Month: March 2005

For those not tuning in often enough (you bad reader you), you probably need to catch the earlier piece to figure out what’s going on.

Summarizing the earlier exposé, the prospect of coming up with something bleh (technically speaking) has left me mortified.

Backing up a bit here to hopefully give you a better idea of what is going on, the thing that brought most of this uneasiness to the fore is the fact that I’m taking what’s called my “preliminary exam” (prelims) this term. This is something of an overall research plan articulation, where you officially declare your committee and let (these and any other interested) people know what it is you plan to achieve, where you’re at along the way, where you think you will be in a while, and why any of this is a path worthy of exploration. Loosely paraphrased again — let them judge if what you’re suggesting is new, and cool enough.

The problem here, you see, is that I am a lot smarter than most people I know (including you, obviously). The standards I can (and do) set for myself in these intellectual realms are only matched by my lack of standards in any other avenues. They are much stricter than what other people expect of themselves, or have their academic overlords expect of them.

Ego masturbation aside, as a first step toward determining my prelims proposal, I decided to jot down bunch of notes as to where I saw myself going with all of this and circulated it within my immediate academic overlords. The feedback I received, within moments, included among other positive things — “FIENDISHLY AMBITIOUS” and “A KAMIKAZE MISSION”, but always ended with something similar to “… but rightfully so.”

So, obviously, what I claim to be able to achieve is enough. More than being just enough, these people (who’re insane geniuses in themselves), honestly believe what I’m talking about is complicatedly cool.

My problem, you guessed it, is I that don’t see it as particularly cool, or worthy. Unfortunately, by definition, if I was able to think of this in such a short period of time (couple of years), how cool or groundbreaking could it really be?

I reiterate, for those kids at the back not paying any attention — Nothing I say can be “cool enough”, purely because it was something I “just thought” of.

This, ladies and gents, is the root cause of a lot of confusion in my life at the moment. I’m wandering in the dark sort of semi-lost-hope, semi-scared, semi-ego-bruised, semi-<insert anything queasy you want here>, and I don’t really have the fortitude to oft dwell on it here as well.

This is why there haven’t been any substantial updates to the journal recently. This is why the only few posts that do show up are to do with something arbitrary and not real-life pertinent. This is why there hasn’t been a picture posted on delineate for so long.

And I don’t believe any of this is going to change any time soon. Not until I come up with the next grand theory of something or the other that no one else’s dreamed of.

As you have undoubtedly noticed, there has been a marked drop in quality and quantity of the content on this (and sister) site(s). You might have also noticed, there is clearly a lack of real-life-pertinent content, and just a whole lot of arbitrary filler material that, well, to put it mildly, is plain mediocre.

The problem here is not a lack of time or the lack of semi-interesting things to talk about. The problem here is not some new found disdain toward the idea of whining about my semi-mundane existence, while trying hard to inject some humour to make it palatable. The problem here is not some fear of an arbitrary stalker-type mad(wo)man.

The problem here seems to stem from a surprisingly hopeless disposition I seem to have gotten myself into, coupled with the fact that I see no way of getting myself out of this state any time soon. The details of this are hard to put down in words, but that hasn’t stopped me from seemingly-aimless blabbering before.

With that intro out of the way, let’s get on with things.

In case I haven’t made it clear enough already, I am in grad school pursuing a (bunch of) masters and a (bunch of) doctoral degrees. While some may argue that it is a trivial task conning universities into parting with degrees, they only succeed in utterly missing the point. The purpose of a prolonged stay in grad school (apart from the belief that the “work” one puts in at the time will result in major future payoffs) is to think of (/come up with/do/make/any other similar measure of intellectual contribution) something new and cool. If this weren’t clear enough being an unsaid rule, unis usually proceed to spell it out on the degree requirements for a PhD — “… substantial piece of work that presents and analyzes original contributions to the field …”. or something similar.

