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.
    

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.

Gregarious grammar, garrulous grammar

The following post deals with learning, knowledge and memory. It details the way humans learn language and assimilate grammatical technicalities to form phrases that depict their ideas. It also deals with the aspects of age and mental maturity, and how they affect learning processes.

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Linguists studying the aspects of recognition and cognition regarding languages will tell you that younger children tend to absorb the structure of their native language (or any other) at a rate faster than their elders. You will have noticed that a child of 2-3 years will absorb the nuances of its native tongue in a matter of months – while once adolescence is passed, structured classes and guidance become necessary to do the same. Although this theory is only empirical to me, it is quite established in scientific circles with adequate proof to back it up. I would like to extend this same argument to one more facet of learning: that of expanding one’s grammar to accommodate newer words.

Here, before I continue, I’d like to introduce something called the grammatical circle of words. This circle represents all the words recognised by an individual as being usable on an everyday basis for him or her. To rephrase, these words will constitute a lexicon. The area of this circle will increase rapidly at the younger phases of one’s life, as detailed in the first paragraph of this post. The newborn child will go from knowing no language to knowing one in the span of a year, and the circle will expand from zero volume to a finitely large one. Bracketing this transformation will be a learning period in which the child will learn about all types of words, sentence structures and idea constructions. The act of pointing to an apple and crying will now become replaceable by “I want that apple because I’m hungry.” In this period, there will be a momentum that will characterize how fast the child learns such things. I could define it like this.

A1 = Initial number of words; A2 = Final number of words.

M = [ { ( A2 – A1 ) x 100 } / ( 365 x A1 ) ]

(i.e. Momentum = Percentage increase in number of words averaged over 1 year)

If the momentum is high (over a suitably long period of time), the child will have learnt 500 words as compared to another child with lesser momentum that learnt 300 words (example). My idea is that greater the momentum during this period, slower will be the acquisition of newer words later in life. By this, I mean that if the grammatical circle of words expanded very quickly in the earlier stages of one’s life, it will be more rigid towards the final cognitive stages. Now, let me give my explanation for it.

Say I learnt 1,000 words before I was 5. As a child of between 5 and 10 years of age, my circle of 1,000 words will be sufficient to detail to myself and to others what I see, hear and feel. If I find that there is a new experience that seems incapable of being described through the words I already know, I will learn a new word – “ostentatiously gregarious” the 1,001st – to be able to use the language more effectively. At this point, suppose I have a friend whom I’ve known for a long time, and that he’s displayed a larger momentum of learning. At the age of 5, if he knows 2,000 words, then it should suffice for him to not acquire any new words till, say, he’s 15. Growing up together, I’ll find that I’m learning new words at the rate of 10 per year while he is grammatically dormant. Now, at the age of 20, if I find that I need to learn 5 new words for a job I’m applying to, I’ll find it easier than him. Why? Because the momentum which I said bracketed the learning period is still greater than zero for me, so the learning period involved is longer for me than for my friend. His circle will have been completed will mine will still be expanding. I can accommodate, he can’t.

All of this is based on an (empirical) assumption on my part that the learning process I keep referring to happens only once in one’s life. Once it dies out (at an age corresponding to the completion of one’s postgraduate education), newer experiences no longer seem like solutions to remember but problems to tackle. At these stages, what has already been learnt yearns to be put into use, i.e. the application-oriented years of life. If the learning process is spread out through these first 20-25 years, the amount of knowledge is greater than when the process spans about 10-15 years. This could be because what we learn is encoded away in our memories as a collection of sights and sounds. If I were to read in a book the word “gregarious” at the age of 12 and know its meaning through the context of its usage, I will remember it for the next few years only when I can remember the context itself. If I were to encounter the same word when a friend of mine describes someone else so when I am 18, I will remember it for a longer time. The difference in these two cases is that, although the learning period is in effect, the latter is remembered in more forms than the former. When I am 50, there is a better chance of me recollecting something that has a sight, sound and texture associated with it than that which is triggered by the name of the book or a character in it.

When reading a piece of text that seems too hard to remember, one tends to ascribe the whole picture it brings to mind to a memory that is readily accessible by “mugging” it. When this happens, nerves in the head keep firing signals in a particular channel. With repetitive firing, the cognitive system tends to identify that particular channel as one that will be regular use and therefore keep it active. You will be able to better understand this phenomenon when you associate it with some languages in your life whose words you are slowly forgetting because you don’t use them often. Similarly, when a person grows older, his responsibilities also multiply given that fact that he will now have the physical strength to execute them. To supplant this strength, he will begin to use his past experiences as lessons so he learns to optimize his own performance. At these stages, what he has taught himself will now come forth in the form of actions and decisions. The nerves will now begin to fire in those channels that seem most necessary for that supplementation (some lessons will seem more useful than others).

If I had stopped learning new words at the age of 12, then the application-oriented stages of life will set in prematurely, and the nerves will begin to decode rather than continuing to encode. Due to the said prematurity, the necessity to learn a new word because of a strange experience will now tend to be tackled by using older words. So, since I’m 12, I’ll use the phrase “moves freely with people” instead of the word “gregarious”; at the same time, my 18 year old friend will learn it. Analogously, when I am 18, I may not be able to  properly define the word gregarious. The Venn diagram should help you.

The probability of recollection

If an event ‘A’ is associated with both sight and sound, {x,y} depicting the occurrence of the sight-event and sound-event being fired (resp., through Boolean logic), then one of the following will happen when the memory will need to be recollected:

1. {0,0}
2. {0,1}
3. {1,0}
4. {1,1}

Therefore, there is a 75% chance that ‘A’ will be remembered by the person. If, however, an event ‘B’ is associated with only sight (like a word being encountered in a novel), then there is only a 50% chance of its recollection:

1. {1}
2. {0}

Phew! I learnt a lot there!

