OddThoughts

What does this mean?

A Note: -> a “promise or certificate” that an amount will be paid to you. as apposed to a Draft (ie: cheque), which is an order that an amount be paid to you.

So the “idea” is this. Orginally if someone did a “service” for you, or provided you with a “product”. Then you would be in debt to them.

The barter system is the exchanging of one form of goods/services for another. Later things like gold and silver were traded for goods and services (to pay of this debt).

Legal Tender is the “forced requirement” for a person to accept the bank note (cash bills) as payment for debt.

So if you go to the store, and purhase groceries totalling $50.00, the grocery carrier has to accept your cash as payment for the goods. (They are not required to accept cheques, credit cards, debit cards), but they must accept cash. The currency of the nation as defined as “legal tender”.

(it’s double quote day “” for everything)

Reference:

What is a negotiable cheque? 

A lesson in economics

I had a big of a “discussion” with my wife th other morning regarding the concept of “Daylight Savings Time “.

For those unfamilar with the concept, many areas at different times of the year, push their clocks ahead 1 hour (in the spring) and back 1 hour (in the fall) . Essentially what this means is in the spring months there will be less daylight in the morning, and hense more daylight in the afternoon.

The problem we had was with the notion of “savings”. Technically, you are not really saving anything. Although we adjust the clock, we do not save any time. We simply adjust the period in which the light is used.

So an agreed upon defintion would be that at certain times of the year we adjust our clocks in order to make “more efficient” usage of the daylight hours.

So it is unlike a “savings account”. Where you bank your money with the anticipation of using it at a later time.  You can’t “bank” the daylight and use it later. We can only adjust our notion of where the daylight occurs, or essentially adjust our lives.  It’s not like you can “save” this hour and use it at some point in the future.

So I prosed that the concept of “savings” may have multiple meanings. In addition to being something that can be “held on to” and used later (like money), which got me thinking about efficiency.

Efficiency is often described as “doing more.., better”, or doing more in less time. Efficiency implies savings. If something is efficient it must have saved us something right? If it didn’t save us anything (time, money, resources) it wasn’t really effecient was it?

So we can’t even save time then can we? Time will pass regardless of what we try to do about it.  No matter how organized you are, your day still has 24 hours, your week 7 days, your year (well you get the idea).

If we adjust our tasks in such a way as to get more done in the same amount of time, we call this efficient, and we consider that we have “Saved time”. But you can’t put that time in a time bank account and spend it later.

Often it seems in life, that the more time we “Save”, the more work that fills in the gap. So our “Reward” for saving time, is to get more work.. doesn’t seem fair does it?

Just a few random things for you to ponder.

Wait! Before the religious jelots come attacking me with torches please allow me a moment to explain.

I’m not saying that the bible is wrong, or that it isn’t good, or even that God did not have a hand in it.

I’m saying it was written by human beings, beings which are imperfect, make mistakes and have a free will. Beings who form  committees to decide which of the words sound best and which need to be thrown out.

We know the bible was written by human beings; they in fact often name themselves (eg: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and of course the authors of the old testement, some of which are anonymous or use Pen names)

It is often argued, however, that the hands that wrote the bible were “guided” by the hands of God and are therefore his (or maybe her) words. Perhaps this is true but does not change the fact that it was written (and translated over and over by the hands of man (and women).

The first “law” of the universe (or law granted by God if you prefer) , is that humans are given “free will”. The ability to choose.

God would not take away that ability for any reason (hence explaining the reason that evil exists)

Free will also causes humans to intrepret, paraphrase, and adapt to information. So even if the almighty guided the hand of the authors of the bible, and deciding which parts to include and which to exclude, humans also had a part in this. They were not “zombies” only able to do the will of God.

And therefore; all those “errors” or “contridictians” that seem to appear are either

a) Mis-interpretations by the humans reading the words

b) Incorrect details recorded by the humans who wrote the words

Most likely, it is a combination of both. In a similar manner there are “so many different” religions again because humans have the ability to choose.

