Friday, December 30, 2005

So quietly

A crowd of friends are sleeping over at my place tonight. The chandelier burns at the faintest dim above darkness. G breathes peacefully on the left; he has taken it upon himself to wake us up at a quarter to seven in the morning. S snores, restlessly tossing over every now and then on the couch; perhaps he dreams of the girl he was for a good part of an hour on the phone with a while ago. I belch up the smooth aftertaste of peppered pesto. And Svo Hljótt whispers down my eardrums.

Saturday, December 24, 2005

Delight

"... forrrty sevenn...forty eight... forrty neine- *big man with pony tail and specs, dressed in jeans, rattles off in a placating grown..*

"... fifffty... fiffty onne... hey, you know who's fifty one? You know? Well Nanny is, Nanny's fifty one!"

"But I don't want to-" *whines a three-year-old girl sitting opposite the coffee table*

"But you have to, dear. We are playing a little game here, aren't we? We are seeing if we can count till hundred, and whether Anne can-"

"But I donnnnnnnnnnn't want to-"

"But it's fun, Anne. Now where was I? Daddy lost count... can you tell me what number we were at? Anne? Okay, let's start over again-
"Onnee... twooo... thurree... foourr... faaaive..."

*some time passes by, as I'm lost in thought... the next time I hear them-*

"You missing Nanny? No-nonono-... you need to hold the drink with both hands, okay? Like theeeesss... there you go! Hey, isn't this brownie yummy? So yummy in the tummy..."

"But I DONNN'T WANT TOOOOO-"

Friday, December 23, 2005

Allergic


Hidy tidy, Christ Almighty,
Who the Hell are We?
Zimm Zamm! God-damn!
The Mighty Vindies We!

Vindy-Hoo Vindy-Hah!
Vindy-Hoo! Vindy-Hah!!
Vindy-Hoo!! Vindy-Hah!!!
Vindy-Hoo!!! Vindy-Hah!!!!

Nostalgic



Here.. boys, lets-sing a school song
For the best schoooool of them all..
Cheer.. boys, cheer-for St. Patrick’s,
Cheer-for St.Patrick’s Asansol..

Whatever-the-task, on us, depend,
We’ll-fight-to-the-last, our school to defend,
Whether-at books or games, it’s all the same,
We are always top in the end. [PUM PUM
PUH]-

(So) here.. boys, lets-sing a school song
For the best schoohoooool of them all...
Cheer.. boys, cheer for St. Patrick’s,
For-we-are-the beeesssstttt ooooffff aaalllll!

Monday, December 19, 2005

Touch



3:15 am. I raid the fridge, stealing another piece of chicken, and munch in thought. I look at the tortilla rounds, think a bit more, then walk back to my bed, get the plate I'd left there after dinner, grab a handful of them chips, dab in a decent amount of salsa, and walk back to my bed with the plate. Thinking, thinking.

3:21 am. New mail. About work finished earlier in the evening. I want to start something fresh in the morning. No worries about lunch tomorrow!...biryani in the fridge, that's the chicken I snicked.

3:43 am. Now.
This, as usual. A new post tonight. I travel from there thence, beyond and back. I've been doing this all week. I love the reads. A couple of mornings back I mentioned this blog to my girlfriend. I can often tell by her voice when she does not like something, and especially when it's me talking about another girl, which she never likes (and don't I adore that!)---the fact that this girl's name is pretty close to hers does not help. What I did want to tell her about this girl is, well, irrelevant. What she said to that, and what I think of it today, are therefore and otherwise, of course, again, irrelevant.

Alright, so this girl is a mystery. I've been reading about her, her grandmothers, suitors, flatterers, a lot of others she points to. Quite unknown to her, she entertains me everytime I type 'm' on the browser URL box, wait for the autofill to do its thing, and enter. It is funny to imagine I'm writing about this, and it is even funnier that I do not want her to know about it. She writes really well. She's funny. I'm sure I couldn't keep up with in real life. Yet safe behind the bush, I love reading her write and can't help but smile.

...

It rained like crazy all weekend. It never stopped raining. No, mister, when I say it never stopped raining, I mean never, never, yes, that is to say, it rained all the time. Pitter-patter-pitttter-patter, howl howl howl. Oh-and-did-I-mention, I went to see the chimp last night, chimp, ape, pot-a-to, pot/a/to, whatever, was a nice watch. Here's the report: tried the "Before Sunset" shave, dressed in black, microwaved the cappuccino from the night before (oh-and-was-that another story! I could not, could NOT for my life let myself drown into sleep that night, so I went out at six in the dark morning to get that coffee---and stupid me, felt really sleepy before I could finish half of it, so)...now-where-was-I?Ah-so, dressed in black, armed with a huge black umbrella, I set out to see the chimp. Was a twenty minute walk, was feeling cheerfully lonely, I'm always cheerfully lonely when I walk briskly and the air is cold. Not many people were out with umbrellas, and believe me, there were many people that evening, out enjoying the rain, and I thought to myself, fuck it, put this huge black thing away that's giving you the aristocratic-buffoon-in-the-age-of-poverty look, so I apologetically went umbrellaless the few more hundreds of steps to le théâtre. It was crowded, it was fun, the chimp was good entertainment. I walked back whistling, stopping for some hot chocolate at a certain cookie place on the way whose hot chocolate SomebodyIknow raves about, nodding in disapproval after taking a couple of sips, which thence added that accidental tune to my whistling.

(I would like to admit here and now that I cannot whistle anything, that I pretend to whistle but all I can do is the Oh Baby one or that Wow Baby one, both tools of the average streetside Romeo that I never was, and that nodding vigorously is the only way I can get the semblance of a wave riding on the monotonous drone.)

It was then that it happened.

Saturday, December 10, 2005

The nature of proofs

A proof may hope to be correct only when it can be verified independent of intuition. The prover and the verifier may agree on a common language to write and analyse the proof, but that language must be bred outside the domain of the proof itself (and I assume that a proof subsumes the theorem it seeks to prove). To analyse a written proof is then to mechanically establish that it has a valid structure.

This necessity, however, abstracts away some burdens off the proof, viz. the denotational meaning of the terms of writing and analysis. One might, of course, prefer to call a proof a proof only when it answers the denotation as well; I would be a bit skeptical, in that case, on what decides the denotation of the in-the-limit denotation language itself. At some point, one would need to rely on intuition to write a theorem to be proved, and write the proof-writing-and-analysis structure, without analysing the soundness of these "translations" formally; it would be futile to seek to avoid this leap.

One now needs to focus on getting the proof right, after such other burdens are hidden. A good principle: strip the proof of any essential intuition. An intuition would reflect a denotation of structure to some in-the-limit informal domain. There is no guarantee that the translation preserves structures, because the structure itself is not formalized in the domain speaking the intuition.

It can thus be thought prudent to delegate writing and analysing proofs to a mind that has never seen the denotational translations as well.

(Note added on 12/16/2005: Maybe I'm repeating an idea that Dijkstra talked about in 1988.)

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Camaradereverie


Friendships
evolve much like
partitioning algorithms---friends
are much like
inhabitants
of intermediate partitions;

Unrelated beings
are not associated
a priori---they
are the only ones
that may
collude their partitions---
on
collusion, friendship begins;

Detachment
happens when
differences arise
due to association---association
is necessary
for detachment;

Detachment may evolve
to indifference---a
partition broken
may opt out
of
further evolution---
it may then rejoin
unrelated partitions.

[ ]

One
should
be careful
when building
un-
de-
ta-
cha-
ble ties
before knowing
the fixpoint---the
only undeniable fixpoint
is solitude, which
precludes the existence of ties.