physics, philosophy & phart

Is smartness overrated ?

2010-12-24T14:22:00.006+05:30

Below are a few excerpts from The Talent Myth

Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Columbia University, has found that people generally hold one of two fairly firm beliefs about their intelligence: they consider it either a fixed trait or something that is malleable and can be developed over time. Five years ago, Dweck did a study at the University of Hong Kong, where all classes are conducted in English. She and her colleagues approached a large group of social-sciences students, told them their English-proficiency scores, and asked them if they wanted to take a course to improve their language skills. One would expect all those who scored poorly to sign up for the remedial course. The University of Hong Kong is a demanding institution, and it is hard to do well in the social sciences without strong English skills. Curiously, however, only the ones who believed in malleable intelligence expressed interest in the class. The students who believed that their intelligence was a fixed trait were so concerned about appearing to be deficient that they preferred to stay home. "Students who hold a fixed view of their intelligence care so much about looking smart that they act dumb," Dweck writes, "for what could be dumber than giving up a chance to learn something that is essential for your own success?

In corporate culture, McKinsey pioneered the "talent mindset". In their opinion, the approach to success was to hire really smart people, give them dispropotionate incentives and treat them like stars. They believed this would make these bright people perform the best, and the company would reap huge benefits. They trusted this philosophy so much, that they not only follow it closely, but also recommend it to companies which approach them for HR consulting. Enron was one of those companies.

...as another senior Enron executive put it to Richard Foster, a McKinsey partner who celebrated Enron in his 2001 book, Creative Destruction, "We hire very smart people and we pay them more than they think they are worth."

The management of Enron, in other words, did exactly what the consultants at McKinsey said that companies ought to do in order to succeed in the modern economy. It hired and rewarded the very best and the very brightest--and it is now in bankruptcy. The reasons for its collapse are complex, needless to say. But what if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mind-set but because of it? What if smart people are overrated?

The article provides two questions to chew on.

Is it good enough to fill up a company with smart people, or is it necessary to create a good organization where the company can function well as a unit, without needing many "star" performers. Can a company sustain a solid work culture, with many such "star" employees ? It is possible that excessively pampering a small fraction of their employees, and neglecting the other bunch might affect both the atmosphere in the company and it's performance, hurting it in multiple ways.
The issue of talent, and the question of how important and relevant it is. Is there really something intrinsic called talent that is quantifiable and measurable, and will it act as a good judge of performance ? How far can talent hold stead in accomplishing tasks, and when do other traits start becoming more important ? Are they so worried about looking smart that they are too averse to accept a failure and cut losses ? Would it still be useful to select "talented" people, if it were known that they were not responsive to change, and find it difficult to adapt to situations they don't easily have a solution to, since they have never learned to fight.

I would appreciate comments on the thoughts expressed here, addressing either of the questions.

EDIT: Thanks to Suvinay for pointing out an interesting article which talks about the influence of everything other than genes, on IQ.

Proactive citizenship in democracy

2010-12-10T17:49:00.000+05:30

Let's start off with a couple of questions. Did you check the news today ? Do you consider yourself to be a reasonably well informed person, on national and global current affairs ? Let's take a sampling of the big things in news over the past few weeks (just to make this concrete) -- the Radia tapes, the WikiLeaks cablegate affair & the Julian Assange controversy and the 2G spectrum allocation scam. There are more, but in my (probably biased) opinion, these are three of the dominant stories.

Now, I ask you if you are aware of these controversies, and the issues involved. I'll admit that I am myself not really up-to-date with these things. It is very easy to lose touch with that happens in the country and the world, under the pretext of being busy with other things. It requires an active effort to be abreast of current affairs, but once you make it a habit, it becomes quite natural, and the overhead effort required to be informed reduces.

Democracy is based on the assumption that on any issue of importance, the parties affected (the people in the state) get voice their opinion (through a vote, or through other means). In such a situation, it is critical that they have an informed opinion. In a country like India, a huge fraction of the population is illiterate or doesn't have access to informative resources. They are thus uncapable of fulfilling their role in the democracy. In such a case, there is a bigger responsibility on the shoulders of those who are capable, to fulfill that role actively. It is not just important to be aware of the issues, but to also deliberate on them, and critically analyze the matters involved. Don't blindly accept opinions being bandied around. Think for yourself. It's okay to be indecisive. Often, you will not have the complete information and might need to change your opinions once new information comes to light. Then it's okay to change your stand, and very important that you do so, if rational analysis demands it. But do form an opinion, based on facts and logical deductions, and always be open to accepting new facts and rationale even if they don't agree with your hypotheses. It's very easy to become prejudiced and judgmental. That is something we must guard against very carefully.

