Archis's Blog

January 14, 2010

The resurrected art of bad writing?

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , , , — archisgore @ 11:30 pm

I recently took to reading some classics again – after a few year hiatus. The first book on my list was “King Solomon’s Mines”. As I read, I appreciated the high quality of bad writing. It’s ingenious. The book is a first-person narration by Allan Quartermain, and as he describes himself as a humble hunter and trader, it would make so much sense that he would write that way. Took be about half the book to realize that. Sure the auther could have been eloquent to show off his own ego, but that would have ruined the book. The writer could have been just a terrible writer, but then the book would have been horrible, yet it’s not! This was the work of a genius.

I don’t have much to say here beyond getting opinions and thoughts. This was quite an interesting read. The only other book with such a curiously unique writing style was Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s a book of first-person narrations through letters. The book is also brilliant in being thrilling, encapsulating and mesmerizing, given the limitations the author imposes upon himself then he restricts all narration to letters written between certain people. The letters need to portray different personalities through words alone. Situations such as fear, anger, emotional states of characters, need to be represented through their (the character’s writings). It seems to be we rarely give credit to the magnificient art of simply writing itself!

In case you have any books where you’ve seen such an uncommon writing style, I would love to hear from you.

On an ending note, it just hit me – I’ve been reading reviews about twilight lately and they’re all but inspiring. Maybe those critics aren’t appreciating the good writing here? This “Bella” person seems to be as much a mentally degenerate person in need of institutionalization as anyone could ever be. And the book (according to reviews), is written from her point of view. Maybe you’re not appreciating the writer’s genius here. Wouldn’t it seem wierd if Bella were narrating a well-thought-out, logical story without describing Edward’s body a million times? Twilight may just be the resurrection of the art of bad writing! (There’s no way in hell I’m reading one of those books though)

January 13, 2010

Medical Capsule dilution experiment

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , — archisgore @ 12:13 pm
Picture of Capsule Dilution experimental setup

Capsule Dilution Experimental Setup (click image for larger version)

So… once in a while you want a controlled release of certain substances in a solvent, and the easiest method with minimal chances of failure is to have a capsule that slowly dissolves in the solvent, thereby unleashing whatever awesomeness you have stored inside.

Timing with capsules can be quite a feat, and for some upcoming big plans, I needed to have a controlled release of large capsules simultaneously. This experiment was designed to study that.

The picture above shows the experimental setup. The capsules used are B-Complex vitamin supplements. I opened one of the capsules to replace the stuff inside with a colourant (thereby allowing me to visually see when the capsule got broken), but since all my solvents were colourless, and the stuff inside was a yellowish powder, I figured it would suffice to use them as-is.

I wanted all this on video, but I left my handicam DVDs in Pune with my parents, and had forgotten to buy new ones, with very little chance of me getting them at 1:30 am in the morning.

Let’s get to the contents of each of the containers – they’re all labelled in the picture. We’ll refer to each container combination as Ci where i=1 to 5.

C1 Water
C2 Water
C3 Isopropyl Alchohol
C4 Diluted Ethanol (Vodka)
C5 Citric Acid + Acetic Acid

Now I’ll get to a table with the timeline as per my log entries and you’ll know just what happened.

 1:35 Capsules were inserted in C1, C3 and C5 to test water, alchohol and acid . All 3 capsules float on all liquids.
 1:35:30  Water bowl (C1) immediately shows dissolution. The capsule’s outer shell is dissolving. I wonder if the width of the bowl was a factor that the achohol and acid didn’t have, so I start to setup C2 with a narrow tumbler.
 1:40:40  C5 shows signs of dissolution, yet mild. C1 is dissolving significantly.
 1:42  C2 is started – starts dissolving within seconds and at 1:42:30 has colours diffusing in the water. The capsule floats.
 1:43:30 C5 is slightly dissolving. Constant rate. Slow. C2 is rapid. C3 has NO CHANGE. I mean this is shocking – the capsule might as well be in an inert fluid. I decide to determine whether the type of alchohol matters. I begin setting up C4 with ethanol (knowing very well that vodka isn’t pure alchohol and my ethanol supplies having run out, I would have to make allowances for the water content in Vodka being responsible for a significant portion of the dissolution)
 1:46:30  C4 started. The capsule floats. C1 is almost broken. C2 is a close 2nd. C5 is now visibly dissolving – the colourants from the capsule’s outer shell are mixing evenly (unlike in water where they were breaking off and sinking to the bottom). C3 – NO CHANGE! C4 is going pretty fast.
 1:48:31  The picture you see above was taken.
 1:49:30  C1 broke. The contents within it sank to the bottom. C2 is almost broken. C3 NONE. C4 catching up fast. C5 broken. C5 seems to have been broken a while ago, but it’s contents weren’t coming out of the capsule. This may have something to do with the fact that these were vitamin tablets containing all acids and perhaps the water had already been saturated with an acid.
 1:52 C2 almost there…. C4 close behind. 
 1:54  C2 the capsule is shrivelled but the contents are not yet exposed to the solvent.
 1:60  C2 broke with contents now exposed to the solvent and started diffusing.
 1:59  C4 still in the race. Given up on C3 it had NO CHANGE!
 2:16  C4 broke. (many logs between 1:59 and this entry have been omitted that only record “no change”)

Each solvent’s start and end time is presented below

  Start Time End Time Duration
C1 1:35 1:49:30 19:30
C2 1:42 1:60 18
C3 1:35 practical infinity infinity
C4 1:46 2:16 30
C5 1:35 1:49:30 (maybe upto 30 seconds before) 19

 

Conclusion: Alchohol in water is a good way to control the dissolution timing of each capsule. Given capsules that are thinner, we could start with a base-line water-dissolution lower than whatever we want, and then mix enough alchohol in the water to fine-tune the time.

