Fortune Cookie Funnies

Fortune Cookie : "Your good nature will bring you happiness"
Kid beams with happiness.
Cynic beams with joy.

Fortune Cookie Funnies

Fortune Cookie : "Lend a hand to one less fortunate than yourself"
Like you do to all mankind :)

Report on a tiniest bomb

Today in Lexington, Kentucky, USA,
on way from university to home,
I heard "I hate terrorists"
craftily hurled at me
on the pedestrian path.

To the credit of this land
I can not judge back
because I have
What statisticians dispassionately call
a sample space of one.

The truth of that data point
loomed for a while
brought home by the twice turning back
of the hurler's neck, somewhat surreptitiously,
as I stood incredulous and then
laughing.

Fortune Cookie Funnies

Fortune Cookie : "Accept the affections offered to you - They are sincere"
The Universe - a grand theatre of chance - has offered you to me, and I accept you :)

Funnies

A comedian spent an afternoon trying to decide which sentence is funnier : "A tautology is a tautology." or "A tautology is a tautology is a tautology."

Fortune Cookie Funnies

Fortune Cookie : "Participation in sports may lead you to a lucrative career"
And a tautology is a tautology.

Fortune Cookie Funnies

Fortune Cookie : "Seek new friends, and you will find them"
Indeed, like I found one in you ;)

Fortune Cookie Funnies

Fortune Cookie : "Kindness makes for Happiness"
Your kind words are making me happy :)

Classical Forms in our Arts, Performances and Traditions

Through senses, one lives. one senses through
Now, what's sublime about sublime; what's now
There is now Here. now is there
Dancing Body and Mind and Body dancing
Here, silently admires, silently here
recognizes Classical Form. Classical recognizes:
Beauty of sensations of beauty.
Easy made hard made easy.
From head to heel to head. From
Senses to Memory then, and then, Memory to Senses.

Fortune Cookie Funnies + Paradox

Fortune Cookie : "Follow your beliefs"
My belief is not to follow but to lead.

Fortune Cookie Funnies

Fortune Cookie : "Luck will visit you on the next full moon"
hmmm, may be I will get a lucky fortune cookie next full moon ...

Funnies + Not-so-a-Paradox

labor omnia vincit
pigritia vincit laborem

Hard work conquers all
Laziness conquers hard work

Fortune Cookie Funnies

Fortune Cookie : "Make those special talents you have work like a charm"
Dour Logician : Isn't that a contradiction ??
Stud : oooo yeahhhh, but it isn't work
Worker : I wish ...
Clown Logician : I definite need to learn that from you !

Sermon + Hypochondriac + Geeky + Paradox

The way to not suffer through suffering is by viewing it as part of that flow in which we keep temporarily flowing through distributions over the whole population of emotional levels for different emotions, i.e. headaches may be fine, a haemorrhage is certainly not.


Resolution of the paradox :

A way to suffer through suffering is by viewing it as part of that flow in which we keep temporarily flowing through distributions over the whole population of emotional levels for different emotions, i.e. headaches may be fine, a haemorrhage is certainly not.

Fortune Cookie Funnies + Not-so-a-paradox

Fortune Cookie : "Joy will come with the return of a good friend"
Indeed, my good friend !

Fortune Cookie Funnies + Geeky

Fortune Cookie : "Soon, you'll have a chance at a profitable transaction"
Seems like you can be my effective team partner in the non-zero sum game of generating nonsense.

Fortune Cookie Funnies + Not-so-a-Paradox

Fortune Cookie : "A surprise treat awaits you"
Fortune Cookie, aren't you lessening the element of surprise somewhat ? Or is this your way of accentuating it ?

Sadomasochism and Failure in Poetry / Poem for Poets

Page is blank
blank is the page.

Stare, stare, and stare
The page remains bare

All over lies remains
Of fertile decay to share
Still, the page lies verily bare

But does not lie,
nor butter up,
nor stare back;
There is no combat there,
a simple contrast in calm white
the hard-to-get lover if you will

come to me, then come to me

We can go to a golden desert,
roll a rock up the great dune,
the sky will be vast, cerulean,
fatigue will render vivid and simple,
trick us in to beauty,
punish us in to creation.

Shall we take a break then ?
Let us cheer up now.

Fortune Cookie Funnies + Not-so-a-paradox

I got a fortune cookie that said, "Re-evaluate your long term plans for success." I re-evaluated and decided to not consult fortune cookies for any planning.

Fortune Cookie Funnies + Not-so-a-Paradox

I had the bad fortune of counting as good fortune a fortune cookie that said, "Some unexpected event will bring you good fortune".

