Just a thought about life

It came to me quite clear while driving to work listening to the radio. A song came up, a quite recent cover of an original i'd listened to previously. The cover was, for want of a better word, much 'inferior' to the original.

To a person born much later and if s(he) had just listened to this song without ever the opportunity to hear the original, would only know of this particular version. S(he) would think it either a good song or a bad song. S(he) would never know how beautiful the song could have (or should have) been because there would simply be nothing to compare it to.

a-ha! The Quietus Interview

An interview with one of my favourite band from the eighties.

If we failed to preserve those things which humanity should live for, then when would they live again?


Akira The Don Vs A-Ha - The Foot Of A Mountain Interview from akdonovan on Vimeo.

Assessing Context As To The Truth or Falsity Of A Statement

First, we look at these two nearly identical sentences:

1) Ah Beng came over my house today.

2) Ah Beng never came over my house today.

In different contexts, each statement can be true. But on a given day when Ah Beng did came over to my
house, to say that he never came would be a false statement. And yet, except for the single word (ie. "never") , every other word in the sentence is “accurate”. You could say that it is 87 percent (7/8 ie. seven out of eight words is) accurate, but it is still completely false in its context!

The bottom line is we have to use our brain mind to figure it out.

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And here is a report from TMI: http://tinyurl.com/83m7afv

Excerpts:

" “No, I’m not aware,” Najib told reporters after the Barisan Nasional (BN) supreme council meeting..."

"Another source confirmed the investigation into the national oil company, saying the MACC has informed Najib and his deputy Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin..."

So, two contradicting statements. Whom to believe?

Do we believe the one with power? Or do we believe the unnamed source, the one who has less 'power'?

To someone who has no 'experience' of the many things our politicians said and done (or rather 'not done') or "said one thing but do another" ie. 'flip-flop', s/he would have no idea if what was said was true or false. For all that matters, it may be true that the PM could be telling the truth. For all that matters, it may also be true that the anonymous source could be telling the truth too. It all depends on whom one believe in.

But the problem is one's beliefs is always subjective.

To someone who has 'experience', someone who knows the true nature of a certain person, then it is not so difficult to discern if what they're saying is not a lie. It could be a lie but we're not absolutely certain of it. It could be the truth but we are not certain of it either.

So how do we solve this?

We now take a different approach. We take the context of what both were saying to get to the truth, or falsity of the matter. The real context that should concern us is "there is graft in Petronas". This is a serious issue. For if there is rampant corruption, as stated by "industry sources" in the report, wouldn't that mean there is serious leakage of public funds too as a large part of Petronas' revenue is used to fund the government?

So should we still concern ourselves with whether the powers that be is telling the truth that s/he is not aware of the corruption happening in our state oil company or should we be more concern that there is rampant corruption within the company itself that could cause more of our public funds being siphoned off? And what did it say to us if someone who is in charge of the said institution "is not aware" of the happenings inside there?

The truth that should really concern us is, if there is serious corruption in a major institution of the country, then what is the implication that other public institutions will not be subjected to corruption too? And so, persons elected to look after the people's interest foremost are always 'not aware' of what is happening?

Budget Deficit & Subsidy Rationalization

GDP & Debt correlation
Malaysia
Simplified assumptions and estimates of a Budget Deficit policy:
Interest rate on debt (est):			4.00%
GDP rate of growth* (est):			4.00%
Debt rate of increase^:			12.00%

Karma and Free Will in under 2 minutes

Liu: Liu Jinxi (Donnie Yen); Xu: Xu Baijiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro)
Liu: If you hadn't come today, I wouldn't have fallen. It's karma.
Xu: It was an accident
Liu: "No. A monk had taught me.
 The fabric of existence is composed of a myriad of karmic threads.
 Nothing exists in and of itself. Everything is connected.
 For example. If I had not come to this village, i wouldn't have met Ayu.

We have become the very people we despised

Dammit, i am sick and tired of the reading the news already. Everyday there is something "good" which came up. All those ministers elected by us the people, of course, screwing up our beloved country. The latest, a minister who purportedly wanted to create our very own "beef valley". Now doesn't that sounds great. In fact it sounds wonderfully great. A beef valley where everyone could get our own beef without depending on other nations to serve us.

