SarafSpace - meme of the moment

Becoming poetry

2012-01-23T21:30:00.000+09:00

I sometimes write down questions that strike me as being important.

One such question, what to do when inspiration hits or enters, the mind goes on a highand ideas that seem good just don't stop?

... express as words written onto paper, diagrams sketched, spoken about
to a friend, look at and then let them ferment till they translate into
action, look at and and then let be, merge into silence trusting
that they will be refined and translated into manifestation with time,
or let the flow continue on unabated ... :-D

This reminded me of a thought partially borrowed from rumi, google
isnt turning up the quote right now, but I got it from a facebook post
from Amano Manish bhai: write poetry, do not write poetry, let your
life become poetry.

Spirituality is perhaps not a choice.

2011-10-13T22:42:00.002+09:00

Question from a friend:
I read your blog,
but they are increasingly spiritual, so tell me whats up

Response:
Spirituality is perhaps not a choice. :-D But both of them are tricky words.

Words can be gooey things, slippery, vague and nebulous - but sometimes strong, each being stuck with a whole cloud of ideas, meanings and intentions. The subtler and more generic the word - usually the stronger it is. But we must work with what we have. Hacking (reality hacking?) through the layers of shabda - artha - rasa - bhaava (spoken word or even lower, written word - meaning - emotion - intention) to identify the spirit/identify with the spirit.

For a photograph to exist, light is not a choice.

-email thread with an old friend

to the (most probably very very few) readers of this log

2011-09-04T11:00:00.002+09:00

I have not been writing much.

I am obsessed with that, which I believe I do not possess.

(I have been obsessed with creation, timelessness and seminality, systematically eliminating the time-bound and trivial.)

I experience that, which I believe is not a part of my being.

I know that, which I believe I have no experience of.

I express that, which I believe I have still some doubt about. (this reminds me of a sentence in ZATAOMM (zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - R. Pirsig -- "No one is running around yelling that the sun is going to rise today! " To express something fanatically, there -must- be an element of doubt. )

I talk about that, which I believe I do not entirely know.

I have found myself talking too much, and have started noticing sometimes that it reminds me faintly of my ignorance.

Hence the desire to integrate - being, possesion, knowledge, experience, intent, desire, meaning, and finally expression.

All this is perhaps just a play of words.

Perhaps ... hence the silence

A million new romances

2011-09-03T11:45:00.000+09:00

If I am alone, and must be a part of this world
I will become the sun
and I will marry the earth
I'll love every single one
person, animal and thing,
caressing them with my rays
impregnating them with my vitality
creating new life
with just a few glances,
every day - a million new romances.
- yearning, from miquelrius journal late 2007

dear 'kaahi bolaayche aahe'

2011-08-07T12:31:00.002+09:00

Dearest "kaahi bolaayche aahe" (On speech - http://www.blogger.com/profile/00580929730887756405),
Ataa bolNyaachi shakti parat aali aahe. :-)
You seem to have closed down your blog.

If your're still reading this - I know -very- few people do, perhaps only the few people I have shared my copy of the patanjali yoga sutras with some time or the other.

Ye na bolaaylaa aataa :)
mail id: aalhad@acm.org

Prime mover memes. Principles.

2011-06-06T09:42:00.001+09:00

Yesterday night, I asked my father some questions -

Why has 'God' (even evolution - if that happens to be your God. Social evolution(?)) created both, forces like fundamentalist terrorists, as well as Mahatma Gandhi ?
Is it possible to act truly as an instrument of a God meme? I will not now act of my own will. I dare the creator of this space time dimension-space I find myself in, to enter 'me' and act directly; a stubborn child, I refuse to now act on 'my' own.
How does one differentiate between 'Gods' will and one's individual will?
What are the biggest gears, the prime movers that lie at the root of this space-time complex?

Possible answers that struck me while I was sleeping. In reverse order:
We must first define the framework for what we are trying to understand.

The prime movers - the big gears that drive this space-time complex

This power to effect change is proportional to the extent of alignment one has with the memes that lie at the root of this space-time complex. To summarize my understanding (backed by intuition and experimental verification to varying degrees, of the Yogasutras of Patanjali - beginning with my reading of a photocopy of a study of the sutras by IK Taimini, sometime during my student days during engineering school and my stay in Alandi.)

To summarize:

Meme a: Satya - Truth
What alignment confers: realization, materialization of one's intent
Extreme alignment: utterance or thought that is out of sync with this space-time complex or reality is impossible. What one speaks, thinks, conceives -must- come true, for not only is that being incapable of thinking or conceiving or dreaming of a falsehood, it is verily truth itself that continually speaks, acts and sees through him.

Meme b: Asteya or abstention from theft
What alignment confers: freedom from a sense of lack of anything. Wealth flows.
Extreme alignment: Nature cannot let such a being experience a 'lack' of anything. The whole universe is at ones disposal.

Meme c: Aparigraha or non-possesion and abstention from greed
What alignment confers: Freedom from ties in this space-time complex - things, ideas, thought, belief... knowledge and action is possible across larger and larger expanses of time and space.
Extreme alignment: Knowledge of the past, present and future, of the seeds of desire that flower into manifestation through threads of matter woven across time. Patanjali posits that one may gain knowledge of the past, present and future of one's self. (I guess, self as a function of (x, time, space) for larger and larger and larger values of x, time and space as the self of sense expands.)

Meme d: Ahimsa - non violence
What alignment confers: There is no obstruction. Action will progress without hindrance from any force/any one.
Extreme alignment: The being starts creating an atmosphere around self, (self(x,space,time) for larger and larger values of x,space,time) where violence and enmity must cease to exist. All beings, even animals are sensitive to such an atmosphere - as many trainers would testify - the animals 'know' they won't be hurt.

Meme e: Brahmacharya - continence. Of speech, thought, action, being and also of the most refined, the most seminal representation of our essence, the ability to create and procreate.
What alignment confers: creative force is available at one's disposal.
Extreme alignment: Tremendous creative force - to create anything in this spacetime fabric. create(x, space, time, matter, thought) for larger and larger values of x, space, time, matter and thought. At the very extreme, create new 'seed meme complexes' like this one.

See and create, unhindered, across unlimited expanses of time and space, using every or anything - in this space-time complex, with a guarantee of materialization of intent. This may perhaps be a good definition for 'God' hood.

Some side-notes on the prime-movers:

These memes are vehicles.
One starts by aligning oneself with them, by 'boarding' these meme vehicles.
Once this direction is fixed, one witnesses the beginning of a 'transcendence engine'.

One must know where to get on and get off and when to press the accelerator, when to stop, rest or just enjoy the view.

And either discover newer, more fundamental meme-vehicles, or create them.
This is where 'the middle path' is important. As you start nearing the destination, and hit a point where you need to get off (transcend?), the duality of the vehicle becomes apparent. Mahatma Gandhiji rode the vehicle of non-violence to a point where his very existence was the highest form of violence for people who believed in violence as a vehicle of change. Summary: The middle path is safe. Skill is needed. Your mileage may vary.

The vehicle becomes the driver. The driver becomes the vehicle.
After a point, no conscious driving is necessary. The vehicles or principal memes take charge, embed themselves further and start driving the person. One need not try to, or 'speak' the truth. One becomes truth. Truth starts using the person as a vehicle for expression.

God's will, individual will

These large forces drive smaller forces,
all lying within them,
and they in turn have smaller still,
and so on ad infinitum

All these memes have dual kinds,
For consciousness they dance,
Riding vehicles of matter, Desires in their arms.

The strongest memes are what we call God
This massive dance is Mind
(But -why- the heck all this goes on,
I am yet to find.)

These meme-dancers will go out of Time,
without non-dual love to bind 'em,
their matter-vehicles will sink into primeval slime,
with no consciousness to find 'em.

(adapted the Siphonaptera for the first verse.)

By this definition everybody is God(x), to an extent. And these memes and their duals(for it is a matter of degree - not of quality - like in the last statement in this post.) may be considered as 'God's' will. This might be the basis of a statement often heard in India 'सब ईश्वर की इच्छा है'.

Fanatic fundamentalists - follow what they see as truth strictly, believe strongly in a code of ethics and are thus 'driven' and have varying degrees of power. Sometimes they ride the dual-meme-opposite of non-violence and thus are bound to face varying degrees of opposition and are limited in the amount of change they can effect. Only if terrorists would -experiment- with riding the vehicle of non-violence, I wonder what could be possible. But then when that happens, when the + and the - start seeming, becoming alike, we would perhaps be close to the beginning of a new space-time complex, a new set of prime-mover-gears-meme-set.

Further questions:

What is it that makes these prime-mover-constructs so powerful and seminal?
How is a sustainable, emergent value system and a desire system engineered?
How does one engineer such a system, a new set of prime-mover-gears, like the yamas outlined by Patanjali are for -this- space time complex.

i.e. How does one play God(x,self) for sufficiently large values of x and self.
(a very small value of self - would be for instance, expanding ones self when starting a new family.)

:-D

Usual Caveat Lector applies.

Optimal learning

2011-05-04T22:10:00.000+09:00

After a long break, I have come back to using words.
:-)
If one masters the ability to enter a state of single pointed focus, the ability to focus ones desire to a laser sharp point and the ability to see what needs to be done i.e. vision - I used to believe that the purpose of formal education has been served.

Learning is an interesting and fascinating phenomenon.

One of the questions I had was - how does one achieve this one pointed focus at will?

The Patanjali yogasutras offer hints as to how this process occurs.

shraddhaa veerya smriti samaadhi pradnyaa poorvak itareshaam.
Patanjali's yogasutras (1-20).

Shraddhaa - loosely translated as faith. It begins with belief - with faith. Faith in the teacher, in the subject, in the process of learning. Faith provides the "wetness" necessary for union. (between teacher and student, between student and subject) In a teacher-student situation, without faith, there is dryness - resulting in "dry dis-course" that is a painful boring 'one-way' process.

Veerya - this can also be translated as utsaah or enthusiasm. Faith leads to enthusiasm - (enthusiasm comes from en+theos from Greek - literal meaning - to be filled with God) and the being of the student is ready for union with the subject, for learning.

Smriti - Enthusiasm leads to past experience and knowledge being brought up into the memory cache, ready to be recalled at will, thus providing a firm foundation for learning to occur.

Next is samaadhi - or union with the subject of study, a state where one pointed focus is achieved. Nothing else except the subject exists.

This leads to the awakening of pradnya - a state where after the subject is assimilated into ones being, the blossoming of wisdom results.

( 'poorvak itaresham' - this sutra is referring to most normal people, and not those who have been talked about in the earlier sutras - those who have already achieved the ability to enter 'samaadhi' at will.)

shraddhaa->veerya->smriti is one of the pre-conditions for achieving one pointed focus. Hmm.

Wherever there are gaps in this chain, sub-optimal union with the subject at hand and thus learning might occur.

Refinement ... food

2011-05-03T13:27:00.000+09:00

This desire to go beyond what is, slowly morphs itself into the desire to live the best life possible, a search for best practices. A process of continuous refinement. This process of refinement reflects itself in various ways. Including diet.

