Flying chapptis

I saw a post about Indian food. The last video in that post is awesome.

Ngram Viewer

Google has a new tool called Ngram Viewer. It has led to a new field called “culturomics” - the study of culture using vast amounts of data. Here is how these buzzwords came about. For a jobless guy like me, it is fun to key in different words and see their trends. Some interesting ngrams were:

1. India,China,Brazil - Why is India dipping in the last three decades?
2. Some management jargon - Oh those MBAs!
3. Schadenfreude
4. I saw a list of 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know. I looked at the graph of a couple of words that I did not know. (There were some words whose meanings I was not sure of but I probably would have guessed them if I had a few alternatives like in Reader's Digest. But I had no idea about these two words.)
5. I saw a post about the best movie quotes of all time and looked at the trends of some of the movies (not the quotes because I am not sure how to handle the punctuations).
6. Some poets
7. Some fictional detectives
8. Distinguishing real science from fads
9. Apparently this is the Best Google n-gram yet.
10. The Science Hall of Fame

But the graphs should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Some random thoughts

A couple of passages in two books struck a chord in me. The first passage is from Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers:

An overabundance of information can be stressful as well. One of the places I dreaded most in graduate school was the "new journal desk" in the library, where all the science journals received the previous week were displayed, thousands of pages of them. Everyone would circle around it, teetering on the edge of panic attacks. All that available information seemed to taunt us with how out of control we felt - stupid, left behind, out of touch, and overwhelmed.

I got this feeling many times. In school, the library was this wonderful place which had splendid story books that gave you hours of pleasure. Then you go to college and the library will be filled with journals and books bearing intimidating titles. Serious People will be poring over these books with great concentration. Was I intimidated much? You bet! I will also try reading these books but will not be able to get past the first couple of pages.

There will be whole books on topics that you had thought had been adequately covered in one paragraph in the textbook that you had been using. There will be a rack with the ominous sign 'New Arrivals' where new books with strange titles will keep arriving and disappearing every week. I will wonder who read these books and survived. (There are people who do incredible things. I saw a list of The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English and the first word itself I did not know, among many other words. It is disheartening, I tell you.)

The other passage is about the Nobel laureate Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar in E=mc²: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation:

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was renowned for keeping a calm exterior, but internally: "I am almost ashamed to confess it. Years run apace, but nothing done! I wish I had been more concentrated, directed and disciplined." At the time of this lament he was twenty, and it was but one year since the sea journey where he'd peered into the catch-22 from E=mc², which, along with other work, would ultimately lead to the understanding of black holes.

When I read books on evolution and astronomy, I often think how the authors know so much. At the end of the book there will be a plethora of books and articles listed as recommended reading. I will wonder when they got time to read them and more importantly, assimilate them. As Mortimer J. Adler said, " In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you." And they also have to spend time on a day job. Did that guy called Isaac Asimov really exist? He wrote so many books on so many diverse subjects that I wonder when he slept. And I start thinking like Chandrasekhar: 'I should not have wasted so much time.' As Kushwant Singh says:

Over the years I have discovered what enormous energy silence creates, energy that socializing and useless chit chat depletes. You have got to train yourself to be alone. You have to discipline yourself to follow a slavish routine.

A major difference is that Chandrasekhar had the thought at 20, I had the thought at 40. What is it that Jimmy Connors said about experience? " The trouble with experience is that by the time you have it you are too old to take advantage of it."

More communication snafus

When I read about mondegreens, I realised that I also had been stumped sometimes by such auditory glitches but unfortunately I cannot remember any, except for the confusion between 'about' and 'above' which happens frequently. I will frame a sentence containing 'about'. I will dictate 'abo..' and Jaya will guess 'above'. I will hear it as 'about' and blink affirmatively. When the sentence is over, Jaya will stare at it in incomprehension and I will wonder what was so complicated about it. When I examine it, I will realise what the problem was and make the necessary correction.

Dictating mathematical notations could cause problems. Once I wanted to dictate a²-b² = (a-b)(a+b). I began : 'a square...' and immediately ran into trouble. Why? That was because Jaya started wondering why I was telling her about a square when the problem had nothing to do with squares or rectangles or any other shape. After much rolling of eyes, pulling of hair (figuratively speaking), stiffening of muscles and cough induced due to frustration, Jaya will guess what I was trying to dictate. I had thought that I would be able to solve the problem in fifteen minutes but here I was having just got started. I will realise later that the confusion could have been avoided if I had dictated 'a power two minus b power two' or 'x square minus y square'.

'You won't understand'

'A genius ...Elusive, delicate but lasting. He created such a credible world that, sadly, I suppose, never really existed but what a delight it always is to enter it and the temptation to linger there is sometimes almost overwhelming'- Alan Ayckbourn about P.G.Wodehouse

Once during physiotherapy, I suddenly started laughing. The physiotherapist thought that it was about something to do with the exercises so she asked me what it was about. I wondered what to say. This was because at the time I had been reading 'The Code of the Woosters' and had suddenly remembered a funny scene in it. Bertie Wooster had gone to Stiffy Byng's room to pinch an incriminating notebook but was set upon by her dog which made him jump quickly onto a chest of drawers. Sitting on this uncomfortable perch and gazing down sourly at the dog who was sitting on the floor and glaring at him, Bertie muses:

I remember Freddie Widgeon, who was once chased onto the top of a wardrobe by an Alsatian during a country house visit, telling me that what he had disliked most about the thing was the indignity of it all - the blow to the proud spirit, if you know what I mean - the feeling, in fine, that he, the Heir of the Ages, as you might say, was camping out on a wardrobe at the whim of a bally dog.

