The importance of stupidity in scientific research

That is the title of an article by Dr. Schwartz, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at U of Virginia. A short and interesting article, and probably helpful for those who are struggling with some research project. If you have done a research project on your own, you are familiar with the moments when you just want to bang your head against the desk, or monitor (or whatever hard place you can find), from the frustration of days and nights of being stuck with apparently unsolvable questions and problems at hand, and feeling you are the most stupid person in the universe. How to manage your stupidity or at a higher level, how to turn it into "productive stupidity", is quite a lesson you should learn in the course of a good research work.

A good adviser could play a key role here, in helping you over come the frustration you'd feel from time to time. Whenever I feel frustrated or hopeless after some time of not making progress or even having results that shows some assumptions from the beginning were false, my adviser here tells me, "hey that is science, if it was supposed to be easy and straightforward, we would have been out of business!"

Anyway, here are some interesting excerpts from the article:

What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don’t know what we’re doing. We can’t be sure whether we’re asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result.

Science involves confronting our ‘absolute stupidity’. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, ‘I don’t know’. The point of the exam isn’t to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it’s the faculty who failed the exam.

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right.

...but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
-- Martin A. Schwartz

Confusion

When you are thinking about something you don't understand you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion. It is a very difficult and unhappy business, and so most of the time you are rather unhappy actually, with this confusion, you can't penetrate this thing.

Now, the confusion is, because we are all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid trying to figure out how to put two sticks together to reach the banana, and we can't quite make it. So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, I put the two sticks together, and I reach the banana. --Richard Feynman

That was a very interesting piece I came by on Shefa. This explains a lot about why I look unhappy sometimes. That is because I am easily confused, I'm not that bright!* You can watch Feynman saying the above in an interview here.

--
* Read that with Chandler's intonation when saying:
"And we’re easily confused. We’re not very bright." (Friends, E10.15)

Mathematizing Love!

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!

Become an expert in a field, or may be not!

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...

Epigrams on Programming

"Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers." -- Alan J. Perlis

This quote is from an interesting text by Alan J. Perlis called Epigrams on Programming. There are some 130 quite interesting epigrams there, worth a look.

...for who could ever learn to love a beast?

Once upon a time,
in a faraway land,
a young prince lived in a shining castle.
Although he had everything his heart desired,
the prince was spoiled, selfish, and unkind.
But then,
one winter's night,
an old beggar woman came to the castle
and offered him a single rose
in return for shelter from the bitter cold.
Repulsed by her haggard appearance,
the prince sneered at the gift
and turned the old woman away,
but she warned him not to be deceived by appearances,
for beauty is found within.
And when he dismissed her again,
the old woman's ugliness melted away
to reveal a beautiful enchantress.
The prince tried to apologize,
but it was too late,
for she had seen that there was no love in his heart,
and as punishment,
she transformed him into a hideous beast,
and placed a powerful spell on the castle, and all who lived there.
Ashamed of his monstrous form,
the beast concealed himself inside his castle,
with a magic mirror as his only window to the outside world.
The rose she had offered
was truly an enchanted rose,
which would bloom until his twenty-first year.
If he could learn to love another,
and earn her love in return by the time the last petal fell,
then the spell would be broken.
If not,
he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time.

As the years passed,
he fell into despair,
and lost all hope,
for who could ever learn to love a beast?
-- The introduction part of the "Beauty and the Beast"

I simply love this animation movie, especially the introduction part.

A taste for Music

According to my friends, I have an irregular taste when it comes to music (actually not just music but most everything!). But actually I am quite fond of my taste of music. I enjoy my music not just as something I play on the background, but I try to sense the feeling of the composer while composing or the player when playing it or see the imagery it tries to convey. This taste is not limited to any particular genre, it could be Iranian folklore music, or European classics, or even pop and rock. But the essential thing for me is the music itself, it can have a singer, but I can enjoy it only if the voice of the singer is well integrated into the music and is actually working like just another instrument in the orchestra (singers with exceptional voice or strong lyrics are exempted here).

Anyway, enough about me! I said all this because I wanted to talk about Hermes Records, which is my favorite music publisher in Iran. It has published some fabulous works that I think no other publisher in Iran would have dared to. Not for the fear of censorship, but for the fear of bankruptcy, since the audience of these kind of music is unfortunately quite limited here. You can hardly find their tapes or CDs in most music stores and to my utmost disappointment, one of the stores I knew in Mashhad who used to bring them told me today that they won't bring it since they don't get sold!

