Back here

Well, I am back here and I am writing from an iPad. Who would have known that, huh? When I first started writing I was in nottingham UK, kinda young determined to become famous blogger, partly pushed by Barney from how I met your mother. Now it is only year apart and a lot happened. I managed to get back to KZ, become unemployed and very sadly dearest friend of mine passed away. Fuck, time is something so usual and so common and yet it is something completely estranged from us human beings. Interestingly it is quite easy to write from touch screen, of course it is no substitute for conventional keyboard but a quick note can be made here, and I am sure that with time one can become pretty good at it. Well be right back some day I hope, always nice talking to you

Flexibility

In a current turbulent environment there is more pressure on a person’s abilities and characteristics than ever before. There are huge demands from all sides of this life and to be able to meet them someone has got to be very flexible. He has to be a leader and a servant all at the same time. A team player and and individualistic goal oriented person. All this seems impossible, well in fact it is. You just need to work really hard to be able to get all those faces inside of you. And if you are able to do so, maybe you will be successful. But the main question you ask yourself at the end of the day: Is it worth it after all? Of course success is something everybody strive for, it just has many faces. But after all those transformations you might someday look at the mirror and see a complete stranger in there. I mean we are what we do. And we do what we think is right to do, or at least we should act so. But sometimes in life you think, well one small step down a different possibly easier road will not change it that much. Here I have to disagree and say that it would. Because there is no such thing in life as a simple “break”. You cannot just sit one day and say to yourself, well I have been a consistent person all these days, and today is my day off. No, it doesn’t work like this! One step will inevitably force a second step and so on. So when thinking about just resting for a while from being a person you want to be think hard about whether you are up to face all the immediate consequences. It may sound stupid and probably even extreme but a person should live his life so that if tomorrow is his last day he can stand tall and say, I have always done what I thought was right, and I never bowed to the peculiarities of this world. It came to me today when I had to decide upon one small thing, but then I realized that it is not the way I do things, and I am sitting here right now, while I could have been somewhere else, and there is no regret.

I have no conclusion to this part. There should be no. Everyday the story continues and it is in your interest to make it the one you would want to tell about…

Twitter is way too good for me

Twitter is a great thing to share your thoughts and activities with your friends and also be able to see not only what your friends’ thoughts are, but also see what people who you don’t know but would want to know do or think. But the problem for me is that Twitter has a word limit for a single tweet, and I am too dumb to compress my thought into a pre specified space. Of course I can write something like “on a plane, going somewhere” but what would that mean to anybody? Well, apparently I am on a plane, so what? It doesn’t entertain me much to know something trivial like this. I really would like to see the logic behind each action and I am also not so smart to interpret something like “eating at a beach”. Writing that I can’t interpret such thing essentially means is that I will have million of scenarios of why this person could have possibly ended up on beach or on a plane and each has equally little probability. So even though I really find something interesting about posting tweets I find it too hard and confusing. So at the end I opted out for blog, because here there is no word count and I can spill your dumb thoughts without an end. In essence Twitter is a blog but face lifted by relentless process of progress and it is aimed at people who really live in time with the progress. So that each and every minute they have something to do and each and every minute they change their mind so that they can’t afford to write such long Blogs I am writing right now. Probably when I will be able to post tweets properly that would mean an end to the thinking process I am so proud of now yet which maybe an old way of thinking about something or writing about something.

