24 Kasım 2015 Salı

How to keep your sanity everyday?

From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

Molecular foundations of happiness

A great short read about the molecular foundations of happiness.

http://web.expasy.org/spotlight/back_issues/172

8 Eylül 2015 Salı

Mathematics, NSA, hedge funds and origin of life

Imagine a talk brilliantly covers topology, its applications in physics, finance and humble interest in origin of life.

Jim Simons: A rare interview with the mathematician who cracked Wall Street
http://go.ted.com/bdvr

29 Ağustos 2015 Cumartesi

Love is pathological

The best love story I have ever watched. However, it proves that you should have an insane mind or pathological to love... deeply...


13 Temmuz 2015 Pazartesi

VASTLY SPACE

I regularly check Elon Musk's twitter even though I stop using it 2 years ago. I came across one of his tweets "If the moon were only 1 pixel". Amazing work showing how our space is VASTLY EMPTY by means of scaling the map of solar system. In this map, as the title says, moon is 1 pixel and Sun and other planets are scaled down by reference to moon. You see how empty the space is... I have already chosen my book before sleep ;)


Here some quotes make you ponder on nothingness...

"It’s easy to disregard nothingness because there’s no thought available to encapsulate it. There’s no metaphor that fits because, by definition, once the nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist."




Here is the scaling map of solar system:

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

11 Temmuz 2015 Cumartesi

You Shouldn't Let Poets Lie to You


I have come across this amazingly cute "Björk talking about her TV" video. Wow. Such a cuteness and things that make you feel think about in this short video... I have watched again and again and still couldn't get enough of it. The way she describes the inside of television, the analogy she made like " a little city and this might be an elevator" shows the childish and at the same time creative side of her :)

Actually the things she said about TV is partially true. We are all hypnotized by watching TV. Either it is because the interesting program on screen (less likely) but mostly because we are really busy at that time to analyze what is going on there, or as Björk said, to bring all pieces together. So we literally swallow everything TV shows us.

Check this video from 1988...



Ex-Machina and Rise of Super Cool Scientists

I have just watched Ex-Machina (2015) in such a calm and lovely Sunday afternoon. As a sci-fi maniac and enthusiast of future of machine - human interaction, this movie has been on my list for a while. I am very glad I did it. Well, it should not mean that I am totally in love with the movie but instead it made me realize in a crystal clear vision that the image of science and scientists in public has taken a steep: scientists of old times with their obsessively cleaned lab-coats, thick glasses and anti-social behavior has been buried! Now, is the century for good-looking, sexy, rich scientists and their lost souls... In Ex-Machina, Oscar Isaac (very cool name) is starring as Nathan Bateman, CEO of a search engine company (can we say equivalent of Google?) Blue Book. He lives in an isolated place, in the middle of Nature, where is actually a research facility that he does some cool stuff in there like creating AI and lifting weights to stay fit. He also hates to speak like old-fashioned scientists and avoids using jargon. He likes to stick to street style. 



Domhnall Gleeson (Caleb) is an employee in Blue Book and apparently there was a competition going on inside the company in which the winner would be prized to spend one week with Mr Bateman in his house. So the guy ends up in his house and soon after he learns that the reason of his presence is to test newly created machine, highly intelligent Ava, whether she is capable of passing the Turing Test. Ava is a beautiful AI, has perfect body ratio that can manipulate any men's decision making. So, according to Caleb the Turing Test is biased in this situation because Ava’s sexuality is clouding his mind. I don’t want to give more details for those who would like to watch. You can learn after watching movie, whether Ava passed Turing test or not.

My overall observation is the new age scientists are imaged as super-hot, muscular or if woman slim/slender but curvy, fit and so relax… We get used to see scientists in their lab-coat, exploding things here or there, most probably asexual but handsome, fit and into sex? It must be a new trend. I also observed this phenomenon in new trend of “entrepreneurship”. Like Elon Musk… Is it some kind of selling strategy? Because It was proven that cute faces, men or women, tend to be more successful in life. People around them tend to trust them more than to the ones with less cute faces… Can it be the same strategy that Ava did to Caleb? Or is it simply our thrive for perfection?

Perfection in mind and body…


18 Haziran 2015 Perşembe

Cloud in the Sky

Awesome lyrics and melody by Archive from their Take My Head (1999) album.

14 Mart 2015 Cumartesi

Awesome YouTube Channel: Kurz Gesagt - In a Nutshell

I have just discovered a YouTube Channel named Kurz Gesagt - In a Nutshell. They have brilliant animated videos about everything that tackles our minds: What is Life?, Evolution, The time, Alien life and much more. I feel like I can move aside all my work and watch all the videos one by one in this Sunday afternoon. Here is the one I last watched.