... throw yourself off the top floor of your building?
The weather here this past week has been mostly grey, overcast and rainy. My friend was complaining about the weather while she was driving, and I was nodding away semi-attentively. And then she said something that made me sit up. She said that the suicide rate in Seattle, WA is one of the highest in the US, and that the city also happens to have rainy weather for most of the year. Apparently, the weather was so depressing that people wanted to kill themselves!
I haven't checked the veracity of either statement about Seattle, nor have I tried to find out if there exists a correlation between weather and suicide statistics. But despite the morbidity of her statement, I found myself interested in and amused by it. I asked myself, how would I feel if I looked out the window and found it raining most of the time?
The first thing I thought was that we grad students are indoors, in our labs or apartments so much that it hardly matters how the weather is outside! Then I forced myself to treat the question more seriously, and the answer was surprising. I would love it if it rained everyday! I like the smell of rain, wet grass and damp earth. I like the pitter-patter of raindrops. Rain whets the creative part of my brain, makes want to write poems and listen to music. If I knew any musical instrument, I bet I would whip it out on a rainy day!
If you are reading this, I want you to drop a comment and say: how would you feel if you looked out the window and found it raining all or most of the time?
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Sunday, June 25, 2006
The week gone by...
Pay it forward
Channel surfing does pay off now and then: this movie starring Haley Joel Osment, Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey is one of my all-time favourites and I was happy to watch it again after all these years. "Pay it Forward" is Haley's submission for his social studies homework: think of one thing you can do to make the world a better place. The idea is that each person does three "favours". Each favour has to be something huge, something extremely difficult, even painful for you to do; but it must go a long way in helping another person. In return, you ask that person to do three more such favours, to other people. If things go right, you ought to have a chain reaction of people helping people, and the world will be a much better place.
I'll not go into the details of the plot itself, but I highly recommend this movie to anyone who hasn't seen it yet. Haley's acting is brilliant, and I miss the kid's presence on the big screen.
Face your enemy
Aeons ago, my teachers called me a math prodigy. However, from high school onward, I slipped slowly to average and even lower than that. I know for a fact that I had poor math teachers, but I'm sure a good percentage of the blame lies with me. Over the years, I've come to think of mathematics as my enemy, and I've tended to perform poorly in courses that are heavy on math content. Anyway, the time for reparation has come. My research requires that I be a math genius all over again, and all my courses next semester are geared toward restoring my math skills. I haven't a prayer of keeping my 4 point GPA after this, but what needs to be done has to be done.
Playing in the big leagues
I've been assisting my advisor in writing a project proposal this week, and although I was given some rough instructions, guidance and feedback, I essentially had to do the research and write the proposal myself. I had been under the impression my advisor would draw upon his vast experience and rewrite the document, using my research for the "meat". Imagine my surprise when the final draft was 95% the same as what I'd written. My friends asked me why I was surprised, for grad students are the ones who are supposed to do the research and write such proposals, and often the final draft is 100% the same as the one submitted by the student. I shook my head and told them that I couldn't believe that the proposal for a several hundred thousand dollar grant for work in a cutting edge research area had been written by inexperienced li'l me. It's going to take some getting used to, playing in the big leagues with minimal supervision. In a few years' time, the work I do might be instrumental in saving lives around the world. How's that for work pressure?
Of good books and bad books
Being in the bad books (and I mean extremely bad) of important people in my life is no fun. Sometimes it is for standing up to what I believe is the right thing. Sometimes it is inexperience, lack of concentration, or plain human error. Either way, the seriousness of the repercussions, real and possible, staggers me numb. Adult life sucks. I wish the only books I'd have to worry about are the novels I borrow from the public library, but life has other ideas. I know, I'm twenty three and I have to face these things like a man. But why does it have to be so hard?
