Category Archive: Miscellaneous

Proust on still life

Posted by Ankit On November 9th, 2013

I sought to find again in reality, I cherished as though for their poetic beauty, the broken gestures of the knives still lying across one another, the swollen convexity of a discarded napkin into which the Sun introduced a patch of yellow velvet, the half empty glass which thus showed to greater advantage the noble sweep of its curved sides and, in the heart of its translucent crystal, clear as frozen daylight, some dregs of wine, dark but glittering with reflected lights, the displacement of solid objects, the transmutation of liquids by the effect of light and shade, the shifting colors of the plums which passed from green to blue to golden yellow in the half-plundered dish, the promenade of the antiquated chairs that came twice daily to take their places round the white cloth spread on the table as on an altar at which were celebrated the rites of the palate, and where in the hollows of the oyster-shells a few drops of lustral water had remained as in tiny holy-water stoups of stone; I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the  profundities of "still life."

-From "In search of lost time", v.2

A wrong lesson from the past

Posted by Ankit On October 30th, 2013

What is it that I really learned from my undergraduate education? Hmmm, that's a tough one. I actually do not remember in concrete terms what is it I really learned, owing to the fact it was many years ago and also because unlike many of my peers I have sort of continued in the same general area of academia. This makes it impossible for me to sort my knowledge on the basis of its origins. All of my memory in this respect is basically one vague muddled mass where the task of telling whether somethings I know now were actually learned during my undergrad is a hopeless one. But I do remember one thing that I learned during my undergrad which I should not have but which is very easy to learn growing in the educational system that I grew in.

For those who may be unfamiliar with the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology this time) system, here's a synopsis in a nutshell. Hundreds of thousands of aspirants compete to get into one of these tech. institutes every year out of which a few thousand are selected. The exams for these selections used to be exceedingly hard, so hard, in fact, that I am reasonably sure that I would do really badly if I were to attempt them now. The rigor of these exams seems to have gotten diluted now and the acceptance rate risen up a little (from 1% when I attempted to around 2% now). There is something to be said about being able to 'crack' that exam but I ceased to be proud of it a very long time ago. And I feel nothing but pity for those who may still be hanging on to that sentiment. Part of the reason why I don't feel much about that anymore is the regret I have for learning something which is absolutely wrong in the real world. The idea that it is sufficient to be smart, and that the world owes anything to people with intelligence. Of course such ideas are never explicitly discussed but there is a massive undercurrent which promotes such thinking at the IITs. There are absolutely brilliant students at these institutes. Students who have to study merely for a few hours before the exams to completely crack it open. It is natural then that the ideals of such people and of such an intelligence are continuously reinforced at a subconscious level. Too bad then that the real world doesn't really care too much about it and the thing that really seems to matter finally is how hard one can work at something. I am not saying that intelligence doesn't figure into the equation but that it is not enough, which is precisely what was reinforced in my undergraduate education. And this conclusion is just for material successes. I feel that ultimately the only important thing is if one can be happy about the various situations one is in. The satisfaction from one's work, the social situation one is in, the intellectual stimulation from the environment, perhaps the existence of more intangible emotions like altruism and empathy which make you feel connected to a wider reality, all of these must add up to one's final degree of happiness and I have a sneaking suspicion that people who are made to believe in the virtues of raw intelligence and not hard-work are dealt a rather poor hand when such sum total is considered.

I used to feel a particular emotion and I have seen it far too often in others. The sinking feeling that the world isn't the way that one was led to believe by one's family, relatives, friends, peers, teachers, and professors. That it has little value for the fact that you cracked a tough exam many many years ago. I sometimes wonder about those 'adults' who should have known better and I wonder about the sort of priorities they must have. They are not the only ones who got it wrong. They must be the precipitates of a culture where such proclivities are more than just skin deep.

Proust on memory

Posted by Ankit On October 16th, 2013

From Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", second part:

"Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never recapture it. Or rather we should never recapture it had not a few words been carefully locked away in oblivion."

A similarly beautiful passage occurs in the first part:

"But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."

Python, pycuda, gpu computing et. al.