Funnies + Paradox

Q: What is the name of something that can not be named ?
A: Unnameable.

The Adventurer and the Poet

Out there
Alone in the wilderness,
here with mates in the city jungle,
the wheels turn, the knees give and take,
the ground responds, the hands do their thing,
the head does not think about thinking,
the body and the machine self-solve,

dissolve into the eyes
of a head
to fire electrify
a new synchrony
that sometimes inhabits
the space that the poet loves.

This wonderful, amazing space
that all of us inhabit
from time to time
intersects fondly with
a terrain where
brick be word
clay be sound
sculpt might be marble
and play is surely adventure
among myriad other unnameables.



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

Dedicated to Danny Macaskill

Looking out of LH 426's window

The sea of white clouds
the snaking river on orange-brown silt
within the sea of trees
The sea itself
The snow-white earth-black mountains
the snow crystals all crazed
on the window
The wing and the sun and the blue sky
betraying nothing.

There's so much beauty on any side of us,
that you can keep writing and writing,
and buying refills and beautiful fountain pens,
and singing songs, and making movies,
till the audience is bored so much that
it gives purpose to boredom
and still
you can keep writing and writing

till your bones grind down in the process
and that will also be beautifully poetic
like love

Accomplished Fugitives

Flow through Crowds. / Surety of Knowing. / (Like Carbon on Cellulose.) / Baby accomplishes Blindness. / Grown-ups help. / Escape the Fearful. / To the Wonderful then / In the Accomplished Fugitive. / Celebrate precedes Elevate.


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PS : We can keep ourselves so busy, fill our lives with so many diversions, stuff our heads with so much knowledge, involve ourselves with so many people and cover so much ground that we never have time to probe the fearful and wonderful world within… By middle life most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves.

- John W. Gardner

Slaves of Ego - I Nagarjuna and Taking Offence

You can never see or tell what goes on behind a pair of eyes. Even after beers or any substance that claims to chill them down. Even when you are discussing philosophy of life or meaning of existence, topics that are supposed to bring out the best. (Perhaps it was mixing of the two - beers and philosophy - that is to be blamed.) Wonder how Nagarjuna would have reacted to his detractors. A pair of eyes landed on his book of philosophy centuries after his time, and made gentle fun of the "deep-sounding"ness of some random statement in it without analyzing too much. Very cheeky since Nagarjuna was not there to make fun back, in the right spirit of course. To this the other pair of eyes, till then distracted by other things, to this said fiercely, "Nagarjuna is the one of the greatest philosophers there is !" They took offence at Nagarjuna being made fun of, the first pair supposed. What did the second pair really see ? Or was it blinded by the knowledge of knowledge ?

"Deep-sounding"ness has a seductive charm of its own. Thankfully """deep-sounding"ness"" has nothing going for it sonically.

Sermon on Selfish Tears and Pity

I shed tears for the world and its hapless children
when I am starving for affection
and love ....

Rumi or Iqbal said,
"In presence of Beauty is Liberation"
(Independent of sad or content ....)

The Megalopolis

.... is where you can die in full anonymity
if you so desire
do not worry
the horns, headlights and headphones
will drown out,
tall pretty photos in shopping malls
will hide your deathly silence,
even if you are committed to a communal death
as an anonymous part of a small crowd
say in an average chawl on fire,
even if you are the poor white tiger
that comes once in hundred generations.

-------------------------------------p

Tribute to Krishen Khanna's The Dead and the Dying

Let the Painter immortalize you then
while you are dead and rising with a shroud covering your eyes,
or while you in death watch the dying
perhaps playing cards (play the game)
from a weird angle, God's mad pastime.

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For 9/11 and Iraq victims :

(Consider not dying with a big crowd in tall buildings,
who knows your desire for a too anonymous death
turns out to be the weirdest starting point
for killing the wishes of good family people
to die in peace, among friends, not in full anonymity,
if you care that is
for all the pedantic brouhaha about people-power democracy,
globalized disconnectedness, universal connectedness, etc.)




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

2/jul/14, Mumbai

PS : Krishen Khanna's The Dead and the Dying, and shout-out for Arvind Adiga's White Tiger 

Cycling Trip by the Donau in a Parellel Universe

The whim silently became surreal that day 

thanks to the great grey-white river;

something like fairies whimsically out on a weekend flying trip
out of nowhere finding paradise.

The clouds and chill started by teasing, soon became friends,
the rented cycles beneath us became little chariots,
while the whole scene covered in pure misty spray
conspired to become heavenly.

