Veni, Vidi, Vetti

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2011-12-10T07:31:00.000-08:00

Some of the most celebrated verses in the Raghuvamsha describe the king Dileepa:

जुगोपात्मानमत्रस्तः भेजे धर्ममनातुरः।
अगृध्नुराददे सोऽर्थमसक्तः सुखमन्वभूत्॥

jugopātmānamatrastaḥ bheje dharmamanāturaḥ |
agṛdhnurādade so'rthamasaktaḥ sukhamanvabhūt ||

"He protected himself, but not out of fear. He 'did the right thing', but not in haste. He collected wealth, but not with greed. In summary, he enjoyed pleasures, but didn't cling to them"

ज्ञाने मौनं क्षमा शक्तौ त्यागे श्लाघाविपर्ययः।
गुणा गुणानुबन्धित्वात्तस्य सप्रसवा इव॥ १-२२

jñāne maunaṁ kṣamā śaktau tyāge ślāghāviparyayaḥ |
guṇā guṇānubandhitvāttasya saprasavā iva ||

"He was silent in spite of being learned; he was forgiving and forbearing in spite of being strong. He didn't care much for praise, in spite of giving away much. Such contrary features resided in him, like brothers in a family"

--

"The world looks with some awe upon a man who appears unconcernedly indifferent to home, money, comfort, rank, or even power and fame. The world feels not without a certain apprehension, that here is someone outside its jurisdiction; someone before whom its allurements may be spread in vain; someone strangely enfranchised, untamed, untrammelled by convention, moving independent of the ordinary currents of human action." -Winston Churchill

--

The more one sees of power and its abuse, the more one is convinced that such traits are the sole hope for any kind of sustainable governance.

Kagga correspondence

2011-12-10T07:21:00.000-08:00

One of most favorite, most cherished quotes: "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." -Plato

ರಾವಣನ ಹಳೆವವನೆ, ಜೀವವನೆ ಬಿಸುಡಿಸುವ
ಲಾವಣ್ಯವೆಂತಹುದೊ? ನೋವದೆಂತಹುದೊ?
ಬೇವಸವ ಪಟ್ಟು ತಿಳಿ; ತಿಳಿದು ಹಳಿಯುವೊಡೆ ಹಳಿ
ಗಾವಿಲನ ಗಳಹೇನು? ಮಂಕುತಿಮ್ಮ

rAvaNana haLevavane, jIvavane bisuDisuva
lAvaNyaveMtahudo? nOvadeMtahudo?
bEvasava paTTu tiLi; tiLidu haLiyuvoDe haLi
gAvilana gaLahEnu? maMkutimma

(Rough translation, does no justice to the beauty of the metre)
"You are quick to judge Ravana - but what do you know of the beauty he saw, which made him throw away his entire life? What do you know of his pain that made him do it? (One argument goes, Ravana treasured Sita more than Rama because he held on to her even after knowing he'd be defeated in battle. It doesn't take much love to wage war when you know you're going to win, does it?) Don't speak lightly of others' troubles."

[Aside: lAvaNya, commonly used to mean "Beauty" or "Charm" literally means "Saltiness". Societies that treasured salt, etymology of salary, "worth his salt", the monkey trapping scene from Animals Are Beautiful People, etc.]

--

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh" - H.L.Mencken

ತೋಯಿಸುತ ಬೇಯಿಸುತ ಹೆಚ್ಚುತ್ತ ಕೊಚ್ಚುತ್ತ
ಕಾಯಿಸುತ ಕರಿಯುತ್ತ ಹುರಿಯುತ್ತ ಸುಡುತ
ಈ-ಅವನಿ-ಒಲೆಯೊಳು-ಎಮ್ಮಯ ಬಾಳನಟ್ಟು ವಿಧಿ
ಬಾಯ ಚಪ್ಪರಿಸುವನು - ಮಂಕುತಿಮ್ಮ

tOyisuta bEyisuta heccutta koccutta
kAyisuta kariyutta huriyutta suDuta
I-avani-oleyoLu-emmaya bALanaTTu vidhi
bAya capparisuvanu - maMkutimma

It's impossible to translate without Kolaveri-fying it. The rough meaning, omitting the cooking-actions analogies, is, "Fate throws us into an oven called life, and relishes our trials". The choice of words is almost signature DVG.

Preyas > Shreyas, Yama can suck it.

2011-12-09T05:53:00.000-08:00

In any relationship, there's a point where one party realizes he does things thinking 'this it the Right thing to do' more than being driven by emotion or any other sub-conscious drive. Very similar to Weber's social rationalization, except at an individual level. Once one has entered this iron cage, I don't know if there's ever any hope for emotion.

This article by Anil Menon talks of several things, some of which seem ridiculous (hint hint, it begins with an F and ends with a d), but the part of adhering to Dharma making one lose oneself struck home the closest.

--

The distinction between 'Preyas' (what is pleasant) and 'Shreyas' (what is Good) forms a central theme of the Katha Upanishad.

Shatavadhani Dr. R. Ganesh's Ashtavadhana at Vijaya College

2011-09-24T21:14:00.000-07:00

[Edit 25 Sep 2:30 PM: Several very useful edits by Shreevatsa.]

I attended my first ever 'ashtAvadhAna' by the effulgently brilliant ShatAvadhAni Dr. R. Ganesh today (thanks Shreevatsa for the invite), and to say I was impressed would be the understatement of a lifetime [1] I learnt more in those few hours than I probably did in the past few months. Anything I might say to describe the experience would be a pale shadow of the real thing, so here is an attempt to reconstruct the event with some of the notes I managed to take.

--

There are 9 people on stage - the avadhAni (the person answering, the performer) and 8 pRcchakas (the questioners). The performer has a chat with each of the 8 questioners in series, for a total of 4 rounds (these numbers can vary in general, but the one yesterday had these). The performer has no paper or pen, and has to rely entirely on memory. The questioners yesterday had the following roles, and I've filled in details of what happened with each of them yesterday. Above all, this is a test of concentration because ALL 8 conversations are interwoven.

(The program was in a mix of Kannada and Sanskrit, with almost no English; I didn't remember exactly what they said at times, so I have glossed over them in English)

1. niṣedhākṣari ("Forbidden letters")

The questioner suggests a topic and a metre for the performer to compose a poem. He also prohibits the use of a certain opening letter. In each round with this questioner, the performer must compose one line of the poem (so 4 rounds would make a full verse). But there's a catch: every line must be composed interactively with the questioner, letter by letter, and at each letter, the questioner can prohibit the use of any letter of his choice for the next letter!

For example, suppose the questioner asked a verse on Gaṇeśa, in the śloka metre and the first letter prohibited was 'ga', in the hope that the performer couldn't start off with anything like 'gaṇeśa', 'gajAnana', 'gaṇapati', etc. Suppose the performer thought of the line 'śuklāmbaradharam viSNum' - he has to say -'śa' first. The questioner would immediately know he's onto this verse, and prohibit 'ka' next!

The example here uses a known verse - but in the avadhAna, the verse is being composed on the fly. This levels the playing field - the questioner doesn't know what the performer is thinking, and has to guess at the next possible letter to ban, while the performer can think of huge array of alternatives if he has the vocabulary. It is absolutely BRILLIANT in how it engages the questioner and the performer.

The questioner for niṣedhākṣari yesterday was Prof. Kannan, Sanskrit lecturer at National College, Jayanagar. The topic he gave was "What would happen if Modi became the PM of India?". The metre he prescribed was pramANikA which had the syllable form

short-long short-long short-long short-long for 4 lines [The 4 together is called pañca-cāmaram]

If you think about it, it's a very clever choice - the questioner knows that the next letter WILL be a short or long, so the number of possibilities is greatly reduced!

The first letter prohibited was 'pa' - presumably to prevent any opening like 'pradhAna mantri'. Here is how it transcribed: (SRG is Ganesh; Q is the questioner)

Q: Alright, let's start, 'pa' is banned
SRG: bha
Q: He's probably going to try a variant of 'bhavati'. va banned next!
SRG: Ah, you got me there. Let me try this: bha-jE
Q: He's going to use a form like 'bhaje-ham'. ha banned next.
SRG: Nope. bha-jE-ta
Q: This is the end of the word. No matter what I ban, he can find another word. But I think 'modi' has to come somewhere, so I'll ban ma next.
SRG: bha-jE-ta na
Q: Is he trying narendra? ra banned
SRG: Good one. bha-jE-ta na-ndi
Q: Something with milk? nandini? na banned next
SRG: Nope! bha-jE-ta na-ndi-tam
Q: Aargh. Ok, end of the word again. Have to shoot in the dark. Ok, 'ta' banned next
SRG: pa. bha-jE-ta na-ndi-tam pa
Q: He's definitely trying something like 'patha', path. 'tha' banned.
SRG: Come now, that is nothing. de. bha-jE-ta na-ndi-tam pa-de

That finishes the first line!

[The performer then moves on to the other questioners for the rest of the 1st round. I'll collect each of the questioners here in serial order. Note that in doing so, I'm gliding over a very, very difficult part: the performer comes to the second line only after 40-50 minutes with the others. I couldn't even remember what I had WRITTEN DOWN, but he had to start perfectly right from memory.]

Q: Let me ban 'ra'. No reason, just a whim.
SRG: sva
Q: Likely going to be 'da'. da banned.
SRG: sva-bhU
Q: Surely he's trying 'bhUmi'. ma banned.
SRG: Ah good one. But I can get around that. dha. sva-bhU-dha
Q: Is he trying 'dhana'? na banned.
SRG: Got me again. But how about a va? sva-bhU-dha-va
Q: Aaargh. vasu? vasati? sa banned.
SRG: Not even close! ccha! sva-bhU-dha-va-ccha
Q: This completely beats me. The only word that strikes me now after 'Cha' is 'Chala', cheating. la banned.
SRG: ("Enu swamy nammanu mosagaararendu nemisibittiri?") vi. sva-bhU-dha-va-ccha-vE
Q: The word ends there. Have to shoot in the dark. 'ma' banned.
SRG: pa. sva-bhU-dha-va-ccha-vEH pa
Q: pada? position? da banned
SRG: No! ra! sva-bhU-dha-va-ccha-viH param

That's the second line. Note how the metre is being perfectly adhered to, and how it's almost like a chase sequence out of Catch Me If You Can!

Q: Third line. Surely he has to use 'modi' SOMEWHERE! ma banned.
SRG: Tch tch, why? hi. hi
Q: Something like hita, I'm guessing. 'ta' banned.
(Brilliant quip by SRG: "Nodi sir, ivaru endU nanage 'hita' bayasolla")
SRG: hi-mA
Q: Talking about himalayas? something about siva? sa banned [I didn't get this, he could have banned la]
SRG: You can't stop a mountain! ga! hi-mA-ga
Q: End of the word. Maybe next is dharma? dha banned. [Didn't follow reasoning for this either]
SRG: va. hi-mA-ga-va
Q: ta banned. vatamsa something.
SRG: cchi [Made a nice joke about deriding the questioner]. hi-mA-ga-va-cchi
Q: Aaargh, the Cha again. Maybe it's a sandhi he's talking about shikhara. 'kha' banned.
SRG: Devaranne maretubittira sir? vam. hi-mA-ga-va-cchi-vam
Q: End of word. Pure guess, 'sa' banned.
SRG: va. hi-mA-ga-va-cchi-vam-va
Q: vara? 'ra' banned.
SRG: het. hi-mA-ga-va-cchi-vam-va-het.
End of third line!

It was very late by the time the 4th round came to this questioner, so he gracefully said he'd troubled the performer enough, and so in the interests of time he could compose the 4th line as he pleased. SRG took less than a few seconds to compose the last line:

sa-kun-ta-lA-tma-jA-nva-yE

The full poem reads:

bha-jE-ta na-ndi-tam pa-de
sva-bhU-dha-va-ccha-viH param
hi-mA-ga-va-cchi-vam-va-het
sa-kun-ta-lA-tma-jA-nva-yE

At this point, I still wasn't sure how this was making sense, but he gave a brilliant explanation. "nanditam means 'one who is happy' - that's the same etymology behind 'modi', so it is a fair synonym. bhajeta nanditam pade endaru "modi pradhAna mantriya padaviyannu paDedare" endu.

'dhava' is "King" or "Lord". 'svabhU' is "our land". sva-bhU-dhava is "The ruler of our land". Chavi endare sundara. Andare, adu ati sundaravAgi iruvudu endu.

himAga is himAlaya (aga is mountain). vat - like. vahet - will carry. Himalayavu Shivannanu hotta haage Modiyavaru Shivavannu (oLLeyadannu) horuvaru. A second interpretation via [S] "Like the Himalayas he will protect us from invaders, harsh winters and is the fount of the rivers that are the lifelines of India"

'Shakuntala's son (Atmaja) is Bharata. "anvaya" is that which follows, in this case our country, Bhaarata.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant stuff!

There was an apocryphal anecdote about Nehru here: the ink hadn't yet dried on the Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai agreement when China attacked. Nehru tried a sheepish defence: "Not even a blade of grass grows there anyway". A senior bald person in his cabinet is quoted to have pointed to his bald head and said "Not a hair grows here either, would you allow it to be chopped off?" [It was mentioned this person was Sardar Patel, but that's historically impossible]

2. samasyA-pUrti (Making sense of a 'bad' line by introducing context)

samasyA-pUrti is a classic round where one line is given to the performer, and he must compose a poem with that line as the last one. This line is nonsensical, or contradicts a well known truth, or is not fit for recital in public (has dirty or vulgar references, say). The rule is, the line must be heard as the final line in the poem. The typical way to 'solve' it is to add a letter at the beginning so that the meaning changes (but the context must make sense, so the first 3 lines are used for that purposes); or to identify an alternative sandhi than the ones that are originally apparent.

Let me dive straight to what happened yesterday. The questioner posed this as the last line:
"stana doDDatanadalli shobhisuvudu" (crudely "The breasts are beautiful because they are big"). Now obviously this is not fit for a public performance! How can this be modified?!

He started off with a lovely joke, "noDi, namma uttara kannaDadalli doDDastana (local variant of doDDatana) shobhisutte, neevu stana doDDatanavannu shobisibittiri" [S]

Just like the last, in each round the performer gives one line. This keeps the audience on tenterhooks. The first line which he gave right away was:

anurAgavati geLati modala rAtriya baLika

("The curious friend, after the lady's first night with her beloved...")

(At least 40-50 mins till he speaks to the other participants)

mana bicci nuDiyutirpe Alige embaL
(asks her when she's in a good mood)

I'm amazed at how he's almost speaking in perfect verse effortlessly!

"binadi enE nallanu?" ella bageyinda

("Is your lover a fun guy? It looks like it, because...")

"hya-stana doDDatanadalli shobhisihudu"

(hya: yesterday; hyastana - something that happened yesterday; he split hyastanadoDDatana as hyastanada-oDDatana. oDDatana is coyness or roughness)

"Neenu nenne enAyitu endu heLalu oDDutana (shyness, roughness) torisuttiruvudarinda nanage haage annisuttide!"

"You're so coy about what happened yesterday, that tells a lot!"

Again, pure brilliance!

The questioner had a different but equally interesting solution, where he spoke about kri-stana doDDatanadalli shobhisihudu
- how Christianity shines because of Christ's sacrifice. No sandhi magic, so I am inclined to like SRG's better :-)

3. datta-pada ("Given word")

Here, the questioner specifies a topic and a metre. Then, he rules that in each line, a certain word must appear. This word can be anything, even something from another language! Yesterday, the topic was "In the Ramayana, what did Hanuman feel when he was just about to jump across the ocean?". The questioner did not specify a metre, so SRG chose mattebha-vikrIdita - and what a choice! It is a very rare, very difficult metre! The required words from the questioner blew me off. They were:

In the first line: Ape
2nd: Lemur
3nd: Monkey
4th: Gibbon

!!! These 4 must appear - or sound like they appear. Here are the lines he composed. Again, these had 40-50 mins gap between each line, so he had some time to think but he was answering other questions in the gap. That makes it even harder!

vibhu ramEpse vasanta maNgaladakam mAtanga kandAspadam

"The wish (IpsA) of the lord (vibhu, i.e. Rama) is like an auspicious spring, dignified, beautiful and playful as an kid elephant"

svabhavOddeshame swAmigAgali murOdhAryam tadIyam matam |

"Let it be the purpose (uddesham) of my life (sva-bhava) to serve him (swaamige aagaLi) - I should take on (dhAryam) a gigantic form (mura)" - thinking thus (tadIyam matam)

shubha sandEshavan Ivenendu nabhaman kIkhEshvaraM muTTutum

"I will bring him good news" - thinking thus, he grew skyward, touching the sun [But what is the kI? kheshavara is the sun]

prabhavippam migilAgi bandhura mahAkAyam nikAyOcitam ||

"He took on (prabhavippam) the beautiful (bandhura) enormous (nikAya) form"

This poem is at the level of classical poetry! The construction, the metre, the alankaras - they can beat ANY classic, and yet this was composed on the fly in a very noisy and deliberately distracting environment!

4. citrakAvya - Constrained writing

The questioner gives a topic and metre, and some constraint. Yesterday, the topic was 'saraswati', and metre was 'rathoddhata' and the constraint was 'gUdha chaturtha' - in this constraint, the performer has to first compose the LAST line of his verse and say it out aloud. Then, in the subsequent rounds, he has to compose the first 3 lines, in which the letters in the last line must appear sequentially.

SRG gave the last line in an instant:

shAradE rasika vAgvishAradE

The first line was:

sharadindu kamanIye

Oh you who are as beautiful as the post-monsoon season moon,

lAsikA AsphAla camatkriye

Oh you whose movements are magical like that of a dancer,

AsaradaNte poreyamma sragviNI

Protect us, oh garlanded one, like a savior

shAradE rasika vAgvishAradE

Oh Sharada, one adept at speech

I am not too clear on this one - several questions - would be very glad for any assistance.

5. AshukAvya

In this round, the questioner gives a topic and the performer must compose a poem instantly in a metre that is "appropriate" to the topic.

Topic 1, The end of the rainy season

SRG's instant answer:

kAmana billekhaniyane

("With the rainbow pen...")

stOmam kondirpa mugila hALegaLol

("On the paper of the skies")

[Couldn't transcribe the next two lines]

(To the extent I remember, he compared the end of the rainy season to that of a poet writing the last verse of his epic, with the rainbow compared to his pen, the skies to his paper, the clouds to his inkpot and the earth to the subject of the epic.)

Topic 2: How should a husband balance his duties to his mother and his wife? How should his relationship with them be?

[Several brilliant jokes on how Ganesh is a brahmachari, and he seem adept at a lot of questions about married life; several anecdotes also related: from a Kailasam play, a character always calls his horrible, domineering wife "Dolly". A friend asks, what's so cute about her, why do you call her dolly. The chap says "Well, I say "cham" in my head every time" (chan-dali :D :D :D)]

He composed this poem in the sAngatya vritta - Brilliant choice! (sangati - companionship). Apparently this vritta has a lot of very interesting metrical and tala properties - it can be sung in any tala very nicely.

smara-rati bANagaLirpa chandassante

"Like a story involving Kama, Rati and Kama's arrows: i.e, Kama chooses when to fire his arrows to seduce Rati"

or

"Like the vritta which has smara, rati and bAna (i.e. sAngatya) - alternating attention, can go at any pace, etc."

merevudu maga mEN patiyu

"The role of both the husband and the child could be played perfectly"

doreyada hAge tAyige heNDatige

"If he slips away from both his mother and his wife"

[Not transcribed correctly]

Holy amazing self reference Batman!

Topic 3: On the feeling of a parent seeing his child take its first step

[Not transcribed correctly]

A nice poem comparing the feeling to how a guru would feel seeing his discipline complete his first avadhAnam!

Topic 4: What would Bali feel when he comes to visit the earth this Deepavali?

mitApi viSNunA pUrvam
"Even though it was measured by Vishnu"
amitA nu vasundharA
"The earth was still an infinite bearer of wealth"
hatA adya hatOsmi iti
"Oh, I am ruined! I am ruined!"
vairochaniH arochakaH
"The son of virochana will be desolate"

Then followed a BRILLIANT commentary on the Reddy brothers. His humour is incredible!

6. kāvya-vācana - Identify the verse

(I could not transcribe the questions as they were too fast)

This round has a lot of music fundaes, which went right above my head. The questioner sings a verse from ANY work, and the performer must compose a verse explaining the reference, context and include his opinion.

Verse 1: prapancha-sriSti ... the seventh verse from the ardhanarIshvara stotra.

The lines had alternating feminine and masculine genders, so it was mostly something on shiva and parvati, so it was somewhat straightforward. SRG immediately composed a reply in the same metre in the same style of language, sung it in the same raaga, and gave a very beautiful commentary on the concept and about Shankaracharya.

Verse 2: murallIlAlola ... a lovely poem with lots of 'las' and concluded with a salutation to Ganga.

SRG got this one too, it turns out to be from the Ganga Lahari from Panditaraja Jagannatha. Again beautiful reply verse, and a lot of quizzing trivia! It turns out Jagannatha was given great patronage by Dara Shikoh, the brother that Aurangzeb killed. He translated the Upanishads to Parsi, which was later translated into Latin, which Schopenhauer read and pretty much started a new wave of the Indology craze in Europe. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer#Indology )

Verse 3: Something from the Mudrarakshasa, written by Vishakhadatta

SRG answered this in a jiffy, and then made a wish list of films that he'd make if he had the money :D

Also some lovely lines "apEkSeyilladavarige devaru kasave allave?". Astounding!

Verse 4: A verse from Raghavanka's Harishchandra Kavya

SRG GOT THIS TOO! HOW HOW HOW HOW HOW HOW! He also related several anecdotes about Raghavanka, his life, EVERYTHING. He also told of a brilliant connection between the scene where Harishchandra's wife is begging the cemetary man not to throw away the corpse of her son ("bisuDadiru bisuDadiru...") and she can't get herself to call the corpse "It". She still calls it "Him", and cries that the child will be hurt if he falls down - and the last scene in King Lear where he is carrying Cordelia's corpse.

[S] Nice anecdote: after RaghavAnka had composed his Harishchandra Kavya and showed it to his guru Harishvara, the guru slapped him for having composed a 'nara-stuti' instead of a 'hara-stuti', and RaghavAnka lost four of his teeth. In repentance, RaghavAnka composed works like SomanAthacharita, SiddharAmacharita etc., which are all nothing in comparison to Harishchandra Kavya, being sectarian and propaganda works rather than true poetry.

In all of these, SRG mentioned several gems a verse of [S] rAjashekhara's "nAstyacauraH kavijanaH nāstyacauro vaNigjanaH | sa nandati vinA vAcyam yo jAnAti nigUhitum" (There is no poet or tradesman who is not a thief; he who knows how to hide enjoys without blame) compare "The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources." attributed to Einstein; a verse from Jagannatha which ended "..vACam vipAko mama", which was about the difficulty a poet faced - many, many others

7. aprastuta-sangati - Distractions

In the middle of all this, there is a questioner who keeps asking the performer about random stuff, trying to make conversation and trying to distract him. The questions can be facile - there was one about Yeddyurappa and Shobha Karandlaje - or very deep, like a question between personal morality and public justice. The performer must answer these in good spirit, and must not lose his temper. This is also an opportunity for the performer to demonstrate his public speaking and conversational skills : and did SRG rock it! He answered the Shobha question beautifully - "Namage swayam-shobhe-ne saaku swamy" - ROFL!

This questioner was easily the most voluble of the lot, and he did a good job. This is easily the most difficult of the questioners' roles - the conversation has to be kept up, must be meaningful, funny and yet should distract the performer.

8. Magic square

I consider this just another distraction, but a very tough one. The questioner had a 5x5 square, and his requirement is every row and column of which must sum to 975, a number announced on the spot. The performer is given no pen or paper, and must remember the square in his head. The questioner randomly interrupts and asks him stuff like "What is on the 3rd row 2nd column?" or inverse questions like "Does 202 appear in this square?". SRG, needless to say, cracked this with consummate ease. The most difficult part is to keep in the square in mind amidst all the action!

This is a partial transcript from my notes, and I will update this as I remember more stuff / talk to people. Please do comment with any questions/suggestions, that will help me remember and order this better.

Disclaimers:

1. The contents are themselves so vast and amazing that I don't even know where to begin commenting. A chat on any one topic itself could go on for hours! I've tried to be judicious in my commentary, but if there is any part that needs expanding, please do let me know and I will be glad to answer.

2. One thing that gets elided over is the extraordinarily 'high' level of poetry and conversation. These poems are almost epic-class, and yet they are being spoken around like in normal conversation! For example, just knowing the metres and ragas itself is an achievement in normal times, while here you not only must know it, you should be able to compose in it, and play with it!

3. I've separated out the threads, but they are fully interwoven during the performance and that adds an enormous systemic level of complexity.

4. Please pardon and notify me of any transcription/kAguNita errors. I initially had plans of having this in Kannada, but lost enthu in the middle (~~that's why you see the 'za's - they are the 'sha's in ITRANS~~) ~~Maybe I'll reformat when I have more time~~. Edited for easier readability, and with deference to the fact that these maybes most likely will never be.

[1] Total Perspective Vortex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Total_Perspective_Vortex

If I am to dare to give an analogy to how I felt after this: "To say I was impressed is like saying the lower bound of Graham's number is 6". And it's true, and what I can manage to say about it is as paltry as 6 compared to Graham's number! And the only reason it is finite is because SRG claims there are people more brilliant than him!

:-)

MS

2011-06-11T08:21:00.000-07:00

The deepest, most soul-crushing of tragedies that can befall man are those from 'silly' causes. Something that works as a matter of routine for everyone so much that it's not even a thought that crosses your mind, but alas, a trivial random event so fully exposes the horrific fragility of being human.

Tragedies stemming from acts of God or 'great' events that feature in a long-arc narrative, or as identifiable to some deep cause, are relatively 'manageable'. It takes superhuman mental strength to deal with an event unique to you in impact, but is unclassifiable to most other people. The enormous guilt that comes with it, with a post-mortem of every decision that lead to it no matter how far away back in time or relevance, no matter how deceiving the clarity of hindsight; the constant reminder of what could have been; the constant self-flagellation, ... I shudder at the thought.

A short history of lyrical eloquence in modern Kannada music

2011-01-21T19:31:00.000-08:00

Inspired by A short history of modern African-american music[Image]

Shanubhogara MagaLu - K.S.Narasimhaswamy, 1942

An extraordinarily perceptive, sympathetic and gently humorous description of the joys, unsaid wishes, constraints, little white lies and wisdom of lovable characters in a harsh social mileu.

**

Amma Loosa - V. Nagendra Prasad, 2011

"Pappa pyaanv..bum bum bumbum...Amma loosa? Appa loosa? ... Baa baa black sheep ..."

--

I debated for a long time whether to choose Shanubhogara MagaLu or Rayaru Bandaru for the gold standard. While the latter is much lighter, the lyrics are no less brilliant.

The nadir also had stiff competition: I had been intending to write this post for years now, and the prize contender till this clear champion came along was the hitherto apodictic Taliban Alla Alla.

A parable

2011-01-15T23:46:00.000-08:00

"It is a tragedy that our youngsters are deserting scientific and technical fields and rushing headlong towards more lucrative careers in management. Why? Don't our youngsters have any passion towards technology? Why?"

I'll tell you why, cupcake.

--

We zoom in to the haggard engineer in an MNC, as usual completely disillusioned in life about his job. Though his salary isn't anything remarkable, he's paid far more than the value he thinks he is adding and so has the consequent guilt complex built on everything from him feeling underused, to feeling like he's cheating someone, to a sinking feeling of becoming more and more worthless and chained to his present sinecure every passing day. It's also been two days since he took a bath, because the commute every day to the industrial ghetto at the other end of the city is so fucking long that all life is sucked out of him by the time he's back.

He's listening to his auntie or mom - always an elderly female authority figure in all versions - going on about her neighbour's boy, who went to IIM, getting married. The engineer, of course, is not married even after about 400 'unofficial' attempts by himself and about 3 and counting official ones by his parents (the latest one turned him down because he didn't give a concrete enough reason for not going to/staying in the US, and the one before that because his company hadn't given him a laptop; the piteous checking of company email on weekends on his desktop, over a VPN on a net connection he paid for, obviously meant that the company did not believe him to be executive material).

The auntie continues - The IIM chap is "well-settled" in Singapore, Hong Kong, London, New York or some such world center of trade, and earning about 5 lakhs per month - note, it is always helpfully presented in INR per month. The wifey is earning an appropriately smaller but still respectable 3 lakhs per month, usually (actually, preferably. "these days the woRRRld is so flat no?") in a different world center of trade.

Cut to flashback scene where the Engineer had actually Facebook-stalked the IIM chap many days before the auntie's narration. Fish eye to show we're in the engineer's memories. The marriage is one perfectly made for Facebook, and all manner of ABCD and DCBA cousins carrying DSLRs ensure there are 3000 high-quality pics of every ritual. Each album and Charcoal-filter photoshopped picture receives an appropriate number of 300 Likes and 250 comments, most of them (rather accurately, to the Engineer's dismay) say 'oh u 2 r so cuuuuteeeee!!!!'. Just clicking on the commenters' profiles provides more opportunities for bird-watching than what an entire month of his regular life does.

