The American Divide

Posted by Ankit On August 31st, 2010

During my last 5 years of stay in America, the one thing that has always managed to perplex me about this country is how much of a dichotomous heart it manages to hide under its own twinkling skin. This dichotomy is in its simultaneous sanctuary to the conservative and the ultra liberal, the billionaire and the homeless, the free spirit and the suicidal. While in a country like India which is only now beginning to take its first steps towards what can be termed intellectual enlightenment, we can expect ignorance and poverty to linger on for a bit. Its irrationality is justifiable. Its stupidity can be explained away. But finding such elements on a large scale in America, a country which literally leapfrogged ahead of everyone else during the 20th century and basically rode the crest of the wave intellectualism for much of the last two centuries, can only be termed anomalous. Specifically, I am speaking about the latest rally that FOX channel's Glenn Beck spearheaded at the Lincoln memorial. Glenn Beck as a phenomenon is actually easy to explain. In a sufficiently large group of humans, there are bound to be lunatics who have convinced themselves of all sorts of theories. Their nature must necessarily imply a predilection for falsities, irrationality, ignorance, insecurity, and mental derangement. They must necessarily believe in a lost golden age when 'concepts were simple', when issues could be easily resolved into 'right and wrong', in other words, when heart spoke the truth and the brain was looked at with skepticism. They must also necessarily believe that an age which is defined by shades of gray isn't so because it has to be so but because there is something seriously wrong with it - something which needs forced correction. I believe that this is an essential stage of social development and is bred by a lack of exposure to new ideas. Knowledge with its sweeping broom is expected to clear away such simplistic notions. And America is no stranger to great ideas and all forms of knowledge. In such a situation what I find most amazing is the fact that Glenn Beck's rally was attended by 500,000 people. The truth is that there is a deep divide within America. It is a highly, almost dangerously heterogeneous society and this society is being stretched at its seams. Maybe it has to do with the huge size of the country coupled with its relatively recent history - this ensures that intermingling, which is so essential for the exchange of ideas, proceeds at a slow rate. Maybe it has to do with the initial crop of people who came and inhabited this land - those who by their very origin were deeply religious. When you couple these factors with an environment where parts of the society and the country believe in an almost radical version of free though (if there is such a thing) you begin to understand how the deep divide and the insecure skepticism may arise. The result is a country divided between those who still cling to their Bibles because they have been left behind in the mad rush of progress and those who have crossed the chasm and now cannot understand what they perceive as a lack of basic rationality in the former. They are separated not only by geography but by time and while geographical homogenization may occur quite quickly, the temporal one has a mind of its own.

I am not saying that the coastal regions of the progressive part of the society are more rational compared to the religious midwest. They have their own concrete beliefs and they also view scientific thought (which, differentiated from mystical thought, is the only form of rational thought) with a cross-eyed skepticism. Their new age delusions are as amusing as the idea of a God who keeps a constant eye on you. They might be having different assumptions but their failing is the same - that their assumptions are final. Anyway, in a country which is segregated in so many different groups of people who have their beliefs sacred, I am amused that the one thing that all of them are deeply skeptical towards is the thing that made the country great in the first place. It is not really science because it is too narrow a term but a disposition towards inquiry. For a country which is seen as the beacon modernity, which must necessarily be accompanied by a welcoming attitude towards change, so many of its people cling on to their provincial notions. Is it true of all societies? Am I being too harsh on America? I don't know...

My experiments with life: Sleep Deprivation

Posted by Ankit On August 30th, 2010

I have lately been in an unusually experimental mood. One of the main reasons for this is my renewed fascination with research which has encouraged a resurgence of the 'curious character' in me - which, by the way, is also behind the continuing lull in updates on this blog.

