Chennai floods - Donate!

"It's rain in Chennai" is usually accompanied with a ":)". Not anymore. People from all walks of life are affected to varying degrees. Please donate milk, food, water, essentials, clothes and money you can. http://chennairains.org/ will help you track this crisis as it progresses.

I spent 4 days without electricity in West Mambalam and the biggest problem I had was boredom. The only other challenge was aligning my internal clock with the Sun. So while donating, please make sure that me, or like people like me, do not receive any of your donations.

Chennai is recovering from this flood fast with sunshine today and hopefully more pleasant days looking ahead. There are many government entities, volunteer teams, political parties, other organisations and individuals who are actively working on this recovery. Let us trust the entire system and give them time and hold off any criticisms until full recovery.

#chennaimicro

#chennaifloods

#chennairainshelp

Road:SpeedBreaker :: Human:System

Roads are awesome. They connect people in the real world. This technology is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted.

But who invented the Speed Breaker? When? Why? I thought these were one of my usual useless questions and about to move on - but "i felt lucky" to find them so easily. Arthur Compton (a physics noble laureate) invented them in 1953.

This is a mildly interesting but largely irrelevant fact to me. The interesting unanswered question is "Why?". If there is a ditch in a road which slows people down, we want to fix it. But we add our own bump in the road. The answer is probably obvious - people do not follow rules always and any technology has to be idiot-proofed. In an attempt to avoid a probability that rash drivers can hurt people, we are making everybody feel a tiny bit more frustrated all the time.

I really do not like the speed breaker - not as a single invention. But as a generic type of inventions which prevent people from using the full technology because they can hurt themselves and others if they use it wrongly.

I recently had an interesting intellectual conversation with a passionate person who would fight to get the right system in place so that people can live their lives together. Though I admire that passion and agree that such technology is needed to keep everyone alive, I do not share such a passion to create a system. I would much rather work on making one individual mildly happier. Or I would be my usual-lazy-self and not do much at all.

Whose Will?

On a fine Sunday afternoon
I threw a stone in to a lake

I started thinking why did I do

what I just did.

I did not decide to throw that stone

even when picking it up.

Who could have known I was going to throw

if even I did not seem to know?

Did my neural subsystem decide out of sheer

randomness to throw the stone? If so, whats my part?

Did God predetermine that I will throw the stone

long before I was born? If so, whats my part?

I can think of only one possible answer to this question.

Let me stop throwing stones into lakes. Even if I do,

let me stop pretending to know why I do.

The burden of consciousness

The burden of consciousness

I am

Why?

I just am.

 But why?

I have always been me. Too late to change. Whats your problem?

You are just a thought. Why preserve something that is not worthy of preserving?

What else is there to do? What better constructive suggestion do you have?

You??? Why so much distance? I am you. You know that!

I know :(

Don't worry. Lets sleep and forget about this mess. Hopefully nobody else knows about this conversation.

Asshole. You are going to upload this to fb. Aren't you?

May be. Why? Does it matter? No body reads it. No body can make sense of it even if they read it.

Not everybody is as stupid as u and me.

I know :(. Whatever.

"Just Be Yourself" == a very bad idea

When you ask some one for some kind of social advice sooner or later the knowing friend tells you to "Just Be Yourself". As deep and thoughtful, this advice is, its hollow at best and dangerous at worst.

Taken literally, this "Be yourself" command just asks you to continue your miserable existence unaltered. Come to think of it, you have no choice but to be yourself (unless you are considering some form of black magic to convert to someone else).

The more natural explanation is "be your usual lively self", which for most people doesn't work. The better advice at this point would be "to fake as much as you can be to pretend to be that awesome-self". Ironically, the "Be yourself" camp cannot argue against the seemingly opposite advice because your natural self could be one that always try to fake to be a better self.

A more useful advice would be "to pretend to being yourself", which just says that pretend all you want, but be careful in showing that to be your natural self so that people think you are being yourself. That I think will work in all situations.

P.S: I have not left my house in the last 50+ hours. Just a disclaimer on why this entire blog should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Bad person

While growing up I was always the good boy. Somewhere halfway through, I became "ok" - not so good, not so bad. Now, I realize I have crossed the line for sometime. I am a bad person in every describable way I describe good/bad.