Crudely paraphrased, new, cool, and yes, worthy.

For some people I know, this really isn’t a rigid rule, and they tend to treat it more like a friendly guideline they’d like to follow, but can choose to ignore without any consequences. To put it bluntly, I’ve seen people getting away with doing… what could only be classified as a complete joke. Their “work” is neither original, substantial nor even particularly relevant. Therefore, it just ends up being something they spent some time on, voluntarily or otherwise. I openly mock such people every single day. Yes, I mock a lot of things (and people) but these are the sorts of people who perpetually remain near the top of my frequently mocked list.

And what’s my sudden problem you ask?

Alarmingly, I’ve begun to sense a tiny-but-ever-growing chance I might end up being one of them.

(Real life details resume soon.)

For those interested, I’ve almost gotten my computer to a state I wanted it to be in. With all the moving data out, formatting, repartitioning, reinstalling OSing, moving data back in, … I’ve managed to reclaim over 20 gigs of space I’d arbitrarily given up earlier. It’s amazing how much you can save when you have only one copy of a piece of software on one OS installed and not have redundancies running all about. (MikTeX/LaTeX, MATLAB/Octave, Windows/GNU/Linux, …)

Strangely enough, I don’t miss Visual Studio, I miss the frickin’ Canon “EOS Viewer”. A tool made by Canon to read my photos in Canon’s own RAW off the camera.

On to lighter things.

Since I am not one to read laundry instructions, I ended up washing a new woolen sweater in near steam when it wasn’t designed to be exposed to over 50° C or something, twice. The first time, you would say that the result was an overly snug fit. The second time, I have just one word for it, (OK, two) — Sports Bra.

Cue tasteful humour.

I, apart from being a certified sociophobe, am also what you may call a phonophobe. As in, I don’t really make or receive telephone calls, and more amusingly (to you), I am extremely terrified by the prospect. Therefore, for the most part, my phone is just a $300 clock, and not a very good one at that.

Amazingly enough, for the first time in… forever, I looked at my phone this morning as something… more.

The reason for this sudden change of perspective? I spent all night on the phone with an old friend from college, and we got around to talking about all sorts of things. And I, as in I the one who really doesn’t care about what other people are up to because it “doesn’t really matter”, cannot believe how nice it feels to actually catch up with someone and get a glimpse into how their lives are at this point in time.

In the midst of all this, there was one thing that was said that’s still bothering me. She said something vaguely akin to, “If you didn’t find anyone you’re interested in so far (referring to undergrad) and you settle for some random person (referring to a random person in general, but more directed to someone of possibly not the same cultural background) now (as in so soon), it basically reflects the fact that you haven’t met too many people, and you’re selecting the first person you’ve taken the chance to know.”

I reiterate, this bothers me. Of course, I didn’t say anything about it because it seemed to make sense at the time (plus women are usually correct about these sorts of things, and everything else), but thinking about it, this reasoning is flawed (because it’s assuming something that isn’t entirely true). I’ve jotted down some rough dates on that napkin nearby, and it is quite clear I am going to spend more time in Ann Arbor than I have in any school or college so far. Definitely more than undergrad. Consequently, the chances for my spending maximum time with someone, and letting myself know them better is actually higher here than it has been anywhere else. Given this scenario, I don’t believe it’s alright for someone to assume, “Oh, poor guy, he just settled for someone after all these years of not knowing all these other people” because there is a good chance that’s not going to be true.

“He realized he liked someone because he spent more time with and got to know them better here, as he decided to spend eons in grad school”, will probably be my take on the whole scheme of things.

And no, I don’t particularly care if you agree.

partially. But there have been semi-major data losses (including said posts) with the whole computer not being OK thing. And that sucks.

So, while I was salvaging stuff and waiting for many many gigs of data to get copied over to the new external hard drive, I wrote this up.

Why would you care? You don’t. I was just trying out some new CSS to get a “console” like feel for the command line stuff. And it looks sweet.

