Very short blog update by Dana Boyd, and very interesting. I agree wholeheartedly.
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/11/01/fb_helicopter_parents.html
Diaspora has been at a testing stage for a few months now. For those of you who haven't heard about it, it is a distributed system for social networking, where you can actually have different "aspects" to share with different people. It is totally open source, and maintained by a community. It just might turn out to be the next big thing.
If you need more information, here are two articles that explain what happened:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/12/diaspora-open-facebook-project/
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-diaspora-should-do-with-their-newfound-fkyoufacebook-money-2010-5
Here you find one server:
https://diasp.eu/getting_started
REMEMBER: This is Alpha-testing only at the moment, and you shouldn't share any sensitive personal information.
And here is the project page:
https://joindiaspora.com/
I had some doubts about whether I would post this entry in Turkish or in English. After all, I'd write about Turkey's problems, the problems that concern the Turkish speaking population.
However, that can't be true. They must concern everyone on the planet, at different levels. Therefore, I'll stick to what a friend used to enthusiastically call " Da Babylonian Language" - the global language of our times.
(1st glass of wine)
Personal misfortunes forced me to reassess some aspects of my life recently. Being myself, I took the philosophical route as always, and tried to make sense of things at a global level, not just the personal one. The issue, on the surface, is about what we call the "family values" and how they fit into the modern times, but as I dug deeper, I found a deeper understanding.
My parents have always been big on this. We valued the family, we took care of the family, and the family took care of us. For all I knew, and for all I know, that is a good model: You are not alone if you don't want to be. At the face of crises, you get support. It is a bit like a small-scale insurance policy; not just against the financial problems, but against all problems in life that cause you to stand alone. And from an economic, rational point of view, it is a good model.
It seems that this model is more prevalent in the emerging economies, and less so in the developed countries. Whatever the reason for that might be, people in the developing economies face a different world than they used to know, and the values that may have helped a lot one generation might not help the next generation at all.
What I understand is happening at the world right now is the process of urbanization. The already-urbanized cultures seem to hold individuality as the value, whereas the not-yet-urbanized societies are the ones who cling to family values, as well as other forms of social cohesion. The fact is that as the world becomes urbanized, as this culture emanates from the urban centers, the world shifts. Whether the traditional model is a good model or not does not matter now - it is already becoming obsolete.
What we seem to have is a clash of cultures, but not one defined by religion, language or by geographical borders. We seem to have on one hand an almost homogeneous "Urban Culture", and on the other hand, all the local cultures still existing far away from the metropolitan centers.
(2nd glass of wine)
How does this come about? It had already been happening for a few centuries now, a parallel process of Westernization. Back in the 15th century, when Ottoman traders would go to Venice to conduct business, they would stay in their own circles. And conversely, very few city states (like Venice and Ragusa) that did trade with the heathens were able to do so only by special Papal permits. But ever since the Age of Reason, first traders and diplomats, and then common people started to travel to cities, and live there. And eventually, in the last decade, with the rise of Internet, Hollywood, TV shows, finally, almost everyone gets to see some aspect of the worlds beyond their own. They are exposed more to the lifestyle they see on the TV, or perceive on the Internet, than the lifestyle they see on the street. (Which one of you guys reading this know your neighbor's occupation better than Tyler Durden's occupation?)
How is this perceptible in our lives? The question to ask is " Sex and the City". How come a show, revolving around a specific circle in a specific city called New York is circulated and seen all around the world? It must have appealed to the people around the world in a lot of ways. The fact is that global shows seem to penetrate people's minds - and souls - more than the local shows do, and more so when the viewers are more adapted to the urban life. The point is that urban-dwellers all around the world are beginning to have more in common with each other than with their local rural counter-parts, living just 20 miles apart from them.
And this fact, I believe, this clash of cultures, between the global urban culture and the local cultures, is also shaping today's politics. Don't believe me? Consider the demographics for Republicans vs Democrats in USA, or Social Democrats vs the Christian Democrats in Germany. If asked, "which party represents the urban culture better", your answers will be consistent. Just to prove me right, SPD won, in Bavaria, in Münich, over CDU, just two years ago. They had this victory in Bavaria, which is the stronghold of CDU, and they had this victory in Münich, in the urban center, not the rural locations.
(3rd glass of wine)
One other fact that I had found very intriguing was a sentence: Almost all Turkish people who return from the States seem to have one criticism above all others: "There are no human relationships in the US." I heard the same sentence uttered by various people, people who don't know each other, people who come from various social classes. This is a strong sentence, I thought, obviously there has got to be "human relations" in US, but what do these people mean by that? And I think that now I have the answer - this is the urban culture, promoting individuality but also promoting loneliness, an alienation from social feelings.