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Channel surfing does pay off now and then: this movie starring Haley Joel Osment, Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey is one of my all-time favourites and I was happy to watch it again after all these years. "Pay it Forward" is Haley's submission for his social studies homework: think of one thing you can do to make the world a better place. The idea is that each person does three "favours". Each favour has to be something huge, something extremely difficult, even painful for you to do; but it must go a long way in helping another person. In return, you ask that person to do three more such favours, to other people. If things go right, you ought to have a chain reaction of people helping people, and the world will be a much better place.
I'll not go into the details of the plot itself, but I highly recommend this movie to anyone who hasn't seen it yet. Haley's acting is brilliant, and I miss the kid's presence on the big screen.
Face your enemy
Aeons ago, my teachers called me a math prodigy. However, from high school onward, I slipped slowly to average and even lower than that. I know for a fact that I had poor math teachers, but I'm sure a good percentage of the blame lies with me. Over the years, I've come to think of mathematics as my enemy, and I've tended to perform poorly in courses that are heavy on math content. Anyway, the time for reparation has come. My research requires that I be a math genius all over again, and all my courses next semester are geared toward restoring my math skills. I haven't a prayer of keeping my 4 point GPA after this, but what needs to be done has to be done.
Playing in the big leagues
I've been assisting my advisor in writing a project proposal this week, and although I was given some rough instructions, guidance and feedback, I essentially had to do the research and write the proposal myself. I had been under the impression my advisor would draw upon his vast experience and rewrite the document, using my research for the "meat". Imagine my surprise when the final draft was 95% the same as what I'd written. My friends asked me why I was surprised, for grad students are the ones who are supposed to do the research and write such proposals, and often the final draft is 100% the same as the one submitted by the student. I shook my head and told them that I couldn't believe that the proposal for a several hundred thousand dollar grant for work in a cutting edge research area had been written by inexperienced li'l me. It's going to take some getting used to, playing in the big leagues with minimal supervision. In a few years' time, the work I do might be instrumental in saving lives around the world. How's that for work pressure?
Of good books and bad books
Being in the bad books (and I mean extremely bad) of important people in my life is no fun. Sometimes it is for standing up to what I believe is the right thing. Sometimes it is inexperience, lack of concentration, or plain human error. Either way, the seriousness of the repercussions, real and possible, staggers me numb. Adult life sucks. I wish the only books I'd have to worry about are the novels I borrow from the public library, but life has other ideas. I know, I'm twenty three and I have to face these things like a man. But why does it have to be so hard?
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Sunday, June 18, 2006
Soccer fever hits everyone but me...
No, I'm not exactly working hard either. I'm playing computer games but if someone asks me why he hasn't seen me lately, I blame it on soccer :P
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
The Elements of Style
Towards the end of my last semester, I had to write and submit several project reports in record time, thanks to my procrastination. Unintentionally, I'd slipped into the informal language that I would use, for example, in this blog, rather than the formal and correct usage that is expected in such reports. That earned me a mild rebuke from my advisor, who was subjected to two of those reports, and knew that he would have to read several more by the time I finished my Ph.D. So he asked me to read the book, The Elements of Style, by William Strunck Jr. and E.B. White.
It turned out to be a rather interesting guide to correct writing, albeit in an annoyingly didactic, almost supercilious tone. It is an old book, and any authors who are still alive must be squirming on seeing what the english language has degenerated to. Consider, for example:
... Omit needless words. "The fact that" is an especially debilitating expression. It should be revised out of every sentence it occurs.
... Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by a mark of exclamation. The exclamation mark is reserved for true exclamations and commands, such as "What a wonderful show!" and "Halt!"
... "as to whether". "Whether" is sufficient.
... "regarded as being...". Not appropriate. Simply say, "regarded as.."
... "Certainly". Used indiscriminately by some speakers, much as others use very, in a attempt to intensify any and every statement. A mannerism of this kind, bad in speech, is worse in writing.
... "character". Often simply redundant, used from a mere habit of wordiness. "hostile act" is equivalent to "an act of hostile character"
and so on and so forth. The acerbic manner of meting out this wisdom nearly led to my abandoning the book half-way through, and I would have if not for two things: the advice was sensible, and it was punctuated by a dry wit that reminded me of a close IIT friend who is now in IIMA. For instance,
... The hyphen can play tricks on the unwary, as it did in Chattanooga when two newspapers merged - the News and the Free Press. Someone introduced a hyphen into the merger, and the paper became The Chattanooga News-Free Press.
