Category Archive: Miscellaneous

Ulysses

Posted by Ankit On September 24th, 2012

Anyone who has known me for any appreciable amount of time has probably grown weary of my extolling the brilliance of Nabokov's pen. I think Lolita is one of the most dashing English fiction ever written and his autobiography 'Speak Memory' is equally mesmerizing. His 'Pale Fire' just boggles the mind with its multi-layered complex creative form and his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin is a fine painstaking study in how translations must be done. Nabokov was a renowned scientist, a strong chess player and a well liked professor at Cornell but among his many talents the one that really sweeps me away is his linguistic ability. And yet when he was compared with James Joyce, his reply was simple:

My English is patball compared to Joyce's champion game

And you really do understand why he said that when you read Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce's mastery is in its own category and there is no one who comes close. When I read it for the first time it was nothing but utter frustration for me. Far too many words that I didn't know the meanings of, far too stream of consciousness in style, far too erudite in its allusions. But now that I am reading it again with more patience and with more humility I am beginning to glimpse the genius of Joyce. All great writers break the rules of composition and take artistic liberties with 'proper' form but Joyce seems to make his own rules. His vocabulary is staggering but he doesn't use it to show off. He uses absolutely precise words for complex ideas, feelings, and objects and as if just to show that he doesn't give a flying toss about his precocious lexicon, he mixes those beautiful exact words with completely made up ones. At places he writes in beautiful complex constructions and at places in broken sentences which end in half a word. He captures elaborate emotions and gestures in single words and spends pages following spontaneous lines of thoughts which don't go anywhere. For its rebellious experimental form and for how well it works, Ulysses is the most virtuoso book I have ever read. I don't claim to understand it fully, not even close. But the little that I do understand gives me immense pleasure and satisfaction.

Clocks and watches

Posted by Ankit On September 23rd, 2012

I have lately been fascinated by how clocks and watches work and here is a little summary of what I've found. Timekeeping devices of the current form started all the way back in the 13th century for astronomical and administrative purposes. Many technological advances have occurred since then but the essential idea remains the same. In the broadest of terms there are two main parts of a clock: a timekeeping source and an energy source. A pendulum, for example, is often used as a timekeeping source and the reason why it is an appropriate one is an underlying physical principle. A pendulum of a given length completes each oscillation in precisely the same amount of time. Therefore, by adjusting the length of the pendulum, it can be made to complete each oscillation in precisely 1 second. If we were living in a world where there was no friction and no air drag then that is all that was needed. One could theoretically design a mechanism which would count every oscillation of the pendulum and that would be the 'second' hand and one could design additional mechanisms to 'tick' once for every 60 'ticks' of the second hand which would be the 'minute' hand and so on and so forth.

But we live in a world with mechanical losses which means that the pendulum cannot go on oscillating indefinitely without providing additional energy. In the medieval ages I suppose one could have imagined hiring an underling to stand beside the pendulum and give it a 'kick' every so often but it's not a very feasible solution even for an outsourced economy! So we have had to find additional 'automatic' sources of energy. This additionally energy can be provided in different ways. In big old pendulum clocks this was often provided by a falling weight and in the small wrist watches this is done through a wound spring but the essential idea is the same. Since there is a small and finite amount of energy stored in a falling weight or a wound spring it is important to regulate how this energy is transferred to the timekeeping source. This is done through a neat little mechanism called an escapement mechanism which ensures that one doesn't have to wind the clock/watch or change the batteries too frequently.

The whole field of horology can, therefore, be summarized in a few statements. The effort is to find a phenomenon in nature which is periodic and consistent and to keep it going by providing additional energy. Obviously the mechanical implementation is intricate fascinating and beautiful but that is the essence. Wrist watches obviously don't have oscillating pendulums but they have a similar timekeeping source - a mass rotating on a spring. Modern wrist-watches have another more accurate timekeeping source - a tuning fork made of a quartz crystal designed to oscillate at precisely 32,768 times a second and the energy comes from a battery. Atomic clocks have a yet more precise timekeeping source: atoms transitioning from one energy state to another emit radiation at a precise frequency. Since that frequency is constant it may be used as a timekeeping source. Atomic clocks based on Caesium-133 count 9192631770 cycles of the radiation emitted by the energy transition of the Caesium atom and the time it takes for those cycles to complete is equal to 1 second.

