It's not a problem to be ignorant here or there. It's a problem to be ignorant permanently.

Going out for a Picnic on Saturday?

Interestingly, in highly-populated areas, especially in the ones located close to the sea/ocean coast, there is a 22% higher chance of rain on Saturdays than on Mondays. The reason is pretty simple: heavy traffic and industrial pollution during the 5-day working week result in production of extra clouds and thus increase the likelihood of rain on Saturday.

I discovered this fact accidentally trying to find the information about the nature of "rain from clear skies" effect. I had never seen such an effect before, but observed it twice for the last few weeks here in Yorkshire. Unfortunately, I have found no relevant information about this amazing phenomenon on the Internet (similar effects are quite usual for the lowlands located near the mountains, but there are no high mountains around). The only idea that comes to my mind is that such rain could be caused by extremely high humidity level in the atmosphere, so atmospheric moisture condensates directly to water drops. Or maybe it's due to massive air flows and whirlwinds that take water from a sea and move it over the land. Will investigate it deeper when I have some time.

Religion is [supposed to be] here to care about kindness of our hearts and purity of our minds. Surprisingly, a number of religions prefer to promote themselves by erecting majestic castle-like temples, fulfilling an entirely materialistic approach... Love and respect should not be substituted by worship and spectacles; otherwise people's faith will be put close to political movements, superstitions and iReligion.

I wonder how many opportunities we lose by throwing away ideas or deeds that we consider unpromising. Sometimes these considerations are based on our complexes, sometimes on our experience, and I cannot say which reason is worse. In any case, while complexes are something that is a bit out of control of an average man, experience is more or less a cognitive substance. A man with huge experience is somewhat similar to an expert system; they maintain a knowledgebase of various statements along with a set of possible ways of their resolution. As a matter of fact, that feature of experience makes life simpler, as it allows to automate many aspects of life; instead of thinking over yet another use case, a man "contacts" his experience database and gets the known pattern for that use case.

What is bad, is that these specifics of our mind prevent us from doing irrational things. It is hard to run something unusual and exotic, as our experience raises both its hands up and shouts "No, buddy, this activity never used to be successful in the past, so what the hell are you expecting from it now? Stop and do something well-tried". As a trivial example, we will never go shopping on Sunday, as our experience tells us that the stores are all closed (and may miss some attractive Sunday offer). This doesn't look reasonable to me.

Our world does not encourage rational way of living; luck and randomness have a great effect on our life. People living in a rational way are doomed to flow together with the common stream, as the factor of randomness is rarely present in a rational life (of course, there are exceptions). As minds of different people are more or less similar to each other (of course, there are exceptions), one will not be able to outrun the crowd acting in the same way as the crowd. By acting irrationally, one brings some randomness and luck into his life (by exploiting the chances that are ignored by the others, rationally-acting people), increasing the probability of catching the faster train.

First, someone invents something. Second, someone improves that something and makes it a real sweetie. Third, the idea is caught by the corporations. Fourth, the corporations push the inventor off the market and downgrade that something to yet another piece of pink, fragrant, fluffy and lousy shit.

70

That love is all and love is everyone...

Black Cat

Several days ago I was walking down the street. One middle-aged lady carrying two heavy bags in her hands appeared far ahead. We were walking towards each other, getting closer and closer, when suddenly a black cat appeared in the middle of the distance between us and began to cross the street.

I really love cats, you know, I like to talk to them, that's why I smiled when I saw her and accelerated a bit to take a closer look (she was a beautiful shiny one). Suddenly the lady raced on, panting and shaking her enormous bags as if they were two fan blades. I was a bit confused at first, but in a moment I got the idea. Some people in our country consider black cat as a sign of bad luck. If one crosses your way, something bad and terrible will reach you sooner or later. That's why they try to omit such situations wherever possible. The lady happened to succeed in her undertaking, and the frightened cat failed to reach the opposite side of the street and jumped out to the bush. Having the victory in her hands, the lady put her bags on the ground and stopped, continuing to pant. Obviously, she has just rescued herself from a mortal danger.

I was thinking about different sides of this situation on my further way home. First, it appears that we have more signs of bad luck than signs of good luck. Moreover, bad luck signs are much more ordinary, easy-to-come-across ones. Bad luck is guaranteed by broken mirrors, ladders, empty buckets, Friday 13s, scattered salt, ravens, owls, left feet and that poor black cat. Good luck by four-leaf clover (anybody seen that?), horseshoes, coins found on street, rainbows, ladybugs... is that all?

Second, there is no problem in trapping into something bad. Lack of attention, misunderstanding, memory failures, wrong estimations and simply a bad mood often lead to unpleasant consequences that can be treated as caused by bad luck. Life ain't easy, and in many situations we get not what we expect to. It is natural for a man to be mistaken, but those mistakes are often considered as a crook in the lot.

So what we have? We have a huge number of bad luck signs and are open to various bad things due to the nature of our world. There is a high probability that another fault comes soon after a sign of bad luck... confirming the latter. Good luck signs are just too rare to affect something. A good environment to build a loser from everyone.

Thence, accepting bad luck signs is a wrong strategy. Instead, it is reasonable to invent various good luck signs and let them make you think positively. The bad things are going to occur independently of whether there were bad luck signs or there weren't; and the good luck signs bring you in good mood, making you feel confident and easy. Luck is something that can be built, and we should care about building it in the right way.

