On meaning of life / On writing / Copy-paste colleges vs MIT / Daily crono / Strange…

On meaning of life

"The meaning of life is what you make of your time" says Myron W. Evans and is right. I have realized during the last 5 months, that the most important decision is where to use my time - I think that studying, and later trying to use the new skills and knowledge for something, which helps the whole human race (like energy systems, or water systems, or political systems distributing wealth more evenly, etc) is the most valuable thing to do. Just going to work for a some company just to get a lot of money, buying a house in suburbs, two cars, whatever, oh, what a waste, what a meaningless way of living one's life. That is, for me. For someone else, it certainly is meaningful. Also, as pointed out by Kumar today, money does not bring happiness - just imagine suddenly getting 10 million dollars. It would be a catastrophe! It would, at least for short term, devoid life of any meaning. I think I have to make sure I do not get millions suddenly. (thanks to Tapio for the quote).

On writing

Writing is hard. And it is not getting any easier. I should now write the paper for the air traffic seminar, but I just cannot begin. I have used all my traditional witchcraft (read papers, took a nap waiting for the writing to reveal itself, got the drugs, had a walk), but all is in vain. Not even blogging helps. This is bad. But I will prevail, I have always been able to write these kinds of short papers, and I will this time, too. And I know, that once I get started, everything should be rather easy.
I followed advice by Robbie (see today's comments) and I have now written more about 1000 words. So, I have done 40% of the work, and used some 4 hours. Therefore, I am rather confident, that I will get the whole paper done rather early tomorrow. The work is really interesting and will benefit me directly: only by writing one learns. Reading is necessary but not sufficient.

Copy-paste colleges vs MIT

It seems, that somewhere out there exist many copy-paste colleges, where copying things from the internet and pasting it without references in one's own work is not acceptable, but recommendable. Of course, in any decent university, not to speak of world-class places like MIT, this kind behavior is not only prohibited, but deeply despised. Should one do that, and get caught, one gets such a reputation, with which it must be impossible to even get out of bed in the morning afterwards. And even still I have seen the copy-paste college and its lousy students creeping in MIT. In one course, I realized that my classmates had just copied definitions from dictionary.com and presented them as their own inventions. How can anyone do that? Do they not have any self respect? I have to confess, that anything they do now is hard for me to take seriously. For me, intellectual honesty, not copying anything, doing my own work to my best ability, and then succeeding or failing, is a matter of honor. Anything less than total honesty is totally impossible. It is infinitely better to fail when trying one's best than trying to avoid the failure by copying the work of someone else. After all, it is impossible to learn anything without doing mistakes, without failing every now and then. Even Gödel made once a mistake in his Latin assingments. A single one, but still.

Daily crono

I took a long, 2-hour, nap.
And even in other respects, a normal Friday. One class, nice lunch in the Bengali-restaurant, coffee sitting on the stairs of the Stata-building, back home, nap, sushi, lots of Dr Pepper, writing, drinking some wine with Kumar, and writing blog. Life is almost perfect, only S is missing, but she will arrive in Boston in less than week. Then, life is as close to being perfect as I can imagine it to be. I am such a modest person.
I was thinking about homes/houses. Now I am living in a small studio, in Helsinki I had a 1-bedroom flat with S, In China we had a 5-bedroom flat with 2 floors and a roof-top terrace and whatnot. I cannot see my happiness and quality of life depending on these external conditions. The only thing which is important is to have enough room for a decent home library. Otherwise, I do not care about the place I live in. But it has to be close to work, within walking distance, if possible. Commuting by car/bus/train is wasting one's life, and should be avoided. For these reasons, I cannot really see why one should invest enormous amount of money (and thus time) in buying a nice home. Or a home at all, for that matter. Property is a nuisance.

Strange things in USA, part 12

73. Having to pay for receiving SMSs. The most stupid way of pricing mobile services imaginable. Practiced by US carriers. I will be interesting to see, what happens when the SMS spamming begins - I will send bills to anyone sending me spam by SMS (if I just can figure out where to send the bill) 74. Astronauts.

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs from May to June 2005".