Is monogamous love narcistic? Is jealousy justified?

Is it realistic to believe that out of the several billion people in this world, that we are "the one" for our beloved? and for all time?

When parents have a second child, what do they say to their first child? If the lesson there is to share, why does it not apply to other relationships?

But a pair bond is different, it is intimacy at a different level.

Or is it just a practical matter of child rearing requiring a stable long term parental relationships and let the parents' emotions be damned?


Then there is the time element, the bonding that comes with shared experiences over time.  Is romantic love the glue that initially keep couples together long enough for the passage of time and accumulation of common battle scars to take over as the curing agent for this glue to be permanent?

Is it our unwillingness to share that put us into a compromise that is a monogamous relationship?

"If you love somebody, set them free....." so goes a popular song, true?

Can we maintain our sanity if there is no one in this world that will accept us unconditionally?  To think that we can always be replaced?

Can we make an alliance agreement with another to support each other during these moments of weakness so that we are stronger as a whole?

Even if the other is not the best match alliance partner, it is an improvement over dealing with our weakness on our own.

Consciousness, the hard question

We will be discussing consciousness at our next meeting.

I came across two videos from the Royal Institute on this topic, both thought provoking and interesting.

There is this one to get us thinking about something that seem so everyday...pain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHXCi6yZ-eA&list=PLbnrZHfNEDZz6R5Y-32dx2HuF_iUQw2sI&index=1

Then there is the panel discussion that provided some partial answers but provoked more questions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=313yn0RY9QI&list=PLbnrZHfNEDZz6R5Y-32dx2HuF_iUQw2sI&index=3

Most interestingly are the various descriptions of brain disorders where people have out of body experiences,  or recognize their wife but said she is an imposter, or being upset that someone is hitting an artificial arm that they have come to think of their own after a virtual reality experiement.

It is so weird that we really cannot make this up if this didn't actually happened.

Then there is the suggestion that consciousness is responsible for the social animal that we are, the reason that we evolved to be different than the other animals.

Some suggest in the discussion that consciousness may be one of those things that we as humans are not equipped to know.

Looking at the progress made in the last few decades, it seems that we have started to place the loose ends of a puzzle on the board and patterns are starting to emerge.

Theater of the mind, things happen, we sense it, then we play out the narrative in our minds.  How is the script interpreted from the sensors?  Who directs the narrative? How do "we" influence it?  Who are "we"?

Meeting on partial truths and casting actors based on ethnicity or gender

We had our meeting this evening discussing both partial truths and casting actors based on the two blogs over the summer.

There was a lot of discussion about the word "truth".  However, the main point of the partial truth blog is that whether something is true or not may not ba anywhere as important as whether that truth is relevant to the situation.

It is natural to think that partial truths are used by people who want to manipulate their listeners and "spin" the message a certain way.  However, the person expressing this partial truth may not intend to mislead but simply is not aware that it is not important to the discussion.

So when contemplating a situation, the first action is to determine our purpose, what we want to do.

The next step is to determine what are the most influential factors that may help or impede us towards our goal.

Only after then do we determine which action to take and whether it is "true" that this action will lead to our desired result.

So, in the cell phone charger example mentioned in the blog, we first need to establish that our purpose is to conserve power use while still use energy wisely on things like charging cell phones.

Then the next thing is to determine what are the most influential factors when it comes to saving power use.

We can look at using more efficient refrigerators which uses a lot more energy than cell phones, or minimize electric heat by trapping mores sunlight, using heat pumps instead of electric heat and so on.  All these devises use hundreds or thousands times the power use of cell phones.

Then we can select one with the most energy savings impact, confirm that it is valid and then do that.

The problem with doing something "because every little bit helps" is that we only have limited energy and attention.  Again, baling the sinking Titanic with a teaspoon comes to mind.

The other significant thought illustrated by the cell phone charger example is that we often stop looking when we are convinced that something is "true".  In diverting our attention to verifying the truth of the claim, we have lost our focus on prioritizing our efforts for the most effect.

Very often a discussion of this type can shift from purely technical to political, as in "I am doing my part, how about you?"

While hard work is certainly better than less than hard work in the same direction, it is no indication of achievement if the priority is wrong or the approach is not correct.

So what seems like purely technical issues ultimately involve economics in terms of effort costs to do things and also political in terms of our value system and how we prioritize our "wants".

It is so easy to point to something that is technically true and then feel superior for doing a part for humanity when in actuality it is a waste of effort.

We also spent the first hour discussing whether an art form such as a play should be "authentic" as the playwright intended it or open to interpretation by the director of the play. It is a wide open topic and not anywhere as easily nailed as the partial truth issue.

