Category: crazy ideas

The nightmare of artificially low water prices

The Bureaucrat in Your Shower discusses regulation of maximum water flow rate in showers taken by USA residents.

I agree that it would be better to charge higher prices and make water desalination economically viable. Or at least require attachment of water consumption meters to shower heads, so that people can see exactly how much water they are consuming. Water consumption meters together with existing technology would at least allow people to enjoy brief and intense showers while conserving water in the large.

Philosophical dilemma of very creative people with disabilities – my opinion

I wrote about the philosophical dilemma and left a dangling hint that my own answer is forthcoming.

Henry Kisor, a deaf journalist, was educated by Doris Irene Mirrielees, who used an obscure methodology of educating deaf children. Her methodology was the oral one (teach ’em to speak and lipread and do not expose them to Sign Language) but with the twist that she emphasized general knowledge over communication skills. Her methodology was different from the usual practice of educators following the oral methodology, which emphasized the utmost importance of communication skills.

Henry Kisor did all right and grew up to be a successful journalist. He had good communication skills, certainly when using the written word as a medium of communication.

So a good answer seems to be: when there is a working substitute to the lost ability, then do not bother with the lost ability but invest your time with those abilities which you have. Cannot hear? Read, write and use Sign Language. Cannot walk? Use a wheelchair. Spend your time perfecting that profound scientific discovery rather than overcoming your deafness, blindness and loss of your hands.

כותרת: דילמה פילוסופית של אנשים יצירתיים מאוד עם מוגבלויות – דעתי

כתבתי על הדילמה הפילוסופית והשארתי רמז שהתשובה שלי עוד תבוא.

הנרי קיסור, עיתונאי חרש, חונך על ידי דוריס אירינה מיריליס, שהשתמשה בשיטה לא נודעת לחינוך ילדים חרשים.  השיטה שלה היתה אורלית (למד אותם לדבר ולקרוא שפתיים ואל תחשוף אותם לשפת סימנים) אבל עם השינוי שהיא הדגישה ידע כללי (תוכן) על חשבון מיומנויות תקשורת. השיטה שלה היתה שונה מהנוהג המקובל של מחנכים שעובדים בשיטה האורלית, שהדגישה את החשיבות הרת הגורל של מיומנויות תקשורת.

הנרי קיסור יצא בסדר גמור וכשהיה גדול הפך להיות עיתונאי מצליח. היו לו מיומנויות תקשורת טובות, כמובן כולל שימוש במילה הכתובה כאמצעי תקשורת.

כך שתשובה טובה היא כנראה: כשיש חלופה שעובדת ליכולת שלא קיימת, אז אל תטרח לשקם את היכולת החסרה אלא השקע את זמנך באותן יכולות שיש לך. אינך יכול לשמוע? קרא, כתוב והשתמש בשפת סימנים. אינך יכול ללכת? השתמש בכסא גלגלים. השקע את זמנך בליטוש התגלית המדעית הגדולה ההיא במקום להתגבר על חרשותך, עוורונך ואובדן היכולת להשתמש בידיך.

Nandor's Exhaustive Chemical Words Pages

Few days ago I wrote about pangrams and today I saw in Slashdot another way to play with words – build them from chemical symbols. I think it would have been more interesting if chemical formulae and chemical reactions could be used rather than just chemical symbols. However I do not see any competitor to Perl Poetry.

Is a Jewish cyborg allowed to live on Saturday?

There is a thread (in Hebrew) about the subject in Ort’s Sci-Fi forum. The topic was opened by me after having seen a discussion in a forum of Israeli cochlear implant (CI) users about using CI on Saturdays.

The next question is: are there any halachic considerations concerning life with heart pacers. They are not ordinarily turned on or off by the human who carries them, unlike hearing aids or cochlear implants. However, the heart beat rate might be varied according to what the human is doing with himself. I do not know the details but I assume that it is possible to vary the paced heart beat rate by performing certain actions, such as running. The question is now whether this is allowed on Saturday by the Jewish halacha.

