An Ideal Apartment

The baby seems to have started moving in a noticeable matter. I haven't noticed yet, but my wife can tell when the baby wakes up.

We're in the middle point now, and we're of course excited. One of the things I've done lately is to start looking for an apartment to buy.

When I was little, I imagined that at some moment I would own my own house. The house prices bubble crushed this idea hard. When I was in the middle of my degree in university, i thought i'd be lucky if I could afford a normal rent. However, the "good" part of this crisis is that apartment prices are going down, with no sign of stopping anywhere in the near future. I believe at least a year will pass until they reach a reasonable price, and after that, for a while, we may have an inverse bubble (people expecting the prices to go down some more amd not buying at the real price apartments should have).

They're still stupidly expensive, mind you. However, they don't seem to require all your savings plus 50 years of mortgage anymore. I believe that, if prices keep going down, it may be possible to pay close to one third/one half of it with savings only (well, it depends on the apartment, of course).

First of all, even with the current crisis, the political situation and the overall stupidness of the country, I would like to live in Barcelona, eventually. I like houses, but in Barcelona it's not really possible to get one (unless its a little hole, in ruins, or crazy expensive). In U.K. and other countries is more common to have houses for middle-class people in cities, but in Cayalunya non-posh houses are present only in small towns, urbanizations or in the middle of the mountains.

Therefore, I would like an apartment in the city. As per the situation of the apartment, I'm fond of the Sants-Les Corts area, since it has everything you may need (markets, schools, shops, bars, restaurants, metro and train stations, not far from university area, not far from the center..). However, the area where I've always lived, Clot-Sant Andreu, has also most of these things, so it's also an option. After these two, lots of places in l'Eixample are very nice as well, specially next to Sagrada
Familia. Anyway, I'm not eliminating options.

For the apartment itself, that it has elevator is mandatory. You can live in a place without elevator for a while, but you will always have lots of extra difficulties. First floors or basements are not a good option, I'd prefer something higher than the average street light. The higher the better, but I'm not picky after the first two floors.

Once inside the apartment, let's start with the size. I would like to have 4 bedrooms. The main bedroom would be for us, of course. I think it could be around 10 square meters, if we want a big bed and a big closet to put all of our thingies. It could be smaller than that, but around 10 seems the right size. Then I would like to have 3 smaller bedrooms, 6 square meters each, at least. I lived all my life in one such bedroom, and that's enough space to consider it decent. 2 of those bedrooms would be for possible future kids, and the third one would act as an office or guest room (as in, it should work as both).

Two toilets are mandatory, I hate the idea of having only one, after experiencing it in other houses. One should have a shower or bath, bidet (also mandatory), closet and all that, and the other only would need a toilet. Any extra thing would be nice, but not necessary. I believe the big one could be around 6 square meters, and the small one only needs 2 or 3.

The living-dining room should be big enough to allow two big different areas: The couch/TV area and the table area. We'll talk about these later, but I believe the minimum size should be around 20 square meters. The kitchen needs to be big enough to fit all necessary equipment, but it doesn't have to be bigger than that. I'm not sure, but allowing it to be 10 square meters seems enough. Maybe part of this can be a small laundry room or something similar.

A terrace is optional, but welcomed. Let's say it adds 5 square meters to the total.

Adding everything up, we have a minimum of 72 square meters. However, depending on the distribution of the house, we will probably have corridors. Some corridors may be nice, but they add a lot to the total area. Let's assume not the best distribution, and add 20 square meters made up of corridors (I believe it's a reasonable number given the rooms the apartment would have). This pushes the total size of the apartment up to 92 square meters. Being generous, let's say a round 100 square meters.

So, my perfect apartment is around 100 square meters, including some small terrace, 4 rooms, 2 toilets, one big living room and kitchen/laundry room.

Apart from size, I would like to have natural sunlight (preferably during the morning or a bit after noon time, before evening) in the main bedroom and the living room. The rest of the rooms do not necessarily need sunlight, but they should have exterior windows, and if there is another building in front, there should be enough distance to avoid being able to jump from one to the other...The toilets should have some type of window or ventilation system better than just a small grid with a fan in one corner (otherwise humidity is quite a danger).

I believe that the apartment I described is reasonable enough. I can make concessions (not all rooms have windows, not as much sunlight as I would like, etc.) if the apartment closely resembles this description.

Now, let's talk about some internal details. First, I would prefer an apartment with no furniture. Furniture raises the price, and with some possible exceptions, I would prefer to choose it myself so it fits in very specific ways. I want to use space wisely and according to my taste. Our current apartment in Adler is awesome for the moment. Howver, for long-term stay, it has such wasteful distribution and furniture I could cry. I want to avoid this, even if it implies not being able to prepare all rooms when we buy the apartment, since it may be too expensive to prepare everything from the start. As for the condition of the apartment, I would prefer a new apartment, not older than 20 years.

