On the fear of the disgusting

Disgusting things are broken, unnatural manifestations of beauty in an otherwise beautiful world. If anything, isn't it the symmetrical and the alluring that we must fear for their full mastery over chaos?

Disgusting things are defeated things.

With our fear comes the baleful regard we credit them with, the attention of our minds. They don't deserve it, those weaklings. Promise ourselves not to look upon their world as we are walking, or they will all gather at the feet of our attention; no!

Trample them if we must, ignore them if we can.

One day, there shall be no screams, just a hollow silence, the memories of fear long dissolved into the flesh our feet. That day, we will be Masters of the Diseases, and their reckoning!

The most beautiful human face

I'm going to try and explore an interesting aspect of beauty, i.e. symmetry, in this post by breaking it down and rebuilding it from scratch using fractals, cellular automata, and statistical learning. I'm doing this because recently, I read an article somewhere (I'm trying to find it, believe me) that spoke about teaching machines to identify beauty and then photograph it in nature in the form of flying birds, trees, running/leaping animals, etc. I want to explore how machines may be taught what beautiful can be by considering one small example, the human face, putting it together as a mathematical procedure, and then examining it.

Let's begin.

On either sides of a straight line, consider a process that begins called fractalizing. A fractal is any figure such that how many ever smaller pieces it's broken down to, each piece has the same shape as the overall figure. So, when two processes fractalize on either sides of that axis very, very similarly, symmetry is born. And any high degree of similarity is rare because each time a fractal is formed, there is an associated chance of error that pushes the process to move this way or that in space.

[caption id="attachment_21347" align="aligncenter" width="529" caption="A spiral where each arm displays a fractal geometry (notice how every branch - large and small - is an image of the entire spiral)"][/caption]

It so happens that one of the characteristics of a visually-perceived object that we usually look for is beauty, and the important thing about beautiful objects is that they are usually symmetric. If I drew a straight line using a special computerized program on a 2D surface, and then instructed it to commence a fractalizing process on either side of that line in opposite directions and moving away, what are the chances that the line won't be an axis of symmetry? None, given that there are no damping or noise-generating functions coming in the way.

As a second step, then, let me introduce a small damping function on both sides of the line. The processes should now experience a hindrance in their progress, something that keeps them from flexing their muscles entirely. For example, if the processes' task was to draw a sine wave on either sides of the origin-line, they'd now be drawing one with a steadily dropping amplitude.

[caption id="attachment_21346" align="aligncenter" width="529" caption="A damped sine wave (with persistent damping, the amplitude of the wave - or its "volume" - falls at an exponential rate to zero)"][/caption]

If the damping functions act symmetrically, then damping should occur equally on both sides. However, if I tweaked them to be asymmetrical and partly random (like a differential function on two variables, one of whose values is drawn from a normal distribution chart), then we'd start to see variations from one side to another. Let's take this one step further and start the fractal processes on either sides of a plane instead of a line and in 3D space, with the dampers allowed to act on very small sections of the fractals. We'd start to see a 3D figure emerge with time that was mostly symmetrical.

Since these processes are programmable, let's introduce cellular automata (CA). Basically, CA is a tool for microstructure modeling that works with discrete parameters, like the grid on a sheet of graph paper, or the one I'm using to simulate the asymmetrical fractals. Using CA, I program these processes to assume different shapes depending on how far they have moved from the plane. For instance, if they've been plotting out smaller and smaller squares for 5 cm, I can instruct them to chart out larger and larger triangles for the next 10 cm, and so on. A similar instruction can be doled out to the damping functions.

[caption id="attachment_21348" align="aligncenter" width="199" caption="In the cellular automaton shown above, each cell on the grid is hexagonal. The automaton is called an Oscillator if run according to the program called Rule 34/2."][/caption]

Now, let deploy this program to recreate an arbitrary human face. Based simply on technologies like facial recognition, I can access a range of imperfections-of-symmetry on a human face and program a series of damping functions. And based on the same technology, I can access the specifics of what makes a human face - the physical dimensions, the ratios, the curvatures of various parts - and program a series of surface-generating processes. (At this juncture, you're probably wondering why I chose fractals instead of normal curves: they're smoother as a plot and have interesting properties that allow them to be modified in different ways.)

