Minorities

If we can ignore the few exceptions, all systems are designed by the majority, and naturally, designed to the convenience of the same majority.  When a minority finds it uncomfortable to be in such a system, they create a subsystem where they are the majority.  (Or they join an existing system where they can be majority.)

Note to self: Don't fall for aesthetics again

It looks I will have to get a replacement laptop in a month or two, and every now and then I think of getting a MacBook.  Could be because of unintentional peer pressure.  Almost everyone in my company carries a MacBook around, so it won't be surprising if a part of mine is sold on the beauty of the machine.

Here I am going to enumerate the reasons why I should stick to a Linux machine -- or rather my past (bad) experiences with the Apple machine.  Just so that I don't fall for aesthetics again ;-)

• MacBooks do not have Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys.  Command+arrows work in some programs, but not all.  Some programs might respond to Ctrl+arrows.  Bottom line is that no key combination can be programmed into my muscle memory, and I would be frustrated by the lack of productivity.
• Apple believes that people run several different apps simultaneously, and that it's not common for a single app to have several open windows.  You'd press Command+Tab to switch between apps and after switching to the app you want to, you press Command+` to cycle between the windows of that app.  But I do pretty much everything on the browser, so technically I have only one app open with a dozen windows.  Suddenly, all I have is sequential access to my windows!
• This might have improved by now, but when I used a MacBook about two years ago, the UI was mostly mouse-centric.  Some dialog boxes just cannot be closed with the keyboard, for example.  I am a keyboard warrior and I go out of my way to avoid using the mouse.
• They still have the freezing problems.*  Not more than two weeks ago I saw a colleague trying super hard to bring his MacBook back to life after it got stuck somewhere.  The laptop would go to sleep, wake up, and do all that, but just won't let him do any work.  He had to power down the machine to get it back to working.  If they haven't fixed that problem in the past two years, I don't think they will fix it in the next few months.  No matter how brilliant the sleep indicator is, if the machine would lose my work I don't want it.
• Mac OS has only one clipboard, which means I will have to explicitly copy stuff before I can paste.  I know there are people who get confused by X's primary selection and clipboard, but I am not one of them.  In fact, I love them.
• I know there's a Mac App Store that may make it easy for me to find and install apps.  But hey, apt-get is a hundred times easier and it costs no money :-)

* I came up with this a few weeks ago: MacBooks are like ice cream.  Pleasant to look at and use, but frozen most of the times.

Facebook Disconnect

When I open TechCruch, I see a Facebook widget on the page with a listing of my friends who have "liked" TechCrunch.  In addition to enabling me to connect with my friends, this widget tells Facebook every time I read something on TechCruch.  Facebook now knows that, e.g., I am more interested in Android than, say, FourSquare.  Facebook knows so much about me without my permission or willingness to share with Facebook.  Without getting anything from Facebook in return.

Of course, Facebook might show me more relevant ads.  Facebook might provide me a more personalized experience, sure.  But I am not sure if I trust Facebook enough to give that information about myself away.  Plus, I don't even open Facebook frequently nowadays.

Yesterday I was seeing a video about Facebook and privacy and it dawned on me that Facebook has been collecting my information for a long time now!  It's not that I am a privacy freak or anything.  I have been using Google Web History since the day it has been available, and I have found it useful.  Occasionally I search my Google web history to find a page that I once visited but forgotten its URL or search terms to find it again.

But Facebook is not like that.  I have no idea what Facebook will do with my data.  They don't even show me what URLs they have from my browsing history.  And I don't use Facebook as much for them to "personalize" my experience either.  So I went ahead and installed Facebook Disconnect on my Chrome.  I can always rethink my decision later, if there's a need.  For now, Facebook doesn't have to know what I am up to online.

The Dancing Wu Li Masters

A good friend of mine gifted me The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a very fascinating book about "new physics", i.e. quantum mechanics.  I am on page 56, and book has already surprised me several times with the information in it.  It says:

Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics are partners in a double irony.  Newtonian physics is based upon the idea of laws which govern phenomena and the power inherent in understanding them, but it leads to impotence in the face of a Great Machine which is the universe.  Quantum mechanics is based upon the idea of minimal knowledge of future phenomena (we are limited to knowing probabilities) but it leads to the possibility that our reality is what we choose to make it.

(Don't worry much if this is not very clear to you... this one is explained over several pages in the book and it will be very clear if you are reading it in the book.)

In another place it quotes a book of Carl Jung on psychology, and the idea resembles what I saw in The Secret:

The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.  That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposite halves.

It's a very good read if you like science in general.

Scientists say it well

There are several ways a single thing can be explained.  But there are times when you look at some explanation and go wow.  I am gonna list some really cool explanations that I have heard.

• The first such explanation I remember was given by a MySQL trainer.  He was talking about different data types and gave the best explanation I have heard of why floating point data in computers can be inaccurate.  He said that every data type in computers is finite, and there are infinite numbers between any two fractions, say 0.1 and 0.2.  So floating point representations hop through the interval including some values and skipping several values.  For instance, one implementation of float type might be able to only represent 0.1, 0.12, 0.14, 0.16, 0.18, and 0.2.  You simply cannot represent 0.17 using such a type.  (When using such a type, your computer cannot differentiate between 0.1734 and 0.1748; it will treat them as two equal numbers!)
• Someone told me sometime back that if you keep applying the brake, it would eventually fail.  I looked it up on the web, and I found a curious explanation (I don't remember the source).  It said that while applying brake, we transform the kinetic energy from the wheel into heat energy.  When there isn't any more kinetic energy left to move the vehicle forward it stops.  (If we keep applying the brake, the brake will get so hot it cannot take any more heat from the wheel.  Since no energy is taken off the wheel the vehicle keeps moving.)
• The Dancing Wu Li Masters says that no one has ever seen an atom.  To see if science has improved since then or still atoms cannot be seen, I did a Google search and found an answer Argonne National Laboratory's site.  The answer is more than 17 years old now, but the way scientists answer questions is interesting.  Arthur Smith of ANL says that atoms cannot be seen because all atoms are thousands of times smaller than the smallest light waves we can see using our eyes.  It conveys the idea directly that we don't see objects, but all we see is light.