Wednesday 13 November 2013

Essay - how should we behave?

There is no general and final rule that could establish the way of our behaviour. There were different philosophical as well as religious concepts that strived to give us a recipe for life, but without success. Moreover, there is always a clash between conservative and liberal approaches to life.
Technology seems to be the one of the sources of frictions between older people and teenagers. The elder are reserved towards new electronic devices, whereas young generation absorbs them rapidly and uses them everywhere, especially in public places. In my view, young people should neither play songs noisily from their smartphones in public places nor telephone to somebody and talk loudly. It can be really annoying. On the other hand, sitting there and waiting for somebody or going by bus and doing nothing can be boring. Then, the person can read something on a tablet, listen to music using earphones, play a game or textchat with somebody. It is at least difficult to get to know somebody in a bus, so why not to catch up with your friends on Facebook. The best way to solve the problem is to have both sides the elder and younger to sit there and talk about technology. Maybe, this time young people could teach  something their parents and grandparents.
We should remember about individualism. We should not be concerned about other people's judgement about us. Only then can we be creative and enthusiastic. Each of us has his or her big value as an individual. We ought to be aware of that since this forms a fundamental role in our personal and professional life. I fully agree with this. However, we do not have to become rebels. The case is to find our own paths in our lives and follow them even against the odds. Everybody will die someday, so we have nothing to loose. It is easy to copy others. Although it is much harder to be innovative, it gives more fun and satisfaction.

All in all, our behaviour is a result of many factors. Each of us had better find their own path, but at the same time be tolerant and be aware of different opinions. We should inhibit the bubbles created around us by the other people from inflating. We must stay hungry, full of energy and open-minded.

Friday 8 November 2013

Who is an outcast?

I'm attending an online course on Algorithms, Part II by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne. I implemented a tool that uses WordNet data to determine an outcast in a group of words. What was interesting about that? There was a file outcast2.txt which contained only two words: von_Neuman and Turing. Here is the result of a test:

Test 1: test outcast() on WordNet digraph
  *  outcast2.txt
     -  nouns = Turing von_Neumann 
     -  student   outcast() = von_Neumann
     -  reference outcast() = Turing
 
It occurs that Turing was an outcast, not von_Neuman. Hmmm, according to the video by Bret Victor http://bit.ly/1d47YgE, if we had listened to all von_Neuman's theories, we all would write code in an assembly language ;)