Category Archive: Uncategorized

I came across this awesome youtube video by Alfred Leitner where he is showing some fascinating experiments involving supercooled liquid helium. Helium turns into a liquid when cooled to ultra-low temperatures (<-268 degrees C) but when it is cooled further to -270 degrees C it turns into what is called a superfluid. In this superfluid phase, it has zero viscosity and flows through extremely fine pores without any resistance. It climbs up glass walls and has zero entropy (perfect order) but what I find most fascinating is that heat travels like waves through this phase. It hits boundaries and gets reflected, just like sound or light do!

I have just completed reading the code book by Simon Singh and was immediately struck by the elegance of our current encryption technologies and their pervasiveness. The book clarifies how the very fundamental concept of prime numbers lies at the very heart of all our Amazon purchases and our banking transactions.

The fundamental problem of encryption is the following. Person A wants to transmit a private message to person B. This message is vulnerable to getting intercepted by person C but even if it gets intercepted A wants the meaning of the message to hidden from C. The fundamental way in which it can be achieved is by changing the form of the message (encrypting) and transmitting the encrypted message. B receives the encrypted message and if he knows how to decrypt it then he can reverse the process of encryption and gather the original message. If C happens to snoop in on it and doesn't know how to decrypt the message then even though he has the communication, he would not be able to make sense of it. As a very simple example, A might want to transmit two numbers 15 and 20 to B but he adds, let's say 50 to each and transmits them. The encryption in this case is the addition of the number 50. If B knows the encryption function (addition of a number) and the key (the number 50) then he can retrieve the original two numbers. If C doesn't have the ingenuity to figure out the encryption and the key, then he would not know the original numbers. There are, therefore, two distinct problems here. The first one is deciding upon an encryption algorithm and the second is deciding upon a key with which to encrypt the message. Ideally one would want to encrypt a message with an encryption algorithm which is complex enough to render decryption impossible without the knowledge of the key. In essence, the encryption algorithm may be public knowledge but it should be impossible to break it without the knowledge of the key. The simple encryption described above doesn't suffice obviously. If A is trying to transmit something meaningful like say the Fibonacci sequence and if it's known that he has merely added a number to all the entries, a mere trial and error would reveal the original sequence. Precisely because A is trying to transmit something meaningful, the simple encryption would be rendered useless. The second problem is how does B know what the key is? A can also transmit the key but then the key may itself get intercepted. A can personally meet B and give him the key but in the real world where billions of messages are being exchanged every day, personal meetings between senders and receivers are frankly out of question.

A solution to both these cryptographic problems was suggested in 1976 and goes by the name Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange. The first idea is to use an encryption algorithm which is very difficult to undo without the knowledge of the key. The second and more revolutionary idea concerns the distribution of the key itself. The encryption algorithm is a modulo function.  c = a(mod b) gives the remainder c when a is divided by b. 8(mod 2) is 0, 9(mod 2) is 1 etc. As it turns out, if one only knows c and b, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to figure out a. The modulo function, therefore, is a one way function and a good candidate for encryption. The second idea was how the modulo function was utilized to solve the key distribution problem. 'A' chooses 3 different numbers let's say 3, 7, 11. He transmits the encryption function as being (mod 11) where can be any number. He keeps the first number 3 secret. 'B' also decides on his own secret number, let's say 6. Now C, who is snooping, may get to know the encryption function which is public but he doesn't know the private numbers 3 and 6 which were never transmitted. Now A transmits the result (mod 11)=2 and B transmits back (mod 11)=4. Upon receiving 4, A calculates (mod 11)=9 and upon receiving 2, B calculates (mod 11)=9. Both have come to the same number 9 which is the key. C which knows the encryption function and the numbers 2 and 4, cannot figure out the key 9 because he doesn't know the numbers 3 and 6. It can be seen that the key depends upon the secret numbers which were never transmitted and yet, both A and B come to know this key.

