The XKCD mythos

XKCD, the webcomic of romance, math, language and sarcasm has become over the past few years one of the true icons of Internet geekdom along with lolcats [icanhascheezburger.com] and 4chan. Randall Munroe's minimalist cartoon with stick figures spouting hyper referencing comedy is slowly seeping into the mainstream world as well. In a world which has started to acknowledge nerdiness and geekiness as cool, XKCD is one of the true standard bearers. And the best thing about XKCD is : It is completely free !! It's released under a creative commons attribution licence. And that gets it a 10/10 from me. It's fans include programmers, scientists, guys who play dungeons & dragons and people with an concerned about Velociraptor attacks [or maybe it is only Munroe]. It is often due to the fact that it's NASA contractor turned cartoon creator peppers his comics with inside jokes and internet memes. The cartoon strip's cultish followers have ensured that the general public too get a taste of XKCD humor even if it usually leaves the "unwired" kind scratching their heads. With Youtube being the latest to acknowledge the power & reach of XKCD in the internet, here is a list of my more favorite instances of life imitating xkcd :

[1] Starting off with my favorite, this incident happened after Randall's cartoon [which I had included in my last post] had ninjas attacking Richard Stallman [founder of the free software movement]. And when Stallman went to Yale to talk about DRM, he was really attacked by a bunch of student ninjas!! And in another homage to the cartoon, Stallman was mailed a Katana, a Japanese sword that Stallman uses in the cartoon to defend himself. Stallman apparently e-mailed his benefactors back telling them he keeps it beside him when he goes to sleep. So, Bill Gates, your plans ain't gonna work.

[2] This cartoon refers to Wikipedia's stringent citation requirements. The man on the dais is obviously a politician. The point is clear.

And who took this to the real world? Apparently this crazy fat guy in Cambridge, Massachusetts did. He screamed around the college streets screaming "No allegations without citations". Maybe our politicians can take a lesson or two from Wikipedia.


[3] In another instance, Youtube included an idea that was illustrated in this XKCD strip : "Listen To Yourself" into its comments feature wherein a user can hear his/her comment read out aloud [optional] before posting. This apparently helped in reducing strong and negative comments. There are tons of more examples of life imitating XKCD that I have heard of. But I would advice you to just go and read this awesome comic.

A GNU Morality

This is my first blog posted from a non-windows machine. For a while now I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop [dual boot with vista] and I have to say that I am pretty pleased with it all. So pleased in fact that I rarely boot to vista these days. But then why change? I personally find Microsoft's operating systems to be substandard and of inferior quality. I in fact passionately hate the lot, having used various windows flavors from Win'95, Win'98 to XP and Vista, with all of them leaving me in various degrees of frustration, disillusionment and anger. And it's not only the operating systems, I hate most products they make except perhaps the ones from MS Research. Not just because crapware like Vista are DRM software in disguise and not because the constant crashes and BSODs are a real pain in the behind. I hate Microsoft products for a deeper reason. And that is the same reason why I have been using Ubuntu [Intrepid Ibex] almost exclusively for the past one month. It's about morality. Maybe morality is not a good word, it has been misused by people in the west for hundreds of years, especially the religious kind so much that it has now almost dissapperered from mainstream vocabulary. I think I will use a better term : Dharma. Although translated usually as "Duty" in English, the word has deeper connotations to it which are frankly untranslatable to English. Oh yeah, you must be thinking : "What has Dharma got to do with software?". Well, it has everything to do with it. Just watch "The Matrix", you'll know :). Ok seriously, I believe that using free software is more Dharmic than using closed source, proprietary systems. Suppose you buy a car and you decide later to modify it to your liking. It could be a NO2 booster or a car radio for that matter, but the point is : you can do whatever you want with your car, and the car manufacturer wont care. This has been done from the days of the Ford model-T by small town mechanics and auto-enthusiasts to the present day Dileep Chabrias. So we consider it legal and very much moral [read Dharmic] to modify cars, furniture or anything we buy to suit our likings and needs, right? Not really. Well, at least not according to the guys at Microsoft, Apple and other proprietary system vendors. So you are stuck with an annoying OS that comes bundled with your PC and you have spent a fortune on that and other software that ends up costing even more than the hardware. And if you feel like modifying some aspect of it to your liking?? Well, you don't. Period. You bought only the binary and not the source code that build the application. Sounds absurd doesn't it? Well, as simple as this argument sounds it is not an easy one to arrive at. And the people who first arrived at that conclusion were the men and women of the GNU foundation, and not least of all the great RMS : Richard Stallman himself. An iconic figure, the Gandhi of the software world who works out of the MIT AI lab, he foresaw the far reaching consequences of the [then] gradual decline of openness in software. This came about after the US copyright law of 1976.

