Author Archive: Ankit

The highly erudite David Foster Wallace's very touching commencement speech at Kenyon.

Some lines:

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

In my few days that I have been in Chicago I have had generally a good impression of the place save for one aspect: its coffee shops. It's not a defect which would bother a lot of people but it is one which, to me, is the most damning defect of a city. Because to me, the non-existence of good coffee shops is not a coincidence but is linked inextricably with the spirit of the place. While walking around Chicago's beautiful tree lined streets and its many vibrant neighborhoods the only coffee shops that I come across are either chains or ones which appear highly pretentious. Chain coffee shops can be pretty good, an example of which is Peet's on the West coast but the ones that I find here are generic and appear to lack that soul which separates a good coffee place from one which would merely do. While I don't have anything against coffee places which are owned by big conglomerates, I absolutely cannot stand places which are pretentious. This general dislike for most things smug has seen me move towards the center and a little right on all issues in life. I have found myself liking things and ideas which have no coolness attached to them, which try to make no statement beyond their own utility, and which have completely missed the fashionable bus. From the vantage point which occupy these ideas I look in at the nuts which occupy the fringes on either side and feel grateful for the fact that I'm not adding to the general noise by being too passionate about things which I don't possess the intelligence to place in their proper contexts.

Anyway, that's a digression for another day. A pretentious coffee place can be easily spotted by its exorbitant prices and a disconcerting presence of too many Apple products. French sounding pastries is another dead giveaway as is the presence of coffee making apparatus which is better suited to a chemistry laboratory. Additionally if a place is named Intelligentsia you don't have to enter it to figure out the level of pretentiousness involved. That's the kind of thing that I am finding here. San Diego, on the other hand, had tons of great middle of the road coffee places with their own distinctive character serving solid coffee in great laid back ambiances. Perhaps it was the nature of the city which was reflected in its cafes. It is a city which has no beefs with anyone and which cannot be bothered by anything because life at the beach and below the ever-shining Sun is just too good. Other places have to do great things and 'succeed' and make statements and appear different and grind their axes. San Diego cannot be bothered by any of these high octane ideas. It's not going anywhere and it doesn't want to go anywhere. It just lounges about with the salty wind in its hair wondering why others have gotten so worked up. It has cafes which exude a similar modest sort of vibe, slowing you down, asking you to stay for a little longer for there is nowhere you must rush to.

I have found myself hating to pay for software, especially scientific ones. I am, therefore, always trying to figure out if things can be done with stuff available for free. As far as software available to do scientific word processing is concerned, the paid stuff doesn't even come close to what is available for free. For instance, LaTeX leaves MS-Word in the dust. There is a price to be paid when it comes to the learning curve but LaTeX is an incredibly strong tool which just reeks hardcore utility. I have been trying to find something similar for solving engineering problems. There are a lot of options out there but they often require you to given an arm and a leg for them. For instance, software like COMSOL, ANSYS, ABAQUS etc. are very good I believe but they are quite expensive and, more importantly for me at least, they cloud the underlying mechanism of problem-solving. Nothing too grave for people who just want to use them but for me they leave something to be desired. I recently came across this software which, however, promises other things. The learning curve is steep because there is scant documentation but it looks good in what it can do. So how does it (getdp) work?

All problems in mechanics are basically statements of differential quantities with certain initial conditions and certain boundary conditions. For instance says force equals mass times acceleration. Acceleration is how fast the velocity is changing and velocity is how fast the position of something is changing. A concise way of writing which is which is the differential statement of a simple mass moving under a force.  If we also add the information that this body was sitting around at time then that would constitute the initial conditions which would determine the trajectory that the body would take for all subsequent . The boundary conditions come about when such differential equations are defined over a domain (). For instance, how does heat distribute from a central source (forcing function) on a disk shaped plate (this is ) when the boundary of the plate (this is the boundary of denoted by let's say ) is kept at a certain temperature (this is the boundary condition) given that the whole plate was at 20 degrees at the beginning constitutes a well defined mechanical problem which accepts a unique solution. The mathematical statement is the underlying differential equation of the problem on whose solution cannot always be found analytically. The way to go about it, which is rather general, is to transform it to what is called an integral form. This means that rather than trying to find a which exactly satisfies the differential equation subject to the initial and boundary conditions we try to find that u which minimizes the integral  for all suitably chosen functions . This process transforms the differential equation to its equivalent integral form and lies at the heart of the Finite Element Method. By applying the Gauss theorem, surface terms are taken into account which satisfy the boundary conditions. The integral form is also important as fundamental natural laws, as it turns out, can be equivalently expressed in differential or integral forms. For instance saying that Newton's laws holds is equivalent to saying that nature tends to minimize a certain quantity called action (built from potential energy and kinetic energy of the system) as the body moves from one state to another. This principle of least action is an integral representation of nature and can be used to derive the equations of motion of any system.

