The value of labor

Mission Impossible

In the underground I saw a note saying: “If you see a train being vandalised call the transport police on this number.”  I picked up my mobile and dialed. There was no cell reception -- there hardly ever is in the underground.

They might as well put mail boxes on the trains to snail mail our spotting. The best vandalism letter will win a free ride.

Meeting people on the train

At the train station, a cheerful, attractive, girl handed me a brochure. It said: “Meet the people behind your railway.”

It seems that the train operator feels that when we realize that trains are operated by people, we’ll feel less frustrated by the poor service.

To keep the record straight, I don’t take the train to meet people. I am there to meet trains. The truth is that I’d be much happier if I didn’t meet anyone on the train. So please don’t introduce me to more people. For this I have my blog. Just make sure I get to it on time.

The Value of Life

In case you ever wondered about the value of life :

The nurse who comes to visit our sick neighbor, in charge of her well-being, receives 9.50 an hour for her visit.
The man who came to fix her heater charges 35 an hour
he electrician sent from washing machine company charges 99 for a visit, plus the cost of the repair.

I wonder what the conclusion might be.

Backballs and the common sense factor

Look inside the highlighted part of the ad above. If a company is truly  afraid that someone will use this product internally and sue them, something is fucked up with our legal system. To quote the honest guru: it's unfair that 95% of all lawyers gives all lawyers bad reputation. 

Bigamy

It's no long ago since premarital sex was punished by death, bastards were forced to live outside the community, and homosexuals were burnt alive at the village square.

But in the modern UK teenage sex and pregnancy is part of school curriculum, same sex relationships are encouraged, and adultery is natural part of life.

So with traditional marriage being only one of many life-choices, why is bigamy still a crime?

Isn’t it time that the law will stop picking and choosing based on individual judge's preferences, and will let us live our personal lives the way we choose to. Doesn't it have more important things to deal with?

My New Word: Party

It might be my non-English background, but I often find myself missing the subtleties of the language. For example, the world Party was a word I misinterpreted; I needed to come to London to learn what it meant.

Originally, I thought that Party was a social event or a celebration. But now  I realize that Party -- whether a birthday party, a Christmas party, and definitely New Year Party -- means drinking until London appears like a fun place to be in.

I like this interpretation. Yet I still wonder, is it really the only way to have fun? I still have many Christmas parties lined up to figure this out.

Put the Students Behind Bars

An article in yesterday’s paper describes the government's intention to force high-school student that refuse to stay in school to 18 to attend weekend detention.

What will happen to those who do not appear to the detention? Will we employ the police force – too busy to finish their current paperwork – to chase students? And when they catch them? Will we burden the legal system, or shall we simply extend the anti-terrorist law and allow for detention without a trial? Shall we build special jails for them, or shall we just release before time some more dangerous rapist and murderers to free jail space?

There was another interesting fact in yesterday’s paper: on an international scale, in the past five years, British students have plunged down from 4th to 14th place in science, and from 3rd to 19th in Reading Literacy.

So why do we want to force people to go to school? After all, they don’t seem to learn anything there. Aren't they better off getting a job and learn something useful?

Instead of detention centers, the government may want to think of alternative education, make educational TV attractive and exciting. Or perhaps create a free game arcades with exciting educational games.

I’m sure it can’t be that difficult to create some exciting and educational games. For example: a person approaches you in the dark and asks for help (oral comprehension), as soon as you recognize he made a grammatical mistake you can blow his head off, but if you were wrong, he chops you with a machete (grammar education). However, when you are out of bullet you can pick up a bottle of acid (chemistry) and throw at his face and see how his body deforms (biology).

I am sure that the creative minds can come with better games, if not we might want to consider the drop out student as their replacement -- a change that may feel just like the holiday that UK needs.

What have we got in common?

In some places U-turns are allowed, unless otherwise indicated

in other places  it is not, unless explicitly permitted.

