Author Archives: Romeo

About Romeo

Born in Romania in the Botosani district (Romanian: Judet) sometimes between 1960 and 1970. Immigrated to Canada in 2001. Computers and more precise software for application and database servers as well as automation (micro electronics) is the way I make a living. Working for IBM Canada Ltd since 2010 to present

Baltimore Burning, Why kids burn down their own community assets?

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I’m amazed how some of us are “dazzled” on the burning just happening right now in Baltimore and happened some time ago elsewhere in US.
There are cases when people are willing to burn their own property, but I bet this is not it. This is different, this is deeper, this is something that if it is not well understood by as many of us, will only amplify over time. My guts are telling me that, these kids are burning down what they feel and regard as not being theirs. A society built on “dog eats dog” philosophy emerged from throat cutting business competition can easily breed these types of mentalities (this is not limited to US at all, is universal). At their age (as the video footages shown mostly youths) they are pressed by the crowd effect, to do “special” things and at the moment the “community” is only a far echo in their minds.

BaltimoreBurnig

Interesting enough way back in time on the time of the socialist Romania people used to say “What is everyone’s is no-one’s” and that society was supposed to be all about “community” and “sharing” and it did not work. Lesson learned? Seem not.

Lead by example they say. What example I say?

Let’s Think, or even better, let’s Think different…

Again I believe we have to start asking “why?” and continue the “why?” after each answer it comes in our minds, not stopping before we do this exercise at least 4 levels down. You’ll be surprised what you’ll discover.

My hero from law enforcement business

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After (re) awakening to a crude reality of the injustice in the justice system, finally a break, one giving us hope, hope that we can hold our humanity high in most dreading conditions.

I’m saying re-awakening since I’ve seen first hand, back in the communist regime of Romania, what the injustice of the justice can be, and one of the reasons I’ve emigrated to Canada was the better justice system the occidental countries built over time. I still believe (or hope) I was not wrong.

Please view (or review) this CNN article and video on a US Richmond
Officer Jesse Kidder which did the right thing and shown a high regard for life in distress. This shows that officers do not have jobs like all of us. They have dangerous jobs which outline this: not any person can or should be a first line officer holding a gun and ready to take lives. We need people which can and will put their own life on the line to save another no matter if that entity cooperates or not. Second, for this type of high stake job I totally subscribe to pay these people much better. I want to know that when an officer points the gun at me (hopefully never) that he or she will only be motivated by high morale stakes and not by the need to “make a quota” for the day or simply chicken out or even worse “snap” an my (temporary) bad behaviour or mental state.

Unfortunately we see more and more evidence of some officers taking the stance of a “Rambo” or “Judge Dredd” type of characters, which tend to take short cuts and be all the justice system at once, (Cop,  Judge, Jury, and Executioner) all in a fraction of a second. This is a best recipe for disasters on both sides, as I’m sure you can’t take a life without being impacted. Someone being able to do so is a mental disordered killer having no place in this society let aside police.

I was stunned to see “experts” called by CNN to weight in on Officer Jesse bold action, saying he should have shot that person! This is scary, really scary, that these type of thoughts can exists in the minds of the people which you’d expect to cherish life as they market themselves as “life protectors”. Think of why all the Police cruisers have (or had at some point) the slogan “to serve and protect“? On that register I’d suggest making the slogan more precise as in “to serve and protect all life“. How about that? I’d be more than happy to have well paid high morale person working to protect life instead of the narrow view of “law enforcement”. I’m saying that because we have too much history of laws which were (and some are today) morally wrong which only serve narrow interests of the few being able to sweep those laws under the scrutiny of the overall society.

Until now we have been technically unable to solve those issues, as they need mastering a very difficult form of communication, the “many to many” case. Yet with the rise of the new information technologies we can now address this issue frontally and choose to build a better future!

 

Safe flying with Automation

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Another 150 souls vanished in little pieces on the slopes of a mountain. Can we prevent such things in future? I believe so and here is how.

