Daily Blogs!: Thinking of the Abstract

Daily Blogs!: Thinking of the Abstract This is a trackback to one of Thite's blogs. It's about an essay he wrote in the tenth standard, about abstractions. Go read it first to grok the context of this post.

This is a pretty good piece of writing for a tenth grader. I don't think I ever came close to writing anything like this back then - just the usual tripe they saddled us with in school. As with many things, whatever little ability I have with the written word seemingly sprang into being like Athena springing fully grown from the head of Zeus. I can't remember ever actually practicing or anything...

This may have had something to do with the fact that I never really wrote anything for the hell of it back then. :)

*BEGIN PEDANTIC SPIEL*

Er, one doesn't think *of* the abstract, but rather *in* the abstract - hence the phrase 'thinking in the abstract' . Inconsistent? Not if you're Spanish - AFAIK they always say pensar en rather than pensar de, which would be the direct English translation...

I suspect the real reason for this confusion is that a fifteen year old Thite didn't appreciate the distinction between the words 'abstract' and 'abstraction'. A little creative substitution will confirm this hypothesis.

*END PEDANTIC SPIEL*

"Where two abstracts meet we find physical existence. One man can alone think of an abstract idea. But then he himself cannot imagine it physically. Add another person with the same idea. Let them debate on it. Let them decide. And physical presence will originate."

I beg to differ. Two people debating on complex numbers will not give them any physical presence, since they aren't properly isomorphic to real world entities. Unless you count their weird quantum-mechanical uses to represent probabilities, which on quantum scales have both magnitude and direction, and are pretty abstract themselves...

What you think is *not* reality - that's independent of your image of the world. It's pretty obvious that you can't hold an exact model of the universe in your head - too much complexity. (Remember H2G2's Total Perspective Vortex?) So you make do with a little approximation, something close enough to get you across the road without being run over.

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Because Nadeem was using him as a lame example to support some dumb idea in a blog post.

This business of 'your mind creates reality' pisses me off no end. Consciousness does not manipulate the universe - at least not at the macroscopic level we inhabit. And for those about to invoke quantum mechanics, be warned that a camera(or something similar) can collapse wave functions too. Go figure.

(If you don't get the wave function part, forget it. That bit wasn't addressed to you anyway.)

Stuff like this reminds me of those New Age dopes who go around talking about 'energy' and such stuff. For Einstein's sake people, get it through your heads that energy isn't this glowing thingy that keeps moving all around us. You wanna see that, gawk at a neon light or something. And enough with the 'positive energy' stupidity. The adjectives you can stick before the word 'energy' are words like 'mechanical', 'kinetic', 'electrical', and so forth. Even 'potential', though that's slightly deeper. Physicists and others who get the context can get away with using the term 'potential'. Those who don't should stick to saying 'mechanical potential energy' or 'electrical potential energy'.

Human beings often grab at an idea for the reason expressed in the sentence 'Oooh - shiny!'.

The reason so many people buy the 'energy' crap is because it sounds semi-scientific and has weird(but cool sounding) mystical connotations, with the usual dose of omnipresence that appeals to their theistic inclinations. That's a very devilish meme to fight.

Enough with the ranting now. Here, look at this disclaimer instead.

Disclaimer: Keep in mind that the views expressed in the essay are those of Hrishikesh Thite circa five years ago. Presumably he's older and wiser now. Eh, Thite? :)

The weird ending was probably just an attempt at coming up with a grandiose climax to get more marks. God knows I've written plenty of weird but stylish conclusions with only tenuous connections to the subject at hand. I've probably done it on this blog too, but at least here I preface such specimens with the usual 'incoherent and disconnected rantings' tag, or words to that effect. There's no excuse for doing that in an essay, but dumb tenth graders don't really know any better.

Some teachers don't know any better either. I remember consistently scoring incredible marks in ninth standard English because the teacher apparently appreciated my style. Unfortunately my tenth standard teacher didn't appreciate it that much, being of a more staid school of thought. Sad, but at least she could appreciate really good English. A lot of the people who correct English papers for the SSC board exams aren't even English teachers, or are bad English teachers. My school(which rocked) never had bad teachers(seems so strange now), so I never ran into that problem there, but it's still a fact that they are more crappy English teachers than good ones. In fact, there are occasionally ads in the paper for a certain big coaching class of the slave-driver persuasion, and they write in this really hilarious English. Typical Indian gaffes are literally dripping from their ads. And to top it off, one of their founders apparently teaches English, and there's usually a message from him that takes the cake.