I'm curious what a cat thinks when finds himself at the top of a tree, having climbed there by chance when monkeying around (cats often do strange things when monkeying around), being completely stuck and afraid of getting down?

There are two major vectors in today's social and economical life:
1) the population is steadily growing,
2) most of the businesses invest in automation in order to reduce their operational costs.

These vectors are opposite to each other. The result of these tendencies is that with the years we have more potential workers but less positions that could help employ all of them. That's why the unemployment rate peaks we notice today are not the highest ones.

In further perspective, new unemployed's (apparently the ones with lower mental skills, who are generally dismissed by the automation process), will be forced to migrate to less developed regions of the planet to apply their skills there, making the gap between the developed and third-world countries larger. Finally, the things will become irreversible, so third-world states will lose any chance to outrun the developed ones. None of the possible consequences of that world setup makes me happy.

A solution that might prevent this kind of future is to invent an extremely labour-consuming activity that will help to give a job to those millions of workers. This can be Moon or Mars expansion, or world-wide greenery planting program for example. Space investigation is a preferred one, as exploration of neighbour planets will also assist to overcome the overpopulation problem.

9/11 has shown the defenselessness of the world in the face of terrorism. Though developed countries spend enormous funds on intelligence services (emerging countries also do, but as they are less attractive targets for terrorists, their intelligence services are less aware of terrorism), the attacks have illustrated how easy it is to break down the most powerful and well fixed intelligence service in the world. According to the 9/11 commission's report, the cost of the attacks to their authors was in range of $400000-600000, less than a million dollars! (total US intelligence budget for fiscal year 1998 was $26.7 billion).

The investigations show that the hijackers did not fit into the "general model" of suicide terrorists, being fully-formed well-educated adults. Probably that was one of the key reasons for the CIA to miss them on the attack preparation stage.

The official timeline of the day shows total lack of coordination between aircraft crews, dispatchers and air defense force. Neither party was ready to react to the threat adequately.

Has something changed since then? I am sure that yes. I am sure that it is absolutely impossible to replicate 9/11 attack today. If you do, you will be caught yet at the airport on the boarding stage. If not, the pilot will do his best to prevent you from directing the aircraft to the critical locations. If you come out to kill the pilot, the air force will shoot the aircraft down in minutes.

However, I am also sure that the terrorists will never resort to such kind of attacks again. They are not idiots, and they understand that intelligence services do learn from their mistakes. Instead, they will search for another hole in the defense system and try to exploit that one. And I am not sure that the CIA (or any other intelligence service) will be there to handle that newly discovered hole at once.

Photo: Recently built World Trade Center, 1976

We often think unfamiliar people to be better than they actually are... just because we only see the good side of them. There is also the bad side that is hidden from public and visible only to closer people.

In exactly the same way, we often consider unfamiliar people to be worse than they are just because their visible side is their bad side.

Evolution

When I was 15, I dreamed about standing with a guitar on stage in front of a hall full of excited girls. A cowboy hat, a black leather and a smoking cigarette were a must.

When I was 21, I dreamed about standing with a guitar or beside a keyboard in front of a hall full of concerned people who came to listen to music. A cowboy hat probably was a must, but all the other stuff wasn't anymore.

Now that I'm 28, I dream about having a concrete box to lock myself inside with a guitar/piano/flute/whatever and play for myself, catching every little piece of sound, enjoying every single note, every single offbeat, every string vibration. I'd also prefer a cozy bathrobe to the hat. And this one is the sweetest dream of all three for me.

Five Inconsistencies of London

(as they seemed to me)

Very Historical / VeRY_mOdERn
...Anthill-like... / D e s e r t e d
Gaudy / Conservative
Friendly / Unfriendly
Rich / Poor
Here should be the 6th / No five is enough

Books

The cover of the latest Time issue contains a photo of Jonathan Franzen accompanied with the following message:

Great American Novelist. He's not the richest or most famous. His characters don't solve mysteries, have magical powers or live in the future. But in his new novel, Freedom, Jonathan Franzen shows us the way we live now.


The fact that the person placed on the Time's cover is a living novel writer was so surprising, that a number of other media sources dedicated a news entry for it. It appeared that Jonathan Franzen is the first writer for 10 years to get to the cover of this magazine (the previous one was Stephen King in 2000).

In my opinion, this fact is not a worse illustration of the way we live now than the mentioned book. For 50 years (1951-2000) as many as 42 living writers were honoured to get to the Time's cover, ~8 authors per decade. The first decade of 2000's was not that rich. However, I cannot say that the shelves of bookstores have become smaller. Conversely, they obviously have become much larger than ten years ago. And the books have become much more colourful and pretty than before (right now I'm looking at my good old Catcher in the Rye, 1975 edition, and I'm sure it would have never been sold in today's bookstore due to its ugly cover).

The abundance on the bookshelves hides the scarcity of modern literature. It is the same entropy loss problem I wrote about some time ago. The problem is that we produce a lot of form, while forgetting about the sense. A typical book available in a store today is nothing more than a coloured pack of printed paper whose life is limited by a trip from New York to San Francisco. What a difference to my Catcher, the Catcher I've bought at bibliopole's, whose pages become yellow with time, who has some wrested pages pasted back in wrong order, who spent his best years being read by a dozen of my friends (and their friends), and who is still alive and carefully dusted once a week on a dedicated bookcase shelf, waiting for succeeding readers.

