I am so going to get this book

Finally, someone who speaks my language!

Someone who attempts to bridge the very big (relativity) to the very small (quantum physics).

Well actually, a few people already described the same a few thousand years ago. Lao Tze, Siddharta, a few Greeks. I just couldn't understand the gobbledigook.

But its gonna be fun seeing the woo woo stuff through the eyes of physics and neurology so I'm going to be busy reading this weekend. ^_^

This is the abridged summary by the author.

On faith as belief without evidence

I had the biggest scare of my life a few days ago when I spotted what I thought was a dead body lying under a tree near my condo. No joke. It was 7am in the morning. The body lay motionless and looked pale, as if all the blood had drained from it. And it was partially covered with dried leaves.

I went over, heart thumping. I prodded the body, hoping its not dead. After about a minute, the eyes slowly opened. It was a young male caucasian (no wonder the pale skin) and he was pissed drunk. I wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or tell him off for giving me a fright. By that time, other joggers had come over to see what was going on and I left it to them to sort it out.

For a brief moment, the incident did make me pause and think about the ultimate question. No, not where to have breakfast but if he were actually dead, where would he be? The Catholic heaven, the Mormon heaven or whatever heaven he believed in?

The same thoughts ran thru my mind years ago when I saw some people gunned down (gang fight) in L.A.

Some of my friends don't believe in heaven or anything God related. Too many inconsistencies and contradictions, they say. No evidence, no belief.

It's a loaded statement that invites a whole nebula of arguments that I won't get into here. One of the things that I'm glad about though is to have studied astronomy as a subject in college. You know what was the greatest lesson I learnt from it?

That I should take my eyesight, my mind and other biological senses with a pinch of salt.


Look at the night sky with your naked eye. What do you see? Probably nothing but black and a few stars. So you tell yourself its mostly empty space up there. You don't see nuthin', you assume there's nuthin'.

And then you look at the output of an x-ray telescope and suddenly your whole perspective changes. Damn, those things weren't there before. You saw nuthin' but there's a whole bunch of somethings there now!

A scientific journal estimates that 9 billion neutrinos from outer space pass through your thumbail every second. That's a lot of particles. Yet we can't see or feel a thing.

Your eyes, it turns out, are woefully incapable of seeing everything out there, which kinda makes the phrase, "I'll believe it when I see it" sound rather narrow and self-serving.

But this sets up an interesting proposition for everyone.

No one can disprove there isn't a flying invisible teapot orbiting between the earth and the sun. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there. Just like the neutrinos and the nebula in the picture, maybe you haven't got the right instrument to see it. You can replace the teapot with anything you like. A giant chicken, a green alien, or a God of your choice.

It does throw a spanner in the works for me as far as beliefs go. Why do you believe what you believe? Because it feels so "right?" just like how others believe their beliefs feel so "right"?

Did you see something they didn't? Or did they see something you didn't?

What instrument did you use to see what you saw? Are you sure that's all there is to see? What if I could come up with a more sophisticated instrument to see beyond what you saw, like the x-ray telescope?

Still, as sophisticated as x-ray telescopes are, there's only so much they can reveal so I'm not going to say it gives me the final definitive picture of reality. 'Coz I'll be the moron if some guy comes up with a subspace gravitronic telescope tomorrow and sees everything x-rays can see plus a whole lot more. Yes, maybe even an invisible orbiting teapot speeding around the sun.

The point is, we don't know a lot of things and its silly to act as if we do. And worse, to believe that what we're told as "truth" is the ultimate truth. Obviously I have my principles for survival reasons but I keep an open mind, knowing that if I don't see the evidence, it may simply be because I haven't found a technology sophisticated enough to see it yet.

As astrophysicists say, the universe and by extension, existence, is a lot weirder than we think.

Current affairs

I dislike politics because after following the last US elections closely, I've come to generalize politics (maybe unfairly) into one sentence.

May the best liar win.

What I read from Iran and Italy recently merely strengthened this.

But to those who want change and didn't get it through the voting process, let me ask you one question. Who do you think is the problem - the politician or the people who voted him in?

