Emotionally 1 + 1 = 1

Applying emotions in Business is like applying it to War. If you decided to launch a War, you should defeat your enemy in order to win, but still you should (not must) have mercy to your enemy.

Success is very difficult with emotions in place. However its not impossible. I'm not suggesting in this post any solutions but rather clarifying some vague point.

In Business (especially banks) this comes into practice that someone can't pay his debt because of lots of personal financial troubles. The bank (or lets say people who work in the bank) have to make this tough decision. They can take his house or they can give him an extension.

This is similar in saying that 1+1 = 1 because the first "1" is having financial problems and its out of the bounds of the moral law to take his "1" and give it to somebody else just to earn 2.

All goes back into the human himself.

You Choose. Just remember

Who are you?

Brainstorming is about Quantity not Quality

Usually when you hear your boss carrying a brainstorming session you panic. Now you have to come up with great ideas or just simply, shut up.

Brainstorming is defined in our work as the process of getting smart ideas and through the junk ones. If an idea that is infeasible the group will start criticizing the owner.

Patrick Mcdermott the author of Zen and the Art of System Analysis propose a unique way to perform Brainstorming.

Brainstorming is about filling the board with crazy ideas without limitation. The most important key is having fun. He insists that Brainstorming is about Quantity instead of Quality. As long as your teams are freely shooting their ideas without any criticism or BUTs/Howevers/NOs. You should get the best out of it.

The more your teams place ideas on the board the more you exercise their brain to produce even more ideas. The quality doesn't matter at this stage. You can later select, combine, remove ideas to create qualitative ideas.

Patrick says he measures the success of his brainstorming sessions by how loud his team laughs and the number of complains he get from the next rooms!

The Car Keys Anomaly

When you open your car with its keys, you're brain is wired 100% that the car will always open. Because you believe it will open no matter what. In fact there is no room for thinking of a slight chance that it won't open.

Now somebody asked me.

What IF I replace your car keys with ones that look just like yours without telling you. You will still be 100% convinced that the car will open with those keys but it won't.

This is interesting claim to make. However, in this case whoever replaced my car keys, his thought wave function is much more stronger than mine. Now HE is 100% sure that my car will not be opened with the keys I have and his conciseness travel in time at the incident event and affect the reality of me being unable to open the car.

The Reason is that we are all entangled and we affect each other thinkings.

Now, suppose for example, if we can assume that a computer did the replacement of the keys (randomly) without you or me having any knowledge what keys the computer will replace, is it the right or wrong. In other words your consciousness and thinking doesn't play any rule in this process. I will always open the car no matter what keys the computer selects. Because I am 100% sure that my keys haven't change and I am unaware of this computer replacement process.

There is an exception as well to this paradagm. If you are "Watching" the computer replacing the keys, or thinking that "ok, the computer will pick the wrong keys.." this also affects the result, or say you have a desire that the computer to replace my keys with wrong keys. In this case its up to the uncertainty prenciple. You may say its a battle between my conciouness and yours. Most probably I will win.

So for this thought expirment to be true, you shouldn't be able to play any rule in it by any means. That means, you should place that machine in a closed room and let it do the keys replacement.

OK, Someone somewhere must have picked keys so similar to his keys but are not his, he was 100% convinced they were his keys, no one has interfered in him picking the wrong keys, yet I'm willing to wager they were unable to open his car.

Great

The car keys will not open in two cases:

1. If our guy discovered that those keys aren't his before he actually opens the car. The keys won't open.

2. If our guy (or anyone else) WILL discover sometime in the future, say after one month or two months or two years that the keys aren't his. The car will not open NOW. This is an example of how the future can affect the past. (I will elaborate on this more)

The car keys will ALWAYS open in one case.

1. If our guy didn't discover that the keys are not his, or he (or anyone else) WILL NEVER discover in the future that the keys are not his. The car will always open. Thats because there is a full synchronization between the future, the past and the present (The now).

This is a simple example of how the future can affect the present. In the Quantum world, we are entangled with our future self and our past self. So anything you do now affects the future and anything you might be doing in the future will affect the present.

I would love to fail

The last thing we want to do is to fail. I don't get on the stage and present because I might screw up and the audience will laugh. I don't write a book because some of my friends who think I'm still young will make fun of me if my book sold zero copies. I don't dance because I might make a fool of myself.

We fear failure because its embarrassing. So we have built this behavior that failing or being wrong is the worst thing we can do.

We live in the world of TV and movies where heroes don't make mistakes and do things perfectly. A simple equation that always apply, if you fail, you suck. No room for mistakes, quitters are losers, winners never quit.

