Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Mathematics and Mysticism
which is the smallest number greater than zero?
unsolved heh?ok so lets give it a shot!There is no "smallest number greater than 0". This is not only because Mathematicians are self-centred egotists, or even because maths profs are Mathematicians who wish only to flunk their students. Mathematics believes in doing well-defined things (ONLY). It's practically the science of well-defined things. Having a smallest positive number would break this. For suppose such a number x existed. Then we know x > 0, so x > x/2 > 0, which is a contradiction (x/2 is now smaller positive number!duh!!).
So no such thing exists. And you cannot meaningfully "define" something to be this nothing. There is no number 1/infinity, no number 1/aleph0, no number 1/ω, and no number 0.00...001 (where there are "infinitely many" 0's between the decimal point and the 1). None of them make sense, none of them are defined, and all of them are even more nonsensical than the idea of a smallest positive number x as above. And don't get me started on 0.99999...; it really does equal 1 (and no, 1-0.999... is not the "smallest number greater than 0").
Grow up; deal with it; there are bigger things to worry about.
PS-
-hey, what's the smallest number greater than zero?
>think of a number greater than zero.
-is this like a magic trick?
>in a way, yes.cool!
-i like magic tricks! alright, got one!
>halve it
-uhuh
>halve it again
-yup
>halve it again
-ok...
*** several minutes later ***
>halve it again
-um, how long is this going to take?
*** several hours later ***
>halve it again
-are you following me?!?!??!
*** several weeks later ***
>halve it again
-please! i can't take it anymore! can't we just call it quits and round it down to zero?!?!?!
>certainly not! halve it again...
-arghhhhhhh!!!!!!
Saturday, September 1, 2007
IN THE SHADOWS
No sleep No sleep untill I am done with finding the answer
Wont stop Wont stop before I find a cure for this cancer
Sometimes I feel I going down and so disconnected
Somehow I know that I am haunted to be wanted
I been watching
I been waiting
In the shadows all my time
I been searching
I been living
For tomorrows all my life
In the shadows
In the shadows
They say
That i must learn to kill before i can feel safe
But I, I rather kill myself then turn into there slave
Sometimes I feel that I should go and play with the thunder
Somehow I just don't wanne stay and wait for a wonder
I been watching
I been waiting
In the shadows all my time
I been searching
I been living
For tomorrows all my life
Lately I been walking walking in circles,
watching waiting for something
Feel me touch me feel me, come take me higher
I been watching
I been waiting
In the shadows all my time
I been searching
I been living
For tomorrows all my life
I been watching
I been waiting
I been searching
I been living for tomorrows
In the shadows
In the shadows I been waiting
Friday, August 17, 2007
chupke chupke
Parimal (Dharmendra) and Sulekha (Sharmila Tagore) meet on a hill station holiday in which Parimal, a professor of botany, impersonates hill station's caretaker in order to give the real caretaker a few days off. Parimal and Sulekha fall in love and marry - they are joyful and playful in marriage, but Parimal finds himself half-pretend jealous of Sulekha's brother-in-law Raghav (Om Prakash), whom she idolizes. So Parimal hatches a scheme - with Sulekha's full cooperation - to play a practical joke on Raghav, whom he hasn't yet met. He poses as a driver and gets himself hired to work in Raghav's household. Then Sulekha comes for an extended visit - ostensibly while her husband is away on business - and together they fool Raghav into thinking that they are having an illicit affair. Parimal has a couple of friends who are in on the joke - Prashant (Asrani), a Bombay businessman, and his colleague Sukumar (Amitabh Bachchan), a professor of English. Wacky hijinks ensue - Sukumar turns up impersonating the real Parimal, and falls in love with Prashant's sister Vasudha (Jaya Bhaduri). It's a massive prank for the ages.