A major difference between USSR and western rock music of 60-80's is that most of the Russian bands never really cared about the music (yes, I know that USSR != Russia, but as the majority of the bands sang songs in Russian, I will use that term). There were many reasons for that. There were no money, there were no good instruments, there were no good recording equipment. There were no sponsors. There were no local musical heritage, and getting discs with western music was a challenge.

However, even though the music was recorded on handicraft hardware built from spare parts of three different machines, even though the guitars and processors sounded as a mix of Nirvana, Chuck Berry and Bach, even though a drum machine beat the same boring 4/4 far-from-reality rhythm through entire song, even though guitar solos were as simple as in guitar beginner's guide, even though the rehearsals were performed at someone's apartments or (in better case) in underground studios, even though in many cases there were no official discs available, so the listeners had to use their tape recorders to spread records, even though... Despite all of that, Russian bands played the rockest rock I've ever listened to. Every single song was an inexhaustible source of energy, love, truth and wisdom. It may sound oddly, but probably the poor quality of the music was one of the compartments of the inspiration made by the songs... Good enough music would just have prevented the listener from feeling the spirit they carried.

One of the common ways of spending summer vacation for me, as for a typical resident of humid continental climate, is a trip to "somewhere where is sunny and hot". However, I am completely stuck this year. It appears that every place that I'd considered as a good summer choice in past years is much cooler and less sunny than my hometown this year :).


A wonderful consequence of a hot (what? I said "hot"? I must have said "hoooooot"!) summer this year in Kyiv are the chestnuts that have blossomed a second time this August (usually the chestnuts blossom on Spring).

No wrong no right,
I'm gonna tell you there's no black and no white.
Queen, "One Vision"

A small addition to the previous post.

Dividing people (and other things) into black and white on the basis of some particular feature of them is one of the biggest mistakes one can make. Unfortunately, our mind is lazy. It is much easier for us to sort a hundred elements out into two (three, four, ten) groups by some common criteria and operate with those N groups, than to put each one to a separate personal group and deal with 100 groups instead. Sometimes this is called abstracting. Naturally, abstracting is good when used in maths or biology, but it distorts our vision when applied to real-world or social stuff.

Sometimes this feature of our mind is exploited by unfair people. The teams of candidates of presidential/governmental races often try to blacken the opposite candidate by showing them as adulterer, a person of doubtful character and so on. Well, it is difficult for me to understand the relation between PM's sexual temperament and their economical and manager's skills (needed for the state to prosper).

I try to classify the things as vectors of different essential properties. For instance, a typical vector of a person is (name, sex, age, sense of humour (1-10), kindness (1-10), intellectual level (-1-10), positiveness (1-10), honesty, appearance, physical skills, risk-ability, ..., smoking (yes/no), ...). This relates to all people, not only to friends (politics have some of the properties grayed, e.g. honesty ;)). The properties are mostly orthogonal, and thus such classification helps not to sort people into black and white, stupid and clever, or honest and dishonest. Really, there are quite a few properties to consider, and the presence of negative ones does not mean the absence of positive ones.

When I was younger, I did not like smoking girls. The fact that the girl smokes was quite definitive for me; every such girl used to immediately get to the "black list" (or "uninteresting person list", no matter) without any possibility of becoming a close person in future. I don't know the exact origins of such attitude; it is likely to have been built from a number of sources including viewpoints introduced by the parents, books, movies and own [poor] experience.

However, the attitude has changed drastically when I was about 16. I was forced to spend a continuous period of time with a girl who smoked hard. Though the girl obviously had to get to the "black list" at once, she was someone quite different from all the smoking girls I have ever met. Actually, in all other aspects she was very close to my understanding of what the ideal woman should be like. That was really a challenge, something to what practicing psychologists often refer as a "pattern breach".

That case made me reconsider my viewpoints a lot. Basically, it has given me an understanding of two things, (1) it is stupid and extremely unwise to sort out people and things into black and white just on the basis of their particular feature or features, (2) if something does not fit into the existing viewpoint, it is very likely that the viewpoint is wrong and should be revised. Since then I am trying to be more liberal and intelligent when forming my opinion on particular person or object.

Really, being too unloyal is non-productive and even insulting sometimes. Don't you hate your neighbour just because he snores too loudly at night? Hasn't your coworker become an enemy for you just because he always occupies your parking place? Haven't you stopped buying goods in a nearby supermarket just because a cashier has once shortchanged you?

You know, snoring is always a symptom of some disease. The neighbour does not snore intentionally to annoy you; he is likely just not be unaware of such "feature" of his organism. He is also likely to be a smart and friendly person in all other aspects. The coworker is likely not to know that you have chosen that parking place for yourself, in turn, he also dislikes you because you are occupying "his" place. The SM cashier might have had a sleepless night that day because of her daughter's school exam and just got mistaken when calculating the change. Yet, a smoking girl is neither a devil nor a criminal. (Yes, most of the criminals are smokers, but you can hardly state the opposite). Maybe, each of them is worth giving 'em a chance?

