Typepad, we need to talk...

God, I loathe Typepad. I loathe its sluggish website. I loathe its Typelists, Typeprofiles, Typewipes, Typejars and Typekeys. I loathe its chirpy uncool corporate cheer. I loathe its randomly-capitalized script language. I loathe the fact its menus only look like tabbed menus. I loathe its useless commenting system. I loathe its pathetic attempts to play catch-up with Facebook. I loathe that its spell-check has never heard of "Facebook". I loathe its half-assed blog export utility. I loathe that it doesn't have a body I can push down the stairs. And I'm glad I loathe it, because if I didn't, I'd use it more, and that'd really suck, coz I just loathe the mofu.

Sprout Out Loud - 2009 SF Workshop at IIT-K

A Few Good Stories

Vandana Singh, Suchitra Mathur and I are teaching a three-week speculative-fiction workshop at IIT-Kanpur in June/July this year. The application form is here, and the announcement is here. IIT-K doesn't have a web link yet.

There have been other SF workshops in India of course, but they've been sporadic affairs designed to teach beginners. Our focus is a bit different. We're aiming to help the semipro writer get to the next level. We also intend to make this an annual affair. The long-term goal is to create a network of desi spec-fic writers. Right now, there's a lot of talent, but they mostly work in isolation. We hope to change that.The instructors may be different year to year, but the overall goals of the workshop will remain the same. Sustainability is important here, because it's probably going to take a couple of decades of effort to make a real difference. But I try not to dwell on that part.

Suchitra Mathur at IITK had to do most of the hard work in setting up the workshop, and now we'll reap the benefits of her hard work. I know. It is unfair. I know. But look yaar, I didn't design the Matrix.

But this blog is not about the workshop. It's about putting together a list of spec-fic stories for the workshop. One problem with writing workshops is that the participants are all working off different stories. It helps to have a common pool of stories for discussions about voice, point of view, dialog handling and so on. Making the list is a lot of fun, but it's also turning out to be a lot harder than I thought. It reminds me of the scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack talks about the art of making a compilation tape:

"A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to hold the attention. Then you have to take it up a notch, but not blow your wad, so maybe cool it off a notch, and you can't put the same artist twice on the tape, except if some subtle point or lesson or theme involved, and even then not the two of them in a row, and you can't woo somebody with Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" and then bash their head off with something like GBH's "City Baby Attacked by Rats," and... oh, there are a lot of rules..."

Exactly. So what would be the killer first story?

Democrats In Deep Gloom Over Inability To Fail

The Democrats are in deep disarray over the devastating success of their candidate Barack Obama. In cities, towns and college campuses across the country, the same refrain could be heard.

"We got complacent, dude," admitted PingMe32, a self-declared transhuman. "Just because we've failed for twenty odd years, we thought we could take the American people for granted. But they were hip to our game. We totally deserved to win."

But others vehemently agreed:

"I don't know what else we could have done," mused a baffled Dr. Tom Fumblesworth, president of the Fruit Fly Anti-Defamation League. "We picked a guy named Hussein, a black guy, a Kenyan-American, an elitist from Harvard, a community rabble-rouser, a guy who likes to use complicated words like 'audacity.' That's at least four syllables. I guess the message is that we should have played it safe and picked an illegal immigrant as the nominee. Well, America, we hear you, loud and clear."

Perhaps this unidirectional finger-pointing itself explains why the party failed in its efforts to lose. The party, insiders confided, had moved far from its roots of inconsistency and incoherence. They had moved like an organism with six legs attached to one body instead of six bodies attached to one leg. The signs of success were on the wall, and while the democrats texted, facebooked, blogged and goosed them to each other, they'd forgotten the words of Jimmy Carter: "A little organization is a dangerous thing."

Anil Menon, maverick maverick and self-declared human, found comfort in liberal mathematics: "A system built for failure cannot succeed at failing on a consistent basis. It's asking for perfect imperfection, and Godel only promised imperfect perfection. Failure is not always an option."

