It is interesting to ponder what could have led to such a decision: scrapping a feature? The blokes were genuine enough to mention that the page was in a beta, and that everything there wasnt spot on. And so it was understood. But to scrap a feature after it has been in beta for a long is rather unusual. The only possible thing I can think of is the stats being completely bogus or there being a big hole in the code somewhere. It is difficult to estimate feed readers especially with the gamut of available reader services. Or maybe it was hard (resource intensive?) to keep track of everyone who accessed the feeds.

Anyways. It was a good feature. Even if slightly off target, many bloggers seemed to like it as another number adorning their blogging ethos. Hope it comes back soon, as is promised.

Religion is, I think, the next most talked off topic, rather the next most thought off topic (since its still a taboo), after love, of course. Its perennial rivalry with science is so popular that it finds its way into beauty magazines too. This post is another drop in this ocean, another discussion of what I make out of this enigmatic facade to human life.
Disclaimer: I am not a militant atheist. By referring to Religion here, I do not refer to any one in particular. The understanding of Religion that is being portrayed here is that of an average human, who is moderately aware of the world around him, thereby being the popular and not necessarily the correct understanding.

From what I understand of Religion, I feel there are two significant problems in the way it is. I think it is correct to say that Religion was invented to solve an unfathomable puzzle. And that was done with the concept of God. This sort of a big-bangish birth is always a cause of worry. Human mind tends to lean on to logic for reinforcing ideas it has created. Unfortunately this idea of God does not provide that sort of comforting support. Hence religion is sort of based on an insecurity, if you like, or more strongly stated: fear. Its similar to the fear of the dark. We cannot see (explain) things around us, and hence the sinking feeling. Furthermore, Religion goes on to impress God as an omnipresent and omniscient answer to most problems considered worth pondering. Something like Intelligent Design is a lively example. Somehow this top-down approach with iterative references to the unfathomable complexity of the universe does not count as an attractive theory.

The second problem with religion has been the way it has been propagated. Religion by its very nature has been a very strong magnet, which could be used to domineer hordes of people, that is, it has always been community based. Often such a community has been shown the light by an able and enlightened leader. Outcasts existed, but they remained what they were: outcasts. Somehow in this structure, authority was impressed upon as a tautology. Its not hard to see the murder of democracy in such a structure, and with it the unspoken stench of intolerance.

But it is neither fair nor profitable to undermine every aspect there is to Religion. It has indeed been a very important dimension of human existence, which has consumed the intellectual lives of many a great men, and that too over a very long period of time. The glowing contributions made by religious heads to literature is testimonial to what has been achieved. I think one of the most disappointing mistakes that mankind has ever committed is that of considering Religion and Science as conflicting bodies of knowledge. This is mainly due to the extensions in the job profile of the earliest God.

At this juncture I am reminded of an Akbar-Birbal story. Once Akbar announced, that anyone who could stand in the river (beside the castle), bare and throughout the night, would win a stately prize. It was the winter season, so the water was pretty cold. Many volunteered, but failed. One brave villager however succeeded. Akbar was surprised. He asked the winner, How did you do it? The humble villager replied, Saab! I constantly kept looking at the lamp lit in your castle.

Ok I will cut the story short here, and let you JFGI. Yeah so the trouble of this story telling exercise was taken to just draw a parallel between the role of that light to the villager and the role God, I think, should play in our lives. The role of flickerless light which provides strength, hope and love for no logical reason. God is capable of that, and I think was invented for that reason. An endless fountain in a middle of a desert. I am tempted to correlate this to the capability of the human mind of generating in itself that hope or love from just a concept like that of God. Here is where I feel that Religion begins where Science finishes.

Also the other problem of the lack of democratic nature to Religion is a major concern. One of the fundamental challenges in any thought process is in passing the baton to the progeny. To condense in the education system all the knowledge that has been gained, equivocally, is very crucial. And I think here it is critical to let young minds look at the vast expanse of what is on offer and take back with them there own personalized distillate of it. That is let them define their own God.

