The Limit Point

Thinking wide Vs thinking deep

2006-03-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

This is a post after a long time. I have been very busy lately including a trip to visit my family. You might say I was vacationing but then I find my vacations so much busy - because I am meeting my family after a year and there are just so many things to do - lot of travel, socializing, eating :), catching up etc. Contrast this with my life here - simple : Goto office, work and be back home for TV at most including some exercising in between.

That was just to update you about my whereabouts. I have been again reading lot of theory CS (and well yes relativity too :)) and I was thinking of what kind of thinking is really necessary in different aspects of life. I could come up with classifying thinking into two broad categories - thinking wide and thinking deep. Thinking wide is being able to come up with ideas - lots of them inspired by different walks and some maybe even not effective to the problem at hand. Thinking deep means being able to drill down into any one idea - this requires lot of analytical skills and knowledge etc. I thinking I am good at the latter (in the domain I find interesting). Generally thinking deep also requires thinking wide to an extent but the new ideas you generate/consider are from a small domain. Creativity is the ability to be able to think wide and be able to have the intuition to see what ideas are good. Research requires creativity and the ability to drill down into an idea and convert it into a solution.

A Resolve

2005-12-17T21:05:00.000-08:00

Dear all,
so much has gone past so soon. I decided to understand the deepest of theories, the General Theory of Relativity. I think it will give me peace to know the mind of God. I have always always wanted to understand it. Why? Because to me it seems like a profound theory in itself examining the most fundamental of assumptions about our daily experience. Also it came out not trying to explain something but trying to reconcile the fundamental understanding about the nature of space-time as found from Special theory with Gravitation. And out came the equations of the General Theory. Another of my dreams from a long time has been to understand Quantum Theory (or to convince myself that I understand it, since no one really understands QT). But that I will keep for a later time. I found some really nice lecture on GTR which employs Mathematics not beyond what I know. I will try to understand it now. But how do I force myself? Readers of this blog, at least the interested ones, I am going to try to explain what I read in the simplest of words, as I read along, to you. Of course this is not going to be easy for you to understand unless you remember your mathematics. But please readers remind me if I am slowing down or tell me if I am covering too much in one day/week. I will try to be regular. So day 1 will be tomorrow (procrastinating today!).
For those who never heard about relativity - The theory of relativity was formulated by Einstein based on a very well experimentally 'confirmed' assumption - the speed of light is constant in all intertial frames of reference. Based on this single assumption Einstein proved that our notions of space-time are incorrect. The most surprising of those conclusions is that the concept of 'Simultaneity' (for example : You and your roommate are reading this blog at the SAME TIME) is RELATIVE i.e. to a different user this statement might not be true!. When Einstein tried to use his understanding in the framework of Gravity he came up with the General Theory which basically explains Gravitation not as a REAL force but merely an 'illusion' created by curvature (this is a deep mathematical concept) of the four dimensional fabric of space-time. What mathematics led him to conclude this? What was the intuition behind all this .. the blog entries will try to explore all this as well as the mathematical equations which came out of the powerful insight of Einstein. Without the power of equations it is said to be pretty much impossible to understand the GTR.

So dear readers .. buckle up for the ride .. and brush up your knowledge of mathematics :) Vector spaces, Geometry (differential) and the Calculus! Watch out for the next post ...

The truth?

2005-12-16T23:00:00.000-08:00

Many a wise men have often said that they search for the truth. However a strange fear has engulfed me since I really thought seriously about it. What if there is really NO truth? Ok, let me try define truth. First of all the issue is the attachment of a boolean value to a certain question (is this entity X true) according to a certain answering mechanism (for Computer scientists that would be an ALGORITHM!). IF all people who are able to answer the question attach the boolean YES to the question - we say it is TRUTH, OR, IF by logical reasoning alone one is able to answer the question to YES we would say it is truth. So for the wise men, the question is which one among one of several possibilities about whatever they are looking for is true. A basic quality of truth is the following. If entity X logically negates entity Y or is mutually exclusive with Y, both X and Y cannot be true.

So, first of all wise people - here are the faults in your reasoning.