The next major development in cryptography was the RSA encryption which is the mainstay of all secure communication today. The above key exchange process still suffers from the fact that there needs to be a two way exchange of information between A and B. RSA does away with this by another neat usage of the modulo function coupled with the headache that is prime factorization. A prime number is a number which is only divisible by itself and 1. While it is very easy to take 2 prime numbers p and q and find r=p*q, given r it is extremely time consuming to figure out p and q. The RSA works by having a public and a private key. 'A' chooses 2 very big primes p and q and multiplies them. He keeps p and q secret but publishes r=p*q. If 'B' wants to transmit an encrypted message to A he uses A's public key (the number r) and uses a modified modulo function to encrypt his message. The function is such that even if r is known, it is extremely difficult to decrypt the message. As long as r is large enough, there is no way to decrypt the message unless p and q are also known (and hence A can do it).

The strength of RSA encryption basically boils down to the difficulty of prime factorization then. As all public knowledge stands currently, the encryption is unbreakable. Despite the tremendous amount of research in the problem of prime factorization there is no fast solution yet. The day the problem is solved much of our daily activities would grind to a halt! I find it fascinating now to think that every time I buy something on Amazon and provide my credit card information, the data is encrypted by what would be Amazon's public key (just a very very big number which is a multiple of 2 very big primes) and the current theoretical understanding assures me that decryption by a third party is beyond all human capabilities.

There is a bookstore in the neighborhood which I ended up walking into today. I do not remember the  name of the place but it's just as well. The place is stuffed with arbitrarily crammed bookshelves which rise up to the ceiling and one has to tiptoe around them for the fear of making one wrong move and bringing the whole place down in an academic tumult. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason in the arrangement of the books on the shelves either. So while Joyce is found jousting with Zola, art history blends effortlessly into biographies with nary a seam to be seen. The air columns separating the gray ones have the unmistakable smell of stuffed paper and they are colored in sparkling gold-dust as a lone sunbeam finds its way inside the shop and illuminates the suspended dust particles in streaks of yellow. I move my hand through it and the dust is perturbed. A little part of the mighty Sun, which continues to burn away aimlessly in a void, is captured in the contours of the liquid dance of dust. The solar shaft ends on Huxley and a brave new world is prominently called up on stage. Although purely coincidental, a romantic must dream! I stood there wondering if the time of the bookstore is finally up as the brave new world takes over. '21 years,' said the owner when I asked him how long has he had the place. I mentioned that during these 21 years he must have seen a tremendous amount of change. 'Yes,' he said adding, however, that it's merely transitory, as if to imply that the good old days of yesteryear are bound to come back as the wheel of time inevitably complete its rotation. The wheel may be broken now, I thought, as I saw him selling a used book for 54 cents.

Ours is a time of short attention spans and slick surfaces, a time in which the rough and antediluvian presence of bookstores is fast becoming anachronistic. It's a little sad, especially to a nostalgist like me but it does seem inevitable. I do not remember the name of the place but as I said, it's probably just as well.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

- John Shade (Vladimir Nabokov)

If you read it carefully you'd come to understand that in these beautiful and effortless lines Nabokov is describing the reflection on a windowpane from the point of view of a bug who has just crashed into it. The bug imagines its own smudge on the glass as being alive since it has life and activity to it. The life and activity which it has exists by virtue of the fact that its background, which is the reflection of the sky on the glass, is continuously changing with changing cloud patterns, hence giving the lifeless smudge a borrowed existence! Pale Fire is a beautiful and courageous work. Its structure is highly experimental and when it boasts of prose and verse this exquisite, how can one not stand in awe.

In looking back through the years that have crept away I notice an unusual pattern. Memory which should have been cumulative, building upon a developing brain and an improving consciousness of my own place in this world, is in reality composed of a turbulent flow of images and remembrances. At some places the flow is lucid with well defined streamlines and deep clarity while at others it's frothy, indistinct and pliable to the extent of being uncertain. These patches of screeching clarity and rough disorder are mixed together in an unpredictable manner so that while there are dark gaps in some of my recent memories, some of the earliest ones are scrupulously near and visceral. As I tumble through the jumble of my mnemosyne with the past in flashes over the present, with the half-remembered ghosts of the times gone by reaching out to me in vague images and vaguer impressions of sounds and smells, I see the sepia-tinted world of my earliest childhood standing there, in front of me, quiet and graceful, as if assured that it would survive the obliteration of time by virtue of its own unblemished innocence. In the nonlinear fabric of time which has been scissored and patched and mutilated and half-assedly repaired far too many times,  the earlier folds are still pristinely white and unmarked. And yet if only I try to go far enough in the past this continuous flow of remembrances breaks and sputters and becomes patchier and patchier until it is merely constituted by single images which stand for their barely remembered contexts. The story of life at this point is a postmodern story, with abrupt cuts, incoherent narration and episodic nonchalance.