You can check out their online catalog. I have a few of their albums and I particularly like these (you can hear a sample by clicking on the name) Journey by Massoud Shaari and Christophe Rezai, Genesis by Navid Afghah, Gypsy Moon by Mohammad Reza Aligholi and Now and Then by Alireza Mortazavi.

Hermes Records is also the publisher of the Endless Vision by Hossein Alizadeh and Djivan Gasparyan, which was nominated for the Grammy Award 2006. I like the "Sari Galin" and "Shurangiz Improvisation" in this album very much.

As I said they have a very nice taste for what they publish and they do it with elegant packing as well. Most of the albums they have published have a story behind the music. For example, at the back of Gypsy Moon you can find:

"A lunatic falls in love with the Moon. He marches the world night and day, not to loose the Moon from his sight. A different style of using traditional motives accompanied by Iran's most passionate instruments like Daf, Setar, Kamancheh ..."

Or at the back of Genesis you can find:

"The story of Creation is the most important chapter in the mythology of the Babylonian civilization. Based on an ancient Sumerian tale, the order of the universe was built upon a dramatic confrontation between a Dragon-shaped creature who ruled the darkness, storms and the seas, and Mardukh, the God of Babylon. After over forcing the devil-hearted Dragon, Mardukh created the sky and the stars, the trees, animals and finally mankind.Genesis is formed in three separate parts: Genesis, Universe, Life .
Genesis, the album, is a remarkable experiment, using the diverse sound generating capabilities of Iran's traditional Drum, the Tombak. Navid Afghah, a young talented musician and Tombak player, tells the story of Creation by making a unique and colorful ambience with his instrument..."

I have planned to buy all their works and make a complete collection. Unfortunately most of what I have is on tapes and it is hard to take tapes along so I should start collecting the CDs. There are a few more of their works that I really like to get hold of before I leave, like Safar, Ditirambi and Cello Songs for Silence. I hope I can find them. I'd recommend you to treat your ears to some nice pieces as well, you won't regret it! (And no, I don't work for Hermes Records and I don't get anything from them!)

D5: All Things Digital

The 5th Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital executive conference has just come to an end, with some interesting exhibitions and interviews. The climax I guess was the interview with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It has some interesting insight on where the industry is heading, and some good advice on how to move foward and not get stuck in your past!

Steve Jobs: There’s a lot of things that happened that I’m sure I could have done better when I was at a Apple the first time and a lot of things that happened after I left that I thought were wrong turns, but it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter and you kind of got to let go of that stuff and we are where we are. So we tend to look forward.

And, you know, one of the things I did when I got back to Apple 10 years ago was I gave the museum to Stanford and all the papers and all the old machines and kind of cleared out the cobwebs and said, let’s stop looking backwards here. It’s all about what happens tomorrow. Because you can’t look back and say, well, gosh, you know, I wish I hadn’t have gotten fired, I wish I was there, I wish this, I wish that. It doesn’t matter. And so let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.

You can read the transcript or watch the video.

Alles ist Spiel! (Everything is game!)

UNTERHALTUNGSMATHEMATIK IN HISTORISCHER PERSPEKTIVE (Obviously, auf Deutsch)

Blogging with LaTeX

A cool tool for using the power of while blogging. It works like a charm, you just need to install the Greasemonkey's add-on for firefox and then install the LaTeX for Blogger script. (For more details, check the instructions provided by the author of the script).

Then you can simply write
$$e = \lim_{n\to\infty}\left(1 + \frac{1}{n}\right)^n$$
or
$$e = \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{1}{n\fact} = \frac{1}{0\fact} + \frac{1}{1\fact} + \frac{1}{2\fact} + \ldots$$

and get

or


Published on your blog :D
(As ashamed as I am, I'm illiterate in , so I might have written the formula not the best way possible, I just put it here as a proof of concept.)
--
By the way, recently I'm just fascinated by the constant e. It keeps popping up in the proofs for correctness and convergence of randomized gossip algorithms we study these days. I really regret why I didn't pay enough attention in the math classes, I wished I could free up some time and go back and study some real analysis and some linear algebra. Also some more graph theory... if I could I might have considered changing my field and go study math....

