Category: General

Disclaimer: This post is potentially disturbing. If in doubt, don’t read it. In my pre-defence, I don’t mean any harm.

I’d written up this huge (and yet somewhat unfinished) piece which eventually ended up in everyone’s favourite no-no, racism[1]. In particular, I’d seen a news article on TV about two paedophilic-thought-inducing darling-looking twin teens who “sing” extremely racially charged songs. I’ve quotesified “sing” because they’re so not talented.

I was intrigued by something, and being the good researcher type that I am, I began looking into this in greater detail. My primary beef being, apart from all the White-Supremacist and Neo-Nazi brouhaha that was tacked along with their seemingly angelic faces, there was also constant reference to negative connotations of the word “Aryan”.

Now this bothered me, because I have relatives a few generations up the ladder that have mentioned on occasion that they’re Aryan. Now they’re the very-sweet very-old lady types, so I was struggling to see what the media’s problem was. I mean, they don’t fit the profile of someone who’ll run out and get all violent.

After much reading, I realized what might be going on. Bookmark this representative article and read it at your leisure, and it will all make sense. According to numerous sub-classifications under Hinduism, I am apparently what’s called a Brahmin. Now this happens to be the priestly, scholarly class who’re[2] supposedly knowledgeable in the vedas and such. None of this is true or even valid anymore (or probably really even wasn’t eons ago), but the point is, the word “Aryan” stems from Sanskrit roots that sort of imply—spiritual, respect-worthy and stuff of that nature; which is the context in which Hindus, Jains and Buddhists used the word historically. Now, some might see it appropriate to use the word when referring to a scholar educated in religious texts. (You are supposed to respect your teachers you know.) And this is the context in which I’ve come across the word, in a totally innocuous sense.

Now what has happened is, some violent folk in Germany have:
a. Conveniently forgotten that this word has Indo-Iranian roots
b. Conveniently taken just the fun bits (the indication of nobility) and exponentially warped it—now feeling the need to “cleanse their world of the inferiors”
c. Used this as a rationale to do their dastardly deeds

It is this that the media takes offence to. They weren’t picking on my frail old great-grandma on her wheelchair.

There, I feel all better now.

[1] So I decided to sever that section and make it its own piece. You will get to read the longer (and somewhat more boring piece) soon enough.
[2] “Whore”, teehee. Juvenile humour never goes stale.

Before you wear your seriously low-riding butt-hugging pair of jeans that don’t leave much of your lower back or the top of your crack or thong to my imagination, take a gander at your own behind and ask yourself, “Am I fit and attractive[1]? Is this something I’d like to see?”

Because, if it’s a yes, by all means, go ahead (you ought to be chided if you don’t).

If not, just don’t. Wear your loose fitting large sweatshirt and baggy pants, saving the rest of us from some pukeworthy scenery[2].

This has been a friendly public service announcement from your neighbourhood community watch.

[1] In quantitative terms, like, “Is my hip to waist ratio smaller than the tiny requisite?”.
[2] Think overhanging flab to the sides of excruciatingly tight fitting pants.

People have referred to me in various ways—non-conformist, bohemian, mildly-eccentric, socially aloof, original—when they’re trying to describe my lifestyle in relation to society. What is clear, however, is that I am definitely not a follower, and often tend to buck “fashionable trends”. I rarely do this on purpose, though I have been known to make it a point to look the part on occasion.

I have always wondered why this was, and at some point chalked it all this down to my (yes, you guessed it,) social stuntedness. As in, if you don’t notice things like how people behave or appear in public, or what the “cool people” are wearing or doing, then there isn’t much scope for mimicking what goes on.

When people bring it up, I oft tell them something along the lines of how strong and independent I am, or something similar, subtly implying I genuinely don’t care about what society thinks. I am smart and tough enough to form my own opinions as well as rules, and stick firmly to whatever it is I’ve figured out for myself.

Basically, I don’t need your approval, nor do I crave validation.

The reason I bring any of this up is that I was up to some light reading the other day, and chanced upon this most apropos quote by Sartre (Jean-Paul Sartre).

“People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends. I have no friends. Is that why my flesh is so naked?”

I was blown away, and found it a most succinct and poignant way of putting the crux of the matter across.

Make of it what you will.

Whenever people (and it’s usually clueless newbies who do) ask me the question “but why are you working on a PhD?”, I’m tempted to give them the “real” answer, which is actually rather shallow.

