Frozen credit

The AMEX card being thawed after being in the freezer for a month.  One may think that there was no need to do this, but it did help in the no-credit card month to have this in the deep-freezer to avoid any temptations. It was a bit of a pain to keep track of the cash spending, but after a while you get used to it. The   experiment was overall a success with the added 'mindfulness' of spending money. A useful exercise in showing that,  far from being rational, impulses take hold of us.


The card had a nice washed look after the thawing and was promptly put to use!

Monkeys, Shakespeare and the Internet

"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true."
~Robert Wilensky

Is Doing a PhD a waste of time?

This article showed up in the Economist a while ago (December, 2010) but I got to reading it only now. I am currently in what can be described as 'evangelical zeal to read magazines' that have been piling up.

While this article -- The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time -- might be late in coming, it's still an interesting read in the manner of the perfect 20/20 vision of hindsight.

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle....Whining PhD students are nothing new, but there seem to be genuine problems with the system that produces research doctorates (the practical “professional doctorates” in fields such as law, business and medicine have a more obvious value). There is an oversupply of PhDs. Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings. Meanwhile, business leaders complain about shortages of high-level skills, suggesting PhDs are not teaching the right things. The fiercest critics compare research doctorates to Ponzi or pyramid schemes.

It's true that it takes a number of years, and perhaps your best ones. I sometimes felt that I spent all my youth in school. Of course I was much better off than students in anthropology and physics who on average take 7-10 years. As a PhD who is no longer working in academia, and for the record most of my friends who finished one are not working in academia either, I have never regretted for a moment taking/or wasting years finishing the degree. I enjoyed doing it and I had many rich experiences that were totally unconnected with academics, which I would never have enjoyed if I had a regular 9-5 job.

Academics tend to regard asking whether a PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world. They believe that knowledge spills from universities into society, making it more productive and healthier. That may well be true; but doing a PhD may still be a bad choice for an individual.

Now being done, I have not suffered greatly either. I admit that it may not reflect the experience of every PhD as it is in a 'somewhat useful' and currently 'somewhat hot' field of biomedical engineering. It may not make sense for everyone to do one. And as the article points out, everyone does not have the right motivation or reasons for doing one.

Many students say they are pursuing their subject out of love, and that education is an end in itself. Some give little thought to where the qualification might lead. In one study of British PhD graduates, about a third admitted that they were doing their doctorate partly to go on being a student, or put off job hunting. Nearly half of engineering students admitted to this. Scientists can easily get stipends, and therefore drift into doing a PhD. But there are penalties, as well as benefits, to staying at university. Workers with “surplus schooling”—more education than a job requires—are likely to be less satisfied, less productive and more likely to say they are going to leave their jobs

As the article points out there are about 100,000 PhDs minted each year and only about 16,000 new academic positions. People have to find work elsewhere, or may choose to find work elsewhere. The central assumption of the article that the PhD should lead to a academic job is not entirely correct. There are lots of well-paying, and often better-paying jobs in industry, non-profits, think-tanks, government, and startups. The article states that only 57% of the student actually finish a PhD casting some doubt on the enterprise. People quit for various reasons and I think that for many it might be the right decision. As in most things in life, the training and experience can always come handy later. I do agree that it's best to quit early. I am not quite sure if you can treat it as a 'sunk cost' if you quit in the 6th year of your program.

I do agree that there is an oversupply and universities should practice, as the article calls it, more voluntary birth-control. In addition there should be more training for PhDs who will be looking for non-academic jobs and developing soft-skills given that 90% of the people will not pursue jobs in academia.

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.

Words: Misread and misheard

Over the weekend as I was transferring the clothes from the washer I noticed this scribbled on a piece of paper:

ANGER NOT WORKING, BEING FIXED. TX!

I was struck by the profundity of the message and chuckled at the absurdity of finding something like this in the laundry room. Sometimes life is like that - you never know what you find. Everybody's anger needs fixing. I am glad that the person who wrote that note at least acknowledged it. It drew a much bigger laugh a few minutes later when the reality of the message struck me.