It is very exciting to fight with your own mind. My today has begun with a bunch of minor and major negatives. First, I failed to get in time to a bus to carry me to a gym (20 seconds is not a delay for an appointment but they are vital when you are trying to catch a bus ;)); the subsequent bus had no free seats, so in addition I have lost 30 minutes of morning reading. Finally having got off the bus (the driver obviously used to drive road rollers in his best years), I found one of the pedestrian traffic lights on my further way broken, resulting in yet another 5(000) minutes of waiting for traffic to let me cross the street. And it was only 7:15.

The dawning day gave me another missed-on-the-edge bus, enormous queue in a bank, broken lock of the outer door, discharged battery on the mobile, and three or four broken or postponed (for various reasons) work plans.

Yet going in the first bus, I understood that it’s simply an another “unlucky day”. Such days - consisting of a shower of misfortunes and sad mistakes - occur from time to time, and in most cases I just accept them as they are, trying to avoid doing complex or critical tasks. However, for some reason I decided to fight my mind today and to do my best to remove the “unlucky” sticker from the day :).

So, having got off the bus I began to search for positive stuff around to fix my karma. Funny dogs in a park, clear blue skies, an accidental green wave I’ve got into, a small smiling girl didn’t help. Next, mad race in a gym to squeeze negative energy out of my mind. A little better, but still far from the ideal. Okay, 10 minutes of relaxed park walk; an exchange of smiles with an ice-cream seller (I’ve tried all the sellers around); another chapter of a book; a cold shower; some funny Internet stuff. Nope. Fixed door lock. No avail...

And finally I did it! To be exact, the sound of acoustic guitar, harmonica and Bob Dylan’s voice coming from my PC’s speakers did that. And the mind has suddenly become clean and positive; I realised that it would be even better to alter the work plans in the way I was forced to do in the morning, and there’s nothing fatal in missed buses and absence of habitual morning book. I also realised that I’ve just lived (and continue to live, as it was something about noontime) a brand new day of my life, - a wonderful day, full of new experience, knowledge and feelings. You bet, I have just fought down my own mind!

Covers: Ghost Riders in the Sky

The song that expresses an American version of the Wild Hunt story has been covered more than half a hundred times (for half a hundred years).

What is interesting about the Ghost Riders version of the Hunt, is that the American idea of the story is quite optimistic and life-asserting, while the classic European versions describe the Hunt as something presaging suffering, catastrophes and deaths. Though the original lyrics are credited to Stan Jones, he said that "he had been told the story when he was 12 years old by an old cowboy friend". That is, the story is likely to be something more than just a personal view of the author, and can be considered to belong to American folklore of that (or former) times.

Duane Eddy and Dennis Solee, Ghost Riders in the Sky.

Our knowledge or, to be accurate, the part of our knowledge responsible for subjective information, is mostly wrong. Our knowledge is being constantly formed by the sources that produce highly distorted information that is often based on assumptions of the authors, false or even counterfeited facts. In many cases only side aspects of the whole picture is presented.

The dissonance between the “real” reality and the reality that is forcibly being boxed up into our minds has increased drastically with the overall commercialisation of the society. News is not a source of up-to-date information anymore, it is a commercial product that is positioned on global or local markets of “news receivers”. Led by the main idea of capitalistic economics, the competition, news companies are forced to run after fun, not after essence. It is more important to have weather forecast presented by a hot blonde in mini rather than to provide accurate temperature values for tomorrow (I have nothing against the blonde herself, even the other way round, yet the *main* purpose of a forecast is informing about correct weather). In order to make information acceptable by as wide set of “news receivers” as possible, the facts are often brushed and beautified to exploit baser instincts at the expense of actuality.

Actually, it is hard to blame news companies for this, as they are just doing their business. Those who do not adhere to the general stream will be knocked down and substituted by the others who will do.

What is sad, is that “thanks” to our oversimplified and running-for-sensations world, we stick to false ideals, we hail losers (or common people in best case) and are not aware of real heroes. The “real” reality has nothing to do with the things propagated. There are no fairy adventures and heroes on white horses, live-for-today’s and good-vs-evil’s, 90-60-90’s and 23-years-old-sexy-nuclear-physics-professors; the real reality is boring and mostly undistinguished, but whom such reality would be interesting to? Pop is king.

Obviously, this cannot last forever. While not being able to discover it today, the people will definitely notice the difference between what they watch, hear or read around and what they see with their eyes. But what would be the price?

When opportunities choose us

On August 20, 2008 an MD-82 airplane performing a JK5022 (Madrid-Las Palmas) flight has failed to take off from Madrid-Barajas airport, fell down and exploded. 154 of 172 passengers and crew members were killed. The further investigation has shown that the accident has been caused by a sequence of pilots’ and technicians’ mistakes. The fatal mistake, the one that actually was an immediate reason for the crash, was an attempt to take off with slats and flaps closed.

A very similar case (and happily, not a “very similar accident”) has happened in that very Spain a year before the Barajas crash. On June 5, 2007 an MD-83 airplane performing Lanzarote-Barcelona flight had been a subject for exactly the same bunch of staff mistakes, and also attempted to take off with closed flaps. Fortunately, there was a strong headwind; besides, the aircraft was slightly underloaded. Because of these two factors the machine succeeded in reaching the necessary lift that let it have avoided the JK5022 fate. The crew and the passengers had to experience several seconds of drastic 60 degrees right and left rolls though.