Anyway, it has always seemed fascinating to me as to how much we take the brain for granted. From its myriad neurological firings spring our love songs and our cold revenges, in its labyrinthine corridors lurk fascinating undiscovered potentials, and it holds our personalities with the death grip of a few electric signals. With a few fires here and there, it has the potential of changing the perception of reality and how we see ourselves with respect to the reality. It truly is a worthy subject to be curious about. I have always wondered how interesting it would be if I could simulate a condition where the brain is forced to perform in a way in which it is not used to performing. One way to achieve something similar is by tiring it so that it has to make some prioritizing decisions. I figured it would be interesting to see what happens when I tire it, for example, by sleep deprivation. My goal was to go at least 48 hours without sleep and I began by waking from Friday through to Saturday. I noticed that the most difficult hours in my effort to keep awake were between 5 and 7 but there was no major lack of coordination. I did notice that in my effort to play the Moonlight sonata's 1st movement, I felt much less inclined to complete the more complex parts on Saturday morning than I was on Friday night. I went with Khatri bhai to have an early breakfast on the beach but I noticed that even after just 24 hours it was taking me significantly more effort to engage in rational arguments. I was more inclined to agree with Khatri bhai's contentions although I did not have much trouble understanding him. It wasn't until 4 in the evening on Saturday that I could start feeling noticeable signs of mental tiredness. It was a nightmare (!) trying to keep awake through the afternoon and I had started having a slight burning sensation in my eyes. I called Nikhil and asked him if he would come with me to watch a movie in the theater so that I could keep awake and we decided to watch 'Get Low.' I rode my motorcycle to his place at 8:30 and we proceeded to the theater. It was then, after 36 hours, that I started feeling a definite incoherence in thought. It was taking me significantly more time to understand what he was saying and to respond to him. My voice was trailing off and I felt like I had to consciously spend effort in order to formulate basic ideas and sentences. My chain of thought would break down and it became an effort even to maintain balance while walking. While in the theater I could not understand the slight accent of the actors when Nikhil could do it easily. I felt definite irritation from the constantly changing lights on the screen. Most importantly, though, I felt the onset of serious palpitations. Even the slightest movement while sitting on the chair would send my heart racing and I had the constant urge to stretch my legs and hands. The movie finished at about 11:30 and I asked Nikhil to drop me home because I did not think motorcycle was an entirely safe idea then. I came back home at about 12:00, having done 40 hours now. By this time I had started feeling serious dizziness and a significant lack or coordination. I tried playing the Moonlight sonata but I kept making the simplest of mistakes. I would forget how to go from one bar to another and the notes on the sheet music just did not make sense. There was barely any coordination between the left and the right hands and my eyes had turned red from the effort. A few more hours (3:45 in the night - ~44 hours) and I felt the kind of anxiety I have never felt before. I had started blinking much more than normal, my fingers were shaking, and there was a constant urge to stretch. I had started breathing through my mouth because I felt that I could not get all the air I needed with each breath. My heart was pounding at a worrisome rate and I could just not fix my thoughts on any one subject. It was then that I decided that there is no way I could make it to 8 in the morning without taking rest. Through the last 44 hours I had not even laid down for the fear of going to sleep and ruining the experiment so I thought I would lay down for a bit. The next thing I remember- it's 12:00 on Sunday morning. I have very little recollection of yesterday's movie - I am certainly not sure how it ended, although I was awake through it all and I have no idea when exactly I slept.

I think it was a very interesting weekend. If nothing then it at least convinced me that I never want to do it again!

Oh the donutity!

Posted by Ankit On August 6th, 2010

The other day Himanshu said, 'a donut and a bagel were sitting side by side.' And I doubled up laughing! The possibilities are limitless.

Posted by Ankit On July 21st, 2010

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind,
Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves,
The haunted, frightened trees, out to the windy beach,
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.

-D

What?

Posted by Ankit On July 20th, 2010

I realize that I have not written in almost a month. And I can almost not form coherent sentences already. I have even started finding it hard to finish se. And as far as proper, to the point sentences and understandable, well knit ideas are concerned - ideas which require neither grammatical dexterity and verbal calisthenics nor lexical acrobatics and circuitous prolixity but merely an honest to goodness intent to communicate, or in simpler words, a desire to put across, in a manner which is ideally not verbose and certainly not circumlocutory because all it serves to do is cloud up the essential point, to the other person, what one's ... well, I think I lost my chain of thought there. And yes I remember now, I have started meandering a lot, like a boat whose anchor has been cut and it drifts with the wild wild waves with their white frothy embrace over the cold surface of a bottomless ocean in whose depths are engulfed half formed ideas and vague sentences and in whose darkness lurk a million traps ready to snap and decapitate a thought whose coherence was in the preliminary stages of formation despite the complete lack of moorings which I am afraid you, the reader, might be experiencing right about now. Such disorientation on the part of the writer, I suppose, is an inevitable precipitate of a solution whose predominant component is logical, scientific inquiry. In the absence of absolute certainties and in a world of shades of gray, a logical mind can do nothing but disintegrate into absurdity. And English, that most unfaithful of mistresses, with a flick of hair and a disapproving look, makes a move and renders me ... I forget the word.

