“What is the end and aim of life? None, because I know that I am the Infinite. If you are beggars, you can have aims. I have no aims, no wants, no purpose.” –Swami Vivekananda

Whatever your personal beliefs, the works of Swami Vivekananda are, and will always remain, a source of great inspiration.

Links

(1) Welcome Address by Swami Vivekananda — Chicago, 11^th September 1893

(2) Complete Works Of Swami Vivekananda

OpenOffice.org Writer (OOW) is a decent piece of software, in terms of usability and features. One of its best assets is the ability to apply styles to any part or portion of the document, such as a page or paragraph. A ‘Heading’ style can be applied to all the headings, for instance, and a ‘Text Body’ style can be applied to the body of the paragraph. As long as styles are applied consis­tently across the document, the entire document can be updated in terms of fonts, inden­ta­tion, spacing and align­ment simply by modifying the original style.

When it comes to efficiency and speed, however, OpenOffice.org is floun­dering in the deep sea. The main program takes ages to load, and once it does, its menus and dialogs are still slow (even with 512MB RAM on an AMD64 3200+). Loading a text document shouldn’t be this hard. At the very least, backend editing features should be separated from the frontend document-viewing features so that viewing (as opposed to editing) documents is quick and easy.

OpenOffice.org has some level of depen­dency on Sun Microsystem’s Java. Java makes program­ming much easier than with C or C++, but it is way too slow for a desktop GUI-application, not inher­ently perhaps, but slow, all the same. I’m not sure if it is Java that is slowing down OOW, but I’m pretty certain it isn’t helping to speed it up.

If the next version of OOW does improve things to the point of not having to dread opening documents with it, then we can have some really useful compar­isons between Microsoft Word, AbiWord, KWord and OpenOffice.org. Until then…

Many of the comedy series on televi­sion have hilar­ious dialogues. If you can’t get hold of the video, you can simply visit a site like Twiz TV and read the transcripts of your favourite show.

The memory of a dream fades away before you know it, unlike memories of true events. Maybe it’s because the brain figures that what’s not real is not worth remem­bering. Still, the colours and the shapes seem to linger for much longer, and once those are gone, all that’s left is the emotional state built up gradu­ally during the dream. That’s probably why we wake up from our sleep feeling elated or irritable, although we have no recol­lec­tion of the dream itself.

To me, it appears that dreams are about trying out new connec­tions between real objects. It’s the people and things that we see in our day-to-day lives that manifest themselves in our dreams, albeit in strange ways. Maybe, the brain is trying to figure things out: there’s this huge jigsaw puzzle with a zillion pieces, and they’re being put together in different combi­na­tions to see if it still makes sense. I had a dream once. I was travel­ling on a train — or rather, on top of a train — and I could see things zooming by. I also recall that it had something to do with a railway station, but all I really remember is a lot of brown and grey, and a few shapes. Did this really happen (in a dream) or am I making this up just now? As a system admin­is­trator would put it, how do I ensure that my dream-database hasn’t been corrupted? Ask Slashdot? Yeah, right!

Links

(1) ‘Hacking’ Sleep

(2) Effects of sleep-deprivation

Yesterday was the day on which India became a Republic — but that was fifty-six years ago. Appar­ently, the people are still feeling pretty good about it, because it’s always been a national holiday. Oh well, I got a day off.

I feel the wind rush past my face,
It’s really cold I know,
I’m falling, falling past the clouds,
Amidst the rain and the hail and the snow.

The stone is strong, the ground is hard,
I know what waits below,
Until the day it comes to me,
I fly and dance and laugh ho! ho!

Little specks of white and blue,
Cloud-ish shapes and more,
The whooshing sound, a chime so sweet,
They’re so much fun to learn and know!

Towering shapes of mud and stone,
Fresh green trees below -

Splat!

Discus­sions about art, prose and poetry almost always centre around the notion that the artiste must have been trying to convey something from deep within his or her psyche. A simple state­ment such as, “the mountains were beautiful” will evoke an avalanche of musings from ardent readers as to the nature of the state­ment, the histor­ical backdrop of the writing, the genealogy of the author, and of course, the wars that were fought at the time.

If the mountains being beautiful had indeed been metaphor­ical phrase­ology, then couldn’t there have been a footnote that said so? That would have saved others the time and the effort of creating meanings out of thin air, especially the kind that no one else can compre­hend. Or better, wouldn’t it make sense for an author to say what he or she means to say, no more and no less, and make it clear that there is no deeper meaning to be derived?

…she’s back!

The relation­ship between the owner and the owned, the master and the slave, has been touched on in many science fiction works. This is an arena where the bound­aries between the realms of fiction and theolog­ical debate dissolve, and the genre of science fiction merges grace­fully into percep­tions of reality. It is, in fact, the culmi­na­tion of the growing idea that what was origi­nally consid­ered fantasy may eventu­ally become a practicality.

To delve right into the heart of the matter, every individual defines a set of entities that are ‘owned’ by him or her. A house, a car, a pet – these are accepted as entities that may be owned or possessed. But morality and ethics come into play when the entity being discussed is capable of mimic­king ‘human’ charac­ter­is­tics, viz. emotion and intel­li­gence. If a robot could pass the Turing test, would it have to be treated with the same respect as a fellow human being? Isaac Asimov’s Robot series has this question as a persis­tent under­lying theme. If we consider the real-life question of who should assume respon­si­bility of a cloned human-being, we will have to resolve the issue of owner­ship, by deciding if a clone ought to be consid­ered the property of another individual, or a human-being in its own right, no different from any other. Like the monster in Shelley’s classic Franken­stein, the clone may hold the scien­tist respon­sible for all the misfor­tune that it deems to have incurred at the hands of destiny.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the concept of individ­u­alism is anathema to the individual, a conse­quence of the strict code of behav­iour enforced by society. The society behaves as if it were a self-propelled organism that evolves into a monstrosity where the religion of technology suppresses ethics to create a world of clinical precision.

Asimov’s Founda­tion series, with a timeline spanning more than twenty-thousand years, gives us an account of a future that is similar in many respects. In Foundation’s Edge, the author borrows from James Lovelock’s Gaia hypoth­esis, extending the societal construct to living organ­isms in general, and describing a world where the idea of society being greater than the individual results in a Utopian world.

In both these accounts, there is an under­lying notion of the society as the owner or overseer of the individual, which is a plausible solution to the problem of defining bound­aries of individual owner­ship. For instance, if we consider the currently ongoing debates on the ethical aspects of human cloning, the primary objec­tion to the technology is that the individual is usurping the respon­si­bil­i­ties of a higher power. This dissent is somewhat silenced in Huxley’s world where society, as a power greater than the individual, assumes the respon­si­bility of the overseer or the parent.

The progress of science is towards creating a unified global commu­nity as evidenced by the devel­op­ment of commu­ni­ca­tion, trans­port, global organi­za­tions and multi­na­tional corpo­ra­tions. Although science may not be the sole factor in these devel­op­ments, it is the driving force, or the fuel that propels the ship. The scien­tific method, in a sense, is a religion of modern times, with the abstract society as an overseer or God. Whether this will lead to Huxley’s world or Asimov’s, only time will tell.

There ought to be an automatic hair-cutting device that someone can put on so that it cuts off all the hair that is longer than a partic­ular length. It’ll be devised according to the shape of the skull, and it’ll look like a helmet. I’m sure it’ll have great demand in the market.