Philosophy of Everything

Better reads: Data Consistency in Distributed System - CAP, PACELC Morality series - a heptalogy This blog is mainly focused on my Philosophical and theoretical ideas. From time to time I have practical posts that are too few to deserve a blog by themselves. I still hope my other work (like above) is even more valuable than such practical article as below. * * * Black Friday is a selling race over the gift budgets: the budgets that have a peak around the start of December What is the lowest possible price on "Black Friday"? Sellers will try to make this unpredictable. However, there are certain price strategies that any rational seller should apply. This can give you hints about the likelihood of obtaining a lower price on Black Friday, Cyber Monday and similar. Why having price cuts at all? Normally, any producer or seller would want to have the highest gain from the products it sales, therefore a higher price is desirable. However, selling more many pieces of a pro...

Welfare Welfare = produced  goods + redistribution curve At the basic level, welfare in society is just a matter of produced good (including services) and the redistribution curve. Money is not welfare in itself, as you cannot eat money. However, money is the system that controls the production and redistribution of goods. People with more money are entitled to consume more goods in this moment. But they can also chose to delay the consumption and have no impact in their welfare for the moment, then consume goods at a later time. Or money can lose value and can be never exchanged for the expected value. Money is motivation to produce goods Money also controls the motivation in the production of goods - like in working for salary or creating a company to get rich. Money permits to save the value of the goods that you produce now and later consume goods produces later - like when you retire. Money is used to redistribute goods to people that cannot produce goods (like unem...

Even better reads: Data Consistency in Distributed System - CAP, PACELC My  Secular Philosophy - Life, God, Knowledge, Morality, Ethics This blog is mainly focused on my Philosophical and theoretical ideas. From time to time I have practical posts that are too few to deserve a blog by themselves. I still hope my other work (like above) is even more valuable than such practical article as below. * * * This article explains how to install Ubuntu 19.04 or similar on USB+UEFI, like you would do it on a hard drive. Regular USB install will likely fail, you need the fix below. Ubuntu installer has a bug when installing on USB using a PC that already has an UEFI boot system (like Windows 10). Such thumb-drive is not only persistent, you can also do regular updates on it, customize the programs, repair the file-system. This is more than just a live "USB Pen Drive Linux" with persistence, it is your full Linux system in your pocket. Only (U)EFI boot is covered here, but most recen...

Better read:  Data Consistency in Distributed System - CAP, PACELC This blog is mainly focused on my Philosophical and theoretical ideas. From time to time I have practical posts that are too few to deserve a blog by themselves. I still hope my other work (like above) is even more valuable than such practical article as below. * * * On short : in order to Boot Linux in UEFI mode: UEFI loads Grub and a minimal grub.cfg from a fat32/EFI partition. Ubuntu uses 2 directories: EFI/Boot and EFI/ubuntu Grub detects the root partition (via UUID) and loads the kernel and initrd from that Linux/ext4 partition. In Ubuntu, the minimal grub.cfg calls another grub.cfg from the ext4 partition - containing boot menu. More details

I will approach mindfulness from an informational perspective, adding just a little brain physiology. If you already know about mindfulness, you can directly skip to " The heresy" Introduction As many subjects that I approach in this blog, my knowledge about the subject is at hobby level, maybe a little more than the average guy. One of my childhood dreams was to discover something really new. The strategy that I considered then was to start on that subject without all the prejudice from the previous research done in that domain. I realize now that it is merely impossible to innovate something without having in mind the prior results and mistakes done on that study field. However, I still hope that one can derive new perspectives in a domain by combining common knowledge from various domains. With that said, here is a little essay about how and why mindfulness might  be working for humans. This might depart sometimes from the mainstream conception on mindfulness and ...

Reality is pretty complex, alright... Normally we expect reality to be far more complex than we can comprehend in a limited human mind. Each time we look to one object, many other objects go outside our perception field, even if the eye can still see them. And this is OK, because we have only a limited processing brain power for perceiving the reality. It's not only the limit of perceiving reality, there is also a limit in our capacity of "knowing" about reality. If we think about it, it is very intuitive: the physical mind is far smaller than the reality we want to know about. In order to know about reality, we need to have a model about reality stored inside our minds.

We know that cancer is when some human cells are multiplying very fast and then spread all over the organism. The are many substances that seems to be "cancerigenic". However, recently we started to link some cancers to bacterial or viral infections. What is more probable: that a chemical substance makes a cell to multiply and spread, or some viral/bacterial DNA is reprogramming cells to multiply and spread?

An information representation (or string) s  is very compressible if the size of it's smallest possible compression K(s) is very small compared with it's observed size(s) . The smallest compression size  K(s)  is the Kolmogorov complexity . We can define the compress-ibility C(s) of a string s  to be the smallest compression  K(s)  divided by the size of the original representation  size(s) : C(s) = K(s) / Size(s) - lower is better The smallest compressed size" for any given string is a function that cannot be calculated in general, however you can always find an upper bound to it as soon as you find a compression of that size. A compression of s is basically a program along with it's input that can generate s as output. If is always possible to find a program slightly bigger than s  (think: print " s "), therefore it is only interesting to find compression with size that is lower than size( s ).

  One philosopher said that "philosophy is a natural act of human living" and I agree with him. But what brings philosophy in addition to "regular" science"? I find Philosophy to be a kind of "meta-science", permanently inquiring about the root of all assumptions that we use. In this way, Philosophy is different than "regular" science, however it can contributes to the methods used in all the rest of the science. By analyzing the limits of our knowledge, we can better understand what level of certainty we can expect from science and the rest of our knowledge and believes. Of course, by using specific methods and logical deduction in assuring coherency, Philosophy is also a science in itself.