You might wonder why you should do this. Our time is precious to us. We all have other things to bother with; things which are of immediate importance to us, and will probably give us returns in the foreseeable future. Why then should we spend time on these issues ? Keep in mind that these issues shape our country, and in the longer run, all of human civilization. In a democratic setup, your opinion matters more than you give yourself credit for. The right to information, is both a right and a responsibility. Which way we head from our current situation, is in our hands. The world is inevitably an ever changing place. The only choice is if we change for the better or for the worse. Take part in the change, and help let us all move towards a better future.

Scandals & Plagiarism

2010-10-21T17:17:00.002+05:30

After the Commonwealth Games, academic scandals seem to be the theme for this month. There are numerous plagiarism scandals raging around the blogsphere, some of which have spilled over into news media. It is well known that students end up plagiarizing often (on some pretext or the other), but for professors to be doing this is a serious low. Even more shocking is a case of blatant plagiarism by the top brass of "India Today". Details of the latter are available here and here. I shall not go into the details of the controversies in this post; you can find those out from the links provided. I'm pointing out only certain cases here; there are lots more which are stirring up controversies. In fact, there's a whole wikipedia page for it!

What bothers me is how it doesn't occur to most among us that plagiarism is just simply wrong. Starting with the school project we did in fifth grade, to stuff we author for a professional report or a presentation, somehow, the importance of attributing credits and giving references is never impressed on us. I have seen a lot of people who advocate cogging from random sources as good project work! I wonder if it really needs to be explained to "educated" adults that it is WRONG to randomly flick images from google searches and put them onto a project/presentation without taking permission, or in softer cases, atleast attributing credit for those with references to the original. Ethical principles dictate such a practice even when copyright policies are not explicitly stated along with the content.

I have often wondered why the situation is so, and how we can make an effort to curb this malice. From what I've seen, the biggest problem is the widespread lack of awareness about this concept of "copyright", especially for intellectual content. What ensues is a blatant disrespect for intellectual and other content. I believe the first step is making people understand the concept of "copyright" or intellectual property rights, and why it is *wrong* to pass off someone else's work as your own. I am not justifying or encouraging the concept of imposing copyright on what should probably be common and free knowledge. But it is important to respect someone's work, and the credit they deserve for it. Stealing credit for someone else's efforts or produce, even they are of an intangible nature, like ideas or opinions, needs to be condemned. This is something that needs to be instilled right in school, as part of basic education.

As for college students who haven't learned this yet, I wonder if an initiative by professors to enlighten them about these issues will clear up the air.Maybe this is something that could be strongly espressed by all teachers in the first few weeks of classes, for incoming freshers. I think that it would be a great idea for institutions to adopt an honour code, and strongly encourage all involved members to adhere to it. More importantly, the idea will work only if everyone realizes the value of such a code, and believes in it. Which brings me back to the point of awareness and enlightenment.

Summer School @ HRI

2010-05-16T11:58:00.001+05:30

I've been in Allahabad for just over a week now, attending the Summer School on Gravitation and Cosmology, at the Harishchandra Research Institute (HRI). It's been a very hectic week with lectures right through the day and quite a bit of work to do at nights before I catch a few winks. (Believe it or not, I have assignments here too! O.O) Happy to see a Sunday come up so that I can cool off a li'l bit.

HRI is an amazing place, with a very beautiful campus. Lots of lush greenery around, and the campus is very well maintained. Summer is not the best time to visit the place though, as the the intense heat and dryness is sure to take a toll on your health if you're not careful. Thankfully, all the admin/acad buildings have central cooling and that makes life much more pleasant. However, nothing beats taking a stroll around the campus once the sun is down and things have cooled down a bit. The campus has loads of facilities including a stadium and a swimming pool! The only unfortunate thing is that I haven't been able to find anyone here who plays footer, so yours truly is lazily hanging around online and blogging.
The canteen here is very good, and we have been treated to something different and tasty, every meal so far :D (Have discovered a few new dishes which now come high up on my all time fave list!) The drinking water is a bit of a problem though, and I've had to resort to bisleri to keep my perennially cranky throat in check.
I should also mention that this place has an amazing library, and a very nice auditorium(where we have our lectures). There is also a fim club that screens movies in the audi every weekend, and I saw the french movie "Amelie" last night. It was very nice.

