Month: December 2018

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2019 World Predictions by Michel Hayek – The Amazement

Keeping up with every year’s tradition on this blog, I am doing a preliminary translation of the 2019 world predictions by Michel Hayek.

Disclaimer by me:

  1. I am not a professional translator and I do this as a hobby.
  2. I do not claim that the translation below is accurate or true.
  3. I did not translate everything. I skipped many things including predictions of events that are very local to the Arab region and Lebanon.

If you can understand Lebanese Arabic, I have edited and cleaned the TV interview with Michel and made it available here:

Predictions from previous years:

Let’s get started! Continue reading “2019 World Predictions by Michel Hayek – The Amazement”

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He among you who is without sin, let him cast the first stone

Jesus is quoted to say in the Bible:

He among you who is without sin, let him cast the first stone

Everyone fell in silence and cast away their stones and started dispersing.

Jesus answered well the inquiring crowd but one might wonder if what he said also applies to him?

Was Jesus without sin? If so, why he did not cast the first stone according to the law?

Was Jesus not a child? Was he not mischievous?

Every kid is mischievous, that is part of growing up, including Jesus. I remember when I was in my childhood and preteen years, how my parents and society kept haunting me as a sinner for doing anything that they don’t agree with. Do you want to convince me that the teen Jesus did not give headaches to his parents or caused problems?

No wonder that the Bibles we have in circulations exclude his childhood stories. Those who control the populace from behind the scenes had a different agenda: they wanted to portray Jesus as being perfect and everyone else is born a sinner and can never be perfect.

In all cases, remember this:

Do as we say, not as we do

No one is perfect on Earth. Everyone errs, and that is not the end of the world.





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Riddle: How many brothers and sisters are there in this family? Z3 Theorem prover

The other day, I ran into a riddle:

A brother said to his sister: “I have as many sisters as brothers”
His sister replied: “I have twice as many brothers as I have sisters”

How many brothers and sisters exist in this family?

I figured that it’s a nice exercise for the Z3 theorem prover. All I had to do is express the riddle in a series of constraints and ask Z3 to try to find a solution.

The following is a Z3Py program that expresses the riddle:

import z3

# Create a solver instance
s = z3.Solver()

# Create two variables representing the total number of males and females (m and f)
m, f = z3.Ints('m f')

# The brother said: I have as many brothers as sisters
s.add(m - 1 == f)

# The sister said: I have twice as much brothers as I have sisters
s.add(2 * (f - 1) == m)

# Check for the solution
if s.check() == z3.sat:
  sol = s.model()
  print "Brothers: %d, Sisters: %d" % (sol[m].as_long(), sol[f].as_long())

When we run the solver, we get the following solution: 4 males, 3 females.

If you prefer the good old systems of equations, we can solve it like this:

The brother said:
m - 1 = f          (1)

The sister said:
2 * (f - 1) = m    (2)


So we have 2 equations, let's do some substitution:

-> f = m - 1        (1)
-> 2f - 2 = m       (2)

--> m = 2f - 2      (2)
--> f = 2f - 2 - 1  (1)
--> f = 2f - 3
--> f - 2f = -3
--> -f = -3
--> f = 3

--> m = 2f - 2
--> m = 2*3 - 2
--> m = 6 - 2
--> m = 4

 

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Unhealthy food cravings and their healthy counterparts

Often times a modern man craves unhealthy and junk food that did not exist before (artificial sweeteners, transfats, fast food etc.). What to do in this case?

Cave in and eat unhealthy foods? or try to find a more healthy alternative to satisfy those cravings?


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