Entropy, puzzle rings and the fractal nature of dust

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India, puzzle rings

Is your winter blanket in the kitchen sink? Are your dirty dishes among the bedsheets? Is your wet towel on your piano? If not, you need to give yourself a pat on the back. You have successfully resisted the physical laws of entropy. It doesn’t matter that the winter blanket is still not put away though it’s May, the dirty dishes have been in the sink for three days, and the piano has a fine layer of dust on it. Whatever state of tumult your house is in, or pigsty-ness as I like to call it, always remember, it could be so much worse.

All of civilization is a battle against entropy really. You start by keeping the wild animals out, you move to keeping the other tribes out, next you keep non-family members out, and somewhere along the way, you desire to keep the dust out as well. This last, as we find out later, is a sizable challenge.

Perfection IV

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perfection

This time featuring rusted perfection, and not completely natural either. Can man create perfection? In a bauble no less? How about a combination of man and nature?

There are plenty of canyons near where I live, complete with walking trails and railway tracks. I came across this perfectly rusted bracelet in there somewhere and found it intriguing. What are the scenarios in which a piece of ordinary but dressy jewellery comes to lie at the bottom of a canyon, to be at the mercy of the elements, and to become such a strange amalgam of man-made and natural? Whatever the story, it’s a pretty neat object to my mind — made by humans, probably even mass-manufactured, but an object on which nature has had the ultimate say, creating something unique in the process.

(See previous posts Perfection, Perfection II and Perfection III. And while you are at it, you can see this too. All of these were about objects that are created with zero direct input from humans.)

Mozart and the lively Requiem

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choir, concert, mozart, requiem, singing

Singing Mozart makes people feel happy and exhilarated, because his music is wonderful and uplifting and contains sheer power. But all that is just the surface reality. At its core, singing Mozart accomplishes something at once more subtle and more profound. Because he created music that transcends time, and which represents some of the greatest pinnacles of human endeavour, when you sing him, it creates a conduit through which you can glimpse, if only fleetingly, this other universe, his private universe as it were. And for a little while, infinity seems to get just that little bit closer. At the end of the day, singing Mozart is why people sing at all.

Sometimes when I stand up to sing with my choir, especially if the light is streaming in and it’s a Saturday afternoon, and even more especially if it is Mozart, I think to myself that this is the absolute best thing the world has to offer to me. That it isn’t really possible for life to get better than this. And in order to truly avail of this thing, especially if it is Mozart, I have to give it my best too. To sing Mozart even half-way well, you need commitment — not just in the moment, as you sing, but in all the weeks and months of preparation as well. To stay on top of his moods and his tempi, to create anything close to the sound he must have heard in his own mind when he composed, the demand is that you give it your all. And the best part is, he makes you -want- to give it your all.

To see a world in a grapefruit

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Blake, fruits, grapefruit, mango

William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence starts with some of the more famous lines ever written. (And I like them quite a bit, so I’m hardly going to miss a chance to quote them.)

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I suppose his meaning was more metaphorical and mine here is more literal, but I think that every time I peel open a grapefruit, the act connects me instantaneously to all of nature’s structures.

Nature, of course, is a whole book in itself, a book of books, some might even say THE book of books, and I refer only to the structural aspects of it here, that is to say, a chapter or three from this massive tome, but to me they are fascinating chapters. How things are put together has always intrigued me — the intricate structure of a honeycomb, of a sea shell, of a pine cone. How these forms are attained is a whole other story in itself (an entire giraffe arising out of a bitty egg and one sperm — I still haven’t fully grasped that one!) but for now I am content to focus on the final structure alone, and the chosen object of meditation is the grapefruit, at least partly because it was the most happening object in my house last week.

Take me home, falling rain

Tags

India, rain

The population of India is over 1.2 billion. Any statement that you make about Indians, it is likely that both it and its opposite will be equally valid. Many Indians like cricket, but others don’t. Many like mangoes (me!), others shun the fruit. Most Indians like spicy food, in fact, I actually don’t know any who don’t, but I’m sure they exist. (Oh, I suppose my father is one!)

Actually there are other statements that are less obvious, that have a better chance of being true — Indians (hardly ever) go to school on elephants, and Indians (hardly ever) dance around trees, even though there is a whole film industry trying to prove otherwise. A statement that I am prone to making, and which someone or other unfailingly pipes up to disagree with is, “All Indians can sing.” And there’s another that I want to be true, but I know that it just isn’t. “Indians love the rain.”

Apparently they don’t. Or not all of them anyway. I know people who have been traumatised by Bombay rains, and even I would be hard pressed to argue that the many millions of slum dwellers in that city enjoy the torrential and massively disruptive rains every year. Any yet, I like to think that rain, or at least the notion of rain, holds a special place in the hearts of most, if not all Indians.

The rock that smiled

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hiking, san jacinto

See the smiley in the middle?

Sometimes it goes like this. You drive two hours to get to a trailhead. You spend several hours reaching the top of the mountain, noticing the changing flora. You wonder if the dark clouds that are pouring down in the distance are going to float over and pour down on you, and, worse still, bring with them the dreaded lightning, which turns bare granite mountains into lightning rods. You sweat, you get tired, you reach the top, no rain so far. From the peak you get magnificent and contrasting views of the desert down on one side and still the threatening clouds on the other side.

Desert down below

Rain in the distance

On the way down, you see the rock with the smiley face, and take some pictures, as is your wont. Later, there is not just rain but a full-scale hailstorm. It’s all pretty damn exciting, because you love the rain and don’t mind the mud or the getting wet, and you are below the treeline anyway. You get to the car and find that the seats are wet. It had been warm when you parked, and, in your infinite wisdom, you had left the windows down by an inch, so that the car wouldn’t get too hot, but the weather had had the temerity to turn around on you completely. But you are too tired and happy to let the inconvenience bother you. You get home late, and go to bed satisfied.

