Facebook: The Flea Market

First off: I'm back.. at least for the time being. :)

Second: Facebook is like the largest and most addicting flea market you've ever been to - and nonetheless, you're always there!

Facebook

Why is it a flea market?

At a flea market you have a tons of tiny pieces of junk that are really cheap, and as you stroll around casually you buy these random things that you'll never use and that you don't really need - you'll just go home and toss it in some corner or box and you'll never use it again.

The same goes for facebook - the posts and links you're clicking on are many times just cheap junk. They're things that aren't really funny and you won't remember them anyway and it's just a complete waste of time actually - but you click on it, because it's easy, and it looks like maybe it could be something cool! And because: "Oh.. this could be good.... ah it's just crap."

So take care and don't waste your time on stuff just because it's really easy to click on it ("It's just a 2 minute video, I can check it out, 2 minutes isn't a lot!").  The really cool stuff goes viral anyway and you'll see it sooner or later.

Seriously, you should be using your friends as filters - if only one or two friends like or share something, it may not be that good; but if all your best buddies - especially those with similar taste - like the same thing then it's probably worth a look.

Just like a flea market, there's sometimes a real treasure (like my blog posts :) ), so keep your eyes open.

System shutdown

Hey guys! I'm going to have to stop posting for about a month because of university activities (lots of studying + a trip to Paris :) ). Next expected post around December 19. Be good! Cheers.

Humming Someone Else's Tune

Ok so this is me and my buddy, doing some canoeing on the beautiful Danube, at Szigetköz.

Just joking - it's not really me, not my buddy, and not Szigetköz

And I've got my cool humming business going on - I'm humming some rad tunes (at least I thought so). Well anyway, it came to my mind, that the tunes I'm humming - these melodies, are probably melodies that I've heard before. I'm humming these exact notes in this exact order, because I find it to be harmonic.. but the reason I find it harmonic is probably because I've heard that composition of notes sometime, somewhere before!

And it really started bugging me - can I actually make a new tune? Or am I secretly being influenced by my previous experiences with music - and my subconscious self is generating "new" tunes out of the tunes I've already heard in my life?

I am an optimist, and I essentially believe that I am very much influenced by my previous acoustic experiences, but I am capable of generating new music.

But even if I do... even if I create something that's new for me - it probably exists already! Seriously, there's only so many tunes that sound good to people, and there are so insanely much people. There's more than 7 billion of us only today - and that's not counting those who once lived and are now dead. And all these people live on the same Earth, hearing the same natural sounds, getting the same acoustic impressions, and many of them getting the same cultural impressions.

Well it really makes me think that if you try to hum something new... it probably won't work - probably someone already felt like humming that. Which is Ok, I guess; I mean like who cares if someone, 1000 years ago, hummed the same tune?

No Time Ever

It's a question that came to my mind a few years ago, and it seemed at first only as a game of thought... but it really gives a different perspective on reality.

Time seems to be a non-existent thing - it is a valid concept, but it does not exist in itself, not like everyday objects in any case.

Let's start by noticing that everything we think is the passing of time is only the movement of objects relative to each other.

What?

Yes. When you read a clock, you are only reading where the hands of the clock are. If you wait, then the hands turn slowly. In this case the passing of time is only realized by the movement of the hands of the clock.

You might say that this is just a specific example, and it's not good because watches and clocks were designed to move in such a way ~ in other words they only measure time.

But what isn't "only" a measurement of time? We have minutes and hours and months and years passing - each of these is connected to the movement of objects - the rotation of a hand on a clock or the Earth revolving around the Sun!

So here's what I think: there is no such thing as time - we are all objects moving around in the forever existing present. What does this mean? There is no past, there is no future - there is no "time-path" that we are moving along. There is no "flow of time". There is no time-travel and there is no rewinding time. Because there is only a constant present, and we are always rearranging everything in that present.

So I say that we are objects, moving relative to one another and we can only move as fast or as slow in space as our "moving-ness" allows us - in other words our mass. It is our mass that determines how we can move around in the forever-present.

