Ahmed's Chunks

This blog is dead. Live update from new blog.

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 16:22:22 +0000

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Blog move

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 22:51:30 +0000

ANNOUNCEMENT

I have moved to http://ahmedschunks.blogspot.com/

Please note I will not be updating this blog anymore.

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Poll for all readers of my blog

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 23:28:27 +0000

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What ventures will live forever in Dubai? Lessons from the lavish King of Egypt circa 1870.

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:36:39 +0000

Consider this bit of news from Dubai (last night): "Grand opening of the new
$1.5bn marine-themed facility built off the Gulf coast on an artificial
island in the shape of a palm tree. Organisers claimed that the
fireworks display for the $20m party could be seen from space." The
grand ceremony featured some of the biggest names in showbiz.

Hold that thought.

Why hasn't anyone drawn a parallel between present-day Dubai and
mid-to-late ninteenth-century Egypt under Khedive Ismail? There is
probably a book in this!

Khedive Ismail was King of Egypt 1863-1879. Whereas it was his uncle
Said (whom he succeeded) who signed off the order to construct the Suez
Canal (an artificial canal linking the Red Sea to the Mediterranean
Sea), it was Ismail who bankrolled the project relentlessly and took it
as his flagship, the centerpiece of his vision for Egypt. Approximately
30,000 Egyptian workers died during the Canal's construction and it
costed more than a billion dollars by today's standards.

Khedive Ismail announced at the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal:
"Egypt henceforth ceases to be part of Africa, it is now part of
Europe." Having mixed with French, English and Italian aristocracy, such
was his ambition for Egypt. But sadly for him, within a few of years of
the opening ceremony, Egypt had become bankrupt. He was exiled, his son
succeeded him, and the British arrived. Egypt had not become part of
Europe; instead, Europe had come to Egypt - and not in a nice way!

The British were in Egypt to "protect" the Suez Canal; they more or less
dominated the country until 1952. Strictly speaking, it was not the
canal that bankrupted the country; it was Ismail's insistence on
borrowing in order to continue pursuing his lavish vision that did.

Before Ismail was thrown out, he was busy spending. He is considered
the architect of modern Cairo. He hired the best French and Italian
engineers and architects of the time to plan Downtown Cairo (now an
older-looking part of Cairo). He also got them to design palaces,
bridges, gardens, and public buildings. Ismail put in place great
economic openness, and Egypt became a hotspot for foreigners of many
nationalities, especially Europeans.

In that atmosphere, they competed to construct the buildings and
infrastructure that Ismail saw fitting for Egypt. The climax was the
grand opening ceremony of the Suez Canal, which featured the opera Aida,
a special composition that Khedive Ismail had commissioned from the
Italian composer, Verdi. The ceremony was spectacular by those days'
standards; Ismail paid for almost all the royal families of Europe and
the Mediterranean to travel to Egypt for the grand opening.

Ismail dreamed big, and he failed big. He could not even die in Egypt;
it was only years later that the royal family fulfilled his request to
be buried at home. They shipped his tomb over from Istanbul, Turkey
where he had been buried alongside the Ottoman royals.

I have lost you. What has this got to do with Dubai? Well, I know there
not that many parallels between Egypt of 1869 and present-day Dubai. The
contexts are different too. But I am sure someone out there can make a
good case for the few parallels there are. What strikes me are the
parallels of lavish spending, the desire to imitate by importing from
abroad, and the buy-in from various nationalities.

Let's get this straight: in Egypt, Ismail is mourned for his naiveness,
for having aspired just a little too much, but he is appreciated for the
beauty he brought to the country. His vision set the country in a good
direction. Most importantly, the Suez Canal remains to this day one of
his great achievements: it brings in about $3 billion a year in revenues.

I am sure that great good will come to Dubai from some of the projects
they have undertaken (just like the Suez Canal brought great good to
Egypt). However, I think the razzmatazz will come to nothing.

The question is: what projects will remain standing as good business
propositions long after the speculative bubble is gone? I don't have the
answers, I invite you to speculate with me!

See also:

Khedive Ismail entry on wikipedia

The Dubai desert dream: it's not all fireworks and Kylie

Khedive Ismail and Downtown Cairo

24 November Dubai's Grim Reality

Poll

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Malcolm Gladwell and the statistical basis of Outliers

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 02:25:53 +0000

Malcolm Gladwell promotes his book on Colbert. Go watch it.

Isn't it just wonderful how comedy can get to the nub of things and
throw thoughtful, serious people off-balance?

