Wednesday, December 25, 2013

The logic of God and Evil

Although I always wanted to make a flowchart like this, I was too busy (lazy) to do so.
But somebody made it, by God's grace. I stumbled upon it over the web.
Credit to Steven Butler.


Monday, December 23, 2013

Empathy and Sympathy

"The truth is, rarely a response can make something better, 
what makes something better is connection"


Sunday, December 8, 2013

The Chaos Theory - A layman introduction

I spent my Sunday learning about Chaos, Fractal and Self Organisation.

A beautiful and charming concept. I have been trying to get my grip over it for since I first came across it(~2011), but I was always left in bits and piece. A recent book I read made the magic.

The reason why this is beautiful is because of its elegance and importance in understanding the very basic working of nature.
PS- There is a movie based on Chaos Theory. :)


Before you go-to IMDB, you gotta know what Chaos theory actually is.

Chaos- In layman term.

Let say you are practicing basketball. But instead of ball, you have marbles. Now you throw the marble for the first time. You miss the basket by huge distance. Now you realize you have to throw it a bit left. You do this. Again you fail, but this time the distance is reduced. You shift you trajectory a bit more and again you fail but with a lesser distance.

After number of try, you realize the actual trajectory and the elbow angle needed for throwing the marble right in the center of the basket. Yupi!!!

The twist is here. Now even if you throw the marble a little bit left or right, you have a chance of not missing the basket. What this means is, a little bit of change in the initial condition does not change the result of the system to tremendous amount.

This is what we call as Newtonian Systems or Deterministic system. These are system which have initial conditions (the elbow orientation, the trajectory, the size of marble), set of fixed rules/laws (the law of motions, the law of gravity governing the marble, the air friction, etc) and the output (in this case the marble landing in the basket).

Simply, INPUT + LAWS -----determines-----> OUTPUT.


In a Newtonian system, if we know the initial condition and the laws, we can predict the outcome (as in case of marble-basket game, you can predict that if you keep the initial condition and set of rules same, the marble will land in the basket).

But there are some system in nature which is not predictable. What we mean by this is, even if you keep the keep the laws/rules the same and just change the input a little bit, the outcome can be drastically different from the predicted.

Simply, INPUT + LAWS ------doesn't determines -----> OUTPUT

This is a what we called chaos. What it means is "even if you know the exact input and the set of rules governing the system, you can never ever predict the outcome of that system."


Example-
The first mention of chaos theory was by MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz. Lorenz was working on a new software which was built to predict the weather for future based on same input data (temperature, pressure, humidity,wind velocity, etc). This was based on mathematical equations.
When Lorenz gave some input to the system, he got a graph like this.
|
|
|........---__----.....-----....-------.......------
|

|_________________________________________


Lorenz just re-ran the whole program again with the same input and same software. Surprisingly, this time the input was astonishing different.
|
|         /\             / \
|......../ \..., ,......./ \......., ,......./\.../\......
|              \/                   \/

|_________________________________________



Lorenz was amazed. He checked the input and the calculation once again thinking it was his mistake. Astonishingly, every thing was similar to the last run. Why has the system produced such a different output.

Lorenz realized that there is some changes in the initial input values.
In the first run, the values were like 0.98453 or 12.32470 or 3.6614.
In the second run, the values were 0.984 or 12.324 or 3.661. i.e., the values were rounded off to 3 decimal places.


Lorenz realized that the determinism fails even if you change the value by just 0.0001. That means if there is just a minor change in the input field, the software will show rain instead of winter at particular place. He realized that this is a big failure and that not all system in the nature is deterministic. What this means,there are some system to which you can never determine the output to utmost accuracy, no matter how hard you try, this is because the initial data of some system can never be known with complete accuracy (like weather).


The consequence of this theory is something called as Butterfly Effect. 
It says that flapping of a butterfly's wings in South America could affect the weather in Texas


This is CHAOS THEORY in a nutshell. Happy learning!

The Conversion Factor

Going around Mumbai roads, you will quite frequently  come across this hoarding these days.


Pay attention, keep your mobile phone aside. Think about the following.
  • This poster or advertisement has no “responsibility tag. What I mean by this, the poster has no names of the organization of the committee who are responsible for this.
  • This poster has no “description” of what it is all about. All it speaks about is change or parivartan (in hindi).
  • It has Johnny Lever and Nagma. Both of them a known television stars. Good selling point.
  • It offers you free books and free sessions. Just call on the number. Maybe just a miscall will do

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