1st post in 2007

It's been some time since I posted anything here, as usual. I have been thinking of posting a lot of stuff, but then, it might as well become to long, like the last post. As they say, better late than never. And I wouldn't bother if it is boring for the reader, because I am sure the number of people who actually read this(thanks to RSS/Atom feeds), are less than countable on fingers. In that sense, I practically don't have to bother about the blog being public! Ah, the joy of solitude... By far, my writing style is something that can be translated into speech without having to change words, tone etc. I am hence, at a disadvantage. My written and spoken language have amazingly high correspondence. And I am sure that is a sign of lack of refinement. In my view, written language ought only to be read, preferably alone. Collective reading or reading aloud leaves the reader with a handicap. As said in the Mahabharata(if I remember it right),
"An arrow that just left the bow, and a word that just left the mouth, are similar - they can't be revoked"
There's no perfect return/review once spoken out, or interpreted jointly. That reminds me of the way learn to study(?). In the early years, reading aloud is the best way to read and study. In my estimate, by around 3rd-4th class, this should be done with. That's when one learns the amazing way of reading, learning and understanding without the necessity of a voice, so to speak. Still, there is an inner voice(I am not preaching religion here!). The brain is the most amazing thing I can think of(crazy enough making the brain think of itself, or there is a place in the brain which thinks about the brain!). It is amazing how the brain can recall images, voices, touch and even smell/taste; leave alone raw information. Of course, all these are ultimately just electric impulses - a lame excuse for us to make(?). Getting back to written language, for a moment, brackets are a powerful tool in written language(and I use them lavishly).

I always wanted to experiment with all the brain's abilities. Thanks to me being in engineering, I'm not making guinea pigs of people and playing with their minds(another arbitrary boast which is rather baseless - and for the record, who said an engineer can't play with minds?). From my simple experiments with my mind/brain/whatever-you'd-like-to-call-it, I find that the brain is more or less serial in processing. Of course, I am not intensive enough to do an exhaustive mathematical analysis of this. I'd be happy enough to get an idea. This might explain why it is rather difficult to do different things with either hand at the same time(for instance, musical instrument players, if you'd want to argue, are trained for only that specific purpose for the parallel processing. They can't mirror their skills, as in - exchange the functions of their left and right hands). It may probably also make one think that this is probably why many ambidextrous people are Mensa members. I remember a particular example of a friend of mine telling me about his school teacher who could write different languages with his 2 hands at the same time - now that's crazy! I had also recently read about an MRI/EEG-based program to learn how multilingual brains work. I'm rather sure that there was also a reference to a paper in Nature. The study showed that different parts of the brain were active when using different languages. I don't have the link with me now, sadly enough(I had got the link through StumbleUpon). In India, with the amazingly high number of languages we have, it is really hard to be monolingual. Again, going by classification, we can have more than one native language. There are quite a few communities which are inherently multilingual. I am from one such community, the Kerala Iyers(Palakkad Iyers). We speak both Malayalam and Tamil, and our language isn't really pure. It is very different from either language. Thankfully, most of us can speak enough Malayalam to live in Kerala, and enough Tamil to live in Tamil Nadu. Being the center of a linguistic confusion, Palakkad Iyers have been subject of many a comic character/story in TV soaps, movies etc(again, both in Malayalam and Tamil). So much for the Iyer connection.
Getting back to the multilingual brain, KV Mohan once asked me a very interesting question - what language do you think in? It would be of profound interest to a multilingual theorist. I think in almost all the languages I know, though I have not thought in Sanskrit yet(yeah, very funny). But another question would pop up again - which language do I think most often in? That's still a puzzling question. Anyway, thanks to the world being a smaller place, there are more and more multilingual people around, and the answer to these questions will be found. The other thing I found in my experiments is with our brain's ability to reproduce music. Our brain can reproduce music almost exactly. So good, that you can put in a playlist and let it play, let alone having an iPod do the job. But yet again, the serial processing(or so I call it, maybe wrongly) limits the exact reproduction of the music. There is a rough limit on the details that can be reproduced, as if the brain has some kind of polyphony limit or something. Yet, it is plainly amazing that the brain can merely reproduce sounds and images, and also create new sounds and images. That was one of the ways I used to learn songs. I used to remember the tune perfectly, the lyrics vaguely(as my brain interpreted them) and then fill in the gaps with new information(who knows where that came from!). I have also had songs running in my mind while writing exams, and I used to match my writing speed with the rhythm of the song.