I really really need to read something non scientific.

Soccer and Cricket

Posted by Ankit On June 25th, 2010

I have been following the soccer world cup with a certain degree of regularity over the last few days. Now, I have never been as ardent a fan of soccer as a lot of my friends have been but I have been sucked into the maelstrom by the waves of passion which must necessarily exist for a game as widely played as Soccer in a place as multicultural as UCSD. So I have been waking up relative early in the morning, watching the games, trying to figure out the myriad combinations through which teams can stay in the fray without actually scoring even a single goal, cheering for teams which in my relative ignorance I find more watchable and rooting for those who manage to win my sympathies merely by virtue of the facts that their countrymen are my close friends and roommates. And in the national fervor and pure joy which the world cup seems to have engendered, my mind invariably goes to the question, 'Whatever happened to cricket?'

I remember the time when my passion for the game rivaled that of any soccer fan today, when the instantaneous joy and polarizing effect of watching an India Pakistan slug-fest was as sanguine in my heart as the crushing desperation of Italy's ignominious exit is in the eyes of my roommates. That all seems to have changed and I realized it all the more when my sister told me that India managed to win the Asia cup to which I replied, 'Is it 20-20?' The truth is, it's not that I feel disappointed with myself that somewhere along the long course of the last 4-5 years, I stopped caring about cricket as much as I used to. For that I blame cricket itself and how it has been managed in India. If I had to describe it in a few words, I would say that the current state of cricket 'is a joke.' It's a terrible terrible joke and if someone had asked me a few years ago what changes I wanted to suggest in order to improve the condition, I would happily have suggested to gun down the managers, the players, and anyone else who is concerned more with making money than playing. Having mellowed down a bit now and hopefully having become a bit more rational, I try to see how such a degradation fits into the general scheme of things. When people come from a background of severe paucity, when there is so much to be frustrated with, every human endeavor is poised to degenerate into mere entertainment. Quick fixes are needed to alleviate the pathos of an existence which is already tough to begin with. The spicier and more fantastic one can make them, the better and more palliative it is. That is why television is so dumb in India and that is the same reason, I think, that the game of cricket has transformed into just a couple of hours of mindless antics. There is money in the shorter version of the game and thereby, quite understandably, we have 1 T-20 world cup, 1  IPL, 1 ICL, and god knows what else every year. But the effect of it all is to push the game into the direction of heartless capitalism. It doesn't help that cricket is a very localized sport which is played by only a few countries. It certainly doesn't help that within those few countries the true financial muscle lies with a country which is in such a transitional state of development where every artistic endeavor (yes games are artistic endeavors) is in danger of becoming a mockery of its former self. I'm hopeful that things would improve as people become more confident of a living and more discerning in their interest but by then the face of cricket would have changed beyond recognition.

Compare it to soccer where the countries which play the game come from such different backgrounds that no single country can dictate changes. Any change is difficult to come and that is not always a bad thing. Money is big in the game but the essential structure has remained more or less intact so that money becomes inconsequential if the basic qualities are compromised. Let me put it this way. The game of soccer has not been tweaked in the way cricket has been in order to satisfy those who supply the moolah. And therefore its fans can have a feeling of continuity of passion. Their passions, their loyalties, their love now is towards the same uncompromised structure that soccer, to a high degree of approximation, has always been. I, on the other hand, have lost that feeling of continuity and my passion has gone missing. It doesn't help that justified or unjustified, I have some sort of a prejudice against dumb things. I weigh the intelligence or lack thereof in T-20 in the same balance which I reserve for those family soap-operas which infest the Indian silver screen with a rotting stench. They are both heartless, mindless, dumb shadows of their former intelligent selves.

Gulf Oil Spill

Posted by Ankit On June 8th, 2010

It has been 50 days since the Gulf oil spill started and the news media and the internet have since then been inundated, often confusingly, with various estimates of the amount of oil leaking into the ocean every day. We heard 1000 barrels in the beginning, then 5000, then 12000-25000. I was watching CNN today where they were showing a high quality video of the oil spill as shot by a remotely operated vehicle. This video has only recently been made available and hopefully it would help in actually fixing the speculations once and for all.

