Best things I’ve heard this week

1. “My life’s mission is to, as an adult, realize all the promises that I made to myself when I was a little kid.”- Casey Neistat
2. “I don’t want my poems to be taught to students in a system dominated by pitiable teaching standards and liberal valuations whose only aim is to ensure everyone gets good marks.”- Balachandran Chullikkad
3. “To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in this darkness and grope towards an answer, to put up with anxiety about whether there is an answer.”- Ray Dolby 

 

Museum of metal wonders

I went to an Archiological Museum. Did I spell that right? Archeology-cal? Archaeoloji. Ar…Ar… Anglican. Anyway… this museum had some unusual stuff in it. I reached the museum quite late. It was about to close. So, a security guard was assigned to guide/nag me through the entire museum. As you all know, I take my museum visits very seriously. So I explicitly stated that the guard maintain a distance of exactly three metres away from me at all times. Why ‘three’ you ask? Well, that’s none of your business. As soon as the receptionist understood that I had difficulty speaking Bengali, she began to shoot questions in English. “Are you South Indian? Where do you stay here? What did you have for dinner yesterday? What’s your blood type?”. You know…the usual stuff. I mean, she was very attractive. That’s probably why I panicked. After a short, uncomfortable conversation, I began the tour with my personal bodyguard.

There were extremely old paintings and pottery(7-14 century). Just as I was about to finish viewing the ground floor, motherfucker(guard) started to blow a damn whistle(probably to ask me to leave). Another guard heard this whistle and started to blow his own whistle. Within a few seconds, the whole fucking museum was whistling. I could see birds fly away from the roof. Motherfuckers were disturbing the wildlife.

As soon I got to the first floor, I knew it was a different scene. You see, there were these sculptures made of metal, kept in glass housings. They were sculpted in the 9th century. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. Figures sculpted with unimaginable level of detail and yet so tiny and realistic. That was not the impressive part. The figures were not of people or animals, rather it looked like something that was taken straight out of a Stephen King movie. There was a figure with an elephant’s head and a slim guy’s body(It had nothing to do with religion). It was holding a walking stick. It had a hunchback. It looked like it was dying. Then there were snakes, dragons and warriors that looked like trees, stuff that I have never seen or could have imagined. I was awestruck.

How could somebody think of that? How wild does ones imagination have to be to make something like that? Where did he get the idea from? Did an alien put it in his mind? Did he dream of it in his sleep? Did his day-to-day life affect the design of the sculpture in any way? Did his family approve of him spending so much time making figures that made no sense to common people? What was going on in his mind when he made it? How was he able to put an ‘idea’ into a sculpture? Does the sculpture mean something? So many questions.

I don’t have any pictures of the metal wonders because pictures were prohibited inside the museum. And I can respect that. All I have is a picture of a tree, from the museum’s garden.

The metal wonders will always live inside my head. I do not need pictures of them.

On an unrelated note, I got a keyboard. Today is Day 4 with new keyboard.

Side note: I do not know how to play the keyboard.

Contrast

I learned today that there’s a computer out there called Watson who is actively reading through millions of medical research papers/articles/doctor’s-notes to find out solutions to problems that even human researchers would find difficult to tackle.

And I’m sitting here, in my bachelor pad thinking, “what the fuck am I going to do for dinner today?”

How real is real?

I was talking to my grandma the other day when I got an email saying my booking for a one-on-one ‘intimate’ experience has been confirmed. So I took a moment and thought to myself, “it doesn’t get much worse than this. On second thought, at least its not a mail from work”. So my natural reaction was to hit the spam button before reading it just like how I deal with all the other problems in my life. But it also had an attachment with a name that I usually use as my username. This creeped me out a little. So I opened the mail. It said, with my ticket, I would be able to watch a concert on my phone, live, in VR. I confirmed it was spam but it got me thinking. How real is real? How much ‘immersiveness’ do we really need to be able to say, “wow! that really felt like real life”? I mean, TV is getting real, movies are getting real, reality TV is…wait that piece of shit is still garbage. People like it when actors show a little humour even during the sad scenes. This, I think is a step closer to reality. Same goes with virtual reality. A ‘true’ virtual reality experience however, would take a few more years of development. There is however, a problem with this whole thing. This tech is tailored to satisfy the average customer and will keep on adapting with that motive. I am not saying that all immersive tech is evolving this way. I am only talking about those used in the entertainment industry. Let me explain.

There was a study done in the field of psycho-acoustics where people were made to listen to recorded sounds of a forest they hadn’t been to. The test was conducted in a controlled environment using high quality speakers. The aim of the experiment was to identify the type of surround-sound tech that people liked the most. So the sounds were played back a number of times, each time using different surround sound technologies. They were also made to listen to a version where the played back audio was perceived to be closest to the actual environment (with minimum special effects). It was found that people preferred the slightly exaggerated version over the close-to-original version. This is what I am slightly concerned about. Despite having the tech capable of replicating the actual experience, we still prefer to go for the artificially modified versions of it. Does this imply that you need to make the reality ‘realer’ to make it feel real? Or do people prefer distorted realities over actual ones? I can imagine a future(not that far from now) where people would be exposed to these ‘fake’ realities even before experiencing the real thing. For example, an AR experience of a jungle where you can go on a trek, run around, scare birds, eat a snake, you know, all that good stuff.  I am interested to know how the future generation would react when they experience the real thing for the first time in real life. Pretty sure there will be quite a lot of disappointment because they couldn’t do it while sitting on their couch, eating leftover pizza(like me).