Generally, an aircraft taking off with its flaps closed does not have a chance to climb. That is, the passengers of MD-83 have been sentenced to death when they checked in to the flight in Lanzarote (or when they were booking the tickets, or ... who knows when exactly they’ve been, never mind). But the environment -- someone might wish to call it fortune, destiny, God, weather, closed system, whatever -- just has given them a minute opportunity to survive.

A good case to recall when you will be blaming the piercing wind that has blown your hat away.

Happy Birthday Paul!

Today is Paul McCartney’s 68th birthday.

Sir Paul’s performance in Kyiv on June 14, 2008 was probably the most exciting musical event I have attended for all my life. To say that it was wonderful, impressive, awesome, cool, great, unforgettable -- is to say nothing. There are no words to describe my feelings that summer night -- I just stood open-mouthed and stared at the scene, listening to the songs I loved since my very childhood, the songs which caused me to rend my fingers down to pieces, helplessly trying to play them accurately with my old guitar when I was about 12. Probably, that was the day of pure, absolute happiness.

And what a night it was! A powerful shower was pouring down from the sky for the whole day, so the streets in the city centre looked exactly like channels in Venice; umbrellas were pretty useless -- what one can do with a paper shield against a dozen of steel arrows? :) But the rain was nothing for 350’000 gathered at Independence Square to listen to a live legend, a legend whom many of the spectators have been awaiting for more than 40 years. It was an unique atmosphere of pervasive happiness around.



So, happy birthday Paul -- be just as young as you were there in Kyiv two years ago, and... just thank you for your songs and the joy that you bring with them to our hearts.

Photos: Korrespondent.net, Viktor Pinchuk's fund.

Opportunities

It is hard to imagine how many opportunities we miss in our lives just because of our passiveness. Some of those opportunities could have made our lives more interesting, sensible and happy, helping us to reach higher peaks. What is clear for me is that the life flow is not a well-defined thing; conversely, it is quite unstable and highly detail-dependent. Though the socium stimulates an iterative and more or less steady way of life (school, high school, university, then building a career brick-by-brick...), this one is obviously not the best one. Yes, it is really not that bad, as it provides some stability and makes you confident in your future... a future of a yet another average man or woman.

The thing that comes to my mind is that the iterative way is ideal for passive persons. It just lets you drift with the flow, with minimal movements required from your side (as a side effect, this system does not accept active persons, having various insulting words such as upstarts and careerists to refer to them; Russians even have a proverb stating that “the initiative leads to punishment”).

At the same time, every day gives us a number of opportunities -- big or small, residing near or far, promising or with almost no evident output. In many cases those opportunities are hard to observe, but even being discovered, they require us to leave our cozy shell and do something unusual to catch them. Strikingly, but most of the people tend to stay in their shells even if they do see those opportunities. In some cases there is no reason to blame them, as catching opportunities may result in loss of stability of their current lifeflows (which is the core of life model propagated by the socium). However, the other opportunities are ignored for totally different reasons... For our scares, first of all. We refuse to suggest our revolutionary ideas to the director because we are afraid of his skepticism; we have to lock our manuscripts in the drawer because we do not consider them to worth a penny; we miss a chance to dance with a girl at a prom because we are afraid of being kicked off... Yes, it is completely possible that the director will tear your ideas down, the editor will send your stories back, and that blue-eyed girl will just laugh at you... But at least you will be confident that you did everything you could. Yes, the romance failed. But was it possible at all if you just have preferred to have another beer?

Being active and catching positive opportunities is vital for putting yourself above the average line.

A river flows across the land,
I’d love to be there but I can’t.
I’d like to sit beneath the pine.
It’s time to end this senseless rhyme.

Covers: The Man Who Sold the World, Nirvana

Nirvana just have given a second life to this old Dawid Bowie's song.

What is interesting about this performance, is that though the thing is supposed to be done unplugged (i.e. with no output effects except amplification), Kurt brazenly uses guitar processor for his solo part. However, the processed guitar gives a fascinating sound to the song, so I tend to forgive him ;).

Another interesting thing is that The Man was one of the first songs we've played at school parties with my first band. That were really сrazy times... Our equipment consisted of ex-acoustic guitar with a self-made built-in distortion effect, a bass obtained from another 7-string acoustic guitar by placing bass strings in place of 1, 3, 5 and 7th strings, and the drums made from casseroles and their covers. Nobody was aware of the exact lyrics, as there was no Internet and our English was not that good to understand Kurt's mumbling clearly. But, you know, we sounded great for ourselves (and I think not bad for others as well, as we were invited to more than one party ;)).

Eat me!

One of my [ten thousands] favourite pieces in Alice in Wonderland:

Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words `EAT ME' were beautifully marked in currants. `Well, I'll eat it,' said Alice, `and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!'

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, `Which way? Which way?', holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

It is an outstanding illustration of two things:

1) How our mind can be confused with a sequence of unusual events. Having eaten the cake the day before, Alice would have never expected it to have something to do with her size.

