Life is good!

"Why do you wake up so early?" asked my neighbor, when in our conversation I told him that I typically wake up sometime before six.  "Do you have to go milk the cows?"

No milking cows, but early do I get out of bed.  Old habits are hard to shake off.

"But, why that early?" is perhaps a question that is in your mind too.

Every once in a while, I, too, ask myself that very question.  Why not take it easy?  Why not sleep in?  Especially when the weather is so conducive to that activity.  It is not as if it is unbearably hot and humid, which makes any activity unbearable.

I get rewarded.  Rewards that one cannot possibly earn by sleeping.  Heck, rewards that one cannot earn even by earning gazillions of dollars.

Like the reward earlier today.

It was a pleasant 49 degree early morning as I pulled out of the garage.  The first thing I realized was that it was not raining, after all the gallons that poured out of the sky yesterday.  I opened the sunroof.

And, a sun that was fighting a good fight to break through the cloud cover.

I started humming "I can see clearly now, the rain is gone."  It was going to be a great day.

Even the traffic lights were all green every time I neared them.  Come to think of it, I should perhaps have bought myself a powerball ticket, given the start to the day.

Oh, but, no powerball winnings would have ever equaled what I did earn.

A few minutes into the drive, the sun broke through an opening in the eastern sky.  The sky immediately lit up with colors that I didn't even know were possible.

The sights were awesome in the side view mirror, and I kept looking over my shoulder to get a glimpse of the real thing.

"I wish I had listened to Joe" I thought to myself.

Why Joe?  He is meticulous about car maintenance.  Rain or shine, his cars are spotless, as if they just rolled off the showroom.  I, on the other hand, rarely ever even dust my car.  If I had paid attention to his comments, then I would have had nothing but awesome views in the side-view mirror, through the passenger side window.

I didn't care.  I continued to drive and fished for my iPhone.  I got to the camera function and clicked as I drove.

But, the human that I am, I was not content with that.  I looked up through the sunroof.  It was spectacular.

The problem with driving along a country road, and not on the interstate, is that often there is no shoulder space to pull over.  But, I needed to record my reward for waking up early.

I held the camera in one angle,with my eyes on the road, and clicked.

I picked up another evidence of the reward that I enjoyed throughout most of the drive.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring!  Perhaps a tasty pasta dinner, with a salad on the side, and a tiramisu with decaf to wrap up the day?

Hey, a man can dream, can't he, even though he woke up many hours ago, and bedtime is a couple more hours away?

TV spying on us. Phones tracking us. Robots attacking us. Help!

Back in my grandmothers' villages, there was no privacy--everybody was in everybody else's business.  Thus, one can easily understand why there was that old saying, "பேர சொன்னாலும் ஊற சொல்லாதே" (when introducing yourself to a stranger while in a different town, do not say where you are from.)  One could, thus, become anonymous in the big city, and visit the village once in a while and even spin stories of life in the city.

It appears that all we have done, in the name of progress, is to trade that kind of village-level invasion of privacy with a global one.  A horrendous loss of privacy in which there is no possibility of being anonymous anymore, whether in a big city or in a village!

Even before the GPS-enabled smartphones, the cellphone data gave away our location information.  The smartphones made that all the more easier.

When we read books--the old paper kind--nobody knew if we read only the first seventeen pages of Ulysses or lasted until the very end.  Now, ebooks routinely keep track of that information and relay that to their bosses, along with data like whether we highlighted or bookmarked anywhere in the book, and more.  Heck, they can even make the ebook you purchased disappear!

If we didn't want to talk to anybody and did not want to read any book, we might have turned the telly on and cursed at the dull and boring shows while rapidly changing channels.  Smart TV with voice recognition will bring you the internet right to the TV and you can even bark your commands, they say.  Apparently, they didn't tell us this part:

Samsung privacy policy warns: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of voice recognition.”

Ray Bradbury warned of a future when the walls at homes would be nothing but television screens to entertain us and we slowly start enslaving ourselves.  George Orwell warned us that those screens will not be passive devices:

Parker Higgins, an activist for San Francisco-based advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation who brought the privacy policy to light, compared the feature to the telescreens in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
Orwell wrote: “Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.”

PC Magazine reminds us that it is not merely with Samsung TV.  There are all kinds of devices always lying in wait for our voices.  The GPS navigation systems in cars to which you can talk your commands. Or your smartphones to which you can talk your commands.  Or the ... We have been trading away our privacy.  Gizmodo sums it up well:

Depressingly enough, all of this is just more evidence that "yes, if your smart gadget is connected to the internet, then it's probably collecting data on you." 

Meanwhile, how about this news story about a robot attacking its owner?  Ok, it wasn't like HAL.  And to some extent, well, funny.  But, hello!

When a South Korean woman invested in a robot vacuum cleaner, the idea was to leave her trustworthy gadget to do its work while she took a break from household chores.
Instead, the 52-year-old resident of Changwon city ended up being the victim of what many believe is a peek into a dystopian future in which supposedly benign robots turn against their human masters.
The woman, whose name is being withheld, was taking a nap on the floor at home when the vacuum cleaner locked on to her hair and sucked it up, apparently mistaking it for dust.

You, too, should be worried at all these developments.

Remember, these are all private corporations.  And then there is the government.  Be afraid. Be very afraid ... so, party like it is 1984 ;)

We pick it ‘because it’s there’

I never, ever, have to worry about running out of bloggable material.

From the title of this post, you will never be able to guess what this post is about.  You forgot the title already?  Here it is:

we pick it ‘because it’s there’

It is about what you and I and everybody else does on this planet.
From the poor Ethiopian to the rich Bill Gates.
From the powerless Bangladeshi to the powerful Barack Obama.
We all do it.

We do it in the bedroom.
We also do it in the living room.
In the bathroom, of course.
Heck, even when driving sometimes.

What could be that activity where we pick it ‘because it’s there’ ...

If we get caught red-handed, we experience shame and regret.

And that activity is?

I'm talking, of course, about reaching up into your nostrils with a finger in an effort to scrape out snot.

Would you have guessed that?

Even more, did you know that there is a medical term for it?  I did not know that!

rhinotillexomania

A mania?  Hmmm...

perhaps nose picking is just evidence of laziness. Fingers, after all, are never in short supply when you feel the urge to clear your nostrils.

I tell ya, there are people who are so bored, so lazy that they can't even be bothered with picking their noses but had to do research about it!

It's gratifying to know that some researchers are still trying to understand the reasons we pick our noses and the consequences that arise from it. In 2001, the Indian researchers, Andrade and Srihari, were recognised for their work with an Ig Nobel prize, which is given for research that first makes you laugh and then makes you think. At the ceremony, Andrade remarked, "some people poke their nose into other people's business. I made it my business to poke my business into other people's noses."

Stop, stop, stop!
Take your finger out of your nostrils and watch this video instead ;)