Resplendence

I am not the words you are reading, I am not the ink on this paper. Nor the lit or unlit pixels on a screen. I am not an existence, nor am I a representation. I am neither English, nor a particular order of symbols in Latin alphabet. I am the answer to “Am I a question?”. I am the thought in your mind, do not mistake me for the arrangement of neurons or their firing, I am not that. I am  those little sparks of understanding that exist only between the the points of time when your eyes are busy capturing these words and your mind is busy parsing them. I am the comprehension that comes from abstracting away all details while the assimilated words and notions become ideas, and ideas become thoughts.  I am that blaze ignited when the thoughts that refer to themselves spawn, as the sequence of these words end.

Blog-3, I think.

My grandmom used to say that God has given us two eyes and one mouth because He wants us to observe twice as much as we express.  When I studied about depth awareness in vision, I felt God gave us two eyes because he gave us 3 spatial dimensions to explore. Going further,  we know that time is 4th dimension. So did God give us Neo Cortex to explore future (read this paper which says Neo Cortex is responsible for sequence prediction in brain) ? Going even further, we know that probability is possibly the 5th dimension, (check this video) .  So did God give us the concept of insurance policies to explore this possibility?  Wait.. it wasn’t God who gave us that!!

LOL!

Bloglet-2

I am learning MATLAB, checking out the I/O for files, as an example I read a the program’s file itself and modified a few bytes and … then I suddenly stopped, and deleted the entire program file and shut down the computer, for I realized this is the first step to the program’s self awareness, it could turn into another ‘skynet’ or ‘deux machina’ and wipe out entire humanity! I breathed a sigh of relief, another great danger averted!

PS: inspiration for this crazy bloglet comes from “self describing tables” in data management!

Pre-Pre-Script: In contrast to my normal blogging habits, I am planning to write small blog entries like this one, between classes and call them Bloglets.

Pre-Script: I love switching between languages often, that’s why I am a fan of native languages (no, not like Kannada) native languages used in Java for ex., I like witching between English/Hindi/Kannada/Programming/Math, if someone gave me one cent every time I switched languages I would be a millionaire by now. This bloglet is one such language-context-switched entry, with inter-language puns!

Many ‘big people’ keep telling us to have steadfast aims in life. But I feel Life is monotonous (see, here I switched from English to Math,  by ‘monotonous’ I don’t mean boring, but its mathematical meaning, as in ‘monotonously increasing/decreasing functions’). Life has few predictable points of inflection and they can be derived quite easily (again!). So it is enough to make greedy decisions (again, I do not mean the Ayn Rand ‘greedy’, I mean the greedy as in greedy algorithms, ones in which  you make local decisions without a global aim) and be sure that if most of those greedy decisions go right, you are bound to end up in neighborhood of global maxima/minima as you require.

post script: naah, I am not adding a post script and a pre-script, this is just for effects!

This blog is about a very important aspect of mathematics, in fact so important that we apply this concept in our life consistently. It is about “transformation”, in this case, viewing the life as something else to make certain emancipating conclusions.

My university required me to submit my degree certificate, so my parents obtained them from my previous university and couriered them to me, which arrived yesterday. Th last day for that submission being only 3 days away I was pretty tensed, so I hurried over and submitted them, after finishing the formalities I went to study center and was securely packing the degree certificate, along with my transcripts (which listed all my marks from first to last semester), when I read that certificate ” ..he  has been declared eligible to the award of Bachelor of Engineering degree in … “, a sense of exhilaration coursed through me reading that. In the rush of the life we so often forget what path we have tread to come here, how eventful that path has been.

Now I was rooted, I re-read all my marks cards, and certificates from tenth standard till final semester, sure these are not the most impressive marks one can see, but they were mine and those bunch of numbers were actually  life buoys in the nearly forgotten of sea of time that lies behind me. To a prospective employer or someone similar they are “metrics” to gauge me, but for me they are the quintessence of a small struggles,  battles at times, in the past, some won, some nearly lost, but gory all. I saw the pathetic marks I had obtained in Mu-p, I remembered the struggle I had put up to pass that subject and yet maintain FCD. When I saw the tenth marks card, I was filled with memories of preparation, of reading History on top of Arun’s house terrace (I still get nightmare in which one day I wake up and realize that day is Social Studies exam and I have not prepared at all or something similar). Then I saw the Chemistry marks in 12th, I was so reminded of Babuji’s classes and the pages from Physical Chemistry text.. All those were tense times, moments when those exams looked like insurmountable obstructions, they were moments of complete panic and near hysteria,  now naught more that a  speck in the past. When I sit to think of those exams, the severity of the moment comes back, not diminished only distanced, somehow dulled.

