July 27, 2006
"Tonight" Party
Imagine there's a party or show or whatever, and it's called "Tonight". Then a few days before it happens, conversations like this will take place:
-Have you got tickets for "Tonight"?
-Yeah, but I forget when it is, is "Tonight" tomorrow or the day after ?
-"Tonight" is tomorrow night.
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Now imagine the name of the show is "Last Night".
-Are you going to the show "Last Night" ?
-What do you mean, you're saying the show was last night, how am I supposed to go to the show tonight ?
Or:
-I've got extra tickets for the "Last Night" party, you want one ?
-Haa ?!!
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Now Imagine the name of the party is "Tomorrow Night".
-You've got tickets for "Tomorrow Night" ?
-Yeah, but I thought it's tonight ? Who's going ?
-Sure it is. We're all going to "Tomorrow Night" tonight.
Anyhow.
Posted by masoud at 01:46 PM | Comments (2)
May 12, 2006
Love & Hatred
What is Love, what is Hatred ?
From what I can think of, Love is something that exists on its own. The ultimate love is when you love something/someone so much that you're ready to give up everything else that you like, for it.
However, I can't think of a way to define Hatred like that. I need the definition of Love in order to be able to define Hatred and I define ultimate Hatred as when you don't like something so much that you're ready to give up everything you love, to destroy or ged rid of that thing.
See ? I have to use Love to define Hatred, whereas I don't need Hate to define Love.
I might be mistaken, so if anyone can think of another way of defining these, lemme know.
Posted by masoud at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
May 06, 2006
Shut Up 100
I suggest it becomes mandatory for all highschools/colleges/universities to have a series of courses titled "Shut Up" in order to teach people when/why/how to shut up. This course will teach students to shut up when they're not supposed to talk, will have practice labs for them to put theory into practice and will overall bring the quality of day to day communication between people in the society to a higher level.
A test shall be designed to identify which course is suitable as a start. "Average" students will take Shut Up 100 in their first year and follow it up in the next semesters. For students who score below "average", a prerequisite course Shut Up 98 will be designed to teach them a better understanding of the whole "shutting up" concept.
If you have any suggestions regarding this course, please don't hesitate to give us your feedback.
Posted by masoud at 03:16 PM | Comments (1)
February 26, 2006
Siren Chip
Jake looked at her watch. It was 11:45pm and she was already 10 minutes late. The road was kind of empty and she pushed on the gas pedal. She couldn't possibly miss the new years' party at her friend's house. "If only there was a faster way of travelling", she thought.
She was getting lost in her thoughts when suddenly she heard police sirens. She always hated the police, not because she broke the law too many times, but because of their inflexibility. They were only taught to enforce the law, exactly like how it was written, without knowing the philosophy behind them and being able to bend them to fit the situation, like a robot. Well, at least most of the police officers, and all of the ones she had "met" were like that. Once, she even dated a policeman, but she had to break up, because one day she parked her car in front of a parkometer, paid the fee, but she was 5 minutes late. So her "boyfriend" at the time, gave her a ticket.
Getting back to the current situation, she looked in the mirror. There was no police car. She was slowly getting used to this situation, it was the 4th time this had happened on that day. She had got a few tickets for speeding before, and at the end, since she didn't have the money to pay them, the judge had decided to go with the "chip". They installed it yesterday. She reached to her head, almost subconciously and touched her skull where a little area, the size of a nickel, was shaved. That's where the chip was installed. The chip, as they had told her, could communicate with the sattelite and identify where she was, and knowing the speed limit for that zone, it would start a police siren in her head, if she was going too fast. And "too fast" meant 5 kilometers above the limit, this time it was a real "robot" enforcing the law. The problem was that the chip was not that "smart" yet. If she was going in some other person's car and they were going too fast, the chip would still start making the siren sound in her head. If she wanted to go by the airplane or train or anything else, she had to go to the police office, with valid proof of travelling and exact times of departure and arrival, and they would program the chip to be silent at that period.
She couldn't possibly miss the new years, but she couldn't stand the siren sound in her head anymore either. The more it went on, the louder and the more annoying and unbearable it would get. She didn't have a choice, so she pushed on the breaks. As soon as the speed dropped below 60, the siren went off. She looked in front of her and in the mirror. There were no cars on the highway.