"In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused the software's source code for the Xerox 9700 laser printer (code-named "Dover"), the industry's first. Stallman had modified the software on an older printer (the XGP, Xerographic Printer), so it electronically messaged a user when the person's job was printed, and would message all logged-in users when a printer was jammed. Not being able to add this feature to the Dover printer was a major inconvenience, as the printer was on a different floor from most of the users. This one experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be free to modify the software they use." [Courtesy : Wikipedia]

He also commented on what was to be the moral underpinnings of the free software movement :

"Stallman argues that software users should have the freedom to "share with their neighbor" and to be able to study and make changes to the software that they use. He has repeatedly said that attempts by proprietary software vendors to prohibit these acts are "antisocial" and "unethical". . . . He argues that freedom is vital for the sake of users and society as a moral value, and not merely for pragmatic reasons such as possibly developing technically superior software." [Courtesy : Wikipedia]

The GNU project was established in order to make a completely free operating system, which as Stallman frequently states is about being "free as speech and not free as in beer". By early 1990's, the project had built all the necessary tools for an OS except for one very crucial part : the Kernel. Thankfully a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds built a kernel using GNU tools and released it under the GPL. The kernel was soon adopted by the GNU movement and the marriage resulted in one of the pivotal moments in software history: The birth of GNU/Linux. The free software movement has never looked back since. As of today, 423 of the world's top 500 fastest supercomputers run on GNU/Linux. The next revolution came with the South African billionaire and space tourist, Mark Shuttleworth entering the scene and his non-profit Canonical Ltd's "Ubuntu" coming into the picture. Ubuntu means "Humanity towards others" in Zulu and is derivative of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. It's user friendly approach and the steady monetary support by Shuttleworth saw the beginning of a second dawn for the free software movement. And this time, with Linux starting to penetrate the lucrative desktop market, Microsoft was facing the heat. Today they are hundreds of Linux distributions. GNU/Linux is being adopted everywhere from classroom computers to low cost netbooks. This was all a result of the uncompromising souls at GNU and the free software movement. Today we see the values of the free software movement seeping into the creative arts as well [Creative Commons licence]. The selfless work and endeavor of the free software movement and the thousands of developers who adhere to it shows a commitment to morality. and a bright future that is open and free. Free as in speech.

I leave you with an XKCD cartoon about RMS, who by the way I was fortunate enough to meet two weeks before at the Free Software, Free Society [FSFS] International Conference in Trivandrum. I got an autograph from him that said "Happy Hacking". And do visit the Open Source Car Project website. A very logical conclusion to my "car" argument earlier.

India At War

The past week saw the worst terror attacks in Indian history. The financial hub of India, Mumbai and it's most important icons were targeted. About 200 people lost their lives, including 30 foreigners. All evidence point to the Pakistani link [surprise!]. As a terrifying narrative of urban guerrilla warfare emerged live on TV screens around the country and the world, it was slowly dawning on all of us, the utter magnitude of the situation. Our nation was helplessly impotent in dealing with terrorism and had a system that bred and laid laurels on mediocrity at the top levels. The image of corrupt politicians getting Z+ security with NSG commandos contrasted with brave Mumbai ATS officers wearing ineffective armor marching to their certain deaths, will resonate disturbingly in our minds forever. The following is an excerpt of an email that I sent to my friends a few days back. I felt strongly that I should publish it on my blog as millions across the country feel cheated and outraged. Make no mistake about it. I am not a war monger and we Indians are not so by nature. The Americans had their 9/11, the British their 7/11, while we have been putting up with our own 26/11s in Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Varanasi, Ahmedabad and many other cities and towns across India for the past decade. To those who advocate peace & diplomacy : The patience of the Indian people have run out. The time for diplomacy is over. We are angry. With Pakistan. With our politicians. With our bureaucracy. This time however is different. The call to action is loud and clear. Please read through and do post your comments. They are much appreciated during this time of national debate.