Of course its the politician you might say. Stupid question. However everyone ignores the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the 60% of the people who voted the scoundrel in.

Okay, lets say 20% of the vote was rigged as is the usual complaint. Still, that means 4 out of 10 people are honestly convinced that this openly corrupt, lying, even murderous scumbag is the right leader for them.

Don't you get the shivers if you knew that every other person standing around you support an openly sick psychopath?

I know that's how some people felt when America voted in G W Bush not once but twice as president, after proving himself not once but many times to be one of the most incompetent leaders in its history. I am seeing a resurgence of that in ex-Gov Sarah Palin, a clueless but pretty airhead who've created a fan base of horny Republican males who might just succeed in pushing her to be US President in 2012.

Now statistically, to have 5% of a country's population be fanboys of a famously incompetent leader is normal. The same no. of people are inclined to scrawl "Mickey Mouse" on the ballot paper and put a tick there anyway. But to get 50-60% support for an openly sick or retarded bastard?

Something's not right here. Either the people who support him are also sick bastards or the bastard is not as sick as the press makes him out to be.

And that's the thing I dislike most about politics. You can be served many versions of the truth but you can never get the real truth.

Or maybe, there's no such thing as truth and that politics is a battle of perception, not the truth.

I like what my friends say. Forget politics, its more fun to download porn.

Hmmm. Maybe they have a point.

Being normal. Is there such a thing?

Would you consider yourself to be a normal (= average) person?

Normal as in you'd melt into the crowd because you dress like everyone, talk like everyone, harbor the same hopes and dreams as everyone?

Boys want the 6 C's. Girls... I dunno what they want. Nice clothes? Everyone's so predictable you could take any random person, write a description about him or her and find that most of what you wrote is true. That's how similar we all are despite our valiant efforts to be different.

Ok, so we've grown up getting whacked if we don't conform. It starts from home where you're told how to behave and follows you to school and work where you're told how to behave. Yeah, from parental pressure to peer pressure. That's why I laugh at books that tell you to dare to be different when society whacks you the moment you actually try to be different. In my age group for instance, one of the things you do not want is to be called "gay." If you wear a pink shirt, you're gay. If you're born with super smooth skin, you're gay. And if you drive at slower than daredevil speeds on the streets, boy you're definitely gay.

So we insecure dudes avoid wearing pink anything, we culture trophy scars on our faces and we endanger other people's lives on the road in bursts of machismo driving in our bid to be "not gay" (=normal).

I can't tell you how silly that is, having grown up in the San Francisco area and used to seeing people who do all these macho things and they are gay as a fly.

Anyway, sexual orientation is not what this post is about. Its about this whole business of conformity, about how we expect - no, demand conformity from others. Its about how we are quick to take down anyone who doesn't talk, dress and think like us even if they come to us in good faith. Its about how in our rejection of such types, we are helping to reinforce the creed of "be normal or else," the very thing we dislike about our peer-pressurists.

Back at school I'm not ashamed to say I was the odd guy out, a weirdo. When kids were busy thronging around their favorite alpha male, I'd sit alone. No amount of bullying would make me grovel at some jock's feet. Even the girls shied away because they couldn't deal with someone who wasn't an alpha or wasn't a slave to one.

So I learnt very early on that there is a steep price to pay for not being Mr. Popular or Mr. Groupie. But I survived. The result: my tolerance to "deviants" is a lot higher than your average jock who cries "gay" to everything he doesn't like. Some see that tolerance as a weakness. I see it as a strength, because I can live in strange cultures in different countries and not mess up my mind as much as the guy who believes that only he defines what's normal or cool.

On the question whether its good to be normal (I've been asked that question before), the question actually makes no sense to me because "normal" in Hachioji, Japan is not the same as "normal" in Hammond, Indiana. When you travel that much, normal ceases to carry a meaning. That's why I've come to conclude that people who make fun of "abnormal" people tend to mentally insular and small-townish. But that's okay. If they haven't been out of their hometowns, who can blame them for not having any idea that from a big picture perspective, there is no such thing as normal.