Nostalgia

While I celebrate the availability of:

 

·      Thousands of channels to watch on TV, I am dismayed that very often we feel that “there is nothing worthwhile to watch,” and remember the days when we eagerly looked forward to the next episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show.

 

·      Endless on-line courses, from geology to history, from science to art, I am dismayed that I have lost ability to focus on one subject at a time, and remember the time when the only way to learn something was in a classroom and we had to focus on that one subject.

 

·      Instantaneous news, “Breaking news”, I am dismayed that the focus is on sensational news, and remember the days when the news presentation was much thought through.

 

·      Multiple news sources, I am dismayed that they start to look alike, and remember the days when we only watched Walter Cronkite to get “authentic” news.

 

·      The availability of zoom, I am dismayed that the ability to interact face to face is getting lost, and remember the days when I looked forward to an event because of the opportunity to mingle.

 

·      GPS for going anywhere at any time, I am dismayed that my ability to navigate is lost (creating a mess if by any chance the GPS is not available), and remember the days when I used to land at the airport, rent a car and then figure out where I was going based on paper maps.

 

·      Any music any time any place, I am dismayed that my ability to enjoy spontaneity and randomness of a radio is now lost, and remember the days of listening to “Binaca Geetmala” every Wednesday on a radio in India.

 

·      Easy and free connectivity with anyone in the world, I am dismayed that the face-to-face conversations have become now a rarity, and remember the days when the family members interacted with each other at a gathering instead of being lost on their iPhones.

 

·      The vast amount of content created/forwarded by friends/family…must read articles, videos, tik-tok, Instagrams, FaceBook, photo albums…I am dismayed that there is no easy way to prioritize what I should hear and watch, and remember the days when receiving a clipping by mail was an event.

 

·      Digital photography which allows me to create “slideshows” of my travels rather rapidly and share with far flung family and friends, I am dismayed that hardly anyone is interested in watching them, and remember the days when actual slideshows were often the reason that family/friends got together at our place.

 

Perhaps I am now old enough that nostalgia about the past is more significant than the possibilities of the future .  

Happiness equation

 I have a simple equation that captures the reason of being happy in a situation:

 

Happiness = (Reality- Expectation) x Attitude.

 

Both reality and expectation are composed of multiple factors. Take for example, the location you select to live. In that case, reality may include year-round weather, closeness to a city, possible outdoor activities, the quality of the neighborhood, the quality of school system, job opportunities, and so on. There will be a corresponding set of expectations. 

 

So, the happiness equation is really a sum of reality minus expectations for every factor important to you.  A positive outcome means you are happy, a negative, unhappy and zero indicates an equanimous situation. 

 

This gets amplified by attitude. A person with a positive attitude will amplify factors that are positive (i.e., reality exceeds expectation), and ignore those that are negative. The reverse will be true for a person with negative attitude. For them, it is the negative factors that matter and worthwhile whining about. The positive factors don’t matter much. 

 

Expectation is very important in deciding happiness. If it is low, one can be happy more easily, and the reveres is true if it is high. That applies to every factor, not just lump sum. So, one would have an expectation for what the weather or the neighborhood should be like, and so on. 

 

What factors to include in this equation depend on the stage of your life. The expectation related to job opportunities will disappear as a factor once you retire. During that phase, the expectation related to weather may become more important. To be more accurate, each expectation has a weight attached to it, which changes depending on phase of life. 

 

The level of expectation you have for a specific factor is also dependent on how competitive you are. For example, if you want to keep up with the Joneses, you may establish a high expectation for, say, the size of the house you want to live in. Not that you need it, but because your friend has one. In that case, a perfectly reasonable but small house will bring unhappiness. 

 

Finally, there is a time element associated with the happiness thus calculated. It declines over time. As the newness wears off, a perfectly good situation may start getting boring. Unless, of course, attitude kicks in and puts sanity back again. 

Artemis

 Finally, the moon program, Artemis, has lifted off, launching the next era of space travel. The initial unmanned voyage to moon and around will eventually be followed in 2025 by the first manned landing in fifty years. Next will come a colony on moon and an orbiting station that will serve as a launching pad for destinations beyond moon; Mars being the first one on the list. 

