Deep thoughts expressed in deathless prose

Like many of my contemporaries, I’ve lived my life so far as the intellectual equivalent of the idle rich. Lucky enough to go to an undergrad university that opens doors because of what its called (independent of anything that might be taught or learned), I have since proceeded to drift determinedly from one place to another. Things kicked off with some initial jumping up and down as I pondered whether to become, what in IIT Delhi lingo was called a ‘Consulteer’. That morphed into a near escape from philosophy at oxford. Finally I ended up in a masters programme in engineering, funded largely by research on India’s population (don’t ask – this is grad school).

The masters degree was enjoyable, but one particularly miserable winter spent watching the rain drip slowly off eucalyptus trees in funereal Escondido Village was enough to generate a sort of black, unadulterated dissatisfaction with life and unhealthy amounts of soul searching and angst. The natural reaction was to go back to India and engage in save the world activities instead. This involves a few clearly laid out steps^

1. Pick a cause. I chose energy and environment. Why? As a certain professor of mine used to say – “There is no good reason for anything”*
2. Pick an NGO (a non-profit). Make sure its beautifully located in a big city. This is because the best grassroots work gets done in New Delhi or Bombay and real change always comes from the top.
3. Find a nice part of the moral high ground, pitch your tent there and practice a patronizing smile. Once you’ve got the smile down pat you can use it to great effect on management students, consultants, and of course i-bankers. The smile is often accompanied by the words ‘how interesting’ when you ask what they do, but if you’re really good you shouldn’t even have to say anything. Plus if you ever go on to become a PhD student you can continue to use this on those same three groups. So the investment pays off.
4. Become strongly left liberal. Of course it helps if you truly believe the ideology you espouse, but its not particularly important, and would probably make you something of a minority. A few simple rules make this part easy. Anti big-dams, pro tribal rights, pro reservations (an Indian variant of affirmative action), feminist (bonus points if you’re male and still go around claiming to be feminist), anti ‘war in Iraq’, anti Indian military action in the North East etc etc. I think you’re allowed to be libertarian though, so long as you’re pro social security of some kind for the downtrodden.
5. Dress appropriately. Kurtas and jeans are ideal for most days, though theres some leeway. If you’re female, carry a jhola. Indulge in kajal. And remember that bright colours are good.

I never quite made it to the perfect kind of NGO, having joined something that suspiciously resembled a big think tank / environmental consultancy instead but came close enough. Then found myself drifting again – this time into a PhD degree – more save the world stuff, to be precise ‘energy and climate policy’.The point however is this. A few days ago I decided to go skiing or, more accurately, to learn skiing. And as I cut my way down a gentle green at Kirkwood, gathering a fair amount of speed and coming to a smooth stop using my well honed technique (namely falling down extremely hard on my back and missing someone else by inches), I realized that there’s this common thread running through all these career shifts. Its this moment when you look around and hear everyone talking earnestly about something, and you listen to yourself say the same things, and you realize you don’t believe yourself, and the guy next to you doesn’t believe what he’s saying and even the paper you’re discussing is rich with the inner skepticism of the authorial voice. Its a much milder phenomenon in the sciences but its not non-existent, especially when you’re working on an epsilon importance problem and having to make it sound like a matter of life and death. If you’re in the field of climate change its particularly bad since you’re constantly having to battle the sinking feeling that no one is going to make major lifestyle changes, carbon emissions are not going to drop to stabilization levels and if there is light at the end of the tunnel it lies in either being wrong, getting lucky, or toughing it out and surviving as best we can. You can’t say this of course and so reams of paper are spent discussing targets, and options, and wedge based reductions and costs and being optimistic in general.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t doing anything life changing and wouldn’t know it if we were. So this constant need to play up the value of research or work to gain funding, tenure, recognition, admission to b-schools, and so on is really rather silly. With which deep insight I shall return to my work. Its forgettable, certainly not life changing, very possibly wrong but still satisfying while it lasts and better than average. Definitely worth a PhD and funding for a number of years no?

*NB: As you can imagine this particular teacher never had any trouble answering questions in class.

^Ok, so this is hopelessly cynical and obviously only half true. But it is half true.

Snippets

Cry softly little one. Pick up your coat, brush your hair back, smooth the faintly crumpled blue dress you’re wearing. Run your hands over the dressing table (careful now, don’t touch that vodka). Find some lipstick…not too bright, remember to look classy…the pale pink should do. Now the eyebrows, liner, gray-blue contacts, time to wipe those tears. Those are nice shoes, capping elegant black-stockinged legs. One small silver handbag, and the proverbial icing on the proverbial cake – a tiny gold watch. Why, you look beautiful again angel.

