My Little World

When I read a story, I start to imagine all the events in the book as if I get to picturise all of what goes on. It is as if, I watch a movie, only that it is inside my brain. But, dont we all agree that we can view things only through eyes. What was I doing? Does my brain bypass my path from eye to the brain into producing these signals which made my brain to think that I was looking at things that I only imagined? But, I was infact, reading the book and my eyes were looking at the book at the time. How does brain handle these multiple events and process them at the same time?

When I walk along the pavement, I tried to pick the inside of the square slabs than the edges or the corners. Infact, I dont even pick the squares adjacent to the one that I am in. In other words, I walk in a straight line. Suddenly, a thought came to me. If this straight line of slabs were hanging in air at a very large height, can I still walk along the path.. I probably cant. Is it because the brain judges the risk associated with walking along that path? If I were given a perception that I am suspended when in fact I am not, would I feel the same way? If I were to be removed from the perception and was able to walk through the suspended path, will I be able to easily walk along the path easily?

When I eat my food, I start wondering, is it the feeling that something going into my mouth makes me feel that I am eating and the feedback from stomach upon eating or the portion of food eaten thereof that tells me that I am done eating. What if I am virtually subjected to the same feeling through some sort of machine? Will I still feel the same way? This is not just eating, but a lot of our day to day activities, like the situations portrayed in the movie "Matrix". The sense of anything is only true to the extent that is decipherable by the brain. If brain is subjected to decipher things through an external stimuli, will brain do the same thing that it normally does?

The cuckoo clock just sounded 8:00PM. Shoba is not around. Now that it is already 8:00PM, I have to start thinking about cooking. May be, I dont need to. But then, I need to find the trade-off between going out and getting food from a restaurant versus cooking something on my own. I've got rice and beetroot poriyal from yesterday. All I need to do is to cook some gravy to add the rice to. May be I can just use paruppu podi or puliogare. Hmmm... what should I do?

Valu Mouse

While shopping for a mouse at Fry's electronics, I saw a Valu-Mouse. Well, every mouse has a "Vaalu", but that mouse specifically mentions it!

PS: In Tamil, Valu means 'Tail'. With some difficulty, I resisted a conversation with valu & vaalu :)

Benford's Law

I was watching this serial called "NUMB3RS" the other night and I heard about this interesting stuff called the Benford's law. Apparently, someone by name Newcomb (1881) observed that the first pages of logarithmic tables were more worn than the rest of the pages. Dr Benford (1938) later formulated it as a theory based on his findings that the number "1" appeared with a probability of 30% in most of the statistics, logarithmic tables and so on. This is much higher than the anticipated 11% if things were uniformly distributed among the numbers 1 to 9. In 1996, Dr.Hill proved Benford's law with a formula for the probability (log (1+1/D) base 10), where D is the digit.

All this means is that, if you pick any kind of random list of tables or data, the number 1 appears more often than it is probabilistically predicted (somehow 0 is omitted). This is called the first digit phenomenon or the first digit law or leading digit phenomenon. The interesting outcome of this law is useful in analysing financial reports, income tax returns, statistical tables and most of the naturally generated data. If you try to plug-in your "made-up" numbers into any of these, it may not make up the same distribution as predicted by Benford's law. So, if you are cooking up numbers, you better know what you are doing..:)..

Leading digit Probability (from Benford's law)
1 30.1%, 2 17.6%, 3 12.5%, 4 9.7%, 5 7.9%, 6 6.7%, 7 5.8%, 8 5.1%, 9 4.6%

References:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BenfordsLaw.html
http://www.rexswain.com/benford.html
and a bunch of other websites...

Perspective

I was talking to my sister this morning. Being a slightly eccentric intellectual , she finds few people looking at things from her perspective.She is one of those persons who just gets carried away by the likes of Einstein, Feynman and Nash. She finds them to be really great people and admires them ferverently. I, on the other hand , definitely admire their intellect but rather call people with philanthropic attitude as great. Thats just my perspective.We usually agree to disagree.
Talking about perspectives, I remembered an interesting episode during one of my curves workouts. I was talking to one the ladies, who works in the SLAC lab at Sanford. She is elderly and has been working there for a long time. On hearing that she works in the theoretical physics department, I jumped with excitement and asked if she has met Feynman or listened to his lecture. She replied with a nonchalant "Yeah, I have attended one of his lectures. It was very popular and was full." ..I go, "Wow.It must have been really good listening to him." It follows with,"Yeah ..Hmmm..you know what,he was really interested in pretty women" , accompanied with an eye-roll. Hey! That what she remembers about Feynman and its her perspective.
Rights & wrongs, good & bad, best & great.....on and on...varies from person to person as per their perspective.

I was crossing the street yesterday, when a car was pulling out from an underground garage. He did not notice us, and pulled out onto the street as we were walking. It seemed like a legitimate mistake (giving him the benefit of doubt) Imagine a person with his neck craning to gain visibility when he is peering out from the car at some place much higher than his perch.

At this a man kicked the rear of the car really hard - and swore that this should teach him not to be rude!

Hmm.....if rudeness would teach a person not to be rude.........

