Untitled...

I've been in this world, for many long years
Put in my blood, sweat, and tears
Even had a couple of beers
I've taken leaps, and faced many fears
Have loved and lost, and suffered a few jeers
I've certainly lived, for many long years

'Tis true my friends, I've come a long way
Heard a few interesting things, and found a lot more to say
I may stop and rest some time, alas, 'tis not today
That day will come, when beneath the heavens I lay
Yet one, a few, the world, may remember me, for that I pray
I ask not for the sun, just a ray

But new little faces look back at me
In their eyes, their gap toothed smiles, I see
That innocence, that wide eyed boy I used to be
But I'm yet that boy, playing on the shores of a deep blue sea
Scared of the waves, but not enough to flee
There's more to suffer and learn, so to life I exclaim, Mais Oui!

-- Me


(Needs a little polish, and a title, but that never stopped me before :) )

Postponement (aka I'll do it tomorrow)

I am a kind of person that people might call lazy. What they seldom see, is that there is a complex mechanism of prioritizing underneath. That mostly serves to convince me that I'm not lazy. So I've decided to diagnose myself as suffering from what I've coined as "Postponement Disorder".

So lets get to the symptoms. The primary symptom obviously is the tendency to postpone current tasks into the future, for various reasons which may vary. But they can usually be categorized under the umbrella reason of "I didn't feel like doing it". But the underlying causes usually reflect your current level of frustration with life, work etc. What most people don't realize is that hard working people who are lazy otherwise are so because their work-life balance is off. Well sure, you might also hate your work, your life, or even your wife, but then you'll have a clearer idea about it. So, back to that elusive work-life balance. We all know about the hallowed thing, how we're supposed to maintain it, and how companies spend millions on trying to motivate their workers to do so as well. But we all know times come when we have to screw that balance for a certain duration cause of the work load. In fact, for real success, you have to screw it most of the time. This is especially pertinent in a grad school situation, cause work load is pretty intense, in addition to the fact that you really never leave work. That's the other problem. Jobs are nice in the sense that there is a demarcation between work and home. Grad school, is mostly treated as school, and not the work it actually is. Which means we work odd hours and all hours of the day and night. Especially close to deadlines and when our advisors lean on us, we keep everything else on the back burner and just work. And this everything else isn't just having fun, it's family, relationships, and even our health. I'm probably guilty of doing all three. But by the end of it, I've realized the folly of that approach. Sure, a lot of people know that secret beforehand, to them I say, lucky bastards, you've probably worked a few years. The ones that don't, I really can't say anything to convince them. This is a fact you either take or leave, it's hard to explain or justify, cause understanding it requires a having gone through the amount of pain and trauma you experience from the above. Which means it's a matter of faith, and that's where it gets hairy. Cause there is a certain threshold of that very pain beyond which you really can't work, something like a breakdown stage. If you're good, you can still maintain a work throughput which a lot of people can't achieve at full trot, so most people won't even notice it. If you're not, it'll be pretty evident to everyone, and they'll tell you, or fire you if they're your boss. And funnily enough, to most people it'll simply look like you're lazy and aren't putting in enough effort. A lot of said people will also tell you to suck it up and just work.

Which brings to the next part, except there really isn't one. If I had a quick fix to this problem, I'd use it and not write this whiny post :) If you do, tell me, I can use it!. Though I must say I'm starting to learn this balance a little better everyday, which gives me hope that I can recover from it minus expensive therapy :P All I will say to those who might also be going through the same is this. Live your life too, PhD's and other things take about the same time whether you kill yourself or not. Well, maybe not, but the rule applies for most things. More importantly, don't keep postponing everything else in your life, cause like willpower, you'll realize you have a limited postponement power, ergo use it wisely, or at least avoid using it as much as possible.

I see now that this post has absolutely zero structure and it didn't end anything like the beginning might have implied. So I'll end by saying this. I think this work life balance thingy sounds important. So I'll get right to it after my PhD defense!

Assumptions

If you've seen The Hurt Locker, you might remember a scene where the protagonist is talking to his baby. The dialogue goes something like this:

"You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don't ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older... some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you'll realize it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one."

