Evolution...

Evolution has played a major role in the dominance of the human species. We have evolved into this dominant species because of our developed brain, opposable thumb and lot of other features most of us are aware of. But whats next? Does evolution end here? Are we the most highly evolved beings? Maybe, Maybe not, only time can tell. Time of billions and billions of years, but how are we as a species evolving on a time scale of hundreds or thousands of years?

If we look in the animal kingdom some of the most dominant species are social animals that form a close knit group. Although the clashes amongst groups are inevitable and most of the times fierce and life threatening for the group members they still survive only because of their sole evolutionary tendency to fight for their group members. Humans as a species gained a upper hand from some of its more powerful counterparts in the early evolutionary phase (I like to call it the survival of the fittest phase) just because of this very trait and till date its seen in our highly civilized global society that only the groups, that we call families (could be even a business family), that are close knit survive the test of time.

But then why does one sometime get the sense of insecurity in this closed packed herd? Why does one feel himself to be more important than the group? Why does one tend to do more for himself at the expense of the other members of the group? These traits lead to cheating and theft, but are these traits wrong? Generally as preached by our education system these traits are considered a taboo of the society, but they are evolutionary defects caused by our own interests. Evolution has taught us to live in numbers, but as we progress in our greed we feel safe in larger and larger number and hence we become part of multiple groups in order to survive. Being part of multiple groups its impossible for person to look into the interest of all his various family members at the same time. Many a times with a very high probability these interests clash and then comes the crucial moment where one needs to decide his loyalty towards a family. Billions of years of evolution has embedded into us the fact that only the closed knit groups survive and thus one generally decides to stick with the group which is the most tightly bound. So if this decision of his goes against the norms of the larger group called society he is banned from the larger group and sometimes even punished severely.

So are we any different from the animals? How are the humans a more gentle and evolved species? All I feel is that billions of yrs of evolution can not be wiped out from our brains in a matter of thousands of years and it will take another few billion years of evolution for one species to be the most dominant and still be humble in the true sense.

Clash of the Operating systems...

This weekend I was testing some of the new operating systems in the market and some virtual machines on my Macbook OS X 10.5.8. I was really eager to try the new google OS "Chromium" and my beloved Ubuntu's newest version "Karmic Koala". Although I had some reluctance in testing the new "Windows 7" after the memory hungry Vista but I still gave it a shot from some of the better reviews I have heard of the system. VMware fusion was my trusted virtual machine for all these systems and I think in comparison to its competitors Parallels and Sun microsystem's VirtualBox this piece of software is somewhat more stable and reliable.

 My first test subject was Chromium and although its not much of an OS but just a modified web browser I had a lot of expectations from google after seeing some of their other products. But unfortunately this OS is a big disappointment. Although it boots up quite fast, approx 10 secs which is much faster than any other OS, its quite sluggish and looks quite an infant as compared to Microsoft and Macintosh. Even though its just a browser it takes up quite a bit of RAM, which is not very good if you run this as a virtual machine. The typing speed is not coordinated well with the keyboard speed and the mouse keeps bouncing off the corners. Plus installing customized software is not much of an option on a web browser. It has all the google features such as documents, calender, gmail etc. but for someone like me whose bread and butter depends on computers I don't think it is much of an option.So overall I feel that this is not for people who use the computer but for the ones who simply use the internet. 

The next guinea pig was my favorite linux distros Karmic Koala. All my linux training has been done on Ubuntu "Hardy Heron" which is one of the most user friendly and stable linux distributions. Hence I had a lot of expectations from Karmic Koala especially because it was said to have graphics to match a Mac. But this time Ubuntu has failed me miserably. This system has more problems than solutions and I think should still be in the Beta stage. Although it has amazing graphics and the entire system is made more user friendly by adding software like Add and Remove programs and System manager(Quite similar to Task manager) overall its a formidable task to get this system up and running. It took me nearly 4 hrs to install this system and to solve its sound and graphics problems before I could actually use it (This is compared to 10 mins of installation time for Chromium). But once this koala is up and running its quite easy and beautiful to watch. Overall I would recommend this to people who know their linux and who want the power of a linux system in the most beautifully designed GUI.