In Japan there is a special kind of diet called shoujin ryouri. If you are a vegetarian in Japan, then you'll be glad to know that you can enjoy shoujin ryouri at most Buddhist temples and some onsen (hot water spring bath inns)

The word shoujin is made of two characters. Shou - "refine, essence, spirit".
Jin - "advance, progress".

The word ryouri - loosely translated in English as "cooking" is composed of two characters "ryou" means material. And "ri" means "logic, arrangement, principles of right and wrong.

There is a tacit recognition of the fact that all matter, everything that exists, is 'food' for some force or the other. All material is food. Cooking is the process of arrangement of material according to logical principles of right and wrong.

However, material may be arranged to reflect refinement, so as to bring out the essence and to progressively aid the advancement of that refinement. The principles for doing so have been identified and are embodied in "shoujin ryouri".

-miquelrius journal, end of 2008

On speech

2009-11-24T20:34:00.000+09:00

From Miquelrius journal - Oct 25, 2006

How long before I reach a state where every word I utter, can be construed as not being harmful to anyone. For instance: If I am speaking about something I desire or something desirable that I have acquired, people who don't have it may be hurt. If I tell someone what ought to be done - if they are incapable of doing it, they may be hurt. If they are not amicably related, they might even want to hurt me... even a thought of doing so should not be provoked in their minds.

I must learn, neither to praise anyone, nor blame anyone, or compare anyone or anything using speech, for I have no control over the impressions and reactions it will form and cause in the consciousness of the listeners.

A key virtue to have with respect to speech is the ability to only speak when necessary, for right action to occur in a manner such that it causes alignment among all listeners. This stretches the limit of not only expertise with language, but one's control over personal and collective consciousness.

Characteristics of a philosopher - Epictetus - (commonplace entry from June 2006)

2009-06-24T23:27:00.001+09:00

The condition and characteristic of an uninstructed person is this: he never expects from himself advantage or harm, but from externals.
The condition and characteristic of a philosopher is this: he expects all harm and all advantage from himself.

The signs of the one who is making progress are these:

he censures no man
he praises no man
he blames no man
he accuses no man
he says nothing about himself as if he were somebody or knew something
when he is impeded at all or hindered, he blames himself
if a man praises him, he ridicules the praiser to himself
if a man censures him, he makes no defence
he removes all desires from himself and he transfers aversion to those things within power and contrary to nature
He employs a moderate movement towards everything
Whether he is considered foolish or ignorant, he cares not

And, in a word, watches himself as if he were an enemy waiting in ambush.
- Epictetus - Enchiridion.

(June 18, 2006, Commonplace from journal (Miquelrius) )

A page from my diary - September 11, 2008

2009-06-12T03:19:00.000+09:00

If you treat your thoughts as clean and precious
clear as a fresh brook, pure as the bright sun
your mind will soar, till you need it no more,
with the whole world you will be one...
for with a being so pure, there's nothing more sure -
the soul shines through, and to think - is to become.

-----------------------

Here you are you puny body,
seated on the brink of death.
you sordid tale of like and dislike
the Elements bound by cords of breath

yet within, a temple lies
be still and you will see
'tis open, vast ... like the boundless skies,
nothing was, or is, and will be.

-----------------------
Repetition of message to self:
Know very well that as you were born without too much control over where you were going, this body too will die. Live every moment then in oneness with whatever is around the body at the moment (in other words, like a God :-D)
For to be one with any one thing is to be one with it all. Yoga is holographic.

Consumption - Production game, who's who?

2009-06-12T03:18:00.000+09:00

Thinking about true cost and the story of a one rupee coin - had gotten me thinking about the dual meme nature of production and consumption.
Trying to get down to the essence of this dual meme led me to this -

The desire to desire is the consumer.

That which believes it exists is the consumed.

To clarify - that which believes it exists is - basically everything that 'is'. I use the word 'belief' for want of a closer word - for example, if you believe 'you' exist, you are binding this concept of self with space and time, and will thus be subject to the consumption process - if by nothing else then by time (which is to say - desire operates in time-space co-ordinates - and desire being the urge for something other than what is, what is - must be consumed.) Yoga enables 'one' to free 'oneself' perhaps, by neatly transcending this dual-meme.
What this implies in space-time terms, may be understood by trying to practice the Yogasutras.

(from somewhere in early 2008)

Bus rides, the mind, rationality and sustainability

2009-05-30T15:32:00.003+09:00

Here is a thread about sustainability from an email conversation.
Although some of it is a re-write of earlier posts, in retrospect, I find it to be a good summary.

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 3:04 AM, Aalhad Saraf wrote:
Dear G. san,

Here are some thoughts on the sustainability thread -

Words are vehicles. So is rationality. So is thought. It is possible to never see the map but just keep going from one place to another. It is possible to never know where to board and where to get off. Skill is needed. (just what this skill means is another big discussion)

A few years ago - when I first hit upon the concept of un-sustainability while trying to define wealth http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/05/story-of-one-rupee-coin-true-cost-and.html I happened to meet a 90 year old ayurvedacarya from the varkari sampradaaya http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varkari, in a RSS meeting that I was invited to - and we were discussing careers that kids should' pursue. I talked about the story of the one rupee coin then ... and the 90 year old was infuriated at my casual view of 'economics' - (which did not surprise me, I have often found RSS people to have an unusual fondness for picking fights and being angered by things.) However, his last remark stayed with me for some time - he said 'You are clever, and you have interesting ideas ... I quite like them ... however, almost everything you know, you will discover ... is wrong.'

The next year showed me just how far the vehicle of thought and rationality and words can take us ... and the magnitude to which I was mistaken when I was thinking about sustainability, wealth and the world in general. Think cosmic makeover :)

Most of what we can comprehend / see using the senses/rationality cannot be really verified 'objectively'. (we are a bit like sprites in Doom II not being able to get the architecture of processor or the OS.)

The earth as we see it, 'is not'. It is a principle. sookshma. what we see is a sthoola roopa.

I remember the RSS ayurvedacarya saying - 'You overestimate human role without understanding the architecture of what is'. I have since gradually come to comprehend what that might mean. Another thing he said was 'What do you know of the power of mother earth, beyond what your books have taught you ... and you know not where they come from ... or from what your senses tell you ... She has the power to nurture you infinitely, no matter what you do ... 'you' - if such a thing is there, are inconsequential, yet this you cannot comprehend. If you 'think' you are 'hurting' her, you are 'hurting' your'self' ... and make no mistake, you will cause pain ... but please do not talk confidently about what you do not understand.'

God as we 'know' or 'talk' or write about ... even in the sacred scriptures 'is not'. The Yoga Vasishtha (which is perhaps the last book I studied seriously before I hit the end of 'words') also has an incident where Vasistha tells Rama ... 'What are the Gods that you talk about but a mental construct ... ' (I highly recommend this to you if you haven't read it yet - you will even come across discussions about the non-linearity of time) This is one version I found on amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Concise-Yoga-Vasistha-Swami-Venkatesananda/dp/087395954X

My model of the mind was radically altered in the months that followed.
I am perhaps like a ripple in a field. Without any individual existence. (many scriptures mention this - but I had no experience, nor any concrete context) Like a node of a massively parallel machine (that is how you and I can see the same things in the same room) or perhaps even just the bits of code running on the node (DNA, other less 'sustainable' memes...) or perhaps not even that.

This is a snippet from a mail I sent to aai, dada and some close friends ...

I have seen the Mind.
Imagine an ocean ... massive, without end, on a dark night with a full moon.

The wind still. The silence perfect.
Now see the entire ocean turning up, vertical, into a massive wall ...
like a tsunami ...
you are surfing a foot away from this wall, and the wall stretches out up to infinity.
dark roaring water. massive.
And this is only an approximation of what it feels like.
It is this force that creates everything you see around you now.

The sun. The moon. Your Gods.

The very screen you are now reading this on.

If I die soon, I will have died after seeing the greatest spectacle possible on earth. The mind. There is nothing else left for me to see ... even if I climb on top of Mount Everest, I will be unstirred. Everything ordinary around me IS the freakin miracle.

Okay ... now, again, about sustainability ... it is one of those dual-memes. http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/12/dual-meme-transcendence.html

Everything has a time-stamp. A yogi can see it - and perhaps alter it.
(A good engineer is a yogi to some extent that he creates some memes that sustain for a certain amount of time.)

Some provocations - why do you want things to be sustainable? Isn't unsustainability a natural phenomenon? Everything perishes, right? So, just why did our race become enamored with this particular dual-meme? Why not enjoy the unsustainability? (it is easy to see beyond these questions) What is the DESIRE that drives the NECESSITY of sustainability? and where the hell does that DESIRE come from?

Dual-memes are interesting ... all religions are based upon strong dual memes. Right-wrong, pure-impure ... and so on. religion = thing that holds together. A study of the principles of religion-creation is very relevant to having a deep understanding of sustainability. For sustainability is a side-effect of religion.
http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/06/you-may-think-that-im-im-religious.html

Deep exploration of any meme associated closely with religion is likely to yield significant insights into sustainability. Take desire for instance. In 2004 or so, I found myself asking myself - what is the point in studying electronics or math ... some other fancy models of reality ... if one were to study Desire Engineering ... learn to focus desire to a laser sharp point in oneself and later in others, it would be possible to achieve ANYTHING (or even otherwise, that it is much more 'important' than physics or algo analysis ... I noticed this once again in 2006 during a thought-session, when I was given the responsibility for maintaining the 'technical vitality' of a group of people in IBM, i.e. ensuring that they maintain a state where they file patents and write papers ... and again in 2007 when I saw that everything visible... every single thing is a manifestation
of a desire. There is nothing necessary. NOTHING IS NECESSARY. Necessity is ALWAYS predicated upon desire. (I tried some experiments with minimal living in 2004 to try and figure out just what is the minimum 'necessity' for existence - independent of desire. outcome - existence itself is based on desire, the desire to exist. (who has that desire, or where it comes from - is next step in the architecture series :-D but that is not very easily expressible in words or thought - for these tools are then useless.)

Now - dual-memes are necessary for motion, or for anything to happen at all. (+ -)

Un-sustainability is one side of a dual-meme.
To create sustainability - one must transcend this dual-meme.
People who are bothered by sustainability (rajas-tamas?) or are ignorant of it (tamas) will perhaps not be able to effect such/much change.(even if they want to/is 'necessary')

(This brings to mind something I read somewhere - an advert. for a class on yoga by an Indian teacher in the US - had a picture of a jaTaa-dhaari orange-clad hermit standing in a one-legged pose on a surfboard in the sea. The caption read - we can't stop the waves, but we can sure teach you to surf!)

This is where yoga comes in - and the reason why I urged you to read the Sutras. (Even the Yoga-sutras, their outermost form being clad in words, have their limits, but the words are where I had to begin.)

PaanDitya or the pursuit of knowledge has a limit, easily reached.It is not very effective. It seems easier for a yogi to do something about sustainability than a pandit.

