Happy New Year

Wish all of you and your family a great and exciting new year.

I have been away from the blog over two months now, but hope to be back blogging on a regular basis henceforth (and no.. this is not my New Year's resolution).

Cheers!!!

French Kiss

Here is a sketch I did way back in 1999 - when I had more time on my hands. I came across an old calendar with photographs by Robert Doisneau at a old book dealer in New York. I bought the calendar, and the first thing I did when I reached home was sketch this.

The original photo is here. More photos by Doisneau are here.

Crossroads for Planet Earth

Though I haven't read the entire Sept issue of the Scientific American, here is a graphic and some quotes I would like to share with you that is relevant to my earlier post and Sunil's post. In the introductory article of the special issue, The Climax of Humanity, an eight point plan is presented for the 21st century. George Musser goes on to say:

A recurring theme of this plan is that business is not necessarily the enemy of nature, or vice versa. Traditionally the economy and the environment have not been described in lik eterms. The most watched economic statistics, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), do not measure resource depletion; they are essentially measures of cash flow rather than balance sheets of assets and liabilities. If you clear-cut a forest, GDP jumps even though you have wipes out an asset that could have bought in a steady stream of income.

More broadly, the prices we pay for goods and services seldom include the associated environmental costs. Someone else picks up the tab - and that someone is usually us in another guise. By one estimate, the average American taxpayer forks out $2,000 a year to subsidize farming, driving, mining and other activities with a heavy environmental footprint. The distorted markets gives consumers and producers litte incentive to clean up. Environmentalists inadvertently reinforce this tendency when they focus on the priceless attractions of nature, which are deeply meaningful but difficult to weigh against more pressing concerns. The Endangered Species Act has provided iconic examples of advocates talking past one another. Greens blamed th3 plight of spotted owls on loggers; the loggers blamed unemployment on self-indulgent orinthology. In fact, both were victims of unsustainable forestry.

In recent years, economists and evironmental scientists have come together to hang a price tag on nature's benefits. Far from demeaning nature, this exercise reveals how much we depend on it. The Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, published earlier this year, identified services - from pollination to water filteration - that humans would have to provide for themselves, at great cost, if nature did not. Of the 24 broad categories of services, the team found that 15 are being used faster than they regenerate.

When the environment is accounted for, what is good for nature is often what is good for the economy and even for individual business sectors. Fishers, for example, maximize their profits when they harvest fisheries at a sustainable level; beyond that point, both yeilds and profits decline as more people chase ever fewer fish. To be sure, life is always not so convenient. Society must sometimes make real trade-offs. But it is only beginning to explore teh win-win options.

I have yet to read the details of the action plan (which forms the entire content of the special issue) - but it promises to be a good read.

Is there a Conflict between Economic Viability and Sustainable Resource Utilization?

I recently attended a presentation titled "Is there a Conflict between Economic Viability and Sustainable Resource Utilization?". It was a trial lecture for one of the PhD students in our department and left a lot of questions (including the title) unanswered.

Michael Higgins' wonderful blog Chocolate and Gold Coins has quite a few posts on an economist's view of resource utilization (two of them are here and here). Half Sigma is another blog with an economist's view of resource utilization. His views on recycling (here and here) and energy are opposed to mine.

In this post, I will try to answer the question "Is there a Conflict between Economic Viability and Sustainable Resource Utilization?", while trying to show that applying economic theory coupled with science, the economists might have to change their views. For more on how to reason economically go here (Link via Michael Higgins' post Teaching Economics to Everyone).

Economics analyzes the costs and the benefits of improving patterns of resource use. Economic theory has failed as it does not have a connection to the physical world - where the resources originate. It has followed a price system where the environment (atmosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are free; thus markets prices will not reflect the true costs associated with producing/consuming a product. I agree with economists in that markets work, but one must make sure that the basis is correct.

Thermodynamics is a formal system or procedure to evaluate and understand the interaction of people, machines etc with the environment. In other words, it is a set of rules governing the behaviour of the natural world. Thus, thermodynamics would be the ideal basis for setting the value of materials.

Exergy, a thermodynamic quantity derived from the Second Law, is defined as energy quality or the ability to do work. It is important to remember that there is continuous exergy loss in society as a whole. Exergy of any material can be calculated by defining a constant reference environment (it composition, temperature and pressure). Exergy is thus a measure of the physical value of the material. This can be used as a basis for the economic value of a material.

