September 2003
Monday, September 29, 2003
Keeping it alive
praudhatvi nija shaishawAs japAwe
bANA kavi chA ase
Translation:
To keep the inner child alive
Is the creed of poets
Working on making the translation lyrical
Suggestions/parallels that already exist/entries? :D (By Poets, I mean all creative people of course!)
UPDATE: Leading entry till now [;-)]-
To keep the inner child alive
A true poet must strive
by - Aniruddha Mahajan (blog)
Edited on: Friday, October 03, 2003 10:41 AM
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Sunday, September 28, 2003
Charter
I've been thinking about writing up a 'What you can expect o read here' post, but it's getting tougher and tougher nowadays to sit down and write, what with all the mid-sems, poster presentation and research report deadlines looming on the horizon [No, not like ominous clouds, think more on the lines of annoying mosquito swarms that distract you from your picnic ;-)]. In any case, I'm going to start with this post, and keep adding to it as things come to my mind. Suggestions, of course, are quite welcome.
***What you will find here:
-Thoughts on various news that I come across
-Mesmerizing tales from my amazing adventures in researchland ;-)
-Miscellaneous posts as related to the various categories I've made up...
-Update on what's going on my life - not very frequently...
***What you will not find
-My deepest and most secret desires :D
-My nefarious plans to take over the world
-Irrelevant trivia - however amusing - as eats up my webspace and your time!
-etc. etc.
More later....
In passing, a bunch of articles in Science - Networks in Biology Haven't read them myself yet, but looks interesting...
Edited on: Monday, September 29, 2003 10:40 AM
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A beautiful day...
It's an amazing day here in Nashville. Cool, crisp, sunny... just the kind of day to NOT sit in front of your comp doing homework and lab reports... but who can help that! I think March-April and September-October are the best times around Nashville. Spring and Fall. Childhood and old age. Just beautiful. There are no word to do justice to such beauty. If a carry a penny for every time I wished I had a decent camera, I'm sure I won't be able to walk for the weight... ;-)
Monday, September 22, 2003
Human relations?
Chanced upon a couple of interesting news pieces today - On NBC's Today show, a woman with an MBA from Harvard was present to promote her book - ‘Find A Husband After 35’ The book tells women how to apply marketing techniques - marketing, branding, niche positioning etc. towards the quest for a husband! Reason? There are 28 million single women over 35, but only 18 million single men over 35 (U.S. Census, 2000). Couple that with the increasing western preoccupation with 'youth' (or at least the appearance of it)- witness the scores of anti-aging creams, hair transplants, cosmetic surgery, botox and human cadaver collagen* (!!!) treatment - and the concomitant - and contradictory - quest for increasing longevity (Money for old mice!**), and one wonders what the social structure is going to be in 20 years if this continues...
While we are becoming more and more superficial, and forgetting how to communicate with each other, we're also trying to imbue intelligence in machines, so we can talk to them and not understand that they are machines! - On BBC.com, a report on The Loebner Prize - the annual competition to find the computer with the most convincing conversational skills, started in 1990 - basically, embodiment of the Turing Test. The developer of this perticular AI chatbot says - If I have my way, people will be walking around, sitting, cooking and more with one on their shoulder, talking in their ear. ... noticed that some people, particularly the young, believe AIs are entities in their own right. They talk to the bot with respect, showing compassion and understanding....I once found a user had evidently left their browser window open for weeks, and said more than 20,000 things" ....
The use of enabling technology and all that stuff is perfectly fine, and one of the examples would be Deepti -- A Hindi Speaking Chat Robot (you can even test it if you run Linux), but the argument for dispassionate development of technology is sometimes hard to accept... Every technology effects a change in the human way of life. The question is, are we aware of how the world is changing around us, and are we going to be able to accept the change and live - a longer and longer life - with the change.....
*Cosmetic Surgery News: - Soft tissue augmentation with an injectable filler is another option for some of the shallower acne scars. Some of these fillers include bovine collagen, dermalogen (human cadaver collagen), cymetra (injectable alloderm which is made out of human cadaver tissue), fascian (human cadaver fascia) and fat injections."
**Nature Science Update: - A contest to produce the oldest laboratory mouse, and so help to unravel the mysteries of human aging, is launched in Britain today.
Edited on: Monday, September 22, 2003 11:55 PM
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Now fully online! (I think....)
Back after three gruelling days of memorizing names and structures of amino acids, lipids and what not - and a good exam! Biochemistry helps those who help themselves ;-)
Blog update - commenting issue is resolved! Now if you click on the 'Comments(#)', the resulting popup window will contain comments related to that post, and if you write a comment, it'll be linked to that particular post. So that's that. Another thing, now the blog - like most others - will have the latest entries first - obviates all the unnecessary scrolling down...
