I have learned an important thing – people who should have been researching on equanimity have been researching on mindfulness instead. So much that even people doing the research got a bit tired of it. This was one of the titles of an actual research paper…

Moving Beyond Mindfulness: Defining Equanimity as an Outcome Measure in Meditation and Contemplative Research

Translation: “Enough researching on mindfulness! Do equanimity now”

There is woefully little research on equanimity. There is not even one standard definition of equanimity in psychological literature. I have combined the definitions from a few papers to make this…

Equanimity: calm and balanced state of mind or a neutral attitude towards all experiences or things regardless of their origin – be it pleasant or unpleasant.

I blame mindfulness for this lack of research. That is taking up all the researchers.

I’m not saying mindfulness is bad – all the research I read was unanimous in calling it the best thing to happen to psychology since Frued’s weird childhood. Since I don’t have enough research on equanimity, I’ll have to do the next best thing. I’ll have to prop up equanimity on this large body of research – because equanimity is one of the two important effects of mindfulness meditation.

To understand that, you must first understand how mindfulness works. To do that, you must know what mindfulness is. There is a definition I ran into in one of the research papers…

Mindfulness: “Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally”

It will be easier to understand it if we break it down to three steps(these are called the mental actions of meditation)…

1. Attention or concentration on something specific.

You can focus on your breathing. Or on the food you are currently eating. Or exam you are writing at the moment.

2. Observing your mental experience

When you focus on the activity, you should observe your mental state. You can use these lenses…

• Thoughts you are having(eg. “I’m so going to fail this exam”).
• Emotions you are feeling at the moment(which I’m assuming is complete and utter dread as you are writing an exam).
• Perceptions from your senses(I feel very cold – might be the AC in the exam hall or the fear)
• Beliefs(I should have have studied yesterday instead of playing PUBG all night long)

This should be done without judgment. You can observe your fear – but you shouldn’t label it good or bad.

3. Letting Go

Active letting-go of expectations, judgments, thoughts, opinions, ideas. In our example of the exam, you might have an expectation of passing that exam. You let that expectation go. You might have judged this exam as the hardest exam you have ever sat for. You dissolve that judgment.

Another place where this action will become necessary is with distractions. When meditating you will get distracted – with other unrelated thoughts. Or other external stimuli. You will have to use the same process to let go of these unrelated things and come back to original object.

When these distractions happen, there is a tendency to judge yourself. Again, same process. Let go of that judgment. Distractions do happen.

The Practice of Meditation

To get its benefits, you’ll have to meditate many, many times. You get better each time. This is how…

1. To focus attention on something, selective attention is required. The neural networks required for this will be strengthened by practice.
2. To observe your emotions, thoughts, etc., you have to look at it from an external view point – this is called meta-cognitive awareness or de-centering. This also gets better with practice.
3. By adopting an attitude of acceptance and non-attachment to experiences on a regular basis, you gain the ability to alter the quality of any experience to be more neutral.

The improvement of the trained abilities, the deliberate use of meditative mental actions in daily life, and the other aspects that come with meditation practice trigger mechanisms that bring forth two effects of meditation:

• Equanimity
• Insight

You already know what equanimity is. At the end of that article, I said that psychology is a better tool to reach equanimity. This is the tool I promised – Mindfulness meditation.

I’ve talked a lot about Equanimity – what about the other effect? Insight is defined as the changes in beliefs that are accompanied by a feeling of deep understanding and by changes in perception, judgment and/or behavior. There are 2 types of insight…

1. You know exactly what the insight was. This can be the realization of necessities and needs, or changing perspectives or recognizing that own opinions, beliefs and ideas were wrong.
2. You can’t articulate what the insight was exactly – it is experience based and intuitive. The insight was changes in the perception of the self and world.