Standard disclaimer applies:
Caveat Lector. All Words are Lies to some extent of the other on the
Index of Reality.
:-D

Mail reply from G. san,
Interesting what happens when you cross the boundaries of reason and logic and get into the domain of faith?? Are our senses limiting us in the number of dimensions we can perceive around us? Is the method of reason and logic self limiting? Interesting proposition by Aalhad...is going to take time, if ever to sift through...
The eternal conundrum.... Great job...
I am sure Laurie the acerbic lawyer has a lot to say on this...
That the method of reason and logic limits many a mind from going beyond .. Or is it the argument of those who cannot cast their thoughts in the logical framework.. The eternal conundrum...

Cheers G.

On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 5:06 AM, Aalhad Saraf wrote:
Dear G. san,
thanks for the reply.

no no ... no faith required ;)
is reason and logic self-limiting ... :-P the moment you 'define' something, you have laid down the limits to what it is 'not'.

see ... words are perhaps fairly useless (or useful (same thing!) - i.e. they may be used towards achieving an end - given an end). they may be used to do anything you want - like a tool. but they are inefficient at modeling reality. (the mind has tried in other parts to create other languages like math - but that again is a model.) A model has limits. Because it is 'defined'.

What I have experienced is that 'argument' is a fairly inefficient method for the discovery of reality or truth. (what those methods are ... is another long story :) )

Words are like a fairly utilitarian tool. Great for altering mental data structures - but even then deeper levels of language exist -
http://kanjinotes.blogspot.com/2009/01/words-leaves-of-thought.html

Do not blindly have FAITH in the methods of reason or the church of Words, test them. ;) but you cannot test them - for your methods for testing them are defined by the beliefs and systems themselves. Modeling reality - rather modeling reality completely is a wicked problem to crack.

The logical framework (THE logical framework?) (the language guys... the pandits ... 'philosophy'... the upanishads...) is a vehicle. A tool. A yogi will have the skill to know where to get on and get off each vehicle - for otherwise - the 'conundrum' is eternal - hell, you have designed it to be so. The 'Why' has no final answer - it's a language feature very well suited for showing you the limits of the tool :-D
http://aalhadsaraf.blogspot.com/2008/07/unanswerable-why-and-mistaking.html

A body of thought that talks about 'knowability' must also perhaps define these entry and exit points - without which you are being taken for a ride - without knowing where to, for an unknown fee ;) And maybe you could pick a quarrel or get into all kinds of trouble for insisting that your ticket IS not a ticket, not the map, but the design document for this world. ;)

So would the 'conundrum' between logic-faith seem to be a 'conundrum' only to the people who are confusing their tickets for the design documents of the World(TM).

Philosophy as expressed through words has easily visible limits - axioms, and the methods for defining those axioms. I mean, come on - if you define the limits of what is knowable and how you add to your 'body of knowledge' ... there is 'limit' written all over the place :)

So even if modelng reality is a wicked problem - meanwhile, we humble humans have several utilitarian models and modeling strategies and vehicles ... the entry and exit points if known, one may skilfully travel towards addressing and then transcending a given dual-meme (rich-poor, terrorism-peace, sustainable-unsustainable). IMHO ... yoga is the most pragmatic vehicle I have seen so far. Wherever I see sustainability, I also see a yogi. (no faith required.)
:-D

Dual-meme transcendence - II: Beyond Good and Evil and Beyond THAT.

2008-12-14T20:01:00.001+09:00

Continued from the previous post ...

If you're trying to be good, very good at what you do, or if you love someone with all your heart, or if you want to learn something with all your heart ... you are witnessing the start up of a transcendence engine.
It is automatic. And seems universal.

This brings to mind the 'Beyond Good and Evil' of Nietzsche -

Where he suggests that the strongest people are marked by a cruelty to themselves, according to which they mercilessly expose their every prejudice and assumption in order to dig further into themselves.
"Free spirits are investigators to the point of cruelty, with rash fingers for the ungraspable, with teeth and stomach for the most indigestible".

(A few years ago - before I read Nietzsche, I used to wonder - why is it that we as a species enjoy cutting off the reproductive paraphernalia (flowers) of another species (plants and trees) ... even for purposes like 'offering' them to constructs like 'Gods'. (and people still thought that I was religious, while I was trying to understand the -nature- of religion.) This would perhaps make Nietzsche put me in the 'free spirit' category.)

Now the question is - is being a free spirit cruel to ones self? and what does cruel mean anyway? and what is this 'self' other than code passed on from media (friends, books, school ... ), DNA from parents... this 'self' to which a free spirit is cruel?

What I feel: Like all dual-memes, cruel/kind dual-meme ends up being transcended as well, it has no easy resolution.

(consider this - every time you breathe, you 'kill' millions of micro-beings as you suck them into your lungs. Every time you eat, some form, some being, some structure has 'sacrificed' itself, for another structure to be created. You are massively violent at a micro scale. Scale, not quality.) How 'kind or cruel' can you be?

Dual-meme transcendence - I

2008-12-14T09:58:00.003+09:00

Anything that is a dual-meme, anything that has a dual - an opposite, is transcended.

During childhood, sometimes it is a big deal whether a room has the lights turned on at night or not. Eventually, as we understand the nature of light and dark, and learn that light can be controlled, we cease to think of it as a fear inducing element. In fact we cease to 'think of it' at all.

A combination of what we allow our senses to perceive, and how we process them and act (karma) seems to decide what memes our thinkspace will be occupied by. (why is it that I don't have to bother about my throat being slitted by a knife or being shot?) That also decides whether our awareness expands or contracts. By contract, here what I feel is that, if awareness is like a balloon like surface, a highly contracted state will take us back to being intensely bothered about whether a room is lighted or dark, a botheration that was once 'transcended'. An highly expanded state of awareness, might result in a loss of identity of the individual 'self' (which is a very narrow detailed story), one of the strongest dual-memes.

In between - there are a lot of other dual-memes that get transcended. Here are some that come to mind right now -

Like trust/mis-trust (I used to find it difficult to decide whom to 'trust' with what, and to what extent ... eventually, it becomes a non-question)
Pleasure/pain (this one takes a long time sometimes. eventually, once you know they are the same see-saw (one predicating the existence of the other. two sides of the same see-saw plank ... then after a point, you outgrow the see-saw.))
Mine/yours (having a child is one of the events that helps go beyond this one I guess.)
Production/Consumption (For a long time, I thought it was 'better' to be producer than a consumer ... (i.e. to create video games than to just play them ...); but if one produces something, someone must consume, then just what is it that makes production better?!)
First/Last (I'd come 1st in class in school, but then I couldn't figure out WHY must there be a system where a very small part of a system are in a position that is coveted, when the majority of the class IS not the guy who comes first. Also, why must there be pain on 'failure' or on not getting something 'right' in a 'test'. I tried flunking a few courses, tried 'fighting' my genes, just to prove that I am not bound by anything as mechanical as that. Similarly in the corporate world, I wondered about WHY must all the 'desirables' in the world, go to a minority say 5%, when the remaining 95% remains a big part of the corporation. If a manager is responsible for the entire team, and the CEO for the entire company - is creating a coveted position on top that everybody aspires for the only way to reward and to ensure progress. Can't there be a more inclusive system. Anybody seen the massive minus field around on 'performance evaluation day', well, 95% of the guys can't play the game as well, (even if the rule is to write really good code or some such) and aren't happy. (The root of this unhappiness is another story altogether, but you don't usually get the system till you see beyond it.) )
Doctor/Patient (the meme called a doctor is 'useful', 'because' the meme called 'patient' exists. New dis-'eases' will keep springing up. This dual-meme has been transcended and well documented in our scriptures. For instance, among one of the causes of disease as stated in the Caraka Samhita is the unnatural production or suppression of natural movement-forces in the body - the forces that move tears, urine, vomit, flatulence, sperm ... and so on. A yogi, by sublimating the root causes of these movements, can transcend this dual-meme easily. Other simple means of transcending this is to live a balanced life - (maybe, as documented and prescribed in the aahaar, vihaar etc sections of the caraka samhitaa...))

Everything that has an opposite, gets transcended by awareness.

Which is perhaps pretty much everything of what 'is' - in the conventional sense.

Now WHY BOTHER ABOUT ALL THIS ANYWAY?

It seems this process is automatic.
One of those processes that seems to be a part of 'evolution' (?)
It begins with best practices. Trying to live the best life possible. Even with trying to minimize pain for self or others. Or being kind. Or trying to discover what one is supposed to do in this world.Once you get serious with this (by this time, you have perhaps already 'transcended' Maslow's needs-pyramid); you can hit a lot of very difficult questions (if seeing and solving difficult problems and the path of discriminative wisdom - viveka buddhi is your preferred way of life.)

Or even if you want to -

be good, very good at what you do, or
love someone with all your heart, or
know and study something with all your heart, or
focus on your work with all your heart

... you are witnessing the startup of a transcendence engine.
It is automatic. And seems universal.
Everyone is a yogi to a different extent.

notes on the kanji - a new blog begins

2008-12-10T05:37:00.010+09:00

imi no bakebanashi 意味の化け話
http://kanjinotes.blogspot.com

Some of the initial posts from the blog follow:

Stories about the ghosts of meaning as they mutate and float around in　kanji characters, words and compounds.

意味 imi = 意（feelings, thoughts)+味(flavor, taste)
化け（る）bake(ru) = to change, mutate, take the form of (also implies ghost as in obake - in this case, the ghosts of meaning.)
話 hanashi = tale, story.

Mojibake - 文字化け is composed of 文字 (moji), which means letter, character, and 化け (bake), from the verb 化ける (bakeru), which means to appear in disguise or to take the form of. Literally, it means "character mutation".

This journey is about how imi (meaning) bake'd into moji(characters) and how moji bake'd into jukugo(compounds) and later perhaps even look at how that bake'd into bun(sentences).

It is a record of my journey as I explore the space between reality, the manner in which the ancient Chinese perceived it, and how that perception condensed into the snowflakes we call the Kanji. And further into Kanji compounds. Also perhaps, some interesting patterns that emerged as the kanji were adapted by the Japanese to fit their language. And then some oddities, questions and interesting kanji tidbits.

slowly the kanji,
sink into this mind-ripple,
like snowflakes drifting down to the ground.
each one different, but similar
silent moments of frozen beauty, a clue ...
for this world, that there is another....

Who's the beggar?

2008-11-28T09:25:00.002+09:00

There was a discussion somewhere some months ago about beggars ....

here is some ugly hip hop I made up ;) .....

The world is a perpetual beggar.
the stomach when fed,
does not stop,
nor do the ears, the eyes or that
mind on top
MORE MORE MORE till the fella goes POP
reached a high, beg for a taller ladder, don't DROP
have enough, want more,
got it, then store!
work for love? that's a bore.
you're POOR, you beggar
salary raise, more money, more marks
you're not just any beggar
okay don't be sore,
but ... you... you don't just beg,
you whore.

not pretty. but the next time you see a beggar on the street look at yourself carefully to see how much of your own self, mind and body constantly begs for more. And who is the greater beggar.

Yeah, this was about the time when I used to really dislike words then.
Because they can be used to any effect. (Law and Lawyers)
However they are very, very bad at modeling reality.