He remembers their marriage web page - it had a cool AJAX form for the RSVP that didn't work with his 750 a month BSNL connection, and it didn't automatically start playing corny music like the other marriage pages did. There was even a live Twitter feed by an uncle of the bride who is a web 2.0 evangelist. His uncles, in contrast, did little more at marriages than complain about the ever-declining quality of the nadaswaram. He remembers making a mental note to expect a joint blogging 'experiment' to begin anytime, starting with an oh-so-hilarious attempt at making chocolate cake (with pictures), which will have 120 Likes; next of course would be the intolerably poignant notes from their eco-friendly honeymoon to the Seychelles, where the wifey would be impressed by what a softie the hubby is when he gives a dime to a beggar boy, and ...

Fish eye view slides to another memory that is involuntarily and inevitably linked, that of the Engineer once again nervously refreshing his OkCupid Quiver Matches list, and deciding against all reason to go ahead to write to the lady(?) with the face-only profile shot in spite of that most fatal of portents: "Body type: Curvy". Fish eye disrupted by Engineer's natural reluctance to dwell on extreme self-humiliation,and we pop back two layers to the world where the auntie is finishing her story with great elan.

Both the bride and the groom are around 26-27, and judging by their career growth so far, are all set to jointly start the next biggest Africa philanthropy foundation in 20 years. The biggest worry plaguing the young family right now though, is that the boy has bought a 2000 sqft house in Singapore, girl has bought a 1800 sqft one in Hong Kong, how to manage?

The auntie then leaves. The Engineer then thinks back to his fate - that salary he draws looks very measly now. Also, it's made up of about 3.6 bazillion allowances of which he claims only 2 - who the fuck cares to keep their petrol bunk receipts or commute bus tickets or telephone bill (non-internet only) component receipt? His company tells him it's all to save tax, but he suspects it's a regular CTC-whore tactic to fuck him out of his allowances and essentially pay him only his Basic, which by the way is below the Nation's taxable limit, praise the DTC.

He once again imagines the shitty, smelly lab he has to go to every morning, and all the beakers he has to wash because his boss believes that doing low-quality work builds character. The wedding invitation from a few days ago is still at his desk, and the paper used is of a gauge that even his highest degree's certificate can't match. The Engineer in a fit of impotent rage then takes the acetylene cylinder lying there, and turns the knob anti-clockwise. It tightens. Arrggh you won't even let me die in peace you bitch. He turns it clockwise.

The end.

:-)

Golden days

2011-01-04T22:33:00.000-08:00

Whenever I whine about how awesome the olden days were and how dull and boring and debauched the present is, one or the other righteous smart-ass starts spouting statistics about technology, healthcare, social freedom and whatnot.

Here is the ultimate rebuttal to such hokum, and why the 70s were awesome:

A few days before the elections, on a Sunday, Jagjivan Ram addressed an Opposition rally at the famous Ram Lila Grounds in Delhi. The national broadcaster Doordarshan allegedly attempted to stop crowds from participating in the demonstration by telecasting the blockbuster movie Bobby. The rally still drew large crowds, and a newspaper headline the next day ran "Babu beats Bobby"

Yes that's right, bitches. When nuances of National Politics involve strategically timing the broadcast of Bobby, that's when you're talking Golden Days.

2010 in out-of-context quotes from various correspondence

2011-01-03T07:27:00.000-08:00

Inspired by the Master's version.

Jan

"..To ruin Heaven for a person, all you need to do is put two doors at the gate. He'll spend an eternity wondering what would have happened if he'd picked the other door."

"Junta, I landed in Bang yesterday. Chustunnadi gaganamu-ninda egire jhanda rammantu, veestunnadi deshapu gaali jhanda uncha anamantu so only nijam telusuko-ing and rnam teerchuko-ing from now. When do we meet?"

Feb

"Meanwhile, in other news, all is lost. I have been shamed so spectacularly by the bird in question that the only honourable recourses left to me are to either commit ritual Seppuku or quickly change companies by night. The first option seemed easier, but alas, my blade consignment was caught up with the customs. Therefore, I am desperately looking for jobs."

"It's already at the # Postdocs = # Grad students singularity, and it's an inch away from an irreversible collapse from there to a black hole of dummy papers."

"...Microsoft Cocksucking Office Motherfucking Comminicator man. Who would think that that fucking piece of shit would have a 'Block' feature? Which son a bitch frustrated sadist bastard software engineer choot remembered to put in a 'Block' feature in fucking Office Communicator? I will narrate the gory story over some brandy."

Mar

"..I have some hopes on this, judging at least by a new index I've created: the Company Marital Transform Index. A huge number of people have gotten married right after they got into X, and that can only be because of two reasons: accessible hot max babedom or complete satisfaction in life leading to such ghastly imp-of-the-perverse measures."

"I'm thoroughly enjoying the comforts of home, and even though it's painful to listen to the regular crescendo of "Whaaaaaaaaaaat? You left a STANFORD PEEE HETCHH DEEEE to come back to Bangalore?!!!!!!", life is going well."

Apr

"..aaha.. ishtondu prashamse salladu saar! idella odi, higgi kobbi mattebbi, naaLe officealli area figure Santaanalakshmina pataaysoNa anta shuddha-sphatika-sankaasha-sirigannaDadalli romaanchaka romantic dialogue baarisdaaga, avaLa boyfriend GuLi Ramesha nanna kai kaalagasbitre eneno kansitkondiro naanu ellappa hOgli?"

Intense sadness.

May

"I spend half my time inventing bad analogies about it (my latest: "They fully believe in the philosophy of dumping fresh recruits at the deep end of the pool and seeing who makes it. [pause] But only, there's no water [longer pause] and the alligators are hungry"); the next half I spend putting out fires he lights with his effulgent incompetence; the third half I spend trying to forget all I've learnt, turning myself into a randroid, and fellating the biggest swinging dicks in Finance in the hope of making heap-big-heap of money; In the remaining quarter, I wonder what happened to my quant skills."

June

"Esteemed sirs, I beg you to kindly bear my pettifogging. I have an all-important, make-or-break, life-or-death ppt today at 3, where the hounds will decide if I must be torn down instantly and fed to the Water team, or if I may be granted my liberty and the honour of their free, PAR-evading patronage till the next fake ppt. My survival entirely depends on your (planted) questions and my perfect answers to those gems of inquisition, those marvellous manifestations of the spirit of inquiry."

"I've realized that the most scarce component in our lives these days is closure. Closure from anything! It is such a comfort to wrap up and categorize an event in the showcase of memory, but such luxury is very rare."

Jul

"I am told that if all goes well and things move fast, I can expect a decision by early 2018"

Aug

"The sweetest deal I could imagine: great research, lots of freedom, great money, fantastic work-life balance"
"Easily one of the very worst professional experiences in my life, even counting getting a no-dues certificate from CCW"

"Sir, with respect, I still can't get myself to stop mentally cringing at the idea of asking my lady love, an angel of kindness with whom I'd crave to spend many a vulnerable moment, a manifest perfection of the highest ideals I am capable of thinking, an impossibly superior being who is infinitely forgiving, what she thinks of the popular metric that a well-formed female's nipples align with her earlobes. Offering my expert services to check is absolutely off the table. "

Sep

"...and so far the only difference seems to be that there are some rumours that some people have heard others say that they have read somewhere that a few have felt that they detected faint hints that perhaps work may be going on someplace. Hope springs eternal."

Oct

"..doubtless this esteemed vocation of practicing my signature every day has been entrusted to me to ensure that when I'm a high flying executive on my way out of my penthouse after clinching the deal, the nubile young women from the fawning crowds should not be inconvenienced for too long when they offer their buxom bosoms for an autograph."

"I am also beginning to tire of this tirade of "this is an important lesson in life" that I tell myself. I'm done with the fucking lessons already, give me some peace! All these lessons seem so profoundly pyrrhic and I've had enough with depth."

Nov

"..Sach keh raha hai tu Rajju..asal me hum dono ki kismat gadhe ke ling se likhi gayi hai saaLi.."

Dec

"We hear a lot of talk of 'compatibility', and certainly economic-, social-status-, materialism level- compatibility are important; but most important is a compatibility of self-doubt levels. "

Democracy

2010-12-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

"Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried"

I had thought little more of this quote than any other witty saying, but lately I'm realizing more dimensions to it. Let's for a moment lump all consensus-driven systems under 'democracy' - organizations these days are as big as the societies that reformers of the past ages wrote about.

The quote posits quite a radical little idea, changing the focus from gains to losses: Democracy is a tool for minimizing loss - Every other form of government will result in even more losses to society. The way it does it is by taking away power from any one group of persons, and handing it to an abstract, nebulous entity called 'consensus'. This means limiting both good and bad changes. Nothing moves. In that sense, consensus is a fine thing to extol when one's coffers are full.

As an example of what happens when a non-consensus approach is attempted, P.V.Indiresan has an interesting take on one of our most deeply-valued concepts, the concept of Rama-rajya:

Many people extol Ram Rajya as the ultimate in governance. With due respect to Rama's devotees, I must point out that they do not enquire why Ram Rajya collapsed once King Rama passed away. It collapsed because it gave too much power without responsibility to persons of limited wisdom. It enabled an illiterate washerman to make wild accusations against Queen Sita and forced ultra-scrupulous King Rama to banish her.

However, one of the less obvious issues that this insistence on consensus effectively puts the burden of change on unknown unknowns and 'extreme' behaviour. Once one is past the stage of believing all the 'little drops make an ocean' bullshit, one realizes that virtually all change comes from these two sources. Either something from outside the system comes up, or an asshole (or someone who has little to lose) pushes his agenda because no one can stand up to him without losing something. Symmetrically, if one wants to introduce positive change, one has to depend upon the mercies of some eccentric who happens to have power; Abuse of power is common, but here we have the curious case of non-use of power. 'Consensus' never made a nail or a nation.

*Dec 29: Well look what the cat brought in! Behold, by the grace of Dileep, the fine process of consensus ably supporting the underbelly of the world's largest democracy:

Transcript of the Rajya Sabha - 1 [2 page PDF], 2 [1 page PDF], 3 [skip to page 29]

"पािण जी, बच्चे आपको देख रहे ह।
..(�यवधान).. वे क्या सबक लेकर जाएँगे?
..(􀃋यवधान).. The House is adjourned to meet at 12.30 p.m."

"MR. CHAIRMAN: Hon. Members, the two hundred and twenty-first Session of the Rajya Sabha comes to a close. It displayed distinctive features: no debates or discussions on matters of public interest took place; no Special Mentions were made, or, laid on the Table of the House; no Zero Hour interventions were sought; no questions were answered orally and no supplementary questions were raised."

"The prohibition in the Rules about shouting slogans, displaying posters, obstructing
procedures by coming into the Well of the House was consistently ignored. Peace prevailed only when obituaries were read."

I hate GMail

2010-12-22T20:51:00.000-08:00

GMail and Reddit are really getting to me. Whenever I have a Gmail tab opened, I spend a LOT of time doing useless things like organizing old email (which essentially is deleting bacn), trying in vain to think of how to write a non-embarassing reply to a 3-month-old message, fiddling around with settings, re-reading the same old stale buzz, or just plain clicking 'Refresh' over and over again! With Reddit, I just keep reading wall upon wall of puerile AskReddit shit, which consists mostly fake stories being heatedly argued by a crowd pitchforking the same old straw-men. The painful part is that they are somehow 'addictive' and it's actually hard to get out of the groove.

GMail is even more insiduous because it has a lot of things that I commonly use embedded in it: I want to be online on Gchat; I use Drafts for a lot of things from to-do lists to jotting down philosophical observations; I frequently use email for backing up documents; Buzz is just around the corner as a 'sneak peek' to Google Reader posts so that I don't have to worry about constantly "mark unread" to postpone thinking about interesting posts; all of this present in one place, and I hate it because I seem to get struck doing all this, but ONLY this again and again!

Edit: An article that will surely become part of the Great Internet Introspection canon: Five emotions invented by the internet

Mumbai

2010-12-18T21:00:00.000-08:00

When one has a theory for complete systemic corruption and degradation, one is disturbed by exceptions. With a hat-tip to Sayan, how the hell can one explain these:

1. How do the Mumbai locals run with such efficiency? How does it not happen that a fishplate or an engine cylinder fails, and then the bidding process for fixing it takes months, and then the fix is done by the company owned by the minister's nephew? How does it not happen that the driver comes in half an hour late, and plays a minority card when he is attempted to be disciplined?

2. How is Mumbai, much more populous and having much more economic and social inequality, a safer place for women than Bangalore, the cherished home of marauding gangs from TN whose sole vocation seems to be kidnap and rape?

In Frivolity we trust

2010-12-16T04:26:00.000-08:00

One of the main points in a Huxleian vision of a bleak future, one that I heartily agree with, is that we are turning into a trivial society too amused by its own silly frivolities to consider doing meaningful things, or to even recognize its own serious problems. This classic comic comparing Huxleian and Orwellian dystopias would be a quick summary.

I found these paragraphs in Alain de Botton's most excellent Pleasures and Sorrows of Work a fantastic counterbalance to this claim:

It was in the eighteenth century that economists and political theorists first became aware of the paradoxes and triumphs of commercial societies, which place trade, luxury and private fortunes at their centre whilst paying only lip-service to the pursuit of higher goals.From the beginning, observers of these societies have been transfixed by two of their most prominent features: their wealth and their spiritual decadence.

Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. But the premises of a biscuit company are a fruitful place to recall that there has always been an insurmountable problem facing those countries that ignore the efficient production of chocolate biscuits and sternly dissuade their ablest citizens from spending their lives on the development of innovative marketing promotions: they have been poor, so poor as to be vulnerable citizens, whom they have lost famines and epidemics. It is the high-minded countries that have let their members starve, whereas the self-centred and the childish ones have, off the back of their doughnuts and six thousand varieties of ice cream, had the resources to invest in maternity wards and cranial scanning machines.

Amsterdam was founded on the sale of raisins and flowers. The palaces of Venice were assembled from the profits of the carpet and spice trades. Sugar built Bristol. And yet despite their frequently amoral policies, their neglect of ideals and their selfish liberalism, commercial societies have been graced with well-laden shops and treasures swollen enough to provide for the construction of temples and founding hospitals.

Alas, it is true. It is the finicky cigarette manufacturer looking for a new thing to say in his marketing campaign that is interested in the intricacies of a better edge-detection algorithm. The question, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?" quite loses its punch, doesn't it?

Compression - 2

2010-12-11T01:09:00.000-08:00

I was completely mindfucked by this line in Bana's Kadambari -

नाम्ना-एव यो निर्भिन्न-अराति-हृदयो विरचित-नारसिंह-रूप-आडम्बरम्, एक-विक्रम-आक्रान्त-सकल-भुवनतलो विक्रम-त्रय-आयासितम् च जहास इव वासुदेवम् |

nAmnA-eva yo nirbhinna-arAti-hRdayo viracita-nArasiMha-rUpa-ADambaram, eka-vikrama-AkrAnta-sakala-bhuvanatalo vikrama-traya-AyAsitam ca jahAsa iva vAsudevam |

It's impossible to translate directly, of course, but here's an attempt: "The king, who conquered his enemies (lit. broke their hearts) just by the mention of his name, and who had conquered the world with just a single stride, seemed to laugh mockingly at Lord Vishnu, who had made much noise and fanfare in taking on the Narasimha form (i.e so much trouble to kill his enemy), and who probably was exhausted by the three strides he had to take (as Vamana)."

ROFL :D

The part that amazes me is the extreme succintness - viracita-nArasiMha-rUpa-ADambaram conveys so much, and the vikrama-traya-AyAsitam has the mocking tone so brilliantly ingrained in itself! ADambaram and AyAsitam - ROFL!!

(Compression 1)

Irrelevance

2010-12-05T20:13:00.000-08:00

Several events in my life over the past few weeks repeatedly reminded me of this thought from Russell's essay, On Youthful Cynicism:

Moreover many kinds of beauty require that a man should take himself more seriously than is possible for an intelligent modern. A prominent citizen in a small city State, such as Athens or Florence, could without difficulty feel himself important. The earth was the center of the Universe, man was the purpose of creation, his own city showed man at his best, and he himself was among the best of his own city. In such circumstances Æschylus or Dante could take his own joys or sorrows seriously. He could feel that the emotions of the individual matter, and that tragic occurrences deserve to be celebrated in immortal verse. But the modern man, when misfortune assails him, is conscious of himself as a unit in a statistical total; the past and the future stretch before him in a dreary procession of trivial defeats. Man himself appears as a somewhat ridiculous strutting animal, shouting and fussing during a brief interlude between infinite silences.

The essay was written in 1930.

Thinking grooves

2010-11-20T21:50:00.000-08:00

PS has an interesting post on how the quality of citations in a topic depends on how easy it is to search for papers in that topic. I've been reading something on related lines: I get the feeling that a large part of our thinking is driven by tools that are popular only because they win in a "fast time vs slow time" setting.

Stop Press: This Slate article on the Slow Photography movement tells everything you need to know about slow and fast time.

"Fast time vs Slow time" is a very interesting idea in Thomas Hylland Eriksen's Tyranny of the Moment (which I found via Shreevatsa). It really does deserve an entire book, but the short gist is this: "Fast time" is the state of mind associated with instant gratification; you feel hungry, and the next instant you have a ready-made hamburger in front of you. You feel bored, and the next instant you have a truckload of information porn about news of the stock market and purported explanations for every half-decimal change, which somehow satisfies the urge for information. Fast time is the frame of mind where one indulges in these transactions.

Slow time is an almost 'opposite' state of mind. It's a slow picnic meal where there's no hurry to go anywhere, and the food itself is something of great interest. It's a slow, reasoned conversation with no sense of hurry or depleting attention span or need to put thoughts into 140 characters or less; the kind which you will remember a week later.

One of Eriksen's main points is that when fast time meets slow time, fast time always wins. I think of it in a slightly different fashion: Suppose there are many ways to do something. They are all somewhat balanced in how 'hard' they all are, and each of them have their own unique advantages and disadvantages. Then, if a much 'easier' way to do the same thing comes up, all the old ways will be lost irrespective of their advantages. I think a lot of this is happening to us.

Consider the idea of doing a literature survey on Google. It's barely a decade since Google (and the Internet) acquired critical mass to give some results on queries. But now, just because Google exists, any other way of doing lit searches seems inordinately difficult and remote. I frankly don't know what to do if I didn't have some kind of electronic search for lit searches, and suspect most people don't, either. The other day, I saw some chap giving a very interesting lecture on the 'mood' in the Kannada cinema industry during the 70s. I don't have the first clue where to go read up on it, because Google gives nothing!

I seem to be implying that the presence of armchairs increases the number of armchair anarchists, and in general makes real anarchy appear "harder"; the presence of reddit and it's infinite nuggets of bite-sized tl;dr-ified information makes reading real books harder. Seems like a stretch?

The education market in India and the US

2010-11-15T01:48:00.000-08:00

When I think of the education market in India, I see tremendous opportunity. Anyone with a bit of panache can make an absolute killing giving tuitions for 11th and 12th students, and for variety and recreation can teach engineering students part time. The kind of income one can make if one is keen easily surpasses what the best of MNCs can pay several times over. Of course, an important component of this income is from rent-seeking from several sources: the brands one flaunts on one's resume, the education bubble and the brands the crowd is after. Even charlatans who know little more than the contents of the last 10 years' question papers are highly sought after.

However, when I think of the education market in the US, my first thoughts are extremely pessimistic. High school teachers are paid a pittance compared to even the most regular 'decent' engineering job. There's no major tuitions market to speak of (maybe here and there for SAT, but I don't think one can think of it as a viable career option as here). The moment we get to universities, it's an absolute clusterfuck. Extremely talented, extremely hardworking people with PhDs and multiple years of experience shuttle around teaching part-time and barely eking out a living. One of the surest of certainties today is that a career in academia in the US is an absolute no-no except for exceptionally passionate people willing to sacrifice everything.

There is something wrong here. Either my understanding of one or both of the systems is wrong, or the market in India will cool down, or the one in the US will hot up. I feel the latter is not possible, and it doesn't fit the general trend that the US is 'ahead' in the saturation curve. Like a lot of what is hot in India, the market here is driven by caprices of regulation. What am I missing?

Open letter

2010-11-10T06:30:00.000-08:00

Dear Classical Sanskrit Poets of yore,

Would you PLEASE lay off these INTENSELY IRRITATING fixations:

1. Lotuses. Oh GOD. Someone should cleave out a special 'Padmopama' and 'Padmarupaka' alankArAs. They should then be summarily banned, and treatises should be written on how many centuries one would spend in Raurava hell if one employs them.

2. Cows

3. Said cows' (and sundry other) udders

4. The unimaginable enormousness, pinkishness, and full-of-milk-ness of said udders. "भ्रुवं कोष्णेन कुण्डोध्नी मेध्येनावभृतादपि, प्रस्नवेनाभिवर्षन्ती वत्सालोकप्रवर्तिना" "Having a pitcher-sized udder, showering the entire earth with a flow of lukewarm milk streaming forth at the sight of her calf, and more sanctifying than even a sacrificial ablation" - I mean, WTF man, K., seriously, what were you smoking? I can wholly sympathize with a big-tits fetish, but this is ridiculous!

5. While we are at it, could we please also take it easy with the elephant-trunk-like thighs and vanishingly narrow waists? The rest of us would like our heroines' midriffs to be at least simply connected, thank you very much.

6. Ah yes, Elephants

7. Said elephants' secretion of temporin during musth

8. All manner of obscure floral anatomy. It is hard enough in these bachelorly times to have a firm grasp of human anatomy, let alone worry about the sodding pistils of the blighted Crateva Religiosa.

9. In general, ALL elaborate descriptions of flowers and plants

10. CHAPTER LONG encomia on deer, rabbits and other wholly harmless and BONE-CRUSHINGLY BORING hermitage-animals and their god damned fluttering eyelashes and brows.

11. Birds, almost always some obscure species that can only be referred to now with Latin names. "Like the song of a Sylvia atricapilla" FFFFFFUUUUUUUU!

12. What the hell is this fetish of 'strictly abiding by scriptures' that is spoken of every other verse? WE GET IT.

Certainty

2010-11-08T07:35:00.000-08:00

Roads that are practically impossible to cross are so passé - Every Bangalorean worth his salt either bravely crosses them, or dies trying. Ours not to make reply, ours not to reason why, ours but to cross or die seems to be the spirit of the times.

Therefore, the BBMP, sadaa namma seveyalli, has taken the next step forward in urban innovation: roads that are theoretically impossible to cross.

Behold this marvel of topology and urban Development:

The triangles are the traffic signals, pointing towards the expected direction of traffic flow. The yellow dots are likely places you will be in right after you get out of IISc. If you are trying to go anywhere south in the image, you have to cross CV Raman Road - just that it's theoretically impossible because there will always be traffic coming from either the south or the west because the two western signals are perfectly in sync. The fact that the pavements on all roads in the picture have been razed down with a vengeance and asphalted till a few inches up the IISc walls also helps.

Mr.T would understand

2010-10-19T08:04:00.000-07:00

Consider this song:

What leads one to think a-priori that it may not suck?

1. It is not sung by Udit Narayan, Kailash Kher, or any other cold-blooded murderer of the Kannada tongue (and ears).

2. Neither is it sung by Sonu Nigam, who by sheer, all-encompassing, suffocating saturation has managed to achieve a level of obnoxious aural horror that can only be dreamt of by stalwarts like Himesh.

One then proceeds to hear the first verse.

Shiva anta hogutidde roadinali...
sikkapatte saala ittu life-inali..
ardha tanku petrol ittu bike-inali..
nee kande side-inali

Quite excellent, one thinks. Excellent, natural, not-wannabe Kanglish. The 'dha' in ardha is a perfectly enunciated mahaprana. They're attempting something very ambitious, pitching the gauntlet to the epic Madhya Rathrili, Highway rasteli. Depending on how high one is, one might even appreciate the distinctly non-universal, non-preachy, highly contextual setting so much that one might hazard a comparison with some songs from Mysore Mallige. One might also...

But one will not. Because someone fucked up so badly after this verse that it hurts just to listen to it lose its way horribly and become absolutely disgusting. It's almost as if the highly promising lyricist was deadlined to worthless mediocrity. Pity, pity pours from all directions into this downhill nosedive. The last verse.. ugh, calculus students will learn this song as an example of what a large negative second derivative feels like.

X(

E, MF, DYSI?

2010-10-09T22:28:00.000-07:00

1. "I think so that you should ..." GAAA! NOO!!! There is no 'so'! "I think that you should ..." or even "I think you should ..."

2. Almost every 'also' should be replaced with 'too'. "I also came" => "I too came"

3. What vile nether regions of hell did "revert" come from to haunt us? That, combined with the absolutely monstrous "the same" is the most lethal combination ever. "would sincerely request to please kindly revert back with the same" [shudder]

4. "I can able to do" - NO. "I AM able to do it" or "I can do it" (Tx SV)

5. "Hence". It feels as if the 16th century is upon us all over again, especially when it's used in speech. "Hence, suck my cock"

And deviating a bit from ranting about just usage, please do what you can to fight this cancer of 'analytical thinking'. The entire spectrum from JEE coaching centers which go public to the investment banks which take them there extols its virtues to the highest heavens; verily, analytical thinking is the pinnacle of all human endeavor! How wonderful the world, how colorful its rainbows would be if it were to have only Analytical Thinkers! Just feel that word, my God, a-na-LY-ti-cal! Five full syllables, enough to explain all expectations one could have and to simultaneously broadcast the brilliance, high intelligence, sharp discretion, and of course, the analytical thinking ability of the speaker. After expressing so much, does the word even need to mean anything?

Enthiran

2010-10-08T11:11:00.000-07:00

The name 'Enthiran' struck me as a very interesting example of a feature that Tamizh shares with Telugu, but does not share with Kannada (or any other language I know). The use of the male nominative case suffix '-an' is a brilliant way of making 'Enthiram' (machine) into 'machine-man'. In Telugu, I'd do it like 'Yantrudu' (with 'Yantramu' for the machine).

Two features are important:

1. The nominative case suffix should be quite distinct for the masculine gender compared to the neuter gender. The '-an' and '-am' difference in Tamizh, and the '-mu' and '-du' difference in Telugu are sufficient, but there's nothing comparable in Kannada. Hindi or English don't use case suffixes, so they are totally out.

Kannada is weird because it has a nominative case suffix that is used in formal writing that makes sense only when used in a sentence, and not independently. 'Ramanu' can never exist independently as a word (while 'Rama' can).

Sanskrit does make a clear enough distinction, with 'yantram' and 'yantraH', but:

2. The gender of words should be dependent purely on the gender of the object. Else, there's nothing to do!

I wish the movie was half as clever as the name, though :-)

Bangalore rains

2010-10-04T06:45:00.000-07:00

"भो भोः पान्थ कुतो?" "नगरतो" "वार्ता तु काचित् श्रुता?" ।
"बाढं !" "ब्रूहि" "युवा पयोदसमये भार्यां विना जीवति !! ।"
"सत्यं जीवति ???" "जीवतीति कथिता वार्ता मयापि श्रुता ! "।
"संकीर्णा पृथिवी जनाश्च बहवः किं तन्न सम्पद्यते ?" ॥

:-/

(My apologies for presenting this without a translation. The Sanskrit original is witty, "gently mocking" and (aimed rightly) almost could serve as a pick-up line. Everything I've tried to tell the exact same thing in English sounded sappy, desperate, emo and somewhat sad.)

Ok, here goes. "Yo dude, where are you coming from?" "The city" "Any news?" "Oh yes!" "What?" "It seems a young man there lives alone ('without his wife') DURING THE MONSOON!" "Whoa, you mean SERIOUSLY?" "I too have only heard rumours (I mean, come on, is that even possible?)" "Tch tch, it's a strange world with all kinds of people. Nothing's impossible, I guess. (/resigned attempt at trying to make sense of a completely miraculous and unbelievable piece of news)"

ए

2010-07-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

'विपरीत' has a very nice etymology: vi - away, pari - (cognate with Greek peri-) around, surrounding, and ita - gone. "Gone beyond the surrounds or perimeter", i.e "excessive". Similarly, 'vIta' is 'gone away' or 'lacking', as in 'vItarAga' (lacking in desires). Similarly atIta 'exceeded', adhIta 'attained'.

'e' is cognate with Latin 'eo', which also means 'to go'. No discussion on this topic is complete without Monty Python's take on it :-)

Sheena Iyengar on choice

2010-07-27T03:40:00.000-07:00

I bumped into this brilliant TED talk on choice by Sheena Iyengar via Munnu on g-reader. It's a talk that directly resonated with one of my topics of constant rumination, and I strongly recommend it.

This comes at a time when I need to make (what I think is) a very critical and important choice in my life; as a result, this talk was amazingly timely on multiple levels. Some thoughts:

- If her description of Japan is right, I think I'll be blissfully happy there! I absolutely, viscerally, totally detest choice; actually, I detest the process of making a choice even more. I'm programmed with a strong instinct to make sure to make the 'right' choice, and when I am not absolutely sure I am doing so, I get very frustrated. The sting of "What if?" thinking, and the current worry that I may face that sting later, is particularly unbearable, and I have a strong feeling this is a pre-programmed personality feature.

