Energy Nerd | Circular Economist
Guard against the Hardening the Heart…
Unfortunately, in this harsh world of mankind, humanity seems out of place, seriously misplaced. Sometimes I ponder over how right it is to have a word which has it’s roots from ‘human’ to describe something that is really not that human nowadays. The hardening of our hearts is a phenomena that seriously need some tracing back to understand why it’s really so hard for humans to be humanly and for the terms mankind and humanity to converge.
Guard against the Hardening the Heart…
Unfortunately, in this harsh world of mankind, humanity seems out of place, seriously misplaced. Sometimes I ponder over how right it is to have a word which has it’s roots from ‘human’ to describe something that is really not that human nowadays. The hardening of our hearts is a phenomena that seriously need some tracing back to understand why it’s really so hard for humans to be humanly and for the terms mankind and humanity to converge.
Propagator is temporarily backed up on this space in case there’s changes over at erpz.net as the deadline for hosting approaches. This shift is under test and may be used full-fledge in future for Vib’s blogging.
Getting too economics nowadays, and the philosophical mind slips into inquiry into behaviour that does little to question purpose of fundamental existence or the reason behind non-economic emotions. I scurried through some blogs and found how sentimental people around me are. Cool. At least for the hungry philosophical mind. Then economics mode set in and all sorts of question concerning the utility people obtain from being labeled ‘philosophical’ or more colloquially, ‘cheem’, or the kind of incentives that pushes people to thinking in ‘philosophical’ ways despite overwhelming social pressure that considers philosophical inquiry out of modern context or simply put in the most Westernized way, ‘uncool’. That, is supposed to be more of my concern – what exactly drives people to be philosophical? Innate curiosity about the world, pure divine inspiration, or just for the exclusive label forced upon by the society that has some form of mixed-blessing effect?
The last driving force seem the most powerful, though the second last may be as valid. The fundamental things that drives people is based on the incentives involved and thus the utility gained from the action. If the action of inquiry provides such high absolute utility, blogging these thoughts would have such low marginal utility that the action is unlikely to be carried out, so we can be rather sure that innate curiosity is insufficient to make people think philosophically, or at least, insufficient to allow us to perceive the philosophical-ness of a being. The fact that this property is detectable leads us to the next 2 plausible driving forces.
Divine inspiration is an attractive solution to the problem but it’s in no way a stable conclusion to this little problem we have over here. The fact is that people around me shares some similar properties about perception of social forces and they way of handling it leads us closer to the justification of social forces. However, in a bid to remove the ‘divine inspiration’ theory, we first have to present the empirical situation. The circumstances is such that many people are feeling sentimental, philosophical, emotional and they blog about it, and they convey if with such cliche statements that unless ‘divine inspiration’ is a mere software programme that behaves like a virus, that should not happen. The question naturally comes – if everyone’s having this divine inspiration, why not me; or perhaps now is the time? No. The answer is that there’s no divine inspiration to discuss, for everyone’s merely succumbing to this social pressure that innate desire to question seems to fuel. The word is ‘seems’, for it doesn’t. The forceful incorporation of humanities’ way of inquiry in Sciences have upset our youth’s way of thinking. We are ‘forced’ to think of something meaningful to ask about rather than having questions naturally arise from us when we have our encounters. That’s a clear example of pure information overload.
So, what the crap is this social force making people inquire about the natural world, the humanly interactions, and the things we perceive? It is a high level kind of social pressure, one that works it’s way not from interaction, or mirroring the rest, it works through imposing a barrier, that ‘exclusifies’ the author and encourage them to immortalize themselves, at least within their narrow scopes of perception. This sort of crap inquiry, pseudo-philosophy, may be capable of destroying our foundation of humanities, our roots in questioning about the world. Scientists, can never become the sort of philosophers who have asked the great questions we spent centuries seeking to answer, and the effort to make them so can have devastating results to the field of inquiry itself; for the wrong method of inquiry naturally leads one to the wrong solution and thus the wrong answer to the true inquiry. There’s a philosophy version of Alchemy and it’s brewing. Better whip out your Philonomics to clear the way.
2 Years (or was it 3?) ago, I rejoiced at the fact that I have a Kodak DX that allows me to capture 4.0 mega pixel photos and being a digital compact flash camera, I am happy to bring it around with me on overseas trips as well as gatherings or outings with friends. I was happy to be able to upload what I shoot and to me then, 4.0 mega pixel was a whooping lot of pixels and great resolution. So you can imagine what kind of country bumpkin I was.
