Author Archives: Kamran Numvar

Somebodies

I’m going to start a theme of articles called Somebodies – , that tell short stories about everyday people. The kind of people who may seem invisible. They go about their lives as if they’re sons and daughters of nobody, but they are somebody.

This theme includes six women and two men. At first, nothing stands out as an interesting characteristic about these people. But they have all experienced defeat, and touched the depth of life in their own way, and then found their way back to zero. For them, the high point of life is the ground level. So life doesn’t offend them, anymore.

Expect vagueness, and cryptic-like story telling. Don’t look for details that usually help us in making logical connection between data points. They’re doing their best to tell, but not tell.

To be continued…

Fiona

People, places, things, and I’m continuing to find people the most interesting of all, maybe because we’re all beautifully imperfect creatures. People are interesting mainly because of the untold stories. Everyone homes great stories that are different than others’.

Through a series of events, I came to know Fiona. Her intelligence portrays itself in form of her acquaintance to scientific mysteries, silence, and humor. She is selectively kind and exudes perfection, but you know there are untold stories around the innate waves and flares. She gives the impression that she is daughter of nobody, but there are maternal instincts and clues in her words and traits. She reflects sturdiness, and an enticing version of vulnerability –both at the same time.

I die to know about her untold stories, but they have to come on their own rhythm and tune to stay pure and personal…

F’ing New Year’s Resolutions

New year’s resolutions come to me as a comical, and to some extent, venal concept. They all look like these quantitative performance metric that corporate dudes follow … Being able to bench press 350 pounds, losing 25 lbs of butt fat, increasing the size of boobs from B to C. Shit like that. All these examples only disclose people want to be more disciplined, but they struggle.

When the new year arrives, everyone feels like they need to act like grownups with tits ‘n’ all. You see and hear the resolutions, but sadly, the next thing you know, they pass out in the same Irish dump the passed out the year before. How about some dreams, as oppose to resolutions? How about some dreams that don’t necessarily benefit you? How about being qualitative? With that, here are my fucking dreams:

– Saying “fuck” less
– More acts of kindness
– Eliminating world’s illiteracy
– Promoting sense of Personal Responsibility
– Adopting or having a child
– Visiting my parents more frequently
– Drinking more water

Good Luck with medieval peacock vows to vanity.

Strawberry Leaves

For some idiosyncratic reason, people often remind me of fruits in the character they signify. Potato, Cucumber, Apple, Olive, Grape to name a few, and of course Strawberry. Potato has minimal nutritional value but shows no specific character. Cucumber presents signs of coldness and indifference. Olive has long stood as a symbol of peace and harmony. Grape transpires glory and magnificence…

… strawberry however, is an honest fruit. Her seeds are on the outer skin, so you see the roots and cores first. Strawberry symbolizes perfection in every sense of the word.

Strawberry is leaving.

Altitude Matters

Like many, I had the opportunity to waste 6+ years of my life in a couple of universities. As always the schools of medicine, engineering, and law were the ones that had long queues of enthusiasts. I picked Physics for undergraduate as my first choice because back then I believed “science rules man!”. How naïve.

Physics was an honest and clean pain in the ass as a faculty. No course was like the other. The epitome seemed all over the place in that it touched chemistry, electrical engineering, solid state, astronomy, statistics, and religion. It was only during the first year that I enjoyed some fun stories such as: apple fell from the tree while Newton was observing and flirting with the girls, -or- the twin paradox tale where someone tried to part the age of twin brothers by years, only if one of them could travel close to the speed of light. After the first year however, it all became mathematics of most intense kind –where we almost ran out of symbolic characters and had to tap into Greek characters to explain why space bends around mass.

Every learning was theory bound. Though that applies to all areas of science, Physics is highly theory dependent. Every theory starts and end with something like this: one day Adam was doing something and suddenly realized:

– A ~ B : A increases or decreases proportionally with B – Observation / Theory
– A : B : Let’s do some experimentation to find a curve as to what that proportion is – Experimentation
– A / B : All experimentations suggest there is a constant (=K) that relates A to B – Thesis
– A = K * B : and K came from experimentation. – Conclusion

And suddenly we have a constant and a law. The constant is called Adam’s Number. And ladies and gentlemen, here I give you the Law of Adam. Almost all of Newton and Thermodynamic laws were formed like this. The only complexities had to do with the context and environment where K could be a function of temperature, time, or dimension.

