Category Archive: Digressions

Bend in the river

Posted by Ankit On July 31st, 2013

I have finally made the move to my first proper job in what they say is the real world, joining the Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering department at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago as an Assistant Professor. The better part of last year was interesting, with a lot of words being entered in word documents and a lot of pdfs being created, with a lot of flying to places I had never been and meeting a lot of people whom I would perhaps not have met had it not being for the fact that they liked those pdfs which I had spent all that time creating. And upshot of it all, of all the flying and of all the meetings and of all the talks and seminars, of all those times which I spent in transit cities wondering if the inclement American winter weather would give me a break long enough for me to make my next flight, is that I have finally ended up in the quintessential American city of Chicago. It's only been a few days here but we all know how important first impressions area and mine have been really nice. But we have also been told not to judge a book by its covers so I will not. I will judge only when I have read her first few pages at least.

However, San Diego is a book which I have read from end to end, several times. I have spent the last eight years poring over its many ink blots and many purple passages. I have come to recognize the musty smell of its dusty Western hardbound and  its pages have turned dogeared between my fingers. I am intimately charmed by its yellowness and I remember its content from its page numbers. San Diego is a book that I can judge, perhaps not to the extent that some people can but more than a lot because of the time that I spent and the people that I came to know there. San Diego is a curious city. I honestly believe that if you live there, there can pretty much be no justification for being unhappy. It exists peacefully in that goldilocks zone of warm contentment which can provide you with surprisingly more than you expect from a city like it. Of course there are always bright young things who are mesmerized by the shiny facade of other places but I have come to take their hopes of happiness with a pinch of salt and a passing chuckle.  San Diego effortlessly provides diversity in demographics, eclecticism in arts, a vibrant outdoor culture, near-perfect weather, and the opportunity to lounge about on the beaches of the mighty Pacific every day. There are great things that one can do in places like New York or Chicago or San Francisco or Los Angeles, feeding off of the energy and creativity of the teeming milieu. One so inclined can probably write great novels and create great music at these places, inspired by their sharp edges. However, it probably is much easier to be happy in San Diego and that really is the argument to end all arguments.

In addition to landing in the perfect city for PhD I also had the great fortune of knowing some truly interesting and intelligent people there who have wittingly or unwittingly molded the rough draft of the personality that I began with in the US. Through my experience of knowing them I have come to appreciate a certain kind of person, one whose particulars cannot be stated but whose essence can be. They have substance to share and possess a certain depth of thought and view. They are about more than the next hot hangout or the next great financial investment. I have enjoyed the company of such people in San Diego and learned from them. So much so that I have no doubt that the years that I spent in San Diego have been the best years of my life, and the most formative ones. I look back at the company of those people with a genuine sense of gratitude, for having contributed to the exciting exchange which shapes personalities, to the invisible and complex hands of human interaction.

Pointless issues

Posted by Ankit On May 27th, 2013

I am reading The Great House by Nicole Krauss and the book has fomented enough waves of emotions within me to pick up my fingers and bang in this post. There is absolutely no doubt that Krauss is a top rate intelligence and if the worth of a book has something to do with its ability to make one feel alive again then this is a top rate book as well. This intense feeling can either manifest itself in the form of positive emotions or negative ones - both are fair game and none makes the book any less great - the eternal failing of a purported work of art being when it leaves you merely indifferent. This book presses some of the buttons which haven't been pressed in a long while. So this post, rather than being a review of the book, is more about the red lights which those buttons have set alight.

One of the unmistakable traits of the American culture is, without doubt, its incredibly inward looking attitude. You can see it in the awareness that an average American seems to have of the affairs of the world and you can see it when the American football teams play against each other and become world champions. In general I view this trait with mild amusement, very aware of the many failings that I myself have as a human being but every now and then I come across a particular manifestation of this general trait which drives me up the wall. I think I can say, with reasonable give and take and with an acceptable degree of accuracy, that most of the problems that Americans face are ridiculous problems that pale in comparison with what a lot of people around the world have to face. When there are children dying of malnutrition in many parts of the world and when there are people getting killed almost everyday due to civil wars, I find it incomprehensible how the collective focus of this culture can revolve around such superficial issues as 'not being able to make a lot of money' or 'yet another breakup.' I don't quite want to argue that the existence of this much more sinister and much more broad reality beyond the comfortable American life must lead to some kind of guilt but I do want to just put it out there and hint at the smallness of it all.