Looks like I've been ranting again. Sigh...

For those who haven't figured it out yet, this entire post was mostly an excuse to avoid studying Advanced Microprocessors. Just a bit of the usual stretch-your-fingers blogging I do occasionally.

One down

So that's it for Intelligent Systems. Pretty okay exam, except for the scary first question asking us to design an expert system for software testing. Naturally, most people wrote stuff about all sorts of related things, while dancing around/diverting attention from the main question. Makes you wonder how many of our politicians are engineers...:)

Incredibly, they actually asked us a question on genetic algorithms. I hadn't studied a word about it, but that didn't make a difference, since I wrote a little genetic algorithms framework in Java over a year ago, and then ported it to Python to boot. I have a feeling that I and Hrishikesh were the only people who weren't caught on the wrong foot by it.

Sagar blogs again! It's a miracle...

He actually plans to do it again today. That'll be another miracle.

I'm beginning to wonder if I should produce one blog post after every exam. With the nice long holidays, I shouldn't have any trouble fitting it in with the usual punishing schedule of studies.

Off I go to fight with my sister for a bit...

Something wicked this way comes...

And that thing is the exams. Yep, the moment of truth has arrived - or will in about 10 hours.

Every semester, I'm reminded of one word at exam time - Kralizec, the Typhoon Struggle. In the world of Dune, the Fremen use this word to mean the cataclysmic battle at the end of the universe. It's never really very clear who exactly they expect to fight, but a myth is a myth is a myth...

In any case, comparing Mumbai University Engineering exams to the Typhoon Struggle is like comparing the Battle of the Alamo to a minor roadside altercation. And no, I haven't messed up the order. It's the sort of thing a hell-and-damnation type of preacher cooks up to illustrate the tortures of hell to his unbelieving flock. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Once more unto the breach...

Charles Babbage on dumbasses

"On two occasions I have been asked[by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."

10/10 for the way he describes that weird feeling of incredulity you get when techno-dumbos say something stupid. The ancients always did have a knack for subtlety.

This just came up because I was doing First Order Predicate Logic, and remembered the old 'Falsity implies anything' business. In other words, the right answers may or may not come out. It depends on the calculation you happen to be making. False premises can imply true conclusions, or false ones. That's why you should always be sure of the veracity of your basic assumptions.

Check out these links:

1. Wikipedia on Babbage.
2. Computer Stupidities.

Back to studies again...

Yet another uninspired blog post

So the exams are just two days away now - the first paper is Intelligent Systems on Tuesday. While we do have really long intervals between exams(3 and 4 days in each case), it looks like I'm going to have to do some tremendously intensive studying a la standard 8 and 9, when I usually studied about a week before the exams and always did unreasonably well. There was a guy I knew years ago who was always really pissed off about this sort of thing, since he studied as hard as he could and still had his ass kicked by unworthy nuts like me with no preparation at all.

I just hope the old magic is still alive and kicking - I've been so incredibly busy sending off apps that I've barely touched anything. I don't think I've ever been this underprepared for an exam - ever. Thankfully I have all the studying I did for the vivas to fall back on. Hail Mumbai University - at least they had one good idea.

Oh yeah - the apps are all gone now. So that's finally over.

There's a pigeon nesting outside my kitchen window. There's a grill there, on which my mom, who has something of a green thumb, has arranged a number of flowerpots with a pretty incredible variety of plants. Ditto for the living room window, which looks even better. I have a sneaking suspicion that all this new foliage is the reason there seem to be more birds around here nowadays.

Anyway, the aforementioned Mrs. Pigeon has taken up residence in an empty flowerpot. She deposited two eggs(my mom claims there were three) there a few days ago. Unfortunately, the depredations of crows and an eagle have left her with just one egg. Sad.

Just went over to the kitchen to take a look. Mrs. Pigeon was sitting on the eggs, though she seemed somewhat sleepy - her eyes were closed and she didn't notice the first few seconds of my visit. Sleepless nights?

When she did see me(through the window), she did something I'd only read about- she puffed up to almost twice her normal size! I didn't even know pigeons could do that, but she does seem to have received extreme provocation. Woe to any would-be egg eaters - they're going to have to fight one very pissed off mother. I wonder if she would be willing to take on the eagle my mom saw. It probably wouldn't be much of a contest - eagles are bigger, stronger, not to mention bred to kill.

