Tuesday 22 September 2009

Where is the plane now?


Hi guys, today I'll post a brain teaser for you.



There was a plane departing from an airport located in the North pole. The plane flew 40 miles to the south. Then, it changed its direction and flew 30 miles to the east and stopped there.

The question: How far was the plane from the North Pole?

Answer the question by giving comments to this post.

Good luck! In a few days, I'll give you the answer.

Monday 21 September 2009

Life is about Making the Right Choice

Hi guys, I have been busy and lazy to be precise, therefore I have been taking a break from blogging.


This time, the topic is about Life and making choices.

Goal of life?
What does it mean to live? It means to be able to breathe, to eat, to move, to reproduce, and other things. What kind of measurement do we use to measure our standard of live, to decide whether our lives is a good or bad lives? We usually use our happiness to measure it, although sometimes people use wealth. Why happiness? My friend told me that according to Aristotle, our goal of live is happiness. People work for money, and the money is used to buy things that satisfy their needs, which will give them happiness. People do things to be happy.

What does happiness have to do with making choices? The answer is simple, we have to make choices, a lot of choices, in order to achieve happiness. How many choices do we have to make to achieve happiness? We have to make almost infinite choices to achieve happiness. Every second, even every millisecond, we have to make choices. Among the choices, we have to choose one which is the best.

For example, every time we want to move, we have almost infinite combinations of possible moves, we can move our arms, hands, head, eyebrows, eyes, leg, feet, or any other body parts. Combined with the possible directions, the number of combinations approach infinity.

Another example, when we see a person, we have a lot of possible actions we can do, varying from slapping that person, kicking him/her, shouting at him/her, or even kill him/her. A decision we make will affect our future. If we choose to kill that person, we will be chased by the police and put into jail. We will also have some kind of feeling which tells us that we are wrong, we made the wrong decision.

We, humans, are able to make decisions better than computers(of course, we are the ones who program computers). We are able to immediately remove choices which are bad for our future, i.e. killing people. We don't even think about that choice(killing people), but computers have to analyse every possible choice and then measure the impact on our future. Therefore, it's wrong to have computers choose for us.

Factors that affect our capabilities to make choices?
There are a lot of factors that can affect our capabilities to make choices, I will explain about one of them, which is knowledge.

Knowledge has a great role in our lives, actually it's something that control almost all our way of thinking, the other small part is controlled by our inner child. It is important to have the knowledge about the choices we make, to predict the effect of those choices.

People with great amount of knowledge will make better choices, not all, but most of them. For example, we have the choice to have drugs or to be addicted to drugs. Most people with knowledge would consider the future effect, when they will lose their health, their money, their social life, and most importantly, their life.

People with less knowledge will make worse choices, most of them. Why? The reason is obvious, their lack of knowledge. They don't have the knowledge to predict the effect their choices will have on their future. For example, to beg for money at the corner of the street. It's not a solution for their financial problem, as it will not improve their standard of living. Beggars will beg for the rest of their lives, as they don't have the money and skills to start a business. In fact, they will lost their interest in gaining knowledge and trying other occupation. Why? They think that they can get enough money to eat by begging, so why should they try another occupation? It would be better for them to work as labours at factories. They can even work as mechanics, with the knowledge they will eventually gain, they can open their own business.

Making the right choice is not a skill you can get in an instant or by reading a book for dummy, it's a skill you will get as you grow up, gain knowledge, and gain experience.

I'm sure that we have the capabilities to make the right choices for our lives.
Good luck!