June 27, 2008
Food - Eat, Memory - Family Meal - Food - Eat, Memory - NYTimes.com
Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.(Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth
transfixed by a sun ray:
and suddenly it is evening.)
June 26, 2008
I never knew Google was THIS massive!
“The blogosphere was amazed earlier this year when it realised the true size of Google. Think Google is the King Kong of search? Think a million King Kongs and you’re getting close. Google processes 20 Petabytes of a data a day. Don’t know what a Petabyte is? Check this out:An MP3 is about 3MB. The Beatles recorded 214 singles- that’s close to just one gigabyte. 1024 gigabytes makes a Terabyte and 1024 terabytes makes a petabyte.”
June 25, 2008
June 17, 2008
Something I have been noticing in the way human expression has shaped up in the recent times.Aren’t we slowly going into a language which is more metaphorical than it has ever been ? Language has heavily come to depend upon analogy and discarding exactness or precision of a scientific expression ,it now uses symbols which are thinly veiled poetic expressions or imagery. Everything that we have invented has been conceptualized or realized as an idea through the use of metaphors. The use of metaphors is not merely for the sake of better articulation but as an effective connecting link between different stages of idea forming and idea evolution .The distinction between expression and thought gets effectively blurred as thought at some stage becomes expression and expression ,once achieved, becomes a thought in itself.
Apart from the use of metaphors by science scholars and science thinkers ,the geeks use metaphors in a big way .In a typical paragraph of technical writing you will always find a large number of metaphors .Everything that the geek expounds uses metaphors and it is through metaphors that new concepts evolve in internet and technology . Knowledge aggregation through tagging becomes possible through metaphors and lateral linkages by way of analogy and ontological methods.
“A tag cloud ” is a pretty metaphor used for the collection of the frequently used tags on the blog or website-a highly visual image. “Avatar” is a beautiful metaphor for a virtual representation of your identity.The word is Sanskrit for the incarnations of God Vishnu on the earth to rid it of its accumulated sinfulness from time to time. “a kismet” is Arabic word for “automatic Kismet”,meaning each spam comment deserves what its content is i.e.the bad ones get the boot,the good ones get the approval. “Twitter” is another beautiful metaphor for a tiny 140 character micro-messenger and the “tweets” are an extension of the bird image which has become so popular .
“Being woken in the dead of night by noisy neighbors blasting out music could soon be a thing of the past.
Scientists have shown off the blueprint for an “acoustic cloak”, which could make objects impervious to sound waves.
The technology, outlined in the New Journal of Physics, could be used to build sound-proof homes, advanced concert halls or stealth warships.”
In this piece of science writing ,watch out for the metaphors galore-neighbours blasting out music,blueprint,”acoustic cloak”,”stealth warships” etc.
The metaphors make the expression visually effective and the assimilation of the idea becomes easier .For instance , the metaphor “acoustic cloak” is a highly visual representation for the gadget developed by the scientists and the same thing would take a long time for a lay reader to understand without the extremely pretty image of the cloak.
June 3, 2008
The German poet, playwright, and critic Friedrich Schiller thought there were two kinds of poets: "sentimental" and "naive" (and neither term, for Schiller, was an insult). Sentimental poets, he said, are self-conscious and retrospective; they "look for lost nature" in the people and things they write about. Their characteristic works, Schiller believed, sound carefully wrought, conclusive, even if written at high speed. Naive poets, on the other hand, seem to "be nature"—poetry seems to come out of them as wind from the sky, or leaves from the trees, as if it were their native speech. Naive poets often sound as if they never revise, even when we know they’ve worked hard on many drafts; their poetry seems to flow and does not want to end.
May 2, 2008
Do you exist if I do not believe you exist-is the question.
Of course one is not sure.An objective reality cannot exist without somebody perceiving it.If you believe it still exists independent of your perception,you may do so but that is only a belief and hence is subjective. It is therefore safe to presume that nothing exists without our perceiving that it exists. The question that arises is whether a reality has necessarily to exist if we believe it exists.By way of example ,I believe ghosts and gnomes exist and does that mean they exist as an objective reality ? No.Additional conditions apply .Verifiability of the evidence suggesting their existence should possibly be one of the conditions. Of course one would ask what we mean by verifiability.Suppose there is a mountain near the horizon and everybody’s perception and everything else points to the possibility of its existing. Which means the sensory impressions of all the people with respect to the object tally in all respects. We may therefore conclude the mountain exists. The unanswered question is whether several assessments tallying with one other and based upon “physical verifiability” make the mountain an objective reality .
