Teaching Graphs

I've been intensively tracking visitors to this blog using the tools Google provides. Vibhat kept seeing the usage graphs on the screen and asked me what was that funny picture. So I sat down with him to try to explain graphs. He got the basic funda in just a few minutes and was saying "Ok when there's a lot of visitors that's when there's a peak in the picture and when there's very few its low".  I was very surprised. I was expecting a painful process of him having to understand x-axis , y-axis, lengths along axes. But without talking much about axes, I was able to communicate the idea. 
In contrast, I remember how I learnt graphs - getting introduced to graph paper, then counting distance along axes, then plotting abstract points like (3,4) and so on. It must have happened over atleast a month or so. In retrospect it seems a painfully abstract and unnecessary process. 

So, is graphing much easier to understand when you do it with a 
real-world example ? 
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Separately, I've been getting about 20 visitors per day to the blog, but there are two curious spikes in 2014 and 2016 as you can see in the graph which I am not able to explain. However, there seem to be a lot of spammers and other junk visits, so the actual numbers could be even lower :-( 

Elements of a life philosophy 3 - "Empty and meaningless"

Sartre said “Life is empty and meaningless” and Landmark clarified that to “Life is empty and meaningless and its empty and meaningless that its empty and meaningless” 

One way to look at this is something like: 

You are a speck of a human being among billions of others , billions before, and billions after. And all this on planet Earth with the vastness of the Universe around us. Can you try to say our lives have meaning in the face of all this ?

If you’re very conscious of this insignificance all the time, you might freeze into inaction. Or surprisingly, you might find it very liberating and free yourself up to do whatever you want. 

Even if you don’t get into the cosmological analogies above, you can see the meaninglessness in other ways: we are all born, we go through whatever we go through and then die. That’s all that actually happens. Everything else is our attempt to make sense of this and give us courage to live in the face of the apparent pointlessness. Religion and morality are prime examples. 

Going further into this, all our opinions and judgements are ultimately invalid. We may respect someone, love somebody, dislike someone, hate someone. But if you look into it, all those judgements don’t have objectivity in them. There is always another opinion or judgement you can have that it equally valid. This is best illustrated by a practical example, I'll add one in when a good one comes to mind! In the meantime, you could just try it yourself taking some situation or person that you really feel negative about. Then see if there is a valid other way to view it. 
There is no way to have a truly ‘correct’ or ’objective’ opinion about something. 

I believe that the ‘Maya’ idea of Indian philosophy was trying to express the same idea.

“Empty and meaningless’ can be understood as a theory but to really impact how you live life, it has to be experienced. That experience can be pretty discomfiting - a feeling of the ground giving way under your feet. 

How does ‘empty and meaningless’ influence me? I have a tendency to make negative judgements about people and create elaborate justifications in my mind to support that. 

Having internalised ‘empty and meaningless’ I’m able to catch myself often in this process and drop it and accept that its just my judgement and its up to me to stand by the judgement or not irrespective of the justification.  

Also, I don’t get too much into ideology - all ideology is an intellectual exercise that can never capture the entirety of life. Use ideology as an aid to thinking, but realise that’s its temporary and provisional 

That we are all imperfect or flawed is obvious and a truism. One deeper understanding of it is: there are times when we are helplessly dependant on others, and there will be times when the vice versa is true. This is often true with a significant other. We should let this be, instead of trying to be tough and independent and not allowing oneself to be 'at the mercy' of others. Being dependant or vulnerable is a passing thing, and you can be sure that the tables will be turned at some point.

The Economist on climate change science

Summary/excerpts of a recent Economist article on Climate change science, mostly for my own reference:

Full article here:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15719298


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In any complex scientific picture of the world there will be gaps, misperceptions and mistakes. Whether your impression is dominated by the whole or the holes will depend on your attitude to the project at hand. You might say that some see a jigsaw where others see a house of cards. Jigsaw types have in mind an overall picture and are open to bits being taken out, moved around or abandoned should they not fit. Those who see houses of cards think that if any piece is removed, the whole lot falls down. When it comes to climate, academic scientists are jigsaw types, dissenters from their view house-of-cards-ists.

The defenders of the consensus tend to stress the general consilience of their efforts—the way that data, theory and modelling back each other up. Doubters see this as a thoroughgoing version of “confirmation bias”, the tendency people have to select the evidence that agrees with their original outlook.

No one doubts that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, good at absorbing infra-red radiation. It is also well established that human activity is putting more of it into the atmosphere than natural processes can currently remove. Measurements made since the 1950s show the level of carbon dioxide rising year on year, from 316 parts per million (ppm) in 1959 to 387ppm in 2009. Less direct records show that the rise began about 1750, and that the level was stable at around 280ppm for about 10,000 years before that. This fits with human history: in the middle of the 18th century people started to burn fossil fuels in order to power industrial machinery. Analysis of carbon isotopes, among other things, shows that the carbon dioxide from industry accounts for most of the build-up in the atmosphere.

Disagreement is not with the level of C02 or that it comes from human activity. It is with the warming associated with a particular level of CO2. Problems:

Background natural climate cycles.
Climate is a complex non-linear system
Oceans can absorb heat and add inertia to the climate system, so atmosphere warms more slowly than expected.

On the data front: There are three records of land-surface temperature put together from thermometer readings in common use by climatologists, one of which is compiled at the Climatic Research Unit of e-mail infamy. They all show warming, and, within academia, their reliability is widely accepted. Various industrious bloggers are not so convinced.