There is some interesting wildlife here -- peacocks, jackals and a variety of other interesting birds. It is here that I saw a peacock for the first time ever. Not the things they have in cages in zoos and all, but the real deal - a beautiful majestic looking creature with it's feathers spread, and was it an exhilarating sight! :D The birds are a bit difficult to sight as they don't come out much when the place is quite hot during the day and I never manage to wake up early in the morning :P But while strolling around in the evening, you will come across lots of different and interesting looking birds that I can't name but are nonetheless beautiful to look at. If you're anywhere near this place, I bet you'll hear the jackals howling in the night. The first night I was completely shocked to hear a frenzied, continuous, loud howling that lasted for around five whole minutes! Takes some getting used to. Haven't seen much of the jackals though, apart form a couple of sightings at night. It looks mostly like a dog, but it had pointed ears and the face is a bit like a wolf, and the whole fur has a silvery glow to it in the night light. Saw it from quite some distance and I hope to get a better look sometime this week.

The skies here are amazing... very clear with hardly any night pollution, at least to the east side. Just after midnight, it's quite easy to see the milky way, which would have risen to barely twenty degrees above the horizon! If one is well dark adapted it's very easy to see it stretching all the way from near Scorpio, till past Aquila (Non astronuts can skip the last line safely). I've really been craving to get my hands on a telescope here. Let's see if that effort succeeds.

Warning for non-geeks... Dangerous stuff ahead. Please resist the temptation to wiki any technical terms you may find, if you value your mental health. If you haven't that restraint and couldn't resist doing that, and now feel strong nauseating symptoms after you read the wiki page, I suggest you go out to get some fresh air. If that still doesn't help and these thoughts keep lingering in your mind, welcome to the dark side my friend, for you have been seduced by the uncanny and enigmatic beauty of the the universe.

Coming to the main reason why I am here -- the school. What can I say, the school has been absolutely smashing! So far we've had mainly two threads of lectures, one on General Relativity and the other on Observational Cosmology. GR was taught to us by Prof. Narayan Banerjee of IISER-Kolkata. He introduced GR and it's subtleties in a nice way. Ten hours is definitely not enough time to learn GR upto the Schwarzschild & the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric, but I've managed to survive since I've had some prior exposure to GR. We've also had a few tutorials and loads of problems to solve... stuff I'm supposed to catch up on today. :P The other thread of lectures is around Observational Cosmology, and how we use astrophysical processes & spectroscopic methods as observational tools to deduce all that we know about the universe. These lectures were given by Prof. Srianand form IUCAA and were very absorbing and enlightening. He did a great job explaining to us in a lucid and intuitive fashion, how we go about observing our universe and making far-reaching inferences from those observations. The concept of the cosmic distance ladder was especially awesome. \m/ The tutorials were also loads of fun as we derived loads of totally cool things like the dipole correction in the CMBR due to local (galactic) movement, and the fraction of unionized hydrogen left over in the universe, and a lot of stuff about stellar structure, purely through intuitive, order of magnitude computations. We also had a couple of lectures on CMBR by Prof. Pankaj Jain from IIT-Kanpur. Again, they were very good. Apart from that, we're starting to have lectures on truly large scale cosmology, which will continue over the next week. The string of lectures on "The Smooth Universe" is being taught by Prof. Seshadri from Delhi Univ. He's a very popular and well loved guy wherever he's known and I'm just finding out why. :D With an excellent sense of humour and his smoothness with the subject(pun intended), his lectures are truly a pleasure.

Over the next week, we have a very interesting set of lectures lined up, over black holes, the perturbed universe, inflationary cosmology and gravitational waves. I'm looking forward to all that and more from my remaining few days here. I shall post more about the place and the school in another week maybe.
Until then, while my mind is being stretched, spaced out and generally perturbed by the expanding universe, wish you a week full of sun, sizzle and sparkle.