Leading democrats declared they would simply have to try harder. Many could be spotted fanning out to the libraries and book-meets to hammer out a new success-proof strategy.

"We need to read more, study more, think more and do less," sighed award-winning writer and feminazi, Mary Wollstonecraft. "We've managed not to come through before. The darkest night awaits the brightest dawn. We will endure. We. Will. Endure."

If only failure were so simple. Against talent, ambition, hopes and human will, what can mere negativity achieve? If a Barack Obama is possible, if such a possibility is possible, if probability itself has become a subset of the doable, then the Impossible may be, just maybe, the last citizen left its once vast and marmoreal imperium. Be kind: hug a democrat today.

Moonshot

All right, let's all calm down. Mars is still a few weeks away and the center of the galaxy will take at least a month. Maybe even two.

Who cares!!!!! Chandrayaan I of 2,4,5, 10 Million buts and bolts is on its way to the moon. The moon! The moon. The goddamn moon! I'm so thrilled I could bark. I am, actually.

It seems the payload has to be under 1500 kg, which worried me. 1500 kgs means there's space for about 18 dancers (80 kgs/dancer), and with eight dancers for the hero and eight for the heroine, that leaves a total of just 80 kgs for the 11 scientific payloads. Tight. Very tight. Still, if the damn vehicle managed to crawl through the Indian bureaucracy, anything is feasible.

What a long, long wait it has been. The Sanskrit poets had been tempting us for centuries. Just listen to Sarva:

The moon that spreads its rays jasmine-white
as lovely as the breast of a Kashmiri girl
and its mark, as waterlily-dark,
is like the painting of her breast with musk.

I can't confirm the accuracy of the simile, alas, but the man sounds like he knows what he's talking about. At any rate, if that doesn't motivate an astronomer to fiddle with his astrolabe, I don't know what will.

"Chandrayaan," as the newspapers tell us, is "ancient" Sanskrit for "moon vehicle." Ancient Sanskrit is Vedic Sanskrit, and Chandrayaan is probably more like "post-vedic" Sanskrit usage, even though both pieces (Chandra and yaan) do appear in the Rig-ved. The word "Soma" is often used as a synonym for the moon (sometime visualized as the cup containing soma, the ambrosia of the Gods, namely, Heineken beer) so perhaps Chandrayaan could also be converse-translated as "beer-vehicle" in ancient English.

And Soma is what our ancients should be tippling at the moment. That Chandrayaan is making its way towards the vaulting arch of heaven is due in part to all those long centuries of slokas, sutras, shastras and smritis. Let a poet (Dharmakirti) have the last say:

The East has borne the Moon.
Love dances and the nymphs of the directions laugh,
while the wind scatters holi,
the pollen of waterlilies, through heaven's court.

Shubh yatra, Chandrayaan.

 

Evolution Of The Obvious: The Foster-Kokko Model Of Superstition

Social evolutionists Kevin Foster and Hanna Kokko, in their recent paper in The Proceedings Of The Royal Society,  set themselves the following problem: "...under what conditions might a tendency for performing behaviours that incorrectly assign cause and effect be adaptive from an individual fitness point of view?" It's puzzling why the authors think there is anything to explain. Is superstitious reasoning an inheritable, evolutionary feature? Take woodcutting. Amateurs will work wood in incorrect and erroneous ways. That's not to say there isn't an efficient and systematic way to work wood that can be taught and encouraged. Do we really need an evolutionary explanation why we evolved to have babies who don't know the difference between an adze and a maul?

Foster and Kokko's real motivation is revealed, I think, in an earlier paragraph:

"In a world increasingly dominated by science, superstitious and indeed religious thinking typically take a back seat in academic affairs. However, superstitions play a central role in many small-scale societies, and indeed remain prevalent in the popular culture of all societies. Why is this? Can science rationalize this seemingly most irrational aspect of human behaviour?"

Needless to say, the authors' rationalization is that superstitious reasoning may have some adaptive value. It's a curiously Victorian attitude to human cognition; as if irrationality were somehow taboo, and town and manor had to be reassured that the phenomenon only appeared to be irrational.