Still, I've given up on trying to figure out the weird powers that mothers have. I'm pretty sure most people have received the "It's going to rain. Take your umbrella along" prediction from their mothers, on a completely cloudless day. Needless to say, we all disregard this advice and are duly soaked.

Hmmm, maybe there's a reason we say Mother Earth and Mother Nature...

Of hidebound reptilian humanoids, otherwise known as bureaucrats

Just when you begin to feel better disposed towards the bureaucracy, some specimen of that wretched caste comes along and leaves you with the conviction that the entire race of bureaucrats are the bastard offspring of an unholy ménage à trois involving a human, a reptile of some sort, and some species of dung beetle.

Bureaucrats. Bah humbug.

News and stuff

What follows is a long-winded, idiosyncratically arranged and rather disjointed set of rantings, descriptions, commentary, and the other sort of useless writing that can usually be found on my blog. I'm not exactly sure why I'm blogging about all this stuff, though. Sometimes it just feels good to have prose flow from your mind, through your fingers into RAM/virtual memory, and eventually onto the Web.

Sagar and Thite had the CAT today. For those who don't know, that's one of the world's deadliest entrance exams, used for getting into the IIMs and other fancy management institutes. Even I find it a bit scary, and I actually cleared the IIT-JEE...Anyway, not being a management type(at least not yet), I didn't have to suffer the tension of competing for about 2000 seats with about 175000 applicants. That's right - 175000. After all, India accounts for about a sixth of the world's population. Big numbers like that are inevitable. They also account for the inertia that prevents things from being changed easily in most walks of life. Add to that a self-satisfied entrenched bureaucracy, and there's enough material to rant about for a year or so. This I choose not to do at the moment.

In any event, Thite and Sagar both had a bit of a shock when they were confronted with 90 questions rather than the usual 150. Why is this bad, you ask? For the simple reason that the CAT isn't meant to be finished in the time they give you - they've built it so that completing everything is impossible. The real key is to do as many as possible in the time you have, so you need not just skill at solving, but skill at choosing too. Thus when you have fewer questions, choice is no longer as big a factor, and because solving these things is so terribly difficult, most people are deprived of their chance to score. Presumably this year they're looking for people with more skill than luck.

Next up, sis and Mom are leaving for Bangalore tonight. My cousin's wedding reception is being held there. I would have gone along, but as I mentioned in a previous post, I'm stuck here. Sana, if you're reading this, a gazillion apologies - I really wanted to make it. The universe is just giving me a raw deal. I say we chuck the current administration out of office, since they don't seem to be doing such a great job anyway. Naturally, I am willing to step in graciously to accept the burden of cosmic power. And I've always wanted to stand on the Empire State, with lightning flashing in the background, and thunder modulating itself into the words "I am the Almighty Silicon God! My will be done!"

It also helps that since my view of God is practically deistic(God, the do-nothing king), I can just sit back and leave the universe to run itself for all eternity. Rather boring, of course, but then this measly universe is hardly worth my divine attention...Perhaps I'll make a few more of them, more suited to my tastes. Might also take Sundays off, a tradition the present incumbent established quite clearly in the book of Genesis :) ...Maybe it's a union rule, and if not, it ought to be.

Ran into an interesting MSDN article by James McCaffrey on generating permutations using these weird things called factoradics. This is getting really interesting, so I think I'll go take a closer look at it, and then write my own Java implementation. Maybe even port it to Python after that - after all, I did use Python to generate permutations even before I learnt anything about the traditional backtracking algorithm. That was rather icky code, too.

Hmmm, this looks like the second time this week I've referred to my earlier code as ugly/icky/incompetent. Reminds me of Paul Graham pointing out the difference between the way coders learn to code, and physicists or mathematicians learn to do physics or maths. The physics guys start out by doing good stuff(i.e - solving problem sets) and eventually get original. On the other hand, coders start original(the aforementioned ugly code) and get good. At least that's what I remember of his comment.

So it isn't that surprising that my early attempts at coding stuff were ugly. It's like trying to prove the Theorem of Pythagoras without knowing much geometry. You might just come up with a proof, but odds are it's gonna be anything but elegant.

And I rise again!

Just finished off SRM 272 and had a nice healthy rating increase - a cool 70 points from 1266 to 1336! Now after they finish the usual ratings rerun after removing cheaters and all that, I'm hoping that I end up with just one more point. That way I can brag that I am officially '1337'.