It's a totally stupid plot, and that's part of what makes it so funny - the other part is the utter good-enough-to-eat cuteness of the characters. Dharmendra and Sharmila, as Parimal and Sulekha, have a delightful tenderness and mischief that just bursts out of the screen every time they give one another a naughty look. It's clear that they have fun with the pretense,all the indiscreet sneaking around turns them on, so making their hosts think they are having a reckless and improper affair is easy. Parimal sneaks into Sulekha's bedroom nightly, once "accidentally" leaving his monogrammed hanky outside her door where Raghav will find it. And they gallivant openly in front of their hosts' five-year-old daughter, knowing that the little girl will tattle on them. The film is full of cute moments like that - the best of them is the song "Ab ke sajna sawaan mein," in which Sulekha sings a passionate song of longing to Parimal while Raghav looks on, vibrating as though he is about to pop a gasket.
Adding to the comic absurdity of the whole situation, Raghav wants a driver who speaks perfect shuddh Hindi (why is not entirely clear - perhaps to protect his young daughter from the rough tapori spoken by the laborers available to him in Bombay) and the erudite Parimal, in his charade, is more than happy to oblige, offering language so pure and high-tone that others in the household can't always understand him - he takes Raghav's desire for pure language and throws it back in his face, with hysterical results. Dharmendra completely stands out in his performance plus his greek god looks would put all the john abrahams of today to shame.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Why Career Planning Is Time Wasted
Our culture worships planning. Everything must be planned in advance. Our days, week, years, our entire lives. We have diaries, schedules, checklists, targets, goals, aims, strategies, visions even. Career planning is the most insidious of these cults precisely because it encourages a feeling of control over your reactions to future events. As that interview question goes: where do you see yourself in five years time? This invites the beginning of what starts as a little game and finishes as a belief built on sand. You guess what employers want to hear, and then you give it to them. Sometimes this batting back and forth of imagined futures becomes a necessary little game you play in order to 'get ahead'.
"We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences."In reality, people frequently don't know what they want and psychology has proved it. That's why career planning, or at the very least just deciding what you're going to do next, is so unpleasant. It's no fun at 18 years old when people ask what you want to do. There seem to be so many different options, each with myriad branching possibilities, many of which lead in opposite directions, but all equally tempting. Surrounded by these endless spiralling futures, it is no wonder that many a school-leaver sticks with what they know and follows in parental footsteps. But we don't all want to trust the tried and tested, whether for good reasons or bad. We want to make a decision all of our own, based on our own values and preferences.
Midlife crisis
If it's hard at 18, it's even harder in midlife when people are theoretically better equipped to make their choice. In reality by your 30s wide-eyed optimism has normally been replaced by a more cynical outlook on jobs and the workplace. Now it's more clear what the downsides of certain jobs are. There's not only our own experiences of work but we also have friends at work, all of whom colour our perception of their careers. Everyone has their own internal trade-offs. How much routine do you like: boring but safe)? How much do you like travel: exciting but you'll be away from loved ones? How much do you care about earning more money: and taking a more boring/stressful/less fulfilling job? Whatever the outcome of all these swings and roundabouts along with many more, the reason that deciding what to do with your life is so difficult is that it involves predicting the future. There's many reasons why it seems we should be good at prediction what we want. If I know that I'm enjoying what I'm doing now, then I should enjoy it in the future shouldn't I? On top of this I've got years of experience building up a set of things I like - cinema, books, sitcoms - and things I don't like - trips to the dentist, severe embarrassment and flu, especially not all at the same time. If I've got this huge bank of likes and dislikes it should be easy to predict my wants in the future. And yet, it seems we are often surprised by what the future throws at us.
Miswanting
"We are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future."The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future has been termed 'miswanting' by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to a range of studies finding we are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future. My favourite is a simple experiment in which two groups of participants get free sandwiches if they participate in the experiment - a doozie for any undergraduate. One group has to choose which sandwiches they want for an entire week in advance. The other group gets to choose which they want each day. A fascinating thing happens. People who choose their favourite sandwich each day at lunchtime also often choose the same sandwich. This group turns out to be reasonably happy with its choice. Amazingly, though, people choosing in advance assume that what they'll want for lunch next week is a variety. And so they choose a turkey sandwich Monday, tuna on Tuesday, egg on Wednesday and so on. It turn out that when next week rolls around they generally don't like the variety they thought they would. In fact they are significantly less happy with their choices than the group who chose their sandwiches on the day.
