Biscuits and tea with William: YouTuber and Maths-enthusiast Vihart on reaching y...

Follow This LInk to read the rest of the post--->Biscuits and tea with William: YouTuber and Maths-enthusiast Vihart on reaching y...: In this video Vihart discusses a surprisingly relevant, to the internet today, piece of writing from the 70s in a video that should be inte...

Couldn't agree more. Reminds me a bit of this xkcd comic.

(Note: Finding xkcd comics that are relevant to every situation you come across is the first sign of xkcd addiction.)

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: A Review

I finally finished reading all 85 chapters in HPMoR. Although it is a work in progress it is still one of the best books I've ever read. Until now the books I thought most highly about were the books in the Chaos Walking Trilogy written by Patrick Ness. That book was always full of excitement. Every sentence made you more interested. Every sentence made you want to read the next.

HPMoR is better not just because of the excitement in its pages. It does have exciting chapters. There are many chapters where my pulse literally started racing. (Personally I think Chapters 51-61 and Chapters 79-85 were the most exciting.) HPMoR is better because of the amount of knowledge and inspiration it can impart. It has evolved into something more than just a piece of fanfiction. It's when I read stories like this that I realize how much strict copyright laws are stifling creativity. I wonder how many more excellent works of literary art we could have enjoyed if copyright restrictions didn't extend so long after the lives of the authors.

WARNING: THE REST OF THE POST PROBABLY CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS. READ ONLY IF YOU'RE OKAY WITH SPOILERS. 

I was particularly inspired by the thoughts expressed in chapter 45. Let me quote what is in my opinion one of the most beautiful thoughts I've ever seen expressed. It is so beautiful that even now as I read it to copy and paste, I feel goosebumps erupting all over my body. The kind that you often experience after  you stumble upon a heavenly piece of music.

Harry thought of the stars, the image that had almost held off the Dementor even without a Patronus. Only this time, Harry added the missing ingredient, he'd never truly seen it but he'd seen the pictures and the video. The Earth, blazing blue and white with reflected sunlight as it hung in space, amid the black void and the brilliant points of light. It belonged there, within that image, because it was what gave everything else its meaning. The Earth was what made the stars significant, made them more than uncontrolled fusion reactions, because it was Earth that would someday colonize the galaxy, and fulfill the promise of the night sky.

Would they still be plagued by Dementors, the children's children's children, the distant descendants of humankind as they strode from star to star? No. Of course not. The Dementors were only little nuisances, paling into nothingness in the light of that promise; not unkillable, not invincible, not even close. You had to put up with little nuisances, if you were one of the lucky and unlucky few to be born on Earth; on Ancient Earth, as it would be remembered someday. That too was part of what it meant to be alive, if you were one of the tiny handful of sentient beings born into the beginning of all things, before intelligent life had come fully into its power. That the much vaster future depended on what you did here, now, in the earliest days of dawn, when there was still so much darkness to be fought, and temporary nuisances like Dementors.

Mum and Dad, Hermione's friendship and Draco's journey, Neville and Seamus and Lavender and Dean, the blue sky and brilliant Sun and all bright things, the Earth, the stars, the promise, everything humanity was and everything it would become...

On the wand, Harry's fingers moved into their starting positions; he was ready, now, to think the right sort of warm and happy thought.

And Harry's eyes stared directly at that which lay beneath the tattered cloak, looked straight at that which had been named Dementor. The void, the emptiness, the hole in the universe, the absence of color and space, the open drain through which warmth poured out of the world.

The fear it exuded stole away all happy thoughts, its closeness drained your power and strength, its kiss would destroy everything that you were.

I know you now, Harry thought as his wand twitched once, twice, thrice and four times, as his fingers slid exactly the right distances, I comprehend your nature, you symbolize Death, through some law of magic you are a shadow that Death casts into the world.

And Death is not something I will ever embrace.

It is only a childish thing, that the human species has not yet outgrown.

And someday...

We'll get over it...

And people won't have to say goodbye any more...

The wand rose up and leveled straight at the Dementor.