Epilogue

The purpose of this article is to give a scientific method to reach a state of equanimity – and that is mindfulness meditation. But I can’t conclude this article without a disclaimer. I didn’t reach equanimity through mindfulness meditation – I reached it through flow state. It’s a state of mind that can be described as intense focus. These are the characteristics of such a state…

• intense task concentration
• a loss of self-awareness
• an altered sense of time
• merging of activity and awareness

It generally happens when you are engrossed in an optimally challenging activity. When you do something that you enjoy – and is a bit challenging. You have no idea where the time went – you have nothing else on your mind but the activity you are involved in. That’s flow state. For me the activity was programming. I’ve spent years of my life in front of a system, coding. And, for a good percentage of that, I was in flow state – or near it.

That said, Equanimity through flow state is not something I could find any psychology research papers on – its just a theory I have. So, for a psychologically valid process, I’d still recommend getting to equanimity using mindfulness meditation.

References

The various research papers I went thru to create this content, in case anyone wants to nerd out…

• Moving Beyond Mindfulness: Defining Equanimity as an Outcome Measure in Meditation and Contemplative Research
• PROMISE: A Model of Insight and Equanimity as the Key Effects of Mindfulness Meditation
• Peace of Mind: Emotions, the Limbic System, and Equanimity
• Examining the Decoupling Model of Equanimity in Mindfulness Training

It has some disadvantages(its very difficult for me to be extremely happy), but the advantages are well worth it…

• You never get depressed due to external circumstances.
• You are functional in situations that are very stressful.
• You have a state of good mental health.
• You are a lot more in control of your emotions – even other emotions like anger, jealousy or any of the other popular ones.
• Etc – because I’m too lazy to think of more

Turns out, this concept is very popular in Philosophy. Many philosophies consider this as their main goal. And I have figured it out by myself.

As a matter of fact, this is how I got into this field. When I got to know that I have reached the goal of many philosophies by myself, I thought “I’m a natural philosopher – I should do that in real life”. But that would mean that I’ll lose a lot of my coolness quotient. Because most philosophers are boring old men with really big beards. The only way to balance that is to attach it to something considered cool – in this case, I selected stand-up. That way the coolness I lost with philosophy will be made up by the coolness brought in by stand-up – there by reaching a state of thermal equilibrium. And yes, I’m working on that beard.

Equanimity in major philosophies

Many philosophies use different terms to talk about Equanimity…

Ataraxias

This is a greek word(because greek philosophy tend to use greek words). It can be translated as Tranquility – freedom from distress and worry. Multiple greek philosophies use this term…

• Stoicism
• Epicureanism
• Pyrrhonism

But all three define Ataraxia in slightly different ways, because, philosophy. Epicureanism and Pyrrhonism think of Ataraxia as the ultimate goal of life.

Apatheia

Another Greek word. It’s literal translation means “without suffering/without passion”. The English word ‘Apathy’ comes from this word – but it has a very different meaning from Apatheia. Mostly because English is a stupid language.

Eudaimonia

This is one of the big ones – many philosophies think of this as the goal of life. It can be translated as human flourishing or prosperity. Many prominent Greek Philosophers have used this concept…

• Socrates
• Plato
• Aristotle (Thus hitting the Greek philosopher trifecta)
• And others

Upeksha

Source: Indian Philosophy, Buddhism
In Indian Philosophies, it means: Non-attachment, even-mindedness or letting go.
In Buddhism it means: staying neutral in the face of the eight worldly conditions…

• Loss / Gain
• Good-repute / Ill-repute
• Praise / Criticism
• Sorrow / Happiness

Samatvam

This is from Hindu Philosophy – specifically from Gita. In that book Krishnan says, and I paraphrase, “Arjun, bro. Perform your duty as well as you can without any attachment to success or failure.”

Other Phrases that people use to mean Equanimity

… but originally means something else.

• Zen
• Nirvana

Practical Equanimity

Now that I have demonstrated how important the concept of equanimity is, lets get to the next question – how to be in that state. Each philosophy has an answer – which boils down to “Do what this philosophy tells you to do”. If you want to follow 20 different philosophies, go ahead, do that. If not, I have a condensed version of the plan – made by copy-pasting from a bunch of ancient philosophies.

