4 March 2013

What is need of reincarnation ??

Half an hour ago, I had a heated discussion with my friend over reincarnation, and though he understands things a little bit different, we agree that there is a dilemma around the subject reincarnation.

So, it brings the topic, why in the name of any curious god, we need reincarnation ? God, who is considered so almighty, that he created the Universe, made species like blue whale, polar bear, mosquito and humans etc. He gave us something to wonder about,  diverse grasslands, steep mountains, long rivers and indomitable seas. And as a material witness, I would like to believe that he is something else. However, he cannot put just enough imagination in creating himself. So what does he do, he change essential parameters, like height, voice, caste etc. and bam!! there is your reincarnation.


I think there is an elaborate conspiracy going around, and the conspirators are no one  else but us. Hell, God himself is confused.  He, with so much hardship, thought of a nice character for ongoing story-lines. He thought this is it. He thought it to be an original masterpiece.  But people down there,  are calling it up a sequel. And he cannot protest, cause technically he has no voice of his own.

Before, I argue about my convictions, I want to make clear understanding, of what I mean by reincarnation. It is revival of a soul, or revival of conscious, that was known to exist, before the arrival of a new being. It is to be noted, that revival doesn't mean exact replica, however there is a sub-part, that must match in order to call it reincarnation.
Now basically, there are two approaches, either our soul/conscious is infinite, or otherwise. Due, to lack of substantial proof, and our understanding of issues, my premise of argument is that soul can be represented in finite terms. 

Consider a program, that prints itself. Lets call it a reincarnation program(Or Quine in programmer's jargon).
#include <stdio.h>
char *program = "#include <stdio.h>%cchar *program = %c%s%c;
%cint main()%c{%cprintf(program, 10, 34, program, 34, 10, 10,
 10, 10, 10, 10);%c    return 0;%c}%c";
int main()
{
        printf(program, 10, 34, program, 34, 10, 10, 10, 10, 
               10, 10);
        return 0;
}
So, to write such a program, we need to know everything before, so that we can alter our corresponding program string. Since concious, is way complex then this simple program, and the way it interacts with non-replicated parts make its nature chaotic. But still, this chaotic program has to be written. 

Now in mythological terms, either Lord Brahma, is too efficient to write  such a program or people are taking reincarnation for granted.  And as Einstein said, genius might have limit, but stupidity is limitless.

Our refutations and our premises are all assumptions, but the understanding of process and computational intractability is not. We still may discover some way to write such a program, which considers every possible combination of events, and able to execute it on some machine. However proven mechanisms of understanding, restricts us to believe in what reincarnation stands for.


Reincarnation, it is a lore, it gives us hope and it acts like amendment in sacred religious scripts, but claim is too out there.
  

3 March 2013

ज़िंदगी और मौत

ज़िंदगी और मौत
-------------------------------------------

ज़िंदगी  और मौत का ,
चंद पालो  का है सफ़र ।
सालों  साल है हम सोचते,
पर लगता  है केवल एक पलक।।


मैंने  भी बहुत सोचा, 
जिंदगी  के कभी इधर, कभी उधर,
पर ना  मिला, कोई सही प्रश्न ।


शायर और लेखक, 
वैज्ञानिक और भिक्षुक,
सभी सोचते है, और कुछ पाते है ।


पर मैंने  क्या पाया, मैंने क्या पाया।
शब्दों के विचार, निति  का व्यवहार,
बेलव्ज प्यार, या अनचाही कतार।।


मैं  अंजान नहीं, मैं भगवान् नहीं,
देखा है एक सपना, जिसे  पाना  आसान नहीं ।
अब मैं खुश नहीं, अब मैं नाराज़ नहीं ।।


अब मैं हो चला, और हो चली मेरी आयु
 और हो चले, मेरे जवान ।
और मेरे छोटे जवान ।।


वे भी मुझसे पूछते,
क्या है या ज़िंदगी, क्या है ये बवाल ।
मैं हँसा, और बोला, यह है एक तलाश,
जिसकी फिदरत है गोलमाल, और आकर्षण है विचार ।।



रौनक, रिक्सोर वाला

2 March 2013

A golden bullet in my head..

A golden bullet in my head

A chill of November, and a dew of night,
a few lone sparrows, with sun in the sight.

Nature's aura, and this nature brigade,
brought to a moody man, more moody upgrades.

