On Gandhi, Mountbatten and Jinnah after 62 years.

India turned 62 this August 15, 2009, marking another year of highs and lows in the arsenal of the Indian experience. Of course, nothing drastic had happened – we were riding the slow horse of the recession just like every other nation. We had not jumped over it and continued to grow at the alarming rate we were once so proud of; we had the stock market rising and falling, droughts and floods wrecking havoc, innumerable bomb blasts leaving pock marks on our faces and the occasional sports victory. This take-it-in-your-stride attitude, however, went to hell come Independence Day. The first step, in my opinion, is when you see the beggars at the traffic signals when you stop your vehicle. They go from window to window, from rider to rider, selling flags and other green-and-orange paraphernalia. I was once sharing an auto with a software engineer while getting back from a friend’s place. He turns to me and asks, “What Independence Day are we celebrating! What independence do we have with bribery and corruption still giving the politician a dictatorial grip over the common man?” These questions are wispy, freely floating in the air, waiting to be asked. First the engineer next to me will ask it, then the auto driver, then a forgotten friend on Facebook. From their, it will jump minds and mindsets, asking and asking. What I don’t like about these questions is they don’t wait for an answer.

Often, arguments beginning on such notes end with something I have come to dislike over the years: Gandhi-bashing. If you were to prowl university campuses around midday and when the tea-stalls are fervently issuing glasses of tea and Gold Flake Kings, you can get a solid dose of “Gandhi was a bastard! He let India be split apart into two factions, and one Islam!” – good enough to make you wonder. I’m an Indian. I know of the infamous partition, and I know of the number of people who died that year. I believe no one can ever come to truly understand the losses of the nation – in terms of numbers, in terms of families, in terms of happiness. But we have moved on; Jawaharlal Nehru captured it in his landmark speech, ‘Tryst With Destiny’. One of our own killed the Mahatma before the nation attained republic-hood and with his demise commenced all that was a face of the Independence Struggle. After that, the early Indian political scenario was dominated by the Congress (INC) – that was inevitable because most of those in Parliament had been freedom fighters.

So yeah, Gandhi and Jinnah together had been responsible for the formation of India and Pakistan, but I don’t think India values Gandhi as much as Pakistan values Jinnah. The general consensus is that Pakistan values Jinnah because he convinced both Gandhi and Mountbatten to conceive those chasms of division that would give birth to the warring nations, while Gandhi succumbed to such pleas and proceeded to divide India of his own volition. Now, before I get down to the specifics, a small story. When Captain Jack Sparrow was detained by Commodore Norrington after saving Elizabeth from the waters, the officer finds out that he is, in fact, a pirate. The Governor subsequently orders Norrington to hang Sparrow. At this juncture, Norrington proclaims that “… one good deed does not excuse a man from a lifetime of wickedness.”

Sparrow: “… but seems enough to condemn him!”

That is the case with Gandhi! The India we all speak of today was because of his efforts. We think we can afford to see Gandhi as someone different from how the world perceives him to be, but in doing that, we go one step too far and condemn him. Yes, we are Indians just as he was and are blest with that kinship, but the truth does not expose itself differently to us and differently to the others. It is the same: Gandhi liberated us from the British  – and that is irrespective of whether it was his ideology or his actions. Gandhi made it possible for us, you and me, to speak of an independent India after 62 years. His efforts went into releasing the country from the relentless talons of the British royalty and he did just that. Blaming him for delivering an India enslaved by money exchanged under the table is like blaming Jack Welch for Dumbledore’s death. And by this time if you don’t already see the fact, you’re retarded.

Now, moving on to the ideological trangle of Mountbatten-Gandhi-Jinnah. As one of the foremost authorities in the Partition Council, Mountbatten was for the Muslim grouping – a solution where the Muslim and Hindu communities would be segregated into two different camps because of Jinnah’s rising demands for a separate Muslim state. Although these demands were not shared by the total Muslim populace nor by Gandhi, Muhammed Ali Jinnah cited the reason for his demands to be the steadily increasing threats of the radically rightist Hindu Mahasabha (popular members of which were Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte). When he (Jinnah) noticed Gandhi’s reluctance to approve of the partition, Mountbatten was faced with the prospect of open civil war in the regions of West Punjab, Sindh, North-West Frontier Province and East Bengal – regions that fell under the political protection of Jinnah. The time soon came for Congress to make a decision on what had to be done – it could either go against Gandhi’s sentiments and partition India, or it could agree with Gandhi and suffer a civil war. Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the Iron Man of India and our first Deputy Prime Minister, decided to take a firm stand and ensured that Congress went ahead with the partitioning after convincing Gandhi of the adverse consequences of any other decision. A devastated Gandhi agreed.

Following this and the 1947 Indo-Pakistan War, the INC decided to deny Pakistan’s its due Rs. 55 crores as part of a deal brokered by the Partition Council. Sources of tensions within the nation included Patel, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Patel was of the opinion that Pakistan would use the money to escalate the war against India, an idea that the Mahasabha and the RSS shared. The RSS, for its part, began to press for the deportation of all Muslims in India to Pakistan. Gandhi feared that if Pakistan wasn’t paid its share, agitation from across the border would spill over into Indian territories. Result: he undertook a fast-unto-death demanding that Pakistan be paid in full and the Hindu extremist groups recant their threats. This time, the INC had no choice but to listen to Gandhi. As an outcome of this incident, Apte was led to believe that Gandhi had betrayed Indian sentiments and subsequently instigated Godse to kill Gandhi, which he did. They were convicted and executed on November 15, 1949.