But nobody knows about this, not because I have been hiding it or anything. Its just that I am too lazy. Too lazy to do real bad or evil things. I always think of those things, think it will be cool to do it, but not do it out of sheer laziness. So, its not wrong to conclude that my only "virtue" left is god-given-laziness (I am typing this blog while lying down in my bed!).

This post is not a problem statement or a minor flaw that I am looking forward to fix. This post is more like a reminder to myself encouraging me to do something bad, so that I can give the future-historians a true account of my character.

Tips for laziness

Hi

one more year

One more year of mediocre existence achieved!

One of the scary things about birthdays is that it reminds of the previous occasions and also painfully forces me to remember every stupid thing I did in the interim - worse are the memories of things that I wanted to do but was too lazy to even think about it.

This date also forces me to think about the end, reminding me that I will have only a finite amount of these days. Its not a fear of the unavoidable death that troubles me, but a sense of lethargic acceptance of the death with an implicit denial of the meaning of the time between now and the eventuality.

Lastly, the thing I dislike the most is the ordinary nature of the special day. Irrespective of what fun activities we do, what extra fun we get out of this day - the day itself is spectacularly ordinary; like every other day. This fact in itself has been troubling me as long ago as I remember birthdays.

Anyways, all these are disclaimers for why I might have sounded grumpy or reserved today. Happy birthday to me! Thanks for the wishes.

Critical analysis of Endhiran(ROBOT)

Endhiran (Robot) is a tamizh movie staring Rajinikanth and Aishwarya Rai. This is a high budget commercial sci-fi movie and it wins hands down on all three counts.

I am most excited about the sci-fi component in this movie. I wish the inevitable success of this movie to proliferate the genre in tamizh industry. List of sci-fi questions raised and (atleast partially) addressed by this movie

Can a robot

1) be called alive?

2) be part of our society without emotions?

3) understand/feel complex emotions like love?

4) understand moral rules?

5) replicate?

6) form collective intelligence?

7) break paradoxes?

8) do self evaluation?

9) take over the world?!

Even though I liked the amazing visuals and LOVE rajini's evil villan laughter in the second half, the innocent pj-cracking emotion-free robot version 1 is the best part of the movie DOT

self-less-ness and the true athiest

The Agnostic Manifesto

selflessness is a lack of concern of oneself in comparison to others. This is a rare and interesting quality in itself but I am interested in sort of a "variant" of it.

I am trying to imagine a true atheist - a person who shall believe in nothing unless there is a proof or enough evidence pointing to that belief. Such a person will reject gods and UFOs in seconds (rightfully so). But does it stop there? What about the sense of self itself? Its obvious (at least to me) that one cannot prove the existence of ones own self any better than prove the existence of ones own god.

Does the presence of consciousness prove the presence of self? Yes! Is our contradiction resolved? No, because neither self nor consciousness can be proved to an external entity and our true atheist is not allowed to have "gut feelings" which cannot be objectively validated. Alas - the root cause of this problem is that some trivial facts in first person cannot be promoted to third person.

So how can one be a non-hypocritical true atheist? Can a person reject the notion of self and lead a truly selfless "life"? No - I don't see life, as we know it, exist in true selflessness.

Our true atheist has to settle for retaining the "unprovable" notion of self even after successfully defeating every other superstition. Although this is as good as any human could do, our self proclaimed true atheist has almost arbitrarily chosen few unprovable personal beliefs over the other.

Lets consider a true god believer who has forgone his personal identity in pursuit of his visionary god (imagine a lonely saint in a forest trying very hard to commune with god with no care about his primitive impulses .. yeah - u get the picture!). At first glance, our true believer is a lot dumber than our true atheist for he is basing all his life on an unverified theory. Even at second glance, our true believer stays dumb since he probably leads a suboptimal life from the materialistic view of the world. Should we stop at that view? Take the true athiest, remove the sense of self, and replace it with a grander illusion of god, you get the true believer. Our two fictional characters can (and will) argue forever, faithfully but fruitlessly, about which is the right assumption "I" or "GOD".

Both the true believer and the true atheist are having "fun" (yet another subjective entity) based on their own choice of superstitions and they are incomparable.

57-el-PJoker

This is my new phone number (google voice number). 57-The-Poor-Joker is the expansion for the non spanish folks.

If you guys are looking for creative ways to publish/communicate your phone numbers, I recommend this site.