Before you start, a word of warning. Just because you know it doesn’t mean that you can live it. Most philosophies expect you to reach this state only after years or even decades of self work. To show this clearly, I’ll attach a difficultly rating to each solution.

Ataraxia

If you believe that something is good or bad, its a problem. When you DON’t get the “good thing”, you are upset. And if by any chance you get the “bad thing”, again, upset. You chase the good and avoid the bad.

On the other hand, if you take no position as to what is good or bad, you neither avoid nor pursue intensely. Result, Ataraxia.

Difficulty Rating: 3/5 (5 being most difficult).

Apatheia

Don’t react emotionally or egotistically to external events, the things that are outside your control. For stoics, practically everything is outside their control – except your own actions and thoughts.

Difficulty Rating: 4/5. Best of luck hitting this one.

Eudaimonia

According to Aristotle, you can get this by living a good/virtuous life.

Difficulty Rating: 5/5. I’m not even going to try this.

Upeksha

You can reach this by getting free of all kinds of desires. Then there will be no preference for one thing over the other. Buddhism goes into some detail regarding this…

• Have neither pleasure nor displeasure
• Mind is equally affected towards all beings
• Mind is equally affected towards all thoughts
• Mind is equally affected by the same force of determination
• Mind is equally affected towards all kinds of wisdom.
• And a few more that are more confusing – so I’m skipping those.

Difficulty Rating: 3/5. Because its very close to Ataraxia, and I had already rated it a 3.

Samatva

Do your duty well, don’t worry about the outcome too much. Winning and failing is beyond your control – so don’t have an attachment to neither.

Difficulty Rating: 1/5. Fairly easy – just be super lazy. Eating will become a problem soon(because you don’t have money for food) – but that is beyond the scope of this article.

Conclusion

As you can see, reaching Equanimity is fairly difficult. To be specific, according to my very scientific and not at all biased system, it has a 16/25 difficulty rating.

Its really difficult because we are using the tools given by philosophy to get there. Ideally, Philosophy is good at asking questions. It gets really confused when it comes to answers.

To find a better answer to this, we have a better tool: Psychology. But I’ll save that for the next article.

A word of warning: This is an analogy. There will be places its not an exact fit, but it helps us understand the system better. We are used to comparing our brains with the most complex system we can understand – it was machines and engines for a long time. That’s where the phrases like ‘he ran out of steam’ and ‘they were pushing my buttons’ came from. Right now, the most complex system we have is a computer. And since I know a bit about that subject, its the easiest way to communicate.

If your behavior is the programming, then your brain is the hardware. Your attributes or character is the firmware(permanent software that comes bundled with the hardware). It comes with the hardware, its built by other people/external situations – and its very difficult to modify.

To get this system to a more functional point, you need a good OS on top of these things – an Operating System for the Mind. A mental OS is something that you have ‘installed’ over your childhood. These are lifestyle influencing belief systems¹.

A good example of a mental OS is religion. Its generally learned in childhood and affects a lot of your lifestyle and beliefs. The OS will be a combination of the religion, family traditions, local community practices, and a few other things.

This OS has been install in you by other people – BUT – from this layer on, you can start changing things(unlike your hardware or firmware). You can actually re-install your mental OS.

A decent OS I can recommend is Rationality. But before I can give you the rational for Rationality OS, you need to know the functions of a mental OS.

Characteristics of a Mental OS

Yes, these are the characteristics of a computer OS. Now that we have this analogy, lets see how far we can push it.

Kernel / Core

The Kernel is the central part of the OS. This is your Identity. Examples…

• Christianity OS: “I’m a Christian”
• Rationality OS: “I’m a Rational person”

Software compatibility

This decides what other beliefs/mental models are compatible with your OS. There will be some beliefs that work very well with one OS – and some beliefs that won’t work at all.

• A religion that teaches that one gender is preferred over another will be way more accepting to a belief like Sexism.
• Rationality works very well with ideas like Scientific Thinking. And also with ideas like “people who believe in a invisible man in the sky are idiots”.

