Go Forth and Multiply

I came across this bizarre yet sophisticated system of multiplication used in Ethiopia before the age of calculators and computers.

In order to multiply any two numbers, all you need to know is how to halve a number and how to double it. Don’t believe it? Check out the video below:

Essentially, this ancient system breaks the multiplication into powers of 2 (i.e. base 2 arithmetic) – which is exactly the system that computers and calculators use today!

While we’re at it, here’s a fine trick to find out the multiples of 9:

[T]o find the product of 9 times n, hold your hands out in front of you and fold down your nth finger from the left to separate the tens and the ones. For example, to find 9×4, you would hold down your 4th finger from the left [...]. The bent finger separates the tens and ones digits, so the configuration of 3 fingers (folded finger) 6 fingers gives the answer of 36.

[Hat Tip: 360]

Frost Modi

I know it’s ridiculous… totally hopeless, but while watching Frost/Nixon few days ago, I really hoped, rather yearned, that one day we’ll see Narendra Modi too breaking down in front of camera and commit his horrendous misuse of authority as the chief minister of Gujarat — like how Richard Nixon, the only man who ever resigned from the US Presidency, did in 1977.

Below are the three specific things that Frost (the interviewer) mentions when the defamed ex-president Nixon asks him “What do you want me to say?” –

… there are three things the American people would like to hear you say.

One, there was probably more than mistakes. There was wrongdoing – yes, it might have been crime too.

Second, I did abuse the power I had as President.

And thirdly, I put the American people through two years of agony and I apologize for that. 

And I know how difficult it is for anyone to admit that – most of all you. But I just feel if you don’t, you’d regret it for the rest of your life.

To this, Nixon, now perspiring, visibly shaken and ravaged, responds by committing his crime and admitting that he let the American people down.

When I heard Frost asking for those three confessions from Nixon, I couldn’t help but think how relevant they are with respect to Narendra Modi — admittance of crime, abuse of power and an apology. I know, I know, it’s too much to hope from Modi who evidently doesn’t share Nixon’s guilt-conscious and compassion (as I perceive from the movie).

So there. Hope in vain…

P.S. Thapar did try once to bring him to knees, but his arrogant approach was bound to fail.

P.P.S. If you haven’t watched Frost/Nixon yet, I highly recommend it. Isn’t it amazing that a political drama that exclusively revolves around an interview can induce an adrenaline rush as high as if you were watching a boxing-movie?

The Incompatibility Between Science and Religion

(This is a follow-up to my earlier post – A Good Question: Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith?)

Jerry Coyne, the author of Why Evolution Is True, has sparked off a Big Debate about whether science and religion are incompatible. 

Sean Carroll, who writes a wonderful blog on the Discover magazine, joins this discussions and, while taking the side of the “incompatiblists”, lays out some really good points.

Science and religion are not compatible. But, before explaining what that means, we should first say what it doesn’t mean.

It doesn’t mean, first, that there is any necessary or logical or a priori incompatibility between science and religion. We shouldn’t declare them to be incompatible purely on the basis of what they are, which some people are tempted to do. Certainly, science works on the basis of reason and evidence, while religion often appeals to faith (although reason and evidence are by no means absent). But that just means they are different, not that they are incompatible. 

True, there’s a difference between difference and incompatibility. One doesn’t necessarily follow the other. After making this very important distinction, Sean goes ahead and elaborates his rationale:

The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions. It’s worth noting that this incompatibility is perfectly evident to any fair-minded person who cares to look. Different religions make very different claims, but they typically end up saying things like “God made the universe in six days” or “Jesus died and was resurrected” or “Moses parted the red sea” or “dead souls are reincarnated in accordance with their karmic burden.” And science says: none of that is true. So there you go, incompatibility.

Can’t argue with that!

