Matt was lost in thoughts. Time froze as he was still lying on his bed with his eyes fixed on the rotating fan on ceiling; however, his mind was seeing through it, into his past. Matt Jason has been an orphan ever since he knew about himself. From a downtrodden life at an orphanage he struggled alone all the way to reach what he was. Matt, final year undergraduate genius was awarded the biggest scholarship in the history of his university. Still life wasn’t easy for him. He did every odd job to sustain while he focused his energies on education. Being the best student in the class was an indifferent success to him. He missed love the most. He sought after true love all his life and failed at every instance.
Matt finally broke away from the fit of sulk he was in when the doorbell screeched. He looked at his watch; it was few minutes past eight in the evening and at once realized Joel Paxton, his roommate was at the door. Matt and Joel stuck to each other in a symbiotic relationship ever since they shared the university dormitory. Joel got help from Matt with his studies and in return he would assist Matt on his finances. Joel was everything Matt was not. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His dad was one of the wealthiest industrialists in the country. He was tall, gifted with a handsome figure as opposed to his roommate’s scrawny body. He always spoke about his luck with beautiful girls and whined about his grades. Although Matt and Joel looked up to each other to fill in their weaknesses, Matt deep in heart surreptitiously saw Joel as the personification of his own ill fortune. Despite the odds Matt liked Joel because if not for Joel’s dad he would never meet his living expense and most importantly he thrives in the company of Joel most of the day.
Several unremarkable days passed by. Then a Sunday afternoon, a week before the commencement of final exams, Matt was slouching in the couch watching television while Joel was sleeping; they were taking a break after tedious hours of studying. Around then the telephone rang forcing Matt to answer the call.
Matt: “Hello”
(Few seconds of silence followed before Matt received an acknowledgement)
Betsy: “Hi... This is Betsy. Betsy Clinton.”
(Matt immediately recognized the name. She was this blonde freshwoman every guy in the university wanted to date with. Matt dropped to a perplexed state of mind wondering why she would call him.)
Matt: “Are you not a fresher from the arts department?”
Betsy: “Yes. I’m.”
(Her reply reassured him.)
Matt: “How can I help you?”
(She frantically spoke.)
Betsy: “I’m in this weird situation. Some of the seniors were ragging on me asking me to do a kind of study on different guys and report to them before I eventually chose one to date with.”
(She made a pause to clear her throat.)
Betsy: “I’m afraid I’ve finally chosen you. I would be really lucky if I could go on a date with you. I’ve been following you in the last three weeks. I was always there at the Burger King in some corner seat quietly watching you. I know you must be thinking this is all a joke. Well it started out to be one but I aint that cruel enough to play a joke on someone. Unless you don’t like me (chuckles), may be you should give it a try.
(Matt was overwhelmed with joy on the one hand, however on the other hand he was still not convinced.)
Matt: “Honestly speaking I would love to go on a date with you. But you chose me just upon following me to the Burger King? I’m missing something here.”
Betsy: “That makes only some part of the story. If you can recollect you would remember having more friends for lunch at the food court in the recent times.”
Matt: “Yes. You are telling me that…”
(She interrupted)
Betsy: “One of them is my cousin. To my advantage he’s your classmate. I told him about the whole thing and was all along getting more information about you. Also if you had ever taken your eyes off the tennis ball you would have noticed my friends and me playing volleyball. I was trying to catch your attention but it didn’t really work. Well this is everything. I was wondering if we could meet up at the Starbucks around 2 p.m. tomorrow and so you would be in a better position to decide upon the whole date thing.”
(It was a moment of euphoria for Matt. His mind was racing for words.)
Matt: “…. I’ll… I’ll see you at the Starbucks tomorrow.”
Betsy: “Thanks a ton. See you tomorrow. Bye.”
It was the greatest moment of Matt’s life. After placing the receiver back on the cradle Matt looked at Joel who was still sleeping tight. This time around Matt didn’t see the personification of his ill fortune. He felt the day has come to finally redeem his lost prize - ‘true love’. Matt was the happiest man on earth. He knew Betsy was prettier than all the girls Joel ever dated. For a fact she was the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. He no longer missed anything in life. Joel woke up startled by a loud noise from the speakers. It took him some time to realize it was Matt’s favorite track. He found Matt pressing clothes in synch with the song’s rhythm. In all these years Joel has never seen Matt so elated. Just about when Joel decided to strike a conversation, Matt preceded him. Matt told him that he would be late for lunch the next day and would introduce him to a new friend. He wouldn’t speak anything more about it as he was saving the rest for a surprise.
