On what to be proud of

I'll say this and say nothing more:

Think of what you're proud of: something that you've accomplished yourself or something that was handed to you.

That itself shall tell you the kind of person you are.

ark

Travel: Vancouver to Seattle-Tacoma Airport by Public Transport

(A public-transport and budget-travel enthusiast's guide to international travel.)

Why?: Flights to/from Seattle-Tacoma are usually cheaper than those to/from Vancouver. The train journeys Vancouver ⇔ Seattle-Tacoma take about 5 hours one-way and are not too bad.

Top level itinerary: Somewhere in Vancouver ⇒ Pacific Central Station, Vancouver ⇒ King Street Station, Seattle ═walk⇒ Int'l District/Chinatown Metro Station, Seattle ⇒ Seattle-Tacoma Intl. Airport.

Travel date: December 2022.

Papers needed: Passport, Visa/eTA for Canada, Visa/ESTA for USA.

Rough budget: US$40 one way Pacific Central Station, Vancouver ⇒ King Street Station with Amtrak + US$3 Metro Int'l District/Chinatown Station ⇒ Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

Getting to Pacific Central Station: The closest station to Pacific Central Station via TransLink (Vancouver's metro train) is Main Street-Science World. However, there is no direct walking connection between the TransLink station and Pacific Central Station. One has to get out of Main Street-Science World station, cross the Main Street and walk about 200 meters to Pacific Central Station, which has to be taken into consideration when travelling with check-in luggage.

At the Pacific Central Station: It's best to be about 1.5 hours ahead of the travel time. There's usually a long-ish queue and passport + customs pre-clearance before boarding. You will drag your check-in luggage with you throughout.

Luggage check-in option for the train only: Amtrak offers a luggage check-in for train passengers, who can leave the luggage at Pacific Central Station and collect it at King Street Station. This is optional; one can also carry their check-in luggage with them and place them in the ample luggage space in each train compartment. I checked in my luggage and received it problem-free at King Street station on a carousel similar to airports, for which the wait time was about 10 mins.

In the train + border crossing: Seats are very comfortable and US American co-passengers, if you have one, being the friendly lot, will keep you very good company if you're up for it. At Peace Arch, border guards will get in and check your passport. This is painless. However, note that the on-board restaurant will stop serving around 30 mins prior to border crossing and will continue only after the border crossing. The on-board restaurant choices are limited and the food is just okay.

Getting off at King Street Station: If you have checked-in your luggage for the train, you'll receive it back at the station on the carousel. King Street station is in the middle of "nowhere." (see Uber note below).

Getting to the Seattle Metro Station: The closest metro station to King Street Station is Int'l District/Chinatown. Take either (a) the stairs or (b) the lift to St Jackson St and take the turn into 5th Avenue, see Google Maps for alternative routes, especially the one where you can cross the 4th Ave and get to the back entrance of Int'l District/Chinatown. Either way it's a 200 meters walk.

Tickets + Getting to Seattle-Tacoma Airport: Tickets (to SeaTac/Airport Station direction Angle Lake) can be bought at automatic vending machines for US$3, which can be paid via Credit Card. I did not explore online tickets, although this was indicated as a possibility. Do not expect the best cleanliness and facilities at the station or within the metro trains, however, they are, however, functional. I travelled at around 10 pm; there were about 2 co-passengers in the compartment, one of which was moaning loudly all through! I did not feel unsafe only slightly irked.

Getting off the SeaTac/Airport Station: Getting off the metro and going to the terminals is very straightforward and is a 100 meter walk. One just needs to follow the signs.

Note: Uber-estimated "nominal" fare from King Street Station to Seattle Tacoma Airport is about US$40-50. The fare varies considerably depending on the demand.

Move to the Dark Side!

