Portable handrest
Hands are useful. I have full respect for them. I don’t know what I would do without them.
But there is a problem.
I don’t know what to do with them when I am not using them. They are not like the other body parts that mind their own business when not in use. Take ears for example. They just sit quietly on the sides of your head all the time, even when you don’t need them. But hands hang from your shoulders in an awkward way and make you look funny. In fact, thanks to gravity for at least pulling them down, or else, they would probably just start floating in the air.
People have tried coming up with solutions. For example -
And some rather extreme ones too, such as -
However, one thing that’s pretty evident from all this is the following – they are all clueless.
So I suggest making a simple device that will solve all problems. It’s a device that I like to call portable hand rest. The way I imagine it is that it would look like something that can be worn around your waste with two padded things coming out of it on which you can keep your hands. The padded things would be foldable, so that you can fold them back when you don’t need them.
Eating yourself
Recently I was thinking of interesting ways of completing the following sentence – “I am so hungry that I can eat _____.”
One interesting way I could think of was this – I am so hungry that I can eat myself – which then led me into thinking if such a situation can actually occur. Or to be more precise, does there exist a situation where eating yourself will lead to a larger chance of your survival than just staying hungry? This can be answered trivially. The answer is no, because eating yourself will always lead to your death (Proof – Let’s say it doesn’t and so you successfully finish eating yourself. Since in the end you have been eaten, you must be dead, which is a contradiction), but staying hungry may not. But then what about the following variation of the above question – does there exist a situation where you will have a larger chance of surviving if you eat a part of your own body than if you stay hungry?
This, now looks more like a question for a person with a good understanding of the human anatomy. However, I being someone who has absolutely no understanding of the human anatomy, conjecture that the answer is ‘yes’. The reason is as follows. Not all parts of the human body are crucial to living. Some parts, such as the appendix, are in fact so useless that they can be removed from your body and your body will not notice. However, these parts still contain (I assume) stuff that can be digested by our digestive system to produce some energy. So now consider the extreme case of food deprivation, that is, a situation where you must eat something or else you will die with almost 100% probability. This can happen if you are so starved that your body doesn’t have enough energy to pump your heart. In this case, if you eat your appendix (or some other not very essential body part), you should survive for at least some more time.
However, from a completely different point of view, if the above is true, there is a major bug in the design of the body. It’s rather silly for your body to keep energy shelved into something as useless as the appendix when something as important as the heart needs it, especially because just removing the appendix from its original place and putting it into the digestive tract does the trick. When there is energy present in the body itself, albeit in a rather inaccessible corner, there should be some mechanism to use it. Or may be, there exists such a mechanism. That’s why I said this is a question for someone with a good understanding of the human anatomy.
I will stick with a ‘yes’ though.
Socks
It’s useful to have all of your socks of the same color, because then you don’t have to waste time finding the “other” piece of the pair. Any two pieces make a pair.
Shitting in the middle of an auditorium
Washrooms look like washrooms. You don’t have to look at the sign on the door to say that you are standing in a washroom. They look shiny and bland. They have tiles and generally, very plain colors. They don’t have stuff lying around randomly. And so on.
I will like to change this.
I will like to have a washroom that does not look like a washroom at all, and in fact looks like something that’s the exact opposite of a washroom. For example, a classroom. Or a meeting room. Or a museum. Or a laboratory. There are many options.
So for example, imagine waking up every morning and entering a room that has an expensive carpet and a huge wooden round table in the center with very expensive chairs around it and white boards hung on the wall and a projector kept facing one of the walls and at the center of the huge round table, there is kept, very conspicuously, a western commode.
Alternately, imagine a huge auditorium with a seating capacity of five thousand people and a western commode kept on the stage where you can go and shit.
I think it will be fun if your toilets look like any of the above. I can’t imagine how a person can be sad for a long time if he has such a toilet. He will have to feel funny at least once everyday. I can’t imagine thinking about why you lost your job, or why your girlfriend left you, or why you are overweight while you are shitting in the middle of an auditorium.
Do rich people get bored?
I want to know if the richest man on earth ever gets bored. I often think of the kinds of things one could do just for amusement, provided one had loads of money. For example, if I had an unlimited amount of money, I would never need coffee. I would pay twenty million dollars to Space Adventures and have a visit to the International Space Station instead.
