My friend Reuben over at ZooStation wants to spread the word about a $10,000 fellowship fellowship set up by SAJA for anyone wanting to do aTsunami aftermath story. The details are here.
This has been a Public Service Announcement brought to you by the kind folks at Zoo Station and its affiliates. Support also provided in part by Deeshaa Network which is made possible by a grant from an anonymous foundation.
I have started on Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography. Absolutely fascinating. No doubt that he was a remarkable man. I find the book un-putdown-able. The reason I started on it is rather pedestrian: I am out of reading material and went to the Crosswords bookstore around the corner and found it to be the cheapest among the lot that I wanted to read. It was only Rs 30 (about $0.70.) Amazing window into the mind of a man who casts such a long shadow onto India. More about this man later.
Post script: Over the years I have written a bit about the man. Here’s the category link on Mohandas K. Gandhi.
{via Sonal Vidya.} From the New Scientist: 11 Steps to a Better Brain.
One of which is:
Sleep on it
Never underestimate the power of a good night’s rest
So I am doing that a lot. I will have to work on the other 10 bits.
Stanislav Andreski in Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972)
So long as authority inspires awe, confusion and absurdity enhance conservative tendencies in society. Firstly, because clear and logical thinking leads to a cumulation of knowledge (of which the progress of the natural sciences provides the best example) and the advance of knowledge sooner or later undermines the traditional order. Confused thinking, on the other hand, leads nowhere in particular and can be indulged indefinitely without producing any impact upon the world.
“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
— Samuel Johnson quoted in Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.”
If you come to think about it for a moment, what we really want is knowledge, not information. (Recall what the business school guru said: what people want is not a quarter-inch drill but rather a quarter-inch hole.) The good news is that there is a lot of information out there. The better news is that the cost of accessing that information has been dropping exponentially. But the bad news is that the cost of searching through the vast stock of information to satisfy your knowledge needs is increasing.
Continue reading “The World is (Information) Fat”
They beat him up. According to the MidDay report of June 1, “after a thorough beating,” they handed him over to the police in Mumbai.
Continue reading “Ill Fares the Land . . .”
My Dear Abhishek:
You, like everything else, are a little bundle of energy, aren’t you!
Let me tell you a story. It was a very long time ago, by some estimates about 15 to 18 billion years ago, this universe we inhabit was born. Why it came into existence nobody knows. Where did it come from? From Absolute Nothingness. You may ask: how can Something arise from Absolute Nothingness? Here is my conjecture. You start with Absolute Nothingness and represent it with a 0 (zero). Some call it “Shunyata” (Emptiness). Then you separate the 0 into some positive quantity (E) and an equivalent negative quantity (S). If you sum up those two quantities, you end up with what you began with: 0.
Now, take S and create space out of it. Simultaneously, take E and make energy out of it. This created energy permeates the space created. Then transform some of this energy into stuff of various kinds which then hangs around in space. This is where I conclude my conjecture. From here on, my story will follow the currently accepted theory of what the universe is.
They call it the Big Bang, an event which gave birth to Time, Space, and Energy. Right after the Big Bang (whatever it was), the universe was very very tiny. And it was very very hot. The tiny hot universe began to expand, that is, space began to grow. As the universe grew bigger, the temperature dropped. As the temperature dropped, some of the energy began to “condense”. Little bits of energy condensed first into what is called quarks and electrons and other little bits. There are just a handful of quarks. Then these itsy-bitsy quarks combined together to form bigger units such as protons and neutrons. As the universe expanded and cooled further, protons and neutrons combined and formed elements.
The early universe was simple. You had space, energy, and matter. Most of the matter was Hydrogen (about 75 percent) and Helium (about 25 percent). I am simplifying all this and leaving out details such as neutrinos, electrons, and all sorts of exotic stuff. What is important is to note that to start off with, there was just energy. And some of that energy became matter. Matter and energy are one and the same, as pointed out by one guy called Einstein.