Posted by masoud at 08:19 AM | Comments (1)
March 11, 2005
Infinite Loop
I'm stuck in an infinite loop. Everything I think of becomes infinite. I was thinking of the concept of "being nice" and then I thought being nice is nice. Then I thought even thinking that being nice is nice, is nice. Just one step further and thinking that thinking that being nice is nice, is nice, is nice. Now the question that how many steps you can go and still make sense of it, is left as an excercise to the motivated (1) reader.
Now the sentence "being nice is nice" brings us to the following point: If someone asks you "what things are nice ?", besides many things that you can come up with, you can say "being nice, itself, is nice". If you call the set of things that are nice, set A, then this means that something being equal to A is in A.This means that A includes itself.
This reminds me of a riddle that says "what is it that includes everything, even itself". And the answer to this riddle was "Alphabet", something a child understands. Now we have another more complicated answer to it, more suitable for screwed up minds.
(1) This is when "motivated" is a synonym of "screwed up". So if some day when you ask for the synonym of motivated in microsoft word, and you see "screwed up", you know where it's comming from.
Posted by masoud at 08:02 PM | Comments (2)
March 08, 2005
No More
So, I was at this seminar about copyright, etc. and I've decided to not write about any practical cool ideas anymore :) But instead, I will write about other "impractical" or impossible cool ideas. And who knows, maybe one day they actually WILL be practical, like a bicycle that you can warm up your coffee with as well. Or a frying pan that plays music too. Or a book that does grocery for you when you're not reading it (or even when you ARE reading it. huh ?).
Anyways, this whole idea of writing about impractical ideas, is itself a practical idea. All of these things can be in an episode of the Simpsons for example. So if one day I see these in an episode of the Simpsons (or maybe this idea has already been done in the Simpsons (1)), I will go and sue them.
(1) Like that episode of South Park named "Simpsons did it" in which any weird "new" idea that this guy wants to do, the Simpsons have done it before. Well except for the whole idea of Simpsons-having-done-the-ideas-before. But then doing Simpsons-having-done-the-ideas-before in the Simpsons would've been very hard (or maybe impossible) to do, it's more or less like "can God make a stone that he can't lift himself" kind of thing. I hope you see the connection. You know I can go on forever with this....
Posted by masoud at 11:01 AM | Comments (3)
March 01, 2005
Trip Themes
Here's what a good friend of mine suggests for trips to make them more memorable:
Decide about a particular band/singer (or two) and everyone makes cds of that band and the major thing you listen to in the trip is the ones you've agreed on. This way, when you talk about a trip a few years after, you can refer to it as "The Metallica Trip" or "The Guns Trip", etc....
Posted by masoud at 01:14 AM | Comments (2)
February 26, 2005
Philosophy of Life 3: Treasure, Heart & Happiness
A friend of mine is leaving, and I found out that she has some interesting viewpoints about life somehow influenced by the Alchemist book and as she says experienced in practice....
Everybody, as soon is born, has a treasure in life and happiness resides in finding that treasure. You should listen to your heart and it will tell you what it is. The heart will try to tell you about it, but if you don't listen, gradually it will not bother telling you anymore. You should look, listen and try, it's hard, but possible. You should put light out there and light will come to you. Once you learn to listen to your heart, you will find peace and happiness. You will hear the universe and you will get a new vision of everything. You will feel the energy and matters become simpler....
Some people are afraid of this world, but if they find their treasure, then they will learn that even their sadness becomes tolerable and will be a tool towards reaching their goals. And everything will be in harmony (somehow this reminds me of the "What A Wonderful World" song, sung by Louis Armstrong. At some point the lyric goes like this: "I see friends shaking hands, saying "How do you do ?", they're really saying, "I love you"").
Posted by masoud at 10:34 AM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2005
Philosophy of Life 2: Good & Bad
This is the result of a ski trip (!): a new proposition for the philosophy of life. I take no responsibility for it though. I just filled some of its holes and combined two different theories together to make a little sense of it. It's all my friends' faults. Please kill THEM if you don't like it.
There's no God, we will end once dying. There's no "good" and "bad". It's all about "Karma" and "energy" though. Some actions have "positive" energy, some "negative". When you do a "positive" action, it brings your "energy" level up. Now, with energy levels, is a probability associated. The higher your energy level, the higher the chance that something with positive energy happens to you (like money brings money kind of thing ;)). So assuming that killing someone for no reason is a negative energy action, if you kill someone for no reason, your energy level goes down and the chances that someone kills you for no reason goes up. Some people might do positive things in all their life, but still they're killed for no "fair" reason. It's all about probabilities.
