Reading list for 2010

Here is a list of books and their authors that I intend to read in 2010. I hope that reading these will improve my understanding of the world around me and provide me with some much needed inspiration. You might notice that almost all of them are science books. I spent the better part of the last two years reading books by Osho, Robin Sharma, Deepak Chopra, Dalai Lama and Gurcharan Das. I even read Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol". I feel that there has been an over-dosage of "meta-physics" and "philosophy". A stiff dosage of science is required to restore some balance! Some of these are classics worth reading multiple times. I hope to be able to lay my hands on most of them. Wish me luck! I might even blog about some of the "interesting" things I learn from these books.

I'm considering taking a vacation to do this as well. I hope that the recession thing is done with and one can hope to live a little again; Rather than work one's butt off in perpetual fear of the axe.

A Short History of Nearly Everything	Bill Bryson
Dragons of Eden	Carl Sagan
Cosmos	Carl Sagan
Mind's I	Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofstader
Stumbling on Happiness	Daniel Gilbert
Godel Escher Bach	Douglas Hofstader
Blackholes and Warped Spacetime	Kip Thorne
Complexity	Mitchell Waldrop
The God Delusion	Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene	Richard Dawkins
Climibing Mount Improbable	Richard Dawkins
The Greatest Show on Earth	Richard Dawkins
Shadows of the Mind	Roger Penrose
The Road to Reality	Roger Penrose
Programming the Universe	Seth Lloyd
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking
The Universe in a Nutshell	Stephen Hawking
At Home in the Universe	Stuart Kauffman
The User Illusion	Tor Norretranders

Stop the climate change denial.

There are a set of jobless scientists who have spent years of their lives trying to establish that human activity is contributing to climate change. Clearly human beings have nothing to do with it. Actually Human beings have nothing to do with anything. It is ridiculous to suggest that we are in any way responsible for anything. Every event that occurs on earth can only be influenced by celestial objects. For instance, people lost their jobs recently because saturn transited from the 4th house to the fifth. Clearly the fact that the person was not being productive or that the economy tanked had nothing to do with it. On similar grounds, it is quite obvious that the changes in the global climate are the result of Sun transiting from house 8 to house 3 and the mars transiting from house 6 to house 3. Mars is the ruling planet that controls the emission of lava from volcanoes. Just in case you did not know. The stupid scientists at IPCC etc should have just consulted any local astrologer who would have been able to confirm the same. The fools went around the globe with their fancy measuring apparatus, dug holes in the artic ice to recover ice samples and many other "discredited" methods.

I guess one needs to be bit careful these days. I actually think that the attempts to blame the sun and volcanoes for climate change are no different from citing "astrological" reasons for events in our lives. A lot of human do so. I'm not surprised that some of them are trying to use similar "reasons" for climate change. Seriously people it IS that lame.

I do hope that better sense prevails in copenhagen. I woke up today morning to a nice editorial from the hindu on the topic. You can view it here if you have not done so.

Lets stop the silly denial and get to action. We owe our kids a better life.

A silly fable.

Back in the 1980's the school I went to had a class on moral science. The teacher uses parables to get the students to see what morality is. The idea of using parables to get a point across is quite interesting. Aesop's fables are possibly the most popular literature of this kind. Well, I do have a point to get across and intend to use a fable to do so.

Kamal Education Promotion Board is a non-profit organization working to advance the cause of academic achievement amongst children living in the suburban areas of Chennai. The board would like to see the children in these areas achieve better scores in their exams. It is quite evident that improving the scores would allow the students access to elite schools and subjects of their choice in the future.

The board comes up with the following recommendations that it believes will allow it to achieve its goal.

1. Teachers will be held accountable for achieving the target score in select subjects. 70% in Physics, 80% in Maths, 90% in Chemistry.
2. The questions in exams should be clear. For instance, all questions should end with a "?". Questions should require elaborate answers. Multiple choice questions and fill-in-the-blanks type questions are to be avoided.
3. The students will be required to wear white uniforms with their report card (scores) printed on them to school.
4. It is desirable that the students achieve these scores without any "additional" classes. The Board should be notified if teachers deem it necessary to train specific students with additional classes.
5. Supplementary exams for students who did not do well are banned. Students must do well in the exams that are already in place.

These recommendations are then shared with the teachers and students printed in nice glossy paper. A bunch of kids were found looking at these papers, laughing and making paper planes out of them.

There you go! That's my fable. It it not very good. That is the point.

Replace the KEPB with management, improving student scores with improving an organization's or an individual's performance. Do you see similarities between the list mentioned above and some steps management in general takes to improve performance? Are you surprised that the kids (workers in this case) don't take it seriously? Would you be surprised if the kids don't score better?

metamorphosis

Metamorphosis, we learn in high school, is the process that transforms the creepy crawly caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly. The larva becomes a pupa and then the butterfly breaks out and flies away. I often wonder why human being do not or cannot transform themselves into something beautiful, develop capabilities that they did not possess earlier or set themselves free to do things they were not able to. I guess the trouble is one never starts. If one does want to start do we know what one wants to metamorphose into?

