Spirituality, Science and Technology

An Exercise in Stopping Thought

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 02:43:46 PDT

It is necessary to sometimes stop thinking, or quieten the mind. I find there are parallels of this in Taoism, Zen, Jiddu Krishnamurti and in some forms of prayers.
Krishnamurti was once asked by a scientist:
"How can I be a scientist," I asked him, and still follow your advice of stopping thought and attaining freedom from the known? ... He answered: "First you are an human being, then you are a scientist. First you have to become free, and this freedom cannot be achieved through thought. It is achieved through meditation - the understanding of the totality of life, in which every form of fragmentation has ceased. Once I had reached the understanding of life as a whole, he told me, I would be able to specialize and work as a scientist without any problems."
In this connection, I find the passage from Theo Fischer's book "Laß dich vom Tao leben" very interesting.
Attention, which excludes nothing, correcting nothing, embellishing nothing, ist the key to all transformations

True attention excludes nothing. In this attention, there is no concentration on particular objects, no filtering of what to perceive or what not to perceive. It means, that without special efforts, I am conscious of all happenings, external as well as internal.

You can easily feel the interconnectedness of man and cosmos if you do a small exercise:

Stop thinking for a couple of seconds. Like holding your breath. And during this thinking pause, pay attention to the surrounding. You will notice right away, that when thinking stops, the separating process also stops. There is a direct relation to the outer world.

You suddenly feel the bond to your possessions disappearing, even to your bank account, house and partner, for a few moments, the rigid and clinging relations are not there. You will no longer feel the chasm between oneself and the surrounding.

Your personality disappears for a few seconds into the background, and for a brief moment, there is no feeling of separation from the outer world. There is no difference between inner and outer during the exercise. And if you try this often, your brain will anticipate, that it is so much easier to live – and even to think.

This is not the usual kind meditation. There is no concentration, no reflection, no labeling, no insight, instead we try to absorb all at once. I am not sure it can be called meditation.

The above is an example that religions, if their metaphysics, beliefs, organizations and rituals are stripped off, then the core has much in common with one another.

Python Visualization of the Financial Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 04:36:22 PDT

I came across Reginald Smith's “Epidemiology” of the Credit Crisis (DRAFT) via Vitorino Ramos' Chemoton blog. A picture is worth a thousand words, a movie even more.

By the way Chemoton is very interesting, it talks about Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, Complexity, Evolutionary Computation, Economy, Finance, Swarms, etc, all topics I am interested in.

Reginald Smith's visualization is obtained by constructing a minimal spanning tree using Python Graph and animate using Graphiz and Pydot modules.

Data used are S&P 500 and NASDAQ-100 stocks, between Aug 1, 2007 and October 10, 2008.
The nodes are the stocks. The links are basically correlation coefficients between 2 stocks, modified to make it satisfy a distance metric. A log function of the closing prices is taken before the correlation is calculated.

Color codes used: green means return greater than -10%, yellow means return between -10% and -25%, and red means return greater than -25%. The return is the cumulative return since Aug 1, 2007.

Here are 4 snapshots taken on Aug 9 1007, Nov 12 2007, March 14 2008 when Bear Stearns collapsed, and Oct 10 2008 (all images from the original paper).

Smith cautions that correlation links are statistical and not causal links.
It might be interesting to see a similar visualization for World Financial Market as the crisis has spread geographically.
When the bottom is reached, we could have a visualization of the recovery process. This could be a long wait.
Finally, using copulas instead of traditional correlation coefficients would be more accurate, but the computing task would be huge.

The Paradox of Choice in Open Source Software

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:00:32 PDT

Professor Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice: How More is Less, in a talk at Google, showed, surprisingly to many of us, that our sacred assumptions, assumptions used in the following syllogism, can be false. These assumptions and syllogism are the:

more freedom => more welfare
more choice => more freedom
Hence more choice => more welfare

This was discussed in more detail in his book.

In essence, more choice can lead to worse decision making due to the increase complexity and resulting regret. In fact, people are often paralyzed and would not make any decision at all, if faced with too many choices. If they do make a decision in such situation, the decision is often made based on non-rational reasons and superstitions, and the result is far from optimal.

Schwartz gave many examples of this situation. Examples from daily life are the explosion of choices in a supermarket: 175 salad dressings, 250 kinds of cereal, 360 types of shampoo, gel and mousse.

Schwartz used studies to support his findings, and also makes use of behavioral economics as in Kahneman Tversky's prospect theory.

Of course some choice is better than no choice, but when the number of choices in increased, more is less. The discussion of its implications are very interesting, it includes why people who have everything are less happy. Beyond subsistence, increasing abundance does not increase happiness.

The above situation is applicable to the software industry.
I will look at an example of open source software. Proprietary software has its own advantages and disadvantages, which are not discussed here.

Consider Schwartz's example of making a stereo system from components: there are approximately 6,512,000 ways to do it.

Now consider a software for a Python based application framework.
We have frameworks like Turbo Gears, Django, Pylon and more.
Each of them uses other open source components (the following are just a few of the components, not a complete list):

Databases: SQLite, MySQL, Postgress, etc
ORM: SQLObject, SQLAlchemy, etc
Javascript libraries: Prototype, Scriptaculous, Mochikit, Yui, Dojo, jQuery, etc
Templating systems: Kid, Mako, etc
Widget libraries: TocsaWidgets, Tk, etc
Utilities: WSGI, JSON, XML, Genshi, virtualenv, paster, Cheetah, CherryPy, etc

The combinations are many, and confusing. Nobody can make a reasonable good combination without knowing most of the components.
And worse yet, the end-user who just want to use the software to write programs for his domain, will have a hard time installing the software with all their dependencies.

Another example is Open Object, which seems to be very good, but the installation is very difficult even for an IT person.
Many years ago, I had the same experience with building software using Java components.

I think leadership means giving people enough choices, but not too many. The leader must decide (even if the decision is not optimal) upon one combination of components which can produce quality software and ease of use, not leave the decisions to the user. The whole should then be packaged and branded.
I am not advocating proprietary software, but there are things we can learn from it.

Open source software need leaders.
Ultimately, open source software leader will make users happier.

Related:

Some Good Things To Run in Chrome

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:28:39 PDT

With the many-fold increase in JavaScript performance in Chrome, here are some interesting applications which you can try. Some of these are not really compute intensive, and there would be little difference with other browsers.

Mathematics.
Tutor is a JavaScript application written by Moshe Sniedovich from the University of Melbourne.
It deals with various operations research algorithms, such as simplex method, dynamic programming. You can enter data directly on the screen and run the algorithm interactively.

Math Authoring
AcsiMath is a math authoring system written in JavaScript. It was reviewed here

A personal wiki
Tiddlywiki is a standalone wiki written in JavaScript

JavaScript toolkit libraries

Toolkit libraries such as Dojo, Yahoo Yui, Prototype, Mochikit, Jquery, and others are collection of scripts for various tasks, including AJAX and COMET. Google's GWT also belongs here, although it can run with either Java or JavaScript.

Visualization

Processing.js is John Resig's port of Processing, a software to make beautiful presentations and visualizations.
See examples here

Web Framework
JavaScript can now be used as a complete web framework application.
Apple's SproutCore was perhaps one of earliest frameworks, if we exclude rewrites of other frameworks such as Ruby on Rails in

JavaScript.

See the demos here
Google applications
Google applications will obviously run faster (sometimes much faster) in Chrome, try Google Maps, YouTube and Gmail

The effort to make a faster and faster JavaScript engine is now hot topic, see about JavaScript JIT here

Of course, the JavaScript engine can also run without the browser, Webkit source can be downloaded and compiled using a C compiler.

The other end is the server client. Here JavaScript has also make inroads with the idea of a server side JavaScript. Jaxer is the new AJAX server by Aptana for the task. To be fair, Microsoft JScript already has server side JScript, which is Microsoft's version of JavaScript.

