New Year

I have fifteen years of experience that the New Year's Eve is a bad time to be out partying.

Crowded with amateurish drinkers who have way too many expectations for one single night, the early hours of the new year always witness sudden sublimations of frustration and aggression.

A bad time to be out.

Beauty and Boat Making

A friend of mine, who is a boat maker, told me that when you're building a sailing boat, you need to calculate a lot of stuff. "But", he added, "if the calculated lines do not please the eye, it is wiser to trust aesthetics instead of mathematics."

Fun and No Fun

In parties and such I sometimes find it necessary to explain why I prefer Sprite to booze. It boils down to two reasons:

1) I can easily have fun without alcohol.

2) I can easily have alcohol without fun.

No further explanations are needed.

Criterion of Successful Teaching

A teacher has succeeded if and only if the student becomes better than the teacher.

If the teacher does not succeed, regress occurs -- something is lost. After a large enough number of generations with teachers who failed, humankind would be back to Stone Age.

The Holocaust vs. a New Holocaust

Funny how European leaders are now getting agitated about an Iranian leader who argues that the holocaust did not happen.

It's funny because the same European leaders never got agitated about the same Iranian leader when he earlier called for a total destruction of Israel, i.e., a holocaust.

Feyerabendians

Paul Feyerabend was an anarchistic thinker. He was called the worst enemy of science and a betrayer of the truth. But he made his point clear and unambiguous: The only methodological advice that does not shackle thinking is "anything goes".

I can but imagine the regret of poor Paul when, on his death bed, he was told about the numerous scientists who had become his followers.

The history of thinking can be characterized as myopia that is every now and then abolished so that it can reappear stronger than ever.

Ban Torture Now

I just read from the cageprisoners.com that the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay are tormented in a number of horrendous ways. They are flown to Cuba; they can just lie flat and not work; they are forced to listen to Meatloaf, Aerosmith, and Eminem; they are forced to take drugs, drink alcohol and eat pork; they are made to watch pornographic films, dirty magazines, and sometimes live naked women.

This must stop.

(See "how to help" at cageprisoners.com.)

Boring and Uninteresting People

Two things that I keep on hearing connected with drinking are "Let's go have fun" and "I met a lot of interesting people at the bar."

I deduce that alcohol is for boring and uninteresting people who hope to be fun and interesting. I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.

Two Cultures Revisited

When I think about it again, I believe C.P. Snow got it wrong; Why two cultures?

Does it mean that a psychologist would appreciate an anthropologist, that a philosopher and a historian would speak the same language, or that linguistics and social policy would pull together? It's hard to even tell which disciplines belong to which culture. "Psychology?"

Does two cultures mean that a mathematician and a computer scientist would share a common culture, that a biologist and a chemist wouldn't disagree about their explanations of the same phenomenon, or that medicine and physics would share common goals?

I think that Snow got it wrong by a number of orders of magnitude. Science is not an uniform culture. Two thousand cultures, that would be a number to start with. (And n! cultures, where n is the number of people might be a number to end with. Or perhaps larger, yet not infinite.)

Dear Katie

I've been wondering what do you mean when you sing "There are nine million bicycles in Beijing; that's a fact - It's a thing we can't deny, like the fact that I will love you till I die."

I've been thinking and thinking about the words fact and deny, the exact figure 9,000,000, and the logic of your sentence, and I've come to a firm conclusion that it's better for the lucky guy or girl not to broach the subject of factuality with you. "Yes, Katie, me too. Kiss me again"

The Crux of the Two Cultures Debate

In science and mathematics, an argument starts "Let n <> 0", and ends with "Q.E.D." ("which was proven" [sic]).

In humanities and social sciences, an argument starts "N.N. writes that ...", and ends with "I believe that this viewpoint can be fruitful for further studies on the topic."

You don't see an argument in physics starting "In this thesis I offer a new point of view to the Second Law of Thermodynamics", or an argument in mathematics ending "In my opinion, v-e+f=2".

Neither do you see a social sciences argument starting with "Assume that people are two-dimensional", or an argument in English literature ending "Hence, Yeats' hypothesis of clothes of heaven is incorrect. Q.E.D."

Never the twain shall meet.

Zero, One, Two

Lately I've been thinking of why did it take so long for mankind to come up with number zero. I believe the reason is that number one is the only natural number.

You can give someone an apple and say, look, here is one apple. But you can't give someone a non-apple and say, look, here are zero apples. And when you give someone two apples, you are actually giving one apple and one apple. Two is just an abstract coupling of two physically separate things, something that we create in our minds. There is nothing in the brute world that is naturally two; even the electrons orbiting the core of Helium atom are ones.

One, one, one, and one -- Poof! we create all the other numbers.