Enough Is Enough !! It's Time To Act !

All of us Indians feel the same way. That enough is enough. Those idiots in the government & bureaucracy should be held accountable. Although I won't advocate throwing these ignoramuses from the top of a building or declaring war against Pakistan, I am extremely lenient to both ideas right now. But anger is good to the extent of it being constructive. Let us pick the pieces and start all over again. We should start thinking differently since only a secure nation can become successful economically. We criticize our politicians all the time but how about us becoming politicians ourselves and become the change we want to see? Obama has shown that change truly is possible in politics. Our bureaucracy & our security infrastructure needs to be re-organized. Who better to do that than we ourselves? Well, those words are easily said. But how do we get started? How do we start to hold the govt accountable? The luxuries that these people enjoy are from what people like you and me pay the government as taxes, bribes and all the import and export duties and whatnot. I suggest all of you start to question the government. They have a constitutional duty to answer to us. A powerful tool is already available - The Right To Information Act. You can file an application under the RTI act to know how the politicians spend our money. Visit this link to learn about filing RTI forms. For example, those of you in the coastal states can file requests to know about the present status of our maritime security, whether there are any emergency protocols in place to handle situations like a tsunami or a terror attack, how much is being allocated for modernizing the police force? These people are answerable to all of us. They are public servants. You can do this and more like get in groups and file Public Interest Litigations [PILs] like the one that Mumbai lawyers filed yesterday for separating the police force from the politicians. Get involved in debates. Instead of chit-chatting about the latest bollywood gossip in your college & workplace cafeteria, talk about real issues, try to find creative solutions. Instead of doing senseless final year projects like library info systems that most of us computer science students [from what I have seen] are prone to do, how about creating security related applications like surveillance equipment, bomb disposing robots and new ways to fight crime and terror?. And do not forget that basic power that most of you have : the Right to Vote. Get out and vote. Every vote counts. Read this rediff.com article to know about a growing civil disobedience movement in Delhi & Mumbai. Think of ways to co-ordinate activities across different cities.

And do not forget one important thing : no matter how much we criticize our politicians or our bureaucracy, we will and should present a united face to the rest of the world. The Pakistani media and establishment have been remarkably successful in being influential in the world media by suggesting that India is being irrationally aggressive towards a "peacable" Pakistani nation. Just read this callous Financial Times article. Irrational? Absolutely! See this pakistani news video footage for instance. One can see that even the most moderate of Pakistani voices are heavily and irrationally anti-Indian. Each one of you should realise something : that Pakistan is fundamentally untrustable and unreliable. We realise and forget this lesson in vicious circles again and again. Remember 1998 when Vajpayee was talking about opening Indian borders, peace with pakistan and blah blah? What happened next? The Kargil incursion. Remember the whole idiotic Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai drama that you learned in your history books? What happened next? The 1962 Indo-China war. We have become used to our politicians making strategic blunders and then our brave soldiers and police officers like Maj. Sandeep Unnikrishnan and Hemant Karkare cleaning the mess up and making the ultimate sacrifice for the country.

What can you do about the Pakistani issue? I suggest that you start presenting the threat that India faces to the world media by writing to editors of leading magazines around the world, to influential groups like the American Jewish lobby & the Indian American community. The lack of accountability is one thing that every politician & terrorist in the present and our many conquerors in the past has taken advantage of. Because we are divided by them on the basis of religion, caste and langauge and we are too busy fighting amongst ourselves. It is time to act. It is time to ask some hard questions :

- Why is it that significant parts of Chattisgarh, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh are virtually in a different nation altogether under the control of the maoists??

- Why is that Bangladeshi migrants can come into our nation across our "open" borders in Assam almost unchallenged? And how come they settle down and get the same privileges and rights of Indian citizens?