The evening light streaming over Alcatraz came to rest finally on the slick muscled black body of a particularly large sea-lion. The bay, as dictated by the conventions of language and wordplay, was liquid gold under the setting sun. They stood on the wooden pier, two Indian boys, unsure and excited at the same time, looking around and looking lost. One gazed longingly at the crepes being tossed a few metres away (early days yet, soon they will think in feet). And then at the right hand column on the menu board propped up against the wall – 5 dollars. Too many, far too many. In a new world, numbers and money are confusing things and the crepes were too expensive, yet laptops so cheap. Two years later the three hundred dollar New Year’s party in Vegas will become well worth it. For now though the food was dismissed without a second glance, and the two walked on.

They’ll do, look pretty clueless. Hopefully not dead cheap though. Worth a shot at any rate. Fuck this, its not like I can wait forever anyway. Tired, really exhausted. Can’t even smile properly, it hurts my lips. Maybe its a sign.

The lady in blue walked up to the taller one, who was dressed in standard attire blue jeans, t-shirt and a black leather jacket. White running shoes and a walmart backpack completed the picture. ‘Excuse me’. She smiled politely but her eyes looked worried, the slim fingers of one hand clenched into a nervous fist. ‘I was wondering if you might be able to help me?’. ‘I’ve run out of gas on my way back from work and desperately need to fill some more. Thing is, I seem to have left my wallet in my office desk and…’. Her voice tailed off. ‘Umm do you think you guys could help out? Please…’ Those blue eyes opened wider, pleading. She looked beautiful, rich, in trouble. Very Hollywood.

A few minutes later, the boys were ten dollars poorer (a pair of exquisite nutella crepes, to put things in perspective). The blonde in blue was smiling gratefully and walking away, slipping quickly into the crowd. The dying sun gleamed off the silver bag, a goldfish slipping into the laughing crowd. The two students looked at each other faintly embarrassed, but filled with the warm fuzzy feeling that accompanies doing a certified ‘good deed’. Soul food for months really, to be savoured in those night-time moments before exams and research presentations when you wonder whether God loves you.

Walking to the tram station they saw her again, talking to a Chinese girl, who looked genuinely sympathetic. ‘My car…’ they heard, in that oddly lilting accent. Money changed hands. And again the blonde-blue-silver princess walking away quickly, throwing herself into a run down Ford, turning into a somewhat seedy alley. There’s really not much to say at these moments. The two exchanged a couple of quick exchanged glances, some ‘do you think’ awkward laughter. Then, because to skip this step is virtually impossible for most Indians, there was a bit of philosophizing about things that actually matter. And it is true – in the larger scheme of things, actually in pretty much any scheme of things – ten dollars is no big deal. There will be pick-pockets and muggings and completely useless used cars to come. There will be dapper Turkish salesmen selling eighty dollar felt hats and ascribing to them a glorious Anatolian heritage. Even so, some incidents remain oddly hard to forget, romanticized and polished with time, still faintly mortifying and yet not wholly unpleasant.

EE364

california suburbia,

crickets dancing on the lawn.

three am pancake suppers

jon stewart laughing on.

 

aimless facebook people watching

turkish radio, catchy song.

convex sets and danish cookies

would a little catnap be so wrong?

 

about this time chicago’s waking,

delhi’s making evening plans

bangalore is stuck in traffic,

if only cvx ever actually ran.

Y2E2

The Bay Area is full of a particular breed of conscientious human beings – they vote democrat, worry about Sudan, fret about climate change, eat vegan/organic/free-range, pretend they’re in France whilst consuming vast quantities of wine and cheese, and are always keen to point out how lovely their Apple iBooks are. Naturally therefore, the powers that be at Stanford have also been rightly concerned about not being eco-friendly enough and consequently are presently engaged in demolishing the entire campus to construct new buildings that are ’smart’ and ‘green’ and ‘clean’ and ‘modern’ and ‘efficient’ and ‘open’ and ‘light’ and quite possibly, though this is still only rumour, also alive.

I’ve been lucky enough to have my research group shifted wholesale to the first such construction, the rather grandly named Yang and Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building (or as the cool people call it, Y2E2). This is -on paper at least- something of a step up from my current abode – a quaint wooden office (or as T would insist on saying – ’study area’) within the termite ridden Terman Engineering building.