Although she briefly touched upon the topic of why some people might think this way ("Fear"), I think she could have gone further:

-At a somewhat trivial level like choosing between Coke and Pepsi, I think it's mostly right. To the choice-averse brigade, it simply doesn't matter because the differences are so minute, silly and irrelevant. I've been thought of as an ignorant hick one too many times when I ask for advice on buying a car. I say "My budget is X, tell me a good car to buy", and tone instantly becomes very delicate.

"What brand are you looking for?"

"I don't know, I just want a good one with good service"

"But all of them have decent service these days. What kind pickup/mileage/x do you want?"

"I don't know, just a normal regular car to go around, that's all"

"Ok... what kind of resale potential are you looking for in the next 3-4 years?"

"I don't even have the car yet, how do I know what I should do it with in 3-4 years?"

I firmly refuse to believe that "doing your research" on buying a silly thing like a car or a suit is at all useful! I am reminded of this comic Anush had shared a long while ago:

As a side note, this is one point where Apple absolutely scores over every other company. Very, very limited choice, but each product functions decently and mostly to expectations.

-Elaborating on the "Fear" factor, I think it's a version of Buyer's Remorse. Personally, I find it very much more easier to make my peace with events whose causes are beyond my control, than events which I caused. It's not a question of evading responsibility, because that is a dishonest twisting of facts; This has a lot to do with a discomfort of being self-centered and needing an external, immutable thing, as in Alain de Botton's talk and DFW's essay.

-At a higher, more important level like choosing a career or country to live in, the difficulty lies in the fact that you never have enough information. A very major portion of your post-choice life is going to be determined by unknown unknowns, and there's no way you can include them in your analysis. So, you cannot know with any certainty about how good a choice it was! I've had times when I took really important decisions, and found out more game-changing data in one day after making the choice than a year of pre-choice analysis!

-An even more debilitating fact is that you are merely choosing between mental models of outcomes of choice, and nothing concrete. All kinds of fictions rule these mental models! There is really no meaning in attributing anything to a particular choice someone made, because it may have been made under completely different assumptions. This brings me to one of my favorite gripes: there is very little that can be learnt from one's own or other's experiences. "No man ever steps in the same river twice", etc. This pervasive nonsense about "learning experiences" gets on my nerves. That old fake Chinese curse goes, “May you live in interesting times”. Just this one curse would make that most fundamental of all human interactions, teaching and learning, quite worthless beyond the confines of academia. As Paul Getty said, “In times of rapid change, experience can be your worst enemy.”

A simple solution to this, as espoused by the Sunscreen song, "Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's". I was about to go do just that, when I bumped into a hurdle also covered in the self-same song: "If you succeed in doing this, tell me how." :P

-As a corollary, I will punch in the neck the next person who quotes with a smug, all-knowing air, "Have no expectations". I can jolly well have no expectations when I have nothing to think of, but if I'm making a choice between mental models, the only way it can be done is if I have expectations for each choice in front of me!

-Coming back to the talk, one very real problem that arises from those assumptions is a social wisdom that is quite perverse. "Leadership" is often associated with the ability to quickly choose; people who prefer a programmed, defined, 'secure' life are unfairly relegated as incapable.

-Boundless choice on a level of personal ethics also brings with it a very serious issue that there are no constraints. When faced with an unfamiliar situation, constructs like ethics, morals, conscience, 'character', etc. give guidelines that, above all, allow a man to rest assured that he took the right decision. I hold this to be the primary function, because it is impossible to talk of the consequences of an action and talk about these constructs on those terms (for example, it's silly to talk of a conscience as something that guides a man to do 'good'. What might seem very good today would probably turn out to be a horrific wrong tomorrow. The only thing a conscience does is to allow a man the satisfaction that he's done the right thing).

-In an old post of mine, Kaushal's comment had reminded me of an interesting and related idea. Issues with choice arise primarily from a conflict between 'I will make my life' and 'Let my life make me' attitudes. Of the hundreds of schools talking about Moksha and how to attain it, two stand in sharp relief in this context. One is called the 'Markata kishori nyaaya' and the other 'Marjaara kishori nyaaya'. 'Markata kishori nyaya' literally means 'Monkey-child procedure'. A baby monkey holds on very hard to its mother as it jumps around, and the hold is thought to be so strong that it is even immortalized in metaphor - 'kapi mushti' or 'monkey fist' means a very strong grip. The baby monkey is actively involved in shaping and controlling its life.

'Maarjaara kishori nyaaya' literally means 'Cat child procedure'. A kitten wouldn't even have its eyes open when its mother catches it by the scruff and jumps about. It simply doesn't (cannot?) care, and lets its mother take it wherever it pleases. The question these raise is, is Moksha something that should be actively pursued, or do you let the quest take over you?

I guess this little conundrum exists even in the quest for Supreme, and not just in our silly little life-choices :-)

--

I found her final message somewhat tame and not particularly insightful, but whole talk was still great.

Maybe another way to look at choice-averse people is to think of them as people desiring choice at a 'higher' level : they want the choice of having choices only when they want them!

:-)

Now I've seen everything...

2010-07-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

You know you live in dangerously interesting times when #define private public is a major plot driver in a primetime Kannada soap, complete with grayscale triple takes and grand orchestra background music.

Paul and Randomness

2010-07-11T21:14:00.000-07:00

I have been a great devotee of Paul the Octopus, and cannot wait to invest in the company that buys him out and starts a predict-your-future gig. He's had 8 consecutively correct predictions, and I was sold by the time the 3rd one rolled in. I truly feel that he's got something going.

This reminds me of an anecdote Taleb relates in Fooled by Randomness. (paraphrasing) A smart scamster takes 10,000 envelopes on Dec 15th, and fills 5000 of them with this message: "Greetings! We have a fantastic new stock market predicting technique, and we think you'd be interested. But you needn't believe us. We'll send you one prediction a month, and you can call us when you get interested. We claim that by Jan 31, the stock market would have gone UP from its Jan 1 level". The other 5000 have the exact same message, except that it says the market would go DOWN by Jan 31. The envelopes are then sent out all across the country, with some simple measures to minimize chances of some of the 10000 people knowing each other.

By Jan 31, 5000 people would have received a correct 'prediction'. Our chap then writes a more confident message, and tells 2500 of them that the market would be "EVEN higher by Feb 28!". To the other 2500, he writes "BUT THIS TIME, the market's going to go down!". Come Mar 1, 2500 people would have received two consecutive correct predictions with an increasingly confident pitch.

It wouldn't take people more than 5-6 months to start believing something is seriously on. The crucial part in this, as well as with Paul, is that these planned events are intertwined with everyday life, and not perceived as clearly laid-out thought experiments. One prediction would have made someone want to "try it out", and when it worked, it would have resulted in a whole chain of events in his life. A little more confidence the next time, and even higher rewards.

As Jean Cocteau once said, "We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?"

:-)

Compression

2010-06-19T20:20:00.000-07:00

I bumped into these hilarious verses from the first canto of the Raghuvamsham:

(The context is that the great emperor Dileepa is very unhappy that he does not have children, and approaches the sage Vasishta for help and advice, and rants away:)

नूनं मत्त: परं वंश्या: पिण्ड-विच्छेद-दर्शिन: |
न प्रकाम-भुज: श्राद्धे स्वधा-संग्रह-तत्परा: || (1.66)

nuunaM matta: paraM vaMshyaa: piNDa-vichCheda-darshina: |
na prakaama-bhuja: shraaddhe svadhaa-saMgraha-tatparaa: ||

"And surely, my ancestors in heaven see that there won't be any more offerings for them (because I am childless), and won't eat to their fill during their annual ceremonies because they are busy storing away whatever they get!"

मत्परं दुर्लभं मत्वा नूनम् आवर्जितं मया |
पय: पूर्वै: स्वनि:श्वासै: कवोष्णम् उपभुज्यते || (1.67)

matparaM durlabhaM matvaa nuunam aavarjitaM mayaa |
paya: puurvai: svani:shvaasai: kavoShNam upabhujyate ||

(This one is a whopper)

"Thinking that these offerings will end with me, their hot drinks become lukewarm because of their depressed sighing."

I'm totally amazed by the detailed, extraordinarily compressed imagery!

"Solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum"

2010-06-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

I bumped into this fantastic short story written by David Foster Wallace, titled "The Depressed Person" (PDF link), via a link Srinivasan had shared as a Google Reader comment. I had read very little of Wallace before, and knew him chiefly through his fantabulous commencement speech at Kenyon college (about which I had written earlier). I knew he was hailed as a genius of sorts and (yet? consequently?) a severely depressed individual, but the depth of his understanding and attention to detail in this story absolutely blew me out of the water.

I'm very interested in depression because of the sheer mindfuck it is (!) : a bunch of fucking chemicals are out of balance in your head, and poof! It doesn't matter where you are, who you are with, what you have accomplished or what you do, life is hell. It's hard to keep a straight face when phrases like "aim in life" or "ambition" or even "Happiness" are thrown about, when you know that a trivial chemical imbalance can radically deform the very lens with which you view the world. Forget about viewing the world, even the "you" in the last sentence won't be well defined!

The story does have its share of irritating features (the 'child of divorce' cliche, somewhat boring asides, an unconventional sentence structure that grates in as many places as it piques interest,...) but it is amazing in more ways than I can describe, and some ideas and lines were too disturbingly, chillingly close for comfort:

- the idea of "principle" morphing from being a tool of order, guidance and closure to one of chaos, torture and unfulfilledness; whether inflicted by others or by oneself.

- "who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long-distance, for badly needed sharing and support and just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day's despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always apologized for dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free long-distance lives."

- "The depressed person confessed to her therapist that when she reached out long-distance to a member of her Support System she almost always imagined that she could detect, in the friend's increasingly long silences and/or repetitions of encouraging cliches, the boredom and abstract guilt people always feel when someone is clinging to them and being a joyless burden. The depressed person confessed that she could well imagine each "friend" wincing now when the telephone rang late at night, or during the conversation looking impatiently at the clock or directing silent gestures and facial expressions communicating her boredom and frustration and helpless entrapment to all the other people in the room with her, the expressive gestures becoming more desperate and extreme as the depressed person went on and on and on."

- The dark recollection of the dorm room pantomime

- and "as a legacy of that experience, she dreaded, more than almost anything, the thought of ever being someone you had to appeal silently to someone nearby to help you contrive an excuse to get off the phone with. The depressed person would implore each supportive friend to tell her the very moment she (i.e., the friend) was getting bored or frustrated or repelled or felt she (i.e., the friend) had other more urgent or interesting things to attend to, to please for God's sake be utterly candid and frank and not spend one moment longer on the phone than she was absolutely glad to spend. The depressed person knew perfectly well, of course, she assured the therapist;' how such a request could all too possibly be heard not as an invitation to get off the telephone at will but actually as a needy, manipulative plea not to get off - never to get off- the telephone."

- "said that she felt she could support the depressed person's use of the word "vulnerable" more wholeheartedly than she could support the use of the word "pathetic," which word (i.e., "pathetic") struck the therapist as toxically self-hating and also somewhat manipulative, an attempt to protect oneself against the possibility of a negative judgment by making it clear that one was already judging oneself far more negatively than any listener could have the heart to."

- "intruding on their functional and blissfully ignorantly joyful if somewhat shallow and unconscious lives and appealing shamelessly to their compassion"

- "not being able to share the way it felt, what it actually felt like for the depressed person to be literally unable to share it, as for example if her very life depended on describing the sun but she were allowed to describe only shadows on the ground"

- "Her apologies for burdening these friends during daylight hours at their workplaces were elaborate, vociferous, and very nearly constant, as were her expressions of gratitude to the Support System for just Being There for her"

- "the depressed person's emotional agony had so completely overwhelmed her vestigial defense mechanisms that whenever a member of her Support System finally said that she was dreadfully sorry but she absolutely MUST to get off the telephone, the primal instinct for sheer emotional survival now drove the depressed person to swallow every last tattered remnant of pride and to beg shamelessly for two or even just one more minute of the friend's time and attention,"

- "when she got quiet and centered and looked deep within, she could neither feel nor identify any feelings for the therapist as a person"

- "And thus that although the depressed person had had agonizing feelings aplenty since the therapist's suicide, these feelings appeared to be all and only for herself, i.e., for her loss, her abandonment, her grief, her trauma and pain and primal affective survival. And that this terrifying set of realizations, instead of awakening in her any feelings of compassion, empathy, or Other-directed grief for the therapist ...these realizations seemed merely to have brought up in the depressed person still more feelings about herself."

- the idea of a "toxic or manipulative self-hatred", and the act of recognizing it for what it was was itself declared to be a manipulative, desperate, "unable-to-face-the-truth" cowardice

- "her capacity for basic human empathy and compassion. She was asking sincerely, the depressed person said, honestly, desperately: what kind of person could seem to feel nothing- _nothing_ - for anyone but herself? What terms might be used to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, bottomless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared to herself to be?"

As I said, mindblowing.

:-?

Mahesh

2010-05-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

It's been a month since Mahesh's passing, and it still is a strange feeling for me to come to terms with it. I've known him since our very first day at IITM, and ever since then, we've been in touch via nearly every medium that existed. We're in together in every single group I'm a part of, and it was a rare day that I didn't hear something from him - some brilliant pun that he cooked up, some illuminating etymology for a Sanskrit word he chanced upon, some nice article he stumbled across or some music video that had a brilliant funda to it.

I could try describing him to you if you didn't know him personally, but I'm quite sure it'll come nowhere close. He was supremely brilliant, to a degree that I could not comprehend with my abilities. I mean every word of that: in the 6 odd years that I've known him, not once have I been able to grok how someone could know so much, be so sharp and so effortlessly connect ideas together. Even the most trivial chat conversation with him would leave me completely spellbound by his sheer intelligence. I ended up learning something fascinating in nearly every conversation with him, and everyone who's met him would agree with me on this. What made it even more amazing was that his enormous depth of knowledge pervaded every field imaginable. Academics? There he was, putting fundaes to 10 people crammed in his room the night before the quiz, not getting irritated once at needing to repeat himself, not thinking the least bit about spending all his time explaining stuff to junta, supremely confident of his own fundaes and doing all this with his inimitable panache, humour and style; Music? Ask him to describe RHCP's evolution, or the intricacies of a raaga, or about using formants in Fruity Loops and you're in for an absolute treat. Hell, he'd give you a live demonstration composing music on his cellphone synthesizer as he went along his lesson! Sports? You want to talk about basketball or tennis or football or skateboarding? He could as well be a professional bookie with the amount he knew; Got bored of talking and want to actually play? He was the basketball coach for an uncountable number of people, and many like me took up skateboarding because he was the teacher and it couldn't get much better than that.

It came to an extent that Mahesh was the recourse for many of us who were very disgruntled with the 'general sham' of the adult world. Here was a guy who could tell you that no, it wasn't all crap, and show you why it wasn't. And when he showed you, you'd see it, see that it wasn't all crap. You could pick up a conversation on anything with him, and by the end of ten minutes you'd find yourself seriously thinking of picking it up as a new hobby. Last year, we were all at Death Valley and getting rather bored as the night passed by. Someone remarked that the starlit sky was very clear, and slowly Mahesh started telling us little factoids from here and there - about how Orion actually has a bow that isn't visible in the cities, about how to locate Aldebaran, how Pleaides has much more than meets the eye.. by the end of half an hour, we were as invigorated as if we had been given a tour of the greatest show on earth by a guide who truly felt the greatness - and we had!

But to remember Mahesh primarily by his intelligence and learning would be like trying to remember the sun by its Fraunhoffer lines. There was much, much more to his personality than just his superior brilliance. For one, he was humble to a fault. The combination of such unbelievable talent and equally unbelievable humility was something I could never comprehend. I cannot count the number of times I've gone back and thought over some argument I had with him, only to realize that the openness, humility and fairness he displayed were far beyond what I was capable of.

I brought up fairness - whenever you reflect on your mental image of a person, there are some characteristics that stand out as being particularly amazing in your judgment. Mahesh's sense of fair play and ethics were almost superhuman. Here was a person who you could trust to play by the rules NO MATTER WHAT. Never once was there a compromise. Never an argument with himself that went, "See, that's fine, but let's be practical...". Never giving in for an opportunity for a 'quick con'. It was always the high road, no matter what the consequences were.

And in spite of following to the dot the severest of such self-set rules, he never took moral high ground when interacting with people. Never did he speak one word of criticism about anybody else's ethics. We hear much talk of 'dependability'. You could depend on Mahesh to help you out. Period. He was the kind of guy who would take it upon himself as a mission to help anyone who asked him.

Such a treasure trove of the finest of human qualities, and yet he did not have the slightest air of self-importance. His sense of humour is legendary, and never did he have qualms about making fun of himself.

How can anyone react to such perfection in any other way than mute acceptance?

Why did he take the extreme step? I don't know. Given the number of times I have sought and blindly followed his advice, and cannot help instinctively thinking that he fully knew what he was doing. Maybe this was all the world deserved of him. I hope those he has left behind find peace.

:-(

[ Very well-written posts on Mahesh by:

Sayan

Priya

Please let me know if there are more. ]

Insane theorem knockout

2010-04-09T08:58:00.000-07:00

(Many millions of thanks to Pradhan, who nucleated an enormously satisfying positive feedback loop that ended up making an extraordinarily dull day memorable)

Step right up folks! On the left, we have the Jordan Curve theorem. Essentially (please correct me if I'm oversimplifying):

You build a closed fence. At any point in time, you're either inside the fence or outside it.

The proof for this is either 60,000 lines long, or 6,500 lines long, depending on which formal language system we adopt and how many 'libraries' of theorems we invoke.

On the right, we have something that's not quite a theorem, but which we hope will appease the roaring bloodthirsty crowds nonetheless: The problem of finding a theoretical greatest lower bound to Graham's number. At one time, Graham's number was famous as the 'largest number to have ever been used in a mathematical proof'. That's a modest way of putting it:

Indeed, the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies at least one Planck volume.

It was in 1971 that Graham and Rothschild proved that the original problem to which this number is the answer is solvable in the first place, and their best estimate of the lower bound to this monster was ..... 6. They qualified their result modestly with the line, "Clearly, there is some room for improvement here."

There have been dramatic recent developments, where in 40 odd years later another chap, Geoff Exoo, "showed the solution to be at least 11, and provided experimental evidence suggesting that it is at least 12. The current best estimate of the greatest lower bound stands at 11."

Who do you think should win? :-)

Fungible

2010-04-04T03:28:00.000-07:00

This recent Shoaib Malik telephonic love business has us quite rattled, gentle reader. There, but for the grace of Brazzers.com, go half the world's engineers.

:-|

That explains it

2010-03-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

Bhartrhari is one of those Sanskrit poets who leaks vitriol and fire wherever you touch him. His angry rants about fools, full of the most delightful, full-mouthed, heartily aspirated mahaapraanas, are an absolute treat for those days when you just hate the world.

I was wondering why the poor chap had so much ... (wait for it)... negative energy (yes, my job involves a dangerously large management component) when I chanced upon this verse of his:

यां चिन्तयामि सततं मयि सा विरक्ता
सा अप्यन्यम् इच्छति जनं स जनो अन्यसक्तः |
अस्मत् कृते च परिशुष्यति काचिद् अन्या
धिक् तां च तं च मदनं च इमां च मां च ||

yaaM chintayaami satataM mayi saa viraktaa
saa apyanyam ichChati janaM sa jano anyasaktaH |
asmat kRRite cha parishuShyati kaachid anyaa
dhik taaM cha taM cha madanaM cha imaaM cha maaM cha ||

"The girl who I think of all day totally doesn't dig me, and she's after some other guy. That dick is after some other chick, and meanwhile because of my doing (of rejecting her? more?) one other girl is suffering. To hell with her, him, Love, this other one, and me!"

There. Clearer than Swami Nityananda's dedication to ananda-yoga.

--

I found this when I was searching for more fundaes about this absolutely fantabulously unbelievably epic bit of very old school wit, which I found via - who else? - Shreevatsa. Among the little gems of wit one collects with the bleak hope of flooring that super-cute chick in the bus the day one will finally manage to make eye contact and (gasp!) conversation with her, this one is verily the Koh-i-Noor:

There's metre iambic
and metre trochaic
and metre that's tender in tone.
But the metre
that's neater
and sweeter
completer
is meet her by moonlight, alone.

:-)

Notes from a budding adventure

2010-03-04T07:06:00.000-08:00

It is a rare moment in these debauched times of Kali, gentle reader, that one thoroughly enjoys doing something for its own sake; when that something stands by itself as a pleasant memory without needing to be an inflection point in a larger 'success' story arc. One therefore treasures such moments, and writes blog posts on them in hopes that one's readers don't notice one really has nothing to say.

--

X: "So what do we do this evening?"

[Deep mulling]

Y, in all seriousness: "How about Go-Karting?"
Z: "Uhm, err, Go-Karting eh? Uhmmmm no da..."

Y: "Good. I just wanted to make sure I got it out of the way before anyone else actually came up with it. How silly can a sport possibly get?"

--

X: "Macha, Money is fine da. I want Power in life."

Y: "Ah. I want to be in a position where people do not know that I wield a lot of power."

Z, speaking in the tone of a patient, experienced teacher gently reminding a pupil of an obvious part of the question he's missed answering: "But macha, do you want to be in that position while you actually have power, or when you don't have power?"

[Everyone instinctively understands there has been an epic moment. You can actually hear people thinking the logic through, before it hits everyone with the rousing force that N.D.Tiwari brand Musli powder ads hit the local TV circuit]

Y: "Macha obviously! If I don't have power and people don't know that I have power, ...."

--

X: "Macha IITM sucks now da. Our juniors don't do a tenth of the things we did."

Y: "I disagree. They are doing a lot of cool new things." [In a suave, smug, confident tone like that of Alan Shore in full flow when he's found just the perfect anecdote to make his case] "My juniors brewed beer in the wing."

Z: "Hey Pota's father's wing junta did that and they all got diarrhea the next day."

--

"Hey stop. You know what? Every base is base '10'. 2 in Base 2 is '10'. 3 in Base 3 is '10'. 10 in Base 10 is '10'. Just sayin'."

General junta: "WTF?"

"Fundamentally speaking, the job involves maximizing exports of Fair-and-Lovely cream to one of its most promising emerging markets, Kenya. It's hard for even the fraudest MBA to live knowing that."

--

Bonguly [MP3; Warning: NSFW, explicit.]

--

"See, we all want a caring, loving, understanding angel of a girl who wouldn't fall for cheap charms and wouldn't be impressed by momentary displays of wit. Therefore, by definition, the perfect girl is one who'll never fall for us."

--

"They do bloody Iyengar Investing, like Islamic Investing. Total cocksuckers man.They called X for an interview, and at the end asked him for a reference. He gave his McKinsey Associate Principal's contact. The fuckers called the Associate Principal up, asked crappy questions about X's math skills and school scores for 1 whole hour in the middle of a working day, and at the end, asked for a reference who could speak about him. WTF?"

--

"..but all that is fine man. What I want to know is, you're given this one life. What do you want to make with it?"

[Deep, thoughtful pause]

"Babies."

--

:-)

Nimbe uli - 'Raiyya rai'

2010-01-28T06:28:00.000-08:00

When the Joker said, "Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I'm a dog chasing cars ... I'm an agent of chaos", this was probably what was playing on his MP3 player:

Raaga link, MusicIndiaOnline link(much lower quality)

The perfect (r, t) to listen to this is a crowded bus at peak hour, with a million horns honking outside. It honestly is BRILLIANT! Even after the 10th listen, I bet you won't know just what the hell is happening in this song. I mean, somewhere in the middle, out of the general noise comes this fantastic bit of existentialism:

Bhagavanta shyaane budhvanta, hutsyaavne namna gottilla innu yaakanta!

And there's the general refrain of 'nimbe uli' (which pans left to right back) which is comprehensively senselessly awesome! There are so many voices and so many instruments that I can't even identify what is playing!

You can't even find anything to Google the song with - raiyya rai? nimbe uli? Even the movie name is 'Thaakath'. Hell, how do you even spell those consistently?

Gurukiran (the music director) and Hrudaya Shiva (the lyricist) now definitively occupy a genre that only Upendra could command so far - you can't decide if they've doped their balls off, or are sublimely brilliant strange attractors in a phase space of mostly boring lyrics!

:-)

Die Luft der Freiheit weht heimwärts!

2010-01-12T01:08:00.000-08:00

As a wise man who probably wanted to convince himself to move his senti ass once said, "Life is not so much a matter of position as of disposition." :-)

501 Fascinating Facts

2010-01-10T14:05:00.000-08:00

The Sanskrit word for 'essence' is 'sattva'. That literally means 'is-ness' or 'being-ness', with 'sat' being the participle (noun-ified version of a verb) of 'as', 'to be'. Later connotations have taken on a meaning of 'goodness', via the idea that something is truly itself only when it is at its 'best'.

Curiously, the word 'essence' follows in the same way from the Latin verb for being, 'esse' :-)

अथातो blog-अ जिज्ञासा

2010-01-01T00:09:00.001-08:00

(This is my first attempt at blogging in Sanskrit! Here is a PDF file with the transliteration, my translation and some notes. Also, that should have no problems with the fonts. The cornerstone on which I'm constructing this monument of corniness is a resolute conviction that no one will ever read it :) Happy New Year!!)

(All glory again to Shreevatsa's Sanskrit transliterator. Google Indic sucks because you no longer have access to the English 'source', but here you do. Also, each scheme has some letters more 'naturally' represented than the others. You have all of them together here, and can seamlessly switch!)

बाणकाव्य-बहुव्रीहि-क्षुधार्त:, हनूमत्पुच्छेन भीमसेन-बाधवत् blog-एषाम् घोर-दीर्घतयैव साधुपाठक-परिपीडन-कलावल्लभ:, रघुवंशकवे: सन्मार्गे प्रतिलोमग: इव आरम्भ-स्वनिन्दनयैव (अ)पाण्दित्यम् प्रकटमान:, अतो मौनमिति एकैकचित् स्वदीयम् नाम विभूषणम् परित्याजमान: अस्म्यहम् भवतो विनतो गद्यकार: |

मदनुभवे लघुतमे भाषापरिज्ञानम्

लेखनम् < वचनम् < पठनम् < श्रवणम्

इति क्रमे उद्ध्रियते | सर्वत्र स्वमतप्रकटनम् सुलभतरम्, अन्यमतग्रहणम् दुर्लभतरम् हि | उत वचनम् प्रतिमत्य लेखने कालप्रश्लेष: न संभवति | तर्हि अपि, एषु लेखनम् सुलभतमम् सत्यपि लभ्य-गद्याङ्गने नव-संस्कृत-पाठकानाम् चङ्क्रमण-चिह्ना: न प्रकाशन्ते | कुत: तथा?

Monier-Williams कोशादि अद्यलभ्यै: उपकरणै: गद्यलेखनानुसन्धानाय अयम् एको रोमशीदान: | यत् लघु-ज्ञानानुभवपरिचय-नदीपुषम् संस्कृत-लेखनदौर्लभ्य-महासागरम् तितीर्षुणा कोविद-विलसच्चित्तज-वानरसैन्येन सह अल्पा: अपि रोमशय: उपयोग्या: :-)

जन्माद्यस्य यत:? गीर्वाणवाण्याम् गद्यरचनम् कुत:? बाण-कोण-पिनाक-पावकेति केयम् कुचेष्टा? आङ्ग्ले पाठकपीडनातृप्ति: न लब्दा वा? एभ्य: श्रीमद्भागवतारम्भे भगवान् वेदव्यासस्य ध्यानो अयम् अभिज्ञायते :-

जन्माद्यस्य यतोऽन्वयाद् इतरत: चार्थेष्वभिज्ञ: स्वराट्
तेने ब्रह्महृदा य आदिकवये मुह्यन्ति यत् सूरय: |
तेजो-वारि-मृदाम् यथा विनिमयो यत्र त्रिसर्गोऽमृशा
धाम्ना स्वेन सदा निरस्तकुहकम् सत्यं परं धीमहि ||
(1.1.1)

तन्महाकाव्यस्य अनतिविश्रुतेऽन्त्यश्लोकेऽपि एत एव वाचो दृश्यन्ते :-

कस्मै येन विभासितोऽयम् अतुलो ज्ञानप्रदीप: पुरा
तद्-रूपेण च नारदाय मुनये कृष्णाय तद्रूपिणा |
योगीन्द्राय तदात्मनाथ भगवद्-राताय कारुण्यत:
तच्छुद्धं विमलं विशोकम् अमृतं सत्यं परं धीमहि ||
(12.13.19)

(पद्ये द्वेऽपि मम प्रियतमे 19x4 शार्दूलविक्रीडितवर्णे स्त: | निरुक्ति: वर्णनामस्य-अस्य किम्? )

Blog-एषु वा, तालपत्रेषु वा, आङ्ग्ले वा, Klingon-ए वा, शुद्ध-स्फटिक-संकाश-संस्कृते वा मूले इदमेको हि उद्दिश्यते - तच्छुद्धं विमलं विशोकम् अमृतं सत्यं परं धीमहि :-)

--

उपाधिरसौ ब्रह्मसूत्रेभ्य: विनीतो चित्रनमन: | ब्रह्मसूत्रेषु प्रथम: 'अथातो ब्रह्म जिज्ञासा' इति | अस्मिन् जिज्ञासाया: प्रामुख्यता, प्रथमता, हेतुत्व:, आवश्यकता च गमनीया: | 'जन्माद्यस्य यत:' इति द्वितीयो सूत्र: :-)

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

2009-12-30T12:22:00.000-08:00

I found this absolutely fantastic TED talk via Thejeswini:

There are far too many brilliant quotes to choose one as a teaser. Truly one of those instant epics that we'll refer to frequently for a very long time to come. As always, I'm too lazy for structure, so here's ever-reliable SoC.

de Botton's definition of a snob is perfect. Superiority complexes, looking down on people, elitism, etc. are all important features, but quick judging is a very important part of snobbery. I am reminded of this little anecdote I read a long time ago:
It is reported that former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George was once introduced by a chairman who jokingly said, "I had expected to find Mr. Lloyd George a big man in every sense, but you see for yourselves he is quite small in stature."

