This is the best acoustic cover of any song I have ever heard. He is playing rhythm and lead at the same time. He could be deep in a solo, but the rhythm never stops. Talk about not missing a beat. Just amazing.

I can drive on either the left hand or right hand side of the road. I learned to drive a stick-shift, in a car that had its steering wheel on the right side inside the car, and I drove said vehicle down the left hand side of the road for many years.

And then I came to America, and everything got flipped around on me.

I always thought the choice to drive on the left or right side of the road was arbitrary. I did not know that it was a French versus British thing since Napoleon's time. Also, apparently there are good practical reasons for driving on the *left* side of the road with the steering wheel on the *right* hand side. Let this homeless British man educate you.

These are a couple of great videos. A scammer gets scammed, and a spammer gets spammed. Karma in email form. Very fun.

Let me get one thing out of the way first before I say the rest of this.

I am an atheist. I have no use for the god-belief. If a stranger approaches me and says, "I believe in God.", to me it sounds like he said, "I like gumballs." On an average day, those two facts, stated by a random person, create about the same number of ripples on the placid surface of my psyche.

"Really, that's interesting." I say, desperately trying not to yawn.

But some other days, I think about some of the statements made by the god-botherers. Statements that are, frankly, ridiculous.

In God we Trust.

Take that statement for instance. It's so popular, that it's on the fucking currency.

How can you trust God? God has a plan, and apparently no one knows what this plan is. How do you trust something you don't know? It's like saying, "I trust my ignorance." That sounds like something you would say after Clint Eastwood pistol-whipped your face with his .44 widowmaker and turned your brain into soft mush. Do you trust your ignorance? Well do ya, punk?

To know God's plan, you have to know his mind. What if he changes his plan? If you say that he cannot change his plan, then he is obviously not all-powerful. Hell, even I can change my plan.

Attend. Saying that God cannot do something removes free will from the very thing that supposedly gave you your own free will. Saying that God is compelled to do good runs up against a little philosophical problem called moral agency. Look it up.

Let me put it in terms that even the most feeble intellect can grasp. You do NOT know with certainty the mind of your own fucking spouse, who you have lived with for fifty years. Once in a while, she surprises you by running away with the pool-boy and half your cash. And you think you stand a chance of knowing the mind of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity who gargles up universes at the drop of a hat? Wouldn't that make you a bit god-like yourself, you pathetic tosser?

OK, let's pretend that you know God's plan is good. Every day the sun is shining, birds are singing, and the Great British Baking Show is on the telly. And then, pow!, a fucking tsunami kills a bunch of dogs, moms and kids. Even if the overall plan is good, it is undeniable that the intermediate steps are fucking *terrible*.

Knowing what God will do next is like predicting the outcome of a coin toss. A coin toss is a random event. Saying that you trust God is like saying you trust that the coin will turn up heads the next time you flip that fucker. Only idiots say this, and even they wait to say this until they are high on something.

There is a colloquial word we use for random events: luck. When the outcome of a random event goes in your favor, you have good luck. When it goes against you, you have bad luck. God's next move is a random event to you. Hence it is indistinguishable from luck.

So the next time you are in your church or your temple or wherever the fuck Zoroastrians go to waste their time, just substitute the word "luck" for "God" in your stupid mumblings and prayers and the sentences you form will be equally sound.

"I trust God." is the same as saying, "I trust my luck."

"God will get me through the day." is the same as saying, "Luck will get me through the day."

"God will punish evil." is the same as saying, "Luck will punish evil." Actually why leave this last bit to luck? Why not get off your god-bothering ass and take care of evil yourself, the best you can?

Here endeth the sermon. Go in peace. And may luck be with you.


 

The Crook and the Idiot

It is far better to be ruled by a crook, than it is to have an idiot in charge.

You gradually realize this after working for some time. Some workplaces are nice. They have good culture, good policies, and good people. If you happen to work in these nice places, this message will not move you and you will not understand. But meanwhile, in another part of town on the other side of the tracks, there subsists workplaces that are utter shit-holes. And in these festering shit-holes, sometimes the boss is a crook, and sometimes the boss is an idiot.

Prefer the crook.

On the face of it, this goes against intuition. The crook will do bad things. Yes, this is true. The crook will do bad things. But here's the thing. You know this. His actions have limits, and you can prepare yourself to deal with them.

The crook will do bad things. Even terrible things. But he will never ever hit the button that says, "Warning! Do NOT press this button. This button will blow up absolutely EVERYONE."

You do not have this guarantee with the idiot.

Stupidity is limitless. Prefer the crook.