PS: If you can't figure that out, try reading the numbers as letters. If you still don't get it, try saying the word out loud. And if you still don't get it, read this article at Wikipedia.

Of binary searches and undefined behaviour

The java.util.Arrays class provides a little binarySearch() function. I was reading through it's documentation, and I came across this interesting line:

If the array contains multiple elements with the specified value, there is no guarantee which one will be found.

If you ask me, this is a painful restriction. Binary search is pretty commonly used, and it's not that difficult to think up a version of binary search that finds either the first or the last of the multiple occurrences. I'm a bit surprised that they didn't do that - it's not a very large piece of code.

Anyway, it turns out that you can use a binary search to pull off something like this, with practically no difference in code size. In fact, it actually seems smaller than the conventional implementation. The difference is presumably that you only check for equality right at the end, when the interval is just one unit in size.

Here's the stuff I hacked up. I had a slightly weirder version up a while ago, but it didn't work for certain inputs. This one seems to be perfect.

    // Returns 0-based index of the key if it exists, -1 if it's not in the list.
    public static int binarySearch(int[] list, int key)
    {
        int n = list.length;
        int lo = -1, hi = n-1;
        while(hi-lo > 1)
        {
            int mid = (hi+lo)/2;
            if(list[mid] < key)
                lo = mid;
            else hi = mid;
        }
        return list[hi] == key ? hi: -1;
    }

Suggestions and challenge cases are welcome. Feel free to try and break this code.

Side issue: The Blogger edit window goes nuts whenever I try to edit this post. Something about the code is conflicting with the HTML or something. My guess is the way HTML encodes '<' and other signs('&lt' anyone?) . Any ideas?

The Law of Leaky Abstractions - Joel on Software

This article is a must-read. It's about abstractions, how they occasionally slip('break' as Joel puts it) and what that means in actual development.

Condensed version: All non-trivial abstractions are a bit leaky. Thus they save us time working, but not time learning, since at some point the abstraction slips and you have to look below it to figure out what's going on.

There's also an interesting example at the end. I quote:

And when you need to hire a programmer to do mostly VB programming, it's not good enough to hire a VB programmer, because they will get completely stuck in tar every time the VB abstraction leaks.

No wonder I dislike VB. Programming is heavily dependent on creating, understanding and using abstractions. After a few years of this, it's hardly surprising that VB sets off alarms in my head. On some subconscious level, my mind can see the leakiness of the VB abstraction, and it is an ugly leakiness. Far uglier than the C++ string class or the inconsistent query execution times of SQL.

Reading this essay has actually made me able to articulate something that I've been trying to say for a long time. It probably doesn't sound as clear as it is in my head, but that's the essential dilemma of communication, eh? Here goes...

Never completely trust abstractions. Not until you understand the stuff they abstract, and just how and where they leak. And even then, stay on your guard.

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes | Linux Journal

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes | Linux Journal

Definitely one of the finest and most insightful essays I have seen in a long time. Doc Searls does an incredible job of explaining just why network carriers and content industries cannot ever be allowed to control the Internet and its content. Secondly, his characterization of the entire debate as a battle of competing metaphors is so utterly penetrating that I've been left completely speechless. Simply brilliant.

Why is it that legislators always respond to things by adding more laws? Most of the problems with the world's legal systems stem from the fact that there are too many laws, not too few. Government power should always be painfully limited. History shows that eventually they just end up interfering with every aspect of our lives, when it is we who should be breathing down their necks, watching them like hawks, just waiting for an opportunity to toss them out of office. Kill corruption by making it so tremendously difficult that they die of heart attacks for fear of being discovered. Natural selection at its best.

Sadly, no such system has ever been put into practice as far as I know. If it ever is, I recommend basing it on the following principle - aside from the fundamental rights, no law should be valid for more than 10 years. After that, it should be unceremoniously thrown out unless someone can make a clear case for its continued existence at that point in time, at which point it should be rewritten before being passed again.

Why is this good? Because the sheer pain of having to redo the same stuff over and over again will force the lawmakers to pare the law books down to a very small core set of laws that can be effectively dealt with. Naturally, this would require a total revamping of the judicial and legal systems, so I don't foresee it happening in any currently existing society. Perhaps in a post-Singularity society, something like this might be implemented from the time of conception. It might just take posthuman minds to pull it off.

And while they're at it, they might consider simplifying the tax code...

Er...

Clogged sinuses. Very annoying.

(Blows nose loudly. No use. Still completely blocked.)

