Blogs and Politics

They say if you don't talk about politics in your blog, then it is not a real blog. Ok, I really don't enjoy talking about politics but for the sake of the blog ideology, I'll do this now. Let's talk about the war in Iraq. First of all, I’m totally against it. But one of the things that bothers me with this war is the lack of objectivity. What is the goal? To say that the goal is to get rid of Evil, that’s too vague. Besides, God and the good folks have been trying that already for awhile, I don’t think it will be an easy task. But back to my point, if we had measurable goals it would be much easier for the community to understand where we are with the war. Examples of measurable goals:
- Have only 200 civil casualties/month, for 3 months in a row
- Have zero US/Iraq casualties/month, for 3 months in a row
- Stay there until the gasoline price drops to $1/galoon
Something along these lines. Even Hitler (which was a monster, did terrible things and was responsible for several million deaths - *disclaimer*) had a measurable goal: he wanted to dominate the world. That’s measurable: you can keep track of where he is at with his commitments. So that would be my taken on politics: they need to be more specific. Whether they really want to be more specific is a different story…

Dan Simon beat me in and out of the court :(

Today I had the opportunity to play squash with Dan Simon. Dan Simon (http://research.microsoft.com/crypto/dansimon/me.htm) was the first one to prove that Quantum Computers can do things that Classical Computers can't. Last summer I studied Quantum Computing at UW - boy, it is just heavy math, believe me, heavy stuff. In this course I learned about the algorithm the Simon invented. It gave me a lot of headaches... Today for the first time we played squash at Pro Club. I thought with myself: "Ok Sir, payback time!". I wish... He got me 9x3 and 9x7.

What the hell/heaven happens on the other side?

Religion is something very interesting: although all religions praise love, peace, honesty, etc, which is kind of cool, when it comes to predicting or I should say prophesizing what happens after death they all diverge. Some claim there will be a paradise and a hell – basically if you did well on earth you’ll get all the good stuff, otherwise you’ll be punished endlessly for the bad things you’ve done (in other words, you’re screwed...). Ok, that’s fair. Others claim that you’ll come back to earth incarnated in some another animal (or plant perhaps?). And the list of religions and post-life theories keep going on and on. Thinking about this when I was taking a shower, I came to the following conclusion:
There are only two valid scenarios:
a) One and only one of these religions is correct
b) None of these religions is correct
Notice that the current existing religions have post-life theories that do not overlap with each other, so the possibility that two or more religions are correct is not valid.
Therefore, if (a) is correct, when we die someone on the other side will say: “ok, for those of you who followed religion abc, please take the stairways to heaven. Everyone else, please go straight to hell”. If (b) is the correct answer then that’s even worse: “ok folks, getting down please, everybody down”. Hum, kind of interesting and scary. Oh well, I think I had a long day today.

Being Young

If you can swim 2,000 yards today...
There will be a day that if you can swim 1,000 yards, you'll still be young
And there will be a day that if you can swim 200 yards, you'll still be young
And there will be a day that if you can swim only 50 yards, you'll still be young
And then...
There will be this day
That if you can just feel the wind blowing on your face
And the smoothness of the water touching your hands
You will feel as young
As you've never been before...

Well, welcome to my thoughts!

Hello all, glad you're reading this, that means you want to know what's on my mind. Right now there isn't much of interesting :-), but just want to welcome you to this space.