How many times have i read people who commented or wrote that we will not vote for the

A Simplified Assumptions of a Budget Deficit

GDP & Debt correlation

Malaysia

Simplified assumptions and estimates of a Budget Deficit policy:

Interest rate on debt (est):

4.00%

(average taken from here)

GDP rate of growth* (est) :

5.00%

(optimistic estimate)

Debt rate of increase^ :

7.95%

Are we too late to change our choices?

Are our choices too late to change what is going to happen from now on? Or have we already made that choice?

A Tribute to the "crazy" geniuses

"Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race

An Ancient Saying...

An ancient chinese sayings...

"If the wrong person uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way".

This is in sharp contrast to our belief in the 'right' method irrespective of the person who applies it. In reality, everything depends on the person and little or nothing on the method.

Einstein's Physics of Illusion

Our native understanding of geometry, or rather our native misunderstanding of geometry, is a genetic mistake. It was never necessary, in the long past history of our race, for us to see space and time correctly.

It is not possible to have a universe of space without a universe of time. It is not possible to have space without time, or time without space, because space and time are opposites. If, between two events, the space separation between them is the same as the time separation between them, then the total separation between them is zero, as observed by Albert Einstein.


In electricity if we have the same amount of plus charges as we have of minus charges, say in the same atom or the same molecule, then that atom or that molecule is neutral. There is no charge seen from outside. Likewise here. If the space separation between two events is just the same as the time separation between those two events, then the total separation between those two events is zero.

I'll give you an example. Suppose we see an exploding star, say in the Andromeda galaxy. There's one going on there right now. It's been visible for about a month or so. Now the Andromeda galaxy is two and a quarter million light years away, and when we see the explosion now, we see it as it was two and a quarter million years ago. You see, the space separation and the time separation are the same, which means that the total separation between you and what you see is zero. The total separation, the real separation, the objective separation, that is, the separation as seen by anybody, between the event which you see and the event of your seeing it -- the separation between those two events is always zero. What we mean when we say that the space and time separations between two events are equal is that light could get from one of those events to the other in vacuum.

We see things out there, and we think they're really out there. But, you see, we cannot see them when they happen. We can't see anything when it happens. We see everything in the past. We see everything a little while ago, and always in such a way that the while ago just balances the distance away, and the separation between the perceiver and the perceived remains always at zero.

Our physics is on our side of space and time, if you like, but Einstein’s equations say that behind our physics there is this question: “What is it?” We know that it has to be beyond space and time.

The rest of this article can be found HERE new Link HERE.

More about the author, John L. Dobson here, and here and here

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This is a difficult, but not impossible, concept to grasp.

Taking the example above of the stellar explosion in the Andromeda galaxy. There are two 'events' in this scenario. The first is the actual stellar explosion in the Andromeda galaxy. The second event is the observation by, say, this writer, at a certain time eg. at this present moment.

The real event of the stellar explosion 'happened' 2 1/4 million light years ago. It had already happened 2.25 million light years ago. That event is in the past, when we are referring to the event "now", in our "present time".

In this writer's mind, while i am seeing, or observing the first event (ie. the stellar explosion) now (in the present), all i am aware of is the explosion had already happened in my past. It had already happened a long time ago, in a distance far away while i was not even born yet. In fact Possibly it happened while human being was still only using stones as tools or they have not even existed yet.

But, according to Einstein (his Special Relativity postulate), this is a wrong perception of space and time. The time separation of 2.25 million years is the same as the distance 'space' separation of 2.25 million light years. So, in effect there is no separation of space and time between the real separation of space and time between the stellar explosion in the Andromeda galaxy (which 'happened' 2.25 million light years ago), and this writer's observation of the explosion is zero.

To summarize again, even though the stellar explosion happened in the 'past' (2.25 million years ago in 'time', to be exact), the very nature of me seeing the explosion (2.25 million light years across 'space') happened at this 'present' moment means there is no real separation between the event itself and my observation of that event.

It does seemed like an illusion when we think about it. The thing is, no other living beings in this world could grasp this concept other than us humans.

The part about not seeing things or events as they happened but only seeing them in the past could be taken at another level. We do not see the result of our action now, today. If we did, we would not have learn the lessons that life would have to offer. Maybe that is the way we are supposed to live our life here in this world.

Perhaps also that we do not have the foresight to see into our future. But what we do have is our free will to live in the moment. To appreciate all the things and especially the people we care about in our lives. And to know that with this 'will', we could perhaps change our world for the better.

Cosmic meaning of consciousness...

