tag:oz.akan.me,2014:/feedOz Akan2015-09-28T05:23:43-07:00Oz Akanhttp://oz.akan.meSvbtle.comtag:oz.akan.me,2014:Post/time-is-in-our-brains2015-09-28T05:23:43-07:002015-09-28T05:23:43-07:00Time is in our Brains<p>It all happens in our brains.</p>
<p>We are living an illusion. Imagine the time you are working on something you like. You are in the zone, drifted away just to find it has been hours which felt like minutes. Then think about those long travels you did during your childhood. These long, boring car drives. Time would stop.</p>
<p>Stop reading this, hold your breath for a second and close your eyes. Experience “nothing” happening. Your consciousness will experience stillness. Still, there will be billions of activities going on in your body. Trillions of cells won’t stand still. They will experience “time” in a wild pace.</p>
<p>Universe is 13.8 billion years old. Earth is 4.54 billion. Humans are around for the last 200.000 years. Likely, you are around not more than 100 years. Everything you know, everything you will ever know, all you believe is important. All whom you love, all what is happening to them, all your values, all your anger, love, all it is just a brief moment in life of universe. As you can’t experience time as your cells do, the way you experience time has nothing to do with how universe observes time. It is as if, the smaller you are the slower time gets.</p>
<p>As it all happens in our brains, it is just an experience.</p>
<p>Sit there, close your eyes. Try to feel time. Try to feel what you are leaving behind, into what you are moving. Can you feel it?</p>
<p>I bet you won’t.</p>
tag:oz.akan.me,2014:Post/i-feel-suspicious-about-the-existence-of-time2015-09-20T19:13:07-07:002015-09-20T19:13:07-07:00I am Suspicious of Time<p>I feel suspicious about the existence of time.</p>
<p>One can observe time only if there is movement. Think about it, if nothing moves… You are looking out to the street and no one moves, no bird flies, no cloud changes its location, no voice travels through the air… Nothing happens, as if you are looking at a picture taken a little while ago. You keep looking at that image right in front of your eyes, nothing has changed for the last 10 minutes. If you wait 10 more days nothing will change. You can’t see time in that image. You can’t find time in a picture. Time doesn’t seem to exist when nothing moves.</p>
<p>Think about your thinking. It is actually brain cells communicating with each other through an electrochemical process. That is a movement between brain cells. Going back to our still street, if we are talking about complete stillness, then there shouldn’t be any brain activity, which also dictates there shouldn’t be any cell activity. That makes me think if time doesn’t exist, there wouldn’t be life.</p>
<p>Lets think about how we think a little bit more. Now, think about two numbers. The only thing that matters with this exercise is, you shouldn’t be thinking about anything in between picking these two numbers. Ok, you have two numbers. Think about yourself, picking the last number first, just the opposite of how it actually happened. Think about it. Does it really matter which you picked first?</p>
<p>Thinking is a physical activity in brain. If nothing happens between two physical activities then does the order they actually happen matter? Does it matter if I picked 5 first and then 8? It does not. If you wait long enough you will find that you remember two numbers you picked but forget the order you picked them.</p>
<p>We obviously order events as they impact us. If we observe three events where event A affects B which then affects C, we say A happened first. And it all happens in our brains. So it is not really what is happening around but it is what we experience in our brains. It is like seeing few shadows and guessing which object is the biggest using shadows as clue.</p>
<p>Think about a movie film. While watching the movie things happen in a sequence. You can tell the beginning of the movie and the end. That is because a movie is shoot in a way humans can understand. Imagine the picture frames in that movie. 24-30 of them per second. Imagine you are looking at the pictures, imagine they are in random order. Millions of images in random order that your brain can’t make any order. Imagine you are watching the movie in that seemingly random order, and movie ends. Everything happened, every word is said. Just nothing in particular order. Where is time? That man died a year before he saved the girl?</p>
<p>Time is maybe us ordering events. There must be a reason in all, time, after all a good tool to find the reason.</p>
tag:oz.akan.me,2014:Post/frustration2014-11-11T08:30:03-08:002014-11-11T08:30:03-08:00Frustration<p>It is a state of mind. It jumps from mind to mind. The more potential you have the bigger it’s impact is. It is contagious. It infects others around us, teams, organizations, companies. It has a name since mid 16th century and describes the state of mind when one feels she is not able to achieve something she wants to. This feeling, makes us accept we couldn’t achieve, even worse we can’t achieve. We start the sentence, “No matter what I did…”</p>
<p>We all know about viruses and how they spread. I have been thinking on ideas and how they spread. Some do same math on social applications to see how they spread. There is this term “basic reproduction number”. It can be thought of as the number of cases one case generates on average over the course of its infectious period. The bigger this number is the faster virus / infection will spread. You want this number to be big for your social application and pretty small for a deadly virus. In any case, it works the same way. Find a weakness, something common in your audience or prey. Then attack.</p>
<p>Find a weakness in humankind, something common. Something everyone has coded in their DNAs. Then add everyday circumstances. Make them realize the situation, give it a name. Make it very OK to feel that way. Pull people in. Welcome people. Spread the thought. Make people comfortable with that idea. Make it the light end of the tunnel that you can never reach but always see.</p>
<p>Frustration. One word, I dislike more than any word I know. It is the thought bug. Infected billions of people. It is what shouldn’t be named. </p>