Coming Up With Good Stuff in Polynomial Time
(Since I had not posted anything in a long time now, here is something I wrote for The Scholars’ Avenue long ago.)
Even though coming up with good stuff has lots of applications in areas such as living life, having fun, impressing girls and designing fault tolerant systems for distributed applications, it has not been studied completely and there does not exist any known algorithm to solve it efficiently. Human beings still rely on those random sparks of creativity they experience when on crack or when having a bath in Syracuse. The earliest known example of such an incidence is when the famous homo erectus Jon (71st descendant of Adam) came up with the idea of controlled fire. Although the exact nature of motivation has not been documented, a popular folklore that has been passed from generation to generation by word of mouth does suggest that he had dedicated his invention to his neighbour’s daughter.
Ever since Jon, several attempts have been made by human beings to come up with good stuff. Examples include things such as knife, flute, sewing needles, boomerang, alcohol, dental drill, agriculture, ice skate, comb, noodles, horseshoe, chess, toilet paper, hand glider, coffee and hydrostatic balance. More recently, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, Alonzo Church’s Lambda Calculus and Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy have been widely regarded as good stuff. However, as was pointed out earlier, the process has been fairly random. In fact, most of the people who did manage to come up with good stuff complained that it was almost impossible to do that when they wanted to. We, however, propose an algorithm that will give humans more control over the whole process.
We will exploit the fact that even though coming up with good stuff is difficult, deciding whether a given stuff is good or not is fairly easy and so, can be trivially done in polynomial time. For example, even though composing an award winning song is difficult, deciding whether a song might win awards or not is fairly easy. Taking into account the above observation, a simplistic algorithm can be designed straightaway. First of all, invoke your random stuff generator and next, check whether the stuff generated is good or not by invoking your goodness verifier. Since both these steps are trivial, they can be carried out in polynomial time. If the generated stuff is good, then you are done, else repeat the whole process. Obviously, there is something wrong, since the algorithm seems to be too trivial to have any actual use. The catch is that although each step is quick, the number of times you may have to repeat it may be very large in the worst case. Moreover, when you discard a particular random stuff because it was not good and generate a new one randomly, you might end up having something even worse.
An improvement over the simplistic algorithm can be achieved by using a subroutine that calculates the goodness slope. The goodness slope of a given stuff is basically a direction in which it should be modified in order to increase its goodness. So if we can calculate the goodness slope each time we generate a stuff, we can make sure that each iteration improves the goodness of the stuff. Building the goodness slope calculator is, however, a little tricky and can only be done through some amount of practice. It is not too difficult though, because the algorithm does not require the subroutine to return the best possible direction. All it requires is one direction in which there is some improvement. However, the subroutine might still fail to do this with consistency, i.e. without failure. So, the idea is to use a combination of both the random stuff generator and the goodness slope calculator. You basically start by generating a random stuff. If it is good, then you are done, else you invoke the slope calculator on it. If the slope calculator is able to give you a slope, you modify your stuff accordingly, else, you generate a new random stuff. The exact algorithm is as follows.
Step 1. Generate a random stuff.
Step 2. Check whether the stuff is good or not. If yes, then return the stuff and exit, else move to the next step.
Step 3. Invoke the goodness slope calculator on the stuff.
Step 4. If the goodness slope calculator is able to return a slope, move in that direction, modify the stuff accordingly and goto step 2, else, goto step 1.
As we can see, the above algorithm still requires lots of repetitions of steps and if your goodness slope calculator is completely useless, it is exactly equivalent to the previous simplistic algorithm. However, it can be shown that on an average, the goodness slope calculator can be made efficient enough to make the above algorithm polynomial. The details are left to the reader as an exercise.
We implemented the algorithm on some human subjects in order to verify its correctness and the results were outstanding. The subjects were monitored for about a week and it was noted that they all came up with at least three good stuffs per day. Besides, there was also a noticeable (more than 112%) improvement in the quality of their love lives at the end of the week. However, the amount of amazingly good stuff they came up with was still fairly low. In fact, the problem of coming up with amazingly good stuff is still open and the interested reader may take it up as a research exercise.