The New Yorker (May 23, 2011) informed me about the 'karma chain' that was set in motion by Lama Pema in New York a month ago. It was an interesting experiment: Lama Pema played a version of 'Chinese Whispers' (called 'Telephone' in the U.S.). The idea was that Lama Pema at the start of the chain of 300+ people would recite three sutras that would be passed from person to person with the author Salman Rushdie at the very end of the chain to receive the final message. The Lama wanted to test the proposition "information can extremely volatile when words pass from person to person". The sutras that he read out (using his iPhone!) to person #1 in line were:

1) Like a shimmering star, or a flickering lamp
2) A fleeting autumn cloud, or a shining drop of morning dew
3) A phantom, a dream, or a bubble, so is all the existence to be seen

Even by the 20th person the messages were largely mangled from the original. Finally at the end, Salman Rushdie read out the final messages

1) Follow the glass stone. Follow the glass stone
2) The droid from hell
3) If anything exists it changes

These were 100% wrong as the Lama said. He said that not a single word that Rushdie read was the same, but in the end 'the words were not my message'. Accidentally and miraculously the listeners had listened to the gist of the message and then had collectively "put words to it". I am not sure I agree 100% with the Lama (considering #2), but it was an interesting exercise.

The scribbled message in my laundry room that sounded profound actually wasn't. It was more mundane and functional than spiritual and insightful than I had imagined. Because of the loopy 'Y' and the hastily scribbled cursive capital 'D', I had misread the first word: it was 'D-R-Y-E-R', not 'A-N-G-E-R'. Clarity had been restored, or not? My original misreading had actually lead to a moment of clarity. Everybody's anger needs fixing. It was a happy misreading.

Only the ones you need

In their remarkable book called You: The Owner's Manual, Drs. Roisen and Oz  wrote on the human body. A thing that everyone possess but most people (including yours truly) seem to know little about (and what they think they know is mostly myth). I was most intrigued by their descriptions of the two main cavities that book-end our generous plumbing a.k.a the 'digestive system'.

On one end they recommended to stool watch - i.e to pay attention to the shape and the consistency. If something's wrong with your digestion then you are gonna see the effects. The ideal stool needs to long and S-shaped (they write: like the shape of your intestine). It shouldn't be hard and softer than al dente is Goldilocks perfection.

We all know garbage in, garbage out doesn't just apply to computer programming. On the oral end people seem to have most of the right ideas. Eating healthy is known, if not followed very well. On the aspect of maintenance people are diligent about brushing their teeth at least twice a day and certainly at night. Of course no one really changes tooth brushes every six months as recommended. It's one of those things that no one really takes seriously like the notice on mattresses: "Do not tear this label, or hell will break loose".

Despite all evidence and suggestion to the contrary, I have yet to see anyone as diligent about flossing. No dentist, drunk or sober, is going to not recommend flossing. What do Roisen and Oz propose? They  leave it up to you and recommend rather pithily:

Teeth: Floss only the ones you need

Since my last dental exam, I have actually behaved in a manner that I didn't care.  I was given a clean bill but like everything in life, you can't rest on your past laurels. So, I freaked out when I learned that I had my dentist's appointment in two weeks. Brush as much as you want, those bleeding gums give away that you haven't flossed for love or for money in past few months. 

To avoid the dead giveaway and lose face in front of my dentist, I crammed.  I was cramming for the last two weeks for the dental exam by flossing every day.  The gums, they bled, but by the end of the week the really nasty tell-tale signs would be gone.  On the day of the exam, the removal of the calculus was painful, but the gums didn't bleed. This is to say that I  passed with a high B+ on in the flossing column of the report card.

As is always the case, after the cleaning and gentle admonishment I felt very repentant. I swore that I will finally turn a new leaf and floss. It's for my own good, no?

So, I have been very disciplined. Using the best floss money can buy and sleeping very soundly at night.

What is it with flossing? Is it just me? Every time I floss, I feel very virtuous, as if I did a good deed that day. A feeling that is better than the one you get when you eat a healthy salad when the rest of the people around you are eating something patently bad -  like nasty French fries. It just seems to lift you up to a higher plane.

Consequently, if you really want to intimidate somebody then just floss while they are brushing their teeth. It eerily makes them feel a little less clean. It's more effective than the using a hand sanitizer for no real reason. Pulling out the hand sanitizer makes most people think you are just one of the  'germ theory' show-offs. You could lose friends this way.  But, flossing, ah that's a subtle one.

So, every night as I rub the twine between my teeth I feel like a  better bigger person, a human being that people want to emulate but can't quite do it. Besides, I sleep rather soundly knowing my gnashers will be there the next morning.

Wrong Time to..

