Friday, July 27, 2012

Me+flights = FUNNY (Én+repülés= mókás történések)

Whatever I do, it just usually is not turning out to be normal. It is just fact. There is laws of life, common senses whatsoever..If you want to understand me, usually do not even try to approach the topic from this angle. I am not arrogant, but it is really the truth!  May be it is also my fault in a way, who knows.

Anyways, also some funny things can result from this. Just like what happened to me recently on the plane today. I was arriving quite exhausted and tired, but took a bunch of books with me to read. One of this was the "I Ching" which I have been using since I was 17. This is a book to get some guidance when you need it, and it is based on concentrating on a question/problem, and throwing 3 coins from the same kind 6-times after each other. Then you get a sign which is supposed to contain some guidance for the current situation what you can think about.

So, I was sitting to my place and there was a group of some Austrian men sitting next to me, the guy who was sitting directly next to me was seeming some rocker-hippie type of person in sunglasses and Converse-shoes. Ok, the plane was starting and I took the 3 coins, tried to be discrete, did not want everyone watching me..Then at the 4th throw one of the coins fell down. Great. I had to ask the people around me to try to find it, behind me some old businessman  was sitting, who I think thought that I am crazy/witch person.

But finally the coin was found and I finished the 5th and the 6th throw. Then I hear the guy sitting next to me saying in German to his friend: "This woman next to me is forecasting the future with some coins". Vahahha. I speak German, so I understood of course what he said and turned to him like "I am sorry, but I can understand everything what you are talking" Bamm. Then he was like "Ok, ok, I am sorry, it was just interesting to watch what is this." I said that no problem, and explained in couple of sentences what it might be about. After this I was reading, listening to music, feeling more exhausted sometimes, sometimes a bit less.

We arrived in Vienna and I did not even pay attention to my environment at all. Then one friend of this person from the most distant corner of the group turned to me and asked about his friend that "Und, war er freundlich?" ("And, was he friendly?". I had to laugh, and said that "Ja, alles war ok" (Yes, everything was ok"). And then they said goodbye and left. 

I just had to think after all of this, that it is amazing that wherever I get, there will be always some trouble going on. May be it is me, because I just have to start to throw the stupid coins on the plane and risk that I will be seen as a crazy-witch woman, even though I never pay any attention to anything more than my hearth only, and I use these things just as a tool which might give me good hints, or not.

So hello people, I am back from the creative break. Many things happened, may be I asked for the trouble myself, but I am here and as you can see I even won a new role to my life: I will stay in the memories of those people for ever like the crazy-hippie witch woman from the plane. Because I am so much like that, o yeah. I can just say as a conclusion of this that yes, it was funny, but lets be a bit less superficial people, and not to think all the time that we know everything and can say from one-two things how the other person is who we encounter by random.

2 comments:

  1. As one of your erstwhile plane-mates, let me share a curious insight from my professional field, related to the idea of getting guidance from random dice throws via the I Ching. Any problem of "direction" in which you can always back out of false starts can be modeled as a walk through a maze where you can only see the options at the current intersection---like a tall hedge maze.

    From the late 1970's until 2002, the best way known to guarantee (essentially, and efficiently) reaching the goal was to flip coins at each intersection to choose the next hallway---including the option to go back the way you just came. The reason is that this prevents you from getting "stuck in a rut"---and since there are no one-way, back-to-start-only hallways, you don't get a big penalty for a random wrong turn. Thus it was really most rational to follow "random signs"!

    The other thing that followed from this randomness is the existence of "Universal Sequences"---a single book of coin results that is absolutely guaranteed to work for any maze! Before 2002 the only way known to compile such a sequence required more effort than you want to expend on the problem. In 2002 however, someone figured out how to do it with the same order of effort---in a way that could fit into a small memory like on a smartphone. "Same order" is however still more effort than you spend with coins, so as long as you tolerate a teeny-tiny risk that the coins may give you a bad outcome, it is still practically more efficient to use the randomness!---or to use someone else's faithfully pre-packaged advice.

    The technical buzzword for this is "Undirected s-t connectivity is in deterministic logspace." Anyway I hope and pray that with events this week you may avoid getting stuck in a rut...

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  2. Hi Ken, thank you for your insightful comment. I am sure that I won`t. This coin-thing was just to hit the time anyways. Since any direction to go is better than being stuck in the same place, I will not figure too much what is the right direction, just start to move and see where it leads.

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