Dinner Party
It was a regular Sunday morning, or probably a regular Sunday evening, or what the hell, may be even an irregular one, Frank had no idea. All he knew was that he was still in his bed and that his head was making periodic attemtps to explode. He had a vague memory of hearing the door bell once when he was still asleep. He had assumed that it was the milkman and then had cursed the landlord for not doing anything about that extremely unpleasant sound the bell used to make. But that was long ago. It felt as if he had slept for ages after that.
He wanted to check the time. He looked around and realized that the only watch in the room was kept on the side table facing the window. This annoyed him. Why the hell should a watch be facing the window? Who was it trying to tell the time to? He thought of turning it around but soon realized that that would require him to lift his hand and lifting his hand was the last thing he wanted to do at that moment. The first thing he wanted to do was to have a cup of coffee. “Tara!” he shouted, gathering up some left over energy from the corners of his body, hoping that in all these ages he had been sleeping, the landlord had somehow appointed a maid called Tara who would be willing to serve him coffee. He was wrong. No one responded. “May be she had left already,” he consoled himself, “why would a maid stay in the house at such a late hour of the day?” This reminded him that he did not know the time yet and he had no idea why he was assuming it was already too late.
He looked at the watch again. It was still facing the window. He stared at it for five minutes, trying to make it turn with his will power. Didn’t work. Damn it. Time, was a piece of information that should have been easily accessible to everyone. He had never before in his life faced such difficulties in finding out what time it was and hence was puzzled that he was not able to do it then. It was not usual. He was probably missing something. May be there was a mirror somewhere in the room that would show him the other face of the watch. No, there was not. May be, the body of the watch itself would turn transparent. It did not. Then finally, as one last desperate attempt, he closed his eyes and concentrated hard hoping to make a telepathic connection with someone who knew the time. This didn’t work either. He got completely vexed and decided that once and for all, he was going to end this idiocy. He had the right to know what time it was and he was going to find it out against all odds. He shook his head, which hurt by the way, and decided that it was somewhere around 4 pm. That’s all. It was a Sunday and it was 4 pm. He took a mental note of it and warned the world to not argue with him about it. Good. A regular Sunday evening, then. Or may be an irregular one.
Through the corner of his eyes, he got a glimpse of the mess near his wardrobe. This made him uneasy. He closed his eyes, because although he was still in his bed, he knew that there were several things around him that he didn’t like. The mess of dirty clothes, empty beer cans and old newspapers was just one of them. He had long struggled with this dilemma and was still not even close to a solution. The dilemma was to choose between the boredom of arranging his room every now and then and the agony of living in a mess. If he chose to do one, the other wouldn’t happen, true. But his problem was, why even choose one? Couldn’t he, in some way, evade both of them? Why, in other words, was it so natural for the things around him to go from bad to worse when left to themselves? Couldn’t they just behave themselves even when he was not looking? He had learnt in high school that it had something to do with the second law of thermodynamics, the one that said that entropy always increased. He had always believed that it was some kind of cosmic error, a bug in the source code of the universe. He wished he had access to the code. He had worked on big software projects before and had the ability to handle thousands of lines of code. He knew he could deal with the universe.
All these thoughts about source code and software projects reminded him of his computer. It was a small, regular laptop with very humble features just sufficient to surf the internet, chat with friends, listen to songs and watch porn. His laptop was perhaps the only exciting thing in the otherwise monotonic and often depressing state of affairs around him. It used to be on and working most of the times running Frank’s favourite instant messenger. He would, every once in a while, take small five minutes breaks and check whether someone had pinged him. Finding a message from someone was always exciting and not finding anything was disappointing. So this was a kind of game he used to keep himself busy with.
He decided that it was time for one of those five minutes breaks now. His laptop was lying very close to him fortunately, so that he did not have to move too many limbs in order to touch the mousepad, which took the laptop out of its sleep mode and showed the extremely cluttered desktop. There were three different messages. He made a quick check if any one of them was from Olivia and then soon remembered that she wasn’t there in his list anymore. He had removed her a few months ago, as soon as she had announced her engagement. He felt bad, not because Olivia was engaged – that was past now – but because he did not have any messages from her. The fact that she was not on his list and could not send him messages in principle did not stop him from feeling bad. He felt bad out of habit, because it had been almost hardwired into him now.