- Why is that the Central & Maharashtra governments simply ignored the warnings by the Intelligence Bureau and the RAW about possible sea based attacks on Bombay??

- Why is that Afzal Guru, a terrorist who has been found guilty by the Supreme Court and sentenced to death for trying to destroy our parliament, the citadel of Indian democracy, still alive and well?? Why is the govt tying this issue to vote bank politics?

- How come that the Defense minister of the then NDA govt, Jaswant Singh "escorted" Maulana Masood Azhar and two other terrorists to Kandahar during the IC814 hijacking in 1999? Why was there not any attempt to rescue the hostages using our commandos? [Please don't justify it by saying that it was in Afghanistan, the Taliban was in control etc etc coz Israel had rescued hundred of their citizens from Uganda who were taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists during the famous entebbe incident. ]

- Why wasn't there any retaliation against the attacks on the Indian embassy which according to international diplomatic rules is Indian territory? Why was there no retaliatory attack against Pakistan when the CIA itself said that the ISI was involved?

- How did Bombay limp back on its feet every time after the terror attacks that had been hitting the city for the last few years? Was it because of the "spirit" of Bombay or simply because of the fact that the people were helpless and had no other option but to go to work to feed their families??

This could very well be one of the pivotal moments of our country's history. Do not fear to question authority. Let us make a better India for us and our future generations. Let them not know us as an impotent nation that fails to protect and care for it's own. Let us unite as a nation for the war on terror, corruption, poverty, hunger, the "chalta hai" attitude and plain indifference. This is war thrust upon us whether you like it or not. Let us set aside all our petty issues & differences and answer the call of our nation. Because if we don't, no one will.
Vande Mataram !

Update : Although nothing happened for some months, me and my friends at the Samskriti club are beginning to make a difference right in the campus itself. More on that later!

A Quantum Of Water

I saw "Quantum Of Solace" yesterday. But this post is not going to be a review about the godawesome movie that it is. The movie definitely gets a 10/10 from me, and anyone who has watched Casino Royale would know that Daniel Craig brings the real n gritty James Bond of Ian Fleming back to life with his superb acting. [Warning : Spoiler Ahead !!] But I'm going to talk about a very important issue that is at the heart of the film : Water politics. In the film, Dominic Greene, a member of a secret organization that is [revealed in Casino Royale] is a businessman heading a company called "Greene Planet". But Greene is anything but "Green". He plots to overthrow the Bolivian government in order to control it's water resources. Mathieu Amalric who plays Greene in the film modeled his role as a wily & pitiful figure, more a politician than the crazed villains of earlier bond films. Amalric based Greene on "the smile of Tony Blair and the craziness of Sarkozy". Buying huge tracts of land in the Amazon rain forest for "reforestation" purposes, Greene reminds one of the many supposedly "green" capitalists who seek to make their billions from the current global focus on anything "environmental". The first effects of such businessmen is already being felt the world over with the current food crisis [overshadowed by the economic one] being worsened by the push [especially in the US thanks to Bush] for bio-fuels made from sugar cane & corn. The hungry in Somalia & Darfur have to compete with the biofuel industry to survive and in the end it is not the biofuel companies that are losing. But Dominic Greene's plan for controlling water resources makes the whole biofuel fiasco look like child's play. According to him : "This is the world's most precious resource; we need to control as much of it as we can." And the man has a point.

"Many of the wars of the 20th century were about oil, but wars of the 21st century will be over water."

