1,000 knives of thought - answers

True. How about a logic explained by a psychiatrist Dr. Inada Nada: Imagine there is an ideal food for you. It's so perfect for you that you don't feel a need to eat anything else anymore. However, if you keep eating it for a long time, you are destined to get bored with it. You would feel nauseated just by looking at it. That's not what I call ideal.

Kenji Saito

True because one can only understand what he or she discovered by themselves. Learning is always rediscovery.

Kenji Saito

99% of the time depending on the abstraction level, because most genetic coding is shared between a human beings and a monkey (chimpanzee), and every behaviour is a phenotype of our genes. Perhaps most of our behaviours originated in the common ancestors of primates.

Kenji Saito

A little green man is a god for those who like to be scientific but lack the ability of analytical thinking, if they believe that it's already here or any equivalent claims.

Kenji Saito

A group of terrorists occupies a high-tech building. You are confined along with other hostages. The common language among the criminals is English, and they are using English when conversing among them. This way they can hide the contents of their speech from most Japanese hostages. But they don't take any chances. They ask if any of the hostages speak English, and being honest, you raise your hand. The very last sound you hear is the sound of a gunshot.

Kenji Saito

Agriculture is about controlling nature to profit from it. Being on diet is about controlling our bodies, which are the examples of nature closest to us.

Kenji Saito

False. Changing is an interaction between the person and the environment, and whether people change their views of life or not should depend on their personalities. As an extreme case, if someone has the complete set of knowledge about life to begin with which is new to most people unless they discovered it in India (or so they say), he or she would not change at all by travelling there.

Dr. Chiaki Mukai, the first female Japanese astronaut, says she didn't change her view of life even when she went up and saw the Earth from above.

Kenji Saito

• Just one important problem: there is a difference between chromosomal sex determination of mammals (XY:male/XX:female) and birds (ZZ:male/ZW:female). Since an extra-partner copulation must be a phenotype of a gene set, I think this difference is very important.

Kenji Saito

False because there is a set of laws with respect to marriage and marital status, while there should be none if it's really a personal matter. Conversely, if it's really a personal matter, there is no need to be getting married.

Kenji Saito

False. Firstly, "dimensions (stages)" is an ambiguous combination of words. Secondly, mathematically speaking, we cannot know about existences in other dimensions and we cannot be known about from other dimensions. For example, the world without thickness cannot recognise three dimensional objects, and we cannot recognise the world without thickness (as it doesn't even reflect lights). It is useless to talk about existences while we can have no interaction at all.

Kenji Saito

True. Whatever an innovation is, it must be useful in some ways. If it is useful, then it must be based on some sort of laws, whether physical or mental, in order to be practical. Therefore, there must be a path to reach an innovation if one keeps sticking to logical ways of thinking, applying known ideas. Many have not made innovations because they forgot to stick to logics somewhere along the path because of their beliefs.

For example, if you watch an apple falling, and then look at the moon, it is only logical to wonder why the moon is not falling. It's just a step from there to think that the moon is in fact falling in some sense. If you follow each step logically, you can discover gravitational laws.

Kenji Saito

False as not a small number of people regard money as a subject of collection.

Kenji Saito

I got the following by thinking of the systems to connect my brain and toes:

1. Blood circulation gets improved.
2. Neurones which are not used daily get active, which stimulates the whole brain.
3. There is an acupuncture point in toes which makes people cleverer (which I believe is a different abstraction of the above two).

Kenji Saito

True. It's likely that such a music will not be liked by many people. I don't think music has a use if no one will listen to it. Combining portions of existing music is a much better way to create an interesting music which many will find new and amusing.

Kenji Saito

True as composing can be a homework. Is there anything which cannot be made a homework?

Kenji Saito

The first thing I should do is to find out what kind of problems are there. Then I start solving the easiest ones first.

Kenji Saito

How to bring pragmatism into creative activities.

Kenji Saito

Everyone on Earth and in its orbits.

Kenji Saito

The ability to solve problems with multiple agents. Since a mind is likely to consist of multiple agents, any problem solver, even when he or she is working alone, is a leader.

Kenji Saito

1. Shutting all outside information out does not help creativity.
2. Approaching toward normality is an efficient way to create something new if you are abnormal to begin with.
3. Things can move a lot faster if you are not too analytical.

Kenji Saito

True. Some kind of cicadas have 13 or 17-year life cycles, which are prime numbers, but I think these numbers have been reached through an evolutionary process, which is not intentional. Therefore the cicadas did not _discover_ the practical use of prime numbers.