2) How our mind can be constrained by our past experience. Alice expected the cake to make her smaller or bigger, but never expected it to cast her to a bird or a fish (or to force rain to fall from the sky), just because of her prior experience with a bottle.

It's too hard to be good. Actually, it's much easier to be good in heart rather than to be good in doings. However, only being good in doings has some sense.

I've just understood that Danica Patrick doesn't seem to get any older for more than 6 (7, 8?) years I deal with Godaddy. I just imagine myself attending Godaddy site being an old angry man -- and still seeing Danica there unchanged :).

Entropy loss problem

Past decades are widely considered as the period of enormous growth of the amount of information available around the world. Though the overall amount of information on the planet has really grown significantly (and continues to grow), a much bigger basis for this viewpoint, as for me, lies in dramatic decrease of entropy in the information data surrounding us.

I cannot say “the entropy in the information surrounding us” as this is not formally correct, because “information” assumes 100% entropy, while abstract “data” may contain no information at all (and thus have zero entropy).

What we have today is enormous growth of the amount of data, not information. We have more books, more music bands, more radio stations, more TV channels. However, all those sources bring us much less information than they used to 50 years ago. Most of the news channels use original copy-and-paste method, obtaining news from a small number of information agencies (e.g. Thomson-Reuters or Associated Press), and only several of them do work on producing something more intellectual than just reproducing the facts. The shelves of bookstores are full of books, but it is quite difficult to choose a good book to read. Finally, I have just entirely stuffed my new 400GB hard drive, but I doubt that my PC contains ten times more information than it used to do with 40GB drive ten years ago.

Why entropy loss is a problem? Due to its flooding effect, of course. There is just too much low-entropy data around us, so retrieving high-entropy data requires more and more efforts to be done. Moreover, certain skills are needed to be able to tell a smile from a veil (C); it is too easy to get led by fake ideals. Finally, the world is not that simple by itself, so why should we make it more complicated by bringing extra trash into it?

Covers: Dust in the Wind, Scorpions

In my opinion, most of the covers cannot compete with the original performances. Still there are some exceptions. An outstanding arrangement of a good old Kansas song, primarily thanks to Adriana’s cello and the keyboards.

I’ve been watching yet another “Air crash investigations” film yesterday. To make a long story short, the crash (B737 disintegration in the air) has been caused by improper pilot actions in response to airplane roll in poor weather conditions. When the investigators sank deeply into the details of the catastrophe, they found out that all the pilots of the air company (Adam Air, Indonesia) were trained defectively. To be exact, they were trained comprehensively to handle normal situations, while having absolutely no knowledge about what to do in abnormal situations.

Then I have realized that many bricks which our world is built of are quite weak, but no one sees it. A really great number of devices, constructions, rules are designed to work when everything goes as expected, however, they will immediately fail as soon as something starts going wrong. I am concerned a bit about the situation in the information protection field. It is horrible to accept that many software products intending to protect sensitive data do not actually protect it (though giving the illusion that they do). What is the worst, it is almost impossible to detect such weaknesses from the outside, as everything looks good as long as the environment is appropriate. The pilots of Adam Air have performed dozens flights successfully -- thanks to the absence of abnormal situations -- and who could ever imagine that something is wrong? Many of us live beside potentially dangerous objects: various nuclear reactors, factories, dams. Who can be sure that the personnel working there has enough skills to handle all the possible situations? Who can be sure that -20 frost will not break them down due to constructors’ assumptions that “such frosts have never been noticed in this area”?

People are bad risks managers when it comes to estimating real-life risks. They often overestimate the low-probability events, while underestimating the higher-probability ones. One of my acquaintances is extremely frightened of airplane flights. At the same time, he sees nothing critical in drink-driving from time to time. It appeared useless to explain him that he has much bigger chance of getting into a car accident (even not considering drinking) than of being killed in airplane crash.

Most of the people are afraid of dogs, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, hackers, civil wars, disability. Of course, many of those scares are real and justified ones. However, much more dangerous are everyday threats that we usually do not consider at all. Unprotected sex takes away hundreds times more lives than mad dogs do. Smoking will turn you to a disabled person much faster than your old CRT display will (the one that you have finally upgraded to a brand new LCD device, so that your ashtray felt comfortable beside the keyboard). Inability to get rid of stress is likely to kill you ten years before a terrorist blows your car up.

Sometimes I find myself thinking that modern arts is too ideal to be arts :). The technical quality of modern paintings, music, photography and films just does not leave any chance to find a minimal performance mistake.

That’s why I always prefer live performances to studio records when it comes to music. A common product of studios is something unreal, something too ideal to live together with us in our imperfect world.

Silence - 81%
Small birds singing - 7%
Leaves rustling - 2%
Footsteps - 4%
Distant airplane engine voice - 2%
Trees crackling on the wind - 1%
Repetitive woodpecker drum part - 2%
Rustle of birds swarming in dead leaves - 1%

Alice in Ordinaryland

I'd awarded the movie with The Greatest Disappointment 2010 prize. Carrol's Alice in Wonderland is one of my most liked books from the very childhood, and I was looking forward to watching the movie since it was first announced. It is pity to say, but... it would be better if I have missed it due to some trifling reason. It seems for me that the creators of the movie just did not understand the idea of the original story, trying to fit the book into the standard "successful motion picture" scheme. Carrol's "Alice" is not a yet another fairy tale from your bookshelf, it has its own very specific atmosphere built on top of quirks, English folklore, logical conclusions and puzzles. Unfortunately, the movie we got is free of all those -- yet another evidence of the fact that commercial grounds ruin the arts.