- Isamil Serageldin, World Bank Vice President

According to many critics, the Iraq war was nothing but one of America's ways of ensuring a smooth supply of oil from one of the largest oil fields in the world. Around the world, we see a lot of scrambling around for natural resources with significant consequences like China's support of corrupt African regimes. India fares no better with ONGC partnering with repressive regimes like that of Sudan and Burma for developing oil & natural gas fields. Russia flexes it's muscle with a helpless European Union with it's energy company Gazprom providing a significant amount of Europe's gas supply. Energy security is one of the more significant issues in the global security scenario with Obama promising an energy technology revolution once he comes to power. Hopefully his administration will be able to do so. But the current energy crisis will pale in comparison to the coming scuffle for natural resources, the most significant being water. A steady water supply is one of the pre-requisites of any civilization, as historical records show. One can see that almost all of the world's major cities sprung around rivers, coasts & lakes. A city that loses it's water supply simply fades away. The disappearance (or redirection) of the Saraswati river is speculated to be one of the reasons for the gradual fading away of the Indus valley civilization. Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery warned that unless measures are taken the city of Perth could become the first ghost metropolis, with no water to sustain it's population. Los Angeles and it's surrounding ever expanding suburbia is practically on a desert and struggles to find adequate water supply. The same is with Las Vegas and Beijing. The situation is made even worse by global warming as snow fall lessen & glaciers that feed the world's biggest rivers recede. Our very own Ganga is living on borrowed time. The Gangotri glacier which contributes to 70% of Ganga's water is receding at an ever accelerating pace and according to a UN climate report, it could vanish entirely by 2030. From then on, the holiest of holy Hindu rivers will be a seasonal occasion coming and going with the monsoons. About half of India's population [and the entire Bangladeshi population] is dependent on it and the future spells a catastrophe of epic proportions. The same holds for all the rivers originating in the Himalayas like the Indus, the Yangtze, the Mekong & the Brahmaputra. This does not bode well for old treaties like the Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan that barely survived many of our wars. The future may see that India & Pakistan fight not for Kashmir but for the rivers that they share. And yeah, Bond goes after Greene motivated by duty and not after revenge for Vesper's death.

Manhattan Project 2.0

MQ-9 Reapor UAV armed with hellfire missiles over Iraq

Last month, Bob Woodward revealed during an interview on 60 minutes [CBS], the existence of a top secret US military program that was behind the dramatic reductions in violence in Iraq over the past few months [I'm talking in the relative sense here]. Bob was on air talking about his new book "The War Within". In his book, he compares this secret program to the Manhattan project, the famous 1940's multibillion dollar project that ended up making the first atomic bomb. The new Manhattan project as Woodward calls it involves some esoteric technology [acc. to him] that enables UAV's to track and target terrorists from afar. When asked about the nature of this tech, he declined to comment citing security issues. But the funny thing is, as many commentators have noticed, the pentagon has been remarkably forthcoming about their STTW [See Through The Wall] and CTTL [Continuous Clandestine Tagging, Tracking, and Locating] technology development over the past few years. Generally people were dismissive of his claims accusing him of sensationalism in order to promote his new book.

But that doesn't sound right. Bob Woodward [pictured left] doesn't need this sort of cheap publicity. This Pulitzer winning journalist is close to being journalism royalty. In 1972, Woodward along with Carl Bernstein brought to light the mothership of all political scandals, the infamous Watergate incident that resulted in the resignation of President Nixon [a latter day Bush]. I wouldn't go into the details here but I would recommend that you watch the movie "All The President's Men" with Woodward played by the ubercool Robert Redford. In addition to that Woodward is an associate editor at The Washington Post. So much for him making tall tales. The US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley too acknowledges in the book's foreword about the existence of such a project.

"All I have to do is point the sensor at him," said a military officer familiar with the system, "and a missile can be off the rail in seconds." [LA Times]

Scores of Iraqi insurgent leaders are dying inside their safe houses struck by missiles fired by Predator drones flying often miles away. I think he is onto something. Something significant is happening here. Let me give you a run down of possible candidate technologies :


Heat Sensing
Good for direct sensing. Ruled out for STTW as the sensors are not sensitive enough to detect through walls. But this tech is still relevant it can be used for identifying known terrorists, since each individual has a unique thermal signature. Although I wonder what will happen if they come down with a fever?

RFID tags
Thousands of insurgents were captured and released repeatedly over the past 5 years. It is likely that RFID chips could have been implanted on their bodies. But then again this would require the detectors to be present at close proximity due to the low power of embedded RFID chips.

Remote mobile phone tracking
A technology that was used by the special forces from the 80's onwards. The following is an excerpt from a Register article on CTTL -

the ability to track or even remotely activate phone handsets: there are credible reports - for instance in this book, by respected UK defense hack and former British Army intelligence-corps operator Mick Smith - that quite amazing mobe trickery was in use by US spec-ops elements as long ago as the 1980s. It's now common advice even among biz security types to remove mobile phone batteries during sensitive meetings, and serious criminals or terrorists would nowadays completely discard any phone that might have come to the notice of the authorities.