Anyway, as time went on, the universe moved from begin featureless to a state where interesting structures started arising. Huge clouds of hydrogen and helium condensed into stars under the influence of gravity. Within the stars, hydrogen got converted by nuclear fusion into helium. The energy released by this reaction balanced the crushing force of gravity. But when all the hydrogen was converted into helium and other somewhat heavy elements such as carbon, oxygen, and iron, gravity won and the star exploded and became a Supernova. In that violence, even heavier elements were synthesized.
The stuff that was thrown off by supernovas again collected into stars with hydrogen and a new star went through its life. Every element that you have on earth (except for hydrogen and some helium) was manufactured in stars over many billions of years. We are made of elements that were cooked in stars: we are star stuff. Every atom in our bodies started off as a bit of energy which condensed a long time ago and came to us as the grandchildren of may generations of stars. The most basic description of anything anywhere in the universe is that it is a bundle of energy.
But then, you may say, that this basic description is lacking a certain something. It does not explain the distinction between equivalent amounts of energy with different forms. You may say that there may be exactly the same amount of energy in a sack of coal and you, but the sack of coal will not have the cuteness that you have. How does this cuteness come about, you ask. That I can tell you in one word: Information.
Let me see if I can explain what I mean. At some point in your life you will doubtless ask, “Where did I come from?” One answer (amongst many others) is: “From a store, mainly. You have been bought at a store.” Here is a thought experiment. Put a man and a woman in a suitable container and stock it with all that they need such as food and air and water. After sufficient time, if all goes well, some of the food would be converted into a baby just like you. Since all the food was bought from stores, the baby came from the stores in brown-paper bags in bits.
What happened was that some of the elements of the food was rearranged into a different organization according to instructions which are biologically encoded somehow at the cellular level. Those instructions you inherited from your parents, who in turn inherited it from their parents, all the way back to the beginning of organic life on earth. In creating you, no new matter was created; only a re-arrangement was done. You are a bundle of energy organized in a certain unique way.
To recap, everything material (including the food that became re-organized as you) is made up of a handful of elements such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. You start off with sufficient amounts of about a 100 odd elements and you can build yourself everything you see around in the universe. The elements themselves are made up of even fewer more fundamental bits such as protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. These bits themselves are made of still fewer bits called quarks. You get the idea: the deeper you go, the simpler the bits become. The immense variety you see in the universe emerges from complex arrangements of simpler bits. At its most complex, at the highest levels of organization of the elements, life appears.
So we have elements organized in specific ways. The blueprint of that organization is information. You take some stuff (elements) and arrange them according to some blueprint (information) and you get all the structures, from stars (very little information content) to babies (very high information content.) To fully specify a baby, you need gigabytes of information about the DNA of the baby.
The whole universe is nothing but information and energy. Your fundamental nature is the same as everything else in the universe — it is all energy organized in special ways. Perhaps that is what the ancients in India realized when they figured out the philosophy of Advaita (non-duality) and said “Tat Tvam Asi” — That You Are. You and the Not-You are the same. When you attain enlightenment, you will see beyond the duality and realize that all things have the same nature but only the form differs.
So let me conclude this with a line from the Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra:
Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is also Form.
With a deep bow to the Emptiness within us all,
Atanu
PS: The first of my letters to Abhishek is here.
Dateline May 4th, 2005, Kolkata: The Slimes Times of India reported that IIT entrance test set for overhaul:
The IIT-Joint Entrance Exam may soon be easier to crack. The Union HRD [Human Resource Development] ministry feels the examination is too tough, causes immense stress to candidates, and needs to be toned down immediately.
The ministry has formed a committee … to modify the IIT-JEE pattern.
Clever, isn’t it? In related news, another ministry has expressed concern about the fact that hunger is a problem to some few hundred million people and something needs to be done immediately about it. So a committee is being formed which will revise the daily caloric requirement from the current approximately 2000 Kcals per day to about 1000 Kcals. This would reduce the number of hungry people by about 80 percent.
Continue reading “Enough already of not being filthy rich for me”
{A continuation of my previous post Me write pretty some day.}
My obsession with fully comprehending a problem before attempting to solve it springs from a simple personal trait: I am unbelievably lazy. How to get something done with the least effort is my constant obsession. My motto is work as little as possible to get only those things done that cannot be avoided. So of course I have to identify a minimal set of things that are unavoidable and then figure out the most efficient way of getting them done. Easily enough stated, my creed is not easy to follow. Sometimes I misidentify the set of things that need to done, and sometimes even after properly identifying the set, my method is imperfect. But by and large, I do get by and have managed to keep body and soul together—with a little help from my friends, of course.
