My Power Pack.

Two days ago I was with chilling my classmates, discussing. Somehow we started talking about parenting, and someone said he is going to be a good father. I thought about the statement and said “Hopefully, I’ll be a good father”. Another person reacted to what I said. The person felt I sounded too pessimistic or too passive. I tried to explain that what I said was that I’ll try to do my best to be a good father, but it is possible things turn out differently. My stance was that I couldn't categorically say that I’d be a good father. There is a considerable amount of time till I become a father (ceteris paribus), and a lot could happen that could stop me from being a good father. I explained, that it was possible that in the time between now and when and I become a father, I could start drugs and become messed up, I could have cancer, and become bitter about life, and a lot of other things could happen that could stop me from being a good father. It appeared that I was being far more pessimistic than necessary, but it didn’t appear so to me. In my opinion, these sad things happen, and they happen unexpectedly and unpredictably. I did not believe that I have complete control over what happened in my life. Forces and influences exist that are above what I could control.

The next day, something happened that illustrated exactly why I had that kind of mind set. I wrote an article shortly after waking up that day, and I planned to type it and edit it later in the day. The day went on, and when I was about to start to typing and editing it, my power-pack blew (it literally had a tiny explosion). After the reality of the explosion, and its implication that my power pack was damaged, dawned on me, I felt rather strange. I hadn’t planned on my power-pack exploding that day, but there I was, without a power-pack. I left my department, and took a walk to clear my head. I thought furiously about what I could do. I was broke to the last dime, I couldn’t call home, because I had just done so two day earlier to ask for money for a racket, and it had already been sent. I knew I couldn’t borrow from my friends, because I had tried to do that when I needed money for the racket, and they, like me, were also broke. It seemed like I was doomed to be without a power-pack for at least a few weeks. The consequences of being without a power pack was really, really grimy. It would mean asides eating and having my bath, I would have nothing else to do till I could fix it. I had experienced what it felt like to be without a laptop, earlier in the year, and it wasn’t something I looked forward to. I almost lost my mind then. Besides, I had so much to do this time around, that I just simply couldn’t be without my laptop.

My mind battled furiously on finding a way out of the apparent quagmire I was in. Then out of nowhere, someone occurred to me. A friend I could borrow money from to get a new one. I called him immediately and asked him if I could borrow it from it. He agreed, and I was instantly relieved of my feelings of desperation.

I started thinking about what happened, and I remembered the discussion of the previous day, and I saw that I wasn’t completely wrong in my opinion. Life actually does happen, and there’s little we can do from preventing it from happening. I realised that what happened could have been far worse? The explosion could have been more powerful, and it could have fried my motherboard, or even more powerful and blew off my hand, or electrocuted me. On the other hand, it could have possibly not have happened at all, and I wouldn’t even be thinking these thoughts. What mattered however was that it had happened, and I was fortunate to have my efforts at averting its consequences successful, because even those could have been unsuccessful, and I would have still been in a mess. I felt grateful at the way things had turned out and I returned to my department to continue typing and editing my article.

Today is Tuesday and the time is 7:14 PM, about 44 hours past the time I planned to upload the article I wrote. I couldn’t finish editing on Sunday, because my battery went out. I couldn’t do it yesterday partly because I had a lot of other more important things to do, and partly because I was lazy. I hope to complete it today, but I can’t say categorically if I will. I am currently in my department, power is out, and my laptop battery is low. I didn’t plan on power going out today, but it did. And that’s life for all of us.

‘krama

Tuesday, 06 August 2013

The Question.

 “Is all of this true?” For many non-religious converts, this, or a slight variation of it, is the question that initiates the notorious process of losing faith. Some non-religious folks, like me, were actually quite serious with their faith before losing it. This isn’t so hard to imagine; I was born in a Christian home, and taught Christian stories and values. This extremely exposure to Christianity made me grow up to believe everything in my version of Christianity as perfectly inerrant and completely apodictic; for me Christianity had epistemological primacy. This is perfectly natural, humans generally do not go about questioning the fundamental things they learnt from infancy.

