Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Explaining the wurlde, one Venn diagram at a time: softwares

Towards Empire

This Scottish gentleman, Iain M Banks has been one of the most prolific writers of the last two and a half decades, or so. He writes science fiction under the pen name of Iain M Banks and literary fiction under the name of Iain Banks.

I have so far only read two of his novels. The second is 'Excession'. The first is the 'The Algebraist', which deals with a multi-species pan galactic civilization in which much of the current economic and military concepts and ideals hold true. In a sense, it is merely a vastly scaled up empire, but fundamentally no different from any contemporary or historical civilisation that you may care to mention. Transport over huge interstellar distances are achieved by tunneling through artificial black holes called 'Portals'. The construction and maintainance of these Portals is extremely difficult, and they are as jealously guarded as any Roman highway through barbarian territory would be, or National Highway 1 through Kashmir is guarded by the Indian Army. Peace is guaranteed by the overwhelming superiority of the 'Summed Fleet', the strong arm of the political structure, which is called the 'Mercatoria'. Mercatorial forces are always engaged in low intensity conflicts at the periphery of the controlled Galaxy with breakaway populations which do not wish to join the Galactic mainstream. A parallel
may be drawn to the last decades of the Galactic Empire by Asimov (think of the Prefecture of Anacreon). The wildcard in this tableau happens to be the 'Dwellers', who live in gas giants. Theirs' is a very widespread and immeasurably old civilization. While their very age almost guarantees their technological superiority, their enormous lifespans also give them what is almost contempt for pretty much any other short lived species, whom they term 'Quick'. This translated into a couldn't-care-less attitude towards the Mercatoria and the rest of the Galaxy. Banks brings all these participants together in a beautifully complex mileu, rivalling anything that our twin gods of SF have ever dreamed up.

More will follow....

Monday, January 28, 2008

Funny Indians?

Everyone knows that Desi's take themselves waaaay too seriously. Indians have little, or no sense of humour at all. Apparently that is changing. There is this bloke called Russell Peters, a Canadian born Indian (a contradiction in terms, you think? Maybe we will call him a CBCD. I am SURE you know what that would mean. Hint: what does ABCD mean?). Anyways, I think Peters is funny, but only to a point. His act pulls on all kinds of racial stereotypes (a fairly common thing in stand-up comedy: the truly worst and quite disgusting example is Carlos Mencia). But Peters has a gift for comedy, far better than Mencia and he manages to get across to the audience with his imitations of different accents. Check him out here.

This new bloke just appeared on my radar, called Papa CJ. UK based, and nowhere near Peters, but he may get there.

Its Monday!!

Yeah, big fat hairy deal.. the gawd-awful joke of the previous week is :

Q: All the molecular dynamics people of the world get together and have a big party. What do you call the event?

A: 'The Penalty Function'.

Young Karthik's much more intriguing (and raunchy contribution): 'The Scoring Function'.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Some people have such amazingly complex minds.

This dude, great friend of mine, extremely smart fellow... well, I messaged him 'ki korchhish', which is Bangla for 'what are you up to?'

Here is what he had to say:
whats up
re: "ki korchhish", does that translate to a "whats up", or a "what the fuck do you think you're doing"
regardless, the answer is "i dont know"

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Green Patches.

Someone sent me a 'Green Patches' invite on Facebook. Apparently, it has something to do with stopping global warming. Without going into a discussion about Global Warming (see, I think the topic deserves capital letters), I wonder how just joining a group on facebook (note small letters here) will help. I don't really see how. Ok, I appreciate the general effort in that it is good to educate people about issues affecting the environment, but I doubt that just being on Facebook and creating a community will help. My point it that it might assuage whatever latent guilt there is in people who might actually make a difference without making that difference. By the way, Green Patches was the name of a short story by Asimov which did make quite an impact on me, a long time ago.

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Fast food ... ughh!

