November 5, 2008

Democrats In Deep Gloom Over Inability To Fail

Filed under: Current Affairs — anilm @ 10:24 am

The Democrats are in deep disarray over the devastating success of their candidate Barack Obama. In cities, towns and college campuses across the country, the same refrain could be heard.

"We got complacent, dude," admitted PingMe32, a self-declared transhuman. "Just because we've failed for twenty odd years, we thought we could take the American people for granted. But they were hip to our game. We totally deserved to win."

But others vehemently disagreed:

"I don't know what else we could have done," mused a baffled Dr. Tom Fumblesworth, president of the Fruit Fly Anti-Defamation League. "We picked a guy named Hussein, a black guy, a Kenyan-American, an elitist from Harvard, a community rabble-rouser, a guy who likes to use complicated words like 'audacity.' That's at least four syllables. I guess the message is that we should have played it safe and picked an illegal immigrant as the nominee. Well, America, we hear you, loud and clear."

Perhaps this unidirectional finger-pointing itself explains why the party failed in its efforts to lose. The party, insiders confided, had moved far from its roots of inconsistency and incoherence. They had moved like an organism with six legs attached to one body instead of six bodies attached to one leg. The signs of success were on the wall, and while the democrats texted, facebooked, blogged and goosed them to each other, they'd forgotten the words of Jimmy Carter: "A little organization is a dangerous thing."

Anil Menon, maverick maverick and self-declared human, found comfort in liberal mathematics:

"A system built for failure cannot succeed at failing on a consistent basis. It's asking for perfect imperfection, and Godel only promised imperfect perfection. Failure is not always an option."

Leading democrats declared they would simply have to try harder. Many could be spotted fanning out to the libraries and book-meets to hammer out a new success-proof strategy.

"We need to read more, study more, think more and do less," sighed award-winning writer and feminazi, Mary Wollstonecraft. "We've managed not to come through before. The darkest night awaits the brightest dawn. We will endure. We. Will. Endure."

If only failure were so simple. Against talent, ambition, hopes and human will, what can mere negativity achieve? If a Barack Obama is possible, if such a possibility is possible, if probability itself has become a subset of the doable, then the Impossible may be, just maybe, the last citizen left its once vast and marmoreal imperium. Be kind: hug a democrat today.

October 22, 2008

Moonshot

Filed under: Science — anilm @ 7:58 am

All right, let's all calm down. Mars is still a few weeks away and the center of the galaxy will take at least a month. Maybe even two.

Who cares!!!!! Chandrayaan I of 2,4,5, 10 Million buts and bolts is on its way to the moon. The moon! The moon. The goddamn moon! I'm so thrilled I could bark. I am, actually.

It seems the payload has to be under 1500 kg, which worried me. 1500 kgs means there's space for about 18 dancers (80 kgs/dancer), and with eight dancers for the hero and eight for the heroine, that leaves a total of just 80 kgs for the 11 scientific payloads. Tight. Very tight. Still, if the damn vehicle managed to crawl through the Indian bureaucracy, anything is feasible.

What a long, long wait it has been. The Sanskrit poets had been tempting us for centuries. Just listen to Sarva:

The moon that spreads its rays jasmine-white
as lovely as the breast of a Kashmiri girl
and its mark, as waterlily-dark,
is like the painting of her breast with musk.

I can't confirm the accuracy of the simile, alas, but the man sounds like he knows what he's talking about. At any rate, if that doesn't motivate an astronomer to fiddle with his astrolabe, I don't know what will.

"Chandrayaan," as the newspapers tell us, is "ancient" Sanskrit for "moon vehicle." Ancient Sanskrit is Vedic Sanskrit, and Chandrayaan is probably more like "post-vedic" Sanskrit usage, even though both pieces (Chandra and yaan) do appear in the Rig-ved. The word "Soma" is often used as a synonym for the moon (sometime visualized as the cup containing soma, the ambrosia of the Gods, namely, Heineken beer) so perhaps Chandrayaan could also be converse-translated as "beer-vehicle" in ancient English.

And Soma is what our ancients should be tippling at the moment. That Chandrayaan is making its way towards the vaulting arch of heaven is due in part to all those long centuries of slokas, sutras, shastras and smritis. Let a poet (Dharmakirti) have the last say:

The East has borne the Moon.
Love dances and the nymphs of the directions laugh,
while the wind scatters holi,
the pollen of waterlilies, through heaven's court.

Shubh yatra, Chandrayaan.

 

September 15, 2008

Evolution Of The Obvious: The Foster-Kokko Model Of Superstition

Filed under: Mathematics,Science — anilm @ 11:03 pm

Theevolutionofsuperstitiontoddsch_2
Social evolutionists Kevin Foster and Hanna Kokko, in their recent paper in The Proceedings Of The Royal Society,  set themselves the following problem:

“…under what conditions might a tendency for performing behaviours that incorrectly assign cause and effect be adaptive from an individual fitness point of view?”

It’s puzzling why the authors think there is anything to explain. Is superstitious reasoning an inheritable, evolutionary feature? Take woodcutting. Amateurs will work wood in incorrect and erroneous ways. That’s not to say there isn’t an efficient and systematic way to work wood that can be taught and encouraged. Do we really need an evolutionary explanation why we evolved to have babies who don’t know the difference between an adze and a maul?

Foster and Kokko’s real motivation is revealed, I think, in an earlier paragraph:

“In a world increasingly dominated by science, superstitious and indeed religious thinking typically take a back seat in academic affairs. However, superstitions play a central role in many small-scale societies, and indeed remain prevalent in the popular culture of all societies. Why is this? Can science rationalize this seemingly most irrational aspect of human behaviour?”

Needless to say, the authors’ rationalization is that superstitious reasoning may have some adaptive value. It’s a curiously Victorian attitude to human cognition; as if irrationality were somehow taboo, and town and manor had to be reassured that the phenomenon only appeared to be irrational.

One of my irrational habits, while reading papers on evolutionary models, is to substitute the key word– in this case, “superstitious reasoning”– with something else, say, “a fondness for weevils.” I’m glad to report that applying the technique to this paper produced an equally cogent explanation of why weevil-lovers roam the planet Earth.

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