One day, I thought of an extremely-embarrassing-but-humorous situation involving the following.

Imagine that I’m a PhD in whatever, and to flaunt it, I’ve reserved a table for us at dinner or wherever under my newly-appropriated title, Dr. Me. While we’re enjoying our meal, imagine some unfortunate soul nearby suddenly choking on or having a serious negative reaction to his food or something, and collapsing. The woman who first notices our friend in dire straits starts screaming for a doctor. You know, to help. The industrious maitre d’ runs out to his list of people, scans it quickly, and voilà, finds the table where Dr. Me is seated.

He hastily breathes a sigh of relief, rushes to me and beckons my services, as I embarrassedly go, “I’m sorry young man, I’m not really that kind of doctor”.

That’d be so humiliating, I’d die, but I’d die laughing.

That’s it, the story ends there, punch line and all. It’s shocking the lengths some people will go through to make a gag out of an otherwise extremely serious and saddening situation.

And, at the moment I thought of this eventuality and chuckled to myself, I realized I needed to spend a good chunk of my life in grad school.

And here I am.

I know we’ve been through what I’m going to get into a few times, but you’re going to have to sit through it yet again. If you’re leaving, rejoice in the news that there are a bunch of stellar movies playing sporadically on TV now.

Meet Joe Black, The Others, Phone Booth and Mallrats.

If you have the time and haven’t seen them, do. If you don’t have the time and haven’t seen them, make the time and do. If you have seen them before, see them again. I don’t use words like stellar often, and there are few hotter than Claire Forlani. No, I’m not kidding.

Rather than being packed with hyperglycemia and balloons (as they ought to be), birthdays have now become the new hotbed for critical (and often depressing) life evaluations. By now, you’re familiar with the depressing bits (which recur often, highlighting the numerous things I haven’t achieved), but today I’d just like to point out that such introspection also helps one clearly articulate a lot of things:

What it is they really want, what they want to become, what they want to make of this life, … and other things of this nature.

This has been further fuelled by a bunch of recent workshops, where I’ve had to attempt to put down on a piece of paper the answers to the questions—”What do I want to do?” and “Where do I want to do it at?”.

During the course of my life, since when I was a kid, I have wanted to be different things—a teacher, a singer, a composer, and a chef—at various points of time. With time, this has narrowed down to one of those, and today, almost all of what I do is geared toward learning things and preparing to share what I’ve learnt. I am genuinely passionate about certain things, and don’t consider it a chore to learn in these areas, and am just as gratified by the thought of being responsible for another understanding those ideas from me.

So, it seems perfect that I want to be an academician—an explorer, researcher, teacher, mentor… and so on.

Entering graduate school, I had vague ambitions of doing all this at a “distinguished institution” (read top tier research school). Now that I’ve seen the sorts of stress and additional (not necessarily fun) responsibilities involved, I’m seriously rethinking the prospect. I sat down and carefully pondered over (REALLY hard) what I really wanted, and it dawned on me—I want leisure. All I really want is freedom from (wordly) responsibilites and the time and space to do exactly as I please, in my own pace. All I ask for in return is food on my table (and for my family, if I can’t find a partner who’s OK with footing all the bills) and a warm bed.

It saddens me when I realize these utopian dreams may never materialize. Where am I going to find a line of work that pays me to do what I want, without any guarantees of anything useful in return?

I didn’t want to compose or sing. I didn’t want to bake or cook. I didn’t want to learn or teach. I just wanted the space and time to sit down and ponder over stuff without any worries as to “real” needs. Actually, it’s not that I “didn’t want” any of those things. I really enjoy them, I just didn’t want to be doing them on someone else’s clock, with someone else keeping tab of my (rate of) progress and toward someone else’s ends.

I just want the freedom to work, think, play with anything I want to, with no greater end in mind.

I know I am going to be so disappointed with my life.

Fun “science”: It has just come to my attention that pollution makes for more girls. Really, pollution is a reproductive stress, and the human race tries to repopulate itself the only way it knows how, make more women by skewing future births’ sex ratios toward the fairer, more attractive, sex.

All I have to say is, gentlemen, start your (big fat noisy inefficient) SUVs. Ladies too, you know you want to.