We willingly became part of the kind river,
flowing along with it, along with giant freight-boats
slowly flowing with their men,
along with the trees and shrubs,
wet earth and road and fallen white leaves,
along with the tiny sheds, the clockwork dam,
pretty houses and the glorious castle on the way,
tinily drinking in the kindness surrounding us

so that soon enough,
laughter and beatitude was flowing
out of us along with misty breath,
and we felt something truly unforgettable.

We felt like lost fairies.

Till, of course, we returned.

For the average Mumbai Taxi Driver

Sweat, Toil, Grime
makes for a classic trope
in fiction.

This trope is meant for him,
what the luckier customer
experiences as discomfort
or vicarious reading pleasure.

Yet
he is sometimes one with his machine
like a champion racer,
sometimes a scathing social commentator, or a sermonizer
of the highest caliber,
or a most moral value-upholding man, or a kind man, or both,
an entrepreneur dreaming of big things,
maybe a master raconteur-reminiscer of stories
from a time and place from whence he came -- and remembers --
or a man among his mates during breaks or traffic-stops,
sharing jokes and stuff,
or sometimes a plain tired man, perhaps foul and angry,
caught up in the circus of traffic and life,
another classic trope.

On beauty of Simplicity

Let me rather switch to surfactants, molecules with two parts: a polar head
which likes water, and an aliphatic tail which hates water. Benjamin Franklin
performed a beautiful experiment using surfactants; on a pond at Clapham
Common, he poured a small amount of oleic acid, a natural surfactant
which tends to form a dense film at the water-air interface. He measured
the volume required to cover all the pond. Knowing the area, he then knew
the height of the film, something like three nanometers in our current units.
This was to my knowledge the first measurement of the size of molecules. In
our days, when we are spoilt with exceedingly complex toys, such as nuclear
reactors or synchrotron sources, I particularly like to describe experiments
of this Franklin style to my students

-- from P. G. de Gennes's Nobel Lecture

Sermon on mental noise

Giving shape to the goings-on in the background is like drawing a human's cartoon.

Untitled

What a grand flight it was my darling
Remember the daring, when all was light, when all was bright

What a grander fall it was my beloved
Heard no thud, no one bled, heart's messed up is all.


---

7th june 14, tifr mumbai

The Academics

Some people so caught
In playing the big game
By its softer rules, its looser frames,
That seems they forgot

It is only they,
who really rule the rules
And not the rules be the ruler,
let That be clear like the shining day.

Nothing against cliques,
it is but inevitable
Forget able or unable,
lest totally forget how people click

one person with another.

The Solar Freakin' Roadways Video

An idea ---
that among ideas
one single great idea
tossed out by some fellows
tinkering and playing about
may improve the lot
of all of us ---
brought synesthetic choking-up.

Thanks to the superbly edited-in sentimentality
by the crazy craftsman using someone's well-crafted music
near the end of that video designed to go all viral
who believes - I believe - in a better world
where marketing is not a need whenever


PS : Thanks to Pulak A. for the cool facebook post on contranyms !

PPS : https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways#home

crazy craftsman - Who made the video ?!

someone's well-crafted music - Mike Sempert's "Finest Line"


PPPS : same driving force as in "To a Friendly Ear"; same concern in the second stanza as in "The anthropologist's Revelation"

unfeeling sadness and its recognition

Cute little hearts together
on top of the pretty cappuccino
smashed by the swirl of the spoon
to a static photo of Chaos.

Lack of power to undo histories
leads often to despair.
Sometimes to melancholic acceptance.

Or
to a crusty, unfeeling muteness
that presents the semblance of healing.

At the end though,
the cappuccino finished
its pleasures somewhere dissipated,
Moving about becomes indispensable.

Roadside Observation in South Bombay

The scene made pedestrian use of the thousand noises,
the nearby giant cricket maidans and its equal people,
the giant of a Bombay traffic, and its equal people,
the dusty air and the muggy heat around
in the background.

Hero's eyes forced momentarily into focus,
on his way to somewhere,
by advanced digital cameras
clicking away like miniature thunder-cracks
As the poor man posed as a poor man
for them.

How wonderfully more dramatic
would it have been
if those advanced digital cameras
were in fact suspended in the air,
moving around indeed like fighter planes
with guns.

Still no less than an absurd melodrama,
just like in the corny old righteous movies
where men have gone up their own asses,
except for the tremendous melodies of tragedy,
where the hero used to save the day.

Groovy Electronic Music with Good Instrumentation

Cool

Cooked up by Them.

We Move.

Respond

to the Reverb.