Pursuit of happiness and cycle of unhappiness

People are idiots. That is an axiom and I suppose no one will dare to question it. Consider a simple person lets call him “he”. He lives his simple life and he is generally happy about it. Suppose there is one person for him which makes him feel happy. And a simple smile or even a shadow of smile on the face of this other person makes him feel exceptional. There are other people around him which feel the same way about him, but he doesn’t care because all he is looking for is his unique “person”. Now this unique person let us call her “she”. She is living her life and also generally happy about it. But there is some other person not “he” which is closely watched by “she” which makes her feel exceptional. Again “she” is surrounded by many other people who feel something special about her, but she doesn’t care, because she also has this unique person. So there is this vicious cycle of unhappiness created in life by human beings. This vicious cycle creates some inefficiency because if “he” just settles for some other person then, this other person wins and there is a chance that “he” would be able to forget “she”. The same applies to “she” and in the end there would be gains to such alternative allocation. But there is something magical about this cycle of unhappiness that probably drives the progress in some way, makes people write poems and engage in some other productive activities which they wouldn’t have engaged into otherwise if they were totally happy with their lives. So in the end such scenario is beneficial to human race as a whole even though individuals could be made better off. Here is some major contradiction in the mechanism of life which makes it so hard but oh so interesting. )))

 

Inspired by “She”

Why do we smoke?

Majority of non-smoking people think that smokers smoke because of biological properties of smoker. Once someone started to smoke his body demands some amounts of nicotine each day. I think that is a total bullshit and I can explain why. First I tried some diets in my life and easily obeyed to them, second I can be really restrictive in anything – so for example I like watching movies, but I can easily not watch a movie for a month or even more. You see because food has some vitamins and proteins inside by not having a particular one we forfeit some vitamins, of course people can say that we compensate by eating more of something other which is perfectly sensitive. But when I stopped eating something my daily ration didn’t change apart from that particular something. And I can assure you that vitamins are such a narcotic that when you lack some vitamin you really feel sick.

So I drop this explanation of smoking. Many also think that smoking is just a habit, that smoking people just got used that there is something smoking in their hand and they are comfortable with that. They go on to explain that it is a lot easier to talk about something when you have cigarette in your hand and stuff like that. I was also one of them. But again I never found it hard to get rid of some particular habit and always made it if not quickly, at least easily and harmless.

Third explanation I came up this morning when the fire alarm went off at 8 am. The whole house I am living in was forced to get to the street and wait until everybody else go out. I was standing there without cigarettes and thought well now you are part of this world, all these people who stand where and who worry about what will happen next or how are they going to fall asleep again and many other things. And then I saw a person who were smoking. He stood few meters away from the general crowd in which I was also included as I had no cigarettes. He just stood there and smoked and I realized what cigarette really offers. It offers a moment of sanity to a person in the insane world. It offers a safe harbor where you can just think for a while about anything you like. It provides people with the moment of relaxation and self-actualization.

Boom

Sometimes find yourself waking and up and thinking how did I get here? If yes you are not alone. Right now I feel kind of frustrated, and I really don’t know what to do. So I decided to take that time out I have written about earlier. The main point here is to do something that makes you feel good. Don’t think about anything at all, just chill and if you are lucky enough you may find yourself at the end of the day knowing exactly what you want, and what you should do for it. The essence behind such downturns is that it is not always a good idea to go forward without thinking. Of course movement is life, but it is way better to stop for a second and think about where you should go and where are you now than just walking wherever you legs guide you. This is exactly the problem of so called “corporate zombies” or for example “book worms”. they just lived their life very determined and were always moving forward, and there is one nasty thing about moving forward is that when you progress you need double of your effort to progress further. So they were doing this for years and one day they found themselves so afraid to look at what they become that they just skipped this important part of life and just continued moving.

I hope this will never happen to me because until now I was able to make this “pauses” and sometimes it gets quite ugly, but nevertheless it is something which is very useful.

Girls, What about them?

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there is nothing smart you can write about this topic, you should just live with it…….

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Alcohol Induced Behaviour Distribution

This article requires some knowledge of elementary statistics from the reader. But I hope that even those who haven’t had any statistical background will understand this. Anyway I hope it will be a good read!

