ThePanda

“IA diverts flight, saves Pakistani baby” screams the front page of a national daily. The action of the pilot, the aircrew and the doctor who was traveling on board are laudable, the fact that a 10 month old baby was saved from certain death is something we should be happy about, the headlines sadly leaves a lot to be desired. When you have a medical emergency inside an aircraft, the pilot is supposed to land at the nearest airport and help the sufferers get medical help, the fact that this particular pilot did this is well good, however using this incident to highlight the improving India-Pakistan relations (which the headline seems to aim at), or to highlight our generosity as a nation or otherwise is sad.

A baby is a baby, no matter which country he belongs to, which side of the border he stays on, and which countries passport he hold, he remains a baby. Babies are not supposed to be dragged into our conflicts, our wars or our politics because they don’t decide what they like or dislike, they don’t decide what ideology, country, political party or side they support, they’re the most innocent of the bystanders. Time and again we as humans have declared that children are not a part of our wars, we have declared that children amongst every other civilian population have to be evacuated first, we have declared that soldiers and nations don’t have the right to kill or maim children, and doing anything which amounts to such atrocities is an act of unspeakable cowardice. Yesterday an airline’s crew, a pilot and a doctor onboard an airline saved a baby, that matters, the babies nationality does not, indicating that his nationality in anyway affected the treatment he received is wrong. By suggesting that his nationality is important to how he was treated, are we trying to say that if India and Pakistan would have been at war yesterday or if India and Pakistan would have been going through one of their periods of heightened tensions we would have reacted differently? Are we trying to say that if a “Pakistani” would have experienced a stroke, or a heart attack, or would have been unable to breath, two and a half years ago when we had one of the biggest mobilization of troops in decades we would have reacted differently, let that person die? Are we trying to somehow point out that we are generous to our friends and well wishers, not to our enemies, are we trying to show that we as a society have fallen to the extent that a person’s nationality rather than the fact that he’s human determines whether or not we help him survive. More importantly are we trying to suggest that the quality of medical care a child in distress receives in a certain country depends on the kind of relations that country has with the country the child or his parents belong to? One of the main reasons why the Geneva convention and most other international treaties on war insist that children be evacuated from war zones is because children no matter where they are born will to a large extent decide the future of the human race, they above all other humans would decide what the world of the future looks like, and they can’t do that if they are affected by wars. Sadly the effects of war can never be completely mitigated, and while the children live on they usually bear scars from the war, both emotional and physical. However India and Pakistan are not at war, in fact we are trying to ease into more peaceful times, trying to ease into a situation when we can be relatively certain that our countries aren’t going to attack each other. For the first time in decades we have the ability to at least keep children away from the conflict which long marred our countries, and I don’t believe such headlines help that cause.

In a little less than 20 days we’re going to have the start of the Athen’s Olympics and since we’re going back to where it all began, we might as well return to the original lessons of the Olympics. The athletes, and the victors may belong to different countries, the medals may go to particular nations, the national anthem played during the prize distribution may be from any country, the records however don’t belong to any nation, they are a symbol for all humanity, a symbol of what the human race can achieve, a symbol of the undying spirit which all of us possess. “Citius, Altius, Fortius” was never the slogan for one man or one nation, it was a slogan to drive all humanity, humans strive to be faster, go higher, and be stronger, not one man or one nation. If we begin dividing children and babies by nationality how are we ever going to celebrate what we as humans achieve, how are we ever going to celebrate the successes of our endeavors, the strength of our spirit and the force which makes us strive to achieve what no one has before us, to better what past generations have achieved, the force which drives us to discover new things, and survive as a species…

Ze Panda

This was supposed to be an entry on my newly rediscovered love for dynamic programming and most things CS, then somewhere down the line that changed into an entry on Australian bush poetry and Banjo Paterson, which then finally turned into an entry on this month’s National Geographic Magazine. Right now I am not really sure what this entry is about, and I should therefore get the things I am sure of out of the way before heading into the dark unknown. Hmm, Francis Crick has died at the age of 88 and well that’s really sad, because to a large part a lot of the things that I have seen and used through the course of my life have at least indirectly been a result of some of his work. Secondly one of my “Days before Departure” things should be coming up soon, since I (now this is scary, I have to attribute craziness to myself) seem to have gone of on a collection spree, collecting all sorts of stuff which I plan to carry, and packing and repacking my poor computer bag. Oh well that entry should be appearing soon.