As I have decided without any doubt that there cannot be an absolute purpose/meaning to my life, I am preparing myself to solely commit to a series of sweet lies, faked shared preferences, strong group affiliations and occasional get-tog-ethers. In short, stay in touch. (If you dont know me and you are reading this.. Assert(0))

PS1:remove/delete all my previous numbers so that you do not get "who is this?" replies

PS2:I got a Samsung Captivate!!

Faces

A cube has 6 faces- how much does a human have?

I really do not know the answer to the question.. I consider human character to be a continuum of things.. it is the most analog thing out there in the world.In other words, there are no discrete quantum leaps in the scale of greatness of a person. In simpler words, all is grey when u start measuring it!

All my life I have assumed that having a single face is the solution to all problems - absolute transparency and universal objective accountability. But now I can assert based on first person experience that absolute transparency is impossible and hypocrisy MUST be the way of life for any civilized person. There cannot be a single face for all of us - the dichotomy gives rise to personality and character.

In short, if your whole life can be explained based on simple reason - that means u have not been living it. Be a hypocrite or be a stereotype - there is no middle ground!

The power of science and mankind

"The world is beautiful, but has a disease called man." Friedrich Nietzsche

We are a disease capable of exponential growth; tolerating, circumventing and eliminating many problems; creating, distributing and managing lots of resources. But where does our power come from ? I am tempted to say "Science". Our mind with its scientific inquiry can unfold mysteries and make this world a better place.

"Simplicity ,when taken to the extreme, becomes elegance"

What happens if we are really really good at science? In the short term, the answer is obvious, more problems solved, increased human life time, more fun time. What if we find everything there is to find? I am afraid that will be a very bad world to live in.. Anyone who cant do physical labor has to become an artist, and I have to go home!

Thanks to Gödel's incompleteness theorems and other crazy quantum physics theories, we can be sure that science will be arround for a long long time. The real power of our species is not in the large amount of complicated things we have managed to decipher but in the never ending quest to increase our understanding.

Critical Analysis of "Angadi Theru" (Market street)

Breathe eat sleep bathe laugh cry earn save can be done with reasonable tolerance by the protagonists in angadi theru; hope safety comfort progress freedom and prosperity cannot be achieved to any degree of satisfaction; love?

Instead of figuratively touching upon subjects like "love is more important than money" using punch dialog like in most ordinary movies , this movie tackles the above question in a tutorial-by-example fashion. Though we can theorize to some degree that material things are NOT important for love (and in turn happiness), to see the theory exemplified in a real brutal world through live characters in realistic scenarios is an amazing experience.

Despite of having a story about people with bleak future, this movie has a positive note all along, sandwiched between scene after scene of brutal, but realistic abuse. The climax of the movie, though at first glance seems like a movie sequence set in a tone of "final destination" (yet another accident? Really?!!), is a quick summary of the entire plot (in my opinion) : "love + hope > dire circumstances"

Critical Analysis of Ayirathil oruvan(one in a thousand) - Tamizh movie

Ayriathil oruvan is a tamizh movie by selvaragavan, staring karthik, parthibhan, rema sen and andrea.

If you have seen previous selvaragavan films, you could guess that, this would be another "Chery" boy meets city girl, falls in love, kind of story. Throughout the first half, the familiar selvaragavan scenes are retained with a good blend of humor and reasonably strong story telling. You get to see mass killings, gory deaths following some mystery trail - keeps you awake.

The second half calls for more criticism. Selva changes the genre of the movie from adventure,comedy to mystery,gore in the interval gap. Though all else has changed, sex still takes predominant role in plot development. Seduction, gore, magic, gladiator-sequence, more gore and a 300-climax fight followed by rapes and soldiers dying with the king. The second half of the movie is so intense and some visuals so stunning that I could still recollect them as if it were a ghost movie. The pure tamizh delivery combined with costumes were a definite plus to the movie.

There were a lot of pitfalls in the movie, like lack of graphics budget, our ancient kings de-glorified to barbarians. In spite of all that, to everyone's surprise, there was a story in a commercial movie! How often does that happen?

Critical Analysis of Vettaikaran(hunter) - Tamil movie

Vettaikaran is an amazing tamil movie staring Vijay and Anushka. It successfully beats even the lowest expectation possible. I am not concerned about the actual lack of any story (what did you expect from Vijay?), page long punch dialogue without any punch or the twisted physics employed in stunt sequences. I was prepared for it and can sit through that crap. I am trying to decipher the chronology of events to really understand was there ever a screen play written.

