Deconstructing Zaniness

Science of the human condition

2011-12-26T08:26:00.000-08:00

As 2011 draws to a close, here are two extremely broad BBC documentaries (and companion books) about what makes us fundamentally human.

The stunning Dr. Alice Robert's The Incredible Human Journey takes us through the migration of Homo Sapiens Sapiens from West Africa to every continent in the world between 70,000-10,000 years ago. It is a 5 part series (5 hours of screen time), with each episode focusing on one continent. A very broad and fascinating discussion including speciation, the hominini, various archeological sites, genetic evidence, climate models for sea levels, competing theories of our lineage, creation myths of indigenous peoples, and much more. Some thoroughly fascinating questions include: How many waves of migration from Africa eventually survived? One or several? Did we interbreed with the Neanderthals? Did East Asians evolve from the Homo Erectus? Guaranteed to stimulate. I'm currently reading Bryan Sykes's The Seven Daughters of Eve to get a richer understanding of the archeological and genetic methods involved in this richly interdisciplinary, politically charged, and data-starved field that attempts to provide a scientific alternative to epics and creation myths. Eager watchers, catch it on youtube before it gets taken down.

Stephen Fry's Planet Word takes us through the evolution, modern day use, and dysfunction of language and symbolic communication. The breadth of this 5 part series (yet again) is impeccable with a coverage of everything from Chimpanzee communication, the FOXP2 gene, Tourette's and swearing, an introduction to Ulysses, the creation of modern Chinese and much else. Unfortunately taken down from youtube.

"Exact science is not an exact science" ~Nicola Tesla according to Christopher Nolan, in The Prestige.

Here's to another year of awe and wonder!

Change of seasons

2011-10-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

The late October Sun smiled weakly today, like a devout caregiver who has been strong for too long, and is unable to hide his waning strength any longer. "Stay strong without me", he said, in an unsuccessful attempt to inspire fortitude during his absence. A yellow, perforated, autumn leaf fell to the matted brown floor lined with its recently deceased kin --- apologetic, for having overstayed its welcome, and in quiet acceptance of its fate. A solitary gull, now devoid of its cacophonous bravado that the summer warmth had inspired merely months ago, circled the Lehtisaari bridge in silent anticipation of the inevitable.

In Helsinki, the change of seasons is an everyday affair. Starting tomorrow, it's time to switch back the clocks and prepare for yet another winter.

How can the history of gravitational theory inform modern day neuroscience?

2011-09-06T13:19:00.000-07:00

We've all heard it said before. Neuroscience is the physics of the 21st century. The vast ocean of unknowns lies before us, we've just learned to build a vessel, we've just learned to navigate. Let's unfurl the sails, go forth and discover new lands!
In this essay, I'll attempt to simplify such portentous omens by first prying open physics and then neuroscience.

The 20th century atomic physicist, Ernest Rutherford is famous for having said, "That which is not physics is stamp collecting". Let's indulge Rutherford for now, as we try to understand what he meant by physics. But first, let's start with a brief history of studying planetary motion.

Stamp collecting

Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer is most famous in the popular imagination for having observed the first modern supernova. However, a lesser appreciated fact about Brahe is that he extensively and systematically documented the trajectories of planets (#1).

In just a generation, along came Brahe's assistant, Johannes Kepler. Kepler deduced from all of Brahe's accurate observations that the trajectory of planets could be explained by three simple laws or regularities. First, by carefully making calculations of the Martian orbit, he noticed that all (known) planetary orbits were in fact elliptical, as opposed to the conventional Copernican belief before him that they were circular. He further noticed that the Sun was centered at one of the foci of the ellipses. Second, he noticed that the line joining the planet and the sun swept out sectors of equal areas along the orbit. Since orbits were elliptical, this implied that planets moved with variable speed---again a radical departure from Copernicus! He published both these observations in 1609 [I'm suprised he didn't write two papers on these potent mythbusters]. Third, he noticed that the square of the orbital period was proportional to the cube of the major axis of the elliptical orbit. He only published these 10 years later in 1619 [I wonder how he got tenure]. These are now known as Kepler's laws of planetary motion (#2).

Would Rutherford call Kepler a physicist? Would you call Kepler a physicist?

If we define a physicist narrowly as someone who engages in deductive reasoning based on observations of the natural world, then Kepler was not a physicist. However, if we recognize that a physicist must wear multiple hats along the journey from making observations (stamp collecting) to reasoning about them (physics a la Rutherford), then I would call him an exemplary physicist. Let's get more granluar about Kepler. What was he? Using modern terms, I would call him an applied statistician or more specifically, a curve fitter.

Kepler basically looked at the orbital trajectories and said, "wait a minute! this doesn't look circular to me. Hmmm...". He then selected a functional form to represent the trajectories (the equation of an ellipse) and simply fit the parameters to the data, the parameters being the foci and the major/minor axis of the ellipse to the orbit. Next, he looked carefully at the non-uniform speeds of the planet during the course of its revolution around the sun and said to himself, "Hmmm, what needs to be equal in order that the speeds can be unequal?". Finally he graphed the orbital period against the major axis length and mumbled, "There's a pattern here but I don't quite get it. Could it be a power law!". And it was.

In doing thus, Kelper had reduced the painstakingly detailed data recorded by Brahe into three simple regularities or laws. He made an epistemological innovation, i.e. he told us how to organize our observations neatly, in much the same way that Darwin organized species into the tree of life or Mendeleev organized the elements into a periodic table. Kepler's laws could now make accurate predictions about planetary motion.

In the parlance of modern statistics, we could interpret Kepler's laws as a descriptive statistical generative model. It described the statistics of planetary motion by generating them from underlying regularities. However, for all its genius, Kepler's work was merely descriptive, i.e. it succinctly answered the what questions but not the why questions. Why were planetary orbits elliptical? Why did they move faster when they came closer to the sun? For these answers, we had to wait another 100 years.

Newton and the why questions

Newton first formalized the concept of a force acting between two bodies. He postulated and verified the laws of motion. In posulating the gravitational force, and observing that the force was inversely proportional to squared distance, the universal theory of gravitation took shape.

Newton's theory was a causal explanation of the data observed by Brahe and the regularities captured by Kepler's laws: i.e. it could now answer the why questions. Just to take one example: as the planet comes closer to the sun, more force acts upon it, causing a greater acceleration increasing its speed!

I hazard a guess that Rutherford would have included Newton into his elite definition of a physicist!

Marr's three levels modified

From that prelude into the history of gravity, it is interesting to note that the answers to why questions also lead to how questions. How is gravitational force transmitted between two bodies without a medium? For nearly three centuries after Newton, a number of proposals were made for the mechanical explanation of gravity, all of which are known to be wrong today. The current explanation is attempted by quantum gravity, a theoretical framework that attempts to unify gravity with the other three fundamental forces, but as of today, we don't have a mechanistic explanation of gravity!

The sequence of what-why-how questions brings us to David Marr, a 20th century vision scientist and AI researcher, who postulated three necessary conditions for a computational theory of sensation or perception. Marr and his contemporaries conceived of vision as an information processing system. He said, to have a computational theory of a system, we need to understand:

The computational level: what computation/ task does the system intend to perform?
The algorithmic level: how does it represent this computation/ task and what strategies does it adopt to achieve its goal?
The implementational level: what is the precise sequence of steps in the physical wet brain during the execution of the above algorithm?

Now, the universe is not an intentional system with a well defined goal, so Marr's postulates are more suited to building nature-inspired computational systems for solving specific tasks, rather than describing nature. Let's slightly modify (#3) Marr's levels to fit our what-why-how framework:

What happens in the visual areas of the brain? [This is the stamp collecting task of Brahe]
Can we build a simple statistical model that captures its regularities and predicts some of its dynamics? [This is the applied statistics / descriptive modeling task of Kepler]
Why is it happening i.e. what is the brain trying to achieve through the observed dynamics? [This is the causal modeling task of Newton]
How does it go about achieving its goal? [This is the mechanistic modeling task of quantum gravity]

Whither neuroscience?

With parables from Brahe down to Quantum Gravity, along with perspective from Marr, is it possible to meaningfully contextualize the need for theory in neuroscience as a discipline?

Let's take the primary visual cortex and see whether we can analyze developments about its understanding using the above framework.