Good judgment comes from Experience, unfortunately, Experience comes from bad judgment and failure. - Jim Horning

So we have only one source to good judgment and its experience. And Experience comes from failure the very thing that we afraid of.

Let us all pull our strength from this little girl
The Little Girl Story
There was a school girl who don't pay attention to classes. One day in the drawing class, the teacher noticed that she is really focusing on her drawings The teacher approached her and asked her.

Teacher: "What are you drawing?"
Girl: "I'm drawing a picture of GOD"
Teacher, amazed: "Okay, but, no one knows what GOD looks like."
Girl: "They will in a minute."

The girl didn't put any restrictions, its in her nature, she just want to try everything. She didn't care about failing. I previously wrote an article about thinking like kids. Here it is if you are interested more in this subject. Maybe they can teach us a lesson.

Research: Hussein's Frog Experiment

This thought experiment is somehow similar to Schrödinger's cat Experiment of Quantum Physics.

Hussein's Frog
The experiment goes as follows. If you ask a random person, whom you don't know, to think of an object. Then instructed him to obtain that object, place it in a box and seal that box. Assuming a condition this person does not disclose the content of the box to anyone. We will have a sealed box with an object that only one person in the entire world, our world, knows what is it.

The second step of this experiment takes place after that person leave this world, (i.e. dead). Next, fetch the box and before opening it, wish for a frog to be in that box. Imagine the frog inside the box before opening it and when you do open that box, you will always find a frog, or whatever you wish for. The frog, according to Schrödinger's, will be of course both alive and dead at the same time up until the moment we upon the box.

Why is that?
The reason, according to quantum physics, is that whatever was inside that box was there because our person puts it there. He knows about it, he was the only one affecting its existence. With our person gone, the box can freely contain ANYTHING depending on the power of the direct wave function affecting that box.

Exceptions
If the person we instructed to take the object told someone about the content of that box, the box content will snap "back" into that reality. If people start guessing whats inside the box you get all those probabilities and its up to the strongest wave thought function (or the sum of the thoughts with the same frequency) to create the reality. Basically uncertainty principle plays the major rule here.

So for our experience to be effective you shouldn't tell anybody about it.

Karma in Computer Science and the Story of Abbas

For those who don't know what Karma is, here it is in my own words.

In religion if you did something bad, something bad will happen to you. If you did something good something good will happen to you based on your actions. In Islam we call this العدالة الإلهية or the Ultimate justice, In Buddhism its called Karama.

Scientifically, If you do something good or you did something bad there is an amount of energy that you release whether positive or negative, this amount of energy someday will come back to you (the source) .

The Unfortunate Driver
Let me tell you a story about how Karma does its magic.

One day an employee was late for work in the morning, so he drove fast and start overtaking a car in front of him. The other driver was angry, and he also started to overtake the next car, the next driver seeing this overtake the next car.. and so on.

In the end of the day our employee leaves his work. On his way to the parking he was hit by an overtaking car, a car from the same series he created earlier this day.

Karma will find you.

Abbas and the Process.Kill()
OK. Now can this apply this to computer science. Let me tell you a story that will explain the whole thing.

Once upon a time there was a developer lets call him Abbas. Abbas was a brilliant developer, he does his tasks quickly and he rarely says I don't know. One day Abbas encountered a weird error upon closing one of the application. He didn't know the source of the error and after half an hour of searching he gave up and decided to apply a quick fix by simply kill the process on the exit this way .NET garbege collector won't have the time to show this error. It WORKED.

The clients were SO happy the damned error upon closing the application disappeared. The application has been submitted, and the maintenance period finished.

One day one of the clients reported that no matter what edits and changes he apply to the application, they are not saved. So the client IT team started to do their research and stumbled upon a piece of code that kills the application process clearly marked with a comment -Abbas and dated. It appears that killing the process prevented the application from running the On_Close event on which the saving of the data is being done.

Karma found Abbas.

In your next project hire an Actor

Most Projects overrun both in time and funding due to many reasons. Among these reasons is the not my job mindset. The concept of an employee not welling to break the chain of his knowledge that is tying him down from seeing the big picture. This phenomena leaves developers apart from engineers and engineers apart from managers.

If an Engineer gives a developer a set of requirements to develop a simple tool, the developer will simply slam down the requirements one after the other as code. Lets take an example.

Example
* Create a tool that will allow the user to select a Transformer and display the customers being fed from this transformer in a pop-up form.

The developer will simply do the simplest logic possible and show the customers he will show all the customer information (SELECT * FROM CUSTOMERS). He doesn't care if the engineer need all or one of those fields.