There is a nice tea-pot theory related to this. The existence of God cannot be verified, so debate over it can go on an on. One could similarly believe that there is a tea-pot in orbit around Mars. Now such a thing, though more easily conjured in the mind, is again hard to verify. So the idea of God, in that crude sense is not special, and a person could actually believe in the tea pot theory rather than the God theory. So lets not be so rigid about and hooked on to Religion which is just another tea-pot-like-theory. If it can do miracles for you, thats great. Let us not try and be invasive in propagating our experiences. And let us never put this body of knowledge in a war room. It is just not worth all that blood.

To each thy tea pot.

In other news, I added Google web history to my Google account. This is not a new feature and has been around for more than a month (thats like ages in the universe of Internet). I tend to browse a good 100 pages a day. Multiply that by 7 and in a week I have been through pages enough to fill the fattest book I have read, and the fun part it is searchable. So Google figured this out and did what it does best: Store and search. Again its surely an invasion of privacy, and the fact that Google is so pervasive in one’s online life, could be a matter of concern. But frankly I don’t mind. There might be others who would. Its green, make your turn.

The most delightful development of the season has been the consistency of the McLarens: something that looked a distant relative to the McLarens in the past few seasons. The toast in this positive move up, for me, has been the performance of Lewis Hamilton. Still a rookie in the circuit but, he has stood tall in each of the five podiums so far. No doubt the English tabloids are beating their chests aloud and a certain Jenson Button has been elbowed, rather politely nudged, into the darkness of oblivion.

I must admit that the skills displayed by young Hamilton are truly worth the applause. It might not be strange to learn, in the near future, that the McLaren stable is pitching Hamilton as their No 1 driver. The only thing the Brit has yet to do, is to stand at the very top of the podium. And I really hope he does that soon. So at the end of the season, the best possible outcome would be to see Hamilton kiss gold. I would also want to see Kimi ascend higher from his languishing state now, even though that would mean a splash of the (repulsive) red.

ɱcDonalds buys IITk for 40 80 Billion USD (Perhaps our new bid will catch your attention. Yesh, We’re loving it still!!)

I guess this is turning out to be a mockery of the system in place and the fact that this is happening in the so called creme de la creme institution should raise serious questions.

ps. A certain burger company would not mind the free publicity.

Previous Post – IITK Website Hacked

This disappointing tale of my blog comes with the hacking of the IITK website as its backdrop. I posted about this moderately interesting piece of information on my blog, and got listed as 1, 2 and 3 on Google search. Translated into numbers that meant 400 unique visitors since yesterday. The distorting nature of this incident is evident from the following graph from my stats page. The sorry thing about which is that it obliterates my blog’s past, totally.

The other keywords for which my blog is listed right on top are “sage stylesheet” and “iitb lan ban”. Minor derivatives of these would also work I guess. These din’t fall under the breaking news category, so visitors from these searches have trickled down to the website, accounting for the remaining visits to this website. So if you are reading this and were not dropped here by a search engine, feel as happy as you would be if you found a dropped penny.

[ed] The blog also featured at WordPress’ collection of Growing blogs for 6th June at #68.

The IIT websites, atleast the main pages, are never put to any important use. So not much harm should be incurred, if you ignore the embarrassment of the sysads that is. Anyway hacker saab, enjoy your Happy Meal, while it lasts.

[EDIT 4 June 2148 GMT] The IITK site is apparently not loading now, either because the server is down due to the enthusiastic support to McD Hacker saab or as a facesaving gesture from the webmasters @ IITK. [/EDIT]

[EDIT 5 June 0532 GMT] Normalcy has been restored at the IITK website and it looks like the burger party is over! [/EDIT]

[EDIT 5 June 2010 GMT] The IITK website is hacked again. [/EDIT]

ps Times annotate the edit, not the event.

Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. – Sir Francis Bacon

That quote wouldn’t sound more true to me now than ever. Writing reinforces ideas and helps develop more correlation between the various suspended discrete thoughts. So I decided to continue writing on this topic for a while (maybe a couple of more posts). Since I am having a certain heightened amount of eagerness regarding this topic, it is worthwhile to look at what shape something like this can take, in anti-romantic style: what is the use of such a topic.

The concept of a human mind as a system, or the comparisons of these two entities is often encountered in say AI design studies. Science fiction is studded with stunning contributions in this area. With the seemingly narrowing gap between man made machines and the human mind, interesting questions arise as to the technological challenges involved and also the idea of robot psychology, which IRobot did a great deal to popularize.

Though the tangent of AI design appears to fly ever closer to the line of human mind, I feel that there will always remain that padding, an unsurmountable abyss (I forget what figure of speech this is). One could look at this padding from the point of view of designing better robots. The other perspective is to identify these differences as traits which are unique to the human tribe, or more gloriously stated: the opposing thumb of our species. For me this provides a pinhole to maybe look at the second difference (read previous post) more closely, that is in searching for my role.
In the near future, I shall try and write a post on each of the three differences, with a tone of a person trying to use this information to understand himself better.

As an engineering student whenever I look at something, it is impulsive to consider it as a system or look at in the framework of how systems work. A system would typically have inputs, would have some mechanism to do something with these inputs and then may have some outputs which typically are useful derivatives of the inputs. The system thus fulfills the task of transforming the possibly raw input data into an usable output which could be suitably used.

Let us try to stereotype the mind too as a system. Yes! it is true that the mind is such a complex structure that it is hard to conceive an engineered system quite like the mind. Complexity is a very critical issue, the concept of god for example or purely random numbers are difficult because (I think) they are complex rather than lacking a structure. But when we are indulging (possibly with futility) in an idealistic discussion, like this one, we can afford to surmount the mountain of complexity. So let us say we are able to build a system with a complexity close to that of a human mind.

Now we wish to compare the two entities: the human mind and our hypothetical engineering system, and identify certain differences, if any. The inputs to the human mind intuitively are the inputs from our sensory systems. There is a certain computational and memory architecture to the mind which is capable of dealing with these inputs. And then we have outputs in terms of our actions. So we have sort of identified the human mind as a possible system. We are clear till now. But there are key difficulties, on their way.

Firstly, it is very common in engineering to look at systems as black boxes so that we can have a hierarchical structure while assembling bigger systems. An important attribute of a black box is that by providing certain stimuli to the system and recording its outputs, we can completely characterize it and thus can verify its operation. But that is indeed not possible in a human mind. That is it is not possible to maybe characterize the current state of a human mind, purely based on the outputs of the mind. Psychoanalysis is big business precisely for this reason. To understand one’s mind even under that person’s consent is a very hard thing to do. This also probably touches upon the idea of communication skills or the idea of person to person contact. It is possible that only some people are able to fully understand what is happening inside another person’s mind, and positively interact with them. Love is probably an immediate extension to this idea.

The next important difference according to me is that of verifiability. Pieces of silicon can be tested in a fab line and rejected or kept based on voltage or current probes. This essentially is an extension of the fact that the role of the system is to transform a certain input to a desired output. And this role can be tested. As we all know such a procedure does not exist for a human mind, nor has there been found a universal role that we should or are playing. Religion is the area of human knowledge that we are probably wandering into now. But I would like to call it more aptly philosophy.

Another point of deviation according to me, is rather more obscure, that is the existence of preferences in the human mind. It is the preference of the mind to exist in a certain state at a given point of time. This would seem like something that can be modelled in a system. For example variables can be looked upon as some sort of emotions and the system can have a time evolving, input dependent preference function that can decide its preference. But the human mind is more subtle than that. It turns out that the performance (some metric on the internal functions of the mind) is a function of this preferred state. The thing I am trying to point out is that there are emotions in a human mind, which are lo! the products manufactured by the same human mind and tend to affect in a very strong fashion the working of the human mind. The only way we know of affecting an engineering system’s performance numbers is to induce physical changes outside of the system. After psychology and religion we are probably treading into spirituality. We are seeing what appears like a boat being moved, without a row. But since the intuitive Newton’s third law does not allow such an idea to be conceived by us, we have over the past identified (worthwhile) concepts like the spirit or the higher being as part of us.

