2020 Journal Entries.
A revisit to some of my thoughts that I recorded in my journal in the first half of 2020.
This precious day between a sunny transition from morning to afternoon, I wanted to have my first meal of the day and like every other sane human being, I was going to have to do something while reading. I chose to read and the book I was reading at the time was a physical one which I borrowed from a friend. Turning pages and eating at the same time proved to be a really big problem. Just keeping the book open alone was already a problem deserving of the name—problem. So I decided to just look at my journal—a three year old journal—which wasn’t far from me and I stumbled upon the first few things I wrote in it. This was early 2020. I started reading some of these entries and I found some of them, if not most, really interesting.
So I’ve decided to share some of them alongside my current thoughts on some of the entries as well as some context, in other words, what might have prompted such thought. All of what I’ll share will be exactly as it was written in my journal so if you notice some error, just know that it’s because of that. The journal entries that are to be shared will be in italics to differentiate them from my current thoughts. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my thoughts from the first half of 2020.
I have an hypothesis which is when someone is driving and they suddenly encounter an obstacle—maybe an animal, a human being or big objects—their dominant hand will determine the direction in which they’ll stare the car. If their dominant hand is right, the movement of the wheel is clockwise but if it’s left, it’s anticlockwise. So, to test this hypothesis, I’ll be using simulations. The kinds that people use to learn how to drive. Program the game in such a way that after an ‘x’ amount, an obstacle will pop up and they’ll have to maneuver the car. Nice hypothesis.
I have no idea why I added nice hypothesis at the end. I guess it is. I actually haven’t tested it at all. Just like most of the hypotheses I’ve thought about over the years, I don’t get to test them or not. I don’t get to the second stage of the scientific method which is experiment. I miss the guy I was in secondary school. I was always testing an hypothesis not too long after thinking about it. This resulted in a decent amount of theories I came up with no matter how amateurish or wrong they might seem now.
I’d still like to test it, I just don’t know how I would go about testing it. One way that comes to mind is the gadget the whole gang in The Big Bang Theory got Sheldon when they all wanted him to learn how to drive. I don’t think I can get such. If you have any ideas, please let me know. I’d actually like to know if a significant amount of drivers actually go the way of their dominant hand. I have zero knowledge of neuroscience so I’d have no idea of how to explain what is it about the brains of left-handed people that make them swerve left.
Develop an AI(algorithm?) that’s capable of writing a story/article that can be read from the front through the back and vice versa.
I still can’t figure out what prompted this thought in my head. So, the idea here is to write a story that’s just like a palindrome. A short one basically. It doesn’t even have to look or behave like a palindrome. You get to the end of the story and you can start reading the words backwards and it’ll make just as much sense as it did reading it from the beginning. Thinking about it, one might think it’ll be exactly the same story but is it possible to get a different story reading it backwards.
Three years down the line and I don’t think am capable of developing something that can do this. Luckily for us, there’s ChatGPT. From what we’ve seen so far from OpenAI, ChatGPT-4 is much more smarter than its predecessors. I’d like to see what ChatGPT-4 is capable of coming up with if you prompt it for the palindrome story but it just so happens that it isn’t available for a poor person like me. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to see what the available ChatGPT comes up with but I’m much more interested in the what ChatGPT-4 can come up with. So, if you have access to our soon-to-be Overlord, please give it the prompt and do share with me what it comes up with.
You have two guys called Akin and Pawpaw. Akin(a very smart guy and probably thinks he’s smarter than Pawpaw) and then you have Pawpaw(a smart guy, not as smart as Akin and probably thinks so too e.g. “wow! Akin’s such a very smart guy, I wish I was as smart as him”). These guys are given an assignment probably let’s say in Engineering Mathematics by the Lecturer and the topic is a difficult. Both guys do these assignments and come up with different final answers. [They both meet hours before submission, Akin doesn’t bother to ask Pawpaw about his final answer because he thinks he’s right while Pawpaw thinks to ask saying to himself “since]
It’s funny how Pawpaw is the one who asks.