One of my irrational habits, while reading papers on evolutionary models, is to substitute the key word-- in this case, "superstitious reasoning"-- with something else, say, "a fondness for weevils." I'm glad to report that applying the technique to this paper produced an equally cogent explanation of why weevil-lovers roam the planet Earth.

Fishy Transference

One of the privileges of having cogitated our way to the top of the food chain is that we now have the luxury to cogitate on how we got to the top. Or whether other critters cogitate like us. Or not. We make rats scurry around mazes to help us understand how we think. Pigeons get OCD trying to resolve whether we make decisions before we form preferences or after. The Drosophila fly used to be a fly; now it's basically a test tube with wings. Monkeys are always complaining that the only reason they exist is because Steve Pinker needs to write books on languages. And Mr. Toad of Toad Hall would sue for libel were he to read Lettvin et. al.'s classic description of frog life:

"The frog does not seem to see or, at any rate, is not concerned with the detail of stationary parts of the world around him. He will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving. His choice of food is determined only by size and movement....His sex life is conducted by sound and touch. His choice of paths in escaping enemies does not seem to be governed by anything more devious than leaping to where it is darker. Since he is equally at home in water and on land, why should it matter where he lights after jumping or what particular direction he takes? He does remember a moving thing providing it stays within his field of vision and he is not distracted."

I couldn't have described my teen years better. But seriously, animal research does throw light on the oddest things. Fish, for instance.

Apparently, fish can figure out that if fish A can outfight fish B, and fish B can outfight fish C, then very likely, A will be able to outfight C. This kind of reasoning is called transitive inference. It works for some relationships ("taller than", "older than", "darker than", etc.) and doesn't work for others ("married to", "son of", "is a friend of," "loves," etc.).

Piaget had studied transitive inference in children and found that age 7 marked a turning point; kids under 7 could not, in general, figure out that if stick A was longer than stick B was longer than stick C, then stick A was longer than stick C. There were two immediate criticisms of Piaget's work. The first was that if he'd used pizza slices instead of sticks, the results would've been very different. The second, more valid complaint, was that his sample was flawed. He'd used humans, and every self-respecting Skinnerian knew that one didn't learn about humans from experiments on humans. Especially, the French variety! What was Piaget trying to do? Put the rats and pigeons out of business?

So the other species were signed up, per usual, to study the problem for us. And over the decades, just as the Skinnerians had foreseen, primates, rats and birds all showed they too could get transitive inference. Of course, the problem had to be phrased right, that is, it had to be relevant to the lives of the species involved. Given this, it could be shown that the ability to do transitive inference wasn't unique to humans. But what about fish? Were they "in da club," as 50 Cents phrased it?

Yes, says Logan Grosenick, in a recent Nature paper. He and his colleagues, Tricia Clement and Russell Fernald, set up an elegant experiment in which they showed Astatotilapia burtoni fish acting as if they'd made a transitive inference. D. Balasubramanian has a great article in the Hindu on this experiment, and so I'll skip the details. But briefly, the idea is this. Normally, dominance hierarchies in the highly territorial A. burtoni are determined by who wins the fights. Grosenick and his team set up a series of staged fights between A. burtoni fish. These fights were witnessed by "bystander fish," also from the same species. The outcomes of the fights were known to the researchers, but not to the bystander fish. Suppose a bystander fish watched fish A beat fish B, which in turn beat fish C. Then the researchers found that the bystander fish would treat fish A as dominant over C even though it had never witnessed an actual fight between A and C. In other words, as Grosenick explains:

"We were able to create an artificial domi­nance hierarchy for the bystander fish."

It's a clever experiment, and it took a lot of work. It's good, solid research. I have my doubts about their conclusions though. I think the experiment demonstrates an "as if" ability, not the ability itself. These fish act as if they do transitive inference, but that doesn't mean they do it. It's an important difference.