The work of Brahe and (to a large extent) Kepler was done by the early greats (1960s onwards): David Hubel and Torston Wiesel. These guys measured from single neurons in the cat V1, recognized that there were cells selective to things like orientation, spatial frequency, ocular dominance, etc. [a Brahe task]. Next, along with Horace Barlow and other contemporaries, they explained natural images as constituted by oriented edges and gratings [a Kepler task]. Barlow and his contemporaries also attempted to give causal or normative explanations of what the visual cortex was doing. They proposed that the visual cortex was efficiently coding (in the Shannon information sense) the retinal image [a Newton task]. A little later, descriptive statistical generative models of natural images were proposed using Fourier and Gabor basis functions. The models were successful in describing the retinal image in terms of a few regularities [a Kepler task]. With the advent of artificial neural network models, it became possible to take the efficient coding hypothesis one step further and build mechanistic models of neural activity which efficiently represented the retinal image. It was possible to show mechanistically that efficient coding was realized by performing decorrelation in a distributed neural network to achieve this efficiency [a quantum gravity task]. With the advent of overcomplete basis functions: robustness, not just efficiency of visual information representation could also be normatively explained [a Newton task]. With further advances in natural image statistics by Olshausen and Field, it became clearer that besides efficient, decorrelated and robust coding of the retinal image, a key function of the visual cortex was to learn and update hypotheses (Bayesian posteriors) about the statistics of natural images [yet another Newton task]. How is Bayesian inference mechanically realized in a neural network? Again, artificial neural network models have been postulated for the same [yet another quantum gravity task].

One positive example does not make a theory, you quite rightly say (#4)? Ok. As we look around in other areas of neuroscience, what do we see?

I see that on a day to day basis we are all organized as cottage-industries and guilds, learning through apprenticeships, how to solve Brahe tasks, Kepler tasks, (and less frequently) Newton tasks, and quantum gravity tasks. Wider-scale databasing efforts [Brahe tasks] are also beginning to take place. Examples include Bert Sakmann's digital neuroanatomy project, the human connectome project (HCP), etc. Parallely, wider-scale big-data mining [Kepler tasks] is gaining ground. Examples include various connectomics projects, and contests to leverage big-data (such as the ADHD fMRI/ VBM/ DTI data analysis contest). Brahe and Kepler tasks certainly seem to be the mainstream activities of the day.

What do you see around you?

What would Feynman say to Rutherford?

The above comic strip generated some brilliant discussion in the forum. A commentor succinctly summarized this to be the everlasting tension between Rutherford's famous quote and a pithy equivalent by Feynman, attributing the following quote to the latter:

Physicists often have the habit of taking the simplest explanation of any phenomenon and calling it physics, leaving the more complicated examples to other fields.

Is neuroscience ready for Newtons, or do we still need more Brahes and Keplers for now?

Here's another gem from the forum:

Physicists who do bad biology say, "It's so simple! Look, model it so." These do not understand the concept of 'unknown unknowns.' What if, for example, your insects normally behave predictably, but release an alarm pheromone when handled clumsily - for example, by a theoretical physicist?

Physicists who do good biology say, "It's so messy! Is there any way we can control for as much of that messiness as possible? How do we pry apart this noise to get at the underlying rules?" They bring their disdain for vague claims to the field, and back up their claims with data. They aren't airy anti-biologists, but intense, experiment-driven pragmatists.

Notes

(#1) Incidentally, Brahe was not the first to catalogue planetary motion. The Babylonians, the Greeks and the Chinese each built their own MySQL servers to document the movement of heavenly bodies across the sky, with the Chinese effort taking up the most servers by far.

(#2) Interestingly, laws do not come to be known as laws as soon as they are proposed. Voltaire was the first to refer to Kepler's observations as laws in 1738, more than 100 years after they were first published!

(#3) Here's a very interesting modification of Marr's levels discussing the difficulty of studying of hierarchical with emergent properties.

(#4) In a Feynman sense, you just got physicisted!

Microeconomic complexity and development

2011-07-31T03:47:00.000-07:00

At TEDx Chennai 2010 I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Tara Thiagarajan, who heads Madura Microfinance. Tara blogs occasionally on issues peripheral to the business of microfinance. At Physics of Poverty, with her analytical background in neuroscience and complexity theory, she dissects questions about the meaning of socioeconomic development, and strives to bring those questions to the core rather than the periphery of the microfinance industry.

Her latest post, titled Productivity Line, attempts to reconceptualize the poverty line. She suggests that instead of dividing the world into segments based on their incomes, and then agreeing upon a reasonable income as the threshold, i.e. the poverty line, why not segment the world based on economic productivity?

Her post provoked a few questions about the relationship between production and consumption both at the social and the individual level. I note these below.

Firstly, I understand and acknowledge that taking a developmental design approach is more useful and socially sustainable than an approach that hand-holds the poorest of the poor just up to the threshold of the cycle of consumption.

1. What is an ideal ratio of producers to consumers in a society so that the society is economically sustainable (let's define economic sustainability as the capacity to diversify, grow and self-renew).

2. What is an ideal ratio of consumption to production in an individual's life? One could think of this ratio as an index of Marxist alienation and therefore a proxy to measure work-satisfaction or happiness.

3. In general, how do these ratios vary as a function of population size and other demographics as well as economic complexity (let's define economic complexity as the complexity of division of labor and the diversity of goods and services produced and consumed)? For instance, in a subsistence farming society where the economic complexity is relatively low, one could imagine that the ratio of producers to consumers is one, but that is scarcely an indicator of progress. Similarly in an extremely large and diversified society the ratio of consumption to production at an individual level is extremely high, but that is not an indicator of well being necessarily.

4. If one could measure these ratios from the demographic data of target communities receiving MFI, then one could go about defining bounds on these ratios and subsequently designing developmental interventions to optimize them.

Further Reading:
David Roodman's Open Book Microfinance Blog
The Institute for New Economic Thinking
A recent article comparing metrics of economic complexity using input-output measures
The building blocks of economic complexity: A white paper that applies complex network metrics to quantify macroeconomic complexity.

Naturalistic is a fate worse than a fate worse than death

2011-05-26T03:51:00.000-07:00

Two years ago, I had written about neologisms in science. I am finally able to give a bad example of a neologism: "naturalistic". The term I am referring to has very little to do with the ideas of naturalism in philosophy of science, or the arts, but a lot more to do with stimuli used in studies of neuroimaging. "Naturalistic" is vaguely defined as: a laboratory stimulus that is an approximation of the stimuli encountered in the natural world. So a movie would be a naturalistic stimulus. It really is a niggling issue, but I have seen a certain hesitation in the scientific community to call these stimuli "natural stimuli", and a preference towards using "naturalistic stimuli".

"Natural" itself can be defined as similar to or pertaining to nature. So, are we to understand that "naturalistic" is then "similar to or pertaining to something that is similar to or pertaining to nature"?

A fate verse zan deth, I say.

Computational neuroscience vs Neuroinformatics

2011-04-12T15:11:00.000-07:00

Below are some hastily sketched thoughts, by no means complete, on the distinction between computational neuroscience and neuroinformatics.

Computational Neuroscience: The field posits computational candidates for mechanisms by which the brain carries out a certain function. When we say computational candidates, we loosely talk about algorithms. I think algorithms have two or more theoretical aspects. I'll try to articulate those below.

First, the goal of the function performed by the brain must be articulated by a cost function. For example, if the goal is reaching out for an object and grasping it, then the cost function could minimize muscular effort, minimize the #neurons needed to encode the task, or minimize the error rate of the task assuming that it is performed several times. Sometimes, the cost function need not describe a very specific task such as grasping, but could describe a general organizing principle of the brain - such as minimize energy consumption, minimize the use of connective tissue, etc.

Second, the process by which the cost function is optimized must be articulated, keeping in mind that such a process must be feasible in the wet brain. The wet brain provides structural and functional bounds on what a candidate algorithm can and cannot do.

With these basic ingredients, the flavours then vary because the choice of level of description can be vastly different. Someone can talk about how ion channel ratios on the cell membrane are optimal for grasping, whereas someone else can talk about why the number of cortical areas devoted to grasping the brain is optimal. Both these optimalities could be treated computationally by using selective pressures during evolution, or selective pressures during brain
development as explanatory variables. To complicate matters further, optimality in the brain can be posited at the level of evolution, brain development, learning (plasticity), and adaptation.