Better read: Data Consistency in Distributed System - CAP, PACELC My Secular Philosophy - Life, God, Knowledge, Morality, Ethics This blog is mainly focused on my Philosophical and theoretical ideas. From time to time I have practical posts that are too few to deserve a blog by themselves. I still hope my other work (like above) is even more valuable than such practical article as below. * * *   Upda te 2022 : the 8'th generation NUC8i3BEH is still a decent mini-desktop for browsing and office. However, the cooler is going very high when you do something that takes more CPU. The more recent NUC (11'th generation), like NUC11PAHI5 , is the first NUC that is almost quiet most of the time - while cooler still works at low speed all the time. While AMD laptops are cheaper, energy efficient and arguably slightly more performant , I still use Intel as mini-desktop. The smallest AMD mini-desktop I found is significantly larger and has a coil noise at USB due to a motherboard issue...

  Better read: Data Consistency in Distributed System - CAP, PACELC Morality series - a heptalogy This blog is mainly focused on my Philosophical and theoretical ideas. From time to time I have practical posts that are too few to deserve a blog by themselves. I still hope my other work (like above) is even more valuable than such practical article as below. * * *   Update 2020 : My Kodlix died. I am highly disappointed. There was a long time from when I've seen a PC dying before it's moral obsoletion. This one does not show any light anymore, while the power source seems ok. Review Kodlix GN41 Fanless MIN PC, 8G DDR4 64G eMMC, Intel Celeron N4100 up to 2.4Ghz/ 4K@60Hz UHD/Support SSD&HDD/ 2.4G+5.8G WiFi/ 1000M LAN/VGA&HDMI Outputs On short: good performance for a fanless configuration,  plays up to 4K video: 8GB RAM, Win10 included, with the possibility to add a SATA HDD (like 2TB). It has 1Gbps ethernet, it can make a  NAS or Media Server/Player. Ho...

ACEPC T11 Mini PC Windows 10 Fanless Desktop Computer 4GB DDR/64GB eMMC,Support Dual Band WiFi/Dual Output - HDMI/VGA/4K HD,SATA for 2.5 Inch HDD On short : HDD and Ethernet(100Mbps) looks connected via USB 3.0 link, plays up to 1080p

How would you define consciousness? Is dreaming a form of consciousness? What happens when you pass out? Consciousness (like in "aware of himself") is a subjective perception that is normally easily accessible subjectively, by introspection. However, the mechanics of consciousness are hardly understood and the consciousness state is hard to evaluate from outside in non-fully awake mind states. Is there a consciousness while being drugged? Is there a consciousness in catatonic people? Where is the consciousness boundary between being awake and asleep? The following reflections aims to give some clues about the nature of consciousness.

It makes a lot of sense for the US to wish for an Europe that is not big enough to fight economically with US. China is a problem enough. It made sense for Cambridge Analytica to work for Trump and Brexit even without the Russian involvement. The dollar($) value is affected while more goods are traded in Euro. Also, China owns too much dollar bills, they can put pressure on dollar if China moves more savings/commerce in Euro. Russia is not such an economical power yet, so EU is a bigger economical threat for US at this moment. Trump itself kind of said it. From what he said, I suspect that US have a lot of problems with the import/export balance and Euro might further erode the power of the dollar. Great Britain was always a kind of brother of US, so US wants it on their side. This is just a theory/speculation with no proof. Dear reader, please leave a message if you exist! ;) Also, please share this article if you find it interesting. Thank you.

In my 5'th grade, the new professor of Mathematics told us a puzzle: there is a jug with water staying in the desert, and a bird wants to drink some water. However, the jug have a tight neck, like the old Greek pottery for olive oil: it is like a sphere at the bottom, becoming tight while going up, only to enlarge a bit at the entry. At least this is how I imagine it. What is clear, the bird cannot reach the water because the head/beak are too big for the jug entry. How can the bird drink some water from the jug?

This article contains my personal reflections on irrational numbers, especially the informational property of their infinite strings of decimal - strings that often look close to random at a shallow look. It starts with an introduction of known facts, it continues with some less discussed properties and finishes with some philosophical considerations. Introduction Example of irrational numbers are numbers like √2 and ℼ (PI). Irrational numbers cannot be represented as a fraction like, 0.25 is represented by 25/100 or 1/4. Such numbers have an infinite number of decimals that are not repeating any groups we would take. Numbers like 0.(321) are not irrational, even if they have an infinite number of decimals, because they are repeating: 0.321 321 321 321 ... Such numbers with repeating decimal groups can be represented as a simple fraction: 0.321 = 321/999 an therefore are considered "rational". Rational numbers can be represented as fractions (like 234/789), and the...

Science, mathematics, intelligence, every knowledge can be reduced to the ability of predicting the outcome in two directions: "what happens if certain conditions occurs?", "how can I make to obtain a certain outcome". Basically, this is all the expected benefit of knowledge. The theories are just models that have this unique purpose: to link certain pre-conditions to certain outcome. Intelligence, in particular, is used to predict what happens in certain conditions (forward, like f(x)=?), along with finding the way to obtain a certain expected result (backward prediction), like "what x will make f(x)=y". This might seem to be a too simplistic view of intelligence, as intelligence also contains a creative part - that solves very tricky puzzles that even computers cannot solve. Still, I would argue that this activity is also a backward-prediction applied in many steps. Let's consider o detective that is trying to solve a murder case. His problem is ...