The issues that people in this country face are mostly of their own making and they often have the power to change things for the better unlike a lot of other people around the world who are irrevocably and mercilessly condemned to a life and future beyond their control. All the huge gamut of issues which are basically a result of people running after goals and standards and expectations that others have set for them, therefore, evince nothing but a sneering chuckle from me. These standards not only include the corporate structures that one is expected to follow but also the lifestyle that one must keep. Getting a house in a fashionable area, being able to buy expensive branded clothes, drinking 20 dollars cocktails in the hippest new clubs, weekend getaways - all at the cost of a hateful job and a ridiculous soulless grind of a life. This is essentially the story of many on the professional side of an urban environment. To complete the hellish circle, the culture promotes an inclination to be casual towards one's relationships, thereby, filling in all the ingredients necessary for a life continuously caught between the rock of anxiety and the hard place of dissatisfaction. The Indian life is by no means the ideal one, being plagued by some of the same ailments as the American one although in a different form, but I can safely say that people appear happier and more satisfied on average even though they have much less and have to deal with graver issues than people here.

The reason I bring it all up now is because the book The Great House repeatedly brings up characters who appear sad and aloof and inclined to concentrate on the loss of it all. Their stories are touchingly told and Krauss has a great knack at writing highly fluid English. Her powers of observations make me incredibly jealous. But, somehow, I fail to sympathize with the sadness of the characters that she writes so beautifully about. What I do feel is an intense anger at the thanklessness of her characters even though they are born in an affluent country where they do not have to wonder if they will get enough to eat. I keep muttering under my breath, godammit, stop this relentless onslaught of self-pity and loss and try to be happy and thankful for what you've got. Most of her characters don't really have issues. At least issues not grave enough to warrant my sympathy. Just like so many people living here who don't really have issues but would not hesitate to go on and on about their predicaments which, when you consider closely, they themselves generated in the first place and are completely within their powers to change for the better... But the book is good!

Edit: I want to mention again that this is a very good book with some of the most poignant passages I have ever come across. My visceral reactions which lie beneath the surface of general equanimity lie there in an uneasy calm and require but the faintest whiff of the wrong kind of smell to burst forth in a varicolored display. In the present case they are triggered by certain characters whom I find ungrateful and I object to their sympathetic treatment, both in fiction and in life. There are other characters, however, who are absolutely beautifully rendered.

To U

Posted by Ankit On May 19th, 2013

It was one of those muffled days which zips around me in black and white streaks as I tread its cobbled alleyways in a perpetual state of deferred suspension. People zooming past with their lattes and their kids and their bright sunny faces moistened with a million emotions. The scattered flimsy clouds over a self-absorbed blue sky, the birds in aerodynamic formations, the capped ocean swelling below a melting Sun, the brisk breeze in which precipitate a million different voices of a thousand different people all with substantively the same general life, the foamed top of an espresso in a white cup with a chipped handle revealing brown ceramic beneath, the blonde with the Aviators, with the attitude and with the insecurities which she shares with other blondes with Aviators and attitudes, the shade below a lazy tree which is mottled by the Sun shining through its foliage, its single leaf translucent green twinkling at its tip and alone among uncountable others which seem exactly the same as the one, the sunny house with the cute red wooden door and the white picket fence which is hardly white anymore, John Doe's love for Jane Doe lovingly scratched on the concrete pavement just below my feet, all the people who have plans to attend to, determined to have the fun which must be had on a sunny day like today, the inky dark night with its friendly street-lamps and its illuminated, boxed, and windowed lives, the silhouettes of trees and of lamp-posts and of derelict buildings and of sad looking, slow moving homeless people, fancy new cars cutting through the silence by their rude yellow lights and their alpha male engines, lives, complete with all the emotions that will forever be unknown to me hanging in the sky all around in little puddles of yellow light. Just one of those days when I experience an infinity without really experiencing any of it. Rather I sit on the proverbial parapet wall of life with my legs dangling on the other side, hands clenched behind my back and eyes closed, and wait for the confusion to subside, for the next day which will pull it all together and back within the perspectives of reality.

A tale of negative density

Posted by Ankit On April 10th, 2013

While thinking about some of my research problems today, my mind wandered off to a time many years ago when on one morning during an undergrad class of solid mechanics I was first introduced, rather unceremoniously I must say, to the revolutionary concept of negative density.