Yeah, last night was rather interesting... I went to Jorge Cham's talk at the Graduate School.. so he was here about 2 yrs ago, and as he pointed out.. although the talk was very similar to the previous one.. if we were here last time, we should have graduated by now. That hurt. A lot.

Anyways, I got an autographed book, the 3rd one 'Get Scooped'.. and got a couple of points personally cleared up by Jorge. Turns out that Tajel is of Indian origin, she went to Berkeley for her undergrad, and her name is pronounced 'Tejal' from the word 'Tej' meaning 'strength' in Hindi/Sanskrit/Bengali. Hmm... that had me thrown, for a fairly long time, I had Tejal down as either Egyptian, or Turkish or Iranian. I wonder why..? Anyway, I told Jorge that we need less of Cecilia and more of Tajel. Nothing against Cecilia, but I just happen to like Tajel.

Ok, next.. saw Fast Food Nation... this is based on a well received book written some time ago. An excellent film from the director of A Scanner Darkly and School of Rock.. the fast food industry depends on huge meat-packing firms which in turn are labour intensive industries and employ illegal immigrants in sometimes dangerous conditions. All of the different themes in the film: the quality of food, in a strange way mirroring the quality of life (I usually hate that term, it seems that it hides more than it says) and immigration.. all of them get to the same point.. that the price that we have paid for living in an industrialized era is that our comfort comes at the price of someone else's hard work.. really things have perhaps not changed much from the early days of the Industrial Revolution ...


But is there a simple solution to these and other problems.. I believe there isn't. We have all been led to believe, by our media, our government that endless prosperity is just around the corner, nay it is already here, the moment we jump on the bandwagon. It isn't. There are no free lunches. The things which hold true in physics also hold true in human societies.. endless consumption means that someone is starving.

Monday, January 14, 2008

When people own people..

A rather longish time ago, I read a short story about this bloke who had sold himself to a corporation. The deal was simple enough... he had some time free to himself each week, that would not be taken away from him. He could do anything he wanted to, except for things that might be damaging to his body; which was after all, owned by the corporation. He had been paid a huge sum for selling himself: it just happened that he couldn't think of any good way to spend all that wonderful moolah on his free time.

Interesting situation.. there are people in the UK who plan to implant criminals with little microchips which will help track their movements and eventually help to set up 'crime free zones'. I wonder where this will end?

Makes sense, doesn't it?

Smart may not be smart after all.... my friend Young K sent me this very insightful article written by none other than the great Isaac Asimov himself... I thought I should put it here:

What Is Intelligence, Anyway?
Isaac Asimov

What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn't mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP - kitchen police - as my highest duty.)

All my life I've been registering scores like that, so that I have the complacent feeling that I'm highly intelligent, and I expect other people to think so too. Actually, though, don't such scores simply mean that I am very good at answering the type of academic questions that are considered worthy of answers by people who make up the intelligence tests - people with intellectual bents similar to mine?

For instance, I had an auto-repair man once, who, on these intelligence tests, could not possibly have scored more than 80, by my estimate. I always took it for granted that I was far more intelligent than he was. Yet, when anything went wrong with my car I hastened to him with it, watched him anxiously as he explored its vitals, and listened to his pronouncements as though they were divine oracles - and he always fixed my car.

Well, then, suppose my auto-repair man devised questions for an intelligence test. Or suppose a carpenter did, or a farmer, or, indeed, almost anyone but an academician. By every one of those tests, I'd prove myself a moron, and I'd be a moron, too. In a world where I could not use my academic training and my verbal talents but had to do something intricate or hard, working with my hands, I would do poorly. My intelligence, then, is not absolute but is a function of the society I live in and of the fact that a small subsection of that society has managed to foist itself on the rest as an arbiter of such matters.