Suppose we can summarize some characteristics of a person when he is sober or simply not drunk by a normal distribution with mean Ms (standing for mean sober) and variance Vs( standing for Variance sober). For example assume that characteristic is number of jokes told on a date. Actually jokes are bad example because joke is a discreet random variable so better to say speed with which one drives a car. So if a person is sober he drives a car at 60kph with some probability. Such a characteristic will be represented by a following graph:

So in the above graph X is just a speed of car when a person is sober. And if on average he drives at 60kph when he is sober then 60=Ms. Of course sometimes his mood is up and he drives faster whereas sometimes his mood is down and he drives slower or the other way around. Note that if a person’s distribution is close to y-axis his distribution will be truncated because it is probably not a good idea to assume negative values for characteristics. For example in the case of jokes: somebody can’t tell negative amount of jokes or can’t drive a car at –60kph. Of course this model is technically and graphically clumsy but my aim is not precision but rather explanation. So we can come up with many different characteristics that can be graphed like above. Consider talking, then X can be either amount of words spoken when sober on a typical day or words per minute which is just a speed when sober with which a person usually talks. Now we can come to the interesting part of the model: how does distribution changes when a person is drunk? (Important point to know is that the area under the curve is equal to one, which means that the person doesn’t do anything which is out of the curve range) (Also technical notes: Mean is just an average, while variance can be paraphrased as “differences in day to day behaviour”)

Consider a picture below

(D is the speed of the car when a person is drunk). Now when the person got drunk variance of his characteristic increased Vd (Stands for Variance drunk). So that Vd>Vs. Note however that his mean is still the same as Md=Ms (or in other words he is still the same person). In the case speed he still drives at the same speed on average even when drunk. But now with higher variance he is more likely to do some stuff he was less likely to do when he was sober. For example drunk people do things they regret, or do things they thought they never would do. Of course distribution could change in other way

In the above “upper” picture after a person got drunk his distribution got skewed to the left. So that his mean changed and now Md>Ms. You sometimes notice that you cannot recognize a person when he is drunk, it is like looking on some other person. Well no big deal, not only his Variance increased so that Vd>Vs but also he is more likely drive fast on average because his mean also changed. So this person gets really excited and risk-loving when he gets alcohol but also he gets really unstable. In the above “lower” picture the person has Md<Ms which means in case of jokes that he is kind of getting depressed when he is drunk. For example if you go to the bar you can see two or three people absolutely without a mood, but probably there are not so when they are sober, and importantly not all of them got some bad news today. So that only fraction of people who are depressed are depressed because of some bad news while other fraction is simply depressed because of the effect of the alcohol. Also important that you frequently observe drunk people mood changes from depressed to absolutely “high” in a blink of an eye that is caught by higher variance.

Now let us try to use our model and come up with some recommendations for people.

We can in general categorize each characteristic into a “bad” one and a “good” one. Of course such categorization will be highly subjective but suppose we can do that. For example getting into fight when you are drunk can be categorized as “bad” characteristic while getting a better mood while not always good at least harmless so can be categorized as “good” characteristic. So assume that bad is something that everybody or at least most people evade, while good is something that most people enjoy and find entertaining.

So the recommendation will be as follows: if your Md for bad characteristic is higher than Ms or your Vd is higher than Vs or even both, then it is probably not a good idea for you to drink much. If on the other hand your Md for bad characteristic is smaller than Ms and at the same time your Vd is smaller than Vs (because if you fight much when you are sober only having a smaller variance does not help much, and maybe even hurts the situation) probably drinking doesn’t turn you into a monster so you can possibly go on.

The same can be said in the other direction: if your Md for good characteristic is larger than Ms then people probably love to drink with you.

How you can get this statistics for yourself? Simply ask your friends and I am sure you will get a great, detailed feedback especially if your characteristics are mainly “bad” ones.

