Singularity

Just the other day, I recieved the June copy of IEEE spectrum. Apart from some thought provoking and some ultra techno-crap-call it what you may stuff, the cover story read Singularity. Now this was something that caught my eye.

For the uninitiated, singularity is a concept which is applicable in a wide range of topics. Basically, a plethora of conceptual pot-pourri. Singularity, for example, can mean a mathematical singularity wherein a mathematical object cannot exist at a given point. ( Learnt that in semester 4, I did). It can also mean a Gravitational singularity wherein it refers to a point at which an object has infinte mass and zero volume due to gravitational peculiarities. Apologies for the digression.
But as I read on, I soon learnt that the singularity in question here was the one pertaining to artificial intelligence. The article said that over the years, as humans have ceaselessly worked to create A.I, we have slowly but surely increased the capabilities to such an extent, that soon it will be beyond the ken of man to control these machines. The singularity will occur when Artificial intelligence matches human intelligence.
That had me thinking. It's all okay to say that A.I. will not reach our I.Q levels for a long time. But that refers to us (bless me) higher intellectuals. What about those unfortunate few who have brains the size of walnuts and could probably draw a game of chess with a grizzly?
The singularity has passed for these citizens and they are being over-awed by these machines.
We should talk to these victims of the Intelligence shift and gauge the effects of the singularity. It would be a momentous thesis, enabling us higher mortals to endure the celestial A.I. singularity if and when it exists.
If this does go through, will I, like Hawking before me, enter the realms of science history as an immortal. It's up for debate. Don't bet against it though.

What time is it?

My board exams and the league season have been the major hindrance that have kept me from updating my blog for the past month or two, thereby saddening my entire readership network which amounts to a sum total of two (including me).
The Mumbai University and The Mumbai District Football Association have impeded my meteoric progress in the blogosphere by scheduling gruelling engineering second year semester 4 exams and division 5 league matches respectively in this time period.
Strictly going by order of preferrence, I would prefer playing 5 football matches in one day rather than give 1 examination in 5 days (hyperbole to be accepted without challenge). The exam "mentality" managed to screw up my teams chances of winning the league this season. The major contributing factor being that out of the 11 starters, 6 are studying to be engineers.
After a 3-0 victory and 8-0 trouncing of some poor guys in this time frame, we succumbed to two goalless draws leaving everyone except our goalkeeper extremely dejected. ( Anyways, it is quite hard to get our goalie to lose his spirits, though I have no clue whether his happy-go-lucky attitude is on account of his "lack of IQ" and "supposed abundance of AQ".)
Also the primary objective of every M.U student is to attain a minimum of 40 marks in every paper(though for a vast majority, the specified minimum is also the maximum). So, you see where I have been directing all my efforts. And did I mention that I also scored three goals for my team in the course of the two victories we gathered over this month.
There you go.
The sole objective of this post is to show all of you that I am a bloody good football player, and am also not vertically, horizontally or transcendentally or visually or otherwise challenged. And I will not be offended in any way if you consider me a stud.
:-D

Lethargy: Repose en Paix

To tell the truth, I am an extremely lazy person. It is a part of my personality to be sleeping all day on the couch, watching the "idiot box"(I despise that name, because for me, it is only idiots who find something as wonderfully divine as the television, to be an idiot box) or probably dozing off. When my mum asks me how I can manage to be stationary in one place for so long, I often tell her that it's inertia.

For the uninitiated, or rather, the uneducated, because I am so very sure that every education board in India,(yes, even the Mizoram board of secondary education) has inertia in it's syllabus somewhere around the 6th standard. (If you're reading a blog and you haven't passed standard 6, I'll be mighty amazed), inertia is the ability of a body to maintain it's state of rest or of uniform motion unless an external force acts upon it. I guess I have succinctly explained the term in layman's language.

Digression necessary: Layman, that is one term I fail to understand. I have researched the etymology of the word and I have come to understand that it actually stands for people who do not belong to the clergy. By that definition I guess even Galileo had to be a layman, because there is no way a heretic could be clergy. By the natural dilution and mutation of the word thanks to Chronos, it now reads lay instead of laity. It sounds more like some crazy dude, high on testosterone addicted to getting laid rather than an unscientific, uneducated ox which by the way, both mean the same either ways. So there you go!

