Pointed and dull?

In an earlier post (written during an earlier life), I made mention of my boss’s boss’s boss, a big man in every sense of the term.

I was talking to him over the ether the other day. He mentioned that he’d had some time to kill, and he’d killed a part of it learning Python. I was impressed beyond words. Here was a man who had hardly had time to sleep, and when time was available, he used it wisely. Lest you form an adverse opinion of his capabilities, let me state that he earned his Ph.D in theoretical computer science from TIFR, Bombay. He’s achieved much, much more than that – but that is a story best saved for another day.

Contrast him with yours truly – younger, lazier, barely scraped through a Master’s degree and ran away from doing a Ph.D. Ran away from the subject of my Master’s, ran away to something I feel more comfortable with. All through my life, I’ve lived with the guilt that I was never a good student, never made good use of my time at school, college, or at the Institute with Tree Lined Avenues. Every time I get a few days off, I vow to read through and complete at least one chapter from one or more of the following books, depending on my mood at the time:

[1] Challenge and Thrill of Pre-College Mathematics, C. R. Pranesachar et al, New Age International Publishers
[2] Analysis-I, Terence Tao, Texts and Readings in Mathematics, 2006.
[3] Linear Algebra, Hoffman, Kunze, Prentice-Hall, 1971.
[4] A Survey of Modern Algebra, Birkhoff, MacLane, Universities Press.
[5] Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. Hennessy, Patterson Morgan Kaufman, 3rd Ed.
[6] Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Sussman, Sussman, Abelson, The MIT Press, 2nd Ed, 1996.
[7] The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes 1-3, Donald E. Knuth, Prentice-Hall.
[8] Algebraic Codes for Data Transmission, Richard E. Blahut, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
[9] Elementary Probability and Stochastic Processes, Kai-Lai Chung, Springer Verlag, 1977
[10] An Introduction to Statistical Signal Processing, Gray, Davisson.
[11] The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Wiley.

I’m not quite sure as to /why/ I do this – in part, because I think I’m now in a position to understand and appreciate the contents of these books better, and perhaps partly in atonement for my wasted youth.

The list is truly longer – I’ve restricted it to what is usually uppermost on my mind. Needless to say, I haven’t made much progress (if at all) with /any/ of the items in the list. Consider [6], for instance. I discovered SICP about two years ago, and was moved to tears by the beauty of Scheme. I was so moved that I started writing my own scheme interpreter. The day I started to write it, I made it parse numerical expressions – it would easily understand that (+ 2 3) evaluated to 5. It also understood things like (define pi 3.14159). The next day, I /almost/ made it understand what (define (sum x y) (+ x y)) meant. I then gave up, and haven’t looked at it since.

No wonder then, that I was depressed after yesterday’s chat with the Big Man.

Came today, and I was idly leafing through the pages of the little Green Book [1], when a problem caught my eye:

    * Problem: Show that 1 + 2!2 + 3!3 + ... + n!n = (n + 1)! - 1

    First thought:	WTF is this? Oh, OK.

    Second:		Too tough, where's the answer section? Oh crap, it
			doesn't have the answer to /this/ problem.

    Third:		Hey, I could use induction!

    Fourth:		Oh wait a sec. If I induct blindly, I'm not really
    understanding the problem. Let's see now... n!n can be written as
    (n + 1)! - n!.  That's it!  I just rewrite the left-hand side as
    sum_{k \in (1, ... ,n)}((k + 1)! - k!) and happily watch successive terms
    knock each other out, except for the second and the last, which are -1
    and (n + 1)! :

    1!1 = 2! - 1!
    2!2 = 3! - 2!
       ...
    n!n = (n + 1)!	- n!

I felt happy, but the happiness was as short lived as the fizz in champagne from yesterday’s bottle. The book was meant for kids in the 9th and 10th standards. Did I even have a brain anymore? That apart – a good problem solver (dare I say mathematician?) would display none of the trepidation of the second and third steps. [S]he would probably jump straight to step four, after optionally lingering at step 1. I hadn’t had enough humiliation for the day, so my eye proceeded to catch another problem:

    * Problem: Prove that in any given party, the number of people who have
    shaken an odd number of hands is always even.

    First thought:	Damn. I've seen this problem before... where? I've
			forgotten how to do this, damn it.

    Second:		No, you don't /remember/ how to crack problems, you
			effing /understand/ the problem and solve it. Idiot.

    Third:		Let's see now... why would this number be even?
    Hmm... let N_h be the total number of people who have shaken hands, N_e and
    N_o be the number of people who've shaken an even and odd number of hands,
    respectively.

    N_e is obviously even; so for N_o to be even, N_h has to be even. Now why
    would the total number of people shaking hands be even?  OK, here's how -
    each handshake involves two people, so the total number of people shaking
    hands is /necessarily/ even. Bingo. Sigh...