Going back to this month’s NGM, well I have always found the NGM to be a potpourri of a lot of different kinds of stuff, geography (the serious kind, with demographic information, geology and all sorts of stuff), travel (the fun kind of geography), conservancy, biology, physics and chemistry, history (history the National Geographic was is invariably fun) and a thousand other bits and pieces. I guess this is in part because the National Geographic Society sponsors a wide variety of work, and what’s published in the magazine is in keeping in line with the breadth of human knowledge and endeavor. However this breadth of information has its own problems, in my case I have never really found myself enjoying every article which graces an issue of the NGM, usually I love one article a magazine, read about three, and give up on the rest. I don’t really blame the writers of those other articles, neither do I blame the photographers (the photographs are almost always good) or the editors, rather it’s a matter of personal choice, usually it’s because I don’t like the introduction to a particular article, or because the topic doesn’t interest me at that point of time. I generally like articles which have more of a traveloguish feel to them than some of the more factual articles which grace the magazine, I read most of the factual articles but what I really love are the traveloguish articles and stories, which is why I really love this month’s National Geographic Magazine. For one at least one of the authors has tried to experiment with the way articles are written, and while I have seen National Geographic experimenting with photographs (they had this story with photos which looked as if they’d been colored with crayons, and this other story a few months ago where they used multiple frames to create a single photograph) experimenting to this extent with their stories is something new. Usually they stick to journals (expeditions like the Megatransect) or to general factual articles the kind you’d find in most news magazines and the like. This time however there’s this article on the Jersey shoreline written entirely in the form of letters and well that is really cool. There’s also this article on the Australian outback and Banjo country and that’s really good (weirdly enough the last paragraph contains no information, well it was somehow important I write about it). Oh and I absolutely detest the article on obesity, which shows you that I can never really love everything that National Geographic prints.

I also came across some of the dp stuff I had collected some time back, and I suddenly realized dp is fun, it isn’t all that bad. Actually I was biased against dp when I first came across it, mostly because I had become a little uninterested in CS and well programming had somehow gone on to become more of a chore than an interest. Slightly more than a year down the line I cannot imagine why or how I’d have got bored with programming and I absolutely cannot imagine why I would have been uninterested in dp. Admittedly I got the wrong introduction to dp, while the subset-sum problem (given n integers determine whether an integer x can be formed by a subset of those n integers) is interesting in someways, it somehow does not fit my idea of what an intro to dp would include. Now the LCS problem (Longest Common Subsequence, given two strings find the longest common string which can be made using characters taken in order from both strings) or the Traveling Salesperson problem (given a directed graph with n vertices find the shortest path to go through each vertex exactly once) seem to show off more of dp’s power and I believe at least the LCS problem serves as a better introduction to dp. Oh well I hope my “introductory” CS course has some DP in it.

Ze Panda
confused….

Mozart’s Requiem sounds more like a war cry than a requiem, sections of it are simply too violent. It could serve as a requiem for people like Ivan The Terrible, Genghis Khan, and Henry VIII. It is not a requiem fit for an artist, a creator like Mozart. Mozart was not Beethoven. You could blame my observation on the fact that the version I have been listening to was conducted by Herbert von Karjan. I generally find music played by the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra and Karjan to be violent. Karjan seems to play more of Beethoven. Most of Beethoven’s symphonies are known to be violent. Mozart’s Requiem as conducted by Karjan is violent. You cannot readily attribute violence to either Karjan or Mozart. Violent requiems have nothing to do with the rest of this entry. Requiems as a whole have something and nothing to do with this particular entry.

It is sad to see banks collapsing, even when you don’t have money in there. There are all these unhappy people waiting in line to get their money out, there’s all this money at stake, and there are all these people scared about loosing money. As Douglas Adam once mentioned, people on the Earth are unhappy about the movement of little green pieces of paper. Humans attach great importance to little green pieces of paper. Democratic governments try to show some semblance of concern for the welfare of the people they rule. Collapsing banks cause panics. Panics cause long queues. A bank nearly-collapsed yesterday, it probably has collapsed, but the Government is keeping it in suspended animation. The (nearly) collapsed bank has a branch at my Sunday haunt. My Sunday haunt was rather crowded today, with kilometer long queues of disgruntled bank clients. People bank at places which they visit often. Lines at banks serve as a good indicator of the kind of people who visit an area. Banks which die are rarely honored by people. People and things which are not honored don’t need requiems. We would have a lot of violent requiems if people set out to compose requiems for banks.

