Pithy truisms on life from Al Gore probably

You are born cold, wet, hungry, naked and disoriented. The very first experience you have is one of getting smacked solid until you begin to cry.

Guess what? It’s all downhill from there.  Life is a punishment, get over it, come to terms with it and deal with it. Your greatest skill on earth is your ability to deal with disappointment.  It’s the most abundant feeling during this so called journey of life.

A lot of wise men say that the darkest hour is just before dawn.

Ah well that would also make it the ideal time to score your neighbours newspaper, or crap on their lawn. Unless of course you live in the Nordics or something, where I guess you really get one dawn a year. Where I do not think this rule would be really applicable.

The corollary to this one is: There is always a light at the end of the tunnel.

Which is very true, and often it is a train speeding towards you.

Sex and love they say are like the air we breathe.

You only value them truly when you aren’t getting any.

Being irreplaceable in at work, and being driven to excel at your work is a very laudable goal. After all even in the Gita it is written, do your duty without anticipating the fruits of your labour, or something to that effect.

Laudable, yes. However it is also the easiest way to ensure you will never be promoted or recognised for your work. If they did promote you, who would then do your job as well as you can?

Never judge someone, until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.

True. Puts some distance between you and the judged person, plus they can’t really chase you, since you have their shoes to begin with.

If you lend someone money, chances are you will never see them again.

I actually believe in this one, and more often than not; it’s just a small tax to be done with them.

The ability to make correct judgements comes from experience.

Again very true, however experience comes from poor judgements and time.  Avoid judgement all together if you can.

A couple of self explanatory truisms in life:

A closed mouth gathers no feet  and If you’re speaking, you’re not learning.

I tend to agree with both, also it has a few unintended consequences, not the least of which is the ability to put on weight with a closed mouth.

Coming back to experience, why is it we never have it when it is needed the most?

Should you know How to win an argument with a woman; please do share and be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Finally, the leading cause of death globally is birth, just as the leading cause of divorce is marriage.

Avoid both if you can.

[Disclaimer: These are just folksy bits of information gathered along the way. They have been floating around since the dawn of the Internet, and can all be safely attributed to Al Gore. He did create the Internet, and I have no evidence to link him to that or the saying either. If this hurts your feelings Mr Gore I do apologise, for all of the information herein is unsubstantiated. Use at  your own risk.]

Unexistence: Game Theory and the Dynamics of Nuclear Warfare: How to classify and survive a Relationship

‘If you are so meant for me and I'm meant for you why does this have to be so hard on both of us?’ ~a question never asked of me.

Well to understand the reasons why relationships typically don’t work one must understand that Humans, particularly those in relationships tend to play games more often, than trying to make the relationship work.  In order to understand that, we need to understand Game Theory.

In short Game Theory is a mathematical model in which a person’s success is calculated based on the decisions made by others.  This is what makes it ideal for applications such as Nuclear Warfare and Relationship Management.  That is the good news.

Now for the bad. Most games as applied in Game Theory are Zero Sum Games.  So what exactly is this  Zero Sum Game?  A  Zero Sum Game implies that in any given dynamic one person’s gains exactly net the losses of the other person.  Which in turn implies inherent competitiveness, and that does not work in a Relationship.  The seeds of the destruction of a Relationship lie in this competitiveness, since ideally a Relationship is synergistic and complimentary towards common goals rather than competitiveness.

There are several Games we play in the dreaded realm of relationships.  Primarily there are four types of games that can be played out. Let’s quickly look at these.

The first Game scenario is I am OK you’re not Ok.  This is a power play, and one where you are looking for dominance. Typical messages communicated are the Composites. ‘Can you be an adult?’  Quite simply this is a zero sum game, designed to put you in power.

The second Game scenario is  I am not OK you’re OK.  Playing the victim in general or trying to be completely altruistic and failing at Mind Reading.  Which in turn leads to feeling victimized since you can’t do anything right unsurprisingly. Especially since you’re not clairvoyant. What on earth did you expect?  Another Zero Sum Game.

The third Game is potentially the most destructive scenario. I’m not Ok and You’re not OK or in Cold War parlance Mutually Assured Destruction. Personally amongst divorced couples that I have done no scientific study on whatsoever, I believe this is the reason.  Each side will constantly erode each other to the point destruction. I could cite examples, but surmises to say each side aims to balance their losses by ensuring that the other side loses as much. It is a variant of the Zero Sum Game.

Finally we have the fourth Game. I’m OK and You’re OK.  This game does not really fit Game Theory and is the reason why it can make the relationship to work.  Each side accepts the strengths and weaknesses of the other and actively works towards filling the gaps and working towards common goals. It’s the most difficult of the models, and breaks the Zero Sum Game model to smithereens. It is the only way to ensure that a relationship works. One has to weather the storms as a team, being the anchor and source of strength for each other through whatever life can throw at you. Total commitment.

Unfortunately as humans very few of us of have the will, determination and courage to adopt it.

To answer the question never posed to me, as humans we would rather play a Zero Sum Game rather than commit completely and irrevocably to Love.  Unexist and be at peace.

[Disclaimer: I am not a mathematician or a tactician. I have no idea about Nuclear Weapons though do know the ultimate WMD for a relationship are words spoken in anger.]

[Note: The Question is actually from a song called Stay by Jay Sean, and I can't claim to have heard it]

Why your computer is slow and the Network congested

A couple of colleagues, who I shall not name, were having this discussion with me just the other day.  They like most in the industry are bonafide engineers with a number of years of experience building mission critical systems for fortune 500 companies.

The reality of it is that disk fragmentation, large caches of internet files on disk, drivers, programs, overburdened registry hives are common causes for computers to slow down.  However my esteemed colleagues assured me this was not the case.

The real cause for computers to slow down is electricity. It’s the reason why wiring wears out as well and needs to be changed in old houses.

Electricity as we know is a stream of electrons, and metal is not especially brilliant at conducting it. Some of this is lost to resistance and heat, which means the electrons are escaping. This in turn leads to metal loss, due to the atoms being destabilized by the loss of the electrons.

This is why your wonderful 64 bit Core i7 processor becomes a 63 bit processor over time.  Or maybe just a 63.75 bit processor.  This has the effect of causing the instructions on the computer to run slower, especially if they are 64 bit. It is like a car, as my esteemed colleagues assured me, over time the engine loses compression due to wear and tear. Similarly the chip loses bits and thus power. However this loss is uneven, and as information flows over the network, the dislodged bits and bytes come stuck at random places.

On the networks these bits are like pieces of gravel, and once a lot of them come to reside in a particular location they have the same effect as gravel on the roads. If they accumulate into bytes, then they act like boulders. Typically in bends on the wire or in the antennas of the wireless routers.  The packets of data don’t see the accumulated bytes, and thus crash into each other since the protocol is not designed to account for these. Just as you don’t expect speed bumps on the highway.  Hence the network traffic gets congested.

The problem as I am assured by the gentlemen with a Master’s degree in Computing is quite simple. We just have to design our systems with 63 bit architecture rather than 64 bit architecture. That way we will underuse the available capacity, and will have outsmarted the ravages of electricity.

And on that note I need to reboot my brain. A null pointer exception has occurred.