... The word people is best not used with words of number, in place of persons. If of "six people" five went away, how many people would be left? One people?
So, after a day of getting discombobulated about the placement of commas and hyphens, the use of colons and semi-colons, the consistency of voice and tense, the identification of unnecessary and pretentious words and phrases, and a million other things, I'm living in fear of the acidic tongue - or pen - of William Strunck Jr. If it improves my writing skills, I guess it is a fair trade!
Cheers,
Prashanth.
It turned out to be a rather interesting guide to correct writing, albeit in an annoyingly didactic, almost supercilious tone. It is an old book, and any authors who are still alive must be squirming on seeing what the english language has degenerated to. Consider, for example:
... Omit needless words. "The fact that" is an especially debilitating expression. It should be revised out of every sentence it occurs.
... Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by a mark of exclamation. The exclamation mark is reserved for true exclamations and commands, such as "What a wonderful show!" and "Halt!"
... "as to whether". "Whether" is sufficient.
... "regarded as being...". Not appropriate. Simply say, "regarded as.."
... "Certainly". Used indiscriminately by some speakers, much as others use very, in a attempt to intensify any and every statement. A mannerism of this kind, bad in speech, is worse in writing.
... "character". Often simply redundant, used from a mere habit of wordiness. "hostile act" is equivalent to "an act of hostile character"
and so on and so forth. The acerbic manner of meting out this wisdom nearly led to my abandoning the book half-way through, and I would have if not for two things: the advice was sensible, and it was punctuated by a dry wit that reminded me of a close IIT friend who is now in IIMA. For instance,
... The hyphen can play tricks on the unwary, as it did in Chattanooga when two newspapers merged - the News and the Free Press. Someone introduced a hyphen into the merger, and the paper became The Chattanooga News-Free Press.
... The word people is best not used with words of number, in place of persons. If of "six people" five went away, how many people would be left? One people?
So, after a day of getting discombobulated about the placement of commas and hyphens, the use of colons and semi-colons, the consistency of voice and tense, the identification of unnecessary and pretentious words and phrases, and a million other things, I'm living in fear of the acidic tongue - or pen - of William Strunck Jr. If it improves my writing skills, I guess it is a fair trade!
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Reductionist is passé
Caution: Mild geek content
A lazy weekend afternoon at home. I'm watching TV with a roommate and he makes a comment on seeing yet another ad for a low-calorie food product, "The American view on diet is so f***ed up, man."
I smile, and taking one feather from my own cap and one from my Mom's, I dive into an explanation of how the American ideas on diet are reductionist in nature as opposed to the traditional Indian view. We never said ghee is bad for health just because it has hydrogenated fat; we know that there is little harm in having some ghee with rice as long as vegetables and pulses form the greater proportion. I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence when I realized that I was lecturing - I seem to be doing a lot these days. Perhaps this PhD is turning me into a professor, whether I want to be one or not!
But the funny thing is that I'd never voiced that particular point of view before; so where did it come from? The answer: my research. I think I started seeing the distinction between Reductionist and Holistic more clearly after I read a book on Chaos theory.
Chaos theory attempts to explain things where conventional science fails. It says that there are some systems where the equations or rules simply cannot be solved because of the interdependencies; and they cannot be simulated beyond a point because they are extremely sensitive to the variables. There is a famous story in which Edward Lorenz was simulating a weather system, and noticed a re-run of the simulation diverging completely from the original run even though it was the same system with the same initial conditions. So, he re-checked the initial conditions and realized that he'd rounded the floating point decimals down to a precision of six (I think) digits. Essentially, a difference of 0.000001 had yielded a completely different result after just a few iterations!