Anyway, as mentioned above, a reliable way of approximately solving differential equations is to transform them into integral equations and then using Finite Elements to solve them. Getdp is a general set of tools which help one do that. It admits the geometry of the problem through another free software called gmsh (or some other alternatives). Gmsh, by itself, looks like a powerful tool to create geometries and to mesh them. It has a programming language like structure so complicated actions can be carried out with relative ease. Getdp uses this geometry information and accepts the integral formulation of the problem at hand with the associated boundary and initial conditions. All this information is entered through special keywords and programmatic structures. Getdp then uses established Finite Element methods to find a solution to these equations. There appears to be a considerable amount of application of getdp+gmsh to electromagnetic problems but not nearly as much to elasticity problems. My effort would be to describe its application to such problems in the Codes section.

I was walking around in the North East neighborhoods of Chicago amid the various fancy shops selling everything from Thai food to antiques, tiptoeing around the multitude which had came out to enjoy the fine summer evening when I felt the sting of the disconnect that I have felt time and again in myriad different forms as I have traversed the snaking path that life has taken over the last several years. It's a disconnect which prevents me from sharing in the various concerns which other people seem to have, enjoying the sources from which others seem to be able to derive happiness, and sympathize with their insecurities and belief systems. I have turned around and found upon closer examination that my experience of social interactions is often a degree removed from immediacy and is of a separation which is wide enough to ensure that the effect on me is at best a secondary one where everything is slightly muted, slightly subdued, slightly incredulous, and slightly cynical. The meta-investigation of what really lies behind the words and the faces is never too far for me and I cannot help but take things within the context of personalities which were perhaps created to especially suit the conversation. This is not to say that I feel that people need to be distrusted or that I am trying to uncover a deception. It's just an acknowledgment of the many insecurities that we all have, of the millions of faces that we put up to appear prim and proper, of the infinite little lies that we have convinced ourselves of. It's all very harmless and cute actually when you think about it, in a heartless sort of way and is the stuff which makes life and people colorful. And yet it is the sort of realization which prevents me from taking most things and most people too seriously, and the incredulity that I find myself experiencing when others appear too confident, too hopeful, too happy, too sad, or too serious. At these moments my incredulity springs not only from the knowledge, which I think is mostly correct, that life is fluid, almost meteorically fluid, and provides for such changes which are difficult to envisage beforehand and absolutely unknowable in their effects on us, but also from what I perceive are lacks of perspectives, spatial, temporal, and universal.

As hard as it is to take people too seriously, it is absolutely impossible to take groups of people with absolutely any degree of seriousness. I find that conversations with individuals are often very interesting and very colorful. There is always something to learn from them, even if it's just their experiences. Sometimes you can also come across those who even make sense. And even if that does not happen it is generally fun trying to find our ways in the night with a blindfold on. Groups of people with shared ideologies, however, have little going for them. Everyone seems to have sacrificed their identity in order to belong and what is left is a bland concoction of the lowest common denominator, very proper and very efficient, generally powerful and driven, but devoid of all qualities that may interest a sane (or insane, depending upon where you look from) person. It is this general blandness that I feel while walking around when I see people trying to fit in a certain lifestyle with their ridiculous buffed up gym bodies, their fancy glasses of cocktails, their expensive handbags and their stupid little rats of dogs. It is the precise blandness which I presume would permeate huge gatherings of religious people, or high powered financial offices with their jet-setting managers, or people who are fanatical supporters of issues so far removed from them that it's not even funny.