It is also imperative to understand the logic of the “compatibilists” – those who argue that science and religion are compatible. As Sean explains, the purported compatibility is simply a claim about the meanings of the words “religion” and “science”. Their strategy is to twist the meaning of one or both of these words to make them seem compatible. Most likely, they will argue that by saying “religion” they actually mean “ethics”, or “moral philosophy”, or “the way of life”. First of all, this is correct, but only up to some extent. Religion does overlap with ethics, moral philosophy etc. But the fact is, religion is that, and much more. For instance, religion has always made claims about the way our world works – the way it was created, and miracles and what not. And science has proved that these claims are outright incorrect. Secondly, if you mean “ethics” by the word “religion” then simply say “ethics”. No one would argue against those who claim that ethics and science are compatible!

Another important clarification is that the incompatibility doesn’t necessarily mean that a religious person can not be a scientist, or vice versa. People hold contradictory beliefs all the time, and “we should be interested in what is correct and incorrect, and the arguments on either side, not the particular beliefs of certain individuals.” In conclusion, Sean writes:

I have huge respect for many thoughtful religious people, several of whom I count among the most intelligent people I’ve ever met. I just think they’re incorrect, in precisely the same sense in which I think certain of my thoughtful and intelligent physicist friends are wrong about the arrow of time or the interpretation of quantum mechanics. That doesn’t mean we can’t agree about those issues on which we’re in agreement, or that we can’t go out for drinks after arguing passionately with each other in the context of a civil discussion. But these issues matter; they affect people’s lives, from women who are forced to wear head coverings to gay couples who can’t get married to people in Minnesota who can’t buy cars on Sundays. Religion can never be a purely personal matter; how you think about the fundamental nature of reality necessarily impacts how you behave, and those behaviors are going to affect other people. That’s why it’s important to get it right.

Read the whole article here, it’s well worth your time.

Science and religion are not compatible. But, before explaining what that means, we should first say what it doesn’t mean.

It doesn’t mean, first, that there is any necessary or logical or a priori incompatibility between science and religion. We shouldn’t declare them to be incompatible purely on the basis of what they are, which some people are tempted to do. Certainly, science works on the basis of reason and evidence, while religion often appeals to faith (although reason and evidence are by no means absent). But that just means they are different, not that they are incompatible. 

Recent Reads

I read A Case of Exploding Mangoes few months ago, and absolutely loved it. The story is set in Pakistan in the late 80’s — several months before the death of General Zia ul-Haq. It revolves around some very interesting characters – many of which would, one way or the other, get associated with that mysterious plane crash in which the dictator died. What exactly caused that plane crash remains a mystery till-date, but the author proposes several farcical theories ranging from a blind woman’s curse to… well, exploding mangoes. Consistently amusing and often hilarious, Hanif’s witty and satirical trance, and the fast-paced storyline make this book a stimulating read.

A biography of the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan was not as interesting as I though it would be. I felt that The Man Who Knew Infinity lacked an involving narration, the story-telling was too… “text-bookish”. It’s filled with myriad tiny details about Ramanujan and people around him. I congratulate the author for his meticulous research as he pinpoints almost each and every character that came in contact with the eccentric mathematician. But the narration was somewhat sluggish, and some details often hindered the flow of events.

I don’t read a lot of fiction so my judgment can be biased, but I think In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is probably one of the best debut non-fiction work coming out of South Asia in many years. It’s a collection of short stories, some of which were released in the New Yorker magazine over the years (Here’s one of them.) The stories are set in different classes of society and locality, and they involve different generations of people but they all have a cohesive thread and are deeply moving.

I haven’t finished reading The Hindus: An Alternative History yet but I am inclined to move on to other books that are lying on my book-shelf for a while. This book started with promising introductory and first chapters, but somewhere along the line my interest meandered. Since I have not completed this book, I will refrain from giving any verdict.

Nudge was remarkably insightful and refreshing. I’ve already written about the concept of “nudge” some posts ago (here).

[Picture courtesy: NY Times]

Math Clock

Just got this wonderful math clock (for my office) in mail today.