So, Malcolm Gladwell has published a new book: Outliers. It is
Gladwell's summary of, and meditation on, the large volumes of
research on the topic of extraordinary achievement. As usual, the
reviews marvel at his clear prose and credit him with making a tough
topic easy to understand.

Being quite a success story himself, people are getting tougher on
Gladwell. Part of his talent as a great writer is that he makes it
seem easy; lots of stuff is folded neatly in his sentences and
narrative. It takes some getting used to before you can attempt to
unravel his logic. Possibly the strongest criticism of Gladwell's
body of work (NYT, New Yorker, and the three books) is that he
simplifies too much.

I have not read the book! But he sure picks'em - the topics. From
the optimistic message of "Tipping Point", via the equally
optimistic "Blink", he now tackles a topic that has more or less
created the Self-Help movement: extraordinary success.

His message, as reported by the reviews, is again optimistic:
extraordinary success (outlier success) is a product of
highly-specific circumstances, and therefore there is an
awfully-large amount of talent out there that we should not
overlook because it does not act, look, or sound like "successful"
people do.

I once gave a research tutorial on my PhD topic: Data Clustering,
and in one of the feedback forms, I had this guy saying nice things
about my talk, except that because the subject of his PhD is
"Outliers" - he found my talk lacking in that respect. He wrote that
he wanted a "more solid treatment of the topic of Outliers". So,
take what I write below as totally un-solid.

In the field of Pattern Recognition, where my scientific training
has been, Outliers is a special topic. Pattern Recognition - for
those who need a small introduction - is a subject usually
classified under Computer Science that combines statistics and
computer algorithms for the purposes of learning models from data.
For example, you want a computer to learn someone's voice from a
number of his speech recordings for the purpose of recognising that
voice in new, unheard-before recordings. That's a typical pattern
recognition problem.

The fundamental assumption employed in these situations is that a
person's voice can be typified. Often, however, it is not. It varies
according to his stress level, background noise, time of day, etc.
And sometimes the voice that the computer thinks is his, is not, and
vice versa. Typically, the decision rests on whether a given voice
is within the margins of expectation of the voice we are trying to
recognise, or outside of it. Is it an outlier or not?

Thus, the topic of "Outliers" - an established sub-field of
statistics by itself - got linked-in to pattern recognition. I am
not an expert in Outliers - otherwise I would not have got that
comment from the student - but I know enough to know that it is
almost a philosophical question.

Something could be an outlier in one 'representation space' (just
think of 'space' for now) but very typical in another representation
space. For example, in one space - a courtroom (say) - a man could
be exceptionally important - the judge, but in another room - a
hospital waiting room - he is just another patient. Representation
spaces transform outliers into typicals, and vice versa.

Also, let's fix the representation space for now, just how much, how
far, do you go before you say something is an outlier? Maybe it is
noise (a random, unwanted artefact) and not an outlier.
Distinguishing between noise and outliers is a huge pain in the neck
for people in the field.

Another angle: maybe with more data, or in more time, the outliers
cluster around each other, which would mean they are not outliers
but actually a distinct but tiny cluster. Once something is part of
a cluster it is not an outlier.

To recap, the statistical definition of outliers is that they are
not noise, and they do not congregate in tiny clusters. When you
factor in that they are tricky to hunt down because they change
status from outlier to typical when the representation space is
changed, you realise how tough this problem of identifying outliers
is.

Malcolm Gladwell says that Bill Gates and Mozart are outliers. Why
aren't we saying they are noise? (Bill Gates is a random, unwanted
artefact!) And in what representation space are we working? Are we
measuring money, acclaim, extraordinary musical talent, what?

If we had more data, would Mozart still be an outlier, or would he
coalesce with Timbaland, Prince, Beethoven, and others into a
distinct, tiny cluster of "exquisite musicmanship"?

Still, I agree with Gladwell's fundamental message: there is an
awful lot of luck involved in success, and an awful lot of wasted
talent on earth. If Warren Buffet was born in Egypt, would he have
been as rich and as famous? I hope Malcolm Gladwell's book manages
to create a dent in how people assess the "potentially successful".
Amen. Yes sir, please.

Survey

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John Sergeant has dropped out of Strictly Come Dancing!

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:55:11 +0000

Here are the facts:

1. John Sergeant is a former BBC news correspondent. He was the
Downing Street correspondent during the last couple of years of
Margaret Thatcher's prime ministership. He was there at No 10 when
Thatcher resigned.

2. Strictly Come Dancing is another one of the many reality shows.
Most of prime-time TV these days seems to be reality shows.