"EXPECTO PATRONUM!"

There is also this little tidbit from the next chapter.

"I have a dream," said Harry's voice, "that one day sentient beings will be judged by the patterns of their minds, and not their color or their shape or the stuff they're made of, or who their parents were. Because if we can get along with crystal things someday, how silly would it be not to get along with Muggleborns, who are shaped like us, and think like us, as alike to us as peas in a pod? The crystal things wouldn't even be able to tell the difference. How impossible is it to imagine that the hatred poisoning Slytherin House would be worth taking with us to the stars? Every life is precious, everything that thinks and knows itself and doesn't want to die. Lily Potter's life was precious, and Narcissa Malfoy's life was precious, even though it's too late for them now, it was sad when they died. But there are other lives that are still alive to be fought for. Your life, and my life, and Hermione Granger's life, all the lives of Earth, and all the lives beyond, to be defended and protected, EXPECTO PATRONUM!"

And there was light.

I've had similar thoughts over the years but I could never have expressed it so beautifully and so elegantly. These are, in my opinion the best parts of he book. If you read the book and had to chose a single idea that you could remember forever and forget the rest of the book choose these.


I can't wait for Chapters 86-91 to be released.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

I've never been a big fan of fanfiction. I think that the alternate storyline presented in the fanfic intereferes with and contaminates my perception of the fictional universe as presented by the original author. Perhaps it matters so much to me only because I think too much about how fictional universes work. But I am a person who doesn't believe that thinking too much is a problem.

In my view any fictional universe is like a parallel universe governed by natural laws specified by the original author. But no living author can completely write down every single detail of the natural laws and physical occurrences in their fictional universe. It is impractical and will probably detract from the entertainment readers will get out of the book. So when, at the end of the last book in the Harry Potter series, J.K Rowling adds a section preceded by the statement "Nineten Years Later" we have to fill in with our own imagination how exactly Harry grew up in those 19 years and how exactly he got married, what job he took up, et cetera, et cetera ..

Until the original author fills in those details they are mysterious, unknown.

But if you really stop to think you'll realize that nothing actually happened in those 19 years. The fictional universe has no  real  existence. It's not like a biography of Albert Einstein in which the biographer says "Einstein spent his time in the Swiss patent office working on physics he liked." and we know for certain that this happened and there was a specific way in which it happened, a specific way he wrote, an expression on his face as he thought. In a fictional story no detail in the story actually exists until the author writes it down. And to me only  the details specified by the author are actually part of the fictional universe everything else not directly deducible that was imagined by the reader (or fanfic writers) are variables. They are just one possible way in which it could have turned out but not the way it actually turned out. So when I read fan fiction I ususally feel as though I am reading a fake story. I constantly fear that the real Harry Potter or the real Tom Sawyer is going to burst into my mental reading room to claim that all those things never really happened and that the fanfic is a big fat lie.

However Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a rare exception. I have never been more impressed by fan fiction. In fact, I think it would be completely unfair to call this story fan fiction. I think it has evolved into something more. It is more accurate to say that HPMoR is a fantastic tool that teaches the principles of rationality that merely uses the framework and characters of the Harry Potter universe as a basis. I have never been more engrossed in a book before. The first time I discovered HPMoR I read for about five consecutive hours completely absorbed and never once getting bored. In the end I had to tear myself away from it after realizing that pulling an all nighter probably wasn't going to help me with writing that pesky exam I had the next morning.

Trust me, this is a story you should NOT miss. You can start here: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality In a few days I will post a more detailed review of the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

The Arduino

About a week ago I bought an Arduino, a single board micro controller as part of my venture into hobby electronics. It is an amazing tool to work with. And it's completely open source! I just have to connect it to the computer using a USB port and upload a program using the IDE freely available on the Arduino website and I'm good to go.

Here's a little demo. I wrote a basic program which plays a melody.

I tried to add in some chords as well but it turns out that the Arduino can only generate one frequency at a time even if you have two speakers. So you can't use it to generate elaborate musical pieces. It works well for old 8-bit music from the legendary 1990s game consoles though.