Neuroinformatics: The field is concerned with issues of data analysis and visualization of neuroimaging data for human interpretation purposes. The algorithms applied here (such as ICA/CCA/ridge regression etc.) need not conform to any constraints posited by the wet brain. The field does not aspire to explain how the brain performs a certain function - it just aids the process of evidence accumulation, which is of course important for theoretical and CNS because otherwise we wouldn't have phenomena to explain and our theories cannot be validated. In this sense neuroinformatics is a tool for experimental neuroscience.

Deb Roy on wordling junior's life

2011-03-15T01:58:00.000-07:00

Stumbled upon a fascinating longitudinal data-intensive, visualization-intensive series of ongoing work at Deb Roy's group at the MIT Media Lab which prompted me to share some quick thoughts. Watch it here:

The talk is brilliantly structured: starting with an emotional moment, walking through some stunning data visualizations, transitioning into a pitch for bluefinlabs (his startup) with more chutzpah, and ending with the personal yet transcendental.

Scientifically, the work itself, IMHO is meant to be treated as a glimpse into the kinds of hypothesis that can be tested, rather than a definitive statement on language acquisition patterns in children. Further, I've only watched the TED talk and 18 minutes is not enough time to point out caveats, that too obvious ones. I imagine that among the various controls, they would have in fact segmented and separately treated utterances of 'water' by adult to adult vs. by adult to child, since implicit and explicit learning presumably have different mechanisms. But I'll refrain from speculating further without digging deeper here.

Technically, managing parallel feeds of audiovisual data does not seem straightforward in the least. Further, segmenting humans from cluttered fisheye scenes or target words from natural speech, and 100 TB of it, despite 50 years of AI research, is still a pretty big deal. Besides, it's the first graph on a TED talk with error bars! Respect!

Commercially, social media is one big ticket application, but couldn't the same infrastructure be applied to support decisions in interviews or boardrooms, or evaluations in high end schools or creches? What else?

But what captured my fascination the most was the power of big data to accelerate discovery at an unprecedented rate.

On large datasets and fishing expeditions

Scientists are just beginning to appreciate the power of trawling the world for extremely large datasets and subsequently testing various hypotheses on small subsets of the data. This approach (sometimes derogatorily called a fishing expedition) is in stark contrast to classical scientific method where an apriori hypothesis dictates an experiment design and an analysis procedure. The LHC experiment is one such expedition to fish for postulated elementary particles.

To illustrate the power of the fishing expedition approach, imagine if Deb had decided apriori that he wanted to study word utterance length over time. In a conventional longitudinal experiment he might have chosen a subset of words used in natural conversation, asked several child and caregiver pairs to come into a studio for 1h/day and recorded their speech. He might then have analyzed the data, observed this U shaped phenomenon, and reported it in a journal about language acquisition, where it would have promptly gathered dust. Even potentially interested colleagues might think several times before replicating the study with a different set of words, or correlating the word utterance length with spatial context, since acquiring funding and approvals for a longitudinal study would be prohibitive. Instead, with Deb's fishing expedition dataset which might become publicly available someday, any armchair scientist with computational resources can ask their own creative follow up questions of the data with minimal entry barrier!

However, fishing expeditions have their downsides. First and most obvious perhaps is the risk involved: what if there are no fish to be found? In other words, what if a generic experiment design is not powerful enough to eliminate alternative hypotheses until the ones being tested are left standing? Second, what if something is found but it is hard to tell with any confidence whether that something is in fact, a fish? Put differently, does the subset of data relevant to a particular hypothesis being tested (such as a correlation between two variables) have enough statistical power to falsify its corresponding null hypothesis? Last (and perhaps the hardest to spot), fishing expeditions may encourage scientists to operate in a complete vacuum of hypotheses (as opposed to designing for a multiplicity of hypotheses).

What are some other fishing expeditions and their successes and failures? How is the Human Genome Project different from the LHC experiment?

Quality poverty in Indian higher education

2010-10-27T06:02:00.000-07:00

Came across an interesting essay by Ashok Jhunjhunwala, championing quality in Indian higher education.

Here is his paper:
http://rtbi-iitm.in/Ashok/education_link.html

He argues that quality is lacking in higher education primarily because of underpaid teaching staff, thus making the vocation unattractive for the best and brightest. He claims that teachers can only be better paid (salaries tripled) through increasing fees since government budget for higher education cannot be doubled overnight. Then, he does a lot of analysis for building the case of increasing fees while keeping access open, through financial instruments and strong regulation to prevent profiteering institutions.

An interesting aspect, that he touches upon but does not elaborate, is the fundamental conflict of interest between primary/secondary education and higher education! Improving the quality of primary eduation will increase the demand for higher education, because lower drop-out rate and better exposure will mean that more teenagers are college ready. This would triple the current levels of 3 million new college entrants and put a strain on supply or quality of higher education.

I agree with him about how underpaid university lecturers are, and how difficult it is for academics in the west to even consider a return to Indian institutions. But it seems to me that he misses out on three potential pieces to the puzzle, that can shift the burden from the end user (i.e. fee paying students) to some other intermediary parties.

First, enabling third parties to enter the training and educational content domain can decrease the teacher:student ratio (e.g. 1:20 --> 1:40), enabling more students to pay for fewer teachers' wages.

Second, allowing lecturers to supplement their income through consulting gigs made easier through stronger industry-university relations can decrease the strain on the institutional wage bill. It will also offer short-term rather than long-term return for indian industries, making more companies willing to participate. Lecturers can also be given sufficient freedoms to be intrapreneurs in this regard, by identifying and creating partnerships in their field of expertise.

Third, western universities that depend to a large extent on their supply of graduate students from India, might be incentivized to fund entry-level university education in India. In this context too, university lecturers can be paid to create formal programs of student/researcher exchange, creating an alternate income stream.

Reading wishlist

2010-05-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

Chaturashrama as a metaphor for personal and professional management

2010-05-24T03:16:00.000-07:00

Chaturashrama, an ancient Hindu subtext (part of the Manusmriti) describes the four ideal stages of a human's (man's) life. Indeed, Chaturashrama has received a lot of flak for being patriarchal, for being the source of much determinism in modern Indian society, and for being But this post is not about such existing debates.

The four stages (or ashramas) are Brahmacharya (the stage of learning and preparation for life), Grihastha (the stage of taking responsibility and acquiring material, and emotional wealth, thus performing one's core evolutionary duty), Vanaprastha (the state of learning to let go of wordly comforts and spreading wisdom) and Sanyasa (the stage of isolated contemplation). Implicit in the Chaturashrama is that the path to each stage is through the previous. For instance, one cannot learn to let go in the right way unless one has been in complete control. Thus, these four stages represent four key functions of a person's journey through life: learning, taking control, letting go, and reflection.

While the four stages are prescribed for different periods in life, the modern world is seldom so linear. I'll proceed to claim that each stage is constantly present in our lives, and further, that each stage individually can provide both positive and negative feedback on the other. I'll argue that mastering the balance between these constraints or tensions can result in unprecedented success (spiritual, emotional, and or financial).

To be successful in the modern world, any entity (be it an individual direct the course of his/her personal life or a large organization) must continually cycle through these four functions every waking moment. To elaborate, one must continually

learn (update oneself about the state of the world)
take control (make decisions based on the knowledge gathered and take responsibility for the consequences)
trust and let go (be able to delegate responsibilities to those who step up and trust them to do it, as well as move on from unexpected failures)
reflect (create new knowledge through reevaluation and contextualization of own experience and state of the world).

Seen thus, experiences from personal life have direct parallels in management. In fact, several management functions can be (and have been) organized according to these criteria. Given that one is always playing the balancing act between these functions, it is worthwhile asking when they are in conflict with each other, and when they reinforce each other.

The G-V Balance, or how to DO well. Lessons in executive excellence
Mastering the tension between taking control and letting go (Grihastha-Vanaprastha balance), is a trait that can be seen in the best leaders of the world.

The B-S Balance, or how to THINK well. Lessons in strategic excellence
Likewise, closing the loop between learning and reflection (Brahmacharya-Sanyasa balance) can been seen in some of the world's best thinkers. Here learning refers to casting a wide net for ideas and knowledge and having the humility and curiosity to learn from anyone, while reflection refers to the courage to think on one's own reject good ideas at times, the vision to separate bad ideas from good ones, and the capacity to synthesize new knowledge.

[Footnote: Couldn't resist, but excellent thinking is mostly about knowing your way around B-S!]