Now would you tell me, ye adrenaline-powered Gandhi-bashers, what wrong did Gandhi do?

The spirit of life

Over the last few weeks, I was spending increasingly more time on the TED website looking up talks on design issues. It was then that I came across a few projects, absolutely stunning in breadth, undertaking and purpose, so much so that I thought I’d put it up on the blog.

The first one’s called ‘We Feel Fine’, a joint project by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. It plots the emotions of many people from all around the world through diagrammatic and statistical depictions. The design is beautifully simple and easy to understand and can give you a good idea of what’s happening in the lives of people around you. It rounds of the whole attempt by providing interesting and bizarre metrics. You can find the site here and the TED preview here. (Another interesting attempt that runs along the same lines is ‘I Want You To Want Me‘.)

The second one is an even more vast project both in terms of the kind of man power and technology that went into making it and what it hopes to achieve. It’s called the AlloSphere – a large hollow sphere that it is fit with a large host of microcontrollers connected to a supercomputer. What the AlloSphere does is that it generates various designs, constructions, materials and phenomena on an atomic scale which is then projected as a digital image onto the insides of the sphere. A bridge running along a diameter permits up to 20 people at a time to bear witness to breathtaking views that science devoid of creativity cannot hope to present to us at all. Like JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, the director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) at UC Santa Barbara, says: “imagine architects standing in the sphere and seeing microstructures and atoms arranged in space – what if they could come up with a new construction material?” [paraphrased]. Again, here‘s where you can find the TED preview.

The last one is a complete revolution in its own right and I think many people will agree when I say it’s the Gapminder by Hans Rosling. The statistics chapter in mathematics you chose to willingly forget while in school because it made you sleep in a snap – Rosling changes all of that by drawing old graphs in new ways. His sports-person commentary also adds to the pace of this lecture as he plots countries and ideas onto digital graph sheets. Find the TED talk here.

What these 3 ideas did was open me up to another idea that world is changing like no other. Like Thomas Friedman puts it, “the world is flat!” He couldn’t have been more right. This world is no longer curved around the edges and you and me are no longer strangers. With Jonathan Harris’ ‘We feel fine’, I’ll know what you’re feeling some 1000 miles away as soon as you know what I’m feeling. Kuchera-Morin’s AlloSphere will open up technology that you and me never thought we could have access to. And before you know it, Hans Rosling will have it up all on a giant graph and tell everyone what we did, what we could have done and how well we did it.

The world is no longer yours or mine, no longer subject to one war in one region amongst one group of people contending for one piece of information.  It has been globalized by just ideas. The world is ours, subject to our war that involves our people contending for the control over all information.

Mena Trott, the mother of blogging

The Prerequisites Of Possibility

This is a really funny and inspirational TED Talks talk by Emily Levine where she speaks about everything and how she has a theory for it. This particular talk was also a hit because of the way it challenged many preconceived notions by especially questioning the methods of observation of reality.

After listening to this talk, I was reminded of an argument me and 2 of my friends had had a few months ago. We were traveling back to our hostel from outside by bus and found ourselves bored. In order to liven things up, I asked Aditya about his views on this fact: “Communist countries don’t fare well in this world, and that’s a known thing. But is it because of Communism itself or is it because of the many sanctions imposed on it by capitalist nations?” Of course, the answer to this question might exist out there but all I wanted was his views, which he assiduously went on to elucidate upon. One of the points he touched on was the persistent economic disparity between people living under the umbra of a closed economy and those living in an open one.

I’d like to use this particular argument and point out two very striking aspects of it that define its arguing power. Every argument has two sides – and I’m not talking about the “priori” and  “posteriori” – but what I call the assurance density. Although the term might sound hi-fi, what I mean is that when an argument has a high assurance density, it is capable of driving the point home comfortably and, as a result, finds it easy to convince (or assure) others about its validity. Now, this is just the first side of the coin: what the argument does and how well it does it.

The second side is what the argument itself postulates – the theory or the subject matter it carries and is supposed to convey. (Why I thought of this during Aditya’s argument was because there was a particular way he took to it that clearly brought out the importance of verbal structuring and how it could dominate over the content.)

Now, let’s say someone’s made the following statement: “coffee tastes better when it’s cold.”

The first side would be the its assurance density. Do you think this argument does its job? I think it does because it seems to concern a very trivial matter and could well be an argument between a son and his mother. Because of that, the structure of the argument seems appropriate: the boy is introducing his subject, and then he’s using it as a subject of one of his personal wants – that of his taste – and he’s also giving a solution for it (“when it’s cold”). Subject-verb-object structure. Good boy.

The second thing about this argument is that the boy is asking for cold coffee. If he’s given to having frequent illnesses or displaying a caffeine allergy, then cold coffee or coffee itself may not be advisable. In this case, we have insufficient information to classify the argument as valid or invalid.

And this is where I say what I’ve wanted to say for the past 3 minutes: there are two sides to any argument – the structure and the information – that make it recognisable as a statement employed to signify conflict or agreement; conflict mostly.