Following are some additional references which show the actual mechanisms of a clock:

 http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/clocks-watches/clock.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDYjUDrCPv0&feature=g-like

Thoughts on buying a watch:

https://www.jenreviews.com/watch/

Downpour

Posted by Ankit On September 20th, 2012

One of the primary downfalls of San Diego having the perfect weather that it has is the perfect weather that it has. Days and nights are beads on one unending rosary stringed by time where some beads differ from the others merely in the slight discoloration which pure chance engenders. San Diegan weather is a fine classical Swiss watch lovingly stashed away in a velvet case. I sometimes miss the inclement whims of the climate. I don’t remember ever seeing the Pacific under the infinite little beats of a downpour and I wonder what sorts of impressions it would make. The flat vast drum-head of the mighty ocean being played upon by the fallen children of the grim sky. Ocean’s white-maned horses whiter still behind the gray gauze of wet threads. The rolling hills of La Jolla disappearing into the distance and with them disappearing all those houses and all those people and perhaps in that obscurity, in one of those vanished houses, from behind a rain streaked window-pane, someone looking at the ocean and through its artificial truncated boundary, in my general direction and also wondering whether falling trees in unvisited forests make noises. Meanwhile the vibrating ocean under the relentless onslaught of the falling drops would sit uneasily in the bowl of the crescent coastline between La Jolla cove and Black’s beach. And since we are merely imagining, let’s imagine a black umbrella fluttering in the petrichored wind, its silvery ferrule cold to the touch and centered within its black dripping fabric, feet dangling over the stone embankment, wet hands gripping the wooden crook-handle, right over left, eyes half closed from the moist wind, trying to make out blunt figures in the smudged ocean.

Quote from Joyce

Posted by Ankit On September 12th, 2012

He pressed his face against the pane of the window and gazed out into the darkening street. Forms passed this way and that through the dull light. And that was life.

A little quote from Joyce's 'Portrait of an artist as a young man'. One of those clever little quotes which make delicate incisions in your thought process and are remarkable both for the gravity of the injury and how innocuous it appears at first. It says so much precisely by saying so little.

Portrait of a glass of wine

Posted by Ankit On August 22nd, 2012

Someone highly inebriated once said that in wine lies the greatest secret, that all life is fermentation. A small glass sits gracefully on the rough textured top of a wooden table, its heart filled to the brim with the greatest sanguine truth of them all. There is a lamp to its left whose diffused yellow light has created swirling patterns on the foot and the stem of the glass: flecks of deep blacks constituting the shadow of the dark red wine above mingle with the bright strokes of golden brilliance as the light of the lamp is squeezed into nooks and crannies by the unyielding will of the formed glass, and in the translucent surrealism which is the hyperbolic crystal stem there are impressions of the wood behind. If I were to describe these impressions I’d describe them in light vague ideas with rounded corners and soft textures, akin to how the world appears in those dim orphan moments when I have woken up by an unwelcome noise; in broad brushstrokes of confusion, muffled sounds and out of focus vision. The liquid itself is dark red, almost black, and it conforms silently to the whims and contours of the bowl of the glass. It ends about half an inch below the brim of the glass in a thin translucent ellipse where the light of the lamp, having refracted through the walls of the glass, gives up its own essence and reduces the deep black of the wine to a red hue. The glass casts a long dark shadow in which I can barely make out the vague shape of the majestic glass and the forgotten shades of deep reds – perhaps there is a final poignant point to all this, to this 2 dimensional and bland final act to an otherwise exhilarating tale...

How much I admire Ayn Rand

Posted by Ankit On August 13th, 2012

Not at all.

