Life of Zero & One and the quest for the Decimal Point

Whats similar in the following questions? 

Do you want to be shot to death or stabbed to death? 

Or something very familiar to people in my line of profession.. “Do you want to stay back late tonight and finish off the work… or do you want to work on the weekend?”. 

Or the dreaded question by an irritated friend/spouse/family member who’s dear to you… “Can you come and help me out now!? Yes or No?” in the middle of a personally important errand. 

Who would you vote for “x” or “y” when you’re doubtful about both?

Well, as i see it, this is all results of living in a digital world. But hey, we do not do we? People expect you to take a stance and most of the time either of the options that they are promising. Don’t get me wrong. this is not always a 2 point option. Consider this. When you ask your parents for a smart phone, and your dad takes you to a store and gives you an option to choose from 3 of age old dumb phones. What i see as the problem is the definitiveness of the options that you are given. What do you do in such situations? What are you options with picking from the rock and a hard place?

When a mother asks her child “Do you want to drink the milk or should i call dad?”, the little mind wanders, he considers the implications of the same… Do i want to drink this milk which i don’t like.. and cry by my own? or wait for my dad and his dreaded look and burst into tears and still drink the milk? The poor inexperienced kid ends up drinking the milk accompanied by tears & sound effects directly proportional to how much he hates to drink the milk. Once he grows up a bit more, one fine day when he’s presented with the same threat again, he would say, Or… Maybe i’ll have the Orange juice instead. Don’t be angry with your kid here.. he’s developing his creativity… Nurture it…  

Now thats a very simple scenario. As one is in the grown up world, things gets way too complicated. Now the survival depends on how well you have developed your creativity. Depends on how well you could create an option out of thin air which could be partially acceptable to all parties in question. Be forewarned… this doesn’t work always. You got to constantly pre-evaluate your options or else you could end up losing your life metaphorically in most cases. 

Lets look at a few options in the same scenario’s listed as above.. 

Death by Stab/Gun fire? - Why don’t u throw me off the mountain which is not very far.. only like half an hour away…

Work Conundrum - the options are many..  but i think I’ll reserve my own methods on this one to myself in case of a future actual scenario :P

Person close to you asking for a favor - This is almost always a yes. and you can extract your way out for your personal errand on how you are going to definitely help him out. for e.g.: “Yes… for sure… why don’t i drop you, let you freshen up and pick you up for your errand in half an hour” and in that time, you could get done with your stuff! :P

Voting? Well you could just pick one who that person supports or You could just try to remain in an undecided stance. But it gets tricky when you are asking yourself that question if you don’t approve of either of the candidates..

These are definitely very simple & predictable scenarios & solutions to those that i have mentioned. My point only being to trigger the parallel thinking and look for way out. 

Have kids asked you on what is the point of learning math? Here... you have a direct application of decimals and why you need it. 

"Maybe", "Try" and complete obliviousness could be some of the powerful tools on the unlikely chance of you not knowing where to start. They help you in key aspects like buying time, avoiding accountability when you are unsure, and complete bail. But if you do choose to use these powerful tools, i must ask you to pledge to use the same only for the good of the relative world depending on the area of impact. You know, they say, with great power comes great responsibilities.

Enjoy your life responsibly!  Until we meet another time.. 

These are from my limited experience in this world, but if you have some other parallel thoughts, i’d love to know.. Put them here in comments please :). 

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The Dawn of the Zombie Untold

Its 6am of an otherwise perfectly normal Monday. Richard was up early… sipping his coffee getting ready to start his day. He couldn’t digest the fact that his Sunday is long gone… which was more or less spent sulking over the inevitable arrival of the evil one i.e., the Monday. 

His roommate is as usual in his room behind closed doors. Richard mostly haven’t seen that door open in a really long time. His roommate, Roger, works during the evening shift also on weekends. By the time either comes home, the other is either asleep or is at work. It was a bit strange, having heard some weird noise pretty late at night.

He had to look while as door creaked open. There was something strange about the Roger.. he wasn’t looking at anything… steps heavy and unstable. Arms reaching out for support on the walls and anything in range. Slowly he kept moving. Richard called out… “Hey Roger… you ok buddy?”. The moving figure came to a standstill… but only for a second. And he started moving again. Its been months since he has actually talked to Roger and now clearly something was off. Roger made his way to the bathroom as if he was being pulled towards it by some weak gravitational force. Richard’s eyes followed his roommate till the door was banged closed with a force that the Roger that he was seeing could possibly summon. He didn’t know what was happening. 

