The logic of God and Evil

Although I always wanted to make a flowchart like this, I was too busy (lazy) to do so.

But somebody made it, by God's grace. I stumbled upon it over the web.

Credit to Steven Butler.

Empathy and Sympathy

"The truth is, rarely a response can make something better, 

what makes something better is connection"

The Chaos Theory - A layman introduction

I spent my Sunday learning about Chaos, Fractal and Self Organisation.

A beautiful and charming concept. I have been trying to get my grip over it for since I first came across it(~2011), but I was always left in bits and piece. A recent book I read made the magic.

The reason why this is beautiful is because of its elegance and importance in understanding the very basic working of nature.

PS- There is a movie based on Chaos Theory. :)

Before you go-to IMDB, you gotta know what Chaos theory actually is.

Chaos- In layman term.

Let say you are practicing basketball. But instead of ball, you have marbles. Now you throw the marble for the first time. You miss the basket by huge distance. Now you realize you have to throw it a bit left. You do this. Again you fail, but this time the distance is reduced. You shift you trajectory a bit more and again you fail but with a lesser distance.

After number of try, you realize the actual trajectory and the elbow angle needed for throwing the marble right in the center of the basket. Yupi!!!

The twist is here. Now even if you throw the marble a little bit left or right, you have a chance of not missing the basket. What this means is, a little bit of change in the initial condition does not change the result of the system to tremendous amount.

This is what we call as Newtonian Systems or Deterministic system. These are system which have initial conditions (the elbow orientation, the trajectory, the size of marble), set of fixed rules/laws (the law of motions, the law of gravity governing the marble, the air friction, etc) and the output (in this case the marble landing in the basket).

Simply, INPUT + LAWS -----determines-----> OUTPUT.

In a Newtonian system, if we know the initial condition and the laws, we can predict the outcome (as in case of marble-basket game, you can predict that if you keep the initial condition and set of rules same, the marble will land in the basket).

But there are some system in nature which is not predictable. What we mean by this is, even if you keep the keep the laws/rules the same and just change the input a little bit, the outcome can be drastically different from the predicted.

Simply, INPUT + LAWS ------doesn't determines -----> OUTPUT

This is a what we called chaos. What it means is "even if you know the exact input and the set of rules governing the system, you can never ever predict the outcome of that system."

Example-

The first mention of chaos theory was by MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Lorenz was working on a new software which was built to predict the weather for future based on same input data (temperature, pressure, humidity,wind velocity, etc). This was based on mathematical equations.

When Lorenz gave some input to the system, he got a graph like this.

|

|

|........---__----.....-----....-------.......------

|

|_________________________________________

Lorenz just re-ran the whole program again with the same input and same software. Surprisingly, this time the input was astonishing different.

|

|         /\             / \

|......../ \..., ,......./ \......., ,......./\.../\......

|              \/                   \/

|_________________________________________

Lorenz was amazed. He checked the input and the calculation once again thinking it was his mistake. Astonishingly, every thing was similar to the last run. Why has the system produced such a different output.

Lorenz realized that there is some changes in the initial input values.

In the first run, the values were like 0.98453 or 12.32470 or 3.6614.

In the second run, the values were 0.984 or 12.324 or 3.661. i.e., the values were rounded off to 3 decimal places.

Lorenz realized that the determinism fails even if you change the value by just 0.0001. That means if there is just a minor change in the input field, the software will show rain instead of winter at particular place. He realized that this is a big failure and that not all system in the nature is deterministic. What this means,there are some system to which you can never determine the output to utmost accuracy, no matter how hard you try, this is because the initial data of some system can never be known with complete accuracy (like weather).

The consequence of this theory is something called as Butterfly Effect. 

It says that flapping of a butterfly's wings in South America could affect the weather in Texas

This is CHAOS THEORY in a nutshell. Happy learning!

The Conversion Factor

Going around Mumbai roads, you will quite frequently  come across this hoarding these days.

Pay attention, keep your mobile phone aside. Think about the following.

• This poster or advertisement has no “responsibility tag”. What I mean by this, the poster has no names of the organization of the committee who are responsible for this.
• This poster has no “description” of what it is all about. All it speaks about is change or parivartan (in hindi).
• It has Johnny Lever and Nagma. Both of them a known television stars. Good selling point.
• It offers you free books and free sessions. Just call on the number. Maybe just a miscall will do

Read more

It is always now....