Something I personally feel strongly about is that these three differences are the key to the way we humans live and exist. Further these differences are independent of each other, that is, there exist boundaries between these shperes of knowledge. But because these issues are complex and obscure the boundaries tend to fade out and we intermingle these ideas. And in doing so, we probably impede our constant endeavor to find the ultimate truth.

Let me cherish it
To its very last bit.
For I don’t know when next
Life would appear clear, not vexed.

My Poems page

My Poems page

For the sake of completeness, I have a two and half month internship at EPFL in Lausanne in the Western state of Vaud in Switzerland. I arrived on 9th of this month and would stay until 24th July. The dossiers at SD will capture every frame of (what already seems like an interesting) internship.

So I have been playing RTS games for a quite a while now. And the most distinguishing feature about a RTS game, I think, is its learning curve. An FPS or a racing game say, can be understood immediately and mastered in a relatively short period. But the sheer size and intensity of today’s RTS games need quite some time for understanding the nuances of the game. Even today after playing BFME II for say a hundred hours, I do not understand all of it. In short RTS games unlike others are not sequential in nature, the patterns which arise are literally infinite.

The other joy about RTS gaming is that it unearths the true potential of playing multiplayer games. Infact the AI in RTS games always tend to be sloppy with numerous loopholes and thus multiplayer versions become more popular.

RTS games are also much richer, in detail. And especially so when they are tied with a source like LOTR. While other games exploit details in say the arena or the visual portrayal, RTS games build upon their diversity in available methods of approach.

Coming back to the theme. Its called MistyLook, a nice name indeed. I think it is one of the best written themes. Two-column themes always seem to make lot of sense to me. Also the links and archive pages are already built in. A big thumbs up to Sadish.

How much of India I know and understand?

The answer is not much, though the education system, through primary and secondary schooling, was intended for that, among many other things. Courses under Social Sciences were always looked down upon as being academic, in the very truest sense of the word. My knowledge of these subjects remained paltry, aggravated by my mediocre general knowledge.

Then the languages. I received training in Sanskrit and Hindi for around 4 years each. My knowledge of Sanskrit is passable, contrary to the flattering scores I received. As far as Hindi is concerned, I wouldn’t be even able to write a proper essay. How much the education system and how much I have contributed to this failure, it would be hard to tell.

I have traveled a lot around and seen lots of places, many of historical importance. But again I feel the act was procedural. I dint relate to many of the anecdotes and the sentiments and beliefs that went into erecting such monuments. Was is merely because of lack of interest or the aversion towards information overhaul?

I have read Ramayana and Mahabharata, and even the Bhagvada Gita. Blessed with grandparents who consistently reinforced the ideas conveyed in these texts, I think my knowledge of them is wholesome. But there are many other texts, like the Vedas, which I never have even laid my eyes on. Discovery of India, was a book which taught me lot of things, a book which woke me up to the fact that my view of India is very limited, meagre and consequently possibly distorted.

What impression of India I create in myself?

Though India is hailed for its democratic character, I feel that over the years, things which I have been told, have helped erode the regard for the system. Inadvertently, apathy is way I respond to the system, which translates to the failure of the very democratic nature, which I am supposed to relish.

Movies consume a major chunk of my time now. And I would have to admit that I prefer English movies over Indian ones, merely on the metric of quality.

I dont relate to rural India very much. The second hand accounts in the media, are only reflections of the way things are – dismal. Farmer suicides become transient thoughts lasting as long as it takes to read that particular piece.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Probably this holds for me. My impressions could be bloated. But that is the way they are, and would hence influence the way I act.