Not amused, Lloyd George rebutted, "In North Wales we measure a man from his chin up. You evidently measure from his chin down."
His insight into the fixation on society-set emotional rewards was bang on target - as was the one on fearing ridicule and low-opinion more than the direct consequences of failure themselves.
Equality causing Envy - brilliant! Absolutely true! Equality is the necessary cause, randomness is the sufficient one. "Anyone can do anything" is pernicious!

I also think it applies to positive emotions - I think people can only fall in love with people who they somehow imagine to be 'equal' to themselves. Extending it a bit further, I think any kind of engagement happens only on the premise of equality. The fact that you cannot engage with everything is a glorious gift - "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - H.P.Lovecraft
Meritocracy-illusion bashing - absolutely agree. I have never understood why Meritocracy is held as such an achievable (oˆ Shreevatsa), infallible ideal, when there is no way to reliably measure merit. I won't comment on the ideal itself, but surely there should be no misunderstanding that such a thing is even remotely possible!

Of course, in the very limited context of education in India, 'Meritocracy' has a very specific and mostly sensible meaning. But while the other options available are worse, that doesn't make this good - just marginally better. It is carrying the problem of giving opportunities to deserving people one level further - to the level of measuring peoples' deservedness, and I am utterly unconvinced that any exam has that kind of resolution. I'm not in the least comfortable with that, and find it dishonest that we wring our hands saying "We can't do any better, can you?" and think we've solved it.(In this context, I am reminded of Churchill's quote - "Democracy is the worst kind of government, except for all the others that have been tried.").
"Nothing at its center that is non-human" - My thoughts exactly! "Escape from the human anthill" is a brilliant way of putting it.
"Your ideas of success are sucked in from others" - Absolutely! Related must-see documentaries: 'Century of Self' and 'The Merchants of Cool'.

I remember seeing a trailer for Mad Men in the Wabash 9 theatre in July 2007, and one quote from it was branded onto my memory. The protagonist is a successful advertising executive in the heady 1960s, when the true power of PR was being discovered. His secretary tells something naive about love, and looks straight into her eyes and says in an inimitable tone: "The reason you haven't felt it is because it doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons." I didn't (want to) believe it then, and neither do even today, but there's something to the idea. (The line is in the first episode, which you can find on Sidereel).
"It's bad enough, not getting what you want. But it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out at the end of a journey,that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along." - That could be the headline of my blogdungsroman :-)

There were some ideas I wasn't too happy with - the one about showing sympathy for a guy with a Ferrari for being 'insecure' sounded extremely naive and somewhat self-deceptive (or maybe condescending?). The needless focus on the idea that every successful man has some aspect of his life where he wasn't successful also made it seem like he stubbornly didn't want to believe there could be a successful life without a stain. The talk could have done without that bit of whining. Overall though, it's hands-down fantastic :-)

As a person, too, he is quite interesting. For one, I absolutely love his acquired British accent. Acquired accents tend to be more 'perfect' than natural ones, because there is an active effort in identifying what defines the accent. There's a kind of maturity, power, smoothness and elegance associated with his British accent that I can't quite explain. The few minutes starting from 10:00 are just brilliant in this aspect!

His family is Swiss, and is insanely rich. His father was one of the founders of UBS' Global Asset Management group, and left the family £200 million in a trust fund. The wiki claims that in spite of that, de Botton has made a living solely out of his book sales. Do take a look at his wiki page - his books, especially everything he has written after, and including, The Art of Travel seem very interesting.

In one of his interviews, he says this:

Why did you pick Cambridge?

I was attracted to the prestige of either Oxford or Cambridge and picked Cambridge because I liked the flat, rather Dutch quality of the surrounding countryside. I also hoped that I would meet beautiful and intelligent girls with whom to have long conversations about love and truth. It didn't quite turn out that way, in fact rarely have I felt more starved of female company than at Cambridge.

LOL :D Anybody's who has thought that of any university and met with that fate is hereby instantly promoted to the highly coveted rank of "Co-suffering Comrade" :P

(Harsh's epic jab to this: "I see you've been flying Virgin America too" :D )

"Anything else you worship will eat you alive"

2009-12-28T20:33:00.000-08:00

Just one of those days when I remember something in the shower, and feel compelled to write about it.

Exhibit A:

The Mukunda Mala is a fantastic poem in praise of Lord Krishna. The author, Kulashekhara Azhwar, is one of the 12 canonical Azhwars. The poem is notable not just for the evident devotional meaning, but also for little 'easter eggs' of grammar, meter and figure of speech in every nook and corner. Here's one of my favourite verses from there:

नाथे न: पुरुषोत्तमे त्रिजगताम् एकाधिपे चेतसा
सेव्ये स्वस्य-पदस्य दातरि परे नारायणे तिष्ठति |
यम् कन्चिद् पुरुषाधमम् कतिपय-ग्रामेशम् अल्पार्थदम्
सेवायै मृगयामहे नरम् अहो! मूढा वराका वयम्! ||

naathe na: puruShottame trijagataam ekaadhipe chetasaa
sevye svasya-padasya-daatari pare naaraayaNe tiShThati |
yam kanchid puruShaadhamam katipaya-graamesham alpaarthadam
sevaayai mRRigayaamahe naram aho! muuDhaa varaakaa vayam! ||

(This is from Shreevatsa's excellent Sanskrit transliterator page. The really nice part is how all the standard schemes are right in one place, and updated in realtime. Very easy to fix errors and type quickly)

The broad meaning, deliberately translated to be very general, literal and simplistic, is:

"Our refuge, the best of those filled with life, the overseer of everything, he who is very easily accessible by the heart, the granter of great bliss, is sitting right in sight. And yet, we struggle hard to seek and serve some silly king, who at most can throw us some money - surely, we are fools!"

The tone is hard to translate, but I think it is a self-critical ruing, though not in pathetic sense. It almost becomes exhortative in the choice of words near the end ('to seek to serve' - sevaayai mrigayaamahe). The censoring is about choosing the 'right' thing to struggle for.

Exhibit B:

David Foster Wallace's absolutely fantastic commencement speech at Kenyon College, about leading a compassionate life:

Because here’s something else that’s true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

(The speech is really amazing, and worth every minute of your time.)

Exhibit C:

Russell's brilliant essay, 'On Youthful Cynicism', for other commonly glorified things that will also eat you alive. The parts about Progress, Beauty and Truth are particularly amazing. The introduction of the idea of 'comfort without power' being a cause for unhappiness made me look around in my head to make sure ol' Bertie wasn't peering into my head with a time-traveling legilimens spell.

Exhibit D:

[oˆ Mukund] In Africa they won’t feel lonesome tonight - Very nice article, contrasting the individualism of the West with the more communal environment of Africa. It is written with a positive bias towards Africa, but the points it raises are still valid.

--

A joke about God goes thus - 'Devaru iddana?' 'DevaraaNegu illa' ( 'Does God exist?' - 'I swear to God, No.').

:-)

Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corporation

2009-12-22T18:34:00.000-08:00

I was reading the corporate history of the parody newspaper, The Onion, when I stumbled upon this chronology:

1922: Onion Radio founded.
2009: The Onion and all corporate holdings sold to a Chinese conglomerate, Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corporation.
2009: The Chinese conglomerate, Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corporation, having felt misled in its acquisition of The Onion, has placed The Onion up for sale less than one week after purchasing the paper.

Yu Wan Mei Amalgamated Salvage Fisheries and Polymer Injection Corporation, ROFLMAO!! I don't remember laughing so much at a wiki article since the Uncyclopedia article on the Top 100 Worst Movies of all time!

It turns out they've made it extremely elaborate. The website for the corporation is absolutely hilarious, and has fantastic attention to detail. Everything, right from the y-axis having the dependent variable to the random stock pictures and the absolutely fantastic Chinese-English quotes ("This is why SATISFACTION is synonymous with YU WAN MEI.", "ROBUSTNESS IS UNAVOIDABLE with the consumption of YU WAN MEI products."), random quotes from the CEO ("Fish Time Is Success Time") and random others (“To Extract The Entrails, One Must First Extract His Ego”, “Capital Proliferation Cannot Be Stopped”, "Eternal Solutions for Yesterday and Tomorrow", "Internationalized Style of Management"). They even have a super fantastic promo video!

There is even a product line up, and the best of it's products is the Yu Wan Mei Device:

The description reads "The device has been completed and is now available for sale. Code 41-Virtue-00B"

Coming back to the Onion, there is even the CEO's statement on the disastrous acquisition, "Why Did No One Inform Us Of The Imminent Death Of The American Newspaper Industry?". I LOVE the laboured English drenched in metaphor. It reminds me of this fantastic short story by Anil Menon, "Love in a Hot Climate" (small PDF), which has English 'more Indian' than Indian English. In one of those now-ungooglable articles, I read about how caricatures strike a chord because they are more real than the object they represent. The caricature of a politician with a big nose has such a big nose that it tickles our subconscious identity of him. People skilled at making caricatures have a knack for identifying what it is about a person's face that makes us identify him.

:-)

Story

2009-12-14T13:15:00.000-08:00

You want a story? Here's a story. A formula for the roots of a quadratic equation is simple enough to be taught to sixth-graders. But how about one for a cubic equation? Just one more degree and you have a story full of intrigue, challenge, vagaries of fate, lots of money, misunderstandings, medieval curiosities and finally sweet revenge by a disciple.

(All quotes below are sourced originally from wiki article on Cubic polynomials; I just followed the links to the later parts.)

In the early 16th century, the Italian mathematician Scipione del Ferro found a method for solving a class of cubic equations, namely those of the form x³ + mx = n. In fact, all cubic equations can be reduced to this form if we allow m and n to be negative, but negative numbers were not known to him at that time. Del Ferro kept his achievement secret until just before his death in 1526, when he told his student Antonio Fiore about it.

Whoa! Negative numbers not known, formulae kept secret for life, a final change of mind on the deathbed, a lucky student,...

In 1530, another mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia announced that he could solve cubic equations. He was soon challenged by Fiore, which led to a famous contest between the two. Each contestant had to put up a certain amount of money and to propose a number of problems for his rival to solve. Whoever solved more problems within 30 days would get all the money. Tartaglia received questions in the form x³ + mx = n, for which he had worked out a general method. Fiore received questions in the form x³ + mx² = n, which proved to be too difficult for him to solve, and Tartaglia won the contest.

Aww.. poor overconfident young Fiore, who lost so badly that his name is now almost ungooglable, and the fiendishly lucky Tartaglia. Grr, do we want revenge, or what!

Later, Tartaglia was persuaded by another mathematican, Gerolamo Cardano to reveal his secret for solving cubic equations. In 1539, Tartaglia did so only on the condition that Cardano would never reveal it and that if he did reveal a book about cubics, that he would give Tartaglia time to publish. Some years later, Cardano learned about Ferro's prior work and published Ferro's method in his book Ars Magna in 1545, meaning Cardano gave Tartaglia 6 years to publish his results (with credit given to Tartaglia for an independent solution).

Cardano's promise with Tartaglia stated that he not publish Tartaglia's work, and Cardano felt he was publishing del Ferro's, so as to get around the promise. Nevertheless, this led to a challenge to Cardano by Tartaglia, which Cardano denied. The challenge was eventually accepted by Cardano's student Lodovico Ferrari. Ferrari did better than Tartaglia in the competition, and Tartaglia lost both his prestige and income.

Take that, vile Tartaglia, you beater of poor students in public contests and usurper of their meagre RA stipends, you! Revenge is a dish best served cold, particularly by a disciple! (And apropos of Revenge: "Today, I was thinking about the expression 'revenge is a dish best served cold'. Then I considered that 'revenge is sweet'. I've come to the conclusion that revenge is ice cream. MLIA")

The story ends there. But as all good stories, there are layers upon layers of history and depth to everything, and they lead to more stories of their own. For example, why was the origin of the story, Del Ferro, so secretive?

Instead of publishing his ideas, he would only show them to a small, select group of friends and students. It is suspected that this is due to the practice of mathematicians at the time of publicly challenging one another. When a mathematician accepted another's challenge, each mathematician needed to solve the other's problems. The loser in a challenge often lost funding or his university position. Del Ferro was fearful of being challenged and likely kept his greatest work secret so that he could use it to defend himself in the event of a challenge.

Ha! And to think today's profs whine about losing tenure and not getting an NSF Career award :P

But as every good story-within-a-story, there's a lovely big red button begging to be pushed to take you deeper:

Despite this secrecy, he had a notebook where he recorded all his important discoveries..

Ahhhhhh, now that's a few more hours of wikiing :-)

OK, enough about this old guy. Let's look at another guy with character. What about this Cardano chap? He had to do quite a bit of self-justification and 'miserable pettifogging in the court of his own conscience' when he went ahead and published Tartaglia's work in spite of his promise. What of him?

He was born in Pavia, Lombardy, the illegitimate child of Fazio Cardano, a mathematically gifted lawyer. In his autobiography, Cardano claimed that his mother had attempted to abort him.

Assuming Cardano's psychological problems weren't the cause of this, imagine how it is to live knowing that.

He went on to do a whole lot of work, like being the first to describe Typhoid fever, publishing many results in algebra and probability, building several mechanical devices like the combination lock and universal joint, being instrumental (heh) in the development of high-speed printing presses through his work on hypocycloids (Mukund note), etc. Top notch all-rounder, fits the image of a Enlightened European Engineer+Scientist perfectly.

Significantly, in the history of Deaf education, he said that deaf people were capable of using their minds, argued for the importance of teaching them, and was one of the first to state that deaf people could learn to read and write without learning how to speak first.

And yet, in the same Enlightened Europe, a thought like that was so unconventional that it had to be noted down. But tragedy looms:

Cardano's eldest and favorite son was executed in 1560 after he confessed to having poisoned his cuckolding wife. His other son was a gambler, who stole money from him. He allegedly cropped the ears of one of his sons. Cardano himself was accused of heresy in 1570 because he had computed and published the horoscope of Jesus in 1554. Apparently, his own son contributed to the prosecution, bribed by Tartaglia. He was arrested, had to spend several months in prison and was forced to abjure his professorship.

:-( Grr, that vile bastard Tartaglia. Richly deserved his fate of penury, didn't he? What of him, anyway?

Niccolò Fontana was the son of Michele Fontana, a rider and deliverer. In 1505, Michele was murdered and Niccolò, his two siblings, and his mother were impoverished. Niccolò experienced further tragedy in 1512 when the French invaded Brescia during the War of the League of Cambrai. The militia of Brescia defended their city for seven days. When the French finally broke through, they took their revenge by massacring the inhabitants of Brescia. By the end of battle, over 45,000 residents were killed. During the massacre, a French soldier sliced Niccolò's jaw and palate. This made it impossible for Niccolò to speak normally, prompting the nickname "Tartaglia" (stammerer).

Ouch, he doesn't seem much like a villain anymore :( Reminds me of an article a long time ago about how in most of Indian mythology, there is no villain or bad guy or Evil. Good people just assumed the role of the villain temporarily, just to let God have a little bit of leela. In the end, it's one big happy family.

Thinking a bit, what I find most amazing about this whole story and array of characters is that like life itself, it's all spectacularly pointless. What was all the fight for? A closed form solution for cubics? Why? Today, if you give me a cubic equation, the first thing I'll think of doing is to graph it with Wolfram Alpha. Um no, actually the first thing I'll do is to try to convince you that we're both better off by not solving that equation and chilling out instead,

but I'm assuming you didn't fall for that. Graph it, read off the roots and be happy in life. One might object that I am able to do so because of the efforts of all these people, but that is beside the point, that the exact thing these people were fighting for is no longer useful; further, one can always counter that every single fart of every single ant since the beginning of creation has been necessary for me to able to be sitting here and being able to graph cubics. Causality is a very tricky devil.

And that gives me an opportunity to quote one of my most favorite lines:

Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.

:-)

Osmosis Jones

2009-12-05T19:11:00.000-08:00

I was speaking to Vimal about the subjects of my past two posts (Path of Love, More worms), and was reminded of one of the most wonderful animation movies I have seen, Osmosis Jones. I'm surprised how few times it comes up in conversation - I never even remember talking about it in the past 3-4 years!

Ever since I was a kid, I remember constructing elaborate fantasies about how my own body works. I always imagined me to be some kind of a planet, and there are lots of 'little people' going around doing their job. Brain cells, "immune cells", liver cells - all of them were characters in this big world called me. Sometimes they used to break out of character and talked about their lives! I still do that, but it's mostly when I'm sick and I imagine epic battles taking place.

Osmosis Jones is ALL that, and much much more! It's the story of a white blood cell, Osmosis Jones, a 'cop' in the City of Frank Police Department (FPD) in the City of Frank. Frank is a zoo keeper who couldn't care less about his health. Life's as usual in Frank, till a mysterious and very dangerous intruder gets in - and it's up to Frank and his new friend Drixenol the cold pill to stop him! Jones' great-great-grandfather was a celebrated hero who fought the measles in his day, and there's been a Jones on the force ever since his ancestors came over on the umbilical cord. He's determined to save Frank in spite of opposition from the Mayor of Frank, who is Frank's complacency personified. Fantastic stuff!

Everything about the movie is fantastic - the plot, the voices, the music, the jokes, everything! And it has its tearjerker moments, too! Fantastic stuff, every minute of the 1.5 hours is gold. There are tons of copies floating around, here's one.

Thinking a little further, the amazing part about the movie is really the attention to detail. I think this movie beats even Futurama in that department. Everything is amazingly well thought-out and consistent. The brilliant bits are very subtle, and you'll most likely miss them in the first viewing. But even if you don't observe any of them, the movie will still be a nice, fun experience. When you do observe something in the middle of the movie, you go "Fuck, that's brilliant!" and you go back, and you see that it's been there all along. For example, in the Mayor's office is a statue of a sperm cell, and the plaque below it reads "Our Founder" :-)

In another instance, Jones and Drix encounter a virus and Drix is about to shoot it, but Jones stops him, saying "Hold it, this one's on our side. He came in on a vaccine and ratted on the Flu, and is now on our Virus Protection Program".

In a seedy bar near the Liver-more area, a sign reads "No cilia, no cytoplasm - no service!", obviously displaying the area's stark racism against non-Frank cells.

There's a rock band playing in a bar, and it's called 'Kidney Rock' (and part of the full song). Also, earlier in the film one immune cell tells to another sitting in a cop car, "Y'know, this weekend I'm taking my girl down under to the kidneys to see the stones!". The other cop says, "Good, they might be gone soon!"

In one of the scenes, the Mayor is asked by a journalist, "What is your opinion on the latest fat housing crisis?". He replies in a typical politician's drone, "We're beginning construction of a third chin". The Mayor then announces a trip to a chicken wings festival, and there is great cheer through out. The loudest cheer comes from the locality of "Love Handle", which has a sign next to it, "Frank's fastest growing community!" like a housing advertising sign!

The awesomeness only increases as the movie progresses. After a turn of events where the Mayor calls Drix a 'TEMPORARY relief cold pill', Drix gets disillusioned and books his tickets to the Bladder. He's almost got there, and is boarding the ship scheduled for 9:47 Pee 'Em when Osmosis comes to the dock and tells him the villain's still out there, there's more work for them to do and tries to cheers him up. Drix is still depressed, and says "I can't do anything, I'm just a cold pill. I'm useless.". To which Osmosis replies, "Come on Frank, you can do it! I've known sugar pills that cured cancer, just because they believed!" BRILLIANT! Just BRILLIANT!

After a very heroic and close rescue, Osmosis' girlfriend (of course he has one) sighs with relief, "Thank Frank!"

Fantastic movie. Go see!

IMDB collection of quotes from the movie.

The real world is no less amazing:

White blood cell engulfing a bacterium. Just look at the chase! Go Osmosis!

Look at how at 0:03 our Hero thrusts abruptly - "And take THAT.. dang the little bastard is fast". Near 0:07, there's a second bacterium - "Hey, what's this, ANOTHER one? Damn. Should I...? Uh let me just extend a bit over, I can get him... naah, I gotta nail the first one". And at near 0:15, "Aha! Got you now, you sonofa.. DANG can't any o' these RBCs stay STILL? Now you really got me mad!!". This should be set to music, and there should be a commentary!

It never really rubs in, but when I do stop and think for a minute, I'm always amazed at the human body. I'm this walking-talking-thinking universe of 10000 billion cells, all of them alive! Reminds me of this Groucho Marx quote: "Life, n.: A whim of several billion cells to be you for a while."

It's a sobering thought, knowing that so much is happening within each one of us. A billion movies could be made about how T-cell #14,567,933 just pwned that bacterium in your gut, only to discover that his co-pwner just got digested, and how an injudicious choice of pizza topping by the big guy above caused a genocide of 60 million stomach lining cells wiping out friends and family, but ONE guy survived it all, and... :-)

The single best pep-quote I have read ever is this (paraphrased, don't know source): If ever you're feeling down, if ever you think you're not good enough, just remember the first goddamn thing you did in life was to win a race against 300 million motherfuckers!

:-)

--

Update: I'm reminded of a very nice article Karthik wrote at >> : "Why are you producing so few red blood cells today?"

More worms

2009-12-05T16:25:00.000-08:00

Some stuff I thought were related to my previous post: The second most amazing disease I've encountered so far is the Plague. The mechanism of transmission, and the circumstances that lead to finding it are also amazing. From the wiki page:

It is mainly a disease in the fleas that infested the rats, making the rats themselves the first victims of the plague. Infection in a human occurs when a person is bitten by a flea that has been infected by biting a rodent that itself has been infected by the bite of a flea carrying the disease. The bacteria multiply inside the flea, sticking together to form a plug that blocks its stomach and causes it to starve. The flea then bites a host and continues to feed, even though it cannot quell its hunger, and consequently the flea vomits blood tainted with the bacteria back into the bite wound. The bubonic plague bacterium then infects a new victim, and the flea eventually dies from starvation.

As an aside, one of the classic 'punishment births' in Indian mythology is a preta, a state defined by voracious, unsatisfiable hunger.

Easily the most mind-numbing disease I've read about is Syphilis. [You can wiki it, but the page contains graphic images of diseased penises. I suggest you disable images and then load it if you are not sure]. Here's a paraphrased, simplified and dramatized version of the diseases's effects: The victim gets the bacteria via sexual contact. In a few days, a few small, painless boils appear near the point of contact and elsewhere. In most cases, they are hard to even find. They go away without any incident in a few weeks. Nothing happens for the next few months. Then, lesions appear throughout the body and go away without incident again in a few weeks. In most of cases, people don't even bother to visit doctors because the symptoms are not debilitating in any way. Even if they do go to a doctor, it is very hard to diagnose because the symptoms are extremely commonplace and similar to tens of other simpler diseases. It's for this reason that Syphilis is called 'the great imitator'.

Next, the disease waits for as much as 30 years before manifesting itself seriously! This stage is precipitous, and many large organ systems fail at the same time, including drastic changes in the victim's personality itself. Imagine that! 30 years!

Another reason why Syphilis is amazing is the history of cures people have attempted for it. One of them was mercury fumigation, and here is another one of those all-time-epic articles about mercury: The magical properties of Mercury.

The Path of Love is never smooth

2009-12-04T11:48:00.000-08:00

Easily the single most amazing thing I have read about animals in my entire life: Reddit page on the Emerald cockroach wasp.

Make SURE to read the comments too - they are the reason why reddit is amazing.

And you thought your sex life was bad :-)

Update (23 Dec): Here's a somewhat 'corresponding' version about plants: "Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too"
--

The title is from the classic song, Finite Simple Group of Order 2

--

Full Metal Jacket

2009-11-29T00:07:00.000-08:00

I have the distinction of not having a clue about what most people consider to be the cornerstones of the edifice of Good Stuff. Shortage very succinctly lamented when I was raving on about Scarborough Fair a few weeks ago, "What a late discoverer of delights you are!". However, if we are to see the putative half-full part of the glass, this ignorance seems to allow me to discover good stuff at a time when I am more able to appreciate it. I was wallowing in this self-same ignorance when I was browsing youtube for videos of Winston Wolf (from Pulp Fiction; Lord have mercy, I do know about that) for probably the 20th time now, and I saw this video:

Full Metal Jacket - Motivational Speech

By God, and great homecoming fuck fantasies with erect nipple wet-dreams of Mary Jane Rottencrotch! What a scene! I threw all warnings of piracy control policies to the wind and went ahead and watched the movie.

Full Metal Jacket is actually two movies in one, much like Wall-E is. The first part describes military training at camp and the second one is about actual warfare. I couldn't appreciate the second one too much, and I probably need to re-watch it a few times to understand nuances better. But the first one - ah, that's what this post is about.

One thing that stood out, in my view, was that the first part was actually just a series of rather disjoint clips, with no smooth transition. The viewer is expected to fill in the gaps and make the story, and if this technique is done well, the movie gives a better experience than any possible transition scenes. Sort of like this old joke about bikinis [1] :

Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

The viewer's imagination fills it up most satisfactorily. This has a double-advantage, in that the director can also focus on getting each chunk perfectly right, and not worry about how it fits in with the rest of the movie. One of the most important ingredients of this technique however, is that the scenes must be distinct enough for the viewer to detect a clear difference, but not so distinct that the jump is too big to fill. If the scenes are too close, the imagination-filling part doesn't kick in too well and you get a jagged experience. There's definitely some kind of uncanny valley here. Tarantino is one of the people who have got the pre-valley peak bang on. I can't think of one right now, but there are tons of examples of a director trying too hard with transition scenes to keep the narration self-contained, and thereby ruining the feel.

Back to the movie. Without doubt, Sergeant Hartman is the absolute star. I can't stop raving about the guy. Take ANY scene he is in. There's an almost magical power to his screen presence and the power, the raw power that he exudes on screen is palpable. I have had a few teachers who wielded a similar kind of power. I detested them and dislike them even now, but if you were to sneak up behind me and do an imitation of one of them and ask me jiggle my balls with my left pinky, I will unquestioningly jiggle my balls before thinking. This kind of power over people is different from the abstract notion of power that is popular today. Having armies march in front of you doesn't quite cut it - it's more a one-to-one thing. Here's another favorite scene of mine where this power is demonstrated:

Pulp Fiction - Breakfast scene. Just observe the way Jules asks Brett to sit down at 4:06. The way his hand keeps moving, slowly, till 4:09. That's what I'm talking about.

The terror is tetrated later on, when Jules fears Marsellus Wallace so much. If Jules himself is so scary, and he is scared of Marsellus Wallace, how powerful must Marsellus Wallace be! Surely far more powerful than anything that can depicted on a movie screen!

This kind of transitive super-empowering is also done to perfection in The Usual Suspects. This description of Keyser Soze by Verbal Kint chills anyone's blood better than hours of gore:

Verbal's description begins at 1:50. Start there, turn off your monitor and just listen.

The other character in The Usual Suspects that I found as chilling as Keyser Soze was Mr. Kobayashi. In this link, please see the part between 1:04:50 and 1:10:07 - Megavideo link. (Ms. Finneran is Keaton's girlfriend)

Don't be lazy to navigate there. This is not a commonly remembered scene, and is one of the only good scenes from the movie not to be found on Youtube or anywhere on Google Video. The Megavideo link may go down anytime, so do use SideReel and find it if it's gone. In case everything fails, as the very last resort, here is the transcript of the most chilling part:

Get your rest, Gentlemen. The boat will be ready for you on Friday. If I see you or any of your friends before then, Miss. Finneran will find herself the victim of a most gruesome violation before she dies. As will your father, Mr. Hockney. and your Uncle Randall in Arizona, Mr. Kint. I might only castrate Mr. McManus's nephew, David. Do I make myself clear?

This transcript is nothing, I repeat, nothing, without Mr. Kobayashi's mild, educated - no, learned, calm accent. The austere serenity with which this threat is delivered - that seals the deal.

Another recent demonstration of such cold power is that by the fantastic Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. His every moment in the movie is brilliant - the first Jew-rat scene, the Cinderella scene - I can't count! He amazing cold power will keep you riveted whenever he's on.

Inglourious Basterds, the Jew-Rat analogy

His accent that is ever present but makes a distinct appearance at places - like 'never occur' in the clip above, and the derisive, sneering way he mentions 'dignity' - has this effect of marking him as an outsider, not one of us. And he's an outsider with power, loads of it. Earlier in this scene, when he switches over to English, I went 'fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck' till the last bullet was fired. The dialog between him and Ms. Hammersmack which leads to the Cinderella sequence was another one of those gut-chilling moments of fear and tension.

