Re: Christina's five questions for January 2023
Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:20:00 -0500

Since I first started browsing the gopherspace, I've enjoyed reading
christyotwisty's five questions series and people's answers to them.
Today I thought I'd finally chime in with answers of my own to this
month's five questions from Christina's phlog:

  gopher://sdf.org/0/users/christyotwisty/phlog/2023-01-02.txt

The questions
-------------

> 1. What are you grateful for from 2022?

I'm grateful to have been reasonably healthy physically and also not
having caught COVID so far (at least as far as I know), to have had
a roof above my head along with my family, and to have had jobs that
align with my values on computer user freedom.

> 2. Has the internet changed the way you think?

I would say so.  If not the medium itself directly, it has certainly
enabled me to learn about so many interesting topics and people beyond
my small local community, that have ended up influencing how I think
and helping me grow.  For instance, I learned about the philosophies
of software user freedom[1] and its important societal aspects and
impacts, through the internet.  Another great example, I think, is the
gopherspace, where much like the blogosphere of the old web, I've been
been able to find personal, heartfelt writings by people passionate
about a wide range of topics, from all corners of the world, most of
whom I likely wouldn't get to meet or know otherwise.

Oh, and not to forget awesome digital libraries and efforts like the
Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) by the Internet Archive folks that
bring a plethora of information and fun to our fingertips.

> 3. What do you believe is true though you cannot prove it?

My inner nerd half-jokingly points at the Collatz conjecture[2], aka
the 3n+1 conjecture.  The interested reader might also want to look at
Gödel's incompleteness theorems[3], themselves proven to be true, on
the limits of provability in axiomatic theory.  Quoting the wiki page:

> The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of
> axioms whose theorems can be listed by an effective procedure (i.e.,
> an algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic
> of natural numbers.  For any such consistent formal system, there
> will always be statements about natural numbers that are true, but
> that are unprovable within the system.  The second incompleteness
> theorem, an extension of the first, shows that the system cannot
> demonstrate its own consistency.

There's also a great list of unsolved math problems on Wikipedia[4].

> 4. What have you changed your mind about and why?  If possible,
> use an example from 2022.

The togetherness, unity, and degree of social awareness and maturity
the people of my home country have shown to each other and the rest of
the world in the recent months.

> 5. What would you like to return to?

Sometimes 'my childhood' seems like a tempting answer: the times when
everything seemed so much simpler and everyone so much happier, and
almost everyone I cared about lived much closer, rather than thousands
of kilometers away.  Ah, the good old days.

But, for better or worse, I've ended up where I am today, and despite
all the hardships, I'm not sure I'd do it differently, since I may not
get to meet the wonderful people I've been fortunate to get to know,
and some awesome experiences I've been lucky to have had.

So, with that, and in lieu of a time machine, I'll go with wanting to
return to the nature, which I also touched on in my 'New Year' posts.
Growing up, nature was a big part of my life, but over the past decade
I was spending increasingly more time inside and/or away from nature.
Last year, I made a conscious effort to go out into the nature more
often, and I look forward to doing even more of that this year.

Bonus
-----

Christina is also crowd-sourcing "Things to Love in Life" in her post
this month, asking readers to share three such things.  Here are the
three that jumped to my mind:

- petrichor (that earthy scent when rain falls on dry soil);

- crawling back under the warm blankets for more sleep, on a
  cold winter morning; and

- seeing someone's face light up after a kind gesture.

Take care, and so long for now.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_mathematics