Radar
One of the more plausible STTW technologies, a lot of research has been done in using low frequency ultra-wideband(UWB) radar to detect human bodies. Refer to this US Army Research Laboratory report on Human body radar signature : [pdf]

Tera-Hertz radiation sensors
This one is my favorite because I seem to be the only one talking about it. I remember T-rays from a Discovery Channel documentary a few years before. This technology relies on submillimeter terahertz radiation emitted by all human bodies & objects. Although prototypes like ThruVision are being developed for airport security scanners, they operate at short distances. But instead of relying on ambient t-rays, researchers have come up with semiconductor t-ray lasers that can be carried on handheld devices. But the problem remains that current t-ray lasers will operate only at -100°C. Maybe that is the breakthrough that the military had, the creation of small mountable t-ray lasers & detectors that operate at higher temperatures. A Los Angeles Times report have already talked about US military drones being fitted with unspecified devices onboard. According to the report - "The devices are roughly the size of an automobile battery, but are heavy enough that outfitted Predators in some cases carry only one Hellfire missile instead of two." The effect of these devices, according to a former U.S. military official interviewed by the Times, is that insurgents, even indoors, "are living with a red dot on their head."

Though a Manhattan type project could have taken place, it is doubtful whether it is the only the thing that helped quell the violence in Iraq. The "Anbar Awakening" movement was also pivotal since it saw Sunni tribal leaders allying for the first time with the US Army to fight "Al Qaeda In Iraq". And no less significant was the still holding ceasefire agreed to by the Mahdi militia of Moqtada Al-Sadr. It may turn out that the most significant effect of STTW technologies used in Iraq is in making terrorists feel helpless and terrified. But this type of technology could raise some serious questions about privacy if employed during peace time at a time when governments all around the world are slowly assuming the role of "Big Brother".

Another trend that I see here is the increasing reliance on drones by the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan & and even in the border regions of good ol' Pakistan :). Drones like the Global Hawk & The MQ-9 Reaper are so much in demand that General Dynamics is facing difficulty producing enough on time. All that is missing is a lil' bit of AI on the drones & and also our beloved Skynet, that human loving benevolent AI military system that takes over the world by killing over half of humanity in the Terminator series. Boy, I can't wait for Terminator : Salvation to come out !!

The LHC, The End Of The World And The Fountain

The Large Hadron Collider [LHC] officially came online on Wednesday. Doomsayers and the rest of mankind alike heaved a sigh of relief. There were no black holes created, even less any strangelets. Maybe they rejoiced without reading the fine print. Maybe the end-of-the-world-is-nigh folks need to strap on their boots once again because the funny rhyming rapper/scientists never really initiated any collision. Yeah that's right, the CERN scientists and engineers "rapped" about the LHC. And it's pretty impressive. Watch the video below shot at the LHC itself with CERN scientists and engineers all grooving around in it.

So there is CERN playing around with some protons on wednesday in some test runs. Even xkcd joked about it. The collisions are scheduled to happen within the month, no specific date. So should we be worried? Not according to the overwhelming majority of scientists. The probability of micro black holes devouring the earth is even lesser than that of Bush solving a quadratic equation. You see micro black holes will likely form but a form of radiation called "Hawking radiation" [after Stephen Hawking] will seep out of them and they will fade away in microseconds.

On the other hand Professor Otto Rossler from the University of Tubingen,Germany is all crazy over the LHC. This is one of the sweet things he has to say about the LHC - “Nothing will happen for at least four years. Then the weather will change completely, wiping out life. There will be a Biblical Armageddon.”[1]. Yeah ... that kind of "crazy". He's sued CERN in the European Court of Human Rights and ranted on and on about the "end of humanity" to the hungry world media. But inevitably his voice soon began to be ignored. Feeling sympathetic and wanting to know about this "mad" professor, I checked out the Wikipedia entry on him. And let me tell you, this guy is no dufus. He is close to being a polymath in scientific circles, authoring scientific papers on biogenesis, differentiable automata, artificial universes and the origins of language !! He bases his LHC claims on some obscure commentary by a scientist on the General theory of relativity some hundred years back. Ok, maybe he's a bit paranoid but we will just sit around and watch if his predictions come true. Rest assured, there won't be anyone (or anything) around to congratulate him if he turns out right :).