He wanted to run away to work and started planning his exit from the apartment they shared for well over 2 years. But something stopped him. After gathering all the courage, he decided to wait and see if there’s any truth to it or was he just bring ridiculous. and again.. the door creaked open. Slowly a figure stepped out of the room and mumbled something.. and that was when he heard it.. “Hey.. Richard.. Good Morning”. Down came the big castles of imagination that Richard was building in his mind. Mostly an aftermath of “Resident Evil” that he had watched yesterday combined with his friend waking up at an unusually early time of the day. Gulping down his  ridiculous thoughts, he set forth to a brief conversation and then to his weekly routine. 

One might think why this one is a story unlike the previous blogs. Of course this does presume the unlikely chance of the person having read more than one previous posts in the same blog. But make no mistake.. this aint a story either. Without further adieu, lets get into the topic of the day. How and why Roger became a zombie? and what cured him? I’m of the opinion, human brain works remotely similar to how computers works. Which possibly could have something to do with the fact that they were conceptualised and created by brains of the people. In my opinion, what makes a man/woman, a zombie is his limited functioning of the brain. Similar to how if an operating system does not load completely on the computer, maybe the CD drives and all may function but others like interacting with the user may not. Comparing a sleeping person to a computer on screensaver. When you wake up, you would ideally want the screensaver to be gone. But what if you get a blue screen? or it is just stuck? There you have your own personal zombuter. In the case of humans, of course these are not electronics but varying degrees of consciousness.’

There seems to be a ton of different kinds of zombies around. The ones that are addressed in the movies are the super negative variants of the phenomenon. Addressing the rest, i.e., counting only the not-so-super-negative scenarios, for example you have… Morning Zombies, Late night Zombies, Drunken Zombie, Drugged zombie, Meeting Zombies etc etc. The First two occur in nature without much of an external intervention. If one doesn’t get the sleep he needs, the computer that the brain is, sometimes is unable to load it back to the full consciousness level. The third one is pretty obvious. And if “Meeting Zombies…? Really? You couldn’t come up with anything else?” is your first reaction, let me explain. Have you ever been a part of a discussion where you have no clue what you are doing? With all the questions being fired at you from left and right and you got no clue as to what is the right answer? What does one do? You zone out… You zone out till either they decide to take you on or just leave you be. This is only one variant of the same. Another is after a heavy lunch.. again.. you zone out. Not because you don’t know what they are talking about. But because your consciousness tries to leave you and lets you take a good rest and digest the food like a anaconda who just swallowed a buffalo. 

Now thats what i am talking about. Zombies are not a myth. There are indeed zombies among us. Some seem to be able to control the transition easily and others not so fast. If you intend to cure your zombie factor, there are various quick remedies… It could be splashing water in the face? (Remember those days in college where you were asked to wash your face and come back to the class room? No? alas.. must be just me then). Some take help of caffeine. A good Strong expresso helps your brain load most of the data which was previously not loaded. Must be the closest thing to a clean up utility that you get on your computer. More difficult solutions include regulating your sleeping patterns so that overtime your brain boots up, everything is done properly and you’re good to go from the word go. Interestingly, sleep brings in a time dynamic to the zombieness of a regular person. It follows an inverted bell curve. The less you sleep, the more the zombie factor in you.. and this is capped at about 8 hours after which its back to the situation where you sleep less.

Coming to the evil kind of non-reversible process commonly known as zombionization... In movies, you would have seen plenty of them. What makes them what they are i believe is if the connections to the brain that dealt with thinking & Pain is disconnected and instead wired into the motor & digestive functions. Maybe that is why they tend to crave food so much that they run behind anyone and anything and try to consume them. If he looks find with no bodily injuries, a cure might be as easy as pulling those wrongly connected plugs and re-connect to the right ones. Now, you wouldn’t want to do that with the ones who are injured already. When you reconnect it, it will be like you’re waking up a guy who passed out because of his Injuries and say.. “Hey, do you feel that now? the pain from all your injuries combined?”. You wouldn’t want to do that now would you? Those ones could be used to save some money at the otherwise super expensive Gun ranges. 

That being said, lets show them what we are made of. Zombies are / were humans too. Lets be humane. Lets understand and help them out as much as possible.