For example, every time we cross a street, we act as if we're solving complex dynamical problems. In actual fact, we do nothing of the kind. We use thumb rules, quick non-quantitative reasoning, and do clever little things like ignoring information that doesn't have to do with crossing streets. We don't know the details yet, but I'd bet it's not an exercise in non-holonomic control systems. Similarly, I don't think transitive inference is needed for the bystander fish to figure out that it's best to stay away from the dominant fish A. If the fish are not using transitive inference, then what are they using?

Future: Are We There Yet?

iPod. iPhone. iYawn.  It's embarrassing. Have we lost track of the future to such an extent that a bloody phone is enough to get us running in excited circles? Is this what the future has boiled down to? A few pathetic comm devices? Cars that continue to look like sports shoes? Makeup that's monsoon resistant? Travel tech in which waiting to go somewhere takes longer than actually getting there? Is this the bloody future that we stayed awake for? Where do we go for a refund?

Clearly, it's time we got back to inventing the future. Once, the Americans could be trusted to pump out the future that lies under our collective feet. But after watching Jobs and Gates and Bush do their annual Turkey dance, I think it's time we outsourced the drilling. So here's a list of my requirements to the Nnamdi's, Wei Lei's, Renato's, Laxmi's and Ibrahims of the world. No need to gift-wrap, but I'll need a quote on the shipping please.

Keep in mind I've left out most of the really practical stuff like being able to live in geometries of my choosing (Kobayashi-Kresling, of course; then I could unfold like a flower), or to write software the way we write plays (suck on that, Gates) or eliminating aspects of quantum mechanics (way too many Bosons) or on-demand corporeality (it's such a drag being meat all the time). I've even given up on flying cars and food pills and paper underwear. No, this list is mostly Popular-Mechanics stuff, only more ambitious. It's just a few dot-crashes away.

I want:

1. An exoskeleton. Walking is too slow, and a car is too fast. A bike is too much hard work. Basically, an exoskeleton would be like a moon suit for Earth, only sexier and easier to take off when you meet the right person.
2. Electronic paper that's often mistaken for ordinary paper. 'nuff said.
3. Topological tech. Take a coin. Gesture. Voila. It's a cylinder. Click. Now it unrolls into a papyrus sheet. Tap. It's a rigid surface. So on and so forth. I'm reasonable. I'm not asking for a complete implementation of point-set topology. I just want materials that aren't too committed to a fixed geometry. Down with Platonic solids and their originator.
4. Artificial islands. I know there are already a few. But I want hundreds, thousands of them. I want enough to make a genuine market in places possible; a market in futures, so to speak. Let places bid for talent, rather than the other way around. This means of course we've to invent a lot more people, since people make places.
5. About 50 more years added to the human lifespan. Actually, I want a few thousand. But immortality is secured one second at a time.
6. Devices that are clever, not smart. Science is not about generating facts or theories. Science is a technique to generate new techniques. Science is about being able to do more and more. Not doing it per se, mind you, but having the choice to do it. In other words, science is about making us cleverer, not smarter. I want devices that are able to do science.
7. A clear understanding of how the brain works. This is a theory request. It's embarrassing we don't have a better explanation than "and then it multiplies by zero"! How can stuff that's mostly liquid think? That's what I want to know.
8. Everything that's ever been printed made online. And free.
9. Sensoriums. See, I like to wear my Internet. But at the moment, it's basically a pair of goggles. The eye-net, as it should be called (because you're pretty much toast if you can't see) should become the ear-net, nose-net, tongue-net and touch-net. Now throw in some AI and add cinnamon to taste. Voila. A sensorium. Did you get my licks on the topic? Here, sniff this.
10. A laptop that's not also a male contraceptive. Seriously, Nnamdi/Wei Lei/Renato/Laxmi/Ibrahim, I know Convergence's the future and all, but do you think it's possible to keep the gonads cool en route? The Germans have a word, Mösenstövchen, which refers to the effect of a heated car-seat on a woman's, um, nether regions. Don't force them to invent a word for the effect of laptops.

