18 rules for living

Apparently at the start of the millennium, the Dalai Lama issued 18 rules for living. Very very useful.

1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three Rs:
1. Respect for self
2. Respect for others
3. Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.
7. When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

Metacomm Pollution

I was sitting having a sandwich and cold coffee, reading BBCi over my T610, when this idea struck me. It started with someone making some sort of wearable computer which is intended for a human, but a robot can also use it. Somehow building a robot that used stuff made for humans seemed very funny to me. I thought about it. The reason I thought it was funny was that it seemed to be very dumb to make bots use interfaces developed for us.

Think about it, the reason we have these vague interfaces for humans is because we as a species are "interface constrained". All our interfaces for communicating with the outside world are low on bandwidth and are inefficient to go. Why would you want to build a bot that uses a mouse - you would rather connect the mouse port and allow the bot the directly talk to the mouse port. Rather, you would rather that there was no port at all, which would take care of the low bandwidth and restricted data that can is transferred through a mouse interface.

Now think about it. We as humans are restricted by the rate at which we communicate. Remember the peripherals of the computer which was the reason why the processor was never loaded? Are we not a similar analogy? It is our rate of data interaction with our surroundings that prevents full fledged thinking. Take a look at what I am doing - I got this idea in under 10 seconds, and for the last 5 minutes, I have not even come close to explaining the core concept.

Humans are like computers with extremely slow data exchange interfaces and without multitasking.

Life in the modern world is driven by nothing other than this aspect of the human. Humans had basic wants like food, clothing, shelter etc. These were met. He then had some higher needs, which were also met. However as his needs were met, he started facing the effects of his twin drawbacks.

He started finding difficult to concentrate, to be productive. He found it difficult to think and talk at the same time. He found it difficult to communicate with others, put ideas across, get ideas understood and accepted. This has meant that man now stopped communicating ideas and started communicating about the need to communicate better. Sort of like meta-communicating.

Meta communication is slowly but surely clogging up the modern world. The effects of meta communication pollution is visible all over the place. Management is now the most meta communication polluted of all human practices. All the buzz words, all the terminology, all the talk is little substance and all hot air. However it is understood. And reused. Thus meta communication takes precedence over communication when it comes to management. The how's, the font sizes, the styles, the dress of the presentor. All these take precedence over the content, which is delegated to the backstage. Typical of the meta communication polluted day in the life of a manager.

Lets get a word in. Metacomm is short for meta communication, or communication about communication. It refers to all communication that is not directly related to the communication that has to be done. Metacomm also refers to all activities that are an overhead to the action being performed.

The next most metacomm polluted environment is the new fangled "process oriented" software development companies. Software development is an art and a science. When it is treated like manufacturing, a number of steps need to ensure that this metaphor works - metacomm. The CMM levels, the ISO certification - all refer to process orientation and more importantly spew out metacomm.

I could go on, but I will not. Metacomm is the next big evil that humans have to face. In fact it is the biggest evil in the recorded history of mankind. Information overload with metacomm pollution. Degrading lifestyles, deteriorating minds, stressful environments.

Metacomm pollution is the mother of all future shocks that toffler could ever imagine. And believe it or not, it is here.

And I have a feeling mother nature knows about it too!

More on mother nature, up next.

- ravi

Intelligence

Is a question that has troubled me. Why is that a question? The question is, what is it?

People frequently confuse knowledge with intelligence. People confuse wit with intelligence. Or don't they? Where does knowledge end, and intelligence start?

Consider this, when we sit here, discussing stuff, what part of the discussion is intelligence? If I tell you something you dont know, is that intelligence? Or is that knowledge? When I give you a fresh perspective, is it because I can process stuff faster or because I have had this experience before? And this knowledge itself. How much of it is conscious and how much of it sub-conscious?

If knowledge can be sub-conscious, then where is the line between intelligence and knowledge?

Look at an example. Someone tells you that a deal he is involved in is going well because of something very attractive that the opponent is offering. Suddenly warning bells start ringing. And you try to analyse that something might be wrong.

Why did the warning bells ring. Is it only because you are stupenduously intelligent than he is, that you saw a mole where he did not? Or was it that you have been given a raw deal before? Or is it because you have been brought up in an environment that made it difficult to trust people (knowledge again)? Or was it that you have heard of something like this before? How much of it is original knowledge, and how much is original processing or intelligence.

The reason I am talking about this is because I had taken one general IQ test somewhere. And I scored a 136, which according to the scale meant I was up there with Einstein. Which of course is not true. But many of the questions in the test, I was able to ace through because I had worked with those types of questions before. So for me it was a cakewalk. That does not mean I am a genius.

If it is difficult to separate intelligence from knowledge, why are we trying? What is this IQ test all about? Finally, shouldnt we have different semantics to deal with this difference?

keep thinking :),

- ravi

logic...

I was talking today and I got this idea.

Think about the time when you were faced with a problem. Not a problem which is defined in terms of problem -> ? -> solution. Rather a problem which is like a mass of unknown mass. All you know is ?? -> ?? -> ***. You only have a vague idea about what you want, and what you can get depends on what you have, and what you have is not totally defined and how you are going to do it is also not defined.

