Carthik Sharma

The last week was the week when I worked for the longest hours in my life. I slept 15 hours over 5 days. The genetic algorithm programming assignment took up so much time. On two days I had to sit continuosly for more than 12 hours, and on other days for shorter stretches of time. I had two midterms this week, so my midterms are over too. I am reading the book “Red River, Blue Mountains” by Hem Barua. Its a dated description of Assam and is very good, except for the flowery language in some parts, and the repeated comparisons to the San Fransisco sea shore. Comparing the sounds of the Brahmaputra with the sound of waves lapping the SF sealine seems very contrived, somehow. Why San Francisco bay, why not the sea shore at Konark?
I have been dreaming the strangest dreams lately. It feels to be good back among dreams in my sleep. For months now, I have had no memory of my dreams after I wake up, but these past few days, I seem to remember the most bizarre dreams. I remember telling myself when I was taking a bath immediately after I woke up that I have to write down a dream, if possible as a short story, but later, when I had the time, I had this very faint idea of the dream and nothing more. I would love to tell you what it was, but I think its kind of cliched, you know, everyone wants to tell everyone else what they dreamt about, and unless you love a person or something, you would’nt be very inclined to read about their dreams. So I desist.
I slept for five hours in the evening yesterday and again, till 12 noon today. Now I feel a different man.

I discovered that LJ has a character limit to reply-posts.

This is what i got from the page that follows the “Post Reply” mouseclick

Error
One or more errors occured processing your request. Please go back, correct the necessary information, and submit your data again.

Sorry, but your comment of 7210 characters exceeds the maximum character length of 4300. Please go back, shorten it, and try posting it again.

Now I cant figure out a better way of putting my reply , so here goes…

For the record, this is a discussion about a Gaiman poem. I got stuck on a minor detail. and since has traditionally been a friend I can pick fights with, I started the fight

The story so far…
’s original post with replies

>You could write volumes about how a “thing”
>cannot love, or fall in love because hey, it’s dead,and so the poem, the countless vampire books, the innumerable vampire movies get thrown out of the back-door. By >calling a vampire a “thing”, you automatically negate 80% of all vampire fiction >throughout literary history.

A poet can can talk about an inanimate object loving something, as in
“the sunflower loves the sun”
he still cant talk about a dead thing having a life-as-it-is-generally-understood.
I was talking about a galring contradiction, viz, that a lifeless object describing its own life! this discussion is getting interesting. Artistotle classifies the qualities of an object as “per se” and “per accidens” take away any of the former kind qualities of any object and its not that object anymore. take away an accidental property and you dont abstract away the essence. These are rules ingrained into logic. So in calling a thing, oh, i should not use that word, i shall use object, that one described as dead or “not-living”(thus explaining fuzzy states like undead) as having a life is sheer non-sense.

>Technical glitch: Vampires are not “dead”. They are “Undead”…. negates the effect >of “death” – in other words, >the human body becomes a container, the contents of which >are definitely non-human.

i think neutralizes is what you are confusing with negates here. the negation of death (~death) is life, buddy! if something neutralizes death then it neutralizes life too. to get my angle of things, think of _any_ writer writing about a vampire awaiting his/her/its “death”(death , not obliteration). now do you see what i have been driving at?

or say, define life as that unique thing which is terminated by death (nothing else is, or life is that which is terminatable by death) Now since vampires are not affected by death, or in other words, death has no implication for vampires, vampires dont have a life.(theres a fault in this reasoning though not evident and not detrimental to the fact being evaluated)

>Second, my reasoning – or rather, my “humble” opinion about what Gaiman is trying to >say in that particular line. Look at the lines again – “For many centuries I’ve walked >the world, dispensing something that resembled love –a stolen kiss, then back into the >night contented by the life and by the blood.”, so going by your line of thought, he >says “i am contented with MY life and MY blood.”

i am not a moron to think that he says “my life and my blood” i think he’s saying MY life and the blood that i drink.

>well, it’s not. The “blood” here refers to that of his victims

good that we agree on this, but you avoid (for reasons of comfort?) explaining your opinion on whether he is discussing HIS life or the victim’s life, which he doesnt take away, he’s not death.

