Olympians

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
- Kurt Vonnegut

With the Olympics, the Presidential race has been put on the media backburner. Come September, the real games will begin. So far, Barack Obama has been losing some of his early faithful flock because of flip-flop. But, like any highly trained athlete Barack knows that in the final analysis what counts is whether you won or not. Only gold medal winners are remembered, silver medals are just glorified first losers. To win some, you have to lose some. Even liberal New Yorker ripped on him a while ago. Of course, he is politician. What did you guys expect?

I thought it was interesting that the Olympics and the US Presidential elections are always held in the same year. Also, they are always leap years representing a great leap forward perhaps? This year with these two candidates many believe that will be one of most sporting battles. I am really looking forward to the gladiatorial debates. The first one is going to be in a church, for heaven's sake.

Half Dome

View of Half Dome from Glacier Point. At some point, I will process the rest of the images from Yosemite.

Reciprocity

There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.

- Alice Thomas Ellis

Gaps in History

Junot Diaz who won last year's Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a not-so-brief but wondrous book, says that he is fascinated with gaps in history. His book was is set in Newark and the Dominican Republic during the time of the infamous Trujillo. A dictator so brutal and merciless that there are almost no true reports of his republic. He once had a graduate student murdered for writing a thesis on the true nature of his regime. Junot Diaz's point is that if you look at somebody's or a country's history, the gaps in the reporting are the most interesting.

The current presumptive Democratic candidate oozes so much charisma that people who never voted before are now lining up to help him get elected. Of course, armed with an incredible story like Obama's, impossible is nothing. The image that is portrayed is that of a newcomer, a fresh face, someone who represents a new kind of politics. In the same breath one also cites that as a sign of his inexperience and naivety about Washington and the world.

Obama and Trujillo has poles apart, but there is a certain gap in Obama's self-reporting. The recent controversy over the satirical cover of last week's issue of the New Yorker obscured, in ironical fashion, facts that are relatively unknown about the junior senator from Illinois.

Ryan Lizza's story traces the making of Obama in his years as a Chicago politician. To forge an identity as a a nobody in in a city "which doesn't take kindly to political carpetbaggers" would be commendable enough, but Obama's sights were always higher than the tallest buildings in the Windy City. He always knew that he was slated for bigger and better things. People have been calling him President Obama for over a decade.

Of course, politics is always a Faustian bargain. On his way up, Obama has eschewed many of his old principles and let his old friends down. As President, things are not going to be any different even if Obama projects a different sort of image. Lizza writes:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Only the naive would call Barack Obama naive. If he does win in November, like all victors he can write his own history.

Speed dating issues

I would like to think that my dating days aren't over, but just in a perpetually suspended state. However, I was at a speed-matching event yesterday which attempted to have a bunch of people meet everybody else one-on-one in a space of an hour.



First, there were only fifteen ppl and it was apparent that at every round someone would have to sit out. Then another guy showed up and we were sixteen. Since that was an even number no one would have to sit out. The person in charge did the obvious thing - he made two concentric rings of chairs splitting ppl two groups - 'inners' and 'outers'. The 'outers' rotated around the inner ring. After the first rotation, everybody had met half of the people in the group, except the ppl in their own ring. Then he did the next obvious thing, made another two concentric circles of the rings themselves and repeated the process. After the second rotation, everybody had met 3/4th of the ppl. For the next round, these rings needed to be split further into similar rings. As you can see, this process stops when each of the two concentric rings have exactly one person.

Of course, since we had the fourth power of 2, i.e. 16 ppl, this scheme works beautifully. Since, I was part architect of the idea, I wondered if this arrangement would work for other even numbers, leaving the rather odd case of odd numbers aside for now. Very quickly, you can see that this scheme breaks down for 6 people.

Round I            Round II
A D             A-B       D-E
B E             C (sits out)       F (sits out)
C F

After the first rotation, you have Ring I meet everyone in Ring II. Proceeding as before, you end up with 3 ppl (an odd number) in each new sub-ring. Now every subsequent iteration will have one person in each group simply sitting one session out. As you can see from the example, we can form a pair with C and F in Round II, but they have already met each other in Round I. So, every subsequent period, one person will be sitting out and wasting his time. This would require 6 time periods.

Thus, the concentric circles thing is inefficient for all non 2ⁿ even numbers. I tried to come up with a pairing scheme for n=6. Since ⁶C₂ = 15 total pairs, and we have 3 pairs at each stage, we should need at a minimum five rounds. With the schedule below no one sits out and we achieve efficiency.