(a) Suppose two of those theories about the question you have out to be true. Then none is truly true :). This is also called breaking of consistency in Mathematical systems.
(b) What if, there is really NO way to answer if something is true? And this is called not having completeness in Mathematical systems.
(c) while (a) and (b) are attacks on TRUTH from a mathematical standpoint lets come to more physical issues - what if, different reference frames provide different answers to the issue under concern. This, by far, is my greatest fear about the very nature of TRUTH.

Sadly, no powerful enough mathematical system is both consistent and complete so inside the boundaries of a mathematical system there is really nothing called TRUTH - defining TRUTH to be all true statements - if there is we cant know it hence the wise should stop their quest!.

While with the physical world, TRUTH is subject to reference frames itself. How can we ever establish the TRUTH even if we had to choose among one of several possible theories? Eventually we would come down to some equations confirming the validity of that in all frames .. but coming down to equations is actually simplifying the problem to a Mathematical system in which the TRUTH is impossible to find? Maybe I am saying something wrong there but I guess I am stepping into the regions of Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy and because none of them is my domain I have the right to make such foolish mistakes :)

Then, I believe that indeed there is NO TRUTH. But our best effort can only be something fortified by the power of a Mathematical framework - an IF-THEN guard : IF THEN . Even with such a framework we cannot hope to find the truth in that system but at least we can work in a consistent subset of the system.

Now at the end of this rant, I seem to have forgotten the very issue which seemed to have caused this! I guess it was something to do with my searching to know the truth of some matter .. and I now realize that none of my rant above actually disproves that for a certain specific matter the truth cannot be known .. hmmm .. well but what if the judging of truth is a subjective feeling ? Then what is true to you, can be false to me .. truth may be relative .. damn .. I give up

A strange story

2005-12-16T22:43:00.000-08:00

A strange story I know - of love or hatred I know not. Love without hatred is impossible and vice-versa at least till you remain in the shackles of the great Illusion of the material world (please refer to the Gita for this!). Love and hatred are then just two feelings of material nature and it is impossible for one to exist without the other - just like action and reaction. When you love, you reserve the place for hatred somewhere in your heart (albeit for a different object at a different time) and when you hate you must fill it by love in order to live (and the human heart searches desperately for love). Those who say that they only love everything are LyInG (unless they are free of the Matrix - Illusion - Maya whatever you want to call it). What does it take to turn love to hatred and vice-versa ? - that catalytic agent is called TRUST. And thus one is caught in this vicious cycle of love-hatred-need_for_love->love-hatred-need_for_love->love endlessly till one realizes that TRUST itself is the culprit. For Trust by itself comes from expectations and assumptions .. attachments to the fruits of actions thus directly prodding the great Illusion (hencforth we call it GI). Can anybody except Neo get away with taking direct panga (hindi slang) with GI?

Let go ...

2005-11-20T22:05:00.000-08:00

And whats the bitterest and sweetest of all philosophies - To let go. Well, this is so general that it is pointless to demean it by giving specific examples or maybe I am just too lazy to find one (sometimes being very lazy may pay in the long run - just a side remark!). A mystique that I am, philosophy from the Gita has always been something that I am awed at ... and this one is just one small lesson stolen from there. Detachment from what one does ... is difficult and bitter and yet everything is sweet if such is achieved. It is hard and hardest it is indeed of all normal human activity, but sweet are the consequences ....

Whats the motivation?

2005-10-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

This is a post after a long long time! I guess I was (and probably still am) in the so called "blogger burnout" period. But today I felt I had to blog about what keeps me running during those long runs. Inspite of myself being through the long runs (19, 20, 22.4) miles, I am touched by stories of my Asha friend's completing their marathons (Maui and Chicago). Some of us still have the SF/SV to do by the end of this month. I have often wondered myself what keeps me going on? Is it the bagels after the race (no kidding here!) or is it just that I am too strong and this is all trivial or is it just the feeling that I have to get done with it now that I have come so far .. or is it something else? While I do not discount in partial any of the reasons I gave above (except that the second just vanishes after mile 16!!) the real reason is the love to see how far one can go ... its almost like indulging with your mind :) These marathon runs are a test not only of body fitness but also the determination of the mind! Many times I have had to fight pain for few miles and the sweet thought of finishing it strong seems to help mask it in the mind. So do I still know the answer of what keeps me going on? Its probably so complicated and with multiple small thoughts/feelings contributing to it that I will never know ..