Since we cannot separate our consciousness from what we perceive outside of ourselves the only way of verifying the existence of the objective reality is to cease to be the experiencer and become a part of the experienced. This is what the Hindus call brahma gyan(knowledge of Brahma)
May 2, 2008
Groupthink is an interesting phenomenon which can occur when a group of people gathers to make a decision. Essentially, desires for group cohesiveness and a quick decision cloud the judgment of the people in the group, leading to a decision which is less than ideal. Social psychologists have studied groupthink extensively in an attempt to understand the warning signs of this phenomenon, and to develop methods for avoiding groupthink. Irving Janis was one of the first social psychologists to delve into groupthink, publishing a study on groupthink in the context of foreign policy decisions in 1972. He argued that groupthink was probably responsible for some of the more unwise decisions made by the United States government, backing up his claim with studies of group dynamics. Many studies of groupthink focus on foreign policy, since the groups who make these kinds of decisions tend to be classically pressured and very cohesive, setting up an ideal situation for groupthink.
Several things characterize groupthink. Members of the group tend to experience illusions of unamity, morality, and invulnerability within the group, meaning that they think everyone agrees, they are under the impression that their decisions are morally based, and they think that the decisions made within the group are always sound. Groupthink is also accompanied by self-censoring, in which members of the group stifle their opinions because they are afraid of controversy. The group often engages in heavy stereotyping of other groups and the situation they are dealing with, and there is often an immense pressure for conformity within the group. One of the hallmarks of groupthink is collective rationalization, in which the members of the group rationalize thoughts or decisions in flawed ways. This rationalization is often supported by so-called “mindguards,” who prevent contradictory information from entering the group discussion. As the members of the group work with incomplete information, high pressure, and a desire to conform, they come up with an idea which may not be balanced and well considered, like the decision to invade another country on the basis of flimsy evidence. There are a number of ways to avoid groupthink. Most importantly, the group must start out with no clear expectations and desires, and dissenting opinions must be encouraged, to the point of asking individual members of the group to argue against ideas as they are presented. Many organizations also break groups up into smaller committees which come back to the main group with their ideas, in the hopes of stimulating more discussion and creative ideas. In a situation where discussing decisions with people outside the group is feasible, people are encouraged to talk with people not in the group, to see whether their ideas will hold up in the outside world.
How often have I seen this happening in our organisation! The individual decisions of a few strong-willed people often pass off as group decisions merely because the so called leaders ,often self-appointed ,put down dissent by the simple method of shouting louder, using lots of fluffy unrelated data and oneupsmanship. In the group discussions held as part of the promotion process,several clear thinking people get left out because the other participants are brash enough to leave them no room for airing of their own views..The Management’s representatives ,who are supposed to evaluate the individual’s contribution get easily taken in by the apparent consensus that seems to be building up around the leader’s viewpoint and come to the facile conclusion that the aggressiveness of the so called leaders is really what they have to look for in the promotion process and end up rating them higher than the other participants who are considered "also-rans"
April 15, 2008
“Teilhard went on to argue that there have been three major phases in the evolutionary process. The first significant phase started when life was born from the development of the biosphere. The second began at the end of the Tertiary period, when humans emerged along with self-reflective thinking. And once thinking humans began communicating around the world, along came the third phase. This was Teilhard’s “thinking layer” of the biosphere, called the noosphere (from the Greek noo, for mind). Though small and scattered at first, the noosphere has continued to grow over time, particularly during the age of electronics. Teilhard described the noosphere on Earth as a crystallization: “A glow rippled outward from the first spark of conscious reflection. The point of ignition grows larger. The fire spreads in ever-widening circles, he wrote, “till finally the whole planet is covered with incandescence.”His picture of the noosphere as a thinking membrane covering the planet was almost biological - it was a globe clothing itself with a brain. Teilhard wrote that the noosphere “results from the combined action of two curvatures - the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of the mind.”Marshall McLuhan was drawn to the concept of the noosphere. Teilhard’s description of this electromagnetic phenomenon became a touchstone for McLuhan’s theories of the global “electric culture.” In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan quotes Teilhard: “What, in fact, do we see happening in the modern paroxysm? It has been stated over and over again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electromagnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth.” This simultaneous quality, McLuhan believed, “provides our lives again with a tribal base.” But this time around, the tribe comes together on a global playing field.We stand today at the beginning of Teilhard’s third phase of evolution, the moment at which the world is covered with the incandescent glow of consciousness. Teilhard characterized this as “evolution becoming conscious of itself.” The Net, that great collectivizer of minds, is the primary tool for our emergence into the third phase. “With cyberspace, we are, in effect, hard-wiring the collective consciousness,” says Barlow.”
