A byte into “the real World…”

Note: The text ahead may make no sense whatsoever and tht’s pretty ironic since it’s all about logic….so if you’ll read ahead with a mind to understand something then think again

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Was listening to a team mate of mine as he explained how the different musical instruments were mixed after recording using that signal mixing console. I asked him about adjusting the ‘bass’ and ‘treble’ levels and that what in God’s name were those two knobs for.

He launched in on a summarized explanation of how the low, deep notes like that of drums are controlled by playing with the ‘bass’ while high pitched, shrill sounds sometimes like that of guitars are smoothed over by the ‘treble’…As he carried on about how the inputs should just match the range set for any of these or other options…my mind flicked through the graphs and figures in  Digital Signal Processing and the responses of various filters that we studied in them.

I smiled in spite of myself coz i had always loved those subjects that made logical sense   I remember i was in eternal awe of ‘Digital Logic Design’. A friend and I were making ‘4-way traffic signal’ for our DLD project and for the life of me i couldn’t understand how to convert the zeroes and ones into blinking , working lights…..until the journey from deciding logical states to truth tables, then equations and k-maps gave us our circuit…amazing!! the natural highs could be so damn exhilerating!.. The world of digital electronics has always mesmerized me because at the base of it lies the simple concept of presence or absence of a signal, very precisely timed. There is that software to hardware interfacing along with the tiny wonder machines called microprocessors and Digital signal processors that could do something as simple from sending a signal to an LED to acting as a complex speech transaltor… but at the base of these all lies the logic which tells when to or when not to send a signal.

In mathematics it’s a zero or one, in Computing a bit and in physical world a mere switch that turns on or off according to the defined patterns and that brings me to the wonder of having just the ‘right’ pattern…the proper sequence can regulate something as ordinary as accounting, tagging and shelfing of books to something as complex as booting of a pc…so at the apex of it or at the root of it all lies the sequence in which one command follows another.

I’m so keyed up now that i can’t even put together a decent and literarily respectable sentence to express my admiration for the magic, the tricks that logic and numbers are capable of…. I dont know if there is even a central idea to this post…it’s just a random set of words to pay my ode to virtual world of bits and frequencies that are making the companies run, control engineering the milk that goes into tetra packs, refreshing your monitor every fraction of a millisecond and ofcourse teaching u to be v careful and sure coz small mistakes in this environment mean big troubles in our world!!

Year in a day….

  Starting of the new year is the starting of just another day…..

 What difference does it make if December turns into January except for the records in computers? In fact there are several new years in one single Christian year…. the Islamic year, the Chinese year, the new year for a baby born, a new year for a couple getting married, a new year for a student starting a new standard, a new financial year for a company and so many more new years in just one calendar year. Personally I think that starting of any new year doesn’t really have anything to do with how you feel unless there is some direct, life changing impact of it on you. For me a new year or a new beginning is when the monotony of routine is broken and something different comes along. Likewise how can a birthday ensure growing up?

 Two days ago at a BBQ we were having a discussion on guys marrying older girls, while every one of us thought it rather odd and quite misfit…one guy kept on exclaiming “So what’s wrong in that?”….at the time I remember telling him at long last: “Ok bro you can go ahead a do that and nobody will say anything”

However when I got back home and seriously thought about the question, I realized that there really was nothing wrong or odd about it except for the social acceptance of such a match. Besides having some natural reasons for example, often the girl losing her beauty and looks earlier than the guy.  

Practically thinking, if you turn from 19 to 20 in one day of your birthday and yet you are unable to understand something you couldn’t understand a day before then definitely you have not exactly grown older mentally….only physically. The day you solve a long entangled mystery you get a step older and wiser and then maybe you can again celebrate your birthday. Birthdays and calendar marked age definitely matters but so does the mental age of a person…..A person could be 30 something and still be a stupid, vain mutt while a person in his mid twenties could be wise beyond his years though lacking the insight coming from the experiences. It’s all about growing inside and learning to stay happy which can give you the benefit of growing up and yet staying young.

Around 6 years ago I read “Great Expectations’ by Charles Dickens and fell in love with it despite it being so dark and depressing….in it was a character, an old woman who lived within the confines of a dark room where there was no light, no time and nothing to indicate that time is a moving entity.For her time and age did not even exist but it does for us because we have so many things impacting our biological ages for example emotions, stress, gravity etc…..thinking about that now made me realize what Einstein meant by relativity….and as I shall advance in reading Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief history of time” I might better understand the ever intriguing concept of time but for the time being suffice it to say that several new years come and go and there isn’t an iota of a difference in the day of 2008 that unveils from the night of 2007. Difference comes when you make a new beginning  for yourself. _______________________________________ 

Oh and btw on Friday I came to know that back in 1752 when Britain decided to adopt the Gregorian calendar they ate up 11 days to properly balance the dates. 14^th September came directly after 4^th September….It then struck me that if I start multiplying 11 days into the number of years from 1752 till 2007 approximately 255 then we have (11×255 = 2805) 2805 days. 2805 days are equal to 2805/365 ( I am neglecting the leap years in all these years for the sake of simplicity….however if anyone is interested they can find the number of leap years by finding all the years divisible by 4 and get some exact figures!) So 2805/365 = 7.68493 yrs.  This means that all of us have some 7 years lost somewhere in this calendar that we are following, who knows it might still just have been 2001 if those 11 days had not been missed! Whoa….they wish me ‘A‘ happy new year….I found ‘7′ of them….but am not sure if they are the happy ones or otherwise!

……..and it’s a ZERO!

