THINK

In a much bigger picture, various bad things happen to people all over the world and all the time. There is no need to specially pick out one bad thing and apply special consideration and treatment while demeaning the rest of the problems that happen to people on a regular basis.

As a race, we humans are dying day by day since the time we are born into this world. If we do not wish to die faster than we can avoid, then we inevitably have to face up to all sorts of risks, internal and external.

When talking about care for the disabled, most people equate “disabled person” to a person who has musculoskeletal disabilities. Marketing materials also often portray handicapped persons on wheel chairs to stir emotions. People tend to empathise and believe we need to cater special arrangements for them because the ill-informed are made to believe that these people are the minorities (we don’t see handicapped persons everywhere) and that they are being ostracized by the society.

However, disability is more than just all the handicapped persons. A disabled person can be in one of the 14 categories recognised and documented in US Social Security Blue Book:

1. Musculoskeletal System
2. Special Senses and Speech
3. Respiratory System
4. Cardiovascular System
5. Digestive System
6. Genitourinary Impairments
7. Haematological Disorders
8. Skin Disorders
9. Endocrine System
10. Multiple Body System Impairments
11. Neurological Problems
12. Mental Disorders
13. Malignant Neoplastic Disease
14. Immune System Disorders

People with such disabilities can range from unnoticeable to mild to severe; and it is also possibility that many with such disabilities never realise they had it until much later.

Disabled people can exhibit various characteristics which may affect performance of work and its environment such as:

• Inability to learn, integrate, express
• Inability to calculate
• Have to visit toilet very frequently
• Fatigue, tiredness, sleepiness
• Unable to work under certain environments, e.g. sunlight, smoke, low ventilation, high altitudes
• Excessive medical leave, due to weak immune system
• Infectious disease carrier e.g. bronchitis, flu

So then how can we cater to all the disabled in our society? Clearly, there is no other better way than to spare them from the requirements of work. They are pathetic enough.

You see, the human race does not stubbornly, unreasonably and intentionally inflict pain and suffering on itself. Life, aka the process of dying, does it itself.

When we remove all our emotional attachments, we work logically. Logic says that we should mostly leave the disabled people alone and make the others work hard for the economy, for the country and for the world.

We can spare all the disabled persons the hardship of work, but the sad consequence is that more and more people, due to life undoing itself, is claiming social security benefits for their disability (social security claims is made possible due to our emotional calling), but governments and organisations are finding it harder and harder to support these people on top of the aging populations. Alas, we have to rope in the help of the disabled and squeeze every ounce of them still functional.

Look back at the list again and see what we can do. Well, it is a no brainer that the easiest group to target is the handicapped people. We just need to build ramps and lifts to ferry these people to their desk and they will be able to support themselves, and then convince the public and corporations that they are still cognitively functional and adequate to carry out a wide range of tasks.

Quite ironically, somehow most of us have twisted mentalities and doubts about the very society and world that we thrive in: So here we have this system of human treatment whereby through natural, logical selection, we pick the most enabled persons to work. In fact most societies strictly require all abled persons to work otherwise they will be discriminated based on social stigma, but we do not frown upon unemployed persons who are handicapped because we naturally excuse them from work. Then, at the same time, we think that this preferential treatment for the handicapped is a form of ill-treatment just because if they wanted work, they cannot get.

There are many more disabled people than just the handicapped alone, and without doubt, the more “social dependents” we can remove from this group the better. But remember not to be emotional and always be clear of the logical reasons to do this. Do not blame the society, for this is life. Ultimately, rather than we finding ways to help the disabled, the disabled themselves should find their own means to continue this living. They took the risk of living therefore they have to face up to the consequences now (Begs for a whole new topic of “Why and how am I here on earth). I am sorry to say, but most of these people really just cannot stand up to a fair and competitive environment being handicapped. In case a person is really talented, he will have his chance naturally and will not require any social help, for example, Beethoven who is deaf.

Finally, the decision to give special treatment to “disabled persons” in itself is discriminatory. How can we decide if a person is disabled or not; what is the difference between unnoticed, mild and severe conditions? Do we only empathise with the critically ill but overlook the welfare of the potentially ill persons? Do we not judge work performance the same “human” standards but instead have different set of standards based on how many limbs you have; how good your bladder is; or how glucose intolerant you are? The lesser known truth is that there is no clear line between an abled person and a disabled person if look beyond just the set of handicapped persons.