What sort of representation of India do I make?

This is of immediate concern, because I would be very soon traveling to Europe and would need to in many situations represent my country. India is a country which incites a range of reactions from people of other countries: charming, diverse, upcoming, archaic, crowded, democratic, poor, illiterate and so on. And in the face of globalization, and with our ambitions of a super-power status, it becomes imperative that privileged people like me represent India to the others with an air of confidence, sending the right signals everywhere. It is trivial to observe that I would not make a good ambassador of the nation.

How would I contribute to India?

A confessional note is never worth the effort if there is no repair in sight. Yes, I like many young Indians do not understand my mother land adequately, nor do I relate to some of its perennial problems. But nevertheless, patriotism for my nation, is intact in me. And the desire to do something for her, in whatever small a measure is alive. I really hope that I would look back at this article some day, stroking my grey hair, with a sense of contentment.

Saare jahan se accha,

Hindu sitah hamara.

The css files are only available from a free file hosting service and thus you have to wait for a minute for download to start. I think WordPress should allow uploading .css files too. ::rants:: The instructions for using the CSS file can be found at a previous post.

Mika retired. Now though David was my favourite driver, Mika wasn’t behind. He was a sort of demigod that is if you ignore the distorting popularity of Michael. So the flying Finn (Mika) was being replaced by this another Finn Kimi. The season was simply disastrous. Failure after failure, and just a single win in the whole season didnt look good at all. McLaren also lost the second place in the Constructors to BMW, courtesy a Columbian by the name Montaya. If you actually go by my definition of whom I should support, Montaya seemed to increasingly fit the cut. Nah I still cheered for the McLaren folks.

The next was indeed the best season. The rise of Kimi. The season had a dream start, the first two races bagged by either of the McLaren drivers. It felt like what one feels when a long term investment seems to be paying handsomely, ah a breath of vindication. But a certain old fox dressed in red, sneaked through to claim the title, by a measly two point margin. Kimi coming a close second, in just his second year in the lanes. Now that is what meltdowns are made of. Nevertheless a fantastic season, indeed.

If you go by the patterns the performance of the McLarens was following, this had to be an ebb, and was a deep one indeed. Horrible season. Disturbing to say the least. Only bright moment was to witness the rise of many potential winners (only if the men in red retired that is). The Ferraris literally painted all the cities red. The next year had to bring in changes, and so it did.

Montaya was in the McLaren stable. Among all the guys in the lineup who could potentially replace David, my choice would have been this very man. So changes seemed to pep me up and egg on the drivers. The season was again a blockbuster, and fitted perfectly with the McLarens’ hit-flop cycle. Kimi again coming a close second, to uhm… Alonso, a Spanish riding what I previously thought were kaput Renault cars. It was hard not to compare Alonso with Michael, and thus perceive him with an eye of indiscreet repulsion. I really felt that, that was the year Kimi should have got the title. But the dethroning of Michael almost entirely made up for that loss. Smirk.

The next year, as per history was the famed year of flop for the McLaren. But I told myself, that can’t be, Kimi is coming from a great season and Montaya ain’t looking bad either. My hunch was that Kimi was going to kiss gold for the first time. And how wrong was I. The season was another big catastrophe. Reason after reason piled up the McLaren corpse. Montaya wasn’t fit either and test drivers filled in. A season I was just too jaded to follow. Was good to see Michael denied the highest spot though. Smirk.

So here we come to this season. A season of deals. Kimi to Ferrari and Alonso to McLaren. That leaves me in a tight fix, where do I pin my allegiance? Alonso never was in my good books, but he is going to be manning the better of two McLarens. And Kimi, is going to be wearing all red, a colour that I simply can’t get myself to like. And if things weren’t difficult enough, the first two races were evenly shared between these two men.

I guess sometimes one should watch a sport bearing no allegiance. Enjoying every start, chicane, pit stop, contact, spin off, finish and victory lap, being color blind. And so a great season unfolds!