The D-T Balance, or how to THINK by DOING and DO by THINKING
While the G-V balance deals with the issue of how to be a good doer [in management world, an executive; in the scientific world, an experimentalist], the B-S balance deals with how to be a good thinker [in the management world, a strategist; in the scientific world, a theorist]. And doubtlessly, acquiring each balance is a lesson in acquiring the other. By extension, it is possible to imagine that one always pursue excellence in thinking through excellence in doing and vice versa, leading us to study a third balance: the thinking-doing balance.

Mastering each of these balances is a book in itself and may be the subject of future posts!

On crossing the chasm and reshaping the adoption curve

2010-05-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

Moore's bestseller, Crossing the chasm talks about the diffusion of innovation through the technology adoption distribution as though it is a static distribution of people ranging from early adopters to laggards. The book presents a framework to study the dynamics of adoption of a certain idea (or more often, commercial product) and helps us understand its spread from being niche meme to mass hysteria to slow fade out.

Marketing-to-geek ideologies suggest that innovators, rather than making 'average products for average people' (to paraphrase the ideologies of giants such as UniLever and P&G from the mid-20th century) should target the early adopters and recruit their faith and passion to help cross the chasm.

In reality however, the adoption distribution is not static. There is a constant traffic of people from one part of the distribution to another. Laggards sometimes open up, and tend to become mainstream adopters. In other situations, mainstream adopters can become early adopters. People evolve into some ideas, and devlove into others. This flow in turn may be steeply dependent on a few irreducible parameters. I wonder how much this kind of flow has been modeled or studied in behavioral economics, for instance.

Given this assumption of a parametrically varying adoption distribution, it is possible to conceive of a new marketing strategy, which would come up with methods prepare or pre-seed the adoption distribution by tracking the right parameters which control people flow, so that we have inherently more early adopters than mainstream users or laggards. The chasm would not be one static point in the distribution somewhere between the early adopters and the early mainstream, but shuffle around depending on this people-flow across the distribution. We could call such a marketing strategy: Where is the Chasm now?

It is my gut feeling that general purpose initiatives which aim to inspire people and make them take a proactive, curious, experimental stance to life such as TED, would play a very strong role in making the chasm move left, and would thus become a more and more integral aspect of marketing functions in insitutions worldwide.

The third thing about fame

2010-04-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

Among the many assertions that have been made about fame are the following. Fame brings wealth, renown and a great social standing. Aspiring to be famous is for the selfish and power-hungry. Fame breeds arrogance, laziness and corruption. Etc. But are there only those two sides to fame?

Perhaps a nuanced assertion that has been made less often is the following. Aspiring to fame is a deep willingness and open invitation to be judged by the world. It is a complete submission, and a handing over of the right to be criticized, praised and talked about, to everybody in the world, regardless of their qualification or emotional stake in passing judgment. Aspiring to a public life is thus an aspiration to live in complete and utter openness. I'll argue here that there is a right way, a noble way, to aspire to be renowned, that fame is not always base. Let's call this fame 3.0 for simplicity.

Fame 3.0 is very close conceptually to ideas from several places. For instance, it is very close to the the Bhagavad Gita's "actions > rewards" prescription, or the stress of process over results from the enterpreneurial school of thought.

And it's probably fame 3.0 being confused for fame 1.0 or 2.0 that got Jesus crucified or Martin Luther King assassinated.

December season's reflections of a midsummer escapade

2010-04-07T14:11:00.001-07:00

What if Garcia-Marquez had been brought up a Tam Brahm? That is the subject of this experimental fiction piece.

---------------------------x----------------------------

Gopal-Giridhar Madhusudhan looked out of the window, idly, about to roll over and go back to sleep, only to recall the promise he had made to himself this time: to get more out of the trip. It was his seventh visit back to Chennai in as many years. Each December, he had returned, if not from a faithfulness, then from a simple, acknowledged, fear of loneliness in the darkest weeks of the year.

Over Gopal’s first few visits, he had not wanted much, content to laze around in his parents’ home, get driven around, and generally fed the middle-class version of a dream vacation. In later years, he became a more conscientious vacation planner. Once, he accumulated culture-vulture oomph meticulously, attending every lec-dem session in the December sabhas, downing cups of filter coffee with dhonnais of steaming hot kesari in the mornings. Another time, he collected greenie points from wildlife trips. From a Valmik Thapar rant, through discussions with a friend about RFID collars for endangered species and the ethics of it, he had chalked out and executed a trail through Sariska. Yet another time, he sought free-spirit points by doing unplanned road trips through a randomly chosen region, performing informal case studies of microeconomic behavior. This year again, he had set himself such a goal. He would later realize that each vacation’s goal could succinctly be summarized thus: to get a sufficient dose of ‘wholesomeness’ out of the December visit to last him through the next sterile winter.

---------------------------x----------------------------

Gopal sat down, pen in hand, fresh coffee by his side, lighting to his satisfaction. He wrote:

Creativity is not a faucet.

That same tired witticism he had picked up from a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. Not very creative. This was not some e-mail to a junior.

Lately, Gopal had been exploring the effects of the environment and elaborately designed mood scenarios on writing quality, the null hypothesis being that no morbid or weak thoughts could be forthcoming from the nourished, fresh-coffee-equipped soul, on a satisfactorily-lit Chennai morning. He wrote again:

"I'll give you 30 seconds in heaven", she said. "What, literally?" he retorted, faking a nervous laugh, by now. "Yeah, my name is heaven". He was snubbed.

No, no that’s not right. That’s terrible. He was snubbed? Snubbed? Staccato. Faking a nervous laugh? More like trying too hard and not enough altogether at once. No flow. My name is heaven?! Stand-up comedy? He scratched it out and tried again.

“I’ll give you 30 seconds in heaven”, she said. “What, literally?” he retorted, trying on a macho, assured laugh. Wrong move. The ‘Wh’ came out high pitched. He kicked himself internally, but it showed and she laughed. In future recountings of the incident to himself, he would always stress that her laughter was knowing and amused, a laughter of the eye, an ‘I get you, and that’s cool’ signal rather than an exposing, sarcastic laughter. “Yeah,” she replied with a blank stare, quickly checking her impulse to flash a smile, “my name is heaven”. Her future recountings of this moment were fond, and slightly self-congratulatory on account of her spontaneous naughtiness.

Better already. The drama was unfolding neatly. But the punchline had moved too far away for a reader to make the connection. But at this point Gopal checked himself. Too much academic writing, reader simulations, paragraph conjunctions. Humbug. More importantly, this was far from morbid. He seemed to be deviating from the task at hand. Was the null hypothesis undeniable? He tried again. Directness with two esses.

He had fucked a whore, bought himself a ticket to intimacy, barely conscious of the possibility of future remorse. He would later learn to describe this moment as a signing away of his 'claim to have always strived for the greatest good'.

Big deal. That came out just preachy, not morbid.

The aesthete in him made him cringe. The coffee had lost its steamy nip and the sun had risen too high. Imperceptibly at first, but unmistakably, he felt crippled. This was his third day in a row attempting to sketch the same scene. It was going to be yet another sultry day of inaction.

More books

2010-03-16T15:36:00.000-07:00

Stuff I have been snacking on.

Sustainable swimming beaches in Chennai

2009-10-25T00:51:00.000-07:00

Chennai has a large coastline. However, there are hardly any clean and safe swimming beaches. This is largely due to fishing settlements in many inner city beaches. The fishermen do not have access to clean toilets. So, they use the sea as a toilet. This is especially common at dawn, when one would ideally like to go for a swim before it gets too hot.

Another problem caused by the fishing settlements is the inability to build coastal roads through these settlements, leading to congestion in narrow lanes forced to become arterial roads (e.g. Anna Street connecting Kalakshetra colony and Marundeeshwarar temple).

However, the fishing settlement can be empowered with a tremendous resource right at their doorstep. Waves. Small scale offshore wave energy turbines can be installed in each such settlement. A fraction of the energy generated can be used to power low cost housing for these settlements. The rest can be traded in the energy market. The proceeds can go towards funding low cost housing, and a sanitation system, followed by beach beautification.

So that the fishermen can remain economically independent, we need an NGO to fund the setting up of wave turbines, which the settlement can own or part-own with an energy company.

A derivative product can be structured around the risks (the energy company giving the knowhow and equipment for wave turbines needs high waves, the fishermen need low waves).

If this can be piloted in a handful of beach-kuppams in Chennai, over time the beach can become clean. Beautification projects can be started, and people can feel safe to go for a swim without fear of diarrhoea.

