Done with Facebook

Since a few years ago until a week or so ago I had been using Facebook as one of the ways to keep in touch with the world out there. I was able and willing to wade through a lot of FB junk to get what I wanted and to say a few words of my own as well. However, the fact that I did use FB has negatively impacted my private life in ways I do not wish to share. So, I decided to quit Facebook -- and I do not miss it.

I am convinced that I will be able to keep in touch with my true friends (not 650+ FB friends) in other, more direct ways. And I will limit my Internet writing to my weblogs. Life is more peaceful this way.

Redistribution of Income

I was watching a clip on YT (Bill O'reily Gets Owned by Cornel West & Tavis Smiley) in which a very popular catch phrase "redistribution of income" was being thrown at the interviewee in order to discredit him as promoting socialism (small "s" is intentional here).

Now, I am thinking, I should ask how that income that is targeted for "redistribution" is acquired in the first place. If it is acquired by exploitation, cheating, steeling, and other illegal or immoral means, sure enough, it should be redistributed. The question, of course, is what is "illegal" or "immoral."

Both illegality and immorality are human created notions (illegality other than in the sense of being against natural laws, laws of physics) As such they necessarily vary both in time and in space.

Among non-human animals, taking advantage of whatever circumstances one finds in order to better oneself is a perfectly normal, natural reaction to those circumstances and no one goes to jail. Among humans, that can be problematic. If I can take advantage of my physical strength and take away resources from another human by force, that is not acceptable in most human societies. How come? Because it is illegal and/or immoral.

This thing called morality is causing all sorts of problems for us humans as we can not universally agree on what is or isn't moral. And we are doomed to disagree forever on it, or at least for a foreseeable future. As a result, we still use natural means to prevail in serving our self-interests -- except we now label it exploitation or such. Or we enact laws and establish moral norms that make those means legal or moral.

The trick is that those laws and moral norms come into being not by consensus but by force of some sort. So, we are really no better off than non-human animals and I find myself back at square one in this thought exercise.

amazing ignorance or "an altered intuitive sense"

I heard this report on the radio this morning (link to a printed version of it). It reports that

"Gross domestic product shrank 0.9% in the first three months of the year, the Cabinet office said, giving an annualised rate of contraction of 3.7%."

And so that caught my attention as being incorrect. I said, they are probably taking a quarterly rate and calculating the cumulative rate as in ((1 + QuarterlyRate/100)**4 - 1) * 100 and getting something like 3.64889225609997%, which they (wrongly) rounded up to 3.7%. Clearly the cumulative annual rate is not QuarterlyRate * 4.

But their calculation is incorrect since the rate is negative (not rate of growth but rate of shrinkage) and so the result is really -3.5516909439, which is less than 3.6%.

You know, average person has very poor feeling for numbers as they relate to quantities. Research has shown (I do not remember the source) that anything larger than a 3 digit number is beyond our intuitive comprehension. Proportion of "1" to "1000" is felt differently from the proportion of a million to a "billion," which is the same as the former one. I am particularly sensitive to those things likely due to my scientific training.

Rights

What's on my mind? Rights. The so-called inalienable rights, natural rights, god-given rights, etc. etc... whatever you call them ... you know, right to life, happiness, and such.

I do not believe there are any such things, but only those which we afford to each other. And that changes in time and space.

So let's not cloak ourselves in such foolishness and claim that we have rights given by some force outside of ourselves.

BTW, I am fully fireproof :-).

adagio for souls

They come from nowhere, to nowhere they return. As they travel they glow, they dance, they smile, they tumble and twist but go they do. They, the souls on their eternal journey from the unknown to the unknown. Briefly they can see each other through the veils of mysterious fogs, they whisper words of amazement, of enchantment, and they go along. "Hi," they say in passing. They turn around for one last look before the darkness welcomes them back into its rich bosom, but it is no more. They reach, they stretch, they strain, they call, they sing one last adagio and they go. As they go, they leave a trace, a small, weak trace of their golden, shimmering dust, colors of all sorts, glistening, suspended in the vacuum of reality, like the trails should be. "I was here," they say. Can anyone hear them? Those souls of ours. And go they do.

The road from the top

The road from the top is always down. The road from anywhere else is your choice - could be down, could be up, could stay leveled! Where do you want to go?

So refreshing, if you ask me

Ah, it felt so good to read the following few sentences from cnet news this morning:

Pop quiz: Which one is the true tablet? Apple iPad, JooJoo, Dell Streak, or HP Slate? If you guessed any of them you're right. Or you're wrong. Because the answer seems to depend on whom you ask.

And the reason for my excitement may not be what you would expect. It is not about the question raised or the answer (I) provided, or the comments - as clever as they are, comments, that is.

It is that the writer used "whom you ask" instead of the usual - and wrong - "who you ask." I read it and read it again and couldn't stop admiring what I saw. So there! Thank you Erica.