I want to decipher the creators intent to see if there was any thought process in the entire story line. If you are worried about SPOILERS, there is none. In fact, I cannot think of any SPOILER to write - there is no piece of information given before hand will make the movie any better/worse to watch.

1) Ravi (Vijay) is studying 12th standard (for the fourth time) and wants to become a super cop called "Dhevanath". Following the supercop's footsteps, He drives an auto to pay a tuition fees and lives in a hostel actively , flirting with Suseela (Anushka). Occasionally, he does a remotely "benevolent" act, like opening up windows in class rooms, clearing traffic, but does not let you give credit for him by backing the act with a lengthy dialogue. The whole pattern was vaguely familiar from "Sorry Shaktiman".

2) There are a whole bunch of villains, who do bad things. Ravi starts a fight with the villains mainly to rescue his class mate. The "vettai" (hunt) starts at that time and becomes a full fledge war.

3) The war is much like a turn-by-turn game but without any strategy. Both teams are not capable of looking beyond the next step. It is very similar to chess, because nobody can kill Vijay(I was secretly hoping someone will). Some random villan will be hit/killed by Vijay's plan. Everything else is pretty much uninteresting pawn cancellations. To

make it more boring, there are new villans who are also killed/threatened.

4) Ravi hits Chella. Chella calls the cop (Kattabomman) to arrest Ravi and take him for Encounter under the name of a different popular bomb villan. The good-guy-"pretending"-tobe-bad-guy-due-to-no-[eyes-or-family] Dhevanath sends people to rescue Ravi from encouter by making him do an apocalypto jump. Ravi steals Kattabomman's gun and does the real encounter instead of the fake one there by making the police immune to his presence for the rest of the movie.

5) Kattabomman(the bad cop) losing his second wife Janu for the hairy guy decides not to be a villan and helps Vijay proceed with his next grand strategy, which is drive an auto straight to the villans place (If its that easy why didnt he do it before? oops - sorry its a climax fight.). Due to Kattabomman's insult, the villan decides to enter politics and so Ravi and his friends hate him even more.

6) No one exactly happens in the climax gun shot moment can never be truly understood because its basically few people dancing with guns and aruvas; the villan dies at the end, killed by the blind supercop with voice directions from Ravi.

I had a few laughs at step 1 but was waiting for it be done with when the vettai started. If you watch random youtube videos, with same actors in it you can probably make similar causal analysis and derive your own story which is more solid than this one.

If you are heavily drunk or if you are less than 6 years old, you will probably find this movie very good.

Vettaikaran = "Disgrace to humanity"

What does not change?

The monitor you are looking at probably refreshes more than the rate your eyes can recognize just to give you the constancy feeling of the text that is being displayed. Of course, I am assuming you are not printing this stuff out (a very safe assumption).

For a simple interface like a web-browser displaying junk of text, we need a lot of things unchanging - giving the constancy feeling which is very essential for us to "do" anything. How much does the universe have to "do" to give us the constancy feeling that we so much enjoy. "The only thing that does not change is change itself" - is a well known observation by some random old dude many centuries ago, though the constancy feeling that does enable us to observe and appreciate the change is equally (if not more) important. So what does the universe maintain constant for us to enjoy life? Which cardinal constraints should all physical and chemical reactions follow?

1) Energy: Energy is not lost or gained but remains constant in any reaction. Though, if you very small particles (quantum stuff), energy and mass are constant (because Einstein says energy and mass are interchangable).

2) Momentum and Angular momentum: Take a particles mass multiply it by its velocity (or angular velocity) and you get the momentum. Do anything (walk, jump, cry or die), you should conserve momentum as badly as you should conserve energy. It so happens, even the small stuff inside the atom needs to conserve momentum and angular momentum.

3) Charge: Charge is a property shared by all particles. +ve, -ve or neutral. Once a particle has a charge, it cannot magically loose it. In any type of reaction, if a charge comes in, one of the outputs should take the charge out. So the overall charge is same.

4) TCP: time reversal, charge conjugation and mirror reversal. This conservation happens only in quantum stuff. Take any quantum reaction,

a) take the outputs of the reaction and run the reaction backwards (time reversal)

b) Conjugate the charges (electron to positron etc..).

c) Run the reaction in mirror image. Every particle spins clockwise or anticlockwise, just swap them.