Relativity and Problem Solving Time Loops

Science and math geeks have two reasons to celebrate today.

Firstly, today is Pi Day!! In some countries todays date is written as 3/14 which are the first three digits of the Mathematical constant $\pi$ . So people around the world get together to celebrate the world's most famous mathematical constant.

Today is also the Birthday of THE Albert Einstein who has become something of a mascot for physics and science in general. The strange thing was, although Einstein became famous among the general public during the early 1900s for his theories, nobody really understood his theories. They just liked the crazy consequences.

I was really expecting a Google Doodle for the occasion on the Google homepage but they decided to honour  Akira Yoshizawa instead. (Google, you have disappointed me.)

Speaking of Einstein, my A-Levels are now over. So I'm getting plenty of time to delve deep into those obscure bits of physics which were too time consuming for an A-Level student. I've been reading up a lot on Einstein's Theory of Relativity in the last two months. I can finally say that I understand the basics of tensors without feeling dishonest.

A few posts ago, when I was testing out $\LaTeX$ I put down this equation in with many others.

$R_{{\mu}{\nu}} - \frac{1}{2} g_{{\mu}{\nu}} R + g_{{\mu}{\nu}} \Lambda = \frac{8{\pi}G }{c^{4}} T_{{\mu}{\nu}}$

This summarizes everything about the theory of relativity in one elegant equation and this equation is what I hope to eventually understand. Right now, the only part of the equation I know anything about is the $g_{{\mu}{\nu}}$ or the metric tensor.

Learning about relativity inevitably leads to thinking about the mind boggling consequences of time travel. I came across this really interesting application of theoretical time travel while reading on the internet. This trick works even if it is only possible to send information back to the past.

Imagine I have a machine using which can send a Word file "Something.doc" back to the past. If I am trying to crack a simple 3 digit number lock, I can use the time machine to my advantage.

I wait for my future self to send me a file labelled "Combination.doc". If the file contains a combination I try out the combination. If the combination works, I create a file named "Combination.doc" , write down the correct combination and send it back to my past self.

If the combination does not work, I add one to the 3 digit number, write it down in the newly created "Combination.doc" and send it back to my past self.

If if commit to doing this, the only situation which does not lead to a paradox is when I send back to the past the correct combination and so the very first time I open the file, it must contain the correct combination! It's kind of like a "do ... while" programming loop in real life.

The amazing thing is that this technique allows a person to solve any problem which involves combination without any effort at all! This could work even on email accounts which lock you out if you enter the wrong password. Since the information is going back in time, even if the the loop tests the  passwords a billion times, the actual password entry happens only once outside the time loop. Or you could get a hundred percent on any multiple choice test without reading a single question (Of course, if you're smart enough to invent this machine, you probably don't need to answer the questions in the first place.)!

I wonder if this would actually work if we had a real information time machine.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia is an interesting phenomenon that I discovered while watching a talk on TED by the neuroscientist V.S Ramachandran. It's when people have this amazing ability to make strange associations between seemingly unrelated concepts like sound and colour or numbers and shapes.

Toward the end of this video there is an interesting demonstration of something called the Bouba/Kiki effect.

Two Blobs

The effect is seen in an experiment where a large number of people are shown this image (separately of course) and asked to assign the name Bouba and Kiki to any of the shapes. More that 90% of the people name the shape on the left as Kiki and the one on the right as Bouba. This shows a kind of shape-sound synesthesia that is present in all of us. 

I've also been thinking about how this seems to be a learned skill. A person does not learn how to read or count without being taught. And since synesthesia occurs in learned symbols, I think it is to some extent learnable. I think it might be possible to learn to be synesthetic.

So I am going to do an experiment on myself. Since I do a lot of reading online I am going to try and create a script which assigns every letter and number on the page a colour but first I've got to find out if such a script is even possible. 