Different areas are frequented by different kinds of people. Habits blur the power of observation. Visiting one place week after week is a habit which negatively impacts your ability to observe people. Backpackers tend to stick to more historic markets, shopping districts. Historic markets are usually far from recently built housing. Over a period of time people stop visiting places that are far. People tend to forget what they have not seen for long. No city has a single soul, a single flavor, a single kind of people or places. Historic markets tend to have a wider range of shops, and street side vendors. Street side vendors are often irritating. Some street side vendors are extremely photogenic, mostly because of their vends. Peering at backpackers, hippies, and experiencers of Indianess is often fun. It reminds you of all those little things people associate with India, things which people who live in India hardly ever do. A friend of mine blames this on cultural differences. Cultural and regional differences are fun to explore. Exploring too many differences usually leads to fatigue and a loss of sleep. Sleep seems like the most important commodity for a lot of people. The movement of commodities usually depends on the movement of little green pieces of paper. Commodities should decide the clientele and hence the environment of a particular market. Most markets sell eerily similar commodities to strangely different people. Most commodities available in markets are mass-produced. Mass-produced goods are eerily similar. Markets have characteristics other than commodities. People and clients are drawn to a market’s characteristic charm. The characteristics attributed to markets ignore the similarities which govern all places of commerce. Different markets in Delhi have different characteristics. The older the market, the crazier it seems. The crazier the market the more crowded it usually is. Newer post-colonial markets in Delhi are generally smaller. Smaller places appear crowded even when there are fewer people. Crowdedness is a measure of population density.

All threads have a beginning and an end. This thread doesn’t end. The thread was violently cut and hence lost a large portion of its identity. Threads are meant to be cut. Threads don’t mind being cut because that’s the job they are assigned. Tying knots is an art few perfect.

Ze Panda

A long long time ago in a place not so far away, there lived a computer with an orange screen, not one of those fancy P-IIs or P-IIIs, not one of those strange SGIs, a simple computer, a computer with a brain so slow that 486s could push it into oblivion, a calm quiet computer without all the paraphernalia associated with computer of late, a computer without a sound card or much of a video card (!!!!!!), a computer without much of a hard disk, a computer with RAM counted in KBs rather than MBs. A beast of the days of yore, the computer served many purposes and ran many programs, and it was the favorite haunt of a panda, a panda who shot at spaceships through a tiny gun turret, and would have continued doing so, had it not been for one of those revelatory moments when the very fabric of existence becomes visible, when existence defines itself, and so it was the day the computer showed off a new set of programs, the day the panda first laid his eyes on BASIC. Never before had the panda seen such power, never before had the panda seen so many strange words, and never before had the panda seen what a program is, and how much fun programming can be.

The first computer language I ever learnt, a language which I used through some of the bestest days of my programming history, the language which I used for everything from my first Hello world program (it actually printed out Subu, and that was back when I was 3 or 4), to my first robot controlling program, turns 40 this year (actually it did back in May, sorry for being late w. Over the years I have come across a lot of people who learnt Basic of old but have over the years shifted loyalties and started hating the beautiful language, and I find that rather strange. Yes I have shifted over to C, I no longer use BASIC for most of my common programming tasks, however I am still fascinated by BASIC code, and I enjoy coding a few of my easiest, and unnecessary programs in BASIC. A lot of people point out that BASIC introduced some of the worst flaws to have plagued programming, GOTO for instance. BASIC is one of the few languages where using GOTO is considered absolutely necessary and far from being treated as a scrounge upon programmers, GOTO is revered. What people forget is that BASIC was originally intended as a mode to simplify computing, they forget that BASIC was never really a functional language (the functional aspects of languages such as Visual Basic came on much later), and the use of GOTOs greatly simplified coding in BASIC. It is true that BASIC was probably the worst language to use for recursion, but well that’s no worse than what a lot of the “academic” functional languages do nowadays, no loops, only recursion is as bad as no recursion, only loops.

During all these intense periods of BASIC bashing, people often forget all that BASIC helped achieve. BASIC originally started out as what can best be described as an academic exercise at Dartmouth College’s CS department. The project culminated in the creation of the Dartmouth Time Sharing System and BASIC. BASIC over the years forced people to distribute source code rather than compiled programs, and this simplified program distribution actually enabled a lot of programs to spread around, entire magazines were dedicated to printing BASIC code, people typed out code at home, and though the distribution as a whole was error prone, you did have a lot of programs floating around. One of the first popular C compilers was distributed by DDJ as source code, and well in someways even C owes its popularity to the widespread use of BASIC. Until a few years ago you had most kids starting off programming by learning BASIC, and while we have shifted out of that trend by now, most people my age started off with BASIC (or Logo, but well that’s a different matter).

This week also happens to mark 400 years of the Bard’s first performance at a royal court. Coincidence? I think not.