More on JavaScript:

Henri Cartan is no longer with us

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:49:02 PDT

ScienceNews reported the great mathematician Henri Cartan died at the age of 104.

He was no doubt one of the giants of mathematicians of the 20th century.
ScienceNews says: "In addition to his work in Bourbaki, Cartan made groundbreaking contributions to a wide array of mathematical fields, including complex analysis, algebraic topology and homological algebra. He received the Wolf Prize in 1980, one of the highest honors in mathematics, for his work on the theory of analytic functions. Two of his students won the Fields medal, sometimes considered equivalent to the Nobel Prize in mathematics, one won the Nobel Prize in physics and another won the economics Nobel."

I first encountered his name when I was a Math student, reading Homological Algebra by Henri Cartan & Samuel Eilenberg.
The book was considered some kind of a bible of algebraic topology, but very hard to read. I usually read books very fast, but this must have been the slowest book I ever read, and I must admit that I have only read about 70% of the book.

Only later did I discover that Henri Cartan was actually one of Nicolas Bourbaki authors. Nicolas Bourbaki is the pseudonym of a group of mainly French mathematicians who wrote the Bourbaki series of mathematics. The group included, at one time or other, Henri Cartan, Claude Chevalley, Jean Coulomb, Jean Delsarte, Jean Dieudonné, Charles Ehresmann, René de Possel, Szolem Mandelbrojt, André Weil, Laurent Schwartz, Jean-Pierre Serre, Alexander Grothendieck, Samuel Eilenberg, Serge Lang and Roger Godement.
See the Wikipedia entry on Bourbaki.
.
I would not have read Bourbaki, if it was not my class assignment to make a presentation on one of the chapters of Bourbaki's Algèbre. I don't read French, and there were no English or German translations available. Luckily, the Bourbaki style of writing does not employ a rich vocabulary, and I managed to make the presentation without too many embarrassments.

The Bourbaki style of mathematics is very rigorous, abstract, general, axiomatic, formal with little examples and no diagrams. It seems to be in the spirit of Hilbert's formalism. The approach makes it easy to apply one abstract formalism to a very wide areas of applications, hence its generality.

Not everybody likes the approach, Bourbaki has come under criticisms, mainly for being unintuitive and because some mathematical fields were omitted.

Personally, I think intuition is of utmost importance in mathematics, if it is not obtained from books like Bourbaki, perhaps it can be obtained from other sources such as personal contacts with teachers and colleagues. In addition, these days, people talk about mathematics informally on the net, see e.g. A Neighborhood of Infinity , The n-Category Café, as well as Terrence Tao's blog

Related post: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics

It Is My Karma To Be Born In A Digital Age

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 07:51:28 PDT

"It is my Karma to be born in a digital age, so I should make the best of it" is from Prof (emeritus) Lewis Lancaster's Burke lecture on Religion and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, earlier this year.

The title of the talk was "Buddhism in a global age of technology".

The video is available online at youtube.
It is almost one hour long, and very fascinating to watch.

Prof Lancaster started with why Buddhism is portable, how East and West influenced each other cultures. For example cremation is from the East, the early Buddhist statues were Greek, and our modern day campuses were originally Buddhist monasteries.

Then we are taken on a trip from perception, consciousness, neuroscience, causality, why Buddhists don't believe in a first cause, chain of causation, Karma and unpredictability (in analogy with cellular automata), and multiverses.

I find his notion of a multiverse, consisting of one universe inside another universe, and continued ad infinitum (fractal structure) very intriguing. It is highly unlikely that this can ever be proved, but it makes sense in the light of physicist Sean M. Carroll's interview, where he stated that "We're part of a bigger structure".
Our universe, including the big bang is part of a bigger structure. Otherwise the low entropy state condition for the big bang is hard to rationalize.

My above summary does not do justice to the lecture, please watch the recorded video. It is certainly one of best lectures on Buddhism and science and technology.

The Case of the Disappearing Microsoft Sites

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:46:45 PDT

Last week I found Messenger suddenly stopped working. And then discover that I could not access any Microsoft sites, including Microsoft, hotmail, msn, and windows update. The message was " the server at..... takes too long.."
Other sites were OK.

My first reaction was checking the firewall setting and turning it off, running anti-virus and then turning it off, and then uninstalling it. None worked.

Could there be a virus specifically targeting Microsoft sites? Not likely, it has never been heard of.

Searching the internet, someone mentioned adjusting the MTU (maximum transmission unit)value. I did, but no avail.

I connected using a dial-up provider, but it was so slow (and Microsoft pages didn't show up, but no error message) and the results were inconclusive.

The I found this software vrle (Visual Route Lite Edition), which is actually just a fancy version of tracert, with visual and color embellishments.
It showed that after about 13 hops, there were unknown sites, packets were lost and the trace could not be completed.

So I switched to a different DNS server, namely OpenDNS recommended in the ComputerWorld article "Fix your DNS problems" , and the missing sites were back to normal!

I am still rather mystified by the whole thing, and would like to hear from others who encountered the same problem.

Learning the Immune System by Playing a Game

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:09:03 PDT

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has released a computer game called Immune Attack.

ABCNews asks: Are Vide o Games the New Textbooks?
It is not the first time, that games have been tried in the educational field. I remember seeing a game called Atlantis, where the object is to learn to manage the many aspects of a country.
Some multi-player games are very good for teaching cooperation.

In the Immune Attack we take the role of a nanobot, which we must navigate through a 3D environment of blood vessels and connective tissue, to retrain non-functional immune cells. Along the way, we learn about white blood cells and infections, and immunology in general.

FAS stated the objectives of the games as:

Upon completion of Immune Attack, the student will be able to demonstrate understanding of:

The role of macrophages and neutrophils in the immune system
The process of transmigration of monocytes
How the body uses chemical signals to find the site of infection
How the body uses chemical markers to recognize enemies
How macrophages “call” neutrophils for “backup”

I think this is a very exciting way to learn immunology. I expect there will be more games of this kind in the future.

The game can be downloaded for free, it is over 500M, and runs under Windows XP. If you don't want to download it, you can still have some idea of the game by watching videos of the game on the FAS site.

Revisiting Tit-For-Tat

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:07:18 PDT

Tit-For-Tat as a strategy was hailed in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) tournament of Axelrod (see Wikipedia background) as showing that altruism can be a product of evolution (Games People Play and How Nice Guys Finish First):

"Axelrod discovered that when these encounters were repeated over a long period of time with many players, each with different strategies, greedy strategies tended to do very poorly in the long run while more altruistic strategies did better, as judged purely by self-interest. He used this to show a possible mechanism for the evolution of altruistic behavior from mechanisms that are initially purely selfish, by natural selection."

I return to this topic for two reasons.

The first is when I found the software SciLab, the closest thing to MatLab and free as in free beer. SciLab is not a clone of MatLab, but translation from MatLab is relatively easy (there is function mfile2sci in SciLab to do it). I used MatLab before, and I was glad to use open source SciLab.

So the first thing I did was translate the MatLab codes which I got from Iterated prisoner’s dilemma in MATLAB into SciLab and run the tournament.

SciLab is now, together with paper & pen and Microsoft Excel, my favourite tools for doing Mathematics. Sage and Mathematica, although very powerful, are not as handy.

The second reason is the problem of reconciling Tit-For-Tat with Buddhist views.
Tit-For-Tat is said to be nice, forgiving, non-envious, but it also retaliates. It is the last attribute retaliation which is questionable from the Buddhist standpoint.
Tit-For-Tat will never defect first, but it will punish opponent's defection.
The idea of punishment is not acceptable in Buddhism.

Closer examination makes it clear that in the IPD setup, no communication between the players is possible. Hence we can say that IPD is not a realistic model of human interaction.
If communication were possible, it would be used first to reason with the opponent, but then it would not be IPD.
Nevertheless, although IPD is not a realistic model, it does at least show the possibility of the evolution of altruism.