Another by the way! I'm buried (as usual) with my course work and my move to Switzerland (effective from September 2007) has added more complications to the situation, so you shouldn't expect this blog to be updated regularly for some time. Thanks for your understanding! :D

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs has given a commencement speech at Stanford College for 2005 graduates. It is quite moving and inspiring. (You can watch it on YouTube or read the speech here. For those friends who don't have access to youtube, the audio and video are available but you need to have iTunes, I'm not sure if it works with other podcast softwares)

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever."

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life, don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice."

I have listened to it over and over and each time at the end, I felt a vacuum inside, kind of upset with myself for why don't I have the courage to "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish".

And so is celebrated the birthday of the great ones

Today I came by a Birthday Tributes Speech by Herbert Wilf given on Donald Knuth's birthday in 2002. I quote some parts of the first half of the speech where he pulls Knuth's leg a little bit for his emphasis (obsession/passion?) on using correct notation and correct typesetting.

" [...]
Don is one of the great communicators of the twentieth, and we all wish for him, the twenty-first centuries. Actually, that depends a little bit on which endpoint of the vector of communication Don is sitting at. If he is at the initial vertex of that arrow, he is supreme. His papers, books, web site, and other writings and talks, are brilliantly original, and crystal clear. All of us, very much including yours truly, have learned a lot about clarity of scientific communication from his example.

On the other hand - if Don is sitting at the terminal vertex of the arrow of communication, life is a bit different. You have to do a lot of things right in order to get your thoughts through to him.

First, abandon e-mail, all ye who seek to enter here. [...] So you take the hint, and after writing 37 e-mail messages to various addresses that you thought might have gotten through to him, you decide on written communication. Of course, since you are about to write to the creator of TEX, you are not about to write in Microsoft Word, are you? Of course not. To show your respect for your addressee and his creations, you will write in TEX, and so you do. You spend a great deal of effort to get it to look pretty, and you send it off. Let's say that you're writing in order to describe a proof that P = NP which you've recently found. Unbeknownst to you, your letter will be placed on a stack that already has 5,379 letters that reached him before yours did, and which are waiting while he completes his latest additions to 47 new manuscripts and 311 revisions of already existing books. But one day, probably in the same year, your moment will come. He'll read your letter and give you his reply. You eagerly tear open the envelope that reaches you, and what you find inside is your own letter to him, on which he will have pencilled a number of pithy comments on your theorem. Really insightful comments, that make you pleased to have gotten the benefit of Don's knowledge and brilliance. For example, "It's best to use a backslash comma here, in order to get exactly .073 ems of space," or, "the backslash mathchardef doesn't belong here; see page 397 of the TEXBook for a better way," etc. [...]

You take a clue from Don's reply, which was a pencilled scrawl on your original message. That's it! You'll sit down and write, by hand, in pen and ink, on fine paper, the whole P = NP proof. Then, at least, you'll be past the TEX barrier and into real mathematical give-and-take. And so you do. [...]

Breathlessly you tear open the envelope once more, and again you read the now-familiar pencilled scrawl, this time wrapped around the words of your elegant handwritten letter. In one place it says "Good grief! The Euler numbers of the fourth kind cannot be denoted by E(n, k)! That notation went out in 1642 in the writings of Fermat, and since then everybody should be using the triple parentheses with the n upstairs and the k downstairs." [...]

I could go on with a description of the complete Inbound Communication Algorithm, but I won't because there's a better way. The Collected Works of Monty Python's Flying Circus are well known to have the property, shared only by the Bible, by the works of Shakespeare, and by The Art of Computer Programming, that whatever it is that you would like to say, they have already said it, and in a more interesting way than you would have. So let me show you a video of the Monty Python group doing the Police Station skit, which summarizes such communication problems as I have been describing, [...]"

It is quite a fascinating speech. He actually shows a Monty Python Video in the middle of his speech (you can find the part he is referring to here) and he concludes his talk by giving Don Knuth his birthday present, a Theorem in the subject of combinatorial
sequences! I just envy such a life, it is my utopian dream to receive a theorem as a birthday gift.

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

There is this group called Digital Ethnography working under the supervision of Michael Wesch at Kansas State University. They have produced this fantastice piece of video called Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us. It is worth seeing.

You can see it on YouTube, or you can download it from here (WMV, 55MB).