Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Book Review

A truly METAllic experience!

What a wonderful book! This is the biggest one I’ve read and I think it will remain so for many years to come. This book is pure genius, it was like watching one of those Christopher Nolan’s movie. No wonder Nolan himself was inspired from some of the Art inspired from Escher. It has taken 5 months for me to complete this book, wondering how long it would have taken Hofstadter to complete this beast. It is not just some random scribbling, it has a detailed structure and the blending on Music, Mathematics, and Art which also happens to be my most favorite subjects.

Written in the 70s the concepts presented in this book are timeless. There are lots of things I would want to highlight that has stuck with me after reading this.
Formal systems: The concept of formalizing anything into boundaries. This is the heart of any scientific advancement we have seen as a human civilization since our species started to calculate. The beauty of trying to formalize anything is that you cannot formalize anything. The strange paradox keeps looping in again and again in all sorts of subjects and Hofstadter has asked a lot of interesting questions around this area that directly correlates Science and Philosophy.
Artificial Intelligence: Hofstadter lays all the building blocks needed to clone the human intelligence and what it really takes to completely replicate how a human thinks. Obviously, he himself did not find a solution or gathered one. However, the challenges that face straight on for moving the field of AI forward are clearly laid out. Not just laid out, his attempts to “formalize” them and the difficulties that are faced only suggest that Human species and our “life” is one of the rarest things that ever could have happened and makes us think how many of our limited days we are wasting in hatred, guilt, jealousy, greed. That is why this book gets super interesting when you dive deep into ‘formalising’ anything.

Since the book could get dry at few places, he tells some of the wonderful stories with some fantasical characters that have no least relationships with each other: Achilles, Tortoise, Crab being the main recurring characters. You also get to meet Sloth, Anteater, Author Himself, Charles Babbage, and Alan Turing. A story or a narration takes place between these characters which are highly intriguing in themselves and then is followed by theoretical/mathematical approach towards the subject that was just discussed.

This review is just an attempt and it is impossible to capture all the meta-nuances that this book covers. One thing guaranteed is that you are bound to enjoy the concepts in this book given you have basics of Music and a decent understanding of Mathematics. Since I am in the Engineering field, this book was an amazing journey. Digest it slowly, you will definitely cherish it!

Cheers!
Braga

Siddhartha - Book Review

Poetic introspection at its best!

Before picking this book and in the first few chapters, my anticipation was that this is going to be a combination of fiction and history of the great Buddha, the sage. Even the name of the book bore his earlier name Siddhartha. As I read, I later found that this was about the journey of a person going through the various hardships of life. The way the author has set the stage and narration, it did not look as if I was reading a story of the third person, but about myself, silently throwing a lot of insights, encouraging self-introspection on how entrenched we've become quenching only the senses but missing the bigger picture called life. A real eye opener, or rather I would say an eye-widener as I've been trying to open my eyes for quite some time through various techniques and practices.

This book does have mild erotic phases which were both pleasant and well written. Let your full imagination kick in and be committed to this, you will love it. Tragedies do occur here and there and I did not realize that I got myself attached to few characters unconsciously.

Also, this book was published almost a 100 years ago by the award winning Nobel laureate Herman Hesse. From an absolute relativistic point of view even stepping back a decade or two and imagining the times on how time was moving slow and how peaceful life was back then. With the advent of all sorts of technology with the phone becoming a constant companion, even taking a quite retreat from the clutches of the day-to-day schedules has become a luxury many can't afford. Reading through this story made me realize a lot of these and want me to focus more of my energy towards spiritual exploration through simple and everyday activities. I'm glad I read this masterpiece of work, I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed the book "The Alchemist".

Cheers!
Braga

Homo Deus - Book Review

If Yuval's previous book Sapiens was an inconvenient truth about our species' past, this book is a brave, yet a very calculated attempt forecasting how our future will look like. Unlike history, where multiple disruptive changes could not have been experienced in a single lifespan, the current and future changes are thrusting very fast towards us with a myriad of ideas and improvements which we ourselves may soon start to hate. Yuval's prognostication could be deemed baseless, but most of the revamping are already on - some of them even so bizarre and ridiculous. The definition of consciousness and free will would soon come under questioning which could be interpreted as mere algorithms. Yes, it was hard to think each being as an algorithm and that our brains don't just randomly function letting our choices out of free will but through a predetermined set of neutrons and DNA imprints which are scientifically proved.

Forecasting the job market and analyzing the various forks was not an entertaining read either given how much AI has already started impacting and slowly but surely making us humans redundant. It is not a choice anymore because globalization, competition, and economy will dictate the terms of how the entire market should look like. Even worse, these too will be done by machines for machines. Present day, various organizations are using the word "disruption" as a punch line, but it will soon have its literal meaning realized disrupting the very fundamentals of how we lead our life. When that day comes (which is not far by the way, according to Yuval), we as a species could only wish we had not progressed with the pace we progressed.

Cheers!

Braga

Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow

Musical Meditation!

I can confidently say that I am moving to the next phase of inner exploration. In my recent travel between Chennai and San Francisco, I had the blissful experience of doing two things at once. Enjoying music and meditating. During the past 4 years of my ON/OFF meditation, I can say that I am able to touch with my Root, my Inner peace, my blissful state at will. Maybe, it is difficult for the reader to relate what I am saying as these words may not be something described literally.

Anyways, during my recent flight journey, I stumbled upon one of my favorite songs from AR Rahman through the in-flight entertainment system. I tuned to this one song and wanted to concentrate on the various aspects of it. I put this song in a loop a lot of
times and was at total peace in enjoying both the music and the usual Air Conditioning going from my spine to brain.