What is wrong with Roger Federer ?

2009-07-06T02:30:00.003+05:30

The question on everybody's lips... "Atleast now, surely... Federer must be the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time)!"
The answer, sadly, imho, is no. Having been a Federer admirer, and in some ways a religious follower of his tennis -- the artistry, the class and the genius, since as far back as I remember, I have never seen him so out of sorts. He may have won the last 2 grand slams. But he's looking more and more vulnerable. His tennis is nowhere near the best we've seen him play... and in matches nowdays, there are hardly any "Federer moments"(from "Federer as Religious Experience" - the NY Times article by Dave Foster Wallace). He looks like a ragged, jaded, defensive player, who has just enough in him to crawl to championship victories. He's not the champion anymore.

You could say, but then, he's also human... and such competetive sport takes a toll on your mind and body after many years at the top. If it were just the tennis, it would have been okay. But the biggest shocker of all... Federer seems to have lost his class. Of everything, I admired Federer the most for his class, both while playing and otherwise. It felt nice to watch him at it. He was always a gentleman... the classic idol for Wimbledon. And he played like a dream. I dont know what was going on in his mind today after the match. But he pretty much screwed his interview after the presentation. After possibly the best championship final in a long long time, where we all agree that Roddick played better tennis than Federer, all he had, were a couple of lousy words for Roddick and a pittance for the big guys in attendance- Sampras, Borg, Laver!

Roger Federer seemed smug today, his humility all gone. It seems all this GOAT talk has gotten to his head. He thinks he's the best and that no questions should be asked. All the questions about Nadal being better than him are psyching him. Maybe it's his defense mechanism. If he listens to all that the press keep saying or talking about him, he'll go mad. So as a defence, he tries to say to himself that he doesn't care about the slams, and he's just playing for fun. I feel that is very unfair... unfair to the slams, unfair to the past champions, unfair to his fans, unfair to tennis, and unfair to himself. We all know it matters to him. He may feel that tears are unfit for a man his caliber. But his leap and yell of joy as he won show whats in his heart. And the number 15 on his jacket said it all.

There is nothing sadder than seeing someone who doesn't have the sheer desire, going away with the prize. If he really doesn't feel for it anymore, maybe he shouldn't be playing. He should quit tennis and spare us the heartbreak.

The difference between uniformity and fairness - the problem with RG as a system

2009-06-21T01:00:00.003+05:30

Lets rewind the tape back to the 1960s. IITs were emerging as the pillars of merit and quality. The place where the best and the brightest brains gathered, and accomplished great things. The students were very intelligent, liked what they were doing, and most importantly, were sincere. People said "He's intelligent and smart. Maybe he goes to IIT". But the grading system at the IITs didn't do them justice it was felt. Examinations were very difficult. Professors set tough papers; and the low marks scored weren't a fair estimate of the student's potential. So, the concept of relative grading was ushered in, to give the students a "fair" deal.

The argument for the system of relative grading(aka RG) is that it forms a convenient grading scheme against a backdrop of changing syllabi, different professors, dynamic examination patterns and varying marking systems. Hence, if one calibrates one's scale against the average performance/skill of the class, one has a suitable scale to judge students on. The basic assumption when RG was implemented, was that the average quality of each batch was the same and could be taken as the base against which a student's performance could be measured. Such a system would work well, when the quality and the skill set of incoming batches were constants over time.

More importantly, a huge implicit assumption this system makes (as with any academic model), is that the professors(teachers & examiners) understand exactly what they are doing. The onus lies on the professors to teach properly and more importantly, to test properly; something that a lot of professors unfortunately don't realise. Professors are commonly of the opinion that since the system has relative grading, they have complete freedom in organising a course as they see fit, since the environment to all students are uniform, and RG will take care of judging the students' performance. I am not against professors having that freedom; infact it is a very essential feature in the IITs, which helps in keeping the teaching syllabus and methods up to date and contributes a lot to quality. However, it has been observed in a lot of cases, that professors have unwittingly abused this freedom. It's outrageous that many courses are designed from the start, keeping in mind only the ease of grading, from the course coordinator's point of view and with no thoughts for the student. When questioned regarding a certain evaluation pattern or grading methodology, they take refuge behind the fact that the system does relative grading, and hence, all students are on the same footing. In doing so, professors shun the responsibility they shoulder. Hence, it happens that students get tested uniformly but with the wrong emphasis. Look at the irony!