One of the downsides of being me is the useless sinuses you end up with. Once every few weeks, my nose decides to withdraw from full duty and proceeds to cut my air supply in half. Rather considerate, that - leaving me half a nostril free each time. Still bloody annoying.

Still, after 10 years, you get used to it. I've got to be the only guy alive who carries two handkerchiefs - one for the nose, and the other for the sweat that's inevitable in Mumbai's humid climate...

What you don't get used to is those cases that occur once in a blue moon, when your sinuses go AWOL, and your nose effectively retires into private life. On days like this(or nights, more often - for some reason it really comes into its own after dark) the only recourse is to walk around with a hanky, blowing your nose at regular intervals and hoping that it will fix itself. Nose drops help, but you tend to develop a dependence on those - natural resolution of the problem becomes next to impossible.

What bugs me is that I get very irritable when these cases occur. When you're making pathetic attempts to fix your nasal equipment, your Anti-Irritation Shield^TM has a little too much to deal with. It's amazing how much irritating stuff we put up with every day without a second thought. Far more amazing is how people you're very comfortable with - close friends, family - do and say irritating stuff all day long. We just don't notice. Man, can we adapt!

I've always been irritated by people showing pointless/unjustified irritation/anger. This weird response is amplified by the aforementioned state of irritability on my part. I have this urge to snap at people. Thankfully, my iron self-control usually wins out, and I remove myself from potentially annoying situations without killing anyone...The only person I end up snapping at is my sister, but since she snaps at me day and night, for no greater crime than my existence, I see no reason to miss getting in an occasional jab in this thoroughly one-sided contest. *Sigh*, sibling rivalry...

There's a subset of this 'Get annoyed/angry for stupid reasons' group that deserves special mention. These are the insensitive idiots who get annoyed when you're blowing your nose or trying to clear your throat(this is because throat congestion is almost inevitable in the bad cases). The worst of these go so far as to say: "Why don't you just do it once and for all?" in a very condescending voice, like someone who has been doing you a great favour by tolerating you all this time. For these guys, come the Revolution, I shall roast them over a slow fire and say "Why don't you just burn up all at once?"

Enough with that rant. Back to more mundane matters. Pause for a moment while I blow my nose to symbolically end this section of the post, full of venom, bitterness and mucus as it is...

Mom and sis are still in Lucknow at my cousin's wedding. Dad got back at the beginning of the week. Sis and Mom are due on the 18th or so, and then they'll be off again to the reception in Bangalore a couple of days later. This time I was planning to go along for about 5 days, but since I haven't been able to study much with all these grad school applications going out, I've decided to opt out and cram maniacally...Huge disappointment for a lot of people who were expecting to see me there. Huge disappointment for me - I actually enjoy these gatherings, crowded though they are...

Time now to try steam inhalation - maybe that will help unclog my sinuses. On the other hand, there's a small problem with that idea.

Yep. That's right. I can't inhale anymore.

Blogging with Writely

Ladies and gentlemen, this blog post is brought to you courtesy of http://www.writely.com. For those of you too lazy to click on the link, Writely is a web based word processor that allows you to publish stuff online and collaborate on document creation. I had heard about this earlier in the TopCoder forums, because snewman - one of the best red coders at TC - actually works there. It was forgotten all this while, until we heard that snewman was going to be missing the TopCoder Open onsite finals. It turns out that the blogosphere suddenly discovered Writely, and users began to register in droves, forcing snewman to give up on the TCO and scale out their servers. Good thing he did too - they got slashdotted, and we all know what that does to your traffic...

I decided to register since I figured we might find this useful next semester while writing our project report. And naturally, when I noticed that they supported posting to Blogger, I decided to give it a whirl. This is still a slightly experimental service, so let's see how it works out. At the very least, I can give them a bug report.

Minor update - we had our Digital Signal Processing vivas, and things went much better than I expected. The external was one of those chaps who keeps on smiling at you - a few minutes into the viva I noticed that the rest of the viva group(3 other guys) all had equally imbecilic smiles plastered on their faces as well. Thankfully, I was able to resist this, though my control did falter on a few occasions. My finest hour was when he finally asked us what convolution really was. This was something I'd been trying to figure out all semester, so I was able to tell him without too many problems - and his real question turned out to be "Why do you have to fold one of the signals?" This was straight out of the derivation, which apparently only I remembered, plus a couple of properties of linear time-invariant systems...After that, he finished it off with a couple of questions about details that no one really remembers, and that was that. As vivas go, it was pretty good.