Such a wonderful experience - now I want to do it again and again!

Cheers!
Braga

2016 - You were too good to me! 2017 - Here I come with more vigor!

Although the number of years we as a human species are going to live is very less compared to the cosmic scale, a year in our terms is still a year long! In that sense, 2016 has been a fantastic year both professional and personally for me. Simply because I feel that the past year gave me enough thrust to launch myself in a fully positive direction. I was able to achieve a lot in the year that just ended.

Picking up stats from coach.me here are the bunch of positive goals and the number of times I hit them in the past year.

• Sporting activities - 44 (almost once a week over the year)
• Reading - 165 day streak!
• Meditation - 111
• Yoga/Stretching - 109

All these are not haphazard things, these are real habits I've been wanting to develop, nay "Sustain" over a long period of time. Perseverance bears a lot of results over Impulsive Resolutions.

But it is a new year and I too want to take resolutions. Not to develop any new habits. But to sustain the existing ones. Probably improve those numbers above. Yet, those habits above give a lot of positive boost to myself!

Wish you all a very happy new year 2017!

Boxing ring with my greatest fear

This was one of the assignments I received for my writing practice. 

Prompt: You find yourself in a boxing ring with your greatest fear. Describe the scene and detail your plan of attack.

It was 2 AM early Saturday morning and the streets of Bradley Cross were void of people. The snow had already started to get worse and the only sound one could hear was the accelerating breeze around the neighborhood. I felt I was the only one to be walking in that deserted night. The weather was freezing and I had to use an extra thermal wear to go along with my usual woolen jacket. I was walking towards the Regent towers. I entered the building and walked through the narrow hallway. The lights inside the building were only partially lit and a flickering bulb led me to a large wooden door at the end of the hallway. I went and knocked it exactly three times. A man 6 foot seven opened it and said in a thick Russian accent - 'Come fasther, it is going to starth, we were all waithing for you'

20 minutes later I was standing at the arena surrounded by a dense crowd waiting to see a fight whose result they all knew. Although the odds were entirely stacked up against me, a good chunk of them came to see the flight hoping I would somehow win and conquer my long-term enemy any my greatest nightmare Mr.Floosing (Fear of Losing)

My fifteen-minute buzzer beeped.

Cheers!
Braga

UnFacebooked

It has been two full years I've deactivated my facebook account and my life has completely improved from then on. Turns out it was one of the best decisions I've taken till date. There was a point in my life where I use to have a lot of time and don't know how to spend of which Facebook had a lion's share. There were other things besides Facebook where I had wasted (wasting at times) precious time on like the below ones.

1. Youtube deadly suggestion cycle
2. TV Series like Game of Thrones, Sopranos, Suits, The Walking Dead, Better Call Saul, The Wire, Supernatural.
3. Texas Holdem poker by Zynga

Not just a few hours, lots and lots of hours even days if you combine in a given week. Not just during off-work hours, but even during work hours - I had developed the habit of casually spending time on Facebook. At times it was very less and at other times, it was so pathetic that I could not control it. I was under its control. There were many addictive pages I used to follow, I had developed the obsession of looking at all the posts they have put - just to keep myself updated. There were lots of pages focussed on trolls and I was voraciously following them just to have giggles all over the period. It felt really good as I was not using my brains at all to learn something, it was just a large amount of information retrieval. I was not reading something useful, but it may be something interesting and funny. It was not adding any sort of value to neither my professional life nor my social life. The lie I use to tell to myself is that I am "in" facebook to be in touch with my close and distant friends whom otherwise I will not be able to contact or spend time with. This virtual connection I thought was a noble reason. Had I used facebook, say, for promoting my product or advertising about something that would yield a return in the long run or say develop an application on top of it that would either give me knowledge on understanding its architecture or would yield some profit, then it would have served as a proper cause. But the cause itself was a stupid one.

I tried many ways to quit FB. I installed some plugin in Chrome that would limit my time on Facebook - that did not help me for a long time, I tried other techniques on limiting the usage of Facebook, even that I could not maintain the discipline to follow up. I went and read all the bad things that Facebook could do to you assuming that they would give me enough moral incentive to stop using Facebook - nope did not work out. Seems it was a very bad habit that I could not stop.

So instead of trying to stop something that is resistive, I use a technique of developing something else. Coach.me helped a lot in that aspect. I started to learn piano, started meditating, started doing Asana, started brushing teeth at night, started sporting activities. These commitments did not immediately make me come out of FB, however, I slowly started to feel the reduction in my stress levels as FB not only gave me entertainment - it used to stress me out as well for various reasons from hatred posts about religion, race, politics to my friends/acquaintances brag. It was a bit overstretched. So, one fine day I just stopped using it. The results were phenomenal! I could concentrate more on things that I had long wanted to perform. Some kind of transformation took place within me and I was more attracted towards the positive side of things.

(I often could stray from what I am trying to convey, but I don't give a damn, this is an exercise I am doing towards improving my writing skills. So I just want to vomit whatever thoughts coming out of my head and trying to curb my inner critic telling to write this article in a structured way. Screw that!)

Let me change the tone of this article from rant to wisdom. I am not going to ask you to come out Facebook and stop using it altogether - that would be a stupid advice I know. But ask yourself these basic questions. What is the motive behind me using Facebook? What are the things I am gaining by using Facebook - Is it just entertainment or is there any sort of wisdom this gives to me? How long am I using Facebook on weekdays and on weekends? On weekdays, I check during work hours?

Answer to few of these questions and do a retrospect you should get answers in some time if not immediately.

Cheers!
Braga