To refer back to the TED Talk at the top of this post, Emily Levine made me think whether everything in this universe has 2 such aspects to it: a function and a rule that governed it. In fact, if you looked here, you’d find that Paul Romer chooses to put it as “technology” and “rules” as constituents of an “idea”. I’m sure you must be thinking, “My god! It took this dumbass so much time to get here!” It’s fine. What matters is I did! Anyway, what’s striking about this universality of behavior is that it’s like nature itself has put forth a commandment that everything in the universe must conform to. This could be one of the fundamental rules of everything – a theory.

I’m sure all of you must be aware of the bad things about theories – they theorize, they seem very ambiguous on extremely specific (and sometimes relevant) specific subject matter and they’re all filled with squiggly symbols. But the one good thing about them overshadows all of that. They provide everyone working with them a basis, a platform to stand on continue from there, a fallback option. Now, my theory seems infallible enough. But what can I build on top of it?

I’ve decided that instead of building anything on top of it, I’ll use it as the mother of other such standalones, smaller though, that build and define anything from a mom-son argument to Keplerian astronomical systems. Now, how do I begin?

Self-questioning for the win.

What do I have in hand? I have a theory that dictates all kinds of behavior of all kinds of things by saying that they have two inseparable components: a rule specified by nature and a function specified by content.

What do I infer from it? If you’d break it down, you’ll see that the behavior is governed by two elements – one from the outside and one from the inside. Therefore, anything that has a function and a rule attributable to itself can definitely exist. As an axiom, anything that exists has a definite function governed by a definite rule.

What are the implications? If one of us can come up with a biological function that permits rhinoceroses to give birth to baby dragons and then fortify it with a ruling system, then it will happen at sometime in the future (if it already hasn’t!). As a result, the theory becomes a prerequisite of possibility. Now, what we have to be careful about now is contradictions. Is there a case where such a function-rule-possibility (FRP) system will fail? Possible. Perhaps I can use the FRP system itself to come up with a contradicting scenario!

Anyway, what I’ve deduced is that this FRP system could indeed be a standalone system that could provide the sort of support that further verifies any given system’s functional veracity. However, the hypothesis is not perfected yet. Again, before I forget, the answer to this particular question could already be out there, but what I’m doing on this blog is finding things out for myself because I’ve found that once you read about all kinds of thoughts and philosophies, coming to an objective conclusion about somethings can become difficult. The influence in such cases becomes dominating and at one point, you can’t even say if that’s how you’d intend things to happen.

I’ve to confess here that I began this post with a completely different content in mind. As I began writing and discovering things for myself, I had to change the title 6 times and finally leave it at ‘The Prerequisites Of Possibility’. That’s one reason I like three things: TED, self-questioning and my blog.

The 3 kinds of writer's block

“I think writer’s block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible.”

– Roy Blunt, Jr.

I’ve been writing actively in journals, newspapers, magazines and blogs for the last 5 years, and the writer’s block has been relentlessly pursuing me all the time. If I don’t write for 3 or 4 days in a row, I can’t think of anything at all the 5th day. Or, alternatively, if I’ve been writing vigorously for a week, then taking even a small break after seems adverse – it feels as if all my ideas have been exhausted although I know I have thought of something worthwhile to be put down. So, the following is about the 3 kinds of writer’s block I think there are, and what I write is based on my experiences only.

1. Surplus of choices: By calling it the ‘surplus of choices’, I mean that the writer has too many ideas and doesn’t know which one to pick and elaborate on. In this case, the core cause could be conflicting priorities. Not knowing what to write about, in general, could be a statement of one’s ignorance or inadequate knowledge. However, there is also the other possibility where a writer can’t choose between two topics because he finds them both equally important but is not availed the opportunity to indulge in both of them. I’ve had the misfortune to be in such a situation quite a few times, especially when I’m faced with an audience with high expectations.
2. Fear of approach: This reason I think explains itself. Like the quote says at the beginning of this post, most people are daunted by the fear of failure or of not meeting expectations (which may not amount to the same thing). If they start working with such a mindset, what happens is that they question each and every one of their next moves to the point where they lose confidence in what they’re doing. If there’s no confidence, then there’s not going to be any conviction. This morale will eventually avalanche into the writer discarding his or her attempts at continuing to write. There’s also a subsequent chance of this mood upsetting all other projects at hand.
3. Exhaustion of thought: When I’m exhausted of all thoughts, I mean that I’m in a state of mind that’s like a combination of the first 2 types. I might just have completed a writing task and somehow find that, as a result, I’ve used up all my literary devices and techniques in one post instead of saving some techniques for the upcoming ones. So, now, 2 things face me: I have to come up with something suitable to write on as well as judge for myself as to whether it would satiate my literary goals. What I don’t like in this case that whenever I think of something new, I also seem to find an excuse to discard it in favor of another topic. This goes on and on until I’m back on square: nothing in hand, nothing in head.

The interesting thing about any form of the writer’s block is that there’s always only one cure: by doing what it prevents you from doing. Keep writing no matter what. Refering to the quote again, don’t be afraid to write badly, absolute nonsense even. You’ll find that it will come your aid in the long run. When I write gibberish, two things happen to me. First is that I’m inspired by my own (often drab) creativity. When I write a meaningless paragraph and read it again, I’m able to see that I’m headed somewhere but am not able to guide myself properly. In that process, I’m able to identify a topic I seem interested in. Second, I slowly begin to construct longer sentences with broader meanings – in other words, I begin to construct ideas on the go. In the first case, I drew the big picture.In the second, I stuff it with the kind of information that also gives me the foundation.