It's common to have one's chocolate eating habits criticised: What you're eating is not smooth enough, not dark enough, not fair enough, and so on. The burden placed by the society upon the humble cocoa bean is immense. Anyway, being an avid chocolate connoisseur myself, I've received my fair share of such criticism and unsolicited "advice."

Since forever, I've stuck to my childhood ideology that one does not question the nutritional content of what one enjoys. Undoubtedly, an excellent policy to follow. For years, I've enjoyed a creamy bar of full milk chocolate without question.

So, what changed?

Recently, I was hit on my head with a rather large brick -- or so I believe. Or, my brain structure has got a lot smoother lately. An inconspicuous concussion, perhaps? Perhaps. The thing is, I've started paying attention to the ingredients list even for food I enjoy. Heresy, you say? Aging, I say.

It turns out that on this God's green earth, things that are healthful undoubtedly taste bad. So, without exception, this healthier version of chocolate, called the "dark chocolate," tastes nothing like wholesome goodness of milk chocolate and feels more like eating bitter cardboard. The rich, sugary creaminess is surely missing. But, dark chocolates -- at least the good ones they say -- boast of fewer ingredients and no additives: Cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar -- just the bare minimum. A long list is Ok, if the things on the list are necessary ingredients. But, I just don't want to be cheated by substitutes and chemical processing to reduce costs.

Having eaten several decades of full milk chocolates, I said to myself: No harm in feasting on this chewy cardboard out for a while. Maybe, given my concussion, I'll even find a liking.

So, my friends, that's how my journey to the dark side began. It just began a few days ago, though. So, like everything else, I'll throw it at the wall. Let's see if this sticks or drops.

ark

Flashes and Vectors

If this story appears weird and abrupt that's because it's based on a recurring dream I had.

Had someone been frozen in time from the 21st century and woken up today, hardly would they believe that this is Earth. A huge ominous sphere hangs in the sky. Every 15 minutes an intense flash emanates from it. If you're exposed to the flashes, nothing will seem to happen, but you will bleed to death within a day. So, everyone scrambles to take cover within thick concrete shelters. Life moves 15 minutes at a time here.

As if this were not enough, there is another looming threat: vectors. Nobody is sure how these small black, square patches on the ground came about or how they move around. There is not even a single person who can recount an attack. All those found with vectors stuck on their bodies were already dead.

Strangely, vectors do not seem to attack old men. Many over 60 were not harmed and nobody over 70 was ever attacked. They do not seem to attack menfolk either unless provoked. But with womenfolk, it is an entirely different story. Nearly all the dead are women. For their own safety, they have been moved to an enclosure in the middle of the town. Only men are left here now.

My days are the same: watching out for vectors, foraging food, and hiding from the flashes. A few of my friends calculated the timing wrong and are dead now. It is too much for a young boy like me. Anyway, I collect food and then visit my uncle. We eat together. He is over 70 so he has one less thing to worry about. He once told me a story about how he single-handedly drove away vectors from his backyard. I want to believe him. He is a good man.

The end.

Why we shouldn't make Climate Change about Nature

In today's world, there are very few topics which are uncontroversial enough that a person can freely write about. Luckily, climate change and its media coverage seems to be one of them.

When it comes to climate change, media has taken a stance where mitigating the ill effects of human-induced climate change is portrayed as "helping nature." While any attempt to mitigate ill effects is commendable, I feel that portraying climate change in a "digestible" fashion focusing on the narrative rather than the hard truth is trying to manipulate people into doing the "right" thing.

The biggest threats of climate change are shrinkage of land area, worsening of weather phenomenon, changing of crops and crop cycles, and acceleration of carbon absorption. Each of these results reduces the long-term survival chances of human beings. Mitigating these effects must be our primary concern -- whether it's by curbing industries, or planting more trees.

While I may not be well versed or agree with the short-term prediction made by climate science, I think it's overwhelmingly clear that some changes could lead to irreparable effects. To some extent, I do empathise with the challenges faced by the climate scientists, who have to work with unreliable data and unrealistic models to predict a relentlessly chaotic phenomenon. It may be that the current predictions turn out to be wrong, but historic evidence and potential irreversibility of a few phenomena urge us to be cautious.

