Probabilities

I came across one of those future telling parrots today at the place where I'd gone for dinner. For the uninitiated, the way it works is this: There's a guy who's sitting with a parrot or two. The parrot(s) are stuck in a ghastly tiny cage. This guy has a whole set of cards along with him as well. To know how the future would go, you ask the question and at that time this guy spreads out the cards and opens the cage. The parrot comes out and randomly selects the card and based on that, voila! There's your future! All nicely laid out and decided by a parrot of all things...

Coming off a series of days where I've been glued to my seat in front of an astrologer who's been charting my life by a series of mathematical calculations pertaining to the position of stars, the parrot method seems positively unscientific! I have been consoled that this method does have its philosophy behind it. The point is that since you chose to ask that particular question at that particular time, the answer given by the parrot happened to be the it turned. And hence this technique is not one to be trifled with. You should ask the parrot a question only at a time when your mind is truly troubled with the question. Else a question pertaining to whether you are likely to meet your beautiful Princess/Prince Charming asked frivolously could end up with you having a frog for company.

Quite seriously, this has a very interesting point. The assumption that when a person asks a question at a particular time then he gets an answer which is the truth can lead to an interesting extension. It does mean that timing decides the answer to a question. Lets extend this to the simple coin tossing probability problem. Theoretically, if you toss a perfect coin infinite times then there should be exactly 50% heads and 50% tails. But with this time based parrot theory, the answer would depend on when you toss the coin. Therefore, if one tosses the coins at all heads destined times then we would get a clear bias in favour of heads...

Phew. I think the true conclusion is that too much chicken biriyani can lead to a heady cocktail of maths and parrot talk...

A State of Unhappiness

I've been reading Michael Crichton's latest work titled State of Fear. It has made the headlines over controversial claims that the whole global warming theory is all just bunkum. He's made the claim quite well, I must say. It's very convincing. I've been checked up some of the references that he's put down and they hold good. The net also has quite a few sites saying that it is all just an unjustified claim. Makes you believe that maybe the US of A wasn't being all that irrational by not signing the Kyoto Protocol.

However, its not this theme or the plot which really caught my attention. It was a speech given by an eccentric scientist about the State of Fear which has been cultivated. He spoke about a PLM (Politico-Legal-Media) axis which had created an environment where inspite of life expectancy increasing and murder rates falling, people live with a perpetual sense of worry for their safety.

I largely agree with what he's said there. Open the newspaper and almost all pages have some factor of death or danger to mankind printed on it. The sports pages are largely spared of it but even a death caused in a boxing ring in the most remote part of the Ivory Coast would be publicized. In addition, the media would also make as much hype as possible about research such as chocolate being linked to cancer. The next day, there would be a second research stating that chocolate reduces cholestrol. The third day would have a research claiming that chocolate has been linked to an increased risk of impotency. Finally, there'll be some lawyer in US who would win a case based on these arbit research to prove that chocolate has caused the world to have a greater amount of sin. Politicians then move to ban advertising on chocolate and so on.

But if you look a bit deeper, media feeds only what we want to hear. The market forces would show that news articles related to death, danger and sex sell the most. If its the majority of us who want this type of news, then hey, why grumble! Maybe we all need a dash of worry in our lives. Maybe human beings just state they want happiness but happiness can't give them, well, happiness. But then, if you think about it, you wouldn't know happiness without knowing what sadness is...

A Reason for Existence

There are times when ideas come crashing through your head and beg to be written down/typed out (with due apologies to Richard Bach). Unfortunately for me, these ideas tend to come to me at the most unfortunate of times. These so called inspirational moments come to me at times such as when I'm driving, when i'm being driven around, when i'm in class (or rather when I WAS in class) or when i'm sitting in the loo. As you can imagine, such are hardly the times when a person would fling out a paper and pencil and start furiously scribbling with the hope that one day these ideas will revolutionize our very existence.

Enter: Weblog; simplified for dummies as Blog.

A fabulous place for you to scribble those astounding/pathbreaking/simply dumb ideas. And that is the Reason D'Etre for this blog.

PS: Sadly it just doesn't solve that locational problem of those inspirations for me... Sigh.