Matt felt the wait took years. It was 1:50 p.m. and he was already at Starbucks staring impatiently at his wrist watch. He wore his best clothes and his shoes unusually shined that day. Five minutes before two she walked in, waved her hands and threw a smile at Matt. That was just enough to flatten him. But for some reason she wouldn’t make any progress from the entrance. In a matter of time she wore a frenzied face. Matt was hovered between curiosity and insecurity sensing her inertia. After a few minutes Betsy released him from that state of mind as she proceeded towards him. It seemed to him like he got his life back. He gathered his strength and made the first move.
Matt: “Hi Betsy! Have a seat.”
Betsy: “Thank you but it’s alright.”
Matt: “Huh, is something wrong?”
Betsy: “You are Joel’s best friend. I’m sure he must have told you about the phone conversation I had with him. He promised to meet me here at 2 p.m. and it’s already ten minutes past it. Got a clue?”
MOST IMPORTANTLY HE THRIVES IN THE COMPANY OF JOEL MOST OF THE DAY.
A routine weekday would see Matt and Joel go to the nearest Burger King outlet for breakfast, attend the classes together, have lunch with friends at the university food court, play lawn tennis until they part at six in the evening as Matt would go to work at a restaurant while Joel would hang out with his other friends.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Rational Perception
"Fighting terrorism is like being a goalkeeper. You can make a hundred brilliant saves but the only shot that people remember is the one that gets past you." -PAUL WILKINSON
Animals predominantly fight for territories and food. What do humans ('supposedly' a species of animals with a higher sense of cognition and tolerance) fight for? Especially living in a world with terrorism so much on the rise has aroused an inquisitive mind and thus influenced me to arrive at the following deductions.
Taking a neutral stance I can agree that "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".
Humans tend to get into conflicts when they sense a difference developing over what they believe in. Delving further to the root of the problem one may wonder how do humans decide at first place what is right or wrong? This is a very interesting and much researched subject in psychology. A 'cognitive bias' is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situation. There are various types of cognitive biases that could lead a person to believe in a wrong ideology. There is a high possibility that the same faulty ideology could be disseminated to another person (known as Actor-observer bias). Here's an interesting scenario to ponder about - Assume three friends (when I say friends it is implicitly understood there are some things common about them that is accepted and appreciated) having a conversation about a movie they have recently seen. Let us say two of them liked the movie very much and the other didn't like it at all. The conversation slowly builds into a grand argument, until eventually the third person was forced to leave upon losing the patience to argue against his two friends. The two friends feel a blip of illusory superiority and talk about how foolish the third person was. Soon the conversation between the remaining two deviates from the original topic to an analysis on why the movie was good. It led to the making of another argument as one decided it was the director who pulled it off while the other supported the actors performance.
What does this come down to? Aren't we all individualists who make more merry when there are other people who support our ideologies?
Religion a result of 'herd instinct'? Why is science treated differently as opposed to religion even though science has a close resemblance of a religion?
Herd instinct is a common tendency of people to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict. Most of us really didn't have a choice or sense to choose our religion as kids. We were raised in a system of religion that just passed on generations to generations. In such a circumstance it is highly possible that we unintentionally became a victim of the 'herd instinct' rule. If the theory is true then most of the people who believe in religion succumb to the fear of God punishing them if they strayed away from religion. Or is it simply natural that since humans tend to look for people with common ideologies to strengthen their beliefs and boost their morale it is good to trust in God at times you can't count on anybody else?
People who believe in science still confine to the concept of herd instinct. Yet there's a striking difference from the religion. Science is universal. When I say 1 + 1 gives me 2 it is accepted all over the world. Things that can't be proven have a special status called 'theories'. It comes with an option for you to believe it or not. The day someone proves 1 + 1 is equal to 3 the previous assumption is scrapped and the new one simply replaces it. But time would dictate the change to be accepted at its own dispense.
For instance read the below extract from "http://www.mcn.org/c/irapilgrim/sci13.html" -
"As is so often the case with truly revolutionary insights, the simplicity of Newton's discovery (about color) causes one to wonder why no one before him had made it.
In 1660, Isaac Newton passed light through a glass prism, which separated light into a rainbow of colors. He ran that rainbow through another prism and it recombined the colors into white light. He also took various parts of the spectrum and combined them to produce a variety of colors. Any physics textbook will tell you how Newton interpreted these observations, as well as the work that has been done subsequently on light and color. Any artist can tell you which colored pigments have to be mixed to get another color; which was known before Newton. Nowadays you don't need an artist, you can get information on colored pigments at the paint department of your local hardware store.
What you will not find in a physics text book are the experiments on color performed by Edwin Land, the inventor and developer of the Polaroid camera. The experiments that Land performed can be repeated by anyone with access to a camera, two projectors, two color filters, some black and white positive film and the wherewithal to develop it.