 I don’t know what gave the early mathematicians the idea of adding a ‘zero’ in their numbering system. A zero means nothing while the rest of the numbers mean that there is something….but if man has had difficulty in digesting the fact that this whole universe was created from nothingness, could it have been any easier for him to include it in a system which is there to count things that are there…. Imagining absolute nothingness is difficult, atleast for me it is…like the question all of us must have asked in one point of childhood or another: “What was there when there was nothing?”

Zero sounds ominous yet it is one of those most intriguing of numbers. Put before a number it’s sad put it after a number you’re glad…I mean the mere placing of this number could entirely change the status quo of the situations I’ll take a 10 any day rather than a 01 on a quiz. Take another example: in bearing if I typo 003º to 030º then my ship which would be going to Brazil might end up somewhere in Canada well away from the original plan…difference of even a degree at long distances could wreak havoc with the navigations.

It’s also funny how zero which is itself nothing tends to put leaping and jumping effects on numbers it is added after…and more the number of zeroes the better. Another example…it’s a simple ask yourself question, who would you rather want to be…a person with 5000 Rs with three zeroes or a person with 50000 Rs with four zeroes…you know as they say..”the more the merrier!”

 And then that formula of anything when divided by zero renders infinity was pure genius. Sometimes I sit and marvel at the realization of this formula…for me it’s still easier to understand it because I’ve been taught about it but would it have been so obvious to the torch bearers? I divide a mere one pound cake to a horde of my imaginary friends…who would equal a ‘zero’ in the physical world since they are not really there, then rest assured that, that cake is going to last a lifetime…or atleast till my mom gets horrified of the gooey mess it will turn into…divide the cake into no one and it’s going to be HUGE!

I often think about ‘zero’ you add something to it and it becomes the same number it was added into.You divide nothing into anything, ofcourse anything would get a nothing. You multiply something with zero and that number becomes a zero and it has just now occurred to me that I never thought about why is the latter case so….I wonder?

When everything ceases, ‘zero’ is born and when ‘zero’ is born infinity comes with it. Is not this ironic just goes to show that opposites are somewhere around but are not necessarily attractive to each other So although mathematicians around the world celebrate the birth of pi (π) and they sing the songs of the beauty of number phi (φ) I pay my homage to a big, fat ugly ‘zero’ which has a character of its own…So in my books, at east for a while….the  ‘zero’ is a HERO!!

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But dear old zero has its share of shrewdness and it has been very, very naughty in making mathematicians and scientists go in circles after putting this question in front of them…

“what do you get if you divide nothing by nothing?”

Infinity? Nothing? Haha somethings are meant to be undefined forever……

The shortest cut 2 Success!

                              

Disclaimer: The following text may not be finding any reason in the minds of great philosphers and thinkers….however I reserve my right to think freely and stupendously….Thankyou.  

Numb3r5 ain’t not lying!!

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Ok so here is a confusion….

I heard that: “There is no shortcut to success!”

 Granted!…no issues here…

 Then it is said if you follow the right path, walk straight then you succeed…

Fine! I’ll take that as well….

 Now let me take it a bit mathematically….first lets take MATHEMATICAL RELATIONS.

1. Short cut =/= success   (Read =/= as ‘Not equals to’ )                        

 2. Straight path = Success

Therefore: Shortcut =/= straight path

in words: Shortcut is not equals ro straight path from logic

 Got it everyone? I hope you did…because otherwise there would be no point of you reading any further on.

 Since as it is….I’m about to prove this equation very, very wrong!!…Aha! so do your ears perk up now?

 Ok jumping back to mathematics, let us take on Geometry now:

 Say we have two points:

• Point of Success

• Point A

 

 Now from mathematical point of view, or even any other logical point of view too, there are many ways to reach somewhere, lets revert back to the imagery instead of writing a 1000 words…

 

Right! Now for the elaboration of my theory….

According to the straight path, Point of Success is, say 6 m from Point A.

 Now we say we have a circular path, Path A(Suppose it is a circle, OK?)…..according to the Mathematic of Cricles…

 S = r Ө where  r = radius (in this case 3M)

                          Ө = the angle between the two radii (90˚ or Π rad over here)

                          S = the arc length or the curve (path to find)

 

Right….now doing a little calculation:

 S = 3 * Π = 3 * 3.14 = 9.42 M

Jumping back a little to the logical operations:

• We know that every radius passes the center of the circle.

• We also know that the diameter cuts the circular arcs into exact halves

• So if two radii are making a 90˚ angle with each other then they must be cutting the circle into exact ¼

• For our case ½ of our path length

Thus doing a simple arithmetic we find the path length A to be:

9.42 * 2 = 18.82 M!!!

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  Even though this would be enough….just to add more weight !

Please come back to the Mathematic Logic for since I cannot at the moment recall the formula for finding elliptical arches and I fear for you people mistaking this as a lesson in arithmetic and geometry ……that this is NOT!….it’s PHILOSOPHY, believe it or not.

 Alright now if the two points are a fixed length apart, and you draw a circle joining the two points…

Mind you only ONE circle will be formed in the locus of the two points….

Now you could make many larger or smaller ellipses joining them…Take an ellipse, for eg. B moving outward from Point A and ending at Point of Success, it would definitely be covering more horizontal distance than A because it’s moving outward…but the same vertical distance.

 Well then any ellipse outside the circumference of our test circle will have a larger length

Any ellipse smaller than it will have the shorter path length…the shortest being the STRAIGHT LINE…with no Horizontal distance at all…

 Therefore:   straight path = shortest shortcut = success

Q.E.D

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  And so I become the myth buster of the quote: “There is no shortcut to success”

 Man! The straightest path is itself the shortest shortcut to success!! Says Math….says proof!

 I rest my case!

                                                            

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