All new modern airliners can be flown automatically from take-of to landing. The pilots are there for backup reasons and mostly to alleviate our fear of machines (too intelligent machines maybe). So, how can we use this capabilities without alienating people and with high effectiveness.

We can use the idea of “kill switch” which other industries use where when something bas is spotted you can hit a button to stop a process or in this case to start one.

The main issue in those case is that you can never rely 100% on people. Ill minds can be anywhere as this disaster shown, passengers can go rogue, crew can go rogue and ground personnel can also go rogue. The only way we can solve this is to have anyone, I mean anyone on the plane as passenger, crew member of ground personnel be able to hit a “kill switch” and when that happens the aircraft computers will go in a “land on one of the closest known (pre programmed)” airports and until the aircraft is not safe on the runway nothing in the world can change that in any way.

The aircraft automation will simply land the plane and all the controls on board of the aircraft will simply be ineffective until the aircraft has safely landed on the runway.

The aircraft will send continuously its position parameters and intent to its ground personnel and new destination airport.

Looks a simple use case, but due to the current “psychology” of man must dominate machines some changes should be done to the aircraft in order to allow full automated flights.

Keep in mind that this system must be a specialized one to do one and one thing only, detect a abnormality in the flight path, or being “hinted” by the “kill switch” in order to take over and do a single task only, safely land the aircraft. From the moment it is triggered nothing in the world will be able to disable it or influence it in any way until the aircraft is safely on the ground.

Of course there will be resistance on such a system but I personally feel better if it would exists in the flight I’m on and there is a button just next to my seat which if I push I can get safely on the ground. and yes that will cost me a lot of money but not my life!

red_button

Emergency Automated Landing? or EAL?

About Gemanwings disaster: The Guardian

My today’s Hero Kaci Hickox and all frontline workers on Ebola

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Kaci Hickox

A nurse, front line worker, who treated Ebola patients in Africa was put in isolation for 21 days in conditions close to the ones in a prison, because of our collective irrational fear.

CBS News Article and Huffingtonpost article

This irrational fear acted and reacted in many ways and as with any fear, it will only hurt us all on long term. So, why governor Cristie put Kaci in prison? Because he’s a rough politician? I’d say he did it as a response to the average street level citizen (like myself) who rushes to conclusions and uses ignorance instead of knowledge, to “demand action”, that’s it, “do something” we say, and politicians which are fearful of loosing their power (and being most likely as ignorant as any of us) rush to take populist decisions which in the end will hurt us all. So, in a nutshell we kick out own asses!

Hooray for the ignorance! Now all front line workers will thing more than twice, before going to battle the invisible enemies which we fight for long time. Next all people travelling from places where outbreaks happen will, take their chance and lie to avoid being treated as criminals and that my friends, is not going to make us safer.

Maybe, just maybe, we should pause and think. THINK DAMN IT! Before panicking. And… let’s get out of that TSS (Temporary Stupid State) we all find ourselves in, from time to time!

To the bureaucrats who took this decision, a suggestion, please subject yourself to the same conditions as you imposed to those people! I would normally include caring for an Ebola patient first, but it would be in vain, so just do the quarantine and use a tent to do your daily necessities. We will watch…

Kaci, Thank you!

To all workers putting themselves in harms ways for all of us, Thank you!

 

What it takes to be a leader…

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Today my wife and I watched on YouTube the presentation from Simon Sinek about leadership (see bellow).

I found it very well thought and wanted to share it as it resonate with a lot of my own convictions in this area.

This presentation will help one to discriminate between “boss” or “manager” and Leader.

Funny but one can be a boss without being a leader. This realization surprised me and I was finally able to understand those wired feeling I had in the past when dealing with some of my former bosses.

Thorium the energy source of the future

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Energy is crucial for us and our future. What sources of energy do we have?

Stars are the initiators of energy and precursors of life but they also stored caches of energy for us to use and evolve as intelligent beings.

