Reflection 3

Reflection 3 - Homeland

Today i finished reading Homeland which is the first book in The Legend of Drizzt by R.A. Salvatore. The book is a prequel to the Icewind Dale trilogy and is about the Drow Drizzt upbringing from almost being sacrificed to the spider god as a newborn to being an outcast when he turn away from the dark ways of the Drow.

The Drow society is an, by our standards, evil society where the inhabitant strive for power and achieve such by assassinate those above them. All power struggle takes place in the dark and a dagger in the back of an opponent during the chaos of a war is considered something worthy.
The ways of the Drows make me think of our society. We could compare Drizzt to a vegetarian, brought up in a family where all eat meat. Drizzt turns away from the ways of his kin in the same way as someone who decide that he doesn't want to eat any meat. Drizzt feel sorry for murdering his kin as is the drow way and a vegetarian feel sorry for the animal. In our society it seems that this is not a hard step to take. Maybe someone will make some jokes about bacon but that's about it.
Another, more realistic,  way to see Drizzt struggle is to imagine him as an homosexual in a deeply religious family. Or if he would be the only homosexual in the entire diocese as the Drow families can be quite large, almost comparable to the mafioso family.
Coming out as a homosexual is never easy and after reading this book i can get a better understanding to how the homosexuals must feel. No wonder many pretend to be hetrosexual their entire lifes. Especially back in the time when it still were illegal in most parts of the world.
Back to the society of the drows compared to ours. The Drow were in Homeland an evil society but what is evil defined as anyway? Is there a universal measurement of how evil something is or is it rather defined in the eye of the beholder? Is it so that Drizzt was the evil one in the eye of the Drow? 
According to chinese moral philosophy evil is just the same as wrong behavior and i believe that there is much truth in this. Today one of the most evil group of people is IS or Daesh. They rape and pillage in the name of their god. We can all agree on that by our standard they are evil. But at the same time, they do not see them self as evil but rather liberator of their people. They believe that they are doing good by their god.
The same things was something the vikings did and who say that they are evil nowadays? Will IS be heroes in the eastern countries in 500 years like many see vikings today?

Reflection 2

Reflection 2 - Are droids taking our jobs?

Today I watched the TED talk on robots and how they replaces humans in the industries. The robots are not only replacing us when it comes to hard labor but to it nowadays replace us in more and more tasks. One is for example that an algorithm, or a program can write news articles for us, searching the internet and news sources for information, that is kinda cool. And don't forget about the self driving cars, which Google and other companies are developing. As the speaker mentions, this will take jobs from us. Maybe the journalist will be a less and less needed profession or maybe the trucker won't be as needed on the long roads.
He also mentions how the evolution of the human society has increased in growth over the past two millennia. How things like empires, great thinkers, religions bare have made a dent in the curve but when the first machines came with the industrialising, the evolution of the human society almost went straight up from that point. In the same was as the machines aid us with overcoming our muscle limitation, the new programs and algorithms will overcome our limitations when it comes to brain capacity. We already have powerful tool which helps you draw detailed drawings with CAD. What if we get a program, or robot to improve the car all together with design, all technical safety calculations, maximize the effect of the engine etc. All with the push of a button the manufacturer could release a new model while it would take more than a year with a team of designers and engineers.

If we connect this program to the factory and let the robots there have full control over the whole manufacturing process the customer could order a car with their own preferences and nobody would have to lift a finger in the process. We would no longer have faulty products. All this would of course mean that we have a task of creating new jobs ahead of us. Maybe the designer and engineer will have to assist the programmers in order to tweak the tools and make them better. Maybe there ever will be a new brand of products which is marked "human-friendly", as we have eco-friendly products today. Maybe human made products will be a luxury.
No matter what, i am glad that i'm an computer engineer and from this TED talk i can say that my skills will be more than needed in the future. Unless we get a program which can write other programs. Then we will be in the mercy of our robot overlords anyway.

Reflection 1

Reflection 1 - Can a city really ban cars from its streets?

This first reflection will cover the article by BBC. The article is about the concept of having the urban parts of a city completely free from private vehicle and how the german city of Hamburg has initiated plans to be 40% car free within the next 20 years. They also cover the fact that a car takes up to three times as much energy to transport a person than a train would do. 1,668 BTU compared to 4,218 BTU where BTU stands for British Thermal Units per person and mile.

The BTU for traveling with airplane was 1970 twice as high compared to cars but by packing the people together more tightly this has changed. To be able to have the same BTU the car needs to have at least 2.3 people on average each trip rather than the current average of 1.38.

Hamburg is not the first city to have this goal of less cars in the urban areas but it is an ongoing trend among cities around the world. Many european cities introduce a congestion fee to make it more expensive to take the car during peak hours.

While the article describe the goal and gives some fact about the negative impact of cars it gives little to none input of how to solve the issue or which problem might occur. With this reflection, im going to give some thought about the value of the car as well as trying to solve the goal of how a city like Hamburg can become free from private cars in the future.

First of all we need to have a look as why the car is used and to what purpose. The main reason to take the car is, in today's society, shopping. People like to have a place to put their groceries and does not care for taking the subway with multiple bags. If i went by bicycle then i could carry even less back home. This is not really organized for doing the weekly shopping of groceries. One soution to this might be to have delivery of the things you buy to your home.

There are already stores who offer home delivery for a fee. This is ok if you buy all your groceries at the same store and have them deliver it all. However, if you go to multiply stores and buy not as much then this would be a really expensive option. My idea here is to solve this with a special delivery company where you can drop all your items at and after the day is over, they deliver it all. The different stores might have some deal that when you spend money there, then they cover a percentage of the delivery fee. The more you shop at that store, the more they cover.

The second issue with the car ban is that some cities doesn't have as developed public transportation and this would mean that it gets more and more difficult to get to the urban parts of the city. There might be elderly people who just cant go there by bicycle and this would render them more and more helpless if they need to go to a doctors appointment. There are already special transport services who can be used to help these people. If not always, just for the transition time when the public transport system is being developed to cover the entire suburban parts of the city.

The main aspect of this reflection is to illuminate the issues of car ban and how we can get there. However, this can't be done over a night and we need to account for the problems which arise before we ban the only solution.

Introduction to blog

This blog will be used in the course English for Science & Technology I at Karlstad University.

This is the first entry to the blog and will be used mostly to test blog functions and such.