I have many many things to do before the end of the semester, which is a week away. I have papers to complete, assignments to finish, evaluations and grading to do and such. I don't have time to read books or write blog entries.

Pondering my predicament, I walk into the Swaine Hall library (where the CS, Physics and Math books are), looking slightly sheepish. I had ordered a book from another campus library and I was showing up too late. "I got this email about this book, its about Qualified Types by <ark P Jones. Well, I got the email over two weeks ago, do you think you still have the book for me?". The email said to pick it up in ten days. The person looks around and find the book. It was over 3 weeks ago... Anyway, he says that they usually keep the books around for a month or so if no one else has requested them. I say, "Let me look around a bit and I will pick it up on my way out."

I was looking for a book about universal algebras, a subject I know nearly nothing about. Having done my Computer Engg in India and spent some years in the "industry" before coming to college, I have little or no understanding of most of discrete math or most of abstract mathematics. It something about our system in India, and its almost always hard to explain to people at the univ as to why precisely this is the case. Most of the time the ask "You haven't heard of this?". No I haven't. So I am trying to make up for some of this.

I find a little book - an old one - the date says 1947. It was written in 1932. "Galois and The Theory of Groups", H. G. L. R Lieber. (Text by Lillian R Lieber, drawings by Hugh Gray Lieber)(for the unfamiliar, Galois is pronounced approximately Galwa, like in galvanize). It was such a strange little book. I picked it up and Mark Jones's dissertation. I had heard of Group Theory many times, finally I had a text that looked accessible.

Not only was it accessible, it was engaging, though it was written in a strange way. Most sentences were in fragments with strange usages of capitalization. It also had rather strange looking diagrams. I spent the afternoon reading the little book. I think I understand the essence of the idea. I need to look into some details for the proofs and such. Here is how the book starts by introducing the man - Evariste Galois.

What a fascinating subject - group theory. And what a fascinating little book. As I wrote this blog entry, I searched for the authors.

Lillian Rosanoff Lieber and Hugh Gray Lieber

This husband and wife team of a mathematician (Lillian) and illustrator (Hugh) influenced many generations of mathematically inclined readers, who stumbled on one of the Lieber books in their youth and were intrigued by their style of explaining complicated mathematics in simple language. Three of the most popular were The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1936 and later editions), Infinity (1953) and The Education of T C Mits (The Celebrated Man In The Street) (1942 and later editions).

I am glad I have my priorities right about work and other "distractions". :)

"Wikipedia resurrects the original concept of knowledge" — Anon.

What an intriguing thought.

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)

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.

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