Ze Panda

I love rubbing this in, so here’s to all my PC using friends http://www.macnewsworld.com/story/35130.html

Ze Panda

Mails are strange, über strange it would seem. I finally did get my course catalog, a month late it would seem, and mail delays with that particular package seem to have a set off a lot off alarms at Brown. Which is why I received a nice lil e-mail yesterday, warning me about potential delays in receiving the preliminary registration package, and providing me with a plethora of alternate ways. Oh well I did use an alternate way to send in my FYS (coming to that soon) preferences, and well that’s sad, because the registration package did turn up in the mail, oh ya it was in the mail today, a mere seven days after it started out, ughhhhhhh. Oh and I have also been receiving these rather unique postmarks courtesy of Brown Student Agencies, postmarks bearing the words “Greetings from Far Far Away” and a tiny stampish picture of Shrek and the Donkey, cute, but weird.

Ah yes coming back to my course thingee, I was rather miraculously placed in a CAP, my top choice at that (CS17 Integrated Intro to CS, though somewhere down the line I had a longing for CS22, oh well CS17 it is), thought that probably had more to do with a scarcity of candidates (since the only other person I know who had applied for that particular course, ended up with pretty much the same thing) than luck. Hmm now all I need is a FYS (first year seminars, coming back to that later), an acceptance to the BUAD (building understanding across differences, I know little or nothing more about this, but it sounds pretty interesting), MA35 (getting in should be simple), residence info (I’ll get this before I leave) and good food (ok the last one is a bit of an exaggeration, food however is important).

Ah yes, well choosing FYSs seems to be exceedingly hard, mostly because you’re restricted to choosing two of those, and you can never be sure about getting either, damn lotteries (preferential allocations for those who didn’t get CAP courses hardly makes it any simpler). Oh and I have seemingly made it onto a pirates (‘07ers) list of ‘08ers, interesting (umm I did mention googling is a hobby for me, as is traversing through the entangled webs woven by the net).

Ze Panda

A lot of people, who have left Delhi over the past years, have been telling me about things they miss. Most of their nostalgia has been directed towards power cuts, water shortages, dirty roads, and crowded streets. Well living in a dirty, crowded city, without electricity, water and broadband internet is overrated. Rabid dogs, now those would get my vote for the most interestingly memorable inhabitants of Delhi. Rabid dogs are one of those things I am not expecting to run into in Providence, and frankly I wouldn’t want to either. Oh and there’s a theory that Edgar Alan Poe died of rabies, but then again there are a hundred theories about how he died (alcoholism used to be the most popular one, that’s before the rabies theory came along). Poe is not overrated.

Anyways coming back to the rabid dogs. Well a few days ago they had these leopards going around mauling people somewhere around the financial capital of India (sadly they didn’t chomp on too many brokers and CEOs) and you had people moving around with guns, cages, traps, live animals, amulets, charms, images of God, and God knows what else. Well at least they had a leopard. I am locked in my house (actually I am not locked in, my parents have been requesting me not to go out) as are a hundred other people around me because there’s this rabid dog moving around my block (it’s supposed to have bitten eleven people till now, frankly that gives him a legendary kill rate, 11 people in a day, wow) biting people, spreading rabies, using up the rabies vaccine. Now the rabies vaccine is expensive, and though no longer painful (stories of 10 injections in your stomach, are umm well stories) the entire course does tend to stretch out into the better part of a year. Oh well it’s expensive, that gives a lot of people the required incentive to avoid the dastardly animal at any cost, besides Poe died of rabies, so rabies kills. We’ve had everyone from baton wielding security guards to gun totting police officers trying to avoid the dog menace, kill it or something but most of them seemed to have failed in their efforts, and the municipal corporation cannot be bothered to pick up stray rabid dogs. Besides the municipal corporation needs to fill out lengthy paper work before actually capturing or killing a dog, because dogs are protected by laws which are more stringent as compared to those meant to protect humans. But well at the end of the day I am locked inside a house (not that I step out usually, it’s just reassuring to know the I can) because a rabid dog is patrolling the streets outside.

I also got to see my parents carry metal monopods (this is what one of them looks like) to work today, they needed those for safety while walking to and from their respective cars, and well that was funny. Besides carrying a monopod to office is ok, doctors at Baghdad were supposed to have carried AK47s to work during the looting and well this surgeon told RD that he keeps a handgun with him even when he’s operating (the guy doesn’t go around killing people, so I guess the hippocratic oath is not overrated either), but well Delhi is usually supposed to be an okishly peaceful city, umm except for all those murders, rapes, bomb blasts, police encounters and other such things which seem to crop up every now and then. Oh well I am not gonna miss those either, I am gonna stick to missing rabid dogs.

Ze Panda

PS: This is an hour after the original post, and the dog has seemingly been killed by someone. However they have discovered a new jet-black rabid dog, which can operate more stealthily at night.

PPS: Seemingly the dog killed earlier, wasn’t the original culprit, and well we now have four rabid dogs at large.