Security

Your mental OS should ideally give you some protection against hacking attempts, viruses – aka viral ideas(like Racism) or other system issues like mental illnesses. An example is that there is some evidence that religions can give you some protection against mental illnesses.²

On the other hand, many believe that religions are a mental illness.³

Resource Allocation

This part of the OS lets you prioritize things. It decides how much time, energy or money you should spend on which part of your life.

• Christianity OS: You should spend your Sundays in Church.
• Gamer OS: You should spend your weekend playing Counter Strike.

Networking

This module determines how well you work with others. If the other person has a similar OS as you, you might be able to interface more easily.

Members of a same religion can work very well with each other – but the stronger the OS programming, the more issues they will have working with members of other religions.

Error Detecting

This section becomes active when you run into issues. It can be things things that challenge your beliefs or actual crisis.

• Christianity OS: 2020 has destroyed all the plans I made. But God must have a plan for me.
• Nihilism OS: 2020 has destroyed all the plans I made. But its all meaningless anyway.

Utilities

This refers to the tools the OS gives you: habits or practices that are a part of this OS. Many religions give you meditative tools like praying. Or networking tools like going to church. Rationality can give you tools like Scientific Thinking or Bayesian thinking.

Drive / Motivation Engine

There is one critical thing that a Mental OS gives you that a Computer OS doesn’t have to bother about – that’s the drive. A good mental OS will give you a purpose.

Capitalistic OS: Your drive will be to make more money.
Nihilism OS: Error 404 – Drive missing.

Why is Rationality OS Better?

Think of the Rationality OS as the Linux of mental operating systems. You’ll have to put in more work to set it up – but its way more stable, functional and efficient. You can customize and personalize it for better compatibility with your own mind.

Intentionality

You have gotten your existing Mental OS without a say in the matter – whatever situation you were born into molded you into who you are today. Installing the Rationality OS lets you take a more intentional approach in deciding who you want to be. Instead of saying I’m a Christian because my parents are Christians, I choose to say that I’m a stand-up philosopher because I choose this path. Also because it confuses people.

Modern

Do you really want to be using an aged OS like religion in this day and age? Come to a high-tech, modern mental OS like Rationality!

Specifically Created for this purpose

Rationality is created for the purpose of increasing mental efficiency. Its built with a better understanding of how human cognition works – so its much more compatible with your hardware and firmware.

Customization

You don’t have to use the entire OS – you can just pick and choose modules that you think will best suit you. This is something most religious OSes look down upon.

Security

Protection against a lot of bad software and erroneous thinking. It includes patches for most of the known security issues.

The OSM Project

These blog posts are part of my OSM Project. OSM stands for ‘Operating System of the Mind’. The main goal of this project is to create a custom distribution of the Rationality OS. And over the course of the next few posts, you’ll have a better idea of what it will be – and how to install it.

Psychologists have been saying the same thing for decades. This is one of the basic principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy(CBT). Psychology and philosophy have had a very close link. One of the core ideas in Greek philosophy was to ‘Know yourself‘. Sounds like the tag line of modern psychology, right? CBT has its roots in Stoicism – my favorite ancient Greek philosophy. Yes, I have a favorite ancient Greek philosophy.

When you hear about psychology, you think about therapy. About mental illness. About your crazy ex who should be seeing a therapist. These are valid things – but that is not why you should care about psychology. For me, understanding psychology is understanding our internal programming. You do the things you do because there is elaborate programming in your brain on how to respond to stimuli.

Your mental programming is very complex, and highly personalized to you. It very carefully considers your entire history of experience before it creates a response. But you generally don’t even know the rationale of your responses. Have you ever called your crazy ex even after you know that they are crazy? This is a classic WTF brain reaction that can’t be explained easily. Understanding your programming will help you understand the response.