But over and above everything else, writer’s block is there only if you want it to be. And like all unfortunate experiences, it’s easier said than done. However, I do know of some people who continue to write even thought it’s visible that they’ve hit an ideological wall. If you want to get there too, you must understand what’s happening within you. I’ve written here what happens within me. Is it the same for you? Or not?

The Localised Dilution of Resources: A look at Paul Romer's 'Charter City' Concept

This is a TED Talk by Paul Romer, a professor who left his job at Stanford to pursue his very revolutionary idea of the ‘Charter City’. In this talk, he emphasises on the power of rules, and how they guide the technology which it needs to actualise ideas. This he conveys with the following image.

Ideas

Now, rules are the little builders that erect walls within a system, the walls that will bring to life guiding paths for data to move in and out. They specify what can happen and what can’t. With the right technology, what rules can do is not only bring to life ideas – which they make possible because they bring to life the goals that the idea has in mind – but also behave as administrative interfaces between the intelligence that has put them in place and the machinery that will do the manufacturing. For example, in a car, the gearbox behaves like a rule that creates smaller rules. The engine of the car produces power which is conveyed to the wheels by means of a crankshaft. By bringing in the gearbox, I am able to enforce a set of rules in the system. If I now set the gear to ‘R’, the system will deliver outputs of a different kind by moving the car backwards.

CAR = ENGINE + GEARBOX + WHEELS

Similarly,

RULES = BEHAVIOR + INTERFACE

In essence, they govern systems by enabling the incorporation of ideas in the working machinery.

When Romer talks about the good rules and the bad rules, I believe that he is talking about the behavior of any rule in general. A good rule is that which makes the car move backwards when the gear is set to ‘R’ and forward when set to anything else. A bad rule can either be a car that doesn’t move when a gear is changed or that which behaves in opposing manners.

That being said, I was thinking of my ocuntry, India, and how these good rules and bad rules can be identified within its administrative cogs, and how those Charter Cities can be brought to life. Because, just as much as Romer points out to the examples of North and South Korea, and Cuba and Canada, he is essentially pointing to regions in the world where neighboring populations have access to disproportionate amounts of resources because of a change in leadership.

Let me establish the analogy to India here. In India, the nation is divided into little states (on a linguistic basis) each of which has its own little government and a Chief Minister at the helms. Therefore, different states have different policies of governance. This means that they have different rules. This disparity, to note, is lessened by the fact that the central government is usually a coalition of these smaller state parties. But that doesn’t change the fact that when I cross the border from Tamil Nadu into Kerala, I’m exposed to (possibly) the same resources but in different amounts because of a change in leadership.

Let me question myself at this stage.

1. What are the problems I see? To answer this, imagine a vector field that illustrates the policies of the different states. Extrapolated on the India map, they would be a set of arrows pointing in different directions, some similar, representing their individual goals. If two arrows point in opposite directions, they don’t necessarily different goals, but different target groups. For example, Gujarat may target the farmer more than Rajasthan, which will eye the urban crowd. Although they do aid the nation from different directions, this fragmented governing as I see it has one pro and one con.
   1. Pro: With leaders governing smaller and smaller pieces of land, they are able to manage resources better than just one person and one party at the top.
   2. Con: Sometimes, resources are spread across borders and it may be beneficial for a region in particular to be governed in a specific way.
2. What are the bad rules? The bad rules I choose to see are with respect to this fragmented government policy of the nation.
3. What are the outcomes of these bad rules? As Romer says in his talk, villages are too small to experience the benefits of a good business and nations are too big. What is of just the right size is the city. In the Indian political context, when a state assumes the administrative parenthood of a city, it gives rise to a mismanagement of resources. Let me elucidate thorugh some points.
   1. Imagine a state that has a political capital and a commercial capital. Now, suppose that the state is so large that close to 95% of its population resides in small villages.
   2. A party gets elected to govern the state by a mostly rural turnout. Therefore, it is possible that the party that has come to power would have promised benefits for the farmer more than the software engineer.
   3. Now, the state can either be aligned with the central government’s interests or opposed to it.
      1. If aligned, then a nationalised subsidy for the farmer will be compounded by the state’s interests.
      2. If opposed, then the state will turn down the nationalised subsidy and bring into picture its own. Result? The state is wasting its resources.
   4. This localised policy shift will have two outcomes of its own.
      1. If aligned, the farmer will be receiving twice as many benefits as the software engineer.
      2. If opposed, the software engineer in the state will be moving at a pace different from a software engineer elsewhere in the nation.
   5. This particular scenario is quite relevant I would say to the current Indian sociopolitical scenario. Therefore, what the fragmented governance is giving rise to is an uneven utilisation of resources that in a region throughout which the resources are spread out – a localised resource concentration/dilution.
   6. The ultimate loser is the city. Since it is a collection of humans, the value of the city itself is derived from the capabilities of these people. When Romer says that the land value increases because the city’s inhabitants are earning more, it actually means that the city – through its location and other properties – has enabled its people to be like that. In the scenario I detailed out, the urban population is either exposed to a disparate quantity and quality of resources or does not avail them at all.
4. What is my solution? The set of bad rules that I attributed this problem to was the usage of a fragmented governing system. My solution is to fragment the already existing pieces into even smaller ones. And before you think I’m an idiot, let me tell you why that solve some problems.