Time is only a parameter that helps us get a common grasp on all this moving around. In physics, the concept of "time" was never defined - Newton defined just about everything in his Principia, except for "time" - he only wrote that the concept of time is trivial, it does not need to be defined.


p.s.: Babies and children don't have a concept of time - they slowly start learning what time is through experience. You can not tell children that they should wait an hour for something - it is incomprehensible for them - you must tell them that they have to wait until the small hand on the clock goes around completely.

Freedom Defined

It's always been one of those questions for me, that I thought I knew the answer to and then it turned out one silly question can offset me:

What is freedom?

It's a very general question - one that can erupt long-lasting and massive debates on various forums... Am I free? Are you free? Do we live in free countries? How much more free am I than someone in say, North Korea?

Upsetting question no. 1 - Investing of freedom: ~age of 12

Let's say I live in a country I love and where I'm free.. and suddenly a war breaks out and the my country is threatened by an enemy evil tyrant who wants to enslave us. The government decides that all able-bodied men (.. ages 12 and up in my case) must join the army and fight, because if not we will all become slaves.

Am I free? Do I live in a free country?

Well after some while I could come to the conclusion that I am essentially free - but I am required to give up some freedom to maintain my future freedom.
(Well this is sort of like saying I am essentially wealthy, but I am putting of making money now in order to study, so I can be wealthy in the future.)

Ok that seemed settled. But later I thought about it - if a government is allowed to decide about my investment of freedom instead of me - am I really free? Something still wasn't exactly in its place, but I let it be.

(By the way - I've never seen a book about investing your freedom.)

Upsetting question no. 2 - Social freedom: ~age 16

At this time in my life I felt free - living the cool high-schooler life. Of course it turns out it was only an illusion of total freedom, because:

Can I run around naked on the street?

Just to clarify - this question does not reflect my Freudian self, but it does bring forward a few theoretical questions -> Are my other "free" friends bounding my freedom? Not only because of the "your freedom may only reach an extent to where it does not interfere with others' freedom" golden rule of freedom. No, it's much more: my society's expectations are blocking my freedom because of social restraints!

Even if I break free of the initial social expectations - how long will it be until I am tossed back or until I lose my mind?

Intermediary declaration no. 1 - Jailed by systems ~age 18

Even the "free-est" person in the world is only free in the system he/she created.

• The statement above implies that one can never be really free - he/she can only have the illusion of freedom. You can only feel free if you have a system to be free in.
• I will talk about this later.. in another post maybe :) About systems and how to love and hate them.

Declaration no. 2 - Definition of Freedom ~somewhere between 16 and 18 I think

An individual is totally free if -at any given time- he/she makes the same decisions that he/she would make if he/she would have all the options in the world to choose from.

• This is a very very general definition of freedom - it actually says that you are not free in the following situation:
  You are given an offer of choosing between receiving $100000 and $200000 for free. If you, at this moment, feel like growing wings and flying, then you are not free, because growing wings and flying is not an option to you.
• It also unintentionally connects freedom with being content - if you are truly content with what is happening with you than you may feel totally free.
• This can be linked with the definition of being wealthy - if you have enough money to pay for anything you ever wanted, then you have reached the state of maximum of wealth. Even if you can not finance a trip to Mars - if you don't want to go to Mars then you don't really need the money to go to Mars.

Expanding the concept: The state of maximum freedom is very rare - I think we can only talk about how free someone is - between not free at all and maximally free.

The Limit of Human Knowledge

For all of you development- and advancement- freaks this may be quite sad, but the truth is:
Humanity's knowledge will not continue to develop more and more until the end of time. (Not even if the human race never dies out.)

This may seem impossible in the information age - accessing knowledge and information is easier than ever. Anyone, at any age, can search for something they don't know on the internet. The default time of a person's education lasts more than 12 years, and people have many opportunities to keep on learning and growing after high school, and even after college.

What's the problem?

Our knowledge in specific territories is becoming amazingly deep - so deep, that in some areas people need to keep learning 20-30 to fully understand their area of expertise. Only after such a period of time can they contribute to expanding the edge of knowledge.