 

Not quite, but almost there

 

The meaning of life

My aunt is the youngest of five children. I’ve heard my mom say that she was a little ‘different’ right from the beginning. She was a curious, open minded, no-bull-shit, type of person. She had a progressive outlook towards everything. Most importantly, she always got me the coolest presents for Christmas. She worked hard and settled down in the United States of America. She would come visit us every now and then. I used to enjoy talking to her about the cultural differences, education system, religion and society in general. The last time she came to visit, she brought up the topic of race. It appeared as though she was having trouble with a certain ‘race’ of people. She said,” I am a firm believer in equality but something definitely needs to be done about ‘these’ people”. It was at this moment that the voice in my head went, “Uh-oh, this bitch racist”. But with love. I gave it a lot of thought. How could someone like my aunt be racist? How can such a caring, open-minded and forward-thinking person be so fucked up? Most importantly, how do I make her realize her mistake while still maintaining the influx of Christmas presents?

Imagine you have the ability to fly. You decide to go for a ride. You go straight up through the roof of your house. When you look down, at first, you will see your house, maybe some familiar faces, trees, mountains, etc. As you go higher, you will start to see not-so-familiar places, familiar shapes of countries, continents until suddenly, poof! After a few layers of clouds, everything you have ever seen will fit into a tiny blue ball called Earth. Make sure you don’t fly away like Sandra Bullock in Gravity. Speaking of Sandra Bullock, damn! she’s attractive. According to the great Carl Sagan, the Earth, when viewed from so far away, makes one think about how insignificant we are in the awesomeness that is the universe. The time frame of our very existence on the planet shows us how irrelevant we are in the history of Earth itself. It makes you wonder. What’s the point of all this anger, envy and hate? When the camera zooms out and shows the Earth shrink into nothing but a pale blue dot, you suddenly realize that we are one big family.

Now, the problem with viewing everything from outer space is that everything you’ve ever known starts to drop in value! One would wonder what’s the point of anything. Who knows? Maybe in a billion years our whole galaxy will cease to exist. Then what’s the point? Even if that were the case, I wouldn’t want to die a bad person. I want to be good to everyone. People often say “don’t you want to be remembered for doing something great?” Honestly I don’t give a fuck if people don’t remember me. What really matters is that I want to die with a feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of happiness. And being nice to people is the way to do it. Let me explain by taking it a step further.

Lets imagine you make an effort to help better someone’s life. It could be a friend, a neighbour or even a total stranger. By helping them out you might actually end up changing their life. Who knows? They might do the same thing for someone else. This cycle might continue even after your death. In short, your good gesture might transcend the boundaries of space and time. Isn’t that mind-blowing? I’ve heard scientists say that gravity can ‘travel’ through space and time(this is the cue for all the interstellar nerds to start jizzing their pants). So, is an act of kindness as powerful as an elemental force of nature, like gravity? If each one of us wields such awesome power, then why don’t we just create meaning for our lives instead of so desperately trying to find it?

 

The Power of Thoughts

 

 

Adaptive biological reprogramming, a.k.a. “evolution”(I made that up) gave us the power to think. No one asked for it. It was gifted to us by ourselves. Despite wielding the awesome power of thought, we still do not know where we come from. It shows how complex nature really is. Pictures of Earth taken from outer space have shown us how insignificant we are in the awesomeness that is the universe. The time frame of our very existence shows us how irrelevant we are in the history of Earth itself. It makes you wonder. What’s the point of all this anger, envy and hate? When the camera zooms out and shows the Earth shrink into nothing but a pale blue dot, you suddenly realize that we are but one big family. In the process, we also learn another surprising truth: WE ARE NOT THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. Literally!

The fact that we have begun to understand our place in the universe leads me to believe that we might not be that dumb after all! We may not be “special” but we are participants of a great cosmic journey. In the words of Carl Sagan, “We are all made of ‘star stuff’ “. The ingredients that make up the stars are the very same ones found in our body. We are part of the universe. I think that is super cool. We are not perfect. We find cures for disease yet fail to realize that we are the cause of many of them. But we are curious wanderers. We sent our kind into space. We reverse engineered from the present and found clues that lead back to the beginning of the unverse a.k.a wait for it… The Big Bang! We study our own behaviour! We help each other. We do not need a “meaning” for life, we create it for ourselves. Through the universe, we realize that it is not always about “me” but it is about “us”. I think we are awesome. Hi five yourself.