Most general public cannot fathom the idea that the smartest of the people, the scientists, actually make progress stumbling over at every step, just like babies learn to walk. To the general public, scientists cannot be wrong; and if the scientists are wrong even once, they lose credibility. But this phenomenon is completely at odds with the way scientific progress works. And to explain to the general public that science is mostly wrong but is still worthwhile is a tremendously tough task. So, it is no wonder that most scientists and journalists take shortcuts to avoid burdening the public with "unnecessary details." Such a view has some merits.

However, when it comes to climate change, the media portrayal of the problem currently is so far removed from reality, that today, the general public associates climate change with something completely different. Planting trees, being one with nature, going eco and bio, and carbon taxes are probably beneficial, but these are not what climate change is about. It's about a possible long-term threat to human survival on timescales that are so ridiculously large that no human mind can easily grasp. So much so, that sometimes, simple solutions to climate change can actually have the opposite effect! -- e.g., replacing a plastic bag with a cotton one is a bad idea unless the cotton bag is reused to replace plastic ones for more than about a 1000 times. What such altered media portrayal allows for is the commercial exploitation of general public by appealing to their emotional side about climate change.

Hence, from a long time, I'm a proponent of the idea that climate change should be portrayed to be about long-term survival. It may be difficult to grasp at first, and may not be commercially attractive, but may lead to broad policy decisions that may have a chance to mitigate ill effects, rather than individual decisions driven by commercial propaganda, which likely will have no or the opposite effects.

First draft: 30.08.2020

Minor edits: 05.04.2021, 19.05.2021

A case for no case

It's been a growing trend, or so it seems, to boycott upper case letters -- at least in the context of writing down one's own name -- by celebrities, scientists, politicians, and you-know-who (e.e. cummings, of course). It used to irk me for it exuded insincere modesty, a sin in its own right, I think, or at best pretentiousness. And you know, like all self-important brats, I used to make it clearly known that I hate it.

But of late, yours truly, the guy with the perpendicular pronoun, the infallible, has started writing his initials in all smalls himself. Why you ask? It's a reason that was, in a pure display of dogmatism, simply overlooked earlier -- small letters are easier to type and look harmonious at the end of an e-mail. *Now, there's gonna be hoards of people who're gonna hate on me for this, just like I did, but hey, at least I still capitalise the I's.

I'm waiting for the day when I'll stop doing that too. Oh boy, who knew one'd slowly give up things one held so dearly -- time and again and again.

ark

* = This sentence is in #modernlingo

Rants on AI and ML - 2

Essay: One Example Where Intuitive Learning Does Not Work And What It Might Mean

Since last year, Google AlphaZero's clone chess engine, the Leela Chess Zero (Lc0) has held a consistent spot in the top ten positions of Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC). Strangely, Lc0 is a neural network (NN) based chess engine which DID NOT make use of the human knowledgebank of chess. Since early 2019, SugarNN, based on Lc0, has held the top spot in TCEC defeating traditial (commercial) engines like Komodo and Houdini, which draw heavily from human chess knowledge and experience.

When one learns chess, he's taught many "strategic rules": bishops are best placed on long diagonals, pawn pushes have to be carefully planned (they cannot be taken back), and intuitions: queen is strong in the endgame, two minor pieces roughly equal a rook and a pawn, etc. Furthermore, there's a consistent story running in the mind of a chess player consisting of events, plans, and tactics. Every move has a "meaning." This is why chess commentators can present a good overview of the possible thoughts on a player's mind -- a story for the game.

But when it comes to games by Lc0, most commentators are just dumbfolded and struggle to explain the rationale behind its moves. It is as though the game has no story -- it seems completely random. Yet, miraculously, Lc0 always manages to win! (Of course there's a predictable algorithm behind Lc0, but it's perhaps too complex to be woven into a story.)