> I can go into technicalities of how different writers have handled the connection >between a vampire and his/her living victims, but that would be too far-fetched….(I >seriously have no idea how the newwave…Barker, gaiman et al have treated this in >their works, and i can just hypothesise. )

LIVING victims – he doesnt take their lives away and so he is not talking about their lives. it is HIS life he is contented with. The rest of the above paragraph is informative, thank you. And since you say you dont know Gaiman’s “stand” i assume the question is still open. I thought experts should know better (self declared experts more so, in their domain of expertise. )

>So the point here MIGHT be this. The Undead creature refers to the blood AND the life >around him…you can either equate blood WITH life or, life and blood as two seperate >entities altogether….my interpretation, based on the quote that i gave, says that he >just used a repetitive expression ( it IS a poem by a vampire, after all ) to convey >how important blood was in his life.
>As for the sarcasm…..blame it on the hungry soul who comes to the office and sees a >vampire newbie nitpicking on things beyond his ken.

he is contented with the life AROUND him? you dont make the least bit of sense there. take a break from this discussion , and as a third person, read the lines in the poem and think whether what you wrote above is a sensible comment. He is obviously not _contented_ with the life around him, he claims to be contented with HIS life.

>repetitive expression ( it IS a poem by a vampire, after all ) to convey how important >blood was in his life.

you too say ” how important blood was in _his_ life”
Make up your mind , do vampires have a “life”? if the do, we’re clear, Gaiman was wrong (even the Gods are fallible )

>As for the sarcasm…..blame it on the hungry soul who comes to the office and sees a >vampire newbie nitpicking on things beyond his ken.

I am not intersted the least bit in vampire so calling me a vampire newbie is incorrect. I like poetry and I like thinking about the intricacies in the way different authors use language. In fact, my first thought was that Gaiman must have meant to make this stand out, for shock effect. Like Sartre said “Man is Condemned to be Free.”

My ken is limited, so are my interests. I didnt know you had to be a vampire lover or expert to analyse poetry.

>Humbleness be damned! I am humble about things beyond MY scope of knowledge, not about >things I “specialise” in. Have I ever commented about you-know-which-band except for >the odd noises now and then?

Refer to subversive comment on the lack of depth in your speciality in a point I made earlier.
Just because you have not commented on Floyd doesnt mean I cant comment about an artist’s use of words.

Anyways, even in my quizzing days, which for the most part are over, I never claimed to be a specialist in anything, except the one off event when I claimed to be _the_ expert on how to make a certain vodka cocktail, with disastrous effect. I have noticed that I not that passionate about things. I mean I dont think any of my idols or personal favourites is perfect.

I wont burn anything. Please come out of the dogfight mode and think of debates as just that, something that has to be reasoned out logically, without getting emotional about the subject being discussed.

I had a couple of exams today and hence the delay in the reply. I was online when you buzzed me on y! mess, but i had an hour left for the exam, and so could’nt respond, since I knew i would be able to divide my attention between last-minute-mugging and discussing something else. All apologies.

Have a nice day!, and thanks for the interesting discussion.

Well, I got to this post about Google buying Pyra Labs, Owners of Blogger. My interest in Google increased some after I read this post which says google is a nominee for the Big Brother Award, and that its not exactly a innocent, simple company

However, the reasond for this post is a line in the Google and Larry Page which says
“World Graph of where the searches are coming from… India pretty amazing… Lots more searches coming from India than electric lights at night…” Go India!! I found it remarkable cause it wasnt China, or Japan….

A few days ago, a friend of mine got a mail from someone in africa, saying something about getting money for helping to transfer funds someplace using his bank account. And then, a few days later I got a mail from Nigeria.

I had no idea this spam was so special, special enough to warrant a
U.S. Secret Service Advisory!, and a special name “419 scam”. hey , thats a quiz question too (what’s not?, eh)

I got there from the spam abuse help website

Among other things, I had to break my resolve of sleeping by 1-2 am since I had to do this nightout yesterday to finish the Genetic algorithm assignment, and man, the problems multiplied like a pack of rabbits!! I sat up all night, didnt sleep a wink till 4 pm, and yet i had nothing to turn in when the class started. well, I am almost there. I have all the raw data, which will now become graphs and so forth.

Luckily I wasnt the only person who had such problems, and so , Dr.Wu gave us all a two day extension. Man, I love her.(No one is supposed to get jealous over this )(just kidding)

Now, Now, talking of work is all I do , all the time, but there is so little happening in life otherwise. Nothing too interesting has happened lately, something interesting is bound to happen tonight, since its my turn to cook.

Yesterday was a typical day. The only thing worth noting might be that I had innumerable problems trying to run Greffenstette’s Genetic Algorithm Program Genesis 5.0 running on Turbo C. I started with Visual Studio, and then after I convinced myself that it cant be tuned to make and compile all the .c files, i turned to TurboC, and for some strange stupid reason, the program (TurboC) would hang on me, time and again. After 5 hours of agony, i gave up on DOS/Windows for good.

Of course I could have tried doing all this on Linux at home, but there was a small problem. I had tried upgrading to RH 8.0 using the cds sent me, but since the second installation cd would not work, i had to abandon the upgrade. And for some strange reason, i could not get Linux to boot up properly. I was too lazy to install RH 7.2 again.

