thoughts and posts
Lifelong learning
Most recently I completed the book “The Fabric of reality” by David Deutsch. It is a challenging read. The book explains and promotes a whole new world view – anchored on several very fundamental discoveries over more than a century. It was published in 1997 – so quite a while ago. Looking at the bibliography I found references for a number of quoted supporting publications that go back to the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century. For example, a book “The selfish gene” published in 1976 by Dawkins is referenced. Richard Dawkins for example, expanded Darwin’s theory of evolution. I finished college in 1988 (This gives my age away!) and in the early courses we spent some time studying philosophy before diving deep into chemistry and physics. The interplay of different disciplines of science including mathematics, and others like crystallography, for example with chemistry and physics was illustrated
Meeting many friendly people
The way companies deal with phone inquiries has become a differentiation claimed in advertising. The ads mostly distinguish automated answering systems versus real people taking the call. I do believe that this is an area of application where artificial intelligence will eventually gain traction in the future since the scope of the activities and their repetitiveness lends itself to that. Still even a person driven system can have interesting side effects. Today over the course of approximately 90 minutes I met a whole bunch of very friendly people: Jenny, Ivy, Alberta, Jamal, Abby, Christina and finally Robert. The purpose of my call was to inquire about an out of network pre-treatment authorization and the ladies and gentlemen listed above represented the membership office and the physical therapy coordination departments respectively. All of them told me that they were looking into my records, tried to understand what I was asking for
Videoprotest
Attached to an article about the very recent protests at Columbia university was a short video depicting scenes of the demonstration including the police engaging the protesters after announcing the event was not legal. While there was not too much detail to be discerned from the tussle between the police and the protesters – the most prominent part of that portion of the video were other people – some who looked like wearing a press pass and other people clearly in protester gear and both holding cameras and phones intently seeking to record the interaction. So, I wondered – did they come to capture flashy clips for their social media accounts? Why did they not help their co-protesters? If they wanted to – how do you achieve anything if one of your hands is always occupied? Note: it is fair to assume that the policemen and women were wearing body