Purposefulness

My nephew, my sister's son, has decided to get rich. He is so determined that he promised not to leave the bathroom until he has become a millionaire.

The decline of Europe

The current economic crisis may be a moment when the living standards in the "rich" countries fall drastically, and the emerging markets gain relative wealth.

For Europe there is one thing that always could have remained a source of income, however, and that is tourism. There is only one Toledo, one London, one Mont Saint-Michel and one Sacra di San Michele in the world.

Thousands of European towns and cities are potential tourist destinations for the rapidly increasing number of tourists from China, India and the rest of the world.

However, many towns have torn down reasonably old buildings and replaced them with new concrete structures. There are concrete structures all over the world - many of them nice. The ones built today in China and Malaysia are not in any way less impressive than the European ones.

The old cities however, the architecture of the early 20th century and older, that is something that is virtually unique to Europe. There are of course small pockets of old European style architecture elsewhere, but nowhere is there such an impressive accumulation, as there used to be in Europe.

Now, after two bloody unnecessary world wars and vast amounts of bad city planning, there is not much left in Europe either, limiting even tourism as a potential source of income.

Automated slander

In my sister's company, management has yet again problems with the productivity of the employees. They discovered that a lot of time is spent by the coffee machine, where the present slander the absent.

To satisfy this need they added a function to the electronic address book. From now on, you can click on any name, except your own one, and select an option called "comment". In this field, you can enter anything you think about the person, no matter how negative or positive. Everyone at the company can read all comments about everyone except themselves.

By automating this basic human need of saying bad things about others behind their backs, management hopes to limit the time people feel they have to spend at the coffee machines.

Intolerance and Christianity

How come Christianity appeared out of nowhere in the fourth century with so little tolerance for non-believers, compared to older religions?

It is possible that they simply carried on, what was there before.

Step 1. The Romans think it is a great idea to have everyone make sacrifices to the emperor. It is not a controversial idea at the time. A lot of people of most religions made sacrifices to different entities, so why not to the emperor? It was simply a way of keeping the country together, like when British MPs have to swear allegiance to the queen, or when Americans salute their flag, or when Danish immigrants have to perform a test to prove their knowledge of the country, before they can become citizens.

Step 2. The Christians, when they appear, think step 1 was not that great an idea. Their religion stipulates that there is only one god, and that is not the emperor.

Step 3. Christians of all different kinds of beliefs are occasionally prosecuted by the Romans, because of step 2.

Step 4. Within a few decades during the 4th century, Christians discover that theirs has become a state religion. But in step 3, the idea of religious prosecution had appeared. The Christians, now in power, use this concept to hit back at non-Christians, tit for tat. They do not initiate it. They just do not break the habit.

Besides, not tolerating non-believers turned out to be a winning strategy, something other religions have learnt later on.

Fun fact of Nicaea

One thing one may not think of is that the first Council of Nicaea (Νίκαια) was convened by a heathen, emperor Constantine the first. The council took place 325 AD. Constantine lived 272 - 337, and he only got baptised at his death bed.

The council of Nicaea was when the Nicene Creed was first formulated. In other words, the creed hundreds of millions of Christians use, was formulated under the charge of a non-Christian.

Not that it matters that much, of course. God was probably in charge of the emperor.

Confucius entrapped

In the 1999 film "Entrapment", Catherine Zeta-Jones' character, Gin, sees the following Chinese characters, which are supposed to be used to dial a code:

蚊子炮打
夺刀用与
生别牛枪

She immediately spots that six of the characters can be used to say 别用炮打蚊子, bié yòng pào dǎ wén zi, which means "Don't use a cannon to kill a mosquito." She identifies this as a Confucius (孔子) quote.

This is a top secret room in one of the biggest banks in South East Asia. It is strange that they would choose a code that is easy to guess. But I guess, they perhaps had good insurance, so they did not really care.

The grammar of 别用炮打蚊子 is not particularly classic, as far as I can tell. It is good modern Chinese, but hardly the kind Confucius would have used 2500 years ago.

It is also surprising that Confucius would have anything to say about cannons, almost one thousand years before gunpowder was invented.

So, basically, it seems like Gin is wrong from beginning to end.

But, I do not know if that matters very much, because she had a pretty smile when she said it.

Setting Madoff in perspective

I overheard this conversation on a train recently.

"Did you hear they got Bernard Madoff? He had squandered 50 billion dollars. Hearing things like that, I wonder why the police raised their eyebrows, when they found out I had taken just 500 euro from the bank where I work. That's nothing in comparison."

"Yes. It's the same thing for me. I blew off just 4 billion euro, and you should hear the fuzz they made about it."