Coming to music; there's always some of the music videos I wanted to write a lot to write about. The first music video that really caught my attention was 'Californication', by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I am rather sure that this is one of their most popular songs, despite never reaching great ratings; and it has a pretty well-made and most importantly, enjoyable video. And that was the first ever time I knew that there existed something called 3-D animation. That was in my 8th class. Pretty soon, I got my first computer, came to know of 3-D games, and played Road Rash for the first time. Around the same year, the series Starship Troopers premiered on TV. It was CG animated, and looked very realistic to the then me. Of course, I was well behind the times in knowledge of technology back then. Year 2000 also saw the release of Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, a game I still play(I've finished it a million times, but the game is too good). The game brought in too many new features into the Need for Speed series. The graphics was much much more realistic than any other game I had ever played, the car handling was just too realistic, the music was perfect for the game, and the game modes were just groundbreaking(read from the link!). I'd have been writing a 10 page review but for limitations of other things I am thinking of. So, since that year, I have had a fascination with Computer Graphics, Electronic Music, Racing Games and what not. The other thing I wanted to write about in this rather arbitrary stream of thoughts, is about the video of another RHCP song, The Zephyr Song. The video is a brilliantly made with (strangely enough) a psychedelic theme. But the theme just blends into the song like water in milk. There's a kind of beauty in the way it was made(not just the exotic dancer :D ). And it doesn't seem like psychedelic music either!

So much for all that multimedia. Quite a lot has happened in the months past. I'd better not be recollecting the results of my previous semester(yeah, it's the same old disappointment, nothing new). I should say, though, that there were a few courses I really liked and I haven't disappointed in those atleast. December was the month to be last year. After a quick week of stay in the campus, I returned home for what may well be my last full college vacation. And there was quite a lot to it than I expected. On Dec 23, around 20 of us batch-mates at school had a reunion in Cochin. It was quite the thing that I wanted in years. I met some of my classmates after something like 2-2½ years. That's a really long time, especially at this part of our life, when things change drastically almost every other second. Obviously, we had lots to talk about, and I'm sure none of us could finish talking. The humans that we are, the reunion would not be complete without food :). We had lunch together, and the fun just swept us all around the dining tables. Trust me, school life is something every person ought to have in life. It is probably one of the most important parts of our lives, and a lot of what we are, is built up at school. I miss those days as much as anyone else. Time's invisible hand can't be turned back, and the changes it brings upon us are as inevitable as time itself. After the reunion on 23rd, we also had a school alumni reunion on 26th. Since most of the publicity was through either word of mouth, or through orkut, we didn't have a really big turnout. Yet, it too gave us much to remember. And a concrete Alumni Association was formed at last. I did put up a handful of pictures of the reunions on my Flickr page. This time, I don't want to put it up here. The images are better viewed on the Flickr page.

Time to digress once again. I have got back to my thinking habit of late. I love thinking. At home, I was so much into thought that my mother thought there was something I was keeping from her. Well, after all, our mothers are so much the most understanding people in the whole universe, to us(atleast to me). The bond between parent and child is very intense. That's why blood relation matters. To quote in Sanskrit(I just love the language)

"yam mAtA-pitarou klEsham sahEtE sambhavE nruNAm
na tasya nishkrutihi: shakyA kartUm varshatairapi"

It translates to - "The suffering which the mother and father endure in bearing and bringing up a child, cannot be compensated, even in a hundred years."
Damn! I digressed too much once again! It was all for just some idea behind a question I put in a quiz I conducted in my hostel. The question I put in was - What are the colours used in colour printing, and why? And practically all the answers I received were unsatisfactory. The answer is CMYK(Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK) and it's quite elementary. In colours of light, the colour mixing is additive, and in mixing of paint, colour mixing is subtractive. As in, if I mix Red and Green light, I see both Red and Green light. But if I mix Red and Green paint, I see the colour that reflects both Red and Green. Simple enough. So for colours of light, I would be using Red, Green, Blue and of course, their sum, White. But for paint, I would be using their respective additive mixes - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. What a nice idea! And the beauty is that it can be worked out! Let me not be praising myself(though this question did come to me in a stream of wonderful thoughts). The other very interesting thing that has happened, that I read of, is this method in Computational Fluid Dynamics called MLPG(Meshless Local Petrov-Galerkin) method. In all computational methods in Fluid and Solid Dynamics, we(usually) inevitably have to use a mesh to discretize a volume of material into cells. But this method, amazingly is Mesh-free. Now that is some serious genius! I love engineering :D. Anyway, I don't know enough mathematics to understand and write an analysis of this absolute spark of brilliance(I leave that job to this guy). That makes my job easier all the way.

I shall preserve all the other things I consider sparks of brilliance for some quiz I may conduct, some time in the future. For now, I'm just enjoying thought.