December 19, 2009

“Giving up” is not losing

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , — archisgore @ 2:01 pm

When you find yourself in an unwinnable scenario, what do you do? Do you “patriotically” keep fighting to the death or do you admit that this round is lost and give up? Unfortunately such situations aren’t too uncommon in life – and we all end up in those critical decision-points of our lives where we have conflicting interests, and we don’t know what to do.

I read an interesting analogy recently – if a soldier is wounded in battle, and if he cares for the cause, he would first go back and heal his wounds so that he may fight with renewed strength the next day. Only a fool would keep on fighting with bulletholes in their chest and die – thereby really “losing” the battle (their goals shall forever remain unachieved).

It’s also an important concept is Poker. Movies like Casino Royale misleadingly portray the character who keeps on raising as having “guts”. Watch the World Series poker tournaments and you’ll find that knowing when to fold is perhaps the most important strategy towards winning. If someone has a Royal Flush, and you know it’s obvious, then how much do you think you’ll scare them by going “all in”?

I had to learn this the hard way in my job, but it’s an important point to know about yourself. If you find yourself in a situation where you know you won’t win, it’s not easy to back out, but it takes much more courage to live for your cause even under ridicule, than to give up and die on the battlefield and lose sight of what you were fighting for in the first place. It’s important to let go of false pride, and really fight for pride.

Then again, let’s focus on that ridicule angle for a moment. I dare you, if you can find one instance where the persons ridiculing you for giving up, were not the very persons who had something to gain from you not giving up, I’ll retract this entire article. I won’t use the word “in most cases”. I’ll guarantee a 100% complete certaintyof this fact. Your loved ones would be the first to ask you to back out and leave. Your loved ones care about the cause you’re fighting for, than a false pride which you will never gratify anyway. Do you really believe the people who ridicule you for giving up, won’t do so inspite of you dying for your cause?

You really want to win? Go back, rethink your strategy, and actually get what you set out to achieve! That’s how you shut up those who dare make fun of you.

December 18, 2009

Identifying The “Undeclared Couple” in a Group

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , — archisgore @ 12:52 pm

What do you do when after three days of sleepless coding, your bug count goes from a good 14 to zero? You find a void in life that can only be filled with formulating meaningless game-theoretic constructs and presenting them to your readers.

So I find myself in this situation last night, and began thinking of a particular category of games that are quite common in life but we rarely ever get to beat them because we can’t formulate them in time. Regular readers will know how important I consider identifying a game in order to win it. The game is actually about a cooperative multiplayer strategy, but when discussing with a couple of people, I quickly realized the “undeclared couple” in your group is a scenario common enough for it to be used as an example. These principles apply in practically every walk of life when you are in a situation where you do not know the objective functions of other players, and especially if two players are cooperating against your interests. Note that we won’t discuss winning strategies here, since they are discussed in depth in classical game theory. We are just trying to make an effort to identify such games when they are played, so that we become better equipped to react when it does happen.

A lot of times, losing such games can lead to frustration, resentment and anger. You feel treated “unfairly” because people sided with other people. It just gets messy because you try to humanize people when you lose so you can blame them, whereas if you were on the winning side, you would just say, “Hey, I looked after my interests. What’re you so worked up about?”  Goes without saying, the workplace is the most high-stakes game with hidden cooperative players – although I have to admit, personally I’ve not come across any work-related cases yet (it may have something to do with the fact that I work in a company where it’s acceptable to flame a VP if you have something to say). In personal relationships, families, newly weds, etc., it’s much too common for comfort.

Let’s start with a simpler example of Poker. If you had  a cooperative player sitting diametrically opposite from you on a poker table (i.e. you have half the players on the table between your turn and their turn),  you gain a distinct edge. Aside from the statistically trivial possibility of your chances being doubled because you get two hands in the game, you also gain a distinct edge in manipulating players who believe that every single player has an objective of making money only for themselves. Simply relaxing this constraint, and where one player is helping another player make money, can make the game so much more advantegous to the cooperative players. In a game of poker, however, the only way to convey information to other players is through your moves. There are games where we have more information at our disposal, should we choose to use it.

This second example applies to practically EVERY situation where a group is involved – be it clubs, activity groups, friend groups, colleagues, a bunch of aunts and uncles, whatever – you name it. We shall look to the example of two of your friends who might be secretly attracted to each other but are too embarrassed to admit it, and require the entire group you hang out with for various reasons (the reasons are faily obvious, but this isn’t an article on pop-psychology, so we’ll leave the reasons to themselves). Really really think back onto those times when two people constantly hang out together, and will seeminly have their objective functions at variance with each other (they will go a long way to say this out loud a million times). I’ve been personally irritated at least twice by such behaviour, so I know the feeling.

So here’s the situation. Two people want to do something “different” from what everyone else wants to do (damn, I guess I’ll write a blog on pop-psychology yet). In a simple one-vote strategy, they lose out. Every player, express their opinion, and assuming a simple model, the group decides to do what got voted the most. If there is a declared couple in the group, they may resolve contention among themselves and present two votes on the game – not all that powerful really. It’s the undeclared couple that gains immense power, especially if other players are not cautious. Now that I think of it, you could look at the voting strategy as a simple betting round of Poker. Each player votes once, but the last player has an advantage since they know every other vote and they can make a move that is more ameable to the group. Then if there are players who haven’t folded or haven’t gone all-in with all that they had to stake, we have a “flop” where players present their “cards” which are statements made in order to sway votes, and another round of betting takes place.