A similar conclusion is reached when reading the New Scientist article Religion is a product of evolution, software suggests.
While the conclusion that religion is an emergent mental artifact of our evolution is quite plausible, the model is simply too crude and unrealistic. Incidentally the software is written in SciLab: SciLab program to simulate the evolution of religion

Link: Blog entries on game theory

Against Doctrines

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:48:15 PDT

"Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth."

This is the first guideline of Thich Nhat Hanh's 14 guidelines of Engaged Buddhism.
I came across it in Dialogic.
The author Thivai Abhor is right that the guidelines are really guidelines and not commandments. When there is no doctrine, there is no extremism and there are no claims to absolute truth.
Buddhist systems of thoughts are guiding means. Everything else is experienced from practice. And when we don't know (e.g the answers to difficult metaphysics), we simply say we don't know, and keep our minds open. To believe then is simply to make a hypothesis, ready to be ejected if found wrong.

It is very refreshing to read Thich Nhat Hanh again, when there is so much extremism around.

Incense is Harmful to Health

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 06:07:05 PDT

After my last post, Forms of Devotion, where I mentioned the use of incense in rituals, I stumbled on an article from the Buddhist Channel, in which scientists reported health dangers of using incense.

"Like any cigarette smoke and wood smoke, incense smoke contains particulate matter, gas products (carbon monoxide, cardiodioxide, and sulfur dioxide) and other organic compounds (benzene, toluene, xylenes, aldehydes and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) shown to harm human health. Incense burning produces over 4 times more particulate matter than cigarette smoke.

According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, toluene can cause headaches, confusion, and memory loss. Xylenes can cause headaches, lack of muscle coordination, dizziness, confusion, and changes in one's sense of balance, irritation of the skin, eyes, nose, and throat; and difficulty in breathing.

Inhaling incense smoke may cause respiratory dysfunction, allergies, allergic contact dermatitis, growths and tumors, and genetic mutations.

As allergies and chemical sensitivities are on the rise, many yoga studios have looked for alternatives to incense and restrict the wearing of scent to class. Some safer alternatives include natural potpourri and fresh flowers."

Since use of incense is widespread particularly in Asia, we should spread the word about its hazards. The knowledge will hopefully lead people to abandon incense.

Forms of Devotion

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 05:37:42 PDT

This year, I couldn't attend the Vesak (Waisak) celebrations, so I went to the Atthami Visakka Puja instead. Atthami Visakkha means the eighth day after Vesak. Vesak is mostly a morning event, Atthami Visakkha is an evening event.

After the usual rituals, there was meditation, followed by a Dhamma talk.
People sit in rooms, terraces, and gardens under the trees and under the moon.
Everyone carried a candle, an incense, and a fragrant flower (Polianthes tuberose, see wiki and image below)
The chanting together of thousands of people was especially powerful.
On this occasion, the meditation was a short Metta Bhavana (Loving Kindness meditation). It went something (abbreviated) like this: May all beings, in all directions, visible or invisible, devas and other beings, may they be free from greed and attachments, may they be free from hate and anger, may they be free from ignorance and spiritual darkness, may they be free from suffering, and may they be blessed with happiness.
(Actually we start with ourselves first and then extend to others.)

In the Dhamma talk by Sri Paññavaro Mahathera, he said that there are many forms of devotion to Buddha.
The following are my own paraphrasing and examples, not Sri Paññavaro's.

One form could be day to day mindfulness of our thoughts, actions and feelings. The source of greed and hate are often pleasure and displeasure, hence we should be particularly mindful when we feel pleasure and displeasure. We could enjoy sitting in front of the computer all day, blogging, surfing, programming or game playing, that it became an attachment.
We were upset when we heard Sharon Stone's silly remark on karma.
But mindfulness should prevent us from getting angry, and we are no longer upset. Even better, mindfulness could prevent us from getting upset in the first place.

Mindfulness can be cultivated so that it is present most of the time.

Mindfulness in Buddhism is always connected to (it includes) clear comprehension, see e.g. Debugging mind viruses: Clear Comprehension, which is a little different from non-Buddhist mindfulness.

Sri Paññavaro went on to touch on environmental issues, everybody could contribute a little by not littering, not using our private cars at least once a day in a week, not leaving the lights on when not used, not connecting to the internet when not needed, not to cut down a tree without replacing it with another tree. All these are simple little things which anyone can do, and which will have a great effect if added up.

All the above examples are forms of devotion to the teachings of the Buddha.

Einstein's position on religion revealed in a letter

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Tue, 13 May 2008 04:43:17 PDT

The Guardian reported that a little known letter of Einstein will be auctioned, and expected to fetch the price of £8,000.

The letter helps to clarify the misunderstandings in interpreting what he meant when he said "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this."

He clearly rejected conventional religion, although he is said to have a "cosmic religious feeling" which had permeated throughout his scientific works.
Being religious is very different from believing in a personal God: "I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty."

Related:

More Ways To Catch A Lion

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:06:22 PDT

"Catching Lions.....Mathematically" from the Humorous archives, listed seven methods to catch a lion, the first three are:

1. Newton's Method:

Let, the lion catch you...
For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction...
Implies you have caught the lion (Assuming that you're alive)...

2. Einstein Method:

Run in the direction opposite to that of the lion...
Due to higher relative velocity, the lion will also
run faster and will get tired soon...
Now you can trap it easily...

3. Schrodinger Method:

At any given moment, there is a positive probability
that the lion should be in the cage...
So set the trap, sit down and wait...

Here I have added five more methods.

8. Chaos Theory Method:

Find an attractor with a small Poincare set
The lion will go into one of the orbits....
and sooner or later pass through the section

9. Imaginary Plane Method:

Create the lion and yourself in the complex imaginary plane
You should be able to catch the Lion easily
(All you have to do is imagine it)
Then project onto the real axis
and Voilà!

10. Wu Wei Method:

Practice inaction, be still, so still
that you are in harmony
with the forest, and the animals..
You and the Lion will be one...

11. Zen Method:

Confront the Lion face to face without any fears of death
Just when it is about to jump you
Shout as loud as you can, emphasize it with a bamboo stick
"Quatsch!, then ask
"If a Lion has Buddha-nature,
why does it want to eat me?"
The Lion will be totally perplexed and scratch its head for one hour
and will surrender itself

12. Compassionate Method:

Practice compassion and loving-kindness to all creatures
big or small, tall or short
offering your head to the Lion
The Lion will be so touched...
and is captured without being captured

Thanissaro Bhikkhu: Using Meditation to Deal with Pain, Illness & Death

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Fri, 02 May 2008 05:16:36 PDT

This post is a piece by Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who also wrote No-self or Not-self?

The original paper is from the website AccesstoInsight

I decided to reproduce it here, because I think it is very good writing, and very useful. Who doesn't have to deal with pain, illness, and death? More importantly, it teaches a simple method of breath meditation, and of finding true happiness, applicable to anyone from any from any religion.

For free distribution. This work may be republished, reformatted, reprinted, and redistributed in any medium. It is the author's wish, however, that any such republication and redistribution be made available to the public on a free and unrestricted basis and that translations and other derivative works be clearly marked as such.

My topic today is the role that meditation can play in facing issues of pain, illness & death — not a pleasant topic, but an important one. Sadly, it's only when people are face to face with a fatal illness that they start thinking about these issues, and often by that point it's too late to get fully prepared. Although today's conference centers around what medicine can do for AIDS, we shouldn't be complacent. Even if AIDS or its adventitious infections don't get you, something else will, so it's best to be prepared, to practice the skills you'll need when medicine — Chinese, Western or whatever — can no longer help you, and you're on your own. As far as I've been able to determine, the only way to develop these skills is to train the mind. At the same time, if you are caring for someone with a fatal disease, meditation offers you one of the best ways to restore your own spiritual and emotional batteries so that you can keep going even when things are tough.

