"Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be." -- Shakespeare (Hamlet, Act V. Scene II)
The story of Alexander Pope and I was love at first sight! From the very first verse I read from him, I was captured by the beauty and power of his writing. I guess that is not surprising, he is known to be the third most frequently quoted writer in the English language after Shakespeare and Tennyson, but I guess out mutual interest in epic is the reason behind my special interest in him (he is the translator of Homer's Iliad into English). I had once quoted a part of An Essay on Criticism and here is another piece from "An Essay on Man" (You can read the complete Epistle II here).
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
There is this funny article titled "The Calculus of Saying 'I Love You'", talking about a postdoctoral fellow in Chemistry and an engineering doctoral student, discussing when the right time is to say "I love you"!
The engineer says he wants to say it when he is sure of it and when his love has reached a significant point. He claims that would be when dLove/dt = zero. The article argues that the second derivative might actually be a better choice... Just read it, it is funny, and yet perhaps insightful :) This is what happens to people like me who want to drive most of their life through logic! But sometimes I wonder if this is just loosing precious time, and that cold reason is butchering something beautiful, something dear here... Perhaps this is just a way of justifying your lack of courage!
I held a jewel in my fingers-- Emily Dickinson
And went to sleep.
The day was warm, and winds were prosy;
I said: "’T will keep."
I woke and chid my honest fingers, --
The gem was gone;
And now an amethyst remembrance
Is all I own.
People lay the foundation of grand theories like Information Theory in their master thesis, and I am going to become the founder of the grand theory of Nagging through my work (primarily nagging to myself) here!
I was playing around with this Lecture Browser of MIT, where I came to an interesting talk by Sylvia Nasar, the author of "A Beautiful Mind" which is the story of John Nash. Somewhere in the talk, she says something interesting about how and why Nash never tried to be an expert in any field:
... what he did was to simplify a complex problem that appeared to defy solution by pursuing a strategy that the experts in the field [had set up for] and he never tried to be an expert in any field because he felt that absorbing the work of other people would dull his creativity.
A friend of his once tried to describe Nash's style of thinking to me by saying: Everyone else would climb a pick by looking up for a path somewhere up the mountain, not Nash. Nash would go over a completely different mountain he would climb a completely different mountain and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back on the first one...
People at MIT's CSAIL has set up this very interesting Lecture Browser system, which with the help of voice recognition systems, gives you the ability to search through lectures given at MIT (I think the whole audio and video database is not yet available there, but that is the plan).
In the introduction video the project is described like this:
"Conventional search engines are all text based, and that's been very effective, it's great. There's all sorts of text on the web but it doesn't do anything for audio and video materials and this type of data is just exploding these days it's becoming easier than ever to create, to store, to disseminate these kinds of data. Just look at the explosion of podcasting for example this project is all about letting people search inside video material of recorded lectures, to find particular snippets that they're interested in..."This is just great. Although it is not as powerful as you would expect, the ranking of the results doesn't look that good and there isn't much possibility for using complex search queries, it is still a great idea. Perhaps the idea has been around for long, but putting it in practice for lectures given at MIT, I think, is going to show how useful applying semi-perfect voice recognition to a voice/video database and indexing the database based on that is going to be.
