Know then thyself, presume not God to scan!

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!

Knowing...

Don't think you are, know you are!

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!

Oh Grace!

I held a jewel in my fingers
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.

-- Emily Dickinson

Nagito ergo sum!

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!

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...

MIT's Lecture Browser, Dehkhoda and Moien online and Nastaliq!

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.

We have a long way to go before we can have this for videos and audios of speeches given in Persian. As far as I know, we are far behind in the voice recognition and NLP systems for Persian; there isn't even a proper marked-up database of Persian scripts or voice recordings, which is necessary for the current technology for building a functioning voice recognition or NLP system for the language.

Talking of Persian, it's been long I have been looking for a proper Persian-Persian dictionary online and I had always wished looking up words in Persian would have been as easy as looking up words in English. Fortunately last week I found Mibo, which gives you the possibility of looking up Persian words in the two prominent dictionaries of Dehkhoda and Moien. There seems to be some legal and copyright problems and some people are trying to shut the site down (based on what Tehran Emrooz says), but I hope people instead of shutting it down, spend the effort on having a legal version online first.

Another good news related to Persian language I heard last week was that within a Tasma or Takfa supported project, the Nastaliq font is developed and freely available online (the release announcement, download link). It looks to have some problems with پ and چ that comes before the end ی, and the size of the font is relatively smaller than the other fonts, but if these bugs are fixed it would be just great.

A Deeply Religious Man!

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."
-- Albert Einstein (The World As I See It)

This is just a fantastic way of describing true religiosity! And I can't agree more with this sentence: "Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed." It is a pity though, that among the first things most people lose, regardless of their being an atheists, agnostics or blindly religious, are seeking, wondering and marveling.

You can read an abridged version of the essay here.

Ringing in my ears...

...
گويم سخن را بازگو
مردي كَرم ز آغازگو

هين بي ملولي شرح كن
من سخت كُند و كودنم

گوید که آن گوش گران
بهتر ز هوش دیگران

صد فضل دارد این بر آن
کانجا هوا اینجا منم
...
-- مولوی

Sear-born Treasures

I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
had left their beauty on the shore,
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here they are.

I just wished I could go collect shells instead of the _not studying_ here....

It is not something discovered: it is something molded

Happiness! It is useless to seek it elsewhere than in this warmth of human relations. Our sordid interests imprison us within their walls. Only a comrade can grasp us by the hand and haul us free.

And these human relations must be created. One must go through an apprenticeship to learn the job. Games and risk are a help here. When we exchange manly handshakes, compete in races, join together to save one of us who is in trouble, cry aloud for help in the hour of danger - only then do we learn that we are not alone on earth.

Each man must look to himself to learn the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something moulded. These prison walls that the age of trade has built around us, we can break down. We can still run free, call to our comrades, and marvel to hear once more, in response to our call, the chant of the human voice. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Terre des Hommes, aka. Wind, Sand and Stars)

I have recently and gradually come to learn that it is such a greatness, beyond measure, to grasp the true value of human relations.

And good relations and true friendships are definitely molded through persistence and courage, not achieved over night out of sheer luck,... almost everything is so. Talking of luck and chance, Salman has an interesting post in his bugs of life series, called, "Chance is not just out of chance". Interesting read (in Persian).

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.