“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

 ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

I don't need to be the king of the world
As long as I'm the hero of this little girl.

I don't need to be a superman
As long as you will always be my biggest fan.

-- Warrant, Heaven

We don't have homosexuals in Iran, like in your country. I don't know who told you we had it. 

-- President Maumoud Ahmadinejad, responding to a question about execution of homosexuals in Iran.

I am of the opinion that as a rule, every homophobe should--once in his life and purely as a perspective exercise--be held down and buggered by Andre the Giant.

Why the hell someone would meddle in a relationship between two consenting adults, I don't know.

This world has two types of distasteful people. Type I tells the rest of us what is OK for us to wear, read, smoke, drink, fuck, worship, and eat. Example: the Pope, your Parents, Politicians. And Type II slavishly obeys Type I.

Type II cannot think for itself and Type I is only too happy to take over that function.

Type I is distasteful and frightening; Type II is beneath contempt.

And wankers, both.

Every culture has its share and no place is free of these wankers. Whenever you see freedoms being legislated, there is one of these wankers at work. Whenever you see the boundaries of education, conversation or art being defined in great big halls, there is one of these wankers at work. Whenever you see someone telling someone else whom they should marry, there is one of these wankers at work. Homophobic Muslims and Christians, caste-ridden and inbred Hindus--all variations on the same stinking theme.

Fuck them all.

Up the ass.

Kishore Kumar was magic. No one has even come close to touching his robe. But this is cute.

 

Incomparable words.

Now this is the way to say goodbye.

Like they say, you had to be there. This is from the last season of The Office. You plod through all that buffoonery and then there is this. Sitting through all that bullshit makes this song ever so much sweeter. It's kind of like life; suffering through the crap that makes up most of your life (yes, I do mean you) makes the rare few special moments just that much better.

Before I die, I shall fly.

Mountain passes in the Himalayas are often named such: Zoji La, Nathu La, Khardung La, Rezang La, Gyong La, Marisimik La.

You'll notice the commonality. "La" in Tibetan means, literally, "higher" or "above". And high they are. Passes in the Himalayas are higher than actual mountain peaks elsewhere.

Khardung La is the highest motorable (motorable: in a manner of speaking) road in the world. It is at a height of nearly 18,000 ft. That is three and a half miles above sea level. That is insane.

I've driven a motorcycle in the mountains at half that height. You don't know what it means to be frozen until you do something that stupid. Trust me on this. We stopped at a ramshackle hut in the mountains that served tea (and hope). I've held a piping hot glass of tea, fresh from the stove, in my hand, without feeling a damn tendril of heat.

You had to be there.

Trust me, what you see in the video takes some doing.

And I will do it. If you can't do something noble, at least do something unusual, I always say. Before I die, I shall fly.

Perfectly Unhappy

How to be perfectly unhappy: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/unhappy

Anybody with stereotypical ideas of what it means to be an atheist should watch this video.

How do we see things?

"Come on, Sougata," you say. "Gimme a break."

Let's do a little experiment. Humor me.

Say you are blindfolded and stood in front of a large structure of some kind. Let's say the Washington monument, 'cause why not? Also, there is a barricade a few meters around, so you cannot touch the surface of the structure. I now ask you to judge where the edges of the monument are and therefore form a rough idea of the size of it. Sounds impossible, since I have deprived you of two of the senses you might ordinarily use to judge the shape and size of something: vision and touch.

No fair, you say.

Fine, here's some help. Ever so generous, I have decided to throw in an assistant who is carrying a bucket of tennis balls with him.

Stay with me.

The assistant cannot talk to you, but you can instruct him to throw the tennis balls one at a time at the structure at various orientations. So for example, you can say, "Minion, stand right in front of me and throw that sumbitch at the monument. And do it quick before the cops show up." Then you listen for the thud of the tennis ball as it bounces off the structure. Then you say, "Servant, step a foot to the right and throw another ball. Now a foot to the left." And each time you listen for the sound of the reflected ball. When the assistant goes far enough to the right and left so that the ball misses the structure and you don't hear the reflection, you've found the edges.