For eg. Let’s say you start drooling every time you hear a bell. Because this is causing you problems in life, you go to a therapist. The therapist figures out that the issue started in your childhood – someone rang a bell every time you were fed. That created an association of feeding with the bell. And your body starts responding to bell in a way that it responds to food. This is what I mean by ‘understanding your programming’. Also, this is what I imagine happened to Pavlov’s kid.

As a programmer, there are a few things I know about programs…

1. Programs have bugs.
2. Programs can be hacked.
3. Programs can be improved or made worse.

All these are true of your mental programming as well.

Brain Bugs

There are a lot of known bugs in our programming: like optical illusions or misunderstanding sensory data(eg. McGurk Effect). But my favorite brain bug is cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are errors in thinking – often a result of your brain’s attempt to simplify information processing. These bugs are usually the result of brain using shortcuts to solve a problem. And using the wrong shortcuts to do that.

Let’s take the example of confirmation bias – the tendency to search for, focus on and remember information in a way that confirms one’s existing beliefs. If I have an belief that I’m a philosopher psychologist, I’m going to focus on things that support the claim. Like the fact that I had done research on it – and written articles on it. I will ignore the evidences against – like the fact that I have no training in either field. I’ll also ignore the fact that there is nothing called a philosopher psychologist.

In programming, debugging is the process of getting out existing bugs and putting in new ones. In our case, you can think of mental debugging as the process of understanding a bug better and, hopefully, fixing it. Broadly speaking, there are two types of brain bugs…

1. General bugs: issues most people have – like cognitive biases
2. Personal bugs: issues you have because of your environment or upbringing or other reasons specific to you

To fix these bugs, you need to understand them first. And that is the debugging. A good starting point would be going for therapy.

Brain Hacks

Brain Hacks can be defined as getting someone to behave against their own interests. Billions are spent trying to figure out how to use psychology against you and your self interests. Companies, politicians, media all are trying to find the best ways to make you care about some things and ignore other things. To get you to click on ads. To get you to buy things you don’t really want. To get you to use your time to tap colorful things on a phone screen that give you a dopamine hit.

You have heard the adage that Google knows more about you than you do about yourself. Its close to reality. But the good news is you have the ability to fight back. Google knows that you clicked on the third link in the search result. But it don’t know why – you know why. Facebook knows what all pages you have liked – but you know that at least 20% of that is your cat walking on the keyboard. As long as you know yourself, you can fight back against this subversion of your will.

Improving your programming

Once you know enough about your own mental programming, you can start to change it. This is why philosophers have always placed a premium on ‘knowing oneself‘. This means knowing a lot of things about yourself – things like…

• Which brain bugs are you most susceptible to?
• Are you aware of external hacking attempts?
• What would be your response to XYZ scenario?
• What are you feeling?
• Why are you feeling that?

This is obviously an incomplete list – there is just too much to learn about yourself. The more you know yourself, the better you can change your programming. You’ll know which beliefs you hold are causing you problems. You’ll know before you get upset or angry – so you can pull yourself out of the situation before things go wrong. You’ll know which all biases you hold – so you can compensate for that bias.

Psychology has a lot of frameworks, models and tools that can help you understand and improve your programming. Frameworks like CBT. Tools like therapy. And many, many others.

Tl;dr

You have very elaborate programming in your minds. You can understand it using psychology. Your internal programming has these features…

1. It can have bugs. Bugs are errors in thinking – and are often a result of your brain’s attempt to simplify information processing. They can be general or personal.
2. It can be hacked – it can be used to make you to behave against your own interests
3. It can be improved. The more you know your programming, the better you can modify it.

When I decided that I wanted to be a philosopher, I knew that I was going to have a hard time. I could actually see people’s eyes glaze over when they hear the term ‘philosophy’. I had to add the phrase ‘stand-up’ just to keep people interested. I’m assuming you know what stand-up means. And I assume you don’t care what philosophy means. Because, who in their right mind would?

Well, you are wrong. You all need to understand philosophy. It will make you a better person, it will make the world a better place. How? To know that, you must know exactly what philosophy is.