And yet first impressions of Y2E2 seem uniformly negative for most people. Since this is the prototype for virtually all the new buildings on campus, thats a bit disappointing. Put simply, there are two ways of saving energy. One is to leave out big energy guzzling options such as whole building lighting or space heating/cooling. This is what countries like India mean when they talk about the need for americans to take a long hard look at their lifestyles. (which is not to say thats a particularly helpful position or always economically efficient, but there it is). The other way is to build ’smart buildings’ that take quantities of technology and money and attempt to have their cake and eat it too. Y2E2 does the latter.

Thus this new building features a design meant to allow sunlight to light the rooms, underground tunnels to increase natural cooling and a roof that opens at night to allow cold air to enter in preparation for next morning. To make all this work though, the walls are made of a rather unattractive translucent plastic (lets in some light but sadly not enough to be much use), half of them don’t reach the ceiling, and the floor is made of unfinished concrete. Carpeting is a strict no-no because of the need to create an appropriate thermal mass for the night cooling system. This leads to the interesting side effect that most conversations are now broadcast down the length of a whole corridor, aided by echoing concrete and incomplete walls, and punctuated by the clip-clop of shoes and heels on said floor. The unfinished concrete has proven particularly unpopular because it also looks quite frightful, remarkably like something out of New Delhi railway station in fact. Its also, I’m told by some faculty, rather hard on the knees. No one’s falling in love with it yet.

This might all be worth it if this actually saves a significant amount of energy. Unfortunately, thats not something anyone knows for sure yet. But I can’t help wondering – as this country tries to get a bit more eco-friendly, might it decide that all the little things – carpets and pretty walls and sandstone exteriors and wood panels are as important as those so called necessities like central cooling and heating. And if they are, well then, perhaps its time to pull out sweaters and room heaters and go easy on penny-wise pound foolish technology.

Update: A month or so into working in Y2E2 and it’s grown on me somewhat. Its not inherently attractive and never will be, but as with most buildings, once people move in and make the rooms more lived in, things improve. Whether a building that costs tens of millions of dollars in order to shave a few percentage points off energy consumption (in many cases, as with the lighting system, the gap between theory and practice will ensure even that does not occur), is the way forward still seems highly debatable though.

Kane dynamics

This post is going to put a bunch of people off, but I was reminded of it when discussing something with my room-mate (and realizing how much I’d forgotten). Once upon a time I used to be an engineering student before going over to the dark side (save the world, burn less carbon). So…in memory of kinematics and dynamics, here’s what seemed to me to be a quite fascinating demonstration of the importance of variable selection in solving a dynamics problem. Note that this problem is theoretically quite uninteresting, completely understood, and utterly insoluble if you don’t make the right choices.

Consider the spacecraft in the figure with an attached robot arm, used perhaps to hurl hapless fools into the nether regions of frigid space. If the ship is stationary, external forces and torques are balanced and you have nine degrees of freedom corresponding to the three rigid parts of the arm with the spacecraft just sitting there. In order to figure out what torques (and thrusts) the driving motors should generate you need to write the differential equations governing motion. Some of these come from geometry (half to be precise) – thats the kinematics bit. The rest come from dynamics. 18 equations in total. The key is in how you write them.

Using Newtons Laws about the centre of mass is a complete mess, and you wouldn’t really try that. What might be worth trying is to use a Lagrangian formulation, using motion variables and their derivatives. Lagrange’s method has us define position variables as a set of angles. Three for the orientation of 1 in N, 2 for the twin motors at B (rotations about by and then a rotation of 2 about bz), 1 rotation about cz and finally three for the ball and socket joint connecting the grasper E to the arm. Thats 9 if you count, and well – bear with me!

So now Lagrange’s formulation leads to these angles and their derivatives as the position and motion variables. The kinematic equations in this case are trivial since they merely state that motion variables are defined as derivatives of position variables. The shortest dynamic equation is all of 300kms long in 11 point font. Modern dynamics (Kane dynamics) uses an alternative set of position and motion variables generated using a set of guidelines, and of the form of affine functions of positions and angles, and velocities and angular velocities respectively. Follow the right method and you get equations a few lines long, with the longest being a few pages.

The difference between a 300km long equation and a couple of lines is quite simply the difference between saying you can solve a Newtonian dynamics problem, and saying you understand the principle. Figuring out ways to come up with efficient formulations is less than a couple of decades old. Writing F=ma dates back to the 17th century.