The Maanga

I wondered why Nassim Taleb likes Karen Armstrong, who penned this within a month of 9/11. Then I realized, a peaceful muslim is a black swan.

The International Mathematical Olympiad has a simple format. Six students from each country solve six problems each with a maximum of seven marks each. The perfect score is a Douglas Adams like 42.  Usually, solving five problems gets one a gold, solving three gets a silver and solving two gets a bronze. Solving just one problem gets a honourable mention.   

Students with perfect scores (just a gold medal will not do), have gone on to win Fields medals, Nevanlinna prizes and Godel prizes in mathematics.  

What is India’s recent record at this Olympiad? Pathetic. We sent a contingent of six students to Madrid in 2008 and they came back with five bronzes and a honourable mention. India was ranked 31^st among all countries. Who was first? China. The last time India won a gold was in 2001. Were we not supposed to be better at all things intellectual when compared to the Chinese? Maybe all we are good at is outsourcing the west’s back-offices.  

So, what gives? We have a National Board of Higher Mathematics (NBHM) which conducts Regional Olympiads, National Olympiads and so on to finally select the six students to represent India. Professors from IITs and IIsc offer postal coaching to students for a year and a month long on-site coaching. Various professors have written books, presumably solving old Olympiad papers to train the students.  

Clearly this is not working. One look at old Olympiad papers shows that the problems are tough, but not very tough. There are many in India who can do all six. But, they are not going to the Olympiad, they are busy preparing for their engineering entrance exams.  

What can be done? One could simply abolish the National Board of Higher Mathematics and its Olympiad exams. I am sure they are making a case right now for the department to get more funds after the nuclear deal, as it is under the department of atomic energy for some obscure reason.   

The solution: Just pick up the top six rankers in the IIT Joint entrance exam, train them for the month or so using the few professors who have solved some tough problems, and send them to the Olympiad.  

That would be a much better than this elaborate charade for five bronzes. I forgot that honourable mention certificate? Stick it up the ………… of the senior professor who led the team this year. Fear is a great motivator. Look at China.   

There is a clear correlation between the few gold medallists India has and the toppers in the IIT entrance exam. While correlation is not causality, a system that seems to work in selecting the brightest students in the country need not be supplanted by one that is clearly selecting morons to be trained by other morons.

I don’t understand why this hanging of one’s head in shame is any different from right wing nuts.

If you aren’t an individual, you are a mob.

PS: Title with due apologies to TON.

A request. At some point I had written a lot on RH. And at another point, Nilu deleted the entire blog, taking some of my writing with it. If any of you have some of the more readable posts that I wrote - either in your feedreaders, or mail accounts or in your heads. Send to me please? At theothernilu[at]gmail[dot]com. A sudden urge to revisit strikes.  - theothernilu 

Being older than Generation X or Generation Y, I may be one of the few to remember the number of times Doordarshan showed Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”. The film was about a magical “zone” which had the power to grant one’s deepest desires as a result of a meteor or spacecraft crash from a super-civilization. It was adapted from “Roadside Picnic” written by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. At that time, DD showed movies from Russia, Cuba or North Korea. Maybe Iran.

Recently, during an interminable flight, I read the Strugatsky brothers’ “Definitely Maybe”. Another meditation on super-civilizations, more nuanced, as a group of scientists in an apartment complex recognize the Godelian impossibility of a super-civilization.  

From a childhood filled with tales of Baba Yaga the witch, small green mathematics monographs that sold for a rupee from where I learnt Lobachevskian geometry, physics problems from Irodov, science fiction by Stanislaw Lem and the brothers Strugatsky, Dovzhenko’s “Earth” and Paradzhanov’s “Color of pomegranates”,  I moved to the west, read Veblen, but still became an enthusiastic supporter of capitalism.  

As the financial world crumbles,  it is to the brothers Strugatsky that I turn to figure out why super-civilizations are impossible. And console myself with the thought that the most intelligent man in the world is Russian.

This blog used to be a non-linear train wreck.

The real point of the debate: ban all TV that’s not PBS

Exec 1: What about the downturn?

Exec2: It won’t affect us. After all, the financial  sector is not our customer.

Exec1: Isn’t credit a problem for our clients? How about fresh investments?

Exec2: It won’t affect us. After all the financial  sector is not our customer. At least not directly.

Exec1: What about general recession? That won’t affect us?

Exec2: It won’t affect us. People still fall ill.

Exec 1: We aren’t in the doctor business. What if companies cut down on employee benefits or retrench?

Exec 2: It won’t affect us. People still fall ill.

Maybe I’m not as comfortable being powerless as you are.

Maybe.

Much like porn, one can’t define good writing; it can only be read. Though, bad writing, it is becoming increasingly clear, can. Especially those that attempt humor – a good example. Humor, or a particular style of it, by definition, has to become stale relatively quickly; after all, there are only so many ways in which it can be achieved. The poorer the quality of the writing, lesser its longevity. Barath falls into a category of appealing to emotions with some misdirection and ambiguity thrown in. The milieu is Tamil upbringing. That theme is so straight forward that someone who has read him a few times can predict the set up and punch line; assume the narrative drift and the mock philosophical conclusions. All without even reading his write-up. Maybe it’s unfair to him that I use his example — he is a poor writer — even the more gifted writers of prose with a greater degree of sophistication fall victims.

Greatbong, Krish Ashok and several others are ready examples of belabored attempts at humor that are way past their laugh by dates[1]. The simple yardstick to measure bad writing in all the above instances is — people started to react. Of course, if they had not, they would have still sucked. However, the feedback makes the slotting of oneself that much more easier and thus becomes an irreversible process. There is no way in which Greatbong or Barath can now become funny.

When I started this rant, I thought I had a great idea on how eventually all blogs or these extended forms of interactions will be self limiting. But that now seems so fucking obvious that I don’t know why I started to write on it. Which probably explains the point of this more beautifully than I can.

[1] — One could add this blog to that list as well — but that would again be a bad attempt at a bad joke.