Posted by masoud at 12:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 23, 2004
Multimedia Story
Every story we hear or see is in one form of media; for example book or radio or TV (in this case TV can be counted as two, one for sound, one for picture, but then they usually come together anyways).
Think of a story that uses all sorts of media: First chapter is a book, Second chapter is video, Third chapter is feeling, Forth chapter has some smelling, etc....
But now here's something funny that might happen as one of my friends has pointed out: Suppose a chapter of this book has smells involved and in specific a farting smell. So you go to the publisher (or whatever you call it) and ask for Chapter two. Someone comes and farts for you.
A problem that might happen is that when you buy a book or DVD, you can read/watch it as many times as you want. But if you want to redo chapter two of the above book, someone should come and fart for you every time.
One solution is to force the buyers to NOT be able to buy each chapter separately, so if you wanna redo chapter two, you have to rebuy the whole thing again. This is somewhat unreasonable.
Another solutions is to have a number of tries per chapter. So you can only try chapter two 4 times. This will result in different versions of the book with different numbers of redoing for each chapter. So a single-try version will be cheaper that a multiple-try one. But then if you happen to forget something, you won't be able to go back to it.
Any suggestions for the name of such a thing ?!
Posted by masoud at 07:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 22, 2004
Opposite of "Boy"
What is the opposite of Boy (as an adjective) ?
A.Girl B.Man C.Woman D.none
The answer is D. No word that is the true opposite of Boy exists.
Some adjectives like "good" describe only one thing: goodness. The opposite of "good" is "bad". I call these one-dimensional adjectives. Some adjectives have more dimensions meaning that they describe more than one characteristic.
To see what the opposite of Boy is, we have to find what the word Boy describes: It shows that what we are talking about is male (as opposed to female), is young (as opposed to old) and is human (as opposed to animal). So the opposite of Boy is something that is female, is old and is an animal. For an old female, we almost have a word: Woman. But for an animal woman, we don't have a general word. Therefore there is no word to describe the opposite of Boy, at least in English or any other language that I know of.
The adjective Boy used for a specific person, can be represented as a point in a 3-dimensional space where the axes are: sex, age, humanness (!). The opposite of Boy is its opposite with respect to the origin.
The adjective Boy in general, represents a portion of this space, the borders of this portion are kind of vague meaning that there's no explicit point where after that the adjective Boy doesn't apply (for example a person with age, sex, humanness degrees after that point should be considered a Man and not a Boy anymore).
Posted by masoud at 08:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 02, 2004
How do you read this question ?
The answer to the question "How do you read this question ?" is "How do you read this question ?.". (1). First of all what I just said is wrong logically, at least if our brain was extremely logical and would try to evaluate everything completely and not partially. In this case, it wouldn't even be able to finish reading that question in the first place, because to answer the question "How do you read this question ?", you have to first know what "this question" is. But "this question" is "How do you read this question" in which again "this question" is "How do you read this question" and so you have to go on forever to actually fully define what "this question" is and then try to answer it :) which obviously would take forever and you wouldn't even be able to see what the question is in the first place, let alone answer it.
This is an example of a question that would take you infinite time to answer.
Now what is the answer of "How do you read the answer of this question ?" ? In order to answer this question, you have to first be able to know the answer of the whole question first, then try to read it, but you don't know the answer of that question and so you won't know how to read something you don't know ! So the answer to this question is undefined !
This is an example of a quesiton that can not be answered, not because it takes you forever to understand it or answer it, but because it's just not answerable.
To make things more confusing, what is the answer of "How do you read the answer of "How do you read this quetion ?" ?" ?
This is an example of a question that would first take you forever to finish reading it and also the answer to it is undefined, meaning it can not be answered.
I leave further extensions of this to you, of course if you've survived reading this ;)
(1) Note that we need both the question mark and the period, the question mark shows when reading the question, how your tone of voice should be, and the second one shows that the whole sentence is a factual sentence in which you're stating a fact (i.e saying how you should read that question).
Posted by masoud at 04:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 28, 2004
Philosophy of Life 1: God & Devil
This is my friend's friend's philosophy of life:
Once upon a time there was a God and a devil [don't ask me why there was a devil] and some angles and many good humans and the world was a beautiful place. The devil would go down to earth from time to time and would disguise himself and would commit unorthodox actions and they would catch him and take him to court [don't ask me why there was a need for a court when everyone was good except for the devil. I mean people make courts when there's enough crime there already], but everytime, he would hypnotize the judge and the judge would set him free.
