Into the Heart of the Mind

by Kalpanik S

  Into the Heart of the Mind

  Kalpanik S.

  Copyright © 2011 by Kalpanik S.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written permission. Exceptions are made for brief passages quoted in a review.

  Published in the United States by the Center of Artificial Imagination, Inc.

  Contact: info@coai.biz

  University of California, Davis

  The story begins in the computer center of a 20th century American university in 1987. It’s a warm October afternoon. Birds are chirping, flowers are blooming, a breeze is blowing, and Americans are driving their Japanese automobiles: in short, everything is going on as it should.

  Is it really?

  Looking closer at the computer center, we see a maiden with a melancholy look on her face. She is staring blankly at the screen in front of her. It is already Thursday. The homework is due tomorrow.

  She has to write a computer program for matrix inversion using the Gauss Elimination method. She does not really care a bit whether matrices have any desire to be inverted, let alone their preference for an algorithm for inversion.

  In fact, all this Wildlife and Fisheries Biology senior is interested in thinking about is her weekend skiing trip. But she has to pay the price for having a desire to finish her college degree. The university requires every student to do a basic programming class, and she was so terrified of doing it that she postponed it until her last year in school.

  The time is ripe for our hero to walk onto our stage: the computer center. He is an essential part of the American engineering education system, the foreign born Teaching Assistant.

  The girl very coyly asks him for help. He is all for it. He has started on his mission to make the world a better place by banishing human pain and suffering. The sight of a damsel in distress, a pretty girl struggling with matrices, melts his heart. He forgets all of his own troubles...

  His troubles? Yes; he is already regretting what he did exactly a year ago. Instead of spending a Saturday playing cricket, driving his Vespa up and down New Delhi roads or daydreaming, he spent it darkening circles on a piece of paper with a pencil. After trying his best at creating a masterpiece for three hours, he handed over his artwork to eager hands and walked out of the scene and forgot all about it.

  But the misdeed had been done. The piece of paper was mistaken for an answer sheet for the Graduate Record Examinations and flown to GRE, Princeton, NJ, USA. American optical scanners and computers pounced on it, processed it and, after brooding over it for a while, came up with their decree -- the poor chap was assigned a 3-tuple of bounded positive integers--(***,***,***) which sealed his fate.

  After that, everything happened in an instant. Less than a year later, he was exiled to the USA for at least two years. If his conduct was good during the exile, he would be awarded a Master’s degree at the end of it. They agreed to cover his living expenses during his exile through a combination of a fellowship and a TAship.

  He also had a choice of location: he could either fly east from New Delhi to the West coast or fly west to the East coast.

  After accepting the hardship of fate, he chose the lesser evil of the two—west. The climate is warmer, and California has both Silicon Valley and Hollywood in it. So even if he failed to make it big in Silicon Valley earning megabucks designing computers, he could give the dreamland a second try on the silver screen.

  He attends a cultural adjustment course offered by the American Embassy. They use the term “cultural shock” to describe the adjustments a foreign student needs to go through in the US. A “shock”? Come on, it won’t be that bad!

  In that training, he is informed of the rather interesting fact that Americans smile a lot more than other cultures. However, unlike other cultures, the smile is a greeting, more of just a casual facial expression. It is not meant to be an invitation or a sign of intimacy.

  Wise, all-knowing elders, who have never ever been outside the country, are generous with their valuable advice -- he should focus on his studies, and not fall for the worldly temptations the western world is infamous for. And absolutely no girls!

  He blushes.

  The moment of parting arrives: our hero says goodbye, takes a long flight over Singapore and Hawaii, and makes a dive over the Pacific Ocean to arrive in the land of opportunity.

  So he has arrived in the land of his dreams! California, United States of America! The land of Intel, Apple, IBM, DEC and Microsoft!!

  A dive over the Pacific Ocean brings Kalpanik to US

  That is where they make those chips, not potato chips you silly, the semiconductor chips, the microprocessors, the computers, and write all that software. He is shocked by how pale their faces look; somehow the color from their faces (and in some cases, their hair) has bleached out.

  They all speak English with such a heavy “foreign” accent. And the food! How different is their food. Whatever vegetarian stuff they serve is raw or undercooked and is so bland, so tasteless. No spices. Ugh.

  Before he knows what’s really happening, he is standing on the wrong side of the class with a bunch of rough and tough kids giving him a nasty look. Those who do not qualify as rough and tough -- primarily because they don’t belong to the rough & tough gender, gaze at him with horror in their eyes, as if he was telling them ghost stories or dirty jokes!