Some extraterrestrial being may have discovered a practical use, but we don't have means to know about it today.

Kenji Saito

1. Use it for paying on credit.
2. Use it for borrowing cache money.
3. Use it for receiving services for the members.
4. Use it as an identification (if your photograph is printed on the back).
5. Use it to enter an ATM booth (if it requires one as a key).
6. Use it for securing reservations (might not use it for actual payments).
7. Use it for checking spelling for words like 'international,' 'credit,' 'authorized' and 'signature.'
8. Use it for unlocking certain types of door locks.
9. Use many of them as tiles.
10. Use many of them to show how credible you are.
11. Use it to make someone nauseated by burning it.
12. Use it as a bookmark.
13. Use it for imprinting numbers on a sheet of paper (by rubbing the paper with a pencil).
14. Use it to find out how much is left in your credit account for the month (by trying to buy as much as you can and then cancelling the purchase).
15. Use it as a calendar which only tells if the expiration date has come yet.
16. Use an invalid one to buy time while you shoplift.
17. Use it to attract a dog's attention by throwing it away.
18. Use it to draw a short straight line.
19. Use it as a scale (for comparing sizes of two objects bigger than the card).
20. Use it to show how small something is by photographing the object with it.
21. Use it to make a flat surface on a clay object.
22. Use two of them for blindfolding someone.
23. Use it as a gag.
24. Use many of them to make an artistic object by pasting them together.
25. Use many of them to mark where you have been to by dropping them (e.g. when you are lost in a forest).
26. Use it to have a free dinner in a restaurant by discovering it in a fish you are eating (the card must not be yours).
27. Use it to show you are there by throwing it away from a window if you are kidnapped and confined in a house.
28. Use something like the bird on a VISA card to attract children's attentions.
29. Use it for cutting cakes.
30. Use it for shovelling.
31. Use it for swimming faster (I think it would assist if you hold it in your hand).

Kenji Saito

An actress blown away by an explosion at her house, a couple of forks stuck in her head.

Kenji Saito

True. Suicide is such a behaviour because you cannot report the result to your teacher.

Kenji Saito

I cannot take any chances even if it is just 0.01% (actually, it is less than that, but it does not make a difference to me), as I know for certain that there exists a possibility of my dying. However, if I were put into such a situation, I would perhaps feel a pressure from the patient's friends, family and the doctor which I would not be able to neglect. Therefore I will avoid putting myself into such a situation, especially if I don't know the patient at all (if I do maybe I want to risk my life, depending on who the patient is).

I feel I have to live because I feel I haven't achieved anything yet. Some would say saving someone's life would be a big achievement, but I don't think anyone's life should be achieved by someone else. It should be called a help, and what use does a help have if I cannot help myself?

Kenji Saito

If you ever take a polygraph test, the first thing the examiner would ask you is to tell a lie so that they can calibrate the way data should be interpreted. If the result is obvious, it tells them that you cannot lie without showing apparent physiological reaction. In other words, you are an honest person.

Kenji Saito

A box can be more important than its contents in the case of contemporary art. In this case, a box is a type of art, and the contents are the instances of such art. Usually, if an artist invents a box, others would hate to use the box as they want to be original. Other examples of a box being more important is any of do-s such as kendo, judo and sado which are pursuits of forms and manners. In science also, a box can be more important as generalisation is to create a box out of observing the contents.

In many other examples, the contents are more important than the box.

Kenji Saito

1. It is based on the premise that average US citizens can think analytically, which is not true.
2. It lets the government restrain a citizen's activities regardless of the person's current concerns.
3. It forces lawyers to learn to become like TV personalities or priests as well as experts of the laws.

Kenji Saito

True. A problem can be defined as a state where there is a gap between what one expects and what one perceives. According to this definition any problem requires presense of a human being or its equivalent, and it would disappear if his or her expectation or perception changes.

Kenji Saito

How about a case of a spendthrift power-consumer who realised that the resources on Earth are limited, and in order to protect his or her joy of consumption, became an evangelist of recycling.

Kenji Saito

About an hour ago, I was riding a Negishi line, a Japan Railway train. I was so asleep that I took a nap, and when I woke up, I found my neck leaning against one of the metallic bars which support the seat from above. Then I thought perhaps I would break my neck if the train made an emergency stop.

Kenji Saito

Your answer to this question is false. True or false?

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