While mentioning this to a friend, Swathi, I came to a comparison of this phenomenon. Life, I feel, is like mountain climbing. There are moments when you come to face to face with a large boulders with flat faces, at the moment the boulder fills your vision, you find only the sheer rock in front of you and an abyss behind, you feel that nothing at all matters other than getting past that boulder, nothing is more important, and you give anything to get past it because you fear that nothing exists but this challenge, then struggle against the cold rock, bruise your limbs, you toil, you sweat and you bleed, nearly miss it and then, in one glorious moment you peak it, then the moment is past, you keep walking forgetting your terror of abyss and rock face, you forget the moment of exhilaration, you only watch the “present” because someone told you it’s a gift, and you struggle ahead forgetting that adrenaline of climb that terror, only paying attention to the path you’re walking on. . But at one point you stand, braze your feet and look back, those rocks and boulders and abysses, are still very much there, and when you can think, even the terror you felt becomes so real again, it course through your veins, teh you realize the moment has passed, that you have made it, you have surmounted it, the difficulty that seemed to overpower you behind that rock face is very much real but  real only in your head, the rock itself is distanced, now a pebble in your vision. And in those moments when you stand and breathe and look back do you realize that no problem that threatens to over power you exists outside of your head, In that moment when you realize this, I think, you truly live.

This is the transformation that measures our life, the transformation from the terrified squealing climber behind the rock face to the man standing after having conquered it, realizing that yes the terror was real only as real as you made it in your head. It is not scaling the entire mountain, nor somehow making it to the top, but realizing this. The realization that there were many problems in the past and there will be more in the future, I believe, is the true emancipation of a soul.

Thanks for reading,

Here’s to Life,

Cheers!

When one is postulating correlations or causations extant in reality, one should always remember that the human brain is mainly a pattern recognition engine. And it is such a persistent pattern recognition engine that it often perceives patterns where none exist.

Jeff Walther

Yes,  our brain is a very good patter recognition engine:

I recognized a pattern in my “Algorithm Design” textbook, by Kleinberg and Tardos:

(Chapter 8, NP and Computational Intractability, Section 8.3, 4th paragraph under “Problems and Algorithms)

last sentence of paragraph:

We say that A solves the problem X if for all strings s, we have A(s) = yes if and only if  s∈X

On a similar note, I fund this pic somewhere on the web:

That’s all for the post, keep matching patterns,

Cheers!

“The discussion of which is beyond the scope of this text” I read this line first in my 8th standard mathematics text. I wondered when I will actually come to the level where I will read those mysterious things that are beyond the scope of the book I was holding. I forgot what the text was discussing so I didn’t found out if I ever came to that level. And 10 or so years later here I was studying Applied Cryptography, and one sentence lashed at me again from a text: ” the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this book ” Wow! I think even the best brains in this world, in mathematics  in physics and in philosophy, also get stumped by this sentence every once in a while. As Socrates said “The more a man knows, the more he realizes how less he knows”. By the way,this can be mathematically accurate only if we consider that  ”all that is to be known” as an infinite set, or simply that knowledge is free flowing ad infinitum to quote the opening of Ishaavashya Upanishad of Yajur Veda: “Poorrnamadah purnamidam, purnaat purnamudachyate purnasya purnaamadaya purnamevavashishyate” (This is Complete , this is Complete, from that Complete a if a Complete is extracted, a Complete remains, adding to that Complete leaves it as Complete (as before), shanti shanti shanti).  I am sure Adi Shankarachrya, while writing this made sure to call it as just ‘Complete’ and nothing more, possibly to leave the lesser mortals like us to eternally contemplate what he was referring to by ‘Complete’, was it knowledge, the Brahman, the Truth, what was it that will ever drive man in pursuit of that which cannot be completely extracted?

PS: I did not intend to make this quick post philosophical, but well, here it did become one..