The lure of a magic wand is too hard to resist, so is the lure of a time machine. This lure is mainly due to the fact that there are imperfections in our lives that we want to change. If magic wasn't that "miraculous", we would never have had the harry potter series for one.
I imagine the speech where the head of a nation has to address to his public and complain at his ineptitude to fix a broken political system is a pity. There might be veracity to his words and a great deal of gusto to accept the inaccuracies and inefficiencies that have crept into the system. I have seen this happen on two fronts, the indian prime ministers speech and the us presidents speech.
If the head of a nation complains to his republic at his ineptitude to handle a situation with an iron fist, especially when it affects the nation at large. In indias case, just make the law stricter - corruption is punishable by the death penalty, whether it is one rupee or a trillion rupees, make the person who reports it a hero and offer an award. If we can eradicate polio and small pox, corruption should not be that tough to handle. In the us's case, bite the lip and raise taxes, take away tax cuts and stop subsidizing crazy things, stop all the wars until the economy is fixed, stop all foreign aid, tighten the tax rates on the very high income groups. The airline safety instructions clearly says, please put the oxygen mask on first before helping others, should this not apply to a nations economy, fix your economy first before doling out help and tax breaks.
As with any major change there will be dissonance, everyone facing losses and heartache will shout, but eventually they will reconcile and go with it. If you do not have the backbone to make changes for the benefit of a country, step down so at least the looters can enjoy and have their fill; running a nation is a team sport and sometimes you can't play both gerrard and lampard.
17 August, 2011
15 April, 2011
Meerkat Monocle Mannerism
The meerkat is a clueless societal animal like me. The actual meerkat is originally from the southern African region. As always nature was kind enough to give us enough variants just to have a laugh with the names we give it.
It has one quirky mannerism which I share.I was probably once bitten by one of their distant cousins or some concoction of the sort. If you look at the meerkat outside of its burrow which is usually how you would have seen it, it keeps shifting its gaze. The meerkat does this to check for predators and makes an early warning system. How I wish we could teach them the notion of money, and then charge them for inventing a infra red/motion sensor predator alert system. (Thats another science fiction I am working on secretly in my burrow while a meerkat keeps a watch for me outside.)
In much the same mannerism, but in the sense of wearing a monocle. Imagine a grad student in a research group meeting, the lead researcher or primary investigator or my favourite "the brains of the operation" has gone on vacation. So now you need to talk about the progress you made that week, for the pennies worth, you are clueless about what goes on, you just sit in your corner and watch youtube videos and kill your time. The professor starts with the infamous question, "so whats the progress on the transmogrifier?". For a moment you can't believe your ears, you just look around once to see if this is a dream, when you signed for the war you never expected to be at the front-lines. I should explain the monocle now, have you seen a person wearing a monocle, does he not have a quizzical look on him. The grad student in this scenario generally has the same look and the hence the inclusion of the monocle.
Well disaster aversion mode, some other "researcher" in the group, the unwise fool I call him, takes the "lead" and starts pouring out what he has been doing all of last week, and the results on the transmogrification. Obviously this guy was such a jerk, the know it all wizard eh, you look around to your friend with a stamp of "what's he acting so pious for?" on your face. That betraying rascal is actually listening to him and has no clue of your irreverent telepathic phonecall. You look around the room, with a look on your face still hanging like it was painted on. The "researcher"'s close friend looks at you with the mocking "what an idiot!" look. You go all crazy and start fervently shifting your gaze to check for attacks before you hear a familiar reference to the KL divergence and flashbulb remember "your research" ages ago.
The period of frenzy gazing to avoid looking like an imbecile, while proving your idiocy is what I call the "Meerkat Monocle Mannerism". You might see a publication of this in nature in the far future.
PS:
For people who have never heard of the transmogrifier - http://members.shaw.ca/newsong/calvin.html
For people who don't know what the KL divergence is; take a course in linear algebra, I'm sure wikipedia doesn't do justice
For people who have never seen a meerkat in action - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWKW-dw9cuY (albeit the video claims its wales, its thanks to the work of the transmogrifier)
It has one quirky mannerism which I share.I was probably once bitten by one of their distant cousins or some concoction of the sort. If you look at the meerkat outside of its burrow which is usually how you would have seen it, it keeps shifting its gaze. The meerkat does this to check for predators and makes an early warning system. How I wish we could teach them the notion of money, and then charge them for inventing a infra red/motion sensor predator alert system. (Thats another science fiction I am working on secretly in my burrow while a meerkat keeps a watch for me outside.)
In much the same mannerism, but in the sense of wearing a monocle. Imagine a grad student in a research group meeting, the lead researcher or primary investigator or my favourite "the brains of the operation" has gone on vacation. So now you need to talk about the progress you made that week, for the pennies worth, you are clueless about what goes on, you just sit in your corner and watch youtube videos and kill your time. The professor starts with the infamous question, "so whats the progress on the transmogrifier?". For a moment you can't believe your ears, you just look around once to see if this is a dream, when you signed for the war you never expected to be at the front-lines. I should explain the monocle now, have you seen a person wearing a monocle, does he not have a quizzical look on him. The grad student in this scenario generally has the same look and the hence the inclusion of the monocle.