Now what is it that makes great characters and a great story? And why is Ayn Rand such an awful writer? I have often wondered why my bile starts boiling at the thought of some writers who are so widely regarded. Ayn Rand is one such writer. The interesting thing is that when I actually read The Fountainhead at the age of 15 I was completely enthralled by it. I was swept away by the character of Howard Roark and saw in him all that was pure about the human spirit and noble about the human struggle. I saw in him what most people see, an inspiring and uncompromising man who was ready to go to any lengths of sufferings to stay pure to his own principles and just like other people I hated the mediocre world which was being an impediment to him in his pursuits of perfection. I saw the world in the black and white colors that Rand wanted from her disciples and I really did believe that pure characters like Roark existed in real life and even if they did not exist, I felt that Roark was an ideal which must be aspired for. What a bunch of bollocks, I have since realized.

I must say that Rand must be admired for the success that her creations have achieved but if one really wants to talk about her on artistic terms, she must be flayed and with vengeance. So what is it that really makes a great character?  George Carlin, in one of those rare moments of overt sympathy, once said that you can see the universe in everyone’s eyes if you really look. I really do believe that each one of us is potentially a great character just waiting for our stories to be told by a competent and observant enough storyteller. What makes each of us fascinating has less to do with what we end up saying in conversations but has so much more to do with all that we never mention. What we say and what we feel are tremendously dependent upon a host of factors that would be hard to list. From our general upbringing to specific instances in the past, from the current company that we keep to our economic situations, there is almost an infinite number of factors which go consciously or subconsciously into explaining why we chose to keep quiet when a heated discussion on, say, the Palestinian conflict was going on. We snicker in disapproval and we are smitten with envy, we applaud inwardly and we dismiss with contempt but often we say only those things which would keep the wheels of social interaction in motion. We think about betrayal and we think about the ghastliest of things and we often do not mention all the sentimental love that we feel for the fear of ridicule. Against this background of the tremendous emotional turbulence we try to put up a face which is proper and graceful and strong and self-confident. Some of us are better than others at hiding our imperfections and some are better able to ignore the presence of such imperfections but they are present in all us and those character flaws are precisely the interesting bits in each of us.

Who wants to hear the story of the perfect being? We heard it a few times in the past and they still plague so many of us with their unreasonable ideals. The really great characters, I feel, are the flawed ones and especially those who are confused and contradictory in their flaws because that’s what people really are like. The great characters differ from boring people in the conviction that they have but they often do not understand the repercussions of acting upon their convictions. They are driven by true passion, just like Howard Roark, but there is none of that pathetic moral high ground in them which Roark seems to suffer from. Unlike Roark, they are not faced with a world whose sole purpose of existence seems to be stopping them from achieving their goals. They live in a world which is merely and appropriately apathetic and which has other characters as ‘right’ as them. They lead lives which are unfair to them despite all their best attempts and which often do not even compensate in the last few pages. Ayn Rand, on the other hand, creates easy worlds which appeal to our easy sympathies and automatic ideas. She creates worlds for those who want merely an escape and who are fine with missing all the variety and all the color of real life for the certainties of the simple stories which we have been fed with since time immemorial.

I hate her books so much that I had to rage delete my accounts from Orkut and Facebook because of all the people who had Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead in their favorite books list. Rather than going around the city and bashing kittens to take my anger out, I thought it was just better that I ignored that such people actually existed. There, I think those few lines of irrational anger make me incredibly interesting. I’m just waiting for a Tolstoy now!