Typically called an unstructured problem.

The items in this drama are these...

1) unstructured mass of information or data

2) unknown process

3) approximate output is known.

Think about a diamond cutting process. When the diamon cutter gets an uncut diamond he has something he does not truly understand. He has a process, but does not know how to use the same. He knows roughly what the final output looks like.

Think about the process as logic. You have the tool, to cut the unknown mass of data, but dont know how to use that tool. Coz there are a billion ways of using it, just like a billion ways of cutting a diamond. But only a few of them give out the clarity which a diamond can give. And that is the way of using logic to cut the information and classify it so that you get that clarity that guides you towards the solution.

The diamond cutter cutting the diamond and the problem solver solving an unstructured problem.

In fact to facilitate this process of problem solving and making it more of a repeatable process than an abstract art is the effort of a majority of mankind. There is one such method and its name escapes me, googling too does not seem to help.

Anyways, liked the analogy so put it here,

other stuff,

- ravikiran n.

PS: new .sig, more corporatish, and massively scaled in terms of data content

another link

I had to blog this for future reference. This is a story that talks about the origin of Murphy's Laws. Considering that I have quite an affinity for these laws, I am sure I will remember to check this out one day in the future.

And no further update on the site yet. Dunno when I am going to get any response on it.

hope dyeth not

~!nrk

Teaching Technology

I dont know why people dont understand technology. Mebbe, it is the same reason people dont like mathematics, or logic or thinking. Because, technology is the closest one can get to naked logic and mathematics.

I guess it is okay, if most of us dont really understand technology, because a great part of technology also carries with it the responsibility of not needing to understand it. Technology is geared to have technically-impaired customers.

But technology needs technically qualified implementors. And technically qualified people dont grow on deciduous trees. Rather they are grown in classroom farms. And the quality of these implementors is directly dependant on the quality of the teacher teaching them.

The teacher forms the jugular vein of the entire cycle of technical resource development. A technically-impaired teacher is probably the worst thing that can happen to cloud the entire cycle of getting technically competent personnel.

Being a teacher is not easy. Being a technical teacher is even more difficult.

A teacher is not one who can merely transfer information to the student. A book can do that. A video can do that. A teacher is not merely an interactive data source either. A website would have been enough. A teacher is a live person, who can talk to a class, raise awareness of the subject in the class, raise interest about the subject in the class and get people to fight and argue about the subject.

The problem with our teaching system is that it is just that - a teaching system. The focus is on teaching, not learning. The focus is on completion of portion and not on the insights into subject. The course structure gains importance over class structure. Content delivery gains precedence over contect acceptance. But the most importantly the difference is in the time limits. A teaching class is complete when the class or course or test is done. A learning class is for life.

Many people have written about the inadequacy about our teaching systems. And to make things better most have identified that interaction is that aspect that is missing from modern schools. Interaction between students to learn from each other, to gain form others insights and to give a rather subtle point which others have missed. In a way, it is like taking the mantle of teaching away from teacher and putting it with each student.

But the method is still teaching. When all is done and the stove grows cold, all that the student is left is with what he has managed to learn. A half baked knowledge of the world around. A confusion of ideas learnt, and ideas idenfied and conflicts between then all.

But no smoldering desire to learn and to know more.

That is the crux of the difference between a teaching class and a learning class. A teaching class teaches. An interactive class betters some, worsens other and teaches a little more. A learning class, ignites a desire to learn, a desire that takes knowledge to beyond classes, courses and exams. That is the way to teach.

And that is what is wrong with teachers in general. But most teachers might get away with it. For knowledge changes at a pace that would not seriously challenge a snail. Hence teaching is not very handicapped by its inability to ignite a learning attitude. But that is where technical teaching is affected. And affected badly.

We are dealing with a rate of information upheaval that would leave the most ardent followers breathless. A technical subject is having its bases and roots rapidly obsoleted and wasted and revised. Such is the pace of change that teaching would not really teach anything. There is only one way of teaching and that is a learning class.

But that is where most of today's technical teachers lack.

A technical teacher needs to love technology. And get other to feel passionately about it.

The teacher needs to understand technology, not just a concept, but the core. Needs to be friendly enough with technology to be able to introduce it as a friend to any audience. The teacher needs to realized that implementation does not matter, what matters is the core concepts. And understand these concepts.

A teacher needs to be able to get the students interested in technology, not just in how to work it or even in how it works. But the interest should spread and encompass the idea, the implementation and form a seed for new and unheard of solutions.

And a teacher needs to be able to enthuse not just technologists but every lay man to understand and love technology.

That is what we need form a technical teacher.

That is what we lack in a technical teacher.

We have technologists who love technology. We may have some teachers, who can make students learn. When will we have a technologist teacher?

blogging is blogging, writing is writing, don't confuse the twain

~!nrk

The weakening of the written word

With the explosion of the Information Age, there has been a great hoopla built about the easy accessibility of information. The great Information Divide it seems has been conquered. And Information is available to everyone and at everyplace. But what has probably been lost is the fact that this easy access to information has actually lessened the impact of information.