3. I do not own a TV. (What for? Watch reality shows?) So, I am a
late follower of this story.

4. When he first appeared on the satirical programme "Have I Got
News For You", John Sergeant got himself a reputation as a gentleman
with a nice, dry sense of humour. In fact, it was rumoured he would
host the show at some point.

5. He was paired with expert Russian dancer Kristina Rihanoff. But
despite all her hard work, he was seen by the judges as one of the
worst dancers.

6. The public voted to keep him on several times. They liked him.

7. Things got to a head - and this is how I first found out about this
story - when one of the judges ridiculed Sergeant and said he did
not deserve to keep getting through; she said he was very lazy and
did not train half as much as the others. It was evident that the
judges were worried the public will insist on crowning him winner.

Finally, the latest twist: John Sergeant drops out of the show. At
5pm this evening, this bit of news had taken over the nation's
consciousness!

So, I watched the clip of him explaining why he dropped out. And if
ever I saw why the public adored him, it was now. He represents that
'magical' image of how the British people see themselves:
fair-minded, good-natured and humorous.

PS. Just who is John Sergeant?

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Why you should undergo ritual humiliation

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 02:36:25 +0000

This is an account of my fifth-ever judo session. see my previous entry
on learning to walk like a baby.

I went to my fifth Judo session after a week's break. I was
recovering from a 'discovered injury' - an injury that took a couple
of days to be felt. It seems I had pulled a muscle in my upper chest
area, above my heart (which is a muscle too - so what happens when
_it_ is torn slightly?). I did not go to see a doctor; I figured it
was an injury and time will sort it out. A cold came in too. So I
wasn't even sure if it was an injury or a really bad flu! I spent a
week living my usual low-activity life; then I pushed myself to go
to back to the one-hour session.

1. Why should you go to training when you're out of shape and out of
it?

To continue what you started. If you postpone for a couple more
sessions, going back will get harder and harder.

Our instructor on Saturdays likes to give us a good work-out. He
is also less tolerant of various forms of wuss behaviour. So, the
warm-up was particularly intense. We lugged random partners around
the dojo; did several rounds of push-ups; rolled, crawled, and got
ready to be mauled! But I was exhausted already.

This burst of intense physical activity (in fifteen minutes) really
just drained me: the injury felt bigger than it was. Besides, no one
had taught me the Judo-specific warm-up exercises we were doing, and
nothing puts you under more pressure than being the only one who
does not know how to do something.

2. Why should you carry on, when you already know you are very
tired?

To learn a few techniques. To test your physical fitness. To get
your money's worth! The moves you will train on are, after all, a
distillation of hundreds of years of fighting experience.

Our instructor called out for the (Japanese) names of certain
moves, and hardly anyone could answer. He demanded we memorise
the syllabus: names + steps. He didn't look like he was joking!

The next thing I know, a guy's sweaty buttocks were in my face. I
was flat on my back, and this guy was on top of me facing towards my
feet with his bum almost suffocating me. I found myself making an
anti-choke gasping sound. The instructor commended my partner:
"That's exactly how he should feel, excellent."

3. Why should you accept to have a man's sweaty ass in your
face? Isn't it enough that his entire weight is sitting on your
injured chest?

The answer is: To help him learn how to do the move properly.
Besides, when he's doing it right, you're not thinking "this is
disgusting", you're thinking "I want to breathe"! And also, it will
shortly be your turn to rub your sweaty ass into his nose.

When we started doing a new move (I don't know its name, I haven't
studied the syllabus yet), I felt scared. I just did not want to do
it. It involved throwing. And I had to try to throw my partner ten
times, and then my partner had to throw me ten times. My break-fall
technique is bad.

Sure enough, time and again, I fell badly, including one fall in
which I got very dizzy. The partners I trained with all told me to
relax; it seems they felt the tension in my body.

4. Why should you let yourself be shoved around and then thrown like
a sack of laundry over someone's back?

Because it is good for the ego! It is after all a very weakening feeling:
to feel you're not in control, to feel your body give way, to collapse -
it happens so quickly and you cannot stop it. And though it is scary and
quite unpleasant (especially when it is a good throw), you learn how to
break the fall, to lessen its impact.

A friend told me the other day: "it's something we've stopped doing
since our childhood, to fall." A grown man falling is good practice.

Substitute falling for failing (they are the 'same' somehow).
Shouldn't we all practice the art of failing?

Some nice clips Big hip throw in Judo

Knee sweep in Judo

Incidentally, my friend told me his friend was saved by break-fall
technique during a motorcycle accident.