It's a wonderful piece of dialogue, something that stuck with me after the movie. My thought for this post goes along similar lines. When we're young we assume a lot of things. We live in a sheltered world, and a number of simple assumptions maintain that shelter. Things like how our parents and family love us, how they are probably the smartest people around and how they'll always protect us. Then follow the other ones like your friends being awesome etc. etc. Over time though, most of these assumptions get broken. But the ones that don't, form the backbone of our existence, our foundations so to say. Which is why it's so overwhelming and upsetting when one of our long held assumptions, or beliefs, get shattered. I guess the most important of these assumptions are the most primal, ones pertaining to our immediate family. Maybe it's different for other people, but that's the case for me. It seems like a reasonable assumption (no pun intended), since not having a stable home is known to cause behavioral issues among people. I'll even go far enough to postulate that love is somewhat of a fast track criterion for assumptions to be assimilated into the core backbone, cause that aligns it better with how bad breakups hurt.

And that's how faith works too, right? Cause at the heart of faith is a set of assumptions. That's the beauty of it, that assumptions do not have to answer to any form of logic. Which is also why people get defensive when their faith is questioned by logic or science, since it isn't based in logic. But it also emphasizes the importance of not shattering anyone's assumptions in faith for no better reason than someone's need for logical consistency. But most of all, what's important to remember is how deceptively well hidden these buggers are. We're so used to their existence that we don't notice them even when they're staring us right in the face.

When you think a bit more about it, you start to realize that our mind relies on a lot of assumptions in life. Most problems in CS dealing with human abilities, like sight, hearing, intelligence and comprehension are so insanely hard to solve because developing these assumptions using algorithms. We don't recognize everyone equally easily, only those we expect to see. That analogy carries to other senses too, like we understand languages using context. If someone uses words out of context, even the best language experts have to take an extra second to understand it. All this seems to highlight the importance of assumptions, they help us survive and exist. In fact, it's widely believed (or is proven, I'm not sure), that your mind can hold exactly 8 pieces of information at a time. Anything more and one of these things have to be switched out. I'm guessing that makes multi-tasking hard, and that people who can truly multi-task must have some interesting differences in this architecture.

But all in all, this seems to point to a nice avenue to help our species evolve, cause the newer generations seem to have better assumptions in place for technology and the ilk. So imagine if we can understand how assumptions are formed and assimilated, and are able to speed up the process, we'd pretty much be able to instantly teach people things. Or, on the evil spectrum of things, brainwash and control people. But it would definitely be a cool line of research. Maybe then the assumptions we develop ourselves will have that extra value, or rather I hope our mind would evolve to differentiate between the two. Till then, we'll just have to assume other people know what they're talking about and have some common sense :P

Remember remember...

...the 5th of November, that's how V for Vendetta starts off. It's one of my favorites, mostly for philosophy above anything else. The movie makes one very interesting point though, that an idea is bulletproof. After looking at the state of politics these days, I'm starting to believe that even an idea isn't immune to rusting.

Let me start by talking about another movie that I saw very recently, Lincoln. It's a Spielberg movie based on his biography (which now goes on to my ever increasing to-read list). It's after watching it that I remembered V for Vendetta once again. For those of you who might not know, Lincoln is one of the more revered American presidents, for a number of things, biggest of which was abolishing slavery. That's one hell of an accomplishment, but the story of how it was managed and what it took from the man makes it even more poignant. Passion like that made me wonder why politics seems so different these days. Except that I realized politics hasn't changed, Lincoln faced serious opposition to pass his law. The law that seems so self-evident was abhorred by much of the Parliament then, much like some of the recent laws. Which makes it seem like there aren't any big problems these days, or maybe it's hindsight that makes a problem seem great. The bigger problem is the apparent lack of faith in democracy overall. Every little thing is so heavily contested, opinions are so fractured that it makes democracy seem like an exercise in pain that'd make a colonoscopy seem pleasant.

