Skip to main content

Egon the rabbit and me

``Do you have a voice?'', I spontaneously asked a rabbit, when I was reading a economy book. ``It seems people's productivity is increasing, the world population is saturating, why does the world still have a lot of problems?''

The rabbit was looking at me. His name is Egon. Today is Stig's first day of school. ``You don't know why?'' Egon said so, or maybe a part of me told me as Egod told me. I answered, ``Yes, I don't know. I can say human being is stupid, but, that answer doesn't help me even if it is true.'' Egon kept silence, so I thought it was some audible hallucination.
Egon

I looked at the cage. ``Is your cage too small for you?'' I asked Egon.

Egon: ``It's small. I rather want to have large one. How is yours?''

I: ``... Mine? I don't have one.''

Egon: ``Don't you see yours? You made it yourself, and you put yourself in it. As far as I know, only human being does that.''

I: ``Do you mean jail? Usually no one wants to put themselves in it.''

Egon: ``No. don't you build a cage, called a city?''

I: ``... How a city can be a cage?''

Egon: ``Before you build a city. Everyone can sit anywhere. Now you can only freely sit your small part. Some people even doesn't have own place. Most of the city you cannot sit freely. Maybe you don't see the physical cage, but, what is the difference?''

I: ``... I see, interesting. I haven't think about the city in that way.''

Egon: ``Not only the physical ones. You build a system called capitalism or whatever. Then you put yourself in it. Even if you think it will be collapse or is dangerous, people like to put themselves in it. You even afraid to lose your cage.''

I: ``...''

Egon and me

Egon stopped talking here. I start realizing I am actually in a cage. No, I am in multiple cages. A city, political system, energy system, language I can use, ... I thought these are for better life, but Egon told me all of them can be limitation... a cage. I thought the human being is the third clever animal on the earth, but now I am thinking we are behind the rabbit, so at least forth.

Egon: ``You might overrated your life too much. You could find some balance.''

I: ``I overrated it too much. We made nations, army, political system, economy system, energy system, etc. to protect us, but actually they could also destroy us. Do you think this is our problem?''

Egon: ``Maybe so, maybe not.''

Sun is going down. Stig took out Egon from his cage and put him into his sleeping cage.  ``Egon, do you have a voice, like audible voice?'', I asked again. ``Is it really important? You take care the overrating something.'', he answered.

He was busy to eat his vegetable in the cage. ``Did he mean this is a kind of another cage? I always want to hear some audible voice? That is actually not so important?'' I am not sure at that time, but I think I saw Egon was smiling.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why A^{T}A is invertible? (2) Linear Algebra

Why A^{T}A has the inverse Let me explain why A^{T}A has the inverse, if the columns of A are independent. First, if a matrix is n by n, and all the columns are independent, then this is a square full rank matrix. Therefore, there is the inverse. So, the problem is when A is a m by n, rectangle matrix.  Strang's explanation is based on null space. Null space and column space are the fundamental of the linear algebra. This explanation is simple and clear. However, when I was a University student, I did not recall the explanation of the null space in my linear algebra class. Maybe I was careless. I regret that... Explanation based on null space This explanation is based on Strang's book. Column space and null space are the main characters. Let's start with this explanation. Assume  x  where x is in the null space of A .  The matrices ( A^{T} A ) and A share the null space as the following: This means, if x is in the null space of A , x is also in the null spa

Gauss's quote for positive, negative, and imaginary number

Recently I watched the following great videos about imaginary numbers by Welch Labs. https://youtu.be/T647CGsuOVU?list=PLiaHhY2iBX9g6KIvZ_703G3KJXapKkNaF I like this article about naming of math by Kalid Azad. https://betterexplained.com/articles/learning-tip-idea-name/ Both articles mentioned about Gauss, who suggested to use other names of positive, negative, and imaginary numbers. Gauss wrote these names are wrong and that is one of the reason people didn't get why negative times negative is positive, or, pure positive imaginary times pure positive imaginary is negative real number. I made a few videos about explaining why -1 * -1 = +1, too. Explanation: why -1 * -1 = +1 by pattern https://youtu.be/uD7JRdAzKP8 Explanation: why -1 * -1 = +1 by climbing a mountain https://youtu.be/uD7JRdAzKP8 But actually Gauss's insight is much powerful. The original is in the Gauß, Werke, Bd. 2, S. 178 . Hätte man +1, -1, √-1) nicht positiv, negative, imaginäre (oder gar um

Why parallelogram area is |ad-bc|?

Here is my question. The area of parallelogram is the difference of these two rectangles (red rectangle - blue rectangle). This is not intuitive for me. If you also think it is not so intuitive, you might interested in my slides. I try to explain this for hight school students. Slides:  A bit intuitive (for me) explanation of area of parallelogram  (to my site, external link) .