Ponderings
"At a lonely border post high on the Himalayan frontier, Ramaswamy Balasubramanian peered through his binoculars at the People’s Liberation Army soldiers stationed in Tibet-who were peering through their scopes back at him. Tensions between India and China had been high for several years since 1962, when the two countries traded shots across their disputed border. The PLA soldiers, knowing they were being watched, taunted Balasubramanian and his fellow Indian soldiers by shaking, defiantly, high in the air, their pocket-sized, bright-red copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao-better known in the West as “Mao’s Little Red Book.”
Balasubramanian, then a conscript studying physics in his spare time, soon grew tired of these taunts. So one day, he came to his observation post prepared with a suitable rejoinder. As soon as the PLA soldiers started waving Mao’s Little Red Book in the air again, he and two fellow Indian soldiers picked up and held aloft the three big, bright-red volumes of The Feynman Lectures on Physics."
----- Ralph Leighton, May 11, 2005
Recent Ponderings:
The current system of producing knowledge in science is a classical example of a failed capitalist system. Researchers are being exploited, and do not receive money for their work: the knowledge they produce in the form of research papers, does not belong to them. And it does not belong to people either. Instead, the knowledge in science today is a private property of a few mighty businesses, who make huge amounts of money from it. Not only that system is an obstacle to the progess, but it also creates huge distances between rich and poor, where poor people are blocked from access to knowledge. And that includes such important areas as medicine and healthcare.
All this was made possible by the fundamentally wrong concept of intellectual property.
Not only intellectual property creates injustice, but is also self-contradictory.
What can one do to avert this? Cognition? Technological advancement? Brain Mapping?
A new political ideology? Perhaps something that takes heed of evolution? Another Hitler?
Since the past few inactive months, I've actively read up everything I got, from pure mathematics, physics to theology, philosophy, communist and liberal ideologies, cognitive and neuroscience papers, random long essays that highlight the lives of women under Taliban, all in an attempt to become a omnipotent polymath.
Under this false canopy that I used to live, understanding the world, and knowing that it was all just a fallacy is quite the wrenching idea. My cover was torn and I witnessed the world as it is, and now I'm a muddled mess of everything humans have discovered the past few centuries.
Balasubramanian, then a conscript studying physics in his spare time, soon grew tired of these taunts. So one day, he came to his observation post prepared with a suitable rejoinder. As soon as the PLA soldiers started waving Mao’s Little Red Book in the air again, he and two fellow Indian soldiers picked up and held aloft the three big, bright-red volumes of The Feynman Lectures on Physics."
----- Ralph Leighton, May 11, 2005
Recent Ponderings:
The current system of producing knowledge in science is a classical example of a failed capitalist system. Researchers are being exploited, and do not receive money for their work: the knowledge they produce in the form of research papers, does not belong to them. And it does not belong to people either. Instead, the knowledge in science today is a private property of a few mighty businesses, who make huge amounts of money from it. Not only that system is an obstacle to the progess, but it also creates huge distances between rich and poor, where poor people are blocked from access to knowledge. And that includes such important areas as medicine and healthcare.
All this was made possible by the fundamentally wrong concept of intellectual property.
Not only intellectual property creates injustice, but is also self-contradictory.
What can one do to avert this? Cognition? Technological advancement? Brain Mapping?
A new political ideology? Perhaps something that takes heed of evolution? Another Hitler?
Since the past few inactive months, I've actively read up everything I got, from pure mathematics, physics to theology, philosophy, communist and liberal ideologies, cognitive and neuroscience papers, random long essays that highlight the lives of women under Taliban, all in an attempt to become a omnipotent polymath.
Under this false canopy that I used to live, understanding the world, and knowing that it was all just a fallacy is quite the wrenching idea. My cover was torn and I witnessed the world as it is, and now I'm a muddled mess of everything humans have discovered the past few centuries.