Philosophical dilemma of very creative people with disabilities

Suppose you are wheelchair bound, but if you invest two hours a day for two years in physiotherapy, you will be able to walk with a cane. Or you are deaf and are offered a cochlear implant followed by two hours a day of auditory practice (time includes also transportation from your home to the center and back) for several months afterward.

On the other hand, you have a big idea which can benefit immensely the mankind but needs your undivided attention for the next few years. This could be a big invention such as an inexpensive means of reaching the space, a book exposing a profound and breakthrough philosophical theory, or political action to liberate a group of 30 million oppressed people.

Or simply study in an university until you earn a Ph.D.; or build a successful startup which makes millionaires of you and three of your associates, and solves the problem of financing housing for tens of other people.

What should you choose? Spend the time overcoming your disability, or achieve something big using your abilities?

My own answer – later.

כותרת:  דילמה פילוסופית של אנשים יצירתיים מאוד עם מוגבלויות

נניח שהינך מרותק לכסא גלגלים, אבל אם תשקיע שעתיים ביום במשך שנתיים בפיזיותרפיה, תוכל ללכת בעזרת מקל הליכה. או הינך חרש ומציעים לך שתל קוכליארי שידרוש ממך אימוני שמיעה במשך שעתיים כל יום (הזמן כולל גם תחבורה מביתך למרכז ובחזרה) במשך חודשים רבים לאחר ניתוח ההשתלה.

מצד שני, יש לך רעיון אדיר שיכול להביא תועלת אדירה לאנושות אבל דורש את תשומת ליבך הבלעדית במשך השנים הבאות. זו יכולה להיות המצאה גדולה כמו דרך זולה להגיע לחלל, ספר שחושף תיאוריה פילוסופית מעמיקה ופורצת דרך, או פעילות פוליטית כדי לשחרר קבוצה של 30 מיליון בני אדם מדוכאים.

או פשוט ללמוד באוניברסיטה עד קבלת תואר ד”ר; או הקמת חברת הזנק מצליחה שתהפוך אותך ושלושה משותפיך למיליונרים, ופותרת את בעית מימון הדיור של עשרות אנשים אחרים.

במה עליך לבחור? להשקיע את זמנך בהתגברות על מוגבלותך, או בהשגת הישג יוצא מגדר הרגיל תוך ניצול היכולות שלך?

התשובה האישית שלי – אחר כך.

Grassroots Leadership Crisis in Israeli Democracy

Recently I have been informed and/or been involved in three events. Each event is very different from the others, but there is a surprising and alarming common denominator among those events.

  • Eli Moyal, mayor of Sderot, told, in an interview publicized in Ma’ariv’s “Sofshavua” (Weekend) dated 16 Dec 2005, why he abolished the open door policy, which is the norm among mayors of Israeli development towns (which have lower average socioeconomic levels). He found that 99% of the people, who came to see him, came for three purposes: discount on the municipal tax (“arnona”) due from them, getting a job, and getting an apartment. He did not have the authority to grant any of those requests.
  • During the weeks before and during the General Assembly of Hamakor, it was evident that several people did not understand the proper roles of the governing board and the comptrollers. Some people wanted the governing board to take active role promoting various activities.

    They did not understand that Hamakor was originally founded in order to provide accounting and legal framework to people (“projectors”), who want to push their own Free Software related projects. The board itself should concern itself only with finding, nurturing and helping those projectors.

    Some of them even made proposals, which required enlarging the group of Hamakor officials, without ensuring first that there are enough volunteers to fill all the positions they proposed to create.

  • Today there was a dedication ceremony for the new Israeli Sign Language dictionary in a high school in Yahud. I attended the event and noticed that Deaf persons themselves did not lead the project or the ceremony. The dictionary was created by two hearing women (however one of them is CODA – child of deaf adults – and her mother tongue is Israeli Sign Language). All political speeches during the ceremony were by hearing persons. They at least took a Deaf woman to explain the audience how to use the dictionary software, and the concluding art program was by Deaf artists (drummers and dancers).