Knoppix

2005-07-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

Dont start googling on Knoppix: thats the very main topic of discussion here and you will soon be getting to know it. This post is a continuation from the last one. After my installation of Windows XP and the desktop version of Fedora Core 4, I realized that I had to resize my windows NTFS partition. The only safe well known softwares for available for this were expensive - Partition Magic I think is the most well known. The demo version of these softwares just simulate : they dont actually modify anything (and of course I learnt this frustrating fact after I tried it out). I came to know that there is a ntfsresize program for Linux that can resize NTFS partitions from your Linux installation on the same disk. So I installed ntfsprogs (the package that contains ntfsresize) and ran it from Fedora - it sure did work and resized my /dev/hda1 to 8GB but then Windows seemed to have lost track of the remaining space. The trick was to create another NTFS partition on the remaining space. I think fdisk could you used to do that but I was slightly scared of doing that since it meant deleting the windows partition and recreating and so on .. Then I came to know that there is a Linux variant (free of course) of the well known partition magic - its called QTParted. I downloaded that and tried to install it only to now realize that I did not even have gcc on my machine! Damn - I had installed the desktop version instead of a custom Fedora installation .. since I hadnt really installed anything on Linux yet so I reinstalled Fedora, custom this time, and went ahead with QTParted. But it was not to be so simple after all .. soon I ran into several dependancy problems - X includes not found (fixed), libXext not found (gave up on this) ... I realized that it was too tiring .. a new google search revealed that there is a Linux called Knoppix Linux that has QTparted built into its Live CD. I immediately downloaded it and booted from it .. Aha, what a nice experience it was! Knoppix immediately mounted my /dev/hda1. QTParted found it pretty easily too. But one has to unmount the partition before modifying it. I figured that out in 5-6 minutes. After that it was a piece of cake .. QTParted resized it and I created a new NTFS partition on the freed space. I then restarted the machine to check if Windows was alright still!
The logo appeared fine and then I came to chkdsk (ntfsresize schedules a chkdsk automatically if it touches your NTFS partition). With each step my heart jumped as if Windows would throw some fatal error .. but lo and behold! everything went perfectly fine ... a final restart led to Windows XP without any problems at all. And all was done.
Well, I still need to fix some things - like Wireless networking on Fedora and also some error in the filesystem driver (I have no idea what that error is!), but at the end of it all I concluded that Knoppix RULEZ. Just have a copy whenever you have to do any installs, repartitioning etc. Forget Partition Magic and the like ... and anyway if Windows XP disk management will someday include partition resizing nobody is ever going to use Partition Magic :)

Laptop reborn!

2005-07-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

Last week I finally got some time to fix my laptop. Earlier, using the Sony recovery console I had restored the laptop to its factory installed configuration (of course without having prepared the recovery disks). But even then it had the same problem of slow start and screeching(!) sound while the disks rotated. Then, last week the laptop refused to boot after 50 attempts. I then declared it officially dead. Found time to buy a new 60GB 5400 RPM Western Digital Notebook HDD, which came to $120 after taxes, and installed it in the laptop. Then I installed Windows XP on it. Unfortunately I did not make an extended partition, although I left 7GB for Fedora Core 4. After I had spent some hours installing various softwares on it, as well as completed the installation of the desktop version of Fedora Core 4, I thought of resizing the /dev/hda1 to have a data partition for Windows ... and realized after few minutes that there was no free software available to do that. I could have again installed Windows but instead I decided to go around it and solve the problem .... stay tuned how I managed to do that!!