  Can they not understand what he is saying because of his accent? He is already getting used to theirs. Or was his younger brother’s opinion, that he is absolutely incapable of teaching, correct?

  Well, life isn’t handed over to everyone on a silver platter. Here’s the deal, take it or leave it.

  Let’s return to our original scene, the one with the melancholy maiden, the damsel in distress. The teacher starts teaching, the student starts learning and the matrices start getting inverted.

  Two hours later, all the matrices in the world that were supposed to be inverted have faithfully done so. Our hero is satisfied. His younger brother was wrong after all. He can teach. Also, humanity overall is happier than it was 2 hours ago.

  Gosh! We haven’t given a name to our characters yet. Since he claims to be a mathematician at heart, let’s call him “X”. No, X has to be used for the other variable in the equation, because that has appeared first. Let’s call him “Y”.

  The Earth rotates around its axis a few more times as per its old, bad habit of doing the same thing over and over again.

  Y is going through the biggest transition a human being can undergo.

  Not only has he traveled between two places which are at the greatest possible distance from each other, he has also time-traveled 40 years into the future, into a world of coin-operated machinery and coin-operated human beings, a world richer in materialistic wealth but arguably much poorer otherwise.

  Culture Shock? Yep, those Embassy folks weren’t lying.

  Women don’t wear pretty colorful saris but wear ugly looking blue jeans. Students can afford cars, but need to clean their own bathrooms, cook their own meals, wash their own clothes. In Delhi, there were maids to do all this. Most students bring cold sandwiches for lunch to save money. Where else in the world do people eat cold food for lunch? He can’t!

  Switches are on from down to up. Traffic follows the right lane.

  The laws of nature are cruel: struggle for existence, survival of the fittest.

  Y struggles. He adapts. Is he fit enough to survive?

  He is getting used to the new daily routine. He attends classes in morning, assists his students with their assignments in
the afternoon, and finishes the day by doing homework with his Malaysian Chinese classmate. They carry out a comparative analysis between the various spiritual, intellectual and emotional aspects of Chinese, Indian and American girls.

  He eats dinner with his Mexican roommate, who is studying killer bees’ migration patterns to prepare for their arrival in Mexico. They drink Kahlua together, his first alcoholic drink.

  Time to go to bed. He feels restless and can’t go to sleep. He is missing something in his life. What? What?? What???

  Life as a Teaching Assistant (TA) is sort of interesting, especially if you have to be in the computer center at the peak time, the day before the submission deadline. One is in great demand. It makes you feel that you are wanted; the world is not complete without you. You can get carried away and end up spending twice as much time with your students as you are allocated, if you like getting the attention. And if you are a Teaching Assistant in an engineering department in an American university, you also get to meet people from all over the world.

  You get to explain the nested DO loops to Jordanian hydraulics Engineer Bali Khaled, and learn about the weird politics of the Middle East.

  Talk in Urdu to the Pakistani applied physics major Mohamad, clarifying the IF-THEN-ELSE condition. Did you know Urdu is really the same as Hindi!

  Teach the computer editor commands to Jin Ping, from mainland China.

  Work with Apollo, the American mechanical Engineering student, to get rid of the mysterious UNIX bus error. Apollo is such a smart kid. He’ll make a good Engineer!

  Help out Barbara, the girl with such a quizzical look on her face, with subroutine calling and parameter passing. He likes her as a teacher likes a good student.

  Point out the error in declaration of variable type to Krysten– this Vietnamese girl is so tiny, so delicate looking. She picks up stuff really fast.

  Calm down nervous Brenda -- all computer programs ultimately run, though most of them only run at 5 PM on Friday just before the time of submission. When her boyfriend comes to pick her up Friday evenings and can’t really do anything to help her out except call the Indian TA, well, the look of jealousy on his face is worth a million dollars.

  And finally there is X, the girl in the second paragraph of our story. The girl with a shy smile.

  The story of the second, 6th and 14th paragraphs is repeated every week The matrix inversion is replaced by matrix functions, file manipulation, differential equations and all the other stuff which engineering professors consider necessary to teach their students.

  Of course Y’s assistance is required. He assists her in writing and debugging her computer programs.

  Besides many other undesirable tendencies, human beings have a particularly silly one. They like to know about each other and talk about themselves whenever they can. Some actually do so to their pets, which classifies as cruelty to animals.

  So while the computer is busy compiling and running her program, being human beings, they talk.

  She does not like asking him for help. It hurts her sense of achievement. Even he does not like asking others to help him out, but sometimes it is necessary.

  Is he a Ph.D. student?