(There are many other scenes in the movie I want to talk about, including ones not involving him. The Bear Jew scene where the German does not flinch, does not blink and looks straight into his killer's eyes; the finger counting scene; many more. I also want to rant about how much I hated the ending, and how much I hated Brad Pitt's character for winning everything with no effort on- or off-screen whatsoever. I also want to present my theory of optimally-constrained movie moments, but all that for another sunny day. Today is all about cold power.)

It is important to note that in ALL of these examples, none of the parties wielding supreme power have ever any weapon at all. If they have indeed held one, it is at best as powerful as what everyone in the scene is holding. No, it's subtler, more personal than that. Further, none of these people are really at the top of any scheme they are in. Hartman is just a measly drill instructor, not a General with supreme command. Jules is just a contract killer, like a thousand others, who quivers before Marsellus Wallace, and who wets his pants when he contemplates the prospect of a nurse coming home to see a dead body. Kobayashi is a simple lawyer, just an order-carrier for an unseen Kaiser Soze. Even Hans Landa is just a lowly Colonel. It is almost as if their low position clears any illusions of power vested by a hierarchy, and thus allows them to focus on personal power, over individuals. If Landa had been a General, he might have just got a platoon of soldiers to do a job. The power vested in him would have been textbook-like, and his exertion of that power is also textbook-like. If the General of an army gets people to listen to him with rapt attention and hang on to every word, there's nothing special about that. They're listening to him because he's the General. But when a lowly Colonel philosophizes over how rats are different from squirrels, and yet everyone listens to him at the edge of their seats, there you see the kind of power that we are celebrating.

As an aside, I'm quickly becoming a great fan of the techniques of British colonial administration. They were used against us, yes, but that fact should not come in the way of measuring their effectiveness, nor cloud our memory of them being used to root out some of our society's very worst diseases like Sati. Part of this appreciation is because of the brilliant way Dilip taught us Indian history. For example, let me quote Charles James Napier (of the 'Peccavi' fame) from Wikipedia:

The best way to quiet a country is a good thrashing, followed by great kindness afterwards. Even the wildest chaps are thus tamed

This technique is recommended everywhere from wild animal domestication to keeping two-year olds under control. The entire system of ragging (or hazing) is based on just this. It operates at a kind of pre-intellectual level, and by god is it effective! Any intellectual response is necessarily weak, mild, balanced and quasi-static compared to the power of an instinctive response. Imagine how it would have been for someone to discover that millions of men could be controlled like dogs, just by harnessing this power over a few people!

As an aside to the aside, incidentally, wiki claims that Napier's brutality was because he believed 'So perverse is mankind that every nationality prefers to misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another'. Compare this with Gandhi's plea of a hundred years later (paraphrased): "Please leave our country. For better or worse, we prefer to govern ourselves. We will graciously welcome you as our guests, but not as our rulers"

Alright, I've pushed you two far down, let's pop back to the movie level. Sergeant Hartman's raw power, yes. The casting for his part is an engaging story in itself. Here it is from the wiki article about the movie:

Former U.S. Marine Drill Instructor R. Lee Ermey was originally hired as a technical adviser and asked Kubrick if he could audition for the role of Hartman. However Kubrick, having seen his portrayal as Drill Instructor Sgt Loyce in The Boys in Company C, told him that he wasn't vicious enough to play the character. In response, Ermey made a videotape of himself improvising insulting dialogue towards a group of Royal Marines while being pelted by people off-camera with oranges and tennis balls. Ermey, in spite of the distractions, rattled off an unbroken string of insults for 15 minutes, and he did not flinch, duck, or repeat himself while the projectiles rained on him. Upon viewing it, Kubrick gave him the role, realizing that Ermey "was a genius for this part". Ermey's experience as a real-life DI during the Vietnam era proved invaluable, and the realism was such that in one instance, Ermey barked an order off-camera to Kubrick to stand up when he was spoken to, and Kubrick instinctively obeyed, standing at attention before realizing what had happened. Kubrick estimated that Ermey came up with 150 pages of insults, many of them improvised on the spot — a rarity for a Kubrick film. According to Kubrick's estimate, the former drill instructor wrote 50% of his own dialogue, especially the insults. Ermey usually needed only two to three takes per scene, another rarity for a Kubrick film.

The 150 pages of improvised insults - each syllable is gold! "Your days of finger-banging ol' Mary Jane Rottencrotch through her purtty pink panties are over!", "Do you feel dizzy? Do you feel faint? Jesus Saint Christ! I think you've got a hard-on!", "Bullshit. It looks to me like the best part of you ran down the crack of your momma's ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress! I think you been cheated!", "Are you a peter puffer? I'll bet you're the kinda guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a reach-around. I'll be watching you". I could go on and on list all of his dialog!

The brilliant part is these are constructed recursively from equally brilliant components. Consider the last quote. 'Peter Puffer' is a guy who sucks ('puffs') cock ('Peter'). What a name, and what consistent imagery in the rest of the quote! It is a kind of incandescent brilliance that is quite apart from the more intellectual kind of brilliance. I must read up further on it, but there's a kind of fundamental difference between the more literary and educated kind of intelligence and this unaffected intelligence. Urban Dictionary is full of the latter kind!

The marching songs are also quite the earworms. I just can't stop myself from humming 'Ho Chi Minh is a son of a bitch! Got the blueballs, crabs and the seven-year-itch!". And M.I.C; K.E.Y; M.O.U.S.E! That's another thing extremely rare today. When was the last time you ever sang in a large group and felt the song? Can you even imagine a time you'll do it in the future? I can't!

The first part ends rather quickly, in about 45 minutes or so. It ends perfectly, in my opinion. There's a kind of delicious justice in Sergeant Hartman getting killed. I wanted him killed, I wanted him fucked after what he did to Lawrence. There was an unspoken, unthought, instinctive craving that was satisfied perfectly there.

It's a similar justice that happens when the mighty Marcellus Wallace, the most powerful goon in LA, he who has people thrown out of windows for giving foot massages to his wife and has suave henchmen debating the ontology of the act, he who has the power to demand "If Butch goes to Indochina, I want a nigger waiting in a bowl of rice ready to pop a cap in his ass.", he who has the audacity to fix a boxing match while philosophizing, "You see, this profession is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers. Motherfuckers who thought their ass would age like wine. If you mean it turns to vinegar, it does. If you mean it gets better with age, it don't. "- when THE Marsellus Wallace, who even my spellchecker fears and suggests 'Merciless Wallace', gets raped in the ass by a security guard, and with a billiards ball tied to his mouth to boot. There's a primal justice served in that scene. It is so well served, that you instantly feel sorry for the big old guy. Your heart melts, and now the villain's actually Zed the security guard. Talk about inversions! So you feel that primal sense of justice and satisfaction AGAIN when Butch picks up the Katana, and when Marsellus shoots Zed in the crotch. Primal justice has very short memory, and never have I seen that property exploited so amazingly to such perfection, EVER.

Right, this was to be about Full Metal Jacket, pardon me. The whole part did have a few imperfections. For example, the most pernicious one: in the last scene before Lawrence shoots Hartman, Hartman's lines chiding him are weak to say the least. "Major Malfunction"? The only explanation I have for such abysmally weak lines compared to the rest of movie was that Hartman had just woken up. But that doesn't quite cut it.

The scene where Hartman is impressed by Lawrence's shooting skills - that was unnecessary. It seemed to be an attempt to lend some kind of fairness to Hartman's character, but it didn't work for me. They might as well have removed it, made Lawrence still love his rifle because he had no friends, and made Hartman a 100% bad guy for him. That would have made the climax even stronger.

And the blanket party, where the entire platoon ambushes Lawrence. The motivation leading to that was very weak. That's the failure of the very tact that makes the movie sharp at other places, the tact of leaving of transition scenes. I never felt that the platoon as a whole was pained with Lawrence, it was just an inference. A scene or two with grumbling recruits would have served that well.

But these are minor details. Power - yeah :-)

[1] Yes, I know I need to go out more often when I think that was a joke about bikinis and not statistics.

:-)

Kapiratna Kolidasa

2009-11-24T11:53:00.000-08:00

Just marking my territory, I can now ask my fans to google 'Kapiratna Kolidasa' to come to my blog :P I can't believe there wasn't one page on the internet that referred to this phrase!

It's too dangerous for someone who wants to live in Bangalore to tell the original context of the phrase, but here's a watered down samasya-purti: How would a Kannadiga mockingly call a Bengali poet who apes Kalidasa and has an insatiable craving for chicken? Kapiratna Kolidasa!

:-)

(Samasya-purtis are explained on page 49 of the document. The whole thing is a must-read, if you ask me!)

Autoracism

2009-11-15T21:42:00.000-08:00

I was helping a friend out with mock MBA interviews, and read this somewhere when doing my research:

I'm Asian-American woman, and the school actually got an interviewer who was the same ethnicity and gender as I was, which was a little surprising. It was very comforting, and I really appreciated the effort on the school's part to ease my stress.

I was petrified when I read this. I would any day opt for a non-desi interviewer without batting an eyelid. It has nothing to do with liking or not liking people - it's the judgment that gets me all queasy. Intellectually, it's all about the job/application, and there's really no difference who conducts the interview. Instinctively though, there's tremendous discomfort, suspicion, sizing up, one-up-manship and double guessing. I should be the last person to complain about this, because all the interviewers I have ever faced have been exceptionally warm, friendly and willing to listen. But come now, it's no fun being not hypocritical :P

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Perhaps it has to do with an abundance of Indian Crab stories we're inundated with. A representative , possibly apocryphal and correlation-causation-confused example: Circa 2003, X was a highly rated university for Computer Science in the US, though not in the top 4. Like nearly every university, it had senior grad students (3rd+ year) actively involved in their admission process, especially in gauging the achievements of the applicants given that there were so many country-specific factors like entrance exams, merit scholarships, etc. Y was a highly rated university in India, and many people from Y routinely got into universities ranked higher than X. For some reason though, during a 2 year period every single applicant from Y was bumped. This happened to coincide with the time a certain student from Y who had joined X happened to be on the admissions committee. No other university showed this trend, and there was no development in the CS department in X (known from other people from Y in X) that could explain this. It was later learnt that no application from Y managed to get into the final tabling by the profs.

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There's a very common held belief among most desis that Statements of Purpose are 'full of cock' and that all resumes are lies. Which may be true many times, but that is not a comforting observation when you consider that your interviewer or the person reading your application has that self-same impression in mind. Your 'unquenchable thirst for knowledge' and 'firm belief that my work should have an impact' - even if they are absolutely true statements you came up with yourself - don't seem as sincere when you know the guy you're pitching to knows that the very same words have been recycled a million times. It is almost as if knowing that a dishonest SoP can exist invalidates all honest SoPs. It is not as if desis carry a special overcriticality gene - it happens even if they are perfectly fair in isolation, but just know that such dishonesty can exist. The common knowledge causes the situation to degenerate into a suboptimal Nash equilibrium.

"Sheeple"

Even apart from that, suffering-inflation ensures that even if you have a truly wonderful story of having overcome suffering and difficulty in your life - like having virtually no meaningful academic education from your school - it is so commonplace in India that they seem much less of a challenge to a desi interviewer. It is not fair to say "Look, every desi has been through that, there's nothing special about you". If you're looking for initiave, every desi is more likely to be better then, and that is no reason to be setting the bar artificially high!

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In general, wherever multiple groups of people are to be found, there is a tension between two poles. The first one is an instinct to help someone of your own kind. The second is a sadistic self-group-hate, the classic Indian Crab. If it's not full-blown hate, it is at least a pervasive discomfort or negative opinion. It's present among all races, and people have made a lot of money just observing that. But this takes on a fractal, chaotic dimension when you include things like language, religion, caste, or any of the million other turtles that go all the way down. An instinctive fear - and this may be due purely to pessimism - is that important encounters like an MBA interview may be closer to the crab end of the continuum.

F=ma [Made in China]

2009-11-13T00:30:00.000-08:00

We have a confession to make, gentle reader. We're guilty of hubris. We used to think we were no lightweights at this business of re$earch trickery. Why, on a bright day we might even have ventured to put on our Sherlock Holmes hat, and just like Master Detective does with mud-stains in a 50 mile radius of London, we might have dared to claim we can instantly identify which murky alleys of fraud a published result has passed through. But the Grand Reviewer up there probably didn't like our active voice, and sent this whopper that has made our assessment even dimensionally incorrect. The impact of the realization is so large that we are even contemplating sanyasa from the exciting, high-stress life of research and settling down in the serene, peaceful life of a pit trader or an investment banking MnA analyst instead. But perhaps we should begin at the beginning.

A labmate casually remarked today that a very well known professor in a well known university has all his grad students in the US, and all his postdocs in Singapore.

Also, the lab was getting its experiments on mouse cells done in China.

BY GOD, and the entire editorial panel of Nature crossbred with the Economist's! It struck me like the loud report of the starter pistol did to Yeddy when his political race went Ready-Steady-Reddy: Outsourcing research! That must be the most ABSOLUTELY FANTASTIC IDEA EVER! How could we be so blind to it for so long? For shame, for shame! Just take a look at the advantages, which I outsourced straight from an article on the benefits of outsourcing:

Advantage #1: Outsourcing can save you money.

Hell yeah! Customer satisfaction is always our #1 priority. The huge number of research studies which end up with unremarkable conclusions is a tremendous waste of grant money. If for 1/10th the price the people over at Wipe-pro can provide value-added solutions to the Poincare conjecture, with relentless effort towards quality and project delivery excellence (PDE), leveraging their time-tested experience (TTE) of project management, industry best practices (IBP) and internally developed project management software (PMS), who are we to meddle with the free market? High quality results and 100% customer satisfaction guaranteed. All platforms, including NSF, NIH, DoE, ARC are fully supported. 150% moneyback policy if Tier-2 journal rejects work, Conditions Apply. Why needlessly spend money on costly grad students, supercomputers and lab facilities? All a grad student would do with his stipend would be live, eat and watch porn on the lab's projector or Apple HD Cinema Display anyway.

Advantage #2: Outsourcing can help you share risk.

No shit Sherlock! Who wants to run a 3 month experiment only to find the correlation is only 0.4? Plus, universities have developed stiff-nosed Victorian standards of conducting research and it's impossible to be creative under such terrible constraints. Procedure, they harp, Procedure and Hypotheses and Validation and Double Checking and Consistency and Backtesting and yadayadayada. You don't want all that, you want a good life. Take a hint from the investment banker down the road with the Ferrari, and share your risk. Maybe if you imitate him well, you can hope for a Camry. You don't need to do Science the way old European fogeys did it. Peering at the skies for 30 years without a telescope to record observations accurate to 1/60th of a degree, and dying of a bladder burst, pooh! It's 2009 now. Risk is taboo. The seller will be eager to please, and you have the pleasure of perusing results with none of the pangs of Procedure.

Advantage #3: Outsourcing can help accommodate peak loads.

Of course! It was micro and stem cells a few years ago, it's bio, nano, energy and cleantech today, and it will be pervasive soc-nets and Cloud computation tomorrow. You never know when a funding source will chance by one day, so it's always best to be prepared with research power on the bench. GPU computations for resonant MEMS cantilevers? Our Korean team will handle it. Solid Oxide Fuel Cells for Clean energy for 2-stroke engines? Our brand-new benched team, which can't tell apart electron emissions from nocturnal emissions, is right on it, and wants to know what in colour you want the prototype painted. Long-term environmental impact of sulphur effluents on river systems? No problem, our India team has specialized on-ground expertise, and can deliver historical data, analysis and predictions all in a low-cost, 5 papers guaranteed package. Hurry, order before Thanksgiving and get a conference-friendly Java GUI FREE!

Advantage #4: Outsourcing can help develop your internal staff.

Very deep. First, you won't have wasteful grad students asking poking questions loitering around. Neither will you have pesky postdocs. Only you, tenure and a growing stack of publications. Bliss. You can finally take that long-deserved vacation without the headache of that algorithm not converging, or that shady simulation not coinciding with experimental results. It's Someone Else's problem now.

So what are you waiting for? Just pick up the phone and call 1-800-MOAR-PAP3RZ now!

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(Update, Jan 6) Hark, unbelievers! "Chinese academia ghost-writing 'widespread'"

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If our humble efforts have succeeded in piquing the interest of the gentle, generous reader, might we beg that he humour a fleeting thought toward a modest venture embarked upon by the One Post Phenomenon and your humble author, Soopper Turbo Suttifiers GmBH? We offer superior quality German acronyms beside our name, and ensure such high standards of service that you shall always leave our premises with a light heart and a lighter purse.

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Gratifyingly, the website which I outsourced the bullet points from, Sourcing Magazine, 'the world's leading online content provider for the Outsourcing community', has its homepage stuck in an endless redirection.

:-)

Stuff Internet-savvy People Like: Pranav Mistry

2009-11-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

There's a limit to the amount of adulation I can tolerate for raw ideas. Sure, wearable computers are the future; sure, querying the Cloud is Tomorrow's way of just asking someone if that brand of garlic bread tastes good; sure, information that you are now forced to get from slow Facebook stalking can come right from a few discreet thumb-presses, and you can impress that girl with a amazingly coincidental set of interests. ZOMG! She just can't imagine there's someone else in the world who has cats with the same names!

All that granted. But the collective shagging on "the genius behind the innovative SixthSense application", Pranav Mistry, is nauseating. It is just a concept, an idea, like a million other ideas! The video that Pattie Maes showed in the TED Talk is, in my opinion, a reasonably well made funding-agency demo. Nearly everyone I know in grad school who is working on hands-on research has made a video like that. You get a funky piece of technology that is extremely common among some circles, but is surprisingly rare in general. In this case, it's a matchbox-size projector and a gesture recognition system. 90% of the people who see one in action are hypnotized just by the fact that something is being projected out of that small box, but every lab has tens of them lying around. Next, hook it up to a nice GUI, in this case a simple Cocoa-based one. Choose a sequence of examples that are of interest to the target agency - in this case, shopping. Hard code an application to follow a certain procedure to demonstrate a concept - in this case, look up something on the web and project it. And voila, instant internet recognition!

The demo comfortably sits inside the continuum ranging from completely hardcoded demos (everything is scripted) to completely open demos (like if instead of showing a video, a member of the audience was asked to come up, wear it, and do something in realtime). It's much more closer to the hardcoded demos - sure, the realtime web downloading is real, the projection is real, the keypad identification is real, even the gesture identification is real (he claims that it took 50,000 lines of code to get gestures+the computer vision part working - that seems about right for code written from ground up, but no way in hell is this new or even innovative [*]). But the entire thing together is scripted! A few typical scenarios are chosen, and a sequence of events of using those technologies is orchestrated. Getting a few parts of the demo to work would certainly have been challenging, and it does take several weeks to even get a simple computer vision code working for a perfectly defined object if we just vary the lighting and the angles. But it is impossible for that to be considered a completely general product!

The slashdot summary, on a story that says he graciously decided to use open source after having "put paid to the canard that open source and innovation are incompatible" reads:

Mistry’s decision has meaning beyond Sixth Sense. The desire of inventors is always to get their work into the market as quickly as possible. Usually this means waiting for it to be turned into a useful, profitable invention. Mistry is bypassing this by going straight to open source. (Italics mine)

Honestly, I think people are far too consumed in imagining elaborate visions of future technology and heralding the next victory for open source to really look hard and notice that this is just a slick frickin' demo!

I've seen far too many demos and done enough of them myself to believe this is a real, open demo. If indeed it is a completely open demo and anybody today is free to try out the product if they wanted to, then I'm completely wrong and Pranav Mistry has achieved something that I believe is impossible (in a 2nd law sense) with the time and resources available as a grad student.

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[*] - Here's a product review of a $130 projected keyboard.
And a product demo of gesture recognition with video, on a mobile phone.

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Reactions to this post, mainly from critiquing myself and some from others, have included 'Cynic!', 'Overly spiteful critical old crone!' , 'Pessimist!', 'Indian crab!', 'Unbeliever!', 'What have you got against the poor guy?', 'You're just jealous!', 'You try doing something like that!', 'What have you achieved?', 'You're going against public opinion just to seem cool', 'Inverted watermelon!' (Red outside, Green inside (Anger, jealousy)), and I quite amusedly actually agree. I don't know what's possessing me to get so irritated at this.

Sirigannadam Gelge!

2009-11-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

Happy Rajyotsava, dear reader! Instead of the usual fare of putting up "Udayavaagali namma cheluva kannada naadu" as my status message, I decided to go a wee bit further and quote a full song. 'Enda Endti Kannada padgOL' ('Booze, Wife, Kannada songs') by the amazing, amazing, amazing G.P.Rajaratnam is, well, amazing, amazing, amazing! It's from his 'Ratnana Padagalu', a drunkard's view of the world. The humor and intelligence in the song comes mainly from the use of drunk-slang and vernacular, which might be hard to understand if the song is not heard. So I'll post the original song, and my 'translation' of the song into more standard Kannada. I can't even imagine translating this to English! As always, please help me out if I've made any mistakes.

(In case you are having some font issues, here's a small PDF of this blog)

ಎಂಡ ಎಂಡ್ತಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಪದಗೋಳ್

ಎಂಡ ಎಂಡ್ತಿ ಕನ್ನಡ್ ಪದಗೋಳ್ ಅಂದ್ರೆ ರತ್ನಂಗ್ ಪ್ರಾಣ,
ಬುಂಡೇನ್ ಎತ್ತಿ ಕುಡುದ್ ಬುಟ್ಟಾಂದ್ರೆ ತಕ್ಕೋ ಪದಗಳ್ ಬಾಣ.

ಬಗ್ವಂತೇಂದ್ರಾ ಬೂಮೀಗಿಳ್ದು ನಮ್ ತಾಗ್ ಬಂದಾಂತನ್ನು,
ಪರ್-ಗಿರೀಕ್ಸೆ ಮಾಡ್ತಾನ್ ನಮ್ನಾ ಬಕ್ತನ್ ಮೇಲ್ ಅವನ್ ಕಣ್ಣು.

ಎಂಡಾ ಕುಡಿಯಾದ್ ಬುಟ್ ಬುಡ್ ರತ್ನಾ ಅಂತ್ ಅವನ್ ಎನಾನಂದ್ರೆ,
ಮೂಗ್ ಮೂರ್ ಚೂರಾಗ್ ಮುರ್ಸ್ಕೊಂತೀನಿ ದೇವರ್ ಮಾತ್-ಗಡ್ ಬಂದ್ರೆ.

ಎಂಡಾ ಬುಟ್ಟೆ, ಎಂಡ್ತೀನ್ ಬುಟ್ ಬುಡ್ ಅಂತವ್ನೇನಾನಂದ್ರೆ,
ಕಳದೊಯ್ತ್! ಅಂತಾ ಕುಣುದಾಡ್ತೀನಿ ದೊಡ್ಡದೊಂದ್ ಕಾಟದ ತೊಂದ್ರೆ!

ಕನ್ನಡ್ ಪದಗಳ್ ಆಡಾದೆಲ್ಲ ನಿಲ್ಲಿಸ್ ಬುಡ್ ಬೇಕ್ ರತ್ನಾ
ಅಂತವನಂದ್ರೆ ದೆವ್ರಾದ್ರೇನು ಮಾಡ್ತೀನೌನ್ಗೆ ಖತ್ನ!

ಆಗ್ನೆ ಮಾಡೋ ಐಗೋಳೆಲ್ಲಾ ದೇವ್ರೇ ಆಗ್ಲಿ ಎಲ್ಲಾ,
ಕನ್ನಡ್ ಸುದ್ದೀಗೇನ್ರಾ ಬಂದ್ರೆ ಮಾನಾ ಉಳ್ಸಾಕ್ಕಿಲ್ಲ!

ನರಕಕ್ಕಿಳ್ಸಿ, ನಾಲ್ಗೆ ಸೀಳ್ಸಿ, ಬಾಯ್ ಒಲ್ಸಾಗಿದ್ರೂನೆ!
ಮೂಗ್ನಲ್ ಕನ್ನಡ್ ಪದವಾಡ್ತೀನಿ ನನ್ನ ಮನಸ್ ನೀ ಕಾಣೆ!

ಎಂಡಾ ಓಗ್ಲಿ, ಎಂಡ್ತಿ ಓಗ್ಲಿ, ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಕೊಚ್ಕೊಂಡ್ ಓಗ್ಲಿ,
ಪರ್ಪಂಚ್ ಇರೋತಂಕ ಮುಂದೆ ಕನ್ನಡ್ ಪದಗೋಳ್ ನುಗ್ಲಿ!

My 'translation' into 'normal' Kannada:

ಹೆಂಡ, ಹೆಂಡತಿ, ಕನ್ನಡ ಪದಗಳು (ಪದ = song) - ಅಂದರೆ ರತ್ನನಿಗೆ ಪ್ರಾಣ
ಬುಂಡೆಯನ್ನು (kind of bottle or small pot) ಎತ್ತಿ ಕುಡಿದುಬಿಟ್ಟರೆ (ಸಾಕು), ತಗೋ ಪದಗಳ ಬಾಣ!

ಭಗವಂತನೇನಾದರು ಭೂಮಿಗೆ ಇಳಿದು ನಮ್ಮ ಬಳಿ ಬಂದ, ಅಂತದುಕೋ.
ನಮ್ಮನ್ನು ಪರೀಕ್ಷೆ - ಗಿರೀಕ್ಷೆ ಮಾಡುತ್ತಾನೆ ಅವನು, (ಏಕೆಂದರೆ ಅವನಿಗೆ) ಭಕ್ತನ ಮೇಲೆ ಅವನ ಕಣ್ಣು (=concern, ಇರುತ್ತೆ; widely held view that God will test (the faith of) his devotees).

"ಹೆಂಡ ಕುಡಿಯುವುದನ್ನು ಬಿಟ್ಟು ಬಿಡಬೇಕು, ರತ್ನ" ಅಂತ ಅವನೇನಾದರು ಅಂದರೆ,
(ಆಯಿತು, ನಿನ್ನ ಮಾತು ಕೇಳ್ತೀನಿ. ಇನ್ನು guarantee ಬೇಕು ಅಂದ್ರೆ here, I promise,) ದೇವರ ಮಾತಿಗೆ ಅಡ್ಡ ಬಂದ್ರೆ, ಮೂಗು ಮೂರು ಚೂರಾಗಿ ಮುರಿಸಿಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತೇನೆ ( ನನ್ನಾಗಿ ನಾನೇ ಶಿಕ್ಷೆ ಒಪ್ಪಿ ಕೊಳ್ತೀನಿ)

"(ಆಯಿತು,) ಹೆಂಡ ಬಿಟ್ಟೆ, (ಈಗ) ಹೆಂಡತಿಯನ್ನು ಬಿಟ್ಟು ಬಿಡು" ಅಂತ ಅವನೇನಾದರು ಅಂದರೆ, "ದೊಡ್ಡದೊಂದು ತೊಂದರೆ ಕಳೆದುಹೋಯಿತು!!" ಅಂತ ಕುಣಿದು-ಆಡುತ್ತೀನಿ! (LOL :D)

"(ಆಯಿತು, ಈಗ) ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ಹಾಡುವುದನ್ನು ಬಿಟ್ಟು ಬಿಡಬೇಕು, ರತ್ನಾ"
ಅಂತ ಅವನಂದರೆ [instant change of mood now] ದೇವರಾದರೇನು, ಅವನಿಗೆ ಮಾಡ್ತೀನಿ ಖತ್ನ! (ಖತ್ನ = circumcision! ROFLMAO :D also, religious poke at "cutting the dick" off ನಮ್ಮ ದೇವರು :D Brilliant!)

ಆಜ್ಞೆ ಮಾಡುವ ಅಯ್ಯರುಗಳು ( ಅಯ್ಯ = ಯಜಮಾನ) ಆ ದೇವರೇ ಆಗಲಿ, (ಪರವಾಗಿಲ್ಲ),
ಕನ್ನಡದ ಸುದ್ದಿಗೆ ಏನಾದರು ಬಂದರೆ ಮಾನ ಉಳಿಸುವುದಿಲ್ಲ!

(even) ನರಕಕ್ಕೆ ಇಳಿಸಿ, ನಾಲಿಗೆ ಸೀಳಿಸಿ, ಬಾಯಿ ಹೊಳಸಾದರೂ ಕೂಡ,
ಮೂಗಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಕನ್ನಡ ಹಾಡು ಹಾದುತ್ತೀನಿ, ನನ್ನ ಮನಸ್ಸು ನಿನಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ!

ಹೆಂಡ ಹೋಗಲಿ, ಹೆಂಡತಿ ಹೋಗಲಿ, ಎಲ್ಲ ಕೊಚ್ಚಿಕೊಂಡು ಹೋಗಲಿ!
(ಆದರೆ) ಪ್ರಪಂಚ ಇರುವ ತನಕ ಕನ್ನಡ ಮುಂದೆ ನುಗ್ಗಲಿ!

