Frakking in the fog

On February 20, Monday, Chennai was blanketed with a heavy fog that appeared out of nowhere during its early hours. Visibility was reduced to some 20 metres and the sun was completely blocked out. I'm inclined to blame global warming for this occurrence, although I don't know how I could go about proving my point. It definitely wasn't a smog because it didn't look polluted; moreover, if it had been a smog, it should have appeared earlier, too, especially during the post-monsoon and winter seasons.

That's not my point. My point here is to speculate on something a friend of mine, N, claimed to have seen through the fog on her way to college from home: a more than frequent incidence of copulating dogs and pigs, especially the latter. What was it about the sudden change in the weather that could have caused this?

[caption id="attachment_21651" align="aligncenter" width="448" caption="Dogs frakking on a beach"][/caption]

I'm torn between two possibilities. The first is that this phenomenon could've easily been a coincidence. Those dogs and pigs might've done it anyway because the reproductive cycle for female dogs lasts about 6 months each time. Each cycle has four stages: proestrus, estrus, diestrus and anestrus. The second one, estrus, lasts about 12 days and is when copulation occurs. If the animal is sexually active for 12 days in six months, and has an attracted male around her, things are going to happen fog or no fog.

The second possibility - which, again, I have no way to explore - is that the fog might've acted like a curtain that the animals could've drawn about themselves to do their private business. Usually, dogs are more likely to "do it" in relatively secluded areas like parks and infrequently used roads, and during those times of day when coitus interruptus is less likely to occur. The fog just could have been the perfect proxy.

I'm not convinced by the second reason because, well, the first reason seems more convincing and actually overwhelms the argument of the second. At the same time, if estrus and the fog coincided, then copulating activity could've been heightened for that Monday alone. How unfortunate that someone didn't go around the city looking for all those frakking in the fog, and how lucky I am to have a friend like N.

Reaping what the realpolitik reader reaped

One of my classmates in creative writing class today (while unnecessarily taking apart a harmless piece on the non-inclusive nature of Carnatic music):

... unpacking the article, going past the veneer of humour to see what prompted the writer to choose the medium...

My question is: in the medium-as-message context, does anything matter more than what the article is built to achieve? Or is the reader obliged to consider the medium, too?

Because if the realpolitik reader stepped in and took away the humour from a humourous article, doesn't it achieve faster what could otherwise have been achieved by peeling and deconstructing what the writer wants to achieve?

Will not the humour tell the reader what is humourous? Or is the writer to be understood only in his psychological nudity - after the reader has stepped beyond the literary piece itself and has chosen to take nothing away from it but only that there is a medium, a message, and there is the "all-important reason" that those two were chosen and none else?

The function of a "unit cell" in the perception lattice

Old post, now archived thus.

--

Beginning from the quantification of perception, we see, hear and feel the objects around us. We understand animation, we derive motion, we negotiate shapes, and we respond to changes. There is nothing to philosophy if only for our ability to become opinionated and a sense of good and bad, whence we also derive judgment and the skills of decision-making. Just as we have left and right to orient us in the physical realm, we have problems and solutions to orient us in the mental realm.

A problem is perceived in its deviation from normality, and in the exposition of abnormality to alert us to one change in particular and in even greater specificity, its incompatibility with normality as we see it. Problems can arise in many forms - as many as we have come to perceive. It is the solution we come to, the one particular decision to alter things as they are and to set them in positions that would resemble in positions they were. We try to reinstate normality as it should be, devoid of anything erroneous, error-prone or error-causing and greatly limitable by one's own actions as they will be.

While walking on a straight road, the need to perceive a change in direction is responded to by taking a perpendicular turn at the most. The sense of left and right, henceforth, seem to more pronounced owing to the presence of an original path that now takes up the first slot in the history of the journey. While travelling on a straight road, without having to take any turns at any points of space and time, the journey consisted of an abode and destination separated by a distance consisting solely of linear displacements; in other words, there was a problem, and there was only one feasible solution.

But once you have taken a turn, say to the right, then you have an angularity associated with your journey: you have reoriented yourself, and analogously, you have altered your direction in favour of a new solution to the same problem. The presence of an original plays an important role in that it gives rise to comparative decision-making, and a variety of opinions with significant variations between them.

The traversal of a straight road gives rise to no such notions because of its inherent inability to deliver comparability. And this is where a theory of nothing, which is only a set of some questions that seem to answer themselves at first, is born. Man’s natural need to quantify the objects, changes and adaptations around him is only understandable. Only with quantification comes perception. This is because, at the most fundamental of levels, the changes around us are used to keep track of time. When an object moves from point A to point B, it marks a change of position and gives rise to displacement. Therefore, the quantification of the phenomena around us empowers us with the tool of recollection, which can be put to immense use when we use comparative decision-making.