Ok most times you don't have to completely understand your area of expertise to add value to the common knowledge database of Humanity, but you do need to get to a specific level... and as time passes, we need to learn more and more to reach that level.

What I'm saying is that it sooner or later people will have to dedicate their whole lives to learning and understanding one specific thing - for example in physics it is already quite complex to understand what string theory is exactly - and the farther we go, the more complex it becomes.

And if you dedicate your whole life to learning - you have no time left for creating something new! Our scientist are older and older! It's true - in the nineteenth century many lords in their 20s and 30s made great contributions to science - that's getting rarer and rarer!

So that's what I think will happen... unless we can enhance our learning. We can do this in one of two ways (or both): by making our lives longer (or our brains' lives longer) - this will give us more time to study and cultivate specific areas of humanity's knowledge.
Or by enhancing the learning and/or thinking procedure. This would mean developing a means of making humans learn quicker or making it possible for computers to think, to advance our understanding of the everything.

Anyways the whole thing is a long ways off... but I do find it freaky that maybe one day computers will have to do scientific research instead of us, because we are not smart enough.

A Simple Decision

Exactly two months ago, I wrote about the problem of the Wild Railroad Carriage, which was mostly about deciding whether or not to change a track switch if it meant 4 less people dying.

The problem was also varied a bit, so that the question became: should you kill someone in order to save 5 other people?

This IS a hard question!

So let me make it simpler:

You are next to a track switch, and if you change the course of the train, 0 people will die instead of 1.

Wow... much simpler!!! It's like.. who wouldn't switch the tracks, right?

You know what, I'll even guarantee that there will be no more people strapped to the tracks - this is the whole layout! No tricks - there aren't 1000 people tied to the tracks on the left - there aren't more people tied to the tracks on the right. No, that guy is not Hitler. No surprises, nothing special - just one simple guy tied to the tracks.

Yes, it's a very simple question... yet I have been thinking about this problem more than... more than just about anything. I've been thinking about this so much because I think it's one of the most essential questions of our lives here on Earth.

(To be continued...)

Clearing the Whole Probability Session

OK I did not think the so-called "Information-paradox" through... and I'm a bit ashamed.. :)

What I proposed as the information (not-really) paradox was nothing more than the rephrasing of the Monty Hall problem. I must clear this up a bit before posting anything else.

So we're playing the Monty Hall game, and I get to chose between three doors, and I chose one at random.

Monty Hall gives shows me one of the two remaining doors that has a goat behind it. I now have a 2/3 chance of winning if I switch doors.

What I said was that someone new should now come in; someone who has no idea what we were playing up to here. He is told that there are two doors, one has a goat behind it, the other a brand new car.

What confused me was that this person now has a 50% chance of hitting the jackpot.

What happens if now, we both choose one of the two doors at random? He will win 50% of the time, and so will I! Because 1/2 * 1/3 + 1/2 * 2/3 = 1/2 (because I chose the door with 1/3 chance half of the time and I choose the door with 2/3 chance the other half of the time).

If we both chose the same door all the time, say the left door, then we will win according to the 2/3 : 1/3 odds.

So simply put, that is just the Monty Hall problem rephrased... I sort of confused myself ... heh. Sorry about any unnecessary cluttering in your mind.

A cool little plus:
As mentioned before, we can play the Monty Hall game with 50 doors - in which case I will have a 49/50 chance of winning if I change to the other door. Now the cool part is that we can continue adding more and more doors. As we have more and more doors, my chances of winning because of changing grow!

While adding more and more doors, I can eventually get to an infinite amount of doors - I can even keep going until I get a continuously infinite amount of doors (or points), like on an axis.

Imagine trying to guess a number on a line - on an infinite amount of points. It's impossible to think of my number if I chose randomly. But after you choose, I reveal that the number I thought of is either the point you chose or one other point! Well it's basically for sure now that you have to switch. :)

The Information Paradox

When I first heard this problem, I said I should stay at the original door and not switch. And the reason was simple: Why would it matter? Before, each door held 1/3 chance of being the correct door, and now there are only two doors, and they hold 1/2 and 1/2 chance.