Randori - fights - followed. And by this point I was so tired, out
of breath, and disorientated, I dropped out of them. I regretted the
decision minutes afterwards. The fights are a different realm by
comparison to training; half the people are not exceptionally good,
most of the white belts (lower grades) instinctively revert to the
resist-strength-with-strength mentality. So, the fights test
different skills: how do you handle yourself under pressure, how do
you apply what you've just learnt, how do you parry?

5. Why should you not drop out of fights when you are tired?

Because if you do, you are admitting you are scared, weak and
your morale is low, and whereas there is nothing wrong with being
scared and weak, stepping up raises your morale. You can step up and
channel your fear into playing defensively, channel your tiredness
into quick, precise moves. Step up, don't drop out!

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Our unreliable memories

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:53:33 +0000

When I was 13, I used to hang out a lot at a friend's house. The other
day, the same friend and I reminisced about those days. He asked me:
"Remember the dog?" I asked him: "What dog?" He replied: "My dog!"
I had absolutely no recollection of his dog!

Then, trying to get in the swing of things, I said: "oh hang on, yes,
yes, it was a brown dog wasn't it?" He laughed. "No, it was black, it
was a big black dog. Don't you remember?" he asked. I did not.

According to "Memory the Self-Justifying Historian", Chapter Three of
"Mistakes Were Made", my inability to remember the dog is not
surprising. Our minds forget selectively, all the time.

This post is part of a series - also mirrored on the Chaptets blog - in
which chapter-summaries (or chaptets) are serialised. The book I am
focusing on now is: Mistakes Were Made (but not by me).

By comparison to the previous chapter, I found this chapter immensely
interesting. Therefore, I am splitting my summary of it into two parts.

I should point out that my previous Chaptet entry may have been too
critical because I found chapter two largely unsurprising - I knew
humans are biased and prejudiced and have blind spots. But the
unreliablilty of our memory is something that truly surprised me!

CHAPTER THREE: OUR UNRELIABLE MEMORY

Summary - part 1

Memory is our personal, live-in, self-justifying historian.

History is written by the victors, and when we write our own histories,
we do so just as the conquerors of nations do: to justify our actions
and make us look and feel good about ourselves and what we did, or what
we failed to do. If mistakes were made, memory helps remember that they
were made by someone else.

Of course, memories can be remarkably detailed and accurate, too. We
remember first kisses and favorite teachers. We remember family stories,
movies, dates, baseball stats, childhood humiliations and triumphs. We
remember the central events of our life stories. But when we do
misremember, our mistakes aren't random. The everyday,
dissonance-reducing distortions of memory help us make sense of the
world and our place in it, protecting our decisions and beliefs. The
distortion is even more powerful when it is motivated by the need to
keep our self-concept consistent; by the wish to be right; by the need
to preserve self-esteem; by the need to excuse failures or bad
decisions; or by the need to find an explanation, preferably one safely
in the past, of current problems. Confabulation, distortion and plain
forgetting are the foot soldiers of memory, and they are summoned to the
front lines when the totalitarian ego wants to protect us from the pain
and embarrassment of actions we took that are dissonant with our core
self-images: "I did that?"

One of the authors of the book gives an example of a vivid memory she
had, rich in detail and emotion, that turned out to be indisputably
wrong.

Being absolutely, positively sure a memory is accurate does not
mean that it is; our errors in memory support our current feelings and
beliefs.

We do not remember everything that happens to us; we select only
highlights. Moreover, recovering a memory is like watching a few
unconnected frames of a film and then figuring out what the rest of the
scene must have been like. Because memory is reconstructive, it is subject
to confabulation - "source confusion"".

The author of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Mary McCarthy, at the end
of each chapter, subjected her memories to the evidence for or against
them. The evidence killed some good stories! It is likely she had fused
memories in order to have story-lines consonant with her feelings, in
order to justify her present-day feelings.

You have memories about your father that are salient to you and that
represent the man he was and the relationship you had with him. What
have you forgotten? You remember that time when you were disobedient and
he swatted you. But could you have been the kind of kid a father
couldn't explain things to, because you were impatient and impulsive and
didn't listen?

Every parent has been an unwilling player in the you-can't-win game.

Betsy Petersen produced a full-bodied whine in her memoir Dancing With
Daddy, blaming her parents for only giving her swimming lessons,
trampoline lessons, horseback-riding lessons, and tennis lessons, but
not ballet lessons. "The only thing I wanted, they would not give me,"
she wrote. Parent blaming is a popular and convenient form of
self-justification because it allows people to live less uncomfortably
with their regrets and imperfections. Mistakes were made, by them. Never
mind that I raised hell about those lessons or stubbornly refused to
take advantage of them. Memory thus minimizes our responsibility and
exaggerates theirs.