Saturday updates

2005-06-25T21:50:00.000-07:00

Just a regular Saturday update. Had a nice 7 mile run with Team Asha at the scenic Sawyer Camp Trail . I felt great during the run but I felt the impact after about an hour - it had left me totally exhausted. Now I know the importance of sleep! I had slept just 3 hrs the previous night and that too just to watch the 00:00 hr show of the extremely pathetic movie Paheli. Well, after the run, I had a nap of about 3 hrs again which helped me to recover partially. Then I went over and had a nice heavy lunch at a local Indian buffet, only to return and crash for another 2 hrs! But after that, I was back on track. Had my regular caffeine intake :) in the form of a Starbucks tall regular. Also browsed a little in Barnes and Nobles. Then I came back and did my laundry and also cooking (must add this is extremely infrequent). After my dinner, here I am writing this post as I listen to some old hindi favorites ..

Know thyself

2005-06-16T23:25:00.000-07:00

Read the text of a nice speech by Steve Jobs here and a nice analysis of the same by Sujata in this post . The speech is truly amazing. I found the part about connecting the dots very profound. My two cents on this : Knowing oneself is often very difficult, but we should make it the holy grail, the quest that we should never forget. As Sujata says : We are so very stuck in our routine lives, that we almost forget that we have likes and dislikes. And the main reason for this? It is not easy to find what we are and what we really like, for it may not be fixed at all times. And so, we should all take some time, introspect, look back and think to find out where we really want to be. I am sure we can be happier if we know ourselves better. And the irony about gaining knowledge is precisely this : External knowledge is easier - knowing onself is often the most difficult.

We are meeting Dean today

2005-06-14T16:44:00.000-07:00

Today's Asha training at Stanford will be followed by a short meeting with Dean Karnazes. For the uninitiated, Dean is the legendary ultramarathoner who has, among other achievements, the credit of running 262 miles without stopping. Thats 10 complete marathons! Now I could not manage anything to that except a dropped jaw when I first read about it. I am sure even Phidippides would have been impressed! Read more about Dean @ http://www.ultramarathonman.com/ .

My experiences with recovery

2005-06-14T00:11:00.000-07:00

One of the things I learnt: Contrary to the suggestion of never touching your CD-RW drive's lens, soft cleaning with a paper can be helpful. Secondly the Sony Vaio recovery wizard is the most irritating software I have ever seen. For the creation of a recovery kit, it asks you to keep 9 CD-R ready, but asks you to subsequently number them as 8 of 8, 7 of 8 etc. So much for its idiocy. After writing 2 (8, 7 of 8) of them, if there is an error, it just asks you to start after a reboot (which btw is not optional). Well, after you restart, you dont start from 6 of 8, but from 8 of 8! Now this does not work out at all. I created two (8 of 8's), and 1 each of 7 and 6 of 8. But when it errored out after that I simply gave up. So currently my recovery kit creation is stalled. I still think the problem is not to do with any corruption, but with some internal problem in the HDD itself, so that a VAIO recovery wizard flashback to its pristine vendore installation would do no good at all. To begin with it started after I took the laptop to office 4 days in a row and I guess I ended up handling it rather roughly. After booting up it starts working fine in half an hour. I am sure thats because the used programs are entirely in memory which is a good 512MB. Well, I will let it just be for now and arrange for an XP CD. After this I would probably buy a new Toshiba HDD.

The fourth arrow of time

2005-06-13T11:11:00.000-07:00

Now, I know time from about 25 yrs. now. The physicists say that time manifests itself in three ways : Thermodynamic, cosmological and psychological (that one which we all know so well). However I think they miss something : the arrow of time on a windows machine!! The arrow is visible when performing a windows task (like downloading a file or writing a CD). It is generally augmented with added information : how much of this time still remains to do the task and how much has elapsed since the beginning. Now this time has a rather random nature. Its properties:

1. It can stay at its value even as the other arrows of time advance.
2. It can take even go in the opposite "direction" even as the other arrows of time advance.
3. In some cases the duration measured between the start and end of a task are equal to the corresponding value on the psychological arrow, while in other cases it can be vastly different.

One can only hope to understand the windows arrow of time after lot of work experience with Windows. A precise mathematical formulation of its nature still remains an open problem though.

Things looking better!