This might shed some light on the human quest for knowledge. Even in a concrete field like engineering (my field), we do not operate in the "real world." Instead, all our research, theories, and explanations are in an "idealised world" with "good properties." In this idealised world, a piece of theory is like a story -- it builds on existing stories and extends them in a meaningful and intuitive way. Luckily, when applied to the real world, the idealised theories work well. But they're mere approximations -- they're only roughly correct.

Similar to chessplay by Lc0, things in the real world appear random and haphazard to us. When we try to weave a story behind them, it turns out to be a non-story because it's so convoluted. Hence, it is not surprising that "learning based systems" such a NNs, with no intuition and biases and no need for stories, perform much better than our techniques based on our idealised theories. Nevertheless, presently, when we build NNs, we incorporate our biases into them -- in the form of structure and data. Today, without them, NNs don't work well. But, one might intuit, risking failure, that the haphazard approach of NNs is probably better suited to handle the complexity of the real world than organized storytelling offered by idealised theories.

Could it be that we are better off designing systems that lack intuition (because of their complexity) but work in the real world? Such systems, presently based on NNs, have no stories to them. But objectively, they seem to work well compared to the systems that are built based on idealised theories. If so, perhaps in the future this gives us very little room for consistent stories and a lot of room for trial and error and data-crunching based research.

Rants on AI and ML - 1

Essay: Are we right in requiring neural network explanations?

One day many centuries ago, a man looked up at the sky and thought to himself -- "what if" the stars, sun, and the moon didn't control his life and fate (horoscopes)... what if stars and planets were beings with their own laws and lifecycle independent of humankind. This person, ladies and gentlemen, brought about a revolution in thinking -- he wanted to "know" the world he is living in. He wanted to "understand" it. And not merely be a part of it.

It is not surprising that a famous scientists when asked "Imagine the whole human civilization collapses and you could only transmit ONE message into the future, what would this message be?" said the message would be "The Universe is knowable," meaning that Universal laws can be found. That Universe does not run on magic.

Human curiosity and the hunger for knowledge is of immense importance in the saga of humankind. Scientific "explanations" have been a driving force behind engineering and sciences.

But, does it seem like our pet topic -- machine learning -- betrays explanations? At first, it seems so. It seems as though something "magical" is happening within these "black boxes" of neural networks (NNs). But imagine this -- if there were an algorithm which chose a "best-fit function," from an arbitrary list of functions, between inputs and outputs, would we ask this algorithm to explain its choice? No. We know how it works. Surprisingly, this is the case for NN as well.

However, the problem, it seems, is that we associate very personally with NNs. We think of NNs as a model of our brains rather than mathematical entities. Therefore, we require "explanations" from them as we would desire from our fellow human beings. In fact, NNs emerged from brain research and initial NN models were heavily inspired from brain structure. Hence, it is not strange that we associate personally so with them.

Furthermore, it is not even clear why such explanations for the operation of NNs, which are made to solve problems that are extremely complex to be solved using our current thinking tools, should even be possible.

I feel our energies are better spent in understanding NNs rather than require them to behave like us. Perhaps by asking for explanations we fall into the same trap as our ancestors did -- associating special meanings to stars and constellations rather than seeking to understand them.

Perhaps we do justice to our human endeavour by trying to understand these crucial aspects rather than trying to make NNs behave like human beings.

Medley - 5

This post reflects the progression of my thoughts from a teenager to an adult. As a teenager, one is confident, sure, and invincible -- but in retrospect ignorant of the complexities of real life. As one faces more of reality, the ground beneath is shaken and everything held sacrosanct and written-in-stone is up for question.

(Y: Answer by young me; A: Answer by adult me.)

Q: Why are there laws?
Y: Laws exist to ensure fairness and justice towards citizens of a nation.
A: To save the common folk from the common folk. To save rich folk from the common folk.