VAT (Value Added Tax) can be modified to include an exergy cost (sum of exergy consumption from the environment and waste exergy released to the environment). Thus VAT can move from the purview of bureaucrats to that of scientists, where the tax is a measure of the physical value. This would automatically increase the costs of products that have harmful waste products and renewables would get a boost.

When the two pillars of economic theory, incentives matter and markets work, are allowed to function with the material value based on exergy - recycling and renewable energy sources would be viable. And, of course, gasoline prices would probably reach double digits!!!

Thus, there is no conflict in Economic Viability and Sustainable Resource Utilization, as long as economic value is linked to the physical value of a material.

Update:

1. It is worthwhile to note that with this tax Nuclear power would be one of the most expensive sources of energy.

2. The tax proposed here is not my idea . It was mentioned by Prof Jan Szargut during a panel discussion on the furture of exergy analysis at the ECOS 05 conference. Goran Wall also proposed this idea a couple of years ago.

3. Sunil, in his post on the economics of conservation, adds a different dimension to the debate. He presents a case for the conservation of natural habitats and the economic costs incurred when they are ignored.

4. Browsing though my mail from when I was on vacation, I noticed that the Scientific American September edition is a Special Issue - Crossroads for Planet Earth. I haven't read it yet.

Thermodynamics - on this and that

Many people find thermodynamics confusing... and why not. When the first law was propounded last, the second law first and the zeroeth law is not a law at all, you can blame people for finding thermo confusing.

On a more serious note, thermodynamically there has never been an energy crisis. As energy is always conserved, there can never be an energy cris. What we call an energy crisis is actaully an exergy crisis - in other words the useful work that can be produced is reducing, unable to meet demands. Exergy is not a conserved thermodynamic quantity.

Journalist. Who? Me???

My recent activities got me thinking - should we be called researchers or journalists?

I just corrected proofs for one of my papers for Applied Thermal Engineering, finished writing an invited paper for the same journal (during my vacation, I might add) and have to start writing another invited paper for Energy - The International Journal. All this leaves me with very little time to work towards my paper for the biggest conference in my area PSE/ESCAPE 2006, which is due in Nov.

I am spending way too much time disseminating the results of our research rather than producing more. Need to find a balance!!!!!

Presenting Ananya

KuttiMe is now officially called Ananya (or Ananya R. Raman as her passport says).

Ananya - a name suggested by my cousin- is the very essence of Advaita. We were initially planning on calling her Jyotsna (moonlight) - a subtle reference to the fact that she was concieved in November when the moon rules in Norway. As I was filling out her Birth Certificate, Arthi changed her mind and we then decided to go with Ananya.

The Gods know her as Sri Jayalakshmi (her religious name) and my parents like to call her Anagha (without blemish).

To Arthi and me, she will always be KuttiMe.

Reverse Osmosis

Apparently, Indian summer is cooler than Wall Street. This article in the NYTimes reports many MBA students from top schools in the US are choosing internships opportunities in India.

In less than 12 hrs..

I leave for Chennai, India. It has been a long wait from the 18th of July till now and can't wait to see Kuttime and A. Really, really excited, I am.

I was feeling fatherish (if that is a word) a couple of days after July 18th and then it dissapeared - only to reappear now, as I am preparing for my trip. Guess it will truly sink in when I hold her in my arms.

I will be in Chennai till the 15th of Sept and then spend a few days in Mumbai before heading back home (yes, Trondheim is home now!!!) on the 18th.

What is you question?

Yes, what is your question to the collective wisdom of the world?

Dropping Knowledge gives you this chance.

Dropping Knowledge describes itself as an eductaional resource that connects people around the globe seeking to exchange ideas and solutions to the most pressing questions of our day.

On their website they say

dropping knowlege means dropping the assumption that we know all the answers. It means questioning the conventional wisdom. It means figuring out which questions are the most important to ask, sharing answers and then challenging those answers. We call the proctice of asking questions and sharing wisdom, dropping knowledge.

599 questions have been asked thus far. All these questions (and many more yet to be asked) will be combined to form a social issue framework. A pool of 1000 potential participants will form a web-based source of research, which will be used to narrow the answers by 112 global leaders. An audio-visual interactive archive online will be built for these answers that will encourage a global discussion.

The scale of the projec is very impressive. Wether it will succeed or not in its ultimate goal of generating wisdom...well, as always, only time will tell.