What Land did was to take two photographs of a group of objects of different colors (a bowl of fruit will do fine). The photographs were taken using positive black and white film. One picture was taken with a light green filter, and the other through a yellow filter. If you project the black and white slides through the same color filter through which the pictures were taken, and superimpose the projections on a screen, you will see a full-color picture of the bowl of fruit. It doesn't matter what filters you use. You could use a yellow filter and another yellow filter whose wavelength differs by at least 20 Ängstroms. You could use a color filter for one and white light for the other. You don't have to take my word for it, or Land's; this is something that anyone can do. You can find a detailed description and discussion of Land's experiments on color in the May, 1959 issue of Scientific American.
This series of experiments casts doubt on all of the theories of what color is and how we see it. It does more than that; it says that much of what we believe about what color is and how it is perceived is probably not true. Yet, after more than 30 years, Land's remarkable series of experiments will not be found in physics text books. Why would such an important work be ignored? I suspect that the reason that it has been ignored is because it doesn't conform to the concepts that physicists now accept about the nature of color. It is the same reason that Gregor Mendel's work on the genetics of peas was ignored for 50 years -it just didn't fit.
The fact is that while science has made a great deal of progress, human nature hasn't changed a bit. People usually ignore facts that don't conform to their preconceptions. Whether or not we want to admit it, scientists are people.
Many years ago a small airplane made an emergency landing on a highway near Salt Lake City. While the pilot waited for a car to come along to take him to where he could get help, an automobile crashed into the airplane. When the driver of the car was asked if he didn't see the airplane, he replied, 'Yes, I saw it, but I didn't believe it.'
I don't wonder why no one made the observations that Newton made before he made them. I suspect that someone might have done it, but he didn't believe it. If he did believe it, there was no one to whom he could tell it, nor could he get it published."
Despite a lot of things stated in the holy books have been disproved at various instances why are people are still reluctant to have it removed? It is incredible to know that the change hasn't happened in a thousand of years unlike science. Today terrorism sprouts in the name of holy war. Would this happen if there was a singular religion? Be it science or religion for peace to prevail it is important to understand that we have to be more open-minded and carry no pre-conceptions. It is important for us to research and experience every single detail that influences our thoughts before we believe in it.
I'm curious to know why if God had the supreme power to create anything and if he framed the set of rules that decided what is right and what it wrong, would he create human minds with a volition to choose something wrong? Why couldn't have God made all men filled with pure thoughts and let the world in peace? If he was worried about us forgetting him in the process he could have still programmed that into our minds as well. Does this mean God likes to sit back and watch a cruel game on earth??
I don't believe in religion. Yet wouldn't say God doesn't exist but I know for sure if God existed the world would be a more peaceful place to live. I do not want to be stuck in a generalized system or live in the opinions of the majority if they are not proven. I've realized it and I'm out of it. I would believe in only things that stand true all the time and is universal. I wouldn't bound to any laws created by fellow humans because I know sometime or the other some of us are going to break the laws to withhold any selfish interest. I have accepted the bitter reality that humans still subconsciously relate to the jungle laws. There's nothing general good or bad in this world. There's only personal good and bad. But - "what goes around comes around."
Animals predominantly fight for territories and food. What do humans ('supposedly' a species of animals with a higher sense of cognition and tolerance) fight for? Especially living in a world with terrorism so much on the rise has aroused an inquisitive mind and thus influenced me to arrive at the following deductions.
Taking a neutral stance I can agree that "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter".
Humans tend to get into conflicts when they sense a difference developing over what they believe in. Delving further to the root of the problem one may wonder how do humans decide at first place what is right or wrong? This is a very interesting and much researched subject in psychology. A 'cognitive bias' is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situation. There are various types of cognitive biases that could lead a person to believe in a wrong ideology. There is a high possibility that the same faulty ideology could be disseminated to another person (known as Actor-observer bias). Here's an interesting scenario to ponder about - Assume three friends (when I say friends it is implicitly understood there are some things common about them that is accepted and appreciated) having a conversation about a movie they have recently seen. Let us say two of them liked the movie very much and the other didn't like it at all. The conversation slowly builds into a grand argument, until eventually the third person was forced to leave upon losing the patience to argue against his two friends. The two friends feel a blip of illusory superiority and talk about how foolish the third person was. Soon the conversation between the remaining two deviates from the original topic to an analysis on why the movie was good. It led to the making of another argument as one decided it was the director who pulled it off while the other supported the actors performance.
What does this come down to? Aren't we all individualists who make more merry when there are other people who support our ideologies?
Religion a result of 'herd instinct'? Why is science treated differently as opposed to religion even though science has a close resemblance of a religion?
Herd instinct is a common tendency of people to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict. Most of us really didn't have a choice or sense to choose our religion as kids. We were raised in a system of religion that just passed on generations to generations. In such a circumstance it is highly possible that we unintentionally became a victim of the 'herd instinct' rule. If the theory is true then most of the people who believe in religion succumb to the fear of God punishing them if they strayed away from religion. Or is it simply natural that since humans tend to look for people with common ideologies to strengthen their beliefs and boost their morale it is good to trust in God at times you can't count on anybody else?
