Hafez

Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deeply.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

-Hafez

The unanswered question

Trolling through the nether-regions of YouTube - I stumbled across these series of lectures by Leonard Bernstein on the Language of Music presented at Harvard,in the 1973. Meant for a lay enthusiast not trained in classical music theory  - he explores musical structures and meaning through analogy with natural language.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14VhzlcSuT0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2gES6TI-Gc&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0ZE38BQmvQ&feature=related

I could find only bits and pieces of what is a longer series. While, it is indubitably worth the time spent watching it as is - I wonder where I can find the complete set ?

http://www.amazon.com/Unanswered-Question-Harvard-Charles-Lectures/dp/0674920015

Conservatism and intelligence

Yet another study along the lines of the (negative) correlation between religious views and intelligence:

http://www.american.com/archive/2009/october/are-liberals-smarter-than-conservatives

To quote:

"The Conservative syndrome describes a person who attaches particular importance to the respect of tradition, humility, devoutness and moderation; as well as to obedience, self-discipline and politeness, social order, family, and national security; and has a sense of belonging to and a pride in a group with which he or she identifies. A Conservative person also subscribes to conventional religious beliefs and accepts the mystical, including paranormal, experiences."

...

"Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated … At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, vocabulary, and analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education … and performance on mathematics and reading assessments."

How To Criticize Computer Scientists [or] Avoiding Ineffective Deprecation And,Making Insults More Pointed

An essay by Douglas Corner at the CS dept. at Purdue on how to come up
with some solid material when trying to insult your colleagues :

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/dec/essay.criticize.html

The decline of English

I recently came across this great essay by George Orwell on the decline of the English, language, especially in more formal fora.

http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html

To quote:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Great questions for great answers

A:    Go west, young man, go west!
Q:    What do wabbits do when they get tiwed of wunning awound?

Andrei Platonov

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Maureen Pritchard

"At first the old man had been rather mistrustful of the radio apparatus: How could it be scientific? Could emptiness in the form of sound really be conveyed thousands of miles? Science couldn't be busying itself with nonsense like that- science was an important matter whereas a radio was something accidental, and moreover it couldn't write, it didn't leave you any documents, and so there was no guarantee that the cardboard trumpet was telling the truth."

Brain Mapping

If only all functional neuro-imaging were like this ... sigh !

On Thinking Big

A friend recently forwarded me an article by Scott Aaronson titled “Who can name the biggest number?”

 

Using the example of asking people to write down the biggest (finite) number they can think of, he documents the history of reason and science through the ages (albeit from a Western point of view). How the ability to reason about things with sophistication have shaped our ability to answer that question.

 

This article struck me because it shows how many great ideas and Kuhnian revolutions are born by the ability to think big and to dream big. The courage to challenge received wisdom and insidious assumptions – that are so ingrained that we oftentimes fail to notice them as externally imposed limitations –  rather than some fact of Reality.

 

Curiosity and openness lead to fascination with big numbers, and to the buoyant view that no quantity, whether of the number of stars in the galaxy or the number of possible bridge hands, is too immense for the mind to enumerate. Conversely, ignorance and irrationality lead to fatalism concerning big numbers. The Bible, for example, refers twenty-one times to the supposed uncountability of sand. Take Genesis 32:12: "And thou saidst, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted for multitude." Or Hebrews 11:12: "So many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the seashore innumerable." This notion that the multitude of sand grains might as well be infinite, that it’s fit for dumbfounded stupefaction but not for quantification, is an ancient one. Historian Ilan Vardi cites the ancient Greek word ‘yammkosioi,’ or sand-hundred, colloquially meaning zillion; as well as a passage from Pindar’s Olympic Ode II asserting that "sand escapes counting."

 

Serendipity

Today, driving to school, my radio tuned in to WOSU89.7, my head tuned
in to work / research / political problems and other assorted
nonsense, in the background of my consciousness, in the
sub-consciousness, I heard something. As caught up as I was in my own
little ponderings and machinations, some long-lost part of me woke up
and paid attention. As loath as I was to divert my attention from my
viciously cyclical thoughts, I was forced to. The music - the sound -
the feeling - was undeniable.

Listen to it and let me know if there is any part of you that is not
utterly captured and enraptured by the mysterious and haunting
melodies of Rachmaninoff's Piano Trio. I dare you to find another
piece of music as unearthly and yet as compelling and as primal as
this.

Trio élégiaque in D minor:

and

Piano Trio No 1 in G Minor:

Al Jazeera

There is an article in the Oct 2009 issue of the Atlantic by Robert Kaplan Why I Love Al Jazeera in which he talks about why the "eclectic internationalism", "hustle", and dialog based reporting is so appealing. To quote

The Arab TV channel is visually stunning, exudes hustle, and covers the globe like no one else. Just beware of its insidious despotism.
...
(Al Jazeera) is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously.

