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.

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 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.

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.