Streaks of thought: Streak 6

Gifted people are not just gifted, they are gifts for human society as they have highest odds in steering human civilization (evolution?). I am especially fascinated by mathematically gifted ones.

RDP through tunneling

Many use Remote Desktop Protocol for working remotely. This is pretty straightforward if the IP address of the remote computer is accessible on the Internet. Some times the computer is within a subnet and it can only be accessed from within the network.

Now the trick is to get into the network and then access the computer you want to. Usually there is at least one gateway computer in a network. By logging into the network using some special options you can command your target computer by commanding the gateway. Port forwarding (tunneling) is the main idea. The other requirements being that your target computer willing to take the commands (port 3389 being open) and the gateway willing to forward your commands. Any client programs capable of ssh tunneling and remote desktop connection can help you do the job. I will explain the process from client perspective because it does not matter if the target computer runs Windows or Linux.

Using Windows clients:
SSH tunneling client is putty (usually pronounced with 'u' as in umberella not as in put). Remote desktop client is Mstsc.

• Setting up port forwarding:
  Configure your session to the gateway computer as shown in the screen shots below:
  
  
  Select "SSH" on the left panel and check the "Enable Compression" option and make sure SSH protocol version 2 is preferred.
  
  
  Select "Tunnels" under "SSH" on the left panel and in the "Add new port forward" section add a source port (it could be 1 or any port on the local computer which is not used for other purposes) and then add the destination address and port as shown. The host_address should be either the IP address or host name of the target computer you want to connect to then click "Add".
  
  
  Then login to the gateway computer using "Session" on the left panel. And once you log in just leave the session window minimized.


• Connecting to your target computer:
  Connect to your computer using Windows standard remote desktop client by just using localhost:1 as the Computer name as shown below:
  
  

Using Linux clients:
SSH tunnenling client is "ssh". Remote desktop client is "rdesktop".

• Setting up portforwarding:
  ssh -C -L local_port_number:host_address:3389 username@gatewaycomputer
  More options about ssh can be found using man ssh command.


• Connecting to your target computer:
  rdesktop -f localhost:local_port_number
  More options about rdesktop can be found using man rdesktop command.

Acknowledgment:
This technique was introduced to me by Thomas Stauffer, CIS systems manager at Temple University.

Latex 000

Pronunciation:
Popularity decides pronunciation. It is popularly pronounced as how you would pronounce latec.

Background:
I have got several requests for giving quick and short tutorials on using latex for writing reports, papers etc. I intend to add several posts that might help those who have basic knowledge about HTML to start being able to typeset beautiful documents.

Latex is similar to HTML. It's just more powerful. It helps in producing beautiful mathematical formulas nicely aligned. Now take for granted that this is the best typesetting software used for printing articles in journals, books and producing pdf files.

Installation:
You need 3 basic components to be able to use latex.

1. Compiler(Most Linux boxes come with a compiler already installed. MikTex is a popular compiler for Latex on Windows.)
   
2. Editor (any standard text editor would do but I recommend WinEdt)
   
3. Viewer (either YAP or any pdf/ps reader)
   

Hello World:
Once you have the above basic components it's time to say "Hello World!". As the html files have .html as extensions the tex files have .tex in their extensions (too trivial but mentioned just in case).

Download the sample package and just open a command prompt, go to the folder and enter pdflatex Sample command twice. You have to do it twice to generate references. This will generate Sample.pdf in the same folder with bunch of other files. Open the pdf file to see the output.

End of class 000. I will add more stuff slowly or on demand. For those of you who have more urgent needs you can download the package and compile the tex file using following sequence of commands to generate the output pdf file.

1. latex jfrExample
   
2. bibtex jfrExample
   
3. latex jfrExample
   
4. texify jfrExample.tex
   
5. dvipdft jfrExample
   

Reading:
A very good reference can be downloaded here.

Questions:
Once you start using latex you can take off on your own by "googling" but if you have any specific questions I might either help you directly or help you better google.

Errata: I fixed instructions on how to compile sample package. Please read the Hello World section carefully!

Karma - anthropic anlogue of evolution?

Science is all about hypothesizing and verifying hypotheses systematically and in repeatable way. Evolution is taught in science classes and it’s used for scientific explanations for many questions about our assumptions in life sciences. The problem with evolution is that it is not really verifiable. Nevertheless it is a conditioning that has proven to be useful heuristic for many practical applications for life. A similar kind of conditioning which is more anthropic in flavor is the theory of Karma. While the evolution does not center the humans it does center our perception. Karma unlike evolution is anthropic but like evolution does provides us with very satisfying explanations for many though not all events happening in life. Evolution also has it's cracks! Like evolution suggests survival of the fittest, karma also suggests to work hard to be fit and survive and motivates us to put efforts in the right direction. In fact the law of karma is one of the essential seeds of hope, which unquestionably is biggest strength of human mind. Karma can be called science if the anthropic principle is prevalent in science.