Obviously my suggestion is very lazy and naive. It does not take into account the cost of setting up wave turbines, their energy output efficiency, the ability to integrate the generated energy into the local grid and how the energy market works. Oracles, please help me work out the details in the comments section.

For more info:
http://indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/content/ocean-wave-power-generation-concept-trial-orissa-and-other-coastal-states
http://www.thehindu.com/2009/06/05/stories/2009060558970400.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chennai_Elevated_Expressways

New acquisitions

2009-10-21T21:41:00.000-07:00

Some new acquisitions from Landmark over Diwali:

Instantaneous and lagged seasons

2009-09-29T09:56:00.000-07:00

Helsinki is certainly a four-season city. I have often been asked which is the best season to visit. To this question, I often give monosyllabic answers after considering and discarding some very long and unsatisfactory answers.

It struck me that of the four, perhaps the season that is experienced with least immediacy is spring. Whereas summer, fall and winter can be experienced with great immediacy, the experience of spring critically depends on the winter that is ending (the input or the moving-average component) and its experience (the state or the auto-regressive component).

So, I would call spring a causal, auto-regressive moving-average season, a lagged season and rank it as the least interesting when experienced instantaneously.

On neologisms

2009-07-16T08:21:00.000-07:00

While coining a neologism, especially in science, but also generally, here is a checklist that one could adhere to:

1. It should sound less jargon-like than the jargons it is composed of: "Jargon added is jargon halved" effect.

2. It should be fresh, but not just frivolous and as far as possible, intuituve.

3. Once defined, it should have a greater sense of immediacy, and home-in on the concept faster than the definition itself. In that sense it should be focused. However, it should be more than focused in the following way. The definition should remain fresh, such that on re-reading the definition, and definitions of terms used in the definition (recursively), it should evoke a richer, diverse cloud of related ideas and thus contextually situate the neologism.

4. It should have a quality of being used by the 'in-crowd', in a manner that the anxious 'out-crowd' wants to understand what it means and start using it in sentences.

Building on the brain

2009-07-08T04:29:00.000-07:00

I came across this piece in the latest issue of Neuron.

John P Eberhard. 2009. Applying Neuroscience to Architecture. Neuron 62:753-756.

Basically, it is a promo piece for the author's latest book Brain Landscape, which advocates architects to apply findings of brain imaging to their design of schools, hospitals, public spaces, old age homes and memorials. Eberhard is the founding President of the non-profit Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, established in 2003. You get the picture.

Why have ideas such as these and other low-hanging fruit (neuroeconomics, neurocinematics) become so popular these days, without anybody bothering to address how neuroscientific knowledge (such as: the prefrontal cortex is involved in decision making) is not completely superfluous to knowledge from conventional psychology and the behavioral sciences (such as: natural light improves class grades) as far as application domains (such as architecture) are concerned? Note that I do not dispute the fact that such neuro-marriages may be intellectually stimulating.

The saving grace is that it wasn't called neuroarchitecture (not to be confused with neuroarchitectonics: the beautiful and painstaking characterization of brain anatomy in terms of cell types, synapse densities, tissue properties, relative thickness of cortical layers, vasculature etc. etc. which early 20th century greats like Cajal and Brodmann pioneered).

I'm not arguing for traditionalism, I'm not arguing for scientists to be conservative with their imagination. On that contrary, I am disappointed that out-of-the-box thinking falls so dreadfully short of the mark. Why can't we be more original? It is not as though fresh insight and imagination cannot be applied to traditional stuff of the brain such as anatomy, hemodynamics, connectivity, learning, memory etc.

What next? Neuromusicology, neuromarketing, neuropublishing, neurojournalism, neurolaw, neuro-neuroscience? Up for grabs. Quick, before somebody else.

Soul aether poetry

2009-05-03T15:27:00.000-07:00

In earnestly overdesigned, Randian, dystopic cities, ego depletes and the soul bleeds aether, one Merchant-of-Venetian fleshpound at a time. A giant gascloud of fecundity rarefies, almost imperceptibly, and the very creatability of comparative-comparative-history, that great recursive weapon of ideological warfare, set to take root in c. 3500 CE, stands threatened.

Contests for innovation

2009-04-27T05:02:00.000-07:00

So, here's a simple (perhaps simplistic) idea to accelerate the development of innovative methods for neuromagnetic source separation.

1. Create a simulated dataset for benchmarking purposes with unknown number of sources. It should be hard to find the underlying sources. The hardness is engineered by placing sources in known blind spots of existing algorithms (eg. since we know that ICA cannot separate Gaussian sources, or MUSIC cannot separate correlated sources, we deliberately introduce them).

2. Release the benchmarking dataset online, provide a two-year time frame, and announce a small prize money like $50k [roughly, less than the cost of one grad student, without factoring in the resources needed to create a benchmarking dataset].

3. Provide a minimum set of rules for reporting the method and its results.

4. Incentivize journal editors to make a 'special issue' out of the contest solutions.

This would

a) force the already tiny 'neuroimaging methods' community to take each others' work into account more seriously than merely paying lip service.
b) incentivize the abolishment of 'idea embargoes' non-scientific in root.
c) avoid the repeated publication of existing solutions in lower tier journals ad infinitum.

and thus, save resources, and accelerate solutions.

Ancient Hinduism and Bayesian inference

2009-03-05T00:48:00.000-08:00

What is common among the two?

1. Bayesian inference accommodates and absorbs other schools of inference, much like Hinduism did to invading tribes.

2. In both Bayesian thought and (some schools of orthodox) Hinduism, the underlying variable (fundamental truth) is non-deterministic.

Chaturashrama and political philosophy

2009-02-13T05:52:00.000-08:00

There is no one universal political philosophy, just as there is no one universal personal philosophy. What do I mean by that? I am not postulating some new and improved universal brotherhood formula, rather, I am stressing that an optimal (defined in whatever sense, and hence, an absolute) strategy exists for each stage of life as described in Chaturashrama (four stages of life).

Along the same lines, varying political philosophies, that optimize different progress-indicators of a nation state can be adopted at varying stages of a nation's life. For instance, it may be argued that according to certain metrics, market economics was good for India when it happened and should stay that way for the near future, whereas the same cannot be said for a country that is not yet ready to receive competition from multinationals.

The problem of course comes with globalization where there is too much confrontation between nation states, and the diversity of needs (i.e. diversity of definitions of optimality) is staggering, the problem comes when identities of nation states and progress directions have to redefined as fast as they are being created.

Catcher in the rye and other escape professions

2009-02-09T22:26:00.000-08:00

This is not a post about the book or the characters itself, just a lead in.

Why has Catcher in the rye appealed to young readers for many generations? The character is able to articulate his frustration with his surroundings in immediate terms. He is dripping with misanthropy largely because he feels something is glaringly wrong with the world. Most people go through this in the first few years of leaving home.

But perhaps the greatest reason the book is appealing is that it offers a dreamlike escape, or more accurately, it demonstrates the possibility that someone in the depths of misanthropy (of the 'society sucks man', kind) can conceive of an unadulterated world, thus articulating with dreamlike accuracy [1], the reasons of his disillusionment with the world. The character wants to be a 'catcher in the rye', someone who can see the sun cutting through the rye field on the edge of a cliff, making everything golden; there are kids running around and playing in the field; and the only job of the catcher is to catch these kids when they try to jump off the cliff.

Are there any other such appealing escape professions [2]?

Frame lifter

I remember when we hung out on the Dihing terrace, there was one idea (Nachiket, 2005). On an F1 circuit, the pitstop for refueling and tyre changes takes about 6 seconds. To maximize efficiency, a team of mechanics waiting in position. Once the car is parked, there is one person at the back who releases a lever and raises the frame of the car so that two persons at the sides can pull out the back tyres and replace them.

Coffee totaller.

The guy who makes the bill at a small town (eg. Karaikal) 'breakfast and meals' place, slightly larger than a shack or cart on the street, so as to warrant a separate' kanakku pillai' for dawn shift, when the town wakes up, and before the first beads of sweat tell of another blinding, treacherous, humid day.

[1] By dreamlike accuracy, I mean with great attention to the details of the scene, but missing obvious logical considerations such as what happens when the sun sets or the kids poop, or what about the annoying buzz of the cars on the F1 circuit?

