This Day 12/20, Five Years Ago In 2019

Max passed away next to me. My Max left his Balaji. 

I saw him take his last breath. My life as I knew it changed that moment. But yet, I knew I needed to keep breathing. For me and for the Max inside me and for the promises I made Max that I need to try to fulfill.

The wonder of that moment was - maybe whatever minuscule of all the good deeds I did my entire life, that collective drama and karma helped Max and I be at home, next to each other that moment in time.

I am eternally grateful and eternally indebted for that to happen in Max's house. I couldn't ask for more and I will never ask for more in life. 

If anything, I am trying to pay back for that day and moment until my last breath. 

Well, one thing I do ask is for me take my last breath in the same house and in the same place. 

Coincidentally, I was listening to a beautiful old Tamil song today. 

The lyrics goes like this: 

“Isn’t earth my mother since she gave me so much?

Isn’t sky my father since he taught me so much?”

You are my mother, my father, my kid, my teacher, my everything. 

I have no idea what I did in this life to spend 13 wonderful years with you. 

I am blessed because of you. Even the tears that are flowing now like flood gates opened, feels good because of you. 

I am everything that I am because of you. 

I miss you Max. 

The Value of Science – Richard Feynman

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy -- and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter. Since the question of the value of science is not a scientific subject, this discussion is dedicated to proving my point -- by example.

The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone. It is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things. Of course if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science; it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to good work. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad -- but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value -- even though the power may be negated by what one does.

I learned a way of expressing this common human problem on a trip to Honolulu. In a Buddhist temple there, the man in charge explained a little bit about the Buddhist religion for tourists, and then ended his talk by telling them he had something to say to them that they would never forget -- and I have never forgotten it. It was a proverb of the Buddhist religion:

"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell."

What, then, is the value of the key to heaven? It is true that if we lack clear instructions that determine which is the gate to heaven and which the gate to hell, the key may be a dangerous object to use, but it obviously has value. How can we enter heaven without it?

The instructions, also, would be of no value without the key. So it is evident that, in spite of the fact that science could produce enormous horror in the world, it is of value because it can produce something.

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I would now like to turn to a third value that science has. It is a little more indirect, but not much. The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty -- some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely certain.

Now, we scientists are used to this, and we take it for granted that it is perfectly consistent to be unsure -- that it is possible to live and not know. But I don't know whether everyone realizes that this is true. Our freedom to doubt was born of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle. Permit us to question -- to doubt, that's all -- not to be sure. And I think it is important that we do not forget the importance of this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained. Here lies a responsibility to society.

We are all sad when we think of the wondrous potentialities human beings seem to have, as contrasted with their small accomplishments. Again and again people have thought that we could do much better. They of the past saw in the nightmare of their times a dream for the future. We, of their future, see that their dreams, in certain ways surpassed, have in many ways remained dreams. The hopes for the future today are, in good share, those of yesterday.

Education, for Good and Evil

Once some thought that the possibilities people had were not developed because most of these people were ignorant. With education universal, could all men be Voltaires? Bad can be taught at least as efficiently as good. Education is a strong force, but for either good or evil.

Communications between nations must promote understanding: So went another dream. But the machines of communication can be channeled or choked. What is communicated can be truth or lie. Communication is a strong force also, but for either good or bad.

The applied scientists should free men of material problems at least. Medicine controls diseases. And the record here seems all to the good. Yet there are men patiently working to create great plagues and poisons. They are to be used in warfare tomorrow.

Nearly everybody dislikes war. Our dream today is peace. In peace, man can develop best the enormous possibilities he seems to have. But maybe future men will find that peace, too, can be good and bad. Perhaps peaceful men will drink out of boredom. Then perhaps drink will become the great problem which seems to keep man from getting all he thinks he should out of his abilities.

Clearly, peace is a great force, as is sobriety, as are material power, communication, education, honesty, and the ideals of many dreamers.

[---]

If we take everything into account, not only what the ancients knew, but all of what we know today that they didn't know, then I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know.

But in admitting this, we have probably found the open channel.

This is not a new idea; this is the idea of the age of reason. This is the philosophy that guided the men who made the democracy that we live under. The idea that no one really knew how to run a government led to the idea that we should arrange a system by which new ideas could be developed, tried out, tossed out, more new ideas brought in; a trial and error system. This method was a result of the fact that science was already showing itself to be a successful venture at the end of the 18th century. Even then it was clear to socially minded people that the openness of the possibilities was an opportunity, and that doubt and discussion were essential to progress into the unknown. If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

Our Responsibility as Scientists

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. There are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions and pass them on. It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant; if we suppress all discussion, all criticism, saying, "This is it, boys, man is saved!" and thus doom man for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.