Next up was Windows 7, to be frank I had no hopes from this system after looking at Vista. After Vista I have always questioned myself, Why did people at microsoft have to compromise on the stability of Xp just for the sake of graphics and some additional security features? (which most of the windows users don't even care about.) Apparently I think that they did realize this and their answer is Windows 7 which is quite a gentle monster. This OS took less than 1 Gb of RAM with all the graphics. The task bar is quite changed with some of the Mac features creeping into the Windows 7. Also most of the bugs present of Vista have been removed and the system overall doesn't crash much but still there is much more refinement required in windows 7 to compete with its biggest competitor Mac. Overall I would rate this system much better than Vista and its predecessors but still I feel windows needs to do much better if it needs to stay in the market especially with competitors like Ubuntu and Mac.

Overall my weekend was nothing but a wast of time over these highly disappointing OSs. But I still feel that Karmic Koala can outshine the other if its bugs are taken care off and Chromium can be a great OS for the offices where the main work is on the internet. But as of now Windows 7 wins hands down although it comes at price... But after all all good things come at a price don't they?

Conscience...

How does one define a Conscience? One can define it as an ability or a faculty that distinguishes whether one's actions are right or wrong. Its the conscience I guess that gives a person a feeling of goodness or remorse, but is there some science behind this conSCIENCE. Does one develop a conscience or is he born with it? Are we humans the only entity in this universe who have a conscience (I leave aside the possibility of alien life forms)? And finally is there some bigger picture to this conscience and can one logically find an answer to its existence? Here is my feeble attempt to answer these questions...

I try and look at conscience from a completely new perspective, I believe that conscience is nothing special. It is just a collection of past experiences or basically reactions to previous actions (I guess I take my physics quite seriously). Our senses are some of the most amazing receptors ever. Every second of our life we gather in all the information around us and possibly only 1% of this information is really processed by our brain. What I mean by processed is that this 1% is what we able to analyze and rationalize. But what about the rest 99% since we have absorbed it, it is stored somewhere and mostly this is what we call the sub-conscious. So very logically speaking our sub-conscious is nothing but just a series of past experiences which are not really perceived by our brain due to its limited processing capabilities but are nonetheless present. So now what about the conscience? So if we take a sub-set of all these past experiences which have been beneficial to us, (maybe the benefits were realized not at the time of occurrence of the event, but after it...) we term this sub-set as our conscience. Let me give an example to explain... If we ask a small child who has no idea about theft or the consequences of theft to go and pick up a candy from the store and not pay for it, the kid will do it without any hesitation and will have no remorse whatsoever for what he did, but the same act for a responsible adult would be an act of shame. So basically a child who does not have any previous experience in the field of robbery has no conscience to guide him while he commits the act. So that's basically the answer to my first question.
So quite obviously we are not the only ones with a conscience, every thing which can have an experience i.e. all living entities have a conscience. Now lets go to the final and most important question... So is there a pattern at a larger scale? Now instead of taking about past experiences we just term it as history. In physics we generally learn about objects being influenced by its history so now the question is do inanimate objects have some kind of a conscience? At the level at which I plan to explain it might sound quite far fetched, but I'm not planning to lay a foundation here I'm just trying to draw a rough sketch. So all objects no matter how small or how big are influenced by the past. For example if we remove the sun at this instance the earth will feel its presence 8 minutes later so basically the Earth reacted to the action of the removal of the sun which was the past and hence its again a series of actions and reactions that the inanimate objects work on so doesn't this give them a conscience too...
So to conclude I believe that humans are nothing special and all the qualities we have learnt over the period of our evolution are nothing but manifestations of the properties of so called "Inanimate" objects around us and immaterial of how special we consider our self we are just a tiny spec in this gigantic system...