Even though close to 64% of the Indian population is engaged in agrarian activities most of which falls into the rural category, it is the cities that make a difference. With the amount of data that is sent in and out of them, a city makes itself relevant by making sure the data comes from and reaches the right group of people. For starters, think of the two technologies that have substantially increased the nation’s crop output over the last 10 years.

The first was the launch of the INSAT weather satellite. A look at the following table will give you an idea of the benefits of the launch – which was a very important outcome of the utilisation of urban solutions.

Economic Benefits		Rs. Millions
	Program	Nature of Benefit	Estimate from Case Studies	Potential Benefit to the country in the Long-run
1.	National Drinking Water Technology Mission	Cost saving due to increase in success rate	2,560 (5 States)	5,000 – 8,000
2.	Urban Area Perspective / Development / Zonal / Amenities Plan for Cities / Towns	Cost saving in mapping	50.4 (6 Cities)	16,000 – 20,000
3.	Forest Working Plan	Cost saving in mapping	2,000 (200 Divisions)	11,860
4.	Potential Fishing Zone Advisories	Cost saving due to avoidance of trips in non-PFZ advisories	5,450	16,350
5.	Wasteland Mapping: Solid Land Reclamation	Productivity gain	990 (UP)	24,690
6.	Integrated Mission for Sustainable Development: Horticultural Development in Land With and Without Shrub	Gross income	Rs.0.20 to 0.40 (per hectare)	13,000 – 26,000
7.	Bio-prospecting for Medicinal Herbs	Value of Indian life saving drugs		800

(From http://epress.anu.edu.au/narayanan/mobile_devices/ch10s06.html)

The second technology that came to the aid of the farmer was the combined harvester-thresher, which reduced the duration of labor that was required to harvest and thresh a piece of land by substantial amounts.

In this fragmentation process, the nation could be divided down to form clearly discernible urban and rural regions. As I said earlier, it is important for the cities to be governed similar so that all cities in a particular region are availed similar qualities of the similar quantities of resources. Does this look like Communism on a broader scale? Perhaps. But what it ensures is that, with the democratization of information exchange through urban areas, there can be greater coordination towards acheiving common goals. At the same time, rural areas, specifically the agrarian ones, will receive greater and greater concentrations of useful information instead of what just the state has decided to give them.

In this fragmentation, which I call the second-degree fragmentation (SDF), the danger of there arising a difference in policies as a result of the installation of different state governments is eliminated. Secondly, the Charter Cities that Paul Romer suggested could be translated into this SDF picture in that all cities work as one super-city in terms of resource management and policy establishment.

I have two concerns at the end of this post.

1. With the current system set so firmly in its ways, bring in such a massive change is quite impossible. Therefore, if anyone has any such comments to put forth, please don’t do so. Instead, what I’d like to hear about is its theoretical validity.
2. I have not studied this subject (yet). There’s still a long time to go for me to be there. But before then, if you have anything to suggest or criticise (constructively), let me know.

10 Worst torture devices of all time

Although the Middle Ages did present some troubled times to the whole of humanity in terms of widespread religious reformation and a revolution in political beliefs, it may not be a surprise that there did exist a time called the Dark Ages. One read through the torture devices, and methods, listed below should convince you about the aptness of that name. They are a reflection of mankind’s darkest times as well as the convoluted desires we bear and seldom expose.

1. Punishing Shoes: The shoes were often used in conjunction with the standing pillory (a device that holds your head and wrists in place while you stand). How long do you think you could stand on your tippy-toes before you had to rest your heels on those iron spikes?
2. The Boots: The victim’s legs were placed between two planks of wood and bound together with cords. Between the cords the torturers placed wedges which they would violently hammer. Each time a wedge was thumped down, an small portion of the shin bone was shattered. The tormentors could hammer at least a dozen wedges up and down the legs. When the boots were removed, the bone fragments fell to pieces and the skin of the lower legs merely served as loose sacks for them.
3. Water Torture: The water torture was a favorite among Japanese POW guards during WWII. The victim was first bound with barbed wire and his mouth stuffed with rags. Next, the guards would snake a tube down the victim’s nasal passage and bloat his belly with water. Once that was finished, the guards would kick and beat the poor chap’s midsection until his stomach lining burst and and death ensued.
4. Cat’s Paw: This was simply used to slowly tear the flesh from its victim, often times all the way down to the bone, after being strapped face-front onto a wall.
5. Drawing and quartering: Quartering is the rack taken to the next level and was reserved only for murderers and those who attempted regicide. Each of the prisoner’s limbs were tied to a horse and the horses were whipped simultaneously so that each limb would erupt from the body in an instant. Exhibit A: Guy Fawkes.
   