Locus communis. Some pages from my 'Commonplace book'

2008-11-26T22:22:00.005+09:00

Some years ago, perhaps in 2004, I started maintaining a commonplace ("Commonplace" is a translation of the Latin term locus communis which means "a theme or argument of general application".) in a spiral bound notebook and a year later in a Moleskine notebook.

That moleskine was misplaced somewhere in Tokyo in March 2008, thought to have been lost. I found it in a coat pocket yesterday, and thought that it would be a good idea to post some of the stuff here. So here goes.

The last entry in the book goes:
This too shall pass. And that too.
Not always so. This is one accurate, though simplistic model of life.
But must this too be always so?
Bah! Words are lies. And so is this.
Caveat lector.
-Aalhad Saraf ;)

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken... the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many people we meet, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honour us! How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, though silently we warmly rejoice to be with. Read the language of these wandering eyebeams. The heart knoweth.
-Emerson

The ideal sage does not even cross a stream for fear of breaking its serenity: he moves slowly, as a crane treads the surface of water lightly or as a bee tenderly alighting on a lotus, lest its movements spill the pollen. He regards the very atom as a part of life and walks gently as if by compassion.
-Saint Dnyaneshwar

Gently he spreads his life below other beings feet, so that he may be a source of happiness to them and he treads the earth tenderly like a cat holding its kittens with its teeth so as not to injure them. He raises his hands only to afford protection. Never would he even dream of playing with or tossing garlands of flowers. Such a man is gentleness itself, humble and with an intense regards for all living beings and things as parts and parcels of the one and same Infinite Self.
The realized man is never affected by sorrow or by other afflictions; like the great boundless ocean, he can find room for rivers of grief without being disturbed by them. He is friendly with the whole world to the point where he cannot distinguish between himself and others.
-Saint Dnyaneshwar

The narrow minded man thinks and says - 'This man is one of us' this one is not, he is a stranger.' To the man of noble soul, the whole of mankind is but one family.
-the Hitopadesha

Beware of having an over concern for money or position or glory. Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.
-Rudyard Kipling in an address at McGill University, Montreal, Canada

The body is insentient and hence can neither enjoy nor suffer. Nescience gives rise to heedlessness and unwisdom; hence it is nescience alone that enjoys or suffers.
It is indeed the mind alone that is born, weeps, kills, goes, abuses others etc. , not the body. In all experiences of happiness and unhappiness, as also in all hallucinations and imaginations, it is mind that does everything and, it is mind that experiences all this: mind is man.
-III, 115, pg 97, commentary on the Yoga Vasishta by Swami Venkateshananda.

Work - not to rouse pity, win sympathy or adoration; only this -
activity
stillness
as the logos of the state requires.
-Marcus Aurelius

All that you see will soon have vanished and those who see it will vanish themselves, and the ones who have reached old age will have no advantage over the untimely dead.
- Marcus Aurelius

To feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human. You can do it if you simply recognize: that they're human too, that they act out of ignorance against their own will, and that you'll both be dead before long. And above all, that they really haven't hurt you. They haven't diminished your ability to choose.
- Marcus Aurelius

There is nothing more mechanical in a persons life than negative emotions.

Study the nature of wakefulness, dream and sleep states and maintain a single state of awareness in all three.
-Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, BKS Iyengar

'Sit down. Look and you will see that your thoughts come into you from outside. Before they enter, fling them back' Sri Aurobindo followed these instructions exactly, with the result that in three days, or more accurately in one day itself, his mind was filled with an eternal silence.
- introduction to the Penguin Aurobindo reader

I am made up of substance and what animates it, and neither one can ever stop existing, any more than it began to. Every portion of me will be re-assigned as another portion of the world, and that in turn transferred into another. Ad infinitum.
I was produced through one such transformation, and my parents too, and so on back. Ad infinitum.
This still holds good, even if the world goes through re-current cycles.
-Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

Start living your ideals.
Now is the time to get serious about living your ideals. Once you have determined the spiritual principles you wish to exemplify, abide by these rules as if they were laws, as if it were indeed sinful to compromise them.
Don't mind if others don't share your convictions. How long can you really put off who you really want to be? Your nobler self cannot wait any longer.
Put your principles into practice - now. Stop the excuses and the procrastination. This is your life! You aren't a child anymore. The sooner you set yourself to your spiritual program, the happier you will be. The longer you wait, the more you will be vulnerable to mediocrity and feel filled with shame and regret because you know you are capable of better.
From this instant on, vow to stop disappointing yourself. Separate yourself from the mob. Decide to be extraordinary and do what you need to do - NOW!
-Enchiridion

As a careful mother teaches her child to walk carefree, so the careful mind of the Yogi teaches the senses to be carefree. By continued practice of pranayama, the senses become free of obsession for the things they once pined for.
-Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Sri BKS Iyengar

Don't defend your reputation or intentions.
Don't be afraid of verbal abuse or criticism. Only the morally weak feel compelled to defend themselves or explain to others. Let the quality of your deeds speak on your behalf. We can't control the impression others form of us and the effort to do so only debases our character.
So if anyone should tell you that a certain person has spoken critically of you, don't bother with excuses or defenses. Just smile and reply - "I guess that person doesn't know about all my other faults, otherwise, he wouldn't have mentioned only there."
-Enchirdion, Epictetus

On character -
Of Prince Albert - 'He had the greatest delight in anybody else saying a fine saying , or doing a great deed. He would rejoice over it and talk about it for days; and whether it was a thing nobly said or done by a little child or by a veteran statesman, it gave him equal pleasure. He delighted in humanity doing well on any occasion and in any manner."

Concentrate every minute on doing what is in front of you, with precise and genuine seriousness; tenderly, willingly and with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can - if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do - to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this - that is all even the Gods can ask of you.
-Book 2, verse 5, meditations by Marcus Aurelius

.... more later.

Existence. Science. Flavor. Manifestation. Shit.

2008-08-26T10:35:00.009+09:00

The food we eat, derives its flavor from the by products generated during the process of its growth. Meat derives its flavor perhaps from the subtle salty compounds that were formed as it was being metabolized. Uric acid like stuff and so on. It goes the same way for plants and fruits. Existence is thus perhaps a guarantee of imperfection, as it is a waste product of a process - the leap from byproduct to waste-product being a subtle and easy one, if purity is defined in terms of pure energy that is unbound by time. Although ayurveda makes a good distinction between 'mala' and 'dhaatu'; from the perspective of yoga, anything that is not pure energy is 'mala' like or actually perhaps non-existent. Not just meat and plants ... but I too derive my flavor, my 'fragrance' or 'vaasanaa' so to speak, from how I transform all the food (sights, sounds, thoughts ... plants...) I consume.

So ... manifestation is impurity(in the strictest sense of the word).

Manifestation as we see it is the result, a by product, of a manufacturing process.
Where the pure is separated from the impure. The essential is separated from the non-essential.
Which also brings to mind the word 'science' - that field of human endeavor that is enamored with classifying and separating ... the word root is the verb sciere (L. to cut) which came from proto indo european, perhaps skt. - skheid- from whence scissor, schism, schizo- also come. And also shit.

shit (v.): O.E. scitan, from P.Gmc. *skit-, from PIE *skheid- "split, divide, separate." Related to shed (v.) on the notion of "separation" from the body (cf. L. excrementum, from excernere "to separate"). It is thus a cousin to science and conscience. The noun is O.E. scitte "purging;" sense of "excrement" dates from 1585, from the verb.
(from etymonline.com)

This holds true even for the manifestation (also in the sense of avatara) of some of the very highest principles known to Hindustani people. Vishnu had to be incarnated (to be born in the flesh) again as Rama, as a result of a curse (as given in the first chapter of the yoga vasishta)

This is perhaps also the origin of the concept that we are all born in 'sin' i.e. we are a W.I.P (work in progress) ;)

Manifestation is shit. At some level. ;)
So is science.
And so is flavor.

(as always, standard disclaimer applies - all words are lies to some extent or the other on the index of reality.)

transcending reality - transcending time.

2008-07-23T10:07:00.005+09:00

A few years ago, I started developing a distaste, well, an intense dislike for chronological time.
If I had to create something, I wanted it to be timeless - what is the use crafting sublime architectures in C++ when the very basis of the systems that will let them exist, are certain to change and disappear in a few decades. Not that I might be remotely capable of doing anything similar, but in contrast, consider Mozart san and his music ... it has stuck a few centuries, at least.

Also, when doing work, I kept wanting to be in a state where I did not have to be aware of time. Like a master craftsman.
What was this with time and me ...
(this ties in with some of my meme cards about sustainability)

Last week I had the fortune of sharing my residence with a physicist from Albany, NY ... a quantum physicist. When discussing time, its contrived nature and how the mind fabricates time ... he quipped ... 'You had better become pure energy ... for anything else, time is an enemy of!'
This is very interesting.
That might the business of yoga.

Modern science again seems to be approaching the boundaries of rationality. I wonder why this keeps repeating again and again.

Following the yamas ... Truth, and why science can't understand the architecture of the world.

2008-07-23T09:46:00.005+09:00

Let's begin with Satya or truth.
I look at the moon. I say out loud, 'I am looking at the moon.'
I have just lied. Not only have I lied, but I have lied -without- being aware of it, which is all the more dangerous, for it comes with the belief that I am speaking the truth. And that very thing, will prevent me from seeing anything more fundamental.

How? I have no real proof of existence of the moon other than the report of my senses and the result of a carefully constructed series of mental constructs called rationality (which is really a solved problem.)

Yet I say, the moon exists. Like a guy running around in Doom II saying that the sprites that represent the demons exist.

First step towards transcending reality, is to never lie, for that will consolidate the seeming reality of the very virtual constructs whose architecture we're trying to understand.

So following the yama of Truth ... requires me to not speak at all! For the nature of everything spoken - if seen closely enough is untruth! It is possible to mince around, playing with semantics ... and that would perhaps be the job of professional philosophers.

But empirically, it was easy for me to see this once I saw why actions speak louder than words ... actually, certain kinds of silence speak much louder than actions, and give the person who is silent a tremendous power to effect change.

At this point, it was easy for me to turn agnostic (if I am a sprite in Doom II then, I CANNOT figure out the architecture of the OS or the processor ... but that again, makes certain assumptions about what knowledge is and what is knowable), nihilist ... well I could go any number of ways really, but then I wouldn't be any closer to the state of the art ;)
I resolutely refused to conform, yet continued the quest to observe the mind.

(from mid-2007)

the unanswerable why .... and mistaking proximity in time and space, observation and classification for understanding

2008-07-15T07:48:00.006+09:00

Modern science and its derivative fields, amongst other things, are limited in their methods for discovery of truth - that observation (and proximity in time and space, albeit - many times, repeated) and classification is mistaken for understanding or even worse - an understanding of causation. The 'why' is a question - designed to be unanswered. For every answer to a why - can be met with a further why. An open loop. A hole. A back-door through the cocoon of language. Temporary answers to ANY question, based on existing classification models and observations in the time-space dimensions may be convenient or useful in limited local contexts (which - due to the 'value agnosticism' of science .... okay maybe, more on that later), however ... the why remains unanswered.