Inspired By:Weekend Philosophy: Alan Watts on Nothingness — Waxing Poetically: Addressing Culture with a Twist of Poetry

Any discussions involving nothing will immediately lead to a paradox yet for some reason we use the word nothing all the time. Those of you mathematicians out there, of which I certainly am not, have devised a nice mathematically representation of nothing which they call zero (0). Well could you please explain something to me? Okay by the definition of nothing (0) and the definition of 1. I will agree that 1 + 0 = 1. Which only makes sense, we are taught if Joe has 1 apple and I give him no apples (or take no apples from him) than Joe still has 1 apple. Even I, with my limited mathematical knowledge understand that, what I don’t understand is 1 X 0 = 0. I was told to memorize it since the third grade. The definition of X is to add the number (in this case 1) 0 times. If I put that into English I would be saying this: Joe has 1 apple and he never(0) adds no (0) apples to it so he now has no(0) apples. Okay, so I agree that 0 X 0 must be 0 because that statements says: I have nothing and I never add nothing to it at all (which is a double negative in English) so I still have nothing. By the mathematicians very words he eliminates a definition for never dividing nothing up. (0/0). From what I do know about mathematics everything must solve (0/0) since all objects of any kind X 0 = 0. All I’m saying is we base a great deal of mathematics on a paradoxal concept which even leads to error’s in English such as the above double negative. As a matter of fact a computer does not even understand this concept of nothing and will undoubtedly complain should I ask it to tell me (0/0). Calculators do the same thing.

Well I still didn’t tell you what nothing is have I? (that sounds like an interesting statement) When all else fails, when all idea’s have been exhausted, when thought breaks down into elementary concepts, and when we are absent from all we know to be TRUE what is left then is nothing.

You can’t touch it, you can’t smell it, you will never see it but it “exists” nevertheless. What is between any two objects in a vacuum? The moral is be VERY careful when using a concept such as nothing.

Okay the last concepts I wish to discuss is the word GOOD and the word RIGHT. These are two other concepts that the dictionary conveniently jumps around on. RIGHT I think I can easily define because I have already defined TRUTH. In this book what is RIGHT is what is held to be TRUE. Keep in mind that this means that RIGHT is as individual as TRUTH and it is not collectable as society might make it appear to be. We only make it appear so because we do function in a society and as such we must “bend” the “truth” so everyone will believe one thing is RIGHT and another is WRONG.

The concept of Good is a difficult one because it involves some emotional assumptions that won’t be discussed in detail until later in this book. An individual does GOOD when he/she commits an ACT believed to be RIGHT, also believing the consequence of that ACT to be RIGHT and furthermore having a “feeling” that the ACT benefits people as a whole. The “feeling” is the most important part of this definition because we “feel” Good when we do Good.

I hope your not bored with all this defining business but just look at it as bookkeeping so later on when you disagree with something I’ve said you can just go back to the definition and try and see it from my point of view. Of course you must agree with my definitions and I hopefully have convinced you of their validity. Here is the biggest application of my definition, which is the scope of this entire book. In other words if you skipped this entire chapter you should READ at least this part:

All knowledge in any form, whether spoken, written, acted, once it has ended you are left thinking. This is the key of a good story but after a while that thinking subsides and other things enter your mind. I want to leave you thinking with this book and continue thinking the rest of you life this is DOW. The end result of all knowledge is the same if we think about it long enough. From Stephen Hawking, to All My Children, to Sesame Street. They all DO the same thing. They all invoke thought and when we invoke thought we open up worlds which otherwise would never be possible.

Well I hope you can see how one definition can spawn a number of different things about life. I should stress that I am not saying we should let everyone out of prison just because they’ll promise to be good. However when a person really does believe they can feel remorse…when they really do feel it of there own accord and when they are prepared to re-enter society then those people deserve the a chance to start over because those are the people who will not go back to prison and those are the people who have earned it. It just takes some longer than others.