Well disaster aversion mode, some other "researcher" in the group, the unwise fool I call him, takes the "lead" and starts pouring out what he has been doing all of last week, and the results on the transmogrification. Obviously this guy was such a jerk, the know it all wizard eh, you look around to your friend with a stamp of "what's he acting so pious for?" on your face. That betraying rascal is actually listening to him and has no clue of your irreverent telepathic phonecall. You look around the room, with a look on your face still hanging like it was painted on. The "researcher"'s close friend looks at you with the mocking "what an idiot!" look. You go all crazy and start fervently shifting your gaze to check for attacks before you hear a familiar reference to the KL divergence and flashbulb remember "your research" ages ago.
The period of frenzy gazing to avoid looking like an imbecile, while proving your idiocy is what I call the "Meerkat Monocle Mannerism". You might see a publication of this in nature in the far future.
PS:
For people who have never heard of the transmogrifier - http://members.shaw.ca/newsong/calvin.html
For people who don't know what the KL divergence is; take a course in linear algebra, I'm sure wikipedia doesn't do justice
For people who have never seen a meerkat in action - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWKW-dw9cuY (albeit the video claims its wales, its thanks to the work of the transmogrifier)
10 April, 2011
Learning to play
The concept of learning itself comes from the idea of playing. The first words we learn, the first time we ride our cycles, the first time you hold a bat. There is something very basic and essential in that "first time". We are eager to pick up and explore the tools at our disposal, only for the fun of it. There is no sense of purpose, achievement or competition to motivate and propel you forwards. That basic "first time" instinct though is lost on us as we age.
A few of the first times happened a little late for me, the first time I ever rode a bike was just a couple of years ago. It wasn't a sense of achievement, "yaay I can ride a bike now" or an inflated ego boost that got me going to learn then. I was afraid at first, to fall down, to go into traffic and not being able to move, but at some point my curiosity got the better of me. I was not flying through the wind, but I was definitely moving. In all this mind you, I never fell down once, albeit I only traveled in the safety of my neighborhood and not in the wild country or the mean highways. The feeling of the first time, the quaint exhilaration and the magical bliss, can propel into an euphoric trance.
Whats the point of that anecdote you might ask? The point is this, you need to take the plunge sometimes in the depths of the unknown not knowing what the rewards are, make a leap of faith and hope to land on your feet. It is not always possible and you might land on your head, this should not deter your ability to take risks, explore and learn to play. Sometimes, infact most of the times, its quite alright to make a fool of yourself. The reason I am writing about this is primarily to remind myself to explore the craziness in the world around me.
In the words of my friend's email signature -
A few of the first times happened a little late for me, the first time I ever rode a bike was just a couple of years ago. It wasn't a sense of achievement, "yaay I can ride a bike now" or an inflated ego boost that got me going to learn then. I was afraid at first, to fall down, to go into traffic and not being able to move, but at some point my curiosity got the better of me. I was not flying through the wind, but I was definitely moving. In all this mind you, I never fell down once, albeit I only traveled in the safety of my neighborhood and not in the wild country or the mean highways. The feeling of the first time, the quaint exhilaration and the magical bliss, can propel into an euphoric trance.
Whats the point of that anecdote you might ask? The point is this, you need to take the plunge sometimes in the depths of the unknown not knowing what the rewards are, make a leap of faith and hope to land on your feet. It is not always possible and you might land on your head, this should not deter your ability to take risks, explore and learn to play. Sometimes, infact most of the times, its quite alright to make a fool of yourself. The reason I am writing about this is primarily to remind myself to explore the craziness in the world around me.
In the words of my friend's email signature -
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” ~ Mark Twain
06 December, 2010
Ubuntu 10.10 Filesystem access through windows 7
For a long time I was waiting for a good app to access my linux FS without booting into it.
Lo and behold, here it is
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2read/files/Ext2read%20Version%202.2%20(Latest)/ext2explore-2.2.71.zip/download
It works nicely for my windows. I havent tried writing to linux, but read works like a charm.
Lo and behold, here it is
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2read/files/Ext2read%20Version%202.2%20(Latest)/ext2explore-2.2.71.zip/download
It works nicely for my windows. I havent tried writing to linux, but read works like a charm.
01 December, 2010
Discovering order in chaos and learning to control it
A course I have taken this semester has lent my imagination a new kick-start. When you learn about Karl Sims' creatures, Hod Lipson's data extraction, Turing's reaction diffusion models and Neumann's self replicator, you are dumb founded, inspired, amazed.
To this day I believe in my skills as an observer and experimenter, but when I read about Neumann and his penchant to visualize processes, trace phenomena correctly without any knowledge I am left speechless. Turing's quirkiness was particularly well known, but his thought about finding patterns through morphogenesis and obviously the Turing machine. The present day researchers are not too far behind, Lipson's work seems interesting and very promising.