They told me I was wrong, and this was their argument: if I don't change doors, then it's just as if I wouldn't have been given the opportunity to change, so I still only have 1/3 chance of winning. Get it? If I don't change, then it's the same scenario as if Monty Hall would just start opening the doors in just a random order and I wouldn't have had the choice to change.

While essentially that argument holds true, it's this easy to stand against it: "Ok, I didn't change doors when I was offered the chance, but I rethought my choice, and I happened to choose my original door again; obviously that gives me the same chances as if I would've chosen the other door!"

So for months I went on thinking I was right, and all I have to do is just consider changing to the other door, but I don't actually have to change.

Well I was wrong!

Truth is, if you change your choice you have twice as much chance of winning than if you stay (2/3 to 1/3).

If originally you choose the door with the car (1/3 chance), then you lose if you switch.
If you originally choose a door with a goat (2/3 chance), then you win if you switch!

It's that simple!

Imagine it this way: same game, except with a deck of cards (52 cards) and the goal is to choose the ace of spades. Someone chooses a card, and you reveal 50 out of the remaining 51 cards. If you imagine it, then most of the time (51 times out of 52 tries) the person will NOT choose the ace of spades right away, and he/she should definitely switch to the card you left for him/her.

What's amazing about this problem?
-How it seems against my instincts that I will be more likely to win if I switch
-How information changes the whole problem!!! In an amazing and unbelievable extent!!!

The information (not-really) paradox:
Imagine that you're playing this Monty Hall game, you originally chose door A, and Monty Hall, the host, reveals that there is a goat behind door C (so now doors A and B are left). Now you have the chance to switch, but before you do so, another player comes in. Monty Hall tells him that behind one of the doors is a car, behind the other there's a goat. The player's default choice is set to door A.

He SHOULD HAVE a 50/50 (1:1) chance of winning!!! But he doesn't!!! He actually has 1:2 chances!! If he chooses to stay, then he will probably lose, and if he switches, he will probably win!

And the weird thing is, the more doors there were in the beginning, the more distorted his odds become! The history of the two doors isn't irrelevant! If there were 50 doors to start with, and 48 were revealed, then his chances per door are 1/50 and 49/50... and the poor guy just has to make the choice between two doors!

He can not have a 50% chance of winning, because if now we separate the room into two parts with a curtain, and you make a choice and he makes a choice, then door A will win 1/50 times and door B will win 49/50 times!!

Win a Goat!

You find yourself in an empty room, and in the adjacent room there are a bunch of people.
One person will come over from that room to your room. What is the chance that he/she's a female?


50%


Well now I tell you that in fact, there's a men's football (soccer) starter team and a women's basketball starter team in the other room. That gives you 11 men and 5 women. What's your chance of getting a woman now?


31.25%


Notice how nothing changed between the first and the second part - no one moved, no one exited, entered, teleported - nothing is physically different! Your odds changed from one moment to the other, simply because of the information you possessed.
The women's basketball team is actually a wheelchair basketball team, and they left their wheelchairs at home:


0%


Again. Same room, same people as before but your chances are so different!

A probability is only as good as the extent of information you have about the problem... and it changes over time! The more you know, the more it changes.

Check out this cool problem posed in 1975 (The Monty Hall problem):
You arrived to the final stage of a television game show. You have a choice between three doors: behind one is a brand new car, behind the other two there are goats. You get to take home whichever one you choose.

So you courageously choose one.

But here's the twist: Monty Hall, the host of the show, opens one of the two doors that you didn't pick (he opens one with a goat in it) AND he gives you a chance to change your choice to another door?

Now you can choose between two doors; one has a goat behind it and one has a brand new car. Do you switch to the other door?


I will post about the right choice in a few days... until then, think about it!


(By the way a really really cool commercial about wheelchair basketball: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwndLOKQTDs )

DIY Meat

Well it's not really about Do-It-Yourself meat... at least not yet.

But the signs are good!

Especially after seeing a movie like Samsara or maybe Food, Inc (which I haven't seen yet actually), you can tend to start thinking about becoming a vegetarian.

But the truth is we love meat.

And it's not really much we can change in the production of meat at the moment... but the solution is coming!