However, one player, gets two votes, and one of those votes is not put on the table until every other vote has been cast. One player can first cast a vote, and if the suggestion is shot down by the time the voting reaches their partner, the partner can present a vote based on better information about what the group wants, while still maintaining an amicable position for both players.

It’s very important to identify such behaviour patterns not only to win that specific round of betting, but to ensure your credibility in the group is not threatened. Over time, this “undeclared couple” will try to weed out those who present a threat to themselves or those who may call their bluff (one of the winning strategies for such games).

This is where we deviate from mathematical game theory into a social phenomenon called “labelling” which too, I comment about a lot. Labelling is the assignment of a label to a certain population to “differentiate” it from the non-labelled population. We see it all around us on a large scale – religion, names, skin color, whatever. I want you to do a simple experiment tomorrow morning. From the start of the day till evening, simply gague your emotional response every time someone uses the inclusive word “us” that includes you. I know it may sound very trivial, but you’ll be surprised at the results.

The untrained mind has an instinctive urge to be “part of” a social group, and it makes us happy. Nothing wrong with that. Now, when you have cooperative players in a game, their differing opinions are defended by the second player who can label the first player as “us”, maintaining their social standing within the group. Any lone player, however, does not have resort to this defense. Over time, both players, for all public appearences, individually start labelling a threatening player as “not us”. They will do rounds within a group and start subtle suggestive reinforcement techniques to indicate how you are not a team player (ever notice how this phrase is parodied heavily in so many TV Shows?) Common statements include, “See how he doesn’t like what we all like to do?” (the minute other players hear “we all” their endorphin system kicks in).

Over time, you may find your opinions become completely irrelevant regardless of what intrinsic value they hold towards the “declared objective” of the group, since the group no longer lets you in on their real objective function.

So now you know why game theory is so important in real life. Ever find yourself in a scenario where your team at work suddenly ignores everything you have to say? Ever notice how a group of two or three people are favoured by the boss regardless of whether they are really optimal for the team? Ever notice how one morning you wake up and find yourself being called “not a team player”, and you have no clue where it’s coming from? Then go read cooperative gaming strategies, cause you’ve just been duped!

October 5, 2009

Pro-Maharashtrian politics

Filed under: 1 — archisgore @ 9:41 am

Oh dear God, here I go into the dirty world of politics. If I get “roughed up” in the near future during one of my trips to Pune, I shall know that it was due to pious and religious people who believe in free speech and they were simply using their right to free speech to make a statement against me.

I have thankfully been isolated from many reports and interviews on this issue by various parties involved, and yet I found defenders of this cause quite weak in their arguments (or at least, not committed to them). From what I do know however, I can surmise some facts and I leave it up to my readers to correct me if I’m wrong.

Now let us first start with the rules of the game. As you all know I don’t believe in “right, righter and rightest”. There is “right” and there is “wrong”. Nobody is “more right” or “less right”. When it comes to the Law, I am not a Judge nor a person contracted by the Indian Judiciary System to act as a delegate, therefore I do not make up my own laws – I have only the letter of the law to follow.

When the law is inconvenient, people turn to “principles” (or invent a few if necessary) and if they are bigger cowards, talk to me about supernatural powers, God, religion, etc. For those who would use religion as a labeling mechanism, I would like to emphasize as I have done in countless other blog posts, that I never question the rules of any game, but I expect every player to follow them – especially the player who establishes the rules. A rule must be defined as f(x) where x is a person and no matter who that person is, the definition of f is immutable. Of course this is my interpretation of my religion, and since I’m neither God myself, nor a contracted agent of God given authority by God to decide between what is right and what is wrong (as so many people around me seem to be), I leave it up to each reader to make up their own mind.

Having established this fact, let us look into the whole violence that was caused in Maharashtra against “North Indians” (a label I have not assigned and am not capable of demarcating) and understand the facts. I would like the reader to fill in whatever information they have regarding one question. Specifically I want to know in short, what was the objective of this whole movement. Is it to stop all that is illegal? If so, I understand completely. The violence itself was illegal, and in retrospect, those who caused it, I assume, have turned themselves in voluntarily in their local police stations to fight for their cause. I would like facts on the numbers of people currently under voluntary arrest.

Now coming to my main point – I find it disturbing just how many literate (I do not call people with a ‘degree’ educated, but I will grant that they can read and write) people in my own state and falling prey to labeling. I am not one who would deny people the opportunity to fight for what they want – if they want jobs and others are taking their jobs, it’s fine to fight for them. I am afraid of people who try to present their personal convenience in a framework of principle so that they get a feeling of moral superiority over others. I recently heard that a certain leader of this movement in a televised interview stated that while all other leaders are donkeys (an imprecise translation), he is “less of a donkey”, and therefore people should support him.

The disturbing reality of such a leader, as history has shown us ever since history has been recorded, is that subconsciously we end up giving him the greatest power on this earth – the power of God – the power to Judge – the power to say what is right and what is wrong – a power I do not allow any human being to have over me. What makes this situation particularly dangerous is, by supporting such people politically we give them the power to execute their judgment – thereby making them Gods. I would prefer a leader who said, “I’m a donkey, elect me.”, or a leader who says, “I am pure, therefore elect me.” Heck, I would probably elect the donkey rather than the pure leader because I know I am a donkey too. I am afraid of anyone who thinks they are Agents of the Supreme Court of India or the Agents of God and can determine they are “less of a donkey compared to me.” Who is to say when they will change their mind on what constitutes “donkeyhood” and what does not?

