The rate turns out to depend on the ratio of the electromagnetic to gravitational forces!!

 From: Are we alone? by P. Davis

Intelligent life Who?!!!!

Ours is the only planet we know of that is hospitable to life. We are also the only “intelligent” life in the universe as far as we have searched. Knowing that, as well as we do I want to argue that we are not that “intelligent” after all and in fact our planet is rather a ”dumb” one!

Look around you, your building elevator is missing the number 13, so was the row number 13 in the airplane I took last month. 13 is a very very “bad” number!! Bad things happen to you if you are associated with number 13 in any shape and form!!!!

Of course no one exactly knows why. The poor number is one of the primes, what else is its fault?!!

I am amazed how many different cultures have this “Knock on the wood” concept?! You acknowledge something good about someone an then you knock on the wood! What the hell is that supposed to mean? We all carry laptops, cell phone other high tech gadgets but still keep knocking the wood!! What is the problem with us?

How many people you know who believe in astrology? Man has walked on the moon, robots are landing on the Mars and we still believe in that kind of stuff!! Just because you are born at the time when seemingly sun was in the middle of an illusion across the sky called constellation does not make you any different from others!!! beyond that are you saying we have just only 12 different kind of idiots on this planet not more?!! All of this in the face of Sequencing of human Genome?! Try saying that to thousands of people who look into these stuff to find out clues about their life and future and romance and so on. I read somewhere that coach of French soccer national team crossed out all the “Pisces” players from the roaster to win the world cup!

Not sure what was Zidane’s sign? 

Look further. Not too far though. See people who worship cows, those who are waiting for the “End of the world” and give you exact time and day (They have revised that quite few times already!!). Yet these are folks who live in major cities and centers of the civilizations in the world. I am not even talking about what people believe in forests of Amazon or tribes of Africa. 

Why are we still so ignorant in the face of mind blowing scientific achievements in space science, communication, biology, etc?

If I got you thinking, ask me why?

Journey of a carbon atom..

     “We are made from the ashes of stellar death. Some scientists have whimsically imagined the meanderings of a single carbon atom, released in the explosive death throes of a star, drifting for eons across intergalactic space, landing in a gas disk that eventually formed Earth, becoming chemically altered, and finally being inserted into a chain of life as part of a nerve cell that guides a human hand to write about it.”

Don’t know who said this.

My life in two sentences!!

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his time upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing!!

William Shakespeare

For once I could figure out what Shakespeare is talking about!!

Beyond Chutzpah!! Zoroastrians’ struggle to survive!!

Here we got at most two hundred thousands people who believe rest of the 6 billion people on this planet are dead wrong!! I am speaking of Zoroastrians. Talk about Chutzpah (supreme self confidence in Hebrew). They are so convinced of their righteousness that the main headache they have is how to avoid inter marriages in order not to dilute their sect. I mean give me a break!! Now, I am not saying these are bad people or anything like that. Most likely they are very decent people with good moral values but again after few thousands years they have to freshen up.

How much mileage you can get out of “Good thoughts, good deeds, good words”? They should have realized by now that “good” is not good enough!! One needs more road maps more guidelines. For starter is stem cell research a “good” thing? If so please send a letter to White house titled “Thus spoke Zarathustra” !!!

Then again there is nothing special about these folks. There are tons of other small sects out there trying to survive the remorseless history at the expense of assuming rest of us being eternally misguided and doomed. Don’t get me wrong ideologies or religions with many more followers don’t necessarily fair better still they make their living by sentencing rest of us to reside eternally in some kind of HELL! I think some kind of modesty is in order for all people of faith! Lets be more inclusive!! For now we are trapped on this spaceship called earth. I suggest we get along!

Here is the article in NYTIMES that started all this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/us/06faith.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Zoroastrians Keep the Faith, and Keep Dwindling

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Published: September 6, 2006

BURR RIDGE, Ill. — In his day job, Kersey H. Antia is a psychologist who specializes in panic disorders. In his private life, Mr. Antia dons a long white robe, slips a veil over his face and goes to work as a Zoroastrian priest, performing rituals passed down through a patrilineal chain of priests stretching back to ancient Persia…….

It’s the “Relative” success stupid!!

Success is a relative notion. It’s not how an animal does in an absolute sense. It’s how it does relative to everyone else. Natural selection is like the story of two hikers  that saw a bear charging at them from a distance. One of them starts frantically putting on his running shows. His friend shouts at him that it is useless you can not out run the bear. The first guy shouts back “I don’t have to out run the bear. I just have to out run you.”

From the book: Descartes’ baby

I loved it!!