This is how physics legitimized itself. Physics went to bed with Mathematics, to look secure and complete. I know my description seems funny and simplistic. Doesn’t it? Read on…

During graduate studies and in order to get accredited I had to take two other courses: Philosophy of Science and History of Science. That was a treat. Simply put, these two courses felt like some stood right in front of you and said “You think you learned some serious shit? Go Fuck Yourself”.

After six years of hard work and studying some of the most complex and abstract areas of science that had no resonation or correspondence to the outside world or everyday life, it was argued that : you should take everything you learned relatively and consider that some of the laws have been contextual and have lacked objectivity of criterion. Therefore they don’t pass coherentism and have problem of the criterion.

The punch line of the course was even more piercing. It inferred, Altitude of Perspective matters. The simple example was: the earth seems flat when you’re close to it. It’s round when you elevate. So we have two sets of laws that equally apply within context. Newtonian laws of gravity and General Relativity, respectively. After that course and the sudden collapse of my scientific beliefs, I have stopped placing all of my hopes on science. We all thrive to blend our beliefs in science in the hope that the overwhelming certainty and inevitability of science will prove our points. It’d take one years of logical and emotional exhaustion to realize how over-rated and relative that hope is.

Science is one of the best vehicles we possess to explain scoped problems, but science is not the only vehicle. Instincts, philosophy, and synaptic elasticity provide an invaluable sea of data. Human beings fall short of enjoying the ability to articulate or reason within that realm.

Beautimous

Almost everyone agrees that change is inevitable. If nothing else, the fact that clock keeps ticking, reminds you of the seconds that go by.

On a lazy midnight and while maintaining a swollen state of mind, I asked myself : what’s not changing? What things, people, or places have not changed for me, or at least, have lasted for long? I started by thinking about things and objects. And oh my … did that not lead to a pile of mental gash.

Things: speaking of things, I’ve never possessed any object with substantial emotional value. But, there is one piece of clothing that I can’t seem to be able to throw away. It’s a v-neck black sweater with dark grayish stripes that I bought in Montreal back in 1997 -when I used to date Nelly. I don’t know why I like it. Maybe because it still fits and makes me look fitter. I get a kick out of the fact that it reminds me of not gaining considerable weight in 15 years. It’s been a hard 15 years, too –with all the change in my eating habits. Ironically, I bought the sweater on the day Nelly lost her ever-so-loving pinkish lipstick, and she couldn’t stop crying for the whole day because of it.

Places: I have perhaps been one of the least faithful people to places. I have lived in four different countries and seven pretty diverse cities. If a given municipality or borough is the fundamental unit of a place, I don’t have any, to call out as the one that has stayed unchanged. So that’s that.

Surprisingly and almost embarrassingly, there is one entity that has stayed unchanged in my life for the past 12 years. That’s the company I work for. In addition, it gets more awkward to underline that this is the only corporation I’ve ever worked for. Prior to that I was the small business fan, and for a few years, an entrepreneur. What Gives! One just needs to read this blog to know how-unlike-me, that is.

Corporations are partly about people. People share one or two aspects of their lives in corporations. Most of them 9-to-5 it, to earn and provide. Some come to heavily screwing the system up and down and left and right, and go to “succeed”. You got the junkies who have read, memorized, and took-to-church the guidelines. And of course there are the sweethearts who are just people people.

What’s so important about a career? I can’t help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do, doesn’t matter in a life-and-death kind of way. I could see why people enjoy their jobs; it makes you feel important, sought-after and put-upon. But, I’ve always understood that the best way of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. MC is one of those. He’s a coworker. Who he is, and what he means, has been and will continue to stay unchanged.

The Smart Alpha Male

Right in the middle of a pretty respectful gathering, he started speaking loudly and obnoxiously saying a lot of nothing. He was not communicating. He was positioning himself as the alpha male. His voice started to go a few octaves above two-lined and people around him were turning their head as if they were irritated. It all started becoming a scene after a few cold minutes.

Kim noticed the situation and walked across the room to get closer to the alpha male tribunal. The straight-shooter that she is, I thought she was going to ask for calm and quiet given someone else was giving a short speech. But to my disbelief Kim engaged in the banter and started laughing orgasmically -to attract the alpha male. From there on, I knew we had a show that would end up in my blog somehow.

