Happy Thoughts

Okay, listen. The average life expectancy is of 83 years, more or less. There are 365 days each year. The average life expectancy is, then, of 30 295 days. Neat, huh?

What does that mean?

It means that you only have 30 295 days to do whatever you want. It means that, after 30 295 days, nothing will matter. If you failed, there will be nobody to blame you. If you succeed, you’ll get no prize.

It means that, it doesn’t matter how hard is your life, it will pass. Do not worry.

Take life as a game. You’re in a sandbox with 30 295 days to do whatever you want. You can cure cancer, you can write a wonderful novel, you can become a fantastic journalist or a brilliant teacher. But then again, if you don’t, nobody will blame you.

I find that thought quite relaxing. Life isn’t a goal, life isn’t a mission. You just happen to be in a sandbox game. You stay here for a while, and if you have fun, it’s great! But, if you don’t, no problem. You’ll get out someday.

What do you think?

 

Your Brain on a Washing Machine

And even more stupid thoughts.

Suppose you could get into a gigantic washing machine. It spins fast. Very fast. Almost to the speed of light. Can you picture it?

Come on, I trust you.

Okay. As I said, you are inside it, so you are spinning at the speed of light. But the whole “you” is not going at the same speed. The further you are from the center, the faster you go. So, one half of your brain is going at a greater speed than the other.

But there’s more. According to Relativity, the faster you move, the slower time passes for the object in movement.

Therefore, if you got inside a gigantic, hyper-fast washing machine, one part of your brain would go way faster than the other.

If it hadn’t been liquified before.

That’s one of the dumb thoughts I’ve been having lately.

But I am quite proud of my ability for making up these dumb thoughts. They make life more entertaining, both for myself and for others. They create powerful psychological weapons (aka terrible puns). And they provide new insight on almost any subject.

It is always nice to get something new, isn’t it?

 

If a Body Catch a Body through the Rye…

I’ve recently (two months ago, maybe?) read The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger. Yeah, that book that’s mandatory in many schools. It wasn’t in mine, not to brag or anything.

I liked it. I really did. I won’t tell anything about the plot to support that opinion. However, I do have reasons. They are:

• Holden’s language: Holden’s the main character, by the way. He writes in a very particular way. He really does. He uses the same constructions again and again, the same structures, the same catchphrases and the same swearing words. He goddamn does. Why? Because TCitR is not an epic story. It’s a journal written by a teen who flunks his classes. He can’t write perfectly. But he can write. More on that later
• Holden’s hatred: As his sister Phoebe tells him, there’s nothing in the world he likes, except for kids and his siblings, but nobody is aware of that. He lives hating everything and everybody, calling people “phonies” and hypocrites. Which brings us to
• Holden’s Logic: He makes fairly good points explaining his hatred. It leads the reader (or me, at least) to hate the people he describes as much as he does, noticing those disgusting behaviors in people in his life (or maybe in himself). Because Holden’s Logic is correct. There are disgusting things in the world. But…
• Holden’s Solipsism: Yes, he is right. So? You cannot just live hating everybody. There are always exceptions. The lesson he learns is to stop directing his energy against the world, and use it in favor of it, instead. He learns. He makes mistakes, and recognizes them. Which leads to
• Holden’s Evolution: At first he is an angsty teen against the world. But, somewhere in the story, he learns. He decides to become a “Catcher in the Rye”, stopping the kids that play in the Rye to fall into the void. He wants to stop kids from growing into terrible people as the ones he hates. Then,
• Holden’s Coherence: That’s why he writes the book. He wants to teach kinds growing. Because, as teens, most of us have felt as he did. Disgusted by seeing how the world is not as we imagined it to be. And that leads to hatred, just like it led him to hate phonies. But he realizes it’s not right to fall into that trap. Being a cynic is easy. Being hopeful is not. He writes the book to prevent us from growing into suspicious people.

Those are the wonders of the book. It’s one of the best books I have ever read, and I do recommend it, for this brief post is not half as good as the novel is. It really isn’t.

 

Hallo

I’m back. Sort of.

I may or may not have forgotten that this blog existed. To compensate, I have many, many new ideas for posts. Just wait!

Here’s a preview:

The Catcher in the Rye

To Kill a Mockingbird

Goldbach’s Conjecture

Education

The Martian (Did I write about the Martian before? I think not)

Neanderthals

 

Anyway, I’ll be right  back.

 

How do I end this post? I can’t think of a conclusion.

Mendeleyev

So, yesterday was Mendeleyev’s birthday, and how can we honor him better than by making a post about him? (Answer: making a post about him on his birthday)

Who is Mendeleyev? As you may know because of the Doodle Google made yesterday, he was the inventor of the Periodic Table, but his story is deeper than that.

His mother died after riding a horse for days to take him to the University of Moscow, which rejected him because of his Siberian origin, and to St. Petersburg’s, where he was accepted.

He became obsessed, almost religiously, with finding some order in the elements. Day and night, he looked at the properties the elements had, and thought of ways to order them.

It wasn’t until 1868 when, during a cold Russian night, the Periodic table appeared on his dreams. As he woke up, he took note of it, and realized how much sense it made.

By ordering them according to their atomic weight on rows made of eight elements, and leaving some gaps here and there for elements yet to discover, he found that each column had certain common characteristics.