A few months ago, my computer sort-of-hung as it was booting into the windows partition. I watched the hard drive LED stay on continuously for some 10 minutes, after which it continued to boot seemingly normally. Once I logged in though, things weren’t so normal any more. It had “reset” its state back to a factory fresh state. The data and programs on the hard drive weren’t too messed, but the operating system, as a whole, seemed to not be able to see them properly.

This was a horrible pain, because though critical work-like data existed more so in the GNU/Linux partitions, there was still a lot of arbitrary junk (but my junk, you know, photos, ogg vorbis files …) sitting on the windows partitions. The primary reason for this being one OS could read the other’s partitions, but the other way around was not so seamless. Anywho, I grudgingly decided to find the original HP discs, only to remember the freaking things totally wipe out the hard drive before reinstalling 4 year old buggy software — not particularly useful, or fun. So, I painstakingly moved relevant data out of this machine to others with large drives (scp is your friend) at work, went out and bought an OS disc, redid things from scratch, mostly, and slowly moved the data back in.

All was well, except, yesterday, a few months later, the exact same thing started to happen on bootup. Of course, this time I hit the power button after it stalled for a little while. The end result? it’s “reset” itself to somewhere midway. Some things work, most do not. (And by “stuff not working” I mean fundamental things — like the address bar, or the rest of explorer). Reconciling to the prospect that I might have to do this once in a few months, I decided to at least reduce my pain and ordered myself an external hard drive last evening. The plan now is to clearly separate data from the OSs and programs, and store them outside. This way, any time things begin to go awry again, I can do the seriously hard-core step of wiping out and reseting from scratch, without too much of a bother.

Oh, but I don’t think there will be a next time. There is a good chance I will be nuking the windows partitions and resizing the GNU/Linux ones to use the entire hard disk.

The reasons I kept the windows partition around (I payed for it (twice), my random wireless card, Mathematica, less of a bother with overhead projectors when I am giving one of my talks, Visual Studio’s debugger) are now slowly becoming mostly moot. I have written off the windows costs as a loss, my wireless card now works flawlessly, I have gotten proficient enough with GiNaC (I always was, just lazy) and if I need it there’s always Maxima, and I can handle the projector issues when the crop up.

The only thing I will probably miss is Visual Studio’s debugger. Though I am a Free Software zealot, I don’t think there is a better software development platform than Visual Studio, on any architecture. Not one that I’ve seen anyway. And the crazy part is I don’t even use it as an IDE. I do all code writing in Emacs, because there is no better editor, period. If, and this often happens, things don’t work and I don’t see what’s going on, I give up rather soon on gdb and end up with Visual Studio — It’s just that good.

Yes, and I’m yellowbellied^*.

(^*I wanted to use another word here, which conveniently double entendres with young cat, but that’s apparently derogatory toward women. So, yellow bellied it is.)

Stuff I wrote elsewhere, in response to:

You see, science requires proof and rational explanation behind every statement. There may be certain ‘statements’ (that have no)/(cannot have any) proof in the language called as ‘science’.

I’ve been meaning to say something about this ever since I saw it, but didn’t make the time earlier.

No, science does not require a proof or rational explanation behind every statement. All science tries to do is to explain (more and more complicated things) based on logically sound arguments following from (simpler and simpler) assumptions that most people (can and do) agree on. These axioms form the basic tenets of a theory.

You take a (believable enough) axiom, “time cannot flow backward”, say. You then make rational arguments based on and building upon this fact, you get a theory. If the theory fits most things you see in everyday life, it is a good theory. Whether or not the basic axiom is true, is not important. It sure needn’t be proved, as science does not require it. All science says is if you’re willing to accept it, everything based on it is logically true, and holds. (Which implicitly carries along with it the caveat, true as long as your axioms were.)