Posted by Ankit On September 27th, 2013

I have often thought about why is it that nature is so fast whereas our simulations of it are so annoyingly slow and my mind always goes to the same sort of conclusion, nature is a massively parallel system, a seamless collection of very simple processes all taking place at the same time. It then appears that a computation strategy which mimics this parallelism to a certain extent will serve to gain much in terms of sheer computational power and efficiency. Of course there must be incredible challenges or it would be done by now but there you are. Now GPU (graphical processing unit) computing is something which looks suspiciously relevant in this scenario and I have begun exploring it a little for my own purposes. GPU computing allows one to execute massive number of relatively simple processes all at the same time. The catch is that the problem often has to be recast to make it suitable for treatment within the GPU paradigm but if this can be done, and done well, it may lead to significant improvements in efficiency.

Having said that any researcher worth his salt should begin coding in C or fortran and then exploit NVIDIA's CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) to do computations on the NVIDIA GPUs present in most modern computers. I, however, am not a researcher worth my salt, at least not yet by that definition. I code in MATLAB and have recently moved to Python, driven by my pursuit to rid myself of all software which is not exactly free. Python coupled with Numpy is a formidable competitor to MATLAB and it makes sense to eventually port everything to it, if not C and Fortran. This still leaves the issue of parallelization. Fortunately NVIDIA has begun supporting python through PyCuda and I have spent the better part of the last two days trying to figure out how to make it all work. To use Python+Numpy+PyCUDA I needed to install a few things on my machine (Windows 7). Here is a list:

1. Python 2.7.5 from http://www.python.org/getit/ (I used the x86-64 installer which is suitable for 64 bit Win7). I went to the directory where Python is installed and copied its address to the PATH variable. This allows you to run the Python interpreter from the command line.

2. Numpy. A great list of Python packages is at http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/ with numpy being at http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#numpy. I initially made the mistake of using a comprehensive Python distribution (Anaconda) which contains both Python and Numpy. It, however, did not make the correct registry entries and, therefore, gave me incredible grief when I was trying to install CUDA. I found it simpler just to do everything myself. Additional necessary packages which I installed from this page were Pytools, Setuputils, matplotlib (and its dependencies).

3. PyCuda can also be installed from http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pycuda

4. It's nice to have an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Python and I have installed Eclipse for this purpose. You can download it at http://www.eclipse.org/ and look at http://www.vogella.com/articles/Python/article.html for an excellent tutorial on how to get it running and making Python codes.

5. Visual Studio. I haven't been able to figure out why this is required yet but apparently it is essential. I installed VS 2012 Professional from http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads.

6. Finally it is time to install CUDA. This can be done from https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads, choosing the appropriate version for your OS.

Once all this is done you just have to write a python code appropriately configured to use CUDA and voila, it won't run! The trouble is that certain connections which let python know which compiler to use to invoke the CUDA parts of the code don't exist yet. To make those connections consult this: http://wiki.tiker.net/PyCuda/Installation/Windows. However, I had to make appropriate changes to the PATH instructions because my VS is 2012 and not 2008. For some reason my VS installation was also not in the same directory as shown in that link. Moreover, it was a bit of a trouble finding nvcc.profile and then editing it given that it is a read only file to begin with. Anyway, I'm all set now!

Non-belief

Posted by Ankit On September 22nd, 2013

During the last 7-8 years I've had the pleasure of being friends with some really interesting and intelligent people. I have mentioned time and again how much I have appreciated learning from them and how much of an imprint I see of their influence in what I am today. I scarcely doubt the sharpness of their minds but sometimes I'm just amazed at some of the logical inconsistencies that even the sharpest of them display. I find it incomprehensible how some of these people who have grown up within the confines of critical thought can justify their beliefs in supernatural phenomenon of all sorts. Of course I never bring these things up in personal discussions because I already know all the superficial arguments which will be made, both on their side and from mine. These arguments don't mean much because people hardly ever say what they really feel. Moreover, I'm not out to put anyone down for what they believe in. I'm merely curious as to how it can all fit together in one mind which had been trained to evaluate the world around it based upon evidence.