A famous peom I would like everyone to read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came…
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

It is time we all faced our fears and admitted our own sins. When we break a traffic light, we convince ourselves that we are “less of a donkey than a murderer”. Over time we build a strong resistance against our conscience so that these things don’t bother us. Then we end up in a catch-22 situation – other people have played our game and gone Pro, while we still remain in the Pee Wee league. We built illegal buildings in our Mumbai and others came and they build them over thousands of square acres. Now we want to label them so that we are not judged for our sins. We crapped in our own house and now the stench of others crapping here is bothering us!

I am not saying what is happening is appropriate or legal, but I am certainly saying that two wrongs don’t make a right. There are better ways to improve the situation in the state and it is up to each and every one of us to exploit all such means. Imitation is the highest form of flattery and we cannot “teach them a lesson” by imitating them.

As for the job situation in the state, I am a standing testament to the real situation. Within Pune or within my own state I would not have been given a job two years ago when I passed out. And it wasn’t because of the “North Indians” or the “South Indians” or the “Caste X people” or anyone currently labelled as “them”. It was because I did not have a “B.E.” degree and I did not have a job because back then the B.E.’s were “us” and I was a “them”. Back then, I was a “them” for the very people who would now have me become a part of “us” because some other “them” came and took up all the jobs of those elite “us” in the state. If history has taught us anything, such people are the most dangerous sort of people you can ever hope to encounter. Tomorrow another community may come up and start killing a part of the Maharashtrians who form a part of “us” and have lucrative jobs. Can anyone who has lived in the state seriously tell me with a straight face that the have not seen this happen countless times in their own lifetime already?

This is my request to all those out there, I don’t wish to preach and I don’t wish to pass judgment, but I do want each and everyone of you to make sure that the day they come for you, you will have someone left to speak.

August 21, 2009

Are people the worst of our addictions?

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , — archisgore @ 5:43 am

Addictions in the classical sense are substances or behaviours on which we have become so co-dependent, that they seem absolutely necessary for our survival, and at the same time are dangerous for ourselves or those around us. Only when someone else cares enough for us to recognise our self-destructive behaviour, do we begin the difficult journey towards acknowledging it (recovery is still far away). Some addictions are easier to identify – drugs, alchohol, narcotics, etc. They can be measured by the visible co-dependency a person has. Urges to satisfy these needs can be medically suppressed, or in simpler cases, by simply denying access to them. It is easy to call out a drug-dealer and arrest them in order to prevent the drug delivery chain. Even if the addict is a moral failure, the drug dealer can be called an equal, if not worse, moral failure too. Addictions to substances, in short, are VERY easy to deal with because they are visible – and that’s half the battle won.

Lately though, I began to identify a behaviour pattern that had manifested within myself and those around me, and only over the weekend after lots of contemplation, did I identify it as an addiction of the most dangerous kind I had ever encountered. I now realized why attachment is forbidden in the Jedi Code. Under the labels of “love”, “affection”, and “caring”, we tend to become so highly co-dependent on people that we become addicted to them, their company or their approval. Really really think about it. We may dismiss these addictions by running away from them by using excuses like, “Afterall, we have to live in society…” but I dare anyone to say, “It’s not an addiction, and I don’t need it!”

Afterall, doesn’t a drug addict say they “need” drugs to survive too? Don’t they come up with excuses too? Don’t they deny the very fact that it’s an addiction in the first place? What’s the qualitative difference between a drug addict and a social addict? What is the moral foothold based on which the social addict displays their holier-than-thou attitude? At least drug dealers don’t use every form of media at their disposal to propagate their addiction. Society, on the other hand, does – making the drug dealer look like an angel on a morality scale.

We propagate romanticism through novels, movies and even religion. We ignore the true meaning of Love, and instead pervert it with our definition which is identified by our needs rather than the needs of those we claim to love. The existence of very word “heartbreak” shows just how perverted our definition of love is. An alchoholic is heartbroken when they are denied alchohol. So are we heartbroken, when we are denied approval by the person we “Love”. Through creative poetry, we plunge ourselves into the depths of addiction. We then justify said addiction by portraying it as something noble and desirable. Over the last few months, I’ve seen some remarkable achievements of friends who owned up to their addictions to people and turned their life around. Those who seemed like they had nothing to live for, suddenly became people I began to envy because there were thousands of people who couldn’t live without them. I dedicated this blog to honour these role models of mine. They may not be celebrated in newspapers or interviewed on television, but I want them to know that they have one admirer in this world, and I hope, the first of many.

I never realised what they really meant when people say, “Let it go…” My first instinct was to get defensive by saying, “I won’t let it go, because it’s a defeatist attitude. I want to win!” It’s no different from how a drug-addict will use every means at their disposal to “win” more drugs – it’s not really winning at all. The vicious circle was now apparent.

Then we come to those who feed these addictions. Ever notice just how tense the relations between so many “close friends” really are? One wrong word, one wrong comment, one inappropriate gesture, and all relations break down like a stack of dominoes. In order to avoid this, we find ourselves enslaved in their clutches. We try to please them in any way we can. Initially even I thought that the only person addicted would be the blame, but observe carefully and you find another culprit – the drug-dealer.