Just as Science is the study of objective reality, Philosophy is the study of subjective reality.

Objective reality has well defined things. Measurable things. Predictable things. Except, of course, at the quantum level – so far the best scientific explanation of what’s happening there is: some weird, strange things!

Subjective reality, on the other hand, does not lend itself easily to any of this. And thanks to that, philosophy doesn’t lend itself to easy answers. Or definitive answers. Or in many cases, any answers at all.

Thankfully, philosophy is more about the questions than it is about the answers. Philosophy is the practice of questioning subjective reality.

Subjective reality is a collection of judgments about how the world is or should be. Judgments like, “I am a bad person”. “Democracy is a good system of governance”. “Stand-up philosophy is the noblest form of art.”

Not necessarily the last one – that’s probably only a part of my subjective reality. Not a part of the collective subjective reality – at least, not yet (give me time). That’s another funny thing about subjective reality – it’s relative.

Subjective reality can be relative to just one person(for eg. yourself), or relative to a people group(for eg. a football fan club). In a group, its a shared set of beliefs among all members(or majority) of the group.

A good example of a personal belief I have is that philosophy is super interesting. A good example of a collective belief – for most people, at least – is that philosophy is the most boring thing there is, was or ever will be.

Essentially all these are beliefs. They can shift, they can change.

Philosophy is the practice of questioning these beliefs, prodding at it till we understand it a bit better. And even changing it, if need be.

Philosophy has been the pursuit of finding the “true” beliefs. That’s a problem. “True” is hard to define. So “True Belief” is perhaps not an ideal goal. Maybe a better goal would be “Useful Beliefs”.

Philosophy promises us tools to analyze these beliefs, to understand them, and if need be, change them. Once you recognize which belief is more useful for you and the community as a whole, you can try and change your belief.

Subjective reality, or our perception of the world IS the world for us. Its mold-able as its a reality based on perceptions. And because of that, once you learn how to change your belief about the world, you are learning how to change the world itself.

Tl;dr aka The Summary

Philosophy: study of questioning subjective reality.
Subjective reality: judgments or beliefs about how the world is or should be. Can be relative to

• Just one person(for eg. yourself)
• A group of people.

Philosophy is questioning those beliefs and changing it, if need be.
Perception of the world IS the world for us. That reality is mold-able as its a reality based on perceptions. When you change your belief about the world, you are changing the world itself.

Some time ago, I was chatting with a friend of mine, Midhun, who is a major Math geek, when I had to leave for some minor emergency which I no longer remember. This is the result…

Note: I have converted chat-speak to more readable normal-speak(for the lack of a better word). I have also formatted the text for better readability. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind.

Me

I’ll be back in 15 minutes.
You continue asking questions.
Answers after 15 minutes.

Midhun

Wouldn’t that be considered treason?
Why the hell aren’t they being shut down?

… after a while …

35 minutes.

Do you have any idea how fast you have to be traveling for your 15 minute to equal my 45 minutes? So, either you have managed to board a spaceship or a very powerful gravitational field has developed near you.(Oops, physics joke. I am afraid you have to suffer that!)

OK, so given that time is moving indefinitely in my region I have reached four equally improbable conclusions regarding your situation.

1. You are an alien in human form and have decided to return to your mothership.
2. You are secretly a physicist faking to be programmer(I wish!) and have have created a blackhole while experimenting and have been sucked into it.
3. You are secretly a mathematician and is now stuck on the surface of a mobius strip or on infinity many such surfaces.(take your pick)
4. You are indeed a programmer and have managed to create a matrix like reality and is now stuck in it(Like Neo at the train station).

And here are my suggestions to get out of those situations…

1. If you are indeed an alien, please take me with you.
2. If you are stuck in a blackhole(given that there is no singularity don’t worry), you will eventually leak out as quantum information(If Hawking is right) and I will using my future skills and manage to plug you to a computer.
3. If you are stuck on a mobius like surface, than attach yourself to n-dimensional sphere(depending on the surface) an execute a topological cut.
4. If you are stuck inside matrix, then can’t help you mate. At least not yet!