2005-06-13T10:22:00.000-07:00

Well, this post is just a regular update on all concerned blog readers out there. Firstly my cell phone is almost ok, except that outer display is not working. So I would not be able to find out the caller without flipping open the phone. Big deal!
As far as the movie is concerned managed to see it yesterday. Not too great.
The laptop is working now, but horribly slow. There is definitely some HDD problem: I am quite sure about it since it makes some strange noises from time to time. I managed to open up the laptop and check if the HDD was connected properly and it seems all fine. I am going to make up a recovery kit today and then buy a new HDD sometime soon. Managed to get a great deal on CD-R's today morning at Office Depot. Damn Sony, they no longer supply a recovery kit but encourage you to create one as your first action item with the laptop (which obviously I never bothered to do). I am also looking for a XP CD to install the Windows XP recovery console. Maybe a fixmbr would fix the problem (if the matter is to do with some corruption). Seems lot of recovery work this week. Working with databases, I now know that recovery is a big pain anyways. Some of the inherent "inefficiencies" in databases supporting ACID are due to recovery management. Well, thats enough of a geeky post! Back to work now :)

Weekend Jinxed

2005-06-11T17:35:00.000-07:00

I cannot possibly have a worse weekend.
Friday evening : Dont buy tickets for Mr. and Mrs. Smith on the phone when it is available. Drive 30 miles with a friend. When we get there, the show's sold out.
Saturday morning : drop my cell phone in the swimming pool. Cell phone is dead.
Saturday morning : Laptop cannot detect hard drive.
So, I am cut off from all communication while I am at home. This blog post is from the office computer. Am running off to a Verizon store to get my phone replaced! Hope that works out ..

Facilities?

2005-06-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went over to Barnes and Nobles after work. While I was just browsing, I chanced to come up on William Strunk Jr. and EB White's - The Elements of Style. The book is now in its 4th edition and is orginially pretty old work (1918). It was originally written by Professor William Strunk Jr. EB White was his student and has now added to this classic. The beauty of this book is that it lays down few simple rules, easy to commit to memory, which can make one's writing a pleasure to read. There is a chapter which describes frequently misued words and phrases and there was something I found funny. In the US the term for jail is "correctional facility" which I had always found an attrociously wrong use of the word facility. Well, I was happy to see that Professor Strunk noted that too! He was not happy about jails and hospitals among some other institutions being termed as "facilities".

BTW, the original book is now available online at http://www.bartleby.com/141/.
Disclaimer : I have not read the book entirely so don't blame the book or me for my sloppy blog writing!

Organized Crime

2005-06-08T13:05:00.000-07:00

Now, today we had nice discussions about organized crime during lunch. Well, my roommate happens to be quite a follower of actions inside the Mumbai underworld (disclaimer : he has nothing to do with the underworld) and he was telling us stories about the recent murders and gang rivalries in the underworld. Now with the screening of "D" (its the actual name but short for "D company", a new Bollywood movie), people get a peek into the pure business way of doing underworld operations. In D, the character Deshu corporatizes the Mumbai underworld. And our discussion meanwhile drifted to organized crime elsewhere in the world. What about America? Well, maybe Americans had Mafia only in the 1950's or so and all of it was now gone. Or maybe not ... maybe bigger organizations were doing crime and terror in a much more organized manner. Perhaps you are getting my hint - we are referring to governments now!

An interested reader

2005-06-07T16:13:00.000-07:00

I was happy at discovering that few friends actually follow my blog. Maybe I should get blogging much more frequently to keep all of them updated. Yesterday I was happy to chat with Maria who found my posts quite interesting. I would suggest that you start blogging today if you happen to read this post. Happy blogging!

How did I get blogging!

2005-06-07T16:04:00.000-07:00

Now that I think I know so much about blogging, RSS, Technorati (yes they are really cool) etc. I might as well confess how I found out blogging. Well I used to read blogs of some friends from about 2003, but I never thought that it is 'blogging'. I just thought they maintained some kind of personal website where they keep posting their day to day experience. I was amazed at their writing skills as well as their enthusiasm in keeping the world updated about their day to day life by modifying their personal web page everyday! .. not too bright eh :) . Well, to an extent I was correct anyway. One day, as I was searching on "complexity" (my love for complexity theory is too great to be summarized in this small post) I hit upon Lance Fortnows blog http://weblog.fortnow.com . As much as I found this blog extremely stimulating I was still surprised by the enthusiasm of Lance to maintain comments as well. Well that surprise was too great to digest .. so I clicked The 'I Power Blogger' icon on the second day. That was the starting point of no return. The excitement at discovering blogging was great. Blogs in my opinion have become really a great source of information on all issues from travel to technology to experiences. Add RSS technology to it and it opens a plethora of cool applications as well.