Over social experiments and careful observations performed for the last eight weeks, it turns out that the attention-seekers also feed these addictions to keep them going. Whenever a someone realises the person they are co-dependent on is drawing away, they modify their behaviour to what they think will attract the person back. So great is the need that people will go to remarkable lengths to make it happen. So far, nothing is really wrong. However, I found that at some stage, the addict starts losing their interest. They either begin to forget what codependency was like, or they just decide all the trouble isn’t worth the approval they may gain, or if they’re smart, they’ll realise they will never gain the approval they so desperately seek. If only their “victims” were merciful and would allow these people to recover by acting stuck up or standoff-ish. Life isn’t so easy, I’m afriad. It is at these critical points that I found the drug-dealers actually fiegning approval or closeness to feed the addict and give them hope, thus plunging them back into the depths of their failure.

Why this blog? Because knowing the enemy is and facing it is the only way to win the battle. Have you ever found yourself making excuses of “Love” or “Friendship” out of fear of losing someone? Chances are you’re addicted to them. Do you find people around you oscilating between being very friendly one day and distant the next? Chances are your addiction is being fed. It’s time to own up and face the reality. It’s hard to change – especially when you’ve been friends or acquaintaces for a long time, but life isn’t about what’s hard or easy, life is about what’s necessary!

August 19, 2009

I’m an old relic in a new world order

Filed under: 1 — archisgore @ 12:18 pm

The recession has shown many their place in this world, and we certainly haven’t learnt our lesson yet – we still glamourise the same business school suits that got us in this predicament in the first place.

However, I think the software and IT industry has finally matured due to the recession, and in the last eight months, I found myself having become an outdated, worthless relic in a new world order that is no longer dominated by computer science.

The difference is remarkable and yet subtle enough that nobody notices. Back when I joined the industry, I was hired for being a crazy workaholic obsessed with changing the world by solving the hard (computational) problems. Thanks to Google being the new “Cool Kid” on the block, every company was on a mad hiring spree to hire the best computing minds in the world. Everyone wanted to show they were “innovative”. That word was thrown around so much it made many sick. This meant interviews questions were largely academic in nature, and judged the skills the industry thought they wanted – complex algorithms, automata theory, and agile coding.

The recession though, brought everyone back to their senses. These skills no longer hold value on your resume. Google has given up playing the “innovation” card a long time ago, and if you notice the best version of windows so far (Win7) isn’t as innovative as what Vista was. It’s a different world order now, and I guess the next few years should see software and IT truly turning into an “Industry”.

Back in the 60’s there was only computer science. Nobody knew what one might need a computer for anyway. The Macintosh and the IBM PC changed all that. Everyone started building their own computers, which didn’t survive for long. Today, computers are a manufacturing business – you no longer dream of working for IBM or Apple to “build the next PC”. The best you can expect is to replace a LiON battery with a 5% more efficient LiON battery which was invented 5-10 years ago and is now proven to be reliable. It doesn’t really get much more innovative than that.

Software, however, was a different game altogether until an year ago. You could use the latest and greatest algorithm on the planet and ship it out to 10 million people the next day. People actually paid for that. I guess this year should be marked as a landmark in the software world when all that has changed for good. Almost every software company in the world is morphed into a signature of the automobile industry. The majority of the workforce no longer is permitted to make decisions. There are small cells and groups that may work on transmissions, or tyres or bumpers. But largely, the company isn’t a technology company – they’re not in the business to be heralded as the No. 1 employer, or No. 1 innovator, or whatever. They’re in the business to make money. The majority of the workforce is told what to do, and they do it. Not only are they not required to think on their own, but doing so is actually detrimental to the process which has been well-thought-out in the best interests of the company.

If I ask any of my friends today what is rewarded, then it is the regularity with which you come to work, how great you are at your job (meaning how little you deviate from what you are told to do), etc. This should be a wakeup call for all those thinking of studying CS in order to make a difference. Our science is now well-established. We are recognised as a mature field worth having. If you want to innovate, then like all the mathematicians and phycisists and chemists before us, find a tenured position at a University and get a few Ph.D. students. If you want to work in this industry, the days of the 20-year-old-fresh-out-of-college-calling-the-shots have come to an end.

This also applies to startups. The notion that startups innovate in technology no longer holds true. Startups have always, and from now on even in the computing field, will continue to innovate business models, delivery processes, cost reductions, etc. Startups will no longer develop new technology or create radically new markets.

That doesn’t mean you can’t change the world through software, it simply means don’t expect changing the world to be equivalent to good business.

It means all of us old-schoolers must adapt to the new world. There couldn’t be a better Star Trek moment in my life. We now venture into the Undiscovered Country. I find all those years of studying theory, experimenting, and working sleepless nights is now worthless in all but a few irrelevant niches.

July 18, 2009

Gmail’s obsession with preventing getting work done!

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — archisgore @ 11:43 am

This is one of the most annoying features of Google. This one really makes me literally stand up and start cursing in my cubicle and all my neighbours know I’ve got a mail on gmail! I click on the gtalk notification and it opens up my mail. You know what? I can’t operate on it! Is this going to replace my outlook experience? Does Google really really really believe that? There really have got to be morons sitting behind the scenes who’re secretly using all the benefits of outlook or whatever internal tool Google has for their own mail.

As you read this mail, forget the rational critique below (becuase it’s taking a lot of effort on my part to write it), and imagine me uttering the worst curses imaginable.

