Mitfreude

I’ve begun to write again is a bewilderingly good foretoken. Of unexpected signs of thaw from a long, almost cruel winter of deep freeze and bitterly cold headwinds. This past week I spent almost an entire day with Eric Horvitz, one of the best minds in all of artificial intelligence and computation ; a kindred spirit whose fierce and polymathist intellect is matched in equal by his geniality. We talked about approximate posterior inference, of Bayesian theories of human cognition close of those of Sigmund Freud, of stochastic privacy amongst other things. We walked a fair bit that day, oscillating between facing the cold Cambridge wind head-on at times and orthogonal during others.

The three Eyes

There are times when the forces of the universe conspire to teach you lessons that you might have otherwise ignored. Ignored or taken for granted. Complicit and a level of naivety that only becomes clear in hindsight. Over the past month I have seen both the best and worst of human behavior.

There’s something extraordinary about those that love us unconditionally. We often take them for granted, but they are the ones whose kindness and sagacity protect us from harm when we are in crises. No loops of enumeration are enough, no lexicon sufficient to describe the depth and bliss of having them in our lives.

Chevaliers de Sangreal

Many a time we are simply oblivious to what lies in our surroundings. Blinkered by the vagaries of every day life, we attach ourselves to sub-optimal thoughts. Fettered by our desire for instant gratification, our habits follow a dotted path mired an endless circle of need and more need. Our poverty of attention, our inability to focus, and our brazen unwillingness to pause makes us less human. They make us less gratified and definitely far less effective than we would like to admit. What is it like to constantly miss the forest for a tree, to ignore the variables directly under our control and to try and alter those that aren’t?

Love and the Indian Buffet Process

I still remember what you told me when I had my first sip of alcohol. It was almost four years ago, shortly after my twenty third birthday. As I sat there, sipping a glass of deep red wine, you were one of many who walked up to me and uttered the word badass. Oblivion to American slang meant that I took badass to mean that my posterior might have expanded in the way the vast majority of fresh-of-the-boat transplants do after they spend a year in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Free, but scared I spent hours burning off the crowd-sourced label that my apparent backside got that night.

Inestimable Faces

One of the most bandied virtues is that of stepping into another person’s shoes. The corollary to this lemma which never finds a mention is how difficult it is to step into another human’s shoes. To even imagine a subset of someone’s circumstances, let alone simulating their affective states, is by no means an easy proposition. This becomes vastly more herculean if it involves another human you’ve never met or know very little about. Whatever one’s sensitivity index might be, we are built as humans not to develop a deep understanding of someone’s plight until the context begins to move in a personal direction.

Sparkles in the Brownian Motion

ImageIt feels like waking up after a long, deep dream. Chronologically short, but memories that stretch afar and run incisively baritone. Rich and sparkling, full of wonderment and magic. A flurry of challenges and maladies that come with them. Anesthetic at times to even sharp pain, becoming a frequent habitat of the bleeding edge. I cannot grasp how they could all fit into just two short years. How such compression is possible I would never know. One would be otherwise incredulous except that it all feels true. The fact that I have finally begun to write again after such a long hiatus suggests that I am well rested.…

A harbinger of hope

Three close friends of mine and I caught up with each other this week after what seemed to be ages. There is something inherently priceless about old school friends, a kind of camaraderie that is almost irreplaceable. We talked about many things, from our lofty high school misadventures to how scattered we were from each other in geography and in what we opted to study after high school. I felt nostalgic, finding it almost impossible to stomach the fact that I was in high school ten years ago. The year 2001 seems, by no stretch of imagination, not too far removed from now.…

Evenstar

Come close, but no closer said a wise man. One step at a time. One tiny step forward. Each with it’s own set of predicaments, it’s own challenges. A long trail of steps, in hindsight, stretches as far as the eye can see. None exist in foresight though, for that path cannot be foreseen. I can give you no advice, said the wise man, except to make you understand that there is no distinction between your steps and who you really are. You, like every mortal, cannot escape the vicissitudes of that journey, but know that the laws that govern the elements are universal and will never change.…

Adventure and the bullies

There is probably no one who has not come across it. Either as a target or as a bystander, or even worse, as a perpetrator. What ruminations and lamentations could have taken place in the deep recesses of one’s thoughts at that time are unlikely to be forgotten easily. For some, such memories are nothing more than a mere bump. For others, such memories feel like feeble guilt. Yet for many, they are nothing less than a time fraught with anguish and pain. Whatever side of the equation one may fall under, there is no denying of the scarring nature of the problem and the detrimental repercussions that it has on society.…

Expectation Maximization

A chilly mass of air breezes against the face. Withered leaves, in colors of red, brown and yellow gather near the feet. The skies take the hue of teal blue, with a sparse scattering of clouds. Something musters in the air. A change. A transition. The coming of a new season, the making of a quiet, quantum jump. The magical phenomenon of metamorphosis – the development of that which is intricate from that which is next to nothing. The nurture of something organic, the crystallization of a set of ideas. Each day takes it a step further, and by so doing breathing into it new life.…