Me

Heh.
This is going on my blog.

I love April fools day. Today I can actually speak my mind without repercussions. Everybody will assume I’m joking. This gives me a lot of… opportunities. Here is an example – below is a list of ‘statements’ about myself. I won’t say how much of this is true and how much of this is false. Let me see how much you guys know me. Take a guess and leave your comments. Make sure you say which all statements are true and which all are false.

1. I never wrote the 10^th standard board exams
2. I have been a guest lecturer for Bio-Informatics
3. My system has three monitors. My brothers system have two monitors. In total, there are six computer monitors at my house.
4. I can solve the Rubik’s cube.
5. I got 33 3/4% in the maths paper in 12^th standard board exam.
6. When I was a kid, my parents had to send me to a psychologist.
7. I have studied my native language(Malayalam) for 10 years – but a fourth std kid can read and write Malayalam better than me.
8. I’ve been a stand-up comedian.
9. I never went to college
10. I’m learning Japanese.

So, what do you think? How many are true and how many are false?

PS: Answers will be published when the day is over.

The Answers

Spoiler protection in place – press Ctrl+A to see the answers…

Ever since I had two monitors, I wanted another. Well, it happened. I’m now a proud owner of a triple head system.

Most people out there won’t understand the necessity of having monitors all around you. Most people think one is enough. And then there are those who think that even a single monitor is one too many. Those are linux system administrators – we are not talking about them. If you think a dual head system is unnecessary, the wise people of old have some advice for you – “Two heads are better than one“.

The History

Let me tell you the story about my shift to the three monitor setup. Even though I wanted three monitors, I did not know how to make it happen. My graphics card had only two slots – and both of them where already in use. One day, when the power was down, my brother was doing some light recreational reading. In my household, light recreational reading usually means reading hardware specifications and/or manuals. That day he was reading the manual of my motherboard. Deep in the manual between long descriptions of jumper setting and onboard slots, he found the answer to my problem. He found how to enable the onboard graphics card even if there is another graphics card in the system.

Armed with this information, me and my brother soon converted my dual head system to a multi head system. Voila! There – you have it – the story of how I got to be on a multi-monitor machine.

Naming the Thingy

I have been using this setup for three months. I’m quite attached to it by now. I call it the Ravana. The only problem is that western audience will not understand what I’m talking about. So, I’m thinking about calling it Trinity. I thought that was a good name, that is, until I said to one guy that I call my multi-head system trinity. His reply was “Oh. Like in the Matrix?“.

I hate it when that happens. Plus, there are other things I call Trinity. No, not The Trinity. I’m talking about video players.

I have other options too. Currently, my favorite is fluffy. Seems to be an appropriate name for my monitors.

Wait – why the confused look? Haven’t you read Harry Potter? Of course you have – there is no one who haven’t read them. You may have heard tales of people who haven’t read harry Potter – but don’t believe them – they are nothing more than urban legands.

But I digress. I’m talking about Fluffy from Harry Potter. You know, the three headed dog who stood guard to the Philosopher’s Stone(Sorcerer’s Stone if you are from US). The vicious, terrifying three headed dog demon – the one that couldn’t stop three school kids. Yes, that’s the dog I’m talking about.

I believe this dog was stolen borrowed from ancient Greek mythology. They too had a three headed dog who got weak in the knees whenever it heard a few notes of music. It also was a guard dog. But it had a different name. I don’t think the ancient Greeks would name a three-headed hound who stood guard to the gates of hell, Fluffy.

In short, I have three names for my three monitor setup…

• Ravana
• Trinity
• Fluffy

It feels right somehow.

The Future

I have great plans for Ravana/Trinity/Fluffy. There are many things you can do with a three head system. Currently, I’m doing something that is perhaps the best use of a multi-monitor machine. Namely, gloating.

So far, we have gone over the theoretical difficulties is learning to spell. That is – the problems with the languages themselves. Now lets take a look at the practical difficulties – the problems with me.