<p>If one doesn’t like to feel challenged, doesn’t like to look at the same problem for hours, days, weeks. If one never faces hard problems, that no one has ever solved. If one never takes everyone else that came before a step further and opens a path for the ones after. If none of these, one will find more words to describe the situation she is in, instead of actually dedicating everything she has to the problem.</p>
<p>It is a privilege to be there in between a meaningful problem and the solution.</p>
<blockquote class="short">
<p>You are there in between a meaningful problem and the solution..</p>
</blockquote>tag:oz.akan.me,2014:Post/one-thing-to-do2014-06-29T09:27:06-07:002014-06-29T09:27:06-07:00Decision Management<p>Once, I felt, I had too much to do. Too many tasks, more than I could ever finish. Too many puzzles that are waiting to be solved at the same time. You know that feeling of being trapped, being powerless, anxious and broken…</p>
<p>Then, I recognized that neither the number of tasks nor the pressure of deadlines, would change how many of these I could deliver. I could work eight hours productively, maybe a few hours more once in a while. Being a regular human being and being in denial of my regularity, I found that what I am able to deliver wouldn’t change by how much I was asked to deliver. I could produce only so much. I almost can’t choose what is thrown at me. I accepted that.</p>
<p>It was one of these moments, all of a sudden, you would see the world around differently. You would observe the same problem but with an answer attached to it this time. Some call it “aha” moment, some call it a paradigm shift. It was one of these moments that we experience less and less with age. I envy the ability of grasping new ideas of a child’s unconditioned brain. The moment we can get out of that conditioning jail and override a belief we have been carrying for decades, we become a different person. Likely a better person, leaving a little more foolish version of ourselves behind.</p>
<p>I recognized that I am truly able to work on only one thing at a time. That is how I am encoded. My brain can’t focus more than one thing at a time. So it is not about how many different tasks I have, It is about what I choose to work on. At any given time, I will be working on only one task. I will invest eight or so number of hours everyday and I never have to worry about anything but the task I am on. That is how human brain is wired. It is pointless to ignore the scientific facts. Understanding the reality and being able to change the story I have been telling myself is surely enlightening.</p>
<p>I realized, it is not how much I am asked to deliver, it is how much I ask myself to deliver. If I am here at this point, that is because of millions maybe billions of decisions I have made during my entire life. That is because of what I had chosen to focus for years and years until this point. What i choose to do now will define where I will be tomorrow. As all we do, I curve out my destiny one decision at a time. Every decision I make, is not a decision about what to do. It’s a decision about who I am. I choose who I am becoming, now, right now, by writing about it.</p>
<p>So you choose who you are becoming, by reading it.</p>
tag:oz.akan.me,2014:Post/i-ran-ran-and-ran2014-06-14T10:48:20-07:002014-06-14T10:48:20-07:00I ran, ran and ran<p>I said, I will run 8 miles, 3 days in a row. I did it as well. First day was easy. Considering that my best time for 8 miles is 60 minutes, I didn’t push myself at all and finished 8 miles in 63 minutes. The following day, I was tired but didn’t feel much like until the last few miles. I finished in 65 minutes. Third day, from the start my legs were feeling heavy, sluggish with some pain at my calves. Regardless, I ran, ran and ran. Last two miles, more than once, I wanted to quit. Didn’t. When my garmin beeped the eight time, I slowed down, ran a bit more and stopped. I completed in 67 minutes. Everyday I got 2 minutes (15 seconds/mile) slower still I think I did well. First time in my life I ran two consecutive days for 8 miles each and then three consecutive days for 8 miles each. In total, ~25 miles, almost a marathon distance. I don’t think I can ever run all that all at once. </p>
<p>Three days after the run, I still feel tired. I think, I will run Monday next.</p>
tag:oz.akan.me,2014:Post/obsessed-with-automation2014-05-21T21:46:21-07:002014-05-21T21:46:21-07:00Obsessed with Automation<p>I am pretty much obsessed with automation at this point. On my free time, I was working on a script that will create a salt-master with salt-cloud configuration and a file_roots folder pulled from the provided github repo.</p>
<p>With one command and after some minutes a developer could have her own sandbox environment where she can test her latest patch then she can destroy it as soon as not needed knowing that it is only one command / click to create exactly same environment.</p>
<p>When you are addicted, you don’t know where to stop. Now I am writing a salt execution module to be able to create salt-cloud configuration files while salt-master is being configured. Some python requests library magic. I could easily copy a static file for profiles but it was not automated enough.</p>
<p>When obsessed, you just don’t know where to stop.</p>
tag:oz.akan.me,2014:Post/hello-world2014-05-18T18:56:09-07:002014-05-18T18:56:09-07:00Hello World!<p>This is my first post on svbtle which I believe is different from other blog sites by supporting markdown. I am using jekyll for <a href="http://www.humankeyboard.com">www.humankeyboard.com</a> so I have full control on the site. Though, for a personal blog, I preferred something simpler while still being powerful. <a href="http://medium.com">Medium</a>, also has a beautiful interface, even simpler but doesn’t support markdown. I like <a href="http://medium.com/collections">collections</a> under medium. Svbtle has magazine but I think it is not similar. I also have <a href="http://blog.ozgurakan.com">blog.ozgurakan.com</a> which is a tumlr site, simple and has mobile applications on both android and ios but very limited. (I mean limited in terms of formatting. Otherwise it has nice distinction between post types which I like a lot.) So I use it more for inspiring quotes and sharing some ideas in short paragraphs. Soon I will start building a site called <a href="http://saltstack.me">saltstack.me</a> completely about Salt. I think I will use jekyll so it can be edited by multiple people and can be hosted on github as it is.</p>