Have you wondered why your some people cannot follow simple instructions; or keeps on making typo mistakes in documents and reports; or cannot deliver a good presentation to clients; or have bad driving skills; or is always sleeping on the job? Unlikely as you may argue, chances are, they may be suffering from symptoms of disabilities that are lesser empathised and publicised by the public. Unfortunately, there is little we can do to help these people and worse of all, we are not even helping at all! Most of these poor folks will be dismissed as incapable, lazy or simply falling below expected performance.

All in all, “helping” the disabled is just a marketing cliché and a tone set to stir emotions and garner support for the real question of “what to do with the disabled” since we cannot and do not want to support them. Any mandatory special treatment given to these people only imposes more burdens for the rest of the human race.

I was working on some programming projects then I suddenly got stuck at a particular problem that took me a whole day still unable to solve. When simplified, it looks like this:

Background
Consider a tournament where we want to find out the ranking of N contestants. In each competition, M contestants compete with each other at the same time to generate a ranking order. How many such competitions S are required in the tournament to fully rank all contestants given (which would become regular binary sort) and .

There are a few things that are obvious:
1. Inherently at atomic level, the act of ranking involves comparing 2 contestants, which is a binary case.
2. We do not need every contestant to have had competed with every other contestant. Between 2 contestants, the winner wins every other person that the loser wins and vice versa.
3. We must have information of combination(N, 2) rankings between any 2 contestants.

To be continued…

Information Processing
A physical system is in a way corresponding to a computation machine. The computer (physical system) takes and input (initial state), put it through an algorithm (laws of physics) and produces and output (final state). Where that initial and final states are useful, we can call it information.

The Experiment
In classical physics, the simplest information bearing system in the computer is the “bit”, which has 2 “degrees of freedom”, with the label 1 and 0 each. If we do an experiment on the bit, and get an ouput, we measure that output and say whether the the label was just 1 or 0. We can say that the “value of the bit” is an “observable” that can take the possible values of either 1 or 0. In practice we know that the bit is an abstract system of some electrical sub system and often the observable of that sub system is the voltage across some component, where it can take the values, e.g. volts.

In this case, we have identified 2 observables, namely the voltage and the value (of the bit). can take on many labels between 0V and +5V, we say the set of labels that can possibly be is the “spectrum of the observable “. Similarly, the spectrum of is the set .

Quantum Multiverse Interpretation
In order to understand why we do the things we do in the rest of this journey, we need to first explain the multi-universe interpretation of quantum physics. (Bear in mind that this is not the only interpretation of the physical phenomenons that we experience, this is only one that we will use for now)

In reality, every object in our universe has counterparts in other universes. Every event that affects an object also affects its counter parts in all other universes. This phenomenon is known as “quantum interference”. Hence if we were to do an experiment on a system and then consider one observable of the system, I would get one label for each of the counterpart systems in all universes. Although any of these labels will be in the spectrum of the observable, it may not be the same throughout all the universes. Furthermore, each isolated quantum system has many observables that may interact with each other.

Specification of Quantum Systems
In order for meaningful information to be carried in the system, change or transformation must occur. It is however arbitary as to where to draw the line between when the system merely changed its configuration or has ceased to exist. For example we could still theorectically measure the angle between a pair of scissors even if it has been disassembled into parts, but if the metal has been melted down into a pool of liquid, then eventhough the atoms still exists, it will no longer be aproperiate to speak of angles. Therefore despite the transformations, there should be some characteristic of the system where it stays invariant throughout the transformation so that it can be said to continue to exist.

Hence forth, in order to fully specify a quantum system that is of interest to us, we need to define its invariant chracteristics, or “constitution”, namely
– static constitution (observable, spectrum of observable)
– dynamic constitution (law of transfomation of the observable)
– state (as in the Heisenberg state)

Static Constitution
The static constitution of a system refers to all the algebraic equations relating the observables of the system that remains invariant. For example, if a system has observables , … , then if there is a function of some , say that remains true at any time, then it follows that is an algebra of the observables of the system and it is part of the static constitution of the system. For example, a triangle has 3 observables angle , and and remains true regardless of time transformation of the observables. Thus is part of the static constitution of the triangle.

The Measurement Technique
To discover the algebra of the quantum observables, we need a few steps more, particularly to get around the problem of measuring the observable.

