What is 'Smartness'

            I affectionately remember browsing through my ninth grade textbooks at the beginning at the year. Even though the year hadn’t started yet, I already had a sense of accomplishment. I knew I was going to get through the year and, from what I had seen, it looked as though I would be learning so much. I smiled at the childish prospect of bowling my friends over with some of the obscure facts I had memorized from my books.

            A year is a long time. By now, I have become a master of my chemistry and physics books. However, as I have learned from reading the Q and A section below Khan Academy videos, I am far from a master even on some of the most basic topics. It is only after reading beyond the textbook I have come to understand the amount of simplification that goes into a beginner high school course. I’m not a master. I’m just a sorry guy looking for gold on the surface when all the smart guys are mining tons of the stuff down below.

            That realization really drove in the understanding of the monumental task of learning. Even If I study for years and years, I may never be a master of even one field, unless I create it myself.

            That’s a pretty sobering fact. It’s motivating a discouraging. I want to see how much I can learn, but, honestly, I hate studying. I’m much more practically minded. Of course, the virtue of books is that we can read a few words and learn what it took others lifetimes to discover.

            That also leads to another question. Any qualified scientist today have a much better understanding of the universe that Newton did. But does that make them ”smarter” than him? How does one define smart? If I spent all my waking hours memorizing facts from textbooks, would I really be smarter.

            In the end, the question we have to answer is, what really defines a master: factual knowledge, or ability, or both? If Einstein were resurrected, would his impressive capabilities make up for his lack of modern knowledge?

Why Do We Exist?

            One of the greatest advantages humans have, the advantage that has been a major contributor to our (arguable) success, is our inherent ability to question. Humans are masters of asking why. The why has driven us to make astounding and wonderful discoveries of our Universe.  Yet the question, why do we exist, or better yet, for what do we exist, may never be answered.

            The answer to that question is probably quite anti-climactic. I doubt there is any over-arching purpose for which we humans were built, aside from existence. But that isn’t a very satisfactory answer. The fact is, humans need purpose to continue to exist. Without our whys, humans would have any drive to understand anything, no drive to better ourselves, and no need to become anything more than animals. Humans need an answer to that question of why we exist, and often, humans make up an answer to satisfy ourselves.

            I personally know how important purpose is. Summers and vacations can be especially tough on me. I used to think that my sister was crazy when she chose to intern during the summer. I mean, why would you want to lose all this free time you have? Now I understand. The experience of having hours in your hand with nothing worthwhile to do makes one abhor life. This summer, when I finally found a self-improving activity that I liked (programming), the sense of elation I felt was indescribable. I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a good mood all my life.

            So then it’s pretty clear that boredom often arises from our inability to find purpose in life, or, our unwillingness to accept the answer that has been given to us. If that’s the case, the solution is to make a smaller goal, a smaller purpose for yourself, and then work on achieving that. The wisdom you gain from your successes will accumulate, until you are able to craft your own personal answer for your existence.

Clarke VS Asimov

            I was pretty annoyed when I found out that Mumbai had no public libraries. I was also annoyed when I found out that the British Council Library, a ‘private library,’ didn’t carry Isaac Asimov’s books. I was even more annoyed when I realized that the BCL search engine was just as atrocious as the Washington Country library service search engine was. But I digress. Back to Asimov.

            For me it was a terrible blow to be estranged from this wonderful author I had just discovered. My mother’s ear was subject to these complaints, and soon enough, I found myself sitting upright in bed with Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” in my hands.

I was suspicious, to say the least. I mean, who was this imposter Brit, who thought he could go around calling himself the greatest SF author of all time? Perhaps I was being too hard on him. After all, he had co-created one of the greatest movies of all time. Then again, Asimov’s movie had Will Smith in it.

            I cannot deny that Clarke is a good writer. His books have that essential quality of being page turners. Indeed, he does make very obvious attempts at creating suspense. The last line of each chapter practically begs you to flip the page.

            The most common praise given to him is his understanding of science. I think it is more remarkable that he is able to seamlessly convey this understanding of science through the story, without taking away from the action. Clarke uses science to add to the action.

            To be fair, while Clarke and Asimov both were masters of SF, they wrote about two completely different fields. Asimov conjured tales of robots secretly running our world, whereas Clarke concerned himself with ancient, godlike beings who monitored the universe with massive and iconic monoliths.

            Honestly, there was something about Clarke’s description of space that clicked with me. Clarke has made me a thrall to the wonders of space, and I devour his books to experience them. So farewell for now, Mr. Asimov. I’m blasting off to Europa.

Deprivation Addiction

            It is pretty obvious to me what caused the productivity issue I have been dealing with the last week: addiction to television. If you lived with me, you’d say “that’s impossible! You don’t even have a TV.” That’s true. In fact, it was because I was so bored without a TV that I finally decided to go online and torrent shows. Big mistake.

            Show producers are very particular about ending each episode on a cliffhanger so that you are torn to pieces waiting to see what happens. Usually that’s fine. If, like me, you only care about one or two shows, there’s six days between episode premiers. That’s long enough to prevent an addiction. When it comes to torrents, however, how much you view it at your discretion. Since it’s so easy to find out what becomes of the world you have immersed yourself in, you just keep clicking the play button to fuel your addiction.

Once my school starts, my addiction will end. I just won’t have time to squander on watching action TV shows. July 29^th will mean the end of my deprivation addiction.

Deprivation addiction. That’s the term I’ve developed for when people are deprived of something for long periods of time, and then abuse use of it during the short periods when that can. I myself have a lot of experience with it.