The same problem may have given rise to multiple solutions, but when a problem with only one possible solution occurs repeatedly, the problem can be filed away as a one-time occurrence and the solutions that were used previously to tackle it can be thought of as multiple and, therefore, employed again. This concept, in its turn, brings us to the breakdown of time into logically similar categories. When you leave your home for work, the morning may be divided as:

1. You at home,


2. You while driving, and


3. You at work.

By the logical organization of time periods, alternatively ‘time spans’, you find a sense of progress. When the same tasks are performed on a fairly regular basis, the scenario transforms into a routine and the requirement of a logical categorization becomes suppressed by the commoditized grouping of these tasks into blocks characterized by the observation of relatively progressive changes in a parallel walk of life.

For example, when you work at the office, you perform the tasks assigned to you (as conforming to a division of labour). However, the progress is observed in your personal life when you earn money, and in your employer’s business, which seems to want you to work efficiently for it to profit from the collective efficiency. Subsequently, an instance of multiparallelism can be drawn out between all such cases of analogous systems.

In the said cases, quantification has been observed only because it was being looked for; what about when one desires quantification in some other region of perception but is unable to find it? Does that mean that what one perceives is nonexistent? That is absurd because the validity of my perception is then annulled!

In trying to come to terms with change and the relativity of existence itself, we have subconsciously but inevitably generated the need for quantification. But of course, the coexistent fundamentality of the very notion is an excuse enough and has, therefore, qualified itself as a positive sign of progress.

Our understanding of the people and social machinery around us only deepens our faith in the social pedestal upon which we stand, and thereby also increases our commitment to the understanding of other parallel phenomena. So, pre-quantification, we have change, orientation, progress, and some parameters with which we are enabled to measure them. If these parameters were to be absent one at a time, then the ease of quantification becomes reduced, but on the other hand, even the presence of one of these parameters at times becomes a cause for problem. It is the combination of them that may possess any expectations of standing true.

However, when something as abstract as any other fundamental elemental constituent of logic, like logic itself, is subjugated to the detection of such parameters and the establishment of quantified judgment becomes very complicated owing to logically overriding incompatibilities. Therefore, in dealing with such terms with immense applications in reasoning, we have to define the most fundamental of these terms such that those incompatibilities arising out of hierarchal disturbances in the logical structure of reasoning itself are not dealt with.

In other words, we have to define the smallest units of existence which posses the least amount of elemental reasonability and, therefore, can be parallelized to arrive at a logical conclusion to any statement or problem.

The function of a "unit cell" in the perception lattice

Old post, now archived thus.

--

Beginning from the quantification of perception, we see, hear and feel the objects around us. We understand animation, we derive motion, we negotiate shapes, and we respond to changes. There is nothing to philosophy if only for our ability to become opinionated and a sense of good and bad, whence we also derive judgment and the skills of decision-making. Just as we have left and right to orient us in the physical realm, we have problems and solutions to orient us in the mental realm.

A problem is perceived in its deviation from normality, and in the exposition of abnormality to alert us to one change in particular and in even greater specificity, its incompatibility with normality as we see it. Problems can arise in many forms - as many as we have come to perceive. It is the solution we come to, the one particular decision to alter things as they are and to set them in positions that would resemble in positions they were. We try to reinstate normality as it should be, devoid of anything erroneous, error-prone or error-causing and greatly limitable by one's own actions as they will be.

While walking on a straight road, the need to perceive a change in direction is responded to by taking a perpendicular turn at the most. The sense of left and right, henceforth, seem to more pronounced owing to the presence of an original path that now takes up the first slot in the history of the journey. While travelling on a straight road, without having to take any turns at any points of space and time, the journey consisted of an abode and destination separated by a distance consisting solely of linear displacements; in other words, there was a problem, and there was only one feasible solution.

But once you have taken a turn, say to the right, then you have an angularity associated with your journey: you have reoriented yourself, and analogously, you have altered your direction in favour of a new solution to the same problem. The presence of an original plays an important role in that it gives rise to comparative decision-making, and a variety of opinions with significant variations between them.

The traversal of a straight road gives rise to no such notions because of its inherent inability to deliver comparability. And this is where a theory of nothing, which is only a set of some questions that seem to answer themselves at first, is born. Man’s natural need to quantify the objects, changes and adaptations around him is only understandable. Only with quantification comes perception. This is because, at the most fundamental of levels, the changes around us are used to keep track of time. When an object moves from point A to point B, it marks a change of position and gives rise to displacement. Therefore, the quantification of the phenomena around us empowers us with the tool of recollection, which can be put to immense use when we use comparative decision-making.