I know I am sounding suspiciously like a 16 year old atheist who spends his time arguing on the ridiculous atheist forums of reddit but that's not who I mean to appear like. It is an obnoxious religion,  atheism really. In many aspects worse than other forms of religion because of the incredible smugness involved. Most of the people who call themselves atheists are merely following another inviolable prophet in the name of Richard Dawkins and seem to lack the courage and the intelligence to answer the next logical questions which present themselves when you remove a God. Questions about morality, altruism, ethics, and the stability of society never seem to get asked in their circles. I personally don't doubt the non existence of God but I've always found myself getting lost in the subtlety of the arguments whenever I start thinking about these things. It's not that I don't get anywhere but often where I do end up being is always some sort of a compromise zone where it doesn't make sense to be too militant in my views - the golden mean of all our ideas and beliefs. At those moments I wonder about truth and practicality, about reality and happiness, about steadfast loyalty to certain ideas and the simple desire of not being a massive ass to people who are almost always really really nice despite all our philosophical differences. I find this simple courtesy missing in a lot of atheists, therefore, I'd be damned to be taken as one of them.

This still leaves that one question with which I started this post. How can people, and only certain people to whom I have alluded earlier (they know who they are! ), keep it all coherent in their minds? There was a book that I read several years ago which I remember completely changing my life from there on. U G Krishnamurthy's mind is a myth. I did not learn anything concrete from that book except one thing which was not to take authority seriously, not to believe in the given word. Since then I've seen many of my beliefs crumble around me and I've felt relived every time that has happened. In short, I've replaced shoddy and suspect explanations with uncertainties and crumbling bricks and have felt quite okay about it all - perhaps because the earlier structure was all too garish and incoherent and badly patched up together even though it was complete. I quite like the fallen walls now because they're at least mine. Like other things in life like failures and successes, happiness and sorrows, and actions, I feel relieved to take complete responsibility for my confused structure of non-beliefs.

Wrinkled faces

Posted by Ankit On August 12th, 2013

I have been watching Ken Burns' 'Dust Bowl' documentary which basically is an amazing piece of work but what else do we expect from Burns anyway? Apart from the fact that one can learn a lot from it about a time in history which the modern America has been all too eager to forget, what struck me the most about it were the faces of the time. People who were kids then living with their parents on the prairie farms of Oklahoma, Kansas, east Colorado, and north Texas. Their families were trying to make a living out of growing wheat on what turned into immense dust fields through dust storms thousands of feet high. They tell their stories with touching fear of the hardships they had to face and nostalgia about the freedom of the vast expanse of the great American plains. You can almost see in their distant eyes the memories of the Sun setting over an oval horizon with nothing to obstruct the view save a shanty which their fathers built over farms which extended for thousands of acres. It is a beautiful and quiet image and one which draws me further into the romanticism of it all and irrevocably presents counterpoints in the current climate.

I quite like the stories of these people and I understand the essence of the broken lines which form those wrinkles. You can tell that these were people who really faced problems in their lives and they tried to make the best out of a really bad situation. You can feel that uprightness in them which you can find in those who have worked hard in their lives to surmount their issues. And you wonder, you cannot help but wonder, what is it in the current American life which compares to that kind of hardship. I have broad brushes with which I paint thick lines and sometimes my colors leak out from within the boundaries. With such a homogenized viewpoint, I find it impossible to take people's issues seriously in current America, a realization that is only growing as time passes. Of course people here have issues but if they only compared those across time and space... In relation to such things I have been occupying myself by working on my sneers and chuckles.

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.

Cosmicomics

Posted by Ankit On June 8th, 2013

Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics is a brilliant selection of his short stories. Each story takes a scientific fact and weaves a very imaginative fantasy around it. All these stories are told from the point of view of a know-it-all and ever present narrator called Qfwfq. Some of the stories are a little bit of a stretch in terms of the patience required of the reader but most of them are just pure inspired storytelling of the highest order. What I find amazing about his stories is a certain kind of absurdist humor which I have found in some other places (most conspicuously in Woody Allen's insanity defense, Alice in Wonderland, parts of Catch-22, and to some extent in Vonnegut and Douglas Adams)  and which, in my opinion, is incredibly hard to do well.

