Never pity yourself

You cannot be among the top with a victim mentality.

- Aaz

Twelve Angry Men

An old man's testimony has the potential to put a youth (the accused) in the electric chair. However, his testimony seems to disagree with certain facts. But why would he lie?

text from:
http://classweb.howardcc.edu/jbell/ideabook/angrymen.pdf

"...Juror #9 then said that he had watched the old man for a long time in court. He noticed that he had a tom jacket and walked dragging a leg. He believed that the old man had never had any recognition, that nobody knew him, and that it was a sad thing to be nothing, so maybe he made himself believe it for his "15 minutes of fame". Juror #5 then changed his vote to not guilty..."

In the entire movie, I found this to be the most astute bit of reasoning. Why? Because very few people can perceive and interpret human nature as it is. It may not be easy to commit murder, but it is incredibly easy for an unfulfilled person to push a man to the guillotine for "15 minutes of fame". Doesn't the person feel guilty? Of course not! He has wiped out all memory, and overwritten it with belief. Why should he care for a world that does not care for him?

conserve your muscles

It takes seventeen muscles to smile and forty-three to frown,
and none to stare expressionlessly.

Make hay...

May hay when the sun shines.
When the sun is not shining, don't make hay,
but for god's sake do something else!

At the reception

We had a few uninvited guests at my wedding reception. Free food! At most weddings, they go unnoticed, since most people automatically assume that they are acquaintances of the in-laws, but our case was different. There were less than ten guests from my wife's side. So, these folx were easily identified.

What makes them easier to identify is that they eat voraciously, and if you stare at them, or approach them, then they try hard to disappear. In a place like Kolkata, it is not unlikely that they have been publicly bashed for this before. Poor people.

Anyway, three of them were cornered by the organizers of the event (none of this was actually witnessed by me). Two slipped and ran for their lives, fearing the worst. The third, we kept him seated under supervision of two of my biggest cousins, and let him go after most of our guests had left. Here is how the conversation with him went.

Who are you?

-I am related to your aunt?

What is the relation?

-I am related...

Where do you live?

-Tollygunj (a fairly large area)

What do you do?

-I am a driver.

What is your car's license plate number? (saying this my cousin pulled out a diary as if to check)

- W... (All license plates in West Bengal begin in WB...)

W... after that?

-(with a resigned look) X... Y... Z

Anyway, before we caught this fella, he had almost finished dinner. He was on the ice-cream. On the whole, he must not have felt too bad about the whole deal. Neither did we. :))

From J.K.Rowling

"People find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right." - Albus Dumbledore

On hunger and fishing

The other day, we were discussing how bad governments sometimes deliberately paralyze the education system. Chris came up with a nice way of putting it:
“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime. But if you can prevent a man from learning how to fish, then he will be very grateful if you ever gave him a fish.”

While checking my phrasing of this proverb, I came across this. Not quite so enlightening, but entertaining nonetheless :)
http://www.amatecon.com/fish.html

Peaceful Coexistence

Peaceful coexistence is a beautiful idea, but if I had to choose between peace and coexistence, I would choose peace.

History

In one of Satyajit Ray's stories, the following was the description of a 'wise man'.

"He had extensive knowledge of the past, and he was aware of the present. Using these, he could predict the future."

Indeed, human nature has not changed much in thousands of years. Nor has the fundamental nature of our problems changed. We are faced with similar tough choices to make. As a consequence, in the words of Mark Twain:

"The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes."

I think that the single most important reason to study history is to help us understand human nature and instincts, so that we can predict the future, and possibly take steps to prepare for it. Sadly though, history is never taught with such a goal...

The nature of nature
is not limited by the limits
of our wits.

Workplaces

It helps to have more than one place where one can work. Sometimes, working conditions in a place can become a barrier to productivity. A simple example is when you and your officemate(s) are comfortable at very different temperatures. Sound familiar? I have personally been lucky in this regard, but not everybody is so fortunate. Of course, temperature is a small issue. Bigger things crop up from time to time, making life miserable.

Ideally, a person should be able to work in any circumstance. But then, none of us is an ideal person.

Love her...

Love her the way she likes being loved, and she will love you the way she likes loving you.

Belief

Several movies have put forward the idea that if you can really believe that you can do something, then you can do it. The idea certainly appeals to our minds... such power... if only we could believe!