The last viva is on Wednesday - Image Processing, to be precise. After that we just have the project presentation the next day, which is mostly a waste of time - I'll be astonished if there's anyone capable of asking perceptive questions - especially after they suffer through the humdrum average projects that appear every year with minor variations.

I think I'll take a nap now. If you're seeing this post, then obviously Writely's interface with Blogger is working, so here goes...

The Crow at the Window

As I write this, a large specimen of the Corvus splendens persuasion sits outside my window, on the edge of the grill. He seems to be preening his feathers - while this is an activity traditionally associated with birds, I'd never expected to see a crow do it. Watching a crow preen itself is not unlike watching a guy pluck his eyebrows - you're left with a vague impression of ludicrous incongruity. I suppose the harsh caw of the crow and its complete lack of fear of the average urban Homo sapiens sapiens gives it a rather macho aura. Yes, even when it's female.

Disclaimer: I have never seen any guys plucking their eyebrows, but I have it from reliable authority that such individuals apparently do exist. Not that there's anything wrong with it. It just seems weird. Metrosexuality, anyone?

The aforementioned crow seems to have earmarked that particular area of the grill as his own personal fiefdom. He seems to spend most of his day sitting there, presumably enjoying the shade that his less fortunate fellows are busy searching for. My sister claims that he's been coming here for weeks. Apparently his loud disposition didn't find favour with her during her exams about 2 weeks ago.

Just managed to scare him off by waving my hand at him. Clearly he's not accustomed to me being at the window, so he made a run(flight?) for it the second I raised my arm. Otherwise, he strongly resists any attempts made by the rest of my family to evict him from his post.

My mom has strung a clothesline along the grill, and every so often she turns up and hangs some clothes there. Naturally, he's grown so accustomed to her presence that she could probably juggle five smooth stones in his presence and provoke nothing more than a raised eyebrow. Of course, I'm not entirely sure he has eyebrows...Presumably he'd raise a perfectly preened feather.

My dad often comes and takes a look out the window. He doesn't disturb the crow, and the crow doesn't seem to disturb him. They seem to exist in perfect equilibrium.

My sister, of course, is the only one who actively tries to scare him off. Being a perceptive fellow, Sir Crow realizes that she's probably more scared of him than he is of her(N.B: This is a girl who fears butterflies.). Consequently, he treats her every attempt with exquisite disdain. Her terrified shoo's arouse no interest in him, and when she shakes the clothesline, he doesn't even deign to look at her. In short, in his feudal view of the world, she is a mere peasant, unworthy of his regal attention.

While I wrote the last paragraph, he returned, sat still for a bit, jumped to another section of the grill, cawed at something, and left again. He then proceeded to repeat this routine three more times, with minor variations. So this perch is something of a rest stop for him.

As far as Sir Crow is concerned, I seem to be the only unknown factor in this equation. If I poke my hand out the window, he goes into a crouch. Relaxes the second I pull it back in. He still doesn't look at me directly. Fantastic peripheral vision indeed.

In a couple of days, he'll probably have downgraded me to 'Mere Peasant/Harmless Background Object' status. The second bit is owing to my computer's position next to the window. It's probably my imagination, but his last crouch was no longer as tense as the last. This is a smart bird if there ever was one. If there's anything to this reincarnation business, I'm coming back as a crow.

Time for me to get back to Digital Signal Processing. Fourier Transform, here I come...

Oh look, he's back again.

The Joy of Curmudgeonry

It's very rare that you run into a blog that combines devastating intellectual insight, incredible prose style, and humour of the highest order with such consummate ease as The Joy of Curmudgeonry. I ran into it by sheer accident today, but already it stands proudly at the head of my Firefox LiveBookmarks list.

The author is a British bloke with a razor sharp mind, and an even sharper pen(or should I say, keyboard?). His insightful manner of exposing idiocy and intellectual dishonesty with such supreme disdain for the offending idiot is nothing short of incredible.

As an example, check out this post. Truly fantastic rebuttal to an argument that no sane person should fall for. Of course, that doesn't stop many of them from doing so anyway.

Plumb tuckered out

I'm dead tired. For those who don't know, that's what the title of this post means. It also corresponds to a certain state(that of being terribly fatigued) of a certain entity(yours truly) in reality.

That's right, reality. The place where you're hopefully living. If not, just go on reading. I'm not terribly bothered about your mental state anyway. What I am bothered about is my physical state.