Olivia was that girl he had met in his Economics class back in college. She had a round face, that sometimes gave a false impression that she might be plump. She was not plump of course, but was not too thin either – the dimensions that would make one feel that it might be fun to use her as a pillow. She was so soft that a lover trying to plant a passionate kiss on her body would be as pleasantly surprised as a kid who puts a date in his mouth and realizes that it’s seedless. Her hair were dark and short with a few strands hanging out of the otherwise well kept bunch, blocking her left eye on the way and finally tickling the area around her chin. She had a peculiar way of sitting in the class and listening to the lectures. In her right hand, she would have a pen which she would be chewing most of the times and her left hand would be pressed between her two knees in a slightly awkward but cute way. Overall, she was a kind of girl who was attractive without being too beautiful, the kind that Frank liked.
From the day the course started, Frank began doing all kinds of things to impress her. He would buy her gifts without any occasion, do her homeworks for no reason whatsoever, give her a shoulder to cry on whenever she felt bad, fight with people who didn’t like her, write her songs, drop her to the airport and so on. Very soon, she gave him a peck on his cheek and announced that he was her best friend. He was happy. His efforts had finally shown some results. Best friend was like the acme. If you were the best, you couldn’t get any better. So all he had to do now, was to probably propose to her in a nice, romantic restaurant and things would be settled for all. He would marry Olivia and then live happily ever after. He mulled over it a lot and thought about the restaurant he would take her to and the ring he would propose her with and daydreamed about the way he would kiss her at the altar and the place they would go for their honeymoon and so on when finally, two weeks later, she introduced him to her boyfriend. She said this was going on for some two months now and she was sorry that she never mentioned him to Frank but she swore that Frank was the first person to know about him and that no one else had any idea till now. And then she asked Frank if he was free the coming Saturday and whether he would want to join the two for dinner at that same restaurant where Frank had finally decided to propose to her. Frank was in major confusion all this while. This made him pretty much speechless and hence he just kept nodding. Olivia said she found this cute and gave him another peck on his cheek.
This was the beginning of his misery. Two years passed since then and nothing changed, except, for Olivia’s boyfriends. Frank still did her homeworks, he still bought her gifts and he still would be the first one Olivia would introduce her boyfriends to. This killed him. It wasn’t a kind of killing that a murderer would do though, for murderers are supposed to kill. It was rather the kind a confused barber would do – you go and ask him politely for a haircut and he pulls out a gun and kills you instead and then asks you for the fees too, because, may be a shot through your head is what he thinks you asked him for. Hadn’t Frank made it very clear that all he wanted was a regular haircut and not, for example, a shot through his head? Or couldn’t the barber at least give him some time to run or may be just a simple warning before pulling the trigger?
This ended though, or so he thought, when Olivia finally announced her engagement. Of course, Frank was the first one to know about it. He decided that this was the end, that this was the deepest one could possibly fall and that he was finally going to forget her completely. He removed her from his friend list, deleted her number from his phone and had a refreshing bath. He was all set to begin a new life.
This was all past now. He had not talked to Olivia in months and did not want to talk to her in future either. He was living a better life now, at least better than what it was earlier. Right now, all he knew was that it was a Sunday evening, he was still in his bed and there were three messages on his desktop that he had not checked yet. This made him feel a little enthusiastic. He read them one by one. The first one was by Sam. It said, “hey awesome party dude… thanks again… call when you are back in your senses…” This made many things clear, especially the heaviness in his head. He had had a party in his room the previous night and he had been drunk. Others had also gotten drunk. He looked around his room and could identify each person’s mess. There was that stinking crud that came out of Peter’s bowels immediately after his eighth tequilla shot. It had dried up by now and the thought that he had co-existed with it in a small room for several hours now depressed him. Then, there was that pair of socks hanging on the lampshed that had previously been busy warming up Ted’s feet until Ted realized that socks had feelings too and that it was time that he would pay them back for all these years of care and do something to warm them up instead. He realized that there was some left over pizza lying right next to his pillow that he had not noticed yet. This was a lot of mess. He had no idea how he was going to clear it up. He thought he would call up his friends and ask for help.