As an example, his story 'All at one point' begins with the scientific fact that back in the day all the matter in the universe was concentrated at one point (Big Bang) which is followed by Qfwfq casually saying 'naturally, we were all there.' The story goes from there but to me there is something amazing about that first sentence as well. It represents a discontinuous leap of imagination which makes possible lines of fiction which are unattainable to most of us. There is a certain logic behind it (I mean, of course everybody was there!) which makes this line so much more funny than a scenario which doesn't necessarily have a logic of its own (like a man falling over a banana peel). The story carries forth this style which is the hallmark of such absurdist humor. In which characters behave in manners which appear highly unnatural to the reader but which make complete sense to the characters themselves. These characters state the most jaw dropping of facts in the most natural manner and often find themselves in situations which are perilous but ultimately ridiculous. It is their incapacity to tell how ridiculous their situation is which makes their stories so funny. Which makes me think, if there is a God looking down at humans he must be having a damn good time. I find that in such stories, as important and satisfying as the actual fantasy is, it is almost more important and funnier how the author maintains that internal logic of the characters themselves. The former part appealing to the creative side and the latter to the rational one.

Such internal logic is also necessary because it shows that just because the book is a fantasy the author is not taking the reader for a ride by freeing himself of all rules. This, I feel, is what makes it so difficult to write good fantasy because a good fantasy must have an additional responsibility to be coherent and logical since it is so easy to write something which isn't. Any Tom, Dick, and Harry can come along and spew his dreams and nightmares over the sorry pages of a novel. Unfortunately when that happens the world has to make room in the cosmic trashcan for another 'Kafka on the shore'. Guided with beautiful logic, however, we get Calvino's book which treads the trembling and faint line between believability and absurdity with such finesse that reading his stories becomes a pleasure.

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.

Handcrafted and artisan

Posted by Ankit On April 21st, 2013

I was walking around the quaint and upcoming neighborhood of South Park in San Diego today when I noticed a growing fad on the shopfronts. I noticed how a lot of them had started using generic healthy sounding words like 'artisan' and 'handcrafted' to describe their fares which included stuff from chocolate to beer to clothes and more. Terms like these were all over the place and although generally they can be dismissed as merely a quaint amusement, it is also worthwhile to prod the topic a little because to me they belie a demographic which is as gullible and, might I say thick, as the one which it looks down upon so much. And America, being the fascinating place that it is, with all its freedoms and its tolerance, harbors them all and listens to them with patience. I hear people from outside the country coming here and feeling dissatisfied, even angry, with certain facets of America - and I do too sometimes - but I am eternally amazed by the fact that in this country you can always find a chunk of people whom you don't like very much, who have very different values than you do, and it's all a testament to the country's incredible diversity and tolerance.

And, therefore, you can find here wide swathes of land inhabited by those whose lives revolve around hard religion and conservative ideologies and numerous coastal pockets of population who are their complete opposites. I am intellectually fascinated by all this variety but I also cannot help but be cognizant of the existence of follies in any form of 'belief system'. I am not sure if I have a belief system but I am sure that if I have one then it's both flawed and inconsistent. I am also aware that it is okay because finally the only important thing is the color of life and all these badly constructed systems add to the humor of life and to its botched iridescence. So on the one hand we have the far right of America with its heavy insistence on the final word of the Bible, and on the other we have the far left with its own superstitions in pseudosciences such as homeopathy, astrology and other new age claptrap. They both look askance at each other whereas people like me, who think of themselves as being in the middle, are allowed to feel smug!

I was struck, then, by the repeated usage of terms like handcrafted and artisan on the shop windows because these terms don't really mean much. They do however intend to make the buyer believe that the things which these shops are selling are somehow superior to those which come from huge factories. Whenever I come across such words I cannot help but think that there is a sly effort to sell me vague associations of green pastures, clear streams, and old grandmotherly knowledge. To me the intent is so incredibly devious that I am instantly repulsed by it and am rather inclined put my trust in the red bottle of coke with its honest description of high fructose corn syrup and 150 calories.

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