Go on, ask your question.

Link via WorldChanging.

Earlier Marxists - now Jihadis

David Brooks in his Op-ed column of NY Times, Trading Cricket for Jihad, tells us

In his book "Globalized Islam," the French scholar Olivier Roy points out that today's jihadists have a lot in common with the left-wing extremists of the 1930's and 1960's. Ideologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism. It draws the same sorts of recruits (educated second-generation immigrants, for example), uses some of the same symbols and vilifies some of the same enemies (imperialism and capitalism).

Roy emphasizes that the jihadists are the products of globalization, and its enemies. They are detached from any specific country or culture, he says, and take up jihad because it attaches them to something. They are generally not politically active before they take up jihad. They are looking to strike a vague blow against the system and so give their lives (and deaths) shape and meaning.

This view is quite interesting and contrary to my view - posted as a comment to Sunil Laxman's post on the same topic.

Seemingly random events

This has been spawned by my earlier post.



The image above has no fixed pattern (particularly on the right side), and each pixel seems to be unrelated to the next. If each pixel were taken to be an event, the image would represent a collection of events, or more pertinently, a seemingly random collection of events.

Erik Fosnes Hansen in his book Tales of Protection, writes that seemingly disparate and unconnected events in life are connected by a profound something - a something that has not been found or recognized as yet.

The image shown here is a Cellular Automaton of 500 steps from Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science (You can find an earlier post on this here). The image is produced starting with a single black pixel and each subsequent pixel is colored according to Rule 30 in the book. Thus, the seemingly random collection of pixels (or events) is produced using a simple program (Rule 30) and is the something, in this case.

Wolfram, in the introduction to the book, boldly states that this new science, an intellectual revolution, can be used to explain everything. I have only ploughed through 168 pages of this 1197 pages book. Based on what I have read thus far, it is very exciting.

Is this the key to understanding the connection between seemingly disconnected events - such as the probability case?

And now probability

Though not exactly a follow-up on the earlier post, these thoughts came to me when writing it.

In Tales of Protection, Erik Fosnes Hansen bases his fiction on how a collection of seemingly random events are connected by a pattern. As an example:

The probability of heads or tails occurring when a coin is tossed is 0.5. If we get heads 9 times in a row, one would think that there is a greater chance of getting tails the next toss. Yet, the probability is still only 0.5 of getting heads (or tails). Over a large number of tosses, the heads and tails will even out according to its probability. This is fundamental in figuring probability and is call the Law of Large Numbers.

The paradox is that one toss of a coin is unrelated to the next, yet over a large number of tosses the number of heads attain an equilibrium value ( = 0.5 x number of tosses). How is this possible? If the two of us were tossing coins in different parts of the world, would heads turning up for me be affected by what you get?

Is this a self-referencing paradox related to the Gödel's Incompletenesss Theorem? On second thoughts, we probably should leave this much abused theorem be.

Statistics as anecdotal thinking...

I am reviewing a paper where the authors prop up their not-on-strong-theoretical-ground claims with loads of statistics. I couldn't but help recall

Statistics is to engineers, like lamp-posts are to drunks - they are used more for support than for illumination.

This got me thinking - where is statistics used for illumination? Before we proceed it would be worthwhile checking the definition of statistics given here.

Census, I feel, is a practical branch of statistics mainly because its sample is the entire population. Analyzing the census data could illuminate what already exists, but when one tries to use this data for prediction, it is no longer practical. Similar is the case with polls. How scientific are scientifically conducted polls?

Michael Schemer, differentiating between anecdotal thinking (that leads to superstition) and science in his column Skeptic in The Scientific American May 05 issue says:

What we havehere is a signal-to-noise problem. Humans evolved brains that are pattern-recognition machines, adept at detecting signals that enhance or threaten survival amid a very noisy world. This capability is association learning - associating the causal connections between A and B - as when our ancestors associated the seasons with the migration of game animals.

Unfortunately, the system has flaws. Superstitions are false associations - A appears connected to B, but it is not (the baseball player who doesn't shave and hits a home run). Las Vegas was built on associated learning.

..... - if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not.

.....

We evolved as a social primate species whose language ability facilitated the exchange of such association anecdotes. The problem is that although true pattern recognition helps us survive, false pattern recognition does not get us killed, so the overall phenomenon has endured the winnowing process of natural selection. .... Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training.