Of Pokeballs, Nostalgia and Mood Superpositions

My most recent work in Blender 3D is a Pokeball (Pikachu's Pokeball from the very first episode for all the Pokemon fans out there.) which in the final rendering turned out a lot better than I expected it to. It is the best thing I've created in Blender so far and in my opinion, my first work that does not seem too amateurish. I posted it on my deviantArt profile. (Or you can go over to the "Blender Projects" section of this blog and check it out there.)

Pikachu? Is that You? by ~RationalAsh on deviantART

Well it definitely taught me that nostalgia can be a very powerful motivator for art. That first episode I is not particularly complex or entertaining when compared objectively to many of the more recent masterpieces of Japanese anime but it represents something very special to me. Tied to this episode are precious memories of old friendships quarrels that shaped my personality. In fact when I look back on my early childhood, I find that all my memories are inevitably tied with the many cartoons that I watched at the time. They provided a release from the harsh realities of a conservative school. I used to spend hours immersed in imaginary worlds, dreaming of all the amazing, crazy things I could do.

I also noticed something about how moods work. I think that at any one time, people don't feel any single mood in isolation but a mixture of several different moods. The "dominant" mood may vary from time to time but it's always a mixture. So the mood we are feeling is actually a superposition of many moods. I started observing this effect when I did international travel for the first time. When I first visited Malaysia for a period of two months something felt subtly different.  I was under the impression that it was a smell but that description didn't seem to describe it satisfactorily. In retrospect I think that the travel to a new country introduced new moods or intensified some moods that had lain dormant for many years. I observed a similar effect when I travelled within the country but to a lesser extent. Sometimes I walk into a house or some other building and I think: "There is something oddly familiar about this place." This could be because that place had a mood signature similar to that of a place I'm very familiar with.

The mood signature of a specific place also seems to change over time, especially during emotionally significant events such as going up from Year 5 to Year 6 at school or a transition from Junior School to High School.

Coming back to the subject of cartoons, I discovered that by just watching cartoons that I'd watched during a specific period of my childhood life I could temporarily produce inside my brain a close approximation of the mood superposition of that period. It is like being mentally transported back in time to relive that part of my childhood. All the troubles, mishaps, worries, joys and triumphs I had at the time come rushing back to meet me. And perhaps this is what is happens inside the brain when we experience the state of mind called "nostalgia".

I think it's exciting that despite "owning" my mind for over 17 years I still have a lot to learn about it.

The Lost Symbol and My Thoughts on Fiction

It's been a long time since its release but I finally got an opportunity to read The Lost Symbol. Now that I read it I don't think i missed out on much at all.

I was thoroughly unimpressed by the book. After "Angels and Demons" and "The Da Vinci" code this book was completely underwhelming. The plot was a bit weak and I felt none of the unexpected bursts of excitement that had made his previous books so difficult to put down.

About halfway through the book (at which point I was reading simply because I hate to leave a book unfinished) I realized something about why some novels seem so enjoyable while others make us cringe.

It's how believable the story is in its own "universe". The term fiction does not give a writer the freedom to put in whatever captures their fancy. For an example take Harry Potter. It is a story about magic. But in the very fist book the "scene" is set. So the reader gets an idea of the laws of nature (or magic) in the Harry Potter universe. The rest of the books follow the laws of the new reality very strictly. The same goes for  most of the good novels I can think of. The protagonist does not pull through whatever difficulty is presented due to string of coincidences bordering on unbelievable. But this is exactly what happens in The Lost Symbol.

Another mark of a good story is how it draws you in. Many books (like Eragon and Harry Potter) talk about worlds in which, deep inside, everyone wishes to live in. Reading them makes me want to live the book so badly that sometimes I can't help laying awake at night thinking of all the cool, amazing things I would do if I were in the place of the protagonist.

Dan Brown's take on Noetic Science also spoils the book somewhat. The book is supposed to be set in the real world but the book shamelessly represents this repackaged pseudoscience as the real thing. Noetic science tries tie in quantum phenomena with the problem of consciousness but with experiments that mainly involve trying to prove that low probability fluctuations in Random Number Generators are somehow related to focused intention of many people to produce this result which to me just sounds like Deepak Chopra 2.0.