The Abridged Ajani

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OneNote used to be a relatively-unknown Microsoft Office product back in its 2003 days. With Office 2007 came OneNote 2007, and such changed the way it was looked upon henceforth. In fact, I would daresay OneNote 2003 was a complete waste of time, while OneNote 2007 was, salvation, seriously.

What is OneNote? While officially marketed as a note-taking, minutes-taking software and the like, I would like to think of OneNote as a virtual notebook, literally. You know those (paper) notebooks in real life with a fancy cover and tabs within for you to separate content sections? Those manufactured by A-Zone and the like? OneNote files are exactly that - a notebook.

What is the advantage of OneNote over the notebook? Well firstly, it is electronic, far more successful in reducing environmental damage than the pro-green A-Zone even. That being said, it brings advantages over a non-electronic notebook. Have you ever felt the inconvenience when you write till the notebook, or perhaps a certain section of it, runs out of space? Many people, to avoid this, would cram a year’s worth of information and notes within limited space and I mean, what’s the point when you have OneNote?

OneNote allows you unlimited tabs to separate sections, and unlimited pages within sections. Before you even tell me, OneNote like real-life too visualises a two-dimensional page, and this alone I believe is OneNote 2007’s greatest improvement over its predecessor. What I mean by a two-dimensional page? It’s like real life, but I guess I should draw comparisons for better understanding.

Microsoft Notepad uses a one-dimensional page. This means you only type one-way, left to right, downwards. There is little formatting, so as to speak. Then in Microsoft Word (which very much was the preferred software for electronic note-taking back in 2003), you get a primitive two-dimensional page feature. Indeed, you could type anywhere on the page, but it was with the use of textboxes you needed to draw up, pictures with all those weird layouts, text that required troublesome wrapping and all.

In OneNote, the page is literally revolutionised. You point, click, type (or paste images), anyway, anywhere, anyhow you like. Viola! It’s exactly like real-life! You hover, ink and write (or draw) at your will, without the need to specify wrapping, layout, formatting etc. Whatever, now with the fully two-dimensional page, OneNote overtakes Word as the preferred note-taking software.

OneNote other than that boasts a highly-convenient direct audio and video recording function, where the audio content can actually be searched with Office 2007’s powerful speech recognition capabilities. An “always-on” tray icon offers the user, randomly surfing the Internet, who stumbles upon an interesting find to do a “screen clipping”, selecting information to be sent to OneNote’s “Unfiled Notes” for further use later. If you own a Tablet PC, your handwriting can easily go onto OneNote notebooks and really transform the electronic page into just about any real-life notebook, only better!

The above-mentioned are the most seducing features of OneNote. The application has got other quite-useful tricks up its sleeve, like the “file printout” feature, which are fantastic complements to its already-impressive arsenal of tools. I highly recommend OneNote to students, researchers, secretaries, just anyone who may need the information-filing capability real good and real efficiently, and I do not believe there has been another product from Microsoft I have ever felt so strongly for - OneNote 2007, it really is the best of Microsoft, ever!

The catch, however, is that OneNote comes packaged, only within the Office suites of the Home and Student, Enterprise, and Ultimate classes to my knowledge. The more common Professional version users would then need to fork out additional cash to buy OneNote standalone, unable to benefit from the savings otherwise enjoyed with OneNote in its suite form. I assure you, though, if you need it, buy it, and you will really love it. Reviews of OneNote have been mostly positive across the Internet, too.

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Think that it is a disgrace to be caught looking for food in bins, scavenging for leftover waste food, feeling that it is only fit for a beggar? Then you are very-much misunderstood.

The freegans, who self-style themselves as that, are believers in the “free lunch” philosophy. They will only eat food they can scavenge for free from supermarket dustbins. No purchasing, no picky eating; these bunch of people are firm anti-capitalists, and from their name “freegan” (portmanteau of “free” and “vegan”), it is already a statement against the exploitation of human workers, animals and the environment.

Trust me, these guys do not live in just the developing world. In fact, freeganism seems to have a huge following from the heart of capitalist giant America (they call it “dumpster diving” over there) and first-world Britan. Many of them adopt a motorhome as their primary tool for their urban forages - it offers true mobility in the real style of a scavenger, and the freezers and refrigerators that come equipped within are fantastic places to stock their prize.