"It is always now 

i actually want to talk 

today about death 

now most of us do our best to not to think about death 

but there's always part of our minds that knows 

this cant go on forever 

part of us always knows 

they were just a doctor's visit away or a phone call away from being starkly 

reminded 

with the fact of our own mortality 

or of those closest to us.

Now i'm sure many of you in this room have experienced this in some form 

you must know how uncanny it is 

to suddenly 

be thrown out of the normal course of your life 

and just be given the full time job of not dying 

or caring for someone who is.

But the one thing people tend to realize 

at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time 

when life was normal 

and it's not just what they, it's not just what they did with their time, it's not just 

that they 

spent too much time working or or compulsively checking email 

it's that they cared about the wrong things 

they regret what they cared about 

their attention was bound up in petty concerns 

year after year 

when life was normal 

and this is a paradox of course because 

we all know 

this epiphany is coming 

i mean, don't you know this is coming? 

don't you know there's going to come a day 

when you'll be sick or someone close to you will die 

and you'll look back 

at the kinds of things that captured your attention 

and you'll think, "what, what was I doing?" 

you know this, and yet if you're like most people, 

you'll spend most of your time in life 

tacitly presuming you'll live forever 

it's like watching a bad movie for the fourth time 

or bickering with your spouse 

I mean this, these things only makes sense 

in light of eternity 

there better be a heaven if we're gonna waste our time like that 

there are ways to 

really live in the present moment 

what what's the alternative? 

it is always now 

however much you feel you may need to plan for the future 

to anticipate it, to mitigate the risks, 

the reality of your life is now 

this may sound trite 

but it's the truth 

it's not quite true as a matter of physics, in fact there is no now 

that encompasses the entire universe you can't talk about an event 

being simultaneously 

occurring here and one 

at the same moment occurring in Andromeda 

the truth is, now is not even well-defined as a matter of neurology because 

we know that inputs to the brain 

 come at different moments and that consciousness is built upon layers 

of inputs whose timing to have to be different 

are conscious awareness of the present moment is 

in some relevant sense already a memory 

but as a matter of conscious experience 

the reality of your life 

is always now 

and i think this is a liberating truth about the nature of the human mind in 

fact i think there's probably nothing more important to understand 

about your mind than that 

if you want to be happy 

the past is a memory 

it's a thought 

arising in the present 

the future is merely anticipated, it is another thought 

arising now 

what we truly have 

is this moment 

and this 

and we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth 

repudiating it, fleeing it, overlooking it, 

and the horror 

is that we succeed 

we we've managed to 

never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we 

are we are 

continually hoping to become happy in the future 

and the future never arrives 

even when we think we're in the present moment we're, we're in very 

subtle ways, always looking over its shoulder 

anticipating what's coming next 

we're always solving a problem 

and it's possible to simply drop your problem 

if only for a moment 

and enjoy whatever is true of your life in the present 

this is not a matter of new information 

or more information, it requires a change in attitude 

it requires a change in the attentiveness you pay 

to your experience in the present moment "

Part of script adopted from Sam Harris Lecture 

Sam Harris - Death and the Present Moment

Sam Harris

Why Do We Fall In Love?

The following is what I wrote for a QA website. It is a bit poetic, yet it has the smell of science and evolutionary biology in it! I have oversimplified it, but the intend to give a rough idea behind of science of love is fulfilled.

Why Do We Fall in Love?

Okay. Simply to mate. 
Fine, To mate better.

But wait, can't we mate without loving?
Yes we can. Most of the other animals do it that way. Look around you.

So why love?

The more evolved (in term of Natural Selections) an organism is, the more complex the process of mating becomes. Compare algae and consider a dog. Huge difference.

"I won't mate with just anybody ". said the brain at some point of evolution. I will search for the best. Wow. This became the golden rule for sex and thus for evolution (you be dumb to say sex is not tightly coupled to evolution.).

Best? What do you mean by best? The strongest, the fastest, the tallest, the coolest, the healthiest, the nerdest. The 'anything-est' I mean.

And one more thing, the most Trust worthy. Females don't want to take care of the baby alone (obviously , why would they you sick sexist!).  Human mind has then developed a system to separate the perv and the fuckers from the genuine and caring mate.

This system is called LOVE.

Consider world without love. How do you check whether somebody cares about you truly or is just hanging out with you to fulfill his/her (I support gay marriage!) sexual desire.

Love is like a meter for us to measure the likelihood of somebody been a good, caring, long lasting, sexy, yummy, delicious mate!!!

The purpose is same, the process is same, the style of execution varies..

