akrish

This article by George Orwell is really interesting and pretty funny.

Orwell talks about how the english language has been polluted through evolution, and how writers tend to be verbose and ambiguous rather than trying to get their point across. He cites a lot of examples which I’ve seen and heard frequently in writing, speeches, and even common language, showing that even though the article is like 50 years old, it’s still very relevant.

One of the funniest parts is when he translates a line from Ecclesiastes into modern English.

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Seriously… look at that second sentence. First of all it’s really hard to read quickly. Secondly, it doesn’t really say anything. And thirdly, the first sentence provides wonderful imagery while the second sentence is completely abstract. And I’m not kidding, I’ve seen a lot of writing like that (and I’ve even written like that a lot).

One of the problems is that society encourages us to write like that (at least to some extent). I remember that college applications like to see that you have a strong vocabulary, so we include “big” words into our essays when smaller words suffice or are better. Same with the writing I’ve done in college, people don’t seem to argue with you’re writing if it looks like you know what you’re talking about and to do that, you use this cryptic constructs and ambiguous vocabulary.

Orwell continues to talk about politics, and how political writing (including speeches) is complete garbage in terms of language. Since politics is so much about pleasing your audience, phrases that present catastrophes in a “not-so-bad” light are often used. As an example, Orwell writes, “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.” And with the Iraq war, how often have events that would surely be met with public disapproval been covered up with vagaries and euphemisms?

And I hear it a lot in campaign rhetoric, that I don’t even follow that much. Plans and promises on both sides are kept intentionally vague for obvious reasons, but this usage of language promotes itself as politicians are seen as role models. I don’t really know too much about politics so please correct me if I’m wrong. I prefer to stick to my programs, where language is rigid and being ambiguous means being incorrect.

Orwell then suggests how we can work to fix this language, if you’re interested I recommend the read. It’s pretty fascinating.

For all you lazy people out there: Check this out.

Researchers in San Diego have synthesized a compound that affects the metabolic pathways in muscle tissue to simulate exercise. What’s cooler for me is that they’ve come up with another drug that dramatically improves endurance when performing exercise.

Looks like the producers of Wall-E didn’t think that science would solve the obesity problems of the future

I’ve always been a big fan of puzzles and have enjoyed puzzle solving and recently (at least as far as I can tell) puzzles have become a huge thing in the engineering community. Since I’ve come to college, I’ve been given puzzles to solve by my friends, professors, teaching assistants, co-workers and all sorts of other people and it’s truly awesome. When I was a candidate for hkn there were several occasions where the members would just give us candidates puzzles to solve and those were some of the most memorable times of my candidate semester.

There’s also a whole deal about companies hosting puzzle competitions for college students. My housemates and I went down to Google one Saturday for Google Games, which pitted the top Cal students against the top Stanford students in a friendly but competition atmosphere. And the bulk of the competition revolved around puzzle solving. And as an intern, we had an event that involved us getting into groups and wandering around downtown Palo Alto solving puzzles. Both of these were really fun and these are the kind of events that make me want to work for a company.

So why do we like puzzles so much? I think at least one reason is that they challenge our intellect and as engineers (or maybe as students), we have to prove that we are really smart. Also there’s nothing better than solving a puzzle without any help and affirming your own intelligence. But puzzles can also be very social in nature. One night this summer, Prashant’s parents shared a puzzle with around 10 of us (not all engineers mind you) and they kept us all occupied for the night (mostly because none of us could figure out what later turned out to be simple puzzle). It was a pretty fun way to spend an evening with a bunch of my friends.

But puzzles can be really frustrating. There’s nothing worse that being the last person to figure out a puzzle (and trust me, it’s happened to me way too many times). Yet, I think ultimately the pros outweigh this potential frustration, especially if you can solve a lot of these puzzles.

Since puzzles also teach us how to think differently, I’ll leave you all with some of the harder ones that I’ve heard.