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2009-11/dutch-scientists-grow-first-vitro-pork

That's an actual picture of pork growing inside a machine. The muscle is being exercised so it stays fit and healthy - and not one animal was harmed in the making of this (ok, I admit, they did steal some cells from a pig...).

And what's really cool is imagining that in 20 years you'll be growing your own meat at home. Not just pork... nonono! We're talking about zebra meat and beaver meat and duck meat and anything you want.

Well the machine look nice from the outside, but guess what? The product has already been tested:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-08/first-lab-grown-hamburger-served

Awesome! Great job, science!

A Huge Brain!

I'm a physicist, yet I am convinced that the evolution of our language is more important than the progression of science and technology.*

Why?

Without the proper methods to communicate, it is impossible for people to effectively, quickly and deeply share their ideas and thoughts. Without rich vocabularies and very delicate grammatical structures it would be difficult for one person to pass on the right temperament of an idea, feeling or thought.

Does the correct temperament of a message count this much? Yes it does - that provides the basis for profound understanding between the halves, which opens the way to a deeper, more understanding conversation.

Is this important in the sciences? Yes, although maybe not as much as in other fields of life, but notice that mathematics and physics and so on and so forth needed to build up a distinct vocabulary and language. This is necessary for the advancement of any field.

Here's the truth: I don't think languages are very important because of what I just told you. What I think is the really amazing thing about advanced languages is that they connect us! That's the most important task that language has - to connect people.

Imagine that perfect communication exists (maybe with the help of this!).
Perfect communication means COMPLETELY understanding each other in an instant without any effort - basically you look at another person and you know everything they know - thanks to perfect communication!

What this would do is create the largest-ever brain - a brain where people are the brain cells. Just imagine how much thinking potential and creativity such a construction of humans would have! It would be quite a thing.

We are on the way to perfect communication, although we will never get there probably :) The key to this, I think, is the evolution of languages - this (with the help of information technology) will help us get closer to the "super brain state".



(What's the * at the end of the first sentence? I'm not extremely convinced that it's the most important part of development anymore. In the beginning it was obviously the most important factor (cavemen and ancient societies), but today maybe not so much.

I'm imagining the sophisticated-ness of communication as a sort of logarithmic function of time dedicated to improving communication - in other words the later we are in time, the less it matters that we are trying to make a more profound language, but still communication can become infinitely perfect if we have infinite time! So good luck with that!)

Samsara

Prepare to be mesmerized, terrified and amazed by the world you live in: Samsara

The Trailer:

Samsara is one of my favorite films. I saw it in the Budapest Urania movie theater, and it was not at all what I expected. The movie has no speech in it at all, only images and music, which gives the topics a very mystical and profound touch. The imagery is stunning and beautiful.

So Samsara is a very strongly recommended film for everyone who lives on Earth. The movie is less than 2 hours long, have at it:

The full movie (!!! Switch to HD quality !!!) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icIv7nJqjuQ

Would YOU be Beckham?

Here's the deal: If you could be anyone in the world, who would you be?

Seriously, anyone! Pick a person; you can choose a specific person from the present or even the past, or you can just choose a description (e.g.: the richest person ever, the happiest person alive, the...).


There are two options to talk about here:

a) If you chose a specific person, for example Beckham.

So this is a real situation here, I asked this from one of my friends and he said Beckham, and it really started bugging me:
If I were Beckham, would I be Beckham?
I'm asking this in the sense that if I was born in Beckham's place, in his body, would I have had the motivation and ambition to become the most famous football player of my time? Would I have been able to exploit my skills and talents in such an amazing way?

And the following question has really really really bothered me since: What am I NOT bringing out of myself? Am I destroying a great person, am I choking myself by not using my time well enough, by wasting too much energy and time and focus on things that aren't important instead of becoming the MOST that I could be?

b) If you chose a description of a person (the smartest..., the richest...,  a Nobel prize winner, the fastest..., the strongest...), then
Why aren't you that person??? It's like... this is the most self-reflective question ever and I think there are huge masses of people out there that don't really think about this question at all: Who do you want to be?