It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

- More Here

What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know

But despite its fundamental importance, entropy is perhaps the most divisive concept in physics. “Entropy has always been a problem,” Lloyd told me. The confusion stems in part from the way the term gets tossed and twisted between disciplines — it has similar but distinct meanings in everything from physics to information theory to ecology. But it’s also because truly wrapping one’s head around entropy requires taking some deeply uncomfortable philosophical leaps.

As physicists have worked to unite seemingly disparate fields over the past century, they have cast entropy in a new light — turning the microscope back on the seer and shifting the notion of disorder to one of ignorance. Entropy is seen not as a property intrinsic to a system but as one that’s relative to an observer who interacts with that system. This modern view illuminates the deep link between information and energy, which is now helping to usher in a mini-industrial revolution on the smallest of scales.

Two hundred years after the seeds of entropy were first sown, what’s emerging is a conception of this quantity that’s more opportunistic than nihilistic. The conceptual evolution is upending the old way of thinking, not just about entropy, but about the purpose of science and our role in the universe.

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Notions of entropy developed in disparate contexts thus fit together neatly. A rise in entropy corresponds to a loss in information about microscopic details. In statistical mechanics, for instance, as particles in a box get mixed up and we lose track of their positions and momentums, the “Gibbs entropy” increases. In quantum mechanics, as particles become entangled with their environment, thus scrambling their quantum state, the “von Neumann entropy” rises. And as matter falls into a black hole and information about it gets lost to the outside world, the “Bekenstein-Hawking entropy” goes up.

What entropy consistently measures is ignorance: a lack of knowledge about the motion of particles, the next digit in a string of code, or the exact state of a quantum system. “Despite the fact that entropies were introduced with different motivations, today we can link all of them to the notion of uncertainty,” said Renato Renner (opens a new tab), a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.

However, this unified understanding of entropy raises a troubling concern: Whose ignorance are we talking about?

[---]

In September 2024, a few hundred researchers gathered (opens a new tab) in Palaiseau, France, to pay homage to Carnot on the 200th anniversary of his book. Participants from across the sciences discussed how entropy features in each of their research areas, from solar cells to black holes. At the welcome address, a director of the French National Center for Scientific Research apologized to Carnot on behalf of her country for overlooking the impact of his work. Later that night, the researchers gathered in a decadent golden dining room to listen to a symphony composed by Carnot’s father and performed by a quartet that included one of the composer’s distant descendants.

Carnot’s reverberating insight emerged from an attempt to exert ultimate control over the clockwork world, the holy grail of the Age of Reason. But as the concept of entropy diffused throughout the natural sciences, its purpose shifted. The refined view of entropy is one that sheds the false dreams of total efficiency and perfect prediction and instead concedes the irreducible uncertainty in the world. “To some extent, we’re moving away from enlightenment in a number of directions,” Rovelli said — away from determinism and absolutism and toward uncertainty and subjectivity.

Like it or not, we are slaves of the second law; we can’t help but compel the universe toward its fate of supreme disorder. But our refined view on entropy allows for a more positive outlook. The trend toward messiness is what powers all our machines. While the decay of useful energy does limit our abilities, sometimes a new perspective can reveal a reservoir of order hidden in the chaos. Furthermore, a disordered cosmos is one that’s increasingly filled with possibility. We cannot circumvent uncertainty, but we can learn to manage it — and maybe even embrace it. After all, ignorance is what motivates us to seek knowledge and construct stories about our experience. Entropy, in other words, is what makes us human.

You can bemoan the inescapable collapse of order, or you can embrace uncertainty as an opportunity to learn, to sense and deduce, to make better choices, and to capitalize on the motive power of you. 

- More Here

Meta Value - 35

To state the obvious - have values in life. Specifically, because of impermanence meta-values are better than values. 

Most of mankind's problems arise because  (other than their inability to sit quietly even for a while) people don't value anything other than their family and cookie cutter religious, political or economic ideology.

Meta-values are something you act on every moment of your life. And this is not some abstract nonsense from historic text but what you live and breathe. Meta-values that reduce pain and sufferings on this planet. 