The other two messages were from random people from work. He never bothered to reply to them.
He felt it was a good idea now to check who all were online, may be Olivia was and may be he could ping her and have a small chat with her. Then he felt annoyed for thinking along these lines and reminded himself that he had forgotten Olivia completely and that there was no chance that he was going to find her online. This didn’t stop him from scrolling through his friend list once. He even furtively sneaked a glance at that spot between Oliver and Peter, the spot that used to be his favourite till a few months ago. Olivia, of course, was not online. He felt bad.
He thought he would go and call up Sam now because he was pretty much back in his senses and he also needed some help to clear up the mess in his room. But then, he had now scrolled down his friend list completely and this was not the normal position for a friend list to be in. So he thought he would do it some favour by scrolling up and leaving it there. Of course, he planned to sneak another glance at that spot.
The spot was not empty any more. Olivia was online. His heart skipped a few beats.
He kept staring at the name for the next few minutes trying to answer three completely different kinds of questions, the first one being, “How the hell did this happen?” the second being, “What the hell was he going to do now?” and the third, “What the hell?” He first tried to handle the third one. He shook his head as hard as he could just to make sure that alcohol was not the reason for all this. It hurt. He checked the name again. It was Olivia, and not something that just looked like Olivia. He wrote her name on a separate piece of paper and matched each letter backwards. It matched. He scrolled up and down again. The name was still there. He scrolled up, remained there for some time and then scrolled down quickly. The spot was still occupied. It was time to deal with the first question now. He had absolutely no idea what had just happened. May be he did something stupid when he was drunk. Now when he thought of it, he did get a vague feeling that Olivia had come up in the discussions the previous night. He thought he should check his chat history and the numbers dialed on his phone. But then, he was running out of time too. Olivia was on his list after several months now. He didn’t want to miss the opportunity to say hello. What if she went offline and never came back? He didn’t want that to happen. This brought him to the second question. He thought he should ping her and ask what she was upto. He did.
She did not reply. He waited for two minutes. No response. This was definitely a bad idea. She was probably busy fornicating, or may be, getting cosy with her fiance on a sofa. He shouldn’t have pinged her in the first place. But now he had done that already and she had all the right to not reply and make him feel miserable. In fact, he was pretty sure that that’s what she was doing. She was not going to reply. He didn’t want to feel miserable. He wanted a solution and the only one he could come up with was that he should call her up and clarify that it was very confusing that she was on his list because he had removed her a long time ago and the only reason he had pinged her was to ask her how this had happened. He did remember her phone number, so the fact that it was not there in his phone’s memory wasn’t a problem. But calling her up could equally turn into a bad idea. What if she did not pick up? He would feel even more miserable.
He called her. She did not pick up.
He felt annoyed. He wanted to throw something at the wall. He chose the left over pizza. He picked his phone again to see if he had made any calls to Olivia the previous night. He was interrupted by the door bell. He wasn’t expecting anyone. May be, it was Ted. May be, he wanted his socks back. Or may be… no come on, it couldn’t be Olivia. He dismissed this line of thought as soon as it came. However, it did make him pace up a little. He reached the door and looked through the peep hole. It was Olivia.
Vacuum, as it turns out, is more mysterious than one would think it is. You say you take everything out of a given volume and what you have in the end is vacuum. But you see, there’s a problem here. ‘Everything’ does not just contain matter that can be sucked out using an ultra powerful vacuum cleaner. ‘Everything’ contains energy as well, especially because of that famous equation formulated by Einstein that says matter and energy are interconvertible. Now when you suck out energy, using may be some sort of equivalent of an ultra powerful vacuum cleaner that can suck energy as well, you might end up in a state from where you are not able to suck out any more energy and yet, it is not the state with the lowest energy possible. In fact, to reduce the energy even further, you may have to give it some energy first. Such a state gives a false impression of being a vacuum even though it still has a lot of stuff in it. This is exactly like being in a valley, which even though looks like the lowest point in your vicinity, is not the lowest point in the world. Given a strong enough push up the hill, you may roll down into some other valley that is even deeper.