Without Questions.

To Complete

The Cool.

Cooked up by Them.

Respect.

On Human Intelligence and Natural Laws

What is the relation between Human Intelligence and Natural Laws ? A very basic observation is that human brains have the ability to use code, classify things as similar and dissimilar, etc. -- perhaps also coming up with meta-mathematical arguments for problems which don't yield to algorithmic solutions, like showing undecidability, etc. likely related to Penrose's notions. Of course, human brains are subject to external constraints like a) physical - energy conservation, material and physical limitations, b) historical - biological evolution. But those constraints are akin to constraints on "hardware". Then, the "software" part of the brain, where does it come from ? The novel abilities (empirically speaking) of using code to process information in a way that has nothing directly to do with how physical information (this refers to actual material-energetical physical entities like rocks, electrons, etc.) is processed in Nature according to natural laws. This is obvious, but several arguments bolster this already evident statement. That we can be arbitrary in our choice of code, that we can parse and process the paradoxical instances contained in the practice of human language, etc., that we can categorize things (dogs are different than cats) with classification as an end in itself in a sense quite different from how an electron can "categorize" protons different from neutrons based on its physical interactions. In short, the notion of purpose is self-evident to us in terms of its use. While it has no real place in what is commonly understood to be natural phenomena. Nature just evolves according to natural laws, it is a big giant computer processing physical information. In terms of computing, the human brain can process maps between objects and maps between maps, etc. in a multi-layered way which is instrumental towards intelligent behaviour. We should keep in mind that 1) the a big part of human brain is definitely a probabilistic engine that assigns likelihoods to "beliefs" and bases its worldview on them, 2) this is a continual process of change and the likelihoods of beliefs change according to data acquired by the sense faculties. This part is crucial to our survival.

If human intelligence could syllogistically follow from natural law, that would mean we can start with natural law as axioms and arrive at human intelligence as a theorem. Human brain computes, that much we can agree on. What about the standard digital computer. Of course, it is governed by natural laws. But its behaviour is not solely governed by natural law. There is the software which is programmed by a programmer. That can be thought of as the initial condition on which natural laws act. Now, it is known where the programs consisting the software of the digital computer come from. What about the same question for the human brain. Does the human brain more or less compute like a digital compute, albeit its algorithms might be differently sophisticated than that commonly used in digital computers but still reducible to a Turing machine ?  Let it be noted here that there is a thread of computing research related to neural nets that is inspired by the human brain; furthermore there is research on probabilistic models of computation and associated errors and bounds on them, as compared to deterministic computation.

Let's provisionally say that biological evolution has selected for certain structures, etc. that could mimic actions of useful programs like pattern recognition, image processing, etc. depending on what gave humans advantage for survival in early history. It is reasonable to accept that these program mimicking structures were complex enough, since they had to process complex information in the environment. Now the novel abilities of the human brain would have followed from the interaction between these complex structures existing in the skull. But how they followed seems not to be a reductionist question. There is no step-by-step way of going from natural laws of the electrons, etc. to this level of complexity. This is the main paradigm of complexity science. This is somewhat analogous to the myriad phases of matter when it becomes complex enough, and this wide variety comes from the same underlying natural laws that govern the "simple" entities that form the complex system.

Basically, the paper being written upon and the ink doing the writing can never understand what is being written. This is likely a category mistake since "understand" does not apply to paper and ink, but let's continue with that. To elaborate, we could use any combination of sounds, gestures, etc. to communicate that there is danger or that a dog is similar to other dogs. Natural law explains all those combinations. The historical accident of one particular choice can also be said to be arriving from natural law. Thus, natural law explains the biology/chemistry/physics of using sounds, gestures, etc. for communication and also the particular dynamical evolution that lead to the particular historical choice. The real question - for me - that remains to be explained is rather the fact that how did human brain evolve the faculty for abstraction, and an appreciation (biological or otherwise) that using code for communication and achieving desired ends, and classification enhances it in a significant way. That seems to require a leap in computing. To go back to the digital computer, the corresponding leap was in fact taken by the programmer and the computing scientists before him or her. How do we explain our faculty for algebra and logic. How do we think of propositions and the relations between them in the abstract. Yet in terms of experience, these faculties come to us either naturally or with some amount of training. At some point in history, human brains would have made this leap. How to explain that historical event is the key question for me.