The food they manage to hunt on their raids seem to be of a high standard. Choosing to raid the bins nearby supermarkets, where fresh foods shelved only for a few days has been dumped into, they do get a fair share of poultry, vegetables and bread. The foodstuffs are washed thoroughly and disinfected from the packing down. Often, the food is either still-fresh or just-expired. Despite the giving of much of the waste food at the end of the day to charities and food banks by most supermakets, a lot of food still goes into the bins for the freegans to take.

Supermarkets do not usually like the freegan way. They have been known to install barbed-wire fences to deter freegans from taking away the food in their backdoor bins, citing “freshness” as a priority for them, to justify their disapproval of the freegan lifestyle, which they seem to think have no strong opinion on it.

Of course, the freegan lifestyle is not without its critics amongst the general public. Some say that freegans are actually no different from well, beggars and scavengers, just choosing to “sugar-coat” their actions while they are actually just eating from the bin. Critically, others consider the hypocrisy of freegans, who cause the waste to be present even, by not purchasing food from supermarkets in the first place, which cause the latter to have to dump the unsold food in the end, making freegans responsible for causing under-demand rather than the firms’ over-supply. That being said, the freegan lifestyle, however, will live on for those who stick to the principles of ethical eating - there is such a thing as a free lunch.

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What in the world is a pure race? Race is but a majority of bloodline percentages. Who today can claim himself to have only Chinese, British or Pakistani blood? In fact, one can say that he is of any race, but ultimately we might as well say we all are Africans - that is where our ancestors all came from, after all.

People of the conventional “mixed race” ought not feel any identity crisis coming on the search for “race”. To put it quite bluntly, “mixed race” is quite a racist term by itself, which I think has some degree of continental-scale racism involved.

The identity crisis, as I see it, is a society illness. One can grow up thinking he/she has two races, no race, or just side with a race and be fine. It is society that questions the validity of one’s chosen race or lack thereof, to cause the individual to grow up to have serious doubts over self-ethnicity.

Just look at the white Americans. How many of them can profess to have solely German roots, Spanish roots or perhaps English roots? Amazingly, they have no problems with it, so I guess the mixed races should not have them too. However here I would like to bring up my point on continental-racism. White Americans are unembarrassed for the very reason that you cannot easily tell apart their mixed roots. For Asians too, a Korean-Japanese is not easily told apart. It is only as geographical distances grow, the distinctiveness of a mixed blood is seen more and more easily e.g. Malay-Japanese, that one may be presented by society the question - “What is your race?”

Do not doubt your ownself, mixed races! Even the man born to both Chinese parents may have varying, insignificant, but still present strands of Malay and Thai blood, so mixed race as we see is such a huge phenomena, the “mixed” label ought to just be removed for convenience’s sake - we all might as well be race-less. It is no problem, really.

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I think everyone of us (other than real religious fundamentalists) would have heard of, and maybe agreed even, on the idea that we humans, after undergoing millions of years of evolution, have finally stopped evolving. Indeed, Man’s technological advances have overtaken Nature’s evolutionary advances to render evolution obselete. As such, Nature seems to be the unforgiving, wiser of the two.

Nature is de-evolving us. We are going backwards. All this as a result of our increasing reliance on computers and technology.

Yet in midst of this argument, loudly I shall declare, ‘Quit complaining that we are “de-evolving’! That is such a corruption of the concept!”

Yes, I believe that whoever subscribes to the “de-evolution” argument has quite the warped understanding of science. An urban legend, if I could call it by any sense, it would be. Okay, maybe we are all couch potatoes and have problems climbing trees and have issues with corporal punishment. We are weaker, de-evolving, you say?

Evolution is a nasty thing to explain. Some parts of it are still unclear, just as much of science is fuzzy. In his 2005 book “Think for Yourself”, Steve Hinder remembers a medical school dean announcing to the class, “Half of everything we are going to teach you is wrong. We just don’t know which half.” Myself never having a certified understanding of biology, (holding only O-Level qualifications in Chemistry and Physics, while currently continuing A-Level Physics). I will not claim to be presenting the facts as it is, but I advise you to take everything as opinion. I shall attempt to explain scientific concepts factually to the best of my knowledge, of course, but if any factual error be pointed out to me, I shall stand corrected. Evolution is a difficult concept to explain sufficiently.

