Thursday, December 27, 2012

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 :) )

Sunday, December 23, 2012

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!

Sunday, December 16, 2012

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