Now that I have all that out of my system, let me talk about these few guys from the max planck institute who have aroused my curiosity and beckoned my imagination to sit and ponder of the what-ifs and could-bes. This bunch of people who have been featured in nature - http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v6/n3/full/nphys1508.html have observed unique neural behaviour in insects and captured it in a simple neuron model whose ground state is chaotic but is controlled by sensory inputs to generate behaviours. These discoveries in the neural behaviour and contruction could shed light on the actual neural processes in humans leading to potentially simple and effective models of behaviour. In combination with techniques like subsumption architectures(doomed as a failure or atleast not so successful), we could look at simple and evolvable solutions to various problems in locomotion and path planning.
Going further, if we could apply a chaotic organization mechanism to the reasoning process in AI, we would have made great advances. The reasoning scheme in AI has huge problems with representation and these problems will continue to haunt us, but some progress towards such self organizing behavior would definitely go a long way.
To this day I believe in my skills as an observer and experimenter, but when I read about Neumann and his penchant to visualize processes, trace phenomena correctly without any knowledge I am left speechless. Turing's quirkiness was particularly well known, but his thought about finding patterns through morphogenesis and obviously the Turing machine. The present day researchers are not too far behind, Lipson's work seems interesting and very promising.
Now that I have all that out of my system, let me talk about these few guys from the max planck institute who have aroused my curiosity and beckoned my imagination to sit and ponder of the what-ifs and could-bes. This bunch of people who have been featured in nature - http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v6/n3/full/nphys1508.html have observed unique neural behaviour in insects and captured it in a simple neuron model whose ground state is chaotic but is controlled by sensory inputs to generate behaviours. These discoveries in the neural behaviour and contruction could shed light on the actual neural processes in humans leading to potentially simple and effective models of behaviour. In combination with techniques like subsumption architectures(doomed as a failure or atleast not so successful), we could look at simple and evolvable solutions to various problems in locomotion and path planning.
Going further, if we could apply a chaotic organization mechanism to the reasoning process in AI, we would have made great advances. The reasoning scheme in AI has huge problems with representation and these problems will continue to haunt us, but some progress towards such self organizing behavior would definitely go a long way.
04 November, 2010
Player - stage Installation
Installing the player/stage I ran into a few problems and did not find good solutions, I am posting what worked for me-
1. Download the player project
2. Extract the player folder
3. sudo apt-get install python-gdal netcdfg-dev libpq-dev libhdf4g-dev libgeos-dev libatk1.0-0 lib3ds-dev freeglut3-dev
4. Run cmake (if you want create a directory for build like the install guide specfies)
5. Run make
6. Run sudo make install
7. add the following to your .bashrc file
export PATH=$PATH:"/usr/local/lib64"
export PLAYERPATH="/usr/local/lib":"/usr/local/lib64"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:"/usr/local/lib":"/usr/local/lib64"
This should get you to set up.
This link http://www.control.aau.dk/~tb/wiki/index.php/Installing_Player_and_Stage_in_Ubuntu has a lot of information for installing and configuring your player information
1. Download the player project
2. Extract the player folder
3. sudo apt-get install python-gdal netcdfg-dev libpq-dev libhdf4g-dev libgeos-dev libatk1.0-0 lib3ds-dev freeglut3-dev
4. Run cmake (if you want create a directory for build like the install guide specfies)
5. Run make
6. Run sudo make install
7. add the following to your .bashrc file
export PATH=$PATH:"/usr/local/lib64"
export PLAYERPATH="/usr/local/lib":"/usr/local/lib64"
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:"/usr/local/lib":"/usr/local/lib64"
This should get you to set up.
This link http://www.control.aau.dk/~tb/wiki/index.php/Installing_Player_and_Stage_in_Ubuntu has a lot of information for installing and configuring your player information
06 October, 2010
The vienna philharmonic star wars
Any like minded geek would have heard of star wars, seen it, worshipped yoda and lucas. The movie acts at different levels, playing out human relationships and the ever prevalent fight between good and evil. There would definitely have been times when people have referenced the death star, the "may the force be with you" in situations totally unrelated to the empire or the jedi knight.
I have really enjoyed the star wars music, humming "da dada da daaa, pom papapum". This music evokes emotions in humans which can range from "oh no not that song" to "wow" to "what the hell is that?". Surmising these emotions in a word can never be done, so I shall let you see the magic that this music can create.
Recraeted by the vienna philharmonic - the star wars theme in all its glory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9xrmThlsOA
(p.s.: look at the number of people sitting to watch and listen to this, cross cultural, cross planetary, and simply superb)
I have really enjoyed the star wars music, humming "da dada da daaa, pom papapum". This music evokes emotions in humans which can range from "oh no not that song" to "wow" to "what the hell is that?". Surmising these emotions in a word can never be done, so I shall let you see the magic that this music can create.
Recraeted by the vienna philharmonic - the star wars theme in all its glory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9xrmThlsOA
(p.s.: look at the number of people sitting to watch and listen to this, cross cultural, cross planetary, and simply superb)
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