The Outer Limits of Reason by Noson S. Yanofsky

Physics, Mathematics, Book Review

It has been a while since I wrote about a book even though there were some spectacular books that I had encountered and enjoyed very much. This list would be incomplete without mentioning the breath taking reading “When Breathe Becomes Air”, a book about a deceased neuro-surgeon depicting life, suffering, and death all seen first-hand. For the lack of better words to describe it, it felt complete. A few other recommendations are “The Telomere Effect”, “Why we sleep”,”Intelligent Asset allocator”. Some of the books definitely deserve a post for themselves, however I have really no reasons why it hasnt happened.

And speaking of things that happen beyond reason, the main book for this post “The Outer Limits of Reason” is an easily readable, suprisingly compact, and well presented book. I always enjoy popular science books. They hit me with two humbling points:

• Science can be made accessible for non-scientific public.
• Mind-boggling concepts can be sieved to extract the key idea which can be explained in simple words.

The first point is very nice, it allows for general public to be informed about advancements in science. We need more public dissemination of scientific knowledge. I would argue that it is as important to know why Flamingos stand on one leg as knowing that Melinda and Bill Gates are getting divorced. The second point is where I am fascinated by the skill of some authors. It is one thing to bring concepts to general public, and it is a whole other game to actually explain the intricacies of complex scientific theories.

This book does the second point rather well. The author takes on the task of explaining where our reasoning stops. He goes through a bunch of fields physics, computer science, logic, mathematics, and looks at the unsolvable, unattainable, and simply put “The outer limits of reason”.

In doing that, the author manages to navigate through General theory of relativity and Quantum mechanics explaining where we stand today and where we would like to go. The discussion on computer complexity gets into problems that are solvable but takes unimaginable amount of time, then he moves on to unsolvable ones like The halting problem. It has been a delight to read through these. Then the book moves on to higher logic discussions with The Godel’s incompleteness theorem discussing the limitations of axiom systems.

Overall, the book is very nice to read through and easy to sit down for hours reading through it.

From a bad student to a PhD

My lack of compliance to authorities and beliefs had put me in some cases in a bad spot. Originally I thought that my backward hometown and the people there had suffered from being too gullible & ignorant - however lately I am realizing that actually most people in the world are affected by it.

Coming straight to the point: accepting bull-shit has never been my strength. In the current day, this is seen by many as an unwanted annoyance, undeserved arrogance, or just a weird charm. But this was not always the case.

Reflections on 15 years in education

I have been extremely anxious three times in the past 15 years, related to education. The two first events shaped my personality and the third one gave me a PhD in Computer Science. The three events in chronological order are :

Finally, I decided to write up on events that had a significant impact on me and my personality during my education. This will be done by expanding on the three events described above. This account might be disturbingly entertaining. However, it is definitely worth sharing atleast to the different young minds that might be standing right outside some doors being anxious about their future and the definite doom that they believe that is upon them, simply because they do not fit into the norm.

PS: None of this is fiction and all the names here are provided on purpose - Let them all get a credit, good or bad! Also this is not a rant about the education system in India, there are millions of such rants. Honestly I think all education systems suck - they are tailored to be one-fit-for-all systems - but not all students are the same. This is more about mindsets of different people that handle kids at very important ages that lead them to fully grown adults.

Physical abuse as a tool for education

I am completely unaware if I have a problem in writing with my hand, I did not get my time to figure this out. But needless to say, I hated it! I still cannot write a piece of text properly. I have no issues in typing on a keyboard and I personally prefer doing that, much like this. Anyways, moving on to the main topic. In a completely crappy school, called Keshava Reddy Public School, where I unfortunately had to learn my fundamentals in science, mathematics, and everything, a group of seriously under-qualified teachers assumed that physical abuse is the only road to Education, Discipline and Decency.