I finally came across a movie I could not watch. This is coming from someone who is a jaded soul. I have watched some of the most debauched gorefests without flinching. I even sat through The Elephant Man, which has one of the most heartbreaking lines in cinema, when Joseph Merrick screams at his tormenters, "I am not an an animal. I...am...a...human being." The Elephant Man comes close to being unwatchable. Yet I sat through it.

But I switched off this movie.

The movie is The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, based on a true story, and directed by Werner Herzog. I'll let Wikipedia give you the Cliff Notes version.

The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man, wearing a black overcoat and top hat, who feeds him.

Did you get all that? This really happened to someone. A child spent seventeen years in solitary with a fucking toy horse. The first scene of the movie shows the boy playing with the toy horse. And when I say "playing", I mean sitting on the stone floor of his prison (because his legs had atrophied from disuse), and moving the toy back and forth in a small arc (because, chains). Other than the monster who kept him chained and fed, that toy horse was his nearest connection to another living thing.

Werner Herzog is a master. He proves that you don't necessarily need million dollar effects  and pyrotechnics to push someone over the edge. A simple scene does the job just as well.

That toy horse did it for me. That is as far as I got.

The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is far away but I will walk carefully.

-- Russian Proverb

In the 1983 movie War Games, the computer figures out that there are some games that are impossible to win, and the only rational thing to do is to not play at all.

We are not in complete control of the games that we play and sometimes the choice to "not play at all" isn't an option that is available. So if you are compelled to play a game that is unwinnable, what is the next best strategy to follow? The next best strategy is to play in a way where you are oblivious to the outcome, and winning and losing matter equally.

"You can't step in the same river twice."

I heard that sentence in that form a while ago. I took it to mean that you cannot redo the past. You cannot step in the same river again, because the water is not the same.

Entropy, ever stubborn, allows no mulligans.

But when you examine the sentence in its original form, it seems to say more than that.

The original form that is closer to source (Heraclitus) is, "No man can step in the same river twice. For it is not the same river, and he is not the same man."

Time changes both the stage and the actor.

The second part of that sentence also brings up the question of identity. Am I the same man I was, say, seven years ago? Am I same man I was last night?

There is a very interesting thought experiment in metaphysics called The Ship of Theseus. So it goes that Theseus the great Greek hero sailed in his ship and did many heroic deeds using said ship. When he passed, the ship was put on display. People from near and far came to admire the ship. Over the years, the wooden planks of the ship rotted and were replaced, until a time came when not a single original plank used to build the ship remained. Is it still the Ship of Theseus? You could argue this paradox both ways.

Yeah, identity is a paradox. It does not survive the passage of time. What is perhaps worse is that it can be replicated and the very act of replication immediately destroys any notion of identity.

This computer being used to type this post is unique. It is My Computer. Or so it seems. If someone took all the data in this computer and copied it into identical hard drives, and put those hard drives into identical hardware, and shuffled them, how would someone tell which was the original computer? The computers themselves could not tell the difference (if they could think) since they would have identical outputs.

If someone took all the memories I am holding in my head and implanted it in a thousand bodies, which one is Me? Since the memories are identical, each one of those thousand Me's would unequivocally state that it was Me. And they would be equally correct. Or incorrect.

Therefore the paradox. 

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

 ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I don't need to be the king of the world
As long as I'm the hero of this little girl.

I don't need to be a superman
As long as you will always be my biggest fan.

-- Warrant, Heaven

We don't have homosexuals in Iran, like in your country. I don't know who told you we had it. 

-- President Maumoud Ahmadinejad, responding to a question about execution of homosexuals in Iran.

I am of the opinion that as a rule, every homophobe should--once in his life and purely as a perspective exercise--be held down and buggered by Andre the Giant.

Why the hell someone would meddle in a relationship between two consenting adults, I don't know.

This world has two types of distasteful people. Type I tells the rest of us what is OK for us to wear, read, smoke, drink, fuck, worship, and eat. Example: the Pope, your Parents, Politicians. And Type II slavishly obeys Type I.

Type II cannot think for itself and Type I is only too happy to take over that function.

Type I is distasteful and frightening; Type II is beneath contempt.

And wankers, both.

Every culture has its share and no place is free of these wankers. Whenever you see freedoms being legislated, there is one of these wankers at work. Whenever you see the boundaries of education, conversation or art being defined in great big halls, there is one of these wankers at work. Whenever you see someone telling someone else whom they should marry, there is one of these wankers at work. Homophobic Muslims and Christians, caste-ridden and inbred Hindus--all variations on the same stinking theme.

Fuck them all.

Up the ass.

Kishore Kumar was magic. No one has even come close to touching his robe. But this is cute.

 

Incomparable words.

Now this is the way to say goodbye.