Have meta-values. 

Meta Value - 34

I do respect money but I conscientious of the fact that money is always just a tool not an end in itself.

In current society, money helps gain freedom if one is wise enough not to become a slave to money.

Never compromise morality for money, period.

Money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene.

- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years 

The Beautiful True Story of Helga, Harvey, and the Lightning Herd

In 1975, they might have done what Helga Tacreiter did: work on a farm. Helga loved the cows and enjoyed feeding them, snuggling them, and singing to them. And while she cried when each new group of calves grew up and got sent away, she made their lives as happy as she could for as long as she could.

Then one day, lightning struck a large tree on the farm while the mother cows were under it seeking shelter from the storm. Six of their calves survived, but they were now orphans. That meant Helga had to raise the babies, including Harvey, who had been temporarily blinded, couldn’t eat on his own, and turned in circles when he tried to walk.

Helga spent long days and nights hand-feeding Harvey and walking with him, pressed against his side. Slowly, miraculously, his vision started to return and he began to chew grass. One day, he walked in a straight line, then ran, then mooed for the first time. Helga was ecstatic. But as she was celebrating Harvey’s progress, she realized something: Soon, he and all the other calves would be sold. After how hard she and Harvey had worked, it didn’t seem fair.

Helga decided to buy the entire group, which she called the “Lightning Herd.” But where could a farmworker get that kind of money? While she was sitting in the barn one night, her back against Harvey, it came to her. Not everyone got to enjoy cow cuddles as she did – but maybe everyone could. Helga raced to the fabric store and back to the barn, where Harvey, seemingly sensing that she now needed his help, stood still for hours while she draped, measured, cut, and sewed soft faux-fur fabric into what would become the first cow-size “cowch.” Word of Helga’s cowches spread, earning her enough money to buy the Lightning Herd and a plot of land where they would spend their lives in peace.

Today, The Cow Sanctuary in New Jersey is home to dozens of animals – many of them rescued by PETA – including cows, emus, horses, goats, ducks, pigs, and geese. It’s funded by donations and, of course, sales of cowches.

- More Here

You can visit Cow Sanctuary in NJ : https://thecowsanctuary.org/

Meta Value - 33

If you want to permanently eradicate any wrongs then focus on curbing demand rather than curbing supply. 

Modern vigilantism and law is built around perpetual work of curbing supply.  

• Don't lock up prostitutes instead give long sentences and publicly shame men who go to prostitutes. 
• Lock up drug users instead of folks who sell drugs. 
• Lock up restaurants who serve and/or people who eat illegally poached non-human animal deadbody instead of arresting poachers. 
• Lock up the IMF and century old creditors who lend unpayable money to poor countries instead of arresting illegal immigrants. 
• and so on

Why Living Close to your Children in Old Age Could Be the Biggest Mistake of Your Life

True peace does not come from others. Its comes from within oneself

Christspiracy: Correcting 2,000 Years of Censorship on Animal Ethics

You can watch the full documentary online at Christspiracy

From Nazareth to the Vatican and from New Delhi to Kathmandu, the pair questioned world-renowned theologians, Christian farmers, Indigenous shamans, archeologists, and religious leaders and asked them to explain why cruelty to animals is accepted around the world, even though compassion is supposedly the uniting core principle of all world religions.

The historical texts and facts that they found—some hiding in plain sight and some deeply buried—are explosive. The new documentary Christspiracy reveals truths that many lifelong Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists have never heard. For those of us who have felt isolated and confused by seemingly conflicting values, the film offers hope: clear and compelling evidence that great religious leaders absolutely rejected harming and killing animals. This revelation has massive implications for how we conduct our moral lives.

Getting the information wasn’t easy. The filmmakers’ vehicles were chased, their homes were ransacked, and doors were slammed in their faces. Netflix wanted to censor the film. Waters and Andersen refused, and Christspiracy became the first movie ever to have its rights bought back from the world’s largest streaming platform.

Waters was forced out of his congregation after church leaders told him to stop asking questions. And his experience rings familiar to many of us. We’ve been ridiculed for our concern for animals, reprimanded for questioning what we were taught, and mocked for our discomfort at religious gatherings in which animals’ flesh is served. But we stand firm in our belief that violence toward animals is wrong.

- More Here

Happy Birthday Neo!

The little guy now is five! 

It feels like yesterday when he came home...

Happy Birthday my love; thank you for making me keep breathing within hours after Max.