Then it happened, nature was outclassed,
I was asunder, and even...
   
a gold of yellow, and a yellow of gold,
a heart was never so nervous, yet so bold.

A sun in chill of November, with dew of night
Always bring you love and life.
And then, there was she,
always bright, with a pretty smile.


Credits to shine,
that fell in eyes of mine.

And that's what, I conclude..

Three golems that makes a person indispensable:
  1. Vision/Dream
  2. Strong Character and Strong Body
  3. Choosing either axiomatic life or believing that life is flux or not......  

Sometimes, we need to measure our vessel, so that we can analyse, whether it is half empty or half full. I wrote these lines a long back, and happened upon them, while searching for something entirely else. Now, I understand first two points quite clearly, but third one seems a little bit paradoxical.

By axiomatic, I mean proposing a theory based on set of axioms. This kind of thinking, will give you satisfactory results, as these axioms were implicit and seemed truth when you started to realize stuff. However, when you apply the theory in unconventional way, some of axioms start failing.

Around 1930s, Russell who believed that all mathematics can be binded on set of axioms, and anything that has a mathematical form, can be proved using those axioms. He and A.N Whitehead wrote Principia Mathematica, and showed their technique by proving a lots and lots of theorems from it. 
In their time, there was a group called, Vienna Circle, which had most eminent philosophers and thinkers. To name a few, Rudolf Carnap, Richard Von Misses, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kurt Godel etc. Now Russell, was a hotshot with his work on foundations of mathematics, and he began giving seminars and trying to convince Vienna Circle of his technique. However, Godel had different notion, and he pushed the axiom usage in unconventional way, and found that there were serious inconsistencies in this system. So he proposed his findings in one of seminar, where Russell was also present. And when he proved his proposition, Russell only said "This is the end"    
Now Now, this was not  all bad, since Russell tried so vibrantly to prove his claim, he brought the attention of sceptics and mathematicians. And now, we know a paradox "Russell Paradox". 

Now my second argument, that life is a flux. A flux is never constant, it keeps changing with time. It is how we understand essential workings of electricity and magnetism, however attaching life to flux means that there is nothing steady, nothing settling about life. You cannot come upon any verified truth, because universe is large and you are only considering interactions of a few in your force equation. So is this truth, is this the way life should be.
Our scientific approach to problems of real world involves a lot of reasonable approximations. So if we think, we are getting close to truth, think  about reasonable again. This word, according to Godel has no credibility. And as a human being, I tried to follow  path of flux, but I always reached to little conclusions of the life, and that makes me axiomatic.

Isn't it a bit paradoxical on my part ??   But on other hand, it has given me something to think about. 

27 February 2013

IiiT-h Compliments!!

Last December, we had an opportunity to attend MSR winter school at IIIT-H. It was an awesome experience, got a chance to meet Prof. Sanjeev Arora, HOD of Princeton's TCS department, Prof. C. Pandurangan, PHD mentor of Kannan sir, and a leading authority in digital signatures. So far, the title and introduction has no correlation, and that is where Cynthia Dwork comes. She is a leading researcher at M.S.R and is working on differential privacy.

The theory of Differential Privacy works on measures to  protect sensitive information from public records. Well, in order to understand the working, we have pretty interesting cases, but I will focus my efforts on this new trend of our college called IiiT-h compliments. Since the community can't be accessed presently, I will summarize a few facts. It uses anonymous expression of opinions or thoughts directed to some particular individual. This anonymity is supported by a google forms.

Now the claim is that, this anonymity is just a variable under-processed. When you bring in more public databases, in this particular case, facebook likes, acute observation at public places like cafeteria, canteen etc, or rumours, or information that only your friends know; my argument is that, using these information, you can unveil this cloak of anonymity.

I tried out this system, and put an info that only I and my wing-mates knew, and I thought, it will be pretty obvious to the guy whom I was directing to. Now, knowing my eccentric moods, and the fact that I was the one who uncovered that information, the first door knocked will be mine. That got me thinking, is it really anonymous.

Here the anonymity fails because, there are too many loose ends, and bit by bit, it will eventually become a byte. So, all we need a Sherlock and zeal to connect the dots.

