Thank GOD!

Why do we thank GOD for good things and cannot blame HIM for the suffering and bad things happening?

This is a common question posed by atheists. GOD is all-powerful but makes the "game of life" interesting by playing the role of honest prover. If good things happen (convinced of a new theorem) we thank HIM for being an honest player. If bad things happen (unconvinced of a theorem) then we cannot blame HIM as the fault lies on the side of the verification though several times not obvious. Blaming is a sign of tiredness of playing the game and lack of sportive spirit. And do you like players who lose temper in games?

A related post.

Responsibility and credit

Events in life result because of deterministic and non-deterministic sequence of actions. Taking credit for deterministic actions is an easy thing and hence not really interesting. Here I am talking about personal credit, not credit given by society because of being the medium for events. According to karma we can take credit for non-deterministic actions but it is usually hard for most to be good accountants. It takes experience, courage and many more hard qualities which grow by practice to be good accountant.

A subtle but important point to realize is that we are only playing a role of verifier in the system (Nature if you may think so) where some sequence of actions result in events. Since we do not explicitly know who plays the role of prover we cannot take "complete" credit (personal) for events even if we believe in karma. Believing in G-d (I am not talking about belief in after-life or being religious etc., which are only some efficient tools) is probably the optimal choice for the role of prover, who plays a key role in the events.

One important point is that we need to assume the prover and verifier are both honest for the completeness requirement of the system. It is necessary that the verifier is honest for the system to be sound. One can imagine that if there were an all-powerful bad-guy then honest verifier will not allow him win!

Principle of abundance

Modern science laid the universal foundation for rational materialism. Though materialism might be incompatible with several religious beliefs true materialistic rationality can not mislead us in our search for understanding the universe. It is important that it should be true and rational materialism. In fact given the complex structure of the society our survival is currently based on, it is probably the optimal choice to take on. This is because we can then work on complexity of the universe since we can concretely measure (and hence share) our understanding of the universe in terms of "material". To efficiently study the complexity the asymptotic view of amount of resources needed and several "on average" analyses like amortized analysis have shown to be very useful for e.g. in understanding nature of computation which has contributed to understanding universe.

The key to be effective in studying complexity is to be smart enough to care about details and mature enough to have a macroscopic perspective. If a complexity theorist gets too involved in non-asymptotic details he might not be able to make any real contribution. If he is not careful enough with the details of his proofs and assumptions he will be wasteful of resources. Working on non-asymptotic details like creative engineering is an evolving profession like that of practicing law, medicine, programming where as more and more complexity is revealed it becomes more and more important. To work based on asymptotic behaviors it's important to have an abundance perception of the universe in terms of time, life, opportunities, possibilities etc. along with finiteness. If we do not work in finitistic set of assumptions things might turn out to be too abstract to be useful some times.

It is important to understand that the abundance is finitely measurable and is not free which makes the process interesting and safe.

Streaks of thought: Streak 9

Proving lower bounds for complexity (defined in terms of resources needed) of problems is known to be hard. Lower bound on a resource is the minimum amount needed to solve the worst of the instances of a problem. Hence usually worst case analysis is needed to prove lower bounds. The intention of such worst case analyses is mainly to install signs to control traffic of exploration for saving energy and being effective.

Such effort should not be confused with immature and dumb "but what ifs". Immaturity is usually flagged by non-productiveness of thought process. Dumbness is hard to be flagged especially because it's not as penalizing as immaturity for surviving.

MEXperience

I had learnt somethings from my experience building mex files for C-MATLAB interaction. Below I list some helpful points to keep in mind in cases of frustration:

• "mexing" in Linux/Unix requires a new setup of compilers.


• Make sure you have compatible gcc with the MATLAB version installed.


• Sometimes commenting lines of code using '//' might produce errors. Using '/*....*/' is safe.


• mexing on 32-bit Linux produces .mexglx executables and those are not executable on 64-bit Linux machines which need .mexa64 executables.


• mexPrintf statements can make your program really slow.