For instance, the question of freedom. There are dozens for things that one wants to be free from. We want to be free of our worries, our bosses, annoying colleagues, bigotry, violence in society etc. We have concepts of freedom enshrined in our constitutions. We, (most of us, anyway) live in nation states that guarantee us a right to freedom. Technology has set us free of much of the drudgery of life. It is far easier to cook, clean, commute, communicate (and those are just words that start with "c") than it has ever been in the history of humanity. Yet, most of us feel trapped and want to be free. Why?

Friedrich Neitzsche says "Free from what? What doth that matter to Zarathustra! Clearly, however, shall thine eye show unto me: free FOR WHAT?" That actually sounds like a good point. Most of us never think about what we want to be free to do. Is that why one feels trapped?

I often find myself wanting to have a lot of free time or leisure. Who doesn't. At times wondering if taking a long break from work might free me up. I can't answer the question free to do what? Is it possible that sorting out what I want to do would actually make a difference? There are many unplanned activities that I end up finding time for at work. It might be possible to do the same in other contexts if one can identify what it needs to be. Maybe one can create the time required to pursue a hobby or learn something if one identifies what these pursuits need to be.

Another year draws to a close. I'm sure a lot of us, whether we like it or not, end up reflecting upon our lives at this time of the year. It might been a good idea to think about what one wants to be free for. Doing so might just initiate a metamorphosis in us and transform us into the butterfly we'd all love to be. Just a thought.

The ones who care!

I've been thinking about the people who have played a significant part in making me the person that I am today. I realized that some of these people were actually quite hard on me. For instance the head-master of my school was really hard on me. Quite frankly I hated it then. Fifteen years later, I've realized a very simple fact. He did so because he cared.

Clearly not all people who give me a hard time do so because they care. There are some assholes in the world who are giving me a hard time because they can do no better. It would be nice to be able to tell the two kinds of people apart.

The ones who care will probably not hesitate to let me know what they think when I have screwed things up. That should be one good rule of thumb to use to decide if one wants to be around such people. I can easily see why such people would help you grow and be a better person.

The wrong kind of people to surround yourselves with are the ones that will offer you a lot of sympathy when you fail or make mistakes. It should be obvious that such actions don't really help and have the effect of perpetuating our misery and limiting our ability to act on the circumstances that cause us to fail or make mistakes. I don't mean to say that such people are evil and/or should be avoided. They do so with the best of intentions. We tend to like people who sympathize with us and not like people who are pragmatic. That might not be in one's best interest.

The ones that care would also be of the kind who will be "truly" happy for you when you do succeed. One can usually detect "jealousy", "flattery" etc in the wrong kind.

In short, there is a case for one to be grateful to the people who give us a hard time because they care. Just something to think about.

Thoughts on improving one's creativity.

Creativity is a topic that I’ve been interested in recently. What is creativity? How can one be creative?

Creativity is simply the process of coming up with a new solution to a known problem. A lot of the problems one encounters in life have so many solutions that it is possible to come up with one more. To be considered a creative solution, the idea should not only be novel but also represent a significant improvement over known ideas. The people who research this topic have pointed out that there are different types of creativity. Margaret Boden for example lists three.
1. Combinational creativity.
2. Exploratory creativity.
3. Transformational creativity.

Combinational creativity is taking two known ideas and combining them in a novel way to make a new one.

Exploratory creativity is just making changes to a known solution till you get a new one. Very often this might not result in dramatic improvements. But it is possible to imagine that one gets a significantly different solution after many improvements have been added to the existing solution. The creation of new species through evolution is an example.

Transformational creativity is a category of ideas that are just new and cannot be thought to have been derived from anything else that has existed before. These are the sort of ideas that make you think that they are “truly original”. These usually come about when one thinks about a problem in a way it has never been thought of before.

Can we now try to think of how one might go about finding new solutions? The combinational approach is the easiest to do. List down all attributes that you are looking for in your solution. Look at known solutions to the problem. There is a good chance that some of these solution do some of what you want. Find a set of known solutions which spans all your requirements. You now need to combine these solutions into a new one.

A second approach would be to do a set of what-if experiments. Try to change things in a way you think will take it towards filling up the missing requirements. Chances are you will stumble upon a way to solve your problem. You could also try to map your problem to a similar problem in a different domain and see how people have dealt with the new domain. You might find a solution that applies in that domain that does what you want. This thought process might give you clues about how you can solve the problem in your domain.

The brightest ideas come about when people take a problem and think about it in a totally new way. It is not clear to me if there is a set of axioms that people use in such an approach. It is usually possible for people who get such ideas to explain the new idea using known things. It is seen that such an explanation can be advanced only after the idea has been generated though. I find that such ideas have an air of obviousness to them. The obviousness is however only as a result of hindsight though. One can track the idea down to one or more of the fundamental assumptions about known solutions having been changed.