Think about the fact that in real life, there could be a million different external or internal perturbations on a variable, not to mention the difficulty in measuring values accurately beyond a certain point. Chaos theory accepts the infeasibility of studying such systems in the reductionist manner, and instead tries to identify patterns. Today there is quite a bit of formal mathematics involved, but initially, chaos theorists were looked upon as quacks.
My next leap in understanding came when I studied complex networks. This is the science of naturally evolved, large scale networks in a plethora of fields, covering everything from Social Networks to The Internet to Cellular Biology. Why, if you consider co-stars in a movie as linked, then on considering all Hollywood movies ever made, you will come up with a huge actor collaboration network. The science of complex networks identifies amazing similarities in all these networks, and the fact that such a complicated interaction network can yield results that are extremely counter-intuitive. Again, you cannot simply break down the system to the individual parts and rules and expect to easily predict the behavior of the system. With a multi-layered, large-scale network, taking the reductionist approach is but the first step in understanding the system.
Systems Biology is the science of life studied in a holistic manner. As one scientist put it, we are trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We have decoded the entire human genome; yet, we are far away from understanding how the same genes work together to create proteins, which work together to regulate individual biological processes, which work together to "run" a living organism. The same kind of problem is being faced in many, many other fields.
Chaos theory and non-linear dynamics, complex networks and systems engineering; these are are all interconnected fields that try to understand things - and perhaps build systems, with their inspiration - from a holistic viewpoint. These are the new challenges in Science; Reductionism is almost passé, and is increasingly being thought of as the first step in a long process. It is extremely humbling - and interesting - for a scientist to study and understand such complexity in nature. Our ancestors were nearly as good at it as we are now!
Watch your diet,
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Postscript: I made a start to the Science Blog that I was talking about, but decided that I would just include a few semi-scientific posts in this blog. This is one of them.
A lazy weekend afternoon at home. I'm watching TV with a roommate and he makes a comment on seeing yet another ad for a low-calorie food product, "The American view on diet is so f***ed up, man."
I smile, and taking one feather from my own cap and one from my Mom's, I dive into an explanation of how the American ideas on diet are reductionist in nature as opposed to the traditional Indian view. We never said ghee is bad for health just because it has hydrogenated fat; we know that there is little harm in having some ghee with rice as long as vegetables and pulses form the greater proportion. I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence when I realized that I was lecturing - I seem to be doing a lot these days. Perhaps this PhD is turning me into a professor, whether I want to be one or not!
But the funny thing is that I'd never voiced that particular point of view before; so where did it come from? The answer: my research. I think I started seeing the distinction between Reductionist and Holistic more clearly after I read a book on Chaos theory.
Chaos theory attempts to explain things where conventional science fails. It says that there are some systems where the equations or rules simply cannot be solved because of the interdependencies; and they cannot be simulated beyond a point because they are extremely sensitive to the variables. There is a famous story in which Edward Lorenz was simulating a weather system, and noticed a re-run of the simulation diverging completely from the original run even though it was the same system with the same initial conditions. So, he re-checked the initial conditions and realized that he'd rounded the floating point decimals down to a precision of six (I think) digits. Essentially, a difference of 0.000001 had yielded a completely different result after just a few iterations!
Think about the fact that in real life, there could be a million different external or internal perturbations on a variable, not to mention the difficulty in measuring values accurately beyond a certain point. Chaos theory accepts the infeasibility of studying such systems in the reductionist manner, and instead tries to identify patterns. Today there is quite a bit of formal mathematics involved, but initially, chaos theorists were looked upon as quacks.
My next leap in understanding came when I studied complex networks. This is the science of naturally evolved, large scale networks in a plethora of fields, covering everything from Social Networks to The Internet to Cellular Biology. Why, if you consider co-stars in a movie as linked, then on considering all Hollywood movies ever made, you will come up with a huge actor collaboration network. The science of complex networks identifies amazing similarities in all these networks, and the fact that such a complicated interaction network can yield results that are extremely counter-intuitive. Again, you cannot simply break down the system to the individual parts and rules and expect to easily predict the behavior of the system. With a multi-layered, large-scale network, taking the reductionist approach is but the first step in understanding the system.