At least we managed to nail something down.

Casting actors of a different ethnic origin for a role in opera or play

This week on the program Q on CBC, there was a segment on the Mikado controversy.  

http://www.cbc.ca/q/episodes/  Look for the Aug 11 episode of this program.

It is about whether it is appropriate to stage operas like Mikado and Madam Butterfly which seems quaint and outdated with stereotype Asians and old attitudes about the exotic East.



What is even more interesting is the casting for roles that are Asian, African American etc.  Can white actors and actresses be cast in these roles?

Are these white actors displacing positions that should be taken by Asian actors?

Can Asian or African American actors take on roles that are not of their ethnic appearance?

Can an older actor take on the role of a young character while obviously not appearing young?

Is appearance a major part in performance art?  So much so that it trumps all other considerations?

Then there is the question of dealing with classics that no longer reflect current values of race, gender, and sexuality sensitivities.

Should terms like "yellow face" in Mikado or negro in Mark Twain's works be changed or deleted or should they remain as they are?

Should we be reproducing classics as they are or interpret them with current values?

It is easy to forget how far we have changed in our attitudes and how different our surroundings are from a century ago when some of these literary works were created.

Seeing the works as they are gives us a glimpse of a world where people seldom travel, do not meet anyone other than their own ethnicity, and anything foreign is exotic, exciting, and full of adventure.

Can we suspend judgment just so that we can experience their awe or should this be past chapters that are best forgotten now that we are more enlightened?

Partial truths

As a retired electrical engineer, I find it hard to accept claims by people appearing on television news telling us that we are wasting a lot of electricity when we leave our cell phone chargers plugged in all the time. 

The claim is that these chargers still use electrical energy even when not in use and that cumulatively, these chargers use enough electricity to require more thermal electric generators on line.  If we only unplug these chargers, we can shut down some coal burning generators and help our environment.


Most technical people know that unused or wasted energy most often show up as heat. Cell phone chargers are typically cool when not charging even if plugged in and get slightly warm when charging.

One recent television news show with that claim finally motivated me to do some calculations.

The result is that the claims are true, but only partially true.

Typical cell phones use about 2-5 watts when charging and .1 to .2 watts when not charging.  This agrees with my intuition that not much energy is used when plugged in.  Almost all chargers are "switching power supplies" meaning that they turn on to let power through when there is something to charge.  When there is nothing to charge, there is a little bit of power used just to keep the circuits activated and transformers magnetized.

Assuming one cell phone each for the 30 million Canadian population, if we all plug our cell phones in at the same time, it will demand 60 Megawatts from a generator.  This is small in terms of utility power plants but large for independent power producers.

However, if we take the 300 million US population, then the total demand is 600 Megawatts.  Now we can point to that figure and say "see, that is the size of a decent coal burning thermal power plant that can be eliminated if we don't charge cell phones".

But we don't all charge our cell phones at the same time.  So if we use the power usage with the charger plugged in but not used, it is one tenth of this figure.

Now a much smaller power plant of 60MW capacity for the whole US population.

Perhaps we have an iPad, iPod, and a few other chargers.  So triple the figure and we have 180MW.

Still seemingly a big number and still the truth.

However, what is not mentioned up to now is that there are 6,997 power plants in the US with a capacity larger than 1 MW.  The total generation capacity is around 600,000MW.

So the cell phone chargers demand around 0.1% of the generation capacity when charging and around 0.01% of capacity when plugged in but unused.

It cost around 50 cents a year to run a cell phone charger per year.  http://energyusecalculator.com/electricity_cellphone.htm

Note that it is true that if we all unplug our chargers and stop charging our cell phones, that we can indeed shut down a generation plant or two in the US.

It is not that the claim is not true, but that it paints a picture that is not true.

Someone compared it to bailing the sinking Titanic with a teaspoon.  It is true that it helps but it is not the right use of our attention and energy.


Most of us do not have a grasp of the number of generation plants there are and the overall size of the system so we are impressed with large numbers resulting from multiplying with large populations.

Shutting down a power generation plant is a vivid image.  So long as we don't see it as one among several thousand.

Our book club is currently reading Joseph Heath's "Enlightenment 2.0".  It highlights how we need rational thinking and analysis to resist our intuitive feel.

Here is an example of that.

In our modern interconnected life where division of labor narrows us to our own specialties, we depend on experts to for advice.  Unfortunately, these experts often have their own agendas to promote and it is not always easy to judge the validity of their expertise. To make matters worse, mass media is no better at selecting experts than we do and the wrong people get media exposure all the time.

So we have partial truths and it is up to us to decide what else we should know that we have not been told.

How are we suppose to know what we don't know?