I have slippery impressions of our house in Bareilly (I must have been about 4). I see it basked in quiet sunshine behind the prison of its rusting gate. I remember the window behind which I would sit peering out at the barely paved street which would offer, in the dead hours of the sleepy afternoons, the welcome rings of the candy seller's bicycle. In that one simple image of that humble house with its lovingly arranged furniture, I have preserved in my mind the most viscerally felt idea of that quintessential twinkle of hope and ambition and love. That, to my conscious self, is where it all began. That image is, in a certain sense, the fundamental metaphoric building block of the world - the innocent effort of those who don't have very much to begin with towards building a life of some material and emotional consequence, and to do it all with reasonable honesty and morality. The vestiges of that house lingered on in my life for a long time. The oval dinner table was the last to go. But beyond these considerable material echoes which keep reverberating in the sonorous chamber of my memory, what persist stronger than ever are the very human notes of that image, the deep woody scents of the filial attachment and the floral chromatic accents of the sibling relationship.

You know what I had started to think? I had started to feel that I was beginning to lose the passion with which I used to approach literature. I had been reading good books by really accomplished writers and I had begun to like almost everything that I read, which made me think that perhaps that faculty for criticism which I thought I had was beginning to desert me. Reading a lot of good books can become a little boring just like life can be a little too perfect and a dessert can be a bit too sweet. It also lessens the appreciation that one has for a really good work of literature. But thanks to Murakami's 'Kafka on the shore', that latent hate that I reserved for sub-par literature was immediately fanned and I feel so much more alive now.

I know exactly the kind of person who would like the book. A lot of such people must surely exist considering how popular this book has become. I imagine a prototypical fan of Murakami to be a hopeless spiritualist who goes about his/her life believing that there is something supernatural and mysterious that life eventually offers, something that is forever beyond the grasp of science, logic, rationale, or even words for that matter, but at the same time its essence is such that you would be able to comprehend it if only you looked into your own being with courage, determination and honesty. Such people are not necessarily religious but they differ from those who are merely in the thrust of their own irrationality. I feel that they would very much appreciate the open-ended theme of the book with its dream-like sequences, irrationality and elaborate symbolism. They would also like this book because it doesn't really make much sense and somehow a lot of people just love it when things don't make sense, for then they can attribute to those things, their own little interpretation (however inane) and feel special and 'connected with the universe'.

I love good surrealism and imagination. Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' is a book which stands testimony to that. So does Carroll's 'Alice in wonderland'. These works have their own logic and rationale to them. They have their own set of rules which are well defined and then they go about being mad within those rules. It gives a profound sense of tautness to these works and as a reader you never feel being cheated by the author. I believe that the most pleasurable part of a work of art is its struggle against its own boundaries and in the absence of any boundaries it ends up losing much of its charm. And this is what is wrong with Murakami's book. He has disguised what appears to me his own incompetence by implicitly declaring that he won't follow any rules, not even his own. Writing becomes a lot easier for him because neither logic nor completeness have to be respected and at the same time the 'mystique' and incomprehensibility of the book lend themselves to easy adoration by the urban pseudo-intellectual brigade. And to top it all off, the utter blandness of the dialogue is irritating. Whenever the characters are not talking in single sentences, they are describing in elaborately long paragraphs as to how they have no clue what's happening to them. They seem to believe that if only they express their own robotic presence in deep and mysterious sounding dialogue, the need for at least some coherence and explanation can be done away with. And unfortunately it may not be terribly far from the truth either. A lot of people, perhaps impressed by how less the book makes sense, attribute a certain genius to Murakami which I don't think he has. They perhaps forget that a good work of art, however incomprehensible in the beginning, must lend itself to logical understanding if enough effort is put into it and that effort coupled with the eventual understanding of the work is directly proportional to how much pleasure one extracts from it.

My god I despise this book. And yet it has certain passages which have their own poetic beauty. As I said, you may even find the whole book very much to your liking. 2 and a half stars, therefore!