Eight months later, when you think back to that hike, eventful as it was, what you remember most sharply is the rock with the smiley face.

~~~~~~~~~~

I find that creativity is a rare and elusive beast at the best of times, but when you have hiked up to 9000 feet, the exertion and thin air surely make it is even harder to come by. I don’t know who put the sticks and stones on that rock, whether they were camping there, and thus had the time to fool around, or whether they were just passing through, like me. In any case, whoever it was that noticed the rock and then scrambled around to get it to smile, they totally made my day.

I love how that rock is not just round and flat, but also has in place already a mouth in the form of a gash. In retrospect, it is almost begging to be given a smiley face. Giving it exactly that wasn’t just a cute and creative thing to do, it also, in some strange way, said a generous and quite unique Hi to future hikers. Put simply, it was a quite brilliant gesture. Whoever you are, well done!

Facebook Likes, Hari Seldon and free will

Tags

asimov, big data, data mining, facebook, foundation, free will, hari seldon, machine learning, psychohistory, social networks

It all boils down to free will. It always boils down to free will. Or can be boiled down to free will. I was thinking the other day that you can take any statement about human beings, or a specific human being, and connect it to free will in three sentences. But that’s absurd. Every statement about human beings is -already- a statement about free will.

There was a research paper that did the media rounds a little while back. It is some work done at The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge and Microsoft Research, Cambridge. In it, they study the Facebook Likes of 58,000 volunteers, and also use the demographic information and the results of some psychometric tests of those volunteers to come up with some pretty startling predictive statistics. For instance, they use machine learning to develop models that take as input Facebook Likes and predict with high accuracy personal and sensitive information such as sexual orientation, race, religious beliefs and political leanings.

Do you think that human beings are complex? Do you think they are unpredictable and unknowable? What if someone told you that your Facebook Likes, and a simple linear equation could together determine whether your parents are together, whether you use drugs, and what your satisfaction with life is? Well, that’s exactly what this paper does. Some of the findings seem obvious and therefore non-creepy: a Like for Sun Tzu indicates Competitiveness, and a Like for “Sometimes I Hate Myself” indicates a Neurotic temperament. Other findings are non-obvious. For instance, a Like for “Curly Fries” apparently indicates high intelligence, and one for Mountain Biking indicates a Calm and Relaxed temperament. The point where things start to get creepy is when Likes for Britney Spears and Desperate Housewives turn out to be moderately indicative of being gay, whereas less than 5% of the users labelled gay actually have obvious Likes, such as for groups like “Gay Marriage.”

Billions of bilious blue blistering electrons

Tags

computers, large scale computing

What is common to the forecasting of weather, the making of a Pixar movie, protein structure prediction and the design of mobile phone networks? Each one of them requires a massive amount of computational resources.

One of the things that fascinates me about this is how much longer it takes to simulate a physical event compared to how long the event actually takes. For instance, when your hair blows in the wind, it is an event lasting a few seconds. But when Pixar wants to simulate that for Elasti-Girl, it requires a complex model of the physics involved and a computation that probably lasts several hours to make it look realistic. They need a model of hair, a model of wind and a model of the dynamics involved in the interaction of the two. Here is a nice slidedeck about some of the physics involved.^[1]

Similarly, you may make a phone call on your mobile phone in a matter of seconds, but consider what the physical manipulations involved are. At the topmost level there is a sequence of events such as the following — the “network”, that allmighty entity which already knows of your existence (the “bars” on your phone are the signal strength), suddenly responds to your need to talk to someone, then finds out approximately where the other person is, and sends the message out, then the other person (hopefully) responds, a connection is established and lasts for as long as you desire (not if it’s AT&T, but still). And this happens millions of times every hour. At the other extreme, you can think of the most detailed level and study the currents and voltages, and transistors and gates, and electrons and photons, that are sitting inside your phone, inside various pieces of equipment that make up the magical “network” and inside the other person’s phone. And there are many, many intermediate levels that can be studied too. Can’t you just see all the electrons and photons just scurrying around at the press of one button from your all-powerful finger?

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Tags

andrew lloyd webber, music, musical, tim rice, west end

Like a lot of spirited drivers, I think of the roads as a place where I have primacy above all, where all the other cars are insignificant annoyances blocking what is my rightful path, and around whom I am forced to navigate. (I know, my attitude sucks, but there we are.) So when these annoyances rise to the level where a sub-two hour drive ends up taking nearly three hours — wasting an entire hour of my life! adding a whopping 50% time to a journey! oh the injustice! — and I am still completely relaxed when I reach my destination — not just non-frustrated, non-pissed off, but actually fairly cheerful — well, the cause of this unlikely occurrence deserves some scrutiny.

The cause in this case was a CD I was listening to in the car, after a gap of about two years. It was of the musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and it was not in fact the music that made my day, or even my drive, but rather, the lyrics. Though Joseph is famous as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, and the music is indeed quite peppy and upbeat, to my mind, it is Tim Rice’s nonchalantly witty lyrics that really make this CD pop. On the one hand they are so conversational that it could be a funny friend telling you a story over coffee, but on the other hand, they are also full of perfectly crafted (and often hilarious) rhymes, vivid imagery and subtle asides.

Perfection III

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perfection

This time featuring edible perfection. (See previous posts Perfection and Perfection II. And while you are at it, you can see this too.)

Not only do I find walnuts the most addictive of nuts to eat, I also find them the prettiest, including when they are broken and bruised. I love their intricate design, with fine veins on the inside and gentle undulations on the outside. These pictures do not come close to doing them justice, but the claim of perfection is being made for the walnuts, not for the pictures!