6. Cleansing the soul: This was a “warm-up” torture, where the guy was chained down to a bed and made to swallow boiling water or coals. Or both. The names is because this practice was believed to cleanse the unfortunate’s soul of all evil before beginning the more actions packed stuff.
7. The Hanging Cage: I pity the guy, or lady, who ended up like this. First, the victim is stripped to nothing and then placed in a cage  – and not any cage. This is could be adjusted such that the bars completely constrained all movements of the victim. Next, the whole arrangement was suspended from a high point to die of starvation, thirst or exposure to extreme temperatures – which could take weeks.
   
8. The Judas Cradle: The victim was hoisted above the sharpened vertex of a small pyramid and brought down crotch first on it. The torturer could also decide how much of the person’s weight came down on it by pulling on cords and chains the victim was hoisted with.
   
9. Iron Maiden: The following is a depiction of the first recorded use of the Iron Maiden on August 14, 1515 : “A forger of coins was placed inside, and the doors shut slowly, so that the very sharp points penetrated his arms and legs in several places, and his belly and chest, and his bladder and the root of his member, and his eyes, and his shoulders, and his buttocks, but not enough to kill him; and so, he remained making great cry and lament for two days, after which he died.”
10. Impalement: You still here? You sick bastard! Anyway, a long spike, seldom oiled or greased, was thrust into the unfortunate fellow’s anus and pushed in until it jutted out of his mouth. What made it more gruesome was that after impalement, the victim could survive up to a day before blood loss and infection killed him. The most famous perpetrator of this method even incorporated this technique into his name – Vlad the Impaler.
    

The Democratization Of Life

“Printing made us all readers. Xeroxing made us all publishers. Television made us all viewers. Digitization made us all broadcasters.”

– Lawrence Grossman

The recent trend of globalization, which cannot be more than 20 years old at its best, has awakened to all of us the possibility of living a life all over the world while we sit in front of our PC. The technological advancements, coupled with the subsequent progresses in financing, investment and politics, have translated all of our aspirations to memorable careers where speed has been dictating all the terms – and those who lost out were not stupid but only unacceptably slow. In fact, I can comfortably move on to say that there are now only two kinds of people in this world: the “fast” and the “slow”. If you have an internet connection that’s faster than you neighbor’s, it doesn’t even matter if he’s much richer: you can be assured of a spot in the finals. If you can make a telephone call from Mumbai to Rio de Janeiro and make an investment in something that’s being tipped as the “next big thing”, you’ve just gone one step ahead of the race. If a helicopter is rigged with personnel from the Indian reserve security forces in order to escort an electronic voting machine to a far off island with less then 5 occupants, then you can take pride in the fact that democracy is still alive and revered in the nation. However, up until this point, I have only spoken of what a more open world with larger markets and fading boundaries can do to empower specific activities, i.e. business and politics. What can it do to empower te individual? Rather, if globalization has indeed bettered the state of the world, what is it done to better the state of an individual?

Lest we forget, there are always two sides to every coin. I can have all kinds of names and notations for these sides, and in this case, I can call them “what have you given from it” and “what have you taken from it”. Speaking of the global village, we have given it the power to dominate over everything in this world. We have given a small company in Brazil the authority to drive into a section of the Amazon rainforest, cut down a thousand trees, sell the timber and free the landscape. We have given the local authorities the power to sell that land to people interested in erecting business houses there, and we have given the company contractors the authority to sell the timber. We have given the authority to local occupants to begin building a sky scraper on that plot of land, and the traders to export the timber to South Africa, where it is serviced into being usable in the construction industry. We have enabled the ongoing construction of the business house to demand more quantities of support-grade timber, which is now brought in from South Africa, and we have enabled the respective governments to slap duties and taxes on the import and export – the money from which will eventually trickle into the household of a destitute man who will feed his family of seven. At the same time, the business house is complete and its offices are occupied by various companies who put people in their cabins just to gather more and more information for them to make more money – the kind of information that made you take a decision in the first place to let these things happen. You can wonder how we could have given it so much, and the lies in one very important outcome of this New World we inhabit: networking. You, me and everyone like you and me are now part of one very large, inexhaustible network. We’re connected together over the internet, through the telephones, televisions and radios. We’re connected through the books we read, because those who read the same books can be thought of as having the same interests and as forming similar opinions – pertaining to goals if not to ideas. In the end, we have given ourselves to belong to this network. We have opened our markets to a wider range of prospects, and we have exposed the local manufacturer to international competition. But what have we received in return?

We have received the access to information. By throwing all the fish in this world into one big lake, we’ve made sure that if ever we wanna have fish again, we just have to go fishing in that one lake. In other words, we have democratized information. If the stock market takes an alarming dip in London, one phone call to New York can disturb investors in the US enough to pull out all their funds from the British market and into other more promising economies that have shown stabler rises, say, Thailand. It is all in the open now, and if you want to get to the big fish first, it won’t help if you’re there first in the morning. Your bait has to be tastier. If you want someone to spend money on you, then you’ve to make sure you’ve got something to offer which no one else does. Ultimately, what we’ve taken from it all is what we did give it: power. The only difference is that the system which we call globalization has taken in power in one form and transformed it into power of another form. For instance, if I elect a government in my country that promises to open up its markets to a greater extent and liberalise the economy, then I will have given the global players one extra country to align with. In exchange, I will break down the walls around me that were once restraining me from reaching out to a larger customer base. If I were to design a T-shirt and think about marketing it on a larger scale, I will now be in a better position to do so. It’s like droplets of ink in water: before, the bucket was only half full. Now, it’s up to the brim. A single drop of ink can now penetrate through to a greater depth; you’ve to just be careful as to not let it get too diluted – you’re facing a larger group of people now. For the message to be driven through, you’ve to keep hammering it in.