It's a new year! And what better time to resume this sporadic trickle of posts which has fallen through the faucet of this forum for the last 6 years; gushing and ebullient in its infancy and seemingly wise and reserved now that 'I have been through the ropes'. I like, every now and then, to go back to the Archives tab and flip through the pages of personal reflections which stand as milestones in time, revealing the slow and unmistakable transformation that my personality has gone through. In these remnants from the past, I believe that I have a most fascinating and precious lens through which to view the often vague and hazy journey of one's own past but with the unusual brutality and certainty of the written word. All these years in words, all these personalities in thoughts - I treasure this collection more dearly than absolutely anything else.

Don't get me wrong. I do not look back at the past with a smug glow of self-satisfaction or a vain pat on my back. More often than not, it's excruciating to confront one's own reflection in time. One would hope to have grown through the years, to have a better perspective now than one had in the past, and I am no different. It is, therefore, almost by definition true that looking back I feel inclined to dismiss my own thoughts as merely being products of a time and age which I'm wiser to have left behind. And yet this current personality, for better or for worse, is just a sum total of many such times and ages which have chiseled it through the years to produce what has emerged today. I hope that the winds of change are still blowing and that years from now when I look back to today, I would find myself as 'immature' as I find myself now when I read the things that I wrote many years ago. I have an immense respect for change and for the ability to change and I say it with a certain sense of pride that I'm neither sure what I have become, nor am I certain of the trajectory upon which I'm set.

But things used to be different. Certain unmistakable patterns emerge from the chaotic past. I seem to have started, as all young people do, from a state of utter self-confidence. I knew what was wrong with the world and I believed in the solutions which were in fashion. My world view conveniently emerged from the invisible and heavy hand of religion and tradition. Things were 'not right' and people were 'good' and bad'. The bad ones had to be corrected and things had to be set straight and the romantic idea of the way to do it would often be high on octane. There was very little cynicism, which must necessarily be the case if you want to 'do something'. I believe that I was what would normally be called a 'good person'. I believed less in the ideas of the time and more in the ideas of tradition, which is a little unusual for a young person. Had I continued on that trajectory I'd have run the danger of turning into a stupid reactionary like the ones you often hear blowing themselves up for reasons they don' t have the intelligence to comprehend. As it turns out, now I have an intense hatred for such people, not so much because they end up messing other people's lives but more so because of  how stupid they have allowed themselves to become. I have come to dislike and despise all such 'cultures of beliefs' but I'm too much of a cynic now to be bothered to do anything about them.

From a young boy who had strict loyalties which were dictated by strong beliefs and sure ideas, I have definitely come a long way. There are no more sureties and far less self-confidence. In a certain sense, there is a lot more tolerance but that tolerance is as much a product of expanded horizons as it is a precipitate of cynicism. There was a time when I was very much against social work but looking back I realize that I had chosen to disregard the utility of the whole field based just on my hatred for the smugness and the moral high ground which often accompanies it. I don't care as much now. A social outlook has given way to a more individualistic take on life and I've come to enjoy and appreciate certain facets of it which I have chosen for myself. But I really do enjoy life, which is more than what can probably be said for most people. I'm now, more than ever, in awe of the amazing variety that life offers. I'm excited, more than I have ever been, to learn from its myriad hues and brilliant possibilities.

In that sense I have become an optimist, all my cynicism and all my apathy notwithstanding. A happy new year to you!

Looking back at the years spent in UCSD, one thing dawns clearer than any other. I have enjoyed the company and friendship of only those who explicitly offered neither brilliant insights into the grave facets of life nor any secret fountains of wisdom. I have come to despise small and big talk alike and I have ended up deriving all my understanding and enjoyment from what I would term trivial talk. And in some sense that is the most important conversation one can have. It pays heed, in one fell swoop, both to the absurdity of existence which is missed in serious discussions and to the simple joys of life which suffer such a debilitating end at the hands of small talk. Discussions which started with ridiculous topics and disintegrated into wild orgies of inanities, strewn with unspeakable political incorrectness and a lack of consideration for all that society holds dear. And yet those discussions were much more than just juvenile pleasures. They were sharp and intelligent and in their own twisted way reduced life and society of their phony garbs - something that no amount of serious deliberation can do because it is too mindful of hurting sentiments.