A self-respecting follower of science, and one very good at his stuff, probably, soon reaches the limits of what his methods can allow him to see. Where he sees that he does not, in fact, understand anything about anything.

Perhaps - this is what happened to Einstein.
And I also saw it in the bluepages profile of a person who was in my 'most respected' list in IBM. In his profile - it said
Expert: C / Algorithms / Procrastination / Abstraction
Strong: LDAP / C / Windows / Unix / Communication
Competent: Korn Shell / HTML / I18N / Build / CMVC / Software Dev &
Support / Sensitivity
Learning: Java / Package & install / Business Processes / Details / Diplomacy
Clueless: Sales & Marketing / Money / Life
:-)

sleep, sweet sleep

2008-07-09T18:03:00.003+09:00

Some time ago, I didn't keep regular sleeping hours.
On one of those sleepless nights - I wrote a few lines in my notebook -

Sleep, sweet sleep ...
come to me, hold me
in your arms
pray, let me
sink into your lap
enter me
scrub my mind, spirit, flesh and blood
cleanse me
sublimate
sights, sounds, thoughts, food ...
for 'tis all the stuff I ate
for 'tis the code ...
that writes my fate -
joys, sorrows, pleasure, pain...
pray be my mate,
seep through
artery and vein;
be with me,
let your deep dark tresses
hide me;
from that tyrant, time
now let me end this rhyme;
take me.
I'm yours to keep
for the night ...
Sleep .... sweet sleep.

I never had a problem sleeping ever since. ;-)
Sleep, sweet sleep. You love her and she loves you right back. :-D

unsolved ... important

2008-06-24T13:10:00.003+09:00

One way of knowing if you are approaching unsolved problems is if you seem to be stretching the boundaries of your belief system. The axioms that limit your perception. Like two points make a line. And three points make a triangle.

Consider this ...
Try defining necessity independent of a desirability model.
A need devoid of a want.
Look around you - what you see is the rendering of the mind of a bundle of wants.
The very need to eat, to live ... is based on a want to exist.

What is truly necessary - language cannot begin to describe, the mind cannot begin to perceive (since it is a first class beggar - the mother of wants), rationality cannot begin to analyze.

Try cracking a simple problem. Consider a situation ... say -
I decide to read something. A farmer from the town calls me asking if I could come help him with work in his grape orchard. Now - there are wants here. But what is -necessary- ? What should have been done ? What is 'necessary' independent of some want .... c'est impossible, non ?
What do you really -need- ?

you may think that I'm religious ...

2008-06-03T16:32:00.008+09:00

... but what do you think religion is ?

Religion is a set of metastable answers to important, difficult problems ... that help hold things together. (re+ligare: ligare = to bind together, also the root of 'ligament' etc.) The THINGS that these answers hold together may be the body, the mind, family, society, hell - even a company, a team within a company or a software architecture for that matter. Religion is a metastable supported version of an OS ... to ensure sustainability. This is a word bog though - but that is as close as I can come right now.

I have not accepted any ready-made answers at face value. Some of my most pressing concerns aren't addressed by religion - our scriptures come very close (the newest release being done by Gautama Buddha perhaps.) But words have limits. It was my intent to take a sabbatical from IBM last year, to try and discover the nature of sustainability by studying the ancient Indian scriptures - for this has been a thoroughly researched concept - and apply the essence to modern, current problem sets.

This was just before unsustainability hit unexpecting me - at all possible levels.
More on unsustainability and my findings in a later post.

Adding the comments to the main post - since they are really a part of the post and don't show up by default.

Transcending Reality said...: A belief system which can prove to be a binding factor. A means for peaceful co-existence. Its not an answer, rather means to find an answer. Its good as long as its followed in moderation. I guess its something which you do when in solitary. It has to be truly personal. Seeing the turns, religions take in today's world, I am better off without it. I find it redundant anyway. Causes more problems than it should solve. Whats worth a try would be to stuff like what the 'secular' Turkish government had done..ban sporting hijab in public. haha Ask me the same question a decade later and the answer would be: "I would regard it as a disease born out of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race." - Russell - Lucretius ~chetan; July 06, 2008 12:34 PM
mojibake - previously kilocoder said...: actually not a system of beliefs. But a set of principles responsible for binding. Peaceful or not. Like a set of principles that govern a system. If your body exists right now, it is because the system obeys certain principles. If your university exists as an entity - that is because there is an implicit framework that is responsible for it's existence. Religion is almost a synonym for existence - sustainability of any meme complex is necessary for existence to continue. What we see in the world is a massive dissociation between words and what they originally meant - this is exactly what I was talking about in the post where I said I lost my belief in words. You have a religion whether you believe it or not. You may not know what it is. The fact that you exist still - is proof enough of the fact that there is something holding you together. By the time Lucretius and Co. decided to see it as a disease - they had already gone far far away from what religion means. The religion I have in mind is not a set of imperatives to be followed by people. Yoga is personal. Although, yes - it is admittedly easy for a yogi to 'get' the 'cepts of sustainability. (Everything in this world has a timestamp.) Not to be confused with Dharma - 'iti dhaaraytee sa dharmaha'. Dharma is pervasive. Where anything is held together - dharma is responsible. And the principles that govern it are not personal. Where dharma is not - there will automatically be dissolution. Be it a body, a company, a family ... If you can abstract out the essence of sustainability - then you may begin to consciously apply it. (It is of course possible to do it without understanding and being conscious of it - just as great artists don't know WHY they are great artists) Now - the application of the principles of sustainability cannot be done by force, by edicts, by rules. We all know how that fails - bad managers, dictators ... To be able to manipulate the data structures in the human mind - requires a great deal more juice and subtlety than that. To establish a 'dharma' is no mean feat - if you ever see - in a small company - a person - perhaps the owner - with a great deal of 'juice' ... you will see a person who can and is in the process of establishing the dharma of his company. This is admittedly easy in a small group. When the company grows - it is not too much of a wonder when the values of the company can't be passed on the the last guy in the chain by the CEO. It just ends up being some files somewhere - or a mission statement on a desk - easy and boiler-plate enough to be forgotten. To transmit dharma - is almost like transmitting heat or light - through a physical medium. It does not happen through symbols alone, although they help.; July 06, 2008 4:11 PM

the story of a one rupee coin ... true cost ... and why I am not a financial analyst.

2008-05-16T18:46:00.004+09:00

True cost.
What is the true cost of me working in a large company ?
My salary ? My time ? My health ?

Suppose I earn just one rupee a day. Just one coin.
Now I spend that coin on buying what I like, or on a cause that I think is worthwhile - say I feel that people who write and search for knowledge and truth should be supported. So I buy good books. With that one rupee coin. That same one rupee coin now goes to the fellow who wrote that book. What does he do - he does a similar thing. Say, he likes music - he buys a CD with that one
rupee. The same coin - the same one rupee coin moves a million times. Everybody gets what they want. And thus wealth is created. So says economics. Money moves. People get what they want. Everybody is rich. WAIT. One coin moves a million times.

One million things are made. consumed. production and consumption. A million times - the raw material is .... the earth?

energy that comes from the sun? The earth is a largely sustainable meme complex by itself. But one coin moving around a million times introduces changes a million times in that meme complex .... changes which people like you and me, people who

create technology and consume it can only begin to faintly comprehend ... the earth is not INTEREST. It is CAPITAL. (If at all it can be talked about in such simple words.) So ... do we SPEND CAPITAL in order to become wealthy, or do we re-invest a part of the interest (if there is such a thing) back into the capital and consume the rest, and in this case - CAN WE ? wicked loop ? yes?
just one rupee moving around a million times!
For a moment ... forget the ecological implications and the wealth creation aspect.
Say ... I spend one rupee on buying books (or something that you currently deem worthwhile) and then, say the next one million minus one people use that coin to gamble, smoke, drink ... or basically on destroying sustainable memes
(because I CURRENTLY feel that one of the best ways to be human is to participate in and create sustainable meme patterns and complexes - fight entropy (and a new child is just the default apex of what we are hard coded to 'create' ... an anti-entropy genetic construct, a family is the social anti-entropy construct ... and so on) ... but my mental model seems to be constantly refined and altered. And the edge ... the END of what thought as a system is capable of doing, as a tool is capable of creating is almost visible... that is another story)
so ... then what is the true ethical cost of moving one rupee through the 'market' a million times ?

It is possible to consider this as an academic question, and it is possible to be HIT IN THE CEREBRAL GUT by it.

In my case it was the latter.
And ... I closed my CFA books.

A subconscious understanding of the above was the reason I asked girls who wanted to marry me in the year 2005 - 'Will you be okay with the idea of us living only on say a couple of thousand rupees a month?' Most of them gave me funny looks - if this fellow can and probably is earning close to 30 or 40 times that amount ... why would he think of this! :)

We truly no longer know the true cost of anything. And neither do we really know what we really need. :) So ... shinier, stronger, bigger, faster ? more, more, more ? WHAT ? WHY ? The greatest of corporations, the best of our scientists don't seem to have an answer to what we SHOULD need. In the absence of that answer, they just compromise and seem to accept the easier convergent problems. Dangerous. Even more dangerous - they persuade everyone that the problems that they work on - the convergent ones - amenable to the tools of technology and science and rationality are the MOST IMPORTANT problems, and people who don't become scientists or engineers are generally not intelligent (this at least, seems to be the case in my hometown in Pune, India ... and all the most refined brains are sucked in by the Engineering profession)

This post is history. Last year. I have some answers to the difficult questions posed now. Not very easily expressible through words. Words are too mechanical.

If you don't 'get' me - you will call my words 'psychobabble'.

(ever wonder WHY many things speak louder than words? MUSIC ? and silence ? and silence backed with LOVE - even louder? Actually there are even more powerful methods of meme transfer than words and direct action. Parable that comes to mind -
when Ramana Maharshi was asked by a person - 'Why do you live here in the Arunachala mountains - when you could be down in the villages DOING SOMETHING!' - and he replied something to the effect of 'What in HEAVENS name makes you think that direct action is the most effective method of creating change, and what makes you think it is necessary!!!!')

embryos ... most of us

2008-05-15T11:12:00.003+09:00

striving to sustain ... striving to break out of the cocoons of code that surround us ... our parents' ideas and beliefs, the ideas that books and movies and friends give us, the memes embedded in our genes ... do not push away, do not judge ... at least, till we emerge from the chrysalis (and then there will remain perhaps ... nothing to be judged.)

(From notebook ... late 2007)

the (near) end of my reading habit ...

2008-02-21T02:33:00.004+09:00

A couple of years ago ... a question occurred to me ... is any of my thoughts an entirely original thought, or is it primarily a result of everything that I have read from childhood ? Is anything I think my own ? Can it ever be ? If the human mind is a system that is programmed by what the senses are exposed to i.e. DATA, and that in turn plays a major role not only in determining the limits of perception in the future, but also what actions are undertaken by the human body - i.e. if DATA is interpreted as CODE ... then what degree of security do we have. And should one allow oneself to be programmed by -any- book (or experience!) at all, even the Bhagvad Geeta or the Patanjali Yoga Sutras for that matter! If 'buddhi' is also programmed or colored if you will, by sensory input then we are not just full of buffers waiting to be overflowed but we are a system with a completely exposed code area that anyone can write to. (I have since discovered that it IS possible to find a mechanism that is not affected by I/O ... but that is another story)

Seemed scary.