 

I am excited.

 

I grew up in a time when space travel was beginning. First there were satellites in orbit, then dogs, followed by humans. Soviet Union was ahead of US at that time. First satellite (Sputnik), first dog (Laika), first man (Gagarin), first woman (Tereshkova), first multi-man crew (Komarov, Feoktistov, and Yegorov), and so on. The anticipation was that the first human to land on moon would also be a Russian. The joke of the day was: “What will Americans find on moon when they land?” “Russians.” 

 

Then came the famous challenge by a young American president to land a man on the moon by the time the decade was finished.   Apollo program was born and we all know the history. 

 

We anticipated that the tremendous success of putting men on the moon will be followed up by manned-missions to Mars and even more distant corners of the solar system. We thought that even an average tourist like us will be able to travel to an orbiting hotel for vacation. When the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey came out, it did not look that far-fetched.  

 

Year 2001 came and went. Except for building of a space station and the space shuttle system, there was no excitement on the manned travel front. The idea of commercial space travel (for the ordinary folks like us) remained elusive. 

 

It took fifty years, but finally we may be moving in the direction I was hoping for during those early days. Thanks to a few rich megalomaniacs, commercial space travel may become possible in near future. Now with the Artemis system, travel to Mars may also be possible.

 

However, given how much time it has taken to reach this point and how much time I have left, it looks highly unlikely that I personally would benefit out of these developments. At best, I will be cheering from the sidelines, and hope that my grandchildren will fulfill my dream. 

 

This is assuming that things proceed the way I hope they would. Travel to Mars is still considered to be a big joke. (When a news reporter mentioned that possibility while reporting on Artemis launch, the news anchors, all of them, burst out laughing.) 

 

I don’t know how enthusiastic the younger generation is about space travel. Within my immediate circle, nobody has shown any interest whatsoever.  Without that enthusiasm, the funding will be hard to come by. “You think we should travel to Mars when we have all these problems at home?” is likely to be the argument that will kill any ambitious space travel. 

 

Growing up, I never thought that I may not live to see further space exploration in my lifetime, even though I might live a long life. 

 

Now that seems to be a distinct possibility. 

How an event could be interpreted in two ways

 

Many technologists think that we blame technologies or products, instead of people, when bad things happen. According to them, instead of blaming guns for violence in US, we should blame people who use them. “Guns don’t kill people, people do,” kind of argument. Many (most?) of us, including me, disagree. We believe that it is the availability of guns that has to be blamed.

 

When I think about it, I conclude that we are looking at the same event but we come from different perspectives. Let me illustrate:

 

Here is an event. The conspiracy theorists (like QAnon) use YouTube to spread nasty rumors about Muslims in America. The video is watched by millions of people who believe in such things. They go out and harm every Muslim in sight before they are stopped.

 

From a technologist perspective, YouTube was created to provide entertainment, but it was hijacked by people committed to spreading rumors. Result: harm to hundreds of innocent Muslims instead of entertainment.

 

From an ordinary citizen’s perspective, the groups like QAnon are always planning to spread rumors. However, the old way of sending letter or even emails was not very efficient. They would have converted a few people not millions. YouTube provides a way of quickly, cheaply and effectively spreading rumors on a massive scale, and hence harm to hundreds of innocent Muslims instead of a few.  

 

Take the event we are sickeningly familiar with: A massacre caused by a murderer, say in a school, using a legally obtained semi-automatic weapon.

 

Form a technology innovator’s perspective, the weapon was created for a good cause, to be used by soldiers in getting an upper hand in a combat situation. It was the murderer who misused the technology and caused mayhem. The result, twenty innocent lives lost, instead of twenty enemy troops.

 

From ordinary citizen’s perspective, the murder had an intent to causing harm. He would have used a knife and killed a couple of people. However, since the weapon was available, he bought and used it. The result: twenty innocent lives lost, instead of two.

 

So, the same event can be interpreted (or explained) in two ways depending on your perspective or your intent. However, as an ordinary citizen, I am appalled by the alternative views and consider them to be self-serving.