When I open my mail, I want to make a decision. What retard reads their mail and then does nothing about it? I know Google doesn’t want people deleting their mails, then at least allow me to tag it, flag it, label it, categorise it, forward it, reply to it, whatever! I use mail because it serves a purpose for me. Nothing except “remove from inbox” is an option. So basically from having a perfectly categorised mail, all google wants me to do is remove a tag that’ll make the message uncategorised and lost in the depths of my inbox forever, which graciously Google will allow to expand infinitely. Imagine having a thousand spam messages removed from inbox and kept as uncategorised. You can’t even mark a message as spam on that dialog (uhmm…. sorry I meant “page”).

Holy Hell, who ever thinks gmail’s interface is good has got to be kidding me! Clicking on “inbox” opens up a new window! What the hell do they expect me to do with my old window? I have a window with a perfectly legible message. Now I want to do something about that message so I want to go to my inbox. But apparently my previous page’s purpose isn’t over yet. Ctrl+click doesn’t open it in a new tab either. No…. Google – the guys who want to define the desktop of the web, clutter my perfectly functioning desktop with a new window! Do they hire some sort of kindergarten kids to design this stuff?

Once at the inbox, you have 10 unread messages. You want to go over each message in order – tough luck. It’s the new “Web Desktop” – what good would it be unless you got the feel of clicking through links a lot? With a UX design that only idiots who designed the annoyances above could boast of, you have to go back to inbox every single time and find the “next” message you probably were looking for.

Imagine a whole lot of curses at this point. What the hell is going on? People if you have any sanity, please send mails to my perfectly functioning yahoo account which allows me to do stuff with the mail you send me. Sending it to gmail is a one-way ticket to me clicking on that “x” beside the inbox link and your mail plummetting into the spam-riddled depths of the uncategorised messages I have.

June 16, 2009

Is ‘God’ the dark matter of spirituality?

Filed under: 1 — Tags: , , , , , , — archisgore @ 4:13 am

Whenever physicists can’t explain something, they just call it “dark matter” or “dark energy” and assign it properties they need to explain away their theories (well, that’s a gross exaggeration, and certainly not a criticism). Mathematicians come up with “imaginary numbers” (at least mathematicians have the guts to use the adjective imaginary directly.)

I don’t make any claims as to the existence or non-existence of God here, so don’t degenerate the comments section with those issues. The purpose of this post is to explore the very instinctual and primal necessity to believe that God exists. In fact, it is my contention that most people need to believe in God, rather than the other way round through a leap of faith, as most religions would have you believe. Heck, we desperately need to know God exists, because if he doesn’t, all hell would break loose.

To give you a context of what I expect to learn from your feedback, I am looking for answers to how one may truly become a God-believer without needing to, and if, assuming God doesn’t exists, then how do we reconcile the conflicting notions of fairness that I’ll come to below. Basically, what is it that keeps us from falling into complete anarchy?

We live in a world of symmetry and opposites (no, this isn’t turning into a Dan Brown-ish post). Ever since we remember, we are brought up in a profit-loss environment with an ideal zero-sum game. Basically here’s how our brain is programmed to look at the world:
1. All things being equal, the world is zero-sum. We give something, and we get something back of equal worth. We work for money. We pay money for services or goods.
2. Given a choice, and following our natural instincts (I can’t be sure whether these are natural instincts or something we were programmed with as children), we aim to upset the balance in our favour. We aim for “profit” which is a way of saying, an attempt at gaining a return worth more than what it was given in exchange for.
3. When we lose something more than what we get in return, we call it a “loss”. Loss hurts.
4. To keep the system in check, and to prevent a descent into complete anarchy or returning to our savage roots, civilization prides itself on it’s systems of rules and procedures to prevent (2) and (3) happening and to aim to keep the system at (1) as far as possible.
5. In a profit-loss scenario, the loser, blames the profiteer for being unjust or immoral or whatever. The culprit is quantifiable, identifiable and observable.

When it comes to feelings however, we have no one person to blame. We all try to be good people (yes, there may be bad people which I’ll come to later, but I don’t think you’ll find anyone who is truly convinced they are bad themselves.) Due to the Zero-Sum mentality above, we expect others to be good to us in return. This is compounded by the fact that faiths, religions and cults all have some justification for why we should behave morally and ethically.

However this seldom happens. We do get hurt. We feel betrayed, hurt or treated unfairly. And yet, there are no laws to combat or prevent unethical behaviour – since laws depend heavily on “intent” and in such cases, there is little chance of proving the intent to “hurt someone”.

So we end up in a place where the theories don’t fit:
1. The world is based on a Zero-Sum game, or so we’ve been programmed. Ideally, there is no profit, no loss.
2. The world doesn’t seem to work on a Zero-Sum principle. Sometimes we experience only loss – and if it was emotional loss, than all the worse because it is unquantifiable and unmeasurable. Or at least, we don’t see a civilized system of rules and regulations to give us justice when we experience loss.

How do we reconcile the two conflicting ideas above? Well, before that let’s attack why we need to reconcile the ideas above. For one, we all like to believe we have a purpose in life. If the first concept were to be shattered, the world appears to be a much crueller and harsher place than we want to believe. There seems little point to keeping up pretenses of morality and ethics. We would resort to anarchy and selfishness, and yet something conflicts inside us, because even this vision of the world seems equally frightening.