I have a ton of unfinished posts, and they’re all crap. Apparently, good posts are what good hair days have now become—few and far between. I’ve been (actually surprisingly) getting a ton of decent work done as well as getting some (sometimes equally crappy) technical writing done as well. I try to be careful about delineating my otherwise social-propaganda filled dirty-hippy lifestyle from what should probably be a passionate, but totally objective and professional quest for knowledge—or however else my job is defined.

But it isn’t as easy as that.

I was going through some stuff I wrote recently toward some proposal, and I’ve picked a few select paragraphs that were initially interspersed between larger blocks of serious technical jargon. (% are LaTeX comments).

% The basic point one needs to make here is “Sharing
% is good”.

Although it has not been stressed upon previously, we recognize the advantages of using readily available, rigorously tested, open source code published by different groups and this has played a significant role in the choices made for our existing and proposed implementations. Most of the software projects mentioned previously (and their dependencies) are distributed under licenses which offer the freedom to be downloaded free of charge, modified to suit our needs, and in some cases even distributed, with little unfair tethering. As a small sampling, SuperLU is distributed under a BSD style license and PetSC (one of the dependencies of Prometheus) is also under a under a BSD style license with portions under the GNU GPL both of which guarantee the aforementioned freedoms. Apart from the obvious pragmatic benefits—obtaining well written software gratis, reliability through the scrutiny of numerous people, reduced development costs and overhead, faster turnaround times—the inherent freedom related to having access to the source code and having the rights to modify and share it provides the opportunity to study and understand its functionality, scope for easy modifications to suit ones needs, eliminates dependencies on “black boxes” and vendor lock-in, facilitates easy and democratic sharing of knowledge and ideas, reduces the need to reinvent the wheel, allowing futher advances to be made on the shoulders of giants before and creates a sense of community where many skilled and interested people learn, use, customize, evolve and crosspollinate the endeavor with their ideas.

% It is a social statement, with very real pragmatic benefits.
% Plus it is an avenue for socially stunted geeks to make
% friends with people of common interest.

In order to better facilitate the open access of our models and code by the research community we are currently evaluating the use of Fenics, a fully open and free collection of finite element software under the GNU GPL to replace FEAP, which is closed and a central component of our current codebase.

This was eventually toned down to just a few sentences, but see, the point I’m trying to make is it’s just hard to abruptly start or stop aspects integral to one’s nature just because the situation calls for it.

I’d been toying with the idea of becoming vegan for a short while. Over the past few weeks, I’d been taking stock of the kinds of foods that provide my daily nutrition, and proceeded to sort out what I could live without, and what needed (albeit crappy) replacement. The thrust in this general direction was heightened around my birthday, as I wanted to start the second half of this journey toward the big three-oh with some substantially fundamental life changes.

And, as I’ve come to realize, “life changes” for me usually imply resorting to the question “what else can I deny myself?”.

My reasons for attempting this weren’t positive or significant at all, just another thing to try, like… celebrity religion changes. Like most people treat yoga or giving up animal-skin based clothing—it is a fashionable thing to do. I was aiming to be just one of the cool kids who make cool sounding lifestyle choices “just because”. With this in mind, my baking this birthday involved an eggless, creamless cake which ended up being rather flat and generally yucky. (I seem to vaguely recall my mom nearly pulling it off ages ago, but it even then it wasn’t “just right”. I also recall, though I don’t know why, it involving inordinate amounts of vegetable oil.)

What I’m trying to get at, is that this sort of thing is complicated to pull off. I’m sad to report, just five days into it, I’ve already broken down and am sipping on a glass of warm, milky, cocoa. I blamed it on lack of access to, you know, one of those specialty stores that supports lifestyles like this (selling soy and tofu and other generally bad tasting stuff), but I know it’s just me being weak.

I kinda like ice cream and cookies and cheese and …

Fun “science”: From a, let’s just call it “documentary” I recently heard, women on average first masturbate to orgasm between the ages of 16 and 18. Males, on the other hand, are known to attempt to pleasure themselves from when they’re in the womb.

Yes, the WOMB.

So you can see why there’s ample scope for different point of views on some things from the different camps.

I am not a major fan of politics or current affairs, but I have been paying some attention to what Tom Delay and Michael Brown are up to. These guys are slowly becoming my new heroes.

Why? Because they’ve truly understood and are sticking to the fundamental tenet of getting away with something—never EVER admit you’re guilty to whatever it is people are accusing you of.

Just don’t.