An approach to take would be list down all the fundamental assumptions that form the part of your approach to solving the problem. You could then try to think of ways to solve the problem with one or more of the assumptions removed or changed.

I find that engineers have a preference for the exploratory style. We like to make small changes to a known solution. Usually the benefits are small as well. Another small change is then identified and so on. I think such an approach is acceptable for “optimization” type problems where one is not looking for a dramatic improvement. I don’t see this way of working resulting in very major improvements. A preference for such an approach prevents engineers from reducing the problem to its basics to look for a fundamentally different solution. One needs to make a conscious attempt to restrict the time spent in such activities. They have a way of using up a lot of people’s time. I think it makes more sense to abandon this approach if the first few things you change don’t have the desired outcome. This way of solving the problem is very much like evolution. It takes a long time to make an impact. It would be useful to realize that there are other ways to be creative as well. That could motivate people to break the loop and think of other “ways” of being creative.

I’ll need to mention that no one invents anything following any of the approaches listed above. I’m of the opinion that these are just ways to prepare your mind. My personal experience suggests that I spend a lot of time thinking about a problem using these approaches. Then something happens and an idea is born. Chance, they say, favors the prepared mind. I’m only suggesting ways to prepare your mind.

Happy inventing. May the force be with you!

Intelligence, Infallibility and Creativity.

I've been reading Roger Penrose's book "Shadows of the Mind". The book makes rather interesting reading and makes one think a lot about a bunch of things that most of us don't think about much.

The basic point the book tries to make it that the human brain is more than a computing machine. One quote from Turing that caught my attention was
If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent. There are several mathematical theorems which say almost exactly that. But these theorems say nothing about how much intelligence may be displayed if a machine makes no pretence at infallibility.

The quote somehow suggests that just a little bit of "fallibility" would go a long way in making machines intelligent and possibly suggests that allowing for a few mistakes will allow machines to reach the level of human intelligence. Clearly computers are better than humans at performing tasks using known procedures. I suspect that "creativity" or the ability to generate "new" ideas would be considered an important attribute of "Humans" that the machine would be expected to match.

A honest look at myself suggests that the machine would be required to be very significantly fallible. I find that a lot of the "ideas" that I come up with do not actually work well. I would conservatively state that about one in ten of my ideas do end up surviving serious scrutiny. I also know quite a few people (who I consider intelligent) who have at various times indicated that the ratio of "correct" to "incorrect" ideas they have is quite low and in the order of one in ten.

In my own work on successive approximation ADCs, I've found many instances where allowing circuits to make errors results in the system working better than trying to make the circuit "correct" at all times. The idea of error correction and redundancy are quite commonly used in many circuits to improve the performance of the circuit itself. My experience with such circuits suggests that one needs to allow significant errors before the advantages become significant.

In the biological sciences one encounters the phenomenon of evolution as a case where the fallibility of the DNA replication process results in the origin of new species over time. DNA replication is a very accurate process which is probably why evolution takes such a long time. It is also quite possible that the "randomness" of the process also contributes to the slow pace at which new species are "created". This could also suggest that human creativity is not entirely a random process. It can also be argued that "creativity" is not deterministic either since it is not clear what determines the "creation". The even more bizarre phenomenon of intuition probably plays a bigger part in human creativity.

One question to the readers of this blog is "What fraction of the new ideas you get end up being valid once you put them to serious scrutiny?" I would appreciate if you could leave that answer as a comment.

I also found myself wondering if "creativity" is indeed a result of intelligence. Again a simple first person introspection throws up an alternative view. Lets say I want to solve a new problem that I've encountered. My intelligence tries to solve the problem using all the tricks it already knows. Some of these tricks are useful and make some headway towards finding the solution. A lot of these tricks are however not useful and don't contribute much. A lot of effort goes into solving the problem after which a "flash of intuition" occurs which presents the "creative" solution. Another mechanism that generates the "flash of intuition" is listening to some one else describing how they have solved the problem. One goes about hearing and understanding the other person and suddenly a new idea emerges. I don't remember a time when I got a brilliant idea that solves a problem that I've not spent a lot of time thinking about.

I'm wondering if creativity occurs only when intelligence is put out of the way. In other words, creativity occurs only intelligence has been "satisfied" and/or "exhausted". One might even be tempted to argue that intelligence has been a hurdle to overcome before the creative process kicks in. There are many examples one hears where experts in a field fail to see a simple solution while a lay man who just happens to walk past offers a shockingly better solution. I know a lot of people who point out that they have been working in the same area for too long and find themselves unable to be as innovative as they had been in the past (I'm saturated feeling). It is quite possible that such "experts" will need to exhaust a large bag of tricks they already possess before they can think of a new solution to the problem.

It would be interesting to think of ways to "satisfy" one's intelligence as a way to improve ones creativity. Clearly working very hard on a problem is one way. Reading or listening to others who have solved similar problems is another. A better alternative would be brainstorming where a group of people discuss the problem in detail. Usually a lot of ideas are discussed in such sessions and quite often people do end up getting some bright ideas in the end.