Needless to say, such a system encourages unhealthy approaches among students. Students' attention is diverted, from their knowledge or what they have studied, on an absolute scale, to what they have done vis-a-vis the class average. Those who have done well that way, can pride themselves on being among the best of the best; and why not, for their peers and professors consider them so. The other students can take shelter under the class average and hope to get a decent grade or atleast pass, since there is no absolute measurement of their performance. The things is, there can't be any fair measurement, because the whole system was never designed keeping any absolute standards in mind!

A student is rarely told what is expected of him/her. Wait! Even some of the professors don't know what to expect of the students. All they know is blindly implementing the system as it was told to them. The student is judged only on how much better he/she has performed as compared to their classmates.

The B.Tech Curriculum Revision Task Force noted that the average CGPA of the first-year batch has been falling for the last couple of years, in IITM. Firstly, it is difficult to understand how the average cgpa can fall, assuming the relative grading system is implemented properly. Secondly, the authorities are quick to point the finger at everything from extra-curriculars to the LAN/internet as the evil causes for this situation. And so, there were LAN cuts and the 75% attendance rule and other measures by the authorities, to try and get the students back to class. One has to wait and watch to see how effective these will be.

As a short term strategy, these might have some effect, but will not be reasonable solutions for the long term. Please think, is it becoming of a so called great university which supposedly produces the best developed people overall, to shepherd them to class at eight in the morning and to tell them when to sleep, by cutting off the LAN connection. When will the institute start treating students as grown-ups ? Isn't it necessary for students to learn to take care of themselves in the big bad "real world" ? I thought residential college life in hostels, away from parents was supposed to provide just that exposure to students, to learn to take care of themselves.

The system of RG was imported from the US where it was implemented in large universities with very large batches, so that there could be some sort of normalization across large number of classes and professors and different dynamic systems. It is essential for the authorities to understand the mentality of students coming into an IIT. They are barely 17 years old and have nowhere close to the exposure or maturity of their western counterparts. What they learn at IIT makes a far bigger impact on them than anything else, more so because of the image of IITs that projected for them by everyone else - media, peers and family. So, it happens that a young child learns unwittingly that competition is the only way to live life; learning to judge his worth against what his neighbour has, rather than what he has achieved or is capable of doing.

One has to realise sometime that life is absolute and doesn't grade people by RG. No wait... life doesn't grade you at all, or so I believe.

The Physics of Relationships

2008-08-07T22:10:00.003+05:30

As they rightly say, physics provides the explanation for everything we observe around us, even chemistry. [:P] Thus, i believe it should be able to explain (or to be politically.. nah physically correct[:P] will give a model for) understanding the chemistry of relationships. I have to thank my friend Arun(CPro) for giving such an interesting idea to think on, in this blog post of his. In developing my theory, i have used a few of his ideas. So, again, a part of the credit must go to him. Here, i present my theory...

As Einstein showed, gravity explains the behaviour of space-time, the fabric of the cosmos, possibly the most fundamental thing in the universe. So, we have reason to believe, from the point of aesthetics, in a physicst's sense (though some of you might not see any beauty in a few mathematical equations [:P]) that something as fundamental as LOVE, must be explainable in a similar way.

Assume that each person is a mass. Maybe it will work well, to replace a person, by a heart...an abstraction. Then, each person affects the curvature of space-time around him/her and hence, every other person in the universe. We can say that we share a relationship with everyone in this universe, even if it be a very small one, like say we just look at each other for a moment in a crowded bus... this is a very weak interaction. The closer people come to each other, the stronger their interaction. The closer two people are, the stronger the attraction between them and a very stable system is formed. And when you are with someone you love (ie in a strong gravitational field) time slows down for you... this is classic GR(General Relativity). Also, if a relationship isnt very close, and people dont interact much ie..if there is a large distance between bodies, people tend to drift apart...(space-time's intrinsic tendency to expand).
Yes, this is why the pulse rate of obese people slows down... time slows down for them due to the love they share. [:P][:D]
Many body systems are unstable and chaotic... just as seen in real life [:P] Fights in a relationship can be expressed as violent interactions between a pair of binary stars... One or both stars might blow up, and matter may be exchanged between them. When people try to love too much and become possessive of the people they love, the self destruct and form a singularity(a blackhole)... and cause damage to all people around them as well, by sucking in huge parts of the hearts of near and dear ones(blackholes sucking mass). Unfortunately, quite often, not many of us realise the gravity of the situation.