Therese are two species with little in common.

Which one are you?

The Paved Way to European Terror

Was anything surprising about the Paris terror attack? About the fact that Brussels has become a hub of terror? Why do we take an insurance only after the fire consumed our house?

This was a post I blogged over 5 years ago.

Devolution

I fear, therefor I am –

A tool of the political trade

sadly, so effective.

Quotes from the honest guru: underdog

The underdog is not moral or just
she just lack the opportunity to show
she is not

I am not in the business of making friends

Quotes From the Honest Guru

Most people are nice and pleasant

The course of history is dictated by the othes

Quotes From the Honest Guru: The Reason For Wars

Optimism yields wars.

No war would have started, had both sides expected defeat.

Can we Change the World?

This is a tile from the 12^th century, found in Toledo (Spain). It says

The rules of society:

1. The poor works
2. The rich exploits him
3. The soldier defends the two
4. The contributor pays for the three
5. The lazy rests for the four
6. The drunk drinks for the five
7. The bankers swindle the six
8. The lawyer deceives the seven
9. The doctor. kills the eight
10. The undertaker buries the nine
11. The politician lives off the ten

Don't believe what you read

Research allegedly discovered that most people fear public speaking more than they fear death. Wouldn't you expect a pre public speaking suicide syndrome?

Quotes From the Honest Guru: Double Blind

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed men are stoned to death.

Quotes From the Honest Guru: Manipulation

People will stand up for direct attacks on their values, but will consistently ignore creeping changes. Too often the things you are fighting against, are the very same things you would fight for before changes crept in.

Science vs. Religion -- the real question

In the outer rim of a 200 billion stars galaxy, a blue planet, earth, is traveling at a staggering speed of over 100,000 kilometers per hour. It would have disappeared in the vastness of space, if it were not for a mysterious and invisible force of gravity that keeps it orbiting, for all eternities, round a medium-size yellow sun, 150 million kilometers away. 

Every 176 years, four other planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, are lined up on the same side of the sun. This was not known to the ancient astronomers and astrologers, whose picture of the universe did not include Uranus (discovered in 1781) and Neptune (discovered in 1846). This fact, however, inspired the farthest exploration in the history of humankind, when in 1977 two spacecrafts, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, were launched to reach the aligned planets. The extraordinary photos they beamed back, and the new information they are still sending from the final frontier of our solar system, some 15 billion kilometers from home, have made this exploration a great triumph of science and our understanding of the laws of nature, without which none of this could have been achieved. 

These laws of nature: the principles of motion, action and reaction and gravity, are the very laws that started the age of scientific exploration and changed our understanding of nature forever. Although this new worldview did not directly contradict the principles of faith, it did threaten the monopoly the religious authorities enjoyed as the guardians of all knowledge, as declared, for instance, in the Council of Trent (1546): 

No one relying on his own judgment and distorting the Sacred Scriptures according to his own conception shall dare to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge their true sense and meaning, has held or does hold, or even to interpret them contrary to the unanimous agreement of the Fathers. 

This powerful position was not to be given away without a fight; so rather than choosing to become the patrons of the sciences and embracing the new discoveries in order to strengthen faith and belief, the Church and its judicial institution, the Inquisition, chose to declare the new worldview heresy and its holders heretics. 

The birth of modern science into this environment still influences our way of thinking nowadays, nearly 500 years later. Because, while only esoteric minorities will not embrace the many improvements that only science could bring (medicine, transportation, communication, to name just a few) many still view the scientific worldview to be a threat to their beliefs. 

Is it a real threat? Must scientific and religious viewpoints collide, or can there be consistent description of the universe in which each is equally valid? These are deep philosophical questions that have been discussed for generations by religious people, scientists and philosophers. But whatever philosophical conclusions they may reach, for most of us, the real question is whether we, a society empowered by science-born technology, can afford to run our society on ancients principles devised far before the knowledge to create this technology was even conceived.