The same problem may have given rise to multiple solutions, but when a problem with only one possible solution occurs repeatedly, the problem can be filed away as a one-time occurrence and the solutions that were used previously to tackle it can be thought of as multiple and, therefore, employed again. This concept, in its turn, brings us to the breakdown of time into logically similar categories. When you leave your home for work, the morning may be divided as:

1. You at home,


2. You while driving, and


3. You at work.

By the logical organization of time periods, alternatively ‘time spans’, you find a sense of progress. When the same tasks are performed on a fairly regular basis, the scenario transforms into a routine and the requirement of a logical categorization becomes suppressed by the commoditized grouping of these tasks into blocks characterized by the observation of relatively progressive changes in a parallel walk of life.

For example, when you work at the office, you perform the tasks assigned to you (as conforming to a division of labour). However, the progress is observed in your personal life when you earn money, and in your employer’s business, which seems to want you to work efficiently for it to profit from the collective efficiency. Subsequently, an instance of multiparallelism can be drawn out between all such cases of analogous systems.

In the said cases, quantification has been observed only because it was being looked for; what about when one desires quantification in some other region of perception but is unable to find it? Does that mean that what one perceives is nonexistent? That is absurd because the validity of my perception is then annulled!

In trying to come to terms with change and the relativity of existence itself, we have subconsciously but inevitably generated the need for quantification. But of course, the coexistent fundamentality of the very notion is an excuse enough and has, therefore, qualified itself as a positive sign of progress.

Our understanding of the people and social machinery around us only deepens our faith in the social pedestal upon which we stand, and thereby also increases our commitment to the understanding of other parallel phenomena. So, pre-quantification, we have change, orientation, progress, and some parameters with which we are enabled to measure them. If these parameters were to be absent one at a time, then the ease of quantification becomes reduced, but on the other hand, even the presence of one of these parameters at times becomes a cause for problem. It is the combination of them that may possess any expectations of standing true.

However, when something as abstract as any other fundamental elemental constituent of logic, like logic itself, is subjugated to the detection of such parameters and the establishment of quantified judgment becomes very complicated owing to logically overriding incompatibilities. Therefore, in dealing with such terms with immense applications in reasoning, we have to define the most fundamental of these terms such that those incompatibilities arising out of hierarchal disturbances in the logical structure of reasoning itself are not dealt with.

In other words, we have to define the smallest units of existence which posses the least amount of elemental reasonability and, therefore, can be parallelized to arrive at a logical conclusion to any statement or problem.

The function of a "unit cell" in the perception lattice

Old post, now archived thus.

--

Beginning from the quantification of perception, we see, hear and feel the objects around us. We understand animation, we derive motion, we negotiate shapes, and we respond to changes. There is nothing to philosophy if only for our ability to become opinionated and a sense of good and bad, whence we also derive judgment and the skills of decision-making. Just as we have left and right to orient us in the physical realm, we have problems and solutions to orient us in the mental realm.

A problem is perceived in its deviation from normality, and in the exposition of abnormality to alert us to one change in particular and in even greater specificity, its incompatibility with normality as we see it. Problems can arise in many forms - as many as we have come to perceive. It is the solution we come to, the one particular decision to alter things as they are and to set them in positions that would resemble in positions they were. We try to reinstate normality as it should be, devoid of anything erroneous, error-prone or error-causing and greatly limitable by one's own actions as they will be.

While walking on a straight road, the need to perceive a change in direction is responded to by taking a perpendicular turn at the most. The sense of left and right, henceforth, seem to more pronounced owing to the presence of an original path that now takes up the first slot in the history of the journey. While travelling on a straight road, without having to take any turns at any points of space and time, the journey consisted of an abode and destination separated by a distance consisting solely of linear displacements; in other words, there was a problem, and there was only one feasible solution.

But once you have taken a turn, say to the right, then you have an angularity associated with your journey: you have reoriented yourself, and analogously, you have altered your direction in favour of a new solution to the same problem. The presence of an original plays an important role in that it gives rise to comparative decision-making, and a variety of opinions with significant variations between them.

The traversal of a straight road gives rise to no such notions because of its inherent inability to deliver comparability. And this is where a theory of nothing, which is only a set of some questions that seem to answer themselves at first, is born. Man’s natural need to quantify the objects, changes and adaptations around him is only understandable. Only with quantification comes perception. This is because, at the most fundamental of levels, the changes around us are used to keep track of time. When an object moves from point A to point B, it marks a change of position and gives rise to displacement. Therefore, the quantification of the phenomena around us empowers us with the tool of recollection, which can be put to immense use when we use comparative decision-making.