Saturday long run

2005-05-23T17:19:00.000-07:00

Saturday long run at Alameda creek was awesome. I guess we started out a little late since by the time it was ending, it was quite hot. This was my first long run with Team Asha after I returned from India. They did a very nice job of managing the water spots. Plus it was a great experience to be running along with fellow team-mates and getting cheered as well as cheering others. Lastly the gatorade and food at the end of it all seemed very considerate of the team. Must say Asha makes it a very nice experience running. I am sure all this will really be an absolute necessity when we run the real long distances 14-15+ miles. The runs right now are 4-5 miles (which are long by beginner standards) but I have been there. I did not quite connect with the excitement of a lot of runners who made it so long the first time but I am sure, my time is not far ahead!

From Singapore!

2005-04-17T01:56:00.000-07:00

Blogging can always be fun. Even when one is dead tired just waiting for a long journey to end. So I am finally on my way to New Delhi via Singapore where there is a 7 hr halt. Seemed like at least 10 hrs though! With some sightseeing in the free bus tour and lots of roaming round Changi International I could manage to kill 21/2 hrs. Well theres another about 11/2 hrs to still go .. but I guess I will manage -- blogosphere to the rescue!

Running rulez!

2005-04-05T15:58:00.000-07:00

I still remember the days when I was bumped out of bed by my Mom and Dad to go and take a run early in the morning. I hated it then .... but that was long ago. All the same there was a resolve that one day I would indeed bring myself to do this extremely arduous exercise of running with ease. That never quite happened until now. Running is almost an addiction now. Running surely clears my mind. And during days filled with confusions and tentions I really look forward to running as a panacea for all these irregularities in the thought process. I mostly like to run alone because it gives me a time to think through some things with more concentration that I can normally manage. Running RuLeZ!

A write-copy-paste optimization problem

2005-03-29T16:00:00.000-08:00

Ok, here is a problem, solving which would give me an algorithm for my work! The basic task is to write out an item I containing N characters, R times sequentially. Now there is a cost w associated with writing each character, a cost c with copying (selecting) each character. Also there is a paste operation (how would I do without it!) and there is a constant cost p associated with it (that does not depend on the number of characters). Lets leave out costs associated with placing of the mouse cursor at appropriate places. One can assume some suitable inequalities for solving this problem for example : w < c < 5w and p < c < 3p , p < w < 5w. What is a best write-copy-paste strategy that solves this problem for the minimum possible cost?

2 * 5.5 mi

2005-03-28T11:41:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was one of the days, when I really felt tired in the night after a long time! Had a nice run of 5.5 miles in the morning, after recovering from an injury, which definitely had affected my fitness level! (as per what I felt during the run). Anyway I had decided on a nice long afternoon nap after that when suddenly Ashish (Atthi), Amit (Sher Khan Bhatia) and Ankur (Chavanni, Bhai) made plans for a trip to Pinnacles. They called me just before I had dozed off into an irrecoverable sleep mode. Anyways we went on for the hike and it was a good 5.5 mi hike no doubt, with an intial rocky climb. The descent was through nice green areas with a stream flowing by. Needless to say, Ashish and I also had a run of 0.5 miles. The return trip was interesting with the instrumental music in the car matching with the weather outside. It was raining cats and dogs. After a brief detour into a sleepy city because we lost our way, we finally got back on track into Hwy 25 and then Hwy 101 leading us back to Sunnyvale. Then we had a nice dinner at Chaat House followed by bulla session at Atthis home. We also watched "Before sunset". By the end of it I was too tired to even drive back to Redwood city .. just managed to come home and crash.

My Erdos Number!

2005-03-21T18:07:00.000-08:00

I found out that my Erdos number is actually 4 .. yippeee!