A lot has appeared in the media — books, newspapers, magazines, TV — about the role of meditation in treating illness and emotional burnout. As usually happens when the media get hold of a topic, they have tended to over- or under-estimate what meditation is and what it can do for you. This is typical of the media. Listening to them is like listening to a car salesman. He doesn't have to know how to drive the car or care for it. His only responsibility is to point out its selling points, what he thinks he can get you to believe and shell out your money for. But if you're actually going to drive the car, you have to study the owner's manual. So that's what I'd like to present today: a user's manual for meditation to help you when the chips are down.

I've had a fair amount of first-hand experience in this area. The year before I left Thailand I was stricken with malaria — a very different sort of disease from AIDS, but still the number one killer in the world. At present, every year, more people die of malaria than any other disease, this in spite of the massive WHO campaign to wipe it out back in the 60's. Huge supplies of chloroquine were handed out to Third World villagers. Swamps and homes were sprayed with lethal doses of DDT to kill off the mosquitoes. But now new strains of the malaria parasite have developed for which Western medicine has no cure, the mosquitoes have become resistant to DDT, and the malaria death rate is back on the rise. Remember this when you think of pinning your hopes on NIH or the Salk Institute to come up with a cure or vaccine for AIDS.

I was fortunate. As you can see, I survived, but only after turning to traditional medicine when the best treatment that tropical disease specialists could offer me failed. At the same time, while I was sick I was able to fall back on the meditation I had been practicing for the past several years to help get me through the worst bouts of pain and disorientation. This is what convinced me of its value in cases like this.

In addition to my own experience, I've been acquainted with a number of meditators both here and in Thailand who have had to live with cancer and other serious illnesses, and from them I have learned how the meditation helped them to handle both the illness and the cures — which are often more dreadful than the cancer itself. I'll be drawing on their experiences in the course of this talk.

But first I'd like us all to sit in meditation for a few minutes, so that you can have a firsthand taste of what I'm talking about, and so you can have a little practical experience to build on when you go back home.

The technique I'll be teaching is breath meditation. It's a good topic no matter what your religious background. As my teacher once said, the breath doesn't belong to Buddhism or Christianity or anyone at all. It's common property that anyone can meditate on. At the same time, of all the meditation topics there are, it's probably the most beneficial to the body, for when we're dealing with the breath, we're dealing not only with the air coming in and out of the lungs, but also with all the feelings of energy that course throughout the body with each breath. If you can learn to become sensitive to these feelings, and let them flow smoothly and unobstructed, you can help the body function more easily, and give the mind a handle for dealing with pain.

So let's all meditate for a few minutes. Sit comfortably erect, in a balanced position. You don't have to be ramrod straight like a soldier. Just try not to lean forward or back, to the left or the right. Close your eyes and say to yourself, 'May I be truly happy and free from suffering.' This may sound like a strange, even selfish, way to start meditating, but there are good reasons for it. One, if you can't wish for your own happiness, there is no way that you can honestly wish for the happiness of others. Some people need to remind themselves constantly that they deserve happiness — we all deserve it, but if we don't believe it, we will constantly find ways to punish ourselves, and we will end up punishing others in subtle or blatant ways as well.

Two, it's important to reflect on what true happiness is and where it can be found. A moment's reflection will show that you can't find it in the past or the future. The past is gone and your memory of it is undependable. The future is a blank uncertainty. So the only place we can really find happiness is in the present. But even here you have to know where to look. If you try to base your happiness on things that change — sights, sounds, sensations in general, people and things outside — you're setting yourself up for disappointment, like building your house on a cliff where there have been repeated landslides in the past. So true happiness has to be sought within. Meditation is thus like a treasure hunt: to find what has solid and unchanging worth in the mind, something that even death cannot touch.

To find this treasure we need tools. The first tool is to do what we're doing right now: to develop good will for ourselves. The second is to spread that good will to other living beings. Tell yourself: 'All living beings, no matter who they are, no matter what they have done to you in the past — may they all find true happiness too.' If you don't cultivate this thought, and instead carry grudges into your meditation, that's all you'll be able to see when you look inside.

Only when you have cleared the mind in this way, and set outside matters aside, are you ready to focus on the breath. Bring your attention to the sensation of breathing. Breathe in long and out long for a couple of times, focusing on any spot in the body where the breathing is easy to notice, and your mind feels comfortable focusing. This could be at the nose, at the chest, at the abdomen, or any spot at all. Stay with that spot, noticing how it feels as you breathe in and out. Don't force the breath, or bear down too heavily with your focus. Let the breath flow naturally, and simply keep track of how it feels. Savor it, as if it were an exquisite sensation you wanted to prolong. If your mind wanders off, simply bring it back. Don't get discouraged. If it wanders 100 times, bring it back 100 times. Show it that you mean business, and eventually it will listen to you.

If you want, you can experiment with different kinds of breathing. If long breathing feels comfortable, stick with it. If it doesn't, change it to whatever rhythm feels soothing to the body. You can try short breathing, fast breathing, slow breathing, deep breathing, shallow breathing — whatever feels most comfortable to you right now...

Once you have the breath comfortable at your chosen spot, move your attention to notice how the breathing feels in other parts of the body. Start by focusing on the area just below your navel. Breathe in and out, and notice how that area feels. If you don't feel any motion there, just be aware of the fact that there's no motion. If you do feel motion, notice the quality of the motion, to see if the breathing feels uneven there, or if there's any tension or tightness . If there's tension, think of relaxing it. If the breathing feels jagged or uneven, think of smoothing it out... Now move your attention over to the right of that spot — to the lower right-hand corner of the abdomen — and repeat the same process... Then over to the lower left-hand corner of the abdomen... Then up to the navel... right... left... to the solar plexus... right... left... the middle of the chest... right... left... to the base of the throat... right... left... to the middle of the head... [take several minutes for each spot]

If you were meditating at home, you could continue this process through your entire body — over the head, down the back, out the arms & legs to the tips of your finger & toes — but since our time is limited, I'll ask you to return your focus now to any one of the spots we've already covered. Let your attention settle comfortably there, and then let your conscious awareness spread to fill the entire body, from the head down to the toes, so that you're like a spider sitting in the middle of a web: It's sitting in one spot, but it's sensitive to the entire web. Keep your awareness expanded like this — you have to work at this, for its tendency will be to shrink to a single spot — and think of the breath coming in & out your entire body, through every pore. Let your awareness simply stay right there for a while — there's no where else you have to go, nothing else you have to think about... And then gently come out of meditation.

After my talk we'll have time to answer any questions you may have, but right now I'd like to return to a point I made earlier: the ways meditation and its role in dealing with illness and death tend to be under and over-estimated, for only when you have a proper estimation of your tools can you put them to use in a precise and beneficial way. I'll divide my remarks into two areas: what meditation is, and what it can do for you.

First, what meditation is: This is an area where popular conceptions tend to under-estimate it. Books that deal with meditation in treating illness tend to focus on only two aspects of meditation as if that were all it had to offer. Those two aspects are relaxation and visualization. It's true that these two processes form the beginning stages of meditation — you probably found our session just now very relaxing, and may have done some visualization when you thought of the breath coursing through the body — but there's more to meditation than just that. The great meditators in human history did more than simply master the relaxation response.

Meditation as a complete process involves three steps. The first is mindful relaxation, making the mind comfortable in the present — for only when it feels comfortable in the present can it settle down and stay there. The important word in this description, though, is mindful. You have to be fully aware of what you're doing, of whether or not the mind is staying with its object, and of whether or not it's drifting off to sleep. If you simply relax and drift off, that's not meditation, and there's nothing you can build on it. If, however, you can remain fully aware as the mind settles comfortably into the present, that develops into the next step.