Not Interested

The main reason I don’t learn spelling is because I don’t want to. I don’t have the time or the inclination to learn spellings. In the time of text messages, instant messaging and LOLCATS, does it matter? When was the last time you saw a text message without any spelling errors? Exactly! Plus, I’m very lazy.

US Vs UK

Another problem I face is which spellings should I learn – the US spellings or the UK spellings. I’m from India and officially we follow the UK version of spellings. But I write for the web – and the rule of thumb for web writing is to use US English. My final decision is to use Binny English. Its a special version of English spellings in which all spellings I use are correct.

Dyslexic

That’s it! Who’s the wise guy who gave it that name? Really? That’s the name you choose for an affliction that makes people unable to spell correctly? Did a dyslexic kid beat you up when you where a kid or something? ADD – now that’s a mental affliction that I can spell. OCD – that’s simple as well. We Dyslexics need a simpler name.

Now that I got that rant out of my system, lets get back to the topic at hand – my spellings. I’m a dyslexic – and that makes my spellings extra interesting. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining about being a dyslexic. As a matter of fact, I consider it to be one among my many super powers. But that’s a story for another post.

Spell Checkers

As long as I have spell checkers, I don’t have to worry about learning spellings. I could be the worst speller in the world – and no one would know. Actually, scratch that – I am the worst speller in the world. And if it weren’t for these Useless Skills series, you wouldn’t have known it. Thank you spell checker!

In my last post I ranted about the futility of trying to spell English words. I said that English is a bad language created by morons. Before any one accuses me of being a lingual bigot, let me reassure you – I don’t have any discrimination toward any particular language. I hate all languages equally. To illustrate my point, let us take the case of my native language – Malayalam. I truly despise Malayalam.

Malayalam

In its defense, English has just 26 alphabets. Its relatively simpler than say, Malayalam – the subject at hand. Malayalam, for all you non-malayalies in the audience, has 56 letters. That’s not too bad – that’s what I thought initially. But then I found out about letter-fractions. These are not complete letters – but a fraction of a letter that can be combined with other ‘full’ alphabets to make even more new alphabets. I understand if all you mono-lingual, English-speaking people are confused. I was too – when I was five years old and the teachers started teaching me this stuff. Now I understand why they taught me all that – just to make sure that I would be as bitter and hateful as they were.

So, Malayalam has full letters, letter fragments, and letters+letter fragments. Stay with me here – this is where it gets really weird. With all the permutations and combinations, Malayalam grew to be a 500+ alphabet monster. If you think that’s bad, this is the simplified new script(puthia libi). The old script is a 1000+ alphabet monstrosity that haunts the nightmare of little children(who where taught Malayalam).

The old script was removed because it was practically impossible to make typewriters to include all the letters. So we switched to the new script and lived happly ever since – or as happily as possible with a 500+ glyph language(ie. not so happily – as a matter of fact, down right angrily). Now, with the coming of computers and Unicode, this limitation of glyph in no longer there. Consequently, there is an effort to bring back the old script(or as they call it, the ‘true script’). Apparently, torturing school kids with a 500 character Malayalam was too tame for their tastes – they wanted to bring in the big guns.

As a result of this wonderful system, I cannot read or write Malayalam well even after spending 10 years trying to learn it. But I don’t care. Me and Malayalam has parted ways a long time ago – we are no longer on speaking terms. Malayalam can do what ever it wants to do – and I’ll do what I have to do. I have learned to live with English. Its not a bad language. As long as I don’t have to spell anything.

End of Part 4

I am stopping this rant here – many of you non-Malayalam would be terrified at what we are doing to our kids – and many of you malayalies would be horrified that I was assault their precious language. Don’t worry you Malayalam fanatics – my assault is aimed at many Indic languages. Hindi also has this wired letter+letter fragment method of writing. I think Tamil has it too – considering the fact that Malayalam came from Tamil(Disclamer: I do not know Tamil – so I could be wrong).