This happens to be an incomplete thought. I assume I wrote this with assumption that I was going to come back to it soon and complete the thought. Pawpaw asks for Akin’s answer and he discovers his answer is totally different from Akin’s. If Pawpaw is someone who’s not confident in his problem solving ability, he’ll change his solution to that of Akin’s and in some cases, Akin’s answer will be incorrect but because of a lack of confidence, Pawpaw will change it.
I was in school just before the pandemic when I wrote this down. What caused me to ponder on this and eventually write it down was that I found myself in situations where I was trusted too much with the answers I came up with to problems that most times, my friends just went with what I did. Normally, in classes, you form hierachies (un)consciously of the top smartest people in your class. The smartest guy in my class was trusted too much. He’d get an answer to a problem and no one (or maybe most of the class) would bother to check his solution properly to see if he made any mistakes. Most people just tailored their solutions to fit his and went with that. I never found myself in this camp. I always made sure to come up with my solution and if it turned out different, I went with mine and funny enough, my closest friends always went with my answer trusting my intelligence probably too much. “I trust my scholar.” just as a friend has always said. To be honest, I’m curious as to where this immense trust comes from because I have never been the smartest person in the class.
“Science has failed us” That statement annoys me. The present knowledge we have gathered so far has failed us, not science itself, not the scientific process. [definition of science]
If you notice, this was a rant. What caused this? It was early pandemic and we were all at home because of the lockdowns. My Dad was was watching TVC’s Your View. If I remember correctly, I was passing by and decided to pay a little bit of attention to what was being discussed. I was watching and then Morayo—the host of the show—said something that annoyed me instantly. She talked about science failing us and I lost it a little bit in my head. The quote from my journal is the thought that ensued from that anger. I still share the same sentiment.
The way I view science is two fold. I view science first as this process of finding out what is true about the world, as well as this process of gathering true knowledge about the world. Then I see science as this huge body of knowledge. What she was attacking was science as a whole when she should have been attacking the body of knowledge gathered but I guess she didn’t know that and I should have understood that, cutting her some slack rather than getting upset. LOL!
Funny enough, not all of the knowledge gathered up until the start of the pandemic was totally useless. The knowledge to develop vaccines was helpful, I'd imagine. Washing your hands i.e. Germ Theory helped. Using nose masks as well.
I added the definition of science at the end to remind myself to check what the dictionary defined science as. I never checked.
I think it’s impossible to come up with a mathematical model to predict the particular time NEPA will bring the light.
LMFAO! I find this very hilarious.
One of the things that was fascinating to me(on a shallow level) as a kid was electricity, not actual electricity but if one could predict with great accuracy when we were given electricity. I can’t remember how old I was but I was really young, {10 years old < x < 13 years old}. I was lying in the sitting room, really bored, no electricity obviously and the I heard the ceiling fan make this brief sharp noise and seconds later, there was electricity. From then on, for a while, when I heard the ceiling fan make that noise, I expected there was going to be light but I was disappointed so many times. It only ever happened once again as far as I can remember. As regards this journal entry, I had no idea what I was thinking about when I wrote that down.
Despite the very little engineering knowledge that I have, I still have no idea what goes into the distribution of electricity in this country. Is it totally random? Does someone press a button saying “Oya, it’s time for you people to have light”? Does someone set a time for it? I have no idea what the answers are.
There are so many journal entries from the first half of 2020. If you enjoyed this and would like to see more of my journal entries, let me know. If one person indicates interest, I’d write another one.
“I enjoyed this but someone should have indicated interest already so there’s no need for me to.” Is that what you just said? “Shame on you!” I scream at the top of my voice with tears in my eyes. “Drama Queen.” I hear you saying. Who cares?
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This reminds me of Anthropocene Reviewed by John Grene where he reviewed some thoughts and experiences he had had over the years and did a star rating. Reading gave me the same feeling of nostalgia lite; like you (and him) went through the "motions" with me and then i find this blog past (Green's book) that talked the experience. More of this abeg.
*indicates interest*