No, I am not talking about the Information overload that is causing people to spend lots of time just trying to find the information that is relevant to them. I am also not talking about the increase of information availability leading to people broadening themselves, speaking with reference to knowledge, and not gaining a sufficiently deep understanding at the same time.

What I am talking about is the relative weakening of the written word vis-a-vis the spoken word. Seems as though we have come a full circle, from the days before writing ever existed. When the only word was the spoken word. Now the Information age is restacking the odds for the spoken word - the word of the expert.

The reason is this. The explosion of the new era has driven down the costs of information disbursal - and the costs of information generation. Anyone can sit in front of a computer and can generate information - something like what I am doing now. This has meant that there is no automatic disincentive to generate information, which once allowed only those who actually had knowledge to embark upon disbursal. When a book was released, there was a certain certainty of quality associated with it. Though this has been coming down with the decrease in cost of publishing in the recent times, the information explosion has been among the last of nails onto its coffin so to speak.

The typical manifestation of it is seen in all sorts of situations. One is the proliferation of impersonation sites. These include sources of information that are not bonafide either by design or by accident. Those by design include the hoax sites, hoax email chains and so on. Those by accident include all the personal information sites which include and are not restricted to blog sites, information discussion fora, fun focus sites, ask a question sites etc. And the information is anything from health, to technology, to personal blacklisted email domains. These information sources have such a low signal to noise ration that it is increasingly becoming difficult to figure out signal from noise.

This has led to a rapid disillusioning of the information seeker. "I know this is true, I read it on the Internet" does not hold must water anymore. Once bitten twice shy, users are rapidly switching to not trusting the Internet for their informatino needs. Some who can actually separate the signal from noise are profiting, while there are a lot others for whom it is either mistrust or increasing exposure to quoting the wrong information.

Typically technology has responded too. A number of methods have come out which try to understand and review information. The volume of the Internet is so huge that it was deemed impossible to manually classify information. Hence there were a number of automatic, technical methods of information classification which came up. Some it seems succeeded, like the omnipresent google. However as with technology, somewhere the users got whiff of technology and go into the act of meta information manipulations. These moves is slowly rendering difficult data quality prediction using technology. The circle now is complete - it is back to man and manual methods to classify information. Back to the expert. May be technically it is the published word, but it is a good as the spoked word - the word of the expert.

A number of models which do this are currently in vogue. The about.com's initiative is one such effort. It aims to manually give the best sites of information for all the information needs of the Internet users. The other model is that of peer and continuous evaluation. Sites like experts-exchange and slashdot are typical of this method, where experts are the users and where these experts cull out the best of the information available. Hence is the relative weakening of the written word vis-a-vis the spoken word.

haffun

~!nrk

Source Perfect

I was reading this article and its prequel that was posted on /. As the title of the story suggested, the author makes a point that all software source should be open. That is, programs should not be sold without bundling the source that was used to produce it. The point he is trying to make is that, just as buildings and bridges do not hide what they bring along with them, so should software not hide what it was built from. He does advocate crippled source to make sure that people dont recompile and all that, but that idea still being that only by making source open can one actually make sure that people dont write sloppy code.

I like that idea. As in the point that source should be open to make sure that programmers do their work properly, and dont hide behind the compiler for producing bad code. But the idea as he has presented is not, according to me, viable. The reasons are simple.

1. The analogy between buildings and software is not correct and does not hold. Firstly since seeing a building or a bridge is not the same as seeing a source. The analogy is more like blueprint and building. Secondly, what one can do with source, one cannot do with a blueprint - like reusing a part of it, copying it ad-infinitum and so on.
2. Even if we do make it open, who is going to check it? How qualified is he going to be to have to see source that does not compile and tell you if it is good code or bad? When was the last time you saw source code and judged it?

But coming to back to what I was saying. I do find myself agreeing with that fact that source should be made available. Only then can we get some sort of responsibility as far as building source is concerned. And this is a major flaw in the entire process of software building which i believe is fundamentally creating problems with the software (read IT) world. So this is what I suggest. What should rather be done is that we should have some sort of third party certification. Just like html is checked for adherence to standards, code should also be checked for adherence to standards. And companies should be able to proclaim that their software is "Source Perfect". I dont really know if we have such an idea lying around, but this sure is worth trying.

Of course, this has its drawbacks. The standards that need to be checked adherence to. That is the need of the hour. We need to define what good software is. Everyone knows the properties of good software. We should be able to standardise that and make it platform, implementation independant. Then we can be on the first step towards building a world having software that is "Source Perfect".

We had a recent meeting, for some work. There we were meeting these alumni, who were 25 years down the line. I was making a presentation to them, and said "And that is the reason I think I can safely say that we might be having one of the the best websites in the world". To which the answer was "That is precisely the problem with you new generation. Have faith. Say 'Ours _is_ the best website in the world'"

Amen to that

~!nrk

What was that again?

hi

just a thought

if

a. ppl can control it

b. it gives u an easy temporary escape route for sometime as compared to the tougher alternative of goin thru a process and maintaining ur cool...and by getting away from painful situations, a person can concentrate on the main things on hand..that else get bogged down due to worryign abt them..

c. taken infrequently, shldnt do grt physical damage in short run, and in the long run all of us are anywys dead..

if one can use it to buy some time to deal with life so that other imp things can be done more efficiently, then

why shouldnt a person drink/smoke?...