Bear in mind that in this essay, Nature is just that. Whenever I may refer to Nature, it is from my limited human viewpoint. Indeed, this is where the debate starts from really. Is Nature, or evolution, to be viewed from the eyes of Man?

One thing to first make clear, is that evolution is not about advancement towards a more advanced entityhood. Evolution, rather, is just about purely random mutations. It is a furtherment of the concept - natural selection, that determines who gets to survive. Even so, natural selection is never about “being better”. I would guess this misconception came from the cliche “survival of the fittest”. Natural selection is actually about this thing known as adaption. Whoever is better-adapted to the surroundings is the winner, simple?

What use does tree-climbing have in this era where we keep tigers and lions locked up in cages? Maybe the zookeeper working in an under-funded zoo might have some justification to know it for safety’s sake (in case the cages break), but it’s really of not much utility to us faceless businessmen. Can we climb onto trees to escape our bosses? I hope, but no.

The modern world is a product of our past. The environment is changing, and has already changed visibly from that which our primitive ancestors were used to. The African savannahs have given away to concrete buildings and the daily hunt has become the weekly grocery shopping. All this, however, is because of technology. Technology is going to win the war against Nature, in fact, contrary to what I mentioned above to be the suggestion of many. Okay, maybe not that radical, but may I suggest technology to be a result of natural selection?

The random mutations were initially meaningless. Organisms found them meaning. The gift of sight, argued to be quite a complex series of mutation, would be useless if the world was without light. Would an extra ear sticking out from the back of your head be useful to you? I bet, you could then hear what was going on behind your back, would you not? Why do men have nipples? Why do we have fingernails, only to be cut away? To make nose-picking easier? Of course not, it is to protect our fingertips. Why should the fingernails protect the fingertips? If we know that we are in for a potential nail-hazard, we just wear gloves.

There is no purpose in evolution. We find meaning for our evolution, and find de-evolution for our loss of meaning. Technology is that which replaces the meaningless gap of today. The lions are tamed with psychological tactics and locked in cages of engineering marvels. All these can be traced back to our mutations and our interpretations of them, in the past. We found meaning in bipedalism. We found meaning in using our new hands. We found meaning in signalling we know today as language. We found meaning in imagination. We found meaning in preserving information. We found meaning in knowledge. Ultimately, we overtook the pace of evolution and replaced it with our construct - technology.

Technology offers us several advantages over evolution. Technology is purpose-engineered, meaning that it pinpoints a specific problem and solves it, within the human context. Evolution is random, and has no concept of “problem”, let alone “solution”. Evolution modifies and works on a grand-scale. It may not matter how many eventually are lost in the process of natural selection. As long as one superior species survive from the mere probabilities, life is successful. It would be a mistake now, however, to suggest that Nature is responsible for that, for it is Man who gives that meaning. As Man, then, we are not likely to treat human lives as just mere statistics. If we want to get better, we need to have a much-more reliable means of becoming so, than to rely on evolution.

Hence, the purpose of technology. As our utilization of modern technology increases, our need for evolution to serve us against Nature itself has decreased, ironically. We are no longer the slaves of Nature’s own power, but remember, this is to be seen only within the context of human thought.

Much of the misunderstanding about evolution stems from the ignorance of Man to actually see Nature’s workings with the human eye (symbolically, not literally). If we see everything as random, rather than to see things as constant and predictable, maybe technology is the child of evolution. We are already starting to use it against what Nature herself may throw against us - we are experimenting with weather control, we already have fire-resistant clothes, we have ventured to where we face problems never encountered before by our ancestors - Space. I am not saying that evolution ought to die, it shall always live in some way or other as long as Nature exists, but its importance ought to be downplayed, its basics to be clarified.

A lesson we can all learn from this is maybe that life in itself never has any meaning. Nature never gave us any. It is we who make the meaning, adapting the meaning to our times.

Further Reading:
Is the human race evolving or devolving?

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