Which brings us to the main point, why the hell is that the case? History seems to make the case that people haven't changed much, something else should be the problem. A more likely cause are the circumstances. In Lincoln's time, democracy was a gift, independence had just been won, and the generation that fought for it was still fresh in everyone's memory. So the people knew what was at stake, they knew what democracy was better than. On the contrary, the current generation has grown up in an era where democracy is assumed. In most of the western world, freedoms are assumed, and the concept of a time and place where autocratic rulers made arbitrary rules is very foreign. Don't get me wrong, but to people whom freedom is given without any costs, it seems vanilla. To others who haven't grown up with it, it isn't. Just to be clear, I'm not in the latter category either, the world I grew up in had all kinds of freedoms, which is why I react strongly to any loss of freedoms. But I come from a country which obtained its freedom much more recently than the USA, and as a consequence, holds its democracy a little dearer. Not that that means things aren't messed up with it, but that a whole other story. There's a saying that complacency breeds contempt, and it seems particularly appropriate in this situation. Because democracy has been around for so long people treat it with a certain level of contempt, and expect it to do things for them, rather than the other way around.

Winston Churchill famously said "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". For all the chest beating we might do about it, we tend to forget that it requires a lot of compromise. The problem is that unless you know what the alternative is, it's hard to get the adequate motivation to compromise. Which makes me think that democracy as a form of government is reaching a stable state, i.e. the changes in it's existence, shape and form are done. The problem with forms of government is that people get bored with them once they reach stability. Cause all the rhetoric about how they can be glorious stops and people have to see the flawed reality. And the problem about seeing flawed realities is that then people start to look for the next glorious form of government that can work, and revolution starts. The one thing democracy has going for it is that there isn't a viable alternative yet, but the descent to anarchy seems quite close, especially if you see some of the stuff on news networks in USA. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but I jolly well hope not. Till then I suggest you learn more about Lincoln, and even Kennedy and ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Holiday!

I awoke one day with a start
Maybe something was wrong with my heart?
But what is this I see
Fighting hard to overcome my urge to pee..

My mind told me it is a thing called the sun
People talked about it, I figured it was a pun!
They had urged me to try and have this thing called "fun"
Now that my deadline was done

I noticed something on my phone
When I clicked it, a voice started to drone
You have a flight in 3 hours, it said
You'd better be there, or you'll be dead

For it's time to meet people you once knew,
Before for this deadline, before you bid the world adeiu,
In a land far away your family awaits,
Far, yet in these united states :P

So get used to that spherical shape in the sky, that odd shade of red,
And on that note, get out of bed!
Of night-time knowledge you may be a fount,
And even look like Dracula, but you're not yet a count

Go on, go to York born anew,
Holidays like these, you get only a few
Another time, you may belong to the night
But thankfully, those days are not yet in sight

So I shut the phone and stare,
And wonder what to wear,
Surprisingly the laundry is done,
Past me, thanks a ton!

It's time to get ready and look smart,
For the ones close to my heart
There's a new one I get to meet
And she looks oh so sweet!

But since gifts I have none,
I must get there early, I must run!
Beg forgiveness from the queen all of four,
For she shall surely throw me out the door

So I'm leaving on a jet plane,
Sadly I know exactly when I'll be back again
I just hope it doesn't start to rain,
Cause getting home dry will be a pain,

Now I'll end cause this poem's becoming a drag,
And I have yet to pack my bag,
So to all, a good day, I'll see you soon,
Seems like I can write a funny poem, I might even try a toon!

-- Me

In the good old days...

I recently had a few chats with a certain math hating economist who believes sociologists are the root cause of all evil. As someone heavily relying on math, this made me start thinking. Then the further knowledge that she had not heard what UNIX was got me thinking if I'm starting to become a relic of the "good old days" (not before I screamed blasphemy a number of times, and tried to find the computer equivalents of holy water and a cross. Albeit, I couldn't, but I could use suggestions!). Further along this line of thinking, I remembered a discussion I had with one of my closest and oldest friends on his birthday. That the last time I saw his entire face was more than a decade ago. Since then, a rain-forest of hair has ravaged what remains of his face, it is rumored that parts of it haven't seen sunlight in years.