A couple of hours passed and later on in the evening, Kim approached me for a chat and in the middle of our schmooze, she started asserting that the alpha-male-lookalike seems to be a smart bloke. I hope it’s not mean to say this: but for the first time in our long friendship Kim transiently looked like a goat to me –in that very quick moment. I suppose I was being very briefly judgmental. I just failed to understand why. I know I was hypercritical of Kim inherently and involuntarily.

A few days later, I was still feeling pretty crappy about having that instinct about a friend. I started asking myself questions like: was I judgmental? Is it fair that I didn’t say anything to Kim? Did I feel that way because Kim started participating in a socially unacceptable behavior? Do I like Kim, so I was being jealous when she complimented the alpha-male-lookalike? Should I talk to her about it? Am I a good friend if I don’t talk to her? Was I envious of the alpha male because he got attention? and the questions kept going, going, and going. Nothing seemed to connect however…

…and in an unassuming morning at a cliché moment it all came to me. I realized I had felt that way about Kim because she characterized the alpha male as smart. But why would that lead to such decree? How do I know if he is or isn’t smart. What does it mean to be smart anyway? Is being-smart equal to sounding-smart? After a lot of thinking, this is how I broke it down for myself: people usually and mostly inaccurately associate one or more of the following traits to smart:

– Quick get-it factor
– Articulation of facts, stories, and points
– Asking too many questions
– High education or multiple academic degrees
– Being master of a few skills such as music, sports, chess, games, etc.
– Being able to connect a few seemingly unrelated data-points (=intelligence)
– Patient analysis of issues
– Social manipulation
– Remembering names, phone numbers, etc.
– Having broad set of information about different topics
– Knowing historical facts
– Talking too much, as a mean of knowing too much
– Etc.

I’m afraid none of the above has to do with being smart by itself. The adjective (smart) is used to qualify the way one’s brain works. It has to do with the process of a) absorbing b) processing and c) communicating information. A smart person should have a unique ability in all of the three. The only attribute that can distinguish one person from another is (b), and sadly, that’s not immediately apparent because (b) is a function of time and well-formed unconscious.

First, curiosity holds the main weight in our ability for absorbing information as a multi-faceted faculty. The dearest tradition that’s also a painful and common non-sense remains to be the assumption that academic education is the best (and perhaps only) source of absorbing information. That’s why the myth of educated=smart surfaces all over the place. Let’s face it: there are only two reasons as to why one might think that way: the structured manner of academic education and accredited nature of academia itself. In my view, continuous reading and listening can be the most important sources of absorbing and refreshing information. Academia doesn’t necessarily or fully insure continuity and freshness of information.

Second, the most fascinating step happens during processing information. If there is anything as a God-given talent and/or genetic advantage hides under this rug. From neuroscience we’ve now learned that a synapse is the event which causes exchange (or production) of data between brain cells. I have this mental model of relating data to processed information. That means when two or more information points connect, data gets generated. Thorough research has verified the number of synapses per second differs from person to person, leading to the notion that there are people whose brains creates more data per second. I admit, I’m not one of them. My brain seems to have an inability to create data out of raw information without context. For instance, there was this professor in my college who would walk into a class and his default action was to write a painfully complex formula on the whiteboard. There were many of my classmates who seemed to immediately grasp it. I never did. Sometimes it took me the entire semester to understand the formula because I’ve always been handicapped by the story. I need to know the context, the problem, the why, and if that’s not enough, I would also need to attach value to the problem to actually direct some of my synaptic elasticity to the issue. By value, I mean I need to see if this is a subject I care to process.

The third and arguably the most important step is articulation or communication. The talent of being able to communicate data requires knowledge. Knowledge comes out of making logical relationship between data points. The knowledge is bound to be relevant to a context, as the source of relationship between data points. Throughout my life, the main lessons I’ve learned have come from narratives. Story-telling stands to be a rare commodity. It’s more of an art. Some believe you either have it, or you don’t. Literature, charisma, and humor as adaptive characteristics can tremendously help articulation of a story, but we should not mistake those attributes with volume, obnoxiousness, and a fake job.

To me being smart requires perfection in all of the above, wrapped up in a charming gift box of self-awareness and principles.

