facts of life: random

I’ve finally caught up on some reading. Some of the more interesting by-products of today’s deep thoughts and reading are listed below:

  • drone subs: at any given second, we can see drone planes whizzing around, but there must be enumerable drone subs combing the bottom of the sea too. both commercial and military. Looking for sunken treasure, oil, or laying in wait. The resources of the ocean are undermined to date,, so this is ‘exploration’ is possibly the next resource frontier. If used properly, it would be a good thing.
  • Like newton’s first law, The effect of almost any incident has usually an element of good and bad and stimulates peaks and valleys in the ‘event wave’ (to use water as the analogy). take for eg: bubonic plague –> invention of calculus; world war ii –> invention of computer, a liberation of european intellectual power immigrating to the u.s. and onto that generations many accomplishments..
  • Akbar the great, (the mughal who is most famous for building the taj mahal) is a very interesting character. He is a bit like Louis IV, or even cosimo de medici. militaristic, strong, but enlightened and pluralistic in his beliefs. Revamped the concept of equality among muslims and hindis, revised taxation, translated persian texts into hindi and vice versa. a catalyst in the best sense…. the india of the mughal era, was religiously diverse and multi-cultural. the creation of pakistan during 1947 is such a bad idea.. taking a group of people artificially and creating a country from them..  At the time, it’s the only solution but, the fall-out and dislocation always creates mega-conflict as it beckons the  intense power grab which follows, in my op. The best way should be the transition method, from most cases of people-moving and nation-building.My long-term fascination with spain is finding itself mutating into the fascination with india. Going to read Gandhi’s autobiography next – “the story of my experiments with truth” available free online here.
  • John Travolta is an accomplished pilot, licensed to fly numerous aircraft, including a Boening 747 jet.
  • Reading “In Search of Memory” by Eric Kandell. Learning how the brain works, at a molecular level is a bit like watching a car drive around a race course… almost all blackbox. the machinery for memory, it turns out is both complex and elegant. learning about it is very very similar to how an internal combustion engine works.. there are all these events that happen, that push along the memory. serotonin, glutamate, kinase A, Cyclic AMP, KREB, NDMA and bunch of other stuff. The mechanism can target specific synapses. given then each neuron can have hundreds of axons, that gives an idea of the mind-numbing number of circuits that can be created. the book is highly recommended.
  • We are at a level of understanding biological engineering, similar to the level we were at with electronics in around 1900-1910. We can build simple things, most of which are of little use except as playthings, but demonstrate knowledge of how things work. The true value will be unlocked later on.
  • On Level 256 of all Classic Pac-man, there is a glitch in the sub-routine of generating the bonus items, which causes an integer overflow which all the code to be one read, a digit off.. this makes the level appear as if it was on lysergic acid.

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