Their method of teaching involved largely dictating notes to students where the students are supposed to take it down as it was dictated. This notes included all possible questions that could end up in the exam, along with their answers. Then, an examination is conducted where a subset of questions from the notes are asked, to which the only correct answers were the ones in the notes - word-to-word. The textbooks had a wealth of knowledge that was irrelevant as long as these right answers were repeated. As a result, students scored 100 % in each of the subjects without understanding the beauty of a circle, the mystery of a prism, the brilliance of Arthur Conan Doyle or the intricacies of the Opium war. Yet the students excelled with these topics as their syllabus for several classes to later follow the same trend. Needless to say, this formula was immensely popular even with parents paying a blind eye - because students scored very high marks in examinations. Obviously, the knowledge and perception of the parents in that town was also of arguable quality - they were just plain ignorant - including mine until much later.

I had troubles with all of this! I whined! I complained! Yet very few listened, and nobody acted! Why should anybody listen to a 12 year old with a twisted mind! The school was on a trajectory to becoming very successful, scoring the highest possible percentages in all subjects in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There was a point, where they even thought I might have a few mental problems. Their obvious solution to setting me straight was physical abuse. Except for one teacher, every single one that took a class of mine had laid hands/canes on me.

I never wrote my class notes, they were all empty books. I read from the text books and other’s notes, attempted the questions the improper way. At one particular time, Madhavi (the vice principal) even crossed out my entire answer sheets saying that my answers were not the ones from the class notes, even though a senior lecturer approved of them! Obviously, this sort of interaction did not earn me many friends at the time. However, my empty books were open secret to many of the students largely because I borrowed some notes from other students at times. At one particular time, one of the girls in my class decided to ask me for notes right infront of my mom. I tried to send her off causing suspicions in my mom’s head. She discovered my guilt, it was simply flipping a couple of empty book pages. This was reported to the school immediately, mostly because they paid a lot of money to the school.

The next day, I went to school and waited at that door. My mind got clouded with thoughts hinting me that I made the biggest mistake a student could ever make and that this is the end of my education. This was how I was made to feel. Well! Nothing happened, I was forced to write most of my notes by kneeling infront of her office for a couple of days. To be honest, that was not even close to the worst of my imaginations. Naturally, this sort of episodes caused me to question authority a lot more than most people and not bother about what people thought of me.

This continued for a couple of years until the board exams for tenth class. After that, my patience broke and informed my parents that I shall only continue my education at some other much bigger place outside of the town.

With an insatiable zeal for knowledge especially in mathematics & physics, the two final years of my high school is where I learnt the most and formed all my basics. I did not care about the poor background earlier, I just went on to learn whatever I could find. I joined a boarding school for those years. These two years were the worst days in terms of life. We were shoved into rooms in groups of 12 with barely enough space to fit 3. The food was horrible, sometimes we even found insects in there. However, I loved those days because of the opportunities there. This period, along with availability of high quality material and good teachers, paved way into IIT-Delhi, arguably the best engineering school in India, for my Bachelors education.

With great power comes free labour and unquestioned authority.

My bachelors was where I grew up as a person. By the time I got to IITD - I was still an unrest young mind only having had 2 years of proper schooling by far. Obviously my social skills were a complete mess - they still are according to many standards, but my friends are patient. At IITD, you find mostly smart people handpicked from all over India. And most of them have had been the best in their schools and had an amazing confidence level. I was rather fascinated by these people. But I still kept my distance from any group of people. Most of my interactions were individual. This changed across the 4 years of Bachelors period where I finally considered myself a part of a group of very good friends towards the end. Thanks to these awesome few, I learnt a lot about life in general - books, movies, music, travelling, social interactions - pretty much everything.

Those idiots still think that it is cool that I am a changed person, without actually realizing that they were the cause for that change.

During this period, I got to learn a lot about the engineering world too - later to learn that it was just a peek really. I was fascinated by using machines to process data, not just crunching numbers - but actual data that we interact with every day - sound & videos. I got in touch with Signal Processing, in particular Image processing and then into Multimedia systems. The ability to play with some data that we can visually observe has fascinated me, I am still kind of doing the same and will always be fascinated by it.

