I have not posted something in the "meaning of life" category for some time now. I have a bunch of things to say. I will say each individually and in the end connect them all. :)

Weighted Sum of Energies

I am a strong believer in thoughts have power - when you think of something you exert an energy for that to happen. If your energy is strong enough you would cause it to happen. But wait! you are not the only one thinking! Yes, everyone's thought have power, when I think of something I execute energy in one direction, when you think different of the samething you exert energy in a different direction. The net movement is in the sum of the two energies. Say person A's energy moves it 1 unit to the left and person B's energy moves it to 1000 units to the right. The object happens in the right direction (no pun intended :)). Where your energy comes from - is a whole different question - I think it comes from a range of things, your confidence, actions etc..

The movement of events in the world are a weighted sum of all our "energies" (as referred above).

Non-Greedy Optimization

Here is a thought I had. Have you ever heard people say "its for the best" - when something happens, and things seem to have gone wrong for you. When someone says "its for the best" what they mean is for some reason beyond your comprehension this was the best thing that could have happened to you. May be if what ever this event was, did not happen, something worse could have happened.

Say you are working in a graph problem:
You have 4 nodes A, B, C and D.
A is connected to B, with a cost of going from A to B = 1 unit
A is connected to C, with a cost of going from A to C = 10 units
B is connected to D, with a cost of going from B to D = 100 units
C is connected to D, with a cost of going from C to D = 1 unit

You start at A and your final destination is D. You want to minimize cost. You don't know all the costs in advance. You go to a node, and you learn about the costs of visiting other nodes from there.

So, you start at A, and you look at the costs for going to B and C. They are 1 and 10 units respectively, so you would decide that B is the better option, only to later let it cost you much heavier. The journey from A to B to D would have costed you 110 units.

The best way would be, to start at A, choose to go to C, even though it is a higher cost, you would experience a much lower cost from C to D. The whole journey would have costed you 11 units.

Thats 110 Vs 11 units!

I believe this is how our life is. We are at a node, there are a whole range of things that can happen. Something bad seems to happen, and we feel depressed, but I believe its part of a greater optimization algorithm which due to our ignorance we don't realize (and may never)...like the case above, if from A you are forced to take path C, you might feel angered...it cost you more!! but only so that in the end you have a cheaper (better) journey.

Let's try to combine them

The flip side to the second thought is of course, does this mean everything is pre-determined? Well, I think that would make everything somewhat pointless....if everything were predetermined...why!? why do we exist? what can be found...everything is already known. There is no point to anything!

I know there can be arguments against that, since my arguments assume some rationality and things like this is not some crazy experiment conducted for fun by some higher being etc...but thats just a bit too crazy for me to believe in...and I'd rather stick to my thoughts :)

So, here is what I think might be happening. Let me do some defintions to explain my idea:
Entity: An entity can be a person, animal, thing...who knows what else.
Nodes: Nodes are events and things like that. Entities traverse nodes.

An entity traverses through the nodes. The twist is, the nodes don't have static costs. The costs of the nodes vary based on the thoughts of the entities. There is a direct connection between all nodes. The cost of some of them may be really high (think infinity), making them impossible for the optimization algorithm thats running to choose those nodes. But, since the costs between the nodes are based on the thoughts of entities - the energy that they exert - an entity can potentially make a path from a node A to B where it did not exist (i.e reduce the cost from infinity to zero or what ever that works out to be the best).

There you have it! Thats one of my tries/theories to undestand on how our world works under the category of "meaning of life"

There are many more things I want to say, that are starting to come up in my mind...but I have to end this somewhere and its getting late, so I'll end this post here. I hope that was not too intense and that I did not scare any one away...haha... :)

Labels: philosophy, random

Today, I had some home made desert made of fruits and condensed and evaporated milk. I believe that the amount of fat in these milks is really high. But the amount of the milk we added to it was little (2 teaspoons I think).

I started thinking - if I eat something thats 20 grams, how can it result in me gaining more that 20 grams of weight. Then this is how I figured it probably is like: a 100kb file in 1 file system when moved to a different file system may take up 110kb in the 2nd file system - because of the file system's structure and layout I am guessing. Similarly, the 20 grams of food is processed and converted to our body's file system, which may result in us putting more weight.

Thinking about it some more, I figured the above would be a violation of conservation of mass; this is what probably happens when we eat high fat things like the condensed milk, and later drink water or other fluids, the body starts retaining it to match the fat level. Thus we put on weight. The key to our weight would then be the amount of water in our body (which - the water retention - would depend on the other things we eat).

Labels: food, health, random, thoughts

When I opened Firefox today, I saw a link in the home page to "Why is Firefox the safest web browser?" page. I just loved this line that I read :)

An international community of security experts is working around the clock to make your web browsing safer...It's like having your neighborhood watch led by a group of highly trained ninjas...

Hehe...that brought up a smile on my face :)

Labels: funny, random

Google's chrome is out and its in beta. My very first impression of chrome, was mediocre. I didn't know why another browser? and what is special about this one? It's new different look did not dazzle me either. I didn't spend much time on it though...there was work to do (I was at work and stumbled upon it when I was going to do a search).

Labels: random

Edit: Hmm....may be it wasn't that funny, anyway, I have taken some of the text (that was supposed to be funny, but most people did not get and left a few in...)

For our project, one of the tasks was to come up with an OR story. Me and Vikas we came up with this: :) ... in a light note (hope you find it funny...2 tough critics have said its ok...lol...it has some implied Systems references)

A Utopian vehicle manufacturing company realized that the electricity bill for the year was really high. After a study, they found out that one of the areas of concern was the lighting in the parking space. The parking space required lighting at night since the plant operated 24 hrs a day for weekdays and sometimes weekends. Therefore, the head of the finance consulted the head engineer, also known as the "Big C", about this problem, in the "meeting of the heads" (which shall be remembered for generations to come). After consulting, the Engineer inspected the parking lot at night to check how much flux was being generated by the lights at night. After inspecting, the Engineer, who is a Systems Design Engineer (from the legendary class of '77), remembered that he learnt about a method of Optimization in his third year of Engineering (which unknown to him he will teach in 31 years). The Engineer thinks that if he can minimize the lighting flux while maintaining levels of visibility (you got to be able to see you know!) for the three parking lights, then he can probably apply that to the entire parking lot to minimize the bill.

Labels: funny, random

Hehe...Just for the heck of it...here are two photos taken from my camera [phone]:

Parking lot next to the plaza (actual location not named to protect privacy :P):


My Room (a 180 degree view):


The panaroma sort of messed up in the picture above. It wasn't visible in small screen, but its obvious in full size.

May be I should get an actual camera, I like to do this :D

Labels: photos, random