If you do all these, you should get the original inputs back! - theoretically of course.

These are the only things that are always there and give us the continuity feeling that we are so used to. So wat? Nothing, just typing junk as usual. Go ahead and do some real work instead of wasting time on pointless stuff on the net.

Hollywood Hollywood

I always thought road trips are those kind of things which everyone pretends to be excited about because it sounds cool. To my surprise my first driving road trip proved to be awesome fun and profoundly entertaining.

I am trying to break the pieces of the road trip into its constiuent parts - but as you all know the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.. So here all the list of fun things I did last saturday in no particualar order

Aug-15-2009 7:15 am : Pretending to not hear my friend's wake up call to start the road trip.

Aug-15-2009 8:15 am : Continuing previous step with great resolve.

Aug-15-2009 9:10 am : Woke up and asked the simple question "Are we really going?"

Aug-15-2009 9:20 am: Driving my nissan maxima out of my house.

Aug-15-2009 1:00 pm: I travelled at 100 miles/hour for the first time in my car.

Aug-15-2009 3:35 pm: Ate "Soy chicken" in vegan world restaurant.

Aug-15-2009 6:00 pm: Figuring out how to go to Hollywood sign.

Aug-15-2009 7:00 pm: Illegally Hiking toward the hollywood sign.

Aug-15-2009 7:30 pm: Shot a "deeply philosophical" short film (run time 27 secs)

Aug-15-2009 9:00 pm: Sitting in Electirc Karma restaurant waiting for the "sambhar soup" which didnt come with the "Thali" that I ordered.

Aug-15-2009 10:30 pm: Walking in some kind of crazy hi-fi street where things are supposed to be fashionable (meaning expensive).

Aug-15-2009 11:45 pm: Took a picture of my patient friend near Staples building.

Aug-16-2009 12:16 am: Made a wierd left lane change in a curve making the trip adventerous.

Aug-16-2009 1:10 am: Driving back towards L.A to refuel the car.

Aug-16-2009 4:30 am: Found highway driving really boring because there is nothing happening.

Aug-16-2009 5:15 am: Me and my friend had no more topics to discuss and began to start repeating words, phrases, jokes, debates and arguments.

Aug-16-2009 6:25 am: I closed my eyes in sleep while travelling in 101.

Aug-16-2009 6:26 am: Woke up again still in 101 - still travelling in the right direction.

Aug-16-2009 7:15 am: Came home and slept till 3 pm.

Sweet lie or Hard truth?

We are confronted with the choice time and again in a civilized environment. There are always things that we do not want talk about. Lets say a very boring relative calls me up - I have to ask him how he is doing though I have no interest in his wellbeing and I have to laugh for his "jokes".

That part is simple because it is just a temporary mask - or is it? Where does the mask end and "the real you" begins. The way I see it, its much like onions, we have different masks for different people and most probably there is nothing inside.

Assuming that everything discussed so far is reasonably accurate, the next obvious question is what is there in the inner most level of the onion? Cant it be the real you? My best bet is the inner most layer in the onion is just a set of believes held so close to you that you cannot live without them. It just represents one of the stereotypical images at the heart.

In a nutshell, we are all stereotypes of one type or the other and we lie to ourselves about it by forming more and more layers around the fundamental.

Motivation

I woke up at 5:30 PM today evening after sleeping at 4 AM in the morning - a good 13.5 hrs sleep. I woke up twice in between at 10:33 AM and 12:15 PM and chose to go back to sleep because ... ?

The reason I went back to sleep is that I knew that there is no one out there that will know and feel my absence - in other words - anything that I would have done would have been so inconsequential that I figured out that they are worthless in mid-sleep. In essence I have been jobless for yet another day.

What happened to the fire inside me - assuming there is one still left? Have I been fueling it well enough? Have I given it a reason to glow? Or have I let the system-of-things-I-don't-particularly-like and the inertia-of-inaction give in to my fundamental spirit?

Its true that given a deadline I would not have been this lethargic - but shouldn't all motivation be self-motivation? Shouldn't I command myself instead of subjecting myself to a system which commands me to work? Do I have to loose free-will and subject myself to the system-of-things and run inside the system to ensure that I don't choose inaction out of lack of self-motivation?

Ok - Enough work done - I am getting back to sleep :)