When I was younger, we didn’t subscribe to the kid’s channels like Disney and CN. When we used to go on trips, instead of exploring the new location, my sister and I would spend hours watching the very shows my parents wanted us to avoid at home.

It doesn’t only have to do with TV either. Unlike many of my friend’s families, we didn’t keep a constant stash of junk food, most notably, Doritos. My friends would have a constant supply of the stuff, and finish a packet every week or so. I, on the other hand, obtained a packet every three months. My family was lucky if I hadn’t finished it within two days.   

The funny thing is, once I finally got a constant supply of children’s TV channels and Doritos, I lost interest.  Now that I’m on break, with too much free time on my hands, I’ve fallen into the trap of television once again. But I still cringe whenever I see Doritos, though.

Useless

            You might I noticed that by blog remained the same on Monday. I failed to update the page. I see it as a failure because I knew I had to get a blog post out, and I knew I had material to write about, but I kept of procrastinating. Now it’s already Saturday. So, instead of writing on my planned topic, I’m going to address the issue of procrastination and laziness.

            This week has been particularly rough on that front. I’ve not felt like doing any work, mental or physical. I’ve been avoiding some tasks, and completely ignoring others. In their place, I’ve been squandering hours away watching pointless videos. I’ve can’t count the number of times I’ve said “just one more episode”.

It’s coming back to bite me. Since I’m on my vacations now, I don’t have extra work piling up on my desk each day. I don’t have a constant supply of menial worksheets to keep me occupied. And since I’m ignoring my other work, my productivity has essentially dropped down to zero. Now I’m starting to have battles with my personal demons. Each hour I waste hurts me like lingering poison. Before I know it, the day has passed, and I feel terrible that I haven’t gotten anything done. I can’t do much more that say “I’ll do it first thing tomorrow.” Tomorrow morning, I say “I’ll do it in the afternoon. I have plenty of time.” It’s a never-ending cycle.

            I’m starting to break free. My own growing frustration at my uselessness is compelling me to change. I’m tired of that horrible feeling I get at night, that sense of failed expectations.

            By the end of the summer, in 23 days, I want to look back and say “It wasn’t too bad. I was pretty productive.” Then I want to dive into the school year, already feeling positive and charged up, ready for success.

Qubits

There are 10 types of people in this world: those who know binary and those who don’t.

 

If you don’t get that joke, I suggest you read up on how binary works, because binary isn’t just a cool thing to know anymore. Practically every human alive today will interact with a computer at some point in their life. While it appears that computers understand our languages, that’s just a facade. The language of computers is binary: long endless streams of 1’s and 0’s.

As mentioned in the last video, computers process these 1’s and 0’s with transistors. The more transistors you have, the more operations you can do in parallel, equaling faster computing speed. But, eventually we will reach a limit on the number of transistors we can hold on a chip. At that point, what will be do?

The traditional system of storing information uses bits, each bit being a 1 or a 0. Supposing I had two bits, I have four different combinations: 00, 01, 10, and 11. Each combination represents exactly two bits.

Now, let’s bring in some quantum mechanics. Scientists are working on developing new types of bits, known as qubits (quantum bits). Like classical bits, the have two positions: up and down. However, these qubits can exist in superpositions, where we don’t know whether it is up or down. Essentially, it is both up and down, and we only have probabilities two predict which position it is in. That’s pretty cool, and something that takes time to wrap your head around!

Now imagine I had two qubits in superpositions. There are still four possible combinations: DD, DU, UD, UU. However, we don’t know which position each qubit is, so instead the information is represented as probabilities of each combination. That means two qubits conveys four classical bits of information. \

Scientists have found that n number of qubits convey as much information as 2ⁿ classical bits. At first, that doesn’t seem like much of an improvement, but once you start thinking of having 300 or 400 qubits, the numbers get impossibly large for a human to comprehend.

By requiring a lesser number of operations, qubits can work faster than classical computers. But is that the end of the story? Are qubits a universal substitute for classical computers? We’ll look into that in the next post.

The Moore Dilemma

Why is it that after a year, or even a few months, some new hardware is released that makes my computer obsolete? Yeah, you could say that computers are always getting faster, but isn’t there a more precise explanation?

I think the most elegant way of doing this is to refer to Moore’s Law, named after the co-founder of Intel who proposed it. Essentially, it states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit is double every two years. According to Intel, that, in conjunction with the faster performance of transistors, means every 18 months sees a doubling in chip performance. That’s pretty cool.

The obvious question here is, how long can we keep this up? Eventually, won’t we run out of space for transistors? To answer that question, we have to look at what transistors are.

To put it crudely, a transistor is a switch with no moving parts. It can be closed by generating a potential. Each time it opens and closes, it is essentially sending some information, a 0 or a 1. Clearly, the more transistors you have the more information you can deal with (for an in-depth explanation, check out this Veritasium video. It’s fantastic.).

Right now, the size of a transistor can be measured in nanometers. 50 Silicon atoms (the things that enable the transistor to work) fit in this space. To minimize the size of a transistor, one has to bring the nodes (watch the video) as close together as possible while being able to break the switch.

Eventually, quantum mechanics will prevail (again, watch the video), and it will be extremely difficult to make transistors any smaller. Current predictions put this date at 2025. 

I first read about this dilemma a few years ago. My first question was, isn’t there a replacement for transistors? Ironically, the answer lies in quantum mechanics! We’ll look at that more in the next entry.