Now karma seems to be anthropic analogue of the theory of evolution. Do other theories or concepts have anthropic analogues or use anthropicism? Yes. For example we have anthropic computation, anthropicism in cosmology, in physics etc. As Scott uses anthropic computing to give a very strong argument against suicide, the anthropic principle used in life sciences (karma) can be used as a strong argument for hope! Do most theories or concepts benefit from looking for anthropic analogues? I don’t know but it would not be truly surprising if the answer is yes. What would be surprising is the process of it’s discovery and conceptualization.

Health: Working Whenever Wherever

After you reach your desired goal in terms of look, feel and numbers. It's time to keep the achievement tuned and take yourselves to even higher levels but not so consciously. By continuing working out regularly we definitely keep on training body but not just for change but to embed the changes to deeper levels of consciousness like may be subconscious level. For example when we workout for a while (about 2 years) and eat properly our body automatically signals us of any kind of atrophy or over indulgence. We need not push ourselves to go to gym. Think about it. Do you push yourself to brush your teeth, take shower etc? You might skip may be once in a while, but not to the extent that you start hurting your teeth or skin right.

The point is that the workout should slowly become part of your daily activities and then become part of your nature call system. The theory of evolution hints about hardwiring good traits in us to survive. It has been benefiting us: think about vision, while a baby can see right from the moment he is born, we don't have computer vision close to vision of even an ant. Today's state-of-the-art learning machines cannot even be compared to a human baby. It's hard to compete with evolution but if we work hard (and survive long) we can synergize with it and benefit from it.

Here's the conclusion of this health post. Workout so regularly that you imprint the mechanisms into your DNA and hence contribute towards better evolution of future generations in terms maintaining better health. You don't have to complain of not having facilities to workout. Workout with whatever you got, just a simple skipping rope, or stairs, or walking roads should be able to serve the purpose of keeping you fit. Don't you sleep whenever wherever if you need to, automatically. Don't you find something to eat whenever wherever if you are hungry. Don't you clean your mouth (brush) whenever wherever if your breath smells bad. The point is push the act of workout to those basic levels of conscious that you keep yourself fit even without much concern and stand as an inspiration for many to change. So as popular advise goes, move from being inconscious-incompetent, to conscious-incompetent, to conscious-competent and finally to inconscious-competent.

Link to previous health post.

Streaks of thought: Streak 5

Assuming existence of one-way functions we need a system in which nothing is "absolutely" free, to protect ourselves from fraud. This can be used as one of the strong and deep reasons to propone capitalism.

Streaks of thought: Streak 4

For those (like leaders) whose main business can be choice making, self-questioning of their perception is very critical for survival. Also if you constantly feel compelled to question your own perception then better try to make choice making as your business since society has quota for such people also:)

Happy starting => happy journey (w.h.p)

Peaceful and focused start of year 2007

May bring you fame and fortune

Similar to that of agent 007

Hope that no one has to work 24/7

And everyone finds time for kith and kin, and
ken

To make their life a concrete heaven


My old greeting for year 2004.

Corrected a small English mistake in last but one line on Jan 12, 07 11:38AM.

Peace, happiness and sorrow

Everybody wants to be happy. To experience happiness continuously we have to make a choice to be truly fearless - in simple words peaceful. To be peaceful you have to make a choice not to be afraid of happiness or sorrow. To be brave you need knowledge - thorough and mature understanding of the perceivable aspects of happiness and sorrow.

Given that one has bounded rationality he will make choices that maximize the probability of his eternity. According to Brahma Kumaris we are eternal in abstract sense like the way a theorem in math is true in abstract sense. For a theorem to be "useful" it has to be "applied". Similarly we (souls) need bodies. Either in soul conscience (theory) or body conscience (practice) the tough part is in the finer details. We are not yet evolved to skip lot of details in the process of analysis.