I have never done this before. I mean posting other people private stuff on my blog. Ah well, everything has a first right? And this is fine, I guess, simply because there is little personal about this.

I dont smoke or drink. In the words of people who know me, I have the best dope profile. I have long hair, work on computers, read and believe in 0wnz0red, I listen to hard rock and death metal and front a scowl for a neutral face. That meant that no one ever fully believed me when I told them I dont really do em dope. That explains, I hope, to the third party reader about the italicized post earlier.

The answer to the question is just this - No he should not stop drinking or smoking

The world has people, and people are humans. Humans have consciousness and since time immemorial you have had this consciousness in trouble. There is pressure, there is pain. These negative feelings have been the bane of conscious thought ever since the first guy figure out that rolling is different from dragging. And humans have taken a zillion ways of dulling this all pervasive, all powerful consciousness. They drank, smoked, doped, took drugs, injections, morphine, invented GOD, started religion, invented prayers, formed associations, for institutions, established schools and colleges. All designed with one objective in mind. To dim the consciouness and dull the intellect. No, dont take me at face value. You think, prayers are different from drinking? Think again. What do you do when you are unhappy, or otherwise feeling down. Have you ever heard about the healing effects of auto-suggestion. Or the narcotic effects of the same. Ever seen Fight Club? Do you know what Oxygen is? My dear reader, the whole life structure you have been exposed to one that is designed to not let you be at full capacity. Music - Ah well, this is one of the most powerful of narcotics available to all of humanity. What are the only things that dont depend on language, customs, place of birth, color of the skin and sex? Music, sex, narcotics, religion. See the similarity?

Why? I have no idea. But this just makes me feel that we were not be be born on earth at all... But that is another story.

Back to the point of discussion. There is nothing fundamentally evil about smoking and drinking. Okay there is the angle of health right? I mean you will die sooner if you smoke and all that. Well here is the deal. You think the other solutions are any less deadly? Religion - kills inventiveness, kills the spirit, kills innovation, kills motivation and lets you live longer - why? Music - eats into time, halves effective ability to focus. Society - one of the biggest ills of the recent society - does everything that religion does and worse, makes you feel good about it. So how are drinking and smoking different - they probably shorten your life, but what if they allow you to make your life more productive?

Okay there are exceptions to all rules, including this one. And the exceptions can be found both ways. So lets forget that for a moment and focus on the thought at hand.

There is no good or bad about smoking and drinking. There ought to be no reason why you should not do them and till stay in a society and practice religion. But the decision not to smoke or drink should stem from what you feel about losing control over yourself. Do you really want to lose it? Then go ahead, you will not be worse of for it. And that is the closest you will get to truth, coz there is none of that out there.

~!nrk

ps: no thought is arbit, it is all in the mind after all.

Objectivism

"Lets think objectively" is a common ring you hear, especially if things are not going the way the speaker wants them to. "Objectively speaking..." said that very important person when he was asked about his views on the oil embargo. "It is time people rose above their narrow considerations and thought objectively" said a great saint who was dressed like what seemed like a saint.

So I decided, I would do it. Objectivity in everything I do. Be in oil embargoes or just basic thinking. But I failed.

How would you go about thinking objectively. Someone said "do it with math. There is nothing more objective than math. There is nothing more objective than cold numbers which know not what the user wants." That sounded good. But I really wanted to objectively evaluate who among two girls in my class was more beautiful. Objectively, I assigned scores to various aspects and summed them up. I got an answer that demended a recount. So I objectively did the exercise all over again. A second re-count became a necessity, for the results just got flipped. This continued for sometime, when I realized that the answer actually depended on the time of the day. As time passed relative beauty changed. Objectively I concluded that beauty depends on the time of the day.

Then someone asked me if the actress in the new bond movie was beautiful, and objectively I asked him the time of the day. And he hit me on the head with a rolled copy of the filmfare magazine - quite objectively.

When I was a kid, some people at the place I studied showed a remarkable lack of imagination. "If I become Prime Minister for a day" was a favourite topic for essay writing. And the course was not FNT101 Introduction to Fantasy. Last I knew the people at that place were still that unimaginative and they still have that for a topic.

And I could never do justice to that topic, simply because I could never do justice if it actually happenned. Governmental role has been critisized so many times and so severly, that this would not even matter. The most common grouse has been that it is always partisan, and never neutral. Or in other words it is never Objective.

But every theory dealing with either human behavoir or with human action is based on the fundamental assumption that humans are selfish bigots, who dont care two hoots about what happens to the rest of the society. Surprisingly though, that is true.

The point is. WAKE UP PEOPLE, THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OBJECTIVITY. I am sick of people using Objectivity as an excuse to do anything they feel like. I am sick of people complaining of lack of objectivity in others. I am sick of not understanding why other people cannot be as objective as me. This is my wakeup call. There is no such thing as objectivity. WAKE UP.

