Meaningless stuff

I had an interesting dream last night! I was trying to check my email by writing the gmail.com in a piece of paper and pressing the text by my pen :( Isn't it funny! When I woke up this morning I was thinking, well it may not be funny after ten years. All we need a IP enable piece of paper. I hope some technology is going to replace paper very soon and then what we need is a perfect OCR and IP on it. Does it sound like fiction? I guess no. If you look at Amazon Kindle, it looks very similar to book. We need something little bit thinner and pen that can write on it. I hope paper is going to be obsolete in foreseeable future and then we have to attach IP on it! My dream would come to a reality!

Tulsa, OK

Arcadia, OK

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Shortcuts!

For some reason shortcut doesn't work for me. Most of the times if I try any shortcut I end up with opposite; no inconsistency this time as well. I tried one and end up messing even worse. Probably shortcuts are not for me but poor me; they are too lucrative to ignore :( The worst part of the story is this is not the first time I am realizing the fact but I forget the lesson very quickly.

Last few days was total crap; everything was against me! Every news was bad news! Every step was wrong step! Every action received even worse reaction! This is a hard time for me.

Imagine

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

[John Lennon]

Pauls Valley, OK

Trouble with physics

I have just finished an interesting book titled, "Trouble with physics" subtitled "The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next." Interesting book indeed. The first part of the book comprises a brief history of particle physics. I like that part most. I would say the author, Lee Smolin described the history of particle physics indeed in an interesting way.

In the second part is also quite interesting as well, in this part the author presented the rise of string theory and unresolved questions! He also criticizes String theory pretty harshly. He pointed out many questions those String theory fails to answer and many conjectures where String might fail. It is difficult for me to comment on this part because what he said is his arguments; I believe the String theorist must have their own explanation for them. But what amazes me most is, the transition from Part I to part II. Part I was written as if the everything is truth and Part II is written on the perspective of Science. I am not a big fan of popular science because sometimes authors write science book as if they are writing Gospel. The best part of this book the author did not present Science as a Gospel.

Part III presents the rival theories of String theory. Again, these all are theories and far from truth. I believe is Part IV is the part where the author made his main point. He pointed the unfair polarization of resources toward String theory. He also pointed some major flaw in doing science. Let me focus on one point, science is something that tempts scientists to think but recent practice is somehow fail to do so. I kind of agree with him; well I don't know very well about Physics but certainly I know about Computer Science. People are not interesting in thinking, they are more interested in doing, doing science. I am not asking to believe me, lets do this way;

Take some paper from recent conferences and journals and read the abstracts. You will certainly see one common thing. Everyone is claiming "In this paper we have solved Mr X's problem (which is the most important problem in this Universe) using the method Y (which is the best even known method to human civilization) in the context of Z (which is the most futuristic emerging research arena)." And most common trend is the authors have no relation with the problem, it is somebody else's problem; the solution is essentially proposed by someone else and finally the context exists only in imagination. There is not sign of think (therefore no science) in the whole process and to me this is very unhealthy.

I like to add one more interesting point. As a human being we are very fond of good and bad; we certainly know there exist two clusters one is called good and another is called bad. Even though we don't have any idea about what are those representing but we certainly know they are very important. Typically, we love good and we hate bad, since we don't know what are those things, we probably love the names. It is difficult to judge the think of a human being, but we have to attach a name with every person; scientists are not different. Hence we change the way of doing science, now the scientists are evaluated based on what they do not what kind of idea they possess. That made a big difference. People from all over the world are now interested about doing; that leads to another problem. Now everyone is doing something and start publishing. This situation gives the rise of publication industry. Now the problem became different, since publication industry became profitable many organization start moving toward it all of a sudden and the scientists start 'doing' in enormous pace. Now everyone becomes equal again with respect to publication and we are having hard time again to cluster. So now we starting clustering publication industries  and so one and this process continues. I don't know what it is bringing to us but certainly it is not taking us to the next step at least not in my view.

Anyway, go back to the book, "Trouble with Physics." (I have a very bad tendency of roaming around) What I felt about the book is, the main point of the book is not hard to perceive but it is difficult to comment on the specific example "String theory." String theory may find some success in future but it should not consume more resources than it deserves. At the end of the day it is 'just another theory'.

I would like to add some interesting quotes from the book,

• "working on String theory had proved to be a good intellectual training, and some former string theorists are now flourishing in other areas, such as solid-state physics, biology, neuroscience, computers, and banking."
• "String theory itself in need of unification"
• "The community has decided string theory is right and there is nothing you can do about it. You can't fight sociology"
• "After a certain point a successful scientist could easily spend all of his or her time on the politics of who gets hired where"

I have few comments on the very specific topic of the book,

• The things he called package deal (Part II) for String theory appeared same to me the things he called beautiful consequences (Part I)! May be the consequences are not beautiful enough to convince the writer but they are consequences no matter beautiful or ugly.
• The idea of curling up the dimensions and make them imperceptible appear again and again in the history of unification! Is this the same trap where human being are falling again and again or it is the reality? Apparently adding few more dimensions is the easiest mistake we can make.

The relationship

I feel like the relationship I have right now is wrong! It is a very wrong relationship. There is nothing wrong with any of us, I mean both of us are okay but we are not for each other. We are trying hard to make it happen but for some reason I have a feeling that we both know it would not work. We are just very different. Do we know each other? Well little bit and I am not a big fan of knowing very well. I believe knowing well is a very good catalyst for breaking up and it at the same time ends the journey of exploration, so I don't wanna know my partner from the very beginning.

I feel like we are trying to glue up two different piece of materials together which are very wrong for each other. But then again we have gone so far that it's not easy to be apart now. I have no plan to break it up but I don't wanna break it. Even though I know it's not right, still I wanna have it. At least we'll end up with a thermostat. In fact no relationship is perfect for me. Let me see how far we can go from here.

Network connection

I have a super interesting story to share: In my new lab I have one network connection for my Desktop. Since I always bring my laptop, I asked for one more connection. The new lab has every facilities for that and even we have two extra connection port in the room; all cabling and everything already done and it turn out that all the department has to do is to activate those connections! cool!

Now guess what they did! they ask 300$ for the activation! I have never heard of so much amount of money just to activate one connection and unfortunately I never thought it can even be charged. Then I thought probably those extra connections are just-for-show they really don't have any cabling inside them but guess what, they do have cabling and everything but where does that amount of money coming from?

Here is the explanation, in our previous building, if a new connection had to be established, they had to buy the cables and connect the new port to the switch and so and so... and all those things cost 300 bucks! So in the new building even though everything is already done they just charge that much amount of money to activate the connection! Wow! what a lovely elegant idea! Since I don't have money what I did was buy a 10$ switch which comes with two cables. I connect the switch to the network port and connect my machines to my new switch. Obviously that solves my problem but I am thinking what will I do if one fine morning they asked me for million dollar because that the cost of a 3GHz computer when the department was established!

'STUFF' NO-ONE TOLD ME

I went to my feed reader and found google has posted a new "blog of note". I used to follow them regularly but now I don't. Today they posted an excellent blog as a blog of note. I am not a big fan of cartoon but this blog is so good. I have copied one from that blog, I hope you would enjoy it as much as I did.

It's true, no one keeps count of my failure; more precisely no one even cares.