One time the judge turned out to be blind and so the devil couldn't hypnotize him and so the poor devil was sentenced to be in prison for life [that's quite a weak devil by the way and I think he deserved to go to prison. I mean if you're a good devil you should have back-up plans for when your original plans don't work]. Now the devil fans up in the sky, decided to free him up, so did some of the good angles who were tired of all the goodness in the world [again don't ask me why angles who should be good in nature wanted the world to have bad things in it]. So they came down to earth ["down" depends on how you look at the whole thing. If people in one sphere thought the fans came "down" to earth, the people in the other sphere would think they came "up" to earth. If you don't like this confusion, blame Einstein for introducing all this "relativity" crap] and made the walls of the prison disappear, but the devil refused to go free because he thought now that he was sentenced by humans he should respect the judge's decision [don't ask me why a "devil" should think like that] and stay in prison forever [if you ask me, I say the devil didn't give a damn about the judge's decision. He probably could do all kinds of sins in the prison without being caught, so he figured prison's cool. Besides he didn't have to spend so much time and money going all the way from who-knows-which-sky down to earth, I think the gas price was quite high at that time too].
Anyways, to make the story short, those devil fans and angles spread around in the world and started to have lots of unprotected sex and make kids and now we, are actually the decendants of those devils and angles who are living together....That explains many things. Trust me.
Well, to be honest, this story has quite a few nasty holes, never to be filled up by anything, but it's a good story to tell your kids, if they're dumb enough. On the other hand, if your kids are like me, they wouldn't believe you and if they do, when the grow up, they would remember this and would question you and would think either you'd been quite dumb to have told them this story or that you hadn't been a good parent by lying to them.
So overall I don't really know what to say. It very much depends on your kid type. I leave it up to you. I'm just acting as a neutral person [although I'm not really neutral. Trust me. I have affiants]. I think the best way would be to change the story and make it more acceptable or just tell them the story of 3 pigs and the wolf instead. At least it has some pigs in it....
Posted by masoud at 03:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 11, 2004
Anti-IQ Test
Think about a test that measures dumbness. So the higher your score, the dumber you are :) People would actually get tutors and try hard to score lower on this test !!
Actually it's not hard to make such a thing, just have a regular IQ test and make the final score negative and if you like the scores to be always a positive number [1], scale everything up by the highest positive score possible on the normal IQ test.
But, think about a test on which the more questions you answer RIGHT, means the dumber you are !! That's a true Anti-IQ test.
Want some applications ? As an example, for choosing people as some countries' politicians ;) I'll leave the rest as an excercise to the eager reader....
[1] For some reason, some people are quite sensitive about negative numbers. They like positive numbers, but hate negative ones. That's called Numberism (like Racism). It always puzzles me how a simple, innocent negative sign which is all that makes the difference between these numbers, can change love to hatred. There's a famous saying by someone anonymous that says "There's a very thin line between love and hatred". So true.... ;)
Posted by masoud at 09:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 24, 2004
Maybe....
Shot Eins:
Whenever I feel like I'm about to catch a cold, I start taking some precaustions: keeping myself warm, taking some pills, drinking hot tea, etc.
But I've noticed that all these, just prolong the period that I'm in the state of catching the cold. I eventually catch the cold anyways and now taking the above precautions (which by now would be called postcautions), WILL actually shorten the period of my cold.
So it's kind of funny that doing the same set of things BEFORE catching the cold and AFTER cathing cold have opposite effects (of course they both work AGAINST cold, but then they have opposite effects from MY point of view, i.e prolonging and shortening the period of me having the cold).
Maybe instead of taking precautions, I should take some anti-precautions to shorten the period of catching cold and then take some precautions to shorten the period of having cold and overall everyone would be happier !
Shot Zwei:
Maybe sometimes instead of thinking about solutions for our problems, we should just try to REMEMBER (as opposed to forget) our problems and whenever we stumble upon a solution, we can recognize that that is actually the solution for our problem. Sometimes the more we think about a problem, the more it remains unsolved and the more complicated it becomes....
....more shots to be added as time goes by....
Posted by masoud at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)
September 18, 2004
Infinite Idea
Think about an infinite idea: An idea that in order to express it, you would have to use infinite words/time in any language. Does such a thing exist ? Even if it does, an example of it can't be made, because then it would take infinite time to just say it !! well....