Life begins with a gleam in the eye, mood music, and moisture in all the right places. So do futures. Marvin Gaye's done his job. Let's get liquid, people.

Reason & Religion: Odd Couple Redux

Just finished watching the debate between Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Reza Aslan (No God But God) on C-SPAN. The topic:

"Does the Bible provide timeless prescriptions for our daily lives? Or does its inclusion of practices such as slavery preclude its ability to act as such a guide? Are Osama bin Laden's grievances with the United States purely theological, or also social and political? Reza Aslan, author of "No god but God," and Sam Harris, author of "Letter to a Christian Nation," take up these questions in this debate at the Los Angeles Public Library. The event also includes discussion on contemporary trends in Islam - including whether or not Muslims are unique in their religious fervor - and debate over the concept of the Koran as a perfect and immutable document."

Does that sound like a perfect evening or what! Jonathan Kirsch, a bearded, soft-spoken, bear-like dude with a no-nonsense legal letter-pad, kept the men from making any sudden Tysonesque moves. Kirsch's the author of A History Of The End Of The World. After a book like that, I guess he can handle anything.

The score? Well, Harris won. Reza circled round and round a profoundly oft-misunderstood point about profound transcendent experiences that had profoundly to do with context and interpertation sensitive to people's transcendent experiences that profoundly need no validation external to the fact of it being a profound transcendent experience.

OK. That's unfair. Reza's a smart guy. He's articulate to a fault. He was at his best when he dealt in facts. When Harris claimed that the Israel-Palestine conflict was a religious one, it didn't take Reza long to demonstrate Harris didn't know what he was talking about. But for the most part, Reza tried to explain away the irrationality of religion via rational arguments. It's the kind of contortion that'd get even B. K. S. Iyengar's knickers in a twist.

As I see it, Reza's main argument was that most rational questions about religion were misconstrued. He claimed that Religion wasn't about facts, the domain of science, but about "a sacred history." "Sacred history" is a lot like ordinary history except that true/false is replaced with significance/non-significance. For example, to ask whether Moses really parted the Red Sea or whether the god Ganpati really has an elephant's head is to miss the point. The correct question was to ask what these stories mean for their believers, why they matter. To keep harping on truth, evidence and logic was to be unsophisticated. Profoundly unsophisticated.

I was reminded of a joke in The Recruit. Al Pacino's explaining-- hoarse voice, bloodhound visage and all-- to his C.I.A. protege why he decided to betray another three letter agency, namely, the U.S.A:

"There's this parish priest, goes up to the pope, drops down on his knees, starts weeping, asking forgiveness. 'Holy Father, Holy Father, what am I to do? What am I to do? I do not believe in God anymore. What am I to do?' You know what the pope said? 'Fake it.' "

Perhaps Reza is in the position of that pope, asking the padre to defend something not because it was true but because it was important.

E: A Review

Traditionally, classical Tamil poetry (= literature) of the Sangam era (100 B.C. -- 250 A.D.) is divided into akam (inner) poems and puram (outer) poems. As A. K. Ramanujan explained in Poems Of Love and War:

"Akam poems were love poems; puram poems were poems on war, kings, death, etc. The two types of poems had differing properties. Three hundred and seven poets composed only the former, 89 only the latter, though 77 poets, including five of the greatest, wrote both kinds of poems."

This emphasis on the interior has continued in modern times. For the most part, Tamil movies revolve around the family, the quintessential inner place. The workplace-- like other public places-- is not of particular importance. Characters have jobs but are rarely shown doing them. Friends play an important role in Tamil movies, but not colleagues. In fact, the recent spate of movies about friends and friendship (Aasaiyil Oru Kaditham, 7/G - Rainbow Colony, Manododu Mazhaikalam, Paarthen Raasithen, Friends, etc.) represent an interesting new trend. Characters in these movies break often out into long paeans on friendship while family members stand around looking thoroughly discomfited and crestfallen. Tamil movies have begun to tell stories set in a larger world.

The science-fiction movie E is a brilliant example.