If you are with me so far, congratulations, because you have just understood how bats are able to see things in darkness. Bats aren't blind; they just have shitty real estate agents. "Here's a really dark cave. As you can see *snicker*, the previous owner took really good care of it."...is a line typically used by bat real-estate agents. Bats live and hunt in the dark, and instead of tennis balls, they use sound. They catch the reflection of that sound off cave walls and such. It is called echolocation, if you want to get all fancy about it, and it 'shore impresses the hell out of the lady bats, I can tell you that.

There are many ways to see.

We see the surface of the ocean floor--indeed, create detailed maps of it--by hitting it with sonar, i.e. sound waves. We measure distance to the moon by hitting it with radar and measuring the time it takes to bounce back. A large part of life is basically about hitting something with something else and seeing what happens. Just ask Mike Tyson.

Back to you. You take off your blindfold and look at the monument. Thank goodness I can now use my eyes, you say. No more tennis balls and no more assistants.

But hang on. Nothing has changed, really.

You are still using an assistant and you are still using tennis balls. Your new assistant is the sun and it is chucking little tennis balls called photons--particles of light--at the monument. Some of those little tennis balls are reflected back at you and you are catching them with your eyes instead of your ears. And some of those photons are missing the structure entirely and not being reflected back at you. And that is how you see things. A bunch of photons bouncing around and you catching those little buggers with your big dewy eyes.

Let's make this a little more complicated. Put those blindfolds back on. Now instead of the Washington monument, you have on the ground in front of you a tennis ball that you have to judge the dimensions of. Same rules. Same assistant. Same bucket of tennis balls. Easy, you say. I'll have the hired help throw the tennis balls in the bucket at the tennis ball on the ground and I'll have your answer in two seconds flat.

Not quite.

I know I sound dumb saying something so obvious, but when you throw a tennis ball at a tennis ball, you move the target tennis ball. Momentum, darling.

So how can you, blindfolded and such, be ever be able to tell where the edge of the target tennis ball is? How can you even know where exactly the target tennis ball has rolled to after being hit by...well...a tennis ball? You have to know where something actually is in the first place before you can even begin guessing at its edges and dimensions and such. You could wait for the thud of a hit and then the silence of a miss and then...er...blindly point at a random direction and go, "There, that's where the edge is." But you would only probably be right. Unlike the monument which doesn't move on being hit, the tennis ball does, and you have no way of knowing with certainty what the shape or size or location of the target tennis ball is.

Certainty. Focus on that word. We all like it. And as we shall see, none of us have it because there is no such thing.

Enter a dude named Heisenberg. And electrons.

See how I went smoothly from tennis balls to pop philosophy to physics. That's just how I roll, bitches.

Before I move on to the heavy stuff, there is an easy way to locate the tennis ball of course. Throw out the bucket of tennis balls and take off the blindfold and start using the sun and photons again. And hey presto, there it is. This works because photons are much much smaller than the tennis ball. When a photon collides with a tennis ball, the effect is pretty much the same to you as a tennis ball hitting the Washington monument.

Remember this: As a general rule, you can only "see" something by hitting it with something much smaller than the thing you are trying to see. With me? Good.

Let's dial this way down. Let's examine the matter of determining the size and shape of an electron. Electrons, as we know, are a fundamental particle. We are composed of, scientifically speaking, a bunch of electrons.

Same rules. Except let's ditch the blindfold this time, because you cannot see that electron with your naked eyes anyway. You decide to, wisely, skip the tennis balls and go directly to photons. The problem, as you are no doubt beginning to see (har!), is that you really cannot find anything smaller than an electron to hit the electron with. When you hit electrons with photons or other electrons, you change its position and you are back to having a hazy idea of where it is.

Remember that an electron is a fundamental particle that makes up you and everything around you. So can we tell at all where an electron is with certainty? Turns out the answer is "No."

This is the basis of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which is a basic law of quantum mechanics/physics. The principle says that there is a limit to how accurately we can simultaneously determine the position and momentum of an electron.

What this means, in general terms is that the location of an electron is not a specific coordinate in space; it is a probability function. You can think of an electron being located in a fuzzy area--a probability cloud, if you will. An electron isn't a point in space, it is a smear.

Here is the idea in pictures.