Pushpak

Posted by Ankit On August 5th, 2012

I was talking to a friend recently about what makes a movie or a story really tragic and was marveling at the power of art to evoke such deep emotions in the first place. I started wondering what movies and stories had I watched and read which I found especially poignant. I got reminded of this silent movie called Pushpak which featured Kamal Hassan as the protagonist. There is a scene at the end of the movie which I find immensely moving. Obviously the scene is so strong because of how the characters are developed throughout the movie. The protagonist is essentially an everyman with limited resources at his disposal which he tries to utilize as best he can to achieve the little goals that he sets for himself. He doesn't aim very high and his ambitions are very modest and yet he often finds himself compromising even on those. Is he the loser of our parlance? Perhaps, but then he is a loser in a sense that so many of us also are. We differ from him in the scale of our ambitions but we are similar to him in all those ambitions that go unfulfilled. We are similar to him in the little heartbreaks which we suffer as we try to re-evaluate and reconfigure and rearrange our dreams which are forever at the beck and call of the mercurial circumstances. And yet he tries to live through it all with a humorous disposition. The movie, for the most part, is a comedy but it has a very poignant undercurrent of tragedy about it. Nothing  overtly sad is ever mentioned and yet you can feel that all its brilliant color and all its music is set against a backdrop which is plain and quiet. And it has an amazing scene at the end. The guy is in love with a girl but she is leaving for a new place. She hands him a note wrapped around a rose which is presumably her new address and leaves. And as he is standing there watching her go, a sudden gust of wind blows away that note. That's the end.

I wonder why is it that I find it so moving. I love stories without obvious heroes because there are no obvious heroes in life. At least no heroes who have not had to pay dearly for their heroism. And in some sense there are many heroes. People who have had to undergo struggles of various kinds and who still manage to smile and be helpful and not bitter. And who lose in many ways and yet find the courage to try and make something out of the hand they have been dealt. The protagonist is just such a person. A bit like the characters of Chekhov or R.K.Narayan, he is the everyman that most people, including me, would identify with.

Re-membering Wilde

Posted by Ankit On July 28th, 2012

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

The above are a few lines from the poem 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' which Oscar Wilde wrote after coming out from prison. He was charged with gross indecency just for being a homosexual in the late 19th century. He could never really emerge from his treatment at the hands of the government and declined to die destitute and penniless in France. The above lines are on his epitaph and mark the sad and unnecessary end of an absolute genius. Read 'Importance of being Earnest' or 'Dorian Gray' and you would know what I am talking about. Read his essays on aestheticism (The decay of lying) and human soul and creative spirit (The soul of man under Socialism) and you would see the world around you in a more beautiful more passionate light. 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' itself is a brilliant poem. A few more lines that I like:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

Another awesome poem by him is 'The Harlot's House'. I liked it so much that I took a few lines from it and used them as the epigraph in my PhD thesis. It's another matter that in a completely surreal sort of way, those lines had nothing to do whatsoever with my PhD. The title of this post ('Re-membering Wilde) is another little trivia about him which I would refrain from divulging here :).

Why is nature so fast?

Posted by Ankit On June 19th, 2012

I have lately been thinking about a rather interesting conundrum. I'm not even sure what it means to wonder about such a problem but the question is, 'why is nature so fast and our simulation of it so slow'? This statement is a rather general statement because it has the word simulation in it. There are various different ways in which natural phenomenon can be simulated so one has to be more specific here. A very simple example would be billiard balls on a table. If there are two balls on the table and the edges of the table are so far apart that we do not have to worry about the balls reflecting off of them, it's a rather simple problem to solve. One strike, one simple equation of momentum conservation and we can easily track both the balls ad-infinitum. The problem becomes exponentially more difficult when the number of balls is increased and when reflections from the edges are permitted. If the difficulty of solving a problem with 2 balls is x, the difficulty of solving a problem of 4 balls is more than 2x. And yet, the actual physical phenomenon of balls hitting each other doesn't take any more time to occur as the number of balls is increased. Another example would be the movement of stars under their mutual gravitational fields. If there are only two stars one can find an exact solution to the problem. No such solution exists even for 3 stars. In fact the time complexity for solving this problem (to arbitrary accuracy) increases as where n is the number of stars considered. And yet, the stars just seem to move, completely oblivious of our own difficulties following their movements. A closer problem to my own expertise is one of mechanical and dynamical simulations but the essential idea is the same. Nature appears fast whereas our simulation of it grows exponentially slow. And I think that  it is a nontrivial question to wonder why that is the case. Is it possible to do any better? The examples I mentioned are all the more compelling because at the level of abstraction that I am talking about, we pretty much know the laws which govern the natural processes. It's not like the problem of vision where machine vision appears much more computationally intensive and slow than human vision. I think that in the vision problem we are not very sure of the underlying laws so the two problems, nature and computation, are not analogous in the sense that some physical problems are.

