Every damn thing around me seems to make me want to ask a question! The first thing is my frustration with Google. I am now in India spending the winter vacation with my folks. Everytime I type google.com in my browser it automatically geo-locates my ip packets and redirects me rather forcefully to google India. Now, google India doesn't have the interface to search youtube videos!! Son of a Rasthack, fasthack, kasthack, spitipfitigitydoan! >:| Now, I'm on a quest to find out more about IP geo-location and am going to attempt to overcome it. Found this neat 22 page (D-Yikes!) paper,
http://cs.smu.ca/~jamuir/papers/TR-06-05.pdf
The second question that just came across is rather bold and controversial. I was watching this show on Discovery Channel where they show a band of men from Ice-age traveling across the Arctic region from Europe. They see the "northern lights" phenomenon in the winter sky and one lady in the pack asks the leader, "where do those lights come from?". The man replies that those are lights from "spirit-land" and the woman goes "Oooh!". Now, we all know these days that the northern lights are just charged particles from the Sun hitting the earth's upper atmospheric molecules. Coming to think about this more closely (I do have PLENTY of time here to kill at my family home :P), what men dismiss as God or Ghost are those that they don't understand that well. It's a simple explanation of things that borders on irrationality that most of us, even the ones who've waltzed with the principles of science, would accept it. Closer inspection into these "forbidden" sacred or scared realities of life leads us to understand what they really are and lifts the veil of mysticism surrounding them. My question from a completely neutral perspective is that, could we possibly explain scientifically everything that ever happened, happens and will happen in the lifetime of the universe? The answer IMO is a resounding "yes" but it might take infinite time to find out. In short, we may never know :)
http://cs.smu.ca/~jamuir/papers/TR-06-05.pdf
The second question that just came across is rather bold and controversial. I was watching this show on Discovery Channel where they show a band of men from Ice-age traveling across the Arctic region from Europe. They see the "northern lights" phenomenon in the winter sky and one lady in the pack asks the leader, "where do those lights come from?". The man replies that those are lights from "spirit-land" and the woman goes "Oooh!". Now, we all know these days that the northern lights are just charged particles from the Sun hitting the earth's upper atmospheric molecules. Coming to think about this more closely (I do have PLENTY of time here to kill at my family home :P), what men dismiss as God or Ghost are those that they don't understand that well. It's a simple explanation of things that borders on irrationality that most of us, even the ones who've waltzed with the principles of science, would accept it. Closer inspection into these "forbidden" sacred or scared realities of life leads us to understand what they really are and lifts the veil of mysticism surrounding them. My question from a completely neutral perspective is that, could we possibly explain scientifically everything that ever happened, happens and will happen in the lifetime of the universe? The answer IMO is a resounding "yes" but it might take infinite time to find out. In short, we may never know :)
2 comments:
dude.. good that you are exploring geo-location fundaes.. put some gyan when you are back.. Now coming to the can we explain everything part.. It all depends on how we want to explain the events we see... Basically, we may be able to explain everything, but that depends on the model we choose for the explanation. For e.g., look at the copernicus theory of solar revolution.. it pretty much explained things then.. but then came along galileo and gang.. and explained stuff again.. You get the point right...
the difference is rather explaining away "blindly" or with proof for a rational person to analyze; not as much with the model you choose dude...
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