Consider my auto-repair man, again. He had a habit of telling me jokes whenever he saw me. One time he raised his head from under the automobile hood to say: "Doc, a deaf-and-mute guy went into a hardware store to ask for some nails. He put two fingers together on the counter and made hammering motions with the other hand. The clerk brought him a hammer. He shook his head and pointed to the two fingers he was hammering. The clerk brought him nails. He picked out the sizes he wanted, and left. Well, doc, the next guy who came in was a blind man. He wanted scissors. How do you suppose he asked for them?"

Indulgently, I lifted by right hand and made scissoring motions with my first two fingers. Whereupon my auto-repair man laughed raucously and said, "Why, you dumb jerk, He used his voice and asked for them." Then he said smugly, "I've been trying that on all my customers today." "Did you catch many?" I asked. "Quite a few," he said, "but I knew for sure I'd catch you." "Why is that?" I asked. "Because you're so goddamned educated, doc, I knew you couldn't be very smart."

And I have an uneasy feeling he had something there.

Refer: http://www.haverford.edu/writingprogram/Asimov.html



Friday, January 11, 2008

Shite has a way of boomeranging!!

Yeah, shite has an awful way of coming around and hitting you in the face.. something that is very apparent of late.

I have been following the pre election rumbling with some amusement, fueled, as always by the pithy observations of Jon Stewart. Obama? Clinton? Guiliani? No idea... here is a wishlist for what the next American president should embody.. understand that this is a foreigners' point of view. Feel free to disagree:

Not slaved to big business. The current economic model is one of appalling inequity, yet it contains within itself the seeds of a model of great promise.

Not isolationist. Not imperialist. The mistake that most administrations make is either to think of this continent as an island which can turn its back on the world, while everything goes to hell and breakfast. Not true. The other mistake that they make is to chew off a huge problem and solve it by giving weapons to the wrong people. Arming people does not help. Give them rice and wheat instead, and maybe some antibiotics, perhaps some drinking water resources... get the picture?

Think green. Small planet, no other options if the ozone layer just disappears. Think public transport, think smaller families, think hybrids, think lesser energy consumption.

Everyone can be here! Homosexual does not mean immediate danger to the traditional family.

Friendship is possible. Food is a good thing to share: nothing makes for the appreciation of another culture than a love for their mutton rezala, or a pad-thai and peanut sauce. Start somewhere: people would like to get on with their lives without being bombed/starved/strip searched at airports. There are so many good things to do. Go to the Vasant-Habba at Bangalore and watch an artist inscribe your name on a grain of rice for you. Take a trip with a friend. Chances are you will discover something more than just the place you visited. Now, we couldn't do that if we bombed all the nice places to dust, could we? Hence, scrap the weapons.

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

Thought for the week.

Debugging a problem or an issue in research is a rewarding experience. So, what happens to the happy endorphin driven euphoric feeling when you realise that the bug you spent so much time fixing is of your own creation. In other terms: the smart bloke in me is always being slowed down by the dumb-arse, also in me.

Robert De Nero does an excellent turn as director of 'The Good Shepherd'. This film is about the origins of the CIA, its roots in the brotherhoods fostered at Ivy League schools and tempered in the work of the SOE and the OSS duing WWII. Matt Damon has not matured as an actor... he is just naturally good at portraying taciturn men with zero expression. That is what his character was... and he plays it to perfection. A discussion is to be found here.

I walked past the Diag yesterday, it was cool, not cold and there was a promise of rain in the air. There was a girl who walked by, whistling 'The Lonely Goatherd'. I found that very nice.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Are people really paying attenshun?

A long time ago, SMSs were free in India, specifically to the Hutch cellpheun network. I once spent an evening SMSsing prime numbers and maybe even a Fibonacci sequence to everyone in my directory. The assumption being that even 1/r^2 diminishing of wave amplitude, there might be aliens out there who are monitoring the 8 GHz band and will decode my signals as signs of intelligent life.

I thought it was a slightly fun thing to do, and I was bored. Now there are people who are apparently crying out for attenshun, and help all the time. In certain extreme cases, they do such horrible things as slash their wrists. But what is it in the immediate world that we live in that ignores people to the point that it drives people to such extremes? Could there be alternatives? Surely..