3.06: A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain
A globe clothing itself with a brain- a n interesting proposition. The Net is collective conscious,the wiring of millions of neurons .Each individual finds himself everywhere across space and time. When I am sitting here and typing away I am not merely in my local space but am spread everywhere -a noosphere which dominates the world ,the sky and the space.
April 15, 2008
“Gabriel argues that “Worse is better” produces more successful software than the MIT approach: As long as the initial program is basically good, it will take much less time and effort to implement initially, and it will be easier to adapt to new situations, for example: porting software to new machines. Thus its use will spread rapidly, long before a program developed using the MIT approach has a chance to be developed and deployed. Once it has spread, there will be pressure to improve its functionality, but users have already been conditioned to accept “worse” rather than the “right thing”. “Therefore, the worse-is-better software first will gain acceptance, second will condition its users to expect less, and third will be improved to a point that is almost the right thing. In concrete terms, even though Lisp compilers in 1987 were about as good as C compilers, there are many more compiler experts who want to make C compilers better than want to make Lisp compilers better.”
Worse is better - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
We have ,in our organization, experienced this .The banking software we had adopted was based upon an archaic Scottish concept of banking which was implemented at great risk for migration from the essentially manual systems of book keeping to a first time ever computerized book-keeping. We thought the apocalypse had arrived and it was only a few years before we would all take back our left out provident fund moneys and go home. Strangely enough we plodded along for 15 years with the system with occasional hiccups but by and large it went on fine and the doomsday did not arrive as expected. We cursed the system under our breath but carried on regardless. Perhaps worse was actually better because the system evolved beautifully with several useful inputs from the grassroots level implementors and lo and behold the finished product bore no resemblance to the original one which we had inherited from the confused Scotsmen.
April 10, 2008
“…we know almost nothing about our pasts. What we remember is often false. For instance, when I try to think about when I was seven years old I can just recall two or three episodes, two or three images. And I only remember them because they are always the same: I remember remembering them. A lot of people would like to have another past; some are able to make it up and believe in their own versions. The writer Bruce Chatwin, for example, according to the biography by Nicholas Shakespeare, invented such a story for himself. It appears he believed in this past, which led us as his readers to believe in it, too.PP/AT: Do you think a made-up past can come to define somebody’s future, too? And does this idea apply to nations as well?JA: Yes, no doubt about it: by making up a past you’re able to alter your future. That’s why the idea is so attractive. The final objective is to modify everything. Science fiction writers know that by playing with the past you are also playing with the future. There are a lot of books that explain how some so-called “traditions” were made up in a matter of days. In newer countries like Angola the temptation to create national heroes and traditions is very strong and answers a collective need. It’s been done before and it’s being done again now.”
Words Without Borders: An Interview with José Eduardo Agualusa
I have seen this happening in my own life . I try to make up a past which will make me free of guilt. Because guilt is what you feel all the while when you think of the past events .Rather than wallowing in self-misery born of a painful realization of one’s own failures I would prefer to make up my past ,which gives me a better interpretation of my visions for future Not that I try to make a romanticized past with imagined glory.It is just the thought that some of the blandest events that had happened could not have been better and that some of the painful events were not in fact all that pain-causing and could have happened any way without their origin in my own failure.
Tags: madeup past
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