"There was scarcely any sound save the melancholy cry of a bird of prey. This was the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it has always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world. I walked away from my companions until I had put them out of sight, and savoured the feeling of being entirely alone. There I was now, the first human being to recognize that this was the world, but who did not know that in this moment he had first really created it.

There the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. 'What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,' say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence...Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence - without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being."

~ Carl Gustav Jung, 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections'.

Life's Station

Space and time are the construct

Through which is life's journey

Stopping and resting in many stations

But there is a station that i search for

To find there a soul waiting

For her to be my guiding light

And whence we will travel

On a journey together

And never be alone

Forevermore

~ dedicated to my wife

Reality...

The statement "reality is a relative concept" itself is a contradiction of sorts. It attempts to define the statement as an absolute itself-to say that "reality is relative" somehow attempts to "coerce" others to accept it as some sort of absolute truth. Kind of a nonsense too. Not because there is no such thing as absolute truth, as many are wont to say. But that it is perhaps absolute truth is unknowable. Not to us living in the physical world, anyway. And that, is the real meaning behind reality is a relative concept. There i go again, contradicting myself.

Nature of Evil and The Concept of Freedom

"Metaphysical statements are not meaningless statements, but rather not fallible, testable or provable statements" ~ Karl Popper.

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"To be free is to accept the possibility of evil."

For a long time i could not grasp the meaning behind it. It seemed a contradiction. How is freedom possible

Information, Knowledge, Reason: A short, elementary understanding.

Knowledge, it is said, is the higher pursuit of life. And we must free our minds to follow wherever that search may lead us.

Knowledge informs. Knowledge teaches us about the world. It teaches us mostly about the way things work in this world.

Information alone is not knowledge if it has not been filtered through our thoughts. Simply put, if we have not

The End of Free Will?

Transcript of Michio Kaku's shorts:
- Begin -
"Newtonian Determinism says that the universe is a clock, a gigantic clock that’s wound up in the beginning of time and has been ticking ever since according to Newton’s laws of motion. So what you’re going to eat 10 years from now on January 1st has already been fixed. It’s already known using Newton’s laws of motion. Einstein believed in that. Einstein was a determinist.

Eternity ~ A perspective

From Plato's "Timaeus", which describes his view on cosmogony.

The theory of Time..

"When the father and creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and as this was eternal, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be. Now the nature of the ideal being

Music ~ What Is It?

An article i came across in another time.

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What is Music? ~ Author Unknown

"Music is a Science.
It is exact, it is specific and it demands exact acoustics. A conductor’s score is a chart, a graph which indicates frequencies, intensities, volume changes, melody and harmony all at once and with the most exact control of time.

Music is mathematical.
It is rhythmically based on the subdivisions of time into fractions which must be done instantaneously, not worked out on paper.

Music is a Foreign Language.
Most of the terms are in Italian, German or French; and the notation is certainly not English - but a highly-developed kind of shorthand that uses symbols to represent ideas. The semantics of music is the most complete and universal language.

Music is Physical Education.
It requires fantastic coordination of fingers, hands, arms, lip, cheeks and facial muscles in addition to extraordinary control of the diaphragmatic, back and stomach muscles, which respond instantly to the sound the ear hears and the mind interprets.

Music is all these things, but most of all,

MUSIC IS ART.
It allows the human being to take all these dry, technically boring (but difficult) techniques and use them to create emotion. This one thing science cannot duplicate: humanism, feeling emotion, call it what you will.

That is why we teach music!
Not because we expect you to major in music.
Not because we expect you to play or sing all your life.
But, so you will be human, so you will recognize beauty, so you will be closer to God beyond this world, so you will have something to cling to, so you will have more love, more compassion, more gentleness, more good - in short more life."

Have fun with music HERE.

A Short Lesson in History

 "All too often we assume that history is a true and faithful account of events as they actually took place and people as they actually were. We tend to forget that people who lived in the past (and recorded the events of those days), were ordinary human beings who were as vulnerable to the temptation to color events according to their own beliefs, agendas and prejudices as are people living today".
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." ~ George Orwell, '1984'.

Nature of Evil - Preamble

Something silly i wrote on another's blog comment quite a long time ago. Came upon this in my writing notes. Not very original though.

What's the difference between "a girl is in love with the guy's money" and "a girl is in love with the guy because of his money"?

Mathematical decription of "A girl is in love with the guy’s money".