So why do people ignore the small things in each other's lives which make each day slightly special? Second question: are there so few things in people's lives that can be valued? Third question: how valuable is a person's time that it can be spent appreciating things another person loves? Fourth question: at which point does the question 'will you spend time with me looking at painting/movies/walking in the snow/watching the Democrat debate' become an imposition? When does a person become an attenshun grabbing whore?

Our SysAdmin rocks!!

There are few people as good as troubleshooting crazy problems like our SysAdmin. He is the man. Its a terrible pity (for the dept in general, and me in particular) that he is moving on to bigger and better things. They are looking for a replacement... big shoes to fill.

Friday, January 04, 2008

The Pakistani conundrum.

Benazir is dead. We don't know who killed her. The man who ostensibly rules Pakistan, General Musharraf has asked Scotland Yard to help out with the investigation. Forget all this. Why is it that the subcontinent can never seem to digest democracy for more than a few years without a serious case of the hiccups?

This is probably a relevant question at a time when the catchphrase for a lot of powerful people appears to be 'spreading democracy'. Let me theorize for a moment. Good decisions of governance are made, or should be made on the basis of carefully weighed economic and statistical data. Hence, government should be run by technicians, just like a powerplant. Except that all decisions must be simultaneously moderated and supercharged by a person who has the twin capacities of compassion and vision. Such people are truly rare: they are the ones we call Statesmen. One such person was Bidhan Roy. Pandit Nehru was close to being one. Al Gore might well be one. But unfortunately, such people are hard to find.. it seems to be a paradox in that the people who are best qualified to govern are the least willing to do so.

Our only option appears to be to elect the people most willing to climb to power. And herein lies the second dilemma: it is wise to fear those for whom power itself is an end; it is better to pick those for whom power is a means to an end (hopefully a benign one).

Is there such a thing as a ruling class? Clearly, yes! It has been apparent that only those people who are immoral, amoral, or define their own morality are capable of leadership. Such people are bred and trained by the upper classes, or are thrown up from the lower classes. It is rare to see the moral and restrained middle class to produce leaders of strength. It has been the subcontinent's misfortune that the last few decades have not produced leaders of note.

to be continued..

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Whatever works...

it has been a fascinating turn of the year... some good science.. some not so good experiences... and some truly weird ones.. there are some things to understand and appreciate:

1. i will forever look up the spelling of weird. this e-before-i thing just befuddles me.

2. board games... are simulations of what happens in board rooms... someone recently stated that 'its not a negotiation unless the other person is crying'. i am not very happy living in a place where this is the stated philosophy. in ways more than one, i still live in the happy old 80's calcutta/college street environment: there is a point where being competitive is simply not cool. rather paradoxically, i never spent any worthwhile time in college street in the 80's: so the time and place that i mentally live in, perhaps never existed, outside of my immediate imagination.
continuing on this theme... i despise people who cannot live without playing a game of one-upmanship with everyone around them. i pity people who cannot live without conflict, and need a clearly defined enemy to motivate their existence. i respect vegans. i abhor people who consume without producing anything, whose only happiness is from climbing the ladder of material possession. they are unfortunate. even more unfortunate are those people whose bellies are full and who are adequately clothed, but who have never stopped to look at the skies, who have never sung a line, or read a page of a book which wouldn't help them immediately. these are the most unfortunate of all.. where their souls used to be, there are merely bottomless pits of avarice.

3. Young Sethu has invented an improved version of the Vodka Chettinad. Ingredients: a shot of vodka, twice that volume of ginger ale, a dash of lemon. Mix and stir, slice a hot chili longitudinally, so that the seeds come bursting out... add to drink. Stir. Finally, add a slice of freshly cut ginger. This drink is officially known as the Vodka Chettinad 'Shivaji' .. in honour of the great Maratha warrier and the recent Rajnikant starrer film.

4. Tom Clancy really can't write good character development.