I love compl(I)ments, with an I and not complements which has an E instead of an I.

so long and thanks for the compliments

~!nrk

CATB Revisited

This is in continuation of an earlier post, where I talked about the Cathedral And The Bazaar (CATB), which I believe is one of the most powerful essays of its kind. In this post I want to talk about an experience which makes the Bazaar a more meaningful idea.

Okay the basics first. The CATB talks about two forms of software development - the cathedral or the proprietary model (the Microsofts of this world) and the bazaar or the open source and related models (the people behind GNU and Linux etc). In comparing the two models there have been sevaral ideas thrown in, economic, psychological etc. Here is another insight.

Was talking to a friend yesterday, who had worked in an Infotech company called Infosys. During the discussion we almost immeadiately agreed that she was not a person who hated technology, until she joined Infosys. Something happenned at Infosys that forever changed her opinion about technology. This somehow brought on deja vu for me. I remembered having the same discussion with more than one person earlier. Suddenly it struck me, that the reason why ex-Infocions were shying away from technology could actually lie with their stay in Infosys, and might not be a coincidence after all. I decided to find out more.

It seems that Infosys, during the days of boom, used to the hilt its USP of cheap Indian workforce. Infosys, periodically hired some of the best talent in the country by throwiing enormous amounts money at them. In fact, Infosys became such a phenomena that any engineer, irrespective of discipline, wanted to end up doing a job with Infosys. So much so that there actually were fears that there would be a resouce crunch in other engineernig disciplines in the country if Infosys continued on its path. Fortunately, the bubble burst, but that is another story.

Now all these engineers, intelligent people mind you, who were 'bought' by Infosys were taken to their imposing zoos and housed in A/C cubicles and were given crap as work. Infosys followed standard "cathedral" models of software development. Small groups were given specific tasks. Each individual was further given smaller, meaningless, 'coglike' projects. It primarily consisted either of repititive 'copy paste' of existing code, or testing and recommending changes to other code authors. Work was always in small modules.

There was no real development - no one developed a sensible module, everyone attacked a small very very focussed I/O situation. There was hence no learning, either of the programming language or the logic of the problem or hints of the solution. Further, due to reasonable code archives, development was little other than copy-paste. It generally ended up as dreary repititive work, but someone had to do it, and someone human. Not only was there no learning, but the reward for doing something well was repitition of the same job - over and over again. In the name of specialisation, absolutely no job rotation was possible, atleast not enough to retain interest. And about having ownership of written code - hah forget it.

One another class of operations was testing and bug-fixing. The testing section was another nightmare. Testing, is something not generally relished by builders of code themselves. Imagine having to test code that has been _assembled_ by another person. Sheer boredom - no quality work was possible. Still more stagnation in the entire process.

Bug-fixing was worse. Yeah it was. Bug-fixing naturally involved more than one person, the testor and the actual developer. And relations between the twain always managed to deteriorate. This meant that bug-testing was never with a view to improve code, or performance, but just to impress/escape observation of peers. All the wrong reasons, for the most critical of operations.

And this is a typical model of software development. So what did this result in?

First of all, it made the people involved _hate_ code. And not just code, the hatred extended to just about any technical issue. Considering that most of these people were engineers from established institutes, such hatred was no mean feat.

Secondly, the sheer monotonicity of the jobs resulted in a very high turnover of jobs in the organization. The high pays helped, but not for long, and not in the current environments. And not to mention, this did not help the quality of code in any positive way.

Third, the code suffered, and the costs sky rocketed. Some of the prices that Infosys quotes, almost makes me jump out of my skin. And this is just not restricted to Infosys alone. Ever looked at the prices of software? If you are a developer, you will know how high they *really* are. Have you ever looked at the quality/functionality of most software and wondered why it cost so much. Well here is the reason for you. Incredibly costly man-hours. And the model is to blame.

The best part of course, is that I have not even touched the great sink called maintenance, and services. That is another story for another day. But looking at the basic development model alone, doesnt it not look so incredibly inefficient. Compare this with a plausible model using open source components, and a bazaar style of development. Can the Cathedral ever match the prices of the Bazaar?

No, never. Once the customers realise that, the Cathedral will find survival difficult.

signing off as in the last post - Long live the bazaar.

~!nrk

Consciousness

Okay, here I am back. This is the first time I am doing a second post in the same day. But I just cannot help it. For I have discovered an incredible piece on the net. The page talks about some exerpts from the book "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretranders (Translated by Jonathan Sydenham;Viking Penguin, 1998; ISBN 0-670-87579-1; 467 pages). And I think it is amazing. You ought to read that book. As the author of the page said, if it does not excite you, check your vital signs. In the exerpt, the author of the page talks about the term "user illusion" which is again very similar to the concept of the "Sphere of perception" that we had talked about earlier. Amazing really. Googling a lot now. Will add more to this post as and when.

Update: Check out the first link that google threw up. Some more reading the book without buying it. I _am_ going to buy it, but this it till then. Check this out...