Let's dig some details of happiness and sorrow that will help in finding peace. Happiness has been researched a lot and you don't have to be attached to your superficial analysis of happiness. No matter how detached you are from your fleeting views on happiness there is still a need for detachment from your perception of sorrow to complete the requirements for peace. In any optimization theory we have the techniques of zig-zagging or changing momentum to avoid getting stuck in local optima. Experiencing sorrow is a similar technique (designed by Nature) that drives us towards global optima in life and avoid getting stuck in local basins. You can also look at the section on adaptive benefits of depression here. There is no absolute detachment from anything it's just elevating yourselves to higher layers of perception and getting detached from lower layers. BEWARE, the act of being in higher layers of perception is in no way superior if you are not aware of the layers you have passed through to get there. Just to be in the layer where you are without effort to elevate is probably being lazy.

Streaks of thought: Streak 3

Streak 3:
For the newly designed old racing car Surviva from DAL logic is the control system (like gas, breaks, gears) morals (emotions, ethics, etc.) are the dashboard indicators.

Cost of living

There's no such thing as free lunch. Most of us almost agree with it without even arguing about it. Result: Though we agree with it we don't like it. But I try to present somethings that might actually help in liking it not just agreeing with it. The axioms of human survival (like everyone wants to be peaceful, survive, be clear etc.) are of course assumed for this post as is with every other post on this blog.

There are different kinds of struggles based on the kind of society one lives in. The chief characteristic of a society that determines the kind is its interdependency structure. The more transparent the structure is, the less appealing is the saying. Hence the goal becomes to realize the structure. This requires mastery of your emotions and logic which you get by mental maturity. I will present some ideas about how to try to realize the structure.

The structure you are trying to realize is interdependency structure. Results in graph theory can be very useful. Consider humans as nodes in a huge human graph. There is an edge between two nodes if there is an interdependency between the two humans. Each edge has cost for its existence and maintenance. The total cost of all edges connecting a group of people decides the average cost of living for the group. Humans always try to optimize the resources they have to maintain the edges. The actual algorithms like finding minimum spanning trees, or shortest paths among nodes are in P. But more serious issue is that the graph is not revealed all at once. The graph is slowly built and a current model of computation namely streaming model comes to rescue. I am not aware with many results of streaming model in graph theory but research in this direction is very promising.

Streaks of thought: Streak 2

Streak 2:
Mind only business with most but do classify some as your heros. That will keep you motivated intangibly.

Actually this is a mirror streak of streak 1. Streak 2 reflects the actual mood in which I came up with streak 1.

Streaks of thought: Streak 1

I several times have flashes of thoughts in mind based on the situation I am in and it is not always possible to hatch it into a full-blown post. So I decided to add them as a series like those of my health posts. (Now that I have found out how easy that is.)

Enjoy the steaks err.. streaks.

Streak 1:
Classify a few as heros and for the rest mind only business.

Cloaks of complexity

This post is about how complexity is one of the most important fuels (hence not misused) for efficient functioning of a society. Yesterday there was complexitycast release on Scott's reasons for believing P!=NP. At end of the cast Bill Gasarch gives his reason to believe P!=NP which is a one sentence summary of part of what I wanted to write:) I decided from now on to maintain a set of possible upcoming posts in the right-side panel.

Ethics, rationality, innocence, creativity, productivity etc. are all desired in society and appreciated and these traits make survival of many possible. Each of these traits have cloaks of complexity of different classes. I call them cloaks as most such traits are not really complex except for getting used (mature?) to them. As you get used to things you unveil the cloaks. While some cloaks can be unveiled by many as part of hardwired process in the society, there are cloaks which are too heavy to lift off like proving hard theorems and hard math. Any such harder cloaks can be handled only by a tiny proportion of the human population.

In my opinion it is this type of cloaking by Nature that keeps its existence. Now comes the main point. This process is adapted (as usual we borrow many things from Nature) by many systems in the society to keep their existence. Einstein once said: The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. This is not wrong if done with good and generous will. If people misuse this and put unwanted (unnecessary) cloaks of complexity it only hurts in the long run. The point is if they cannot uncloak any complexities provided by Nature they put new cloaks of fake complexity to uncloak them later on, much like creating false demands.

Contributions to society and reasons for balance

No one denies that one cannot survive in a society unless he contributes to the society.

Let's take setting where people are aware of themseleves (souls?) and their powerful containers (bodies?) of a finite capacity. These containers are endowded to them at their birth and they are moulded as they grow and several hidden and measurable variables influence the process. (Usually there is a hidden variable hypothesis because not everything could be explained by variables that we can be aware of or measure.)

Measurable variables include like what kind of education they receive, level of richness they experience, level of security etc. Hidden variables are usually measured as probability distributions with some possible priors like assuming that events happen for eventual good to humanity. Though the containers have finite capacities their moulding process decides combinations of chemical elements that they can hold thus with a potential of exponential variety of containers. One can think of categories like nerds, businessmen, peacekeepers, radicals etc.