Regarding, the bias of the coverage (the news is fair and unbiased only when it agrees with your point of view), Kaplan has this to offer:

Yet Al Jazeera is forgivable for its biases in a way that the BBC or CNN is not. In the case of Al Jazeera, news isn’t so much biased as honestly representative of a middle-of-the-road developing-world viewpoint. Where you stand depends upon where you sit. And if you sit in Doha or Mumbai or Nairobi, the world is going to look starkly different than if you sat in Washington or London, or St. Louis for that matter.

At the end of the article, where he attempts to explains that bit about "insidious despotism", it turns a bit incomprehensible. I didn't really follow the argument or even what he means by despotism. But apart from that - a well written article.

I haven't personally seen much Al-Jazeera. But then, in my defense, I am in the USA and heaven forbid I get to watch any news that doesn't revolve entirely around the USA. "News" being a euphemism for the brain-corroding banal rubbish of the "lefty-liberal" stations like CNN or CBS, or the non-stop pathetic comedy that is Fox. As Kaplan puts it:

The fact that Doha, Qatar’s capital, is not the headquarters of a great power liberates Al Jazeera to focus equally on the four corners of the Earth rather than on just the flash points of any imperial or post-imperial interest. Outlets such as CNN and the BBC don’t cover foreign news so much as they cover the foreign extensions of Washington’s or London’s collective obsessions.

Mathy Jokes

Q: What's the contour integral around Western Europe?
A: Zero, because all the Poles are in Eastern Europe!

Addendum: Actually, there ARE some Poles in Western Europe, but they
are removable!

Q: An English mathematician (I forgot who) was asked by his
very religious colleague: Do you believe in one God?
A: Yes, up to isomorphism!

Q: What is a compact city?
A: It's a city that can be guarded by finitely many near-sighted
policemen!
-- Peter Lax

Re: On Delhi

An excellent article on the socio-economic stratification, consumerism
and wealth-deification of India - in the metaphor of the automobile
culture of Delhi. And the resulting social turmoil and latent anger at
the stark division between the haves and have-nots.

Manoj Palki wrote:
> Check out this excellent essay. Long, but absolutely worth it.
>
> http://www.granta.com/Magazine/107/Capital-Gains/1

Pig Problems in Cairo

A very interesting article about swine flu and the Egyptian government's
response to the problem in Cairo, viz. killing all the pigs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/world/africa/20cairo.html

They're apparently now sitting on mound and mounds of rotting trash that
they are unable to get rid of. Seems like the swine-flu is going to
mutate into the plague.

Mystery

I came across this very nice quote in Matt Ridley's Genome:

The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is a like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance than surround us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, the but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view. Before the discovery of the genome, we did not know there was a document at the heart of every cell three billion letters long of whose content we knew nothing. Now, having read parts of that book, we are aware of myriad new mysteries.

A true scientist loves mystery. A scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him - the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed. The forest is more interesting than the clearing.

Unemployment or PhD

The data is in:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1215

Lost World of Fanged Frogs

Recently, explorers discovered an isolated ecosystem in an extinct
volcanic crater, amid the lust equatorial forests Papua New Guinea.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/07/discovery-species-papua-new-guinea

This ecosystem contains a host of unique and unidentified species,
pointing to a divergent evolutionary path. Take a look at some of the
pictures - stunning and incredibly beautiful.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2009/sep/06/wildlife-endangeredspecies?picture=352597639

It's a shame that all this must be destroyed ...

The great tweets of science - PhDComics

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1198

Exploding whale

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	Exploding whale
From:	Maureen Pritchard

A whale washes up and so the road crew decides to blow it up...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_t44siFyb4  Mo          

Yesterday

Yesterday, I finally, after agonizing weeks of humming and hawing, have made the move. Finally I did it and now all that I feel is relief, calm and yes maybe even peace. I have no regrets as yet - I think I made the correct decision.

I moved from slow, ponderous and mightily buggy Firefox 3.5.1 [a] to the blazingly fast, lightweight, well designed, widely supported and supposedely more secure Internet Explorer 8 [b]. And it is fast. And it doesn't crash every time I say boo. And it starts up instantly and stays up. Did I say that already ?

There is no looking back (of course, unless MS does the predicable and crappify it).

Now I am all ready to make my transition back from gmail hosted webmail to MS Outlook (which is a pretty sweet app - and awesome fonts) - once I can figure out how to IMAP gmail in Outlook.

[a]: I know, I know it wasn't ever supposed to be like this. An open source community supported piece of software - with such a great philosophical foundation to it - worse than something created by an evil money-grubbing corporation that wants world-domination ? Stuff like this just isn't supposed to happen ! Some new-age lefty liberals might blame it on global warming or evolution or some equally fantastic theory. The best explanation I think is that the End is Nigh (See http://www.apocalypsesoon.org/english.html, if you think I'm talking through my hat).

[b]: http://www.microsoft.com/india/windows/internet-explorer/get-the-facts/mythbusting.aspx

Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Preethi Jyothi

"There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulsed to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull of the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity."

It's brilliantly written - it's been a long time since I've enjoyed reading a book so much.