Q: Is the Universe just my imagination?
(That is, nothing really exists except me and my imagination.)
Y:  Certainly not. The world around us is so rich with detail -- nature, other people, stars and planets in the heaven. This definitely is more intense than anybody's imagination.
A: Agnostic. Conscious imagination could just be a rudimentary by-product of subconscious imagination.

ARK

Essays on Policymaking: Rationality and Superstition

It is widely regarded that superstition, an excessively credulous belief in and reverence for the supernatural (OED, 1*), is bad, especially when alternatives exist. However, superstition in the society is not diminishing despite this widespread knowledge. On the contrary, education and scientific knowledge, which are the biggest opposition to superstitious beliefs, have had minimal effect in eradicating superstition in the society. In this short write-up I explore possible reasons for such a trend without being judgmental about correctness or benefits of superstitious beliefs themselves.

Let's begin by looking at a world without superstition. When we take away the special meaning we attribute to our world, via traditions, rituals, and superstitions, we are left with a scientifically amenable world but one which is dry and inconsiderate -- a completely rational universe. In a rational universe, a human is negligible and purposeless.

Hope
 

However, no human would be satisfied in such a world. Each one of us wants there to be more -- a God, a watchful eye, a spiritual being who connects the dots and ensures fair play. In short, each of us wishes for something magical beyond the rational universe. It is with the hope of something magical that we engage in superstitious behaviour. And once we start start to entertain unexplainable magic, we are down a slippery slope -- one where we have no choice but to entertain more magic, thereby increasing and reinforcing our superstitious behaviour.

Especially vulnerable are those who are going through hard times. These would like to cling-on to the smallest possibility of upliftment. They would rather take a chance on magic than face a cruel rational world -- to be fair, not just them but all of us would make the same choice.

But why would rational people want to even entertain the notion of unexplainable magic? One could not have summarised the answer better than late Prof. Marvin Minsky who speculated that we do this in an attempt to fill a void from our childhood when we had a God-like figure -- a parent, caretaker, or a nurse. The need is so strong that it causes us to see patterns where none exist and attribute these pseudo-patterns to unexplainable or divine magic.

Hence, in summary, hope sets up the stage in our mind. And once we start believing in one irrationality, we are led to believe in many.

Complexity

Let's consider a person who has managed to avoid the pitfalls of hope. Is he immune to irrational and superstitious behaviour? Unfortunately, the enormous complexity of the world eventually causes even the most steadfast to submit.

I would like to believe that we evolved irrationality -- in the form of emotions -- in order to tackle the overwhelming complexity of the world around us. Emotions are very useful in situations where "no decision" is far worse than "a decision." It's a way we humans navigate insurmountable and incalculable complexity.

Even things we take for granted -- relationships (complex interactions amongst independent entities), life (environmental interaction, procreation, etc.) -- even the trivial ones -- recognizing faces, predicting movement -- are so complex that our current conceptual tools fall short in a bid to understand them. Global warming and weather prediction have been controversial mainly because of the complexity involved.

Hence, in summary, even the most rational amongst us are eventually overwhelmed by the complexity of nature. They have no choice but to turn to irrationality in order to make decisions. And once they start embracing irrationality, they're down the slippery slope again.

THIS BRINGS us to two important realizations: First, that it might not be possible to eradicate superstitions and irrational behaviours after all! And second, that even if we do so, we might not like living in such a rational world!

So, instead of focusing on eliminating superstitions completely, we must rather focus on removing only those that are detrimental to our current values -- those that deny us a dignified life. Are superstition and irrationality on a diminishing trend? I don't know. But I'd wager that they will never go away. They're a part of being a human. It might be better to evaluate our current beliefs and practices and make tiny corrections than aiming for a complete overhaul.

ARK

 (1*) OED: Oxford English Dictionary.