As I grew into adolescence my belief grew along. I never at any point in time seriously considered the idea that I could be wrong. Consequently I tried to live according the tenets I believed in: God had extreme influence on whatever happened to me, and he was most important factor, in my life; eternity was real, and Jesus could come at any time. Due to this beliefs, I took my faith very seriously, it didn’t make sense for me not to, when I believed that God had so much influence over my life and after. I couldn’t understand people who claimed to also believe but appeared not to give thought to it in their living. I still don’t understand them. I mean, if you believe that the world could end at any time, and that your eternity would depend, at least in part, on how you lived your life, then you should at least make an effort to make sure you’re on the safe side of eternity. I placed a high premium on ‘my relationship with God’ and all things related to it. I lived a good part of my adolescent like this, and all of it was based on the implicit idea that my opinions about the world was, without a doubt, correct. I pitied people of other faiths because of their impending, unavoidable perdition, and I always hoped that at some point they would come to into the knowledge of, what I thought was, the truth.

I continued like this until at a certain point in time when, for no tangible reasons, I started asking myself ‘how do I know that what I believe is the truth’. At this point, I had not started doubting my beliefs. I believed so much that they were correct. I was just wondering how I could be certain of it. It was like having only an intuitive answer to a mathematics question and looking for a rigorous solution. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that I didn’t have any reason for believing, that was exclusive to my own beliefs. All the reasons I had for believing: a sacred text, historicity, ‘supernatural’ events, and even the almighty faith, were not exclusive to Christianity. I tried as hard as I could to find one factor, one thing that was completely exclusive to my faith, but I couldn’t. As my search continued, I gradually started sub-consciously doubting my faith, and after a while, these doubts became conscious.  At this point. I tried desperately to find something irrefutable, something tangible, something, anything I could sincerely hold on to. My feeble attempt ended in futility and with this came a massive case of cognitive dissonance. My psyche could not cope with the thought that one of the fundamental facts on which I lived my life was wrong, so I experienced a lot of mental anxiety, fear, and heavy depressions. As with all things, the passage of time made it less intense. I started questioning my beliefs about two years and two months ago, and I became a self-acclaimed atheist nine months after that.

 Losing my faith changed not only my religious beliefs and activities, it changed me fundamentally. It made me more humble about my opinions and ideas, it granted me a sort of intellectual modesty. Losing belief on something I believed so strongly made realise that whatever I opinion I have, regardless of how strongly I believe it, could be wrong. It also made me become stricter with believing in general. I realised that people generally believed things without having strong reasons for doing so. I started demanding more evidence before believing, and in the absence of convincing evidence, I’d just rather be without an opinion. As one of my favourite literary characters, Lord Henry (Picture of Dorian Gray) said “I never approve, or disapprove, of anything. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our prejudices.”

How I became concerned with feminism, sexism, and gender equality.

It was the morning of boxing day, and we were heading home after customarily spending Christmas at our grandparents place. The journey was quiet and steady and in a few minutes, we had gotten to Ejigbo. The road there was ridden with pot-holes so we had to slow down. The reduction in pace allowed me to observe the surroundings more keenly. I noticed there weren't as many people or vehicles on the road as was usual. I was thinking about this when something on my right caught my attention. Two people were fighting; on closer inspection, I saw that it was a guy and a lady. I felt incensed with righteous anger. 'What kind of scoundrel of a man fights with a woman?' I thought.

Before I could go on with my damnation of the guy, the fight was separated by pedestrian spectators. Relieved that the fight was over, and that the savage man was under control, I looked away.

"Lolo, did you see that guy fighting with a girl?" I asked my brother.

"No, I was looking at my phone" he replied.

"The guy did not try ooo, how can he be fighting with a girl?" I continued.

"If not that they separated them, I might have gotten down to go to go and fight the guy"

"Why?!" he questioned looking surprised.

