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.

two minds

I have been born with two minds - one rational where all roads are connected and lead somewhere, where there is a beginning and an end, where 2+2 is always 4, where up is up and down is down. The other, that other mind thinks in riddles and feels in circles which never end, clouds which never rain, songs which never die.

How did they ever come together, those two minds? and why? to torment each other? or to help each other navigate life's mysteries? Whatever their fuel may be, they tease each other and play games, in constant mixing and melting and molding, miming, saddening and rejoicing in an eternal gasp called life. What am I to make out of it? Well, go for a ride and write home frequently.

reminiscing

I took my last war-time trip to Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in May 1994. My mother had passed on in January, my daughter started living a more normal life in Osijek, my good friend Mira had been out of the nightmare of the war for a few years now, but I still had friends and family in the city. So, I undertook this last trip meaning to visit and bring a few goodies from the outside world to those stuck in Sarajevo.

It is not hard to understand what it meant to those inside to be visited, to be assured that they were not forgotten. I visited with my cousin (I wrote a little story about that experience - "The Other Side of The Mirror"). On my way back, I boarded a military plane (I had a press pass), took off from Sarajevo airport where just a year and a half before I ran for my life under fire to get into Sarajevo and landed in Split in Croatia short 20 or so minutes later.

What caught my attention was the contrast between the two cities so close but yet so far. Sarajevo, a city under siege and fire, and Split, a city in the swing of the oncoming summer with sidewalk cafes and lightweight fun seekers basking in the afternoon sun, sipping their cappuccinos. That contrast brought home the understanding of how easy it is to ignore the suffering of others when they are not seen, not close.