A nonlinear rise in Team India's fortunes is inevitable #Ganita

 Three events reported in a day:

https://twitter.com/niravstoons/status/1759205630274089143 

BAI Media (@BAI_Media) / X (twitter.com)

https://twitter.com/AdvAshutoshBJP/status/1759215880679141779  

A 9-year old boy chess prodigy, a 17-year old girl's nerveless display to clinch Badminton gold for India to win the Asian team championship, a 22-year old cricketer's effortless double century to swing a cricket test and series in India's favor. All in a day's news. Such stories were also celebrated in the past but infrequently and were treated as big surprises, but three stories reported in a day is no longer unexpected. The potential size of India's sports base is such that successful outcomes become inevitable if the number of opportunities to convert to a podium finish is increased even by a small percentage.  Even though a specific outcome depends on individual karma and their sadhana and is not deterministic, the simple Ganita of outcomes as a group is that:

Given 'n' opportunities and a probability 'p' of success per opportunity, the expected number of successful outcomes = np. 

For a nation, n represents the size of its sporting base: the number of individuals with a liking for the outdoors, are athletically gifted AND their family is willing to consider a brief or long career in or through sport.  On the other hand, p captures the complex impact of identifying such talent and the dharma of their selection criteria, diet, training, exposure, and ultimately, their conscious mental ability in the heat of battle.

Until a decade ago, both opportunities (n) and the chance of success (p) were low. The current Indian state is that both n and p are low in comparison to natural sporting nations like Australia. Every small improvement in India's health and fitness, sports and education to reward, encourage, and nurture sporting talent, will simultaneously raise n and p and yield a nonlinear and sustainable increase in the number of such success stories in Indian sport. 

For example, a modest 10% improvement in n and p, improves the expected number of successes to (1.1n * 1.1p) = 1.21 (np), i.e., a 20% increase in the expected number of successes.

The #Ganita of Sandwich Slicing: Are Triangles better than Squares?

Question- How do you like your sandwiches sliced: Triangular or Square?

Triangle

Picture credit: (VIDEO) Tricolour Triangle Tea Sandwiches (theinspirationalnook.com)

Square

(Picture credit: Ribbon Sandwiches (Rainbow Sandwiches) - The Flavor Bender)

To answer this from a Ganita perspective, let's apply some high-school Kshetraganita (the original geometry):

Consider a square bread slice of side length '2a' (area 4a²). Slice it into 4 pieces of equal area a² each in two different ways:

1. 4 squares of side length 'a':

area of each square = a², perimeter of each square = 4a = 2 × 2a, i.e, twice the length of the original side.

2. 4 right-angled triangles:

Confirm the area of each triangle (crust-edge as base) = ¹⁄₂ base × height = ¹⁄₂ × 2a × a =  a²

Next, apply the 'square on the diagonal' result from the Sulbasutras to calculate the length of the diagonal on the original square:

= √(4a^2 + 4a^2) = 2√2 a.
The sides of each triangle are half as long as this diagonal.

Alternatively, using the 'circlometry' of Aryabhata (the original trigonometry), we let φ = the corner angles of the 4 right angled-triangles = 45°.

The original jya of Aryabhata calculates length and not a ratio like sine (it is of the form "R sine φ", where R = radius of a circle), we can obtain the length of the side = 2a×sin(φ) = √2a 

 From this, we get the triangle's perimeter

= base + 2 sides 

= 2a (1 + √2) ~ 2.414 times the length of the original side

The perimeter of the triangular slice is about 21% longer than that of the square slice of the same area. What sorcery is this :)

Since the area of the sandwich filling that is visible to the consumer = perimeter × thickness of the filling,  triangular slices may have better curb appeal as they show off the filling 21% better than square slicing, which is itself twice as good as not slicing at all. 

Each square slice has one full crusty corner, and a crust length of 2a. The triangle is tied on crust length but has two 'half-corners'. So if your kid is fussy about corners, triangles may prevent left-overs in the lunch box. If they don't like crust-edges and the fillings are not exciting, then you may need to go back to the square one.

#NonBinary is an oxymoron, and the Moral Relativism of #Wokism

"Non-binary" is itself a binary classification, and asserts a binary belief.

The moment you use a label, a nama-rupa- the very idea of using a label, is to introduce a binary split within entities that were previously grouped together, First, create a differentiation based on certain attributes and then use a label to mentally reinforce this partition.

Some related tweets on the skewering of logic.