It was the same with me. One doesn't want to make a song and dance about one's ancient lineage, of course, but after all the Woosters did come over with the Conqueror and were extremely pally with him: and a fat lot of good it is coming over with Conquerors, if you're simply going to wind up by being given the elbow by Aberdeen terriers.

Trying to to explain this to someone who is not already familiar with the story and the writing style of Wodehouse would have been an impossible task. Wodehouse fans know that nothing much happens in his novels and the fun lies in the way he plays with words in order to describe the absurd situations that his characters find themselves in. If I had tried explaining it, it would have taken an hour and the effort would have fallen flat. So I chose the easy option and dictated to Jaya,'You won't understand'.

Since then whenever I laughed for no discernible reason, the physiotherapist will look at Jaya, smile knowingly and say,'You won't understand'.

It only adds

Some people think that unweaving the rainbow reduces the charm of the rainbow. I belong to the opposite camp. Before becoming interested in reading about evolution, I would have had only a vague understanding of what Richard Feynman was talking about in the beginning of the video in the previous link. Now I have a better idea of how the co-evolutionary relationship between flowers and their pollinators give rise to complex adaptations. In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins writes:

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worthwhile from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habituation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways.

In Climbing Mount Improbable, Richard Dawkins writes:

The genes of an elephant or a human, like the genes of a virus, can be seen as a Duplicate Me computer program. Virus genes are coded instructions that say (if they happen to be parasitizing an elephant): 'Elephant cells, duplicate me.' Elephant genes say: 'Elephant cells, work together to make a new elephant, which must be programmed in its turn to grow and make more elephants, all programmed to duplicate me.' The principle is the same. It is just that some Duplicate Me programs are more indirect and longwinded than others.

To put it another way, as Samuel Butler said, “A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.” I loved this new way of looking at living creatures which I was not familiar with earlier. It was like suddenly being able to see the second view of the Necker Cube. Reading about evolution and astronomy gave me some idea of Blake's words:

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

But Blake was a mystic and would have written his lines to mean the opposite of what I thought they meant. It is ironical that when I can't physically move an inch of my own volition, my mind delights in traversing vast expanses of time and space. The late George Carlin seems to have been a man after my own heart. (But my interest doesn't extend to a desire to own celestial bodies.) This is the type of conversation that would have me all ears even though some of it is beyond my level of incompetence because, as Feynman says in the video in the first link of this post, there is a 'difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.' (Note: The discussion has nothing to do with what the good professors at IIMA slogged to drill into my head.)

What is it like to be 'locked-in'?

There is a well known philosophical paper called What is it like to be a bat? It is not so much about bats as about the impossibility of knowing fully some state unless you are yourself in that state. You may know all about echolocation but you will not be able to experience the world like a bat unless you are yourself a bat. I won't be able to understand exactly the thought processes of writers who are slowly losing their mind. And I won't be able to understand the experience of someone who has had a stroke in a different part of the brain. (For example, see this TED talk.) The same goes for being 'locked-in'. There is something ineffable that you will never be able to get.

Take for instance the first time I sat upright after my stroke. I felt as if all my internal organs were hanging down limply as if they were attached to the body wall by sheets of muscles that were limp like the membrane of a pricked balloon. I don't know how else to explain it. The feeling lasted only for a few seconds and has never happened again. You will not be able to simulate the feeling because I suppose the relevant muscles are involuntary.

In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker writes:

The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. The mental abilities of a four year-old that we take for granted - recognizing a face, lifting a pencil, walking across a room, answering a question - in fact solve some of the hardest engineering problems ever conceived ... As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.

The same is the case with being 'locked-in'. Reading or blogging don't drive me up the wall. That is reserved for the ant in the pant or the mosquito in the middle of the night. You will not be able to understand why time appears to pass slowly when someone removes the railings from my bed and no one stands nearby. (It does not happen every time.) You will have only a vague understanding of my reluctance to travel.

Whenever someone tells me that I should do this instead of that, I am reminded of an incident that I had once heard. The wife was sound asleep when her one year old son gave her a good bite. The wife awoke in a daze and in pain and gave the child a whack. Hearing the commotion, the husband came into the room, heard the whole story and admonished the wife - 'You should know some child psychology. How will a small child know that its actions are causing pain? He was only being playful.' The wife listened quietly. A few days later the boot was on the other foot.The husband was sound asleep when the child gave him a good bite. He awoke in a daze and in pain and gave the child a whack. Hearing the commotion, the wife came into the room, heard the whole story and asked him,'What happened to your child psychology stuff?'