As I was watching the news, an expert mentioned that the orifice through which the oil is gushing out is as big as a circular trash can. I remembered that a very similar looking trash can sits outside my own apartment. So I went out and measured its diameter which happens to be half a meter. From the HD video one can approximately measure how much the oil is rising up vertically every second. Now this measurement has at least two sources of errors,

1. The only way to measure distance in the video is to measure it with respect to the diameter of the orifice which I hope is not too different from .5 meters.

2. The height that oil rises up per second changes as one measures at different heights in the video. This is because the oil gushes out not as a cylinder but as a truncated cone.

Moreover, only a rough estimate of the rise of height/per second can be made. Anyway, by looking at the frames corresponding to 36,37, and 38 seconds, it seems that the oil is gaining about .15 meters per second. This, along with the fact that the diameter of the orifice is half a meter, means that .03 cubic meters of oil is gushing out every second. This figure is equivalent to about 16,000 barrels every day (1 barrel of oil is 42 US gallons).

Even though this is an extremely rough calculation, it would be hard to imagine how the actual figure could be any less. In all probability, this is some sort of a lower bound. The reason for thinking this is that I could only estimate the rise of height/second at a height of about 1.5 meters from the vent. Anyone who has held a water hose knows that under pressure the stream of water flares out. Since the volume of water passing through a cross-section is same at every cross-section and the cross-sectional area of the water increases with distance, it covers lesser distance forward at a point further away from the hose. A height estimate at the source of the vent would, therefore, most certainly give a higher value. Anyway, that was my two cents towards ongoing confusion.

Neutron stars, sugar cubes, and squeezed humans

Posted by Ankit On June 3rd, 2010

The wikipedia article on Neutron star says the following,

'The density of a neutron star is approximately equivalent to the mass of the entire human population compressed to the size of a sugar cube.'

I hope we can all agree that whoever came up with the idea of measuring the density of stars in the units of compressed human beings was a great visionary. Too bad for him, then, that wikipedia shackles his imagination by demanding facts. In this case, the above statement is followed by a superscript saying 'citation needed.' When someone has come up with such a great idea, I thought it's my moral duty to carry on his legacy and provide some concreteness to his ideas by doing some small calculations.

The problem we want to solve is to calculate approximately how many human beings need to be compressed to the size of a sugar cube in order to have the same density as that of a neutron star. A neutron star has a density 3 E^17 kg/m^3. One sugar cube, according to Yahoo answers, is half an inch (1.27 cm) long per side. Which makes the volume of the sugar cube to be 2.05 E^-6 m^3. If the sugar cube has the density of a neutron star, the total mass it should contain is 615 billion kg. Taking the average weight of a human to be about 80 kg, about 7.7 billion people are needed to be squeezed together in order to attain the astronomical densities we are talking about - which is not too different from the current population of the world.

If we are only talking about order of magnitude approximations, the wikipedia comment is acceptable. But we can go further. The current population of the world is about 6.8 billion and growing at about 1.1% which means that the magic figure of 7.7 billion will be reached sometime near 2021. At around that time, with the assumption of an average weight of 80 kg, the wikipedia statement would be truer than it is today. But then the assumption of 80 kg is obviously on shaky grounds. With so many kids who invariably fail at tipping the weighing machine beyond the 30 kg mark, our noble aim is but a mirage. For all these underweight human beings, it is upon McDonalds and Burger King to maintain the required balance. If it was not for these noble institutions, humanity would still be decades away from the day when sugar cubes,  neutron stars and squeezed humans could be spoken of in one single sentence.

Anyway, I hope this little calculation added to our understanding of neutron stars. I think the citation that the wikipedia article required has finally been found :).

Feynman

Posted by Ankit On May 31st, 2010

If I could have one wish fulfilled, listening to this man in person would be at the top of the list. Above world peace and unlimited chocolates!