    Fourth:		Damn. It was one of those Russian books. Oh wait... the
    guy who wrote it had a funny name. It was a funny name even for a Russian.
    He has a twin brother but they didn't collaborate on this book. One of the
    their names is that of some ancient Jewish Rabbi. Arrghh...  The Brothers
    Yaglom. Akiva and Isaak. (True enough, the book I was looking for was "The
    USSR Olympiad Problem Book", Shklarsky, Chentzov and Yaglom, Dover
    Publications. And no, I haven't gotten beyond the first page.)

It looks like the fear of mathematics that was instilled into me during my schooldays is yet to take its leave. Not a very happy state of affairs, I might add. Someday, I might just be cured of this condition. When, I do not yet know.

Radio Indigo plays Nickelback fairly often these days – notably, Rockstar and Gotta be Somebody. This inspired me to get hold of some of their music, and that forms the bulk of my playlist these days.

I need to go get the car stereo fixed. The CD player is broken, complains of errors in any CD that I care to shove into its mouth. It’s been this way for some time now. It hasn’t hurt me much, thanks to the radio being permanently tuned to either Radio Indigo or Amritavarshini. However, there are traffic-jammed days when I find myself wishing for some soothing Led Zep when all the radio has to offer is Lady Gag-ga or some such. Then again, in these times of economic recession, one finds oneself thinking twice or more about every small expense. My list of things that I should buy (sometime before I die) has now attained mammoth proportions, and is growing at an alarming rate. Thanks to someone’s generosity, one item (actually two) has been struck off the list – I am now the proud possessor of the complete Trionfi tryptych. Ha!

I’ve just begun listening to Catulli Carmina, with a translation of the lyrics at hand – it’s been good going so far.

More later. Soon.

Been a while.

Went on my first roadtrip, strained my shoulders by driving 400KM nonstop, half of it on extremely crappy roads. The return trip was OK, took a different route that wasn’t so hard on the car’s suspension (and consequently my shoulders).

This was a couple of weeks ago.

It’s layoff season everywhere, and I feel lucky not to have been laid off. Yet. Hopefully, I retain my job.

More about all that in a little while.

Argh.

Time – that wretched four letter word of which I seem to be always in short supply. That pisses me off to no end.

My workplace has closed down from the 29th of December until the 3rd of January – economy measures and all that. Which means I have eleven days at my disposal to do what I please, (if you throw in the weekends).

What have I been up to? I spent a day getting the broadband connection up. The effing builder who’d built the apartment complex got away with laying el cheapo PVC pipes to carry water. I stumbled upon this fact when the AirTel guys broke one of the aforementioned pipes open with a crowbar, in their efforts to cut a path for the broadband cable through the concrete walkway in the parking lot. The resourceful watchman, Bahadur (as resourceful watchmen in apartment complexes are likely to be named), turned off the valves on the terrace, and the entire building was left without water. I ran behind a plumber (not literally), and got the pipe fixed – which took about half a day. AirTel has rather efficiently outsourced each part of their operations to different contractors – which means that a bunch of guys dig up the roads and the concrete (to be fair, they patch up what they dug out – rather well, I should say), another bunch of guys takes care of the wiring woes, and a third bunch arrive at your doorstep to activate the connection. AirTel does a very good job of ensuring that these disparate collections of skilled workpeople stay sycnronized. It’s just that the entire process sucked out the better part of my day from me – no fault of AirTel, though.

I’ve been reading up on the Peano axioms and mathematical induction, which has been immensely satisfying. I didn’t realize just how long it had been since I’d put pencil to paper. This is trivial undergrad stuff – but for someone on the wrong side of thirty who’s not really been exposed to math (except for a couple of algebra/random process courses that were required for signal processing), this is heady stuff indeed. More about that later.

There is a post elsewhere that I must respond to. Later, though. I’m consciously trying not to succumb to the SIWOTI syndrome.

Update:Drat. I was also wrong – that sentence about the Peano axioms and induction – well, induction is a Peano axiom itself. Grrr.

Moved into new house.

Got broadband today. Airtel. Blazingly fast so far. Heard good things about it, that it’s the only /reliable/ broadband around here…

Hopefully it’s true!

I’ll. Be. Back.

It has been a while since I last wrote.

Much water has flown under the bridge – my better half and I invested in a flat (with the aid of the friendly neighbourhood bank, of course) – this was at least a month before the beginning of the gooey kablooey. We’re currently blowing the last of our savings on furnishing and decorating the flat. Sigh…

Bloody Wednesday, the 15th of October, is a date that will haunt me in my nightmares for the rest of my lifetime.

Relatives – bloody or otherwise – suck. Period.

The Little Devil is hell bent on scaring the crap out of us once in a month. Fell sick after his measles shot this Sunday. Is recovering. Slowly. Sometimes I really wonder if it was right on my part to have brought a child into this world. Watching the little guy suffer and his not being able to say anything about it just kills me.