Now back to the topic. When I use the word inertia, my mum tends to use the word lethargy. Now that is a big word with many possible meanings. I decided to look up the word and the results I found were quite interesting. Lethargy stands for a state of sluggishness, inactivity or fatigue. An apt way to say, in short, ME. Now when you look up lethargy on wikipedia, it redirects you to fatigue.



Fatigue can be both physical and mental. Physical fatigue is not something I face often, considering that I am a professional Football player and being a winger requires me to be one of the fittest players on the field having to cover up to 10 kms/match. But mental fatigue is something I am extremely familiar with. Having to wake up each day, having to go through another 24 hours as an earthling, it's emotionally draining, if you get my drift.

I also read that chronic fatigue(long lasting fatigue) is a symptom for various conditions. Now that got me thinking. As far as I remember, I have always been lethargic and hence according to wiki at least, I suffer from fatigue. Hence that means I probably have chronic fatigue and that makes me a possible patient of say Anxiety, Cancer, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Endometriosis, Fibromyalgia, Hemochromatosis and a whole load of other not so interesting diseases. Coming to think of it, wiki also believes that I might be Pregnant, but I think that we may discount that possibility on the basis of the vital information that I am virgin. Oh, and I forgot to mention, I am a descendant of Adam...so that decides it. At least I am not going to conceive.

Wiki further suggests that I may be suffering from Combat stress disorder. Now that is a huge possibility considering the fact that I have to battle my way throughout the day against all odds(viz. society, people, earthlings, people, animals, chores, earthlings) in order to successfully waste as much time as possible from the 24 hrs allocated by God Almighty so kindly. But I think I can safely "rest" with the knowledge that this condition is incurable and I shall have to do only things that I can enjoy while laying back on a couch, and thankfully writing a blog is one of them.

Prison Break

I have always wondered how my mum, with all due respect, can bear to watch these serials which seem to go on and on forever. I was always of the opinion that human interest in a particular subject is limited and change is the only thing which refreshes that interest. Every show needs to stop and a new show needs to come out in it's place to keep the channel trps up.
But now i realise how wrong i was.

Recently on the advise of some friend of mine, i started watching this series called Prison break. It's about how the hierarchy in the U.S federal services actually runs the country using the president as their pawn.(Though a certain George W may disagree). They implicate an innocent man Lincoln Burrows for the murder of the VP's bro. His brother, the hero of this series, a god as far as i am concerned, Michael Scofield, realises that his brother is innocent. Any loving brother in this situation, i am sure, would go to court seeking justice. This is exactly what Scofield does, albeit in a completely different manner.

He studies the inmates of the Fox River state penitentiary, their case histories, their backgrounds and does a complete analysis of the guards. By a stroke of luck and it is here that I sense the flaw, he is a structural engineer, and it was his partner who had the blueprint for the penitentiary. So this dude Scofield gets the entire blueprint scaled to size and tattooed onto his body. He goes and fires a pistol in a bank he has no intention of robbing(because he is quite rich anyways) kinda like a dog running after a cab he has no intention of hiring. But thanks to this little incident, the judge sees it incumbent that he see the inside of a jail cell and sentences him to a year at Fox River. Voila. Stage I successful. Once he gets inside, he has reps on the outside who are working their arses out(figuratively and anyways they keep getting killed one by one by a group of federal agents called the company) just to figure out the undercurrents in this case.

For the first time in my life, I actually empathised with them inmates. Bellick, the jailer is brilliantly despicable and T-Bag as the bad man inmate is awesome. I am so inspired by Scofield that I am actually thinking of having my hair cut exactly like him. I guess that will be difficult since for the past 4 years I have had my hair like Becks trademark unkempt look, but the transition, I guess will be smooth.

Until next time blog!!

P.S: There's this character who appears in the second season called Mahon who is as intelligent as Scofield (after a tablet of Metamphetamine) and guesses exactly what Scofield had planned during and after the breakout. Though I personally don't advocate the use of "Met" for enhancing your alertness, this guy is some dude!!