24th

Today is the 24th anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster. The accident was a monstrous result of irresponsibility and incompetence (those features were typical for any soviet institution), and a cruel illustration of the damage that improper handling of nuclear power can cause.

At the same time, Chornobyl disaster was one of the most affecting black swans in my life. At the moment of the accident I was living together with my parents and a sister in Obninsk, Russia. My parents worked in local scientific research institute. Right after the explosion my father, as an expert in radiobiology, along with a group of other scientists was directed to Kyiv in order to investigate the damage and develop the plans on minimizing the consequences of the accident. He then have been proposed to stay in Kyiv on a permanent basis. A year later we have also moved to Kyiv, opening new page of our life in our new homeland.

Porn: the most honest genre?

Many popular TV series and movies exploit baser human instincts, 'hiding' sexual relations, violence and humiliation (attractive for major part of people) behind the naughty 'real-life' scenes such as hospital or office work flows. Actually, substituting a hospital with, say, factory, and doctors with workers (keeping individual relations between them intact) will change nothing! And this means that the hospital is an unnecessary element of the scene...

It may sound a bit mind-blowing, but porn movies are thus the most 'honest' ones, having the highest entropy amongst other movie genres.

High in the sky, together we fly,
Towards the sun we are making our way.
Where is the point, how far is the line
That separates a night from a day?

Do you care about your autumn?

Youth is a good time to think about your gray hairs times. It is important to understand that even though you probably are an advanced one and earn quite good today, inevitable is the moment when you will be unable to do it anymore. The older you become, the less energy you have; besides, it is usually a problem to find a good job for older people because employers prefer to hire young and active ones instead. Having prepared to those times beforehand, you will protect yourself from a potential stress in future and will be able to adapt to your new way of life without too much difficulties.

Such pension-aimed strategy might consist of the following basic elements:

1) Maintain a kind of own “pension fund” by putting aside a certain fraction of your monthly income and investing the accumulated money into various assets. There is a huge number of investment instruments available, from public pension funds and bank deposits (for conservative people), to metals, shares and stocks (for geeks).

2) Prepare yourself for earning money in old ages. It is very likely that you would be unable to succeed on some full-time position (even if you get it). As for me, it is a good idea to concentrate on some self-employment activity such as flowers growing, wood decorating, painting, ship modeling, cage mastering etc. Having started with it now, you will acquire good skills for the moment when you really need it. As a reasonable option, one might wish to have a look at several activities involving different senses (it would be pity to end up with excellent piano tuning skills being totally deaf).

3) Take care about your health. The healthier you are, the less money you will spend to maintain your life, the more time and energy you will have to do what you really love.

And I am pretty sure that an old you will send many thanks to a young you :).

We live with the history we’ve inherited. There is no too much sense in thinking about what history we’d had if something that happened in the past did not happen, or, vice versa, something that did not happen actually did. At the same time, some of the past events are so shocking that it is really pity that we cannot go back and observe the alternative branches of the history. The fatal crash that has taken the lives of political elite of Poland reminded me about another tragic accident happened more than 50 years ago (there are very little common between those cases; perhaps, the only common aspect of both ones is airplane crash).

On February 3, 1959 a small Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft carrying 3 passengers on board took off from the Mason City local airport, Iowa. In several minutes after take-off, forced to fly in extremely poor weather conditions, it crashed in about five miles northwest from the airport. All the passengers and the pilot were killed. The passengers were young rock and roll musicians, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson.

Who knows, what kind of music would we have listened today if the Bonanza landed successfully at the destination point of Moorhead, Minnesota? Buddy Holly was truly one of the most talented and creative musicians of his times. Musician from the very childhood, having created such well-known rock and roll masterpieces as 'Words of Love', 'Peggy Sue' and 'That’ll be the Day' by the age of 22, Holly had every single chance to have a huge impact on the music of 50ths and 60ths. Actually, he did have it - his songs significantly influenced the creativity of such artists as the Beatles (who performed a number of his works at miscellaneous live shows; 'Words of Love' has even been officially released on their Beatles for Sale album), the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and many others. However, that was only the beginning of Holly’s career, and it is hard to imagine the value he could contribute to the popular music if he survived.

Despite the relatively small number of songs released, Buddy Holly is still one of my favorite performers. I propose you to get back to 1958 and enjoy Holly’s never-dying rock and roll hit. The grand piano solo is incredible!

Entertaining physics for those who are willing to achieve their goals

There are two general forces acting on a man moving towards his goal, acceleration force and braking force. The sum of them defines the overall progress speed and the time needed to achieve the goal. If the acceleration force is big enough to overcome the braking force, you have a good chance to win. However, if the latter is greater (in absolute value) than the former one, the goal will never be reached.

The value of the acceleration force is generally defined by our mental characteristics, such as knowledge, confidence, perseverance, patience, belief and others. The effect of temperament-driven capabilities like our energy, leadership and friendliness depend on particular goal and may also be significant.