The key from the piece above is - if you scan enough noise, you will eventually find a signal, whether it is there or not. This is similar to the fact that any set of data can be fitted to a polynomial equation - I vaguely remember reading that the figure of an elephant can be fitted with a polynomial equation. But what value does this equation have in predicting the next data point?

Statistics is a form of pattern recognition, or rather a method for pattern recognition. If used without the right set of data, it becomes nothing more than anecdotal thinking. Thus statistics are a rigorous method in science is questionable.

Statistics has played, and certainly will play, a huge part in science and engineering - in my area of expertise, thermodynamics, Statistical Thermodynamics is important to answer question Why? rather than How? answered by Classical Thermodynamics. I understand that regression analysis, parameter estimation etc are widely used in science and engineering. But the most important footnote when using any of these methods is their range of applicability - which again depends on the data used.

What I am trying to convey through this muddled post is that unless used within a clear predefined set of constraints or bounds, the use of statistics is equivalent to anecdotal thinking and is divorced from science.

Moving offices...

I just moved offices. My view out of the window went from this


to this

The only reason I moved was that now I have my own office space rather than sharing it with 3 others.

Why QWERTY keyboard?

I had always wondered, but never discovered until today why the keyboard is laid out in this wierd way. It appears that this keyboard layout was designed by Scholes so as to slow typing speed. The initial model has a mechanical problem caused by people typing fast and hence the keybaord was laid out in such a way that our fingers would have to travel maximum distance.

Isn't it stupid that computers use the same layout when no such mechanical problems canever exist?

Read more about this at How Stuff Works and Wikipedia.

Quick note on earlier post

I wanted to add that my last post was a piece I wrote nearly 8 years ago for my now-defunct personal webpage. I put it up here again, as it may serve as background on a post that refuses to see daylight.

Colour symbolism in Hindu culture

Pootu vaitha oru vatta nila...

So goes a song from the movie tamil Idhayam. Roughly translated it is "A round moon with a bindhi". Tamil poets from the days of yore (this one by poet Vairamuthu),have tried to descibe the beauty of a tamil woman. A few constants in their descriptions -long hair decked with flowers, chandramukhi (woman with a face like the moon) and a pottu (bindi) smack in the middle of her forehead.

Yes, the pottu adds greatly to a woman's beauty, but why the red pottu and in that specific location? The red color and the location can be prefuncturily explained based on aesthetics. Red is a beautiful and bright color that contrasts well with the fair skinned aryan woman and symmetry requires the location specified earlier.

Is that all there is to it? Well , I think not. A key aspect of Hindu culture (I am specifically referring it to as culture rather than religion as I believe we muddled the two later on) is its symbolism. So here is my take on it......

The pottu is mainly red in color. Red color has the longest wavelength and can thus be seen the farthest (that is why the stop light is red!!!). Red also symbolizes fire... the fire of passion. When a girl is young, she wears the pottu to signify the passion in her. The question that could come up here is - Doesn't a man have passion? He certainly does, but our (rather our ancestor's) society, being as it was, allowed men to lay bare their passion - for education, women etc.

When the woman is married, she applies it to the top of her forehead where the hair starts. This is to indicate that her love is consummated or satisfied. It is a sort of warning sign to all other men who look at her. Also in some cultures, the woman cover her hair after her wedding. This is because the hair is black and black signifies that it accepts everything/everyone.

The color symbolism is so important in our culture. Another such symbolism is why widows wear white and their hair shorn. White as a color repels all light/colors. When a woman is clothed in white, she tells the wold that she is no longer an active participant..... I repel all of you.. all I have is within me.

Women these days barely wear the pottu. They ignore it as having religious connotations, which do not go well in this liberal, modern and hence civilized (so they say) world. Even the few who wear it, prefer black to red.

This is just one example of a religious symbol having no religious roots, rather a societal or cultural root. There are many more such examples. I wish people would stop to ask or think, why we (or our parents) do certain things the way we (or they) do and try to come up with rational explanations rather than accepting them on blind faith or rejecting them as being religious.

We don't give our ancestor's enough credit for being rational thinkers!!

Point of view

I came across this quote attributed to the great German mathematician David Hilbert:

Some people have got a mental horizon of radius zero and call it their point of view.

Liked it!!

NOKIA - connecting people

...disconnecting families

Ask Warne!!!