Posts

Showing posts from April 10, 2005

Colours!

I'm pondering on a question I've had for over 10 years now. The question is: does what we see, appear the same to everyone, with respect to colours. I'm thinking whether there is a way to test this out. Do all of us 'see' the colours the same way. I mean it's possible that the stimulus x gets on seeing green is what y gets on seeing blue. I mean, what appears to x as green, appears to y as what appears to x to be blue. Get it? Its a weird and scary concept. But the concept is not much of an issue (after all these years). Whats bothering me is that there doesn't seem to be any way of testing this out. This has directly got to do with the interpretation of signal from the eye by the brain. What do you mean by 'appear'? After all, the whole visual world is nothing but an abstract model that the brain has made for itself using electrical signals given by the eye in order to consistently and quickly interpret the future signals that the eye would give. T

Book review: State of fear

This one is *very* different from other Michael Crichton books. But this one is as good as any other. He has dealt with a sensitive subject and I think he has refrained from writing his heart out in order to stick to the topic. A lot of research goes behind each of his books and it shows. This time though, it shows litterally :) Read the book to find out what I mean. The book deals with the topic of global warming as its main theme, but is packed with adventure and is very informative (like all his books). The book brings out one point, that science and technology is being governed by politics and the people in the universities don't realise this. Knowingly or unknowingly, they play into the hands of the rich and powerful and serve the purpose of making them more powerful. I guess each one of us out there creating knowledge (in universities or out of them) needs to be be true to himself/herself and more importantly, to science. We have been taught all to well to manipulate the trut

apt-get update

This is why I simply love debian! I changed the package source from my 15 CD Sarge set to the DVD. All I had to do to keep my system in sync and in great shape was "apt-get update". As simple as that. No need for reinstallation, nothing. As I have said over a hundred times before, "Debian ... works". Btw, I decided to switch back to KMail. Thunderbird was good, but it just didn't feel right. I will miss the RSS feeds in the inbox, but I still prefer this.