I went through the trouble of describing all this because they define the resources at hand to address a problem: would it be possible to statistically zero in on the most beautiful human face? Or, a set of the most beautiful human faces? As the program runs and generates billions of faces, each face can be identified by a human user as being beautiful or not. Using that as feedback, it seems theoretically possible that the machine should be able to compile a range of different values for different parameters (such as various facial features) that, together, make a beautiful face.

[caption id="attachment_21350" align="aligncenter" width="316" caption="Facial recognition"][/caption]

The judgment of beauty is a subjective action. It is definitely more than just symmetry, but symmetry in this case is only a control variable, something to hold fixed while we change everything else around it. We are also continuously eliminating the subjective aspect - which works as a fuzzy logic. By iterating the processes over and over again to generate different faces, the provision of feedback on some of those faces should enable the machine to create only beautiful ones from statistical memory at some point. However, this is only a theoretical argument because I have not defined the number of lessons after which a machine is considered to have finished "learning".

At the same time, can this number be fixed at the number of people who have ever lived in the last 4,000 years? Because that's all that we human beings have had to go by for our assessment of beauty, too.

And they were all left alone.

Galaxy NGC474 (showing tidal tails left over after the "consumption" of nearby smaller galaxies over the last billion years)



Iris Nebula in the constellation Cepheus



A relativistic jet emerging from the galaxy M87 (image from the Hubble Space Telescope)



Galaxy NG4565 (a.k.a. Needle Galaxy) near the constellation Coma Berenice



An infrared image of the Milky Way galaxy as seen by the Herschel Space Observatory



A top view of the Perseid meteor shower as seen from on-board the International Space station

And they were all left alone.

Galaxy NGC474 (showing tidal tails left over after the "consumption" of nearby smaller galaxies over the last billion years)



Iris Nebula in the constellation Cepheus



A relativistic jet emerging from the galaxy M87 (image from the Hubble Space Telescope)



Galaxy NG4565 (a.k.a. Needle Galaxy) near the constellation Coma Berenice



An infrared image of the Milky Way galaxy as seen by the Herschel Space Observatory



A top view of the Perseid meteor shower as seen from on-board the International Space station

The fall of the Apollonian

The following is an account fictitious in most parts.

--

I wouldn't be far from the truth if I said beauty's long past retired from the larger things of this world, would I?

It's gone from the argent moon, it's gone from the amber sun, it's gone from the clouds, the sky and the rains, and it's gone from this good Earth. Now, beauty just resides in the small things, the things that can afford to harbour it without drawing too much attention to themselves, things that won't become less beautiful any time soon.

Now, beauty just resides in a woman's legs. Everything else about her is the subject of contention — apparently, she's either moving toward a image or away from one, and if neither, then she's an exception. Anyway, I don't have time for that; I've had enough of gender studies for a lifetime. What I'm here to talk about are a specific woman's legs.

I watched her as she walked around, looking for something or the other, every edge and vertex of her tapering legs outlined in those tight jeans. From beneath my bedsheet and under the dazzlingly bright tubelight, the unceasing journey of her legs was just the balm for the high fever I was running.

From the moment she stepped into my room, she'd sucked up all the beauty in it. The secure and infallible quadrangularity of these walls, the three chairs by the foot of the bed, the two recessions by the window lined symmetrically with cosmetic necessities, the rows of books by the table on my left, all was lost. They'd become droll syntax when, with one leg propped up on my waist, she bent down and whispered into my ear, "Can I get you anything?"

All the while, I stared at those delightful pinions, my mouth clamped shut with melancholic distress. Moving from her ass and down, the skin of her pants confluenced into her knee in a smooth streamline, free of all disconcerting turbulence. Thereon, her powerful calves became evident in the way she occasionally cocked her foot up, standing absentmindedly in the corner, her fingers grazing her lips.

The world was what it was when it was anything between her legs. When she walked, the cracks in the wall behind them seemed like black rivers that I was watching from outer space. When she leaned against the table, the drawer's keyhole seemed to be gazing at her hips, all steely malice. When she started to clean my room, everything that stood on shelves seemed to fall to the floor just so I could look at them from between her slender thighs. Then, the fallen would know recognition.

That bastard Nabokov got it just right. "The light of my life. The fire of..." No. She's not the fire of my loins. She's something else, although nothing so crude or abject. She's a retreating cumulonimbus, a floating shadow riddled with mortality and demise, all for the single purchase of perfection. One day, her legs will become frail and she will sit down on the rocking chair.

