is research the art of ..

finding correlations where none exist

retro-fitting hypothesis to observations

extrapolating to large sample sizes from small subsets of data points

manipulating visual evidence to suit hypotheses

changing definitions to suit what you can prove

changing metrics to suit what you can show

lulling oneself into a false sense of intelligence

balancing on the shoulder of "giants" while being careful not to tread on their toes

"dumb"found

dont know how common this is .. but ive always felt more comfortable with the written means of communication as opposed to spoken means of communication ..
couple of immediate reasons ..
1. the written form allows for objective/impersonal communication as opposed to the
spoken form
2. the spoken form is often not amenable to monologues, at least not very interesting ones
3. it appears much easier to get distracted in the spoken form -- its a low-bandwidth, and low-compute process that often is easy to get distracted from to other threads running in the brain
4. the written form allows deletions!

the only argument i find in favor of the spoken form is that its a stream, which makes it more suitable for a memoryless world than the written form.

should patent a syndrome for this before some psycho-psychologists make it theirs!!

aside: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0650971/

life and sampling ..

for most things in life sampling suffices .. couple of reasons
1. information content in life is low
2. the brain for better or worse is equipped with very good error detection and error recovery processes. so even if you miss data points, its quite easy to interpolate between sampled points. it could be that 1 leads to 2 ..
3. if something is bleeding important the content provider will make sure that its noticeable either by provisioning redudant replicas of the content so that sampling will still guarantee at least one sampled data point, or by making the content strikingly different from the filler material ..

e.g.
1. watching a movie
2. studying for a exam
3. reading a book
4. conversations with people


this doesnt apparently work for tasks where form is more important than content to borrow the discussion from a few posts earlier. sampling content is easier than sampling form .. as some wise man said the devil is in the details ..

academics and the peter pan syndrome

academics refuse to grow up, and refuse to get out into the real world, preferring instead the well-understood precincts of their office spaces and esoteric research topics. however it is the very refusal to grow up that gives them the competitive edge to indulge in eccentric pursuits. there are however, quite a few disturbing examples where people seem to be forgetting this very latitude that academia provides and turning it instead into an industry of churning out results as demanded by external sources. may be every one entering grad school must be administered an E.Q test and only those matching the emotional maturity of 7-year olds should be allowed to get in. its clear that low emotional maturity does translate into childish behavior but its not entirely obvious that there is a causal relationship between the two. the same can also be extended to those in the creative arts and in sports also .. but that will be a bedtime story for another day.

p.s:
And now.. for something completely different ..
as i finish writing this i have followed the advice of a few wise men and done a google/wikipedia search on the title to reveal this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan_Syndrome
darn it .. ive been scooped!

non-determinism

most of the scientific world strives for determinism, even though the best results from deterministic endeavor point towards the power of non-determinism

p.s: inability to understand theory does not in anyway inhibit an idiot from making fuzzy rants about theory.

blogger and infinite monkeys

if the web-surfing/blog-viewing population is best modeled by an innumerable number of monkeys randomly clicking at most recent content, irrespective of semantic intent, then an optimal revenue-generating process based on a per-view/per-click model is to keep generating random junk as fast as possible

questions

the better questions have short descriptions and longer answers.
the fuzzy, ill defined questions have longer descriptions, and presumably shorter (or no) answers.

more self-referentialty ensues ..

on intelligence

how do we evaluate intelligence, either real or artifical? are there sufficiently objective metrics for this task. attacking the definition of intelligence from a computational perspective, is easy to define on many objective dimensions including
speed, memory, precision/recall. unfortunately/fortunately the objective criteria do not necessarily give real intelligence an edge over artificial (i.e., machine) intelligence. of course we have more fuzzy criteria like algorithmic ability, creative
potential etc.

from a computational perspective its nice to believe that on purely objective criteria there is no distinction between real and machine intelligence, but from a human perspective its hard to accept since we can always come up with many subjective metrics on which machine intelligence comes up a cropper. if we have a battle between human and machine intelligence, both sides would never reach a consensus on who would win, because the machine intelligence does not accept the human criteria as valid metrics since it cannot objectively understand or interpret them, while the human intelligence will claim victory since it can always create more metrics on which it can claim superiority.

maybe never the twain shall meet ... and we can all have a good nights sleep without worrying about the toaster turning into a tactful adversary tomorrow morning.

thin red line

the line between ignorance and incompetence is pretty flimsy

books vs movies vs music

appears to be an inherent difference in the way we (or at least me) treat these different forms of entertainment. books and movies which are visual are relegated to the status of one-time events --> once you know the story/plot/main theme you are unlikely to read/watch it again .. whereas with music you tend to repeat the stuff you like and listen to it over and over again .. is it because auditory phenomena are treated fundamentally differently from visual phenomena or is it because books/movies are interesting because of the plot/storyline and once it is revealed they lose the charm ..

of course it can be argued that if you are reading/watching from the point of view of understanding the aesthetics behind it then nothing prevents you from going for it a second time .. unfortunately these things seem to be secondary if not completely irrelevant

paradoxes

are there purely syntactical paradoxes .. as in every paradox i know of seems to arise from semantics of the statements .. can there be something paradoxical within the realms of syntax without associating semantics

the impostor

you end up becoming a close approximation of the deception that you set out to be.

from woody allen

how could you listen to me .. you know how crazy i am!

92

conversation

when does a conversation officially end .. there are not enough
protocols.. connection closes need to be explicit. timeouts dont work
in the real world

humor anyone ..

is there a evolutionary reason for humor to exist

why the obsession?

why do people like symmetry/novelty .. why cant we accept randomness/mundaneness?

technology

is technology an inhibitor or promoter of talent? seems like a double-edged sword that can either push the limits of your capabilities or provide amazing means of masking incompetence ..

context: music performances .. before the digitization talent seemed to be paramount .. now the ability to modulate stuff in digital content seems to reduce the scope for inherent talent .. at the same time it enables substantially better quality music that couldnt have otherwise existed .

confused as usual

jacaranda

pretty much every piece of indian fiction ive read so far has some reference or other to a jacaranda tree .. i have no clue what the hell this tree is .. is it so ubiquitous that every novel must mention it .. or am i so oblivious to obvious implied references (e.g. mythological/emotional/romantic related to the tree) .. dont even know what that tree looks like!

very reassuring

http://www.phdcomics.com/blog.php (the post on sep 1 on "literal")

im not the only dumbo (http://nicertry.blogspot.com/2005/08/on-less-serious-note.html) out there!