United pour la vie!

As I lie on my bed, wondering what worse can happen, what further doubts do i have to entertain? How long will this tension last? How do i come out of this?

I can completely forgive you for thinking that these here lines were spoken by some cranky old whore in the dirtiest street in Eastern Europe. But, in fact these were the exact same thoughts that I had as I saw Chelsea win against Newcastle with relative ease and poise.
The premiership is now finely balanced with everything to play for on the very last day.
Here I quote some arbit dude from one of my friends orkut list and he says "Mann.....isn't it amazing that United are playing on Sunday at 7.30 and so are Chelsea, great co-incidence...this is going to be fantastic to watch....switching between channels with the excitement at a max!!!"
All I can say to this is that this dude sure hasn't watched the last day of the Premiership for a long long time. I say this because, for reasons related to the Integrity and Honesty of the league, the F.A always has conducted the fixtures on the last day at the same time. All matches kick off simultaneously on the final day of the season to avoid any match fixing scandals.
This is the breed of fans we're getting nowadays and I guess this will continue for some time to come.
I believe that we should let results speak for themselves. I rest my case till the 22nd of May.
That is when you'll really know how this season shaped out.
Moscow is where all eyes will be on the 21st of May, but come the 11th, all eyes will surely be on the JJB stadium because the title is United's for the taking.

There's only one United.
P.S: I had a very important exam the day after the Barca Vs United fixture and I'd run the risk by staying up to watch the entire match, unlike most of my friends, if i may add. One of my friends asked me after the test whether it was so important to watch the match, and I told her, it was even more important than the test itself. All the United fans will know, it truly is.

Of Manchester, Rome and Fleet street!

I would like to start this post with the vital information, that I, am a movie fanatic. Not any arbit movie, but movies with good stories and enthralling visuals. A day or two ago, I was(as were millions of other United fans) watching the United - Roma game . It was fantastic to see the awesome depth in our squad and the fact that we had Cristiano Ronaldo completely rested and raring to be unleashed against the Arsenal. If you're wondering why I'm talking about my allegiance to Manchester United, let me explain that, I, like every other united fan, am subject to abrupt and absurd mood swings, which in every way are completely related to Manchester United's form and results.
Now back to the original topic. After seeing United defeat Roma over 2 legs, and seeing United through to the semis for the second year running had given me a high similar to the high induced by perhaps a capsule of MET. In this uberconscious state, I decided at 0300 hrs in the morning, to finally watch a movie that I had been long postponing.
That movie, was Sweeney Todd, The Demon barber of Fleet Street. Now I don't think I am a movie critic. If I was, I'd be waxing eloquent about this movie, because it does enthrall you for most part. I recommend everyone watch it. It's gripping and sometimes grotesque. But the lead character played by Johnny Depp reaches out so well, you actually identify with all the inhuman acts he performs to gain his vengeance on the villain. Also the fact that it is a musical helps.
I rest with the following verse from the movie:
"There's a hole in the world like a big black pit,
filled with people who're filled with shit,
the vermin of the world inhabit it,
there's no place like London."

I like London and this verse does not reflect my opinion of the city. However during the entire course of the movie I actually thought of it that way and completely agreed when the protagonist sang:
"There's a hole in the world like a big black pit,
filled with people who're filled with shit,
the vermin of the world inhabit it,
but not for long."

Mine Metempsychosis

I had created this blog about a year ago when I was completely naive. The sole reason I created this blog was because everyone was blogging and I was eager to jump on the blog bandwagon.
A year on, with a wiser head on my shoulders, I'm wondering what I was thinking when I named this blog "Headstone of Shit". Seriously I am no longer enamoured with the "shit" business. I now hope to continue blogging for all the right reasons and similarly hope that people will read my blog and give me their inputs/rants/advice!
Technobabble and/or Psychobabble are my strengths and I shall primarily rely upon them for filling up this blog of mine.
I hope to write in this blog once every week at the very least.
It sort of explains the name of the post. My blog has just reincarnated and will no longer speak the language of "shit".

Edit:I have successfully changed the title of the blog.