"If he was fighting a guy, would you have gotten down?"

"No, why would I get down?" I reply with my own question.

"Then why should you get down because it's a girl, sebi girls and guys are supposed to be equal"

'Touché' I thought to myself, as I became silent for a  moment. When I did speak, it was in incoherent mutterings explaining how we were equal but different and stuff like that.

He continued in a quasi sage like tirade against absolute gender equality, and abruptly returned to his phone, which seemingly held more fascination for him, than confused, inconsistent ethics.

I, however became absorbed in trying to reconcile political correctness with reality.

A mission I'm still trying to accomplish.

Chebyshev Hexagons- From Imagination to Construction

This is a brief post discussing Chebyshev hexagons (yeah, I know it’s abstract math crap, and probably doesn’t do anything in reality, but they’re quite cool, so you might want to hang around).
Enjoy.

A Chebyshev hexagon is simply an hexagon in Chebyshev space. For purposes of this discussion, we’ll deal only with regular polygons.
Essentially that’s all there is to them. Just your everyday regular hexagon, that by some twist of fate happens to be in Chebyshev space.

Well in case you’re wondering, what Chebyshev space is, Chebyshev space is the maximum metric (and if you’re wondering what a metric or space, or even maximum is, then this is the point where I say in an almost angry tone: “GOOGLE IT :) :)” ).

It is defined over a vector space, where the distance between two points, is the value of the largest separation along any coordinate.
Technically, it’s defined as:
which means that for a n-dimensional vector space (n number of coordinates), the distance between any two points p and q is given by the maximum of the differences between their individual coordinates.
So I’ll explain with two examples.
1. Let’s assume Heaven is a 5 dimensional Chebyshev space (maybe that’s why prophets and people that see ‘visions’ say it’s indescribable).
and I’m at somewhere say, St. Peter’s square with coordinates (4, 15, 6.8,7,7) and an angel is at (6,8,10.5,10,7). The difference between the two points is (2,7,3.7,3,0). In Chebyshev space, the distance between two points is the largest individual difference. Hence the distance between Me and the angel is 8 heavenly units.
2.Coming down to earth, literally, let’s look at the distance between my room in Blk 1, rm 108 and Tolu’s room in Blk 4, 313 Faj (if you’re not an Ife student and you don’t know what Faj is, well that’s tough luck for you). There are three dimensions in this scenario They are:

1. Up/Down: I stay in floor one, and he stays in Medical floor. There is a vertical displacement component.
2. Front/Back: Block one is in front of block four so there’s like a north/south horizontal displacement between them.
3. Left/Right: Facing front, block one is to the right of block four, so there’s like a horizontal east/west displacement.

So in normal space(Euclidean space) the distance between my room and Tolu’s is the square root of the sum of squares, but since we’re considering Chebyshev, it’s going to be the largest  of the three differences. In this case, it’s likely the 3rd coordinate. That means if Faj was a Chebyshev space, the distance between my room and Tolu’s room would be equal to just the  east/west horizontal distance between my room and Tolu’s room.
I guess with this. we get a general idea of how Chebyshev space works.
Now a Chebyshev hexagon is just an hexagon that has all the properties of a regular hexagon. The only difference being that the Chebyshev hexagon is in Chebyshev space.
I go forward to explain my line of thought below.
A regular hexagon (or any other polygon for that matter), in any space, is just a shape that divides the circumference of a circle in that space, into an equal number of segments, so for an hexagon, it’s six segments.(This definition is not official. I created it, so believe it at your risk)
Therefore, a Chebyshev hexagon, is a shape that divides a Chebyshev circle, which is actually a square (yep, you read it right. For some weird reason, that might take too much space to explain, a Chebyshev circle happens to be a square, read the wiki page to learn about this great deep magic).
Therefore, a Chebyshev hexagon is a six pointed shape that divides a square into six equal segments. But an important point to take note of, is that our distance is going to be measured in Chebyshev space, and not Euclidean(normal) space.
Haven’t settled that, the model for the hexagon is described below.

