Stereotypes

Disclaimer: You do not fit it in to any of these stereotypes.

I’ve had an accident and I have made certain conclusions.

• There are only a small number of friends, its mostly people whose interests are temporarily aligned with yours.
• Life has only meaning in struggle. Triumph or defeat is in the hands of the Gods… So lets celebrate the struggle.
• A person is strong only when it knows its weakness.

These are types of suspicious people I need to remember:

• Mr. Salesman: Believes businessmanship is salesmanship. Cons predictably. Relies on vocal negotiations. Counter-strategies: Grim trigger bluff, written contracts and fake penance.
• Mr. Spy/Traitor: To detect one, always keep the eye on the one that is strangely detached from the goals of the group but has normal social life with the members. Not an introvert. Counter-strategies: None. Get rid of it. If you can’t; then be righteous.
• Mr. Republican: Would rather be politically correct than embrace the truth. Takes credit for other people’s achievements. Relies on careful planning instead of sheer ability. Has no real principles in life other than to be accepted by the society and to be powerful.
• Mr. Sidekick: Adores you, but may want to know your limits before you do. Relies on subtle ad hominems and moments of weakness.

All of them flock towards players who play games of perfect information. A false sense of knowledge about the state of the game is the best antidote against such information suckers.

Things I did to cool my graphics card

1. sudo ln -sf /usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.27-7-generic/include/asm/page.h /usr/include/asm/page.h
2. Compile http://www.g2inf.one.pl/~anszom/MBP-ATI/
3. sudo ./radeontool power low
4. Added it to /etc/rc.local

Homeopathy Jokes

1. I invented the homeopathic Viagra. It works, but you need to rub it on really well.
2. Ever wondered why there are no homeopathic contraceptives? Because you are either pregnant or you are not.

I learned to be silent

Recently I said something stupid in class and I failed miserably in defending my case. I embarrassed myself and came to my senses soon after about where I am in the pecking order of geniuses from around the world. I am not on that list! It seems almost miraculous that I am here in this university. Was it some kindaf mistake by the admissions office?

Anyways I have learnt the luxury of anonymity and being just another guy. But I am hungry for power and want to leave a lasting mark on this planet of my existence. I have realized I can’t have it both ways. Popularity comes with power and influence whether I like it or not. And by being popular you are more likely to embarrass yourself in public.

If I choose to be just another guy, I need to get married and leave my lineage before I go. But I would never want anyone like me in this world. I mean this place is tough. I know this sounds bipolar compared to my previous post. Hmm .. I don’t want anyone to think that previous sentence about me. How can I get everyone to only think nice things about me without  forcing them to do so?

Perhaps I need to avoid situations when spontaneity is required. I should think and plan through everything before doing it. Or else I might embarrass myself. Social situations require spontaneity… Hmm I can see why dad was a recluse, and I should be too. But then why did he choose to make kids, did he not have any idea about how difficult it is here? Perhaps he hadn’t exposed himself to every situations to know that.

Ways to be happy

Early this year, one morning, I was taking a run outside my campus amidst nice rich people’s bungalows and something just blew on me: They don’t know they have everything. I do not mean to say they are always hungry for more. But they don’t know they have have it! That’s really cool! So nowadays, when I eat, I enjoy every moment of it, when I listen to music I hear every bit. It is really beautiful when you do that.

I remember another dawn not a long time ago. I had not slept the previous night. I was tired and I walked out staring at the skies and I close my eyes and I could actually feel like I was on a huge sphere turning towards the sun. The joy, humility and awe of being so small and yet intricate amongst everything was so wonderful.

One night when I was falling asleep after a bad migraine, I thought about old age and death and something struck me: the Gods envy us! I mean the whole universe envies us! I know it sounds really cool and proverby but I really felt it. We would stop being and relax forever and everything else must keep going on. I have woken into this dream from my eternal rest into this little wet dream (LOL!) and soon this would end.. mmmm .. I love this dream. I will enjoy every moment of it…

Later today I learned once again that we are very rare and lucky. The right sperm and the right egg. I bet there was a guy in that vastness who was way more intelligent, healthy and worthy to live than me! But he did not make it… HAHA YEAH! I WON! I exist! How dare we whine about this life when the vast majority have never woken up from that eternal slumber.

Debate with a Van Tillian presuppositionalist

Recently on my post titled the “Arguments against the existence of God“, Tyler Wittman commented like this: 

Atheists are as real as Chewbacca. The viability of any worldview is if it can be consistently applied and atheism fails the moment you appeal to science (which depends upon uniformity of certain laws), or trust your cognitive faculties, or hold to any moral standard, or place value upon your existence . . . I could go on, but I won’t.

Another “atheist” blog amongst hundreds . . . Nietzsche was the most convincing atheist, from the standpoint that he truly drank his own kool-aid.

I replied:

Christians are as real as Atheists. The viability of any worldview is if it corresponds with reality, and Christianity fails the moment you appeal to natural disasters, unjustified human suffering…I could go on, but I won’t.

Another Christian “drive-by” amongst hundreds… Some Christians even drank the real kool-aid  at Jonestown.

(P.S: I can make infinite internally consistent worldviews).

To which he has replied this:

You refer to theodicy, which is not an issue that is insurmountable. It all depends upon your preconditions for belief that you’ve already established before you approach the suffering or the disaster in question. Neither am I referring to an internally consistent worldview. I believe to make sense of any other worldview, you borrow from the Christian one.