Prediction failure
This variety versus sameness is only one particular bias that people display in making predictions about their future emotional states. There is another counter-intuitive bias emerging from the work being done in positive psychology. This looks at how people predict they will feel after both catastrophically bad, and, conversely, fantastically positive occurrences in their life. For example, how good would you feel if you won the lottery? Most people predict their lives will be completely changed and they'll be much happier. What does the research find? Yes, people are measurably happier after they've just won, but six months down the line they're back to their individual 'baseline' level of happiness. So, in the journey from the sublime - predicting how we'll feel about winning the lottery - to the ridiculous - predicting which sandwiches we'll want for lunch - we are incredibly bad at knowing our future selves. And if we can't even decide what type of sandwich we might like next week, how can we possibly decide what type of job we'd like to be doing in twenty years?With age occasionally comes wisdom. Over time we learn, whether implicitly or explicitly, that we are not that good at predicting the future. At the very least we begin to recognise it is a much less precise science than we once thought.
A stranger future
This means your future self is probably a stranger to you. And, on some level, you know it. That's why it might be hard for an 18 year old to choose their career, but it's a damn sight harder for someone in midlife when limitations have been learnt.
This might seem like just another way of saying that people get more cautious as they get older, but it is more than that. It's actually saying that it's not caution that's increasing with age, but implicit self-knowledge. People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties, even for those things that would seem to be under our most direct control, like our sandwich preferences.
Best guess beats careful planning
The argument about miswanting applies to any area of our lives which involves making a prediction about what we might like in the future. Career planning becomes painful precisely because it's such an important decision and we come to understand that we have only very limited useful information. The best strategy for career planning is this: make your best guess, try it out and don't be surprised if you don't like it. But for heaven's sake don't mention this in your interviews.
so i guess 3 years from now i wont be an IIMA's last bencher after all!! :(
Friday, August 3, 2007
If It All Ended Tomorrow
Time Runnin Out, Ain't No One You Can Borrow
So Many Paths, which one you gonna follow?
What Would You Do If It All Ended Tomorrow?
Now, so I take a second look at my life
I made too many mistakes that I just couldnt make right
Should've been more focused than I take things light
When I'm gone this is what ya'll will say I was like
A fool, but no not that bad or cool
Just a big fish caught up in the shallow pool
He got lucky with all the fame
In two weeks aint nobody gonna remember his name
But I'm ready to go, 'am done
More importantly though, I proved everyone wrong
Its all over regardless what you say!!
Just lost,everyone's walkin away
I realize life is short so I'm markin the day
Now it's full speed ahead, I'll rest when I'm dead
And I dont give a Fuck what the next man said
I live how I wanna live
Buy what I wanna buy
Do what I wanna do
Try What I wanna try
Fear nothin, take chances
Not afraid to fail, always makin advances
So when I ride my last rites on the Highway
No regrets bitch,
cause I did it my way
so,What Would You Do If It All Ended Tomorrow?