Since we would have no furniture, ideally, there is something I'd like to do: All apartments usually have the electrical installation (and water, gas...) inserted in the wall and covered with plaster. If there are problems, you need to make holes and plaster it again once you're done. I would like to leave all this in the open, not hidden in the wall. Then, I would like to put some type of wooden cover (or any other material better suited for this) over these lines in the walls. This cover would be removable at will, and would allow a higher degree of customization. I don't know if it's a reasonable idea, but in my ideal house we would have that.

Since we would have an easy way to lay new cables, we would then make sure all rooms have all the necessary electrical plugs. These necessities could change with time, but it would be easier to control. Another thing I would like to add is network cables. I would need to decide a place for the router, and then I would like to set up a network with different connection points (that could be just ethernet inputs on the walls). Each bedroom would have one of these, and the living room would have one too.

With an ethernet cable network, I would get a good router with 5 entries for ethernet cables. If necessary, we could get some small switch instead. This would be set up as a private network, and it would be different than our wireless network, also set up.

Another thing that I could set up using the wall covers is a tower computer in the living room, with cheap processor, memory and motherboard, but decent sound and graphics card(with HDMI), and a lot of disk space. Maybe even a raid configuration for backup purposes. It should also have a DVD player, and maybe a Bluray. Then I would connect this to the network as the main house filesystem, and I would connect a good sound system and our TV to this computer, to be able to easily play videos and music from the filesystem or online.

There are other details that would depend on the distribution of the apartment, but another thing I would like is a proper gaming table. It would be in the living room, and it would be wide and big, enough so 6 people can play table games comfortably, without space constraints, even with some of our bigger table games like Arkham Horror.

Anyway, that's the apartment model I'd like to have. I know I will not even be living in Barcelona in at least 1 year, and who knows what will happen in this time and later. Maybe Spain breaks, maybe the euro crashes and our savings are worthless, maybe I will not have a job....However, I still like to think about it, check current apartments, and imagine our future place...

Logical fallacies and religions

Today i read a post in facebook that made me angry. I will proceed to copy the text here, so you know what i'm talking about:

"True story.

An atheist was seated next to a little girl on an airplane and he turned to her and said, "Do you want to talk? Flights go quicker if you strike up a conversation with your fellow passenger."

The little girl, who had just started to read her book, replied to the total stranger, "What would you want to talk about?"

"Oh, I don't know," said the atheist. "How about why there is no God, or no Heaven or Hell, or no life after death?" as he smiled smugly.

"Okay," she said. "Those could be interesting topics but let me ask you a question first. A horse, a cow, and a deer all eat the same stuff - grass. Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty, but a horse produces clumps. Why do you suppose that is?"

The atheist, visibly surprised by the little girl's intelligence, thinks about it and says, "Hmmm, I have no idea." To which the little girl replies, "Do you really feel qualified to discuss God, Heaven and Hell, or life after death, when you don't know shit?"

And then she went back to reading her book."

That's the text. You may consider it a harmless joke, but I find it very annoying.

It reminds me of another text that went around some time ago, where there was an atheist teacher and a student discussing spiritual things, where the student made the teacher sound foolish. At the end, the text claimed this was also a true story, and that the student was Albert Einstein.

Where to begin? I'll start with the logic side.

When argumenting things, you need to use logic if you want to make a good point. I will say that sometimes arguments have convinced people without using logic, but thats because we people are all idiots and easy to manipulate. Lets ignore the idiot factor and agree that you would need logic.

When trying to argument something, you would need then to use arguments that make sense. Eventually, you may realize that in a discussion, there is a core principle, from which all logical arguments are created, that is different in each side of the discussion. With good arguments, you can agree to disagree on the core principle, or correct the other's logical process, in which the core principle is the same but one of the steps was logically incorrect.

Anyway, that's usually too much trouble, so the solution is to center your attention to we the idiotic people. To do so, you can use logical fallacies, things that seem like arguments, but aren't.

The post I copied here uses a very nice logical fallacy, the "strawman". The strawman fallacy consists on creating a character that defends the position contrary to yours. Optionally, you can add other characters with your position. Once you have this, you make this character explain the opposing argument, or defend it in some way.

Once you have done so, you can argue against that argument. Since you control the strawman, you can make him unable to respond, or answer foolishly. If this was a real person, the outcome would probably be different. With the strawman, you can shamefully make them unable to respond.

As an example, let's imagine the same story, with two differences: the man smugly(another trick, to show he's stupid) asks to talk about the one true god that we all should follow and about heaven and hell(let's say christian god). The girl answers in the same way. The man shouts "shut up, heretic!" and detonates a bomb he had strapped on him, blowing up the plane.