This is what we thought matter looked like. This is the Rutherford model: All nice and orderly with electrons orbiting the nucleus like little planets.

Not quite. This picture, below, is closer to reality.

That smear around the nucleus isn't a bunch of electrons; it is a *single* electron. Or rather, all the possibilities of where it might be. Are you getting the picture? In short, at the most fundamental level, we really don't know where the heck anything is at any given point in time. We can guess. 

Werner Heisenbereg, who was an extremely smart man, put forward this idea. It created a great deal of consternation among other very smart men. Albert Einstein, for example, found it very difficult to accept the idea that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic. "God does not play dice with the universe." he famously said.

Einstein worked with large things at stellar scales. He theorized about intense gravitational fields and he predicted the existence of black holes. He redefined our view of space-time and he found structure at the grandest scales of the universe. But he found that his laws did not apply at the most basic level of matter and energy. His work dealing with the very large was contradicted by the laws of the very small.

But wait, quantum mechanics actually gets weirder. You see, this sort of quantum uncertainty as put forward by Heisenberg is just the beginning of a whole bunch of quantum weirdness.

For example, what if you punched a thick steel wall and your fist went right through the wall like butter? Quantum mechanics doesn't rule out the probability. Once you accept that the universe is ruled by probability, nothing is impossible really. Just improbable.

What if you kicked a soccer ball into the net and it split into two and took different paths to the goal. Scoring two goals with one kick. Gotta love that shit. Once again, this is possible. Just not very probable.

What if there was an exact duplicate of you sitting somewhere in the universe? Yup, that is not against the laws of physics. If the universe was larger, then the probability of two copies of you wouldn't be so much of a stretch, in fact.

Yes, you heard that right. The universe, which is goddamn HUGE, is too small for quantum effects to manifest themselves on a macro scale. The only reason you are yourself not a probability cloud, just like that electron, is because the universe is too small. If the universe was large enough, there would almost certainly be an exact duplicate of you somewhere. The probability of the exact configuration of particles that make up "you" occupying another spot in the universe would approach a value of one.

Make the universe even larger and there would certainly be multiple copies of you and I (and unfortunately, Kanye West).

Think about this a little bit. In the current universe, the answer to the question, "Where is Jimmy the Electron?" is a hesitant, "In many places at once." Or the more scientifically correct, "Fuck if we know."

In a large enough universe where you are to that universe, size-wise, as the electron is to you in the current universe, you would see quantum effects at a macro scale all the time. Just as the electron is smeared in a probability cloud around the nucleus in the picture above, you would be smeared all over that mega-universe and in many places at once. You would be Agent Smith.

Mind blown.

Like I said, quantum physics is weird. More on this next time.

Laters.

Language. Ahh, she's a funny thing. I like how words gradually change their connotation and become exactly what they were trying to avoid.

Perhaps this happens to humans too? We become what we are trying to avoid becoming. Gaze long enough into the abyss and it gazes back into you. Philosophy. Ahhh, she's a funny...

Back on topic.

Here's a lineage to consider: Mistake -> Bug -> Issue.

I am pretty sure when the first programmer made a mistake, his boss came up with a coffee-cup dangling from his talons and said, "Ummm...yeah, there's a mistake in your code."

Too direct. No one likes that word when applied to their work. So a new word was born that was meant to deflect the directness: bug.

"There's a bug in your code."

Sounded better.

For a while.

Then even that started to bite. It got tarnished by association.

So we invented yet another euphemism. Bug Tracking systems became Issue Tracking systems. No more: "Have you fixed that bug yet?" Nobody talks like that now. Now it is: "Have you looked into that issue yet?"

Now that we've used it long enough, the word "issue" itself has now become loaded. What used to be a bland and amorphous word now has specific meaning and has to be used carefully.

I leave you with this clip from the late incomparable George Carlin on the subject of euphemisms, delivering the message as only he can deliver it.

meta: Greek, meaning "beyond".

I think of it as "about". A meta-something is something about that something.

Hang on, I'm about to get less cryptic.

So for example, meta-data is data about data. You store a photo on flickr. That photo is data to flickr. But flickr also silently stores data about the data: its size, the time it was posted, so on. So, meta-data.