The key point of all this is the sensation of getting old. Some of you may have been a part of my discussions on turning 25 and being on the wrong part of the 20s. As my sister tells me, the 30s are worse, I worry about friends getting married, she worries about them having kids. But as she just got on the "right" side of that fence, she can taunt the others peacefully for some time. But, that inescapable feeling is starting to take hold that I'm going the way of mainframe programmers. Those of you who haven't heard of mainframes, read that line about UNIX again, and remember that as soon as I find that holy water and cross, I'm coming for you.

I grew up a part of a glorious generation that saw computers, phone and mobility take hold. When we were kids, TVs were bulky and bulgy, phone calls meant you sat in one place tethered to a wall, and no one got tense if you didn't call to update about your plans every instant, or post an update anywhere. The beauty of this time was that we go to choose whether we want to go outside and play, or stay in and explore this new virtual world. Like many, I chose parts of both. The generation before mine mostly chose the former, while the ones after me choose the latter. Unfortunately, I believe that a generation that sees both as equal options may not come again. It is not for me to judge whether either is better, but I'm a big believer that "both" is always better. Later generations may see different options, but I don't think they will see such a life-changing one till we invent interstellar or time travel.

It's my time to head into the world of adults, and try to earn a living. But the adolescence I'm leaving behind fondly is crystallizing into my "good old days", and that rocking chair on a front porch is getting closer. Now I'm off to fight my next battle against the evil rocking chair, so get off my lawn you pesky kids!

Mehkhaana

waise hi itne ghum diye zamaane ne ae ghalib
zara si hansi bhi kyun cheente ho
dilon ke jaam ko chhod kar, zahar ke kalash kyun peete ho
itne lamhe zaayar kiye to sahi, kuch lamhe khushi mein jeete kyun nahin

वैसे ही इतने गम दिए ज़माने ने ऐ ग़ालिब

ज़रा सी हंसी भी क्यूँ छीनते क्यूँ हो

दिल के जाम छोड़ कर ज़हर के कलश क्यूँ पीते हो

इतने लम्हे ज़ायर किये तो सही, कुछ लम्हे ख़ुशी में जीते क्यूँ नहीं 

Balance

I'm a big fan of the now cancelled series Scrubs. I'm a bit like the main character, so I'll start with a line he said at the end of an episode. It's meant to make a point, so don't take any literal meanings out of it :)
JD says, no one understands the importance of sex better than someone who isn't having any. Similarly, I feel that no one understands the importance of balance better than someone who doesn't have one.

Now since I'm done with the titillating opening, lets get down to business. Every natural system in this world has opposing forces, and it may seem like it strives to achieve a balance. I'm not an expert, and there are 2 opposing lines of thought on that, but you may consider this balance a choice of a higher power, or a freak of coincidence that's one of the infinitely many possibilities that have an interesting residual in our universe, and on this planet. The overall fact remains that this leads to an important observation, that balance is essential for something bigger to emerge out of simpler forces.

Some people confuse this balance to be stable. In reality, no interesting system we know about has a stable balance, or in more technical terms, a stable equilibrium. They manifest as unstable equilibria, with small ranges of stability that our world seems to reside in. In fact, as someone who writes simulations, that's the region we strive to achieve, and trust me, it's pretty hard to achieve.

This analogy carries over to our lives and our minds too. A balance is important, not just for ephemeral things like happiness, but even for basic sanity and survival. Your body and mind do not take kindly to extreme conditions. But again, it'd be naive to assume there isn't wiggle room. In that vein, I've spent long parts of my life oscillating between excesses of work and fun. A side note, oscillations are interesting manifestations of turbulence in physical systems, but differentiating actual ones from spurious implementation induced strokes is very hard work.

Honestly, I'm in a field that spends a lot of time and money teaching their members about work-life balance, and then go right off expecting you to ignore it. After looking at the recent incidents in the world, I'm starting to believe this problem isn't just localized to computer science. Over the past month, I read multiple headlines along the lines of disgruntled person goes to a public place and shoots a bunch of people. In one notable exception, the person responsible even survived, and is enjoying media coverage of his now red hair. Maybe it's just me or the effect of media focus, but I feel that the incidence of such events is on the rise. Again, I'm not an expert, but some reasoning suggests that there's a reason for these extreme actions. Every assailant in these cases had extreme cases of stress, having either lost jobs, or  hope in their PhDs. So you can see why it hits a little close to home, I'm in the 5th year of the latter myself.