As the mind settles more and more solidly into the present, it gains strength. You feel as if all the scattered fragments of your attention — worrying about this, remembering that, anticipating, whatever — come gathering together and the mind takes on a sense of wholeness and unification. This gives the mind a sense of power. As you let this sense of wholeness develop, you find that it becomes more and more solid in all your activities, regardless of whether you're formally meditating or not, and this is what leads to the third step.

As you become more and more single-minded in protecting this sense of wholeness, you become more and more sensitive, and gain more and more insight into the things that can knock it off balance. On the first level, you notice that if you do anything hurtful to yourself or others, that destroys it. Then you start noticing how the simple occurrence in the mind of such things as greed, lust, anger, delusion and fear can also knock it off balance. You begin to discern ways to reduce the power that these things have over the mind, until you can reach a level of awareness that is untouched by these things — or by anything at all — and you can be free from them.

As I will show in a few moments, it's these higher stages in meditation that can be the most beneficial. If you practice meditation simply as a form of relaxation, that's okay for dealing with the element of your disease that comes from stress, but there's a lot more going on in AIDS, physically and mentally, than simply stress, and if you limit yourself to relaxation or visualization, you're not getting the full benefits that meditation has to offer.

Now we come to the topic of what meditation can do for you as you face serious illness and death. This is an area where the media engage both in over-estimation and under-estimation. On the one hand, there are books that tell you that all illness comes from your mind, and you simply have to straighten out your mind and you'll get well. Once a young woman, about 24, suffering from lung cancer, came to visit my monastery, and she asked me what I thought of these books. I told her that there are some cases where illness comes from purely mental causes, in which case meditation can cure it, but there are also cases where it comes from physical causes, and no amount of meditation can make it go away. If you believe in karma, there are some diseases that come from present karma — your state of mind right now — and others that come from past karma. If it's a present-karma disease, meditation might be able to make it go away. If it's a past-karma disease, the most you can hope from meditation is that it can help you live with the illness and pain without suffering from it.

At the same time, if you tell ill people that they are suffering because their minds are in bad shape, and that it's entirely up to them to straighten out their minds if they want to get well, you're laying an awfully heavy burden on them, right at the time when they're feeling weak, miserable, helpless and abandoned to begin with. When I came to this point, the woman smiled and said that she agreed with me. As soon as she had been diagnosed with cancer, her friends had given her a whole slew of books on how to will illness away, and she said that if she had believed in book-burning she would have burned them all by now. I personally know a lot of people who believe that the state of their health is an indication of their state of mind, which is fine and good when they're feeling well. As soon as they get sick, though, they feel that it's a sign that they're failures in meditation, and this sets them into a tailspin.

You should be very clear on one point: The purpose of meditation is to find happiness and well-being within the mind, independent of the body or other things going on outside. Your aim is to find something solid within that you can depend on no matter what happens to the body. If it so happens that through your meditation you are able to effect a physical cure, that's all fine and good, and there have been many cases where meditation can have a remarkable effect on the body. My teacher had a student — a woman in her fifties — who was diagnosed with cancer more than 15 years ago. The doctors at the time gave her only a few months to live, and yet through her practice of meditation she is still alive today. She focused her practice on the theme that, 'although her body may be sick, her mind doesn't have to be.' A few years ago I visited her in the hospital the day after she had had a kidney removed. She was sitting up in bed, bright and aware, as if nothing happened at all. I asked her if there was any pain, and she said yes, 24 hours a day, but that she didn't let it make inroads on her mind. In fact, she was taking her illness much better than her husband, who didn't meditate, and who was so concerned about the possibility of losing her that he became ill, and she had to take care of him.

Cases like this are by no means guaranteed, though, and you shouldn't really content yourself just with physical survival — for as I said earlier, if this disease doesn't get you, something else will, and you're not really safe until you've found the treasure in the mind that is unaffected even by death. Remember that your most precious possession is your mind. If you can keep it in good shape no matter what else happens around you, then you have lost nothing, for your body goes only as far as death, but your mind goes beyond it.

So in examining what meditation can do for you, you should focus more on how it can help you to maintain your peace of mind in the face of pain, aging, illness and death, for these are things you're going to have to face someday no matter what. Actually, they are a normal part of life, although we have come to regard them as abnormalities. We've been taught that our birthright is eternal youth, health and beauty. When these things betray us, we feel that something is horribly wrong, and that someone is at fault — either ourselves or others. Actually, though, there's no one at fault. Once we are born, there is no way that aging, illness and death can't happen. Only when we accept them as inevitable can we begin to deal with them intelligently in such a way that we won't suffer from them. Look around you. The people who try hardest to deny their aging — through exercise, diet, surgery, makeup, whatever — they are the ones who suffer most from aging. The same holds true with illness and death.

So now I would like to focus on how to use meditation to face these things and transcend them. First, pain. When it happens, you first have to accept that it's there. This in itself is a major step, since most people, when they encounter pain, try to deny it its right to exist. They think they can avoid it by pushing it away, but that's like trying to avoid paying taxes by throwing away your tax return: You may get away with it for a little while, but then the authorities are bound to catch on, and you'll be worse off than you were before. So the way to transcend pain is first to understand it, to get acquainted with it, and this means enduring it. However, meditation can offer a way of detaching yourself from the pain while you are living with it, so even though it's there, you don't have to suffer from it.

First, if you master the technique of focusing on the breath and adjusting it so that it's comfortable, you find that you can choose where to focus your awareness in the body. If you want, you can focus it on the pain, but in the earlier stages its best to focus on the parts of the body that are comfortable. Let the pain have the other part. You're not going to drive it out, but at the same time you don't have to move in with it. Simply regard it as a fact of nature, an event that is happening, but not necessarily happening to you.

Another technique is to breathe through the pain. If you can become sensitive to the breath sensations that course through the body each time you breathe, you will notice that you tend to build a tense shell around the pain, where the energy in the body doesn't flow freely. This, although it's a kind of avoidance technique, actually increases the pain. So think of the breath flowing right through the pain as you breathe in and out, to dissolve away this shell of tension. In most cases, you will find that this can relieve the pain considerably. For instance, when I had malaria, I found this very useful in relieving the mass of tension that would gather in my head and shoulders. At times it would get so great that I could scarcely breath, so I just thought of the breath coming in through all the nerve centers in my body — the middle of the chest, the throat, the middle of the forehead and so forth — and the tension would dissolve away. However, there are some people though who find that breathing through the pain increases the pain, which is a sign that they are focusing improperly. The solution in that case is to focus on the opposite side of the body. In other words, if the pain is in the right side, focus on the left. If it's in front, focus on the back. If it's in your head — literally — focus on your hands and feet. (This technique works particularly well with migraine, by the way: If, for example, your migraine is on the right side, focus on the breath sensations the left side of your body, from the neck on down.)

As your powers of concentration become stronger and more settled, you can begin analyzing the pain. The first step is to divide it into its physical and mental components. Distinguish between the actual physical pain, and the mental pain that comes along with it: The sense of being persecuted — justly or unjustly — the fear that the pain may grow stronger or signal the end, whatever. Then remind yourself that you don't have to side with those thoughts. If the mind is going to think them, you don't have to fall in with them. Then, when you stop feeding them, you'll find that after a while they'll begin to go away, just like a crazy person coming to talk with you. If you talk with the crazy person, after a while you'll go crazy too. If however, you let the crazy person chatter away, but don't join in the conversation, after a while the crazy person will leave you alone. It's the same with all the garbage thoughts in your mind.

As you strip away all the mental paraphernalia surrounding your pain — including the idea that the pain is yours or is happening to you — you find that you finally come down to the label that simply says, This is a pain and it's right there. When you can get past this, that's when your meditation undergoes a breakthrough. One way is to simply notice that this label will arise and then pass away. When it comes, it increases the pain. When it goes, the pain subsides. Then try to see that the body, the pain and your awareness are all three separate things — like three pieces of string that have been tied into a knot, but which you now untie. When you can do this, you find that there is no pain that you cannot endure.