ಸಿರಿಗನ್ನಡಂ ಗೆಲ್ಗೆ! :-)

--
I found the original at Prof. Holalkere Chandrasekhar's pages on Kannada. It's a fantastic resource, if you can get used to the slightly jagged font in the GIFs (It'll need a revolution in many areas to be able to search Kannada, so I'm not complaining about the GIFs themselves)

Understanding Rubel's Universal Differential Equation

2009-10-07T18:33:00.022-07:00

[Many thanks to HKR for convincing me to get off my lazy ass and figure this out]

Karthik, dispassionately going about his chosen avocation of introducing mind-bogglingly awesome concepts via blog comments, wrote on the previous post a differential equation:

This equation is called Rubel's Universal Differential Equation [R], and has the amazing amazing amazing property that a solution 'y' to this equation can be made to approximate to any desired level of accuracy any (continuous) function on any interval of the real line, and with C-inf continuity! In other words, this is an 'Equation of Everything'! Take anything you possibly know that is continuous. The temperature in your room as a function of time. The position of the earth in space as a function time. The velocity of a comet as a function of its distance to us. The (smoothed) variation of a stock price with time. The degree of contraction of a heart cell as a function of its location. A solution of this one equation can be used to approximate all of these to infinite accuracy, and with infinite continuity!

I'll now attempt to try to reverse-engineer this equation in the manner I tried figuring out Tupper's math quine, and hope to find a plausible way to figure out how Rubel could have come up with this.

Edit (Dec 26): This is a very light, almost sand-sieveishly non-rigorous treatment of the topic written for and by someone with no formal training in Analysis. If you want to skip the foreplay, here's Rubel's original paper that's more intended for a peer in the math community.

All DEs are not born equal

Consider the trivial [1] equation y'' = 0. I can rightfully claim that this equation is the 'master equation' satisfied by all lines y = Ax+B.

The triviality bit, after a bit of thinking, leads us to a categorization: there are two kinds of differential equations. Consider the equation of SHM, y'' + y = 0. We'll call this a 'predictive' DE, because it predicts the behaviour of y, and tells us something about a physical system.

On the other hand, consider the equation: y''' = 0. Every parabola satisfies this equation, but we can't use this equation to predict anything. It's more an expression of the property of all parabolas, and so we'll call it an 'shrink' DE. It's like going to a psychiatrist to know more about yourself, but all you get is some general info that isn't predictive in any way :P

Rubel's UDE is a something like a 'shrink' DE [R2], not a predictive DE. This may come as somewhat of an anti-climax, because when we see DEs as engineers, we always assume that they are predictive. After all, every single DE an engineer uses is predictive. But note that when it was presented, it was not claimed that every continuous function satisfies the UDE; only that solutions to the UDE can be made to approach any continuous function with arbitrary accuracy. That is equivalent to the difference between saying "I have a hole that perfectly fits every shaft in the world" and saying "I have a tool that can make a hole that perfectly fits every shaft in the world."

Even if it's not predictive, there is a sufficient number of curiosities to motivate further analyzing this. For one, we are well familiar with the idea of interpolating a function piece-wise with straight lines.

We can achieve any desired accuracy by increasing the number of pieces we use, but there is one stark fact: The function that we build by stitching straight lines will have sharp corners - there is a discontinuity of some order at each of the stitch points. Even though increasing the number of pieces can reduce the least square error between the curve (called reducing "the error in the L2 norm"), the resulting stitched function will be bumpy. What precisely do I mean by bumpy?

This might seem like a childish construct from Calculus 101, but please humour me. Let's create a hypothetical car. This car has the usual odometer and speedometer, but it also has an accelerometer, a jerkometer, ... an infinite number of meters to measure every derivative of the car's distance function. By 'bumpy' in the last para, I mean that when I drive my car like the interpolated function, some of my meters jump.

Altius Fortius Happius?

We can attempt solve some of the problems of this bumpiness by using higher order interpolating functions that ensure "stronger" continuity. For example, when we use lines, we can claim at best C0 continuity. Using parabolic sections as the interpolating functions, we can, in principle, claim up to C1 continuity. (Thanks Shreevatsa) Following this path, we go into spline interpolation, but there's no way we can ensure C-inf continuity.

As an aside, the entirety of the Finite Element Method revolves around how to do this interpolation. The central property of the FEM, it's raison d'etre, is that it guarantees the best approximation to a function using a given set of interpolating functions, 'best' as measured by the L2 norm. However, higher order continuity requirements across segments are very hard to implement. In fact, even C1 continuity is very hard in 3-dimensions, and C2 continuity is exceptionally rare. It's a reasonably hot topic of research, and part of the framework Pota is working on attempts to grant higher degrees of continuity.

To summarize our conundrum, with what we already know of interpolations, we can have infinitely accurate interpolations when measured in the L2 norm (ie.. C0 continuity), but higher order continuity especially across segments is extremely hard [2]. Rubel's equation, on the other hand, claims that it can achieve C-inf continuity. How?

A detour - the Curious Incident of exp(-1/x) during the Taylor expansion-time

Consider this innocuous looking function,

It looks like this when plotted:

If you have read about statistical mechanics, you'll notice that this is a very common form. The temperature dependence of a huge number of quantities varies as exp(-1/x).

What's special about this? It is trivially provable[R1] that this function is 'smooth'. All its derivatives exist at all points on the real line. If you drove our car on it, none of your meters would ever register a sudden jump.

But there's a deep evil that lurks here that strikes terror into the heart of all real analysts (umm..not really, but I couldn't resist :P ): Look at the function and its derivatives at x = 0. All of them are identically 0. That means that if you try to write a Taylor expansion about x = 0, it will predict that f(x+h) = 0 for a small h. Holy horror! This means that the Taylor series expansion doesn't sense the rise of the function just to the right of the origin! That means the Taylor expansion can never approximate the function if we start from the origin! The function is not analytic!

This is a phenomenal event! The function is perfectly flat at the origin - perfectly flat, with every derivative zero. And yet, the function bootstraps itself into rising! This is incredible, because you never see perfect flatness in any smooth function! There will always be some non-zero derivative that will tip you off on what the function will do! But here, all derivatives are 0! Flat! Perfectly Flat!

The Insight [3]

But wait - if it is perfectly flat, then if we stitch together the perfectly flat ends of two such functions, we can have an infinite degree of continuity! How would it be if we used this as our interpolating function?

That's it. That's the central idea of UDEs. Stitching together functions in regions where they are perfectly flat. All we need to do is find a differential equation that describes one 'piece'. The stitch region has all derivatives existing and equal zero, and so will trivially satisfy our equation. That means our thread, made of many pieces and stitches, is still a solution to the DE. Which means we can claim that we can make any thread that fits infinitely accurately with any given function. We have made our tool!

Some reflection, and dark forebodings

There are some minor things we need to take care of. In the function we described above, we have only one perfectly flat end. It's cumbersome having to flip the function around every time we need to stitch, and so a little bit of playing around gives us this function that has two perfectly flat ends:

(This is called the bump function.)

Uh oh. Wait a minute. We're screwed. Look at that function again. Our fundamental 'piece'. It doesn't do anything! It is zero, then rises, and is back to zero again! Forget about anything else, how can you stitch together pieces like this to form a simple parabola, say y = x^2 ? The piece as a whole doesn't rise or fall!
Note that even if we rotated this thread, we couldn't change the shape of the thread. Our thread of stitched functions can never deform!

Our knight in ∫hining armour

The solution to this problem is (imho) the second most brilliant insight in the paper. What is it that we love about the bump function? The fact that it's perfectly flat at the ends. What don't we like? That the function ends where it begins, and is on the whole flat.

Wait a minute - the function is perfectly flat at the ends - it doesn't matter if it lost a derivative! Eureka! We can integrate the function, and this makes it an increasing function on [-1,1], while still preserving perfect flatness at the ends! Here's what the integral of th function looks like:

Rubel calls these integrated functions 'S-modules', because of their shape. That's it, we've found our perfect interpolating piece: perfectly flat at the ends, and increasing monotonically over the interval [-1,1].

Observe that in Rubel's UDE, the lowest degree in which y appears is y'; There's no term with a raw y. This is what originally tipped me off into suspecting that there was an integration involved.

Cleaning up

Now the task is to simply write down a differential equation for the S-module:
(t is the abscissa) and write a generalized function of this with constants, such that it can be moved (translated) in the two directions and scaled in width and height. Some algebraic trickery to eliminate the constants and the abscissa follows. The exact thing to be done, as Rubel states, is:

and eliminate A, alpha, beta, B and t from these 4 equations.

Once that is done, we have a shiny UDE
all set for world domination. The exact details of the algebra can be found in Rubel's original paper, and I hope after reading this you will also be able to follow his very pithy style. The only catch is that our function will not be analytic at (i.e. cannot be expanded in a Taylor series around) the stitches. But so far as I know, there's no way to detect this sitting in our hypothetical car, so all's well.

Some Puzzles

We aren't fully done with Rubel's paper yet; he claims that his UDE is an analog to universal Turing machines. There is also much talk on Hilbert's 13th problem, and a classic proof by forthcoming publication [4]. I don't quite see the connects yet, and will update this if I figure it out.

Other UDEs

I skimmed through some of the others in the field, and have a rough idea of how they work (ooh don't you just love the sound of 'skim' 'rough idea' 'general sense' 'intuitive feel' ?). Of all of these, Rubel's is the most straightforward; but that may be because I spent the max time on him.

Duffin's paper in the PNAS [R] is a poor man's UDE: it has a parameter 'm', and the solutions are guaranteed to be Cm continuous. It's nice that he was able to condense a simple polynomial interpolation into one equation.

Brigg's paper [R] uses another trick to generate 'perfect stitches' - he uses Jacobi elliptical functions that are periodic in a chosen interval, and therefore have all derivatives the same. It's a nice extension to Rubel's 'perfectly flat' insight.

There's another paper by Boshernitzan [R] that's very interesting: he guarantees not only Cinf smoothness, but also everywhere analyticity. The price we pay is in our domain. We can no longer have our function spread on arbitrary domains. It has to be a compact region of the real line. Again, I don't understand precisely how he does this, that's for another day. Elsner's E functions [R] are worth a look, too.

Commentary

There are two very nice insights in this paper - a general one of using an interpolating function with perfectly flat ends to ensure Cinf continuity, and specific one of deciding to use an integral of a bump function. Apart from that, there isn't any more information content in this UDE than in a least-squares fit equation.

My first (wrong) instinct was to think that the 'n' in Brigg's equation held information about the function. I thought that varying n would make the differential equation plot out different graphs. This is very similar to Tupper's idea in his math quine (the constant 'a' in my explanation). Raghu then pointed out that Rubel's original equation had no parameters. But if you think about it, we can indeed make a predictive UDE with one parameter that cycles through all functions. This essentially requires a constructive proof (as opposed to a simple existence proof) of the bijection (one-to-one ness) between the set of reals (our parameter) and set of infinite number of reals (the values of the function at 'every' point). Let's see if I ever can get to that level of joblessness in life :-)

I'm still amazed and can't quite fully digest the fact that a perfectly smooth function can be non-analytic. I mean, consider the exp(-1/x) function. If you stand at the origin, you have no clue what happens as you step forward! All the meters in your car will read zero at the origin, and yet, somehow the function bootstraps itself into rising! This never happens with analytic functions! If any aspect of a function has to change, (y, y', y'', y''', etc), then it can always be seen as being caused by a change in a higher derivative. For example, if you're going in our car near the apex of a downward-facing parabola centered at the origin, you'll see that y = 0 and y' (your speed) = 0. But your acceleration is not zero! So you can always predict what happens at the next moment using the info the car displays at this moment. We have so far thought that the only time you can't predict is when there are discontinuities - i.e, a 'god' tweaking the function definition. But here, there is no tweaking, and yet you can't predict! I'd instinctively think that infinite smoothness means that every point contains info that allows me to transverse every other point in the function. Apparently that is not so. This is a ripe area for some thought experiments, and I'll write more on this if I discover more.

My aim in writing this post is to provide a plausible way in which Rubel could have come up with his UDE. Almost the only way I can understand something is to mentally re-build it from scratch, so I hope this will be of help in clearing up some of the ideas. Though unavoidable when introducing a new topic, every 'Consider' is a non-sequitur. I've tried to minimize those, and the only place where a real detour is required is the idea that a function like exp(-1/x) exists.

References

[1] A joke about the use of the world 'trivial' in Mathematics on the wiki:

Two mathematicians are discussing a theorem. The first mathematician says that the theorem is "trivial". In response to the other's request for an explanation, he then proceeds with two hours of exposition. At the end of the explanation, the second mathematician agrees that the theorem is trivial.

[2] It's in bad form to ask why higher order continuity is required. It just is. It's also like asking why a real Peugot 206 is better than the one in this lovely ad.

[3] I couldn't resist using the [Blink] tag, just so that I can refer to this old classic. Many thanks to HKR for rediscovering this!

[4] A most lovely list of invalid proofs. My favorites are 'proof by forthcoming publication', 'proof by exhaustion (of audience)', 'proof by reference to inaccessible literature' and 'proof by funding'.

References, the real ones

[R] The Mathworld article on UDEs contains a list of all the works I have referred to here. That was also the first place I heard about UDEs.

[R1] The wikipedia page on Non-analytic smooth functions has a simple proof. I wish it were longer and had more discussion, though.

Also, Tim Gower's essay on continuity is a refreshingly clear read (compared to the shitstorm of epsilons and deltas rife in most analysis textbooks).

[R2] To tell the truth, y''' = 0 is not such a bad fella after all. It's still telling us a physical truth - that the curvature of a parabola is constant everywhere. Rubel's UDE on the other hand isn't telling us anything about the world! It is only we who observe that the solution to the UDE has some use as an interpolating function, and it is we who build the approximation. Talk of outsourcing, man!

:-)

The Uncanny Valley of computational research

2009-09-29T17:30:00.007-07:00

(Update, Oct 17: Greatly expanded with the aid of Chandru, the most inexhaustible source of all fundaes on postgrad in IITM. He also insists that this post gives a biased view that only modeling sucks, and so an edition detailing the heinous atrocities and frauds of experimental research is forthcoming.)

I've been very irritated by almost all of computational modeling research I've been reading up on. I specifically mean research in modeling and simulating systems that we (humans) have not built from scratch. For example, trying to model blood flow in an artery, or the mechanical behavior of tissue or modeling the weather. It struck me that this situation is similar to an idea in human-robot interactions, called the Uncanny Valley.

(Image, as mostly everything you'll find on this blog, from Wikipedia)

This is a graph of a feeling of 'familiarity' or 'liking' vs how human a robot looks. Near the left, an object, say a robot, looks nothing like a human (for example an industrial press) and there's no feeling we attach to it. As it starts to look more and more humanlike (like for example the Asimo), people start finding it 'cute' and likable. But then, as it as it gets to the point of being almost human, uncannily human, there suddenly is a repulsion for it, a kind of disgust like what we feel for a prosthetic or a made-up corpse. Further on however, we're barely able to make out the difference and the familiarity rises up rapidly.

I think a very similar effect occurs in modeling. In the beginning, models are simplistic, produce no consistent predictions and no one cares about them ("The earth is flat"). Then we have models that are simple, and yet have very useful predictive qualities. We can measure the Earth if only we assume a few numbers are 'much smaller' than others (Eratosthenes)! An Engineer's First Sin - just assume a certain linear dependence and you can measure something as elusive as time itself (sin(x) ~ x, simple pendulum)! Say a particle can only have two states and can interact with only its nearest neighbors, and poof! You can explain an event as amazing as phase-change (the Ising model)! Assume everything that can be computed can be written down as instructions on a piece of paper, and voila! You come up with fascinating limits on what a computer cannot do (a Turing machine, and the Halting problem)! (And the subsequent hilarity when the Halting problem is outsourced)

But then, the party stops. Here's a bunch of negative reactions about modeling research:

1. It's pointless: the model is extremely complex and the improvement in results are just not worth the effort. The current models are 'close enough' to make any extension seem useless. There's no intellectual pleasure.

2. Talk about a double whammy: modeling seems to have overtaken reality. Many models, especially in bio+engineering areas, are no longer a critical step in deciding anything and their predictive power is never brought into question in any non-trivial problem. Even a model that is used in a critical circumstance is eaten whole by a very roomy engineering safety factor. This is brushed off by saying "Our models will take 20 years to find their use! Look at potential instead of bare reality!"

3. Modeling is also beginning to be used very deviously to demonstrate that a lot of work was done, and therefore the work is worth publishing. Reminds me of a joke that says CFD stands for Colorful Fluid Dynamics. Another related abuse is to put in a section on modeling in an otherwise purely experimental paper. The modeling is supposed to prove that 'what we think is happening is what is actually happening', but in most cases it serves to fill a boilerplate template mandated by some journal.

4. Pauli is once said to have lamented about a paper he was asked to read - 'This is not right. It is not even wrong'. I'm shocked at the number of modeling papers out there which don't even have a hypothesis, or any hint of the model's predictive abilities, usefulness or even a whiff of a reason as to why some poor sod of a grad student wrote 50,000 lines of code. The import of the entire work seems to be "This work was done".

5. A model that has 56 parameters can match any dataset. It's just pushing the problem of 'understanding what is happening' to the level of finding the right parameters. And that level happens to filled with grunt work and boredom.

6. A misconception that better tools lead to better research is rife. Nowhere is this more true than modeling. A supercomputer cluster is trivial to buy - just a few thousand dollars and you have very decent 'computing resources'. I find it especially grating when universities announce with great pomp the opening of a 'High Performance Computing Center'. This is the textbook definition of cargo-cult.

7. Among a host of adapted dick size metrics, a common one is 'full 3D simulation'. A vast majority of engineering modeling consists either of 1D or 2D models, because till the last decade it was impossible to even dream of full 3D simulations. It is debatable where exactly full 3D simulations are necessary - but such trifles don't stop people from merrily performing 3D simulations in the aforementioned High Performance clusters. This unfortunate tendency has resulted in pitiable cases of 5th year PhD students being told that their work will be 'sufficient' only if they re-test their hypothesis (if they were lucky enough to have such intellectual luxuries) with a fancy solver on a cluster, and finding that everything is wrong, and lest they take solace in knowing at least that for a fact, inconsistent.

8. Quite the same complaint applies to 'non-linear', 'parallelizable' and 'scalable'. I think it's like inventing a fine temperature controller for the swimming pool on top of the Titanic. Note well however, that this is a more refined and arguably less criminal form of intellectual fraud. The more dangerous epithets of ill-repute are 'nano-' (in a former birth, 'micro-'), 'bio-', 'ab initio', 'biomimetic' and 'multi-scale'.

9. Continuing on the 3D bashing, even presenting results is extremely hard to standardize. Contours aren't cool. Slices take too much space and are too hard to interpret. But who cares about the results and understanding them? Animations, preferably with lighting and a suavely-accented voiceover, are in. A sectioned 3D artist's impression adds more to the mojo than a graph with sensible axes. These days, in addition to the panegyrics and pedigree and GRE and grades, a graphics design background would be a wise thing for modeling labs to insist on if they are to keep the reams running (or what has become equivalent, surviving).

10. At a deeper level, most models' greatest strength is the audience's ignorance, and this is best seen in interdisciplinary work. If you don't know a lot about something, you cannot honestly be critical about it. Even if you are, you do not have the moral right or standing to express it. In fact, the fundamental paradox of knowledge is that the more you know, the more you realize how little you know, and so your self-measured moral right to critique something diminishes as you learn! Russel once said "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt". This is a most happy outcome for the fraudulent researcher. In a work on 'Distributed finite element modeling of cancer growth', the solid mechanician can't rightfully criticize the parallel computing algorithm or the biology; the algorithms expert/programmer can't criticize the mechanics or the biology; and the oncologist can't criticize the mechanics or the algorithm.

11. Extending on the previous point, collaboration seems to be similar to Simpson's Paradox in statistics, where each part has one trend (here, honesty) and the whole the opposite trend. This is what makes it possible for a US president to be elected to power even though the total number of votes he has is lesser than that of his rival.

12. (Thanks Serdar) Some researchers take the idea of changing topics to remain 'fresh and motivated' a tad too far. Put their finger in every pie, collect all the low-hanging fruit and jump on to a new topic. This is particularly easy in modeling, where neither resources or, as we have come to see, knowledge is necessary to be productive. It is no longer cool to work on a topic for long enough to truly advance frontiers of knowledge. Stay till the Papers/Effort ratio peaks, and move on. These dilettantes are pejoratively termed 'butterflies'.

13. In the end, simulations are easy on the pocket. Take 6 computers and 6 desperate grad students, mix well, add a pinch of conference publication hopes, funding threats and sublte emotional blackmail and voila! You have a paper factory all oiled up. Continue for a few years and you'll be light-years ahead of anyone trying to actually do science. If experiments are your thing, there's a slightly modified but equally despicable protocol.

14. Another aspect Petre rightly pointed out: Fudge Factors. We've all heard of Skinner's constant (also called Flannegan's finagling factor), the number which, when multiplied by, divided into, added to, or subtracted from the answer you got, gives you the answer you should have gotten. While it goes about giving people a smile, it's evil cousin lurks deep in simulation codes magically making them coincide with experiments/predicted results. Nearly any work that simulates a non-trivial non-toy phenomenon will have a couple of constants that are either not known, or are heavily disputed. In fact, in some places, the reason simulations are done is because those constants can't be known, and so simulations can give a kind of sample space. But that is quickly lost when the goal is to produce 'good' results. In an example I know well of, that elusive variable was the conduction speed of a cardiac cell. The speed varies with time, depends on location, and changes drastically when a cell is taken outside the heart or if a probe is put in! So right now there's no way to measure it, and so the constant was 'set to appropriately typical values' to ensure the results were 'correct'.

15. This is perhaps the most finicky and least acceptable of objections, but still: when the famous Four-Color problem was finally solved using a computer in 1976, there was a murmur of dissent. Yes, we finally know for sure that only four colors are required to color any map, but no living human knows why it is so. You need a few hundred pages of analysis to reduce the problem to a couple thousand non-trivial base-cases, and then a computer to verify that indeed all these base-cases can be colored with 4 colors. So one more cold fact is known about the world, and there's nothing more to it. It wouldn't have been very different if the skies opened up and a thunderous unquestionable voice declared "4 is enough!". Similarly, there are some works which simulate flow of some idealized fluid in some idealized turbulent regime, and proudly claim that they have done it using 200,000 CPU hours. This kind of work is neither here nor there - it is too simplistic to be actually experimentally verified, and it is too complicated for anybody to truly understand.

Every one of these woes carries echoes of being almost there, but not quite. Taking up the task of removing the 'not quite' can be a frightfully unrewarding and disappointing experience.

To complete the isomorphism, we should look at very complex models that make very useful/impressive predictions. Flight simulators and today's video games come to mind - the complexity of the Physics or Graphics engines used is mind-boggling, and yet, they are so convincingly real that after a few trials, you think the Gravity Gun in Half Life 2 is just another weapon (as opposed to OMFG AWESOME!!!1!!). Astronaut training programs have a necessity to be painfully accurate, and do quite a good job. As we go along, our very definition - that the 'high-end' of modeling is when you can't distinguish between the model and 'reality' - starts to get to us. Is language a model for expressing thought, or is it something on its own? Is your perception of the World, which determines your reaction to everything that happens to you, a model of the world, or is it You?

--
Update: I found two fantastic articles by Bertrand Russel, which convincingly strike at the very roots. Pure joy!

1. 'On Youthful Cynicism', the 'Truth' and 'Progress' sections in particular.
2. 'Icarus, or the Future of Science'.

Update (May 23,2010): A very nice wiki article: Map-Territory relation
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The Dual of Happiness

2009-07-10T18:02:00.004-07:00

A huge number of people I know (me included till recently) are very pained/depressed/unhappy/uninspired by whatever they are doing, and the symptoms are almost exactly the same. Some typical features, collected from a pool of conversations with a lot of people, seem to be -

1. Life seems to be led more by following constraints than following objectives. It's so algorithmic[1] that sometimes deadlines are almost craved for, because they give the enormous comfort of just doing what you are asked to do within a certain time. If you have hard constraints, then you don't need to worry about wondering if could have done something else that could have led to different, better things. "I had to do it because of hard constraints X, Y and Z" is such a relief when justifying your decisions to yourself! If you don't have to do something, making a choice is hell itself.

2. All ambition, at least in the direction you've chosen, seems to have dried up. Ambition and drive which were propelling you forward to achieve more and more seem now to be tortuously dragging you down an unhappy path. You realize that there's no end to where you're going, no closure. There's always something that seems just out of reach, and slogging today appears to help you reach that.

Doing a PhD? You better work hard if you want a Faculty position. That's the best use of your work and fight so far, the best you can do from your position. MBA? Get into consulting, and slog there so that you can get into Private Equity. Job? Get as much 'countable' experience as possible to that you can get into a good B-School, hopefully in the top 10 in the US. The more you know about the path and as the fog clears up to reveal the very long road ahead, the less amazing/worthy it seems.

It doesn't stop there. You're an assistant prof? Go fight for tenure and grants. Private Equity? Partner before 35 or bust. Don't you just love your work?

3. A significantly higher emphasis on relationships, and not just romantic ones. Coupled with this is almost crippling nostalgia and excessive dwelling on some happy moments in the past. There's a quote I recollect from one of Jugu's status messages - 'The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past."

4. Romantic relationships deserve an entire dissertation on their own, but we'll suffice to quote XKCD (who quoted the most excellent WarGames) and say it seems to be a game where the only winning move is to not play, and that choice too results in a loss.

5. Absolute, sweeping, riveting disinterest in whatever path you chose. Heaven save you if you had good options to choose from - each of those becomes a stinging gnawing 'could-have-been' nightmare.

6. A very deep realization that almost nothing happens like the conventional wisdom of "1. Set Goal 2. Reach Goal 3. Be happy". Things that do follow this path are usually of absolutely no interest or consequence. Reminds me of one of Zeno's paradoxes, where he argues that a rabbit can never race the tortoise because in order to get past it, the rabbit must first reach the tortoise. But in the time it takes to reach the tortoise, the tortoise would have moved a bit further, and the rabbit must again catch up. Zeno the lucky bastard was dealing with a convergent series, but is everyone as lucky?

7. A question as simple as 'What do you want to do?' seems impossible to answer. It's all an unholy mix of "I wanted to do this at that time" + "If you do this it will be good/future will be secure/you will prove yourself/it will be a validation of your abilities" + "X, Y and Z chose this path for alpha, beta and gamma reasons which seem to be applicable to you" + "Relax, take your time, you'll eventually start enjoying it".

8. You see the ultimate paradox of planning - you're trying to direct your actions in a state where you know more (the future), sitting from a state where you know less(the present). If it works out at all, it has to be by chance.

9. There are always people, very visible people, who are happy in their niches and surging ahead. Their growth seems to be exponential (not just figuratively - the rate of growth is proportional to how far you've gone). So tell me again, what have you done in the past 3 months?

10. "You should have known". A friend here put it very succinctly - "The only bottleneck is now you". There's no lack of information, no lack of tools, no lack of options, no lack of anything.

11. Indecision. Pervasive, biting indecision. You're absolutely convinced of one thing in the morning and another thing at night, so much that you don't even know if you're the same person.

12. Anyone who seems to know what he's doing suddenly becomes a highly sought-after commodity. Advice flows in freely from all directions and towards all directions, and the 'right' thing is the thing that was last most forcefully impressed on your mind.

13. You're safe as long as you're far away. As long as no one really understands what you're doing (which is extremely likely if you're doing anything remotely non-trivial). "If only they knew of the things that people do here", you think.

14. There is an anchoring towards over-dramatizing one positive aspect of somebody else's life, to the point of grieving that you don't have it. Money is too trivial an example, but consider something like traveling. You feel a deep sense of lack that your job/life doesn't involve much traveling, and fantasize about how awesome it'd be to see the world. It's normal to feel that in passing, but in this state it seems as if your life is incomplete without it.

15. There's a tendency to want to live life as if walking backwards. You want to make sure that you make the 'right' choice before making it, even in cases where it's impossible to know the consequences. An abnormal urge to super-optimize everything. A thought-train like this is common - "I'm OK with my job right now. But imagine what I might be missing! What if I instead I was doing this? How do I know I won't like it more than what I am doing?". This is too is a perfectly normal thought in passing, but in this state you feel it right in you, and it's gnawing at you.

The same principle to thinking about projects/offers. You want to take up that job or that project which you are 'best suited' for. You're worried that if you take up something that is not 'fit' for you, you will waste time and everyone will go ahead. This tendency to super-optimize really starts to bite your ass when you see multiple 'good' options, if only 'good' because of your ignorance. Buridan's ass, I meant :-)

16. You realize the greatest con of organized slavery: The reward for hard work is the opportunity to do more hard work.

17. Thanks to Nikhil for this one; So far, all your time has gone into proving the existence of potential. Did well in entrance exams? Good, you could do well in engineering. Did well in engineering? You could do well in grad school. Did well in grad school? You could do well in research. Did a great PhD? You could do well in a career in research. Showed promise as a junior researcher? You could do well in middle management. Every single thing you do is a (likely nonconstructive) existence proof.

18. You do something, say X. Maybe you liked it, or were neutral to it, or let me put it this way, you didn't hate it. People see that you've done X, and give you something related to do, X1. X2, X3,... Very soon, you've so much related to X that that's your only 'qualification'! Even if you now hate X, you're too experienced in X to start clean, or at least that is how you perceive it. You're 'stuck' doing something you once liked, but no longer enjoy.

This happy state of affairs seems to be rather well approximated by the idea of a Quarter Life crisis, but everyone has their own flavor. The solution to all this is? I have no freaking clue.