The commenting solution has however removed Ajit's earlier (and rather flattering) comment about being tech savvy etc - to quote
Feynman - "I have to understand the world, you see." :-) My view is this - the technologies that we use are changing so rapidly, that if we don't keep up, a) we won't be able to use them to their full potential and fall behind those who can; b) within the next five to ten years everything will seem like magic! (Arthur C. Clarke's laws, and more stuff..., and also - Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. LOL)
If there's one thing I don't like, it's using 'black box' technologies.. (or magic - unless I'm playing Diablo! haven't done that in quite a while...) and c) I just like playing with new toys...
Knowledge is indeed power - the more the better.
That said, I have to start working now on understanding my own research! Will be carrying out some experiments to see if my three weeks of doing mostly nothing (other than reading a LOT of research papers) has paid off :-). Then wait some more, then more experiments, then... Plus I have to give a presentation - MS thesis outline - on October 14th... and another exam on 17th. Oh the fun of being in school! :-|
I'm thinking about writing a 'Charter of Contents' for the blog. No point in writing drivel about my day to day activities. I'll start working on that too...
Edited on: Monday, September 22, 2003 3:37 PM
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Thursday, September 18, 2003
A little about the title
This is going to be a long and perhaps a little heavy post, so hold on!
But first, thanks to Bob for all his help with setting up the blog, and
for developing Thingamablog.
That
said, a little explanation of what I mean by the the name of this blog -
According
to WordWeb
explore
(verb):
--Inquire into
--Travel to or penetrate into; of unknown
territory, for scientific purposes
--Examine minutely
--Examine for
diagnostic purposes, as of organs
Don't think that need any more
explanation...
stochastic (adjective):
--(statistics)
being or having a random variable
I was recently reading a little
about Artificial
Neural Networks and a chanced upon the word stochastic,
which I found really interesting. A little more reading revealed that a
lot of complex systems can be best described as stochastic, some even
using stochastic
equations. I suppose it is a good way of qualitatively describing the
whole universe too! Even though (we think) we have significant
understanding of the basic principles that govern the universe, there are
are a lot of events (perhaps almost all of them!) that we cannot predict.
This is where the stochastic, chaotic, random, unknown, or undetermined
variables manifest themselves. As science progresses, and we understand
and define these variables, we increase our predictive power. I'm hoping,
however, that the world will never be completely deterministic for human
beings - that there will always be insufficient
data for a meaningful answer for at least a few questions. A little
randomness makes for a more interesting world!
consciousness
(noun):
--An alert cognitive state in which you are aware of
yourself and your situation
--Having knowledge of
Although this
is probably good enough for a dictionary definition, 'consciousness' -
perhaps the defining characteristic of being human - is a much more
complex and misunderstood phenomenon. In a book that I read recently - 'Understanding
Consciousness' by Max Velmans; the author talks about a new theory of
consciousness that he (and others) have developed. The gist, a little
oversimplified, is that there is no perception 'apart' from what you
actually see. For example, if you see a cat, there is no 'image' of the
cat somewhere in your mind/brain, even though this perception is
understood in two ways - an external observer can observe (via FMRI,
for example) a subject's experience, thoughts etc. as neural activity and
connections, but to the subject, the experience is what they experience, a
thought is what they think. Thus a theory of consciousness and how it
relates to reality should include these complimentary ways - what Velmans
calls 'Ontological monism combined with Epistemological dualism' - of
understanding both.
What all this boil's down to, in my own
layman's way of thinking, is - concousness is reality.
So...
there you have it. I'll leave the task of putting the explanation of the
parts together in order to decipher the intent of the whole as an
excercise for the reader.
:-)
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Ponder, ponder....
This post is just to see how thingamablog handles multiple posts - since I'm using it in a way that it's not really designed to use (I'm just posting on my network drive, whereas it's designed to port the log to a ftp space - not that that should make any difference...)
Another question that arises is, now that I have a blog (hopefully regularly updated...), should I just post all the interesting stuff I come across here rather than e-mail everybody the 'junk' that I find quite interesting... I guess people who read my mails regularly can just check my page...
If anybody knows how to incorporate a reader feedback system - that everybody can read - on a blog, please let me know...
Edited on: Thursday, September 18, 2003 1:13 PM
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First entry
Using thingamablog to make this first entry on my blog! I'll go with plain text for now, but hopefully integrate the blog in my website soon. This is nice!
Let there be more blog noise :-|
Edited on: Thursday, September 18, 2003 4:49 PM
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