On that day, I will see into her eyes for the first time and try and understand what she's been thinking about all this while. Whether she saw me as the same object I always saw her as but refused to concede it in argument. I hope she did, I hope she did because I will then stand vindicated. That will make this very moment a Carthaginian orgy or, better yet, a Dionysian one.

Why Quentin Tarantino is wrong

(This article involves a prelude that I insist you read.)

It's important to understand that technology does not, and will not for a long time to come, replace emotional expression and emotional honesty, and that's where I think the great Quentin Tarantino could be wrong. He once famously stated that,

"You can't write poetry on a computer."

I appreciate his loyalty to the ideals of romanticism but, looking at it axiomatically, he chose to say "computer" and not anything else (although don't ask me what "anything else" could be). What does a computer do to effectively reduce the "poeticness" of a poem? What is it about an electronically supplied numerical input and an electromagnetically generated visual output that is beaten by a leaky fountain pen and paper that crumbles at the lightest touch-or should I say that it is a matter of individual investment and computers limit that when they shouldn't? I don't agree. If anything, typewriters and computers make it easier to compose real poetry: poetry that is completely independent of its medium, poetry that finds it rational to reflect only the literary prowess and emotional content of the individual (objective) and not his/her association with the oldest form of literary communication (subjective).

Poetry, you see, is an abstraction just like beauty and justice are, and if Tarantino thinks he can't find them in a computer or only on a piece of paper, then it's also unfortunately obvious that his films are a product of iconoclastic ideals and the chance of the occasion that I was to be born in 1988, and that doesn't happen often.

Our individual attitude towards technology does not change the way technology itself behaves; it only changes how much we think it can do for us when we take to it-and this applies even to the tech that is constantly being upgraded and modified to satiate different needs. Similarly, poetry that requires a "non-computer" to be realized is not poetry but what we think is poetry: it is subjective interpretation, one that fails in the face of the slightest opposition, and therefore cannot withstand the test of time.

Why Quentin Tarantino is wrong

(This article involves a prelude that I insist you read.)

It's important to understand that technology does not, and will not for a long time to come, replace emotional expression and emotional honesty, and that's where I think the great Quentin Tarantino could be wrong. He once famously stated that,

"You can't write poetry on a computer."

I appreciate his loyalty to the ideals of romanticism but, looking at it axiomatically, he chose to say "computer" and not anything else (although don't ask me what "anything else" could be). What does a computer do to effectively reduce the "poeticness" of a poem? What is it about an electronically supplied numerical input and an electromagnetically generated visual output that is beaten by a leaky fountain pen and paper that crumbles at the lightest touch-or should I say that it is a matter of individual investment and computers limit that when they shouldn't? I don't agree. If anything, typewriters and computers make it easier to compose real poetry: poetry that is completely independent of its medium, poetry that finds it rational to reflect only the literary prowess and emotional content of the individual (objective) and not his/her association with the oldest form of literary communication (subjective).

Poetry, you see, is an abstraction just like beauty and justice are, and if Tarantino thinks he can't find them in a computer or only on a piece of paper, then it's also unfortunately obvious that his films are a product of iconoclastic ideals and the chance of the occasion that I was to be born in 1988, and that doesn't happen often.

Our individual attitude towards technology does not change the way technology itself behaves; it only changes how much we think it can do for us when we take to it-and this applies even to the tech that is constantly being upgraded and modified to satiate different needs. Similarly, poetry that requires a "non-computer" to be realized is not poetry but what we think is poetry: it is subjective interpretation, one that fails in the face of the slightest opposition, and therefore cannot withstand the test of time.

When Kap Fynncraft woke up on Tuesday morning.

When Kap Fynncraft woke up on Tuesday morning, neither he nor anyone else knew that it would be different from any of the previous days. He walked to the bathroom, washed his face, brushed his teeth, had a bath, brewed some coffee, toasted some bread, boiled an egg, breakfasted, dressed up and locked the front door behind him. When he reached the last rung of the ladder he had to climb down, he seemed as if he forgot something, and climbed all the way back up. Wedged in the window grill above the first rung was a folded-up white sheet: the newspaper. He stuck it in his mouth and climbed back down. Adjusting his cap, he stood at the bus stop. It was 07.40.