Fusion of light elements seem to be the stuff reserved for the mighty Stars but here on Earth fission seem to be what the Stars cached for us to get and use.

As many others, I’ve been oblivious of the fact that there is a technology which was tried 50 years ago when the U235 reactors were developed and which should have been our to use by now.

Yet, it seem that our ignorance and political interests focused only on the moment, lead us on the wrong path 50 years ago by building the current water based reactors which are plagued by many issues.
Still, even in this cases nuclear is still the best way to go about our energy needs of the future when we account for all issues we find with all types of energy we now use.

I strongly think we have the duty to maximize the efficiency of all aspects our our lives and minimize the amount of energy we use for each activity we do, however we will need to do more activities in the future, a lot more and all of us must have access to the same abilities in order to step into the future which awaits us out there.

Thorium breeder (LFTR) reactors were simply caned years ago, I think it is time we start building them.

I’m a strong advocate for this technology. To see why, please visit the http://energyfromthorium.com web site or watch the presentation bellow.

Of course, I’m not advocating for blindly supporting the technology, please learn about it and support when you are ready to do so…

Canadian company on Thorium reactors http://www.thoriumpowercanada.com/

Nothing is Everything

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If you lookup the word “Nothing” on a dictionary you may find something like this:

Nonexistence; nonentity; absence of being; nihility

I found this definition by searching on dict.org website. So we all think we know what Nothing “is”. But do we know all its implications? What are its characteristics? Will things be different if “nothing” is really “absence of being”?

Some time ago I’ve stumbled over this exploded car picture (bellow). It looked intriguing and funny but something was missing… No kidding you’d say the darn thing is disassembled, what’s missing is “to be assembled”.

Exploded Car Picture (from: http://www.merchantcircle.com)

Yes, true the missing “part” is “to be assembled”. But wait “to be assembled” is not “something” right? It IS Nothing. You can’t touch it, you can’t feel it, but it has a great impact on the usability of the car. Or, more general said, the state in which the set of entities making the car, exists at any moment is deeply impacted by this “Nothing”.

So, something which is not material or energetic has a great impact on the usage of the car. Can we say the “Nothing” has an essential impact in the usability of the car? Based on the dictionary definition and any common sense “Nothing” should have NO impact on things. But here we are we just realized that it has a huge importance on almost all things which are made of components. But then, this idea is wired in itself. How come “Nothing” can impact anything?

In physics there is one dimension which is used to measure “complexity”, it is called “Entropy“. The Entropy of a system can increase when the system is more complex or can decrease when a system is less complex. A fully ordered system (whatever that means) is considered to have minimal (numerical) value.

If we consider the example with the exploded car, then it becomes clear that there will be a difference in entropy, when comparing the assembled product, with the disassembled set of components. You may argue about any “liquids” like oil, grease, etc. but let’s consider those as being present in the exploded picture as well (for the sake of making the point). So, even if we can’t touch or feel the “Nothing” it seem we can measure certain characteristics of it.

You may ask yourself what’s the meaning of this? What is it useful for? How will it impact me? To get a glimpse on this “utility” thing please remember that only not that much time ago, we had no idea what “electricity” was. Today, there are enough of us which still have no idea what “electricity” is but do pretty well in using it.

The issue with this, is that things you don’t know about can still have an impact on you, like it or not. It is said the “the things you don’t know about can kill you” and there are enough examples of this saying.

The main insight in this case is that, it seem our universe is made mostly out of this “Nothing” stuff, and the entropy concept can actually measure it. The other insight is that this “Nothing” seem to be responsible of the existence of all things including life. Also maybe even more important “Nothing” is the “mater” form which “Information” is made. And since our minds are pure informational entities (my strong belief) “Nothing” is “Everything” for us. It is in fact us. This does not implies though that we are Nothing, but only that we can’t exists without the Nothing. It can’t get weirder than this, right?

So, “Nothing” must be of some importance after all… wired… isn’t it?

The “Nothing” concept is another pillar on the model of the universe I’m pursuing.