If you want to be the happiest person in the world, then go! Have at it, live your life like such! If you want to be someone really skilled at something: GO! DO IT! If you want to embrace the world and travel and meet people - what are you waiting for?! Do you want to be an artist - someone who paints and designs his/her own living room and bedroom in funky and wicked ways, go ahead! Why aren't who you want to be?

And that's the best part of living here and now! We have so many opportunities to choose from on who we want to be - and yet so many people are just going through the norm procedure of education and workplaces because they forget to ask themselves the question: who do I want to be?

Boundaries - Friends or Foes?

Think of something. Or give yourself 2 minutes to think.

Stop. Now answer this question:
What would you rather do, let a train hit five people tied to the tracks or switch the tracks so that only one person gets hit?

                                                                                            

Ok just forget about thinking. Do something, anything.

Stop. Now do what I tell you: take a box of LEGOs and build a tower at least 10 centimeters high, containing more red blocks than any other color blocks, and the tower should have at least one helicopter landing spot, two stairs that lead to the top and 3 or more floors altogether.

                                                                                            

What's the point of all this?

If I ask you to think of something, anything at all, than you have a huge amount of freedom in your thinking. Yet you progress much more when I tell you to think about something very specific - in that case you immediately start thinking and you are fully involved and immersed in that specific question.

In this case if you think enough on the railroad question, you might enhance your thinking, learn something new, progress to new interesting territories while encountering challenging parts in the thinking process, maybe think of some wildly new idea that can influence the way you or others live!

If you have to build a LEGO tower, you start building and you encounter obstacles that you MUST overcome with your creativity and unorthodox thinking.

When I tell you to just do something, or just think of something, you would have probably done or started to think about something simple or just very random stuff or just about nothing at all.

By giving you no boundaries, it's hard (although not impossible) for you to do anything outstanding.

By giving you the right amount of boundaries, you can achieve amazing things.

However giving too many boundaries leaves you trapped.

Having the proper amount and types of boundaries that push us has key importance in our development and learning. It's very hard to give other people or ourselves the correct boundaries - this is one of the most important tasks of teachers and trainers.

Physics analogy: In flowing water, the less space you give it to flow the faster it flows!

Where else are boundaries a propelling factor instead of a bounding factor?

What's a Higgs?

The Higgs boson's original name is the Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble boson. For understandable reasons no one uses the long name.

It's gotten quite a bit of attention from the media, especially since it was dubbed "The God Particle" and because it was successfully proved to exist in the July of 2012 at CERN (<3). I'm going to give you guys a short summary on how you can imagine what the Higgs boson does - (unfortunately it's not God; it's just a particle).

First off we need to introduce the concept of the Higgs field. The Higgs field is a special field that is everywhere - imagine an invisible web filling out the whole space in the universe!

Ok now instead of the field imagine a cocktail party full of people evenly distributed.

These nice people represent the Higgs field.

When a celebrity enters the room the people are all exited about the famous newcomer and gather around him/her.

The celebrity is actually any kind of particle - for example a proton, a neutron or an electron. The new mass of people around her make it harder for her to move and makes  her and the people  accumulated around her harder to stop (if they move together) - in other words her inertia grew! She has now successfully gained mass!

So the Higgs field gives particles their mass - a very elemental property of physical things.

The Higgs boson? In the same room, imagine someone from the outside whispering a rumor to one of our Higgs field representatives.

Since that person has an interesting story, many of his/her neighbors group around him/her and a local cluster comes to life. The rumor spreads on its own, and wherever it is there's a group of people talking about it.

That newly-formed cluster is a Higgs boson. It's actually a particle with mass, that was created from an unusual excitation of the Higgs field. This is why the finding of the boson was important - it proves (or at least strongly suggests) that the Higgs field, the mass-giving field, exists!

Poor Orcs

While watching The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, I couldn't help but feel bad for the orcs.

When a human or dwarf dies, everyone's so sad and we need separate scenes for their deaths and their mourning. When an orc dies? NOTHING! NO ONE CARES!! :'(

Orcs are social living beings as well. They live their everyday lives just like us, they have families and friends and children.