Say you want to improve your reading speed. You go out and buy a book on speed-reading. What are you doing? You are reading about reading. Very meta.

If you are a computer science geek, you know all about meta this and meta that. Programming: Writing a program that does stuff. Meta-programming: Writing a program that writes programs to do stuff. We've all done it. SQL that writes SQL? Been there.

Grammar is a meta-language, since it is a language that describes language. This particular example is even more interesting to me. Grammar describes English, and it is itself written in English. Since it is written in English, it must adhere to the rules of itself, otherwise we wouldn't understand it. Very very meta. Self-referential, even.

Cognition is the act of learning or knowing. So meta-cognition would be...you guessed it: learning about learning. I am doing it right now. I am reading a book about how we learn: Make it Stick, by Peter C. Brown.

More generally, it is a book about epistemology. Epistemology is the body of knowledge that tries to understand the nature of knowledge. So questions like: What is knowledge? How do we derive knowledge? And so on.

I came across this interesting example of meta-cognition in the book. Donald Rumsfeld, talking about Iraq in 2002, sums up meta-cognition thusly:

"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns—there are things we do not know we don’t know."

You hear this in the consulting business: When you are building the product, don't listen to your client. Listen to your client's client.

There is a similar idea in marketing. When you want to target a particular market, don't target the market. Target who they want to be.

A classic example is Marlboro. The Marlboro Man is an instantly recognizable marketing icon. Marlboro certainly isn't the largest selling brand of cigarettes in the world because it sells to the cowboy market. There are very few cowboys left; especially cowboys who look like that. The Marlboro Man exists because Philip Morris realized that selling to your inner cowboy is far more profitable than selling to you.

Cogito ergo sum.

I think, therefore I am.

Descartes said that. Rene Descartes laid the foundation of modern philosophy. Because he was badass like that.

Many people quote that line. They put that on T-shirts. But I do sometimes wonder about how many people actually think (har!) about what that sentence really means.

Here's the thinking (har!) behind that. Basically, Descartes said, you cannot trust anything. When it comes to deriving knowledge about something, you cannot trust anything. You cannot trust your senses. Senses can be deceived. Just watch a fucking magic show. So how do you know anything is real? How do you know that *you* are real? You perceive you through your senses and through the senses of others, all of which could be an elaborate cosmic deception. You cannot trust science because science uses instruments to establish reality. And those instruments are simply extensions of your already untrustworthy senses.

So how do you know that you exist?

By doubting, that is how. This is pure rationalism at work. When you doubt your existence, you establish your existence. Your doubt exists, therefore you exist. If you didn't really exist, you couldn't doubt your existence. Q. E. fucking D.

Still not with me? Go back to that magic show analogy and approach this from another angle. The only way you know that the magic is magic is by doubting it. If you didn't doubt the magic, it wouldn't be magic to you any more; it would be reality. And you would be wrong. (Which, by the way, is how all religions work). Now apply that line of thinking to the question of your existence and you immediately grok what the Big D was getting at.

Conversations with a Monkey, Part I

I am sitting with my five year old daughter and showing her a map of the world.

I point to the United States.

"This is where you were born, sweetie."

I point to India.

"This is where Deeda was born."

She scrunches up her face and thinks for a bit.

"We could drive there? No wait...we can't."

She thinks some more.

"I wish we had a water-car..."

A while ago, I was at a Latin American Festival and listened to a band from Peru play on pan flutes. Two guitars and a pan flute. The Peruvians came up with the pan flute; it is an iconic instrument. I had never heard a pan flute before that, and it was an amazing and soulful listen. We talked to the band after the performance and learned that style of music is called Andina--music of the Andes.

Here is Sounds of Silence performed with pan flutes.

I just got done watching the "Miller's Planet" scene from Interstellar for the hundredth time. Yes, I watched the giant tidal waves caused by the crushing gravitational field of Gargantua yet again, and the goosebumps wouldn't go away.

That movie, meaning Interstellar, vies for the top spot in my movie-going heart. It gets so many things right that it is startling, unexpected, and refreshing.

It gives us a sense of our place in the cosmos.

It gives us a sense of desolation and hope, at the same time.