There is a story written by Mark Twain about how he once met an assessor. He started telling the man about his salary, first modestly and then more boastfully. The man happened to be an income-tax assessor and Twain's boasts actually ended up costing him more in taxes than in the admiration of the man at the end of their conversation.

I ended up talking about my raise in salary, in the most non-specific and vague terms in context of something else in front of some friends. No numbers or details were mentioned except that it had increased. You can do that in front of friends, but NEVER in front of a car dealer (even if that person is the friend's mother). She picked up on that tiny detail like a hound picks a scent and started selling me a car. In the span of 30 seconds, the mother who was narrating ski stories of her children went into total business mode. It was surprising and extremely funny to see the transformation. I was eligible for this discount and that and it would only cost me a few hundred a month, etc.

I tried to tell her that I was not a car guy, and I was not even looking to get a new one. No amount of discounts or features would convince me to consider her deals. It didn't seem to work. What saved me from her advances was something that I thought wouldn't count as a reason.

She asked me, "What do you drive now?"
"I drive a silver-grey Honda Civic."
She grew suddenly quiet after that.

Nothing you say speaks as loudly as the fact that you have a Honda, a Civic and which is silver-grey. This simple fact can totally convince a car dealer that you are NOT a car guy! You treat a car as a reliable means of transportation and there is no point wasting breath trying to sell a Cadillac! Yeah, she was trying to sell me a Cadillac.

The wise man

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
-Robertson Davies

This quote was too long for twitter which is the ideal sort of thing for this kind of stuff. Cutting the quote into two tweets would not be fair.

Wonderful insight. A mad notion is more dangerous than being chased by a mad woman - I can buy that.

Novel Use of Cap and Trade

After this morning's 9am weekly lab meeting, I think it's time to adopt the 'cap and trade' idea used for carbon credits to discussions and questions during lab meetings. The idea occurred to me as someone droned on and on for the umpteenth time with impunity. There are always people who fear too silence, especially their own, during a meeting. They feel obliged to say something no matter how irrelevant or tangential it may be to the question at hand. Then there are those who take an unbearably long time to report on their activities of the past week. The 3-minute timer in their heads never goes off.

I put forth a Cap and Trade Meeting format for all the efficient managers of meetings everywhere. Assuming a lab group of 12 people, we start off with everyone getting 3 questions and 5 minutes of talking time. If you feel obliged to say more or cannot control your natural enthusiasm then you have to buy 'talking time' from someone who would rather be quiet. The currency of exchange can be money, or even something arbitrary, or more useful (as in the case of the present author) a mug of coffee.

This balances fairness and freedom. You can't really avoid the noise polluters from polluting but it does provide an incentive to talk less and talk more sense as a consequence. The wonderful aspect is that perhaps there will be a time when no once wants to say a single word and everyone preserves their talk time. Ah! then that silence will be so golden. It will be a Zen moment.

How close can a shave be?

The safety razor was a great improvement over the cutthroat razor. But, after that it invention for the sake of marketing. To maintain customer curiosity, Gillette and friends come up with 'new' razors everytime I go to get a replacement.

There was Mach, then MACH III and MACH with a vibrating blade. I mean these are razors... not motor cars that can be endlessly customized, enhanced, improved. But, these guys will find something. I think the Onion really put a lid on the ridiculous improvements.

F*** everything, we are doing five blades.

When I do see five blades in the pharmacy aisle, I am gonna roll on the floor laughing.

Do it Yourself

The primary motivation to learn how to frame stuff was that framing is super expensive. The local arts-and-crafts store Michael's was quoting about $100-$120 to frame a Madhubani painting that we had got from India. Like most people who decide to have something framed for the first time you realise that the artwork being framed is the cheapest component of all the costs. Going to get framing done is like getting car-insurance. There are so many different options and picking one over the other can result in drastically different costs. There is a choice of mats - standard, acid-free, rag-paper. Then the choice of the frames - thin or thick wooden, metal, or fancy wooden. Choosing the correct kind of glass is not transparent business at all - there is plain glass, plexi-glass, non-reflective glass, UV-ray protected glass and other varieties. Soon you realise that $120 quoted was simply the base price. I walked away thinking it's not a coincidence that they call it framing.

Even if the initial driver to do-it-myself was cost (being a starving student and all that), DIY is not an option for cheapskates or the impatient. It's probably going to cost more and take much longer than you think.