People are likely to suggest that these are outliers, resultants of some other extreme actions along with an inordinate response. Coincidentally  simulation folk are very familiar with these too, these are indicative of a case where that unstable equilibrium suddenly loses the second word, and becomes just unstable. That happens because some of the underlying forces and assumptions that made things balance, are violated, resulting in an increasing oscillation leading to blowup. In laymen terms, that means that what was keeping you sane, just stops, because your brain just can't balance the forces exerted on you anymore.

Like any decent scientist, I'm inclined to offer an explanation, so let me start with something that I heard a while before I came to USA. I was always told that Indian people here are lonely. After coming here, I realized that's not the case, it's just that the primary model of society is nuclear families and individuals, the latter slowly becoming the dominant set. In my opinion that is the primary cause of this increasingly extreme outbursts of stress.

So, in the early 20th century, right up till the 70s, the primary model of existence was families. People lived in big families, and had a large set of cousins they knew about. Well, ok, maybe not in the cities, but at least in towns. And this model still exists largely in most Asian countries, where these sort of outbursts are not as common. But the fact remains families were, and still are, major balancing forces in our lives. Then somewhere down the line, the baby boomer generation came. They moved out, did great things. Slowly and steadily, that model became the norm, and we started to ignore families, to express individualism. Before you get the idea that I'm trying to prophesize the importance of families, I'm not. I'm simply offering a line of reasoning, and I don't intend the choice of one over the other. So, getting back, individualism prompted people to do great things, since removing family commitments from our lives opens up a lot of extra time and motivation, since the primary focus of our life is work. But, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Earlier generations still had the support of the family they left behind, that foundation. Increasingly however, that foundation is getting eroded, because extended families and people you cared about are becoming an ever smaller set of people. These people help you snap out of depressing thoughts festering in your brain, lines of thought that are better left alone. Social isolation makes you delve exactly into these lines of thought, except, a lot of people don't have any tether at all, meaning they can drown in them. The result is what you see in the headlines, because depression/stress and anger never make for a good combination. I've seen people shoot others over trivial car accidents, so don't underestimate the power of that deadly cocktail.

Granted I took some liberties with rigor, that line of reasoning should hold, so I'll move on to the other part of my discussion. Unstable equilibria, turbulence, they're very interesting phenomena. They may oscillate wildly, and seemingly randomly, but there's always a pattern. The economic issues straining society are becoming ever more prominent. With general public unrest in a lot of places, the chances of a spark igniting this tinderbox are huge. And if you think the natural state of society is stability, well, you didn't really get the point. It's well established that physical systems prefer higher entropy, or more simply put, more variations and chaos. Add weapons to that equation, and the results aren't going to be pretty.

Before you start thinking I'm going to recommend buying gold and making basements to stock supplies and weapons to defend against the coming apocalypse, let me point out that I'm not Glenn Beck. All I'm saying is that increasing volatility is making our society unstable, and the only reliable force we know of is family. So it only makes sense to try and return to that model, at least until we can come up with a better one. What's obvious, is that the current path is becoming untenable, and something needs to be done. The world is heading towards a realignment, and such transitions are never peaceful or painless, lets hope me and you come out of it in one piece. 

Art, music and games

It's been a long time since I wrote my last entry, suffice it to say it's been a helluva ride. And since in the next year I'm going to be trying to graduate with a PhD, I'm not sure what my frequency of posting will be, so lets give this a shot.