But untrue as the proposition may be, there is great power in belief. Indeed, a mathematician might say that although the existence of belief may not be sufficient to achieve an arbitrary goal, it is nonetheless necessary. That almost sounds pedantic :)

Time and again I have pondered over the nature of god, or a supreme power, and I have arrived at the same conclusion that such a power is unlikely to be interested in human affairs, and give instructions such as those given by most religions. God lives in our beliefs. We think of god subject to the limitations of our wits. God is as powerful as our beliefs. And the power of belief, although it may not enable us to violate nature's laws, is still enormous. It is the power of belief that enabled dictators to justify the killing of tens of millions of people, and it is the power of belief that helps billions of human beings to lead a reasonably honest life in a world where there is little other than human law to punish villains.

question and answer

Q: What would you like to be when you grow up?
A: I would like to be lucky!

...the team worker...

his idea of teamwork was a team that worked on his ideas...

Twin primes

For a moment I thought I had proved the twin primes conjecture...

The conjecture is that there are infinitely many prime pairs differing by 2. eg. 5,7 ; 11,13 etc.

I started with Euclid's proof of the infiniteness of primes.
Assume for a contradiction that there are finitely many primes. Without loss of generality, assume that there are exactly n primes p1,p2, ... pn in increasing order.
Then, (p1.p2...pn + 1) must be a prime since it has no prime factors, contradicting our assumption.

In the same way, (p1.p2...pn - 1) must also be a prime if n>1.

Doesn't that give us a pair of primes (p1.p2...pn - 1), (p1.p2...pn + 1) for every n that differ by 2?

No, it does not. Why?

TV for sale

Some people... anyway, here's an ad I saw recently:

TV for sale. It used to work great until last week when the channel got stuck at number 3. $25.

Hmmmmmmm. $25 per channel. 100 channels. Do the math.

Photo rules

I screwed up. I screwed up big time. There are (at least) 3 fundamental rules for taking good pictures. To consistently take good pictures, one must check these 3 quickly before each click in the following sequence:

1. correct choice of f (aperture) for a desired effect
2. correct exposure
3. hold camera steady

Other rules may be
4. choose proper film for the photo setting eg. 400-1600 for night pictures with people
5. use grad filters if necessary
and many others.

I screwed up in 2. I took a picture of a small bright sunlit flower in front of a dark shaded background. My experience told me that unless I underexposed considerably, my subject (the flower) would be a blur of bright light. I underexposed 2 full stops. The image came out nice. From then on, until the end of the roll, and well into the next one, I kept taking pictures 2 stops underexposed... some of my best compositions came out horribly dark.

taking responsibility

I was watching TV and came across a reality show 'Runway' in which some designers compete through their fashion creations. Today's episode was about teamwork, and one of them got eliminated for being the weakest on that count. But that's not really what happened.

It came down to two persons. One had spent several hours crying because she cracked up under pressure. The other simply said that she was slower at sewing than the others and perhaps she herself should be eliminated. The judges agreed, saying that this being an industry, you are supposed to sell yourself, not eliminate yourself. The crying lady got another life.

The decision seemed ironic to me. Here is a person who is willing to take responsibility, who is humble, who instinctively dislikes to pass blame, and who has a kind heart, and she is eliminated on a test of teamwork! I think that I should love to work with such a person as my partner, rather than work with someone who is emotionally immature, or is prone to throwing tantrums.

Somehow, American TV has time and again given me the impression that qualities such as humility, willingness to share responsibility for failures, and not passing blame, are considered weaknesses in this culture. That is perhaps not true is actual work environments, because without these, teamwork is impossible.

Some Buddhist schools, on the other hand, cater to the opposite extreme. Taking responsibility is held sacred. In some of their teaching stories, I came across scenarios where an individual took responsibility quietly and calmly for mistakes that were perhaps not entirely his. And he was served as a model to readers. Isn't is true that taking responsibility for mistakes that you have not committed is a form of dishonesty? It misleads others and just happens to hurt you also. Perhaps the message of the story was that when it comes to taking responsibility, you must check your tendency to get defensive and make excuses. But the example came out as a little extreme to me.

The question

The question is not, ‘‘Is there life after death?’’ The question is, ‘‘Is there life before death?’’