When Frank was looking through the peep hole, he was not aware of the fact that the universe he was living in was being fooled by one such energy valley, that the vacuum in which all the celestial bodies of his universe were floating around was not the actual vacuum but just a fake one with energy much above what could in principle be achieved. His universe had been in that state for some billions of years now and not many people were aware of this confusion of a cosmological scale.
The other thing Frank was not aware of was that about twenty minutes ago, something had happened at a distance of about two billion miles from his room that had never happened before in the history of the universe. A fairly catastrophic cosmic ray collision had occured that had released a phenomenal amount of energy into the universe. The energy released was so massive that it had stirred up the vacuum and had caused it to finally climb up the energy hill surrounding it and roll down into a valley that was much deeper than the one it was previously occupying. Since the vacuum is what decides the fundamental nature of things in the universe, this had caused a major change at the collision spot. It had created a bubble that contained inside it a universe that was totally different from what one had ever seen before. The laws of nature were different. The fundamental constants that had been so loyal to their names for ages now were different. The whole fabric of the universe, its very nature, the way it behaved was different. Forces did not follow the inverse square law any more. Fundamental particles did not exist. And then, the bubble had expanded, reaching areas that were far away from the spot where the collision had occured, changing the very fundamental nature of things into something very bizarre and unimaginable wherever it went and by the time Frank was about to open the door, it hit his building.
Frank, was no longer Frank. Olivia, was no longer Olivia. And the Sunday evening, perhaps the most irregular one in past, present and future, was no longer a Sunday evening. No one was left to even express surprise at the extremely unusual turn of events.
On test reports and their interpretations
Suppose you take a test and pass it along with nine other people. Initially you are only told that you have passed and hence you are all too happy about it. But later, you discover this webpage where a list of passed candidates is given. The list is numbered and your name is mentioned at the first place. However, nowhere is it mentioned that the list is sorted according to the scores obtained in the test. So may be, it is just arranged in the order in which the papers were checked. Or may be, the order is just random. The question is, should this new information make you happier than before?
Suppose you had never seen this list and were just told that you had passed. In that case, it would only be fair to assign equal probabilities to you being at any of the positions from one to ten. Your expected position, therefore, would be 
You should be happier than before if the new information raises your expected position to something above 
Now let’s say, that a friend of yours comes and tells you that the list is either sorted in the increasing order of scores obtained in the test or in the decreasing order and he seems quite confident about it, should you be happier than before now? The answer, once again, is ‘no’. This is because your expected position is still 
I find this analysis interesting because the above situation occurs quite often and in most cases, one feels tempted to draw conclusions about his actual position in the test from the position in the list provided. Also, increasing order of merit and decreasing order of merit are two most likely orders that come to mind.
About food
Although human beings have very skillfully avoided getting extinct in all these ages, I don’t think human genes are very happy about the way things have turned out. At least, if I were them, I would be damn pissed about a lot of things. Protection, of course, is one of them. I mean, it would be really annoying to keep having my hopes of getting replicated crushed on a regular basis by a piece of rubber that was shaped like a dick. I would probably mutate myself and invent a new extra-lethal kind of cancer that would torture these humans to a very horrifying death. If I were to die anyway, I would prefer dying in style.
It’s not just protection however, that I think is in the list of things that can potentially annoy our genes. It is this general tendency that humans have built over a period of time to not give a damn to what their genes have programmed them to do, that is, to help in their replication, and instead waste a lot of their resources on such extremely futile pursuits as, to name just one of them, sports. That it leads to some momentary rush of adrenaline and gives us something to talk about is none of our genes’ business.
Along similar lines, or perhaps I should say, of a similar taste, is the very large amount of time and resources we collectively spend on satisfying the needs of our taste buds. Consider cheese, for example. I agree that it is one of the most astoundingly delicious things ever invented by mankind, and that having a spoonful of cheese melt inside your mouth and slip all around your tongue is an experience of such immense pleasure that it does lead one to ponder that may be having cheese is what leads to procreation instead of the more accepted act of copulating with another human being. However, look at the method used in producing it. First of all, you pull on an animal’s breasts and store the white coloured liquid that comes out of it. In the background, you grow this plant called Hordeum Vulgare and once it is grown to its full size, take out its seeds and throw the rest of it. You do lots of weird things with the seeds and finally obtain a sour liquid out of them, also known as vinegar. Next, you put some of this liquid into the white coloured liquid you had obtained earlier and then once again do lots of totally weird things with what you obtain. This gives you cheese.