People who believe in science still confine to the concept of herd instinct. Yet there's a striking difference from the religion. Science is universal. When I say 1 + 1 gives me 2 it is accepted all over the world. Things that can't be proven have a special status called 'theories'. It comes with an option for you to believe it or not. The day someone proves 1 + 1 is equal to 3 the previous assumption is scrapped and the new one simply replaces it. But time would dictate the change to be accepted at its own dispense.
For instance read the below extract from "http://www.mcn.org/c/irapilgrim/sci13.html" -
"As is so often the case with truly revolutionary insights, the simplicity of Newton's discovery (about color) causes one to wonder why no one before him had made it.
In 1660, Isaac Newton passed light through a glass prism, which separated light into a rainbow of colors. He ran that rainbow through another prism and it recombined the colors into white light. He also took various parts of the spectrum and combined them to produce a variety of colors. Any physics textbook will tell you how Newton interpreted these observations, as well as the work that has been done subsequently on light and color. Any artist can tell you which colored pigments have to be mixed to get another color; which was known before Newton. Nowadays you don't need an artist, you can get information on colored pigments at the paint department of your local hardware store.
What you will not find in a physics text book are the experiments on color performed by Edwin Land, the inventor and developer of the Polaroid camera. The experiments that Land performed can be repeated by anyone with access to a camera, two projectors, two color filters, some black and white positive film and the wherewithal to develop it.
What Land did was to take two photographs of a group of objects of different colors (a bowl of fruit will do fine). The photographs were taken using positive black and white film. One picture was taken with a light green filter, and the other through a yellow filter. If you project the black and white slides through the same color filter through which the pictures were taken, and superimpose the projections on a screen, you will see a full-color picture of the bowl of fruit. It doesn't matter what filters you use. You could use a yellow filter and another yellow filter whose wavelength differs by at least 20 Ängstroms. You could use a color filter for one and white light for the other. You don't have to take my word for it, or Land's; this is something that anyone can do. You can find a detailed description and discussion of Land's experiments on color in the May, 1959 issue of Scientific American.
This series of experiments casts doubt on all of the theories of what color is and how we see it. It does more than that; it says that much of what we believe about what color is and how it is perceived is probably not true. Yet, after more than 30 years, Land's remarkable series of experiments will not be found in physics text books. Why would such an important work be ignored? I suspect that the reason that it has been ignored is because it doesn't conform to the concepts that physicists now accept about the nature of color. It is the same reason that Gregor Mendel's work on the genetics of peas was ignored for 50 years -it just didn't fit.
The fact is that while science has made a great deal of progress, human nature hasn't changed a bit. People usually ignore facts that don't conform to their preconceptions. Whether or not we want to admit it, scientists are people.
Many years ago a small airplane made an emergency landing on a highway near Salt Lake City. While the pilot waited for a car to come along to take him to where he could get help, an automobile crashed into the airplane. When the driver of the car was asked if he didn't see the airplane, he replied, 'Yes, I saw it, but I didn't believe it.'
I don't wonder why no one made the observations that Newton made before he made them. I suspect that someone might have done it, but he didn't believe it. If he did believe it, there was no one to whom he could tell it, nor could he get it published."
Despite a lot of things stated in the holy books have been disproved at various instances why are people are still reluctant to have it removed? It is incredible to know that the change hasn't happened in a thousand of years unlike science. Today terrorism sprouts in the name of holy war. Would this happen if there was a singular religion? Be it science or religion for peace to prevail it is important to understand that we have to be more open-minded and carry no pre-conceptions. It is important for us to research and experience every single detail that influences our thoughts before we believe in it.
I'm curious to know why if God had the supreme power to create anything and if he framed the set of rules that decided what is right and what it wrong, would he create human minds with a volition to choose something wrong? Why couldn't have God made all men filled with pure thoughts and let the world in peace? If he was worried about us forgetting him in the process he could have still programmed that into our minds as well. Does this mean God likes to sit back and watch a cruel game on earth??
I don't believe in religion. Yet wouldn't say God doesn't exist but I know for sure if God existed the world would be a more peaceful place to live. I do not want to be stuck in a generalized system or live in the opinions of the majority if they are not proven. I've realized it and I'm out of it. I would believe in only things that stand true all the time and is universal. I wouldn't bound to any laws created by fellow humans because I know sometime or the other some of us are going to break the laws to withhold any selfish interest. I have accepted the bitter reality that humans still subconsciously relate to the jungle laws. There's nothing general good or bad in this world. There's only personal good and bad. But - "what goes around comes around."
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