First, is the research: I spent the next two months reading up on the subject (with books from the library, of course!) and another month buying the equipment and tools. If you thought the frameshop had too many options, wait till you decide to buy framing tools. There are mat cutters that are $25 and then there are mat cutters that are a few hundred dollars. It is ironic, that as a newbie you often better off getting the more expensive equipment, as it is the easiest to use. That never happens does it? So, you have to deal with the frustration of a fumbling beginner with less than ideal tools.

Second, is practice: Work on projects that don't matter. It's not a bright idea to start framing your masterwork while you are still learning to control the cutter. This process takes time and patience and perhaps a few bloodstains. After being off by an eight of an inch on one side and seeing the resulting disaster you really understand one the maxims of life: "Measure twice, cut once". It is rather humbling that after two decades spent in school, no one taught me this.

Slowly, but surely the pilgrim makes his progress. A few months and a couple hundred dollars later, I had the Madhubani painting framed. Factoring in the bamboo frame and non-reflective glass, the cost of getting it done and doing it myself were about the same. But, at the end of it that's not your first thought. The first and last thought is pride, despite the slight imperfections. And they call pride one of the seven Deadly Sins.

My friend, Tim has been trying to restore a vintage El Camino for the past couple of years. I have begun to believe that he never really intends on calling it quits on working on the car. It's always a work-in-progress. If he quit then there would be nothing more to learn, it will be just be like any other car. I have sat in another one of his rusty-but-not-trusty cars, an 1981 Toyota Tercel, thinking that a wheel might fall off any moment. But, unlike with some other people I haven't been the least bit scared since I know that Tim will be able to fix that car even if it may be a temporary fix with duct-tape. The powerful uses of duct-tape, that's another thing they don't teach you at school.

What kind of liberal are you?

From Menand's piece on Lionel Trilling:

" ... As a matter of political theory, very different types of liberals. There is, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction, the liberal who believes in negative liberty, “freedom from,” and the liberal who believes in positive liberty, “freedom for.” There is the classical liberalism of free markets and individual rights, and the left liberalism of state planning and class solidarity..."

I consider myself a liberal. Now what kind is a difficult question. I am wrestling with the idea of positive or negative liberalism. At the same time, I believe that the labels 'positive' and 'negative' are unfortunate as they seem to connote that negative liberalism is lesser than positive liberalism. It easier to think of them simply as labels and focus on the question.

What if I believed in both kinds of freedom, does that make me a positively negative liberal?

FIFA!

For the wage slaves out there it's TGIF. For me considering the stuff that I need to get done in this fine first week of Fall it's FIFA

FIFA = Fuck! It's Friday already?

The tall and and short of it

Life is an escape. Everyone is trying to escape or hide from something. I am trying to hide from labels. The specific label I seek to be furthest from is 'Starbucks latte-drinking liberal'. The first thing I ever bought in the United States was a coffee from Starbucks. After seeing that on city street corners Starbucks joints sprout like weeds after the rain, I have been avoiding them ever since. I have embraced everything local (Yes! I am that guy now). I have other more legitimate reasons to avoid Starbucks. My problem with Starbucks is their pretentious fancy sizes - tall, venti, grande. Can you trust such a place to give you a honest cup of coffee when they can't their sizes right? The other is that the coffee is way too expensive. I also learnt that if you drink their grande Java Chip Cookie Coffee don't bother eating the rest of the day.

It is well-known that all size and flavors of coffee that you order regardless of the price advertised are within a few cents of each other. The different prices are to fleece the price-blind, but not lose the price conscious customer. What economists call 'price discrimination'. One would think that price range between the cheapest and the costliest of about $7 dollars would keep most coffee shops happy and in business. But, not Starbucks. They have one more trick up their sleeve in this sneaky price discrimination business. Their smallest size is never advertised. You can order it at ANY Starbucks, but you will fail to see any mention of it on the chalk board or menu. Why? Tim Hartford has discussed this at length almost two years ago, yet the word hasn't got out.

I have tried the Starbucks short twice already and I been served without the barista batting an eyelid. The second time I was offered a second shot or espresso - 'free'. For my Starbucks savvy, I presume. Besides, saving valuable cash in this oil-strapped world, it tastes better for the reasons the article explains. Trust the Americans (Texans in particular) to ruin everything by emphasizing size over substance.

*In some fairness to Starbucks: Most of the money made goes into the pockets of the owners of the real estate. Corner shops don't come cheap.