Like they say, you had to be there. This is from the last season of The Office. You plod through all that buffoonery and then there is this. Sitting through all that bullshit makes this song ever so much sweeter. It's kind of like life; suffering through the crap that makes up most of your life (yes, I do mean you) makes the rare few special moments just that much better.

Before I die, I shall fly.

Mountain passes in the Himalayas are often named such: Zoji La, Nathu La, Khardung La, Rezang La, Gyong La, Marisimik La.

You'll notice the commonality. "La" in Tibetan means, literally, "higher" or "above". And high they are. Passes in the Himalayas are higher than actual mountain peaks elsewhere.

Khardung La is the highest motorable (motorable: in a manner of speaking) road in the world. It is at a height of nearly 18,000 ft. That is three and a half miles above sea level. That is insane.

I've driven a motorcycle in the mountains at half that height. You don't know what it means to be frozen until you do something that stupid. Trust me on this. We stopped at a ramshackle hut in the mountains that served tea (and hope). I've held a piping hot glass of tea, fresh from the stove, in my hand, without feeling a damn tendril of heat.

You had to be there.

Trust me, what you see in the video takes some doing.

And I will do it. If you can't do something noble, at least do something unusual, I always say. Before I die, I shall fly.

Perfectly Unhappy

How to be perfectly unhappy: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy

Anybody with stereotypical ideas of what it means to be an atheist should watch this video.

How do we see things?

"Come on, Sougata," you say. "Gimme a break."

Let's do a little experiment. Humor me.

Say you are blindfolded and stood in front of a large structure of some kind. Let's say the Washington monument, 'cause why not? Also, there is a barricade a few meters around, so you cannot touch the surface of the structure. I now ask you to judge where the edges of the monument are and therefore form a rough idea of the size of it. Sounds impossible, since I have deprived you of two of the senses you might ordinarily use to judge the shape and size of something: vision and touch.

No fair, you say.

Fine, here's some help. Ever so generous, I have decided to throw in an assistant who is carrying a bucket of tennis balls with him.

Stay with me.

The assistant cannot talk to you, but you can instruct him to throw the tennis balls one at a time at the structure at various orientations. So for example, you can say, "Minion, stand right in front of me and throw that sumbitch at the monument. And do it quick before the cops show up." Then you listen for the thud of the tennis ball as it bounces off the structure. Then you say, "Servant, step a foot to the right and throw another ball. Now a foot to the left." And each time you listen for the sound of the reflected ball. When the assistant goes far enough to the right and left so that the ball misses the structure and you don't hear the reflection, you've found the edges.

If you are with me so far, congratulations, because you have just understood how bats are able to see things in darkness. Bats aren't blind; they just have shitty real estate agents. "Here's a really dark cave. As you can see *snicker*, the previous owner took really good care of it."...is a line typically used by bat real-estate agents. Bats live and hunt in the dark, and instead of tennis balls, they use sound. They catch the reflection of that sound off cave walls and such. It is called echolocation, if you want to get all fancy about it, and it 'shore impresses the hell out of the lady bats, I can tell you that.

There are many ways to see.

We see the surface of the ocean floor--indeed, create detailed maps of it--by hitting it with sonar, i.e. sound waves. We measure distance to the moon by hitting it with radar and measuring the time it takes to bounce back. A large part of life is basically about hitting something with something else and seeing what happens. Just ask Mike Tyson.

Back to you. You take off your blindfold and look at the monument. Thank goodness I can now use my eyes, you say. No more tennis balls and no more assistants.

But hang on. Nothing has changed, really.

You are still using an assistant and you are still using tennis balls. Your new assistant is the sun and it is chucking little tennis balls called photons--particles of light--at the monument. Some of those little tennis balls are reflected back at you and you are catching them with your eyes instead of your ears. And some of those photons are missing the structure entirely and not being reflected back at you. And that is how you see things. A bunch of photons bouncing around and you catching those little buggers with your big dewy eyes.

Let's make this a little more complicated. Put those blindfolds back on. Now instead of the Washington monument, you have on the ground in front of you a tennis ball that you have to judge the dimensions of. Same rules. Same assistant. Same bucket of tennis balls. Easy, you say. I'll have the hired help throw the tennis balls in the bucket at the tennis ball on the ground and I'll have your answer in two seconds flat.

Not quite.

I know I sound dumb saying something so obvious, but when you throw a tennis ball at a tennis ball, you move the target tennis ball. Momentum, darling.

So how can you, blindfolded and such, be ever be able to tell where the edge of the target tennis ball is? How can you even know where exactly the target tennis ball has rolled to after being hit by...well...a tennis ball? You have to know where something actually is in the first place before you can even begin guessing at its edges and dimensions and such. You could wait for the thud of a hit and then the silence of a miss and then...er...blindly point at a random direction and go, "There, that's where the edge is." But you would only probably be right. Unlike the monument which doesn't move on being hit, the tennis ball does, and you have no way of knowing with certainty what the shape or size or location of the target tennis ball is.