Shorthand: conscious self = "I"; unconscious self = "me"

...

(Ref: The Inner Game of Tennis. "When you short-circuit the mind by giving it an ‘overload’ of things to deal with, it has so many things to attend to that it no longer has time to worry. The "I" checks out and lets the "me" check in.)

...

Spirituality merely involves taking your own life seriously by getting to know yourself and your potential. This is no trivial matter, for there are quite a few unpleasant surprises in most of us. The dominant psychological problem of modern culture is that its members do not want to accept that there is a Me beyond the I. The Me is everything the I cannot accept: It is unpredictable, disorderly, willful, quick, and powerful.

From the Amazon.com editorial review of the book "The Inner Game of Tennis" (Paperback - 122 pages Revised edition (May 1997) Random House (Paper); ISBN: 0679778314)...

A phenomenon when first published in 1972, the Inner Game was a real revelation. Instead of serving up technique, it concentrated on the fact that, as Gallwey wrote, "Every game is composed of two parts, an outer game and an inner game." The former is played against opponents, and is filled with lots of contradictory advice; the latter is played not against, but within the mind of the player, and its principal obstacles are self-doubt and anxiety. Gallwey's revolutionary thinking, built on a foundation of Zen thinking and humanistic psychology, was really a primer on how to get out of your own way to let your best game emerge. It was sports psychology before the two words were pressed against each other and codified into an accepted discipline.

Primed to Discover

Did you ever notice that after you have just learnt a new word, it seems to pop up from all sorts of places. And you wonder how you were able to make sense of stuff in the era before you learnt the word. I have been watching myself watch new words pop out all the time, and have been wondering. It seems this is not just a problem with me, and in fact it is actually a documented fact. When you learn a new word, though it drops out of your consciousness, your sub-consciousness is 'primed' to tag these new words. This is a way in which the sub-consciousness tries to cement your learning through repetition. By tagging words to pop-out it is ensuring that you consciously learn them.

Remind me to thank my sub-consciousness the next time I meet it.

Hey, how would it be, to meet my own sub-consciousness. Remember the sphere of perception we had defined earlier. It was the set of all inputs that a person actually learns from. Well, I guess we ought to add the term 'consciously' to that now. And this also calls for us to rectify the entire setup of the learning process that we talked about.

In an earlier post, I had talked about the two differentiators that make a difference between the way people learn and develop. Taking on the model of the neural networks, there are two primary difference, the amount of input accepted and the learning rate on these inputs. The amount of input accepted was tagged with the term "sphere of perception". Now, we ought to make slight changes to it. The sphere of perception also includes that part of the "sub-consciousness learning" that is relayed back to conscious levels. Although our definition itself does not change, what changes is the kind of inputs available under the definition. Seems that the sub-consciousness is a really aware entity, and it probably gets a lot from its sphere of perception, than the average human does.

Hmm, and where do the twain meet? Dreams? Okay, more broadly sleep. hmm.. Sounds interesting. Imagine a person who did not sleep at all. Well, that person would not be in touch with his sub-consciousness. And what if one day, he finally falls asleep? That is that day, he can actually meet his fellow (sub)consciousness. Wouldnt that be great? I know there are a lot of wrinkles, but those can be ironed out. And what cannot be, we will submit that to a "temporary suspension of disbelief".

Hmm, so how will that meeting be like? Lets say, meeting your sub-consciousness will allow you to form opinions. Maybe that is the final stretch that man has not tapped. I mean, think about it. The meeting of the consciousness with the sub-consciousness could be the fertile ground for "imagination". The ability to "generate" new ideas out of nowhere. Maybe, this ability is not just a matter of conscious effort. Maybe the ability is nothing more than a meeting between the consciousness and the sub-consciousness, followed by an exchange of ideas. Actually it makes sense in a obtuse sort of way.

Lets see if I can put this in the form of a fictional piece. But for that I will have to sleep and see what my sub-consciousness has to say.

~!nrk

Enlightenment

\En*light"en*ment\, n. Act of enlightening, or the state of being enlightened or instructed.

Enlightenment is a completely themeable, highly configurable Window Manager for the X Window System, traditionally used in Unix environments. - That is from the homepage dedicated to the Window Manager for X.

But we are talking about the former - The state of being instructed. I like to think of learning as a passage from ignorance to enlightment. That is the only way learning should occur. Let me define 'enlightment'. When you learn something new, there is a time, when you dont know anything about it. And as you learn it you go into enlightenment. You know you are enlightened, when the topic is no longer strange to you. You know the basics of the topic. You know what rules are involved, and you really 'understand' those rules. The topic is no longer a representation for a cause-effect. You no longer understand the topic in a particular context, but understand the idea beyond the concept. That is enlightenment.

Let me explain. There are a lot of ways of learning

1. Just learn that A gives rise to B
2. Learn that class A gives rise to class B
3. Learn all cases A which can give rise to corresponding cases of B
4. Learn the reason why A gave rise to B
5. Learn what happened
6. Learn why something happened

The case (f) my friends is enlightenment. That is when you dont need to learn anything. The memory requirements are minimal. You learn a basic law of the universe. You have understood something that goes far beyond where you saw it first.
"Into this state, my teachers, let my brain awake..."