The end of the world aside, yesterday I happened to watch a movie called "The Fountain" by Darren Aronofsky. And boy did it take my breath away. It was pure poetry in motion. And I couldn't make any sense of it. But I felt that wasn't it. I was missing something. There was some hidden meaning behind it all. The story was spread across three ages with the lead actor Hugh Jackman as a conquistador, a scientist and as a astronaut/Bodhisattva and the story kept going back and forth the time lines. And the common theme that bonds it all is the Mayan "tree of life" and the protagonist's love/devotion for Izzy/Queen Isabella played by Rachel Weisz. It's about a man's quest to find the elixir of life, a cure for mortality. Later I went and downloaded the movie [I do piracy for educational purposes only ;)]. Finally I could claim to make some sense out of it. And one thing I learned was that this movie has to be appreciated by one's own terms. I would recommend watching it alone. Frankly, it's an awesome spiritual experience. I remember a critic saying so "This movie is too advanced for our times, our tastes have not evolved enough to truly appreciate the movie". One thing I can definitely say about the movie is that the protagonist finally understands the futility of it all and finally accepts death as the true path to immortality.

The Mayan Tree Of Life in The Fountain

Talking about LHC and the Mayan tree of life, it is interesting to note that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21st, 2012. The "long" version of their calendar which started around 5000 years back stops abruptly at 2012. They don't exactly say what happens then. Maybe Professor Otto is onto something.

XKCD : Intro

XKCD : A web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language
Created by Randall Munroe, this web comic is available at http://xkcd.com. The author after finishing a long stint at NASA, started drawing stick figure comics with themes ranging from broken hearts to establishing links between Firefox and witchcraft ;). A true internet phenomenon. Randall releases his cartoons under the creative commons attribution license. So I will be reproducing my favorites here periodically. If you don't get the joke, don't worry. Maybe the joke is on you after all :)

Pong

Smiley Navras

Premise
A week before. It is Onam time in the campus. There is going to be an interdepartmental Onam Pookalam [flower arrangement] competition. The Computer Applications department had always ended up in either of the top two positions since the competitions began a few years back. And this time it's my batch [the 2nd years : halfway between naive and sensible :) ] that has to manage the pookalam for the CA dept. No sweat.

The geek saves the day
We plan on a conventional geometric design. and mind you people tend to be really conservative when it comes to pookalam designs. The girls decide on some design. But yours truly was unconcerned with all of that since he was busy reading "Watchmen" by Alan Moore. It is a pretty ordinary novel if you discount its postmodern themes, the characters who are all superheroes and the fact that it is the only graphic novel to be included in the Time magazine "the 100 best English-language novels" and the only one to win the Hugo award ... phew. Anyways the oft-repeating blood splattered smiley in the novel stuck in my mind as did the smiley that appears on the mars surface. The mars smiley I later discover really does exist.

So there I was talking to my friend Sanju about the large hadron collider at 3 in the morning. I told him about the teeny-weeny possibility of black holes and "strangelets" being formed by the LHC transforming our planet into bluish goo, and he started laughing, thinking that I was joking [let's see who is laughing in a few days when the LHC starts, ha!]. That very instant, instead of feeling outraged by his lack of consideration for the one in a billion chance of a black hole forming on the earth, I had this strange vision of smileys showing the navarasas. [Yeah ... ok ... It is not exactly how it all happened but just bear with me]. I told sanju about it. The conversation went something like this :
Sanju : "Wow man!! That's a great idea!!"
Me : "Dude, I was just kidding!"
Sanju : "Hmmm ... ok"
Me : "You know that we don't have a chance against the other departments don't you? They have more money and manpower than us. And this time ours seniors will be busy with laying 3 pookalams in the ashram. So it's just us and the juniors."
Sanju : "Yup. We don't stand a chance with our existing design"
Me : "Yeah .... it's like we have nothing to lose ..."
Sanju : "Let's try something different then!"
Sanju,Me in chorus : "I know, a pookalam based on smileys!!"