Then, a French scientist comes in, claiming having discovered a new element that fits on one of the gaps of the table, but that doesn’t follow the behavior predicted by Mendeleyev. And what does our Russian friend do? Publish a paper explaining why the French guy is wrong and he isn’t. And he was right.

But his only discover was not the Periodic Table, oh, no. He promoted fertilizers, improved many scientific tools, made Russia a Metric country, and invented pyrocollodion.

And he’s dead.

 

How to -Anything

I really hate self-help books, how-to guides, tips to do stuff, video tutorials, and all that jazz.

Why? Because we’re capable of more than we think. Seriously, next time you want to do something, just start doing it. Then, check what you have done wrong, and think about what you can do to improve it.

Are you totally lost? Do you desperately need some help? Ask a friend. Don’t you have friends? Okay, then do the following:

Get into the internet.

Google whatever you want to do

And open the first result.

Now, that’s important. Open one, and only one tab. Don’t spend countless hours looking on the different ways of shooting a ball, or whether it’s best to juggle clock-wise or counter clock-wise.

Open one tab, and only one tab, and read it throughly once, without stopping to check facebook.

Once you’ve read it, do it!

Yes and No

Remember when I promised to give some stupid thoughts?

Well, I gave you the thoughts on dolphins, but that’s not stupid enough, so here I come with stupider thoughts.

Toddlers know very specific words, like “car”, “house”, “mom” and “dad”. They can talk about trees, balls, beds and shoes.

And they know “Yes” and “No”.

This might be one of the things only I find interesting and everybody else thinks “they’re obvious, duh!”. However, since it’s not them who are writing, it’s me, I can say whatever I want.

The thing is, “yes” and “no” are nothing! There is not such a thing as a yes, and I can’t have two nos on my left hand and three on my right.

“No” means “that does not correspond with reality”. And toddlers can say it! And understand the concept!

‘Hey, Timmy, do you want some ice cream?’
‘That sentence does correspond with reality. Gimme ice cream’

Cool.

But that’s not all. “No” can also mean “That does not correspond with my reality”, that is, “I don’t want that”.

 

3n+1

Take a number. Any number. Done?

Okay, now, we’re gonna do the following thing: if it’s even, we divide it by two. If it’s not, we multiply it by three and add one. Then, we repeat the process again and again.

10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1…

11, 34, 17, 52, 26, 13, 40, 20, 10, 5, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1…

Notice something? They all end in 4, 2, 1! In a loop!

Cool, huh?

Maybe not “real world” cool, but it’s certainly math cool.

The thing is, we don’t know whether it happens for every number or only with the ones we’ve tried so far.

Here is a calculator for this conjecture (which, by the way, is called Collatz Conjecture, guess why)

We think it always finishes in the same loop of three numbers: 1, 2, 4, 1, 2, 4… One way to prove it, then, would be finding a new loop.

But, if there is another loop, it would have to be at least one million steps long. So good luck trying to find it.

 

Experiments with Dolphins

Dolphins are clever. Like, really damn clever. Sure, they don’t have hands as we do, because hands are not useful underwater, and they didn’t discover fire, because, guess what? There is no fire under the sea.

But they have language. They can coordinate, and work in team developing strategies, and understand what tamers tell them and the syntax they use, and even recognize themselves in a mirror and measure the degree of certainty they have, according to this lovely video and this lovely explanation.

Naturally, this has made me wonder many things. Obviously, they have no science (no hands, remember?), but, do dolphins have a philosophy?

We’ll need to understand their language to know it. And I don’t think they have written a Rosetta stone for us (Because no hands), so we’ll have to figure it out. And to do so, we’ll have to see whether they have many languages or it’s just a code of clics that comes with their genes, like our facial expressions.

Jesus, maybe some scientists have been studying French dolphins and others, Chinese! There’s no way we get to speak Dolphin if each one studies a different language!

Imagine discussing about life and epistemology with a dolphin.

Can we play chess with an octopus? How can we teach them to play?

Hm…

I googled it, and there are no chess-playing octopuses. However, Kasparov had something called “The Octopus Knight”. I’ll check it later.

Dolphins, right.

I want to debate with a dolphin. Please, marine biologists, make that possible. It’s your job, after all.

Annoying Stuff

We’re all gonna die.

Okay, that’s not a good way to start a cheerful blog like mine. So here’s a funny thing I found to cheer you up.

I think it’s a children’s book, but I’m not sure.

Where was I?

Oh, right.

Death.

We’re gonna die, and there’s so much we’re gonna miss, and so much stuff we won’t live to see. Like whether the prime numbers follow a pattern. Or why the weird 3n+1 problem happens. Or how future historians will call our time (obviously we won’t be the “Contemporary” when we’re in the past, and we won’t be “The Space Era” either, because future people will be even better at that).

We won’t know what happens to our children, or grandchildren, or grand grand children, or even our loved ones.

We won’t know whether the Humankind goes out in space and makes colonies or dies with the sun.

But it’s not only knowledge here. Imagine dying because of cancer the day before a cure is found. My ghost would be pissed if that happened, and I can’t even imagine how pissed my people would be.

The only way out of this is, of course, living enough to see it happen, or make it happen ourselves.

That’s all. There’s no conclusion. It’s just a thought.