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.