1984

1. I just finished reading 1984 by George Orwell. It scratches one's heart. If I wanted to remember one or two sentences from the book, they would probably be:

"Sanity is not statistical." and somewhere else the same character thinks "Sanity is statistical.".

2. On a different note, last night I watched Mr. Nobody with couple of friends and it was just awesome! 

"Each of these lives is the right one! Every path is the right path. Everything could have been anything else and it would have just as much meaning."

3. "Reality is arbitrary." -- The Limits of Control by Jim Jarmusch

4. I assume the items above are already being stitched together forming a coherent train of thought in the readers' mind. 

The Great Gatsby

"He smiled understandingly, much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey."

These sentences were the most touchy ones for me while reading "The Great Gatsby". This is how the narrator describes Gatsby's smile in their first encounter in the beginning of chapter three. I just finished watching the 2013 movie and couldn't get these sentences out of my head while watching the movie!

As always for me reading the book was a far more splendid and joyful experience than watching the movie. I am happy I didn't watch the movie before reading the book. It doesn't mean I don't like movies based on novels but it just means I enjoy reading the books more. I was thinking maybe the very basic reason is how the author can elaborate on describing the characters in the text and that I go over these descriptions kinda obsessively over and over again. This would probably result in me being able to connect to the characters depicted in the novels more than the ones in the movies based on those novels.

I went through a few sentences of the book again after finishing the movie and one nice thing I either haven't paid attention to earlier or I have had but already forgot is the point where Fitzgerald describes Gatsby's face in a state as if he has just "killed a man". In that scene Gatsby kinda kills himself, he kills the personality he invented long time ago as Jay Gatsby.  

Now comes the most exciting part at least to myself. After reading the book a few months ago I went through the wiki pages for Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and was blown away how their love affair was in parts similar to Jay Gatsby and Daisy's. Just read Zelda's biography and see how this young popular girl  in Montgomery Alabama, is similar to your image of young Daisy in Louisville Kentucky. Honestly to me it was even more unbelievable and in some senses more insane than the love Gatsby had for Daisy (for a delusion of being with Daisy... however you wish to put it) cause actually this thing happened just a few decades ago. Man! Human beings are weird species. 

Stephen Wolfram and Jacob Bronowski!

I wrote most part of this post on Oct 25. I guess I fell asleep before I could finish, edit and publish it. Got the chance to do so now.

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It's late but I gotta wait a bit more before leaving the Ghormeh-Sabzi in the slow-cooker and going to bed. It's an Iranian dish, basically a stew that is served with rice. These stews are called "khoresh"es and are a major part of the Iranian cuisine. 

Today I went to Stephen Wolfram's talk in the physics department. Honestly?! It was as boring as hell. Any new stuff?! Not more than what I learned watching his TED talk and reading his wiki page, which I guess is written by himself. C, my roommate also thinks he wrote that wiki page. I remembered an interview I read loooong time ago, back in high school days, with Freeman Dyson where he points out one cannot find smarter people than Einstein and Dirac and how both of them got drifted away from the mainstream science as they got older and older. Dyson explains that both of these geniuses, after the age of thirty lost their connection with experiment, which was once there major inspiring agent. They got more and more obsessed with abstraction and mathematical elegance and basically their philosophy led them to some kind of isolation from the scientific community. 

I remember reading somewhere in Jacob Bronowski's "The ascent of man" that any field of science is subject to the viewpoint of its founders and if someone else would have started the same field, it'd have probably be totally different from what it is now. I guess what scientists like to think or even take for granted is that scientific method leads you to an objective understanding of the natural world. Frankly I doubt if that is true. Quantum Mechanics showed us how influential the role of the observer is and even in a non-Quantum world I have a hard time believing that any human activity, scientific enterprise included, can be totally free of subjective stances. One can say well, natural science is less subjective than arts for example, cause we have at least the scientific method which tries to minimize the effect of experimenter's ideology or prejudgment on the results but I don't think that effect can be ever reduced to zero. 

Later in the day I was talking to a friend who is a CS grad student. I was telling him even if an objective criteria could exist which confirmed that for example what Wolfram says is the "right way" of studying the universe, needless to mention I doubt if such a thing can exist at all, unless the main part of the scientific community is investigating in it, that viewpoint or whatever will die very soon and the other mainstream "ways" will survive under the name of scientific activity.