That is the problem with our learning system. We learn upto c, and then someone comes along and gives us smatterings of d and f in utterly in correlated chunks. Let that change, things will not be so tough after all.

Wishful thinking? mebbe, mebbe not.

Nothing goes according to plan, if it did, why would it still be called just a plan. It would be reality.

~!nrk

Sphere of eConsciousness

I had defined a term in my post on Tuesday, August 20, 2002. The term was Sphere of Perception. I had said that it is the sphere which a person identifies and understands. It defines the region from which inputs are used by people for learning.

There is a related term, I want to talk about. eConsciousness. Offline, your entire perception is defined by your senses. Your sight, hearing, feel in addition to smell and taste. So what are your online senses? What part of the online life are you attuned to? What is your source of information from the online world? To round it off, what part of your online presence are you attuned to? What is your eConsciousness?

We shall define eConsciousness loosely as that part of the online life you are attuned to. This basically consists of two parts. The first part is the part of the online life you actually know and identify. What exists on the World Wide Web. The answer to that question is the first part of eConsciousness. The second part pertains to that part of the online life, which you truly understand. What is the part of the life online you truly know. What part are you comfortable with. What part of the online life you know makes sense to you, and is not a source of fraud waiting to happen.

Why did I get this idea? Well, it goes like this. I got this message from SmileyGram for an E-card. This was basically from a friend of mine, who apparently had given my email address. I had to go and check out what was happenning there. So I checked the URL and pointed my browser to it. It took me to a page which needed 5 names and email addresses to show me the page. And nothing was optional. Of course i filled it with ****@****.com to get to the page.

I then mailed my friend asking her not to put my email in such forms again. I have been long enough on the web to have my name in a decent number of email databases. I really dont want another one getting hold of mine. The reply was along the lines that this was a 'good site' and that it 'just' needed 5 friend's names and the card is 'worth it'. My friend is showing remarkable eConsciousness of the first kind, not much of the second variety.

This I think is the case with a majority of the users. These are the users who click on the funlove messages. These are the people that download and run cute screensavers with trojans and backdoors. These are not people who are exactly alien to the online world. In fact they know of more free email sites, more free ecards sites than the first 3 pages of google. But they dont really understand the net. If we are to make the net a more secure place, it is this set of people we have to target. It is this set that must be told that not everything on the net is what it seems. Educate them, and we just might become safe in spite of all that Microsoft has planned for us.

One day I am going to develop an eConsciousness quotient.
Should help. Dont you think. tell me if you think so, or if you dont. [of course after demungle the email id]
Hmm, the winter is coming. Things are becoming cooler, and I have started skipping the baths. :)

~!nrk

Absolutely Nothing!

Anarchy - the next form of government. Anarchy Rocks!!!

Welcome back. Oh well, I just wanted to welcome myself. Reborn. Well basically I had these exam things. They lasted 5 horrible days. Had 8 of them coming at me. Of various hues and sizes. Some qualitative, others quantitative. Some were a strain on the brain, some on the memory, some on the heart and others left a deep scar on my psyche. And totally change the way I thought about nothing.

Have you ever thought about nothing. No, I mean it. Did you ever think about nothing. No, not vacuum. Not that. Just about nothing. No, not even void. Just nothing.

For when we talk about vacuum, we talk about the absence of matter (as we know it) in space (as we know it) but surely inhabited by a whole lot of other stuff. For example, there is a hell lot of light in vacuum. There is a hell lot of other energy, or matter, or non-matter in vacuum. I am talking about something even more bare as compared to that. I am talking about nothing. Absolute nothingness. Where there is no time, for there is nothing to identify time. There is no matter, no energy, for either of these would immeadiately make it the swarming space we have here. And there is nothingness pervading everything. And that is so thick that it is almost as if there is nothing there at all.

Yeah, I know. You are thinking that all I am talking about it just a play of words to impress you. What if I tell you how to get there? What if I give you a series of steps which if executed will get you there? Then you will believe me right?

Let me try. Do you know where the true nothing is? Inside you. Absolute nothing is your consciousness. Absolute nothing is your intelligence. Absolute nothing is your sense of "I" or "ID" or "IS". That my friend is the most absolute of nothings which you will ever get to. Did you ever bother thinking about consciousness. There have been all forms of inferences to it - as a place. As a plane in space. As another dimension. Others have dismissed it a nothing other than just a bunch of neurons. I dont know. I believe that, there is something that distinguishes us from non-intelligence. I believe that we are not just the sum of several atoms. It is too easy. If we were, that would mean that we are symbols of random sparks that happened sometime ago.

Dont get me wrong. I dont believe that we were either from the 7days of work or from the golden lotus from the lord. Far from that, I accept that we were from random sparks of lightning in amino acids. But I believe that something happened then. We were introduced to nothingness. An element of basic consciousness was transferred. There appeared a means of trapping nothingness in the fabric of matter. And that became life.

So that my friends is a theory that I came up with, to just pass some time. Listening to "Symptom of the Universe" by Ozzy. Sexy strings.