…once upon a time a professor of Physics was travelling in a boat crossing a river. In an odd moment of silence, the professor asked the boatman if he knew anything about physics. The boatman who was illiterate, said “no”. The professor pretentiously replied “half of your life is gone if you’re not smart enough to learn physics”. After that unpleasant exchange, the boatman and the professor had a few goings. By this time they were in the middle of the river and a big storm suddenly flipped the boat over. The professor was struggling in the water. The boatman asked the professor “do you know how to swim?” … The professor said “No”. The boatman said “well, now your whole life is gone”.

Forgive me, Kim!

The Same Wish

…he ended up having a blue day on his birthday. The day after, he said to Shaila “I wish my birthday was a day earlier”. Shaila cleverly responded “the only change would have been that you would have the same wish yesterday”.

In tough circumstances, we all have this unbelievable aptitude to bring in factors we can’t control, to punt responsibility. We do that to ease down the impact of agony and letdown that follows failure. Personal responsibility is a harsh mistress. It pleases you and feeds your ego during victorious times, and it comes back to belittle you when you’re routed.

During tough times there is a rush of negative feelings. All those chemicals kick in to your brain, and get you to a place where you can see nothing but the worst. But luckily, every feeling with a negative connotation maps to another positive feeling. For instance, selfishness maps to empathy, regret maps to hope, and jealousy maps to generosity. The only hidden element that’s the hardest part to bear, is time.

True, we live in a culture that makes it easier to assign moral status to victims of failure. Yet, one lets himself down if he doesn’t show up, or dismisses his part in this splendorous spectacle we call life.

Solo Dwellers

One of the subjects that has been at the top of my list of issues-to-think-about, continues to be parenthood. I don’t have a clue how it might feel to be a parent, but I can form a logical perception as to what’s involved in parenthood -as I’ve been observing a lot of parents including my own.

On the one hand, children go through a cagey phase with their parents while growing up. By cagey I don’t necessarily mean deceptive (though that could be the case too), I mean guarded, incremental, clever to maneuver one’s vulnerabilities. They balances positions to mollify opposition forces of the outside world, and surely, the unknown.

On the other hand, parents don’t fundamentally change personalities while raising children. However, different aspects of their character raise at different times. The first few years are the protective phase, helping the children with the basic natural functions all at once. But then comes the supportive phase, where parents let children do things on their own, grow up, and learn about the wonders of the outside world.

Nowadays, there is no doubt that the number of solo-dwellers is increasing. There are many academic or speculative discussions as to why that’s the case, but no one argues that that’s the case. I think one of the main reasons for people going solo relies on our inability to hold a human relationship together. Human beings need each other less and less every day, and sadly, the gap between mutual expectations and fulfillments widen.

Parents keep giving without asking for much in return. We can argue around some exceptions here and there, but the trend still stands to support the claim. I strongly believe the relationship between parents and their children and the one-way flow of love and care haven’t been impacted as much as other forms of relationships in transforming societies. And, that’s something to look forward to and desire.

I think I just said it. Yes, I’d love to be a father one day.

The Hype Cycle

In the past couple of weeks, I read a few really interesting articles that left me with some great teachings. Here they are:

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The price of having too many convictions hides in losing connection with others. The price of being too connected is not having any conviction or principle. The best place resides in the balance between the two.

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“The Hype Cycle says that a technology goes through a predictable series of stages on its way to mainstream adoption. In the first stage, Technology Trigger, a technology is introduced. The media or tech blogosphere picks up the stories on early proofs of concept and demonstrations. This sets the stage for a rising tide of excitement until the technology reaches the Peak of Inflated Expectations, where it seems widely expected to beat sliced bread, cure cancer and eliminate all human suffering, sometimes all at once. Some companies jump into the game, but soon there are widespread failures as the technology fails to meet lofty expectations. And so begins the Trough of Disillusionment, a point at which companies fail or merge, and the technology can only survive if it meets the needs of early adopters. If it does not die, the technology reaches the Slope of Enlightenment and the Plateau of Productivity, as it matures and realistic applications of the technology emerge, along with viable business models.”

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Two elements are critical for ensuring the success of any complex problem-solving. First, the people involved must agree on the problem they wish to solve. Second, they must agree on the process for solving it.

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The main problem with online dating is the expectation-gap. Your logical assessment of someone’s profile creates an expectation. When you meet the person, your emotions don’t map to the already-existing logical expectations -which consequently leads to disappointment.