The reality is, the only vision of a tolerable world is one where everyone (at least, everyone except us) is good, and honest and ethical and moral. A view where only we are good, and the world is bad doesn’t fit. A view where we are as bad as the rest of the world doesn’t fit either, because well, frankly, we want peace and happiness. Getting a green signal to breaking morals and ethics isn’t very reassuring so long as everyone else gets that green signal too – we all know there will be stronger people, and a survival-of-the-fittest world would inevitably be horrible for us. For closure, I have to mention one other view appeals a lot more – a view where everyone else behaves ethically and morally, while we have a green signal to break ethics and morals ourselves – basically, given a choice, we want spiritual/emotional profit the same as (1). However, in a perfectly good world, perhaps there would be no point or purpose to breaking ethics and morals anyway, so this view may be redundant….. wait… isn’t this what we define as “Heaven”? We’ll come back to this in a moment.

So there we have it – the reason we want to reconcile conflicting observations.
a. We want spiritual and emotional profit
b. We have no way of knowing how to ensure it – the rules seem very arbitrary. But we already know a system in place where we can ensure profit – system (1) – the Zero-Sum game. So we want to somehow map spiritual gain into a system we are familiar with.

Let’s get back to how we end up trying to reconcile it. We begin with the assumption that (1) applies to (2) without first considering whether it does or not (except Gautam Buddha – the only person who actually even questioned whether (1) applies to (2) to begin with) So beginning with the assumption that spirituality is a Zero-Sum game, we now need to account for the times when we were good to people, or tried to be decent human beings, and yet we get treated unfairly and unethically. We behave in a remarkably scientific manner than most would like to admit. The way Mathematicians came up with imaginary numbers, and Physicists came up wtih Dark Matter and Dark Energy, we came up with God. (No, this still isn’t going in a Dan Brown-ish direction.)
We want to be good people, and we want the world to be good, or rather, we want to be good people because we want the world to be good – it’s the only way we are assured of happiness. So there we are, behaving morally and ethically, and we get hurt.

The system makes perfect sense now. Just as we have judges and rules and laws for our materialistic possessions, we now have a God for our emotional and spiritual ones. As with Imaginary Numbers, we can now assign whatever unexplained properties to God by simply saying, “Let us define God as having x, y and z properties. Now, using God in equations (1) and (2) we can reconcile them.”

As I wrote at the beginning, I’m looking for your thoughts, ideas and other viewpoints on this. Furthermore I want to know how I may be convinced God exists, especially when I have nothing to gain or lose from his existence. If he doesn’t exist, then I want to know how people reconcile (1) and (2). I want to know what prevents them from breaking every pretense of ethics and morals. Why doesn’t everyone turn into a raving murdering lunatic?

Is anyone of us really God-loving or God-fearing as opposed to being desperately God-needing?

(For the purposes of clarity, when I say “God”, I mean the various super-natural concepts around the world, or the concept of a “Higher Power”)

June 15, 2009

Addicted to Failure

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , — archisgore @ 5:07 am

I did comment before on how I find many, if not most, parents determined to grow their kids like horses on a stud farm for the purposes of display in a zoo. Yes, and I mean this quite close to literally in some cases. I can’t come up with a fancy or catchy name for this behaviour pattern yet, but I’m open to suggestions.

This is just a commentary and I make no point here, and I’m certainly not saying what’s right and what’s wrong. It’s just an observation I made and wanted to verbalise it and get your thoughts on it.

Parents’ defensive maneuver
I’ve covered the basics before – parents choose to shower their kids with everything they could possibly do – waiting in long lines for weeks to get admissions in the best kindergarten schools, sending kids off to extra coaching, and super-extra coaching to make sure they top their kindergarten, and if time permits send the kids off to extracurricular activities which are precisely timed and measured. Some learn music, some learn sports, but all in a measurable and quantifiable format. Why you ask? So that when the kid “fails in life” (failure again defined by said parents), the parents can claim they did everything they could possibly do. What more could they have done? Now this would be perfectly fine if it worked, but I’m now convinced beyond any doubt that it doesn’t. (For those not familiar with scientific terminology – all this means is that it has no effect on the outcome whatsoever, so don’t cite examples of where it worked and tell me it doesn’t ‘necessarily fail’ – if it doesn’t consistently succeed – or even succeed with any statistical significance, it’s called a failure. You might as well be throwing dice as your predictor for success.)

Two years after I pass out of college I can confidentaly say that some of my supposedly stupid friends from back in school and college turned out to be greater successes than most contemporaries from prestigious technical institutes who used to look down on us. I can now boast of ex-classmates who are reputed professional singers, an actress, a guy who runs an advertising company, a guy who failed his 12th exam (a BIG deal in Middle Class India) now lives on the sea-shore of Wales discovering oil, and countless others who became successes in things that I’d have hardly imagined were accessible to commoners. These are kids whom I’ve known to have never attended a single class, spent their time in coffee shops all day and spent time doing what they loved to do (which isn’t saying a lot). These were people who did everything wrong with their lives, by social norm. And yet, every time I talk to them when I visit Pune, I experience an intellectual high I no longer find in my own field. These people can talk about everything from literature (and I mean real literature – not Harry Potter books), wines, complex cheeses, intricacies of musical styles from different continents, history, philosophy, movie production, social dynamics, discrete mathematics, quantum physics, nanotechnology, and whatever else you can think of (had to cut down the list up there). These people are truly happy, and fun to be with.