We were trying to figure out some academic arcana about a pendulum, a water tank, an accelerating vehicle, and that universal scourge of high flyers everywhere, gravity and as it often happens in matters of little consequence, the stakes were enormously high. I was standing at the blackboard having just drawn a schematic of the problem under discussion, the quality of which stood as a testimony to the complete lack of the artistic strain in my blood. My sorry efforts at trying to draw a container of water had given it the kind of waves which the moon would be proud of generating in the Pacific on one of its 'in the zone' days. And the pendulum hung there inside the bowl with the pathetic visage of one who has just learnt that his parole application has been denied. The motion of the vehicle on to which my ghastly contraption was supposed to have been placed was indicated by a few swooshes in the opposite direction - an effect that was no doubt the result of having read one too many comics.

So there I stood fidgeting alongside my hesitating contribution to postmodern sketching and it should not be hard to imagine that in that moment of vulnerability in front of my classmates, my attitude towards the problem at hand was inspired by the old adage of attack being the best form of defense. I don't remember the exact train of arguments but I do remember it being broken by the voice of a friend who has always been surer of himself than I have been of myself. Confrontation with him on a good day is quite an ordeal but he had chosen to speak up at a time when the iron had just been removed from the kiln and lay red and embarrassed on the side of the subpar schematic.

What about negative density, he asked. I eyed him suspiciously unable to comprehend the level at which I should refute that incongruous little quip of his. Suddenly I found myself face to face with a question far greater than any that I could have dreamed of. Not only was I not able to establish my position as to the effect of negative density on the problem, I was not even able to comprehend if he was joking or not. I eyed him suspiciously like I have often found myself doing when faced with someone whose character evinces a certain unidentifiable shiftiness and asked after much internal deliberation, what about it.   What if the liquid had negative density, he persisted? What happens to your pendulum then? I looked at my sorry pendulum in my sorry jar and wondered how much more it would have to go through at the hands of sadists such as him. It had already been through enough under my penmanship, its whole substance reduced to a dented bob of arbitrary circularity flimsily attached to a feeble wire and left to brave the torrential waves of a bowl of badly drawn liquid. Surely the pendulum had been through enough and could do without further torment. And moreover, said I to myself, what the hell is a negative density liquid anyway. In the face of a complete lack of evidence that such liquids existed, I promptly concluded that subjecting my down and out pendulum to such an alien ambiance must constitute as some sort of a violation of the Geneva convention or something. In fact I was so incensed by the suggestion that I instantly snapped at my friend for the mere mention of so ghastly a possibility.

I have since realized that my impatience that day was misplaced and that fate, in the semi cruel and semi sadistic sort of way in which it likes so much to operate, designed my life so that eventually I ended up doing a major part of my research in the field of materials with negative densities. And that one question on that fair day in Guwahati which elicited such a visceral response from me has come to serve as a persistent reminder that the true worth of an idea, howsoever ridiculous it may appear at the first, second, and fifth glances, must never be judged based upon irrational emotional attachments to one's sketching abilities, especially to sad looking pendulum faces. I also realize now that I need to learn how to extract useful morals out of life events.

Could of, would of and should of

Posted by Ankit On December 10th, 2012

I have been coming across a strange linguistic twist lately which has piqued my curiosity. I have been noticing an increasing usage of phrases like 'could of', 'would of' and 'should of' instead of 'could have', 'would have', and 'should have' respectively. I can hazard a guess as to why this change is taking place and it has to do with a destructive force in language which is geared towards economy of effort. As time passes, words in any language coalesce together, lose their stresses in various parts, and morph in different ways to strive towards more and more efficiency of expression and communication. This is a very well documented phenomenon and is a major source of linguistic change. It is, therefore, not surprising that a sequence of words like 'could have', which occurs commonly together and is often pronounced like 'could've' due to the efficiency of expression, has now morphed to the altered spelling 'could of' (see Elision).