Saturday, May 5, 2007
Right now
right now....you should pay attention
right now....opportunity is passing you by
right now....US shouldnt be in iraq
right now....guilt is turning someone inside out
right now....you are sitting too close to ur PC's monitor
right now....somebody's got the wrong idea
right now....we have to stop domestic violence in our community
right now....we should volunteer
right now....you arent doing wat u most wish u were
right now....we should stop clicking stupid photos from our cellphones
right now....ppl dont think about the consequences of their actions
right now....you should have finished ur sabzi
right now....too many ppl feel lonely
right now....you need a new hobby
right now....i should pay more attention to wat i am writing
right now....we need to stop fighting with each other
right now....truth is being obscured
right now....your parents miss you
right now....your memory's getting longer and ur life's getting shorter
right now....ppl are doing it for money
right now....we need to stop killing our daughters and our future
right now....we need to treat each other with more love and affection
right now....we need to remember the all mighty
right now....we need to make a difference
right now....you should be expressing ur love to someone
right now....a chocolate bar wud be nice
right now....ppl are getting bored of my long thread
right now....you should stop and think where ur life is headed
right now....u are missing sumone
right now....u are about to end ur college life
right now....you need to apologise to sumone
right now....i must stop with this thread
right now....nothing is more expensive than regret
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
you are saying it too
If I could say, I would say out loud
But for the moment, I won't make a sound.
If I could say it, if only you knew,
Whatever I tell you, you'd make it come true.
I know our differences are worlds apart,
And I know this romance will never start.
That doesn't stop me to feel and desire,
To build in my heart, this raging fire.
Surrounded by beings, I won't say a thing,
This silence is music - hear my heart sing!
Sometimes I feel our eyes are talking,
But you pass on by and carry on walking.
If I could say, I would say it to you
But I need to know you are saying it too!
Monday, April 23, 2007
Does that upset you?
* Your husband is dead.. how do you feel? (Elated?)
* Your boyfriend cheated you.. does that upset you? (no not at all.. I wasn’t particularly faithful
myself)
* You were in jail for 3 years.. was it as bad as you thought it would be? (no. surprisingly they
did have food)
* You were shot at.. how did that change you? (I died)
Aaarrghhh.. am I crazy or are these questions as stupid as any question can possibly get! Too bad people don’t respond the way the italics do.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Simi Grewal and her brand of compassion in Rendezvous on Star World at 8:30 every sunday. She wears white all the time.. pray I ask why.. If you are a celebrity and anything even remotely sad has happened to you, our dear Ms Grewal will make it point to talk to you about it, bring you close to tears or even have you sob uncontrollably and innocently ask ’does that make you sad’? DUH!!
The outline
She brings a high profile celebrity.. hardly ever anyone with good GK, but still someone who has made a name for him/herself. Then she smiles and flutters her eyelashes while encouraging the guest to talk about personal details. When she senses a raw nerve she digs deep without seeming to do so. She smiles, holds hands, sympathizes enough to get you to talk about stuff you wouldn’t confide in your own husband.Why she works In a world where nobody cares about the other, she shines like a lone star. The smiling and the sympathizing goes a long way. The guest’s feel like she’s really listening and that she wont spin yarns like any bollywood mag.Why she just sucks She’s a real fake-o. I guess when you’re face to face with a person who seems sympathetic you do tend to pour out all your grief... but to a viewer her fake-ness is clear. She must’ve told at least half the women on her show how they are her ’favourite’. Or how she thinks they are the ’strongest woman’ she has seen. Gee.. I thought ’strongest’ would be a superlative, didn’t know half a dozen people could qualify for it.
There are just two things on her show
#1. A mutual admiration session where she gushes ’you’re wonderful’ and the guest gushes back, ’simi you’re an inspiration’.
#2. A pity party. People don’t have beautiful women sympathizing with them everyday, so they make most use of this ridiculous opportunity to show the world what hell they’ve been through.
Reasons to watch
* You love white.
* The ambience of the show is a welcome change from the garish sets on other talk shows. And I love the little pond she has on her set.
* The people she invites are the best in their fields. And they never seem to refuse an interview with her.
* You want to hear the weirdest Hindi accent ever! (too bad my friends allege mine is similar)
Reasons to skip
* You hate white.
* You hate the incessant head bobbing and smiling that is now Simi’s trademark.
* You have a dog to walk, friends to talk to, parents to look after.. heck if you just have a life!
Verdict
You still need a verdict?Simi dear, you’re old, wear white all the time probably to hide the uncontrollable dandruff.. people don’t like you all that much but pretend to (just like you) . Does that upset you?