My take on life - 16

When I had gone back to my village, I had an argument with my family over existence of god. A line of reasoning that they (more precisely, my mother) took was

1. there are gazillions of people who have faith in god,
2. Faith is equal to science
3. there is a scientific reason for believing in god

Though I seldom tried to breach their faith, this time I took a hard stance and tried to show them the error in their logic.

A central concept in the philosophy of science is empiricism, or dependence on evidence. Any scientific experiment can be replicated by anyone who cares to undertake it, and any theory is based upon sound experimentation and/or observation. The same cannot be said about religion and god. Are their experiments to prove the existence of god ? I agree that there are no experiments to disprove his existence too, but that does not automatically proves god's existence. Another line of argument they take is "Appeal to Authority" i.e. how Newton, C.V.Raman and some other scientists believed in god. With all due respect to these great names, I do not think they have been able give experiments to prove the existence of god, and hence taking their words at the face value is not a scientific process. At this point they stopped arguing with me any further

I was reading an article, Do It Now, which talks about time management. One of the first points the article says about time management is - Clarity is key. The first step is to know exactly what you want. I thought to myself, "Why am I going to my job today ?". I tried to think of a good reason what my current job will let me accomplish in my life and I have not been able to come up with a concrete answer. I will think about this question some more for a few more days and see if this job is aligned with where I want to go.

Disney is taking the fight against recording of movies to ridiculous levels. Defamer has an account of what took place during the screening of the movie "The Life Aquatic".

The Disney thought police were out in full force, with their ridiculous mouse-eared 'cast' buttons no less. This is really getting out of hand.
[snip]
Once they take your cell phone and drivers license it's placed into a plastic bag and you are given a ticket to redeem them later (just like in prison!). After this you are then asked to open your bags and raise your arms while a metal detector is run all over your body.
[snip]
After you have run this gauntlet, during the film you are subjected to even more security as annoying red security dots with tracking id's flash on the screen every 15 minutes and scowling uniformed security personal scan the audience like the secret service.

I do not know when these measures will start getting implemented in India. It is quite easy to get "hall prints" of the new movies from any of the local CD shops in Delhi. From anecdotal conversations, I gather that these prints are not made by viewers. There is a collaboration between the CD shop and the guy who does the actual screening of the movie.

It feels good to be living in a free country. Thanks to boing-boing for the link

I have been reading the Web 2.0 post archives. A quote by Cory Dotcrow which stands out

Tech companies need to understand that easy copying of media on-line is not a bug to be fixed. It's a property of the Internet. They're convincing the world that this is a problem, and we need to fix that.

I would rank it up there alongwith the William Gibson quote

The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.

While chatting on #linux-india (irc.freenode.net), I came upon one of the participant's blog entry about Infosys campus. Since a few of my friends works there, I have a bit of idea how the Thing works. The infosys is nice looking so that the animals can stay inside, work and die there content without wanting to see the outside world. That is the way most sweatshops in IT work and that is why this industry has such a high bun out rate

At this point, Niyam Bhushan came up with an interesting definition.

Software employment

slavery for the educated. so, give them a cosmetically nice looking pig-sty, an iron-clad contract that favors the master, pay them a small pittance per month to FOREVER own their SWEATWARE, and then patent and license it to customers for a killing. meantime, boot out the slave, unless he/she has more sweat to offer

I guess till the time you become an independent consultant, this definition holds true. Just a random observation.

The law of the lost idea states that

Any idea not put down on paper/harddisk within 10 minutes of it occuring will get lost.

Yesterday morning, I had thought of an ingenious workaround for a problem that we had been facing in one of our projects (while putting on my shoe). Now I have forgotten both, what the problem was and (quite obviously) what the workaround was.

To all those who think that I have left this blog to die, am sorry to disappoint you. My site had been suspended due to some misunderstanding, about which I will write down once the dust has settled on the matter at hand. It was a hard time but I have learnt my lesson. I think it can be best expressed by the following two quotes.

The first one is from The Prince.

And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.

The second lesson learnt is

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

(That is from the book The Dune by Frank Herbert. Though there is no online book available for Dune, you should check out the great collection of its quotes at Wikiquote)