I wondered if there was a way by which I can verify whether this relatively new phenomenon is gaining ground. I thought that an obvious first step would be to check what Google trends says about the phrase "could of". Here is the result:

Apart from the weird peak the plot above shows a general increase in the number of searches for the phrase 'could of' since 2004. The plot below shows the Trends results for the phrase 'would of':

which again shows a general increase in the number of searches of the emerging phrase. But these plots only show that the awareness for the new terms is increasing. They don't necessarily mean that the usage is similarly increasing. To find out if the actual usage of, say, 'would of' is increasing, I did a simple Google search for the phrase and restricted the results over calendar years from 2004 to present. The results showed the number of pages in which the new phrase 'would of' was mentioned. Apart from the first few results which invariably were about how 'would of' is a misuse of the phrase 'would have', the overwhelming majority of the results were actual usages. What I mean to say is that the number of pages returned by Google for a search query 'would of' is very indicative of the relative popularity of the expression. Obviously this number by itself doesn't mean anything since the total number of pages indexed by Google each year is continuously increasing. Therefore, I normalized the number of pages returned by Google containing the phrase 'would of' in a certain year by the number of pages returned by Google for a very simple search query like 'have' in the same year. This normalizes the results and gives us a pretty good description of how the popularity of the new phrases are increasing. Here are the results for the phrases "could of', 'would of', and 'should of':

Very informative isn't it? The trends are clear and if there is something to be learned from the above then it is the fact that we are witnessing a small transition in the English language and the day may not be far when the traditional forms of the phrases discussed above remain no longer in vogue. It seems ridiculous now that somebody could have spelled could have as could of. Really, they should of more brains than that!

Digressions - 1

Posted by Ankit On November 8th, 2012

Several years ago I came across a TED talk by a famous physicist called David Deutsch and I thought that it was the best talk that I had ever seen. He talked about our place in the universe in the context of how humans figure out new knowledge about our surroundings and then he went on to connect his talk with the current problems facing the human race and what's the right way to go about figuring out the solutions. I went ahead and bought his book called "the fabric of reality" and was immensely impressed by the ideas presented in the book.

In his book, he tried to put forth the case that four of our current theories, put together, may already suffice well enough to serve as the theory of everything. A critique of his claim is beyond both the scope of this post and perhaps even my intelligence but one of the theories that he talks about is Karl Popper's theory of the growth of human knowledge. I was very intrigued by Popper's idea that the process of new scientific advance is deductive as opposed to inductive. This means that revolutionary new scientific understanding almost never comes from observing nature but simply by a process which, for all practical purposes, is the same as guessing. Obviously verification and fine tuning are still within the domain of observing and learning but the seed of new science is basically just a hunch. I came across this concept yet again in a YouTube video of a physics lecture that Feynman gave in Cornell (highly recommended again). But it was only recently that I got the chance to read Popper's original paper which first presented his theory. He presented it in the context of the philosophy of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers.

The great Carl Sagan begins his TV series Cosmos, which to me is the greatest TV series ever made, with an introduction to the philosophies of such names as Thales, Anaximander, Democritus, Heraclitus and more. These people lived around 500 BC in the geographical region which now constitutes parts of southern Italy, Greece, and western Turkey and they wondered about the deeper questions of life. Specifically, they tried to explain the inner workings of the world around them. By modern standards, their explanations would appear ad-hoc and childish but it is easy to see that their ideas must have been groundbreaking in their time. They presented a distinct break from the anthropocentric Greek legends and they tried to give a mechanistic explanation of the world. And by criticizing each other and building upon each other's theories, they laid the foundation of the Western scientific tradition. It is also fascinating to see how 'far out' their explanations are and it is evident that their understanding is more guesswork than studied induction.

It takes a special society to tolerate such imagination and creativity, especially when the creative energies are focused towards the deepest questions that there are. It was not before long that this frail tolerance was lost to dogmatic views of the world with the advent of Plato and Aristotle. While western science finally recovered from the dark ages with Galileo, and the western thought with the beginning of Rennaisance, it is interesting to note that this success was never repeated anywhere else. I'm sure that the ancient Indian philosophers asked the same questions that the Greeks did and I'm sure that their answers were equally insightful and beautiful. I'm sure that there existed a time when the philosophers were merely feeling their way in the dark and their theories and thoughts were open to severe criticisms. But today the Bhagwad Gita, for example, is used to ensure that witnesses do not lie in court, thereby imparting to it a rigidity which would have been anathema to the philosophers who contributed to the great work. Other religions have similar stories but I find it odd that the Hindu equivalent of Bible and Koran is the Gita.

So what's the point of this post? Digressions!

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