So, we approached in-house Multimedia expert Dr. Santanu Chaudhury to try out a minor project and that went quite well. We played with some video processing algorithms on FPGA. My partner then got wary of this person and decided to go to another professor. I should have done the same, but me being me does not help. I managed to sweet talk another poor guy to pick up the BTech project course which is a 10-credit work done in two parts(3 & 7). Kind of a big deal with very little flexibility on when to do the project. So the aim is to finish part-1 in 7th semester, then part-2 in 8th semester, enjoy the summer and graduate with flying hats in the fall. We got in contact with Dr. Mona Mathur and started our project on video coding. Dr. Mona Mathur is an industry person who used to work at an esteemed company.

Things were going fine in part-1 until we reached the end. At the end of 7th semester, in addition to most final exams - we also do our job placements. Voila! I get an email from Dr. Mona Mathur, to refactor the code - which was her mistake to start with as she forgot to give the coding standards before we started coding, despite me asking her a couple of times. I tried to tell her that we have a lot of exams and other things now, refactoring an already working code before our demo session is not really at the highest of my priorites. Looking back at it, I am still very confused at what is wrong with saying that. It is an adult to adult conversation with a clash of opinions. Except that is not how anything works in India, as I learnt then, even in the most premiere institutes. It is a messy situation in IITs really, there are several professors - who feel that there are these very sharp young minds they can help, that just need a little wisdom and help to start conquering the world. And then there are professors like Dr. Santanu Chaudhury.

So, we got off to a messy ground with Dr. Mona Mathur, who ended up sharing these conversations at our presentation with the project committee. Imagine the need to pick on 19 year old students by being smily with us and sneaking an attack this way. It was just a mess. So, we decided that we do not want to continue with her and we decided to switch our supervisors. Then Dr. Santanu Chaudhury has decided that Dr. Brijesh Lal is going to play the good cop. So, we waited outside his office, he took us in and explained how a messy situation this is now. And he basically said that if we opt to switch the supervisor, we have to fail this course and redo it. Irrespective of all the work we have done, they put us in a very awkward situation - almost blackmailing. Because, if we fail this course in 7th semester - there is no way that we will graduate on expected time and we have to prolong our bachelors by another year. I said ‘okay - we will take the fail grade’ because I was done with their bull-shit. Here again, I could have given in and take another semester of torture to get our degree in time. But I did not. Instead, we went back to Dr. Santanu Chaudhury, because he was conveniently the associate dean of the school too. We asked him to let us do both parts in the same semester or do part-2 in summer semester. He agreed! We made a deal with another professor to do all the work in the 8th semester and just do the formalities in summer. So, everything was good.

Well, except that it was not all good yet. Dr. Santanu Chaudhury, declined us to register the course in summer semester and declined to discuss the issue with us. So, the extension became inevitable and we had no clue what to do. We approached the head of the department and after listening to the whole fiasco, Dr. R. K. Patney and Dr. Visweswaran decided to help us. So, we made a case to the director to amend the IIT-Delhi rules to accomodate us to finish this course in summer - with pretty much the whole department supporting us actually including Dr. Brijesh Lal. It went to the director, he approved it and it went to the dean for registration. Dr. Santanu Chaudhury still being the associate dean decided to stall the work until the summer is over - this is unfortunately a very common thing to do in Indian bureaucracy. So, we had to get the pressure from ministry of education to let him stop his war with 2 clue-less undergrad students and do his job of graduating students properly. When all of this was done, the department joked about having to turn the sky up-side down to see us graduate. We laughed too then! But we did not do well for about 7 months before that, there was a lot of stress and anxiety - to find a job during placements. Once we got the jobs, we were not sure if we can still keep those if we had our graduation date extended. Unfortunately, I am responsible for all this to happen to poor Gaurav Berry, the affected teammate. Imagine that both of us cleared the national level entrance examination which was written by approximately 200,000 students by being in the top 200. Then we encounter this shit-storm due to very two non-sensible people and a system that allows such people to pursue their power until very far. When I put it that way, it makes no sense - however we had to deal with that for over 7 months.

The sad part is that there are many poor students that are still suffering in those institutes mostly due to very few shitty professors. They even have a few suicides in these premiere institutes of India, the biggest democracy in the world - because these top-minds feel opressed and that is their only way out.

The best people in the field (or the world), they always want to help.