It appears immediately that in a natural phenomenon small parts respond simply to the stimuli provided from their nearest neighbors. A single star in a gravitational system doesn't respond immediately to the change in position of a faraway star. The gravitational information propagates at a certain speed so that it is natural that the response of a star at a certain moment is only due to its immediate neighborhood and I think this is the key problem in our current picture. We are mostly trying to solve steady state problems where the information from all parts of our domain has already reached all other parts. By steady state I just mean that we are trying to solve problems at a time scale which is much larger than the speed of information travel. This essentially means that our solution has to take into account the whole domain of the problem. In technical terms it means that we have to invert huge matrices which is a computationally intensive process with a time complexity necessarily larger than . Can we do better with a paradigm shift in how we simulate the world? I cannot help but wonder.

Great books

Posted by Ankit On June 5th, 2012

Sometimes I like to think about the kind of books that I admire, trying to find patterns in my likes and dislikes. It reveals some truth about my own personality to myself and muddles up some other parts but it's always a fun exercise in the end. A great book, to me, is also often a simple book, but it's the simple ones which are the most difficult to write. They are books about normal people who are trying to survive  in what is essentially an unsympathetic world. They live lives of the everyman with unfulfilled desires and suffocated passions while trying to make the best they can of the hard hand that they have been dealt. Being humans they fumble and make mistakes and weaken and break down. And being humans they scheme in little ways and betray those who love them. Theirs is a gray world with muddled up moral boundaries and vague rationality. There is nothing special about the dark side of their nature as they are compassionate and loving in the same useless kind of way in which they are devious and cruel. They all want to be someone else and be somewhere else just like the rest of us and they have all the insecurities that we all have. Those special characters which appear so different from us in the pages of the greatest literature are actually the ones which are closest to all of us. What elevates such books to greatness is the explicit presentation of this unity of human emotions - a rare talent which only the greatest minds possess. As we see the world from our myopic visions, what we miss the most are the things closest to us. It takes a special mind to make us aware of those truths again.

Let's take the example of a book I often like to think about: Lolita. Only an idiot would actually think that the sinful charm of the book lies in its subject matter. Yes the book talks about the eloquent Humbert Humbert who happens to have a thing for young girls but that's not the point really. The towering achievement of the book is the fact that it manages to evoke an immense sympathy for its 'debauched' protagonist. And it manages to do that in the face of all the received wisdom that has been injected into our veins over the last half century. Nabokov didn't go for the low hanging fruit. It's easy to feel repulsed by such a man because that's precisely what we have been conditioned to do. Nabokov managed for us to feel sorry at his loss. And he managed it by appealing to some of our deepest hidden and purest of feelings. The feelings of intense romantic passion and the unqualified capacity for care that it engenders. The myriad explosion of complex emotions that come in its wake, including the willingness to flaunt the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior and the readiness to be insensitive and hurtful to others. The book is really about how cruel the business of love can be and Lolita, in the form of the 13 year old girl, is the cruelest of them all. The thing that disturbs me the most about the book is that it succeeds too well as a work of art. A good work of art must not have an automatic moral agenda and Nabokov's Lolita has none either. But in his absolute genius Nabokov ends up completely polarizing my sympathies towards the adult 'transgressor'. Lolita's story and her sufferings, which must surely exist, are completely forgotten. It's a sad fallout of the book. The young 13 year old who might have begun her escapades in sinful curiosities must surely have grown older with emotional scars aplenty. It's not even a hypothetical and a purely fictional situation either. I do not know how else to put it but it's a little sad that in Nabokov's resplendent and erudite prose, the simple voice of Lolita's pain and happiness could not find a place - just like it must happen time and again in our real adult world. And perhaps that's Nabokov's final masterstroke and a meta sort of interpretation of my theory of great books. Lolita presents a faithful and sad-eyed reproduction of reality in the mute sufferings of the 13 year old!

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