Table for 6 ppl

Station	1	2	3	4	5
S1	AD	AE	AB	AF	AC
S2	BE	BF	CE	BC	BD
S3	CF	CD	DF	DE	EF

The movement of people is non-intuitive and the schedule is complicated. You would need to hand people a schedule map: A would not move at all. B would move to stations: S2-S2-S1-S2-S2. I was certain that there was a solution to this problem, floating in graph theory or combinatoric literature. And indeed there is! But, this is no simple can of worms as I was to discover.

Famously, in 1850 Reverend Thomas Kirkman sent a query to the readers of a popular math magazine, Lady's and Gentleman's Diary:

Fifteen young ladies in a school walk out 3 abreast for seven days in succession: it is required to arrange them daily, so that no two will walk twice abreast.

1 of 7 possible solutions

The more general case of problem is called the Social Golfer Problem: Determine the maximum number of days 'w' that 'n' golfers can play in groups of 'r' each without meeting each other. This is still an UNSOLVED mathematical problem!!! If you are interested in reading more see: Social Golfer Problem

My original question of dividing 'n' ppl in pairs has been solved at least up to n=200. Round-robin scheduling is a wonderful site for those scheduling matches, or speed-dating style events. There is no simple movement order that can be prescribed. You have to pretty much follow the schedule blindly. Some schedules are unique, in other cases there are over 1000 solution, usually when 2ⁿ numbers are involved.

Yeah! Even speed-dating has issues!

Ignoble Research

While my so-called 'real' publications are limping along, one of my side-projects got published in this month's Annals of Improbable Research. A journal that is self-styled as " the journal of record for inflated research and personalities" . These are the good folks who dish out the Ig Noble Prizes each year

For the past three years, at the Society for Neuroscience conference my labmates and I present a 'joke' poster in the vein of The Onion. The Cingulate Cortex Does Everything started off as a satire on the field of fMRI research in neuroscience. There are tons of papers in journals like Nature and Science that implicate the cingulate cortex in all kinds of behavior. Brain fMRI scans detect oxygenation levels in the blood and determine if blood flow to particular part of the brain increases or decreases with respect to a behavioral event. It seemed rather interesting to us that the use of fMRI correlates so strongly with cingulate cortex sightings. We suspect that since the cingulate cortex is above the saggital sinus, a major drainage vessel for the brain, it seems to light up in fMRI studies as an artifact.


On scanning recent literature on the subject, we saw an explosion in cingulate cortex research and reached our startling conclusion - "Cingularity", i.e. if current trends continue the cingulate cortex will not only take over neuroscience research, but everything!!

Another interesting fact is that the word cingulate is derived from the Latin word cingulum meaning belt. Specifically, a belt protecting your family jewels.

Quiz blog

Dinesh K. aka Dinky has set things rolling with the U of M Quiz blog. And for all you shameless people out there - Googling is allowed!

Dawkins's Mirror Question

A really good book is one that makes you want to put it down for a while so that you can think.

This is taken from Richard Dawkins's latest book The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. See the review in Science (Mail me if you need access).

For years as a college tutor at Oxford, I would try the intelligence and reasoning powers of entrance candidates by asking them at interview to muse aloud on the conundrum of why mirror images appear left-right reversed but not upside down. It is a provocative puzzle, which is hard to situate among academic disciplines. Is it a question in psychology, in physics, in philosophy, in geometry, or just commonsense? I wasn't necessarily expecting my candidates to "know the right answer." I wanted to hear them think aloud, wanted to see if the question piqued their interest and their curiosity. If it did, they would probably be fun to teach.

The book is maybe good bedtime reading, but not the paragraph above. I read the paragraph and I couldn't sleep till had some sort of satisfactory answer. It's rather intriguing and wanted to discuss this below. My friends in Mathematics have a better idea of this, but I am taking a stab at it here.


STOP HERE IF YOU WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE PROBLEM ...



It is about particular symmetry? That lead me away from thinking about mirrors to drawing mirror images and considering that we reflect images about a particular axis. This is a practical issue when it comes to making stamps, or printing for example.

(Pardon my sloppy drawing. It's much harder to draw accurate mirror images than is popularly believed.)
Upon drawing this simple figure, I realised that mirroring (reflection) is a not really a 2D transform, but is a 3D transform since there is no strictly planar or 2-D operation(rotate, shift) can be performed that convert A to B. Of course if you reverse the X-axis then you automatically reflect. It's like looking at the 2-D figure from the bottom instead of the top.

Thinking about it in another way, if you had simply an outline figure (shown on top), you wouldn't really see any lateral inversion. If viewed from one perspective, there is no lateral inversion. That's because the figure being hollow does not have a correct viewing side.

So, according to me it boils down to a frame of reference. By imposing your frame of reference onto the mirrored image you get the perception of lateral inversion. In that parallel universe of mirror images, the X axis is reversed and hence correctly speaking left is actually right! The absolute values of all the points along X have not changed, only the signs have.

