Never underestimate the stupidity of people. Over many years, I believed my bar had fallen sufficiently low enough that not very much surprised me. Then along comes something like this!

ps. Sid, if you are reading, this is your doing: After that link from your blog about PZ Myers, I ended up wasting a major part of my evening browsing around looking at the foolishness. Thanks!

pps. What does the blog title mean? Its the from the banner of the "Landover Baptist Church".

After talking to Pooja, I felt it necessary to mention the great mathematician G. H. Hardy on my blog. Hardy is most famous outside of mathematics for his "A Mathematician's Apology". The book, written in later in life by Hardy, talks among aother things about how mathematics is young man's game. He is also somewhat know for his association with Ramanujan and for being the person responsible for bringing him to Cambridge where his greatest mathematics unfolded.

Quoting one of the mathematicians, C Snow, that Hardy worked with:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Hardy.html

A mathematicians apology is, if read with the textual attention it deserves, a book of haunting sadness. Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candour are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist. But it is also, in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again. I know nothing like it in the language: partly because most people with the literary gift to express such a lament don't come to feel it: it is very rare for a writer to realise, with the finality of truth, that he is absolutely finished.

Hardy was a sort of purist mathematician, one who did his mathematics not for the sake of its applicability to anything, but for the sake of doing great mathematics. Hardy, along with Littlewood and Ramanujan,  is also mention in Apostolos Doxiadis' "Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture". The link above gives a short summary on his life.

Some quotes:

Asked if he believes in one God, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy:

It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Many years back I worked full time at Microsoft on one of the many projects related to Vista (or what was then called Longhorn). Last December I was visiting friends in the Redmond area when one of the jokingly observed how the code I had written for Microsoft still hadn't seen light of day, while two and a half years later, I had moved on and completed my Masters and had started on my PhD.

This wasn't a sort of accidental slip, but I remember we were told at that time that if we had any ideas to suggest for Vista, they better be ideas that will be new and interesting 3-4 years later when the OS actually ships. This is a tall order for any sort of idea, much less for the volatile world of "software project" ideas.

While this seemed like very ironic humor at that time, over the past month or so, once in a while I thought about what that meant. After all, I had spent a year writing all that code. A very busy year at that - I had spent 15+ hours a day, I daresay, that was my average day, struggling with the turmoil of the massive engineering effort that was Vista.

I wasn't a *great* programmer by many standards, but I'd like to think that I was better than many I had encountered. 15+ hours of my time for about a year, took a lot of out of my life and it didn't seem to have amounted to anything! Sure I was being paid a handsomely, but one one like to think that one's efforts contribute to the world in some way as well. After all that year was full of deadlines and things being rushed to be completed and such. What came of all of it? If it came to nothing, what a waste of life that was...

A few weeks back, I got a call from Steve who works with Google (who has a fascinating blog btw), about coming back and working with them on some stuff. I casually asked what happened about the last thing I had worked on, when I was there last summer. I had made some extensions to the Rhino compiler, the largest part of which was adding the yield control operator to it. Steve said that they were using it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I said "What?!".

Maybe my programming has matured over the years. Maybe the ~6 hrs a day I spent in office as an intern produced production quality code. I somehow assumed that it wouldn't see any real world use. Was it really that special that it was ready for real world use? Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad code. But it was code that only written, not "baked" for years.

Maybe there was another reason. Maybe, it wasn't a property of the code at all, but of the fact that there was something radically different about the outlooks of both these companies. There are many thing one can say about this "difference in outlook", positive and negative things things about both. But a shift that causes developers to feel effective by default as opposed to feeling ineffective by default, is an empowering thought. "If I build it for you, what will become of it?"

Maybe mine was an isolated case of wasted engineering effort and this is nitpicking. If that's so, I'll be happy for it.

I am very moved by "Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture" by Apostolos Doxiadis. It's a work of fiction that makes several references to real people and real mathematics. It seems the author has done a fair bit of research to write this book. The book is about a mathematician "Uncle Petros" who spends his entire life trying to prove the Goldbach Conjecture.

In the course of the book, Doxiadis touches on the lives of G H Hardy, S. Ramanujan, Cantor, Kurt Godel and much of the pain, isolation, failure and achievement that is involved in doing research. The book is a fascinating read and is in many ways very true to life though the main characters are fictious.

The Goldbach Conjecture simply states that every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes. Wikipedia has some more detail. The conjecture has been known for about 250 years now. There is still no proof, though the fact has been verified for very large numbers. It is a conjecture and not a theorem because it has no proof. Work still continues on this. Dare to try solve it? You may also enjoy looking at the Goldbach weave.

In the early 90's a long standing famous problem, Fermat's Last Theorem was proved by Andrew Wiles. It took him 7 years of exclusive work to prove the theorem. The theorem has been know since 1637! And has escaped all these centuries without proof despite many many mathematicians working on it. One of the things that made Fermat's last theorem famous is that Fermat has scribbled in the margin of his notebook a comment to the effect that he knew a proof but that the margin is not wide enough to note it. (Wikipedia) Wiles's proof is 150 pages and uses mathematics discovered in the 20th century - this is most likely not the proof that Fermat had in mind, if indeed he had a correct proof.

The interesting things about proofs like these are not just that they confirm the truth of statements that we always suspected to be true, but that they advance the state of mathematics. In the course of chasing hard problems, often new theories and new approaches to proof theory are discovered.

I am taking a Computational Complexity course this semester, taught by Prof Daniel Leivant. The course had not been going too well for me - I felt that though I understood many of the details, I didn't really learn anything since my intuitions drew a blank.

Towards the end of the semester (actually in the very last week), I got my hands on Dr Christos Papadimitriou's text on Computational Complexity. This was such a nicely done book. What also struck me was the subtle elegance of many things. In class, Dr Leivant had mentioned that Papadimitriou was a man of much good taste and style, and this does seem to reflect in his text.

For example the books cover is a the painting of Venus by Botticelli. The front cover looks complex and confusing. It is not immediately apparent what the picture is, much like the subject of computational complexity.

But if you were able to look behind complexity, if you turned the book over, you would see the beautiful face of Venus.

Today I came across what is described as the Indian Cyber Pornography law -

http://netsafety.nic.in/cyberlaws.htm

Whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published in the electronic form, any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it, shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years and with fine which may extend to one lakh rupees and in the event of a second or subsequent conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years and also with fine which may extend to two lakh rupees.

I keep looking at this and saying how unethical is this? Lets look at this a bit

any material which is lascivious:
Dictionary.com defines lascivious as:

1.inclined to lustfulness; wanton; lewd: a lascivious, girl-chasing old man.

2.arousing sexual desire: lascivious photographs.

3.indicating sexual interest or expressive of lust or lewdness: a lascivious gesture.

How many things can you list in the category of "arousing sexual desire" - surely in India it should be forbidden to arouse sexual desire.

appeals to the prurient interest:
From Dictionary.com:

1.having, inclined to have, or characterized by lascivious or lustful thoughts, desires, etc.

2.causing lasciviousness or lust.

3.having a restless desire or longing.

Of course, lustful thoughts and desires are bad... look at our population, we managed it by cross-pollination, not by sexual intercourse. Well, there might have been some intercourse, but it certainly wasn't lascivious or lustful in any way.

Certainly causing restless desire or longing is wrong. If anything you see online causes restless desire, let them know who put it up. They shall be taken care of.

Can somebody please arrest Kushwant Sigh? He gives me lustful thoughts. Also, next time a woman ogles at a sweaty cricketer on TV, arrest him. Get the television network too while you are at it. And yes, the 8.00 o' clock serials certainly have to go. They shall be replaced by non-lustful Vatsyayana tales. After all Indian women certainly shouldn't have any lustful thoughts.

or its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons ...
What does that even mean? How do you know what might deprave or corrupt someone? You might as well have have said "or whatever else we like ..."

I've got to stop picking flaws in it, because there is nothing right in it. Seriously, what were they thinking? Calling the above law wrong is inappropriate because that would imply that it deserves some amount of credibility. Will the genius who wrote the above law please stand up for the recognition you deserve. Maybe we can can just focus on you instead of the quality of your legal skills.

I hope in a few years, hopefully within our life times, India will come to terms with pornography, prostitution, nudity, indecent exposure and stop having stork- stories around them. When India comes to terms with the notion of sexuality we can look back at absurdities like this and laugh.

Maybe a first step to doing that would be to stop pretending that we had it all sorted out in our 'great ancient culture'. The world of mass media, global communication and a global economy was not the world of 2500 year ago. These things affect our notions of sexuality as much as they affect any other aspect of our lives. We must look at the world as it is today, and at our personal values, and start making careful measured choices.

If laws like this weren't so blatantly unethical in what they impose, I could think of them as being funny. Like how back in the 1800s Indiana State in the US tried to establish mathematical fact by passing laws. They wanted a law that states that in Indiana  the mathematical constant Pi would have the value 3.2. Fascinating! We look at this and laugh today, but I don't see the Indian Pornography law as being very different. The Indiana Pi bill was after all a state bill that never got passed. The Indian Pornography law in a national law that is in effect, due to which the CEO of one of India's largest online auction site was arrested (its quiet funny how some of this is worded ".. had obtained the controversial act by Local Area Network (LAN).. " ) when he flew into India, from the US, to help work with the local police because someone sold "pornographic" material on his site.

I am so glad we come from a civilized country with well thought out laws that seek to protect the innocent and punish the immoral. Yeah!

Joan Baez, 1966, singing Dylan's "With God on Our Side".

After being relatively upset about Parzania, I found myself at the RSS community page on Orkut. Needless to say, that was even more disturbing. It was without a certain amount of morbid horror that I looked at their polls, their organized report-as-fraud activities, their cyber-lynchings and such.

I usually don't like to deal with this sort of thing. I am complacent, cowardly and comfortable in my relative safety. It bothered me to think that if I had no fear it would be dishonest, or just plain stupid.

I happened to look at my blog and saw Star Trek and the Q next to Parzania, it struck me what the Q might say about India and the RSS. "Your species is always suffering and dying", he would say in his How-entertaining--What-do-you-expect-anyway attitude.

And indeed, what do I expect? The world has always been a barbaric place. We express surprise and shock at the slaughter of Delhi by Nadir Shah, the slaughter of the Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Ghandhi, the India-Pakistan partition riots, the Bombay bomb blasts, the Ghodhra riots, (and hardly just India) the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia, the Rape of Nanking, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, the occupation of Iraq, the massacre of the Algerians... and on and on and on. Just too many to list. In fact so many, that one should ask, what's the big deal? This is, after all, human nature.

People have been always mercilessly wiping out entire populations of "others" based on some definition of identity. Why are we so surprised by this? Why do we expect that in the times of our generation the world should have magically become a "civilized place"? Hardly, if you look at the evidence.

It will be a long time before we turn into a species that is not always suffering and dying. Something truly deep and fundamental has to change about us for that.

In the short term however, in a few hundred years or maybe in our own lifetimes, the vices of our day shall blow away to be replaced by other ones. To make any of them to go away, something fundamental needs to change that invalidates their cause of existence. A little like the way Frown Power and Superman destroyed the Ku Klux Klan, might there be an Indian equivalent? Prosperity? Accountability? Can we motivate such a change?

Q: Let us pray, for understanding and for compassion.
Capt. Picard: Let us do no such damn thing! What is this need of yours for costumes, Q? Have you no identity of your own?
Q: I come in search of the truth.
Capt. Picard: You come in search of what humanity is!
Q: I *forgive* your blasphemy!

Functional Programmer’s Lament:

Forgive me Lord, for I have side-effected.

Logic Programmer’s Lament:

Forgive me Lord, for I have temporized.

System’s Programmer’s Lament:

Forgive me Lord, for it crashed.

Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?

One of my professor's, Dan Friedman, once said in class, "Some people are of the opinion that computer scientists should choose to work on problems that are *useful*, and that working on your pet problem that has no apparent use is not right. I myself am not of that opinion." After about a year, I must say I agree. In this spirit, some people are of the opinion that people who write blogs should choose to write what others would like to read. I myself am not of that opinion. (My apologies to Dan for not quoting him verbatim, but its been a year)

A romance with musicals which started with Jesus Christ Super Star a few years back, is coming back. JCSS was brilliant – amazing music, amazing lyrics, very interesting characters – a very interesting shift of perspective. Very cool. I remember watching JCSS completely for the first time at Deepak’s place back at Bangalore – at one of our many of dinner + music sessions where Deepak would treat us to the pleasures of the local vegetarian home delivery service and his beautiful taste in music.

If you have not watched JCSS, it is highly recommended –

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275434/

Since coming to Cambridge I have had a chance to sample many interesting things – vintage wines, abstract mathematical models such as pi calculus and category theory, involved pieces of software such as the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, programming paradigms such as STM and monadic yield, London, beautiful medieval cathedrals, beer festivals etc and some musicals.

Its the musicals that this entry is about. A few weeks I got to watch Rigoletto the opera – a live performance at the “Cambridge Corn Exchange”. I had originally expecting nothing – only by the mild curiosity that the brochure was and also intending to sample the often heard “stiff upper lip” British formal occasion.

What I saw were a lot nicely dressed older people who were very polite and very at-ease. Rigoletto was in Italian with English subtitles displayed on a screen above the stage. As I watched Rigoletto, minor details like there actually nude women on the stage got swept aside and the power of music and metaphors started to take over. I started not to notice the gasps from the audience about the directness of presentation and more on what would be going through these characters in the play, if it was all real.

After I left the opera, one of the last pieces “La donna e mobile” played in my mind for days afterwards. This is an English approximation of “La donna e mobile”

Woman is unpredictable, like a feather in the wind,

she changes her voice, and her thoughts

Always a sweet, pretty face,

in tears or in laughter, always lying

Woman is unpredictable, like a feather in the wind,

she changes her voice, and her thoughts

and her thoughts, and her thoughts

Always miserable, he that trusts in her

who confides in her, his unwary heart!

Yet nobody feels fully happy

who on that bosom doesn't drink love,

Woman is unpredictable, like a feather in the wind,

she changes her voice, and her thoughts

and her thoughts, and her thoughts!

This is being sung by an overly licentious Duke who is about to be murdered by an assassin paid by the jester of the Duke’s court. The assassin’s sister who usually woos his victim’s for him such that he can stab them when they are distracted now pleads with him to spare the Duke’s life. The assassin consents on the condition that someone else should come through the door who he will murder instead of the Duke. The jester wanted the Duke killed because he had dishonored his daughter. The jester’s daughter however overhears the conversation between the assassin and his sister and decides to sacrifices herself to save the Duke, despite knowing that he had cheated her. As all this unfolds one can hear the Duke singing in his room awaiting his mistress for the night, the assassin’s sister. Its delicate and is one of those climaxes that’s not easy to forget.

Beautiful.

Two days back I saw the Phantom of the Opera – honestly I don’t have many ways to describe this other than that it sent me reeling ever so often. Its brilliant, its powerful and it is so exquisitely done. Its one of those things that one has to put on their “to do list before you die”. As you watch the Phantom of the Opera so many layers unfold. It one of those things that awoke many sleeping ghosts in my mind.

In sleep he sang to me,

In dreams he came,

That voice which calls to me,

And speaks my name.

And do I dream again?

For now I find.

The Phantom of the Opera is there-

Inside my mind.

This is the version I saw -

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0293508/

Many tracks in the Phantom of the Opera hit you with the raw pathos comparable with Mukesh Chand Mathur (aka Mukesh) singing “Dost dost na raha” in Sangam or “Baharon Phool Barsao” of Mohammed Rafi in Suraj. Brilliant.

In short, I am hooked. Any suggestions for what I can watch next? I know that comparing with Verdi’s Rigoletto or Andrew Loyd Weber’s JCSS or Phantom of the Opera is a tall order – I don’t expect it to. I just want to sample some more real music.

Some quotes and thoughtlets collected over the years. Some are my own, though I don’t know which ones exactly – over time it has all got mixed up in my head.

From Roshan to language designers of the future, on the topic of programming language types:

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

(adapted from Douglas Adams).

I just fixed the last bug!

Any sufficiently advanced bug, is indistinguishable from a feature.

-- quoting Prof Andrew Lumsdaine, Advanced Operating Systems (P536)

Marvin: "I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."

Zem: "Er, five."

Marvin: "Wrong. You see?"

The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind.

-- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

Life! Don't talk to me about life.

Ok, so what the answer?

Its 5,1,1,3,2…

No, no, no, I don’t like it..

You don’t like it?

It doesn’t mean anything, what does it mean?

Now that’s a different question.

-- solving the universe selection problem, Quantum Programming

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Would you like tea or coffee?

Mathematician: Yes.

-- quoting Michel Salim

What do you mean its third party fault? I can’t get my work done and you are partying?

It’s an idea so simple, that understanding it messes your mind.

-- adapted from Dan Friedman, Principles of Programming Languages

Creating a great language doesn’t involve assuming that your users are less smart than you.

The language that you use defines what you can most easily think of. Languages instill patterns of thought. Certain languages make difficult the understanding of certain ideas.

A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly- "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

-- AI Koan

Lambda the ultimate.

-- Dan Friedman

The only law in physics that we know of that has a direction with respect to time is that of entropy.

-- QP class, B629 Computer Science, Indiana University

Accept it. We are Labor.

A style makes explicit what a language makes implicit.

-- Dan Friedman

What I was coming to is that its something that cant be expressed in the lambda calculus.

But that’s obvious.

-- quoting Amr Sabry

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

-- Richard Feynman

This is not even wrong.

-- Amr Sabry

There exists no formal method to convert an informal argument into a formal one.

-- quoting Amr Sabry

There exists no reversible classical function that coverts a quantum superposition into a classical state.

-- above paraphrased by Roshan

Misguided rambling from Roshan: Computer Science to Physics and Back Again

There exists no formal method to convert an informal argument into a formal one. This is roughly equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics - the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value. This is also our only formal notion of the quantity called time. Here the law is rephrased as follows and things brings out its directional property with respect time, more clearly - It is not possible for heat to flow from a colder body to a warmer body without any work having been done to accomplish this flow. Energy will not flow spontaneously from a low temperature object to a higher temperature object. This is roughly equivalent to saying that there is not no notion of a partial computation without a notion of sequencing with respect to time – this is the ‘.’ (dot) sequencing operator of the pi calculus. The lambda calculus does not define sequencing. Are all closed systems pi-systems?

Don’t worry, we are just playing games.

Summary of the known laws of the fictitious universe –

- There exists at least one notion of fundamental duality. Using this all other forms of duality can be derived.

- There exists at least one notion of self referential quantification. Using this all forms of self referential quantification can be derived.

- There exists an order of relationship of things among themselves. There exists an order of relationship of events among themselves. In other words there exists at least one notion of ordering or sequencing.

The Tao that can be described in words is not the true Tao

The Name that can be named is not the true Name.  

From non-existence were called Heaven and Earth

From existence all things were born.

In being without desires, you experience the wonder

But by having desires, you experience the journey.

Yet both spring from the same source and differ mostly in name.

This source is called "Mystery"

Mystery upon Mystery,

The womb giving birth to all of being. (1)

- Tao Te Ching, as translated by John R Mabry

All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions ...

Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved ...

- Gödel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter

I almost made a (potentially) very expensive mistake today. I have been hoping to buy a digital SLR for a while now and in the past few weeks that seems to be the only thing that on my mind. Most people around me are a little wary getting into a conversation with me these days because the only thing I could talk about was the camera I was hoping to buy.

After a lot of ruminations between going Canon or Nikon I finally decided to go with the Canon EOS 350d a.k.a. the Canon Digital Rebel XT. Now I cant really afford this stuff, and it a rather tight stretch to get myself one of these considering my present status of un-rich grad student.

I am also no novice to using the web and to using computers, so I was so stumped by how I forgot the cardinal rule of doing anything on the web – never believe a webpage. Unless you know the entities behind the webpage and you trust their reputation to serve your purpose – never ever ever trust a webpage.

Case in point, this is what you see when you Google for the Digital Rebel XT:

I took a walk down to the nearest camera shop and I mentioned to the friendly gentleman there about how the website prices are about 450$ when he is charging me about 800$. Here came the first piece of news – he says that if you have a Canon USA warranty, in other words if something happens and you want Canon to fix it for you, then there is no way that the camera can cost so less. It must be some international warranty which you may have to ship back to the country of origin.

So I take a look at the website again and the website says that it has a USA warranty – very explicitly. So I feel considerably relieved. I however wanted to check out one or two of the lenses I was interested in getting and so I visited the shop again and I mentioned this fact to the person there. He stuck by what he said – he said that yes they might offer a warranty to you in the US, but it will not be Canon’s warranty. It will be someone else’s.

What? Now I was going to spend what is presently a non trivial amount of money for me so I put things together and I decided to call the online store I was planning to buy from.

I was feeling a little pressurized into getting this purchase done because Canon is offering some interesting mail in rebates which multiply when you get multiple items in combination and so I was planning to through in a decent lens with image stabilization and such.

So I call the store and I had to hold onto the line for a whole 20+ mins. Hmm hmm… what are these guys an airline booking service? And finally I get a most disinterested sounding guy. I ask about the warranty and yes, the shopkeeper I had been talking to was right. This was not a Canon warranty. ‘If something happens, who will be fixing the camera?’ ‘My technicians will work on it’ and that gets me thinking – gee, if I have to hold so long to just speak to one of them how hard will it be for me to get them to fix something for free? And then he says it – ‘my technicians have been fixing these for the last 50 years’. What??? And then a sentence or two later he hangs up while I was in mid sentence. Nice.

So the whole conversation was a little like being hit buy a snowball when you are busy picking your nose. I kind of snapped out of my self hypnotized state of mind and I did what I should have done first – search for reviews on the seller.

Every website I could find had people expressing very strong negative opinions about these guys. I search for some of the other sellers offering similar prices – they all had similar comments. What???

I remember the shopkeeper I was talking to mention that they cant be authorized Canon dealers because there is no way that they could get the cameras so much cheaper from Canon.

So finally, let me point some fingers –

This is the seller I was looking at and the one that I called up –

http://www.infinitiphoto.com/

(Yes they have a reasonably nice looking webpage).

Here are some others -

http://www.bestpricecameras.com

http://www.geniuscameras.com

http://www.usaphotonation.com/

Here are some seller review pages –

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews87615.html

http://forums.photographyreview.com/showthread.php?t=10678

http://www.dcresource.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-7031.html

http://www.dcresource.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-72.html

http://www.price.com/vendor_review_display.html?vid=-2147483120

http://forums.photographyreview.com/showthread.php?t=10918

and so on, there are many pages out there that tell similar stories.

Well this was a clincher –

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller9662.html

Moral of the story – make sure that you search for the seller when buying online always. If in doubt call them up, maybe even multiple times. This is a handy website that gives you seller information –

http://www.resellerratings.com/

More practically, simply search the web for “review <seller name>”.

Ensure that you are not going for opinion bases of 5 or 6 reviews. Averaging over 100s of reviews is decent. Another thing that you could do, is use resellerratings.com or similar to search for the product to see which sellers give you a good price.

And before I change the topic, some good information. I have heard good opinions by word of mouth and in terms of reviews about B&H. They are on the average a little higher in cost than the cheapest semi-reputable seller you can find.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/

I have heard good things about Adorama.com as well.

If you are looking for Canon EOS lenses to buy, take a look at this link (thank you Deepak for pointing at this). This is a good starting point for a beginner in digital SLR photography and is a beginners guide to lenses for the Canon EOS series –

http://bobatkins.com/photography/digital/10d300dlenses.html

Finally, now that I have broken free of my obsession (for a while) I was trying to think of why I got so convinced into buying this, without doubting the seller and other things. The last time I bought a camera online I was very careful. I have two ideas in this regard and they are a little touchy, but here they are –

What changed since the last time I bought my Sony P150 that caused me not to scrutinize the seller as much? One answer – Google. See people form an emotional bond with their search engine – it is their bringer of information, of right information, of truth. It is not an intellectual bond, it is bond formed out of the force of habit. So when something shows up ‘on top’ on google – I think that that information is credible (for some values of credible). If any of the shoddy sellers above were ranked first or second on Google, that would be true. But, they were sponsored links and they were right on top on Google.

When a link is on top by paying for it, of course its not credible. Of course, Google never does vouch for the credibility of the people who it sells ad space to as well. While all of that is correct, the point is that being on top on Google is a powerful selling force. It can slip past the best of us. The same goes for Google’s Froogle – I don’t think any form of paid advertising is involved there though.

Can Google do something about this? Should they check credibility of the ads they host – I don’t think they can if they want to sell ads in bulk the way they do now. I think this is hard for anyone on top – be it Google or MSN or anyone else. But if they don’t, there will be more like me who trust Google ranking and information finding abilities to magically lend credibility to their sponsored links.

However, here is an opinion – if you plan to be a popular website on which resellers can rely on to sell their goods, then you need to have a credibility system in place. Something like Amazon’s seller feedback and buyer assurance. How much do you think I am going to value sponsored links on Google in the future? Maybe on the whole, advertising on websites would take a big boost, if there was a credibility system.

The second point I wanted to make is one that is best described using Ken Thompson’s ‘Trusting Trust’. How can you trust or mistrust one website based on another? What if the review site you are looking at is faking it? What if someone is trying to make one of the above sites look bad by posting fake reviews? Or is someone trying to make their own site look good?

There is, in my understanding, no way out of this. One almost always ends up implicitly or explicitly trusting one system to make a judgment about another, like KT demonstrated in his Turing award lecture.

http://www.acm.org/classics/sep95/

The only thing you can do is mitigate the possibility of being cheated is by looking at several review sites and by calling up your potential sellers. I can’t think of very much else.

Finally, if you are from one of the sort sellers this is what I have to say - get smarter. If I were you and I still wanted to defraud an occasional gullible customer, I would minimally do the following –

- Have more fake reviews in my support

- Sound more endearing on the phone

(despite the bad reviews, a good phone conversation and the price would have got me). You see going on top on google gives you a much larger window of opportunity to get at customers than you realize. Think a little bit – there are many many things you can do. Of course, you will eventually get caught or get sued – but I am assuming you are willing to entail that risk considering some of the reviews I read.

As of now I am not buying my Rebel XT, it a little outside of my budget. But I guess the prices will come down and my budget will go up, in time.

First principles, Roshan. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask this: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does it do, this matrix you seek?

A faceless Marcus Aurelius with the voice of Anthony Hopkins and the intensity of Hannibal Lector kept repeating this to me most of this week.

Last Sunday night something interesting happened – I believed I had a solution to something – a problem in quantum computing - a way by which I can take any arbitrary quantum function that takes ‘m’ bits and produces a superposition of ‘n’ bits and construct an equivalent reversible function. The interesting thing that happened was that I realized was wrong – when I started looking at the matrices that my solution generated, I realized it would not work for any function that produced more than one output bit.

After some amount of thinking about it, the problem was narrowed down to looking for a matrix that was involuntary, the first row of which was decided by the function I was trying to model. Though the problem could be stated in a simple way, it was surprisingly hard to solve.

It kept running in my head everyday, all the time, for a major part of this week and it just didn’t make sense. I could look at the problem from many angles but the matrix kept eluding me. What is the nature of this matrix? it is involuntary. But that did not help me solve the problem.

The idea that finally helped me solve it came from a friend, Abhijit Mahabal, one of the smartest people I know in the department. Abhijit got me to look at the involution represented by a matrix as the reflection of a point about an ‘n-1’ dimensional hyper-plane in an ‘n’ dimensional space. I knew that given a function that produces ‘n’ bits, the matrix would be a ‘(2^n)x(2^n)’ square matrix and hence I was looking for the reflection of a point about a ‘(2^n)-1’ dimensional hyper-plane. That was the true nature of the matrix, the fact that it is useful to construct a reversible function was only incidental.

Of course, when Abhijit first explained this to me and did the math in 2-dimensional geometry, it was a little too much for me to get my head around. I refrained from this approach for two days since the math seemed too hard. But after looking at the problem in several different ways, I went back to asking myself about the nature of the matrix – then it was simple. I worked out the math for the multi-dimensional geometry and coded it up and ran it - and it worked at the first go. Ah, the pleasure of first principles.

Yesterday I had a chance to look at my Professor Amr Sabry’s, approach to the problem and I was stumped. I was used to being stumped by the things he did (after knowing him for about a semester) and I was often reeling from the effects of what a few well thought out lines in Haskell can express. However this time I was stumped because I thought this was something I understood and yet he had a very different solution - one that wasn’t even an involution!

For a major part of last night and today it bothered me that I spent all that time trying to solve the wrong problem. It annoyed me a lot – what was the point in putting in all that energy to solve a problem if it was the wrong one?

Thinking about this caused me to realize something important – in research, unlike in the commercial software world where I spent the last several years – it is equally important to understand why the problem exists and to question to nature of that which causes the problem to exist, as it is important to solve the problem itself.

This should have been obvious, but it was not. The world of commercial software or in general the world that practices software engineering in a way that is not research oriented has certain rules of problem solving that are different  from those of research. The more creative and intellectually challenging of those environments let you take your problems and solve them in any way you want. The lamer environments put too many bounds on how you solve your problems. Very rarely, almost never, in commercial software do we get the freedom to ask the following question in a non-trivial way ‘why is this the problem that we need to solve? why is this its nature?’. If you are not in a position to make decisions about the nature of the business, you are not in a position to question the nature of the problem. 

This will be tricky lesson to unlearn when I go back to an environment that doesn’t give me this freedom.

Last night I was writing some for OS161 – I was implementing a fork(), execv(), getpid(), waitpid() and exit() for the OS161 kernel. I was using Visual Studio Express VC++ edition beta2 to write the code and I had a little ruby script to upload changed file to my linux (gasp!) box and a little script there that would build the kernel whenever the files changed. That way I get to develop code on an OS that has a notion of a unified clipboard and such pleasantries and get to build it wherever the tools are available. I also got a minimal shell like first process done.

Don’t get me wrong when I say this, but I sometimes like to think of myself as a fairly decent imperative programmer – I would be comparably good to many people you might meet. Ever since I came to college functional programming has been rewiring my brain. And its beginning to hurt. And I am enjoying it. And sometimes you need a break.

Hence writing missing pieces in a simplistic os kernel is a nice break. And I am going “Ooh! Look I have variables! Ooh! Look I can reassign the value of this thing. Look, I have loops”. And that’s a nice world to be in, if you can think in terms of state well – for those of you imperative programmers don’t know what that is, it means that things have changable values (like x=5 and x ++;) – and those of you who don’t realize you are imperative programmers, here is a simple test: if you are not a Haskell (and similar) programmer Or Scheme programmer (without set!) Or mathematician Or someone who goes from day to day without anything in the world affecting you, you are a imperative programmer of some device.

So I was enjoying being imperative for a while and then when I had it all going halfway into the night – I had multiple processes forking and execing and waitpiding and exiting – the whole crashes. And then it crashed again. And this was crazy, because all the of the pieces were things I had tested separately and yet they crashed when they came together. Somewhere in the back of my head there was this little elephant called lambda laughing on the floor ignoring his cons-kit for a bit. But wait a minute, I thought all this functional programming was making me a better programmer – I thought I could think more clearly about composition.

After about 2hours of meditation and atleast one or two sets of forays into the debugger as a last recourse, I realized what the problem was that I was not writing things back onto the user space stack in the correct alignment in some cases – and the this was some dword alignment requirement of this machine that was not mentioned anywhere. Lambda and the Turing tape looked down, looking a little sorry. I was in a bad mood by the end of it and that wasn’t fair – that was my little imperative break.

All of this, gets me to some of the conversations with some of my professors here. Dan Friedman is one of the kindest gentlest people you can talk to – and pretty much every other sentence some brain mutilating idea, said in the kindest subtlest way possible. So it happened that I needed to prove that something is not possible (it is related to the hypothetical apply-iterator operator I speak of here). Fifiteen minutes after the conversation I am thinking about higher order programming with continuations and my brain is hurting. (do you know what that means? If you don’t you need to go though the experience of hitting upon an idea that changes the way you look at the world. Changes the way you look at the world does not mean that the next time you eat a burger you look at it slightly more from the left, it is a little more encompassing an idea.)