Happy Holi

HAPPY HOLI to all of you!

Three Qs

Elections are round the corner in the country. I have three questions in mind.

Ever wondered, how you are being controlled by the society, by the leaders and more so, by the business bigwigs?

Since the onset of money in our civilization, money became the ruling power indirectly or directly? Agree?

Shakespeare said, "The world is a stage...". Shouldn't it be, the world is a stage, majority of the humans are puppets in the hands of few powerful and ruthless beings?

Pirates of Silicon Valley

I just happened to see this movie - "Pirates of Silicon Valley".

These are the opening words --
"I don't want you to think of this as just a film, some process of converting electrons and magnetic impulses into shapes and figures and sounds. No. Listen to me. We're here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We're creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. That's how you have to think of this. We're rewriting the history of human thought with what we're doing."

Read more on wiki here.

More on Steve Jobs here and here.

A lovely gift!

My mathematical artist friend "Karl Kempton" sent me this lovely gift on my b'day today. Thanks Karl!
BTW. I share my b'day with Levi Strauss, Victor Hugo, Micheal Bolton and a dutch artist friend. Incidently, all have had artistic capabilities.
;-)

The New Math

Just have a look at Mock Paper Scissors.
Source: Kaz's blog.

Gulzar

I'm happy that my favourite lyricist got an Oscar for "Jai Ho". :D So, I thought of translating my favourite song "Tujhse Naaraaz .." from the movie Masoom.

Here it goes..

I'm not displeased by you, O! Life, I'm perplexed!
I'm perplexed!
I'm worried by your innocent questions;
I'm worried!

I had never thought, I'd have to hold pain to live;
If I smile, I would have to get rid of a debt for that smile;
When I smile sometimes, I feel..
A debt on my lips.
I'm not....

If they got filled today, drops would pour down;
Who knows? Eyes may yearn for them tomorrow.
Don't know where it got lost, disappeared whither?
I had hidden a tear.
I'm not....

O Life! Your sorrows have made me understand new relations;
What we get! We get cold shadows under sun.
I'm not....

[I have written about him earlier too.]

How good are my symmetrical drawings?

I did an Image processing analysis of my symmetrical drawings on MS Paint (by writing an image processing application in C++ ofcourse) using the IPL98 library. I did a statistical analysis for 12 ambigrams (which is a small sample space). You can see some of them on my Ambigrams link.

Surprisingly, I didn't get any result to be a perfect one (that means an ambigram). All the pictures had some error which is quite practical as I was analyzing on the basis of pixels and all the pictures have been hand drawn. The average percentage error which I got is 16.3467 which is quite high.

I think I still have to go a long long way to get that perfection.

[Please Note: There is a bug in the compilation of the IPL98 Library. If you download it and try to compile it, it would give an error in one of the classes. I tried to report the bug, but I didn't get any response. I solved it though. ;)]

Thought!

Purpose of Life--
Differentiate grief;
Integrate happiness!

Haiku!

Circle to point,
Recur back to back--
To infinity.
(5+5+5) 15 syllables only. :(

Unfinished work

If you have an unfinished work, you should come back from hell to complete it.

[Note: The space in Heaven got filled up with the onset of Kaliyuga almost 5000 years back]

:P

Pretty much the same

“There will still be things that machines cannot do.
They will not produce great art or great literature or great
philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of
happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and
friendship.” - Bertrand Russell

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso

Fractals

One of the most fascinating aspects of recursion - fractals. I thought of sharing a link which I like. Take a look here at the Wolfram's fractal collection.

Also, I remember "The Fractal Crystal No. 1" by Robert Fathauer, Nicholas Duchnowski and Hank Kaczmarski which I had the privilege to see in Leeuwarden.

Really a beautiful piece.

To Mumbai

Heading to Mumbai for a short trip this weekend. Hope to see the charred "Taj" hotel.

:(

Mathematical poetry

In this post, I would like to mention two of my friends who have given me an insight into the world of visual mathematical poetry.

Thanks Karl and Kaz.

Kaz Maslanka
www.kazmaslanka.com
www.mathematicalpoetry.blogspot.com

Karl Kempton
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/kaldron.htm
See this link for Karl's works (many of 'em) - http://mathematicalpoetry.blogspot.com/2006/07/karl-kempton-links.html

Also, to inform my readers, I did the translation of mathematical poems by Kitasono Katue in Hindi for Karl Young. Have a look here and if you know Hindi, please feel free to point out my mistakes, if any.

New Year 2009

Wishing everybody a successful year!