Coming back to the other question of top and bottom inversion, the simple four figure shows that top bottom is achieved by rotation around the Z-axis, or by two repeated mirrorings on the Y and X axis. So, you can ask why rotation only changes top and bottom, but not left and right. They are simply two different transformations.


More generally speaking, there is really left or right, or top and bottom. It's all relative all perceptions are due to the frame of reference. So, if you perform a transformation then you have to choose the appropriate frame of reference or grid to view it correctly. In a more extreme case, even in case of a distortion, the square will be a square in the distorted frame, but appears warped only because you impose your original frame on the 'new' square.

So, I think the problem is one of pure geometry and not of psychology or even physics. Perhaps, humans are predisposed to think of particular frames of references which cause this effect.

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.

O Pato

The great Brazilian guitarist Joao Gilberto and singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso singing 'O Pato'. Yeah! the song is in Portuguese and I when I first heard it I couldn't understand a word. But, the phrasing was so exquisite and the duet so lovely that it didn't matter. I like the look on Veloso's face at the end of the song showing his great admiration and respect for Gilberto. It's beautiful.



It's actually quite a fun bossa-nova song about a duck who goes samba dancing with another duck, a goose and a swan (Translation and lyrics).

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!

This Is Just To Say

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

-William Carlos Williams

The poem above leaves me cold. To parody it was delicious and sweet. Some things are better appreciated in reflected light.

This Is Just to Say - I

William Carlos Williams
My poems
Are mere
imitations

Of the real which
readers were probably
savoring
last few seconds

Forgive me
and now listen to mine
so neat
and so bold

This Is Just to Say - II

I have drunk
the coffee
that was warming in
the pot

and which
you were probably
brewing
for yourself

Forgive me
I was drowsy
so tired
and the aroma so inviting

This Is Just to Say - III

I have run off
with that woman
that was in
my dreams

and so
you won't be
expecting
me for breakfast

Forgive me
It wasn't you dear
her lips are sweet
and alluring

This Is Just to Say - IV

We've gone and
wrecked this world
that was to be
your legacy

and which
you probably
wanted
to destroy yourself

Forgive us
we didn't wait
for you
and did it ourselves

My Ph.D. thesis

Why does this ring a bell?

Trail Half Marathon

They said that this Trail Half Marathon would kick your butt! And it sure did! After running a whole bunch of road halfs, I decided to do the non-wimp thing - run on dirt, through forest, and around lakes. (It was actually half wimpy, because some people ran the course twice for the full marathon)

I have been running trails for sometime now. They more fun and easier on your feet than the pounding on the pavement and roads. It was only last month after the ice melted that the trails were safe to run again. Snow on the streets melts, but due to the trees and a lower specific heat, the trails are still icy. A slip can land you in the Huron river!

I wasn't up to the miles for a half and then you train like you were cramming for an exam, I added hills, speedworkouts. After I ran 10 miles on the hills, I knew that at the very least, I would come out of it alive (Never forget that!).

But, hell the race course was tough! The course goes around the famous Potowatomi train in the Pinckney Recreation Area. At no point was the course flat. Either you were going up or down. In total, the course has 7,000 ft of vertical climb. Since the race began and ended at the Silver Lake, you had also 7,000 ft of downhills. While the downhills were welcome, a hasty step would be your downfall, literally. I saw a bunch of people trip and fall. The last thing you want, is to get injured and hobble through miles of forest. That would be a meditative experience in the forest.

Oddly, some miles are shorter and others feel longer. Up and down, then up again. Legs cramp up. Something aches. It goes away. Then after a point you are running from water-stop to water-stop, wondering when the torture will end. And there are people are still in bed somewhere. After a point, your mind shuts down and you are just running. You have no idea where you are, but just following the person in front of you.

But, like all races at the end you are mostly by yourself. At mile 11, I hit a root sticking out of the ground and that was really painful! Nature is beautiful, but you can't be idiotic out in the wild. My shoes have an ID tag, so they know where to deposit my body.

At mile 12, I think I hit my limit! But, who gives up with one mile to go? You calculate that it won't be more than 10 minutes. And then suddenly, you see the finish line. You get a sudden burst of energy to sprint to the finish. The race ends on 100 meters of a grassy flat and that was a relief after the relentless hills. The best part of the race? To ice my legs in the Silver Lake.

Twenty minutes later, it all seems worth it and you find yourself saying something that you would have never thought - "I should do this again!". The harder the race, the sweeter the taste of a finish.

A House of our Own

NY Times Magazine:

Atheists are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don’t feel like they need an organization ... they’re so independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don’t join an organization—they start their own.

- Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists

I never thought that atheism equated with nihilism. But, organized institutions?