Once that’s done, you’ve as good as lost the fight. Keep insisting you are innocent, and there is bound to be some sucker out there that’ll believe you. As in, even if the courts convict you, there is still the court of public opinion (or your own conscience) where in a few people’s eyes, you’ve not done anything wrong.

Because you’ve not acknowledged it.

It’s a sort of, “I’m sorry officer, I didn’t know what I was doing was against the law” argument. A sort of “I… did NOT… have sexual relations… with that woman” argument. They might still jail you, but at least they—and probably you, if you say it often enough—think you’re innocent.

Sticking to the tenet doesn’t guarantee you’ll get away. But not sticking to the tenet guarantees you’re screwed. A necessary—but not sufficient—condition, as the math geeks in the audience might recognize.

Fun “science”: I plan on concluding a few posts, starting with this one, with fun but totally useless “science” facts.

Try as you may, I know you can’t lick your elbow, can you? The combined length of the neck and tongue and stuff fall just short of your upper arm length.

It’s funny what kinds of fun facts one can learn under the blanket of “science”.

Can you hear me?

Being omniscient and all, you know this recently arrived in my inbox.

Please don’t think that this is just another mail to your inbox. I honestly …

<snip>irrelevant but very positive details inside</snip>

Thanks for your invaluable help (once again!).

The next time someone wants to tell me something like this, please let them do it in person.
Please let it be a ‘her’.
Please let her be moderately attractive.
Please let her be willing to stick around in grad school for more than a year and a half.

When she’s doing this, please let me be gracious and warm and not stammer or attempt thoughtless humour or in any other way embarrass myself.

Please, god.

I don’t ask for much, and I spend so much time carefully helping so many people in ways I know you would find thoughtful.

You owe me.

We go through this year after year, but this time I thought I’ll jump the gun a little.

I’m officially entering my mind-twenties in a couple of days (No, you don’t have to break your piggy bank getting me something from my Amazon wish list. <cough>cheapo</cough>). As exciting a period this might seem for most folk, I seem to have associated with it numerous non-positive connotations. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time bitching about it to the only person who’s willing to listen, my mom.

I won’t bore you with the details, but the crux of the issue is that I feel I’ve been around long enough, and yet done so little.

» Found no cure for a major disease.
» In a more general sense, haven’t been terribly useful to mankind.
» No stellar intellectual achievement (or recognition, like the Nobel prize).
» No supremely intelligent, sensitive, significant other.
» No ultimately loyal friends who’d be willing to take a bullet for me in a battlefield.
» On a more materialistic level, no many-millions of dollars in the bank, fancy palaces or personal jets.

Anyway, I went on and on about these and more when she kept trying to get me to acknowledge that I am not “that old” yet, and have amounted to something.

But the fact remains, even when I look back at my own parents, by this time in their lives they’d done a lot more.

And, with much evil hackage, I’ve moved this thumbnailing code over to delineate. The time based archive scheme is still being created, but the category based thumbnailing seems about done.

As in, tadaa:

What say you?

I’m working on the style of the new photo page. What say you?

The thumbnails themselves will be dynamically updated once all the style issues are sorted out. And it works differently on Mozilla and IE.

Update: So as it stands, the somewhat stabilized versions render like so: Firefox 1.0.7 on RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 and Internet Explorer 6.03790 on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (the crappiness in colour depth is because this is via a terminal server client).

Does the transparency or the greying out tickle your fancy?

Update 2: Of course, the final goal is to find a scheme that works for delineate’s archives.

No, seriously, do they even exist?

Most of, if not all, the women I know can effortlessly kick my ass if they so chose.

Everyone’s read or been told the fairy tales, and everyone’s seen the Disney cartoons. You know, the ones which go something like so: beautiful princess-type is taken against her will by this evil doer → the charming, courageous and strong prince-type rescues her → all is well and they live together happily ever after.

Do these supposed, “pretty, weak females, whose only purpose is to be easily taken against their will and held captive” exist in reality?

No.

But do men have to be all prince-like— confident, strong, brave, dashing, …—to be deemed worthy?

Apparently, yes.

Why?

Why does society expect this of men? Do they need these attributes to be able to rescue these mythical weaklings from mythical evil doers? Do they need them to save themselves from the evil doers? Why?

The worlds potrayed in these stories aren’t true. Also, our world isn’t in some prehistoric state where the size of your biceps or your club matter.

The world today is different.

And yet, we’re caught up in “the old ways” of judging worthiness of mates.

And that’s stupid, not because of something profound, but because it means I am alone.