Here’s the explanation of clock numerals. My favorite is the numeral for 5 o’clock that involves the golden ratio, which I wrote about few posts ago (here).

[Hat Tip: Udhay]

Being Childfree

Stephen Pinker, the author of The Blank Slate (to which this blog owes its name), on his personal choice of being childless:

Well into my procreating years I am, so far voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.

Amen! Take that, genetic predilection!

P.S. More on this subject by Amit Varma here. (I think the poem he has quoted in this post doesn’t quite capture the gist of the argument though.)

The Way We Talk, and Think

Do languages impact the way we think? For example, do English speaking people have a different perception of rivers than Hindi speaking people — because river is a feminine word in Hindi (as in “kaun si nadee“) and gender-neutral in English?

According to the research done by an assistant professor at the Stanford University, languages do shape the way we think. In this article, she explains how different languages require different things from the speaker.

Suppose you want to say, “Bush read Chomsky’s latest book.” Let’s focus on just the verb, “read.” To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like “red” and not like “reed.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you’d use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you’d also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you’d use a different form of the verb than if he’d diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you’d have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you’d use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you’d use a different verb form.

Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages?

According to the studies conducted by her group, the answer to these questions is: yes!

In another study they examined the impacts of grammatical genders on the way we perceive different objects.

[W]e asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” To describe a “bridge,” which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said “beautiful,” “elegant,” “fragile,” “peaceful,” “pretty,” and “slender,” and the Spanish speakers said “big,” “dangerous,” “long,” “strong,” “sturdy,” and “towering.”

Read the whole article (here) to see how languages seem to have profound impacts on the way we think about time, space, colors and objects. In conclusion:

Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let’s take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, “Bush read Chomsky’s latest book.” Let’s focus on just the verb, “read.” To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like “red” and not like “reed.” In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can’t) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you’d use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you’d also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you’d use a different form of the verb than if he’d diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you’d have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you’d use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you’d use a different verb form.

Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages?

Numbers Don’t Lie

According to the Benford’s law, the first digits in many real life data follow a particular pattern such that the number 1 will be the most common as the first digit, number 2 will be the next most common, then 3 and so on. For example, one out of three times you will see 1 as the first digit. Click here to see the likelihood for all single digit numbers. This trend can be found in real life data, such as financial statements, birth and death rates.

This means that a simple frequency distribution check on, for instance, accounting reports, can be used to detect fraud – because the botched numbers tend to violate the distribution.

That’s exactly what someone did to verify an anomaly in the ballot numbers from 2009 Iranian presidential elections. And guess what, according to this paper, the results indicate a possible overestimation of the winning candidate’s votes by several million! (Apparently, as compared to the expected distribution according to the Benford’s law, there was an access of 7’s in the vote counts for Mousavi, and access of 2’s and lack of 1’s in the vote counts for Ahmadinejad.)

P.S. Andrew Gelman, whose blog I visit often, is not convinced about the methodology, by the way.

Sonu Nigam Top 10

My favorite songs rendered by one of my favorite singers Sonu Nigam: (In no particular order.)

(1) Satrangi Re – Dil Se

Seven colors (Satrangi) symbolize the seven stages/shades of love: hub (attraction), uns (infatuation), ishq (love), aqidat (reverence), ibaadat (worship), junoon (passion), and maut (death). Gulzar weaves together these seven shades into a great poetic form, complemented by A R Rahman’s wonderful music and Santosh Sivam’s spectacular cinematography. Sonu Nigam, and quite notably Mahalaxmi, brings this dark and powerful song to life by adding the ethos and passion to Gulzar’s philosophical words. At the time of this album’s release, Sonu Nigam admitted that this was one of the toughest songs he ever sang. There are very few other songs that have such prolific combination of lyrics, singing, music and visuals.