Why the iPhone is like a razor

Yeah, the inevitable has happened - Apple has dropped the price of the iPhone by a whopping $200, or caused AT & T to step in with a subsidy. I felt a malicious glee in imagining the faces of all the suckers who bought the iPhone last year. The shiny new 3G iPhone was now within the reach of even this mostly starving, Ramen-eating grad student.

Shaving this morning (I occasionally make time for this activity) I realised, as P.T. Barnum once said, I was almost about to be the sucker of the minute. It's the razor blades thing all over again. The price of the razor is subsidized by the blades. Even the printer-makers like HP and gang figured this out long time ago. No wonder that printer is ridiculously cheap at $60. It's the paper and ink that's gonna get yer wallet.

So, AT & T are selling their razor blades at $69.99. Without taxes and surcharges that is $840. Add another $200 for the hardware (trust Apple to make it obsolete in a year's time). So you are paying about $1040 for the year, or about $2.85 per day. If you factor in taxes, etc. it is about $3 a day. Which is about the price of a small cup of coffee, or 5 packets of Ramen. So, if I give up eating and drinking, I can afford it. I may be hungry and naked but at least I won't get lost with the GPS and I can always check my email, ANYWHERE!

Take your pick!

Lab Notebooks

What good is a lab note-book,
if it doesn't have a coffee stain somewhere?

One ring to bind them

One of the most profound concepts that I came across late this year was of the 'organic circuit'. In The Metaphysical Club Menand writes on John Dewey:

... it assumes that the parts are prior to the whole, when in fact it is the whole that makes the parts what they are...

Meaning that divisions are artificial, there are no real discrete units, there is simply an organic whole. According to Dewey, we do not know, so that we can do, but doing leads to knowing. Knowledge in not the result of experience, any more than a response is the result of a stimulus; knowledge is experience itself in one of its manifestations.

As is usually the case, the same concept once discovered pops up more often and much sooner than expected in other places. At a different level was Jeff Hawkins's On Intelligence which presents a new framework for intelligence - ideas on how to build a human brain. Even after all these years AI did not produce a device that can perform the basic task that a three-year old can perform with ease. Bigger, faster is not going to get us there when the neocortex, the size and dimension of a dinner napkin still beats anything out there in telling a cat apart from a dog.

The key is to first understand how the brain actually does it. Neuroscience suffers from the the other problem - too much detail, no overarching theory. Echoing Dewey, we need to study the organic whole and not just the parts in isolation. Society is not a sum of individuals, but an aggregate of interacting individuals. The brain too works as an organic whole and there is no seeing that leads to perception that results in action, but all these acting together. No wonder that 80% of the connections in the brain are feedback connections.

There are always analyses, the breaking down in various ways. What about the synthesis? the putting together. Is that a tacit assumption that we know how to put together what we have pulled apart? If the market is any judge are there jobs for synthesists?

Coexist

Saw a variation of this sticker, which wasn't half as decent. At least on this one they have science (with science's poster child) on there.

From their website:
Every letter has a symbol that represents a system of thought: The crescent and star for Islam; the pentagram for Wicca; the relativity formula for science; the star of David for Judaism; the Karma Wheel dotting the i for Buddhism; the Tao symbol for Taoism; the cross for Chrisitianity.

Wondering if I should support the notion or not.

Link to my Photo Album

Hi,
How are you? I assume you are doing great and are enjoying the summer. I have just returned from my summer vacation and I would like to share my digital pictures with you. You know right? that I bought a digital camera a few weeks ago and I went completely berserk taking pictures. Who knows? One of them could even make it to the National Geographic!!!

Instead of my usual practice of sending you the pictures as a large .zip file, I am sending you a link to my online album (I know you don't like attachments). Don't worry! you don't miss out on anything as I have downloaded EVERY SINGLE picture. Boy! It did take a long time to upload.

A lot of them look like repeats, but you will appreciate the subtle differences. I like to be honest and I have not deleted the completely out-of-focus and badly exposed shots. By the way, since you like puzzles - all the pictures are titled IMG_(some number).jpg and have ABSOLUTELY NO comments or descriptions. I guess it would be a nice exercise for you to figure out what the heck they are all about (you already know where I went). Going through the slideshow may take a while, but you won't lose track of the fact that it's my vacation album - at least one of us is present in 90% of all the shots. I can't wait to order the prints.

Enjoy!!

- Your friend

P.S. Hope to see your online album soon.

Never Ever

... tell people about your secret parking spot.