By now, all of you must be convinced that this theory makes a lot of (non)sense. So do(nt) let it hang around in your mind. [:P]
Go dissipate energy into your system. May you gather loads of inertia and have many lovely interactions. [:D]

PS: Watch out for the next post, bringing in a radical new idea. Experience cutting-edge research into the truth as it should be. Come back sometime later & have more fun. [;)] [:)]

History's Mysteries

2008-06-19T16:30:00.004+05:30

Unable to sleep, i was ruminating lover an eventful (and slightly unproductive & in some ways disastrous) second sem. So here i am, back with another piece of trash which might just survive critical attacks because most of the readers out there are bored & starved for stuff to read... or maybe they're just starved for stuff to criticize [;)]
(Clarifaction of the title... History: my second sem(or maybe my histronics), Mystery: blackholes ) :D :P

It was a whirlwind, in which i got wound up, and was taken for a hell of a ride. It was er.. "some" experience. [:)]

Along the way, every small mound seemed to be followed by a gorge & it felt like i was sinking into quicksand(there is a deep philosophy behind quicksand, which is explained as an added note, at the end of the post). At the bottom of the deep abyss, i encountered, hold on to your hair(pun intended)... a black hole (i might just get the bad science fiction award :P) and i was sucked right through. From the outside, my future looked a totally dark black inky void, from which there was no escape.

But things in here weren't so bad, except that i had lost my hair... my curly, tangled, messy strands which helped me survive in many a class, both by amusing me through bouts of boredom and by miraculously helping me solve problems in critical situations(atleast sometimes :P).
Stephen Hawking was right... black holes have no hair.
He also said that matter loses its identity, along with all but mass & entropy. Having heard enough about my declining mass from an anxious mother(who believes that i have "lost a LOT of weight" over the semester), i choose to comment only on my experiences with the ubiquitous entropy.
Well.. my life is the most disordered, complicated thing i've seen(everybody had a fundamental right to think so about their life :P) and my mind is the most cluttered & chaotic blob of gooey grey matter that you can ever find.. which has well and truly crossed over into insanity, the bastion of tortured souls.

I don't know why.. maybe it was because i had already achieved maximum entropy (:P), the black hole couldn't do much to me. Now, i see a small faint light in the distance (which, warped up like a ball of string in 26 dimensions.. is right beside me :P). (Who said you lose all sense of space & time inside a black hole ???)
I can sense a wormhole opening(okay all you guys out there with very visual thinking processes try not to think too much as you read this... black holes & worms & holes might just get you imagining a lot of things, which are erm.. purely the actions of a very active intelligence.. so, well.. be proud of your "pervy" self ;) but be careful to not over-indulge it :D :P)
I hope this is the opening to a brighter life (a universe dominated by radiation & not "dark" matter :P). Lets wait, watch and experience....

NOTES:
*Quicksand: Everything is fine and you are doing great, when you suddenly encounter quicksand. one small mistake. Period. The more you try to fight back, the more it pulls you in. The only way you can escape is when realization dawns & when you surrender yourself to it (in a broader sense, life..) & then you'll begin to see that it ain't so bad after all... either you float back to the surface. As always, however, there are other ways, the most "adventurous" one being to fight back with all you can muster. This is pretty interesting and can lead you to experience stuff which you might never have come across otherwise... Do try it out sometime [;)][:D]

*For most references to properties of blackholes & Stephen Hawking, read: "A Brief History of Time" (by Stephen Hawking) and for ideas about wormholes and new universes, read: "Black Holes and Baby Universes" (again, by Stephen Hawking).... If you feel that such things are way below your level and want more serious and original stuff, i suggest you have a go at "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Caroll. [:D][:P]

My Attempt at Poetry...