Labeling

 I had an interesting conversation with a very thoughtful person who I respect a great deal, about his objection to being labeled. The “labels” are what we use to describe ourselves of those we interact with. So, I may use terms like “Indian” or “Gujarati” or “Engineer” or “Liberal” to describe myself, or a person I am interacting with. Associated with each label is a list of attributes; such as expected behavior patterns, likes, and dislikes. These may be real of prejudicial.

 

His objection was related to these associated attributes, because they may be falsely assigned and unfair to the person being labeled. I agree, this would be objectionable, especially for those of us who are (or at least think we are) different from the others covered under the label being commonly applied to us. Ideally, we would like to know what lies underneath--- what are the person’s interests or views he/she holds. They may or may not be what one would assume given a label.

 

However, there are a couple of problems to achieving this “no-label” world. 

 

First, in many cases, you don’t have a choice from being labeled. A black person has to just show up to be labeled as a black person. An Indian has to open his mouth and a Muslim woman wear her hijab to be so labled.

 

Second, it will be difficult to start a conversation with someone unknown without asking a high level label-related question. My thoughtful friend was quite surprised by the first question we asked when we met someone, say at a B&B we were staying. It was: “Where are you from?” To him it was our attempt at label the person based on where he/she came from. When I asked what would he do, he said he would ask what that person’s interests are.

 

In my opinion, that would be quite awkward. If I say as the first question, “Hi, what are your interests?” I might get a glaring look back. So, “Where are you from?” is an innocuous beginning of a conversation, even if it implies we will judge the person based on the response. 

 

Assigning a label is tantamount to pre-filling a list of attributes associated with a person. We may change the list as we know him/her better, and even forget the label we had initially assigned. But we need something to start with.

 

We are here to live with labels, either you applying it to the other person or vice versa. The only hope is that we move beyond the label quickly and keep an open mind regarding the validity of the pre-filled attributes that come with it.

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I have covered related topics in my earlier Posts. In my Post of December 2013 (“No Name”) I wondered what would happen if we had no name, which is an extreme example of having no labels. In February 2015 Post (“Real You”), I developed a three-level structure to describe me (or you) based on a similar structure I read about in a book on 

It is a wonderful world!

 I have a doctorate in engineering and so understand physics, science and engineering fairly well, at least on an intellectual level. However, that does not mean that I do not experience a sense of awe at what nature has revealed to us thus far.

 

Let’s start from the images of universe and its myriad of objects. A good place to start given how fresh are the images sent by James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Although I know that there are 100 billion stars in our galaxies and there are 100 billion galaxies, plus or minus a few billion, I still feel overwhelmed when I see the images of deep space sent previously by Hubble, now refined by JWST. Now think about the fact that the visual stuff is just five percent of the universe. Some twenty percent is dark matter and the rest…seventy five percent---is dark energy. Now consider all that emerged from infinitesimally small singularity when the Big Bang occurred some 13.7 billion years ago. That’s not all. There are likely to be multiple universes around and there is also a possibility that the whole thing is nothing but mathematics, as per Max Tegmark of MIT.

 

From universe, let’s come down to the splendid complexity and variation of life on this earth. First of all, as Carl Sagan famously said, “we are made out of star stuff.” The heavier elements (besides Hydrogen and Helium) we are composed of would not have materialized if it were not the enormous temperature and pressure that are present in a star. As the star goes through its life cycle, it explodes dispersing this heavier stuff in the interstellar space and they eventually end up as our building blocks. How amazing is that?

 

For a physics and mathematics-oriented person, biology is a whole another world, so to speak. From a simple beginning of single cell life, how has nature created a complex human being? We are composed of some thirty trillion cells, each of them has a specific task to perform and requires regular nourishment. This count would double if we include microbiome…bacteria, viruses, and fungi…that live in/on us. 