But about everything else: the most exalted and most venerable Raja Rao once said to an overzealous ED class in glorious Guntur Gult: 'myaake dengevaadu okkadu unte toke ettevadu okkadu untaadu'. (The glory is all but lost in translation, but still: 'If there's someone ready to fuck a goat, there'll someone else ready to lift its tail. [So chill, dude]').

You know you're living an eventful life when you take solace in Raja Rao's expletives :-)

Update (Nov 7): A very nice article in the New York times, The Referendum:

"We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning."

As I said, brilliant article.

Update (Dec 4): A very nice 2 minute video: Music and Life

Update (Dec 28): Career advice from Charlie Hoehn: "Therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don't. No one does. You shouldn't be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren't real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I'm following, and I'm not walking in anyone else's footsteps. I'm making it up as I go."

Update (Dec 31): Is it today's individualism that's at the core of such problems? In Africa they won’t feel lonesome tonight
--

[1] and Title: A 'dual' to an optmization problem is looking at the problem from the point-of-view of a person on the other end of the transaction. For example, if you're minimizing the cost for some buyer in some given cirumstance, the dual of that problem is maximizing the price for the seller in the same circumstance. The constraints of the dual correspond to the variables you can play with in the original, 'primal' problem. Here, you seem to want to minimize regret and eliminate wrong choices than maximize happiness. What you'd normally consider objectives turn into constraints.

About constraints and objectives, there are two very broad divisions of optimization algorithms: the first kind, which slide along constraints and check if they are improving the value of objective. Constraints are very important for this kind, because they can greatly simplify the search. The very famous Simplex algorithm is an example of this kind. I had written a small, general-purpose article about the history of this method a long time ago, and in case you're interested, here it is (Page 26).

The second kind of algorithms care more about the objective function first, and use that as a guide to move around and try to stay within the constraints. Karmarkar's interior point algorithm is of this kind.

So when I say 'algorithmic', I really mean algorithmic :-)

Goodbye Dilip

2009-02-05T19:20:00.004-08:00

Prof. Veeraraghavan passed away yesterday. He is the single most broad-minded, sympathetic person that I have ever come across in my life. He inspired hundreds of students to be better human beings and taught us what sincerity, honesty and caring means. I don't know how to write about a person who every single time I met him made me ponder for hours on the kindness of his words. May he rest in peace.

(There's a wiki of memories of Dilip. It's a very nice idea because everyone has so much to say about him, and I really hope it grows.)

Eulerian Ornithology

2009-01-13T21:45:00.006-08:00

Nikhil, totally excited: "Macha, you should have been there at Tressider this afty. Babes, babes and more babes everywhere da! The babe density was so high that if you saw a babe at a location, you didn't need to move your eyes to follow her. You could be certain that an equally hot babe would be at the same spot in the next instant!"

:-)

--
When you're analyzing motion of a fluid, you have two approaches. The first, called the Eulerian, is to look at one small region in space and see what happens in time at that region. You'd do this if, say, you were measuring the rate of flow of a river at some place.

The second option is to tag a little drop of fluid and follow the drop as it moves. You could do this by putting a small drop of ink that doesn't mix with the flow, for example. You'd do this if you were interested in designing a wing so that the flow over it is smooth.

One of the first things that made me totally fall in love with Feynman many years ago was this example of his that brought out the difference: Consider a liquid going around with uniform velocity in a circular tube with a circular cross section. At any one point in the tube, the velocity of the fluid would not change in time. But if you followed a single particle of water, it's velocity would change direction constantly!

If I ever teach a class on Fluids, I'll give the babe example before I discuss this topic :-)

a = a + b; b = a - b; a = a - b;

2008-11-30T18:17:00.006-08:00

“Macha the dal in the microwave is done. The palak in the bowl on the table seems thawed enough, most of the ice has melted. Take a third bowl, put the dal in it, put the palak in the microwave bowl, and set it for 3 min.”

“Cha, if we could XOR swap the dal and palak we wouldn't need a third bowl da.”

As Charles ‘Peanuts’ Schulz said, "Happiness is a warm Nai." (and a hungry Nikhil and TS).
--

The title is the poor man’s swap program. It interchanges the values of ‘a’ and ‘b’ without using a third variable. The XOR swap does exactly the same thing, but the incisively analytical reader would of course prefer the XOR swap because it sounds cooler :-)

:-)

From Paduvarahalli to Palo Alto

2008-11-19T20:47:00.005-08:00

Hello! It's been a while, so long that the very ground beneath our feet seems to have moved on. I once again take refuge in a disorganized cud of ruminations, and hope you'll think I'm too cool for a well thought-out structure.

***

If was asked to define one word that ruled life here, I'd choose trust. You're trusted to be honest on an assignment. You're trusted to hold yourself from taking a peek from your neighbor's paper. You're trusted to be up-to-date with what's happening in class. And as a friend of mine very succinctly remarked, Trust is a sharper whip than Regulation. While all that makes life calm, nice, fair and all that, it also makes it hair-raisingly boring. No longer do profs devise devious schemes to ensure people attend class, and stay in class and not go escape out the back door. No longer do dispassionate students take a screenshot of the desktop in the class computer, set that as the wallpaper, and hide all icons and the start menu with the selfless aim of having the prof relish the joy of a rock-steady desktop. No Good Samaritans to help the prof improve his mental skills by inverting the desktop. No longer do students need to activate cross-departmental spy networks to steal the BT101 PPTs. No more keyloggers or late-night heists of MMM's slides.

No more do resourceful young men have the grave responsibility of regretfully ending the rapture of a Mantech class by ringing a cycle bell. No longer do students with a bent for experiment write 'Amitabh Bachchan' on attendance sheets passed in class as a necessary and sufficient test to determine if the prof/TA merely counts names or reads them (and consequently, no more opportunities for profs to flamboyantly scratch their invisible beards and claim they are Gabbar Singh). If such a plague of preparedness (for exams) had struck back home, gentle reader, even the ever-dependable Ganga gumbal wouldn't have been able to finger out Savitha Bhabhi the night before Rocket Ramamurthi's exam from the depths of being just another corny sex comic, and single-~~hand~~fist-edly raise it to the status of Art that defin(l)ed our Age. Can you imagine the horror of how much humanity would have missed? Can you?

***

There is a new social phenomenon here at Wal-mart, something I've never heard of from any of my friends in the Midwest (praised be its petite babes and even more petite rents). There you are, keeping your peace and shopping like any normal person, and just like any normal person, deeply contemplating on which brand of electronic mirror washing machine lubrication oil thinner will bring you Happiness. And suddenly!! The hairs on the back of your neck start to prick! Alert! Danger! But everything seems all right, just another aisle of dog tail flea neutering booster allergy relieving cream solvents [1]. And then it pricks again!! Harder this time! OMG! OMGWTFLOLBBQ!!!!11!!oneone!-exp(i*pi)!! even! You suddenly notice that that a dreaded Desi Networker (Dementors are to Desi networkers as Karan Johar movies are to Ekkkta KѬç極خkapoor serials: Both suck all happiness out of your life. One will ravage you and pass on, but the other is an eternal curse upon humankind) following you through all the aisles! Alert! Help! Man the lifeboats! Women and children first! ...---... ! ...---...!@#$%^&*() even! But you can't do anything! You're trapped like a mouse! A mouse in a formerly-pondy-playing-but-now-not-responding MPlayer fullscreen window in CAD lab when Raja Rao is coming your way!

He smoothly walks over to the aisle you are in, and starts looking at the same product as you. You've been smiling and making eye contact with firangs for the past few weeks now (in n00b hopes that you will one day puts with a firang chick, with Eyes As Blue As The Fairy Flax And Her Cheeks Like The Dawn Of Day. And Her Bosom...um, let's not get naughty here.) , and your powers of making people seem invisible, so masterfully honed back home, are weak. So you make eye contact. Poof! Abracadabra! Hocus Pocus! Off starts a delicate socio-economic analysis of 'how these people are giving so less price for so high quality product no?' [in the background, some operator's kept her finger on the PA system switch, and you hear an angry customer say that his microwave turntable didn't even live to swing a full rotation before it smoked], but he goes on and doesn't stop till he's collected your phone number, email, home address, salary, social security number, marriage plans and horoscopes, bank account numbers, spare Will signatures, 401(k) withdrawal permissions, etc. It is, of course, implicit that he will collect-call you at least 40 times every week to offer you unbeatable job offers, best stock picks, finest restaurant discounts, marriage brokerage services and give-when-you-live organ ~~donation~~ collection drives. You, surely, welcome all this with a light heart and a lighter purse for you are but two homesick brothers in a harsh cold faraway land. Which kind of treasonous deshdrohi spurns an opportunity to exchange sensitive personal information with newly-forged kin? The very thought!

***

There was a heinous aspersion cast upon the spotless singledom of my roommate and I by some notorious anti-social elements. The enormity ran thus:

Have I told you that the NRI undergrad chicks are superhot? Well they are. And it is not just here, all around. Was speaking to KVM the other day and even he agrees ( apparently Nikhil and KVM and all are trying for some hot NRI chick in [place blanked out to prevent unnecessary extra competition] ).

Tell me, gentle reader, what is a steadfastly solo man to do when his dedication to being ~~the~~ One is thus basely attacked? Why, compose a harangue in a language that won't jeopardise further efforts to hit on the girl, of course! So I beg to humbly submit for your kind perusal ~~this BTP thesis which is 29 weeks past its deadline DANG wrong window~~ this reply I wrote to a friend of mine in a chat. It's in pure Kannada, and I truly regret that I cannot give you a wee babelfish if you do not understand that noble tongue. Please don't go away, but instead hop over to the next paragraph.

And now for this heartrending tale of woe that was the meat of my rebuttal: Namagelli guru aa bhaagya? MunDedu, ondu baareeno mukha-noo torisilla, dove gati benki haaka. Route-ella perfect-aagi ittu, 80s low budget Kannada philm tara. First naavu nam paadige mane munde osi hodita idvi. Aavaga yaavano 40-ish haida bandbittu intro kotta. 'Hello, my name is ***, my daughter is just coming to study here' and talked very nicely and all. Naavibbaru, bhale biddanalla buttige maava anta sikkapatte yarrabirri pseud haakbitvi. Nenaskondrene mai jhum annatte, ashtu sahasravarnada chitra roopisibitvi IIT bagge. Avaru aa kade side-ge hoda tatkshana we ran back home and got her complete bio [searching for her in the univ directories was an adventure by iself because of her name's spelling, but that is a tale for another day. I shouldn't disrupt the shoka rasa of this conversation with the curiosity (jignyasa?) rasa]. Anyway, we mugged everything about her, right from her pet cats' names, her favorite leaves, her opinion on trout poaching in Norway, and other vitally important foundations for a relationship. HeLabeku andare nodakku ashtenu adhvanavagiralilla... ondondu angle alli chennagidlu anta noo heLabahudeno. Irali, so ibbaru datasheet itkondu, aakashadinda dharegeLida rambhege kaayta iddare, chandanada gombe tara aavi aagbitlu, classes shuru aada tatkshana. Moor hottenu, aar hottu mane ella khidaki-gu curtains-u.. aa 'mere samnevali khidki mein' song baredavanu, be***si nanna maga, avanige ee tara aagabekittu, avaaga baritiddaneno love song-anna. Chaand ka tukda full moDadalli muchi muLigihoyitu. Naaveno adige-nalli nipuNaru, naLa-ne [of naLa-damayanti fame] tattarisi murche-hogoshtu chennagi adige ballavaru, yah-kashchit sundara-NRI-rupavati-yuvati coma-ge hogibidabeku antha enella potluck plans maadidvi. By chance enadaru nam vayyari ildiro adaa ~~haakidre~~ aakbutre? Fatak! antha 'En bulbul, maathaadsakkilva?' antha nam Ambreesannan dialogue-u practice madiddvi. aadre munDedu horage barolla annutte! Gollum tara navibbaru-nu 'my preciousss' andkondu Facebook stalking maadkond iddivi, ashte. Aavaga-aavaaga ketta kanasalli kaado kateri taraha Nikhil-ge kitakinalli kaanistaalante.. paapa, eshtu sarti samadhana madidino avanige. Enu madodu maga, hudukidaru obbaLu lakshanavaada, soubhaagyavati kaLe iro Hot White Chick sigolla. By chance kannige chalesha (cataract) bandu mohada mankuboodinalli muchihogi aa mODi-nalli aa tara yaaradaru kaaNisi avaLige intro kodakkehodare, avaLa hesaru "Quing Ching Da Ding" andubidtaLe.. haaLu kivi ge cataract barolve, enu madodu ?

***

And that, dear reader, is the story of our Second Coming. Everything's not all rosy all the time, though, and on your way back from the lab late on a cool night, beside an exquisitely crafted arch overlooking a mile-long line of delicately planted palm trees, with a huge half-risen yellow moon that makes you think just for a moment that Dreamworks' intro video is maybe not so unreal, then, all alone in every possible layer of meaning the word has, it hits you: There is life, and there is grad life. ~~And Laplacian(life).~~ And as men who have seen it all have sung: Long you live and high you fly, smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry, all you touch and all you see, is all your life will ever be.

--

[0] - The title is lifted straight from Churumuri's What is Churumuri? page, but it's not plagiarism because it's true! My ancestral home is in Paduvarahalli, a suburb of Mysore :-)

[1] - I sorely miss the existence of a formal Bahuvrihi compounding scheme in English. In all 'synthetic' languages (ex. Sanskrit, Latin, German, Greek, Italian, etc.), it's routine to form loooong words after dropping pre- and post-positions, and the meaning of the word is usually something referred to by the constituent words. For example, trinetra means 'three eyes', actually means 'the guy with three eyes'. Decoding what a huge compound means can be an intensely joyous exercise, and a large part of the literary genius of Bana's Kadambari comes from amazing 5-line-long bahuvrihi words. And you have these cute little Sanskrit jokes, which I remember Raghu relating: A surreptitious Sanskrit taunt would be 'Dasharatha-nandana-sakha-vadana' == 'Dasharatha-son-friend-face', meaning Monkey-face. Of course, the wise reader would prefer the much milder 'Abey maa ki *@%^' when he's in some parts of the world.

:-)

A Portrait of the Politician as a Paraprosdokian Poet

2008-06-03T23:06:00.009-07:00

From a story on Page 5 of today's The New Indian Express, Bangalore edition (My thoughts are all Green.)

"Senior Congress leader Siddharamaiah on Tuesday called for introspection among the party leaders, following the defeat the Assembly elections in the State." (Introspection? Not a denouncement that the polls were rigged? Nor an attack on the victor's character? Surely, there must be a suggestion of a scam or scandal or fraud on the victor's part, or in the very least, wife-beaterhood? No? Illve Illva? That's interesting, read read read)

"After being felicitated at a party meeting here, he said the party was confident of bagging the simple majority "The air across the State was also in favor of the Congress. Bit the party had to be content with only 80 seats" he said. "Though the party won fewer seats than the BJP, the voting per cent was in favor of the Congress" he added. (Eh? How could that be? Glory be, is he hinting at something like Parrondo's paradox, where you make a big win by making small losses, moving ahead by seemingly taking steps backward? [1] Maybe a particular form of the Condorcet election method? Shiver me timbers, verily, he is a Statesman! Pluto was a planet the last time a politician sent me scurrying to Wikipedia to understand his deep intent! What more has this sagacious seer to say? Go on, go on, go on.)

"Maintaining that the Congress will make no efforts to destabilize the government,

(Mummy! Somebody hold me, please! Could anyone have imagined something of such wisdom and forethought coming from a politician's tongue? Hark, unbelievers, Rama-raajya is nigh! Udayavaagali namma cheluva kannada naadu! Behold the golden age of polity, the transformation of the Opposition into the ever-vigilant watchdog of Democracy from the rabid mongrel that it has been so far, a reign of Justice, Truth and Liberty paralleled only, if at all, by the reigns of the icons of the Raghuvamsha, (exhale, exhale, wipe tears of joy) what more does this doyen of Dharma have to say?)

He said that the BJP-led government would fall on its own."

Oh.

--

[0] - A paraprosdokian is a fine little thing that, well, is the reason why Groucho Marx so funny. It's a figure of speech in which the later part of a sentence is so completely unexpected that you need to read the whole sentence all over again. My favorite, told by SK, which I added to WP sometime ago: "Generally speaking, women are." And the ever dependable Winston Churchill, commenting on an adversary: "A modest man, who has much to be modest about." And in case you really have time, this one by Groucho Marx.

[1] - Did you see the moonwalking bear?
--

:-)

A watched pot never boils. Let's smoke it.

2008-04-14T02:05:00.003-07:00

Here's a very nice article on Wimpy's blog on how oversampling (essentially, taking inputs too frequently) is the root cause of all misery of mankind.

I get the feeling this applies to far more than just portfolio tracking, to even ridiculously complicated and indecipherable (to me, and quite a few others) things like relationships.

:-)

PhD

2008-03-22T23:10:00.005-07:00

Some Prof to Nikhil (who has the superhuman ability of finding fascinating snippets like these, and begins conversations with profs on the phone with 'Yaentra Donga?') quoted by Makam (The Phenomenon. To be pronounced like 'Denny Crane'. Need I say more?) :

Whaaat is PhD? Apartment-Department-Adviser-Budweiser, thats all!

In other news, this little gem of a story has helped me in simply t(w)oo many occasions in life! And how! It helped me ward off the dreaded "Tell me how you are different from the rest of the people in the group!" and the even-more dreaded "Tell me about yourself." minefields in an IIM-B interview!! The other occasion, well, gentle reader, I am reminded of this old joke:

There are two - just two - essential ingredients to success in anything. The first: don't tell everything you know.

:-)

Finite Simple Group (of order most excruciatingly 1)

2008-03-08T07:44:00.004-08:00

And right when I thought it was just another dreary day spent deciding between red pills and blue pills (with not a shade of any other color :-( Life in Magenta sucks), along came this wee song that had me completely in splits! It's by this band The Klein Four Group, and all the members are math grad students at Northwestern University. The song's called "Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)", and it makes for a lovely, lovely tune even if you're not interested in Group Theory in the least :-) Thanks a ton, Harshal!

And here are the lyrics:

Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)
The Klein Four Group

The path of love is never smooth
But mine's continuous for you
You're the upper bound in the chains of my heart
You're my Axiom of Choice, you know it's true

But lately our relation's not so well-defined
And I just can't function without you
I'll prove my proposition and I'm sure you'll find
We're a finite simple group of order two

I'm losing my identity
I'm getting tensor every day
And without loss of generality
I will assume that you feel the same way

Since every time I see you, you just quotient out
The faithful image that I map into
But when we're one-to-one you'll see what I'm about
'Cause we're a finite simple group of order two

Our equivalence was stable,
A principal love bundle sitting deep inside
But then you drove a wedge between our two-forms
Now everything is so complexified

When we first met, we simply-connected
My heart was open but too dense
Our system was already directed
To have a finite limit, in some sense

I'm living in the kernel of a rank-one map
From my domain, its image looks so blue,
'Cause all I see are zeroes, it's a cruel trap
But we're a finite simple group of order two

I'm not the smoothest operator in my class,
But we're a mirror pair, me and you,
So let's apply forgetful functors to the past
And be a finite simple group, a finite simple group,
Let's be a finite simple group of order two

I've proved my proposition now, as you can see,
So let's both be associative and free
And by corollary, this shows you and I to be
Purely inseparable. Q. E. D.

:-)

Pareto Pessimum

2008-02-22T04:25:00.006-08:00

A Pareto Optimum is a cute idea in optimization theory: In simple problems, you have one or more decision variables and one objective; your task is to find out the right values for the variables so that your objective is maximized (or minimized, depends on your way of looking at it).

Life gets interesting when you have many objectives all depending on the same one or more decision variables. The wiki page describes it rather neatly:

Given a set of alternative allocations of, say, income for a set of individuals, a movement from one allocation to another that can make at least one individual better off without making any other individual worse off is called a Pareto improvement. An allocation is Pareto efficient or Pareto optimal when no further Pareto improvements can be made. This is often called a Pareto optimum.

The old Guns-vs-Butter curve in economics is a standard example.

Life gets really interesting when you're in a situation where you can't make a move without making someone worse off, and by no means could you bear that state being called any kind of 'optimum'. A Pareto 'pessimum', then ? :-(

May you live in interesting times. - Spiteful old Chinese curse

[Now who could have guessed that that quote has a riveting wiki page of its own?]

--
Update: 23Feb: In the intoxicating spirit of 'Why put up a new post when you can make a tenuous 5-steps-removed-connection to something already up?', here's something!

I was speaking to Popup earlier today, and every time I speak to the man I learn something mindblowingly amazing; And so it happens that there's this song called the Sunscreen Song, which is, in essence, a page of (rather sound) advice on Life. Soundness of logic was never a sexy enough reason to read advice on living Life, but this one's different: first, it has a fascinating history. Second, it was originally most irresistibly titled "Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young". Third, the clincher: it's hilarious! Check this out:

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

What are you still doing here?! Oh ok, here's a PhDComics parody. Now go read! :-)

And while we're still wallowing in this mood most sombre, here's the most sensible and sensitive one-line wish I've ever read:

May we have the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Strong O:-)

Hayflick limit, pooh!

2008-02-18T10:37:00.001-08:00

[Ouch, this was languishing somewhere in my drafts, and I bumped into it only now. I wrote it a long time ago and it's a bit dated. In the meanwhile, I have realized that maybe Zen philosophy contributed more to the development of human knowledge than just inspiring exotic ice-cream koans (and plain vanilla Zen koans). Maintaining a distance is what takes you closest :-( but c'est la vie.]

--

You know you're getting really old when you get a mail like this:

[Mech2k4] Sunday Declared Working and Instructional Day
sumit choudhary

how bout a mass bunk dudes??

10:44 PM (35 minutes ago)

sumit choudharyLoading...

10:44 PM (35 minutes ago)

bhoor Jan 17 2008 10:44 PM
how bout a mass bunk dudes??

On 1/17/08, Pasha wrote:
Are we looking forward to meeting some big shot that day?
Parliamentary Personality @ IIT M !!

On Jan 17, 2008 6:10 PM, Lace wrote:
Though i wonder how these *sarkari afsars * are working on a Sunday

On Jan 17, 2008 5:55 PM, Pota wrote:
shit. i have one slot :(
but it is sad that we are still living in a country where some vetti
politicians can cause things like the work week to be altered.

and all you can do is lament that you have no classes to bunk. Till 10th, it was only the school porkis and aspiring rowdies and KDs who would dare think of such gross sedition; Our fit and proper duty, Gentlemen, was to transcribe every cough that unbearable Civics teacher condescended to ...um, cough, and make sure we kept our forearms and palms on rough sheets when drawing constructions in Geometry, lest the much-respected Geometry Classwork Neat Copy book gets a dusty smear somewhere and (the horror!) the teacher shakes her (nearly all my math teachers were kind old ladies) head in disapproval.

After that were the ol' JEE days where mere thought of bunking would greatly multiply your expected JEE rank; All we could do was go green (ooh I love that word!) with envy at the Commerce and Arts guys who'd call forth an act of social unity as sophisticated and involved as a mass bunk with just a scrawl on the blackboard, "Mas bunk 2day da! Njoi!". We were to silently bear the not-so-mild yoke of humiliation when all our behaviour-theoretic constructs and logic ("Macha, just wait and see da, everyone will say he (or she; the gentle reader will do well to note that we're talking about the blessed Arts and Commerce streams) will bunk, nobody actually will") failed miserably, and they actually ended up bunking en masse and going to the latest movie. Oh, Us ? You want to know what we did? We very dutifully found the effective resistance between two nodes in an infinite grid of resistors. ( That, by the way, is no trivial problem. Not at all trivial,

Solution)

Then we came to IIT, and it felt like a gas expanding into vacuum. As in the latter case, no work was done, and 3.5 years went away before we knew it. And before you knew it, we have no more classes to bunk. Oh dang :-(

Customary decryption of title: The Hayflick limit is related to the number of times a cell can divide before it 'dies'. As you remember from school biology, when a cell divides, the daughter cells are as good as new, so theoretically, you wouldn't expect them to stop anytime. Neither did Alexis Carrel (the inventor of surgical stitches, by the way), but this other guy Leonard Hayflick proved him wrong. Apparently, an average human cell can divide only about 52 times before it can't divide anymore.

In short, the Hayflick limit is what kills us.

The idea is also fascinating because certain kinds of cells - stem cells and cancerous cells in particular - don't seem have this limit imposed on them, and they are, in a sense, immortal. There are lots of efforts to beat the limit, the nicest-named of which is the Methuselah Mouse prize (named after a patriarch in the Bible who is said to have reached 969 years of age). The prize is for researchers who extend the lifespan of a mouse to tremendous lengths. On a related note, do watch The Man from Earth; the movie is nice, but what makes it an especially compelling watch is this little matter of principle:

(From Wikipedia, the eternal fount of all knowledge:)

The Man from Earth is a 2007 independent film written by Jerome Bixby and directed by Richard Schenkman. In what may be an unprecedented move, the producer of this film, Eric D. Wilkinson, has publicly thanked users of BitTorrent who have distributed the movie without express permission, saying that it has lifted the profile of this product far beyond the financier's expectations.

:-)

Untitleable

2008-01-26T20:29:00.000-08:00

Bliss, Pure.

All of a sudden, a certain haunted Banyan tree at IITM is the whole wide world.

As I said: Bliss, Pure.

The Last Supper (Free) Lunch

2007-12-20T02:54:00.001-08:00

[This post is dedicated to the Babba, the past-master of concocting Gtalk chats from thin air, the Sole Diety Worthy Of Worship of younglings trying to follow in his hallowed footsteps, and most importantly, Supreme Guide To The Most Important Matters Français]

Our grad-school app group was graced by this piece of glorious news sometime ago:

Junta

[The SSSaviour, name withheld till grad-school deadlines are past] has just told me that he would not entertain any more app recos with him. So please drop your plans to meet him for recos. he is kinda serious about it ..

Anyways all the best to all .. happy apping :)

Regards

After that, Messrs. Master-Sleuth Private Eye, Ear, Nose, Keylogger and Other Allied Services Pvt. Ltd. bravely fought their way to the battlefront to exclusively bring the users of this blog the Truth, the whole Truth, and way much more than just the Truth. In the face of murderous onslaughts, risking our very lives, we bring to you, and to you only, gentle reader and patron, a GTalk conversation overkeylogged with highly advanced Intelligence Technology.

[You might have heard from anti-social elements attempting to discredit the authority of this blog and slander its impeccable reputation, that (I'm sorry, I can't hold back a snicker now) (mmppfff) the chat that ( Ha ha ha ha ) follows is ( LOL LOL LOLZ even ) - why the very thought ( ROFLMAO !! Har Har Har Har Har! ) - is - OMG, imaginary. I mean, I'm appalled at the kinds of suggestions people think other people are foolish enough to believe! This ? Imaginary ? That's like alleging that complex numbers are somehow 'imaginary'! Absurd ! Why, even the smileys are blue!

--

pumpits: Machaa... free afty daa, I'm so bored..
suggest some movie plzzz :) :) :)

t0rb1ne: Me too bored da...no bugger is there on DC :(
and I've seen all the remaining moviezzz thrice over

pumpits: IIT during vacations sux maan :'(

t0rb1ne: Hey! I just got a brilliant idea! Let's go take a reco from [The SSSaviour, name withheld till grad-school deadlines are past] ! ;)

pumpits: What ? Macha how da ?
We've done only two courses under him..
and the second one was a general bonanza..
and to top it all we aren't even apping da,
why do you want reco ?

t0rb1ne: No da you cupper, you could never see the big picture
Just imagine
its night
or early evening
a warm room
a fireplace
u're an old man
your grandson is sitting on ur lap
and there's a small ember that suddenly lights up in the fire
and there is a glint from a frame on the wall
your grandson is frightened
but you console him
he asks you what that framed thing is
your eyes become moist
you become a young man again
a smart young man who made the decision to take His course

pumpits: ya ya
too smart :)

t0rb1ne: CUPPER. DONT INTERRRUPQT !
those days.. the pump and turbine and dump scheme

pumpits: sorry da, go on go on

t0rb1ne: bunking all classes
in fact being requested to bunk classes by the prof himself
prof giving out quiz paper before exam
junta cogging assignment after coming to class
after taking paper and pen from the poor mtechs
Re 1.50 for the entirety of TRR's and Blob's notes xeroxes
And only two classes portions for the end sem
and finally
(number of Ss) > (number of As) + (number of Bs)
And that frame on the wall..your eyes totally well up with tears!
a reco from HIM ! Him even, with just the H capitalized !! THE MAN HIMSELF !
it will make for such a wonderful story
so beautiful
lets go take it
cupper, you will never understand the romantic side of things

pumpits: ooh
ya da
so nice
so beautiful
let us go!!

And so they went, and probably so did 40-50 others, took many, many paper only [1] recommendation letters from Him (electronic recos aren't one-tenth as romantic), finished off three reams of his personal letterhead, and lived happily ever after.

The End.[2]

--

[0] - Anybody who's been through His course knows that saying those courses were Free Lunch is the understatement of the millennium. Free Gala Banquet By The Poolside With Cute Young Things To Carry You Back To Your ~~Room~~ Harem After You're Totally Loaded would be closer to it. Pooh, who needs Leonardo and his meager offering ?