If in this case the developer tries to put his shoes in the engineer (i.e. acting like an engineer) the results will be different.

The developer will say, if I am an engineer, what I want to see in the customers form? I need to see each customer address but most important I need to see how much each customer is consuming from that transformer in terms of percentage. Perhaps I should show that information on the map and make it more sexy by adding some color coding, red are high usage customers, green light usage customers.

Now some of you will say, developers hardly have the time to code what they have, they won't find the time to think like this and waste time. I say exactly the opposite, impersonating the client actually speeds up the development process. The reason is there will be less fixing and iterations and ping ponging between the client and the developer. Moreover, it will increase the quality of the application and promote your developers in seeing the pig picture instead of their own narrow space of sight.

This process is called Empathy. Try going to an acting class, I took Dan Pink's Advice and did go, I am really am improving in seeing

L-Directed Vs R-Directed Thinking

Perhaps you got tired of hearing all the fuss about the Left Brain and Right Brain Thinking. But If you know that those very two hemispheres are the origins of almost everything in this world you will appreciate study them more.

L-Directed Thinking is the process that is done by the left hemisphere of the brain. Here goes the analysis, sequenced logic, 1+1=2 like of logic, computation of complex formulas etc. Basically computers are great at stuff like this.

For example playing chess is an L-Directed thinking approach, You can NEVER beat a computer at Chess, because basically your Left Brain is not as fast as a computer, in performing sequenced steps. The computer will basically calculate ALL your possible moves and encounter it easily.

Garry Kasparov the Chess Champion beat the first computer at Chess, and the second one, but he couldn't beat the third.



Now, If you bring a violent picture and you feed it to a Cloud of computers in order to detect the type of this picture; A 6 years old kid can instantly know that this picture is violent in less than a second where the Cloud can report it after days and most of the time the result is wrong.

This is the power of the R-Directed Thinking which cannot be replicated by a computer yet. So the Right Brain is responsible for emotions, parallel, pattern detection. Whereas you can replace a human left Brain with a Machine.

When you look at someones face, you don't see her nose first, then her eyes, then her lips. You see her face as a whole, in parrallel. Thats the power of the R-Directed thinking.

Imagine your wife is cooking dinner. She asked you to bring some stuff from the store. You forget an important stuff. The wife looks at you and say, "I'm going to the store". Now your left brain will know that this woman in front of you aka your wife, is going to the store. But your right brain will detect that she is angry because you didn't bring the missing ingredient. No Computer can do that.



In another post I will explain the power of the R-Directed thinking and why the R-Directed thinkers will lead the world as Dan Pink explains in his book a Whole new Mind. This post is an inspiration by his book.

ArcGIS: Export Selection as a New Layer Different Source

From time to time, I like to do some handy tools that I just feel that someone will use it one day. Take the Twitter Extension for ArcGIS for instance that allows you to login to ArcMap with your twitter account and tweet from Arcmap. I got some emails from people who actually said they made use of the code. Some said that they created an account that will automatically tweet tasks done by users. Some used it to tweet when a warning when certain location on the map is viewed at a certain scale.


This time I developed a tool for ArcMap, that allows you to select some features in the map. Click a button and it will create a new layer, export your selection into a personal geodatabase in temporary location and set the new layer to that new source.

The new layer will contain the new selection ONLY, you can do many things with it, change symbology, use definition query etc..

And It works on any Data source doesn't matter if its SDE/PGDB/File GDB/Shape file.




Here is a Video



Here are some snaps.

Download Script

Quantum Consciousness - Fear

I've been digging into Quantum Mechanics the last couple of months and really dove into the conscious part of this science.

Imagine yourself at a deserted cemetery 200 miles from the nearest city. No lights, midnight, no sound, just the sound of your foot stepping on the sand and dry leaves as you walk between the graves.

Now the last thing you think of at this moment is picking the Laundry or preparing for work tomorrow, or the virus at your machine or the chapter you skipped from the last book you read. You will keep thinking that some ghost will come and squeeze your soul out of the tip of your toe while screaming very load. Or perhaps an ugly old grandy coming out of one of the graves and running very fast with her back bend towards you to eat your pretty head.

Those thoughts become so sharp, so clear, so thin that increases what physicists called the Energy Density and make those thoughts move to a part of your brain called the Frontal Lobe. At this time, those thoughts, those ideas, those concepts become real.

So you might really see something really weird coming to you because you believed that it will come to you.

Should you achieve this in a fear mode, you can do the same in the normal mode. Say like, you can create a 20 BD in your hand if you believed in it enough. That's how prayers work too to a certain extent. Its about what you believe in.

EDIT: That is turned into a movie. The Apparition [2012]