2008-05-21T15:00:00.001+05:30

a few days back, when i was off track
i drew some flak, for purpose that i lack.
so somebody gave me an end and a start
and i came up with this piece of phart. [:D]

here's the poem that i wrote...

in my heart a song i bore
sitting along the golden shore
its rhythmic thump, made my heart pump.
i felt a bump, but i wanted to jump.

staring into the silky waters clear,
looking through, i lost all my fear.
sweet and crunchy as a pear,
same song she sang i cud hear.

sweet melody it was, a golden voice
i stood enraptured, i had no choice.
on and on, the voice crooned
and over its sweetness i mooned & swooned.

...

i woke to see the setting sun,
and felt inspired to have some fun.
faced south & opened my mouth
cleared my throat and let my voice float.

i sang out loud
with all i could muster
with joy my heart crackled
like a pack of filibuster*

suddenly the sweet voice filled the air
& and sang with me, with great flair.
this sudden surprise, left me dazed
with great delight, i saw amazed
in my heart one whom i thought dear
like a dream, stood by me near...

NOTE:
* filibuster: a brand of fireworks... as encountered in the "Harry Potter" series.

PS: in my last post, somebody got confused between science & poetry [;)] So here i present poetry (rather... my version of it) [:P] [:D]

Relativity in (less than) 4 letter words......

2008-04-01T15:23:00.002+05:30

this is an interesting para that i found somewhere on da net...

Say you woke up one day and your bed was gone. Your room, too. Gone. It’s all gone. You wake up in an inky void. Not even a star. Okay, yes, it’s a dumb idea, but just go with it. Now say you want to know if you move or not. Are you held fast in one spot? Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see that, sure. You don’t need me to tell you. To move, you have to move to or away from … well, from what? You’d have to say that you don’t even get to use a word like “move” when you are the only body in that void. Sure. Okay.

-Brian Raiter (Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity - In Words of Four Letters or Less)

Post (No.) Zero

2008-03-01T18:30:00.001+05:30

It is 4 am rite now and i'm supposed to be "working" on my model for the FETE. but i am in no mood for that and am on my friend 's comp, bewaas & bored.....

as i sit here and wonder what to fart upon, i'm reminded of the topic that i came across, in today's FORAYS debate- "the world as we know today, would not be possible without Zero"
(you must note that "Zero" is the only word in the whole post written in
capitals... normally, i'm too lazy to shift case & prefer lowercase, but i feel Zero has to be given its due importance... and by the time you finish reading this post, i hope you'll understand why)

on pondering over this statement for some time, i got diverted into the thinking about Zero, the omnipresent & omniscient, all-pervading, friendly ( 'delta' [:P] )neighbourhood number...ZERO.
the first thing that struck me was that there are two things one means by "Zero"....
1. zero as a digit & 2. Zero as a concept

zero, as a digit is an essential tool in computation, in any (natural number base)system that uses the "place value" logic.be the system binary, decimal, octal or hexadecimal, computation would be very difficult without a zero. there would be no place value system in the first place...

of course, we would have alternative systems, like say the roman number system. but my personal guess is that computation(i mean calculations) would then be very difficult & cumbersome... for all calculations will have to be done by actually considering a certain number of objects and working with them.
this would in turn, mean, that numbers would be dependent on physical objects and wouldn't have any meaning without them. thus, we would not have math as we know it today with all of its components(numbers, among other things...) existing in the pure "platonic" world.

now, coming to Zero as a concept, we can make the common mistake of not grasping the full meaning & implication of the concept of Zero and the power it gives us in analysing different aspects of both the physical and the ideal platonic world.
the full extent of this concept is something, i believe most of us do not comprehend.
without the concept of Zero, as "nothing", we would not have a theory of limits, which spells doom for the theory of analysis of numbers(more commonly known as "calculus")

Zero, the concept, at its crux, questions our very fundamental assumptions(effectively, our axioms), about yes & no, true & false, and possibly, the possibility of existence of a "truth" at all... for a Zero is "nothing"... pictured as a black and empty void, logically, a no for everything...

an attempt to imagine anything like this leads one to the limits of ones stretch of imagination, and one finds immovable & insurmountable barriers & lacunae in our understanding of the "simple" concept of Zero, which we were taught, as 5 year-olds, in our initial trysts with mathematics, the science of the perfect, "platonic", ideal world... an experience which one may find, slightly disturbing.

so what is zero all about ???
it is still a mystery to me.....
Zero, is an enigma... a mathematical dogma, which if not perfectly understood, slights the whole perfectionist approach taken in mathematics...[:O]