Depending on the combination that their containers can bear, people contribute and collaborate to experience their combinations. (They can experience their mixtures only when used).

The key element for a harmonious experience is probably the awareness. The awareness of ourselves and our containers (our combinations). It's because of existence of other combinations that we are able to experience our combination. So there's no point in one category ridiculing another. Some reactions might have to be done with extraordinary care: Think of human knowledge about nuclear reactions, there are excellent benefits if properly used and pandemoniac consequences if some factors (like awareness) are ignored.

Bottomline is to keep in mind that one only contributes of what he is abundant in: that what his container can hold. It is then upto the congregation of humans to decide how to synergize. This is possible when we have balance in the awareness of ourselves and our containers. This is why we need the balance that most people stress on having.

Health: Optimizing constraints

After you have walked the steps through childhood (don't know pretty much about health), adoloscense (obsessed with certain aspects of health, like looks) in the journey towards better health, time would come to start being more like adults:) Let me explain what it means.

A society invests most power and authority in the age group in which one is considered adult. There is a valid reason for that because that's the best productive stage for most people. Because people want many variety of things in that stage they are forced to try to make optimal decisions if they need to get all those and in the process they fulfill the needs of others as well since humans are very symbiotic in relationships.

So in any journey it makes sense to call you an adult when you are at a stage where you have to optimize several constraints and you will face this stage even in your journey towards better health (ofcourse if you are on the journey for long enough). What are the typical constraints you would have to optimize?

• Money: Don't spend an outrageous amount on nutritional food, on gym fees, personal trainers, fancy short-cut health plans etc. Try to invest money like try to build a gym of our own.


• Social life: Don't overfill the buffer of health benefits. Spare time for your other aspects of life as well and that is the key for longer term benefits.


• Time: Even a 30 min workout (including changing, stretching etc.) will start working for you and hence be smart.


• Health: Of course never let your effort for balance drag you back into your old habits.

This listing thoughs seem non-algorithmic is nevertheless useful for achieving balance (optimization of several constraints) as it provides cues for verification of balance. Walking on the line of balance is an art and there are several ways of achieving it. It is undeniable that there is nothing arguably right or wrong in art which is nevertheless very important.

A small note about making optimal decisions:
Humans always make optimal decisions but only relatively, based on what they perceive. That is every human being makes a locally optimal decision. Greedy strategy doesnot always work towards global optima but as you start being more like an adult your optimal decisions tend to be like global optimas because of the reason I explained, in second paragraph, about this age group being very influential in society.

Link to previous health post.
Added the link on September 25, 06 11:00AM

Man, Machine and Math

Scientists and artists are both fascinated by one thing: Nature. Artists are more obsessed with causality while the former are with results. Both scientific and artistic efforts try to use rationality but under different bounds and are important. Working in bounded rationality is something that is hard to be avoided in this finitistic world. The most profound questions in science happen to be those that question causality like the quest for Unified Field Theory by physicists, quest for proof of P?=NP by mathematicians. Artificial Intelligence is one of the most coveted dreams of man that if realized has unparalleled consequences on machines. An artist can dream of a machine pursuing its dreams like in A.I. by Speilberg. A scientist can dream of finding proofs for most intriguing theorems automatically.

What is the main problem in realizing such dream machines or dream theories like unified theory? It's their complexity. Efficient representation of ideas is very essential in making them useful. Math is a popular tool that allows us to make judgements about different representations, to apply the ideas to a large scale avoiding manual errors, to give new insights which are elusive without it. There are many wonderous things in Nature that are not mathematical (or atleast not mathematized yet) like humans, plants, viruses etc. (BTW the P vs. NP question precisely asks whether humans can be completely efficiently mathematized in terms of their mathematical ability).

Most people agree that to understand a phenomenon completely one must be able to look inside the process. But when we start looking inside our own processes we start being spiritual. For example in one way or the other we try to reason out some important events based on karma philosophy. Though there is no consensus mostly because of non-verifiability scientifically, we eventually settle down for it. If someday we can formalize karma using math, which would certainly be extremely sophisticated and need lot more evolution, we could have unified field theory, more predictability of events in life etc. But then again we need room for growth even then. We don't have to worry unless we overturn the existing logical system.

Health: Dodging injuries

One of the most important preparations you have to make for a journey is to make sure you avoid bad sideaffects, injuries etc. In this post I try to give some tips on dodging injuries on your journey towards better health.

