Walking through the world, Toph-style!

How does a person, deprived of the sense we primarily use, make their way around the world? This is a video from three graduate students from the National Taiwan University of Arts. The blind girl is robbed of her handbag, and her guide dog runs off after the snatcher. The girl begins her search of the dog, and, in doing so, slowly uncovers the world around her. A simple, yet beautiful, short video.

Departures

Associations are a complicated thing. When someone is a very good friend, and you have spent the last five-six years with them, for them to suddenly go away takes away a part of you. It is even worse if it happens twice in quick succession, or, in my case, simultaneously. Either way, one adapts, as one must. That is one of the most enduring traits of humanity in general --- adaptability. Which is why  we survive, I reckon.


When I came to IMSc, I was going to be living outside home for the first time. They were exciting times; the thrill of finding new horizons and limits, and the satisfaction of being able to evolve as a human being outside one's zone of comfort. Except that, pretty soon, this too became my zone of comfort. And it happened because of the fantasticus folks I managed to entwine my life with. Two of them are now departing. The best memory I have with AV has to be in the first year, in the music room, during the November Chennai deluge, when he and JIS had that unforgettable impromptu extempore jam session : the first on violin and the second on guitar and violin, alternately. I don't really have a "best" memory with SP; there are too many brilliant ones to rank. But there is one gesture of his that will always stay with me : whenever I would get an absolute twacky idea, and would enthusiastically proclaim it and set about trying it, he would second it with an assuring and I-have-your-back-go-ahead thumbs-up! AV and SP, I'm going to miss you, amigos!

An Idle Mind is the Devil's Workshop

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done. “Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do,” wrote Thomas Pynchon in his essay on sloth. Archimedes’ “Eureka” in the bath, Newton’s apple, Jekyll & Hyde and the benzene ring: history is full of stories of inspirations that come in idle moments and dreams. It almost makes you wonder whether loafers, goldbricks and no-accounts aren’t responsible for more of the world’s great ideas, inventions and masterpieces than the hardworking.

This I quote from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/. Tim Kreider, essayist, columnist and cartoonist, makes a stirring case in this article. Another quote :

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That’s why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.” This may sound like the pronouncement of some bong-smoking anarchist, but it was actually Arthur C. Clarke, who found time between scuba diving and pinball games to write “Childhood’s End” and think up communications satellites. 

I used to believe, strongly, in what Kreider says here. Now I am no longer sure. Maybe its just a case of fatal "busyness".

Cutlery C-Hilarity

Since I have reliably proved to myself that I am no good at being original, here is a shout-out to a recent blogpost by Guruji. In case you are wondering, "chirality" loosely means "handedness".

When Germans are being nice to you...

SH, The Moff, and John-Smith-in-a-Cool-Bow-Tie.

It don't get better than that.



Pic taken from @steven_moffat at twitter.

In other news, Sherlock has been nominated for Best Drama at the International Emmy Awards.

Rules for Time Travel(lers), by Sean Carroll

Sean Carroll, Theoretical Astrophysicist and Time Lord, has this to say about the possibility of time travel. In this article, he puts forth 10+1 (or 1+10) rules that prospective time travellers, guitar players with boyish faces, mad scientists with dogs named after mad scientists, and madmen with bitey boxes must follow. I quote his Zeroth Law here.

0. There are no paradoxes.

This is the overarching rule, to which all other rules are subservient. It’s not a statement about physics; it’s simply a statement about logic. In the actual world, true paradoxes — events requiring decidable propositions to be simultaneously true and false — do not occur. Anything that looks like it would be a paradox if it happened indicates either that it won’t happen, or our understanding of the laws of nature is incomplete. Whatever laws of nature the builder of fictional worlds decides to abide by, they must not allow for true paradoxes.

In this context, might also be worthwhile to take a peek into this article, as referred to by Sean Carroll in above blogpost. The bit about the botched suicide is pretty good.

1. A Botched Suicide

You are very depressed. You are suicidally depressed. You have a gun. But you do not quite have the courage to point the gun at yourself and kill yourself in this way. If only someone else would kill you, that would be a good thing. But you can't really ask someone to kill you. That wouldn't be fair. You decide that if you remain this depressed and you find a time machine, you will travel back in time to just about now, and kill your earlier self. That would be good. In that way you even would get rid of the depressing time you will spend between now and when you would get into that time machine. You start to muse about the coherence of this idea, when something amazing happens. Out of nowhere you suddenly see someone coming towards you with a gun pointed at you. In fact he looks very much like you, except that he is bleeding badly from his left eye, and can barely stand up straight. You are at peace. You look straight at him, calmly. He shoots. You feel a searing pain in your left eye. Your mind is in chaos, you stagger around and accidentally enter a strange looking cubicle. You drift off into unconsciousness. After a while, you can not tell how long, you drift back into consciousness and stagger out of the cubicle. You see someone in the distance looking at you calmly and fixedly. You realize that it is your younger self. He looks straight at you. You are in terrible pain. You have to end this, you have to kill him, really kill him once and for all. You shoot him, but your eyesight is so bad that your aim is off. You do not kill him, you merely damage his left eye. He staggers off. You fall to the ground in agony, and decide to study the paradoxes of time travel more seriously.

The Rules of Engagement, by Jennifer Oulette

Here is what Jennifer Oulette has to say about the most complicated thing in Life and the Rest of the Universe : Love.

As with mathematics, so with love. There are no hard and fast rules to be blindly followed, no matter what the self-help gurus may tell you. Sometimes you just need to take a Fourier transform of yourself, shatter the walls and break everything down into the component parts. Once you’ve analyzed the full spectrum, you can rebuild, this time with just the right mix of ingredients that will enable you finally to combine your waveform with that of another person.

Quoted from her recent blogpost.

Got this link from RK and PZM.