Now remembering that cheese was just an example and that most of the things we eat these days go through similar stages of processing before we get to eat them, I think, this demands an explanation. Hitting upon such a queer and convoluted scheme for producing a food item clearly shows the presence of a very large amount of motivation in human beings for producing such food items. However, allowing the human body to have such strong urges for sensory pleasures that do not in any way lead to more gene-replication definitely sounds like a design flaw from the point of view of the genes.
Another interesting thing is that unlike humans, no animals (that I know of) are found to take such enormous amounts of pain just to ensure that the things they eat taste good. The reason they eat is to fill their stomach. Of course, we would not expect an animal of the intelligence level of, let’s say, a dog to invent an equally elaborate method for making delicious dog food. But we could, at least, find one of these animals doing some elementary things, like, may be, mixing two things together so that the taste is enhanced. Why doesn’t this happen? Is it because they are not intelligent enough to invent ways of making things taste better or is it because they don’t really have any taste buds? If it’s the latter, then may be these animals are better designed than us in this respect for survival. If it’s the former, then may be this is just a side effect, a compromise that the genes have to make in order to provide us with one of the most unusual and powerful evolutionary tools – intelligence.
The most comfortable bed ever
When I sleep on my bed, I first try to find a comfortable position to sleep in. Of all the things I am forced to do on a regular basis, this is one of the toughest. There always remains one little glitch somewhere. I am always forced to make a compromise, a feeling that says “if only I had another pillow to keep between my knees” or “if only this pillow under my head was a little thicker” and so on. The compromise is absolutely inevitable. I have never in my life slept with a feeling that this was the best position possible and that it could not have been improved by the presence of a more comfortable bed or a larger number of pillows. However, I have learnt to live with it.
One way to live with the compromise is to dream of hypothetical situations in which all this discomfort, all this not sleeping in the most comfortable position is no longer there. So what would that situation look like?
We can get rid of the discomfort by having an extremely customizable bed. If you want a thicker pillow under your head, you will just have to change the settings of the bed and it will bulge at the area below your head. If you want a support for your right arm, you will just need to fiddle with its settings, may be just press a few buttons and the bed will modify its shape accordingly. But then the controls will have to be intuitive and easy to manipulate. For example, if making the bed bulge under your head requires an amount of effort equivalent to calling up the pillow store and ordering one new pillow, then it’s useless. In fact, the effort required should be much much less than that. Even pressing buttons is too much of effort if you are planning to sleep. It should be pretty close to the effort required in just thinking about it.
So essentially, the most comfrotable situation to sleep in will be where you can just fold your body into any shape and no force (other than the internal forces in your body itself) tries to disturb it. For example, if you lift up your head to gain some amount of comfort, nothing tries to pull it down unnecessarily. This will happen if you go far far away from these extremely bulky blobs of mass like the earth. So may be, zero gravity is the most comfortable situation to sleep in.
But is it?
If you have ever fallen towards the earth for an extended duration of time (for example, in a roller coaster ride) at an acceleration comparable to g, you will know that it’s not a pleasant experience. It makes you feel weird in your stomach and very often makes you want to puke. Zero gravity, I guess will not be different from this. If for some reason, it doesn’t make you want to puke, it will definitely not be the most comfortable position to sleep in.
So you will have to create something on earth itself, and that’s where the following extremely revolutionary idea comes in. The most comfortable bed ever, unlike all the conventional beds, will not be a surface, but it will instead be a medium. You will not sleep on it, you will sleep in it. It will be made of a material that will allow you to move through it when you want to and will get stiff on a single command. So now, if you want to keep your arms at a level above the rest of your body, you will just have to move your arms to that level and then order the medium to get stiff. This, I think will be the most comfortable bed that can possibly exist. Ofcourse, you will have to manage air circulation and temperature control, but those are just details.