Shivoham on X: "Can the gender fluid mechanics profs of Supreme court of india even define 'same sex' precisely without tying themselves up into a logical pretzel?" / X (twitter.com)

in this context:

Shivoham on X: "https://t.co/OQfCDa1AQa supreme court jesters must first define "same sex" precisely. let the fun begin." / X (twitter.com)

 

And talking of 'context', Ivy league woke humanities faculty may have taken a digested and utterly flawed version of Dharma ethics (that is always governed by Satya without ambiguity) and turned it into the antifragile ethics of moral relativism, in order to justify "friendly" calls for genocide.

"dharmic thought offers both universal and contextual poles – not just the latter, as that would be tantamount to moral relativism." - Rajiv Malhotra. Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (2011).

(2) Bill Ackman on X: "The presidents of @Harvard, @MIT, and @Penn were all asked the following question under oath at today’s congressional hearing on antisemitism: Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your university’s] code of conduct or rules regarding bullying or harassment? The… https://t.co/eVlPCHMcVZ" / X (twitter.com) 

On the lighter side, gender bias is not a bug but a feature of English:

Shivoham on X: "https://t.co/gTyZDA8I6c caption exposes the built-in gender bias in English :)" / X (twitter.com)

Wokes oppose guns in the US that murder school kids but are comfortable with killing them in the womb to suit a lifestyle.

"Context".

(1) Shivoham on X: "189 abortions per 1000 live births in the US - 2018. 2004 survey (prev link): >90% of these were purely lifestyle choices. https://t.co/ekpxAN6QlH" / X (twitter.com)

A more useful and deeper multi-valued logic exists in the dharma systems of Bharata that go beyond the Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle, including the Buddhist Catuskoti and Jaina Syadavada. The solution to this mess also is in the harmony of dharma and not the divisiveness and hatred sown by the binary pair of Wokism and Abrahamic Fundamentalism.

Shivoham on X: "https://t.co/6JWasksfUU #MadhuraBhakti continue to be dumbfounded by dharma's ability to effortlessly transcend gender and other dualities and unite with the divine. Beautiful post to read and share with family." / X (twitter.com)

An Ode to the Hindoo-Pagan

I was the Vedic circle and square, Desi and dharmically fluid until an Indic druid with a decolonial spray gun painted me polytheist-pagan (a polygon?) and now I'm an Indo-European doctrinaire 

 

- dedicated to useful Hindoo idiots who provide a back-door entry to the fictitious Aryan Invasion Theory.

 

The Sheldon Pollock Syndrome: The Over-informed Non-practitioner

A corollary to the saying “Avoid being over opinionated and under informed”
is "Avoid being the over-informed non-practitioner".

Remembering this corollary helps avoid the pitfall of turning into a top-down thinker, i.e., a person who theorizes others practices through every form of second-hand learning: reading business articles, media reports, video demos, academic dissertations, management reviews, investment hype, book parsing. sound-bites from other top-down thinkers, and soon convinces himself that he's a "strategic" expert who sees what mere mortals cannot, and projects a sophisticated image.  The end result is a delusion of grandeur where one's ego and false pride in 'knowing' defeats common sense.

The "spend ten thousand hours to master a subject" statement is valid only if you are actually immersed in learning by doing, first hand, else it is an exercise in futility and a whole lot of wasted time.  In-the-trenches work is always preferable to head-in-the-cloud intellectualism for the former is much more aligned with reality and Satya. The latter is fragile as it is anchored not in reality but an imagined reality. Success belongs to those who work twice as hard behind the scenes.

This phenomenon of the over-informed non-practitioner can be termed the Sheldon Pollock Syndrome, after the western Indologist Sheldon Pollock who "studied" Hinduism, the quintessential system of lived traditions from every external angle for 30 years without actually practicing any of it. As a result of this intellectual text parsing, every bit of wisdom and sensible thought in the Ramayana or Sanskrit kavya completely bypassed him, leading him to bizarre conclusions and comical "findings" that find favor among idiots and conspiracy theorists.

Whether one wants to get into AI or Hinduism/Dharma or Martial Arts, the best way is to start with actually practicing, first-hand, through Prayoga. Doing is both knowing and learning:

 Shivoham on Twitter: "For example, sulba constructions and demonstrations are 'self-verifying'. No separate theorem is necessary. Hindu idea of prayoga: Doing is both learning and knowing." / Twitter

 

Voting during Covid-era Elections: A Quest for Predictability

There are already many expert articles explaining why Kerala re-elected a corrupt communist leader with a history of violence, how TN deliberately chose a party that ranks among the worst in the world in terms of security of women, corruption and public decency; why Bengal went back to a violent party that has failed its people dismally.

Below is my brief view as a Ganita professional currently studying fragility from an Indic and dharmic perspective. 