After the whole fiasco, I took a year off to practice photography, explore, and hike in various mountains in India. Then I decided to try out masters somewhere outside of India. I ended up doing Erasmus Mundus which gave me a plenty of opportunities to socialize and learn from people of very different origins and cultures. Then things went on to me doing a PhD at University of Oslo with Dr. Carsten Griwodz and Dr. Pal Halvorsen. Due to these guys, I met many top researchers and scientists in the field of multimedia. And many of them just wanted to help me do good in my PhD. None of them had any benefit from it. They would organize visits to various labs and participate in long discussions with valuable input just so that I could progress.

In the process I met Dr. Klara Nahrstedt at a conference, she is a renowned scientist and helped me arrange a visit to the CS department at UIUC(one of the best ones in the world). Similarly, when I met Dr. Wei Tsang Ooi from NUS at a conference, I was truly inspired with his kindness and humbleness. He is a very accomplished scientist in the field of multimedia. Yet he speaks to you as a friend. Likewise Dr. Judith Alice Redi from TU Delft was a source of great inspiration for me with her work at such a young age. Eventually, I was very proud and extremely happy to have two of these three inspiring people to be on my PhD committee. My excitement was barely contained when they agreed.

I did spend many hours at the lab, sometimes late into the night. But all of that work was done by choice and to keep up with other researchers. I have to say that I did hate writing the thesis quite a lot, but it was a necessary evil for the PhD. At the end of the day, none of these top people in the field caused me any stress, on the contrary they helped me quite a bit. Without them my PhD would not have been the same.

There are many issues with academic world, but those are being discussed all over. Infact, I quit academic world due to the lack of a balanced life. But such issues are now widely discussed. Moreover, I did not encounter many of those issues during my PhD to cover as anecdotes.

Concluding note.

Looking back as a retrospective.

The point is that instead of teaching what mistakes are fine to make and what mistakes are bad. My school taught us making any mistake is bad. To the point that people do not distinguish from a necessary mistake to a horrible one. Kids learn how to walk by falling several times. Obviously teaching a kid to not fall and not to fall over a cliff is not the same thing - this difference is what needs to be taught - not all the rigid bull shit about religions, cultures, traditions, and such.

Genome by Matt Ridley

Book Review

This is one of the most intriguing books I read on this topic. Matt Ridley took extra care in dissiminating the ideas and played very carefully on the edge between over-simplifying the topic vs making it too technical.

This book has a subtitle “The autobiography of a species in 23 chapters”, quite literally the author just says 23 stories that are about the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a very interesting narrative. The book concludes with a very interesting note on free will and how it fits in the “everything is determined in the genes” narrative.

From the beginning to the end, the book is very gripping. It almost felt like I was reading a detective novel. The quote above is my own thought when reading about Chromosome 15, and how missing a portion of it is very unfortunate. If the portion is missing in the chromosome from a mother, then it leads to Angelman Syndrome. In case, the portion is missing in the chromosome from a father, then it leads to Prader-willi Syndrome. This portion is a gene and it is the exact same gene. This is very interesting when you realize how different both those conditions are and how narrow their actual cause is.

Anyways, Matt Ridley did a very good job to shed some light on a very exciting topic. In the process, he used anecdotes, scientific explanations, and his own feelings without getting carried away with anything. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested on this topic, irrespective of their background.

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Book Review

This is one of those books that you wish everyone on the planet should have read in their high school. The book is the most concise geopolitical story of the world I read so far. It is very easy to comment on current situations in the world, but Tim Marshall is among those very few people who are qualified to make very careful commentary.

The author partitions globe into various sections and discusses how the local geography defined the politics and demographies in those areas. Then he goes on to show examples of what happens when the geography is accepted and what happens when it is ignored.

Majority of the discussion is centered around various conflicts in the world, the Koreas - the middle east - central africa to provide some examples, and how they are in very stale-mate situations due to the random borders drawn by people ignorant of the local geography. In essense he highlights how much human greed and zero-sum-game approaches had shaped several of these conflicts to take their current form. He then goes on arguing about how this will continue in the future.

The book is a very interesting read written in a simple yet gripping style.