• Having too many "mx.." statements in the C-code might make the code run slower possibly because you are just repeating what MATLAB might already be doing without your C-code. Remember MATLAB does use some of its built-in C-code for speeding up certain operations. As an example if you have to handle structures in your C-code use "mx.." statements to pass parameters but use the "struct" variables in the C-code not mxArrays.


• Initially try to balance of how much of your code you want in C-style and how much in MATLAB. After you get familiarized with "mex" code try to code most of it in C and then use MATLAB as an "interace" for experimenting with your code.


• If building huge systems which you will probably do only after getting familiarized with "mex" forget MATLAB and use development tools like Visual Studio etc. for building and debugging then just add the interface. Debuggin on smaller projects can be handled effectively using mexPrintf which later have to be minimal.

Spiritual materialism

Recently I attended a spiritual retreat organized by Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual Organization at Peace Village in upstate NY. The retreat I attended was titled "My Self, My Work and My Life". This one was special because the theme was to discuss how to optimize your gains from life. The speakers and audience bounced around the ideas of how to "align" universal values (like to be peacful, loved, happy), thoughts and actions to maximize subjective gains and hence optimize overall gains.

Such exercises can provide us with insights that can help us to be creatively materialistic. It is not completely impossible to be creatively materiaslistic without spirituality but it can certainly help and make things lot easier. An analogical post that actually motivated the theme of this post is this.

Update: Added a picture I took at Peace Village to support my ending sentence of the post. 3:56 PM

Pasticide

Attachment to past (any kind, even good) is the biggest reason for procrastination. Procrastination is the biggest killer of opportunities. Opportunities are the biggest gifts of a societal system. Society is the biggest asset the humans have ever consciously created.

So try to use pasticides like detachment by focussing on productivity to optimize your contributions.

Beware of the fact that pesticides help in increasing the chances of reap but overusing might ruin the crop. So use pasticides carefully and maturely as you can be inspired from this post itself:)

JUNE 27, 2007. Corrected some stupid sentence constructs.

Streaks of thought: Streak 8

Thank you for shopping at our place! Thanks for your help buddy. Thank you very much for dropping me off here. Two or more parties involve in an act if and only if all of them have stakes in the act. Then why thanking? Reason for such thanking is not for the act itself but for sticking only to the act and hence helping in performing the act pleasantly to optimize everyones resources (energy, time, money). By the way all the resources that we really worry about in the current world are manifested in the form of money. Basic resources like food, clothing, shelter are not a serious concern in the age of abundance.

Tales off of tension

I came accross on the web something like this: Humans by definition have "spirit" and "body" and there is constant "tension" between the two parts. I think these tensions are the main cause for all the history of the humans. This tension is probably the hidden variable manifesting itself in the form of complex tales of human life. A "good" amount of tension is needed to hold the structure (otherwise there would be no history). If there are surges we see breaks in the structure. In fact how well the tension is balanced influences how stable the system is. According to Robin Hanson as mentioned in Scott's post academia is the least of the broken systems.

I think the reason that it's least broken is that this business is most exclusively handled by powerful elite and they usually tend to inherit "being more moral" spirit along with "being elite" genes and hence the breaks caused by fraudulent tensions are not a serious problem at all for this enterprise. There are those little breaks in the system because there are surges in tension between worrying about deductions and struggle to understand the assumptions.

Sprechen C MATLAB

Sprechen Sie MATLAB? This was on an ad-poster by Mathworks that I saw posted on Longin Jan Latecki's office door. No literate can deny how much Computer Science has influenced thinking styles and the pace of research in human quest for knowledge (genomics, bioinformatics, software simulations etc.). MATLAB is one product that has such outstanding influence on many many applied scientific areas (I call applied because I am not sure if MATLAB has led to any purely theoretical insights. By theoretical insights I mean ability to see non-trivial proofs.)

I have used MATLAB for several of my projects. MATLAB is an interpreted language and is known to be slower for 'C-style' programs. But in many cases you need to write blocks of code in 'C-style'. Since MATLAB allows you to interface with C-programs it's worth to know how to write C-programs that you can call in MATLAB without using files as communication (using files again slows down things doesn't it?)