Pure theory says that doubling Co2 will result in 1 degree C of warming, which is not so problematic. "climate sensitivity". However there are feedback effects that can increase this. The most important involve water vapour and clouds. Warming air will absorb water vapour (powerful greenhouse gas) which is a positive feedback loop for warming. There is scientific uncertainity about how much the water vapour adds, one estimate is 1.7 degrees C, up from the 1 degree C above.

Another point of contention: greenhouse warming should cause warming down below and cooling in the stratosphere. Earlier observations did not corraborate this, but now evidence is building up in favour.

Clouds have both a cooling effect (reflecting sunlight from the upper atmosphere), as well as a greenhouse effect. Sorting these two out to get the net is complicated.

Another source of evidence is the climate of the past, like ice ages and the associated CO2 and other factors that contributed to it. The temperature records of the past millenium is one particular hotspot of debate. Tree rings is one source of data. A 1998 Nature article found a 'hockey stick' shape for temperatures of the last century, mostly flat but with the blip towards the end of the 20th century. This paper is widely contested by sceptics. One contestation is that this curve does not account for the 'medieval warm period' ; when, it is believed, temperatures were as warm or warmer than now.

The most accurate recent climate data cannot be used easily for checking the quality of models because of complexities like aerosols in the atmosphere whose effects are not known well enough so their effect is parameterized in the model instead of being strictly modelled. This also leads to accusations that they are parameterised in such a way as to make the models show higher levels of warming.

Using Twitter

I'm learning and enjoying Twitter ; here are my notes on how I'm currently managing the overload that is always waiting around the corner when you use Twitter:

1.) I'm using TweetDeck which is pretty nice, haven't tried any of the other Twitter tools so far other than Twitpic. I post on two Twitter accounts @ahminotep and @indiawater and TweetDeck allows me to manage both of those, though currently I'm constantly 'crossposting' due to negligence

2.) I've gotten over the initial phobia of following too many people ; now I feel comfortable following interesting accounts I come across. The way to manage this is to try lots of accounts and unfollow or use lists to manage an overflow of information.

3.) I'm finding that its actually not difficult (and its fun) to scan quite rapidly through the 'pending' tweets. The trick that made this work for me is to keep clicking on links that are interesting but *not* follow them right away. Earlier I used to look at each link as I viewed the tweet and found it too disorienting and needing too much context switching. Instead now I go through all the tweets, click-click-click, till I'm up to date and then go and look at all the links that I've opened up (or even just keep them up and look at them later when I want a break). The only difficulty with this is that when one of the links is interesting and you want to retweet, you have no easy way of finding the original tweet.

4.) Its become a little game now to try to see how many mentions and direct messages I can get to happen

5.) Here's my take on some prominent Tweeters and why I follow or don't follow them. Its also interesting to follow well-known people and get some idea of the kind of people they are, but you often find out later that they (or atleast their tweet persona) are not so interesting:

-Kevin Smith, the director @thatkevinsmith : Great guy, really genuine and authentic, raunchy, but huge amount of tweeting, so I had to unfollow and move him to a list instead.

-N.Ram, @nramind : Wider range of interests than I expected him to have (don't ask me why), retweets stuff from prominent foreign newspapers, but I generally don't find his stuff interesting enough to clickthrough. Still following

-Pritish Nandy @pritishnandy: Bursty tweets, often annoying because its like a blog post divided into tweets, lots of analysis of news headlines, intelligent but I don't agree with a lot of his opinions and am not clued into the mumbai stuff he tweets about

-Gautam John @gkjohn, a goldmine of interesting links

-Anand Mahindra, @anandmahindra, just unfollowed :-) , insipid (sorry!)

-Jack Welch @jackwelch, doesn't tweet very often, goes on about sports teams, and I'm beginning to find his opinions pretty annoying, a big difference from the persona that came through in his books which I was a big fan of

-Sivakumar Surampudi, @s_sivakumar, CEO of eChoupal (I think), quite an interesting tweeter especially for a head honcho type, seems to get Twitter

- Genelia D'Souza: @geneliad, seems to tweet quite a lot, does the next generation style grammer that puts me off, I think I'm going to have to unfollow soon

- Brahma Chellaney @chellaney , security analyst and writer for the Hindu, fairly bland

- Chetan Bhagat @chetan_bhagat : Very much like with the books, just a nice down-to-earth kind of guy to follow

- Manjit @chefmanjit : Not exactly famous, but is the chef at one of Bangalore's good restaurants, Herbs and Spice. Just checking him out.

- Shah Rukh Khan, @iamsrk: I just started following him. It looks like its the real guy, not a fake.

- Gates Foundation, @gatesfoundation : Utilitarian news and publicity stuff, worth followingt

I've purposely desisted from following Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai and their ilk (though keep bumping into them in retweets), and same with Shashi Tharoor.

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Update (18/4/2010)

- Vinod Khosla the venture capitalist: @vkhosla : Just started following him

Here are a couple of interesting Twitter related episodes:

- Did live tweeting from our Coromandel colony get-together ; find this much faster in reporting events than trying to do a blog post and uploading photos

- Even without an internet connection , my phone hooks up to a wireless internet access point. This is really convenient and cheap to tweet photos from the phone without having an internet connection on the phone (expensive).

- We have multiple instances at work now of Twitter enabling us to make connections with people we didn't know which has lead to productive results. In one case we met up with an org and tweeted about it and got back negative feedback about the org from someone with relevant links -- very useful.

- N.Ram responded to a crack I made once about Hindu content. Cheap thrills :-)

-- Makemytrip.com corrected the spelling of Visakhapatnam on their site after I tweeted about it.

I'm stuck right now in trying to increase my followers on Twitter .