As always, Chip Ramirez stood to his left, and as always, Ark Eiwen stood to Chip's left. They had nothing in particular to speak about, but a decade-old habit of waiting at the bus stop for 10 minutes in each other's presence made the silence anything but discomfiting. At 07.42 precisely, The Man In The Green Helmet would ride by on his scooter. A minute later, The Two Men With Their Briefcases would open the store on the other side of the street. Just as they reordered everything inside the shop and turned the sign to "Open", a red bus could be seen driving up and down the mounding road on the horizon. At 07.50, Kap, Chip and Ark boarded it.

The bus ride to the factory took precisely four minutes everyday because the amount of traffic between 07.50 and 07.54 was the same on any given day. In fact, the amount of traffic at any point of time was the same on any given day. In fact, nothing else about the city had changed in the last 10 years. As he rode the bus to the factory, he also knew nothing would ever change either because the smoke rising from the smelting factory a few miles in the northeast was always of the same hue, density and emotion. Sometimes, he'd look at it and wonder. Sometimes, he wouldn't look any way at all but the paper. Sometimes, he thought what it would be like to jump out of the bus onto the pavement and shatter his head. The telltale jerk brought him out of his reverie on that Tuesday morning, and a minute later, he alighted.

It was winter. The westward wind was strong and cold, unrelenting against his thin woollen shawl. He drew it tighter around himself, although it had never been of any help. But he'd had nothing else to complain about all year, and something like this was all that he had to keep himself from thinking of different ways to kill himself. He signed elaborately in the register, and as always the clerk looked up at him queerly. Before he went to his seat near the drill, he looked at the calendar. It was March 17, 2144. The celebrations were exactly a week away. Exactly 10 years ago, on March 24, 2134, the country officially declared it had nothing significant left to achieve. The standard of living was appreciable, nobody was poor, no wars seemed possible, diplomatic relations presented no challenges, research output had been steadied, diseases had been eradicated, consumption was regulated, the surplus was sold at fixed rates, the weather was shielded against, and state-sponsored festivals provided distraction from the melancholy.

Kap Fynncraft had been a journalist. When The Threshold was breached, he was reporting a story on a woman giving birth to quadruplets at the capital's government hospital. A few days later, he had been promoted to sub-editorship with the newspaper. A week later, there was nothing to go by except a repeated declaration of the government's accomplishments. A month later, the paper had shut down and he was forced to find work in one of the factories. A year later, in 2135, his wife died when she slipped on the ladder outside his door. He had tried to instigate a revolt in the factory: when they asked him what the problem was, he had said something about wages. The next day, he was arrested by the police. A few days later, he was forced to admit there was nothing he could do about it, and when he did admit it, he was released. When he went back to work,  he found they'd also increased his wages. When he tried to look intimidating, they reminded him of his wife. "This is for you to spend as you wish, Mr. Fynncraft. We've a feeling you loved your wife very much."

At 16.00, he lined up near Gate 2. The queue for the bus was two labourers long, and he joined it as he always did as the third man. At 16.06, the bus started on its six-minute journey. On that Tuesday, it took more than an hour: just as they passed the Presidential Boulevard, they were stopped behind a few other buses, some cars, many cyclists, and what looked like an upside-down truck, its underside charred and smoking. Kap Fynncraft, somehow, had sunk back into a reverie. He would be home late today, dinner would be late, he'd have to eat as he watched the game tonight. He smiled. Maybe he'd annoy that old woman downstairs by walking around at 22.00. Maybe he'd miss the bus in the morning and hitch a ride. Maybe-

Before he knew it, the bus was on its way again. He could no longer see the plumes of smoke on the southwest, the inky blue of the late-evening sky had swallowed it in its entirety. The streetlamps were lighting themselves one by one, as if they knew Kap Fynncraft was coming, as if they knew he'd want to alight and, somehow, not want to break his head on the pavement on a night that involved a postponed dinner and an angry old woman. A moist film of water had condensed on the windows of the bus, and he waited by the door lest he missed his stop. Under the bright white glare of the streetlights, he could see the patterned tiling on the pavement whip by in the oblong shadow of the vehicle. He knew they were somewhere near his house, he remembered the hexagonal patterns from a terrible day when he had reached the bus stop early one morning and had decided to look down.

Black, white, black, white, black, white, black... the lines between the colours trapped his eyes, and he could feel himself moving through the Universe one coloured tile at a time.