A year back, I discovered SLR photography and decided that it was fun and one of the nice activities I am going to indulge in. I never own a SLR so despite using it for quite a long time in my months in Huang Cheng, I was happy to continue with it, so I entered Photography Society to play around with more lens and pick up more knowledge about cameras. Still, owning a DSLR is something I can hardly conceive. In fact, I promised myself to get a DSLR only when I saved enough of what I earned myself. Imagine my horror when I realised those young kids that are now becoming my juniors, those just a little older and are supposedly my seniors, are snapping away during festivals and events with their OWN DSLRs. I am angry for 2 reasons: They were blocking me (And I am supposed to be working for the school!) and they own those cameras they hold in their hands. As an amateur I am already okay with the slow, leisure shots but the high speed ones are really terrible for me, which is also partly the reason for bring angry with those freaks blocking me.
What a rant to make on Chinese New Year Eve anyway. Happy Pig Year!
It’s been a real long time since I logged into my blog because I have been really busy with school work, and all the orientation for the new-comers and so on. It’s been a long month of January, full of crappy and seemingly meaningless work. The first thing on the dashboard that caught my eye when I logged in was the sheer amount of spam comments I received – 241. Well, that’s a great record for having a blog, which is so obscure no one really reads it.
Spam have now becomes such a common occurrence that I would consider it a freaky day when I log into Gmail with the Spam Folder empty. I’ll probably be expecting to do some stuff in my email even when I am not expecting any mail – because I am pretty sure there’s spam for me to clear. Thus, even the clicking on the spam folder, and then the button to select all spam mails, and finally the button to ‘Delete Forever’, is considered extremely productive work. In fact, while I have typed all these chunk of stuff, a new lame spam has just entered the spam folder. And I felt I attained some kind productivity by deleting that one.
That’s life in the modern age.
Yea, I enjoy using laws of natural sciences to explain social sciences phenomena. I made an analogy about life from the kinetic energies of water molecules in a basin, I talked about equilibriums and closed-systems much like those in thermodynamics, and I discussed about really unrelated science theories and laws and apply them on human interactions. There’s one particular law in science that I am particularly interested in applying but never had a chance to. It’s the Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution and I thought if there’s this day, when our income distribution follows that, capitalism would never have met its rival, communism at all.
I am not sure if it comes naturally to you all but the Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution presents the idea that the smaller the pie to share, the stronger the tendency for some big guys to just snatch it away and stuff it into his mouth. Conversely, if the pie gets bigger, the tendency that it is shared becomes greater. Taking the ‘kinetic energy of particles’, which is the x-axis of the distribution curve as ‘wealth of individuals’ and the ‘probability density’ as the y-axis, and the temperature increments as total wealth aggregation, you will be able to visualize how we apply this distribution to the economics. I acknowledge that inequality will remain, and the beauty about this distribution that we have this hope, that while aggregate wealth increases, the inequality gap can be closed – or at least we are tending toward an asymptotic closing of the gap. Wishful Thinking.
Got introduced to this game and its solution. I generalized the solution to apply to any figures. And yes, I was the second player and the first variant of the game was played – so I lost, though it was out of luck rather than strategy (I wasn’t tabulating the numbers).
A and B are individuals taking turns to call out numbers from x-y (numbers ‘x’ to ‘y’, with x y).
In this scenario, the first player will have an advantage and there are focal points within the games that have to be considered by both players. These points are the numbers ‘m – (x+y)’, ‘m – 2(x+y)’ and so on until the number is one that’s between ‘x’ and ‘y’. The first player will be able to force a win by reaching these numbers starting first. For a change in game scenario such that the first who reach the ‘m’ loses, the second player has an advantage. This game formula is useful for similar variations.
I am not really happy with the current ending I have written for the article/essay entitled ‘Happiness Equation’. I thought there’s so much more space to develop, to delve into and uncover all the mysterious forces that’s dictating our happiness in this world of ours. I am thinking of expanding the writing into a bigger research and so I can have my citations together with more advance references.
I thought as a peripheral interest, I’ll reveal how all-encompassing the research will be. The whole issue and argument about equality and inequality stems from philosophical studies as well as natural sciences investigating the natural states of things. This time, because it involves more of human beings, there’s anthropological implications that delve into human nature and thus the ‘flow of wealth’ as a result of that. That would be very close to economics, which brings us into social sciences that involves mathematical models to predict capital flows and I might be probing into how ‘Trickle-down Economies’ is a scam (or at least do not occur in reality most of the time) and try to explain why so.
More empirical evidence relating perceived inequality and unhappiness is required to back this study because the entire research rest on this but I think I am very much right on track. And more importantly, the whole idea about ‘slacking’, literally – whether it is feasible on a large scale and whether it would be considered an ‘advancement’ for mankind – one that’s so preoccupied with development and production for the past few centuries has to be explored more in-depth. At this moment, game-theoretical models have to be evoked to explain the behaviours of individuals subjected this sort of ‘slacking’ pact.
A major component I need to sort out is the inequality that results from Capitalism, all at least the kind of economic system that’s used at a universal at this point of time. Das Kapital may have the answer to my queries but I need a deeper understanding of the differences between the system described by Marx and the system that’s currently being implemented in different nations. This is a great ‘Introductory to Macroeconomics’ project.