Just as we’re now capable of transforming ourselves into uber-individuals in terms of creativity (owing to a greater number of inspirations) and productivity (thanks to the increased access to information), the family as a fundamental unit of society has also been impacted by advancements in technology. Earlier, our fathers and grandfathers had to choose between sacrificing one luxury in order to attain another; today, it’s no longer a matter of what luxury you have – but how you use them to get better results. Earlier, there existed a sizable disparity in terms of wealth and accomplishments between those who had chanced upon just one more opportunity than the rest. Today, that disparity is negligible. When a working father realizes that his job is not being threatened by earthquakes and tornadoes tearing down his office but seemingly inexplicable dips in the stock market that are capable of shutting his company down, he will look to offset risk as much as possible by making intelligent investment decisions and not building his cabin underground. He will also realize that his children have to be brough up with different goals in mind than just settling down because he will now know that there is a long way to go before that. Today’s is a world of competitors, and there are three roads one of which you can take.

1. You stick to what you know and discard anything new and innovative as junk that won’t last the day. If this is going to be your outlook on the world, you will also find that by the end of the day, you will become part of your own idea – you’re old, and you haven’t lasted it.
2. You keep moving around without an anchor. With nothing to hold you down to a specific set of goals, you cannot have a strategy that encompasses all things. The competition in each field is fierce, and you should be able to accommodate for changes in all of them before you make a decision. In other words, you’re either a paranoid prodigy or a dead man.
3. You strike a balance between being moved around and anchored to one set of goals. And yes, it is traditionally easier said than done.

When Intel’s Gordon Moore stated his notorious law in 1965, I think he had an idea of what that law would come to mean 45 years down the line. Moore’s law, coupled with the advent of globalization in this frighteningly unipolar world, is what is making a difference today and now. Again, it’s only a measure of how fast you are. If you’re very fast, you’re one man who’s capable of changing the lives of a million men, women and their families at the click of a button. If you’re not fast enough (there’s no “slow” indicator on this switchboard), you’re one of the millions whose life is going to be determined by the guy with the faster internet connection.

(I wrote this piece while reading Thomas L. Friedman’s ‘The Lexus & The Olive Tree’, a book he wrote in 2000 about the coming of globalization. I just wanted to express my interpretation of the details of the book through this post.)

Civilisation as a child of mathematics

The following are six mathematical functions you can find speckled across the natural canvas, accurately simulating the mathematical behavior of everything from multiplying bunnies to the bending of light around black holes.

1. Sine

The sine function

The sine curve is a fabulous example that concretely solidifies the scientific basis of thousands of natural phenomena. The function that generates the curve is simple:

f(t) = A . sin(ωt + θ),

where A is the amplitude of the wave, ω the angular frequency and θ the phase angle. The behavior of the curve itself bears a close relationship with the circle: draw a circle on a sheet of paper and mark its center as the origin of a Cartesian system. Now, if you were to trace the locus of the figure and project the position of your hand on the x-axis, you will observe that for every rotation that you make a point on the projection will first move away from the center, travel to the axial extreme (a length which is equal to the radius), come back to the center, and then move on to the other. If you were to plot the distance of that point from the center of the circle, you will get the sine curve – of course, you’ve to keep in mind the sign changes.

Because of its convoluted relationship with the circle, the sine curve has basis in its applications as a periodic waveform – a typical wave that repeats itself in design over a specific time period. Remember the path traced by a pendulum in your grandfather clock? Same. Also goes with undamped oscillations of a block suspended from a rigid ceiling by a spring, the propagation of heat waves, the vibration of strings on a guitar, the intonations in human speech, the signal processing that is required in most electronic gadgets, Heisenberg’s inequality and proofs of quadratic reciprocity.

2. Cosine

The cosine function

The cosine function differs from the sine function only in that the phase angle θ is displaced by 90 degrees. In other words, the cosine waveform is the sine waveform that’s got itself a small headstart. Such a wave becomes useful when one studies the propagation and interaction of multiple sine waves that give birth to interesting interference patterns like the one shown.

An interference pattern

3. Exponential

The exponential function

The graph is generated by the following function:

x(t) = α . β^t/τ

Suppose that a gambler plays a slot machine with a one in n probability and plays it n times. Then, for large n (such as a million) the probability that the gambler will win nothing at all is (approximately) 1/e. And so Napier’s constant raises its fiery head.

At first, nobody saw nothing peculiar about the value of e – not until Jacob Bernoulli began to study the gambler’s issue and began to take note of a particular value that could be approximated to the value of another famous limit. Nestled between and 2 and 3 on the integer scale, the exponential growth factor manifests itself in hundreds and hundreds of mathematical problems, all of which have direct impact on business strategies and economic development. You will know the chessboard problem, wherein an Indian king was once gifted a beautifully crafted chessboard by a courtier. In return, the courtier asked for this: one grain of rice on the first square of the board, two grains on the second, four grains on the third, and so on. The king obliged, only to find that for 64 squares to be filled, 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains of rice would be needed – something that would weigh 461,168,602,000,000 kilograms!