Aurora

Beyond the mountains, the crowning guardians,
There was an horizon that spanned the sky
From the seven stars in the cold East
To the sun hidden forever on the brink of the West.
At the foot of a glacier, where the moon turned blue,
I was come finally to the end of my way
Where there was an aurora every day.

In the cold warmth of the infinite loneliness,
Within a loud silence, slept a new world.
In the dark virgin waters, an unborn child swam,
And I knew somehow it was the coming of man.
The sun was never to rise in my eyes again;
I was finally come to the end of my way
Where there was an aurora every day.

A fierce wind lay to rest the reeds around me.
The flock of birds in the distance only reminding me
Of the many, many miles lying open behind my back,
My footprints in the mud showing my children the track-
I knew I was somewhere in a place they called home.
I was finally come to the end of my way
Where there was an aurora every day.

An ode to a distant beauty

The world is lost and the words are gone
In this shade of lilac solecism!
Lost are the shadows of all nefandous
The moonlight, oh, the nightly strands of Tulle
Stranded we remain marveling at the mirandous,
The shadow of your murder, dead desideratum!

An ode to a distant beauty

The world is lost and the words are gone
In this shade of lilac solecism!
Lost are the shadows of all nefandous
The moonlight, oh, the nightly strands of Tulle
Stranded we remain marveling at the mirandous,
The shadow of your murder, dead desideratum!

A Song That Sang Itself

Vienna International Airport is small but interesting. I knew the ‘small’ part of it beforehand. The whole airport, though being divided into five terminals and displaying a confident sort of busyness, has the standard assortment of Duty Free stores to offer. However, the ‘interesting’ bit is something I think will remain so only for a few people.

When I took off from Stockholm’s Arlanda, I did not know that my connecting flight to Dubai had been cancelled, and that I had been rebooked into the 23.15 – a misfortune that left me looking at a stale 10 hours of waiting and watching the clock tick slowly away. An SAS employee at a helpdesk informed me about this much later – but what made the difference was that she really seemed sorry about my status quo. Also, the free food coupons!

Anyway, I landed at Vienna with nothing to do at all and, for the first time in 20 years, realised how important spending time usefully actually was. In those 10 hours, I must have spent at least five walking up and down the longer span of the airport. The other five, I spent looking out a window. That’s also when things were interesting.

The window looked out into an area where the planes seemed to be docked. The runway was a little way ahead, and that particular afternoon, it was very foggy and wet. Below, I could see the engineers bustling around with all their equipments and waiting for aircraft engines to go faulty or the wings freeze up. Just behind me was a shop whose banner read ‘Travel & Care’, and they played good music. Just then, Annie Lennox’s ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’ was going on, and my calves were starting to ache. I turned around and decided to lean against the railing set adjacent to the wall. A short while later, when I saw a couple staring pointedly at something behind me, I turned around again, but this time, for quite a view.

The metal birds were dozing while the brains ran around them in their trucks and what-nots. There was a group of crows in the distance, dancing with the wind. A parking lot below was full of cars except for one empty slot, into which was a black car was now easing. The vipers on its windshield were on full swing and its indicators flashed into the blockade brightly.

A gentle drizzle began just then, and if you had been there and put your face against the window, you could’ve seen each raindrop crash and slide against the Perspex. It was like watching the world from inside a prison cell: as each drop landed, a battle was fought just a few inches away from your eyes. So much torment and turbulence at the other end, and you stood here admiring a beauty that only you could see. It was beautiful.

The song changed to Green Day’s ‘Wake Me Up’. Just then, on the runway, an Emirates jet was building momentum for its ascent. Its tail fin cut through the fog like a burning blade through butter, and the dense cold clouds formed a smooth streamlined trail at the end. After the plane took off, all that remained was a streak of water suspended limply in the air, along with billows of dew that had been whipped off the ground. September ended there, and when I looked up, there was a lonely crow flying around in circles.

“Summer has come and passed
The innocent can never last…“

The world just beyond that window was like a song that was singing itself, moving from one statuesque verse to another. The crows flying around the place as though not knowing what to do or what to make of the great white elysian birds beneath, the black car now easing itself out of the parking slot as nonchalantly as if it had nothing to with the bustle around it, the rain drops and their ceaseless pounding wanting me to belong to a tempestuous world. Music and nature are enigmas, and will remain so for quite some time to come.

Vienna International Airport was a ghost town that evening, and I was happy to be an ethereal part of it – if only to myself and to those unconcerned crows.