The recent Indian State election results (and the POTUS election) can be primarily explained as a public response to uncertain times. Am I covid positive? what will happen if I am? How reliable are the vaccines? Will they make a bad situation worse?

In these highly uncertain chaotic times, regaining, even craving for, a measure of certainty and control in every aspect of life is what we seek. It's a modern human tendency. This quest for more certainty among the public manifests in different ways. People will vote for a party that is (or projects itself as) one single entity with one strong local leader and offers more predictability.

Trump lost his re-election because his handling of the Corona pandemic lacked clarity and pushed the US into greater uncertainty. This was apparent in July 2020 itself. 

Indian public in these times of lockdowns and broken economies too want a party that offers more certainty and predictability. Of course, there are many other factors that domain experts have pointed out. But a state party that appears as one edifice, one clear leader, and projects a degree of certainty that has gone missing in public lives stands to gain from nervous fence sitters in these times.

TN prefers a known gasbag to a bunch of leaky Oxygen cylinders. The winning leader with his party firmly behind him was preferred to the ruling party that was depicted as a coalition of coalitions riddled with in-fighting and tussles, however good their performance was during these troubled times. Of course, when people elect confident gas bags, they will get predictably bad governance they voted for, which during these covid years will eventually result in more uncertain futures for the people, not less.

The lesson for the next set of Covid-era elections is clear then: The party that brings more certainty into people's lives stands a good chance of winning. A party that brings more certainty along with dharma will also benefit the Rashtra and its people.

 

Interesting word origins of some narcotic drugs

Mostly Indic/dharmika non-fiction with bits of good quality western fiction writing thrown in is an antifragile allocation of scarce reading time. The former eliminates your downside, and sometimes, the latter can pleasantly surprise you. Lee Child is famous for his Jack Reacher series:"A detective series where the detective commits more homicides than he solves". His books have some interesting turn of phrase that makes you think long after you've forgotten the story. Given the current 'drug busts' going on in India and the two rival camps that are slugging it out, here are some interesting word origins summarized from Lee Child's short nonfiction book 'The Hero' (my annotations are in parentheses):

Opium Poppy: western scientific name: Papaver Somniferum (the poppy that carries you to sleep). 

(Modern taxonomy credited to Carl Linnaeus may have been inspired by the traditional Indian Sanskrit approach to naming, and the latter is probably better, as noted in Rajiv Malhotra's book 'Being Different':

"..According to the assessment of William Jones, published in 1795, this taxonomy was more advanced than the standard Latin-based ones used by Western botanists. Jones writes: 'I am very solicitous to give Indian plants their true Indian appellations, because I am fully persuaded that Linnaeus himself would have adopted them had he known the learned and ancient language of this country …'")

German Pharmacist Friedrich Serturner refined Opium after several years of tinkering to produce the most potent chemical painkiller known so far.

Morphine: named after the Greek God of dreams.

Rival: from the Latin word Rivalis, one who competes over a river.

Barbarian: Greek word for those 'savages' who were unable to speak Greek. "To the Greeks, all that such people could manage was baa-baa-baa, like sheep. Hence ba-ba-rian." -Lee Child.

Addict: from the Latin word Addictus, a word for a person who is forced to become the slave of his creditor (like the bonded laborers of Zamindars).

A few decades after Morphine's invention, another German chemist, Felix Hoffman was tinkering with Morphine to synthesize Codeine, a milder and less addictive chemical for kids. After many experiments, he ended up creating something that was twice as potent and delivered twice the high of Opium. The chemist claimed it was not in the least bit addictive and it was subsequently put in a variety of western medicines, especially for women and children:

Heroin: from the German word for Heroic.

Hero: phonetic spelling of the Greek word 'gyro'. 

"What was heroic about [Felix Hoffman's] invention? There are two possibilities, I think, in a nineteenth-century context. Either he wanted to imply his product had been on a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils, but it had survived, and it had emerged to do good, in the form of bringing pain relief and pleasure to the masses.  Or possibly he wanted to imply his own personal work on the project had been a long and complicated journey through dangers and perils. Either version would have been absurd, given the accidental nature of the discovery. But vanity knows no bounds." - Lee Child.

(A mild disagreement with Lee Child here. Discoveries invariably come from experimentation and field work done by craftsmen and practitioners. These discoveries are far less accidental than they appear to be when viewed from the future. When we patiently experiment and test contraptions in a smart manner that incorporates learning, it enables 'lucky accidents' to happen, or in this case, a bad one.

 

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
-Thomas A. Edison.

— Sonal Mansingh (@sonal_mansingh) September 20, 2020