In the case of the classical computer, the observable, voltage, can take on labels or real numbers in the range, e.g. , which is a continum of infinite real numbers. A commercial voltmeter we have today only gives an approximate of its true value down to a limited number of decimal places. In many cases such as this one, there are no measurement intruments that can literally measure it precisely, and hence prepare it to a desired value. To simplify the problem, we define another observable, the value of the bit, and then map to either 0 or 1. The function f in this case is defined as

Things are slightly trickier in quantum systems because we no longer deal with a single real number value , but a range of real number values across all universes i.e. is now a set of real number values all of which are between 0 and 5. Correspondingly, the pick and use other functions to map our spectrum of the observable to a new spectrum.

, always mapping to the value 1
, always map to 0, and so on. Then if a function which relates , , etc. say is true regarding of time transformation, then forms the static consitution of the quantum system. Theorectically, there could be many of such .

Dynamic Constitution
The dynamic consitution would then be the deriavative of the with respect to time, meaning that they are the equations the govern how the observables will transform with respect to time while keeping true to the relation .

State or Heisenberg State
A special function that maps an observable to a real number known as its “Expectation Value” is used to specify its state. The expectation value is the average outcome of the quantum observable over a region of the multi-universe. Therefore this special function predicts what the value of the observable will be in each universe that the observable is measured. But then how can we literally traverse the universes and collect all the outcomes? In other words, where can we get this special function that will help we achieve this feat? It turns out that the “Hermitian Matrix”, its properties and its algebra offers such a capability if you interpret its operations in the following manner that we will be discussing.

Matrix Mechanics
The formulation of Hermitian Matrices was first proposed by Heisenberg, Max Born and Pascual Jordan and it was called Matrix Mechanics. If we consider each observable as a Hermitian Matrix, then the eigenvalues of the matrix constitute the spectrum of the observable representated by the hermitian matrix. Subsequently, we can define the expectation function in the using Hermitian Matrix formulation.

Simplest Quantum System
The simplest physical system is one that has only 2 degress of freedom. An observable with only 2 possible values in its spectrum is called a “boolean observable”. The simplest quantum physical system is therefore a system with all its non-trivial observables being boolean observables and we call it a “qubit”. i.e. if all these observables are represented by Hermitian Matrices, then each of these matrix must have 2 eigenvalues each and must be 2 by 2 matrices according to properties of Hermitian Matrix. In fact, the qubit will have as many boolean observables as the number of possible 2 by 2 matrices.

Sharp Observables
Consider a quantum system in a state defined as

And 2 observables represented by the matrix
, eigenvalues = {-1, 1}
, eigenvalues = {-1, 1}
That is to say, the observables Z and X each has the spectrum of possible values -1 or 1. But when we apply the expectation function, , while . This means across the multiverse, the outcome of is always -1 while the outcome of is -1 in half the universes and 1 in the other half. We say that is sharp in this case, while is not sharp. Remember that and are observables of the same quantum system. That is to say although turns out to be the same in the multiverse, the quantum system as a whole is different across the same region. In fact the “uncertainty principle” tells us that even if we try to make sharp, some other observable will inevitably become unsharp.

After the series of very interesting lectures on Nueral Networks, I just suddenly revived my interests in physics.

Just a few years back, probably during army days, I was reading on all these things about relativity and seriously, I could hardly understand any of it all. Somehow, after going through university, everything seems crystal clear this time around. Much to my own surprise, I realised the first time I ever spontaneously thought about relativity on my own was during my secondary school days about the “A housefly in a bus” problem, I still recall relating the problem to friends who probably only took slight interest in the topic.

Basically, I was kind of intrigued by the observation that houseflies seems to fly at their normal speeds in a moving bus. A search in google tells you housefly fly at 2m/s, that’s defnitely slower than the bus! I had always wondered why they do not get hit by the rear of the bus, which is moving much faster in the forward direction. Furthermore, there are other problems:

1. If we assume that the bus and housefly travel at the same forward speed of 60km/h, which is approx 17m/s, how did the housefly manage to accelerate so fast to maintain that speed?.
2. If now the houselfy is flying in an arbitary circular path, how does the fly so amazingly manage the precise flight control system, accounting for the difference in “relative” (secondary school physics sense)velocity?
3. If the bus comes to an emergency stop, how does the fly even know to detected and react to the suddenly change in relative velocity when it is in mid air, particularly, how it decelerates so fast?

Although Theory of Special Relativity may seem like an easy way out, actually, even now it still feels weird and I don’t really understand how. It may well be that my observations are wrong and housefly really just stick to the windows. Anyhow, I won’t do an experiement on that.