Therefore, at this point lies the heart of the dilemma: The urban culture fosters individuality, whereas most local cultures cling strongly to local cultures. Where then, does the answer lie? I definitely don't want to be a proponent of either one of the apparent options: (A) An urbanized world where individuality is valued foremost, where people have space, opportunity, financial and social means to "exist" as individuals, (B) a social world where people live in communes, adhering to the rules of the each commune willingly, existing not as how they see themselves, but as how the society sees themselves, knowing that this is a small price to pay for commune will that will take care of them, financially, emotionally and spiritually. In the words of Aldous Huxley, from Brave New World Revisited, "The problem, ... is to find the happy mean. Individuals must be suggestible enough to be willing and able to make their society work, but not so suggestible as to fall helplessly under the spell of professional mind-manipulators. ... The value, first of all, of individual freedom, based upon the facts of human diversity and genetic uniqueness; the value of charity and compassion, based upon the old familiar fact, lately rediscovered by modern psychiatry -- the fact that, whatever their mental and physical diversity, love is as necessary to human beings as food and shelter; and finally the value of intelligence, without which love is impotent and freedom unattainable." Note that Huxley was coming up with this half-a-century before us, so, hats off to the guy.
The gentleman giving the speech in the embedded video is Aubrey de Grey, and he is giving this speech at TED. The point he is making is about immortality, and that basically it is achievable.
Obviously, many people's first reaction to this last sentence is outright denial - that this is impossible. You could think that he is probably mad, or highly delusional. However, if you do take the time to watch this speech, you will recognize that de Grey is very much sane, and in fact, quite intellectually and convincingly arguing that human life can be extended indefinitely. He further puts forward quite rationally that it is not just possible, but also should be achieved.
I would suggest everyone to watch this video - if only to get a different perspective. One of the key points in the speech is the graph at the point 10:45. What he basically says is that the longer we can keep any individual alive, the more chance the individual has of living to a time when his age will be extended even more. This, inevitably leads to a conclusion: We might never cure all health problems related to aging and death, but, we can solve them fast enough that nobody needs to die.
That is an intriguing thought. Normally, we would imagine that although longevity is obviously possible, we would imagine "immortality" to be impossible, because no matter how many cures we have, or how much advancement we make, we won't be able to solve everything. But, de Grey makes a different claim - he says that we do not need to "solve all the problems", but only to "solve them at a faster rate than the people dying."
Unfortunately, as convincing as this may be, I respectfully disagree. You see, de Grey's suggestion has a hidden underlying assumption - that the discipline of medicine can grow at a rate to catch up with the health problems we will face. So the graph is valid only if you assume that the rate of advancement of medicine to beat the rate of problems in a human's lifetime. I will now argue that this is not only unlikely, but impossible.
You see, medicine, like any other science, advances by experiments. Inevitably, the subjects of the experiments of medicine are humans. Even new medication requires decades to develop. This is part of the nature of medicine. No matter how many guinea pigs die, the doctors know that a certain cure will work only after it has been tested on humans. The doctors will need to come across the problems, work on corpses, and watch how the diseases progress as their patients die to be able to understand the nature of the disease. Therefore, medicine relies on experiment, on humans, and requires the recycling of human generations. Therefore, the rate of advancement can never be high enough to beat Death indefinitely.
That being said, there might be breakthroughs. Our two most serious problems are cancer, and heart problems. If these two problems can be overcome, we basically don't have a next cause of death. For example, if we can grow hearts in labs, which actually looks possible, than it means that we have cheated the most common cause of death. If cancer could be possibly avoided, which actually looks unlikely, given the complex nature of all different types of cancers, we could extend the human life. But other diseases would spring to take their place, we just don't know which ones.
 The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene It was really the desire to conceptualize, and understand Einstein's General Relativity that got me interested in physics. That was back in the high school. Years later, when I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe that I felt for the first time in my life I got a glimpse of what the implications of Einsteins four-dimensional space-time model could be.
But the fact is that even as I am catching up with pre- Schrödinger physics, the physics itself is changing. Einstein's model has incompatibilities with the Quantum Model, just like the incompatibility of Maxwell's equations with Newton physics. It was that incompatibility eventually led to Einstein's discovery. Before Einstein, few, if any, could realize that this incompatibility would eventually topple the whol Newtonian physics, and Maxwell's equations would remain the same. Since the quest for a Grand Unified Theory has gone on for decades now with little success, the next theorem might surprise everyone.
At this point in time, however, this new theory did not yet emerge. The String Theory, as Brian Greene claims, is a strong candidate for this position. However, the String Theory has three drawbacks: One is that it lacks the elegance that Einstein's model has, a very simple explanation of the universe. The other problem is that it still is not mature enough; certain questions have never been answered. The third is more sinister - many of the results of string theory point to impossibility of many aspects of the theory. The distances concerned are so small that the act of observing changes the nature of the object, thus making observation impossible for many parts of the theory. The underlying conclusion is that the string theorists may very well have kept chasing their own tails in a land of mathematical equations which have little relevance to the physical world.