 

Each cell is complicated and contain DNAs, RNAs and proteins. Recently, I started a course of biochemistry and molecular biology and finally grasped how complex the proteins are. There are thousands of them, each with its massive chemical and physical structure. DNAs themselves are a marvel of nature. They are complex molecules made out of three billion bases, which are “simple” chemicals. Something goes wrong with a few of them during reproduction and you have a mutation. However, it is the mutation that makes life as diverse as it is. New organisms emerge and those who are able to survive the situation then are able to thrive. The others don’t. 

 

Thinking about how a simple activity, like walking, requires an efficient execution of a complicated process. The retinas of eyes receive reflected light. That gets converted into electrical signals and get sent to a specific part of the brain which, through pattern matching, figures out what the eyes are looking at. It then sends appropriate signals to muscles that contract to make legs move while keeping balance. The “GPS” in brain notices where I am walking and gets me home. Unbelievable.

 

Even though the world that I perceive on my daily walks is complex, that is only a tiny sliver of what really exists, as described by Ed Yong in his book “An Immense World”. All of us, all living things, exist in our “sensory bubble” referred to as “Umwelt”, a German word. According to Ed, the earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic field. A lot of it is outside our Umwelt. Just see the dog sniffing around. It is able to detect what is beyond what we can. Or a turtle that can track earth’s magnetic field. Or a bat that senses obstacles in total darkness using radar. Each in its own Umwelt.

 

However, even those animals can’t detect the part of our universe that is very small. Beyond molecules and atoms are quarks. The small entities (like electrons or photon) behave like particles as well as waves. Some properties of these very small particles are bizarre. They can be anywhere until observed. Also, a particle can affect another (it is entangled with) immediately even if it is at the other end of the universe.

 

I cannot but marvel at what nature has created. and remember Louis Armstrong and his famous song:

 

What a wonderful world

 

Old laws, modern impacts

Planet Money of NPR is one of my favorite Podcasts. Recently, it had two episodes, back-to-back, that made me think about old laws in different parts of the world and what impacts they have in modern days. 

 

The first story was about lunch time in France. If you have done any business in that country, you would know that lunch in France is not munching sandwiches at your desk. They like to go out to eat and devote more than one hour to this activity. What I did not realize is that there was, until recently, a law that required people not to eat in office.

 

The reason was, in the old days they needed to clean up work places after so many hours of being occupied…. fumigate and so on. So, people were forced to leave office buildings during midday. So, a natural outcome was they ate lunch outside their offices instead of just cooling their heels. Recently, the law was changed so workers can be more like us, Americans, and eat in their offices without risking arrest (I jest).  However, people still prefer to eat lunch out and it is now a French tradition. Why? Because they enjoy camaraderie and time away from work in the middle of the day.

 

Result: This old law continues to be beneficial even in the modern days, not in the way it was intended but because it promotes better work environment. 

 

Another story dealt with a law that is related to the expiry date stamped on food packages. We are all familiar with these dates…good if used by xxx, not to be to be sold after yyy, and so on. Not only are there multiple ways these dates are reported, but there is no consistency and different states have different rules.

 

A specific example cited was for milk sold in Montana. The law in that state says that a grocery stores need to stop selling milk by twelve days after the cow was milked, while in most other states it is about twice as long. The reason for the law is that in the old days milk did not last that long which is clearly not applicable any more given the modern ways of storing and treating it. All other states have changed but not Montana. Now it is difficult to make change in that state due to a powerful milk lobby. If they increase the days milk is allowed to stay on shelf, outsiders may come in. Currently they don’t because twelve days does not allow enough time to transport milk from long distance and sell it. 

 

Result: People in Montana pay higher price for their milk just because of an old law. Not so good, but not the end of the world.

 

It is hard not to bring up another old law which is causing a devastating impact, unlike the milk law in Montana. This one applies throughout US, and is not really a law but a constitutional amendment. You know what I am talking about. It is the second amendment which gives citizens the right to carry guns. This law was created in the days of militia and fear of a malevolent government. Just as is the case with the prior two examples, this reasoning does not apply in the modern times, but it is almost impossible to make changes. Once again there is a lobby involved, the NRA. Thanks to the vicious circle of gun manufacturers, NRA and greedy politicians, this amendment remains in force.

 

Result: Terrible. Massacre after massacre, with no end in sight.