• Workout has its own costs. It not only requires tremendous amount of dedication but also has ethics to be followed - the ethics to be responsible for your body. Just because you are dedicated and going to gym everyday you cannot do whatever you want to at the gym.


• Make sure you have sufficient knowledge of what you are doing with weights or cardio machines. READ instructions, ask the personal trainers, ask the experienced people, read from magazines.
.

• Don't be adhoc in the type of exercises you do. Make sure you concentrate on all regions of your body - roughly speaking upper, middle and lower body.
.

• Give sufficient time for the body to recover after exerting it.


• Make sure you strecth different muscles for relaxation after working them out.


• Have plenty of water around you and drink before even you feel thirsty. Believe me dehyrdrating experience could be really nasty.


• Take special care of your joints, especially knee joints.


• Injuries can be checked using RICE.


• When lifting heavy weights make sure you have someone monitoring you. Minor mistakes here could result in fatal or lifelong injuries.


• Based on my friend, Reagan's advice, a good heuristic for judging a right weight for you is that you should be able to do atleast 4 reps and atmost 8 reps.


• Generally speaking there has to be balance between using your body and being responsible for your body.

Link to health posts so far.
Edited: August 28, 06. 11:07 AM.

Incompleteness and room for growth

Recently I read an exposition on Godel's proof of incompleteness. There the authors Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman do a very nice job of explaining not only the proof but also triggering philosophical insights without loosing the details. The two main results of Godel's seminal paper are: any logical system capable of supporting Peano's axioms (simply stated a system supporting the well-evolved axioms and deducing abilities of humans)

• could not be both consistent and complete


• could not prove itself consistent without proving itself inconsistent

So why is the result so astounding or profound? One of the main reasons is that he proved (to be clear he used no meta reasoning) to show what great minds (like that of David Hilbert, Jules Richard) have been conjecturing about limits of human ability of mental conception. This result has many practical applications similar to those of the result by Cook's result on complexity of theorem proving procedures (the seminal paper in complexity theory). They both gave us reasoning ability to direct research efforts in their respective fields viz. logic and computational complexity (and algorithm design). There are results in almost all fields having similar effects (like result of Nash in game theory, result of Einstein in atomic physics).

If a system cannot be complete and consistent what reasoning can we take help of, to design and implement a system that is useful. No need to worry! We have pearls in pile of human-knowledge-jewelry known as probability theory, theory of statistics at our disposal. These theories for example helped building randomized algorithms, learning theory which unquestionably have proven to be useful.

The research directions consequent to any negative result like incompleteness theorem are essentially examples of positive thinking. The incompleteness theorem implies conjectures which intuitively are true but hard to be proven are always possible thus ineffect guaranteeing room for growth or increased depth of understanding. Look out for the recent exuberance over the potentially complete proof of Poincare's conjecture by Grisha Perelman who purportedly denied the Fields medal.

Anthropicism, science and time

Couple of weeks ago there was a fun contest on Scott's blog about coming up with best antrhopic statement. I took part in that contest (you can find my 3 entries in the comments of that post). The winning anthropicism was from Lev Reyzin.

Though my thrid entry was close to what the winnig entry implied mine was not stated with proper flavor of wit and context! But then I thought I have my blog to write about what I think on the topic:)

Anthropic thinking mainly questions of why things happen the way they are happening and the things of interest are related to human existence. Scientific thinking tries to focus on answering how things are happening not bothering too much about why they are happening. Eg. Physics answers how two bodies attract each other but does not bother why they should attract at all in the first place. Computer Science for example worries about understanding how to reveal what human mind works in a way that can be applied efficiently to machines. But it does not worry about why human mind works that way.

Anthropicism is an effort to accumulate wisdom with reasoning analogous to science. But it is different from science in the sense that it is not so straightforward to verify and replicate the process. Meaning that it might be practically less advantageous. Nevertheless it also tries to find truths in a meta theoretical and meta practical world. Also the history of humanity shows being obsessed with immediate practical benefits is not that a great idea.

Now we can start thinking there is no point of anthropicism because it mainly works in a layer not immediately applicable. Well so far atleast we have not rated anthropic thinking as irrational thinking:) Science is a layer that is a bit above immediate feelings. Anthropicism is a layer a bit above science. Time is the ultimate judge in deciding what is useful and what is the truth because only time has the ability to question the basic assumptions or axioms on which all other theorems are built. So far anthropicism and science have passed the test of time and we did not need a layer much above anthropicism which is above philosophy which is above science which is above common fleeting experiences.