(2) Sau Dard – Jaan-e-mann

Gulzar’s poignant lyrics were intentionally kept conversational because of the experimental (operatic) structure of all songs in this musical movie. I love the way “Ek tu hi naheen” extends and blends with the sound of the flute. Love the way the song reaches its operatic high, supported by beautiful orchestration. The lines “Sau raaste, par teri raah naheen” reminds me of another one of Gulzar’s song from Aandhi “In reshmi raahon mein, ik raah to woh hogi, tum tak jo pahonchti hai”.

(3) Tanhayee – Dil Chahta Hai

This significant milestone in SEL’s career (Dil Chahta Hai) had many gems, but my favorite from the entire album is this sad one sung soulfully by Sonu Nigam. The crying flute before each stanza gives me goosebumps every time I hear it. The picturization of this song by Farhan Akhtar is quite impressive — consider Aamir Khan standing aloof in front of a moving traffic or in between a huge walking crowd… to Javed Akhtar’s “Milon hai phaili hui tanhayee“, Farhan adds a contrasting yet enhancing image: bheed mein tanhayee.

(4) Soona Mann Ka Aangan – Parineeta

Sonu Nigam is said to have shed tears while recording this song. Shantanu Moitra borrows few lines (Phool phool) written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore in this movie that was based on his contemporary novelist Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya, and pays a musical tribute to their era.

(5) Tujh Sang – Dev

One of the few semi-classical songs of Sonu Nigam. Fast paced, moving and amazingly rendered by Sonu Nigam. (I am still unable to fathom how Aadesh Shrivastav could have come up with such fascinating score.) The ease with which Sonu Nigam moves between lower and higher octaves proves his superiority (among other contemporary singers) when it comes to the classical genre.

(6) Desh Ki Mitti – Bose: The Forgotten Hero

A patriotic, yet subtle song. This is one of those handful patriotic songs that conveys the feeling without using cliched words like zindagi, maut, kurbaan, jaan, aan, baan, shaan etc. Sonu Nigam had another great song in this movie – “Ekla chalo re”. But I like “Desh ki mitti” more, especially because of the heart-melting melody by A R Rahman. Listen to the instrumental version of this song (here) and you’ll know exactly what I am talking about.

(7) Kal Ho Na Ho – Kal Ho Na Ho

Another SEL classic, an evergreen melody. This is probably the most popular song in my entire list.

(8) In Lamho Ke Daman Mein – Jodha Akbar

Sonu Nigam’s flawless pronunciations and A R Rahman’s heavenly melody combined with Javed Akhtar’s imaginative lyrics make this song a real treasure. Javed Akhtar carefully chose Urdu words for the lines sung by Akbar, a Muslim king; and shuddh Hindi words for the lines sung by Jodha, a Rajput princess: Pakeeza, qalma, farishtey, falak versus samay, kaaya, prem.

(9) Dheere Jalna – Paheli

M. M. Kreem’s jaw-dropping music, a melange of dholaks, tabla, sitar, flute and shehnai, makes this song so alive and vibrant. (I wish we get to hear more from this most under-rated music director, IMHO, in Bollywood.) Notice how this song comes in the movie when the ghost (disguised as Shahrukh) comes to Shahrukh’s haveli for the first time, and Gulzar’s lyrics give us a hint to his precarious situation — “dheere jalna”, “soch samajh kar aanch rakhna” — and also suggest how his desires can shatter any time… i.e. “kaanch ka sapna gal hi na jaaye”.

(10) Ye Dil – Pardes

There are many other memorable songs by Sonu Nigam and I am not going to list all of them. But I just can’t leave out this song from Pardes that provided a great boost to Sonu Nigam’s career, who established his own singing style with this song, and broke his image as a Rafi-imitator. This album, and especially this song, is probably Nadeem Shravan’s most original work (as compared to their knock-off’s from Pakistani Ghazals and songs).

An Iranian Civics Primer

[Hat Tip: 3 Quarks Daily]