You see? All religius people are ignorant (they dont know about shit), smug and condescending (trying to teach a little girl), and violent fanatics (shouting angrily and resorting to bombs). It's very essy to "prove", because they're my characters and I can make them do whatever I want.

Of course, the story I just explained sounds stupid. That was its point. This techniche is widely used by lots of sides in different types of arguments. It provides examples of other point of views wihtout letting them defend themselves or while making them stupid, thus making the wanted point more reasonable to the reader, or listener.

The story with the student used the same fallacy, plus the appeal to authority. This one is also widely used. In the student story, it was claimed that Albert Einstein was that student. This is not even true, but it's irrelevant in this case. Let's cringe in horror and say he did say these things. So what? Albert Einstein was a great physicist, so I would listen to his opinion in physics. I would not care about his opinion in cooking, because he's not remembered as a cook. He is an authority, but an authority in some topic. Appeal to authority tries to prove something by simply saying someone important said it. The missing detail is to say that whoever said it has to be a respected expert on that topic for it to be considered useful. And even so, it's not enough if there's no solid proof behind the comment. I believe it was Aristoteles the one who thought that arrows without a pointy end would move faster. He was a great thinker, and he was very wrong in this.

Summing it up, to properly use an authority they have to be experts in the discussed field and have undisproved research defending that theory. Otherwise its as useful as proudly declaring your 3-year old son agrees with your idea and thinks you're awesome(good for you, but irrelevant in a discussion).

Since we're talking about religion and logic, I'd like to add a few comments about religion itself. As explained in Dogma, I'm fine with people having beliefs, or ideas. I'm less fine with organising such beliefs in a strict ruleset that needs to be obeyed and shared, accompanied by a big organisation with military-like structure to help its diffussion and power-gathering.

Anyway, it's ok to have beliefs, just be smart about them. Don't use fallacies, and use your brain. I'm more familiar with christianism, so I'll use it as an example:

1- Your sacred book is a list of guidelines, of moral and ethical stories, written by several people among the years and, sometimes, edited by people in power who had their own agendas. Don't take it literal, and don't take it as proof of something. Your book was not done when cars existed, and therefore it does not reflect some of the heavy changes society has gone through. Your book was not written by God, it was written by people, and usually religions agree on the fact that people make mistakes. Focus your attention to the morals, not the content. For example, Christ was trying to spread the message of loving each other, and not doing stuff to people that you would not do to yourself, and otherwise. He was also warning about greed, and about the corruption of money and power. Use logic to apply this message, if you want, and try to fit it in your life. You may realize that organized religions may have twisted some of the ideas for their own purposes, in the process...

2- As mentioned, your sacred book is a number of moral tales. Don't assume they happened for real, and concentrate on the meaning. Science will prove again and again that some of the stories do not fit in our world. It will not be an opinion, it will be proof. For example, evolution is not an opinion, it's a fact. To say otherwise is stupid. To let this shatter your believes, right now, is stupid as well (when it was discovered it was more normal that it impacted beliefs). If you really have beliefs, accept that you may not know how "God" created the world, or in which ways it was made to work, and think that science is just discovering these facts. There are lots of things still unclear, more than before, i'd say. If something as simple as evolution makes you doubt, your beliefs were not that strong on the first place...

3- Be tolerant. I don't know about all religions, but in general I believe that the idea behind most of them is to be nice to each other. If someone's actions are not insulting you directly or damaging someone, let them be. I believe most religions say that people not following them will be judged by God and be punished if they deserve it. Therefore, don't presume to know God's will, and let people do whatever they want. If you belief they're wrong, they will be judged anyway, right? If you're trying to "save" them, well, i'd say you may want to try, but you should know when this intromissions are not welcomed, and avoid them. Specially, avoid any intromissions that would start with you being angry. Remember the free will part, everyone should be able to apply it, don't reduce it in others. If someone is sinning in your eyes, that's their problem, not yours.

4- Religions are not (usually) being attacked by non-religious people. As mentioned, discovering how the world works and realising that your sacred books and ideas mention something different should not be considered an attack. People may react badly against religion when religion is telling them what to think and not allowing any flexibility whatsoever. Always remember the catholic church(even if you're not catholic) during the time of Galileo. The church did not like to have proof that earth was not the center of the universe, and denied it and attacked people who defended this idea. Whatever religion or believe you may follow, think if you're doing exactly the same, and try not to. Just use your brain, and adapt the core principles to this new data. What is more important, if humans evolved or not, or if humans should do good or not?

5- If you believe in the fact that there is a perfect being, and that we humans are far from perfect, accept that this can perfectly apply to you and all the people who created and/or are currently part of your religion. Question things if the messages and the actions do not fit, and always use your brain.

Some time ago I read a brutal sentence that sums up the point i'm trying to make. The sentence said more or less the following thing: "Religions are like dicks. You can have one and feel proud of having one, but it's wrong to try to put it in other people without their permission".