    If I compare this to the situation few years ago, when the Association of the Deaf in Israel (a wholly Deaf-run organization) led the fight for rights of the Deaf – I conclude that the Deaf community abdicated its leadership position. I believe that this was because of some poor decisions and infighting by some leaders of the Deaf community.

The common denominator I see among those events is the fact that training in the practices of leadership and democracy is not sufficiently ingrained in Israeli formal and informal educational establishments.

People do not understand that they should bother their mayors about waste disposal, traffic jams, schools and city planning rather than about their personal financial woes. Then they get corrupt mayors, who get elected because they obtain and give handouts to a group of supporters. For example, in Yeruham, there was a very good mayor. However he was ousted in elections because his electorate did not understand the proper division of responsibilities. The guy who replaced him botched his job, and now Yeruham is managed by an appointed committee, led by Amram Mitzna.

Discussions in Hamakor and several other nonprofits are full of comments by people, who are not familiar with the relevant Israeli law and expect the nonprofit leaders to accomplish miracles. People are not aware that if they want something to happen, they should move their asses and do something. They can only expect the organizations not to interfere with their endeavors (if the endeavors have worthy goals), and only sometimes to provide some help. But they themselves must be the movers and shakers.

The general situation in Israel has implications on the situation in the Deaf community. The Deaf community now finds itself in the uncomfortable position of being led by non-Deaf people, benevolent as they may be. The root cause for this sorry situation is lack of grassroots understanding of the political process and the responsibilities of each participant in the political process.

What the bleep do we know!?

I was in Dizengoff Center because I went to see the Marlee Matlin starred movie. The movie was a cumpulsory movie for me, because was different from the usual mainstream movie. However I did not fully enjoy my experience viewing it. Compared, for example, to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, the Hitchhiker’s wins in a big way.

I did not like the philosophizations which filled the movie. Philosophy and story line did not integrate well, in my opinion. Any philosophical discussion which confuses the exterior and the interior of humans is incomplete if it does not consider also:

  • Korzybski’s General Semantics
  • Love

About the subject of love, I noticed that Amanda, the movie’s protagonist, was essentially alone. While she interacted with other people, and some of her relationships were not exactly superficial, they were not deep either. Missing was treatment of the deep relationship which goes into love, in which both parties create a new joint world and bear children into it. Then the children grow out of the world created for them by their parents and build their own worlds, and then they merge their own worlds with their own lovers’ worlds and so the cycle goes on.

In the movie itself, love was not deeper than relationship with a cheating husband, some flirtatious dances, or eroticism from the point of view of cognitive psychologists.

Postmodern approach to translation

Tal Cohen has a personal opinion about Douglas R. Hofstadter’s book “Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language”. Hofstadter, of course, has an opinion about the process of translating an expression of an idea from one language into another language.

I have a simpler (?) problem to consider. An utterance in one language (say, language A) can be translated into one of several utterances in another language (say, language B). The original utterance can have one of several possible meanings, depending upon the context. To each meaning correspond one or more translations in language B.

Now, in a computerized translation system, we would like to be able to specify, for each utterance in the original text, enough of the context in which it lies, for the software to be able to fit a good translation into language B.

The question is how to specify context. We need to know also how much context to specify. If we specify more than this amount of context, we are really translating into a different dialect of language B.

Carribean Sea as a source of electricity instead of tropical storms?

Tropical storms (hurricanes, cyclones, etc.) are caused by hot ocean water, which heats the air above it.
It may be a good idea to install power stations, which convert the heat difference between water and air into electricity.
The power stations would float on the sea and pump electricity into wires which connect them to land.

This idea can kill two birds with one stone:

  • Less damage from hurricanes and cyclones, because we are denying them some of the energy which powers them.
  • An additional source of renewable energy.