 Which brings us to my point. I would like to draw your attention to the elementary particles. These are basically the particles which we learned in high school physics: Electrons, Protons, Neutrons. You may have had an exam where you may have had to learn their properties. For example, each one of these particles have "mass" as one property. Proton has, for example 1.672 × 10 -27 kg mass. Electron, however is considerably lighter and easier to carry around; it has 9.109 × 10 -31 kg mass. If you indeed did have an exam where you had to memorize these two numbers as a teenager, you may have grunted in desperation "Why can't they be just 1 × 10 -27 and 2 × 10 -31" It would have been much easier to memorize if they had been nice, cooked, round numbers.
And why indeed are they not? In Brian Greene's words, "Why, for instance, does the tau weigh about 3520 times as much as an electron? Why does the top quark weigh about 40200 times as much as an up-quark? These are strange, seemingly random numbers. Did they occur by chance, by some divine choice, or is there a comprehensible scientific explanation for these fundamental features of our universe?"
Now you might think that these questions are absurd, that these are just measured quantities with no significance at all. That could be one approach, but that approach is actually letting go of trying to understand the world. Why does everything fall downwards, and never upwards, one might have asked in the 14th century, and scorned by his peers for the absurdity of the question. However today, we have a comprehensive explanation to the answer of that question, and that explanation is part of the theory allow us to engineer quite a lot of machines, including airplanes.
 Calabi-Yau space by Paul Bourke This is here just for fun, you don't have to understand what it is Another criticism to the validity of my question can come from contemporary physicists, or physics enthusiasts, like myself. This question may seem invalid because physics has actually moved on, and that we have explanations from the mass of proton, ie the mass of proton is using its components, 2 up quarks, 1 down quark and and the extra kinetic energy of the quarks and gluons. Or, if you are an adherent to the String Theory, you might say that the mass of these particles are the result of the vibration patterns and tensions of the strings that make up the particle, and the energy cancellations between them. However, both answers bring newer questions: Why do the up and down quarks have masses that seem to be random, and kinetic energies? And if we answer this question with the string theory, then we have to face a new set up questions: Why do the Calabi-Yau shaped spaces explain the current physical properties of these elements, and not any other shape? Why does the M-Theory require 11 dimensions and not 10 or 12? Obviously, the "how" of these peculiarities can be explained. However, "why the universe came to exist with these properties" is a tougher question to tackle.
I intend to not answer the question, but to provide a certain framework. Put yourself, dear reader, in the shoes of the pre-Darwin era biologists. You would see an enormous diversity of life on Earth. You would likely wonder how come this many species came into existence. You could further ask yourself, why many creature do not exist at all? For example, we have beetles with six legs, and mammals with four legs. Why do we not have mammals with six legs, and beetles with four legs? Why do we not have beetles with ten legs? Or, why do we not have large beetles, and small mammals? You would even be fascinated that many of the creatures that do not exist seem horrendous to you, and you could conclude that there has to be a design out there to make sure that humans actually survive as a species.
Even if you had looked at the similarities between these species, and concluded that some species must have evolved from one another, or a common ancestors (after all, you would notice that the four legged critters are the large ones that care for their young, and the six legged critters are the small ones with chitin exoskeletons - they do tend to group, hmm) you would still expect to see all the steps in between. You would surmise that somewhere out there, they should be some elephants with smaller ears, gradually decreasing in size and having slender bodies, and all the range in between. However, it is with Darwin's proposal that we understand why we see "species" and not all different possible combinations of animal features. The fact is that all that diversity at some point existed, but those "in-between" features were outdone, marginalized and disappeared as the animals became "fitter" for their environments.
 The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch And my proposal is to use the same approach to physics, both in the large and small scale. We tend to draw a clear line between "living" adn "non-living", but as we try to understand the particulars, we realize that the line is blurry. For example, the most primitive viruses that have RNA as their genetic material are quite mechanical creatures - they are self-reproducing mechanisms in the molecular scale. You might argue that non-living material is does not create copies of itself, but we actually know that this is a natural phenomenon - crystal molecules do it all the time, by themselves. Now consider this: Just as life on Earth has progressed in a chaotic way over the course of the last hundreds of millions of years, the first matter may have progressed in a similar way - simpler structures giving way to more complex and more stable structures, only because the more stable structures actually stay. These structures may have interacted with each other to create even more complicated, more stable structures, and incorporated the simpler ones into themselves - within the time span of the first few seconds of the Big Bang. And this may be the reason why we see specific features. We do not have a clear-cut explanation or a clear cut theory, because the process is chaotic. Just as we do not have a model to explain how exactly any given species will evolve in any given environment along with other species, we might not have a model to explain the complexity of the elementary particles - whether they be protons-neutrons-electrons, or quarks-leptons-bosons, or just vibrating strings.
This approach was much inspired by the book called The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
Concise explanation of the different theories concerning particles
|