Long story cut short, I managed to convince the girls the next day about the change in design [don't ask, hell is better]. The juniors were a more amiable bunch, most just didn't care. We didn't mention the idea to the seniors because they generally tend to "receptive" to new ideas [wink, wink].

The Navarasas


So what are the navarasas? Apart from the impressive but incorrectly named Matrix Revolutions soundtrack "Navras" by Juno Reactor, most people [westerners and Indians alike ] are not aware of the significance of the navarasas in Indian culture in the fields of dance, theater and art. All the possible emotional states that can be expressed by a human being are categorized into the following 9 [also described by the bharatanatyam poses in the picture shown above] :

• Love - Sringaram
• Comic - Hasyam
• Pathetic - Karunam
• Furious - Raudram
• Heroic - Viram
• Terrible - Bhayanakam
• Odious - Bibhatsam
• Surprise - Adbutam
• Tranquility - Shantam

[courtesy : Wikipedia]

The Pookalam
Concocting crazy ideas is easy but after that comes the hard stuff : the designing. We spent hours getting the expressions right with the smileys. It had to be simple and to the point. We consulted Yahoo! & AIM emoticons and navarasas as expressed by bharathanatyam, kathak and kathakali. Getting hasyam, raudram, adbutam, shantam and karuna on smileys was easy. I designed the sringaram smiley with heart shaped eyes. But bibhatsam and bhayanakam proved to be hard to design. Many redesigns later we decided on Varun's [another friend] design for bibhatsam and mine and sanju's design for bhayanakam. The background design provided by Sanju was already a winner at a contest at his previous college [his team won 1st]. It would signify the lack of any apparent design in the flow of emotions that we all go through. But on careful scrutiny one could see that the background had the shape of an Omkar.The contest here emphasized on having a theme for the pookalam. And we had plenty to offer : The confluence of the ancient and modern, a tribute to the sms and IM age where emotions are expressed by short ASCII art .... You get the drift.
Without much further ado I present to you the "Smiley Navras" [Insert rousing music here]

The Aftermath
Based on the reactions from all who saw our design, we were clearly the favorites. But then again, Al Gore too was the favorite for the US presidential election in 2000 ;).
The results were out in the evening : The CA department got 2nd with a traditional boat replica as the prize !! :) . The IT dept beat us to numero uno. It turns out that theirs was bigger than ours [The maximum diameter was 2m while ours was 1.5 m] and they had arranged some traditional Kerala stuff besides the pookalam [para, pudava etc] that somehow none of us remembered. But the IT dept's pookalam was clearly excellent. And ... I was a bit pissed off.
It was great to be in the 2nd place nonetheless [oh boo hoo :( ]. We were the underdogs and our innovative idea clearly won over the other more expensive ones from the other departments.

The virtuous circle continues : today morning my brother went and laid the exact same design at his school [Kendriya Vidyalaya, TVM]. His team won the first with 97 points out of a possible 100 with the 2nd team trailing way behind at 85!! :)

Oh yeah and it turns out that Al Gore got an even better deal : An Oscar, a Nobel peace prize and a halo over his head. Things really have a way of working out I guess. :)

Blog Undefined

The blog. Prone to extreme and incoherent ideas and after years of bugging my friends incessantly with my senseless rantings, it's high time I take it to the next level : The Internet. I wanted to define myself in the digital world and what better way to do that that than in a blog? Copies of my digital thoughts stored on countless Google server farms all around the world. Great. Who wants immortality then?
The title. It's a reference to Philip K Dicks classic sci-fi novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?" which was adapted into arguably one of the best sci-fi movies ever - "Blade Runner". Yes me geek :)
Me. I study computer applications at Amrita University, Amritapuri campus. So it goes without saying that my blog will be filled with a lot of computer science stuff. But that won't be the only thing I will be talking about. My interests span almost all spheres of human activity. Hmm .... well ... cricket is an exception though, which must be a rarity among Indians :). Can't seem to have anything in mind right now. You know, it's a zen thing. Well it's a brief goodbye I guess, until I come out of my satori.