In learning any thing new just don't let "But what if" trouble bother you that much. What if I want to pass pointers, what if I want to pass cell arrays, what if I want to return more than one variable from C etc. Well, you can do all these things but don't worry about all those at once before even getting started, deal one thing at a time. I borrowed this But what if idea from Scott's post about such problem in theoretical perspective which is much more serious! Now let's C how to start building the interface.

The key problem in building any interface is passing around parameters without confusion. The basic anatomy of a typical C-MATLAB file can be seen here. I have simple and clear demonstrations for passing scalars, arrays and structures. The README shows how to use the demos. I recently fixed a memory leak in "kdnn" function of Kd-tree software package for MATLAB written in C by Guy Shecther. You can download the "kdnn" function from here after downloading the original package. kdnn finds k nearest neighbors for a given d dimensional point.

Health: New challenges

After you push your health conscience to be at subsconscious level, what's next? You know we always need some thing in conscious mind to keep us busy. Infact the central assumption for the entire progress of mankind is that we consciously keep focusing on something new. Well let's stay focused on what's new to focus on, in the journey towards better health. Here are two reeaal challenging tasks you might want to focus on.

• Rock hard abs absolutely rock and are hard:
  In my opinion both huge and tiny people are trying to do the same end thing (it's just their pathways are different). Both of them try to look proportional and look the best they can. Initially when they start working out the sizes of the dresses are good inidicators for their progress. But after they start looking fine in dresses some start being content. But the naked truth is that they should aim for looking good naked. What are the challenges you have to face? The main challenge is toning muscles and especially the hardest part is toning abdominal muscles and even harder is to handle the lower abs. The main thing ofcourse is to get rid of the fat and build core muscles so that the abs look firm and in shape. My point is not to give advice on how to get that done as you can find lot of information thanks to Google and those who put the information up (Sample link that my friend and health guru Reagan gave me). My main point is to wake up those who are content just because they think they look good enough now when dressed.
  
• Look good underskin:
  Now what about those who already look good naked. Here's a pill that will wake them up too:) If you have fabulous abs and defined chest, biceps etc. you might still not look your best if you have troubles inside. Make sure you look sharp by solving puzzles and keeping your brain warm. Take time to meditate so you can give a peaceful presence whereever you are. Do YOGA type exercises to keep your deep-internal glands work properly. What I mean for e.g. is, you can keep your heart pump blood well by cardio-workouts but what can you do for pancreas and thyroid glands work properly. YOGA has some workouts for such subtle benefits which are very notorious for not motivating people until they get hit.

These two are new challenges that you have to focus on for progress in your journey.
Link to previous health post.

Streaks of thought: Streak 7

Based on several incidents like reading this and brain storming with other researchers trying to piggy back on results from theoreticians, statisticians and mathematicians I had the following streak:

Do not get held back just because you don't understand a result intuitively. Definitely continue to look at it closely until your intuition levels evolve to the required standard but not at the cost of not-using the result. Math has been much more powerful reasoning tool than intuition since intuition evolves much slower than objective reasoning. Another famous saying that goes along with this streak is "One century's wisdom is common sense of the next."

Updated: April 26, 2007. 9:54 PM

Universal language

Yesterday I watched CONTACT, a movie about a scientist obsessed about Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and contacting some alien in the form of her dead dad on VEGA. The story also has a theologian who is not against Science but questions the privilege that Science gets. There is one line that is very nice. "...Universe is vastly huge...if we are the only ones in this universe..then it's awful waste of space..."

One thing that got my interest is the assumption that our Math is the universal language. Math is certainly standard language of Science on Earth. But why should we assume that it is universal. Even the purest of Mathematics on Earth depends on a set of assumptions like ZFC. What if ZFC is not valid in other parts of the universe? What if axioms of deduction are not valid? Perhaps this might be very important question that people already think about in that field. What might be important for CS on Earth is this. We often believe (for some reason) that aliens must be super intelligent than we are. And if so can they solve NP-Complete problems? Let's say that if they are able to solve then is communicating with them NP-hard? Is this the reason we are not able to communicate with them (if at all they are) in the first place. My conjecture is that the communication is NP-hard since the search space of mapping between their assumptions and our assumptions is close to be unstructured and exponential in size.

BTW it's a good long movie to watch.

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:)