Bishop's gambit

Posted by Ankit On May 30th, 2010

Throughout the last 4 years I have been fortunate enough to have had the company of friends who are not only smart people but have an intelligent and curious outlook towards the world. I think that it is relatively easy to be good at something, anything if only you start early enough and work relentlessly towards it. Which is not to say that talent is something which I don't respect. I do, but what I respect more than talent is if it adds a perpective to how a person sees things. There are a lot of really really talented people in the world, much much better than me, and there is something to be said about that, but they only have to open their mouth for you to realize that the capacity for unification of concepts which can potentially come from the pursuit of passion has somehow missed them. As Feynman said, it's similar to the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. I have been fortunate to have friends who know things or at least have a healthy drive to know them. Anyway, during one insightful conversation with Rathina today, we started discussing about a mutual interest, chess. The starting point was again a Feynman observation where he is making analogies between science and chess. Specifically he says that finding the laws of nature is like figuring out the rules of the game of chess by looking every now and then at the snapshots of a game. These snapshots are the only information one is allowed to have and the challenge for human intelligence is to find order from this seeming chaos.

Our discussion veered off in the specific direction of trying to see if it's possible to figure out the rules of the game just by looking at it, and if it is possible, how many example moves would one require to completely figure out every rule? Now it's a complicated problem to even pose formally because if it's a human intelligence which is trying to figure out the rules then the answer is obviously indeterminable. It's because while I might take thousands of examples to figure things out, Bobby Fisher might do it in a few games. So we tried to pose it in a computational framework. How many examples would an algorithm need to figure out the rules? How do we define 'figuring out all the rules?' There are only a finite, albeit stupendously large, number of possible chess games. So we defined figuring out the rules as determining all the possible legal moves which would be sufficient to generate all possible chess games. Now it is not an impossible problem, at least hypothetically, to calculate the minimum number of example moves that one would need in order for an algorithm to figure out all the legal moves for each piece which in turn would generate all possible games. That's not the problem though. The problem is the following question, 'As far as the standards of human intelligence is concerned, does determining all possible legal moves equal determining the rules of chess?' For example, it is easy for an algorithm to make a list of all possible positions a bishop can go to but it's a stretch to say that it is equal to the statement 'a bishop always moves on a diagonal.' It is possible to conceive of an algorithm which is built such that it can distill, from all the data it has, seemingly intelligent statements like 'a pawn always moves one or two squares in a straight line unless it captures another piece in which case it moves diagonally' or 'the game is drawn when a set of moves is repeated three times.' It is possible to make an algorithm which can put in words or figure out, from a sufficiently large number of examples, most of the 'intelligent' statements about the rules of chess a human can make. But what about the rules the examples for which it never encounters? One example of such a rule is that a black piece never captures a black piece. Another is that a piece never jumps out of the board. The dilemma here is that while a finite number of examples demonstrate every possible legal move, not even a single example shows an illegal move! When you add to that the fact that an infinite number of possible illegal rules exist, it seems hopeless how an algorithm can ever figure out all that is there to know. It can definitely generate all possible legal games, which was our original intent, but while the human understanding of chess includes the knowledge that a piece never captures a piece of the same color or that the queen is not allowed to jump out of the board or that you cannot say 'abracadabra' and claim victory, how an algorithm would do it is beyond my current grasp.

But I understand that I am probably oversimplifying. The most obvious simplification is that I am talking about a game which I already know the rules for. On the human side I am probably subconsciously delving upon my prior knowledge of the game - something which I cannot do for an algorithm because I don't know how subconscious prior knowledge can be represented for a computer. This makes it intuitive for me to envisage what 'questions' about the rules a human would find worthy of asking. It helps because there are infinite questions one might ask in order to figure out things. But one has to ask the smart questions. And it is not fair to the algorithm because I, speaking for a human, already know which are the worthy questions as far as chess is concerned.

Asking the right questions requires a lot of creativity though. The chess problem is similar to the following physical problem: imagine you had information about every apple which ever fell to the ground. Now you could ask an infinite number of questions which can be verified or refuted by all the apples, but how does one go about figuring out gravity from them? This, I think, has  a deep philosophical implication. The implication is that our theories are not empirical. They can be directly derived from experimentation only to the extent that gravity is a natural outcome of falling apples, which is not much. The more important observation is that their power is in their creative origins and explanatory powers which do not depend upon experiments all that much. It's satisfying to see how the little discussion indicates that the inductivist viewpoint is quite shallow.

Loading...
X