Did I tell you, my speakers rock! They are oh so incredible incredible.

The next song is "Am I going insane", how appropriate.

~!nrk

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Or CatB as it is popularly known, is a mecca of thoughts.

A collection of ideas central to tommorrow. Why tommorrow? Ever heard of the third wave? If you have not, we'll postpone detailed discussion for another day. But what it essentially means is that there were two waves of development in the human past; the first wave - when man learnt to grow food. The second wave - when the industrial revolution happenned. And in the same line, todays knowledge revolution is the third wave. And this third wave is changing the fundamentals of our society.

And for me, that is the one and only commandment. Over the days, you will be treated to several of my ideas regarding it. But for now we will stick to Cathedral and the Bazaar. Why am I talking about this? Because, I have several ideas related to this, which i want to discuss.

Cathedral and Bazaar, is a juxtaposition of two means of working, especially with reference to the software industry. The Cathedral is the organized juggarnaut for software production. It is the means employed by the Microsofts, the Oracles and others of this world. Where software is atomized into a set of small, simple tasks, doable by everyone. The Bazaar is the opposite. The unorganized wave of will, driven by motives other than those of profit, moving towards an undefined goal. It is the way the Linuxs of this world are built.

Why am I talking about it?

Well, I found a gem, that for me proves a central point of CatB. Yesterday we had a talk by some seniors who had come from McKinsey. Now these people, working consultants, were talking about the informal and helpful work-culture in McKinsey. The topic of discussion was the effectiveness of the mailing list and how helpful people of McKinsey can be. To quote from memory, "These people are very very helpful. When I was new to the topic, I posted messages, asking about everything and anything, and people responded. They answered all my doubts. And just a few days back, there was a question about which I actually knew something about. So I took that extra half an hour to post a reply. It felt great. That is that work culture here at McKinsey"

That aint no work culture, that is Maslow at work. The satisfaction of having helped. The power of knowledge in the knowledge economy.

The precise idea behind the bazaar in CatB.

The Bazaar is not an accident. Long live the bazaar.
I am Jack's wannabe bazaar

~!nrk

Change

Did not have anything else to do, at least nothing that would enthuse me right now. So am getting on with my next post.

Was chatting with a friend, who had just gone to the United States, to pursue her post-grad studies. The difference between this place and that, she felt there was not in terms of the weather, or in terms of the land, or the color of the skin of the people there. What she said psyched her out the most was that on the streets there was this solemn procession of cars. Cars and more cars, moving in orderly funeral perfection. What was wrong with the scene was that there were no people to see. None at all, no open cars, no two wheelers, no pedestrians, none at all.

"Man boxed by metal", I'd said.

I am not a Luddite. Far from it, I am a programmer (by heart and mind), I revel in technology, I do system administration as a hobby. And I love it. But somehow that statement struck a raw note in me.

For what is the limit of human endurance? I dont see our genes modifying themselves, to accept this change that we see. What then is the limit of human acceptance, when man will break. When will the surroundings go beyond a certain threshold of acceptance, after which the human mind will refuse to accept of rationalize them. We talk about technological progress, and about change happening at an increasingly fast pace.

What is the limit? Who will break first? Man or Change?

Happy thoughts on this Glorious evening. The sky is overcast. and there is a gentle breeze blowing across the land, and my room lies smack in the middle of it. And there is a glorious song playing on my Cambridge SoundWorks speakers. Can life get any better?

50 10n6 & 7|-|4nk5 f0R the small and the beautiful

~!nrk

Rain

Wow, this is a first. The second time in two days. Must be a record of sorts. Lets just see how long this goes.

Why do people hate rain? Did you ever sit on the street, watching, when it is about to rain. Did you see people scurrying about. There is a faint mixture of amusement and annoyance in the way they scurry away from water. Why?

Isn't it the same water you take bath in, everyday? What is bad with getting wet. Or is it that we are concerned about our clothes? Or that mebbe our appearance would get spoilt? Agreed that not everything we carry with everyday is water-proof. Why then do people strive to cover their heads as they run to find the closest cover? Is the head not water resistant?

Okay, I know what you are thinking of right now. That we run away from rain, because it will get us ill. Hmm, well then you ought to be ill everyday, after your bath. And more importantly, who has ever taken the pains to see if there is a relationship between getting wet in the rain and falling ill right after that?

Do you know what I think? I think it has got more to do with social engineering of the mind rather than anything else. We have been fed images of people running away from rain. We have been fed "data" telling us that one falls ill after getting wet. We suffer from a global mis-consciousness. We therefore think that we ought to run from rain, and if needed help others "realize" the same. Global mis-consciousness. Figures, doesnt it. And there seem to be more of such examples. But maybe for another day.

Do you know what tastes incredible on a hot day, when you have a parched throat. Take a earthen drinking tumbler, add the juice of two lemons in it. Put in a little mixture of condiments, add some artificial flavour. Open a bottle of aereated soda, and pressure mix the entire concoction. Taste it. Brilliant.

I know.

I am Jack's Global Mis-consciousness

~!nrk