[2] Escape profession summarized by this ex-NYC web 2.0 geek blogger

Note: Thanks to flickr and the diligent photographers

Independence vs. Correlation

2008-11-27T13:54:00.001-08:00

I wonder, of the many distinctions made between these statistical notions whether the following interesting one has been made, i.e., to declare two random variables independent, an observer is not required, whereas only an observer can pronounce two random variables as correlated, post-hoc. Hence, independence is a property of the distribution, (in the context of generative function as opposed to histogram), whereas correlation is a property of one single realization sampled from that distribution with respect to another such realization.

If I were Hugh Macleod, I would say at this point, "Exactly. Bayesian vs. Frequentist."

Vetri kodi kattu

2008-11-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

I walked into the bus with a textbook and a take-away snack, my usual brooding self, and proceeded towards a seat. Instead of the normally indifferent or imperceptible nod from the bus driver, I received an animated "tervetuloa" and a broad smile. He was black. Listening to his own radio catching a bit of the victory speech. Obama trickle-down effect WIN? I tried to find a seat in front to eavesdrop. For the rest of the people on the bus it was another day in the works.

Commedia dell' arte

2008-10-23T09:49:00.000-07:00

Watched a Finnish play yesterday called Kalevala Dell' Arte, an adaptation of parts of the Finnish epic, Kalevala in the genre of Commedia dell' arte, an Italian street theatre tradition from the 16th century.

I was told that Commedia dell' arte, a masked theatre tradition, was created by the first full time travelling theatre group in Europe. This anonymous medium was a voice to criticize society and ridicule the bourgeois. The plots were on common themes such as love, adultery etc. The roots of the modern clown are believed to have originated here. Some brief wiki hopping revealed this.

Aussie Enfield riding Che

2008-09-04T05:02:00.000-07:00

For a while, I had abandoned the dream of road trips of scale. Across continents and spanning years. As eurocentric, as hippie, as naive. Today I bumped into a drunk, genial, greying aussie, who bought an Enfield -- 350cc, 6V battery, he was careful to point out -- in Triplicane. Twenty years ago. And biked across 3 continents in 4 years. Latent dreams are not extinct etc.

Le moderne post (incomplete)

2008-08-26T03:51:00.000-07:00

Orientalism

Edward Said
The myth of the clash of civilizations

Pay attention to the criticisms of Said, most of which I find more important than his work, particularly, the very valid accusations of occidentalism. I find it difficult to believe that the generalization employed by oriental scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries (under scrutiny in Said's work), is intended as a willful misrepresentation of the 'truth' about the east. Whatever that is. In this context, Sen's view of generalizations (and a fluid, evolving truth) in his conversations with history talk (see below) is more earthy.

Subaltern studies (to be watched)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
The trajectory of the Subaltern in my work

Welfare economics etc.

Amartya Sen
Liberal Paradox
Conversations with history
Identity and violence

In connection with Sen's analysis of famine, see Emily Oster

English news in Scandinavia

2008-07-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

With its rapidly greying work force, it has been some time since the European labour market has opened its doors, even if just a symbolic inch, to immigrant workers. It is my perception however (unbolstered by statistics) that among the refugees and the skilled professionals of the third world who enter the continent for work, while the former go on to naturalize, the latter return home, or move away to greener pastures where naturalization is easier (US, Canada, UK, Australia).

One incentive to retain and integrate professionals is to provide more local news in English. Since recently, English print edition dailies in Europe have been extremely rare. Here is a highly incomplete collection of English news and magazines in Scandinavia. Finland seems to be the last to have woken up, but I am optimistic.

Major resource: World Newspapers

Newspapers
Helsinki Times. Estd. 2007. Quality and circulation has improved drastically in a very short time. Printed weekly.
Helsingin Sanomat has daily English summaries and a weekly digest. But this service, like most things in Finland goes down for the summer!

Copenhagen Post. Estd. 1997. Tabloid format. I thumbed through it while I was there. International and local news. Very few pages though. Printed daily.
Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's leading daily, has an online News in English section.

The Local (Sweden). Estd. 2004. Excellent coverage of equality, women's rights etc. which are central issues in Sweden. Free online daily. A print edition doesn't seem to exist. They have started a franchise in Germany this year!
The Local (Germany): Estd. Feb. 2008. Online daily.
Japan News Review (Sweden). Estd. 2007. A unique and exclusive coverage of Japan. Includes redirects to other English news featuring Japan and compilations from Japanese news pieces. How strange!
There is also the rather trendy World News Cafe with newspapers from all over the world (about a week late), situated inside the Kulturhuset in central Stockholm.

The Norway Post: Estd. 2005. Online daily.
Aftenposten (Norway) has daily English summaries online.

Magazines
Six Degrees (Finland). Estd. 2006. Coverage is very expat centric i.e. language problems, job market, refugee integration etc. Some travel pieces etc. A good place to look for city events (Turku, Tampere, Helsinki, Oulu). Prints10 issues a year.
The Reykjavik Grapevine. Estd. 2003. I came across it in some Espresso bar in downtown Reykjavik circa July 2007. Content is very eclectic. Perhaps targeted at the tourist market (who are all quite eclectic). Also quite prolific and prints 18 issues a year.
The Scandinavian Insider. Estd. 2006. Printed in Sweden and Denmark 4 times a year.

Moral high ground

2008-07-18T04:47:00.001-07:00

Recently, I have passively, yet voraciously been consuming distilled wisdom from thought leaders in the blogosphere. Two exhilarating Chennai based blogs are krishashok and maami. They are so good that I could hawk them at traffic signals, pursue a disinterested bloghopper like you unrelentingly, and aggressively advertise them with illegal subliminal messages until you buy into them. In other words, I highly recommend them.

Anyway, a common accusation I have encountered in post-related-comment-page-skirmishes is: you are being self righteous. you are taking a moral high ground. My question is: isn't this accusation itself, moral?

Jalsafication of citations

2008-07-18T04:34:00.000-07:00

Let us dispense with the boring Moore et al. and do some jalsa with it.

Recently, Marquez et hombres showed that...
For a recent review see Arunachalam and nanbargal...
As early as the 16th century, Columbus and cronies...
A compelling alternative was proposed by Paneerselvam and his oothukaadu machis!

The grip of an idea

2008-07-18T04:27:00.000-07:00

I read somewhere that Boltzmann knew what it was to be in the grip of an idea. Is it possible to communicate the experience of the grip (form) independent of communicating the idea (content)? I wonder. This problem I would like to call contentization of form.

This is important because, it is often the grip that tends to unite people, leading to true comaraderie rather than the idea itself. The idea merely serves as a handle to grip, or a social object.

Summarily, form is socially important. We connect around form. This is a well known, yet little understood, fundamental idea which is at the heart of innovations in web 2.0 (there is room for twitter when blogger exists), marketing (coats de rhone vs. goats do roam), world peace etc. I am in the grip of it. How do I communicate it to you?

Quadratic phenomena

2008-07-18T04:05:00.000-07:00

Definition: A dependent variable (y) that is a quadratic function of an independent variable (x), resulting in y(x) having a U or inverted U shape.

Intriguing hypothesis (to be tested):
y: Number of cliques in a city with high intra-clique cultural diversity
x: Cultural diversity of the city

1. Can you think of any other interesting quadratic phenomena?

2. Why are quadratic phenomena sexier/more convincing than linear phenomena (eg. my grandmother's age vs. crude oil prices)?

3. Are they more convincing because there are fewer quadratic sources of confound than linear sources?

4. Are quadratic phenomena sexier to (straight) men because of their curves? If so, is there a population of (straight) women who find linear phenomena more intriguing? (line = thrusting, pointy, hence more masculine). In this connection, there was a looney tunes animation with narration about a love story between a circle and a line.

Ctrl-Alt-Del

2007-09-11T09:53:00.000-07:00

Back, after a not so brief hiatus, just to inform of posts to come:

1. Statistical modelling of music: A speculative framework. Parametrization, predicitve and descriptive models. Residuals. What can residuals explain? Neural basis of musical novelty. Statistical approaches to composition. Neural basis of humor (as a parallel from linguistics). Etc.

2. Travel feature: Hazy memories of Christiania. Surreal week in Iceland. Mad and hilarious hitchhiker-tramp-woman-child. Just mad, I tell you.

Of Cyclohexane and The Blues

2007-01-28T02:46:00.000-08:00

For lack of material, I am putting up an old piece, to showcase perhaps my attempt at syncognesic joinings and my recidivistic romance with the blues. (Think Muddy Waters, B B King, SR Vaughan, Howlin' Wolf...and not anti-'Nam protest rock) On re-reading, I felt the metaphors have a certain mumb-jumbo-ness to them, but the piece is still fresh as ever. Enjoy!