Another area where meditation can help you is to live with the simple fact of your body being ill. For some people, accepting this fact is one of the hardest parts of illness. But once you have developed a solid center in your mind, you can base your happiness there, and begin to view illness with a lot more equanimity. We have to remember that illness is not cheating us out of any-thing. It's simply a part of life. As I said earlier, illness is normal; health is miracle. The idea of all the complex systems of the body functioning properly is so improbable that we shouldn't be surprised when they start breaking down.

Many people complain that the hardest part of living with a disease like AIDS or cancer is the feeling that they have lost control over their bodies, but once you gain more control over you mind, you begin to see that the control you thought you had over you body was illusory in the first place. The body has never entered into an agreement with you that it would do as you liked. You simply moved in, forced it to eat, walk, talk, etc., and then thought you were in charge. But even then it kept on doing as it liked — getting hungry, urinating, defecating, passing wind, falling down, getting injured, getting sick, growing old. When you reflect on the people who think they have the most control over their bodies, like bodybuilders, they're really the most enslaved, having to eat enough each day to keep ten Somalians alive, having to push and pull on metal bars for hours, expending all their energy on exercises that don't go anywhere at all. If they don't, their pumped-up bodies will deflate in no time flat.

So an important function of meditation — in giving you a solid center that provides you a vantage point from which to view life in its true colors — is that it keeps you from feeling threatened or surprised when the body begins to reassert its independence. Even if the brain starts to malfunction, the people who have developed mindfulness through meditation can be aware of the fact, and let go of that part of their bodies too. One of my teacher's students had to undergo heart surgery, and apparently the doctors cut off one of the main arteries going to his brain. When he came to, he could tell that his brain wasn't working right, and it wasn't long before he realized that it was affecting his perception of things. For instance, he would think that he had said something to his wife, would get upset when she didn't respond, when actually he had only thought of what he wanted to say without really saying anything at all. When he realized what was happening, he was able to muster enough mindfulness to keep calm and simply watch what was going on in his brain, reminding himself that it was a tool that wasn't working quite right, and not getting upset when things didn't jive. Gradually he was able to regain his normal use of his faculties, and as he told me, it was fascinating to be able to observe the functioning and malfunctioning of his brain, and to realize that the brain and the mind were two separate things.

And finally we come to the topic of death. As I said earlier, one of the important stages of meditation is when you discover within the mind a knowing core that does not die at the death of the body. If you can reach this point in your meditation, then death poses no problem at all. Even if you haven't reached that point, you can prepare yourself for death in such a way that you can die skillfully, and not in the messy way that most people die.

When death comes, all sorts of thoughts are going to come crowding into your mind — regret about things you haven't yet been able to do, regret about things you did do, memories of people you have loved and will have to leave. I was once almost electrocuted, and although people who saw it happening said that it was only a few seconds before the current was cut off, to me it felt like five minutes. Many things went through my mind in that period, beginning with the thought that I was going to die of my own stupidity. Then I made up my mind that, if the time had come to go, I'd better do it right, so I didn't let my mind fasten on any of the feelings of regret, etc., that came flooding through the mind. I seemed to be doing OK, and then the current ceased.

If you haven't been practicing meditation, this sort of experience can be overwhelming, and the mind will latch on to whatever offers itself and then will get carried away in that direction. If, though, you have practiced meditation, becoming skillful at letting go of your thoughts, or knowing which thoughts to hang onto and which ones to let pass, you'll be able to handle the situation, refusing to fall in line with any mental states that aren't of the highest quality. If your concentration is firm, you can make this the ultimate test of the skill you have been developing. If there's pain, you can see which will disappear first: the pain or the core of your awareness. You can rest assured that no matter what, the pain will go first, for that core of awareness cannot die.

What all this boils down to is that, as long as you are able to survive, meditation will improve the quality of your life, so that you can view pain and illness with equanimity and learn from them. When the time comes to go, when the doctors have to throw up their hands in helplessness, the skill you have been developing in your meditation is the one thing that won't abandon you. It will enable to handle your death with finesse. Even though we don't like to think about it, death is going to come no matter what, so we should learn how to stare it down. Remember that a death well handled is one of the surest signs of a life well lived.

So far I've been confining my remarks to the problems faced by people with AIDS and other life threatening illnesses, and haven't directly addressed the problems of people caring for them. Still, you should have been able to gather some useful points for handling such problems. Meditation offers you a place to rest and gather your energies. It also can help give you the detachment to view your role in the proper light. When an ill person relapses or dies, it's not a sign of failure on the part of the people caring for him. Your duty, as long as your patient is able to survive, is to do what you can to improve the quality of his/her life. When the time comes for the patient to go, your duty is to help improve the quality of his death.

An old man who had been meditating for many years once came to say farewell to my teacher soon after he had learned that he had an advanced case of cancer. His plan was to go home and die, but my teacher told him to stay and die in the monastery. If he went home, he would hear nothing but his nieces and nephews arguing over the inheritance, and it would put him in a bad frame of mind. So we arranged a place for him to stay, and had his daughter, who was also a meditator, look after him. It wasn't long before his body systems started breaking down, and on occasion it looked like the pain was beginning to overwhelm him, so I had his daughter whisper meditation instructions into his ear, and to chant his favorite Buddhist chants by his bedside. This had a calming effect on him, and when he did die — at 2 a.m. one night — he seemed calm and fully aware. As the daughter told me the next morning, she didn't feel any sadness or regret, for she had done her very best to make his death as smooth a transition as possible.

If you can have a situation where both the patient and the caregiver are meditators, it makes things a lot easier on both sides, and the death of the patient does not necessarily have to mean the death of the caregiver's ability to care for anyone else.

That covers the topics I wanted to deal with. I'm afraid that some of you will find my remarks somewhat downbeat, but my purpose has been to help you look clearly at the situation facing you, either as an ill person or as someone caring for one. If you avoid taking a good, hard look at things like pain and death, they can only make you suffer more, since you've refused to prepare yourself for them. Only when you see them clearly, get a strong sense of what's important and what's not, and hold firmly to your priorities: only then can you transcend them.

Many people find that the diagnosis of a fatal illness enables them to look at life clearly for the first time, to get some sense of what their true priorities are. This in itself can make a radical improvement in the quality of their lives — its simply a shame that they had to wait to this point to see things clearly. But whatever your situation, I ask that you try to make the most of it in terms of improving the state of your mind, for when all else leaves you, that will stay. If you haven't invested your time in developing it, it won't have much to offer you in return. If you've trained it and cared for it well, it will repay you many times over. And, as I hope I have shown, meditation has much to offer as a tool in helping you to solidify your state of mind and enable it to transcend everything else that may come its way.

Thank you for your attention.

Thanissaro Bhikkhu
(Geoffrey DeGraff)
Metta Forest Monastery
Valley Center, CA 92082-1409

Lorenz, "Father of Chaos Theory" died at 90

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 01:58:25 PDT

Edward Lorenz, Professor at MIT died, he was 90. Lorenz, a meteorologist, was known for many of his contributions in Chaos theory, hence nicknamed "the father of Chaos theory".

Among some of his famous findings which have now become popular were:

1. Discovery of deterministic chaos: " His discovery of "deterministic chaos" brought about "one of the most dramatic changes in mankind's view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton," said the committee that awarded Lorenz the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences. It was one of many scientific awards that Lorenz won." (physorg.com)

2. Lorenz attractor is a relatively simple attractor with complex behavior. This becomes the typical characteristic of chaos, complexity out of simplicity. (see image from "The Lorenz Attractor in 3D", the site has many other images of the Lorenz attractor)

3. Butterfly effect, the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes, is illustrated by of the Lorenz attractor, see a Java animation here. The butterfly was originally a seagull, here is the story:

In a paper in 1963 given to the New York Academy of Sciences he remarks:

One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull's wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.

