Independence Day

Today is Independence Day for two entities: (1) India and (2) the Artist Currently Known As Anil Menon. I have been threatening to move the blog off the Typepad platform for a while now, and today is as good a day as any. This blog  is moving to Wordpress. The new address:

ROUND DICE:  http://anilmenon.com/blog

Subscribers shouldn't be affected. I'll make sure to update your feeds and send email alerts.

Cheers.

2009 Indian SF Workshop At IIT-K: Part 2 (Being There)

"You will, I am sure, agree with me that … if page 534 finds us only in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable."

Sherlock Holmes in The Valley Of Fear (1888)

For those who came in sideways: this is a continuation of Part 1 (Getting There).

I’ll admit it. The prognosis is not good. If it took me 3,000 words to cover a distance of three days, then obviously, dear reader, you have clambered onto a slow horse. The only consolation I can offer is that you could have been on Tristram Shandy, who took two-and-half volumes to traverse one day of his life.

But this should be brief. I was all set to narrate the events of the three weeks at IIT-K, when the Brain reminded me that I’d issued some promissory notes at the workshop. One of them was that the workshop would be a safe place. A place where any kind of story could be written. Tears, exultation and civilized screaming were permitted, but there would be no fatwas, retaliations, arsenic or pistols at dawn. Most importantly, what happened in Kanpur would stay in Kanpur.

Which puts me in a bind. Whereof I wish to speak, thereof I cannot. Hereof, I’ll have to be sneaky.

A typical day ran from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM, with ninety minutes for lunch (1:00-2:30), and two fifteen minutes breaks. About three hours per day were spent on the critiques, which left about four hours at the instructor’s discretion.

Ah, the critique sessions. For me (and regrettably, for the students too), the critiques were the best part of the day. We tried to do three critiques per day. I preferred to do the critiques in the morning, whereas Vandana and Suchitra reserved them for the afternoons.

The participants were serious about the critiques. For me, it’s what made the workshop a success. Their writing changed. It got more ambitious. Experimental. One writer produced a story that was told in the form of schoolbook exercises. Another reached deep into himself and the myth of Holika, reached for the look in a witch’s eyes as she burns, poor helpless bitch, and produced a postmodern rendering: terrifying, unforgettable and unforgiving. There was a story in which guilt turns memory into music, there was a story about unstable threesomes, one about gigolo robots, there were Stories No One Got, stories with a new interpretation of Sita, clueless lesbians, kings with red horns, shoot-outs with centaurs, stories where old Indian myths were used as stirring spoons rather than spice… with three stories per writer, fifteen writers and three weeks, not to mention the daily reading assignments, we were soon awash in stories.

In the third week (Vandana’s week), two students proposed that the authors’ names be withheld from the stories. Naturally, the author had to offer a faux-critique of his/her work. I found the results fascinating. The participants were mostly unable to identify who had written which story. The routine gasps of “You wrote that?” undid a lot of smug categories. People simply wouldn’t stay put in their assigned slots: X-is-good-but. Y-writes-stories-that. Z-has-an-unfortunate-fondness-for.

How does critiquing work when it works? Not sure. The Brain has a quantum-mystical theory, accurate to several decimal points. But it’s a digression, and despite what my friend Tristram Shandy says about digressions (“Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine---they are the life, the soul of reading!”), I must resist the impulse and plod on.

2009 Indian SF Workshop At IIT-K: Part 1 (Getting There)

What a blast! I’ve been around the sun a few times (all right, many times), and there’s always something new and cool in every trip, but this particular chakkar is turning to be really special. A year of firsts for me. I’ll have my first novel out this year. And this is the year we were finally able to hold the first Indian SF Workshop. The first Great Indian SF Workshop That Still Has No Name. It’s exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do when I grew up-- okay, that’s a lie; I wanted to be a famous theoretical physicist renowned for his humility-- but bloody hell, I’m glad things have worked out the way they have. 

I should have blogged about the workshop on a daily basis, but here’s the catch: if you’re blogging, you’re not doing other things, and those three weeks at IIT-Kanpur were filled with doing other things. Vandana Singh put up a couple of lovely pieces on her experiences at the workshop, and that finally shamed me into action. I've followed the historian's policy of making up what s/he cannot remember.

Saturday, June 13, 2009: I’ve parked my corpus at Tej’s Abode, a cool boutique hotel in GK-II’s S-block in Delhi. I’ve been told to say “GK-2” and “S-block.” My elder brother, who’s under the impression I was raised by courteous Swedish yodelers, gave me a lot of unsolicited advice on how to survive in Delhi, including the nugget that I should never, ever, ask to be taken to “Greater Kailash 2”:

“You might as well hand them your wallet.”

I did get ripped off, but it was well within class-warfare limits.

I told Kaushal, the efficient day-manager at Tej’s Abode, that I had a morning train to catch, and that it was a 6:15 AM train, yes, the Lucknow Shatabdi, and that I really had to catch it, because I really had to be in Kanpur for a workshop. So. 6:15. We chatted a bit about phones and hotel bills and wireless codes. I made sure to set the cell phone’s alarm for 4:15 AM. Actually, it’s unnecessary. Once I set an alarm, the Brain always wakes me a few minutes earlier, as if to demonstrate that it could also run a hotel or two. Pretty freaky, this human time-sense thing. Why should wetware have any clue about the number system we use to mark how many times one needle goes around another? Suppose I used a binary clock? Wake me up at 00100.01111, please. I suppose it’d probably piss off the Brain.

Sunday June 14, 2009: Missed the damn train! My bloody fault too. I had woken up at 4:15, was ready by 5:00, waited till 5:15, then headed downstairs. Mahesh, one of the guys who worked there, had been sleeping, but woke up, listened calmly to my panicked shrieks, explained that nobody had told him anything about getting any taxi, took charge of the situation and ran out to hail a cab or a rickshaw or a passing camel.

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?