To borrow from Bertrand Russel, classification, quantization, drawing an envelope around one and clustering his or her characteristics into countably finite entities, is if not especially offensive, a rather commonplace way to describe a person. For example, so and so is intelligent, pensive and wonderfully verbose(this could be anybody). There, you have it: like a sine wave is decomposed into its Fourier Series co-efficients, I am holding the entire individual in three words on my palm! Oh, and to break away, I suppose that's why a character sketch is called a character sketch is called a character sketch and not a character distribution function.

Well, anyway, I proceed here to represent metaphorically, essentially similar ideas, in the form of a genre of western music that has intrigued me infinitely - The Blues. So, in spite of myself, let me go ahead and "define" the blues, or at least lay down it’s, ah...(a grimace) characteristics. Before I begin, let me warn you (if you're expecting a logical unraveling of facts, or of the type that lets of a hiccup or two at anachronistic detail), I am going to be extremely random with the facts.

The blues originated in the Americas(correct me if I'm wrong) in the mid fifties (when the sampling theorem was not yet applied to music and copies came out largely as LP records or cassette tapes). The blues are about the many faceted nature of this species, about emotions and desire, about dreams and ideas and hope and faith and life and death and love and war. In fact, it is a complex, yet unknown black box(or should I say blue box), that maps the mere twelve (semi tone separated) notes into an amalgam of all the things that I could think of in the previous line.

If you're still reading (which means you can stand my style), you're probably wondering what cyclohexane is doing here, trying to lend an olfactory dose (quote: cyclohexane has cyclohexane-like smell) of its own to that amalgam we are all so much part of.

The blues, are, if not outright unsanctimonious and profane, are cynical in subtle ways that mere lyrics don't spell out. It keeps its distance from society and congregation and politics. In essence, the blues are free, they have infinite degrees of freedom.

And cyclohexane is all these things in a single molecule. It is NON PLANAR (perhaps the most distinguishing feature of blues licks). A lot of other genres of music are horribly planar and predictable. Besides, cyclohexane -- not cyclobutane or cyclopentane, but cyclohexane is devoid of ANGLE STRAIN - it is emancipated from its predecessors and successors; much like that embryonic golden age of the sixties - the youth and prime of blues, a dizzy period of transcendence and awareness (transcendence above obsolete value systems, awareness of the enormity and richness of inner reality). And lastly, (for although - All good things must come to and end is a fatalistic idea, I am as much at my wit's end to conjure up other lines of thought, cyclohexane is of course, CYCLIC, just like every blues lick is a set of non-planar notes that return to wherefrom they began, just like the inevitability of life's bittersweet route that charts its course through that amalgam we earlier, talked about.

Well, what do you know, here I am, holding this incomprehensible motley that The Blues are, in just three words in my other palm (one palm is already holding those three other words). And after all this, if I am unable to arrive at a less inharmonious conclusion than "An idle mind is a devil's workshop, but at least it’s free", it’s because its time to get back home and listen to some more!

June ’04.

Metaphorically Speaking

2007-01-13T04:04:00.000-08:00

How many times have you encountered the following expressions: ‘This soup is rather flat. Pass me the salt, will you?’ Or, ‘D Minor is so blue, it makes me sad like nothing else’. Of course, every language is replete with cross sensory metaphors we use them all the time to describe anything ranging from food and drink to song and dance. But suppose D Minor didn’t evoke blue merely in your imagination and instead rendered a rich temporally varying texture in indigo and shades of blue (akin to media player visualizations) right before your eyes? In other words, if you saw blue every time D Minor was played and red every time you heard F# major? Well, then you suffer from (or are privileged to enjoy) a rare neuro-psychological phenomenon called synesthesia. Unless you are on mescal, peyote or LSD.

Synesthesia (Greek, syn = together + aesthesis = perception) is the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association. That is, the stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses. Its phenomenology clearly distinguishes it from metaphor, literary tropes, sound symbolism, and deliberate artistic contrivances that sometimes employ the term "synesthesia" to describe their multisensory joinings.

As you can imagine, artists and writers are greatly aided by this gift of perception. Some synesthetes are also observed to have amazing memories, almost photographic. This is because almost every event in their lives is rich with conjoined sensation that influences their process of learning concepts and facts in a manner not dissimilar to associative learning.

Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian-American novelist and writer describes his synesthesia in his autobiography Speak Memory where he recalls his early childhood experiences of playing with colored wooden blocks of alphabet. The wooden blocks had a red ‘A’ and to him, ‘A’ was blue! So, he asked his mother how anybody could be so stupid to get the colours all wrong! But his mother understood of course, because she also suffered from same common form of synesthesia in which letters of the alphabet appear coloured. Nabokov’s son Dimitri inherited the trait as well.

Richard Cytowic, a leading neurologist in the field and author of the popular-science book ‘The Man who Tasted Shapes’ shares his inspiration to study the phenomenon. I quote from the transcripts:

…How did you get interested in it in the first place yourself?

Oh a complete accident, absolutely an accident. I was at a medical centre in North Carolina, and I lived next to the Conservatory, the School of the Arts, and my neighbour who taught at the School of the Arts, was kind enough to invite me to dinner and there was a bunch of us there and he'd made roast chickens and he delayed us sitting down to table with the admonition that there aren't enough points on the chicken. And he turned beet red and said, 'Oh my god, I shouldn't have said that, but well you're a neurologist, maybe you understand. I taste according to shape and I wanted the taste of this chicken to be a pointed, prickly shape, and it came out all round. I can't possibly serve this, I've got to fix it up.' And everybody else thought that he was just being silly, and I asked a few more questions and he told me that he'd had it all his life, nobody seemed to understand what he was talking about, and I said, 'Oh Michael, you've got synesthesia.' And he said, 'You mean there's a name for this?' And I said, 'Well yes'. And the rest is history. So Michael Watson, the lighting designer of the School of the Arts, is in fact The Man Who Tasted Shapes of the book's title. And that began a ten year adventure that we had together of trying to explain what was going on in his brain…

Studies have revealed that one in about twenty five thousand persons are synesthetic, women are twice more likely to be synesthetic than men, and further, that it runs in families. Most synesthetes have a conjoining of two senses, vision and audition, vision and taste or vision and touch. (Vision is dominant because of the obvious reason that there are as many as 30 discrete centers in the brain that are involved in processing of visual stimuli.)

Okay, so freak value apart, what is the big deal about this LSD-like perceptual experience without LSD? In other words, what elevates the phenomenon beyond a mere medical curiosity? I quote from Vilanayur Ramachandran’s BBC Reith Lecture on Synesthesia in 2003.

I'm going to show all of you that synesthesia is not just a quirk in some people's brain. All of you here are synesthetes, and I'm going to do an experiment. I want all of you to imagine in front of you, to visualise in front of you a bulbous amoeboid shape which looks a bit, has lots of curves on it, undulating curves. And right next to it imagine a jagged, like a piece of shattered glass with jagged shapes. And just for fun, I'm going to tell you this is Martian alphabet. Just as in English alphabet, A is a, B is b, you've got each shape with the particular sound, this is Martian alphabet and one of these shapes is kiki and the other is booba, and I want you to tell me which is which. How many of you think the bulbous shape is the kiki, raise your hands? Well there's one mutation there. In fact what you find is if you do this experiment, 98% of people say the jagged shape, the shattered glass is kiki, and the bulbous amoeboid shape is a booba. Now why is that? You never learnt Martian and nobody here is a Martian. The answer is you're all synesthetes but you're in denial about it. And I'll explain. Look at the kiki and look at the sound kiki. They both share one property, the kiki visual shape has a sharp inflexion and the sound kiki represented in your auditory cortex, in the hearing centres in the brain also has a sharp sudden inflexion of the sound and the brain performs a cross-modal synesthetic abstraction saying the only thing they have in common is the property of jaggedness. Let me extract that property, that's why they're both kiki.