I will not labor to set out the views here in detail, but I will provide you with a personal story from one of my favorites (whom Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris would all have done better to have read before producing such short-sighted efforts of their own – in particular Dawkins; his 747 argument is embarassing), Cornelius Van Til:http://www.reformed.org/apologetics/why_I_believe_cvt.html

It is lengthy and you may not read the entire thing, but I have pointed you the right way, I believe. Here is a snippet to pique your interests:

“I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief; I hold rather that unless you believe in God you can logically believe in nothing else. But since I believe in such a God, a God who has conditioned you as well as me, I know that you can to your own satisfaction, by the help of the biologists, the psychologists, the logicians, and the Bible critics reduce everything I have said this afternoon and evening to the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian. Well, my meanderings have, to be sure, been circular; they have made everything turn on God. So now I shall leave you with Him, and with His mercy.”

The internet is an inadequate medium for these discussions in the first place because they are impersonal and the acceptance or rejection of Christianity is a serious matter that extends beyond the blasse discussion blogs offer. I apologize for my “drive-by.” I hope that I have atoned for it.

I couldn’t write a reply to this because if I go ahead to debate against every argument in the encyclopedia of Van Tillian presuppositionalism, I wouldn’t win any converts. Instead all I would have done is to prove myself and me alone, that within huge haystack of rational arguments and philosphical jargon lies the truth; that presuppositionalist apologetics is wrong

So herein lies my dilemma: what must I do if I am debating such an apologist in front of a group of potential de-converts? If I engage my opponent who hides his unjustified belief behind a huge pile of pseudo- justifications, I would put my potential de-converts to sleep easily. Or worse, they look at how my opponent sounds without understanding anything he has said to conclude that he is write because he uses complicated sounding words and must know what he is talking about. On the other hand, If I do not engage him it would be easily mistaken by my potential de-converts that I do not have an answer, and so I am wrong.

It is amazing to see the lengths to which Christianity goes against unbelief.

Conclusion: Winning converts is not same as winning against apologists. An unbeliever must not try to satisfy the ego-maniacal need to win a debate. He must instead focus on keeping his replies as short and jargon free as possible while responding to the claims by the apologist. An unbeliever must not let the apologist digress behind piles of jargon or long anecdotes.

An unbeliever must use ideas that are within the grasp of the audience. For example, talking about malaria is better than talking about human suffering.

Blast This

Heard this in a podcast.

BLAST this sequence: atgttcc tgtccttccc caccaccaag acctacttcc cgcacttcga cctgagccac ggctctgccc aggttaaggg ccacggcaag aaggtggccg acgcgctgac caacgccgtg gcgcacgtgg acgacatgcc caacgcgctg tccgccctga gcgacctgca cgcgcacaag cttcgggtgg acccggtcaa cttcaagctc ctaa

Instructions: Copy and Paste the DNA sequence into the query window, and hit the blast button. Try again selecting the non-human, non-mouse database from the drop down menu. What organism is the exact same gene found in? WTF?

I am getting that house mosquitoes and us share this same gene. We use it to make haemoglobin but mosquitoes use it for tissue control, whatever that means. May be they do an alternative splicing to make a different protein?

Nature has excellent code reuse. Better than most Microsoft, Adobe programmers. LOL!

Compiling Scheme into a Cellular Automata

This is will enormously speed up computing: Compile Scheme into a CA. Such a compiler if designed properly could parallelize recursive code from the grass roots. The immense parallel nature will reduce the actual time of execution and might make ab-initio protein folding feasible on machines without relying on quantum computing.

First step in writing a Scheme-to-CA compiler would be to define the . Then define Church numerals. Then define the Y combinator as a CA structure that reproduces itself in a particular dimension if necessary. Then define the primitives: car, cdr, zero?, null?, cond, etc in CA so as to break the meta circularity easily. Thats it! You are good to go baby!

Faster Euclidean Algorithm

Instead of finding the of the smaller number and the remainder of the larger number divided by the smaller number, let the algorithm find the gcd of the difference between the larger number and smaller number AND the remainder of the larger number divided by the smaller number.

In many cases the difference between the larger number and the smaller number is smaller than the smaller number. If it is not, then stick to the original algorithm for that particular instance of the recursion.

This way the Euclidean algorithm will converge twice as fast on the GCD.

Faster PageRank

I might be giving away some bright ideas by writing this post, but I don’t care because I don’t know how to make money with this idea. I think there is a way to speed up PageRank enormously. The current PageRank algorithm uses the eigenvector centrality of an arbitrary undirected graph. Those guys at Google make an adjacency matrix of The Internet and calculate its eigenvector. The magnitude of each dimension of the eigenvector is PageRank. The algorithm for converging on the eigenvector is called The Power Method. But this is slower compared to my speed-up for the PageRank.

I propose to use the Floyd’s algorithm (not Warshall’s algorithm) on a matrix where initially all elements are set to 1 if there is a direct 1 click link form the th page to the th page. All other elements are set to . This is sortaf like the the adjacency matrix.

After applying the Floyd’s algorithm the non elements of the rows are summed up and the row with the least row sum has the highest centrality measure. And therefore the most relevant page.

I am not sure whether this will work when there are cycles in a graph.

The benefits of this method are that PageRank can be done on machines that are not as capable as Google’s MapReduce wielding parallel machines. In fact I am going to ask my employer to try using this for our next generation scientific publishing platform.

Another possible variant is to use the Warshall’s algorithm on the adjacency matrix and select rows with the highest row sum as the most relevant pages.