  No, he is doing his Masters in Computer Engineering. Yes, being a TA helps with the college expenses. He doesn’t really mind doing it though. He likes teaching things he knows to others.

  Her brother is turning more human. Her sister just got married. Her parents are visiting Europe. She went to Australia to study for a year. She likes playing, skiing, dancing and all outdoor activities. She is not all that enthusiastic about studies though.

  He has just arrived in the US. He likes their nation; but does not think it is a great idea to welcome foreigners by sending them telephone bills for 300 dollars. He makes just 900 dollars a month after taxes. One day, he will write programs for AT&T and leave a few bugs in it.

  To make it worse, someone stole his bike.

  She just broke up with her boyfriend, since he was cheating on her. She’s not looking for a relationship anymore, but wants to focus on her studies this year so that she can graduate.

  Relationship? What an unromantic term to describe deep human feelings between two people. Wow! Aldous Huxley was right! In the Brave New World, people don’t fall in love any more, they get into relationships!

  No, he doesn’t see himself ever having a “relationship” with anyone, though it is very likely he will fall in love with someone at the right time in the right place.

  Is every student as silly as she is?

  No, he does not find her silly. OK, just a little bit silly.

  He said that on purpose to make her blush. He likes watching her blush.

  Does he go home every summer?

  All the previous 21 summers, he was in India.

  Is he only 21 and doing his masters? She blushes again; she is 23, older than him, and still trying to finish her Bachelors. He must be really smart.

  No news there, yes, he is.

  She does not look that old; she looks more like 18. He likes her. This time, his affection for her may not be totally classifiable as a teacher’s affection for his student.

  Is it unethical for him to feel affection for her?

  She is older than he is and she seems to be smiling a lot to him. But he remembers the “culture shock” lesson he was taught at the embassy. In their culture, the smile is just a greeting, an encouragement, maybe a sign of sympathy. It is not meant to be an invitation or a sign of intimacy.

  Strangely, neither of those two facts stops his heart from practicing Michael Jackson beats every single time he sees her smile.

  Well, Y is not here only to teach and meet other people from the globe. He is supposed to study and do research.

  Research isn’t as easy as it used to be 100 years ago. Then all one had to do was to sit under a tree, watch an apple fall, scratch one’s head and write a couple of equations and BINGO, the world gets Newton’s mechanics.

  In the 20th century, research involves reading thousands of research papers and attending hundreds of research conferences just to keep track of what other smart guys are up to. After that you have to carry out computer simulations until you get sick.

  Then, if you are lucky enough, you can find a smart way which will reduce something somewhere by 0.2%. But then what? You have to collect a bunch of lunatics like yourself who can understand the technical details of your stuff and tell them how smart you are! But still, doing research has its own rewards. It’s like giving birth to a baby. It’s a painful and laborious process, but one ends up with a joy of creation and a sense of achievement.

  But before doing any research, you have to decide your area. Y’s playground is Electronics and Computer Technology, the world of black magic. Rip apart an electronic system and you see nothing moving, nothing vibrating, in fact you don’t see much at all.

  It’s almost a make-believe world, a child’s fantasy, a writer’s imagination. The only thing that makes you believe in it is that it works.

  A field which moves so fast that it outdates itself every year. A field that has revolutionized the way human beings live, think and act. It makes all the brains in the world get together in the land where they build those dream machines.

  It’s also an area that involves billions and billions of dollars in terms of money.

  Yes, money. The corporate giants - IBM, Apple, DEC, INTEL, Oracle, Microsoft-are willing to pay a lot of it to every good technical resource they can get, no matter where he or she was born!

  Money, which makes little kids leave their nice, cozy homes and go to another land to live among strangers.

  Electronics and Computers - It is wonderful. It is exciting. It is glamorous. It is full of youthful energy. It has a lot of money in it, but it requires heartless minds, it has no place for emotions. It requires giving up your life as you knew it and going far away from home.

  Before doing any research, Y has to learn some tricks already known in the field by d
oing graduate level courses.

  What does doing graduate level courses mean?

  To begin with, you go to classes and nod your head a few times to convince your professors that their attempts at teaching are not fruitless, avoid being caught while taking a nap and daydream with your eyes open.

  Afterwards, sometime when the rest of humanity is doing what humanity normally does in the middle of night, you have to make some sense out of the nonsense.

  This requires reading.

  Let’s start with the section on Error Detecting Codes and Self Checking Circuits in his book on Fault Tolerant Computers. The world needs its computer systems to become fault tolerant so that they can reliably process transactions without stopping. It talks about vector subspaces in the binary Galois field and further goes on to derive ten (10) properties of the unsystematic Hamming codes.