         Image taken from google
  

30 January 2013

Formal Student Interactive Symposium '13

[FSIS'13] sounds like a good reference, so I thought I should check it out. As I entered that hall, and there was nice panel of faculty sitting in front. I knew almost all faculty personally, so I was a little bit nervous about not uttering any word from my sacred mouth. Sanidhya and me were sitting near gate, 'for just in case'  case.
I simply wanted to know how things stand out in our college, and the number of hands that were raised, was quite much. I understood, that there is serious shortcoming in all of us, including me. It is true that these things happen, and there is little bit that we do on our part to stop these issues. It is no excuse, and person responsible for it should be given the taste of his own medicine.

However, solutions proposed were nothing but based upon naive idealism, like offering more humanities courses, or consider the feelings of other every time you talk. They might be excellent solutions in a world where everyone understand each other, and everyone aspires for the goal of better human world.

Claim:  I can disprove both solutions in current setting of things.

Given:
 We are here, because we aspire for jobs that we like, but most importantly that pays. For that we think, that we should go for better grades in courses and complete our credits as soon as possible. It gives a very little time to think about society. If we can just hangout with our friends and have a tea, that is the day well-spent.

Now obviously prejudice of seniors rubs in the juniors and the real confrontation with humanities courses make people have negative feelings about it. Its not my word, it is simple statistics. I think content is more relevant to scholars who want to be enlightened in classical sense. Here there is section of people who want to do MBAs or prepare of IAS. So they might loose interest in these subjects.
On another front,  reading about Gandhi does not make us follow him. Gandhi was a man, which India needed 70 years ago. But today, we face globalization, untrusted politics, many of us have loans to repay.  Problems are of more internal nature, we draw several lines so that we do not cross something, and do something bad.

Proof :

Problems are different in this era, we already drew lines at so many finer levels, and we are just human, we will cross one unintentionally.  Still no harm done, but lines become more complex and problem becomes non-linear[Try Taking Pattern Recognition or Neural Networks or Optimization Methods]. And mathematics is witness, drawing an exact solution for non-linear problem, is NP-hard problem. You should go for good approximations, that is what I do in my research[SOR method for solving linear equations]

I know, I have no right to judge, because I do not know how guys who raised hands feel. Here, premise on which we should base our solutions, is that everybody is human. And what is better than cognitve science and  behavioural Psychology, so that you know how will a fella's mind works. It is nice and important for all of us, because in every job, we'll have human colleagues.  

 With this I've proved that we need to accept hard facts and do something based on that.  Q.E.D

Test Cases: (just simple ones, easy to handle even it backfires :P)

Simply confront people who give you hard time. Even doing so, someone is bothering you, give a middle finger, not because it is sexist, because it is  a gesture to show you are pissed.

I have a few more, if anybody needs it, ping me.... :D

23 January 2013

How I met smugglers in IIIT Hyderabad!!

In 2030,
Kids, It was 2013, Your uncle Anna, Sureka, Vizzam, Chia and me went for an epic trip to Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. It was filled with lot of random decisions, pleasure of eating almost anything and bone chilling excitement.
Oh! wait, this is not what I had in mind, lets leave that story for another time. We go one month ahead, in mid of January. We all were at IIIT-H. You know IIIT, where I made myself a geek that I am today. At that time, our college was in process of hooking up with NKN(National Knowledge Network), however it came up with some set of laws.
And like any other law, it based itself on issues of piracy, privacy and connecting people for good. And with high held principles, began a campaign to ban stuff :/  

Oh! yeah, in those days, it went by this terminology and unlike you, we didn't have classes. Well anyway, after a long series of discussions, it was banned. With all this commotion, a strange thing happened, people changed, people actually changed. Their life was full of dreams, they were laughing and now we were edging towards a perfect harmony.......

Oh! who am i kidding, it was disaster, if life was so simple, there had been no wars, love will be literally in air. Pollution would have been under control, and  Namibia would have imposed a penalty on seal killing. People still do things, and though consequences are still there, but you don't go and say, you forget this part about your humanity, because some of us don't like that human part of you.
You have to live with it.

Kids, these are words, that I heard somewhere. I'm more like a summary guy. Now, I was only one man, there are plenty others who might see from different angle.

Now a few months had passed, and  I was curious, but somehow I remained unaware of happenings. However, At some concert, I saw two of our college guys talking with another guy and I thought I should catch up. Suddenly that dude said "IIIT Mein Ho! :/", followed by a sarcastic smirk, to which those guys gave a weak nod. And then he grabbed one guys hand, and said "Yeh lo pendrive, kaam aayegi".
 And I thought it could be nothing but Pen-drive trafficking.

So kids.. Moral is every man's folly, and everybody is entitled to live with their own.