LIFE, EXISTENCE AND MORE...

13.7 Billion years old and still a little child. That's the time scale at which the grandeur of this universe is displayed. Despite this knowledge we intend to seek the answer to the ultimate question of "our existence" in a period of mere 400 yrs. Philosopher's and Scholars have spent their lives in search of this holy grail. Methodologies like religion and science have come into existence as a result of this quest, but even these detailed methods have not achieved anything substantial. But in the past few decades a whole new line of thinkers have come up. A set of unique people who can think out of the box, the one's who believe in seeking such answers by mere experience rather than divine intervention and searching within oneself rather than the cosmos. These so called "Rebels" have realized the plight of the human race and here I try to summarize some of their thoughts about our existence.

We exist in something called the Tower of Life, which is a complex network of all the things, animate or inanimate, in this universe. Each thing forms a really tiny part of this tower. In our present state we can never comprehend our position in this tower. It's because we are a part of this tower and thus can't see the structure as a whole. We can't tell how important or useless we are. We might be holding a lot of pieces together in this tower or maybe there is no piece in this entire tower dependent on us. But for sure there is no single piece on which this tower is build. Even if one of the basic pieces is removed the others hold the tower up. The Tower of Life is an elaborate masterpiece where the importance of each of its components is known only after it is removed...

My trip to Singapore

"Good Afternoon ladies and Gentlemen the Kingfisher flight IT3623 from Pune to Chennai has been delayed for 1hr 45Min's and will now depart at 19:20", the words that are still ringing in my head after the horrendous journey last night. This was my 3rd trip to Singapore and before this I had stuck with the old and faithful Air India which I generally board from Mumbai, But this time I decided to fly Kingfisher and Tiger on my way back to Singapore. According to my premonitions, this flight combination would save me a lot of money and would be really comfortable since I would not have to spend 3-4 gruelling hours in a cab from Pune to Mumbai. But sadly I was put through more torture than the 4hr cab journey. The time gap between my Kingfisher flight and Tiger airways flight to Singapore was 3hrs 30Min's. This time lag is sufficient to check out of the domestic terminal and check into the international which is a mere 200 Mt's away. But due to the mismanaged Kingfisher airlines which self proclaims itself to be India's 1st 5 star airline I manged to land on Chennai Airport by 21:15. Throughout the flight the only thought on my mind was to make a dash for the international terminal and somehow make it to the flight to Singapore. After pushing through a huge crowd of commuters I managed to reach the luggage check-out by 21:20. Since I still had not run out of my Bad Luck my baggage was the last one to be to be dispatched, even though my bag had a priority label put by the Kingfisher officials at the Pune Airport. It was nearly 22:05 that I reached the International terminal. After a few requests to the officials at the check-in counter they managed to put me up first at the immigration check, which could have easily taken me an hr and I would have surely missed my flight which was schedule at 23:00. After a quick immigration check and spending around 10 Min's at the security check I finally boarded the flight at around 22:50. In the end, all is well that ends well. Finally I'm in Singapore because of some really considerate officials at the Chennai Airport who were angels in disguise for me on the dreadful night that Kingfisher airlines decided to screw me....

Inspiring...

If it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut,
don't do it.

If you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your typewriter searching for words,
don't do it.
If you're doing it for money or fame,
don't do it.
If you're doing it because you want women in your bed,
don't do it.
If you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.

If it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
If you're trying to write like somebody else,
forget about it.

If you have to wait for it to roar out of you,
then wait patiently.
If it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

If you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

Leaving on a Jet Plane...

Being a complete music freak I enjoy every genre of music right from trance to hard metal rock, every song describes a human emotion in the most subtle and perfect way. I think that songs form a major stress buster for most people in this mad hectic world. For me music is no longer a part of life but it is a way of life... Be it in the Bus early morning or at work I need my daily dose of music.