[1] - For the happy people unaware of the tortures of the grad-app process, paper recos are an instrument that Universities use to try the Will of even the most motivated of applicants, something akin to being asked to tie one of those big iron balls to your leg and swim the Atlantic Ocean, when you have a hypersonic jet (with reclinable beds and French ~~airhostesses~~ (thank you, Babba O kind Master) chicks generally ambling about) ready and waiting for you (in other words, electronic recos). My heart goes out to all and sundry who are unfortunate enough to be subjected to this grave test, all my sympathies and good wishes are with you.

[2] - I sincerely hope this is completely unnecessary, and I've completely failed if I made you need to read this, but just in case: All characters in this purely fictional gtalk chat are completely imaginary. Any resemblance to any entity living, dead, or anywhere in between is purely coincidental.

:-)

Fermion, Spin 1/2, No strong interactions

2007-12-13T09:56:00.000-08:00

This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is what I call a Leap of Faith:

Misbah's run out in the 1st India vs. Pakistan test

--
The title describes a family of elementary particles called Leptons. The friendly neighborhood electron is a [gasp! who could have even guessed?] Lepton!

Lepton - Leapt-on, get it? Hello? Anyone home? You still are my friend, aren't you? Please? Uhhh..

:-)

Where Vision Gets Built

2007-12-02T19:06:00.000-08:00

I see it was a pretty good day for both of us :

:-)

Mukund and I were having one of those deeply erudite and philosophical discussions, and we came up with this. It is called [chest fully forward] The Asymptote-translated Hemi-truncated Rectangular-hyperbolic Model of the Mind in Matters of Mass Employability :

:-)

Mostly jobless

2007-11-28T23:20:00.000-08:00

aaand we have the 7th sem drawing to a spectacular close! Phew, time sure does fly like an arrow (and fruit flies like a banana) , it looks like only yesterday that cries of ' Vive la libération !!' rented the air.

--

Mostly jobless was what 7th sem was (in hindsight, at least) and what the future threatens to be, given our eminent unemployability. Pota fished out this brilliant early Bill Watterson comic from wherever it is that Pota fishes out such things:

:-)

Apping

2007-11-20T21:20:00.000-08:00

With the air (and the Name: fields of application forms of poor unsuspecting grad-schools) thick with such mouthfuls of tortuous verbosity as Anantagopalavenkatasubramaniam and Immadithirumalailakshmikumaran, I was reminded of this delightful old-school joke which Kiran related a long time ago:

During the after-birth ceremony, the newborn is named JalakreedasamasaktagopIvastrapaharaka (after one of Lord Krishna's exploits, of stealing clothes of gopikas when they were playing by the river). Someone quipped: "Poor kid, his father didn't name him. He sentenced him."

:D

Update: I was curious to know what other versions of this joke were floating around the net, and after some googling came by this lovely, lovely post on new additions to the Kannada lexicon after the recent government imbroglio. The best:

(Yeddy is the media's chosen nick for Yeddyurappa, the (now former) 7-day ruler of Namma Cheluva Kannada Naadu )

Yeddy: The abominable show man. Now you see him as chief minister, now you don’t.

(x,y) => (x+y, x+2y) mod 1

2007-11-18T08:04:00.000-08:00

My suggestion for XKCD after getting mauled in today's exam:

Click...Click Click....Click...`Ok, now we do the measurement'. [open] MMMEOW!! [wild mutated half-dead shriek] [lightning-fast paw slash] [deathly silence]

Alt text: Today's Geiger counters don't make as much noise, and I will defend to death my claim that the exam is as probabilistic as the experiment (if not more).

Before I forget, the best 'All the best' line must be Pota's GTalk status yesterday: 'Tomorrow, may you all be curiosity personified!'. Why? Because curiosity killed the CAT! :P

--

The title is the core transformation relation of this jaw-droppingly amazing idea called Arnold's cat map.

Update: I found this lovely, lovely cartoon here :D

Information Entropy

2007-10-29T23:11:00.000-07:00

[This post is dedicated in its entirety to Raghu, for his status message roused the entire institute from its collective torpor and alerted it to the unspeakable dangers long, happy weekends.]

If you can prove to me that these two statements convey fundamentally different information, I'll give you $1 million.

Statement A:

You see the whole country of the system is juxtaposed in the haemoglobin of the atmosphere because you are a sophisticated rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity!

Statement B:

Organizational communication as an evolutionary, culturally dependent process of sharing information and creating relationships in environments designed for manageable, goal oriented behaviour sustains and enlivens organizations.

The first line is from that most delightful song in Amar, Akbar, Anthony , My Name Is Anthony Gonsalves. [In my humble opinion, in the history of all possible experimentations with the human gait, there has been no dance-step more graceful than Amitabh cantering out of the Easter egg. Please, for the love of humanity, see the whole song! ]

The second is taken straight from a Business Ethics presentation I'm mugging as part of a regrettable exercise in squandering the proletarian taxpayer's hard-earned money, more popularly known as Professional Ethics 101.

Update: Why, the nerve! Some anti-social elements of ill-repute have dared to question the authenticity of my honorable challenge! Gentle reader, let me take this opportunity to reassure you that I am ever hard at work to ensure that my esteemed audience always receives unmatchable value-added services. I am confident that my insatiable thirst for knowledge, unwavering dedication, superior competence and commitment will help me leave an indelible mark on my field of resea- hey wait, scratch that line, wrong SoP [utters assorted curses at Stanford's Dec 4 deadline]

Fly, thought, on wings of gold

2007-10-25T05:38:00.000-07:00

In a post in some blog (whose name I do not care to recall) [1] I found one of those gentlemen who directs the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering, manages a $250 million hedge fund, teaches 6 odd courses and has an amazing sense of humor to boot. Don't believe me? Read his hilarious article on How to tell if you might be a quant. ( Small PDF )

Here's some general background on what it is like to be in world's best p(l)aying field :-)

--

Ladies and Gentlemen, Crowdsourcing has just left the oh-that's-a-cute-little-word building and is raking in the big bucks. It's just what the name suggests: you outsource your work to a crowd ! This is now more than a year old, but I tell you, I have never seen a more devious design for mass public enslavement and hard manual labor extraction than Google's Image Labeler. From the site:

Welcome to Google Image Labeler, a feature of Google Search that allows you to label images and help improve the quality of Google's image search results. (Emphasis mine)

And I must admit, the darn thing is actually addictive ! Over the last year, it's been a huge success, and people are starting to take crowdsourcing quite seriously.

The second most amazing crowdsourced site I've seen ( the first is Wikipedia, of course :) ) is Wikinvest.com. ( Harsha found it in some obscure corner of Crunchbase. Verily, the man has superior lit search genes ! (Irrelevant note: Facebook is now officially cooler than Orkut, and Microsoft has officially gone mad. Which other soc-net portal do you know that was valued at $1 billion in September 2006, $6 billion in July 2007, $10 billion in September 2007, and is currently at 15 billion? (Something tells me I'm going to love Lisp when I get the time to learn it ) [2])) WikInvest smacks Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance right in the face when it comes to detailed analysis, stock charts and predictions. Have a look!

I also came across this extremely well written article on Evolution and the Wisdom of Crowds. It analyzes three very successful instances of when crowdsourcing has worked wonders: Wikipedia, Prediction markets and Recommendation systems. The part on prediction markets is especially well written, you should definitely have a look at that.

--

I hit upon this most delightful social experiment on BoingBoing a few days ago, the "What is your Formula?" project :

John Brockman's Edge "World Question Center" and the Seprentine Gallery in London debuted a new collaborative project where they asked dozens of smart people--scientists, authors, big thinkers--this question: "What is your formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm?" People like Craig Venter, Keith Devlin, Freeman Dyson, Drew Endy, Brian Eno, and Douglas Rushkoff answered.

The project site is here, and the responses are absolutely mindblowing. I started off on this node, and rarely have I spent a more enlightening evening !

--

[0] Now for the customary fundaes on the cryptic title: it is lifted straight from Verdi's famous opera chorus, Va Pensiero

N.B: Wings made of any other publicly traded, instantly liquifiable, predictably seasonal, resale-value-preserving commodity with an average price gain of about 25% (Image) per year may also be considered :-)

[1] I was going through a Wikipedia list of the top bestselling books of all time, and was very surprised to see Don Quixote listed right up there with the Holy Bible and the Quran al kareem ! The first line of that book happens to be: "In a place at La Mancha, whose name I do not care to recall, not very long ago lived a noble, one of those nobles who keep a lance in the lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound."

The italicized line apparently is a classic Spanish cliché, and this is a humble hat-tip :-)

[2] Lisp is one of the most amazing computer languages ever, and was one of the first languages adopted by the CS academic research community, especially the part working on Artificial Intelligence. What's really great about it is that the language inspired many brilliant ideas like OOP, trees, automated garbage collection and compilers that could compile their own code !

Lisp is distinct because of its syntax: it's fully parantesized. Just look at this example:

((lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x))) '(lambda (x) 
(list x (list 'quote x))))

The customary brilliant quotes by Phillip Greenspun:

SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing.

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. - Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

And the XKCD bit:

:-)

m'I [0]

2007-09-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

"Many moons have waned since this grim nook of the internet reveled in the luxury of human attention..." Naah, too clichéd, how many times can you record your undying admiration of The Seven Crystal Balls anyway?

"I've been very busy and haven't found time to post anything so far..." Nope, your readers aren't really going "OMG!!1!!\lim_{x\to 0}{sin(x)/x}!11!!1^[a] At last! A post! My life has meaning again!"

"Let's cut straight to .." CUT THAT OUT! You're using that phrase almost like a Piliyar^[b] symbol!

Oh well, it would be less embarrassing for all of us if we choose not to pay too much attention to trifles like dates, and just get along. And so, Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls ( and in humble deference to established canon, Makam ), I'm back!

--

Ah yes, my trip back. I'm seriously considering filing a class-action lawsuit against Lufthansa GmBH. They lost my luggage, but that's OK, after all international travel is defined by "Breakfast in London, Dinner in New York, Luggage in Brazil". Their seats were a size too small for me and that gets terribly, terribly painful in an 18 hour flight, but that's OK too, maybe it's a gentle hint that I was too generous with myself and my gastronomical experiments were a tad too successful.

But what is patently NOT OK, was the fact that they played the kuntry-est and warasht {B|K}ollywood songs all through the flight. On the common TV screen for everyone's viewing pleasure reigned songs from the days of yore, when directors were tickled to the bone by the idea of having an army of dancers dressed in such a wide spectrum of pupil-splitting colors that it would give the term Additive White Gaussian Noise^[c] a totally different meaning.

Songs mercilessly ravaged by English subtitles, songs whose poetic spirit was so sublimely wedded to the local sentiments that even an attempt at translation would maul the sensitive emotional underpinnings. Most hesitantly, I provide an example: The sheer poetic beauty of the line "Love-unna Love-u, Man-ennai-stove-u" was ravaged as "Love is Love, Kerosene Stove ".^[d] Gentle reader, need I say more ?

The horror of having to look at my poor wide-eyed co-passengers' bewildered expressions after being bombarded by the tremendous multiplicity of sensory inputs ( from each of the discordant ~~dance-steps~~ writhings of the aforementioned army ) is a fate that I would not wish upon my bitterest enemy. If you have been subjected to this, too, please, I ask you, please get in touch with me right away. I know you are numb with shock, but I'm confident we can take solace from each other's experiences.

--

The next person to tell me GRE is a 'trivial exam da' is going to get punched in the throat. Pointless, perhaps, but no way trivial! Anyway, it was fun studying for it, and Barron's does have its share of nice example sentences. Here are some which I liked:

alimentary ADJ. supplying nourishment. When asked the name of the digestive tract, Holmes replied, "Alimentary, my dear Watson".

caldron ADJ. large kettle. "Why, Mr. Crusoe," said the savage heating the giant caldron, "we'd love to have you for dinner!" ROFLMAO!

--

Scott Adams got it absolutely spot on, but perhaps the Pointy Haired Boss can learn a thing or two from the guys on top here. At a meeting to discuss certain ~~ruinous~~ pernicious policies the insti has of late been promulgating with great gusto, a group of students was clearly demonstrated the fundamental truth of the statement, "If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be `meetings' "

The single most effective way to end a conversation with a 21+eps year old is to simply say "You're only 21 ! What's the hurry? You can always find time to do it later in life!" "You want to do Research? Pooh! You have the entirety of the Rest of your Life to do it!" (That 'pooh', delivered in an extended semi-nasal tone, coupled with a wave of the hand is arguably the single most irritating gesture among all forms of human communication) "You're not interested in working in the industry? Bah! What do you know of interest? That's not genuine interest." Genuine interest, ne'er has a more convenient phrase been concocted by a scheming human mind.

And yes, the next time you want to pique someone to the bone, just remember Stephen Covey's idea of a 'Proactive' outlook and blow it out of proportion. "You don't get good projects? You should FIND good projects for yourself!" "You don't have good facilities in industries? You should do the best you can with the facilities you have! You know, in 1833, when I was at Bi-bi Industries, I had to find all my work on my own. Or the time I was at Basin Bridge Rivets and Fasteners in 1296. Why, Rivets and Fasteners weren't even invented back then. But did that stop me from working there dawn to dusk, and not go cribbing that e v e r y one else had more interesting things to do? No! "

Grr, Gerontocracies suck so bad. Somehow though, I get this feeling that the entire concept of Generation Gap is a very convenient excuse for one or both of the sides to not think.

--

[0]. I know, I'm sorry. No more painful rebuses in the title in the future, I promise.

[a]. That little gem is from Maddox's inimitable butchering of the iPhone

[b]. For ye heathens: a symbol that looks like a 2 with a double underline, written by us staunch Believers on top of all answer sheets to tele-hypnotize the evaluator into overlooking all mistakes, generously dole out 'grace marks', and in general bring good luck. Reminds me of this quote:

Pray, v. To ask the laws of the universe to be annulled on behalf of a
single petitioner confessedly unworthy. -Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914), [The
Devil's Dictionary, 1906]

[c]. A humble tribute to The BoFi. Now that little phrase is a part of ancient insti lore. Everyone who's written the GRE knows that the ultimate way to crack the Analytical Writing section is to gently introduce a couple of ( preferably >6 syllabled, High Latin ) terms from Economics and Statistics. But that is for mere mortals! Our man the BoFi went a step ahead, and brought in terms from Signal Processing and Communication Theory, and demonstrated that a certain statistical measurement mentioned in the essay would be irreparably affected by Additive White Gaussian Noise. All Hail !

[d]. You definitely MUST read these hilarious articles by Mahadevan Ramesh on the soaring standards of Tamizh lyrics in today's cinema.

An Algorithmic Approach To Modern Tamil Verse

Latest Algorithm from Poet Vairamuthu

("Mentor Graphics Stock pola irangi vandhavale" This guy is just the god! Here's the wiki page for the company, and here's the Google Finance page. Scroll back to around mid 1997. ( Random rant: AJAX code unreachable by the URL sucks, I should be able to specify every possible state of a page with just the URL ) )

Naavu bandEva amErikakke

2007-05-23T14:52:00.000-07:00

Greetings! Let's cut straight to the chase: I'm far too lazy to try to sum up my experiences in nice, coherent paragraphs, so I'm going to employ a ruse that's been refined and perfected so much that it is now an art form. (Seriously now, that confounded *!@)^@ defies all my attempts at understanding it :X)

[The story till now: Yours Truly was one of the lucky ones who managed to get both himself and his grades an intern at Purdue University for the summer. (Please ignore that statement if it sounded weird). Clothes were bought and monies exchanged and bags were filled and supernatural Packing Fractions achieved in autorickshaws and goodbyes bid, and then, ...
]

I had flown only once before when I was a kid, and was surprised to see that most of the speed gained before takeoff was in the final 15-20 seconds. Interesting!
It seems to be that a large part of bearing His Mild Yoke is in having all those dreams of cute young females as co-travelers being shattered repeatedly and ruthlessly. Accordingly, mine happened to be very old, very sleepy and very big gents, thereby effectively eliminating all forms of visual, communicative and ambulatory comfort. Wonderful.
Lufthansa's idea of in-flight entertainment is no doubt an expression of the famed Teutonic Precision and Endurance. There was this TV set that showed the trajectory of the plane and the current position, updated by a GPS every 2-3 seconds, and the most exciting thing happening ( the kind that causes the audience jump up from their seats ) was the dot representing our plane actually moving a pixel! Most entertaining! The trajectory was interesting though, we'd fly over Bangalore, Bombay, Lahore, Tashkent, the Black Sea, most of Belgium and then land at Frankfurt.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but the in-flight food was actually tolerable. I may even venture so far as to say it was good ! Gone are the halcyon days when grumpy old aunties masquerading as air hostesses would throw you a packet ostensibly containing idlis, and it would make a loud clink! and chip away the edge when it hit the plastic table.. sigh!
Day broke, and we were over the Black Sea. Most of it seemed frozen, and the sight was awesome! I noticed that the TV I mentioned above also occasionally showed the outside temperature, and shiver me timbers, it was -55 degrees Celsius, in broad daylight ! Wow, I had never thought of that! Steel, which is one of the best materials available that can withstand tension, will crumble like chalk when cooled below -10 degrees! -55 degrees is amazing! Nearly all our SOM fundaes are shaken!
Frankfurt looks queer from above; nearly every building seemed to have a steeply gabled (triangular) roof! Like those quaint postcard towns! The roads look lovely, too!
Frankfurt airport is insane! Between the time we landed and taxied to a halt, three other planes had landed on the same runway! It's mighty scary if you see it happen, trust me!
The airport is HUGE, and I generally followed the directions to my other plane's bay. A second round of security checks, they checked my laptop for explosives and all. Oh, and finally, some visual delights at long last!
This time it was two very old, very big ladies, but thankfully they were rather talkative and friendly, so there was something to do. Very soon we flew over London and over the Atlantic ocean. A strange flight trajectory again, we'd fly very high north, pass over Greenland, over Canada, and head almost directly southward to Chicago.
The cloud cover was pretty thick in the beginning, but when it broke, it was the most wonderful sight I had seen! The ocean is exactly the same color as the sky, and for a moment, you won't know which is which! Awesome !
I landed in Chicago and thankfully the customs didn't bother to check anything. I caught an almost empty bus to West Lafayette, but happily the driver was rather talkative too, so there was some company.
People have noticed many lovely and romantic and sexy `first things' in the USA, but the first thing I noticed, gentle reader, was Rivets. ( Utters assorted maledictions upon that thinly-veiled conspiracy to thwart any morsel of Engineering talent in students, that terrorizing exercise in tyranny euphemistically known as (furtively looks around) (low voice) Machine drawing ). Rivets, rivets and more rivets! On trailers and roads and trucks and buses and signs and billboards! Everywhere!
I thought that the vague depressing colors in the film Mystic River were entirely artificial. Not so, I see. The first impression I had of Chicago was that the whole place looked a lot less colorful and pale. The highways are made of concrete, and are a vague gray, the sky isn't as blue, the trees are a rather pale green, too.
Talking of Highways, I was on an Interstate : Interstates are these countrywide network of huge 12-lane North-South and East-West roads, and the normal speed in the slower lanes was some 120 kmph! I later learned that these Interstates were inspired by the German Autobahns, and more than 70% of the German Autobahns don't have speed limits! The wiki article tells me that the `recommended' speed is 130 kmph, which means people usually go at 180 kmph :)
Many modern cars are capable of speeds of over 200 km/h (124 mph), and most large manufacturers of luxury cars follow a gentlemen's agreement by technically limiting the top speed of their cars to 250 km/h (155 mph) for safety reasons
I also saw this nice neat way of collecting tolls, called the I-Pass system. Your car has a magnetic strip on its top, and toll gates have readers that deduct a certain sum from your account when you pass through them!
Purdue is pronounced `Puh-doo' ( I was saying something closer `Purrr-dew' ) is located in all around a town called West Lafayette. No in-gate or out-gate, that was interesting :) The labs are spread everywhere, right from the airport to the river bank ( There's loong river called the Wabash that flows through the town ).
The place looks and feels exactly like vintage Bangalore! The just-cold weather, the nip in the air, lots and lots of trees, no bustle, sunlight through the foliage, even sparrows! The works!
I was all the more surprised when I met my Prof. He told me he was from Bangalore, from IITM and from Tapti Hostel! Talk about coincidences! Sometime in the conversation,
Me: I have done a first course in linear optimization under Prof. `T.T.Narendran'
Prof: Uhhh (eyes searching) ... (brightening up) Oh, you mean Mama ! How is he doing?
That totally broke the ice :-)
I'm still not very comfortable drinking water right off the tap, but my roomie insists that it's ok. The days are VERY long, the sun is up by 6 AM and sets only by 9 PM. I remarked that these guys had all the luck, and my roomie told it was the other way in the winter, with the sun up by only 7 AM and setting by 4 PM. I still don't think it makes up, though, reminds me of this joke about statisticians:
Three statisticians go duck hunting. Their dog chases out a duck and it starts to fly. The first statistician aims and takes his shot, it misses a foot too high. The second statistician aims and takes his shot, it misses a foot too low. The third statistician says, "We got him!"
Another thing I noticed was that everything here, right from squirrels to soda cans to chocolates to rabbits to sandwiches, is BIG ! BIG BIG BIG! And the chocolates I've had here till now suck big time! After plowing through a `Milky Bar' yesterday the only thing on my mind was this C&H cartoon:

MFFPBTH!! S-SW-SW SWEET!!I never thought that could actually happen!
I seriously think that the town here is designed to be navigable by maps, more than the other way round! I mean, without a map you can hardly make out one building from the other, while with one, you are almost as good as a native.
In related news, I realized I know more about the topography, locations and roads of West Lafayette than I do of Chennai or even Bangalore. This happy circumstance came about because of a Quest for a Plug Adapter, and some maps that made me realize the necessity of each clause, and sufficiency as a whole, of the phrase ``The Truth, The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Truth''. One map didn't tell the Truth, no, there was no Radioshack on Happy Hollow road, another didn't tell the whole truth, it omitted the fact that its scaling was non-linear, and I had to trudge for 2 hours up and down unfriendly terrain to figure it out, and another told a little more than just The Truth, no, Sagamore Packway does not have sidewalks, and you might even get run over, trying to walk on a State highway :X
I'm courting a new muse, cooking ! I had originally believed there existed only three gastronomical singularities known to mankind : home food, Pani Puri at one of those roadside stores with kerosene lamps, and Benne Masala Dosa at a Darshini. (By Gastronomical Singularity, I mean food that you will like no matter what, no matter when. Of course, a necessary prerequisite to fully understanding gastronomical singularities is to undergo rigorous training at an IITM mess, preferably Sakthi Kitchen.) By these exertions, and by the wise counsel of my roomie, I have come to realize one more startling addition: Food cooked by you! Believe me, you will definitely like the food you cook!
Remember all those big wise grownups debunking the existence of the all-powerful, life-giving Elixir ? They even went so far as to tell me that it was a figment of someone's imagination! Phooey! My good man, Elixir verily exists, and is currently being sold under the brand name `Hershey's Chocolate Syrup', for only $3.99 ! If you would prefer a less liquid form, fear not, Ferrero's Nutella will save the day!
In a related insight, I came to realize just how anyone could come to be interested in a topic as esoteric as measuring the coastline of Britain, or in devising elaborate set-theoretic constructs to get absurd conclusions. The study of my first Chapati's boundary is a fascinating excursion into fields and ideas including but not limited to: Lebesgue measure, the Zermelo-Frankel set theory, the Banach-Tarski Paradox, Fractal Theory, Chaos, and Cellular automata.

Phew, and that, gentle Reader, is the story of my first few days in the US of A, and I'd quite agree: Amerika really ist Wunderbar!

:-)

Liberation !!

2007-05-04T00:29:00.000-07:00

I fart in your general direction, all you positive real numbers < 10 truncated to two decimal places! Vive la libération !

Fatal Hilarity

2007-04-26T21:31:00.000-07:00

(Update: I humbly and profusely apologize for the unimaginable degree of hurt I have most carelessly inflicted on the memories of all those who wrote the 2004 TNPCEE exam. Only unlettered, ignorant fools such as I will make a claim so ludicrous as 6000 deg C being the temperature of the Sun; even an Engineer with a modest idea of the State Board 12th Standard textbook will testify that the temperature of the sun is 6000 K, and not a degree more or less. This has been proven beyond doubt by the TNPCEE exam which asked this very question, and gave the choices as "a. 6000 deg C, b. 6000 K, c. 6500 deg C, d. 6500 K". )

(This post is dedicated to Mojan, without whose valiant efforts the world would never have known somebody's singular admiration of Namitha)

--
MSB corridor - Scheduled time of RAC exam : 9:00 AM to 12 noon

Me(along with about 30 others): Sir, please let us in, It is still 8:54.
Namitha : The Circular states that you should be here at 8:50.
Me : But sir, even the answer books haven't been distributed ! Some of the invigilators are coming to the rooms only now! Please !
N : No, go wait in my office. I will come there after my rounds.
.
N's Office, Wednesday 9:20 AM
.
N : I will not let you write the exam without an id card.
A : But sir, that is why I am here to ask you in person, I have lost my ID card.
N : Did I ask you to lose it?
.
N : Now, all those who came late, come in one by one, and fill in this form.
.
25 minutes on Maiya's paper gyaan. A most auspicious start indeed.

--

Exam Hall, Wednesday 11:50 AM

The Friendly, Neighborhood Buffoon: AaL yoo gentil men, tai app yuwar answer sheets yimmediately !

(comes around in a great huff, snatches off my untied mass of paper)

We do naat care if you do naat write anyTHing man, you should have (eyes narrowed, snout protruding, bald head shining, kind of like the Persian dude in 300 who says 'Our arrows shall block out the sun') disssipppplin.

Much further buffonery ensues.

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Sulli's room, Thursday 2:15 AM

Me: WTF, no question on VCRS today. 40 marks on VARS! How could you possibly do the second VARS question, with a double-effect thrown in? I didn't even continue after reading that!

Mojan: Uh oh, the VARS was a typo, he corrected it a few minutes before you came in after your honeymoon with N.

15 marks. Whoosh.

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Sulli's room, Thursday 4:15 AM

(A particularly unwieldy formula for a purely experimental correlation concerning Fluidized Bed Combustion and Centrifugal Precipitation and suchlike, fine concepts about which Mothers tell their fretful babies: 'So ja beta, so ja. Varna Fluidized Bed Combustion ke formula mug karna padega' , was physically, logically, and dimensionally incorrect. However, there was talk that this was a _particularly_ probable question, so we were breaking our heads trying to mug it up. )

Mojan: Mapullais, I know what you are doing wrong.
Makam: Oh, peace, you got it, eh? what ?
Mojan: You are not trying to understand concepts from a scientific perspective. The Spirit of Inquiry is what is missing.

Mojan did not speak or move after that. And he has developed a most inexplicable limp.

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Power Plant Engineering Exam, Thursday 10:45 AM

Question 5: A 400m long, 2.5m wide parabolic trough concentrator [yakkity yakkity yakkity yak]...Water enters the focal line at 38 degrees Celsius. Calculate the exit conditions of water. .
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Doing a simple energy balance, we (all of us) find the exit temperature of water be a slightly warm 35,000 degrees Celsius. Tungsten vaporizes at 5600 degrees Celsius. Hot.
Oh, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics ( 35,000 deg C > 6,000 ~~deg C~~ K, Temperature of the sun) is for sissies, we're Mechanical Engineers now.

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Question 6: An induced draft wet cooling tower [blah blah yada yada]. It receives 4,50,000 kgs of air per minute, and 68,000 kgs of water per minute. [Some arbit question requiring the use of a psychrometric chart.]
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For any reasonable size of the cooling tower, the mass flow rates involved will cause the velocity of air to be comparable the speed of light in vacuum.

Relativistic Heat and Mass Transfer In Conventional Cooling Towers. Joy.

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Question 9: A nuclear reactor with 50 tonnes of natural Uranium [neutron flux, nuclear cross section area, and other such delightful morsels of information follow]. Calculate the rating of the reactor.
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Possibly the most suitable candidate for the honor of The World's Most Subjective Question, we have got values ranging from Mojan's 10.47 W ( => 50 tonnes of Uranium will not quite power a rickety old bog bulb) to somebody's 3327.8 Terawatt , enough to satisfy the energy requirements of all possible earth-like civilizations within 100 A.U of the solar system.

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Now question 11 requires some perspective. Reasonable men would look at a power plant, and ask in moments of deep introspection: If I put in a kg of coal here, how much electrical energy am I going to get out of the other side? Reasonable men will go ahead, put many, many kgs of coal, and publish their findings as performance characterstics.

Agent Solar, on the other hand, waves away such efforts as mere child's play. Real Men, he contends, find expressions for the input of a power plant as a function of its output.

All is well, till that function happens to be a cubic polynomial. With two real, positive roots and one negative root. What does that mean? It means you drop in a kg of coal, and pray. Pray hard, and the output tends to the larger of the three roots. Else, be warned, sinner ! Your power plant could end up drawing power, if the equation is to be believed !! Behold Divine Retribution !

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This will go on our official mech t-shirt, along with all the other pearls of wisdom we've gathered over the years :

We're even thinking of making an AYBABTU (video)-like meme :-)
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And with that, we're done with Core Mech. Khattam-Shud even. Transcendental Peace descends so low, that I can almost touch with the tip of my nose if I stand on my toes.

0:-)