We had vivas today morning. They were pretty okay, as vivas go. Seems the teacher decided to go easy on us. Then we went off to make our last submission, and he just asked us to hand it over, leaving us free to go home.

So why do I feel half-dead? It's not like we had a terribly hectic day.

Provisional theory: Lack of sleep, once again. Last night, in a fit of inspiration(and boredom, brought about by studying a memory-intensive subject) I ended up solving the last SRM's div 1 500. Lots of fun and all that, but the upshot of it was that I ended up sleeping at around 1:15 AM. Painful if you have to get up less than six hours later. Even more painful if you happen to be one of those guys who prefers to sleep for about ten hours.

That's right. I'm one of them. The subset of humanity who would like to spend 41.66% of their lives in slumber, as opposed to the others who are happy with merely 33.33%.

Sagar just dropped a bombshell about our project. Looks like we'll have to waste some more time on pointless work.

The ritual TC update: Did the 250 rather slow this time. Could have been much faster. Had a total rating change of 0 points. That's Z-E-R-O. Doesn't happen very often, but it's better than a rating drop.

Have to get back to the MS apping - but time is short. Life sucks.

We now have a plan of action for getting the project report done. Mostly it involves me working like a dog tonight. Why? The dual curse of being both technically competent and a moderately good writer. Worse, I'll probably have to create a mockup of our project GUI to boot.

Working like a dog? Just how much work do dogs do anyway? It's being human that causes all the problems.

Think I'll take a shower before I start. Maybe that'll freshen me up a bit.

Current MSN tagline: The final straw that turned the camel into a paraplegic.

That's all for this post. Back to work.

PS: In case you're wondering about the new writing style, don't. It's probably not permanent. Just a passing phase born of fatigue and boredom.

Not in the mood to think up a title...

Looks like I haven't blogged for quite a bit. Apologies to people who missed my poor excuse for a blog, but I was busy and bugged, and therefore not very interested in coming up with stuff to post up here. Come to think of it, I'm still busy, and not quite done with being bugged either, so I think I'd better get back to writing useless assignments and journals soon.

Brief update: Two vivas are done, three more coming up, and then a little more work while we finish off our project report. Then I can finally rest for a while...

I might blog in the days to come, but then again, I might not. In short, I'm in a very ambivalent mood. Or not.

Back to work. *Sigh*...

Life...no, literally...

In the last post, I complained about a bit about losing my edge - that weird drive to think about interesting stuff, and code stuff, and so on. Thankfully, it turned out to be a passing phase - the old me returned on Saturday, and life was suddenly a lot better...

About the title of this post - it's inspired by John Conway's incredible Game of Life. Here's the story...

While chilling out after a long day of writing assignments, I decided to use Firefox's cool StumbleUpon extension to find me something interesting to read. I clicked Stumble! and ended up here. This piqued my interest, because Hrishikesh(Kolhatkar, not Thite) had asked me to join him in writing an implementation of the Game, and since I'd always wanted to do this, I had agreed with a pretty fair amount of enthusiasm.

If you've clicked on the link, you can see the little rules at the bottom. They looked extremely simple, and going on to this page convinced me that it was a pretty trivial programming task. Unable to resist, I coded it up, and got it working in less than half an hour - and even that was because of a dumb bug I'd somehow introduced earlier. In fact, it would make a pretty good Div 1 300, or perhaps a Div 2 850, if there've ever been any of those...

Hrishikesh was pretty surprised when he found out - he's offered to rustle up a GUI, so I'll leave that to him for the time being. Perhaps I'll post a code skeleton up at Code Monkeys. It's really pretty simple - nothing fancy at all algorithmically, and that's precisely where the fun begins.

You see, by just following a few really simple rules, and picking an initial pattern, you can make the Game generate nice evolving systems of incredible complexity, considering how little you put in. In fact, the system is so damn fantastic because it's a Universal Turing Machine - which basically means that it can achieve the same level of computation as the machine you're reading this blog on right now...In fancy terms, it can compute any algorithmically computable function...

Life is actually a kind of cellular automaton, which are pretty cool things that I've read about in various places, but never in any real detail. This has piqued my interest, though, so I'll probably follow it up. The last place I remember reading about it was Artifical Life by Danny Hillis. I've been trying to get hold of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science for a while now...