If I contrast them with the people who did everything right with their lives, those were labelled by society as some of the best technical minds from the country, university toppers, 4.0ers, etc., I feel a great sense of frustration. The very people who went to a million coaching classes, did extra school work, would feel guilty for having missed out on the first five minutes of a class they were accidentally late to, are now the ones who spend their lives squabbling over marginal pay raises, fighting for promotions, cribbing about work-life balances, and bitching every evening about managers, co-workers and their companies. You’d have imagined these people spending spending their time discussing advanced algorithms, new breakthroughs, or products that change the world, and you’d be wrong. Then again we know what the smart MBAs from the best business schools, who were funded from taxpayers money and glorified in the press, have done to our economy – we’re all feeling the effects of that. It’s a gloomy and depressing scene in the technology and financial world today – where supposedly the smartest people exist.

Looking back on my life, I feel these people are the real failures in life. The reason we don’t hear about it as “failure” in common society is simply because all possibility of blame has been removed. Parents did all they could – they gave these guys the best tuitions, the best schools, the best of everything. They did everything Middle Class Morality expected of them. It was so much easier to push all responsibility on society rather than show a little backbone and take the risk of being right. You just send the kid to whatever the majority calls the “best thing to do” and you’re now no longer responsible for the kid’s failure – the majority will never admit they made a mistake – and the world moves on.

The Addiction to Failure
You heard that right. It is my observation that such parental behaviour encourages an addiction to failure in kids who are brought up this way. The I-did-all-I-could-do attitude comes from an inherent addiction to failure. During my last trip to Pune – which was my first trip in the middle of the recession, I realised something. My “loser” friends have fun and happy lives because they are really afraid to fail. They don’t know when they might fail, and they’ve experienced some really bad failures in their lives. They know the difference between hitting rock bottom when nobody cares for you, and the mushy-mushy failure when you have sympathisers. This means that they know what real failure tastes like (all you Indian readers can imagine what failing 12th standard feels like) and will do everything they can to avoid it. It also means that whatever fear they had of hitting rock-bottom has been faced and nothing frightens them easily. Someone who scores horribly in exams and goes to bad colleges will know that there is no pity to be expected in real failure – there’s only condescension, insult, and humiliation. You learn to live with the fact that you have nobody on your side. You are relegated to reading in newspapers about various opportunities, initiatives and whatever being offered exclusively to students on fancy colleges or those meeting certain criteria knowing that you have no chance in hell of ever being noticed.

The winners however, are addicted to failure because it gets them pity – an addiction worse than drugs, mainly because it cannot be easily identified. If you do everything right, and yet fail or are miserable, you have a bunch of people to pet you and pamper you. Over time, you start looking for trouble because it’s the lab-rat or dog-training reinforcement behaviour. You do something – you get sympathy – you do it again. When you’re a socially-defined winner, the majority won’t ever admit they were wrong, and instead enable you to feel sorry for yourself in order to justify themselves.

I know this seems a bit counter-intuitive and crazy, but look around you, the evidence is there. If I weren’t in Microsoft, or hadn’t gotten far in Code4Bill three years ago, how many sympathisers would have I had? Would you have said Microsoft doesn’t know how to hire good people? Now put me in the best college in India, and rethink the last two sentences. Would you have told me that I’m simply that bad which is why I failed? That’s real fear of failure – when you know that if you fail, you’ve got nobody to symapthise with you, and instead the entire world is waiting to tell you how much you truly suck. Now when I look back seven years ago at those aspiring singers, actors, writers, musicians, etc. I realise that the reason they learnt to be happy and fun is because they got to experience first-hand what it means to be ignored, rejected and not cared for, and I can safely say that boy are those people afraid to go back there again! The winners though, experienced early on that so long as they do what society asks them, and keep whining about how their life sucks, they get that many more admirers and sympathisers, and I can imagine why they’d want to go back there over and over and over again.

Fear of Failure provides objectivity

Another counter-intuitive statement and yet one that will make sense by the time I’m done arguing it.

People who’re afraid of real failure, know what it takes to win. They do whatever is in their power to win. What they don’t do is irrelevant stuff in a defensive maneuver. People were always surprised to find me and my friends watching movies during exams, and we’d open books at the maximum one hour before an exam. I can honestly say the maximum I’ve ever studied for any paper would be 4 hours before – much less than the countless weeks and months that the winners would spend on. I wasn’t the only one in class though – I’ve known tons of people who wouldn’t touch a book.

Once again, the answer is true fear of failure, as opposed to an addiction to failure. If I screwed up, there’s nobody to sympathise with me. The winners know as well as I do that most courses don’t have a whole lot of content that requires studying for weeks and months, but their sympathysers are the ones who really require to see them study for weeks and months so that when they screw up, they are assured of another sympathy fix, “Aww… you poor dear. You studied so hard. It’s alright, there’s nothing more you could have done!”

I’ve noticed this most commonly in humans. If they are assured they have no shoulder to cry on, their decisions are inherently rational and objective, than if they knew they had someone’s shoulders to cry on. When you know you have nobody on your side, you give up the sham of “hard work” and really begin working hard because you start focussing on what you want as opposed to what you need to prove in order to get sympathy. You really start exploring all your options. You become desperate because you’re afraid. You really end up doing all you could possibly do.

I noticed this in exams and I notice this in all the different companies where my friends talk about promotions, pay raises, whatever. Those who’re really afraid, just do whatever it takes and are happy when they get it. Others will do everything else except what their evaluators are looking for and will keep cribbing year after year about how they’re stagnating, because actually getting what they want would be detrimental to their sympathy-fix.

Part of why I had to verbalise this is that I began to realise I was falling in the same trap lately – especially in the last six months. When life becomes too easy, and you find yourself surrounded by people who won’t tell you you suck, its time to shake things up a bit!

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