It quotes Dylan Thomas.

It shows us a father looking at his daughter through the distorted mirror of dilated time.

And the score...oh, that music!

That movie makes me want to shed tears I didn't know I had to shed.

I know it is all entertainment at the end of the day, but there are people who watch movies like Intestellar and cry silently inside. There are people who watch True Grit (the reboot, of course) and marvel at how liquid poetry can masquerade as movie dialogue and be captured on film like that.

And then there are people who pay good money to watch Star Wars--a film where galactic idiots duel with colored flashlights and misshapen gremlins talk backwards.

Oh Humanity! Can't live with you, can't live without you.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. 

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Ever since I saw the movie Interstellar, I have been curious about 4D geometry. Near the end of the movie, the dude finds himself trapped in a tesseract, which is a four-dimensional extension of a three-dimensional surface.

Thinking in four dimensions is very very tricky. We are three dimensional beings and our reality is bounded in three dimensions. Imagine a one-dimensional civilization that lives on a line and cannot see left or right or up or down. Only straight ahead and straight backwards. In other words, their reality is composed of points on that line. Now try explaining a square to these folks.

Similarly, a two-dimensional civilization that lives on a plane and cannot see up/down will be perfectly fine with squares, but will have a horrid time imagining a cube.

We humans, being more awesome than the 2D people, can see up/down. I am looking up right now, and...eeek...a spider...

Ahem...moving right along.

So we can see up and down. But that is where the awesomeness stops. Our perception is limited to three mutually perpendicular axes: X, Y, and Z. It is impossible to sketch a fourth axis that is mutually perpendicular to all three. Hint: don't even try.

To add to the confusion, some people will tell you that Time is the fourth dimension.

Four-dimensional objects have nothing at all to do with time. Here is how I try to visualize four-dimensional things. Like I said, this is very very tricky. I can barely get my mind around the idea.

Here is one way.

Take a square piece of paper. This is a two-dimesional object to you, for practical purposes. Now hold this piece of paper perfectly flat and parallel to the floor and near a wall. The shadow of this paper on the wall will be a line, if you are holding the paper perfectly flat. We can say that the projection of a two-dimensional object is a one-dimensional object. 'Cuz we fancy like dat.

Similarly, the projection of a three-dimensional object is a two-dimensional object. Like the shadow of a sphere on a floor, or the shadow of your head on a wall. See below.

Taking that further, a three-dimensional object is simply the shadow or projection of a four-dimensional object.

The implication of this line of thinking is profound. It means that every object around us is situated in four dimensions and what we are observing, touching, and interacting with are the three-dimensional shadows of these objects. That cellphone you are clutching is a shadow of the "real" cellphone in 4D space. Indeed we ourselves are shadows of our four-dimensional selves. If we ever encountered a more endowed civilization who can see in 4D, they would see us very, very, very differently from how we ourselves see us. And we would only see their shadows.

Also, why stop at four dimensions? There may be an infinite number of dimensions each projecting onto a lesser dimension. That four-dimensional cellphone that we cannot see in 4D space, but only touch the shadow of in 3D space, is itself a shadow of its five-dimensional self. Reality is a bloody hall of mirrors. Most of that hall...we are effectively blind to, except through mathematics and imagination. And even imagination fails us here. Or fails me at least. I can barely think about four dimensions. Thinking in five dimensions? Forget it.

This isn't pop science-fiction either. There is indeed real mathematics around this. Serious people have serious jobs working with this shit.

Bizarre, no?

Here is another way to visualize four dimensions that I find helpful.

Wait, come back.

Imagine a perfectly flat and square piece of paper. It has four edges. So four lines make up the four faces of a square; you can think of it like that. A cube has six square faces. Generalizing that, we may say that every N-dimensional object has a certain number of (N-1)-dimensional faces.

So it goes that a four-dimensional object has eight three-dimensional faces. Now imagine an object with eight cubic faces, and you have just imagined a four-dimensional object.

Unhelpful Note: In case you are inclined to think so, this is not as easy as imagining a cube with eight other cubes hanging off it like geometrically perfect tumors. That is not a four-dimensional object.

Laters.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

So have I heard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23KHLW2dw_o