Certainty. Focus on that word. We all like it. And as we shall see, none of us have it because there is no such thing.

Enter a dude named Heisenberg. And electrons.

See how I went smoothly from tennis balls to pop philosophy to physics. That's just how I roll, bitches.

Before I move on to the heavy stuff, there is an easy way to locate the tennis ball of course. Throw out the bucket of tennis balls and take off the blindfold and start using the sun and photons again. And hey presto, there it is. This works because photons are much much smaller than the tennis ball. When a photon collides with a tennis ball, the effect is pretty much the same to you as a tennis ball hitting the Washington monument.

Remember this: As a general rule, you can only "see" something by hitting it with something much smaller than the thing you are trying to see. With me? Good.

Let's dial this way down. Let's examine the matter of determining the size and shape of an electron. Electrons, as we know, are a fundamental particle. We are composed of, scientifically speaking, a bunch of electrons.

Same rules. Except let's ditch the blindfold this time, because you cannot see that electron with your naked eyes anyway. You decide to, wisely, skip the tennis balls and go directly to photons. The problem, as you are no doubt beginning to see (har!), is that you really cannot find anything smaller than an electron to hit the electron with. When you hit electrons with photons or other electrons, you change its position and you are back to having a hazy idea of where it is.

Remember that an electron is a fundamental particle that makes up you and everything around you. So can we tell at all where an electron is with certainty? Turns out the answer is "No."

This is the basis of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which is a basic law of quantum mechanics/physics. The principle says that there is a limit to how accurately we can simultaneously determine the position and momentum of an electron.

What this means, in general terms is that the location of an electron is not a specific coordinate in space; it is a probability function. You can think of an electron being located in a fuzzy area--a probability cloud, if you will. An electron isn't a point in space, it is a smear.

Here is the idea in pictures.

This is what we thought matter looked like. This is the Rutherford model: All nice and orderly with electrons orbiting the nucleus like little planets.

Not quite. This picture, below, is closer to reality.

That smear around the nucleus isn't a bunch of electrons; it is a *single* electron. Or rather, all the possibilities of where it might be. Are you getting the picture? In short, at the most fundamental level, we really don't know where the heck anything is at any given point in time. We can guess. 

Werner Heisenbereg, who was an extremely smart man, put forward this idea. It created a great deal of consternation among other very smart men. Albert Einstein, for example, found it very difficult to accept the idea that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic. "God does not play dice with the universe." he famously said.

Einstein worked with large things at stellar scales. He theorized about intense gravitational fields and he predicted the existence of black holes. He redefined our view of space-time and he found structure at the grandest scales of the universe. But he found that his laws did not apply at the most basic level of matter and energy. His work dealing with the very large was contradicted by the laws of the very small.

But wait, quantum mechanics actually gets weirder. You see, this sort of quantum uncertainty as put forward by Heisenberg is just the beginning of a whole bunch of quantum weirdness.

For example, what if you punched a thick steel wall and your fist went right through the wall like butter? Quantum mechanics doesn't rule out the probability. Once you accept that the universe is ruled by probability, nothing is impossible really. Just improbable.

What if you kicked a soccer ball into the net and it split into two and took different paths to the goal. Scoring two goals with one kick. Gotta love that shit. Once again, this is possible. Just not very probable.

What if there was an exact duplicate of you sitting somewhere in the universe? Yup, that is not against the laws of physics. If the universe was larger, then the probability of two copies of you wouldn't be so much of a stretch, in fact.

Yes, you heard that right. The universe, which is goddamn HUGE, is too small for quantum effects to manifest themselves on a macro scale. The only reason you are yourself not a probability cloud, just like that electron, is because the universe is too small. If the universe was large enough, there would almost certainly be an exact duplicate of you somewhere. The probability of the exact configuration of particles that make up "you" occupying another spot in the universe would approach a value of one.

Make the universe even larger and there would certainly be multiple copies of you and I (and unfortunately, Kanye West).

Think about this a little bit. In the current universe, the answer to the question, "Where is Jimmy the Electron?" is a hesitant, "In many places at once." Or the more scientifically correct, "Fuck if we know."

In a large enough universe where you are to that universe, size-wise, as the electron is to you in the current universe, you would see quantum effects at a macro scale all the time. Just as the electron is smeared in a probability cloud around the nucleus in the picture above, you would be smeared all over that mega-universe and in many places at once. You would be Agent Smith.

Mind blown.

Like I said, quantum physics is weird. More on this next time.

Laters.