The preceding piece—written ages ago—was a precursor to the ideas that eventually ended up in this post. I found it while rummaging through some earlier notes and decided to milk it for what it’s worth.

I’ve been trying to type this up for a while, and it’s only now that the pain in my wrists and hands is beginning to subside. I spent way too many hours last night mashing the buttons on my GameCube controller finishing Viewtiful Joe 2 (in extremely soft volume, for those in the audience who might have an issue with it). The game, though fun, can be hard at points, is very short, and doesn’t really add any value over the original title. But that’s not a bad thing, since the original title was awesome.

Anyway, I was talking to my mum for quite a while yesterday, and as seems to be the norm now, she brought up the news of yet another one of my friends getting married. Now it’s odd that she knows this information and passes it onto me rather than the other way around, but that’s just an indication of how close I am to these “friends”.

As your spidey sense is warning you, I could break out into a trite rant about how matter-of-factly she treats this news for some people, and how up-in-arms she gets when it comes to certain other people. But that’s way overdone, and I am not going anywhere near there.

My beef with all of this is far more frivolous. To set the stage, the prettiest women I know are married, or nearly there. Now this makes it awkward when I try to compliment them on whatever. You know, when they walk by in a cutely accessorized maroon blouse, it’s natural to want to let them know how gorgeous they/it look. It used to be fine before, but now, it’s suddenly hard to do without appearing like the random creepy guy who’s (checking them out and) making such observations.

This problem doesn’t seem to exist with pretty women who aren’t married (or nearly there). And, just to remind the audience that deep down we’re all superficial jerks, this is a non-issue for non-pretty women. As much as I pride myself at being cold and calculating, I can be quite frank when it comes to saying what’s on my mind. I don’t like to have to analyze it some more just because their life-partnership scene has recently changed.

Well that, in a nutshell, was issue number 1 for the day.

Moving along, it is a clear and undisputed fact that I am a geek. A geek who can easily be lost in his own little imaginary world when he’s thinking about something, and not really be aware of his surroundings or what he’s actually doing in it. Be it how our schedules align or whatever, I keep running into this one woman I don’t know when I’m lost in my own world—talking to myself and literally moving my hands in front of my face like I’m writing in thin air or whatever—who’s clearly amused by what she sees.

I mean, every single time this has happened and I sort of break out of a trance—after figuring something out or whatever—I look up to see her sitting a few feet away, observing while stifling a giggle. I’ve often contemplated the prospect of letting her know I can be somewhat normal, and there are times when I am not convincing myself of something. But then I’d be the quirky guy who’s worried about how weird he looks doing something stupid in front of attractive strangers.

Women are hard to read. If this were a man, I could have easily differentiated between an “oh, look at his cute little quirks” laugh and a “hah, look at that weirdo” laugh. It would be easier still because one of these instances would involve finger pointing, sand-onto-face kicking and someone crying. Most probably me.

And for our final issue, number 3 is it?, we turn to yet another woman I keep running into. This time, I am sure I know her from somewhere (as she does me), but I can’t quite put my finger on where. You know, when you’re looking at someone, the duration and nature of the eye-contact can give you a fairly decent idea as to where you stand? It’s something like that. I am sure she’s thinking along similar lines because you can see a sort of thought-induced strain and a half-attempt at tentative smile.

But then there’s the issue of a sort of B-movie pick-up line awkwardness associated with just walking up to her and asking her where I know her from. Things oughtn’t to be this complicated.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to doting over another batch of cookies in the oven.

Like clockwork, my life over the past few years has been a steady sequence of steps leading up to the next major event. The next major intellectual hurdle, the next major trip, the next major purchase … . Not breaking the pattern, I’ve decided what I really want next: A British Racing green Mini Cooper-S. (PDF with pictures of the car, attached goodies and pricing.)

Unlike my father, I don’t enjoy recurring expenses. I really prefer paying in huge lump sums. So extreme financing whereby I pay a tiny amount initially and keep paying a sum per month for many months thereafter is not an option. I plan on saving up for it and paying for a bulk of it at the point of purchase. Since our earlier checklist worked so well, I’ve devised a more colourful scheme for announcing my progress toward the goal on this web log. Tadaaa.

For those with negative energy in the audience, I know, sure the average grad student doesn’t want to wait eons and rather goes in for a 2^nd-hand rusty bucket of bolts.

I am not your average grad student.