1. Actually first of all. check out my brothers website. Him and one of his friends have made a bunch of puzzles that are pretty fun.
2. This one my math GSI told us. So you have two nails nailed into a wall such that you’re trying to hang a picture frame on them. The standard way to hang a picture frame is to take a string, and go over both of the nails and then tie the ends to the corners of the frame. In this configuration, if I remove one of the nails, the picture will still hang from the other one. Find a way to hang the picture such that if both nails are in the wall the picture stays on the wall, but if either nail is removed the picture falls. It’s kind of confusing to explain with just words. If people are interested maybe I’ll put up a picture. Also there’s like a very mathematical solution to this one
3. I’ve heard this one a couple of times and it’s pretty insane. So I’m trying to communicate a message to a friend of mine by sending him an 8×8 bit matrix. We share a protocol before hand, that you’re supposed to figure out. I have a randomized 8×8 bit matrix and must flip one bit before sending it to my friend. How many unique messages can I encode (that he can understand) and what is the protocol?
   As an example: lets change the problem so that I have a zero-ed 8×8 bit matrix. Then I can send 64 unique messages and my protocol would be if the bit at [x][y] is on then take the (8*x + y)th message. Basically each element of the bit matrix corresponds to one message and I’d turn on the bit that corresponds to the message I want him to receive.

That’s all for now. If I think of some more that are good then I might make a page of puzzles. Hope those keep you all busy for awhile.

Wow it’s been awhile. but i seem to say that every time so lets just get to the good stuff.

Vivek’s been blogging a lot recently. I just looked at my facebook wall and he wrote to me about how he was disappointed that I haven’t written anything in a really long time. Weird that my first reaction was “apple+T, f6, www.akrish.net” and here I am writing something literally a minute after I read his post. I find it really strange that just a little motivation from a friend gets me to restart blogging, when I’ve been meaning to restart for so many months now.

But I guess that’s not the whole story. I’ve been meaning to write in here for a while now yes, but recently I’ve been looking at it more thinking about things I’d like to write about. What Vivek’s post really did was give me an interesting topic to write about and as I’m writing I’m noticing more and more examples all the time. Like how there’s no way I’d be running/exercising as much as I have been for the last couple of weeks without the pushing from Ravi and Arvind (and more recently Amit). And how hearing about what the other interns at work have been doing makes me want to work harder and finish what I’m doing so I can “compete” with them. Or how even some random guy at the gym can motivate me to bench more than I’ve ever benched before.

What I realized is that my mind is often getting me to not do my best (or stop early, or go slower or whatever) and other people are there to tell that voice in my head to screw off and they’re the ones that actually make me excel. Without these people, I’d probably still be doing a lot of what I’m doing, but I’d be half-assing most of it. Like during this spring semester, I ended up running a lot, but my runs were never that good. Now that I’m running with others I finish almost every run thinking “man that was a good run.”

But without them there are definitely things I wouldn’t be doing either that I’m happy that I’m doing. Case in point writing this blog. So to all my friends and others who push me (definitely my family) thanks for doing it and please keep it up because it’s like The Beatles say “I get by with a little help from my friends.”

So it’s December, 24th, Christmas eve, and the Krishnamurthy family is getting ready to celebrate another quiet Christmas together. This year though, there’s no tree, there’s no extended family, no friends. We just started watching Ocean’s 13, on pirated DVD, smuggled from China (as in it still has Chinese subtitles). Actually it has some kind of Chinese and also some German, I have no idea why. It’s looking like a great Christmas (no seriously).

I actually really like days like this. It’s a holiday and people tend to do special things, but I enjoy spending some time with my family, helping make dinner, relaxing and watching a movie (which I guess is special). It’s not something that a lot of people do on a regular basis, considering everyone’s ridiculously hectic lives (it’s the same for me too), but it’s very restful and it’s an amazing way to spend a holiday. I hope that everyone else takes these couple of days to relax and spend time with their family.

The movie’s starting to pick up, so I’m going to end my post here. I’ll write more about what I’ve been up to during break and what I plan to do for the rest of it soon. Please have a safe, fun, happy holiday. Spend time with your families and your friends, and just enjoy however many vacation days you have.