Maybe, a war on terror would terrorize terrorists into not terrorizing innocent people!

God?

Ever since I had learnt to ask questions, this is one question that I have posed to myself and others the most. Better part of my childhood was spent believing in a God (thiest) that oversees, intervenes, grants and denies. Late teens were spent being an agnostic and devouring literature on arguements that talk for and against. Most of my adulthood- I decided I knew the answer and I thought of myself as an atheist.

Recently, I have come to believe that the question itself is irrelevant. The real question that I find interesting now is- "What belief empowers me?" and I have come to realise that being an agnostic empowers me. Ofcourse this is a personal choice, but I suppose in a way I found for myselt that being either a believer or a disbeliever were closed doors. In both states I assume I have the knowledge and stop questioning with an open mind. But when I decide that I actually don't know either way- I thirst for knowledge and seek different opinions.

Just a random rambling ...

King/Queen Puzzler

This is a puzzler that I got from someone a couple of weeks ago. It was quite interesting to solve it. Thought I will share the puzzler with you. If no one solves it, I will post the solution coming Tuesday...

Assume that there are 3 pairs of King/Queens in a shore. They have to cross this river with a boat which can accomodate a maximum of 2 people at a time. Following is the only rule that needs to be followed at either end of a shore: No Queen should be left alone (without her King) with another King (even if the other King's Queen is around)...

Focus

I happened to see this Successories poster after a long time which reads, "If you chase two rabbits, both will escape". It does make a lot of sense, atleast to me, since I am not really good at multi-tasking. For lack of tasks in my thought queue (thanks to Shoba who took up cooking today..:)), I decided to "focus".

If everyone works on just one single task, how good can one get by the end of their lifetime? It could begin with simple tasks such as dicing vegetables uniformly, growing a plant to the biggest size, touching the tongue to tip of nose, reading the maximum number of books and the list could go on and on. I think we all should formulate atleast one task that we should perfect over time. If you think about it, we already do that in everything we pursue. Just that we dont consciously realise that. I think, if we consciously focus on perfecting, we will certainly be magnitudes apart from any of our couterparts. Not so much for the bragging rights (which is ofcourse a bonus), but, we should be able to prove to ourselves that we are capable of doing more than what we think we can and execute it as well.

As this thought process came to its logical conclusion, I happened to see this poster from despair.com which reads, "Dreams are like rainbows. Only idiots chase them"..:)

Sequel to What-IF?

As a sequel to Mindframe's "What-If", I got thinking:

The flogging NSA is receiving for the fact that millions of phone numbers have been tapped, without judicial permission. Nothing has been analysed, but what-if it is used by the wrong people for the wrong means?

Sources that don't wish to be named (I am seeing this phrase so often these days, that I am wondering about free speech, but that is a whole different blog by itself) reveal that the NSA had the information tapped a day before 9-11 that the attack was planned. But the information was in Arabic, and by the time the translators got to decoding the message, the twin towers were already ruined. What-if they had decoded the message in time, could they pieced together the plot and prevented it?

I was at the Doctor's office yesterday, and the Dr told me she is building a comprehensive database with her patients photographs, so that she may easily be able to link the person when you call. The paranoid me, started thinking: What-if the information in this database is leaked, could it make ID theft easier? What-if the person subsitutes their own photograph in the database and produces photo IDs?

Then again, every now and then, I receive a letter from the Chief Accountant or Lawyer from Burkina Faso, South Africa, offering me a fabulous deal of 23 million USD, because somebody dies leaving the millions in the bank with no known beneficiary. I promptly delete it. What-if it is true? (Laugh out loud!)

Root Cause

I have always wondered how things would turn out to be when people say a lot of "what-if" stuff. What if I can go back in time? What if I have all the money in the world? What if I can fly? Also, there are a lot of questions in defining the being of a certain type of person. For example, how would you characterize a person who is all bad or who is all good? What if someone always chooses to do something that is not the normal way? I was trying to think through it at a very high level. I am sure I am deriving a lot of generalities. But, the key is in looking at a problem in a different dimension.

Let us consider a simple example. What can I possibly do if I go back in time? Will I be able to correct all the wrongs and do all the rights? If you think about it, you will realise that there is no optimal solution. If you do something right, something else is going to be wrong. If you think through each and every what-if type of questions, you will realise that things will certainly have a different outcome, but not the way one would wish for it to be, for we all assume that the universe is a constant when it is not...

Next, to the question of someone being all bad. How will you define someone to be all bad? If you write down the list of things that would characterise someone to be bad and draw a dependency chain between the different bad characteristics, you will realise that several things will be masked out. For example, if one aspect of "bad" is to not to talk to anyone, then anything that you would characterise in terms of interpersonal relationship will be masked out. Eventually, the perfect bad person will be an isolate. It is left as an exercise to you to think of who would be a perfect "good" person...:)...

To sum it up, if you recursively apply certain simple rules that characterise a particular person, then you will find that the entire behaviour will lead to a singleton. The converse should also be true. If you focus on some of the simple rules, then all the random outcomes that spawn out will evolve correspondingly. In other words, there is no complex problem. Or rather, any complex problem is a manifestation of a simple problem. Finding the root cause is the key !