Though I have a tendency to avoid unpleasant truths, I could not evade the conclusion that something was radically wrong with India. Even while I was in engineering school, I was aware of the poverty around me and figured out that being born poor was like getting a very poor outcome in a random draw. I went to a good school because I was lucky to be born to middle-class professional parents; the cleaning lady’s kid would never see the insides of a school and would probably end up with a much poorer life through no fault of his. Having had good schooling, I was able to study computer science at one of India’s premier institutions (IIT Kanpur) and was even paid to do so. Who paid for my education? The unlucky kids from poor families who got dealt a lousy hand in life’s random draw.
The IITs are a portal to the US. I ended up at Rutgers University to do a PhD in computer science. But grad student life sucks compared to that of a yuppie in the Silicon Valley and I quit within a short time with another master’s degree to work for HP. California lies pretty much at the other extreme of the world from India, both geographically and economically. With a population of about three percent of India’s population, its economy was double the size of India’s. Why was California so rich and why was India so poor? I had sufficient time to ponder that question. What distinguished the two? What was the reason for the totally different ways of living: the thoughtless affluence of the few compared to the grinding dehumanizing poverty of the many? I came up with the hypothesis that per capita resource availability had something to do with it. The cause of India’s poverty, it appeared to me, was due to an imbalance between resources and people. As a first approximation to the statement of what India’s basic problem was it was not too bad.
In northern California living is easy and my work at HP was a breeze. I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about India’s problems. I soon realized that economics informs that fundamental question: Why is India poor? I liked the way economists thought (Thomas Schelling was one of the first economists I read) and I wanted to be one so that I could either justify or reject my hypothesis. A PhD in resource economics would do very well, I thought. And since the University of California at Berkeley was just up the road from me, I pestered the admissions committee sufficiently that they admitted me against their best judgment about allowing in someone with not a single economics course in their background. In case you are wondering, they liked having me there and I made lots of friends and even though I changed topics three times, each of my advisors was unhappy to see me go.
Enough of this biographical aside for now.
In all my readings about India, one thing that struck me was that no one appeared to ask the more fundamental questions such as:
It appeared to me that those at the decision making level in India did not have any clue about what was wrong, and they had even less than a clue about what to do about it. Even to an average seventh-grade student it is clear that problems have causes and exhibit symptoms. By examining the symptoms, one can figure out the causes of the problem. And by addressing the causes of the problem, the problem can be solved and thus bring about the removal of the symptoms.
The problem in India was that most people were not even very clearly perceiving the symptoms (poverty, illiteracy, corruption, overcrowding, etc.) to say nothing of understanding the problem and eventually solving it. The decision makers, especially, were evidently living in a separate universe which bore little relation to the universe the great unwashed masses inhabited. The government made plans that applied to their parallel universe and I don’t think they were the least astonished when their schemes did not work in the real universe. They were not astonished because they told themselves that their plans had worked marvelously and so they made even more of those idiotic plans.
Like individuals, countries also get hands dealt to them from a random draw. In one, you get leaders who are superhuman, and the country prospers; in another, you get puny unimaginative egomaniacs and the country ends up with malnourished children and illiterate adults. Can something be done to change the effects of the luck of that draw? I think there is.
For now, let me close with a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith (A Journey Through Economic Time, (1994)):
Ignorance, stupidity, in great affairs of state is not something that is commonly cited. A certain political and historical correctlness requires us to assign some measure of purpose, of rationality, even where, all to obviously, it does not exist. Nonetheless one cannot look with detachment on the Great War (and also its aftermath) without thought as to the mental insularity and defectiveness of those involved and responsible.
I am sorry that I have not had the time to continue with the various threads I have started. But by next week I will be caught up. In the meanwhile, I strongly urge you to read an article by Deepak Lal and another from the von Mises Institute on “employment-at-will”. Both are related.
I will be back soon.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 