actuality.log

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.

(That’s oppOrtunities for you Northies in the audience. Sorry, just HAD to throw that in there.)

Something has happened to my computer. It has, for a while now, been surprisingly smooth, slick, responsive and just a joy to work with. Also, recently, I’ve somehow magically gained the ability to “just touch type”. As in, there is no real delay between thinking of something and it showing up on my screen. As a result of this, it will take a while before I return to carefully worded, checked, rechecked and refined posts. This is just a stream of consciousness that follows. It will be raw, there will be redundancy, and parts of it won’t make too much sense as they weren’t dreamt up for public consumption.

I was at this workshop yesterday, and as usual, they had a sign-up sheet to keep tabs on how many people showed up. One of the columns on this sheet was which year of grad school I was in. Without really thinking, I was about to jot down 2, when it hit me really hard, I wasn’t in my first or second year anymore, I was in my FOURTH.

Or, in more dramatic terms, NEARING HALF A DECADE.

If you really keep track of these things, by the time I am done here, this would probably be the most time I have spent at a given educational institution. Over 20% of my life up to this point. 100% of my adult life.

Now, if you’re going to spend an awful lot of time in school, you probably should learn a lot that translates into making you a better person in real life. There was never really a concern as to whether I was book smart. Really, I can tell you right now as I could when I was old enough to speak, “there are numerous branches of knowledge where I will know more than you with very little effort, and that’s just the way it will be”. But you know what that translates to in reality?… that I can be playing Viewtiful Joe 2 through the night up to a couple of hours before a test, not really prep, and still get a better score. That’s about it. Sure, that looks good on paper, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t mean much. All years of school has given me is the notion that I am not stupid, and that I am smart enough to pull off whatever I need to get by in an academic setting within any time frame, however impossible the odds might seem to you.

Again, none of this translates in the real world to anything. During the time I’ve spent from pre-kindergarten through getting a PhD (again, quantitatively, that’s over 90% of my entire life, and all my adult life), I probably should have been through numerous non-intellectual-life situations and been trained to handle them. Handling interpersonal relationships of various sorts, teamwork, members of the opposite sex, stress, the ability to deal gracefully with defeat, to be a gracious winner, to not be a social outcaste, to realize that I am not just a lone speck but one in a continuum and that the entire neighbourhood about a point is what matters.

I’ve learnt none of this, nor picked up any of these skills in the number of years I’ve been in school. I’ve squandered numerous chances and continue to do so. I’m still remarkably emotionally stunted, socially stunted, physically stunted, and continue to ride through my life only on the belief that I am intelligent enough to make it (read, con my way) through. I don’t deal with loss (for obvious reasons), I don’t know how to deal with groups of people, I don’t even know how to deal with A person. I’ve resorted to doing things a certain way—initially because I felt I needed no one else to get anywhere, and later because I had no one else.

My skill-set (gained?) after all this time is the ability to bear insane levels of stress (yes, more than you) and not-work-toward and ace tests.

But life isn’t a test. At least not of this kind. No one really cares if you can see relations and deduce laws governing the functioning of the universe. It doesn’t mean squat when you can’t be a caring, communicative, compassionate, empathising… human being. I often harp on sciences being hard. I only do this to con the lay person into believing I’m so much smarter than them because I do this and they don’t. They’re really not that bad. At least here, once you’ve crossed the initial hurdles involving figuring out the language of the field and agreeing with the basic principles, you can build with surprising ease and precision. There are many bigger things. Things which “just are”, and can’t be articulated easily. They’re concepts which can’t even be comprehended easily. Now those are genuinely hard. And it’s there that I need but haven’t a clue.

I hate to admit I think it’s all been a waste, and that my narrow skill set isn’t nearly enough. Sure, my most important critic might say (about some recent written words of mine): “You’re such a marvellous writer. You manage to sneak in every little ingredient—poignancy and humor, insight and cogency”, but that doesn’t translate into her ending up with me in life—nor in my arms, even for an evening.

Of course, it doesn’t help to be insanely (nit)pickey. And have the potential to scale the smallest nearly imperceptible imperfection in someone to gargantuan proportions when that’s all that you can see. (As in, OH MY GOD, the angle between her feet when she walks, she’s a living Charlie Chaplin I tell you!)

I’m currently working on a bunch of ideas I am trying to write up. It is just as hard to get out of random-writing-mode and into technical-writing-mode as it is transitioning the other way around. While we wait for this change however, here is something I wrote elsewhere in response to “Why don’t (more) Tamilians learn Tamil?”

[Establishing POV: I am Tamil, as in technically, but didn’t learn it as my second language in school either. I can’t write it, and can read about half the character set (which I figured out by matching English words and their corresponding Tamil script on bus route names). Which means I can inaccurately “read Tamil” by somewhat-crude interpolation and guesswork. I think I speak rather well in Tamil, and it’s definitely not accented (as in the parent had an issue with the “Anglicized-Tamil” the weather lady in the news used to use).]

Firstly, the anglicized accent (and other kinds as well) irritates me profusely, as it does my parents and grandparents. So I don’t think it is an age/generation issue. I am not even sure people think it “sounds cool”. I am tempted to believe people do care, but don’t care enough to force the weather girl to change.

Now to answer your question, at least as to why I didn’t learn Tamil

The ability to learn and use languages, just like anything else, comes in varying levels of difficulty to different people. Personally, I’ve found it extremely hard to pick up languages, so I’ve just chosen one that’s worked and stuck with it — English. I don’t intend on learning a language just to “preserve culture”. I am simplifying languages down to “just a medium to express ideas”, and as long as I can make do with one, one is all I will know.

Also, I think the important aspect of this is what you eluded to — what language do you “think” in. I think in English, and my inability to “easily learn” other languages, has pushed me away from learning something I’ve internally thought of as redundant, including my “native” tongue.

I am not proud of it; I see it as a choice necessitated by an impediment.