So today in the morning I reinstalled RH 7.2 again in the PC at home, and Genesis 5.0 works like a jap (efficiently and without a fuss, no other racial characteristics implied, inherited)

I have to do all this to complete the assignment in the evolutionary computing class, due by monday. I had two weeks to work on it, but i didnt have the time for this earlier, so as usual its a sprint to the finish line.

At about 11 in the night yesterday, me and sumant went to applebees and downed 2 bottles of Zinfadel. Thats really good wine, as and had said it would be. The two of us were laughing most of the time, and sketching transformed pictures on napkins. Dont ask me why we were laughing, its that laughter which happens without reason.

And then I called her and talked to her for a long long time, about this and that, and felt super.

Today is another story, it promises to be a hard night, but I wont stay up too late, should become more regular in my schedule.

Here’s to us.

The icon for the day is ….

all of you can see the image, but only the one is supposed to see the meaning, and intention.

Hope you have a glorious day.

I found this website, Markin Kalpataru, which plays Assamese songs , 24×7!!
please note – this website says “The word “Markin” in assamese means from the United States Of America. Altogether, “Markin Kalpataru” means A Kalpataru Like music program , originated in the United States.” I remembered your “Murkan” when i read this

And then I found out the reason
Why Knuth does not use email any longer I also found that the right way to pronounce his name is Ka-nooth, and not “nuth”. He has dedicated the rest of his life to finishing the monumental “The Art of Computer Programming”. A sage, by any standards. One who gave up a well-paying Stanford full professorship to write a book that eveyone can use. How many of these men do we have these days? You’d get 2.56 dollars if you report a mistake in any of his books, and its 2.56 dollars since 256 cents make a hexadecimal dollar!! I can already see smiling and noting it down as a good quiz question, but really beatzo, I miss quizzing. Its like a grindstone for the mind – keeps it sharp.

I had an interesting discussion with Li Yang, a chinese phd student into CMOS technology and man this guy lives, breathes and oozes transistors and device physics. He helped me out with some questions I had regarding the boot-up-circuit-random-number-generator I am trying to build for the cryptography project. I still have’nt been able to find the solution for my problem.

Interesting problem, actually. The power-on-reset circuit in a modern chip(such as a processor) has a resistor-capacitor circuit. Now due to some features of this small circuit there are variations in the time taken to de-assert RESET and start up the computer. Modern day chips provide a complex circuit to eliminate this variation with regard to time. But I am interested in the unpredictable time variation to create a random number generator within the Cryptarray processor that we are designing. There is a lot of data on the time-error-adjusted power-on-reset circuits, but very little on how much the variation is , without the adjustment.

Now essentially I am trying to use a “bad” or undesireable property of a circuit, and Li put it well when he said, smiling, “I can tell you interesting ways of eliminating the time error , but I cant tell you how to use it, because nobody studies such insignificant “bad” things”

I had an ice-cream soda for the first time in my life, strawberry flavored, from JavaCity. It has been my desire to have one since the time I read about them in Archies comics, back home in India.

She has a campus interview tomorrow.

I walked all the way from home to the department at 1.00 A.M. though i could have ridden my bike.
I have to write a program to implement the genetic algorithm tonight. Coffee, a cd full of pink floyd mp3s, a challenging programming assignment. I met no one on the way and there is no one here. I grow to fill the lab. Everything is perfect in my world. Thank you.

two thoughts:
1. tomorrow dr. wayne gray , director of the cognitive science graduate program at the
rensselaer polytechnic institute
will call me at 3 p.m. for a telephonic interview. He had asked me to read three books, and a number of articles, which i did, but about a couple of months ago. so tonight i stay up and read the books again. i hope it goes well. i cant imagine being _this_ close to my (what i thought impossible) dream of crossing over to cognitive science, and then being denied the oppurtunity. i hope i sound motivated and energetic enough tomorrow.

2. please note – My homepage loads pefectly on mozilla, and there is no problem scrolling smoothly. so its just that one of the CSS styles is not being supported well by IE 6.0 Its a browser dependency problem. I downloaded mozilla just to figure this out.

With one thing and another, the next two weeks promise to be hectic.
i have to
1. present a paper in the evolutionary computing class on monday.
2. work on the genetic algorithm implementation before next friday.
3. work on the cryptarray proposal.
4. get the tolerance for different R – C combinations for the boot-strap random number generator.
5. study for the Expert Systems exam on friday.

I dont know when and how i am going to do all this, so God help me.

I need to put my letters and correspondence in order, all the bills and other mails, all that!