One song in particular that I have been listening to quite often recently is "Leaving on a Jet Plane" by John Denver. Somehow this song represents my state of mind completely at this point of time and the guitar is simply brilliant. John Denver has written some beautiful songs and according to me is one of the best lyricists ever. Every song of his captures the situation perfectly. His words make you feel the situation rather than just hear it and his voice is simply intoxicating. Here are the lyrics to this beautiful composition I hope all who read this cherish this song as much as I do...

Chaos Begets Chaos

The original article has been taken from: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/chaos_begets_chaos.php

"Last month social scientists in the Netherlands empirically demonstrated a phenomenon observed by policymakers and law-enforcement officials for years. When an envelope visibly containing a five-euro note was left hanging out of a mailbox on a sidewalk, 13 percent of the passersby snatched it up. When the same mailbox was covered in graffiti, however, more than double the number of the pedestrians (about 27 percent) stole the envelope.

Graffiti was not the only misdemeanor that fostered a cavalier attitude toward theft. When the ground near the mailbox was covered in litter, 25 percent of the subjects stole the envelope. These results are significant for both social and statistical reasons. Is a disorderly environment responsible for disorderly conduct?

Broken window theory (BWT), first proposed by James Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, holds that the presence of disorder — in the form of broken windows, litter, and graffiti — can encourage delinquent behavior. BWT promotes a "nip it in the bud" stance toward crime prevention: Fix small problems (like litter) before big problems (like theft) have a chance to occur. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani was a loyal subscriber to the theory. He focused on small-scale issues like graffiti, prostitution, and squeegee men to influence, and ultimately drive down, crime in a seemingly unmanageable city.

Still, the veracity of BWT has always been in question. No rigorous study corroborated whether it was really responsible for the changes it purportedly caused. But these new findings by Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Linda Steg (University of Groningen) show that ordinary people are in fact more likely to violate rules in situations where other rules — even completely unrelated ones — have already been broken. This might form the basis of a social model for understanding how disorder spreads.

The authors conducted six controlled field studies. In each experiment, one scenario provided an order condition (adherence to a contextual norm), while a second provided a disorder condition (a violation of a contextual norm). In all cases, violation of a contextual norm caused a significantly higher number of participants to break another rule. When a gate contained signs explicitly asking participants (a) not to walk through and (b) not to chain their bikes to the fence, 27 percent of the passersby walked through anyway. Compare this to 82 percent of the participants that walked through when another contextual norm was already violated — the chaining of bikes to the fence. One norm violation led to the violation of another.

"No, the results did not surprise us," says Lindenberg. "What surprised us was the size of the effect."

It's not that good people turned bad, either. One goal simply surpassed another in importance. In the case of the mailbox, the desire for cash superceded the desire to behave appropriately, because others already hadn't. "People are not bad. People are just subject to social influence," Lindenberg says. An effective tip for crime prevention is to be aware of norm violations on all fronts. After all, says Lindenberg, "Even old grandmothers would do this.""

On my way...

Life is full about making decisions , some small some big. At this point of time I stand at a cross-road where I need to choose. Making choices is something I'm not particularly good at, I guess none of us are, there is always an anxiety to know what if we had chosen the other path... but I guess that's human nature after all. Somehow I'm really hasty in making big decisions, but I guess that's the only reason I'm able to live without regretting any moment of my life. I think the longer you spend on these cross-roads pondering about whats best for you, the more depressed you are in the end. I think depression is more of an outcome of expectations from people or life in general. But not expecting doesn't mean you are low aimed. I think the ability to aim high is mainly motivated by the determination and zeal to pursue one's goal and not simply by expecting high without any effort. Why should we always walk on rose beds expecting that the thorns won't prick us. So why do we expect so much from certain people or situations? To be frank I have no clue... but I guess life keeps constantly teaching you its mysterious ways and the only way to enjoy it completely is to live it to the fullest, make the most of it and never question your own decisions.