Good Luck, Hope it helps)

Automated Life

With Google Maps at hand we can plan our trip up to smallest details of when to get out of the house and at what bus stop to get the bus. It also tells you how you can do it  by foot or by car. I can imagine the next step in this evolution. You wake up in the morning and enter few simple parameters like time when you woke up, your mood and maybe your interests. Probably interests would be recorded only once you begin using this Live programme. Then you can add and subtract interests depending upon your current interests. So when you finish entering all the relevant information which has to be quite easy and quick it will tell you what to do in every detail.

Consider a list like this:

Have breakfast: 2 eggs etc. it will take approximately 20-30 minutes

Put clothes on: probably sport suit will do today approximately 10 minutes

and so on

We can think further of interactive programme which does this not only for you but for many other people and makes sure that you don’t run into people you possibly don’t want to see today. of course this works also in other direction. So for example if one person added you to a black list his day schedule would be so as to minimize his exposure to you. Of course this only happens if people accept to be the part of this big system. If it happens it reaps of huge part of uncertainties that make our lives so unique. 

One day

It was this friday. I woke up at 7 am in order to be in time for my date with Police Department. Interestingly I found it quite easy to wake up even though I was up till 3am the night before.  So after I finished with breakfast I went on to review the documents I need for Police and then it came to me. The leaflet was saying that appointment is at 9:15pm. I am not a big fan of this am pm thing so I looked up in google to be 100% sure about when I should go there. After few minutes of reading the article in Wikipedia I realized that 9:15pm means 21:15 on a normal human scale of time. I couldn’t go back to sleep because I already had few coffees so I decided to watch a movie.

I then went to University and had some lectures, everything was as usual but something was different. I felt that today is not my day, probably because I woke up early or because some other small details. Anyway, I went on to study afterwards and wait until 8pm to go to the city where police department is.

Sat on the bus and realized that I haven’t been out of uni for so long that I kinda forgot the city. So I was going through streets which looked familiar but as if I didn’t see them for years. That was quite strange and at that moment I realized what does it mean to be a corporate zombie. You live your life just the same everyday. You do your work properly, going extra hours and the world outside slowly fades away from you. You viewpoint narrows down to simple routes you know. For example, way from home to work, from work to gym and from gym to home. It can also include some cafes you sit in but that’s all. I felt bitter at that moment so I switched my thought to another topic. While I was thinking I realized I went to far on the bus. I took off and luckily I was quite near city centre just on the other side I’ve never been to.

On my way to police station I was going through McDonald’s and because it was still too early I decided why not? I value European point of view that no matter how you like you are a customer and that means you mean the whole world to the service company, but this time I was able to see the other side of this approach. I was sitting eating my BigMac and next to me there were a table where bums were eating. I don’t know whether its only me but I felt discomfort so I immediately finished my burger and went to police with chips and tea in my hands.

As I approached PD I was relieved when doors opened before me and I could walk in. My relief ended quickly as the women on the front desk told that there had been a mistake and no one actually works at 9:15pm. Must say I had this possibility in my head on my way.

Victoria Centre kinda biggest shopping mall in Nottingham was really close and I knew that I could find couple of bus stops there so I immediately went to it. I didn’t have to wait much because bus 36 was standing there and before going into it I asked the driver if bus goes to Beeston. He replied yes and I hopped in. Must say that I never saw such a decent bus before. Its seats were all in black-something like leather and it was in general very clean without any odd smell. First minutes of trip felt ok, we were going through places I always see when on a bus like Toyota and Lexus outlets. But then it got strange. We passed through university gate and went on driving leaving UoN far behind. I was really anxious about that so when I saw sign “east midlands conference center” I immediately felt better. So I decided I exit the bus and go wherever this sign points. When I finally got to this sign I saw it was pointing the way the bus actually headed but I decided to go further because I knew I saw uni gates on the way here. It was 1:30 hour trip and I had a lot of time to think. Interestingly nothing of it upset me and I was even slightly positive about the trip. Only thing that disappointed me is that Londis (the shop at the campus) was closed when I arrived so I ended up with no chocolate for all friday evening.

 

 
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