Little Sahara, OK

We went for a quick camping last week. It was okay, I have never seen dunes before; so it was quite a surprise. I think I would try it again.

The Fabric of Reality: theory of everything

This is an interesting proposition that there exists an one single theory what he mentioned as 'theory of everything.' One thing popped up in my head immediately: if such a thing exists where should we look for? or What is the nature of such a thing? What are the characteristics of that theory? My question is even more philosophical I guess! I think I would like to know what are the characteristic the 'theory of everything' must have to consider as a theory of everything? Now the question is there anything exists like that? 

Well, I can play an interesting trick David Deutsch played at the beginning of Fabric of Reality. Let say such a theory exists, and as I understand, the only existence of any theory is through its interpretation. I presume there would be numerous interpretation of such a theory. There would be medical science, physics, chemistry and so on. All these are interpretations of that same unified theory. Now can I say like David Deutsch' Oracle, that such theory indeed exists which is our universe! Universe is the theory that has numerous interpretation in our life.

My second concern about such a theory is even more philosophical. Since he didn't defined the characteristics solution, why some philosophical ideas would not be qualified as candidate solution! One such a solution indeed exists in the history of mankind for many year: religion. Religion indeed presents one single unified theory of everything. What makes the proposition even more interesting is, all consequences and existing phenomena may not be immediately understandable from the theory. Just like, it needs years of work to explain real world using our existing theories, we need years of  work to explain this universe using religion as well. On top that, religion is upgrading day by day. My proposition is: nothing disqualify a religion as a candidate for the theory of everything.

Texas!

I went to Texas last weekend. Technically it was the furthest travel I ever made to attend any kind of invitation. Well, 200 miles for an invitation! That's too much for me. So I made it little interesting. I took my 35mm with me and took some shoots.

Social being!

No matter we agree or disagree, we human being are social animal; and as a social animal we need other people to live. I remember reading my middle school books where it says human being are social animal, although I didn't realize what that really means probably I realize now. Maybe it means "we need other people to survive." If I can't survive without other then probably it means I don't live alone either. My life is the contribution and coagulation of so many other lifes. If that what it means then we don't born alone, we don't live alone, may be we don't even die alone. Maybe our soul is a part of bigger soul. Maybe society is more than just a collection of people. Society is not lonely without us, we are lonely without society. 

In my life I have been thinking I an good by myself; but if I am part of something cannot be good without it. I need to be social so that I can survive. I met an extreme case yesterday. Let say his name is John. John is an average guy, or he is a guy like us but little bit introvert. Introvert people without some exceptions don't like to meet a whole lot of people. So our John kept isolating him from other people. At some point he starts believing he can't interact with other people. Interestingly our society never improvise people with anomalous characteristics. So our John was pushed even further. At some point he started fearing people; and society jumped in and made him even worse. Then our John started believing he has no quality at all. This is the death of a soul. So here is the story of our John. 

Could we do little better for our John? I bet yes. All we need to do is push our John out of his comfort zone and I believe we could find him flourish. All we need to show him that we are no better than him. All scholarly face out there is same as what he got. I know we won't do that. We would keep him pushing hard and smash him to the ground. 

Nature is selective. Human like animal form  society for better survivability and at some point we made it selective as well. I don't know whether this kind of multi-level selection procedure is good or bad but it does not feel good if you meet a John. Many of us never notice John is among us and he has everything we have. He doesn't deserve a soul death. I am an introvert person as well but the only difference between me ans John is: I know you loud people are no smarter than me, John doesn't.

Google Drive

Google has been kind enough to invite me to use Google Drive this week. At first glance the service looks interesting and I know this service is useful. I have been using Dropbox from their very beginning. So the service is not entirely new to me. Google drive is pretty much identical to Dropbox except Google drive supports partial synchronization while Dropbox does not. It means Google Drive can synchronized a different set of folders in different computers; which is kind of cool because, now I can synchronize my personal files in my laptops and home computers while my works are synchronized in different work stations in my lab. On the top of that I have been paying Google for storage for last couple of years and I can use them up in Google drive as well. So I have plenty of incentives to move to Google Drive from Dropbox.

However, it becomes uncomfortably difficult to trust Google these days. The way they are pushing everything toward Google+ that makes me little cautious to move to Google Drive (I feel sad for my Picasa). Moreover, Google Drive is not publicly available yet, so it is too yearly to bet all my files on behalf of a beta product. Well I can do something interesting. I installed Google Drive and create a Dropbox folder inside it. Now moved my previously configured Dropbox folder into the new Dropbox folder. So now my Dropbox synchronizes everything I have in my Dropbox and Google Drive synchronizes everything inside the Dropbox folder and few mores (those are in siblings of my dropbox folder). In this way if something unexpected happen to my Google drive my dropbox still have those files. I hope Dropbox would not die pretty soon. Good luck Dropbox!

Java variable argument function!

I found an interesting compile time error today. Java allow variable argument function in that case the signature of the function looks something like, 

Class Y {

int func(int ... x)

}

However the function can be invoked as y.func() without any compile time error. That is kind of interesting for language like Java. It invokes the function with an array of integer of size 0. The same function can be overload with not argument at all! However they don't allow empty call if the function is overloaded with two different types of variable arguments.

ফিরে যাওয়া

অনেক অনেক দিন আগে, একদিন বসে বসে গান শুনছিলাম , কার যেন গান; গানের কথা ছিল, "আমিও পথের মত হারিয়ে যাব, আসব না ফিরে আর, আসব না ফিরে কোন দিন।" আমার পাশে বসা ছিল শিশির ও তখন খুব ছোট। আমিও গুন গুন করছিলাম। হঠাৎ করে শিশির জিঙ্গেস করে বসল, দাদা তুমি কই যাবা? সেদিন জানতাম না, আমি কই যাব? আজও জানি না আমি কই যাব, কিন্তু জানি আর কোনদিন ফিরে যাব না।

Medieval fair, 2012

How much things could change over time. When I went to the medieval fair for the first time I thought it was cool. Lot of interesting costume thing was going on. Many people are roaming around in a medieval set. I thought it was kind of cool. But when I went to the medieval fair this year, my idea is kind of opposite. I feel like it is kind of boring. Partly because all the same people wearing same costumes again and again. Even worse all the stalls are even similar. When I went to take picture, I realized some the characters are actually my familiar. I took picture of them last year. I guess this is the norm of a campus town, here things don't change, people change.

Professional research ethics training

I am attending professional research ethics training this weekend. The training is okay, it kind of remind me the old days when I joined OU. I had to attend plenty of trainings at that time. I have not been attending any training for last three years or so. So it's kind of remind me my early days at OU. My personal feeling is good about the training.

Now what they discuss! Well they were kind of trying to discuss ethical decision making process in the research. The nature of the beast suggest that there is not single right or wrong answer of these questions. All answers are equally valid under different circumstances. So, the whole point is not implanting any right or wrong into the trainees but rather focus on the problems and discuss as many different circumstances as possible to answer the question. Under that perspective I think the training is pretty successful. 

Personally I don't believe anything called ethics but I do believe in social responsibilities. Probably social responsibility is the reason I am not going to street and doing whatever I feel like doing. I believe making a better society is part of my responsibilities: it is the same responsibility that make people take care of their children. Think of a situation where you take good care of your children but then at the end you send them to hell. 

So I think if you take good care of your kids, I think you should take good care of your society because society is the place where they are gonna be within couple of years.

If you know what I am talking about!