Interestingly enough, most things we call laws today were pretty much just statements from very brilliant people, with insanely keen insight into how things might be behaving. Again, the general import here is that they just work, they fit all that we see, there are no obvious counter observations, and therefore, the statement was a building block of science. It didn’t matter if they were stated with proof or not, they worked beautifully, and thus true for all practical purposes.

Case in point, if Newton just said oh, “rate of change of the momentum of a particle is directly proportional to the net external force acting on it”, it doesn’t matter to anyone whether it came with a proof or not. For almost all systems we get to observe in our daily lives, this is a true statement, and thus, we, even as scientists, can “just accept” it. Sure, it can be easily proved today from more general mechanics descriptions making suitable assumptions on the space we live in (space is homogeneous, say). But then again, these other more general mechanics descriptions have their own set of axioms which were arbitrarily chosen (but intelligently argued) to be true.

To conclude, I reiterate — science does not require proof or rational explanation behind every statement. Science takes few building blocks without proof and logically draws conclusions from them. So yes, you were right that there are statements which have no proof in science, but it’s not some secret. Science gladly accepts that.

They’re called axioms, and stated upfront every time a theory is proposed.

I’ve not done something of this sort in a while, and I’m rather rusty.

I was doodling during a particularly boring talk a while ago, and ended up drawing something that I knew I wanted to base this site’s future logo on. It’s based on a mechanical pencil whose lead I’d aimlessly shaved to behave like a calligraphy pen. I decided to slowly transfer it onto the computer, rather than arbitrarily idle while waiting for some simulations to complete. What I’ve shown below is a start.

Before you laugh, let me remind you this was done without a mouse, and just a touchpad. Try it.

And here it is in a vector format: actuality-logo.blog.svg, in case you want to try your hand at modifying it or something.

A ton of things bug me, some more than others. This is just one of those things.

I hate those guys who keep going “my girlfriend” this, “my girlfriend” that.

Like hello, newsflash — she’s got a name.

It’s Audrey. I know, I’ve met her. You can say “Audrey and I are …”, you don’t have to say “my girlfriend and I …”.

Finally returning to our much famed “In grad school…” series.

You view life from extremely warped points of view when you’re born a hacker^*. It ends up affecting the decisions you make at fundamental levels, and determines how you navigate through life. Unfortunately, it’s hard to explain this to normal people, and can cause some confusion as you end up dealing with them in the course of daily life. I, as every other hacker, understand one thing more than anything else. It’s like the quintessential hacker ethos — “There is always another way. Usually, a better one.”

But more importantly, “… and it’s OK to spend arbitrarily large amounts of time searching for the better approach.”

People are driven by different things, but the system we are in assumes we’re all in it to get something done. Think about it, it is almost the only differentiating factor between those who “make it” and those who “waste their lives”. I am, for better or worse, driven substantially differently. I don’t know if it is because of this hacker disposition, or something else, but I tend to be driven to understand and learn. That’s it. There is no drive to do anything with that knowledge. It’s like, I am a knowledge black hole, constantly driven to suck anything and everything in, but yet you can’t evidently see any useful work being done as a result.

Luckily, in grad school, even the few deadlines that exist are relatively soft. There is nothing that, if missed, will compromise anything of tremendous worth. I know this, and that’s why I’m here. Only here can lack of discipline be conveniently mistaken for eccentric genius.

I can’t survive outside.

^*Hacker — One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.

This post exists “just because”. You have no idea how hard I’ve had to push myself to write these few inconsequential lines. I am … spent. I don’t know what else to say. I arrive home from the lab at some 2 AM in the morning, and get back in there by 8 AM. Given this, I should be getting an awesome amount of things done, but I amn’t. I’m just that retarded.

It’s been like this for a while now, and considering pretty much everything has been sucked out of me, I don’t seem to have the urge to create anything. Heck, I don’t have the energy to implement anything I would have thought up even if I had the urge to be creative.

So, stagnation it is. No words, no pictures. Zip.