The upshot of several years of such discussions is that now I have little tolerance for insipid, utilitarian talk. Religious debates, political allegiances, nationalistic ideas, group mentality, financial advice and many more such 'important' topics have started seeming insufferable to me unless they are being discussed within a satirical framework. And I do not understand how can they not be! Does the illogicality of petty little human obsessions repeated ad-infinitum on this little speck of nothingness we call Earth not even deserve its own chuckle? I think it does and I also think that for precisely this reason satire is the most honest and most fruitful attitude to have while discussing anything.

The only conversations which I can never seem to discuss with sarcasm are those which concern passion because existence of passion ties very well with my own individualistic take on life. Although passionate people run the risk of monopolizing conversation, they are at least honest and original even when they are not engaging, but often the existence of pure passion in a person is enough for me to have an automatic respect for him/her. It is too bad for me then that such people are few and far between.

We often take our own natures and predispositions to be more special, more peculiar than those which we ascribe, in an abstract sense, to others. And poisoned by this very affliction I find myself being affected by farewells in a way which to me is more nuanced than how I think other people get affected by them. But perhaps it's nothing more than my own introspective nature coupled with the fact that I have increasingly more amount of time now to think about things, something that I do not necessarily disapprove of.

I find that it is not concrete memories and sure pictures that we miss about people but it's their vague associations with the trivial things that they leave behind which are curiously the most poignant sources of nostalgia. As the world around me presents itself with the same clockwork precision and designed rhythm as it has always presented itself except for some minor omission effected by a departure, I begin to see the particular omissions in darker hues and bolder colors than warranted by mere appearances. I'm amazed by how little things change, how the day is still resplendent with the same glorious sunshine, and the night still bejeweled by the silent moon in the window, how the minutes and hours keep dying off with the inevitability of orchestrated dominoes and how little the natural progression of things pays heed to a new absence. And I almost feel that it's this very cruelty and apathy of time which makes me want to care a little more for sake of the memories. In the surety and blandness of order I feel drawn, almost by sympathy, to those faint marks and distant sounds which constitute all that farewells are made of. Because they are just that - mere shadows of infinitesimal defects in the pristine canvas of life. Jagged edges of time folded on to itself, wrinkles in the space which repeats itself every day.

Richard Dawkins wrote his best known work, The Selfish Gene, in the late 70s and initiated a silent and powerful revolution in the field of evolutionary biology. This was much before when he went nuts and started introducing himself as a militant atheist, writing books with titles like The God Delusion. I personally never heard of anyone who stopped believing in God just because Dawkins told so. If God is a bad idea, which I think it is in a qualified sense, it will slowly be evolved out of the gene pool (or the meme pool to be exact.)

The Selfish Gene, on the other hand, is a triumph of the intellect. It presents the theory of evolution in a way which makes the whole process tautological and the reasoning and the evidence are so beautifully presented that you cannot but marvel at the simplicity of it all. I came to understand that in the general parlance evolution is thought of in completely wrong terms. To think of it as the survival of the individual or the specie is not only simplistic, it's just plain wrong. When we talk about survival of an entity in evolutionary terms, we must at least refer to survival on a time scale large enough for the slow process of evolution to affect. Individuals and groups just do not exist on a time scale that large. The facets which do get shaped by evolutionary forces are traits and characteristics of organisms and they are controlled by gene manifestations in the DNA. It is, therefore, quite logical that evolution through natural selection must act on this small entity - the gene. It is an added benefit that by thinking of evolution in the genetic terms one can easily explain the emergence of altruism and cooperation. Dawkins does it with the delightful example of the Prisoner's Dilemma and other game theory explanations. The gene centric view of evolution also did something which appears lacking in the naive understanding of it: the theory became predictive in a restricted sense, correctly predicting sex-ratios in insect colonies among other things.

It is unnecessary to say at this point that I loved the book and that I would recommend it to prospective readers but I would like to add a qualification here. Dawkins is an exceedingly sharp guy and while reading his book I often got the unnerving feeling that he is smart enough to lead me to believe anything. He is a master reasoner and I didn't know where the boundaries of my belief in him lay. All I could do is trust that he was being rigorous because I never knew what to suspect!