Immortality- What I learn from Matt Ridley

"Nothing last forever, and we both know hearts can change, 

It's hard to hold a candle, in the cold November rain...."

--November Rain - Guns N' Roses.

How perfectly poetic can life be. Nothing last forever, you may have heard this phrase many a time in your life. This is just a spread-out version of saying, things are mortal.

With all my senses, I somehow say this, Science is beautiful, as Carl Sagan says, a candle in dark. It can answer quite a lot of question. It maybe wrong in many places, but it is a self correcting enterprise. It is open to questions, and changes.

Genes are immortal. They have, metaphorically speaking, traversed the planet from the dawn of life, till the present moment. Four billion year of journey, fifty million times photocopy, and yet they are, intact in the most purest sense. 

Consider this, take a original copy of any document, take it to the photocopy machine(most people call it Xerox. This happens when a brand name becomes a parasite. It is called genericide). Start making a copy. From original make the first copy. Call it copy1. Now from copy1 make copy2 and so on. By the time you reach 120-130 copy, you will start feeling that the original is nowhere exactly similar to the copy120. If you do it more, after certain number of copies, the page would be loosing its originality. But look at your genes. 50 million times photocopy, and yet as perfect as they are. Amazing I find this to be.

Diwali, yet again - A letter from a Dog

Wednesday-  30^th October, 2013.

It was the day following the third night after the Daddy day. Human call it Wednesday. I call it day following the third night after Daddy Day. Daddy Day is when I can see my daddy at home for the whole day. Human call it Sunday. What a day for a attention seeking bitch like me!

Anyways, not moving away from the topic, I hear this huge sudden high pitch sound. Like a BANG!.  Not a second later I guessed it was a cracker blast. Few more second later the pungent fragrance touched my nose and I confirmed. I was on my toe. I was worried. Felt like crying :'(.
That very moment I ran into the hall to see if TV is on. Many a time this kind of sound is followed by men in blue dress running on a green field. They are like me, eagerly chasing a ball. Very small ball. I wish I could meet them someday. Brothers from different mothers!

Ehhh! There was no cricket match going on. My fear multiplied 10 times. If this is not a cricket stuff, it will definitely last longer. This generally is accompanied by human wearing colorful clothes. I ran for a place to hide myself. It was an apocalypse arrival sign. 

Find me a place to HIDE!!

Luckily i stumbled upon Vicky. He was lying on the floor reading. I somehow managed to swirl under his armpit. Phewwww! Relaxed!

The kind of bed I need daily!

Thursday – 31^st October, 2013.

It seems my hypothesis is getting colored. I can smell sweets and oil all around the place. Mummy seems to be busy cooking day and night. Oily, yet tasty! I don’t worry about foods you know. I get everything that is cooked, yes everything (I am kinda personal favorite of everybody).

Guess who gets everything to eat!

Not changing the topic, it is confirmed. I heard my pals on street talking about hide out mission. It is Diwali time. Lights, foods, noise, smoke. Why are human so enthusiastic almost about everything. Look at us, we are just excited about Sticks, Balls, Cats, Squirrel, Butterfly, Bone, Royal Canin…… Okay forget it.

I am very strong and stiff. I am very powerful. People here call me Ash. This name coined because of a idiot Great Dane following me. They called him Big B. Opps!

But these few days would be the worst of my time. I have to be very careful while I go for walk. It seems small kids are waiting for me to come out of my house and then blast crackers all around me. I can see bright colorful lights at nights and I have to make sure I am under appropriate shelter. Lot of my paw friends are screwed every year. The light travels very fast and hits the canine body, making scary huge marks. Turning skin into flesh.

We am not in majority. Once we are, we would lodge a complaint to some big court about this stupidity of humans.  Why don’t they care, at all?

Let our day come. We will give the human a Diwali that shall never ever be forgotten!

Friday – 1^st November, 2013.

---I am not in a mood to talk---

Saturday- 2^nd November,2013.

--I will not talk with anybody---

I am not sad. I just feel like NOT talking! 
Leave me alone!

Anyways, wish you a happy Diwali!

Religion is not Bad. People are! Oh common!!!

Me - Look what people do in the name of religion. Mass murder, holocaust, organised crime, demolition of Masjid and Mandir. And in the name of God, they are either not convicted or softly convicted. 

Theist - Well that is not what religion teaches. These people are bad. Not the religion.

Me - Hmmm.....

Theist - Look at all the good thing religious people do. Charity, missionary act, food for free, asharams, etc.