This led me to seek answers to fundamental questions about the nature of information, and the human mind.

When I hit the limits of language as we know it - I needed to work then at another level and saw that I had nothing more to read!

Why I lost my belief in words ... and how I (almost) ended my reading habit

2008-02-21T00:45:00.010+09:00

God. When I talk with you and use the word 'God' - I have many different memes associated with that word in my mind. And -- you -- probably have a set of other, different memes in your mind. And both of us probably are not in sync with what we 'think' is 'real'. Forget what 'IS' real. Why God - even plain words like, say -- 'western culture', when used by enough people, result in a large amount of what can best be called verbal delusion or 'vikalpa' (shabda-dnyaanaanupaati vastushoonyo vikalpahaa - Patanjali yoga sutras, Samadhi paada.)

Examine any language closely, and you will slowly realize that all words are mere pointers to reality. No wonder that ancient sanskrit grammarians recognized and studied languages and grammars -- nay, not just that but whole levels or media of communication more powerful than written and spoken language. For instance - 'paraa', 'pashyanti', 'madhyamaa' ...

Examine any language you know closely, and you will also see laws analogous to Newtons laws of motion or the laws of thermodynamics ... hell, meaning seems subject to entropy as well.

When I realized this, the first thing that struck me was, it is impossible to follow the 'yama' or rule of 'satya' or truth; if I speak or use 'common' language, so to speak. If the very nature of the language I know is untruth, how can I ever claim to be truthful!

All words are lies (and so are these! ... see the loop... beautiful, but a limitation in a tool that attempts to describe reality accurately.) So words seem to me now like シャボン玉　－soap bubbles blown by children. Beautiful, ethereal, temporal ... but not very good as tools for accurately describing reality - a use case most often attributed to languages.

So ... the end of language as I knew it.
This is from my notebook - from about a year ago.

hibernation almost over ...

2008-02-13T20:15:00.001+09:00

more later.

another post for engineers in the making - why should a geek be interested in the money stuff

2006-01-10T03:46:00.001+09:00

this is some stuff from a mail to a good old friend telling her about why I wanted to study financial analysis -

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 18:28:20
.....

Sometime  earlier this year I learnt a few
interesting things ...

1. A good engineer lives with the belief that he need
not bother about money for as long as does really
cool, world class stuff.
2. He believes that the money will just come.
3. :-) It does come.
4. But -because- the engineer does
not know what to do with it when it comes ...
other than spending it on the small good things in
life ... it goes away as well.
5. An engineer comes out of school with the belief
that 'capital' is basically the same thing as
'what is inside one's grey matter' and that
capital will continue giving him 'income' as long
as he uses it.
6. That is a really really stupid idea ... unless
you want to let the world -force- you to keep
doing the things you do right now -just- to fill your stomach all
your life. paycheck to paycheck. some wage hike to
wage hike.
7. The engineer is not trained to -or
is almost *blind* - to the idea of treating money as
capital. :-)

simple stuff ... for one who can work on writing an optimizing compiler won't find it -difficult-
to understand finance, simple - but necessary nevertheless. :)

For engineering students in Pune University - read this.

2005-12-27T01:42:00.000+09:00

This is another meta-post. If you are an engineering student, especially EE or CS, in my alma mater - the AISSMS's College of Engineering or any other engineering school in Pune University for that matter - this is some stuff that you should definitely read while you are in school - an essay by Paul Graham. In fact, you should probably spend time reading all of his essays!
This is stuff that very few profs will tell you.

Hamming on research

2005-12-26T21:51:00.000+09:00

Richard Hamming of Bell labs on 'You and your research'. Must read for anyone contemplating a life invested in solving research problems.

....
Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:

What are the most important problems in your field?

Are you working on one of them?

Why not?

...

photography and quality - my thoughts and a discussion with a friend.

2005-12-17T03:13:00.001+09:00

This is from a discussion I had with a friend on Orkut. I thought it would be worthwhile to put it here - summarizes my involvement in the visual arts. A slightly longish read!

Me:
I am also trying to find a theoretical answer to the question 'how does one produce a great image as opposed to a mediocre image in any situation' - a theoretical answer that can be easily translated to practice. I'm looking for other sources of research/places where people have tried to solve this problem and will probably meet up some people in
FTII about this.

I'd definitely like to meet up with anyone who has insights on quality in photography ... subjective quality vs object quality split (zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance aficionados ?) .... or if you believe in it, the 18 per cent gray in between :) The people I've met so far shrug it off with a 'cannot be captured in a set of prescriptions' attitude ... however what would be interesting is having a very large set of -observations-, and not prescriptions about quality images. It would be a good exercise to create an inference engine for the analysis and determination of 'great' images ... at the very very least ... improving one's own art.

what say?

friend:
It’s true that Photography is an art which can not be injected by others into someone.

About your question, I think that though it’s an art, there is a science and it has its limitations, so to get a exceptional image at any given time, one need to make available all the ingredients in perfect quantity (i.e. light, distance, hardware, state of mind etc.)

"Zen and art of motorcycle maintenance" ;I disagree to it to some extent because of which I left the book in between, but it does make an impact on one's thought process.

The one perfect sentence you made is, we need observations, it’s very correct.

Paradox - but in my sole opinion, I prefer to learn and get the things by my intuition and by own way. This way all what I have learn I can get it into the picture 100%

me:

One need not agree or disagree with the book... I know a lot of people (almost 3/4ths of everyone I know) who gave up half way.

The book does have some interesting insights (interesting to me because ... they are provocative, relevant, indicative of possibility, encapsulate interesting concepts about quality and provide alternatives to existing concepts (well... my gestalts) of quality) and at the very least, it tries to address the important issue of trying to define quality.)

The style in which it has been written will turn a lot of people off. But I would suggest that they hang on (if 'quality' is relevant to them) and read through to the end. And re-read it again a few times.

As I said, it has been said by many that 'art' cannot be injected into a person. The same has been said for innovation and creativity. The support for this is tenuous. The fact that we do not understand how something works is not enough reason for one to believe that it does not work. And there is evidence to the contrary as well, Edward de Bono in 'Serious Creativity' and G.Altschuller in TRIZ http://www.altshuller.ru/world/eng/e-books.asp
.

What I am attempting is not, 'How to become Ansel Adams++',
:-)

but a personal inquiry into the analysis and synthesis of quality images.

anyone around with a similar itch?

>>>> .... so to get a exceptional image at any given time, one need to make available all the ingredients in perfect quantity (i.e. light, distance, hardware, state of mind etc.) ....

Agree with you there, but the etc. in the end is what needs to be expanded on a lot if we want to understand -what- is it that makes up good images. (how else would one improve - after a point?) Some of it is covered in 'art appreciation' courses if one is studying the fine arts. But the synthesis of good images is much more difficult than the analysis(which itself isn't a solved problem in the world yet).

friend:
Not for the sake of debate...but just a thought...

Edward de Bono thinks that Creativity or LATERAL THINKING can be acquired and it’s not born, it can be achieved through some procedures which can be defined and generalized. - its kind of defining success/talent...do he/one really think that one can follow a recipe/steps of a successful person to become another successful person...or rather can someone define such recipe?

quality is a relative term, you are talking abt the improvement in the image quality after a certain point, that certain point is very relative, it can differ from person to person, because of which i said you can not write down it as a formula, it can not be captured, it can be felt but can not be documented.

If something can be defined it can be achieved also, then it will be redundant, and i guess something which is redundant is not quality its quantity

i will not talk abt the book, u may think me as john or chris :)

Me:
>>>>>quality is a relative term,
let's say it is ... to top it, let us say that it is subjective as well. MMM.... why is it that -everyone- I meet can distinguish between an Ansel Adams photograph and my photograph :)

>>>>>you are talking abt the improvement in the image quality after a certain point, that certain point is very relative, it can differ from person to person,

What I really am concerning myself with is how to -push- that point to its limit. I am not content with saying that it is relative. For starters, having enough of a 'concept' vocabulary to be able to analyze an image into a 100 or so factors that have a relative value towards contributing to the end effect that the photograph is trying to achieve. (that may incidentally not even be what the photographer saw/wanted to show, because of his lack of awareness of those factors)

>>>>>>because of which i said you can not write down it as a formula, it can not be captured, it can be felt but can not be documented.

one of the oft attributed purposes of art itself is to not only document what is felt, but to use expressive powers of words and images to enable others to feel it too. some people leave it to circumstance. others try to understand and improve. analysis is a tool for improvement. not a formula.

An interesting study of what 'art' is, the purpose of 'art' in a persons life, and in world could be seen in 'The Romantic Manifesto' by Ayn Rand. Again, I'm not endorsing her views, or even concurring, but 2001 ways of seeing an elephant gives even a blind man (me) a clearer picture.
Another instance - analysis shows that a key reason why Ansel Adams' photographs are impressive is because
of their sheer tonal range. This gave a lot of people an understanding of what 'tonal range' is and a method to capture that tonal range. It gave them the zone system.
It helps in pushing the point where analysis contributes to the synthesis of good images further.

>>>>>>If something can be defined it can be achieved also, then it will be redundant, and i guess something which is redundant is not quality its quantity

This is how I used to feel as well.
However, the premise for this is, again - tenuous.
I may define something, as a first step to achieving something. that does not make the achievement redundant.
Furthermore, the fact that something can be achieved does not make the achievement redundant.
Because, art is more than math.
A photograph is more than a concept. It can engage the senses. (And then the mind as well.)
There is a very real joy in -defining- what is good.
There is a greater joy in -helping others see- it.
There is joy in -bringing- it to reality.
There is a joy in -seeing- good things come to reality.
There is an even greater joy in helping -other- people bring good things into reality.

The definition of a method to see and show the world in more, interesting and better ways, does not imply that we will have 'imitation photography'.
(imitation could be considered a bad thing - because it does not create value other than by enabling more people to
experience a part of it).
One may say that if everybody creates amazing photos,
A situation where we have 100 people taking good photographs could probably be considered better than one where we have 100 people taking less-than-what-they-could-have photographs.
A photograph can be seen as a concept vehicle. It is the duty of an artist to ensure that it is an -effective- vehicle. This can be achieved.

>>>>>>>>Edward de Bono thinks that Creativity or LATERAL THINKING can be acquired and it’s not born,
it can be achieved through some procedures which can be defined and generalized. -
its kind of defining success/talent...
do he/one really think that one can follow a recipe/steps of a successful person to become another
successful person...or rather can someone define such recipe?

One of the key elements of being creative in any sense is the ability to spot the non-obvious.
it -is- possible to be 'successful' at developing that specific ability.
it is difficult to have a universal definition for things like 'success for a person in life'. ('the categorical imperative' of Immanuel Kant)
that goes into studies of ethics and philosophy.
The analysis of quality in art is possible and has been done for ages.
It is the subject of an entire field called aesthetics.
What I am searching for is the contribution of aesthetic analysis to the synthesis of good photographs.