By the time of his talk at the December 1972 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. the sea gull had evolved into the more poetic butterfly - the title of his talk was^* Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?

4. Every day things are chaotic, chaos leads to creativity and life. The "edge of chaos" is where creativity "happens".

Lorenz's discovery shocked the scientific world. Chaotic systems soon began to be recognised in all branches of science. As mathematicians started to unravel its mysteries, science reeled before the implications of an uncertain world intricately bound up with chance. The human heartbeat is chaotic, the stock market, the solar system and of course the weather. In fact the more we learn about chaos the more closely it seems to be bound up with nature. Fractal structures seem to be everywhere we look: in ferns, cauliflowers, the coral reef, kidneys… Rather than turn its back on chaos, nature appears to use it and science is beginning to do the same.

Recently mathematicians have shown that you can control chaos. For instance here in the Mathematics and Physics Departments at The University of Queensland theoretical and experimental work with lasers shows that the rich structure inherent in chaos can be harnessed to expand the capabilities of lasers. Perhaps in the future single systems, which are capable of multi-tasking, such as the brain, will be modelled by chaotic systems. We still have a lot to learn about how nature uses chaos, but perhaps unpredictable behaviour is not undesirable.

As Henry Adams said "Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit" (maths.uq.edu.au)

Dalai Lama reiterates resignation threat over Tibet

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:45:18 PDT

The Buddhist Channel reported the reiteration of The Dalai Lama's threat to resign (as Dalai Lama) if violence in Tibet spiraled out of control.

He also makes it clear that he is not seeking independence for Tibet and that he supports the Olympics.

"The whole world knows the Dalai Lama is not seeking independence or separation," the Dalai Lama said. "If violence become out of control, then my only option is resign - I want to repeat that.

"If the majority of people commit violently, then I will resign."

His position is to make it clear that he is concerned with the human condition of the Tibetan people, but distancing himself from the practical politics of some groups seeking independence for Tibet, and from the radical groups of people who are willing to use violence.

Related:

Gartner warns Microsoft Windows is Collapsing

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 05:00:32 PDT

Gartner analysts warn that Windows is collapsing.

Earlier, Microsoft announced that Windows XP is dead, see "Thank You Microsoft for Prematurely Killing Windows XP" which was worrying people who still do not want to upgrade to Vista. The benefits of Vista are not enough to make an upgrade. In fact Vista is slower than Windows XP ("Testing Shows XP Still Outperforms Vista").

I think Windows XP and Windows NT, along with DOS, were the popular and widely used Microsoft operating systems for a relatively long period of time. Windows XP is said to be the most popular operating system.

The trouble with Vista is it is becoming too complex and yet do not offer much more than Windows XP. As Gartner says, ” Among Microsoft's problems, the pair [Gartner analysts] said, is Windows' rapidly-expanding code base, which makes it virtually impossible to quickly craft a new version with meaningful changes. That was proved by Vista, they said, when Microsoft -- frustrated by lack of progress during the five-year development effort on the new operating -- hit the "reset" button and dropped back to the more stable code of Windows Server 2003 as the foundation of Vista.

Related: Vista is Slower, But XP Is Still Dying

Google AppEngine Makes Web Application Development Painless

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:38:57 PDT

For web developers, the launch of Google AppEngine is a very significant event.

AppEngine has the mission to make the web applications easy to develop, easy to scale, and easy (free now pay later?) to host.
You need to register to try it, but you can't do it now, because the number of registered users has within a few hours exceeded the limit. However you can download the AppEngine SDK, and develop web applications locally on your own computer.
The whole SDK is less than 2.5 M. In addition you must have Python 2.5.2, which can be downloaded from www.python.org

Summary of Features

1. Google AppEngine can be thought of as a lightweight substitute for the XAMPP ( Linux/Windows - Apache - MySql - Php -Perl/Python) stack. It is much smaller, less than 2.5M plus Python 2.5.2 which is about 11M. You don't need to make any setups.

2. Python has been chosen as the primary language. The AppEngine is written in Python, and the Python runtime is the main component of the system. This is not surprising given the long relationship between Google and Python. Guido van Rossum, the inventor of Python was hired by Google in 2005.
Incidentally Python was the most popular programming language in 2007.
In contrast, Google Web Toolkit (GWT) server-side is Java, with JavaScript front-end.

There are plans for using other programming languages, in addition to Python, for the AppEngine in the future.

3. The web server is a small program called dev_appserver, it is partly compiled Python.

4. The database is revolutionary, it is called the Google DataStore, it is a schema-less object database, distributed and scalable used by Google itself for some of its large data bases. It is based on Google's GFS (Google File System) and BigTable technologies.
It is not a relational database, has no join operations. Tables need to have index files reminiscent of the old databases. It is supposed to be efficient.
Users can access data using a SQL like query, called GQL.

5. All applications need to be configure by yaml text files.

6. There are currently ready to use API's: Users and Google account authentication with CAPTCHA, Administration console, Mail, Datastore, Web App Framework Django, URL fetch and webservices

7. Once you are registered with Google AppEngine, you can host your application at Google. For the moment it is free, in the future, I guess there would be free limited versions, and paid with more features version.

Related:

Perel'man more dangerous than Osama bin Laden

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:02:50 PDT

Here is a quiz: Who looks like Rasputin, said to be the smartest mathematician on planet, solved the century old Poincare conjecture, refused the Fields Medal (the equivalent of a Nobel prize for mathematics) and the $1 million Clay prize, and has now given up mathematics?

The answer is Grigori Perel'man, born 1966 in St Petersburg (Leningrad).

The proof itself has been widely hailed, "In a speech at a conference in Beijing this summer, Shing-Tung Yau of Harvard said the understanding of three-dimensional space brought about by Poincaré’s conjecture could be one of the major pillars of math in the 21st century."

Now people are wondering why he refused both the prestigious Fields Medal and the $1 million dollar Clay prize. It is becoming a big puzzle. Speculations abound.

If you like the humorous side of the matter, please watch the 2 Youtube videos, "Life After Poincare: Grigori Perelman".
The story goes like this:
After giving up mathematics, Perel'man got bored, work in a doughnut shop (making use of his topology specialty), but he does not want to be paid, and unfortunately (for his boss) gives away the doughnuts for free. He then tried to be work in magic, to make use of his knowledge of wormholes, but he got disgusted when he saw that magicians work with tricks.
Then he met Sylvia Nasar (author of A Beautiful Mind) and Russell Crowe, who played the role of John Nash in the film. He got persuaded, but later he made Russell Crowe disappear into a wormhole, and was branded more dangerous than Osama bin Laden by Bush and the British.

Links:

Difference between Myanmar and Tibet

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 04:34:01 PDT

The protests in Myanmar were peaceful. In contrast the Tibetans were rioting with a lot of violence resulting in considerable damages and lost of lives.

The Tibetans may claim to be followers of the Dalai Lama, but the Dalai Lama has always preached non-violence. He has never called for Tibetan cessation from China. His concern is for the preservation of Tibetan culture and traditions.

Here is what Phallop Thaiarry, secretary-general of the World Fellowship of Buddhists has to say:
"The monks who participated in the recent Lhasa riot should go back to the monasteries and restudy the doctrines of Buddhism,"
"Buddha taught us to show respect for people, live in harmony and conduct no violence," he said. "But I learnt from the media that some people in monk gowns smashed property, hurt people and burned buildings, which is not in conformity with the Buddhist commandments."

He believed "the majority of Tibetan monks strictly followed Buddhist doctrines, and only a few misunderstood and misused their identity during the riot."

New Findings on Loving Kindness Meditation

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:24:22 PDT

Benefits of meditation have often been reported, see e.g. Meditation increases grey matter in right hemisphere of the brain.