Eradicating with compassion

It is often claimed that man is a horrible threat towards nature. Allegedly, we are much worse than any other species.

It is true that man is responsible for one of the worse mass extinctions on earth. However, it is due to our power, not due to our lack of concern. This is in fact something that sets us apart from other animals. Man is a compassionate animal.

It is likely that there were stone age people worried about the survival of the woolly mammoth. However, they lacked the legal institutions to protect them. It is even possible that the last human hunter who killed the last mammoth thought that there were plenty of other ones around, and had he known that this was the last one, he would not have killed it.

It is likely that there among the sailors approaching Mauritius in the 17th century to get dodo birds, there were some who were concerned with the survival of the species. However, as each sailor went there for just a short period of time, there was no long term plan set up to protect the birds. And once rats and cats were set loose on the island, there was no way to remove them to save the dodo.

We know that people in India feel bad about cutting down the habitat of tigers. However, when you need to feed your own children, they take priority over tigers, especially as the tigers presumably could go elsewhere. The problem is that people around "elsewhere" may say the same thing and cut down the tiger's habitat there. Luckily, the government of India has set up long term legislation to protect the tiger. If it is enough, we still do not know.

A squirrel would never have set up long term legislation to protect the tiger. A squirrel would probably not care if the last tiger died in front of its very eyes. No other animal, except man, cares about the survival of tigers.

At the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, they made attempts to help chimpanzees find food hidden under cups, by pointing at the right cups. The chimpanzees did not understand the gesture at all. However, chimpanzees happily point at objects themselves, to hint that humans should give something to them. It is just that chimpanzees never point to each other. They are unable to fathom the concept of someone else helping them in this way. As soon as the human changed gesture from pointing to an open hand, as if the human tried to grab the food, the chimpanzee understood the gesture. "If the human tries to get the cup, that means that it contains food, and then I can get it." (Documented in "Why Don’t Apes Point?" by Michael Tomasello.)

Chimpanzees are able to cooperate, when they get a reward for it, and sometimes even without direct reward. However, they seem to have a very limited sense of gratitude or compassion.

There are of course some animals, who care about other species. There is for example the fennec fox, which never eats all the berries of a bush, as it "knows" that the bush needs them to survive. Likewise there are plenty of animals living in symbiosis with other animals. However, in all those cases, it seems their behaviour is part of their DNA to protect some other species.

No other animal has the human ability to reflect and feel compassion about another species, for either practical or moral reasons.

Our challenge now is to set this compassion in practice.


Non compassionate squirrel

Ed Wood - what's his grandeur?

I recently saw my first, and hopefully last, film by Ed Wood, Bride of the Monster. This film producer is famous for being the worst one ever. His films are really low budget. The plots are idiotic. The actors are for the most part abysmal, and the "special" effects would make a child feel embarrassed because of their simplicity.

So, why do we admire him? Why did Tim Burton make a film about this failure, and why did Johnny Depp star in this award winning film about the worst of the worst?

Anyone could produce such a bad film as Bride of the Monster. In fact, most of us are potentially even worse film producers, and that is the reason we do not enter the business.

The amazing thing with Ed Wood was not that he was bad, but that he had the tenacity to go on and gather money to produce new films, in spite of his mediocrity.

What we admire is his energy to produce anything that bad.

The Auto Bailout - who does it hurt?

The US senate is not overly enthusiastic about the 14 billion dollar bailout of the car industry. 14 billion is of course much less than the 25 billion that the car industry initially asked for, but it may still be too much.

The bailout will go mainly to General Motors and Chrysler, who are worst off. Ford will lose out comparatively, as they get less money, as a punishment for having run their business better in the past.

The car businesses in other countries will lose competitive advantages against the American firms. Other countries will find the need and a good excuse for subsidising their own car industries, which then will hurt the American car industry.

American consumers, as well as consumers everywhere in the world, will lose out, as three badly run companies will be kept alive - something that hurts the more efficient competition.

American tax payers will lose, as they will have to provide the money.

Producers of other products will lose, as their products will look less accessible than cars.

This does not mean that it is obvious that there should be no bailout, however. There are almost a quarter of a million people directly employed by the three big auto manufacturers, and perhaps as much as three million indirectly depending on it.

If the three companies were to close down overnight, the repercussions are impossible to judge. Banks would fail. The housing market would dive even deeper. It is impossible to tell if the American economy, or the world economy, could handle that.

Luckily, it is unlikely that all three companies will close down suddenly. There will be attempts at solutions, mergers, acquisitions by other companies, domestic or foreign ones. In short, it is possible that the economy could survive without the bailout.

The only worrying detail is that it also is possible that it might not.