Tribute to Times New Roman

Times New Roman was my first and longest-serving superheroine. Always called back into action when the overconfident newbie fails to live up to his promises, Times New Roman takes on the challenge without the slightest of murmurs and gets things done. She can’t fly, she can’t see through walls, she can’t halt speeding trucks in their tracks. What she can do is she can make them happen. There is not a hint of arrogance about her, and you can feel her humility boring into you. She does not ask for much; come to think of it, she asks for nothing. Her rewards are her moments – the willful verification of her veracity, the surrender you must enact unto her. She speaks not much, and when she does, she does so beautifully and with commensurate elegance. She compliments the blandiloquence of your imagery, she denigrates the stunted and the deformed.

Times New Roman

Times New Roman was born in 1932, the daughter of Plantin and the ideas of Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent. Times the newspaper was once criticized by Morison himself earlier in the same year, and the administration let him supervise the designing of the new font along with Lardent, who was an established typographer. The outcome of this oft-forgotten project was one of the most ubiquitous fonts of all time, a font that stayed with The Times for over 40 years. A daughter font, Georgia, is also very popular – the one you see on this page (the typographic difference between them is that Georgia has more prominent serifs).

Over the years, with the advent of digital typography threatening to phase out Times New Roman and her cousins, people began to regard the font itself as a symbol of the times past. TNR survived hundreds of wars, two of them devastating most of Europe and Asia. Media persons desperately digging for a story often locked horns with each other over the rights of the content and a newer angle no one had detected before, but the stories always came out through the mouth of TNR. There was something about her that people found hard to resist, a placid nonchalance that also sometimes disturbed the reader with an air of neutrality. Whether it was Marx, Fawkes, Stalin, Hitler, Truman or Gandhi, the Speaker of the wartorn parliament that is this world was always TNR, and rightly so. Stories from all corners, about all kinds of things, quotations uttered by men from splintered political factions – all of them found no favouritism with TNR. It would always be the same distance between the letters, between the words, between the sentences, between the eye that read them and the mind that interpreted them. Tell me, have you ever heard of any such thing as a Communist or a capitalist font? Although that sounds absurd, the designs imbued in the behaviour of TNR answers the question without hesitation. TNR is both. If not more.

Why I pay this tribute is because of two things. First, the digital age has made more things possible – a craftsman does not have to sit at his board for hours on end design each letter. There is the computer that performs all those millions of calculations in a second, and voila! ‘A’ has been sculpted. Times itself changed its font in the 1970s because of this typographic revolution. The second reason is that Microsoft, whose Office Word has long been a close associate of TNR (a relationship advertised by having TNR as the default font), has now introduced a new default – Calibri. Given a hundred more years, Calibri may perhaps prove its mettle. But it can never do what Times New Roman has done.

Dear TNR, I have not forgotten you.

104 days to TEDIndia2009!

Ever since I’d been introduced to TEDGlobal, I was hooked on to it. It’s possible that this one idea to bring together intellectuals from all over the world could top all the other ideas being presented at their tremendously impacting conferences in the fields of technology, environment and design. Although every such conference includes a lot of interaction between the layman and the laureate, it is the famous 18-minute talk of theirs that makes the difference. The TEBGlobal, a series of such conferences usually held in Oxford, UK, attracts thousands of attendees who travel there just to bear proud witness to these talks. As such each intellectual comes on stage and demonstrates, in varying manners, how innovation by the minute could defeat orthodoxy of thought and the oft bureaucratic methods of science, it gradually becomes apparent that some fields of thought, especially those which we had earlier perceived as too theoretical and therefore not fit for further development, are capable of having impacts on humanity much greater than the others. Take the example of Zeresenay Alemseged, the Ethiopian paleoanthropologist, who discovered the 3.3 million years old fossil of the girl Selam (of the species Australopethicus afarensis). In studying her tiny bones, Alemseged sees the points in time at which man began to differ from apes; in studying the hyoid bone in her throat, he sees the beginning of human languages. The study of both these will provide significant insights into how we, as humans, understand language, and why it is the way it is. This is in turn will aid linguists, and that in turn will aid psychologists, and so on and so forth.

With many such personalities in their arsenal, TED is now beginning to focus on the East, where the economic downturn has had the least impact. Countries like India and China have ridden the slowdown like none else, with many industries still showing massive profits. There is a rising consensus that this cannot be just due to the cheap outsourcing options the region offers or even the low-cost jobs, but due to the diligence of the Indian. TEDIndia2009, the Indian chapter of the TEDGlobal conferences, is now coming to Mysore and will be held between November 1-4 at the advanced training center run by Infosys there. Why I’m excited about this conference is because of the expected topics TED is going to try to handle:

• Which local innovations are destined for global impact?
• Who are the young thinkers and doers capable of shaping the future?
• Can there be economic advancement without environmental destruction?
• Can a pluralistic democracy survive in the face of rising fundamentalism?
• Can we make money and be good? Really?
• What should we learn – or fear? — from China’s investment in Africa?
• Do we have enough water for everyone?
• How do we keep our youth challenged and our aged healthy?
• How can anti-poverty solutions be brought to scale?
• Is there wisdom to be found in traditional medicine??
• Which other ancient traditions can illuminate modern life?

All of this, coupled by the fact that the speakers usually don’t hail from a purely scientific background but also from a partly managerial one, makes it an interesting event to look out for since the answers to the questions above could mean a lot for India as a whole, including its people and the vision it has set out for itself. For further information, check out http://conferences.ted.com/TEDIndia/.