Applications? Unsurprisingly many because of the way the function tends to grow with respect to time. If you observe the graph, you can see that for small increments of ‘x’ after some lower values, the value of the function skyrockets. This is similar to, if not the same as, the many growth factors manifested, for example, in the following:

• The Malthusian catastrophe
• Population of microorganisms in a culture
• Loudness of sound
• Nuclear chain reactions
• Ponzi schemes
• Moore’s law
• Compound interest
• The water lily problem

4. Logarithm

The logarithmic function

Draw a line passing through the origin and having a slope of 1, and using this line as a mirror, reflect the exponential curve. The image is the logarithmic curve, the inverse of the exponent. You must be reminded of having used the log tables, a small booklet with those long lists of extremely tiny numbers with which you could solve complex math problems. That’s the log function for you: it is the mathematical equivalent of scaling. The only difference is that, unlike in practical situations where it is constant, the scale in the universe of numbers is part of a sequence characterised by a growth ratio.

And as the exponential series represents growth, the log function represents a pattern on which to base that growth. The applications of both are the same since one is the inverse of the other, but it is worth detailing both because of the same reasons.

5. Asymptotes

Asymptotes

Asymptotes are like porn movies you find on the net for free: they tease and tease and tease, and then they end abruptly leaving everything else to your imagination. The one shown above is a rectangular hyperbola. The sections of the hyperbola that extend towards infinity along either axes are the asymptotes – and only because they exhibit a tendency towards touching the axes but never do. Put an other way, the first curve (+x-axis asymptote) gets closer to the second (+x-axis) as it gets farther away from the origin.

(x – h)(y – k) = m

m = x . y

The real application lies in the field of asymptotic analysis, which in turn is a key tool for exploring the ordinary and partial differential equations in the mathematical modeling of fluid flow through the Navier-Stokes equations.

6. Modulus

The modulus function

The modulus function is the noble gentleman amongst functions: you feed it with negative values but all it returns is their positive cunterpart. That is probably why it is also known as the absolute function.

Introduced by Jean-Robert Argand, and later conferred a denotation by Karl Weierstrass, the applications of this function pertain to the concepts of complex numbers, quaternions, ordered rings, fields and norms – which in turn are used in the modeling of real-world phenomena.

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Have you ever wondered how 10 digits that were introduced a few millenia ago gave birth to so many different and varied functions and behaviorisms? The need that gave rise to them in the first place was that of quantification: simple and abstracted notations that each stood for a particular value that was a multiple of one. The second step lay in the classifiability of these numbers into similar-seeming sets, each of which was deigned to behave the same way. After this categorization arose the applications, where real world objects were compared to the numbers in terms of their respictive classifiabilities. Next in line was dimensions: the number of objects in a particular direction. Ultimately, there came modeling which represented the interface between understanding what was already there and what we could do in order to mimic it. The computer and the engine, two machines that completely changed the way the world understood and functioned, are both conclusively based on the functions shown above. The computer uses the functions to generate higher values via (complex variations of) Boolean and set logic, while the engine uses them to magnify inputs to result in larger outputs. However, their true importance lay in the fact that each one of them represented hundreds of us. One computer or one engine did what a thousand humans could have together in a single day. They saved time; rather, they brought in extra time, time that was devoted to other purposes, time that quickened the process of civilisation.

10 Lessons I've Learnt While Blogging

While you might have concentrated on optimizing your blog for search engines all this while, there are somethings you master on your own while you write and trim and maintian the whole thing – the little things that matter, the little things that lead to the bigger ones.

1. Don’t let them get stuck in there – Link your blog to other (possibly more) authoritative sites. If a user lands up on your blog, make sure he has many ways out of it, even if that means linking to Wikipedia all the time.
2. Build an arcade – Link your posts together through some keywords. When I read a post on your blog, make sure I can either make my way out of your blog or jump to another post within the same blog.
3. Move around yourself – Don’t stay put. If you’re a WordPress user, go around and make some friends in the blogging circles. Suggest, comment and criticise actively. Make sure people reading comments on other sites are able to make note that someone like you EXISTS.
4. Keep the place clean – Keep it clean, keep it cool. People coming to your blog shouldn’t have to look long for important links.
5. Let everyone know whose blog they’re reading – Don’t be anonymous, you’re not there yet. Put up a prominent ‘About Me’ page with the relevant details.
6. Take it places – Your blog’s like a kid. Everyday, take it some place where it can have fun. Don’t be shy of social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. At least, if you don’t like Twitter like some of my friends, use Facebook.
7. Stick to your goals – My goal is to keep writing no matter what – a selfish endeavour if you will. And I’ve put up 362 posts including this one. It keeps me active, but a greater merit is one keeps showing up in WP circles and Google also keeps an eye out for one’s updates.
8. Keep it specific – If you’ve been catering to a target audience, keep them in mind all the time. A sudden change in theme, if sustained, can have you lose a lot of addicts.
9. Categorise – Like #4, make it easy to look for specific things in your blog. Just a search form won’t do. Having categories (and a tag cloud if you want) can be very helpful in this regard.
10. Proofread your entries – Yeah, it’s somewhat like writing your novel. Even if you’re not so keen on keeping everything spic and span, broken sentences and incomplete phrases can put people off.