A Chebyshev circle of radius R, is actually a square of side 2R. The aim is to divide this circle(square) into six equal(in chebyshev distance) sides.
Now, since an hexagon has an even number of shapes, it must possess symmetry of some sort.

The image is displayed below.

The hexagon is shown in the figure above(In the red lines). It is a regular hexagon (meaning it has equal lengths and angles), with side length R(which is also the radius of the circle, or square).
On inspection, the sides appear to be unequal, but upon analysis, we see that they are indeed equal.
Since we are in Chebyshev space, the length of each side is the larger of the difference between its x and y coordinates. And for each side this can be seen to be R.

So there you have it, A Chebyshev hexagon- from imagination to construction.
Hope it was worth the while.
Thanks :) :)

Soikramari D. Bestman.

Let's try this out.

It's been ages since I've tried blogging anything. I thought I would do a lot of blogging this year, but I haven't come around to it yet. But now since I have good internet, a bloggable write-up  and nothing much to do. I might as well just start.

I'm writing this piece on the fly, to make sure that I actually end up doing it, so don't take any mistakes/errors to personal :)

There a couple( actually a lot) of things I wish to write about, hopefully, I'll come around to doing that. But for now, being the queer person I am, I'll start with a post on Chebyshev Hexagon(and no, it's not a piece of painting by some 18th century Russian dude). 

To find out what ever a Chebyshev Hexagon is read my next post.

:) :)

'krama.

Friday, February  22, 2013

IT Can't Get Any Worse

I just read this. Actually made me laugh.
Enjoy.

how worse could it actually get, in a space of four days, I cancelled plans for an event I had been wanting to attend for years, because of an impromtu exam, I get a modem that doesnt work on my system, but works on others(thank God), the cover gets missing the same day, my ATM card disappears from my wallet (mysteriously, the same way the cover did. and it happens to be the functional one) I get really broke, (this is where the the atm comes in, because its weekend),my power pack just stops working, with no previous sign of any fault,(this is really bad, because my battery was flat when I found out, my power pack model is rare, and all my books,I mean all my books are on my system)  I get an extremely painful toothache that occurs periodically(actually, its more like teeth ache because its more than one tooth) just hours before my exam. what else can actually happen?

I’m not saying that… I have it made… Philippians 3:12

I came across this a few days ago, and it spoke to me personally. Enjoy.

I’m not saying that… I have it made… Philippians 3:12

If you let it, perfectionism will rob you of peace, plus the joy of whatever you’ve accomplished so far. The sportswear manufacturer Fila took out a full-page ad in a newspaper to honour its NBA All-Star spokesman, Grant Hill, and, at the same time, take a swipe at the pressure young people feel today to be perfect.

The ad pictures Hill surrounded by this text: ‘This year Grant Hill led his team in scoring, rebounding, assists and steals, led his team back into the playoffs, led the league in All-Star balloting, earned a place on the Olympic team, didn’t punch an official, didn’t demand a contract extension, was never tardy, was always cordial, didn’t dump his high school friends, listened to his mother, remembered the doorman at Christmas, made his bed daily, promised to take shorter showers in an effort to conserve water, got plenty of sleep, didn’t hurt a fly, organized his thoughts, chose paper over plastic, appeared fully clothed in interviews, improved his vocabulary, counted his blessings, said nice things about his teammates, fed coins into other people’s parking meters, kept his thermostat at sixty-eight, practiced what he preached, actually paid attention to the stewardess’s emergency flight instructions, donated a kidney – and vowed to do better next year.

‘ Now, let’s get serious. There will always be areas of your life that need improvement; you will never ‘arrive’. But that doesn’t mean you can’t stop and savour the moment, or celebrate the miles already covered and say to yourself, ‘I’m not all that I should be, but I’m better than I used to be. I’m all right, and I’m on my way.’