And now to bed, for about five hours of sleep and a boring day tomorrow. Of course, there is the sponsored TC SRM in the evening, and Verisign India is gonna come into the chat room before the match, so it might be fun after all. Sadly I'm now in div 1, so no chance of winning any money, unless some kind of miracle occurs...

And now I lay me down to sleep...on second thought, forget it - why do I bother with these classical allusions anyway?

So much to do...

If you've read a few of my recent blogs, you know I often begin by complaining about how infrequently I get to blog, and so on...Well, as often happens, it's become old and cliched, so I won't do it this time. Consider it all said and let me get on with it...

Strangely enough, my life seems rather uneventful as far as blogworthy incidents go. The only thing really worth mentioning is that I feel a weird laziness these days - I don't want to code, I don't want to think. To my incredible astonishment, I can actually write assignments and journals with equanimity when in this frame of mind. I wonder if this is how normal MU students feel.

Could it be that four years of tedium have finally gotten to me? Is it because life is so uneventful aside from the pointless college routine? Or is it simply due to getting up at 6 every morning? These and other questions continue to haunt me...Well actually, in this frame of mind, they don't haunt me. That's the whole problem...

In other news, Thite is off to Gandhinagar to attend an Embedded Systems workshop at DA-IICT. Sagar is busy working his posterior off for the next SIMCAT on Sunday. Hrishikesh is coming up with algorithms to solve everything I give him so fast that he should be a red coder by all rights. Funny that's he's still gray...Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that his algorithms are either wrong or his implementations fail miserably - or the fact that he never sees the real complexity of the problem he's facing. Ah well, it takes all types...

Wonder what I'm gonna do in the SRM next week - if this trend affects the competition, I'm gonna lose my blue colour! Have to come out of the rut...

Back to the real world...

PS: Just noticed that the title doesn't seem to have anything to do with the content. Suffice it to say that there's so much work involving assignments, journals, college applications and all that, that I don't feel like complaining about it anymore. If that doesn't convey how bad it is, nothing will.

Ho hum...

Posting after long intervals seems to have become a habit with me - it's been over 10 days since I last posted here. Here's the lowdown on what happened in the meantime, in no particular order...

Finally finished off Shaping Regions at USACO - I posted about it a while ago, if I remember correctly...What was the problem? Dumbness and no knowledge of the Java Collection classes...All I did was rewrite the code to split rectangles and switch to Vectors(All I really needed to know about java.util.* I learnt at TC...) and it worked after just 2 tries. Of course, I had made 41(!!!!) tries before this, so I was treated to the standard USACO message saying "Congratulations, your solution passed all tests. This is your submission #43 for this problem." Like I said on MSN, there's a thin line between dumbness and perseverance... On the other hand, there's that old Edison saying about 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration...Sagar and Hrishikesh - if you guys wonder how I do div 2 probs so fast(er, usually) - now you know...

Anyway, after that I was on a roll, and destroyed about 6 more problems in about 2 days and moved on to section 2.3(Shaping Regions was in 2.1). Haven't started anything yet...

Forgot to mention - USACO still uses JDK 1.3! WTF!!! I'm sick of casting things when I use collections, and being unable to use the nice little foreach construct...

Missed SRM 262 this Friday - the rains came down in force and sundered my connection to the Internet, leaving me floundering for almost 2 days. Sad...

I've been feeling a little strange since Friday - rather lethargic from a coding perspective. For some reason, I can't summon up the concentration needed to code effectively. It's not that I can't code, but I can' t seem to think properly about the stuff I'm doing. Kinda bugged - maybe I should play a game or something - but there's nothing around...

So maybe it's good that I didn't do the SRM - probably would have lost rating points if I competed in this frame of mind. As it is, someone else lost rating points and I'm now ranked 47th in the country, up one place. Cool...Hopefully I should be back to normal soon.

Got a bit of happy news yesterday - apparently Google isn't gonna be evil - those of us who qualified but missed the Online Round of the GCJ still get t-shirts! Google, you guys rock! If you guys are planning on holding another GICJ here, you can count me in...hopefully by then I'll be yellow or something - maybe I can make it onsite...I'm feeling lucky! (Pun intended...)

Finally, my aunt is arriving from England today, so there's gonna be another one of those nice family get-togethers! (Hmmm, really odd that I enjoy these things - I'm usually rather anti-social...On the other hand, if you can't relax with your family, who can you relax with?) Maybe I can play a bit of King Arthur at my cousin's place to help me get my groove back...

For now, I think I'll go kill some Covenant - Halo, here I come!