Benefits range from concentration, stress reduction, to increases in the brain's grey matter.

These results have been associated mostly with Vipassana or mindfulness meditation.

For Metta Bhavana (Loving Kindness Meditation) no such study has been made until recently, a group of neuro-scientists wrote a paper " Regulation of the Neural Circuitry of Emotion by Compassion Meditation: Effects of Meditative Expertise"

They used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques to show increase activity in insula due to meditation training.

The result was also reported in the Scientific American article "Meditate on This: You Can Learn to Be More Compassionate"

It indicates that it might be possible for compassion and loving-kindness to be learned. Buddhists have always believe that we can develop our mental faculties, including compassion, like we build our muscles.

Metta Bhavana is one of the cornerstones of Buddhist meditation, in the Theravada and the Mahayana traditions. It complements Samatha and Vipassana meditation. Samatha aims at tranquility and leads to Jhanas, Vipassana leads to Insight and Purification. Metta Bhavana tenderizes the heart and develops good-will, it can be practiced separately or together with the other types of meditation. Many schools teach all three types of meditation.

Some Guided Metta meditation tapes:

Loving-kindness Meditation - Ven. Pannyavaro: loving1.mp3 714 KB Instruction, loving2.mp3 482 KB A Guided Meditation

Guided Meditations with Malcolm Huxter: [31,293 KB] Guided Loving-kindness Meditation

Gil Fronsdal Guided Meta Meditation

Meta Meditation by Thubten Chodron in rm format

The Mandelbort Set Was a Discovery of a 13th Century Monk

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:43:07 PDT

A retired Math Professor at Harvard University Schipke discovered that the Mandelbrot Set, named after Benoit Mandelbrot, who until now is recognized as the discoverer of the fractal object in 1976 when he was working at IBM, was actually discovered in the 13th century by a mediaeval Benedictine monk, Udo of Aachen. Udo is now nicknamed the Mandelbrot Monk.

On a holiday visit to Aachen cathedral, the burial place of Charlemagne, Schipke saw something that amazed him. In a tiny nativity scene illuminating the manuscript of a 13th century carol, O froehliche Weihnacht, he noticed that the Star of Bethlehem looked odd. On examining it in detail, he saw that the gilded image seemed to be a representation of the Mandelbrot set, one of the icons of the computer age.

Udo's original motivation for the fractal was to calculate who would go to heaven. In so doing he came up with an iteration z -> z*z + c in the complex plane.

Related:

Fractal FAQ
Schipke, R.J. and Eberhardt, A. "The forgotten genius of Udo von Aachen", Harvard Journal of Historical Mathematics, 32, 3 (March 1999), pp 34-77.

An Introduction to Hurst Exponent

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Tue, 12 May 2009 06:05:47 PDT

As an example of an application of Mathematics to finance, we will look at Hurst exponents, omitting the technical details.

Given a time series, the Hurst exponent (H) of the mathematical object is a single number between 0 and 1. What can a single number tell us about the series?
It can be interpreted in many ways, one of them is that it measures the jaggedness or smoothness of the series.
It helps us classify time series. For example, one of the basic questions, is whether a time series is purely random (a random walk or Brownian movement) or not.
Many people have suggested that financial data such as stock prices are random, Hurst exponent helps explain that it is not.

H = 1/2 is a random walk with no memory of past states, H between 1/2 and 1 is a persistent time series, where the series has long term memory, and H between 0 and 1/2 is an anti-persistent time series (the persistence works in a negative way). A mean reverting series for example is anti-persistent, but the converse is not always true. In common parlance, "what goes up must come down, and vice versa" applies to reverting series.

Geometrically, anti-persistent series are more jagged than a random walk. Persistent series are smoother than a random walk.

In the extreme case of H very close to 0, the series is almost like a space filling curve.
If H is close to 1, the series is a single line (can be broken and curved).

From this, we can understand that H is also measuring the fractal dimension D. The relation can be shown to be

D = 2 - H

H is also related to the color of noise, white noise has H=1/2, brown noise H=0, and pink noise has H between 0 and 1/2 (incorrect, see comments below) .

H was first introduced by H.E. Hurst, a hydrologist who studied data of river overflows of the river Nile. He wanted to know whether the overflows occurs randomly or not. In so doing he had a wonderful idea, defining H by rescaling (or normalization).

Let the original series be x1, x2............ xn We divide the series into p buckets, each of size m, with n = m.p For each bucket, we calculate the mean and the standard deviation S.

For each bucket, define a new series y1, y2, ...yj.....ym, where yj is the cumulative sum of all (x - mean) from index 1 to j in the bucket.

Define R for the bucket as the largest minus the smallest yj. R will always be positive.
Then divide R by S: R/S. R/S is defined for each bucket 1,2, ...i,....p. Take the average of R/S for all buckets, called this the R/S for the bucket-size.

Now vary the bucket-size and calculate the corresponding R/S.

Hypothesize that (R/S) obeys a power law in the bucket size b, so that

(R/S)_b = c. b^H
with c a constant.

The Hurst exponent is the power in the power law relation above. When H = 1/2, we have Einstein's formula for Brownian movement.

To calculate or estimate H, take the log of the power law equation, and H becomes the slope of the line. The precise algorithm in C++ for estimating H can be found in here.

Some of the attraction of the Hurst exponent, is that it is related to many fields of Mathematics, fractals, chaos, wavelets, spectral analysis, statistics, etc. Accordingly there are many ways of estimating H, unfortunately they don't always give the same answer.

Hurst used the definition to investigate time series data from river discharges, tree rings, rainfalls, and others. He found they have H between 0.6 and 0.8 indicating persistent series with long term memory.

Edgar Peters introduced H into the financial world with his Fractal Market Hypothesis, see e.g. his book Fractal Market Analysis, applying chaos theory to investments and economics.
Peters applied H to stock and bond returns, forex exchange, and their volatilities.

Here is an example of a 5-day return of GBPUSD exchange rates:

I estimated H using Karagianis et.al. software called SELFIS

The result is H = 0.645:

The data uses 5-day returns, as it happens, longer day returns have more persistence than short term returns.

Despite its application to finance, Hurst exponent is not, perhaps to the disappointment of many, a forecasting tool, it shows theoretical predictability, but it is not a prediction method.

Open Source Mathematical Software

noreply@blogger.com (admin) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:01:15 PDT

The label open source is normally associated with software. Open source mathematics is mathematics done with the help of open source mathematical software.

David Joyner and William Stein argued in a American Mathematical Society publication, that mathematical proofs, like the proof of the Four Color problem, are sometimes very lengthy and involve use of mathematical software. Whereas ordinary mathematical proofs can readily be inspected by others using only paper and pencil, computer aided proofs can only be verified if the verifier has the same mathematical software (usually commercial products such as Wolfram's Mathematica and MathLab).
But who can guarantee that the mathematical software is correct and bug-free? If the mathematical software is open source then in principle anyone can also verify the correctness of the software.

William Stein created Sage (www.sagemath.org) with this in mind. It is not the first open source mathematical software, but probably the most extensive. It "can do anything from mapping a 12-dimensional object to calculating rainfall patterns under global warming."
Indeed it can be used for algebra, calculus, elementary to very advanced number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, commutative algebra, group theory, combinatorics, graph theory, and exact linear algebra.

Sage is written in Python, confirming yet again the versatility of the Python. It is browser based. It makes use of many other open source software including GAP, GNU Multi-Precision Library, GNU Scientific Library, Matplotlib, Maxima, Mwrank, NetworkX, NTL, Numerical Python, PARI, and Singular.

This is the strength and the weakness at the same time. To install Sage, you can choose to install Sage with all the dependencies, or you can have everything bundled as one package (VMWare on Windows). The VMWare package is 642M.

Here is an example of building a car using Sage:
Related: