...for an internship this summer. I found this:

Jorge Cham is always giving away our secrets.

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".

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.

Last week I watched Stanley Kubrick's 1975 classic, Barry Lyndon. What a movie! I haven't seen a movie with as gorgeous realistic photography in a while. Kubrick's composition is perfect, every single shot. The lighting and the story telling is awesome.

Barry Lyndon is the story of the life of a curios Irish character, Redmond Barry, who goes onto become the wealthy 'Barry Lyndon'. It is a 3+ hours epic, that is enjoyable right through. Its a nice tale and the way it is told is excellent. A must watch, with some wine and cheese.

As someone with an interest in photography, I am stumped by how Kubrick achieved some of the shots in this movie. The rich colors, the way the light looks... In some ways the film was a bit of a photographer's dream project. Most scenes were shot in natural light - legend has it that the film didn't use much artificial lighting at all. In fact the beautiful candle lit scenes in the movie were shot in actual candle light alone.

Quoting from http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ac/len/page1.htm:

At the very early stages of his preparation for "BARRY LYNDON", Kubrick scoured the world looking for exotic, ultra-fast lenses, because he knew he would be shooting extremely low light level scenes. It was his objective, incredible as it seemed at the time, to photograph candle-lit scenes in old English castles by only the light of the candles themselves! A former still photographer for Look magazine, Kubrick has become extremely knowledgeable with regard to lenses and, in fact, has taught himself every phase of the technical application of his filming equipment. He called one day to ask me if I thought I could fit a Zeiss lens he had procured, which had a focal length of 50mm and a maximum aperture of f/O.7. He sent me the dimensional specifications, and I reported that it was impossible to fit the lens to his BNC because of its large diameter and also because the rear element came within 4mm of the film plane. Stanley, being the meticulous craftsman that he is, would not take 'No" for an answer and persisted until I reluctantly agreed to take a hard look at the problem.

The lens that is spoken of here is one that the famous lens manufacturer Carl Zeiss made for NASA. Not many of us can get our hands on 0.7 aperture lens today, even for still photography. As a matter of fact I don't know of any that are commercially available. Canon's 50mm prime at f/1.8 is 80$ (USD), the f/1.4 version of the lens is about 300$ and there is a L class f/1.2 lens which is about 1,300$. It stops there it doesn't go any lower. Canon once had a f/1.0 lens, which I believe is now discontinued.

Now that I look around, its 2nd on the "Ten Movies Every Photographer Should See" list. The first is, of course, Baraka.

I got my new baby this Friday. The Canon 24-105 L:

Friday was a busy day - meeting with Dybvig, Sabry and Michael Adams, followed by attending some of the Preparing Future Faculty conference talks, followed by a talk about "Exploiting Online Games" by Gary McGraw, followed by a talk about "A Theory of Hygienic Macros" by Dave Herman. I rush home after all of this to see the Amazon package at my door. Quickly unpack, eyes gleam, say "my preciousss..." for sometime and then quickly rush out for dinner with some of the PL folk.

Initial impressions - the lens is build like a tank. Its also fairly solidly built. Its thick and relatively short, with a filter diameter of 77mm it dwarfs the camera. In fact, one of the most solidly build lenses I have seen. Had it been not such a crime to the lens, it might even be used as weapon of self defense. "He was bludgeoned to death with a 24-105'. "Quid pro quo Clarice, you indeed do have a maniac on your hands".

This is also the first lens with which I feel I can manually focus with some reliability. The little viewfinder on the 350d is indeed limiting, but a good lens seems to make a lot of difference.

All that said, I have been able to play with it much. Bloomington has been real windy this weekend at -8 degrees Celsius. One can dress for the cold, but wind at that temperature is just too much. You hands freeze into numbness in no time. This makes me say "NOESS FAIR!" in lolcat style.

Despite this, I manage to take a short walk one day. The pictures below are uploaded full size as they came out of the camera without any sort of out of camera processing. The quality of the images is impressive, take a closer look.

Sunset over the Dunn meadow, Bloomington, IN.

East wing of Swain Hall, the building that houses the joint Computer Science, Math and Physics library.
Bloomington, IN

The other night over dinner with folk from the PL group I heard about "Lambda Cats". This is just hilarious.

Some are a quiet impossible to appreciate unless you know specific people in the PL community. Like this one. Or specific special problems. Like this one. The lambda cats website is inspired by the more general "I Can Has CheezBurger?". There you can even build your own :)

And of course, I had to do my own.

After you have done one, it gets sort of addictive. I wonder if I can take pictures of my friend's pets (or kids) for the one true cause...

Bloomington punishes and Bloomington heals. Seattle stays squishy. :)

One of the things I enjoy about Windows Vista is the slideshow gadget that comes with the OS. I have pointed the slideshow at my external hdd folders where most of my photos live. Hence this keeps playing back randomly selected thumbnails from my rather large photography set. This brings back rather nice memories at times.

Bloomington is rather cold today (its reached -14 degrees Celsius as of now) and I was thinking about warmer places I have lived in. As chance would have it, the slideshow brought up a picture of the Charminar in Hyderabad. I remember squinting to take this picture in the bright afternoon sun.

The Charminar, Renovations - March, 2005.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charminar

The monument was built by Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah in 1591 to commemorate the eradication of plague, shortly after he had shifted his capital from Golkonda to what now is known as Hyderabad[1]. Legends has it that the emperor Quli Qutb Shah prayed for the end of plague and took the vow to build a masjid on that very place. He ordered the construction of the masjid which became popular as Charminar because of its four characteristic minarets (possibly depicting the first four khalifs of Islam). The top floor of the four-storeyed structure has a masjid which has 45 covered prayer spaces and some open space to accommodate more people in Friday prayers. Madame Blavatsky reports that each of the floors was meant for a separate branch of learning - before the structure was transformed by the imperial British administration into a warehouse for opium and liqueurs.[2]

True to the legend, the city blossomed into a synthesis of two cultures. In 1591 while laying the foundation of Charminar, Quli prayed: Oh God, bestow unto this city peace and prosperity. Let millions of men of all castes, creeds and religions make it their abode. Like fishes in the water.

I just walked back home from Soma, the local coffee shop. Today is a cold day in Bloomington. I miss Cochin.

Spent most of the day brooding over over the fact that I have a lot of work to do which I am not doing because I am wasting my time brooding over it. Good ideas behave a lot like fear - in the right environment the fear is real and impossible to ignore. Category theory turns out to be an idea almost that good.

My category theory is acting up: It strikes me that many paradoxes can be explained away by the observation that there is no such thing as equality, the best you can have is isomorphism.

There are many profound discoveries that come your way as a phd student. I realized that I recently invented something of great strategic importance. The Junk Food box. Over time I realized that every now and then when I visit a less frequently explored corner of my house I discover junk food that I hadn't eaten. Most of the time, it would be very nearly expiring. Had I known it was there, I would have liked to snack on it. 

The junk food box is a great invention - its this box, a large cardboard box - that sits in my living room that has all my junk food. You should try it sometime - despite how simple it sounds, it works great. Now not only do I know where all my junk food and save me the trouble of searching, I have come to appreciate the fact that I don't waste as much.Also there is a quiet a bit more of variety immediately available. Plus you come up with all sorts of ideas. I recently mixed moong dal, cashews, cheetos and diced some onions in. Ah!

Today evening, over pizza, Dr Hofstadter combined his Poetry class and his Group theory class and explained to the combined audience how Al-Khwarizmi visualized the solution to quadratic equations and how Tartaglia visualized the solutions to cubic equations. Using these simple visual models, he derived the solutions to the general form of the equations. He then went on to explain Tartaglia's 1534 AD poem that details his solution to cubic equations written in terza rima, the style of Dante Alighieri's La Divina Comedia. Needless to say, it was a fun class.

But what caused me to burst out laughing was this conversation I overheard where two students were discussing Group Theory and its application to Physics. Apparently there is a textbook by approximately that title and the university bookstore mislabeled it as "Group Therapy for Physics".

As I burst out laughing, something from my own ignorance struck me. Being somewhat culturally limited, I tend to think of some Chinese foods as "strange". Today morning I was trying to prepare some packaged Chinese food that I had purchased, when I noticed that the instructions on the cover said "Mix in the Soap Powder with constant stirring", and my instinctive reaction was "Oh, that's another strange thing that they'd eat". It was only several moments later that the awkwardness of of thing struck me. I went back and looked carefully at the instructions again. I had misread it, it really said, "Mix in the Soup Powder with constant stirring".

What a wonderful little tale, meta-circular metaphors! By none other than Raymond Smullyan.

Planet Without Laughter
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/smullyan.html

Once upon a time there was a universe. In this universe there was a planet. On this planet there was virtually no laughter. Nothing like ``humor'' was really known. People never laughed, nor jested, nor kidded, nor joked, nor anything like that. The inhabitants were extremely serious, conscientious, sincere, hard-working, studious, well wishing, and moral. But of humor they knew nothing. All except for a small minority who had some feeling for what humor was. These people occasionally laughed and joked. Their behavior was extremely alarming to everyone else and was regarded as an obviously pathological phenomenon. These few people were called ``laughers,'' and they were promptly hospitalized. What was so alarming about their behavior was not only the strange noises they made and the peculiar facial expressions they bore while ``laughing,'' but the utterly pathological things they said! They seemed to lose all sense of reality. They said things which were totally irrational, indeed sometimes logically self-contradictory. In short, they behaved exactly like anyone else who was deluded or hallucinated, hence they were put into hospitals.

(Hmm... I realized later that this is linked to Donald Knuth's webpage)

The past weeks I have been dealing with the consequences of my personality disorder - my annoying tendency to get involved in things I find interesting along with the annoying habit of showing up at situations where interesting things are happening.  As a direct consequence most places I show up at these days, I am asked - where's that thing you said you'd do? People with memory... argh!

Its the end of the semester and the mountain of pending work is back breaking, or rather, wrist breaking in my case. RSI is reaching new dimensions and I have been looking around for replacement forearms. If people expect nothing from you, its easy to exceed expectations. Why do I keep forgetting this? Douglas Adams comes to the rescue -

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

I don't believe it. Prove it to me and I still won't believe it.

Things other than my mundane bullshit: The other day we had a talk by Gene Spafford who is professor of computer science at Purdue U at the colloquia. He was talking about the The Value in Questioning what you think you Understand. That simple idea has been one of my major causes of pain this semester, it greatly decreased the number of things I did understand and greatly increased the number of pending things I had to do.

Anyway, 'Spaf' said about thinking 'out of the box', "In your case I don't know where the box is, or how large it is, but I'll help you get outside it". Soundness and Consistency. He seemed to be of the view that the large amount of work we do is engineering as opposed to science - this was rather ego satisfying. It was all nicely summed up by Mike Dunn is the now retired Dean of the department - Since we are human instead of trying to 'evolve' computer science - we should be doing 'intelligent design'. That was a fun talk. He also quoted Douglas Adams.

Reality is frequently inaccurate.

I am truly flooded with work these days and things have been getting annoying. I was searching the web for something when I came across this. It considerably cheered me up.

Conway's Law: Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

Or, colloquially: Software is doomed to reflect structure of the organization that produces it.

I cam across this in Michael Feather's blog. That is an enjoyable entry, worth a read. 

Its a bit shocking that this is indeed true. Having worked on a certain large OS project once, I know this to be true about that system with surprising accuracy. So there is a good and bad side to this. The good is that some part of the org maybe actually functioning very well. The bad is that it may not be.

I recently switched to Vista and things were good for a while until some driver issues started showing up in the past few days. I haven't got a chance to chase it to its death, so I am having to proverbially 'live with it'. The strangest of the issues is this one:

I have been using a simple Logitech USB keyboard with my laptop for several weeks now. Its a normal usb keyboard - no fancy media buttons or anything. Its just plug and play keyboard. It worked fine for a while until, the other day, Vista asked me for a driver! The keyboard didn't come with one - it never needed one on XP. Also it didn't need one on Vista as well until that day. So Vista gives me a bunch of options for finding and installing the driver automagically and such. These cause Vista to search the windows database online and then do some other web search and such. Several minutes of waiting later it gives up and says it cant  find a driver. The keyboard didn't come with a CD and the Logitech website doesn't have a Vista driver for it. After that my keyboard stops working!

This is really stupid because my bios can detect the keyboard. The keyboard works fine till Vista logs on and prompts me for a driver! After some grief with this I learnt that it I simply close the window that prompts me for a driver, everything continues to work just fine. I can use the keyboard with Vista as long as I just ignore its lack of a driver.

I remember remarking to myself "How did they not notice how the keyboard worked before? This reminds of working at MS...".

An odd idea from a few days ago:

I watched this video a while back, this is Richard Feynman giving a lecture about discovering laws in physics -

He is talking about laws in physics. (the underlying Philosophy of Science that Feynman describes here is due to Karl Popper)

What Feynman is describing seems fundamentally different from what we do in the formal sciences like math/logic/cs. In the later we usually choose an axiom set that we believe to be right, based on our aesthetics, and then go on to prove other things that are right wrt our axioms.  Only things that are provable are taken to right and things that are right are irrefutably so. The system is inconsistent if we deduce False from the rules that we have. Inconsistent systems are not interesting. All formal methods work like this, in spirit - they keep track of what is right.

In what Feynman is describing, they don’t have a formal notion of right. They have a notion of what is wrong and as long as something cannot be constructively (by experiment) shown to be wrong, they can temporarily accept it to be not-wrong. If you look at this as a formal system, this is one where “what is not wrong yet” is known instead of what is right. Something is not wrong because 1) We don’t know a proof by which we can construct F from it or 2) Given our current inference rules there is no proof for it. But, we may add a new inference rule to the system in the future which may invalidate the belief that something is not wrong. It’s a feels like the opposite of what we do with logics.

Imagine a formal system or a model of computation based on notion like this. We are, in a fundamental sense, giving up the notion of consistency and completeness when we do this. I wonder if there exists a computational model that corresponds to such a “co-logic” of the sort they use in the *real* sciences. Such a system, in spirit, might be able to deal with partially correct data, incorrect assumptions etc. in a natural way. Absolutely correct data (or properties about the data) would be the exception.

(I wonder what this implies for the incompleteness theorem and such. I have been told that the "co-logic" I refer to here is actually co-induction. I see some similarities there, but I am not sure if its exactly that. )

A Tutorial on (Co)Algebras and (Co)Induction - Jacobs, Rutten

A Tutorial on Co-induction and Functional Programming

Yesterday I went out to the the Union and bought myself a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. My laptop is a Dell Inspiron, has a 1.7GHz Intel processor, 1 Gb or Ram and several external hard disks. The student license costs me ~20$, roughly the cost of two dinners. Vista roughly rates performance as 3.6 for my machine - the bottleneck being my processor speed.

I had heard several conflicting opinions about the OS, most being negative. I finally decided to try it to find out. I must say that in the past day or so my experience has been mostly pleasant. As a matter of fact the OS is yet to do anything to upset me very much.

Yes it is slightly slower than XP on my machine (my previous 2 year old XP setup had degenerated to crawl, so in cases it is actually faster than XP). Despite being slower it is not too frustrating as they have taken care of a vast number of small details, that makes the system more pleasant to use.  The weather gadget for example means that I don't have to use that piece of bloat from weather.com. Outlook actually seems to start a little more promptly on this OS.

Things like the fact that the OS asks about privilege escalations is rather nice. Even other things, like the fact that they did something as goofy sounding as brining your systems performance down to a single number makes a it rather handy. Most of the time people ask things like, "I have this hardware and this setup... will the following software run on it", now there is some heuristic with which you can come to an answer without relying on your local bullshit-expert. This is all entertaining and daresay, even useful.

I like the Aero look. I like the Win+Tab combination. I like the fact that they don't run the indexer all the time and bog down the system like they do on XP. I like how access control and such is better integrated into the UI. A better file copy interface finally. It also seems like there are some scheduler hacks to better prioritize interactive and foreground processes. Altogether a nice package.

Kudos Microsoft! I was truly skeptical and I had my XP installer handy. Now lets see how all this hold out for a few months.

This Sunday, Kyle, Michael and I were enjoying a little late morning brunch at the lovely Le Petit Cafe and some light banter about polymorphic lambda calculi. Patrick would occasionally swing with his strange stories, narrated with his uniquely French mannerism. Joie de vivre!

Thus passed a nice Sunday morning when I see a little girl walk up to me. She is short, about 3 foot tall, not quiet opaque and is wearing a bright red cape and hood. She stands by my side, next to our table, and listens to us for a bit. Kyle and Michael were chatting about Kinds and Sorts. Then she says to me "What strange conversations you have Grandma". I say, "The better to understand them with, my dear". I expect her to scamper away, doing whatever it is that she needs to do, but instead she stands there, her large luminous eyes locked in mine. All this starts to get very irritating and I'd wish she would just buzz off when Kyle asks me something. I turn to reply mumbling that maybe I should eat her or something, that way she'd go away. Kyle asks me what I mean. I explain. The two of them suddenly get unnecessarily excited. "You hold him down. I will run for help". Groan...

Thinking back about it, I wonder if the wolf ate her simply because she was so annoying. After all, ignoring rumors, he was trying to get some sleep and there comes this pest asking all these inane questions.

Sometimes you've got to scratch an itch. So here goes:

X-Zylo
http://www.xzylo.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GavWPxAAlY

GyroBall: A Japenese Baseball Pitching technique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyroball

Dyna Flex Gyro Ball Gyroscope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nC5AjM2NI_c

Stirling Engine
http://www.gyroscope.com/catalog.asp?catalog=1014
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM0YmlRIYBI

Gyroscope
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WbbfzMH2to

The Controversy generating Royal Institute talk by Eric Laithwaite
http://www.gyroscopes.org/1974lecture.asp
(Its a bit funny actually)

XStream: Internal Wing Aircraft
http://www.rexresearch.com/carrcoan/carrcoan.htm

Winshurst Machine (Voltage Generator)
http://www.physlink.com/estore/cart/WimshurstMachine.cfm

Maxwell Wheel
http://www.physlink.com/estore/cart/MaxwellsWheel.cfm

Levitron
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv8msBamA3M

Radiometer (Light Mill)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Zd70sOcYOQ

Got more?

Did I ever mention that I have always been a die hard Star Trek fan? I havent watched any of the Star Trek series as much as the Next Generation, so my admiration of Star Trek is largely limited to the Next Generation. I got up today morning and with some ado I decided to look at the notes for a test I have about Computational Complexity. I hate exams where I actually have to look at the notes for any non-trivial reason. Even worse, I hate subjects that make me need to look at the notes when I really shouldn't have to, had my love for the subject been left undistrubed. Irritating.

This reminded me of the "human equation" from one of my favourite Star Trek episodes, "Hide and Q":

Data: "Sir, how is it that Q can handle time and space so well, and us so badly?"
Picard: "Perhaps one day we will discover that space and time are simpler than the human equation."

Googling for this, I came across Q saying: "Your species is always suffering and dying".

This considerably cheered me up. Ok, back to the notes. (Later addition: if you want to read a nice spoiler about the episode go here. Please read it only for memory sakes, dont read it if you havent watched it already. Ok, now back to my notes).

I grew up with a great love for Dylan. Dylan's poetry and the way only he could sing it was something I didnt find an equal to anywhere. Until of late when I started indulging in Ghalib. I daresay, maybe Dylan pales in comparison to Ghalib.

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib, who in my opinion is one of India's greatest poets I have had teh pleasure of knowing about, lived from 1796 to 1869 in Delhi - a very troubled and telling time for that city. He primarily wrote in Urdu and Persian. In the subcontinent it is his Urdu poetry that is more popular.

Some of his poetry is not easy to translate into English. Some words have no equal in English that conveys both the mood and the meaning. Also, there are some usages of words that are striking in one language that lose the their essence when translated to another language. Such is the nature of much of the poetry of Ghalib. I sometimes compare this to the "the dude" in Big Lebowski saying "That's like your opinion man...", so simple a phrase that it looses its effect when translated into some other language.

I recently came across some work by the Persian poet and Sufi master from Shiraz in Iran, Shamsuddin Muhammed Hafiz who lived from 1320 to 1389. I have access to an English translation of Hafiz's work. I dont understand Farsi and so I wonder how the originals sound. Hafiz's poetry has a very different flavor from Ghalib's, some of it is very clearly religious mysticism, some of it falls in that grey area of junoon. In much of the older Urdu poetry, and I am told this is true of Farsi poetry as well, the subject of love is described as a gender neutral "beloved". The beloved could be a man or a woman or god. The translation that I have of Hafiz's work uses God and beloved interchangibly, sometimes losing out on the other possible interpretations of verses.

That's the whole Idea

Fire has a love for itself -
It wants to keep burning.

It is like a woman
Who is atlast making love
To the person she most desires.

Find a Master who is like the Sun.

Go to His House,
In the middle of the night.

Smash a window.
Act like a great burglar -
Jump in.

Now,
Gather all your courage -
Throw yourself into His bed!

He will probably kill you.

Fantastic -
That's the whole idea!

Zero

Zero, is where the real fun starts
There is too much counting,
Everywhere else!

 

Manic Screaming

We should make all spiritual talk
Simple today:

God is trying to sell you something,
But you dont want to buy.

That is what your suffering is:

Your fantastic haggling,
Your manic screaming over the price!

I spent the past two days recovering from a trip to New York. Recovering from the stress of meeting an old friend in whose company, the both of us inevitable live larger than life.

Abhijit and Shweta drove me down to NY – a 16 hour drive from Bloomington, Indiana which we covered in two days on the way there.

Bad weather

and the general monotone of a long drive in a closed car on a US highway were the dominant aspects.

Anand is doing his PhD in Social Anthropology at Columbia University.
New York, with Anand, was great city to visit

with sky scrapers

and statues,

and seagulls,

and interesting cuisine,

and public transport,

and strange dancing light creatures,

and buildings with character.

Christmas night was spent over poker with Jose and Shweta, Marilyn and Ashok and Shweta’s sister and her husband. The day after Christmas was spent at a Jazz bar in Harlem which had great music – partly prompted by the fact that the godfather (James Brown) has passed away. All of this punctuated by fairly insane amounts of walking, drinking, late nights running into early mornings and several other things that one can do insane amounts of, in three days.

All in all, much to recover from.

Here's linking to Anand who has more intense things to say.

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)

Recently I have been watching Sean Connery’s old James Bond movies. (When I went to Scotland it was interesting to notice that they wasted no time in pointing out that Sean Connery was once a milkman in Edinburgh.) That minor detail aside, I was wondering what I would like to do when I get out of college.

And then it struck me – I would love to be a high profile programming language designer. People all over the world who need someone to design their languages for them, will know the right man for the job. “Hello, may I speak with Mr. 00\lambda please?”. “Mr. 00\lambda we have an emergency situation here that needs your immediate attention. We need a domain specific language with the following bisimulation properties…” “No, no, Mr. 00\lambda, the weak barbed congruence for the underlying process calculus must be provable, otherwise all hope is lost…” “Our competitors have the advantage of equational reasoning for their monadic computations.”

That would be a good life indeed. “Sorry I am busy today evening, you see I am in Tokyo right now”. “No not tomorrow, tomorrow I am at INRIA in Paris…” “Its the work of a systems programmer! I should have known it…”

And when I am leaving for a mission, Q would hand me that parser generator that is disguised so conveniently as a watch, or that POPLMark verifier that fits in the sole of my shoe. “And what’s that Q?”, “That, my dear lambda, is something special – top secret I must add – that our secret new decidability checker… of course, you know the risks of using it”.

Anyone out there with a great language design job on your hands, come talk to me.

I think it had been baking inside me for a along long time now – this need to travel. The last time I really traveled was with Anand to Hampi, Gulbarga and Bidar many many years back. Of course since then I have traveled much, but nothing that had the sense of rawness that this weekend had.

This weekend I traveled to Cornwall. I grew up in Cochin which is a little costal town in Kerala, India. Cochin is a very beautiful place, but it is also, like many places that one grows up in a place that doesn’t let you realize how beautiful it really is until you have left it. Since leaving Cochin I have mainly been living very far away from the sea. So now that I was in England I looked around for the best piece of coastline I could find and decided to visit it. The best piece of coastline I heard of, as recommended to me by many people, was Cornwall. And so sometime mid last week I decided on a whim that I was going to Cornwall. Cornwall is the south eastern tip of England and is famous for its rocky , cliff lined coastlines.

The journey to Cornwall would be 12+ hours by bus from Cambridge because I pretty much had to travel all the way across the country. Not caring much for the strain of the journey, I decided that I would leave Friday night arrive on Saturday morning and leave Cornwall on Sunday night and arrive back at Cambridge on Monday morning by 9.00 and then show up for work. Needless to say, I did, though there were many points in the trip at which I felt I wouldn’t make it. And this being Monday evening, I haven’t had any sleep yet and my feet are killing me. But I loved it, every bit of it – even the hard hard parts.

If you have got your head messed up when you were really young and have read Bach and Pirsig and kept that sense of aching inside you – and then you watch a movie like the Motorcycle diaries and it stirs up everything – then at some point you just have to let it all go and travel and see if you really have it inside you to do so. I think this trip to Cornwall was a little sampler for me – to see if I have it in me – I think the answer is yes.

So this blog entry is a travelogue of sorts of this amazing weekend. Needless to say, I have many many pictures as my witness.

This was the plan – board the bus to Penzance, get off at St Erth and catch a local train to St Ives. Start walking to Pendeen from St Ives. That was supposedly 21km according to the guide book I had. I booked a little bed and breakfast at the Radjel Inn at Pendeen. The next day I would catch a bus to Land’s end and walk to Porthcurno. From there I would catch a bus to Penzance where I could cath my long distance bus back to Cambridge. That was the plan.

I arrived at St Ives by about 10.30. St Ives is beautiful – the sort of place I regret so much having to rush through. If I ever go back to Cornwall I hope to spend a day or teo just enjoying St Ives. It’s a little rocky coatal town with very scenic winding narrow roads and several beaches and lots and lots of seagulls.

Seagulls are interesting birds – if you have never had the chance to see lots of them up close before you are in for  treat. It was interesting seeing this one squaking at a sign that said “Don’t feed the seagulls”. Every now and then you would see a fat seagull with the personality of a duck wobbling up to you. I remember asking one of them if it had had any self respect and if it had heard of Jonathan and it left looking rather offended.

I sampled some of the traditional “Cornish Pasty”, got myself a sandwich and some bottled dribnk and I was off. Like the guide book (which is titled “Walking in Britain”, and I highly recommend it – expect I think the book is written by athletes of some sort) the walk was rather strenuous. 21km may not sound like much but winding up and down these cliffs by the sea it is really something else.

Every hour or so you would see another human being – but that aside all you see are miles of open grasslands and rugged cliffs and a beautiful blue green sea. If you break a leg or sprain your ankle you and pretty much finished unless someone comes by and finds you. I started out only by ~12.00 and sure enough I didn’t make the walk to Pendeen. After almost giving up several times along the way and once getting my feet caught in some bog I made it to Treen. I was out of food and water at it was about 6.45. I was sure I couldn’t manage any more. Treen was this little town which pretty much only had only one street and a dozen or less buildings. Most of the buildings were bed and breakfasts and there was one hotel! All in the is little place. And whats interesting is that the prices were very high! It seemed like it was popular place for people to give up.

There was this one person how I had crossed paths with several times during my walk who knew someone locally and managed to get a cab from somewhere. The town itself had no cabs or public transport. Hence I got a lift to Pendeen. I had a shower at the Radjel Inn (a nice place to stay if you are looking for a place to stay at Pendeen) and got myself some tradition Cornish mead and dinner from a local meadery. I slept like a log that night – esp considering the long days walk and the fact that I had got no sleep on the overnight bus.

The nest day morning, after a great breakfast I walked ~2miles to the lighthouse at Pendeen. At 9am its foggy and beautiful. There was a middle aged couple there peering intently out at the see – a little later the lady walsk up to me and ask me if I would like to see to a basking shark “Everyone should see a basking shark at some point in their lives” she said. And so I did.

I caught one two hourly bus that passes through Pendeen and got off at the Land’s end aerodrome. I heard (got a pamphlet at St Erth  railway station) that said that they sell rides for 29 pounds in a little Cessna. At the aerodrome they said that they need atleast two people for a ride or that I would have to pay for an additional child’s ticket for 15mins in the air. Seemed steep. Then it struck me that I could do something better – and I did – I got myself a  half hour training flight for 69 pounds. So I flew my first Cessna 172 (my first aircraft of any sort) on Sunday the 15th, June, 2006. It was brliiant – we flew all over Cornwall in those 30mins. I got to do most of the takeoff and landing by myself as well with instructions and occasional corrections by the trainer co pilot. I now have a little “Trial Flying Lesson” certificate on my desk that I am very proud off. My instructor was friendly guy named Ben who patiently answered my many questions about the aircraft. It was beautiful – you treat it well and the aircraft flies itself. It even has little landing light which are handy to scare the seagulls J

After my flight I caught the next bus to Lands end. Lands end is apparently the most scenic part of Cornwall – rightly so. However the guide book said that the walk from Lands end to Porthcurno is about 3.5 hours (and I remember I could do their walk the previous day). However it turned out that the last bus was two hours away and the bus driver told me that I could make the walk in less that two hours easily. Oh boy! I grueling one and half hours later I back away from the cliffs. This walk was scary – every now and then you are walking along a little much trail (like those in the middle of a paddy field – if you have ever walked through a paddy field you’ll know what I mean, with a steep rocky drop on one side). There were an occasional Jonathan and Fletcher to give me company.

After a while I could not keep up the pace and the focus and chickened out. As with all things in life, when you are doing something for an objective instead of the sake of doing it, your fears and difficulties multiply. I started to walk away for the cliff and cut across some fields and ran into some women who had a real map (yes, I didn’t have a real map – yes, I am slightly crazy). I seemed like I was less than half way there to Porthcurno and there was only 25mins to 5 when the last bus was. I hurried along and 15mins later reached a main road that said that Porthcurno is only 1.25 miles away. And I was pulling my last bit of energy together and started getting annoyed with myself for being so attached to the failures of reality and car came along and I had my ride to Porthcurno. A very friendly elderly lady who had been to India and said “At some level I know that some part of me is Indian” – I didn’t know what to say. She drove a little out of her way to drop me at Porthcurno.  I reached there few minutes before 5.00 in time for the bus and by now so thoroughly annoyed with myself for clinging so desperately to safety.

So I decided to do the only obvious thing, forget to bus and go sit on the beach. And I did just that and walked to the Porthcurno beach and say there till felt at home with my sense of struggly for having reached the place. And so a half and hour later when I headed back I noticed other troubled people trying to find a cab or some way to get out of there. I wasn’t overly bothered – would I miss my bus back from Penzance? Maybe. But then again maybe not – and sure enough there came the bus that I expected at 5.00 – a little bit of miscalculation and little bit of delay – but it was there just in time to pick me up when I had so conveniently finished with the beach.

Again I didn’t sleep to well on the over night bus back and I kept thinking of the ocean and cliffs and the wind. And I thought things I could say to myself when I had been weak at many times in my life and things that I could say to my friends when I had seen them weak. A trip like this is a very real experience, the beauty, the fatigue, the cost of a mistake, the realization if your own mortality are all very real things. This is the sort of trip that cut away many layers of flak that you accumulated on your thinking leaving you fresh and exposed and stronger.

Maybe I will do Cornwall again – maybe during this stay in the UK or maybe at some point later in life. Also now I have two places in the world that I would like to live the later years of life away from everything else – both may not happen, but its nice to know they are there – Bidar, Karnataka and Pendeen, Cornwall.

26^th Monday June 2006.