Me - Well that is not what religion teaches. These people are good. Not the religion. Check mate!

This happens when you argue with religious people. It apparently appears that they are enemies of logical thinking and have declared a war on it. Take a extract of debate with these people and you will encounter almost all logical fallacies, up and down!

I asked this question of a QA forum lately. "Religion is not bad, people are.." What are the best responses to this argument? I got some very amazing replies. You can follow the link to read the answers (You need a account, best things in life are not free). Anyways, here are the highlights of some of the best replies.

People are ultimately responsible for everything they do, there's no way around it. But something make doing the bad things a lot easier, and that makes these things dangerous. 

When people aren't responsible for their actions, many are willing to do horrible things. The Milgram experiment proves that. Religion by itself is not bad, but it sure makes easier for people to do bad things.

Guns don't kill people, people do. But the guns sure help. Same logic.

Rape is not bad, rapists are bad. 2+2=5 is not wrong, the people that claims it, is wrong. Faith over a falsehood leads to ignorance, misery and, in most cases, war. All the religions claim falsehoods not only as truth, but as the "Word of God", which if you don't believe unreasonably, you will burn in hell.

Here is my take on this issue.

Anybody can be a criminal. The driving force for crime is not an ideology, but circumstances. What ideology does it make you carry forward your crime.

That said, I am convinced that an theist would be more comfortable getting away from his/her (henceforth, just his) crime in the name of religion or God. An atheist on the other hand, can be a criminal but has no ideology to back his crime and hence the chances he commits one is less

This is how it works. When people do bad thing, most of them feel sad about it. They feel guilty and sometime uncomfortable. They cry, yell, consult people. At this moment, religion tags alone. It tells you, "What you did was good. It was a noble deed. Suffering is inevitable. You are doing work of God. Maybe you are convicted this life, but next life, you be a happy man. You will have 72 virgins waiting for you. Your future generation would be happy for this deed you did. Etc/Etc"

Now this is what religion does. It makes you commit a crime without feeling the guilt about it. You are deluded and convinced that whatever you do, whatever happens, is happening for a great cause called God. You are working for God and hence anything you do is for a great cause. This is a self fulfilling prophecies. A logical error in thinking.

Nothing can make you fly airplane into the tower killing 2000+, hijack 5 star hotel in Mumbai killing 200+ people, holocaust 6 million Jews, rape minors and yet feel like Lord Krishna and yet convince you deep within, you are NOT DOING ANYTHING BAD.

Religion is very dangerous force. Any amount of good it does cannot cover the mind block it creates in masses.

I think Steven Weinberg put its succinctly

With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

INCEPTION- Got You!

The stuff about PRIDE

Lets start by defining the term pride

"a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements, the achievements of one's close associates, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired."

Over here, we are not really going to be broad about the definition of proudness, rather, we are taking only the part of it. "a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from achievement of one's close associates".

People are proud of almost anything and everything these days. Nation, religion, caste, land, national flag, color of pajaymas, culture, Asharam Bapu, floor color, desktop wallpaper and what not.

Some pride are OK. Some are (very) dangerous. Very Dangerous. Make a person proud of his city or state and he will be totally convinced to throw a man out of running train. Make a man proud of his religion, and he will do whatever it takes to get a masjid or mandir from dome to trash, using just a hammer. Make him proud of his maleness, and he will beat the shit out of his wife for asking him to come early at home. Pride breed intolerance.

How do we check whether our pride is OK Dokey and acceptable?  Here is what I do. Don't be proud of anything you haven't achieved or worked for. I just gave you a golden formula for resisting yourself to be a anti-social element!

Lets talk about the pride of nationality or religion. Is  being a Maharashtrian or a North Indian Bhramin or a Muslim something to be proud of?

Toss a coin. What comes up? Heads? Ask yourself, "Is getting a heads something to be proud of?". Sounds stupid?

You should not be proud of something you were born with (like you kidney, 10(or 11 or 12) fingers, your nurse hairstyle, your height, etc.). You never had a chance to *select or earn* any-of the thing. You were just born!!. Randomness? Evolution at work?

You have to be proud of something you earned yourself.

The tag of Marathi, Bhramin or for that case any other thing, is not what you earned, but something your parents gave you which was given to them by their parents and so on.

And as far as Marathi, White, American, Sunni, Brahmin etc. are considered, these are nothing but (now) useless social constructs.