Posted by masoud at 03:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 26, 2004
A New Term
Attention: The following post contains applications of biology, mathematics and computer science and it's not suitable for the general audience. Viewer Discrection is Strongly Advised !
[18+]
There are some algorithms known as "genetic" algorithms because the idea behind them is comming from genetics, hence the name. Genes interact with each other (parents) to create another gene (child) that usually has the "good" characteristics of the parents and does not have the "weak" characterstics. Although there are always counter-examples, like some kids who are a lot more stupid than their parents (i.e. my high school principal. although in this case he was a counter-example of intelligence in its minimality and a good study case to see how/why would someone become this dumb), but let's just have some mercy on these exceptional talents for now.
Now genetic algorithms in computer science/math are mostly used in optimization problems, where you are (well, maybe not exactly YOU) interested in finding something that maximizes/minimizes a characteristic (i.e finding a specific kind of graph with maximum number of edges). So you (again, maybe not YOU) basically take two instances (parents) and kind of mix them together and create a child. Now if the child is "good" (meaning it has better characteristics than one of the parents), you keep it, otherwise, you burn it and throw its ashes into the closest river at night (meaning you throw it away). Now you repeat the process with the new creations, until you get a creation with acceptable charactersitics.
Now sometimes when you do that, you can't get new instances with better characteristics. So what you do, is that you throw in some weird new instances into the population and let them interact with the old ones, in the hope of having some kind of a mutation and getting better results (this is what the US government does by accepting people by lottery or what Canada is doing in a greater extent by getting all the "good" people from different countries and letting them "interact" (i.e have lots of sex) with each other to create better creations. That's exactly why half-breeded people or people with parents comming from multiple ethnicities turn out to be so hot from time to time (i.e a friend of mine)).
So far we had concepts of "parent", "child", "good child" and "bad child".
Having said all this long history, I propose the following terms to be used in papers/scientific conversations throughout the world:
1. "Bitch": an instance that interacts with all the other instances and doesn't get ommited for some generations (because it creates worse children than itself). A "bitch" can be a "male" or "female" (1).
2. "SOB" or "Son Of a Bitch": self-explanatory with respect to the previous term
3. "Bastard": a child resulting from the interaction of the "new" instances we threw in, with some "old" instance that already had a partner (i.e had created a child before).
4. "Whore House": it's a street word for "population", specially when the algorithm you're designing doesn't work, you'll say "what the f*** is goin on in this whore house" (to avoid any kind of confusion, make sure your prof's wife is not around though).
5. "Pervert": an instance who interacts with one of its parents
6. "Motherfucker": a male (1) "pervert" who the instance he interacts with, is believed to be his mother (1)
(1) I'm not sure if these terms are already defined or not. For the sake of this posting, we assume they are.
Future Extentions: I prefer to keep this part as a secret or the readers might think I'm a corrupted human being, although any suggestions by the readers will be accepted.
Now Beware ! As the whole thing shows, all computer scientists who use genetic algorithms, are atheists/agnostics in their subconscious minds, and from the point of view of religion, they will definitely go to hell. I strongly think that these algorithms should be banned and forbidden by the well-respected religious leaders throughout the world and anybody who dares to use them, should be sentenced to 174 years in prison without any water/food/sleep.
Posted by masoud at 06:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 18, 2004
How to cook fish
Despite all the recipes suggested by all these "pro" chefs, I just found out that the best way to cook fish, is in the microwave. The reason for that is simple once you hear it (so read it aloud so that you can hear yourself): All the fishes have evolved through time in such a way that their flesh will be best cooked in the microwave. That's only because our ancestors have been using microwave from thousands of years ago to cook fish and fishes have naturally evolved to best fit this process.
Now someone might say: "that can't be true. because once you cook a fish, it can't make kids anymore, so their evolved genes would not transfer through generations and even if the fish want to best fit human's process of cooking, they can't. therefore you suck with your stupid theory". First I'd like to say "YOU suck". Dude ! the answer to your question is so easy ! It's all about the spirit not genes. Eventhough the fish are dead and cooked and can't "make kids", their spirit is transfered through generations and their tendency to be cooked best in the microwave to fit human's need, is transferred as well, and since everybody knows that the spirit changes the body, this evolved spirit will change fish flesh in such a way that it will be cooked best in the microwave. Well, if you don't believe me, you'll go to hell for sure. So from now on, cook fish ONLY in the microwave.
Posted by masoud at 10:14 PM | Comments (1)