New scratch on the car’s bonnet. I pissed off a tempo guy who took his revenge on me. My car’s bonnet, that is. Car seems to have reduced pickup, and seems to make funny noises every now and then. A visit to the service station is due… so is the consequent hole in my wallet. Drat.

I haven’t spent much time reading the stuff that I want to read. There are a couple of interesting articles in the last 3 issues of CACM that I really want to finish. I looked on CACM as a waste of paper until the new editor took over – these days I look forward to seeing the colourful CACM cover in the mailbox every month – not to mention the last few pages.

On a related note to the last paragraph – I find myself humbled yet again by a simple looking problem. It just goes to show that… I haven’t been spending time solving problems. Soon, very soon… I need to tie up a few loose ends and then I’m gonna make sure that I get to have some time for myself. The problem that screwed me this time? Evaluate . Never have I hung my head lower in shame.

On the whole, life’s been pretty much the same – perhaps there’ve been more downers than uppers, but that’s still OK.

Miscellaneous notes to self

Stuff to do, sometime in the near future:

Read Jon Ingram’s post on Euclid’s Elements, and then The Book itself. I haven’t read Euclid yet, but I did spend some time doing Geometry of the kind Jon describes when I was at school. I most emphatically did not understand a whole lot of what I was doing, then. An extremely enjoyable book that deals with Euclidean geometry, among other things, is The Challenge and Thrill of Pre-College Mathematics by V. Krishnamurthy, et al. I wish this book had come out when I was younger.

Complete the Z_m is a finite field if and only if m is prime proof. Drat.

Scour Krish Ashok’s work on Bollywood’s fine tradition of Unplayable Guitar Chords to find more gems like mango-people. Out of the 58 (till date) commenters on that post, nobody’s cottoned on to the connection between mango-people and the hapless targets of free power, free rice, free clothes, free TVs and other surefire vote-winning strategies of successive governments. Ha!

Watch Tahalka. It would be bad form on my part to not mention that it was Greatbong’s review that inspired me to try and watch the movie again. Before reading Greatbong, I remembered the movie for one thing and one thing alone – Dharmendra trying to rip off Clint Eastwood in Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo, but coming out with something that sounded like If you vaant to shit, shit – don’t taalk. I kid you not!

Get hold of House on DVD. Every single episode till date.

The traditional “last but not the least” item: Make my peace with the little Devil. His diarrhoea got worse, and I took him to the hospital. He had to be restrained while the nurse pricked his left arm for the IV, and I held him and tried to pacify him as the needle approached. Despite that, he managed to lash out and bend the needle the first time around. Ever since, my entrance into his room provokes from him a look that combines suspicion, hostility, disappointment and other like emotions. My many apologies to him have had little success, and his forehead sports a crease that goes away only when I leave his sight. An attempt to kiss his forehead results in an emphatic waaanh of dismissal. Damn, I didn’t know infants were as picky as this. Hopefully this shouldn’t take too long to do.

Yellow becomes green
Smooth foreheads crease with worry
New teeth, or old bugs.

Update, 04 Sep:
What was green is slowly turning yellow. What was runny is slowly turning clumpy. An old bug it is (was?). Did anybody say parenthood was easy?

Update 05 Sep:

Bloody hell. The little devil had to be taken to hospital and hooked up to an IV, screaming, kicking and bringing the place down. He should be back at home today evening. A paediatrician’s job is hell, I must say. Trying to administer medicine to a wailing 8-month old is a pain in the butt, and what’s worse? Hooking up a needle to his arm. Argh. The LD has amazing lung power, I could hear him scream two floors down. Bloody hell.

Four minutes to twelve.

The rain is falling in sheets, and makes a noise reminiscent of the ancient Hawkins pressure cooker at home heard from a distance. Funny, how one’s childhood home is always home. I’m surrounded by a mess of discarded clothes, half-read books and empty soft drink cans. The floor is unswept, has been for days. A corner of the bed is dedicated for cables of many kinds. Close by lie my prized pair of Faber-Castells, and several almost complete Hindu crosswords. My faithful companion of nearly a decade, Kernighan & Pike, stares at me, upside down, its yellow, brown and green fluttering gently in the breeze from the cluttering ceiling fan. Orhan Pamuk’s bespectacled visage smiles from another cover, in another corner. Unwashed denims mingle with freshly washed socks and a few crumpled checked shirts.

Some nights, it is not nice to be lonely.

My bedroom in its current state is a good approximation of what my room at the R-block in the Institute with Tree Lined Avenues looked like. Not pretty, at its best. Disorder is the word that comes to mind.

A week more, and I shall be complete again. My other half and our little devil will join me. I need to get rid of the disorder at home before that happens. It is with some regret that I contemplate the end of my temporary bachelorhood – no more late night hacking, no more living like a tramp, no more junk food. On the other hand, the little devil with the cherubic smile should be more than willing to make a mess of the house. He’d be able to get away with it – all he has to do is smile, and both his angry parents are rendered powerless as their anger melts away.

Nothing like a little disorder to liven things up.