Perhaps a guiding light in this direction would be the study of development of algebra within the field of mathematics; by looking at what Newton and Liebniz did for calculus I can say that their achievement is one of those moments where a proto-thought came into existence after substantial effort and then became formalized to be copied by the rest of species. My interest lies in these moments from a phenomenological and computing perspective. How does the brain accomplish such moments or periods as a computer. It could be a random walk in idea space guided by previous experience and training until the proto-thought is reached and is recognized for its potential again by previous experience and training. Human language is another thing that should be understood from a computing perspective (linguistics has made a lot of progress on the phenomenology of human language which sets guiding principles.) Hark also to Penrose's idea of a human brains having access to Plato's ideal world which exists independent of our natural world.

To clarify this is not a hardware question for me; we can comparatively easily imagine how the hardware side of this aspect of brain evolution would have taken place. This is a software/algorithmic question for me. We can also see that this is not a vacuous question. This is because there are many species who can not perform the rudiments of abstract thought, while humans can perform levels of abstraction that can not be considered low compared to these species. This qualitative difference in brains remains to be explained and is a valid scientific question. Can chimpanzees - who can count if taught - do algebra in the sense of x standing for something yet unknown ?

Does this imply that there is some ingredient to human intelligence that can not be accounted for by natural laws and concomitant phenomena ?

Or does this imply a Wolfram-esque idea or Conway's game of life like scenario where we are complex entities doing "intelligent" things where intelligent just stands for complex ways of processing information. And the only real meaningful (in the colloquial sense of the term !) thing to do is quantify and perhaps classify complexity.

The later is probably a better point of view to start.




WRONG Any computation would require some finite amount of information processing and thus finite amount of energy. Now we agree that there is a physical limit on how human bodies does what it does (including the process of starting with natural law as axioms and arriving at human intelligence as a theorem). Suppose A0 that "Natural law implies human intelligence". Then we could show that A1 is true where A1 is "Humans have the intelligence to show that Natural law implies human intelligence" or "Humans have the intelligence to show A0" can show using sufficiently simple logical steps. That needs an expenditure of some amount of energy. If we could show A1, then we should also be able to show A2 that "Huams have the intelligence to show that they are intelligent enough to show that Natural law implies Human intelligence" or "Humans have the intelligence to show A1". This requires an additional amount of energy. Thus we should be able to A(n+1) that "Humans have the intelligence to show An". To show An for all n would requires too much energy. WRONG --- because first we can stop with A0, second the number of humans doing the showing can diverge too with any loss of principle.

Sermon+Funnies on Creativity

Creativity and Digestion are very analogous starting from the raw products, the process, all the way to the end products, including the farts !

Sermon on Wit

Wit at its cleverest is at the expense of no one. Or better rather, of everyone !


PS : One may indeed preach on everything !

Growing up / Does the old shady tree know its own growth ?

Lapse in the head
the time ticking by

The average seed resting in its earthy womb

-- in a kind of limbo where nothing seems to happen --,

Then
Suddenly bursts out of the soil,
grasps the earth,
one representation of the elemental flow
as time passes by

and somewhere waves splash on to sands under the moon,
the stars sway,
fluids in spinal columns slosh,

while that seed pushes out of the earth, the force of water
meets the sun to reveal a green
that might equal life before getting twisted,
to so many scores and tunes, it keeps pushing and pulling,
hardens,
the leaves come out,
the flowers give back in full bloom
that which is circling,
a form to include others in its orbit.

This is one story captured by the passing of time,
not yet finished,
and much too small a part of the whole ...

The question is thus -
Does the average seed see its story pass by ?
How much we know our stories,
Lapsing by for better or worse ?


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A related point is that living with loves ones is good for the telling of our stories, the inherent lonesomeness of a mortal journey must not be practiced too much ...

Sermon on Intelligence

Measuring up to being intelligent is one of the unintelligent things to pursue.

Measuring up to being best is, on the other hand, one of the best things to pursue.


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An irrelevant question that the intelligent person must not ponder is whether one has the attention-deficit disorder of a genius or that of a fool ...

Sermon on Simplicity

A form of earthiness that is endlessly endearing is to be in the heavens, avoiding the hells as much as possible. These heavens and hells of ours connect us to earth without guaranteeing the good earthiness.

Sermon on the Political Animal

Being animal is my condition,
my rise and fall,
Being star-dust is my miracle,
my truth and release.

Why the music of Karunesh is great for me

(At some phase)
When I am woken up by the dull incongruity of my dreams,
some waking moments still enthrall.
A retreat in mere existence
is always there to go to - not to be had -
where words or math are not necessary tools.

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



At some phase
When I was woken up by the dull incongruity of my dreams,
some waking moments still enthralled.
A retreat in mere existence
is always there to go to - not to be had -
where words or math are not necessary tools.