Now let us take this idea of sensory fusion to a higher level of abstraction. I propose (with a heavy heart, for I discovered just yesterday that Ramachandran beat me to it) that we can obtain a glimpse (however slight) into the neural basis of the uniquely human aptitude for metaphor, abstract thought and the ability to draw parallels between seemingly unrelated ideas. I propose that akin to synesthesia, there must exist a phenomenon I dare to call syn-cognesia which helps us unify (not involuntarily perceived stimuli) but learned concepts that seem dissimilar. For instance, syn-cognesists like Newton and Kepler explained the waxing of the moon and the falling of an apple to the earth by the same law. Non-linear dynamists posit a common criticality to explain weather, ant colonies and superconductivity. And of course, more trivially, surrealists like me can spot stark similarities in the structural properties of cyclic alkanes and twentieth century music!

An experimental recipe: Lemon Curry?

2006-12-15T14:12:00.001-08:00

I hereby add another hue (or rather, a whole spectrum) to the Metaphorical Rainbow. In other words, I attempt to stretch metaphors two sizes too large. Hopefully they will shrink in the vortex of washing machine-like discourse to follow.

1. I start with a meta narrative. On metaphors. Overt stress on metaphors in writing or formulating theories is like shopping for more than you need. Often, the beautiful ideas coming about through cross linkages across vastly dissimilar hyperspaces may stay forever in the idea book, just as the dazzlingly splendid garment may spend it’s life in the bottom of the closet.

2. Is it a mere coincidence that the body of a neuron, the purported functional unit of consciousness shares its name with the Vedic ‘Ambrosia’ of the Gandharvas? Incidentally, it also shares its name with Huxley’s fictitious Ecstasy like serotonin circuit activator!

3. Eureka! The neural basis for a very complex emotion: love. [Note to self: Throw in some Shakespeare to make it sound cooler]. I predict there must be a molecule for platonic delight – just like serotonin for hedonistic pleasure. Or at the very least, something at the systems level: a neural circuit of sorts. Those perceptive enough will acknowledge the almost impulsive need to seek something intellectually stimulating and lastingly beautiful moments after an orgasm. Sometimes even before the cleaning up. Perhaps this is the platonic pleasure circuit (or our Plato-serotonin if you like) at work. Differentially coupled with the hedonistic serotonin in a homeostatic loop.

Extrapolating, I wonder if evolutionary psychologists would trace man’s artistic and cultural achievements – heretofore considered as epiphenomena resulting from the blind workings of Darwinian selection (and thus reviving an interest in Lamarckianism), to the refractory period! Speculative as it sounds, what isn’t when it comes to EP? However, I note here that a refractory period between orgasms may be merely a necessary rather than a sufficient condition for if it were, why don’t mice visit art galleries in Gothic mouse holes?

4. More EP-ness. OK. This is rather radical. Evolutionary Philosophy. ‘Western religion and philosophical thought’ and the propensity to classify human traits, to evolve a codified morality: is certainly at loggerheads with Eastern Mystic ideas, Vedanta or Zen Buddhism, where duality is an illusion, time is eternal and all become one. Now consider the clockwork like change of seasons in the temperate regions, the finesse of the drizzle, the impeccably neat vegetation and the clear demarcations between plain and plateau. By contrast, the torrential rainfall in the tropics of India, the dizzy altitudes of Tibet, or the chaos of the evergreen forests of Indonesia seem to have a natural identity of fuzziness, a tendency of fusing into one another. Connect the dots.

5. Is there a time and place for the sublime experience? Religious gatherings? Meditation camps? Malgudi days? Amsterdam? Can it be realized only with total ‘awareness’ as J. Krishnamurthi might suggest?

Or can it hit you like a bolt from the blue in the most unlikely of places? In the middle of a conversation on logistics; as you are driving by; or perhaps when you are selling a pack of chips door to door? There is a very fine line between the vulgar and the sublime. The glint in your younger brother’s eye when you tell him his first adult joke. The twenty one grotesque creatures of the Galerie des Chimerales overlooking the majestic Notre Dame. Or the half-clad, half-broken, half disgusting Venus de Milo adorning the most elite portals of the Louvre.

6. Mix well. Bring to a boil. Add salt to taste. Lemon curry at a Naked Lunch.

The great gig (in the sky)

2006-11-17T12:58:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons I started this blog on a whim was to provide a window to Finland, especially to those who have tacitly suggested that I have been reporting about largely trivial matters on orkut or otherwise. Yes, I can feel the vibes. So, in keeping with tradition, I will dutifully brush aside those vibes and NOT post anything about Scandinavian myths today. If the title of the post misled any (hypothetical, for I am not yet widely read) reader to believe that I chanced upon a dazzling streak of the Aurora Borealis during some overrated H.I.M. concert, then, well, it is a misleading title.

Just to quell all expectations of a concert review right away, I am not posting about the great Maiden gigs which took place on the 14th and 15th, back to back at the Hartwell Arena, Helsinki either. Hell no, fuck that! I am not your nitwit Eastender like Nicko McBrain! McBrain it seems! I half heartedly tried all avenues to get passes or tickets to a sold out gig without avail. But I digress.

And now for something, completely different. Before systems can be broken down to their constituents, buildings demolished, knowledge unlearned or for that matter zaniness deconstructed, they have to be evoked and sustained and spun, thus pervading the far reaches of their respective hyperspaces. What I mean by that for example, is that the wind cannot whisk away an air castle unless the air castle is conjured up in the first place. Hence, this post is about the nature of zaniness itself. I will aim to deconstruct it another time. ``Build, demolish, build'', says the Holy Trinity, ``with eternal recurrence''. ``Demolish, build, demolish''.

Just as a horse has to be led to the waterhole: for it is better than defining water to a horse with a chalk, a blackboard, lone pairs and pi-bonds, so let me try to define zaniness by evoking it. Zaniness (a noun form of zany) is a peculiar type of madness, other-worldliness or fringe-rationality personified by those rare geniuses capable of genuine wit and empathy, whose refinement shines through their childlike earthiness, who simultaneously exhibit a lust and apathy for life. They are those who have downed one too many from the shot-glass of reason, been drunk with it, immortalized in their own right by that transitory high, slept on the pavements of the real (rational?) world, experienced a nauseating hangover and subsequently puked it out of their system. With the fire of reason thus doused, what they are left with is their instincts and their guts (both visceral organs and balls (which are also visceral organs in a socially (un?)sanitized sense. Go figure!)). This purity of living by instinct sooner or later distills into a sweet irrationality, a stream-of-consciousness that knows not and judges not. According to me, this irrationality is in some sense elevated above logical reasoning and Descartes' school of 'thought'. For completeness, I must make some pop culture references. I refer to the likes of Yossarian, Salvador Dali, Monty Python, that protagonist from Notes from Underground (just kidding about this chap, he is a drama queen) and on occassions, an ambivalent loony by name Arjun (bracket inside (or outside) bracket) Krishnan (an inside reference).

However, zaniness is not only about zany people, who's personalities borrow from the adjective just as much as the adjective borrows from their personalities. It can also describe quite well, a time sequence of the subconscious. Dream-like sequences, oft rejected flashes of insight, or zany writings (unlike this piece) or drawings are instances when this element of subconsciousness breaks free to the fore. There are two universal types of irrationalities (independent of culture and other biases) and to use a simple parallel, they could be best described as childlike and childish. To use a bad metaphor however, anybody who has worked with stereograms will recognize that there are the spaced-out and the cross-eyed methods of viewing it, and that the figure leaps out from the ground in the former case, while it sinks below in the latter. If the ground represents a ground state rationality and the figure, a type of irrationality, then you have a neat visual metaphor for the two types of irrationality. (I suggest you view this one spaced-out, it will leap out at you!).

I hope it is apparent to some that I have woven a tight web (with many loose ends) of interleaved contradictions, emergent self parody and meta-emergent insight. There are a number of word tricks too, if you have an eye for detail. For those saner among my honoured readers, with a lower ZQ (Zaniness Quotient), well, I am not in Rome Doug, I am in rush!

Footnote: The great gig in the sky is the brightest side of The Dark Side of the Moon, which got me started on this piece.

Conver(sa)(tia)tions with myself

2006-11-12T06:21:00.000-08:00

The impulse to write has been building up inside for long enough. It has finally gathered ballast, passed a critical threshold - enough so that I have succumbed to the weakness of creating a blog for myself! Soon, the posts are going to rain down, not like the fat, assertive globules of a tropical monsoon, nor like the blinding flakes of a treacherous snowstorm in northern Siberia, but rather like the finer spindles of snowfall at zero degrees, uncertain whether to sting or tittilate, to fall wet or dry to the passive earth. When in Rome, Frankie, my son!