Orcs are depicted as such ugly and nasty creature, that not even the orcs care that orcs die! It's like orcs are such terrible creatures that they should be slaughtered for everyone's sake, even the orcs sake.

Next time you watch LOTR or Hobbit, please feel some compassion for the orcs as well. And goblins and trolls and wargs.

The reason we don't care about the orcs is that they're really depicted as ugly creatures, and the Halo effect(holdudvar hatás) takes control over our feelings.

The Halo Effect is when you attribute properties to a person because of your general impression* of them - basically because of their looks. For example orcs look ugly, they are probably evil creatures.

It also works the other way - ladybugs are very nice and cute insects and you enjoy having them walk around on your skin. If they wouldn't have dots on them and they would be all black, and maybe have a different shape you would freak out because of them.

When I was young, I hated the show: "Courage the cowardly dog", because it was full of scary and disgusting things, and Courage, the main character, wasn't appealing at all. Years later I realized that maybe that was the point - ugly messed up creates can have good souls and amazing personalities.

Unfortunately, our beloved Disney is probably the strongest enforcer of the halo effect. Evil characters are ugly and good characters are beautiful (in the Beauty and the Beast this isn't as true as in the other movies - but seriously the point of that movie is that if you're rich than you're also OK)

So that's that - please think about the poor orcs next time you watch a movie with them. And maybe try to image the movie with switched roles!


*it works the other way around as well - if you chat online with someone for a long time and you've never seen them and they are a good chat-partner then you imagine a very pleasant person on the other side; if they are annoying then you don't imagine them as prince charming

Video: Inside

Wild Railroad Carriage

So I searched Wikipedia for the correct phrase, and it turns out that the things that make up a train are called railroad cars, or railcars for short (US and Canada), but in the UK it's railroad carriage... which is the expression I'll be using, because it sounds nicer.

Philippa Foot (1920-2010) proposed the following situation:
There's a wild railroad carriage going down a hill, seemingly unstoppable, and there are 5 people tied to the tracks... and you are there watching.

Luckily you notice a railroad switch, which can change the path of the carriage to another track, where there's only one person strapped to the track.

What do you do?

You switch the tracks; that's what most people would do.

So along comes Judith Jarvis Thompson (1929-), who puts a twist in the scene:
You have the train carriage coming at full speed, 5 people tied to the tracks... but there's no switch, only some people who are passing by who haven't noticed the carriage.

You grab a person and toss him in front of the carriage before it slices up the 5 innocent people into 15 pieces; the carriage gets derailed and the 5 people are saved, but the fellow you tossed in died.

Was that correct? If so, would making this decision be harder or simpler than the last one, when all you had to do was change the switch? In fact, was changing the switch the right decision at all?

I think it's a tough thought, hope you'll be at it and think about it some more, make new scenarios; it's easy to start wandering off to other ideas from this one.

By the way this is from a book called 30 Seconds Philosophy, which is pretty good at first sight, I've only read a part of the ideas in it, but it seems to be good and it summaries the ideas well.

These weeks

Hey! I won't be writing too much until 08.26., because I'm on vacation, but I'll try if I get the chance.

A Carnivorous Flower

“The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Most all of us have seen a few wonderful sunsets each summer (e.g. at Lake Balaton ^^ ). In fact, most of us have also probably read about why the sky is blue - we have so much in common!

Quick summary on the sky's color: Light coming from the sun scatters off the molecules and atoms in the air in a way that lower frequencies of light (like red, orange, yellow) scatter less and higher frequencies of light (like blue, violet) scatter much more.

When the sun goes down, it seems to paint the bottom part of the sky red and orange. How?

No one knows...

Just joking - hehehe. We do know - it's the same effect that makes the sky blue!

When the sun goes down, the light coming from it has to travel through much more air.

So when the sun is low, we have lots of light coming through the "long path" (see illustration). Because it's going through a long path, the effect of bluish light scattering away and reddish light remaining is stronger... simply because it happens through a longer path!

Cool right?

So the bottom of the sky is beautiful red and we have a nice gradient all the way to blue.

This brings us to an artistic question to think about:

-If the atmosphere were thicker, would the sky be red?