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We are no angels

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:12:29 +0000

It's taken me ten+ years to figure out that women, like men,
are no angels. Ever since my early twenties I have felt "less
than" the average woman I met. Less in the sense of being less
gentle, less thoughtful, less kind, ... Afterall women are the
fair sex, they are tender and gentle and cuddly and they are
ever so thoughtful. Then I started taking the occasional dance
class.

Half the women in these classes are pushy, tense, insecure.
They blame their dance partners, not themselves, they state
the obvious in an insensitive way, and they can't chill or relax.
They are selfish too; wanting to find the confident, experienced
male dance partner who will teach them a few tricks. In short,
they're like everybody else!

Yes, yes, I am aware that when you are doing your first or second
salsa class ever, you do feel under pressure and insecure. But
that's precisely the time when good character is supposed to
come out.

Memo to men out there: take her to something you've both never
done before, and see what she's really like.

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Learning Judo is like a Baby Learning to Walk

nobody@vox.com(Chunks) — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:30:34 +0000

This is my fourth blog post on my new journey into Judo. See the
previous entries: Rei!, My Understanding of the Philosophy of Judo,
and Strangled By Judo.

I have a baby niece who I had the pleasure of observing as she learnt to
walk. It was exciting - as well as funny. She would stand up, look like
she is drunk, flail her arms about, steady herself, and then take a
forward step, look like she is vewy, vewy dwunk, steady herself, ... and
so on. She fell flat on her face many times. But the beauty of the
"life" program coded in her DNA is that she did not stop trying.

Well, so it seems with Judo. It is now clear to me that learning Judo
consists of executing technical moves repeatedly; doing them over and
over; it is training. You stand and watch the technical steps of a move
being demonstrated to you, you get the rationale, you can even explain
why the move works, but this all means nothing if you do not execute the
move well. Execution is far more important than idea.

The beauty of proper technical execution is that it flows like an
overpowering current. You do apply some physical force here and there,
true, but because you are altering your posture ever so dynamically and
interactively, your partner finds he has no choice but to fall in line
with your plan. You are using the known weaknesses of your partner's
human frame against him.

Once you have executed your moves with grace and control, he has no
choice but to fall, roll over, or do what you intended for him to do.
It's like clockwork. Logic. Beautiful execution = Partner crumbling.
Only if your partner is quicker than you, can he disrupt and parry your
attack before you can complete your execution.

The technical moves allow our instructor, a woman shorter than most of
us and not as physically strong as some of us, to bring down a guy
bigger and stronger than her. She causes imbalance, remains in control,
sweeps her partner's leg from underneath him, and then gets out of the way
as he falls. The moves teach us how to take on someone considerably
stronger than us. We do not need to work out at the gym every day (not
at this stage). We just have to learn the moves - just like a baby
learns to walk.

A youtube Judo clip of an exercise similar to what we do in class.

And, a hip throw.

The downside, of course, is injury. The toddler learning to walk falls
flat over and over. Sometimes she hits something on the way down.
Sometimes, just the shock of falling flat on a hard floor causes her to
cry ("I'm disorientated, I might have been injured," she seems to cry).

Everywhere I turned today, my partners told me about injury. It is a
must; it's part and parcel of training. Someone broke his big toe seven
years ago, quit Judo, and now he is back but he still feels the occasional
pain in the toe. Another guy pointed at various spots on his body where
he's had injuries, and told me he visits a chiropractor regularly.

Do the falls stop the little toddler from trying to walk? You must be
joking! And so it came to be that I realised: this is a life-long project.

The art of falling is something, I am finding, I have to learn. Me,
someone tips me, and I fall flat on my back like a log of wood. Head,
neck, and back all hit the floor at the same time. Gravely unpleasant!
It turned out I had to keep gripping my partner with one hand, thereby
hitting the floor with one side of my back.

I have been musing about injury not just because I saw clumsy and
impatient novices in action, but also because I got injured! A week ago,
an exhausted novice yanked so hard on my jacket (as described in my
earlier blog post), it hurt; three days later, I woke up and found
myself wondering if I've had a heart attack. Every time I blew my nose,
sneezed, or yawned, my chest area seized up.

An experienced player told me today that I must have pulled a muscle. I
need to warm up very well and stretch all my muscles before I train, he
said. Muscle-pulls, 'getting winded' (feeling as if all the air has gone
out of your lungs), broken something or other, ... here I come.

A clip from the film "Fight Club" - a great movie and possibly an early
motivator to get involved in the martials arts world.

Tyler Durden Body Language

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