In all honesty, I've always been a mediocre gamer, delving into different games sometimes, but never so good as to hold delusions of earning my livelihood through them, or boast about my skills. In the past month, finally being relatively free motivated me to try once again. Oh that relatively is so loaded a word. I played the usuals, Crysis, Modern Warfare, even the new Max Payne. Ignoring the fact that I ran through these games like a 100m dash (that's the way I do things, the black plague way), I didn't quite like them as much as their predecessors, with the possible exception of Crysis. Don't get me wrong, games have become quite breathtaking, especially if you have the right hardware. But they've lost some of their soul, so to speak. Visual brilliance has taken precedence over other aspects. But I know there'll be some who'll point out that my sample set's quite skewed to make that call. And I agree. The next game I played, was the one that made Bioware famous, Mass Effect. And damn was I surprised. I'm a guy who started playing games when they were designed for things with much less compute power than your not-smart phone. I've played SpaceWar, when it was still new, and that's been a badge of honor of sorts. They made me take up computers as a serious hobby, but that's a whole other story. Speaking of stories though, games have always been very linear, checkpoint oriented cause any other kind of story or choice would be prohibitive to code up. Plus, they were never very complex, only basic shells to assist the protagonist in blowing things up. Mass Effect seems to be the other kind. Yes, there's still a lot of blowing things up, but there are actual choices, ones that make a difference in how your game progresses. Story controls the game, rather than the other way around. Lovers of RPGs, don't take offense, but anything that just helps your character gain points doesn't really count. I expect the hordes of WOW (that's World of Warcraft to you non-gamers) followers to take immense offense to that line, but I'm saying it as I see it. Heck by the end of the game, it had handled complex issues like homosexual relationships, relationships in general, life, death, and a bunch of other things with great sensitivity and panache. That's something you don't usually expect from a bunch of geeky coders looking for aliasing lines at 1080p.

All of which seems to suggest that games are maturing, dare I say, as an art form. Mass Effect is a statement if there ever was one, and the tree or graph like elements in its story where what you choose to do actually makes a difference, is very new, at least to me. I'm sure there are other games which are doing a similar job, maybe even better. The icing on the cake was a background track at the end by Clint Mansell (http://youtu.be/WE8Rhmy8v0E). I'm a big fan of the guy, very few people have the talent to make such haunting music with very little. If you listen to this one, it only has a piano and a string quartet playing. If you don't know who he is, try seeing the movie Requiem for a Dream. I still haven't, but that track speaks louder than most pieces of art I've seen (http://youtu.be/hKLpJtvzlEI). Honestly, as a grad student of limited means, this game offered more value for money than any movie or book I've seen in the recent past.

People talk a lot about art evolving and experiments being done with new visual media. I've been to very weird installations which I couldn't make any sense of, but which a lot of people praised immensely. It might be time to consider games as an art form, but only if it's taken out of control of resolution jocks who only care about getting 60fps at highest quality settings. That's an insult to what a game's supposed to be. The resolution, visual quality serves to immerse you in a virtual world, much like CGI is supposed to do for movies. When it's used as a crutch and made a major selling point, it's stupid. Yes I know you're thinking Michael Bay and Transformers and laughing, but there are other offenders too, even Apple sometimes (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/15/5-reasons-i-hate-my-new-macbook-pro-a-geek-s-critique.html) (yeah I'm a little prone to Apple bashing). Graphics is and always has been an enabler, not an end, and unfortunately that's what some people would like it to be. But overall, games are getting better and more interesting, at least the non-iPhone kind. And that's where I have a bigger problem with Apple and iPhone gaming. It encourages those same toy like games where you grind your finger against the screen. No depth, just mindless droning. Sure, instead of carpal tunnel, you'll get something else. But if iPhone gaming becomes the norm, it'll kill this rising art form, and that's something I have a problem with, cause it'll kill something that's been more than 2 decades in the making. 

An ode to rebuttals, writing in general, and to things unsaid

There are some things that need to be said,
But the words escape me,
The thoughts are there in my head
But the verses escape me

... to be continued

Talaash

This verse is actually in Hindi, transliterated

Kis zameen ko dhoondhta hai tu
Kis aasmaan ki talaash hai
Sab to hai, bas yahin, tere saamne
Aankhein phere rehta hai kyun

Thanks to Google's transliterate tool, here's it written in Hindi:

किस  ज़मीन  को  ढूंढता  है  तू
किस  आसमान  की  तलाश  है
सब  तो  है , बस  यहीं , तेरे  सामने
आँखें  फेरे  रहता  है  क्यूँ