The value of braking force is constituted by many more factors. The simplest of them are miscellaneous objective restrictions, such as laws, expensiveness, absence of bus communication etc. Those factors are rather obvious and can be either bypassed or at least considered when planning the goal. The second source of factors are people around us. Some of them are skeptical, the others are envious, the thirds are just incompetent in the field of your goal; in either case, most of them will not miss a chance to show you that your goal is wrong, unreachable or does not worth reaching at all. The third, and the sneakiest source of factors is... our mind; to be exact, its parts which are usually referred to as fears, complexes and doubts. It is incomprehensible how big can be the contribution of our own mind to the task of preventing us from reaching the goal.

Thereby, having the above statement, it is easy to formulate the tactics for reaching the goal in effective way. Basically, all we need to do is increase the acceleration force and decrease the braking force in every possible way. The first part involves improvement of our mental skills, comprehensive intellectual development, as well as constant and deep self-motivation. Much harder is to overcome the braking force, as this often requires us to fight our mind with itself. But... Doesn’t your goal worth it?

Why does the cat lick its paws?
Because it does not have an ice-cream. Have you ever seen a cat having an ice-cream and licking its paws?

Do you remember your dreams at the age of ten? Are you still at the mercy of those dreams today? If no, why have you abandoned them? Have you considered them a momentary infatuation, or they were just too hard to accomplish (so closing the eyes was easier)? If yes, how much of your time are you dedicating to making them closer today?

Those who get used to blame circumstances in their defeats instead of trying to find the reason in themselves will never reach the top of the hill. Sometimes extraordinary efforts are needed to admit your own mistakes, however, you can be sure that you will never let those mistakes affect your life again. It is necessary to understand that mistake is not just something that has been done in wrong way, but also something that has not been done at all. You cannot stop the storm, but you can prepare to it by building a shelter. Not building a shelter in time is obviously a mistake that can lead to grave consequences.

Yet, there still do exist circumstances that we are not able to get through. Those ones hit us with all their power and cruelty, occasionally horrifying us with their ruthlessness. However, the life stopped by such an accident is always worth living. Just because of knowing that you were so strong, so active, so vital, that the life has been forced to use its most powerful and dishonest weapon against you.

The Markermen

When you are asked about the people who influenced your life at most, what would you answer? A common answer we can hear from our friends and relatives is something like 'Edgar Poe changed my life drastically' or 'I learned how to make relations with people after reading Dale Carnegie's book, which has turned my world upside down' or even 'The example of Oprah Winfrey's success kicked my ass, so I threw away my TV and got a good job'.

It is obvious that our life is largely led by the great people and the ideas they put to our minds (not sure whether the great word is in the right place, but let's call them that way; another word that came to my mind, famous, is definitely worse). Their books, biographies, operas and movies, or just real life examples they give affect on the way we think and act deeply.

Besides the answers above, you will surely get responses like 'my father made a real man from me' or 'my mother taught me to respect people around me'. The other social group that forms our minds are close people, such as relatives and friends. It's them who puts common values to our hearts and heads, who builds our nature and widens (or, sometimes, restricts) our horizons.

One interesting thing I have noticed recently is that there does exist a third group. I found out that some 'ordinary' people influence our lives significantly; their contribution to our minds and lifeflows is sometimes even bigger than the one made by our parents and favourite writers. They seem to follow us for some period of our life, helping us in bad times and supporting or even leading us in good times. I have generalized all such people under the markermen term.

Markermen usually act implicitly and unintentionally. They drop a meaningless phrase which attracts our curiosity to some idea or thing that later fills a significant space in our life; they give us wrong advices that makes us go in a wrong way which appears to be the only right one in the end; they accidentally spill a cup of coffee on our jacket -- just to push us to meet our future wife while washing out that arabica from the jacket in the restroom. What is doubly is that they are likely to never guess about the consequences of their words or actions.

A meticulous reader might object that all of those are just accidents in global sense (i.e. a fallen brick and not a markerman might have suggested a revolutionary idea; I might have read a wrong-right advice in a newspaper or journal; it could be my fault to spill the coffee on the shirt). He would be right in the sense that our life is highly influenced by a sequence of random events in general. However, my idea is slightly different. My experience shows that markermen are unlikely to 'fire' only once. All the markermen that influenced my life did that several times (often with a large time gap though). That's why I cannot consider that as 'pure' accidents, thinking of markermen as of a kind of 'dedicated', personal angels.

Cinematography provides several good examples of such people. A classic example of a multi-target markerman is Forrest Gump. Wilson is a markerman of House. François Perrin is a markerman of Campana in La chèvre (Knock on Wood in English).

Preface

I have just found out that more than two years have passed since I created this blog aiming to use it for training in writing, recording interesting ideas and figuring out the thoughts. As the blog is named 'thoughts in spare time', I have to choose today whether there have been no thoughts or no spare time for those two years ;).

In this very first message I would like to expose my thanks to everyone who visits this blog in future (and that would be really great if some of the things written here will be useful or help you bring some sunshine and goodness to your life). This blog does not aim to concern some particular idea or ideas; it would presumably contain my thoughts on different aspects of life. I have no intention of collecting dozens of readers; it is likely that the blog will never reach top 1000000 on Blogger. As a matter of fact, this one is just a scrap of paper lying on the cafe table.

...and do not say that I did not warn you! :)