To end this up, here is something George Carlin said on the stuff of Pride

"Pride should be reserved for something you achieve or obtain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn't a skill... it's a fucking genetic accident. You wouldn't say I'm proud to be 5'11"; I'm proud to have a pre-disposition for colon cancer."

Occam Razor. The simple, The Better.

"Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler" 

--- Albert Einstein.

Ever heard this quote anywhere? What does it means? It's been long I have written a stuff. This is a second start!

Let’s take an example. A situation is given. People are asked to analyse it, and publish their results. There are three people doing it, Aman, Babli, Chiku. The illustration is below.

Read more.

If stripes are advantageous, then why don't horses and other animals have stripes like zebras do?

Good question. There is a simple answer to this. Richard Dawkins proposed what is called the 'Climbing the Mount Improbable"

We can convert the question to rather generalized one

If X,Y,Z traits are advantageous, why don't all the animals have it?

Here is the idea in nutshell:

When a particular characteristic is been developed in any species, it is like climbing mountains (mountain is abstract to evolutionary journey). We all start at the same starting point. There is no question of single best mountain as such. Every mountain is of different height (complexity and nature of characteristic). Some species climb up a particular mountain and stay at the peak. Some other species climbs another taller mountain and stay at their peak. Some other climb a smaller peak and stay there. The characteristic you develop is determined by the mountain peak you are at.

Note: One peak is not bad/less worthy than other peak. They are just different and not comparable.

In your case, the horses have climbed a smaller mount improbable with respect to Camouflage and stayed there. By luck and and probability and chance, Zebras got a higher mountain to climb and hence they have somewhat complicated black-white strips.

We can see this example using eyes. There are 20+ types of eyes in who of animal kingdom. If you see the below diagram, every type of eyes have reached a particular peak and settled down there itself. There is no race to be the best. All you do is by probability climb your mountain and when you reach the peak, settle there. But that time, some of your friendly species may get a chance to climb a higher mountain peaks and stay and some other climb a smaller peak. All is improbable.

What's the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists?

One man's terrorist is other man's freedom fighter.
- Gerald Seymour

Here is what Noam Chomsky said in one of his lecture.  I am paraphrasing it.

Every word in linguistic has two meanings. One is the theoretical meaning and other the technical meaning.

The theoretical meaning is the one which is always kept on papers and are used in non-practical work. The technical meaning is the meaning the word has in practical real world application.

Example:

Democracy - 

Theoretical meaning : Democracy is government by the people, of the people and with the people

Practical meaning :Democracy is a government in which is run by vote bank politics. India is a best example

Peace Process -

Theoretical meaning : The attempt to create peace using non violence mode.

Practical meaning : The US on-going in Middle East is called peace process.

Considering USA as a example, it  has already decided that whatever it does in middle east is a peace process and whatever the middle-east people do is terrorism. This is a non falsifiable hypothesis. It cannot be refuted because it will produce contradictions.

So, by definition the act of USA is a peace process. No amount of argument can make it terrorist act. On the same logic, whatever Iraq does is by definition terrorism, no matter how hard they try to convey there message, it will still be called terrorism.

What if evolution had the capacity to pass on *experience* of an individual to its offspring?

It is 9 am in the morning. My nephew is sleeping by my side. With his suckling bottle handy, he is crawling from one end of the bed, to another.

Suddenly, he reaches at the edge. I rush! Ghosh! I pull him the other side. My heartbeats swings up. He starts crying. I am reassured. He is annoyed (I just harshly pulled the baby hands).

Then I thought. Why don't I fall of the edge? There is a simple answer. I have an experience/knowledge that falling from the edge is a bad idea. I may get hurt, I may bleed or break a bone.

Why my nephew is not so vigilant and smart? Simply because he is not having enough knowledge and experience.

The question arises. What if evolution had the tendency to pass experience down the line? What if my nephew knew all that I knew. WoW! Wonderful, isn't it. But would it be a evolutionary advantage?

A lot.

In fact if you look on a wider scale, human beings have the capacity to pass on experience to their offspring. Although that in not much through genes, but through culture and our capability to preserve memories and solidify it using our amazing capability of language.

The below image is taken from the TED lecture of David Christian. He shows that every generation of rat is fresh and new. No teaching and experience is passed on. Whereas humans have greater tendency to avoid mistakes their past generations has done and learn from the experience. We grow exponentially, they grow linearly.

It is the result of our highly complex brain.

If you wanna youtube the video, here is the link. The part we are interested starts at 12.40 min.

David Christian: The history of our world in 18 minutes