Systems Biology is the science of life studied in a holistic manner. As one scientist put it, we are trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We have decoded the entire human genome; yet, we are far away from understanding how the same genes work together to create proteins, which work together to regulate individual biological processes, which work together to "run" a living organism. The same kind of problem is being faced in many, many other fields.
Chaos theory and non-linear dynamics, complex networks and systems engineering; these are are all interconnected fields that try to understand things - and perhaps build systems, with their inspiration - from a holistic viewpoint. These are the new challenges in Science; Reductionism is almost passé, and is increasingly being thought of as the first step in a long process. It is extremely humbling - and interesting - for a scientist to study and understand such complexity in nature. Our ancestors were nearly as good at it as we are now!
Watch your diet,
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Postscript: I made a start to the Science Blog that I was talking about, but decided that I would just include a few semi-scientific posts in this blog. This is one of them.
Friday, June 02, 2006
Play to Win
Yet another evening at the Bridge Club. I take my seat at a table where a conversation is already in progress. One guy - who I think of as the comedian of our club - marks my entrance with one of his trademark, grand sweeping statements: "...but Prashanth, he plays to win!" Much amused, I comment, "Of course! Don't we all?" Judging by the expressions around the table, it was the wrong answer.
Now, there happen to be a lot of people at our club who have far more playing experience than me; and yet, they do not bother to learn or play complicated partnership conventions; they do not make or figure out deceptive plays; they do not read advanced playing tips from books. But for me, those things are like bread and butter, for without them, you will remain at best an average player even if your basic technique is sound. I do play to win. And not just in bridge. It's an in-built urge to be competitive and be a winner; be it academics or games.
But many people just play to have fun, and it doesn't matter whether they win or lose. I wish I could be that way; but I wince every time I make a mistake, and I feel a little unhappy if I lose badly. Yet, I still wear my smile, because I know I just learnt one more lesson! I adore my partners who explain my mistakes and teach me the way to avoid them; but they are not as well-liked by others, for I've heard statements like a rueful "He lectures!" or a semi-jesting "He's a meanie!"
The interesting trend I noticed here is that the younger (relatively speaking: people in their fifties come under this category in bridge!) people are more competitive than the older players. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come. Everybody wants to win these days. And yet, I do not see it as a bad thing. To not strive to do better is to be less than human, in my opinion.
I'm sure there is a line somewhere that separates the competitive from the over-competitive. But many people draw it at the wrong place. "Being competitive" is no excuse for a transgression of ethics; but "Being over-competitive" is no excuse for mediocrity.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Now, there happen to be a lot of people at our club who have far more playing experience than me; and yet, they do not bother to learn or play complicated partnership conventions; they do not make or figure out deceptive plays; they do not read advanced playing tips from books. But for me, those things are like bread and butter, for without them, you will remain at best an average player even if your basic technique is sound. I do play to win. And not just in bridge. It's an in-built urge to be competitive and be a winner; be it academics or games.
But many people just play to have fun, and it doesn't matter whether they win or lose. I wish I could be that way; but I wince every time I make a mistake, and I feel a little unhappy if I lose badly. Yet, I still wear my smile, because I know I just learnt one more lesson! I adore my partners who explain my mistakes and teach me the way to avoid them; but they are not as well-liked by others, for I've heard statements like a rueful "He lectures!" or a semi-jesting "He's a meanie!"
The interesting trend I noticed here is that the younger (relatively speaking: people in their fifties come under this category in bridge!) people are more competitive than the older players. Perhaps this is a sign of things to come. Everybody wants to win these days. And yet, I do not see it as a bad thing. To not strive to do better is to be less than human, in my opinion.
I'm sure there is a line somewhere that separates the competitive from the over-competitive. But many people draw it at the wrong place. "Being competitive" is no excuse for a transgression of ethics; but "Being over-competitive" is no excuse for mediocrity.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
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