If anyone is interested in the relationship of ideas related to music, math and art - G.E.B. (Goedel, Escher, Bach) The Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter is an intriguing (and information-density-rich) book.

A lot of people are good but they do not understand why.
Some people try to and can understand why and how.
People who want to be good may not attain immortality because of that understanding.
That is not enough reason to stop trying to understand the why and how.

The point, of course, is not to argue for arguments' sake but to improve and to actively search for means of improvement.

:)

my 2 cents
Aalhad
Friend:
I am getting an exponential learning curve here. Thanks Allahad

(A photograph can be seen as a concept vehicle. It is the duty of an artist to ensure that it is an -effective- vehicle. This can be achieved.)

I was thinking as you are interested in taking and enjoying and taking photographs by yourself, but what I can infer from your post (correct me if I am wrong) is that you are more social and interested in making others to enjoy the photographs.

For me, I don’t do it for the sake of people; I enjoy the snaps that I take full stop. I don’t take snaps so that people will enjoy it, the people come in the end, and I m sure that if I enjoy my photograph then everybody on this earth will enjoy watching it.

(One of the key elements of being creative in any sense is the ability to spot the non-obvious it -is- possible to be 'successful' at developing that specific ability.)

The one that you think is developing the ability, I call it as finding it within yourself, unfolding it, its there if you can find it, but if its not there for you then you may want to but you can not have it. (This might go towards the concept of finding the ONE – Matrix)

(The analysis of quality in art is possible and has been done for ages.
It is the subject of an entire field called aesthetics.What I am searching for is the contribution of aesthetic analysis to the synthesis of good photographs.)

Photograph or any art is the feeling its not a tool or a body, one need to feel it to enjoy it, Enjoy the beautiful painting rather than debating and finding out why the Mona Lisa is smiling?. When I listen to music (flute/sitar/tabla) I want to close my eyes and want to feel it, I don’t want go into the technicalities of it.

Don’t you think that going into “WHY” will fade out the joy of “FEEL”.

The snaps taken by you at are marvelous, I don’t have words. ?
Especially Butterfly street 2 Green Leaf 3 The B/W photo of the lady.
Please let me know which Camera you have used for the same.

Me:
Thanks for the the comments!

((I was thinking as you are interested in taking and enjoying and taking photographs by yourself, but what I can infer from your post (correct me if I am wrong) is that you are more social and interested in making others to enjoy the photographs.)

Actually, contrary to popular feeling, aesthetics is not governed by emotion or enjoyment - but more on this in another post. :) And I am -very- interested in the improvement of my ability to create good photographs. I am also interested in helping other people to do the same.

((For me, I don’t do it for the sake of people; I enjoy the snaps that I take full stop. I don’t take snaps so that people will enjoy it, the people come in the end, and I m sure that if I enjoy my photograph then everybody on this earth will enjoy watching it.))
That is okay ... and a good thing. One must not be driven by popular taste. Also, if I enjoy watching my own creation, that does not automatically mean that others will enjoy it either. The aesthetic value of a photograph can be evaluated independent of whether one enjoys it or not.

Aalhad finding omega 3/27/2005 7:48 AM
((The one that you think is developing the ability, I call it as finding it within yourself, unfolding it, its there if you can find it, ... (This might go towards the concept of finding the ONE – Matrix)))

Who is to say ... whether you are the one or not :)

((but if its not there for you then you may want to but you can not have it.))
Although if one were to believe the Patanjali (morpheus?) yoga sutras ... we are all 'one' ;-)
It is good to free oneself from the matrix and help others free themselves from the matrix if you can. Let's build a Nebuchadnezzar. :)

It is perhaps good to be open to all methods - 'rational' (within the purview of human reason) or 'mystic' (those that require experience outside the rational framework)
but, call it whatever you will ... developing your creative ability, 'finding' yourself ... searching for the 'one' ... leaving it to chance or circumstance is, simply put -- not being responsible for ones improvement.

Aalhad does understanding detract from 'feel' ...? 3/27/2005 8:56 AM
((Photograph or any art is the feeling its not a tool or a body, one need to feel it to enjoy it, Enjoy the beautiful painting rather than debating and finding out why the Mona Lisa is smiling?. When I listen to music (flute/sitar/tabla) I want to close my eyes and want to feel it, I don’t want go into the technicalities of it.))

There is a distinction between allowing a work art to affect one's senses, evaluating the aesthetic quality of a work art and improving the process by which art is created. All of them may be enjoyed.

((Don’t you think that going into “WHY” will fade out the joy of “FEEL”.))

According to my experience, going into the 'why' -enhances- the 'feel' ... for example, it is difficult to appreciate classical music unless one can understand and appreciate its complex meaning and beauty. It may be possible to just listen to it, devoid of meaning ... but it is then reduced to a mere 'tickling' of the eardrum ... which becomes less pleasurable with the repetition and the passage of time. One of the reasons why, imho, popular music exists and fades away for a relative lack of meaning. Meaning is very relevant to quality of art.
When listening to a great classical artist, especially, hindustani classical, there is a lot that goes into making you feel what you feel. If one wants to really appreciate it, it helps if there is a resonance between the artists state of mind and the 'shrotas' state of mind with respect to the understanding of the language of music. It helps communication of the state of 'feeling' easier. This understanding may be obtained by inheritance, circumstance (association with a guru) (in either of these, you need not be aware of it, and can afford to just 'feel' the effect of the artist communicating in the language you 'know') or by focused learning and perseverance (which may be directed towards creating circumstances where one can learn, i.e. from a guru). continued ...

Aalhad 3/27/2005 9:13 AM
... one commentator on indian classical music goes on to say that ... the degree to which a person can enjoy a performance of classical music is limited by
a.) the extent to which the artists understanding of the 'sva' or the 'self' and the world has been developed
b.) the extent to which the shrotas understanding of the 'sva' or the 'self' and the world has been developed
c.) the extent to which these two resonate.
d.) live performances are all the more enjoyable, because the physical presence facilitates this resonance to a great degree. Which is another reason why purists only enjoy live performances ... and great artists decide what to perform or at least how ... on the basis of this resonance present in a given set of circumstances with a given audience.
The understanding of the meaning of one's self is so important that it is the 'sva' in 'svara' and 'svara' actually means ... the shining forth or the putting forth of the essence of ones self ... (interesting thought on etymology...'sva' = self + 'ra' = to put forth or to present.)
(a few more things worth thinking over ...
a.) most great hindustani classical masters are also people who have a deep understanding of the self, the world and the human psyche ... they are very close to being spiritual masters.
b.) not too many people find it easy to be in a state where they can understand or appreciate classical music. )
I've concluded that cognition and understanding are inseparable from art, and this should probably hold true for photography as well ...

Aalhad glad you liked the photos .. 3/27/2005 9:43 AM
Thanks! I'm glad that you like the photographs!

(The snaps taken by you at are marvelous, I don’t have words. ?)

marvellous -is- a word ? :)
(a word that says more about what you felt than about the photograph though)
To critique a photograph, and discuss how it could have been improved and learn lessons for further experiments, a study of aesthetics is helpful.

(Especially Butterfly street 2 Green Leaf 3 The B/W photo of the lady.

Please let me know which Camera you have used for the same)
I use a Kodak DX6490 advanced-point-and-shoot with a 6.3mm to 63mm (38mm to 380mm equivalent Schneider Kreuznach Variogon zoom) and am trying to create a budget for a EOS 350D or a EOS20D or otherwise a D70)
www.treklens.com/members/aalhad has the exif info for each photo as well.

This thread is digressing too far from the 'photography course..' topic. Maybe we could move it to another post ?

more snaps of the kata r 103

2005-12-04T16:16:00.000+09:00

Some more shots of the R103. Okay, I forgot to mention the price - it is slightly pricey - around $170 on Amazon (including shipping within the US) ... so that translates to roughly 7650 INR.

But for equipment that it houses, 170USD is okay for shock and weather protection. It is -definitely- worth it.

caring for your EOS 350D / Rebel XT

2005-12-04T15:25:00.001+09:00

Still haven't bought a bag for your camera?
Want a -really- good way to protect your investment?
Get a Kata R-103.
I have it since October 2005. I've travelled through south india for 11 days - in 'sleeper class' train compartments, crowded streets, trekked through the jungle surrounding the periyar lake with the following stuff in this bag -
Canon EOS 350D, a Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens, a Canon 75-300mm telephoto lens, a Tamron 18-200mm lens, Canon Speedlite 580EX flash, 4 rechargable 2500 milli-amp-hour NiMH AA cells, Nokia cell phone charger, NiMH battery charger, an IBM T42p Thinkpad laptop, laptop charger, my ebook and music library on a spool of 10 DVDs, a charger for the Canon camera NB2LH battery, a Sony portable Discman, an Apple iPod nano 4G (there were 9 more people in our gang, so we needed multiple music playing devices), a portable travelpod for the smaller Kodak DX6490, a larger Hansa tripod for the 350D, Apple earbuds, Shure e3c canalphones, Shure e2c canalphones, a full set of sleeves for the e2c and the e3c, cables for hooking the ipod to the laptop, a 25-in-1 memory card reader, a Nokia 6600 cellphone for continuous bluetooth->GPRS connectivity on my laptop, a kensington laptop cable lock, ethernet cables, a couple of paperbacks and a bunch of other small knickknacks like chewing gum and mints ..... so, the bag although devoid of all the equipment in this snapshot, has much more room than you can see!

The bag is made from military standard nylon that is ACTUALLY dust resistant! I've lugged it through a jungle - and not a speck of dust on it yet. It seems to be very shock resistant - Kata should know this kinda stuff well - they make bulletproof vests and other such equipment for the Israeli army!!!

The ergonomics is superb for a person who is 170-180 cms in height. It has full 5 point adjustment, external straps for lashing up tripods to the backpack shell, a really comfortable shoulder 'wrap' underneath the shoulder straps.

The bag is the most ruggedly built bag I have ever seen - perhaps with the exception of the Lowepro Dryzone (but who needs something that -heavy- unless one is going kayaking with camera equipment and there is a danger of submersion.) The Kata R-103 comes with a all weather raincoat that is reflective on one side for sun protection and is black on the other for the rains.

I managed to lose one half of the waist strap as it came off the sliplock when I took it off - so I wrote them asking about what I should do next. I expected a mail giving the part number and a URL where I could order it online. But guess what - I received an email from them within half an hour asking me for my shipping address and phone number - saying that a replacement waist strap would be on the way immediately the next day. Thank you Bellina Israel - Kata should be proud of people like you!

This is some of the best customer service I have seen yet.

I haven't been paid by anyone to write this. This backpack is just a showcase of very good design and engineering. And if Kata is listed on your local stock exchange - you should go and buy some stock. I would.

Impressions of Austin

2005-10-17T02:04:00.000+09:00

Okay ... long time no post. :)
It is October. 2005. I'm in USA for a month. Austin, TX. Should be back home in a week or so from now.