The same problem may have given rise to multiple solutions, but when a problem with only one possible solution occurs repeatedly, the problem can be filed away as a one-time occurrence and the solutions that were used previously to tackle it can be thought of as multiple and, therefore, employed again. This concept, in its turn, brings us to the breakdown of time into logically similar categories. When you leave your home for work, the morning may be divided as:

1. You at home,


2. You while driving, and


3. You at work.

By the logical organization of time periods, alternatively ‘time spans’, you find a sense of progress. When the same tasks are performed on a fairly regular basis, the scenario transforms into a routine and the requirement of a logical categorization becomes suppressed by the commoditized grouping of these tasks into blocks characterized by the observation of relatively progressive changes in a parallel walk of life.

For example, when you work at the office, you perform the tasks assigned to you (as conforming to a division of labour). However, the progress is observed in your personal life when you earn money, and in your employer’s business, which seems to want you to work efficiently for it to profit from the collective efficiency. Subsequently, an instance of multiparallelism can be drawn out between all such cases of analogous systems.

In the said cases, quantification has been observed only because it was being looked for; what about when one desires quantification in some other region of perception but is unable to find it? Does that mean that what one perceives is nonexistent? That is absurd because the validity of my perception is then annulled!

In trying to come to terms with change and the relativity of existence itself, we have subconsciously but inevitably generated the need for quantification. But of course, the coexistent fundamentality of the very notion is an excuse enough and has, therefore, qualified itself as a positive sign of progress.

Our understanding of the people and social machinery around us only deepens our faith in the social pedestal upon which we stand, and thereby also increases our commitment to the understanding of other parallel phenomena. So, pre-quantification, we have change, orientation, progress, and some parameters with which we are enabled to measure them. If these parameters were to be absent one at a time, then the ease of quantification becomes reduced, but on the other hand, even the presence of one of these parameters at times becomes a cause for problem. It is the combination of them that may possess any expectations of standing true.

However, when something as abstract as any other fundamental elemental constituent of logic, like logic itself, is subjugated to the detection of such parameters and the establishment of quantified judgment becomes very complicated owing to logically overriding incompatibilities. Therefore, in dealing with such terms with immense applications in reasoning, we have to define the most fundamental of these terms such that those incompatibilities arising out of hierarchal disturbances in the logical structure of reasoning itself are not dealt with.

In other words, we have to define the smallest units of existence which posses the least amount of elemental reasonability and, therefore, can be parallelized to arrive at a logical conclusion to any statement or problem.

Philosophiae homis

The 'Book Summary' makes me wonder... why are the likes of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman so few and so far in between? The popularization of science may not seem like a necessary fixture to its acceptance in mainstream media, but over the years it has become increasingly necessary to clarify its role in the eyes of the common man—even roles such as those played in the maintenance of the Large Hadron Collider or of the International Space Station. That Einstein's papers on special and general relativity need a "redesigning" betokens a moment's reflection on the dependence of our day-to-day activities on scientific research and development, whether the increasing investment in experimental apparatuses sees justification just like military spending does, and if anyone ascribes the need for that investment to anything apart from science's utilitarian value.

Philosophiae homis

The 'Book Summary' makes me wonder... why are the likes of Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman so few and so far in between? The popularization of science may not seem like a necessary fixture to its acceptance in mainstream media, but over the years it has become increasingly necessary to clarify its role in the eyes of the common man—even roles such as those played in the maintenance of the Large Hadron Collider or of the International Space Station. That Einstein's papers on special and general relativity need a "redesigning" betokens a moment's reflection on the dependence of our day-to-day activities on scientific research and development, whether the increasing investment in experimental apparatuses sees justification just like military spending does, and if anyone ascribes the need for that investment to anything apart from science's utilitarian value.

Notes On A Nuclear Blast

[caption id="attachment_779" align="aligncenter" width="295" caption="h - Height of the burst; d - Distance above ground zero to which peak overpressure extends"][/caption]

The height of burst and the distance from ground zero above which a peak overpressure extends is given as:

d.h1 = h.d1 = W^(1/3)

where W is the yield of the explosion, in kilotons.

‘d’ and ‘h’ are the distance and height for a 1 kT yield.

Given any two of the yield W, burst h overpressure p, or distance d, proceed as follows:

[caption id="attachment_780" align="aligncenter" width="320" caption="h vs. d chart"][/caption]

1. Calculate scaled height of burst: h1 = h.W^(-1/3)


2. Given the scaled height h1 and the given overpressure p, calculate the distance d1 at which p is produced


3. Convert scaled distance d1 to actual distance: d = d1.W^(1/3)

For any other two parameters given, proceed in a similar way.

"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom."

- Thomas Carlyle