Friend or a shadow in the pool...

"I do not want a friend who smiles when I smile, who weeps when I weep; for my shadow in the pool can do better than that." Confucius

Is self from self: a deadly banishment!

And why not death rather than living torment?
To die is to be banish'd from myself;
And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her
Is self from self: a deadly banishment!
What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?
What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?
Unless it be to think that she is by
And feed upon the shadow of perfection
...

- William Shakespeare (Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act 3. Scene I)
--
I came by this painting of Silvia by Charles Edward Perugini some time after I posted this piece, I'm appending it here. It is quite nice, I particularly like the dress!

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)

It doesn't matter...

It doesn't matter what I want
It doesn't matter what I need
It doesn't matter if I cry
It doesn't matter if I bleed
You've been on a road
Don't know where it goes or where it leads

It doesn't matter what I want
It doesn't matter what I need
If you've made up your mind to go
I won't beg you to stay
You've been in a cage
Throw you to the wind you fly away

It doesn't matter what I want
It doesn't matter what I need
It doesn't matter if I cry
Doesn't matter if I bleed
Feel the sting of tears
Falling on this face you've loved for years

-- It doesn't matter by Alison Krauss

It sometimes hurts, being a girl...

The thought there in I cannot confront

Whatever enters my mind cannot be tossed aside.
But the thought there in I cannot confront.
What shall I do when I am unable to scream for you?
Separation, Separation, Free me from this Separation.
Whatever language is spoken, Separation always exists.
Vicious, Relentless Separation ...

-- Part of a beautiful song by the NoorSaaz group.

Cute!

Baby Bunny Grooming!

I always loved to have a pet, but when your father is a parasitologist, the most you can have at home is a fish tank! I want a bunny too...

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

Can't walk!

Why run, until you can't walk?

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.