Austin is not a very large city - seems small compared to Atlanta, GA - that I visited in the year 2000. Wide open spaces and temperatures ranging from 10 degrees celsius to 42 degrees celsius in a single day. Very, very unpredictable weather - we had a summer, a winter and rains all in a couple of days - however all extremes within Pune limits. So wasn't much of a problem.

The thing that struck me first was ... how little of a change the US has seen since the year 2000.
Malls ... roads, shops ... hell even Walmart is the same as it was 5 years ago. After seeing this, I find it easy to appreciate the -phenomenal- rate at which India is moving ahead.

A very old lady - probably in her eighties came over to me in H.E.B (a grocery store) and asked me - why is it that Indians are taking away their jobs - and if it was really true that China will be surpassing the US in every by 2015!

a first look at the 350D + Canon EF-S kit lens

2005-07-21T19:13:00.000+09:00

Got the 350D+ Kit lens from jj mehta (run by a nice chap - kartik mehta) in mumbai.
47k for the body+kit lens+2year Canon India warranty, and 5.9k for a Sandisk Extreme III IGB CF card.

Also am getting a Canon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens tomorrow. (-the- BEST glass you can get for the price of 5k. period.)

First few observations:
The sensor gives amazingly crisp and silky smooth image texture as compared to anything else I've ever seen yet.
The kit lens is a huge let-down .... since I'm coming from the Schneider Kreuznach Variogon on the Kodak 6490 - believe me ... I just realized that the 6490 cost breakup is like 25k = 20k for the 38-380mm lens and around 5k for the body+sensor+other electronics. (now the 6490 costs around 18k)

The kit lens is a Canon 18-55mm EF-S II f/3.5 - f/5.6. This lens does not allow enough light for good indoor photos in low light as compared to the Schneider Variogon on the kodak. I can open up the Variogon up to f/2.8 even at - say - 200mm - which is really fast i.e. it allows in more light and thus allows me to afford a shorter shutter speed (i.e. crisp - shake free photos) compared to what the Canon kit lens allows me to do. So --- I'm returning the kit lens (which costs 4.5k) and will probably go in for a Tamron 18-200mm f/3.5-f/6.3 lens .... I still haven't decided on this yet - but the kit lens sure does disappoint me.

Shooting with a dSLR is -very- different from a compact point-and-shoot-zoom-with-creative-controls camera.
The most prominent issues that a compact point-and-shoot user will face -
a.) no LCD screen based composition
b.) no great kit lens - and this is a -big- drawback if you are used to a compact with a very good lens - say, like the kodak DX6490.
c.) a different weight distribution in a different shape hinders blur and shake free shooting in low light (again, this is probably very lens dependent)
e.) the AF system on the Canon 350D is pretty useless when shooting a subject more than 5 meters away in the dark, outside, with just street lighting to go with.
(the flash fires a series of very fast strobes as an AF assist beam - NO INFRARED BEAM as in the kodak) This is awful, but can be rectified with the Canon Speedlite flash unit that has an IR AF assist beam

I have a very good friend in mumbai who is a pro photographer, -AND- uses a kit lens (!!!) with a 300D .... so, it is probably a bit subjective and it depends on what you are used to ... eventually the creative faculties will adapt to the equipment (happened with the kodak for me - the slow autofocus and lack of aperture settings beyond f/8 ... the really noisy sensor that forced me to never shoot at anything other than ISO 80 for anything I wanted to print).

So ... I've bought the Canon 50mm f/1.8 prime - which should effectively solve the low light shooting issue. And am looking for a cost effective solution to the tele-zoom issue (got spoilt by composition choices that the 38-380mm zoom on the kodak offers :) find it difficult to use my feet as a zoom now. ) The problem is .... glass is -VERY- expensive - if it is any good. And glass prices don't come down :( like the camera body prices do. A good quality lens that I'm looking at buying right now (maybe not so right now ... :) )is a Canon 70-200/f 2.8 IS USM L lens ... and it comes with a price tag of 78k INR!!!!!!!!!! Meanwhile the Tamron 18-200/f3.5-f6.3 will have to do @ 18k ... although it is not as fast - but at least it will give me something closer to the Schneider Kreuznach Variogon 38-380/f2.8-f5.6

My recommendation- if you are planning to buy a dSLR ..... buy the glass first. Buy the best glass you can afford. This could be repeated -n- times - a good digital body with the cheapest available glass ( the kit lens in this case) is like having a Bose home theater attached to a local made 14" monochrome monitor and a really crummy pair of cheaply made car speakers salvaged from the local junk yard.
Well, not that bad, but if you are on a 'Pune, India' kinda salary and are spending a bomb on a dSLR system, first save up for and buy the glass ... and then save up for the body (which will decrease in price then)

What makes moving to a dSLR worth ... is, of course ... the quality of the finished product :)

Once you see what a -good- lens can do, there's no coming back :)) be warned - read this -

entry into dSLR land

2005-07-20T21:20:00.000+09:00

Canon EOS 350D / Digital Rebel XT Review: 1. Introduction: Digital Photography Review Got a Canon EOS 350D this weekend. :)
Will post more later...

what should a personal website be like ...

2005-06-20T00:02:00.000+09:00

Here is an interesting form I found ...
topology.org - ak's personal web site
What are the different forms that a personal website can and should take is a question that probably every person who has a personal website has faced at one point of time or the other. (Of course, not everyone would choose to think about it too much). The other questions that this raises is, why is it that one should have a personal website. For me, I want to have a publicly visible representation of my thoughts, ideas, and activities to enable collaboration and participation in mutually beneficial transactions with and affecting as large a subset of the human population as possible.

Something to think about during this week .... how to structure http://www.sarafs.com/aal ... how to create a structure like a wiki that would ensure that the site stays in sync with atomspace. hmmm ...

tools - what's your notepad ... misc tips

2005-06-16T00:58:00.000+09:00

Tip #305 - Best of VIM Tips (VIM's best Features) : vim online
If you aren't a Vim power user yet ... :)
I've moved back and forth between Emacs and Vim since 1995 and I've grown to like both of them

Check this out as well - a vim configuration to make vim into an even powerful editor that looks lesser like vi ...

words that you would want your existence to be associated with ...

2005-06-15T03:12:00.000+09:00

For me -

Creative. Thorough. Relentless.

What are yours?

Google Corporate Information: Our Philosophy

2005-06-15T03:01:00.000+09:00

This is how Google does it :)
Google Corporate Information: Our Philosophy

Want to make your pages as responsive as Gmail?

2005-06-14T23:30:00.000+09:00

The answer, if you haven't already read about it, is AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript XMLHttpRequests ....
ONLamp.com: A Simpler Ajax Path

Go google out some more ... if time permits, will post a tute on this.
Am thinking of ways of incorporating this into my site design.

A man wanting to read a book is not just a man - but a soul reaching out to seek the infinite.

2005-06-11T13:38:00.000+09:00

Why should a person read
Simply put - to transcend the immediate limitations of human senses and perception in order to experience this world in as rich, diverse and interesting a manner as possible.

I have had various discussions and arguments with some of my friends who maintain that it is better to just live life as one sees it around oneself instead of qualifying that experience by perceptions one acquires from reading books. My answer to that has been -- books give me a glimpse of a much larger subset of the world that I may then -choose- to experience, they help me transcend the boundaries of my immediate surroundings and circumstances - for example, give me a controllable environment where I can choose to talk with J.Krishnamurthi and Mahatma Gandhi instead of being in a group of people living around where I live, where the subjects of discussion are usually limited to local politics and gossip. (And it is more difficult for me to control my atomspace location than my mindspace or bitspace location.)

(peronal opinion) And I believe that not using the power of the written word to control how one 'programs' oneself is being an ultra-luddite. :)

(impersonal opinion! :-)) An answer to 'should one read' can be found by trying to understand what the purpose of one's life is. There are phases in a lifetime, when it is -very- relevant to have access to written literature and a person should read. As to 'should one read a lot', that should be decided by what is 'necessary'. How to decide what is 'necessary' requires an inquiry into what is 'good' and 'bad'. However, if one aims to see further, standing on the shoulders of many giants helps. How much one can read depends on the efficiency and effectiveness of the persons 'comprehension apparatus'.

On invention and being a generalist+specialist ...

2005-06-11T13:34:00.000+09:00

I discovered a book on invention (quite by accident) on a site called http://www.books24x7.com, which I have access to, by letting IBM Software Labs fund me right now. It is about an inventive method of problem solving called TRIZ.

Some of the conclusions drawn in the book align with my world view. One such conclusion:
You have a better chance of creating technically valuable inventions, if you have combed deeply through the problem and solution spaces of many, diverse fields.

'TRIZ', classifies problems into 5 categories on the basis of their technical invention value
as decided by their problem domain and the required solution domain -

a.) a problem of a specific field in an industry solved by knowledge from that field itself.

-for example, requiring knowledge of compiler design to solve a problem in compiler construction

b.) a problem of a specific field in an industry solved by applying knowledge of another field in the same industry -

-for example, requiring knowledge of compiler optimization to solve a problem in Operating System design.

c.) a problem of a field solved by knowledge from another field

-for example, requiring knowledge of mechanical gear design to solve a problem of compiler construction

d.) a problem of a field solved by advancement of science in a related field.

-for example, a problem of compiler construction, requiring an advancement of the state of the art of mathematical theory.

e.) a problem of a field requiring advancement of science in an unrelated field

-for example, an improvement in the interface of an Instant Messaging system that requires an advancement in economic theory.

now studying ...

2005-06-10T12:55:00.000+09:00

What am I doing right now?
I am currently a student of financial analysis, ethics, aesthetics, French and photography.
Currently reading about - the use of CSS in web design.
Beginning exploration of human computer interaction, social networks and social network analysis.

Why am I doing these things?

Financial Analysis - for an understanding of the 'economic behavior' of people, societies and organizations.

French - (and other languages, and etymology) to satisfy curiosity about how languages used by humans to program others are - and have evolved.

Photography - for an understanding of how a visual medium may 'program' a human being.

Aesthetics - for a deeper understanding of the theory of a visual programming language like photography, painting or architecture.

Ethics - for an exploration of how have various people tried to answer the question of 'what is good and what is bad' - interest derived from all the above.

CSS - for this is something that I have missed out by being away from web programming for 5 years.

HCI - for this is the face of technology visible to the world at large. If, and wherever, I can improve it, I must.

Social Networking - to try applying ideas obtained from all the above fields and things studied earlier to a field of active research.

Each of these give me specific and general insights related to what I do everyday.
I hope to share as many of these as I can.

caught in the blogosphere

2005-05-17T12:35:00.000+09:00

blogs look like a natural cross between instant messaging and the world wide web. like giving some sort of persistent medium to IMers, or rather creating a medium that lies between 'maintaining a web site' and 'chatting on IM systems' on the persistence, responsiveness, 'informalness' scales. this seems to be now the method of choice for expression on the web. this has been happening over the last couple of years, and for old-timers who have been away from active participation in the online community, browsing http://www.technorati.com gives a feeling that one is falling behind :-)

First Post. First Blog.

2005-02-05T03:43:00.000+09:00

Lets see where this takes us.