Humming Birds, Monarchs and Kuakas: Fly High and Free, and Wing Through the Skies

Map of the southward Bar-tailed Godwit migration, from a study published by Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2009.

Three amazing migrations by tiny living creatures. The first one is by the Ruby-throated Humming Bird, weighing a couple of grams, the same weight as that of a couple of dimes, which can choose to fly nonstop 500 miles over the gulf of Mexico instead of taking the land route over the coastline. The second is the land route taken by Monarch butterflies which can fly 3000 miles over the land from the northeast USA to the southwest Mexico. And, the world champion is an ordinary looking bird, known as the Bar-tailed Godwit or Kuaka (in New Zealand), weighing the same as two oranges, which can fly all the way from Alaska to New Zealand, a journey of over 7000 miles. The record is held by a kuaka which flew from Alaska to Tasmania, a nonstop flight of more than 8000 miles over the great Pacific Ocean. It lost half of its weight during the epic flight which lasted 11 days!

For a moment, imagine yourself being a tiny ruby-throated humming bird and making the final decision to hover over the flowers and get some nectar, for one last time, before you embark on the nonstop journey of five hundred miles over the sea rather than the safer route over land.

Humans have moved around the earth. We prefer to migrate along the economic routes. In the future, hopefully it will be within the solar system and beyond, driven by a desire to explore.

In our individual lives, we decide to take certain paths. Our own migration paths. Our own journeys.

Here is a poem for the kuaka which flew from Alaska to Australia.

What happens when a bird
Over an endless sea gets tired?
What does it do when the flapping
Of its wings start weakening?
Over an immense with no horizons
It seeks a place to rest?
It knows it has no choice
But to keep flying!
From a distance it looks
Such a marvelous voyager
To naturalists and documentary watchers,
- but its little beating heart alone knows
The pain of being so far away from home!

Here is a beautiful song by Glen Campbell for all of you who have had the courage to fly high and free, irrespective of the outcome. Wing through the skies!

Hindi Literary Journal Looks at the Anthropocene and Climate Change

For the November 2022 review of the Sadaneera issue on the Anthropocene topic: see Outlook Weekender here. For Sadaneera, click here and here. Sadaneera mostly focuses on world poetry. It has also published special issues, a recent one was on LGBTQ. The Anthropocene is the latest topic.

Anthropocene:

adjective

relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

noun

the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

Putting on our scientists’ hats, let us examine the evidence. See the 2015 article in Nature.

“Time is divided by geologists according to marked shifts in Earth’s state. Recent global environmental changes suggest that Earth may have entered a new human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Here we review the historical genesis of the idea and assess anthropogenic signatures in the geological record against the formal requirements for the recognition of a new epoch. The evidence suggests that of the various proposed dates two do appear to conform to the criteria to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene: 1610 and 1964. The formal establishment of an Anthropocene Epoch would mark a fundamental change in the relationship between humans and the Earth system.”

Aman Tripathi in his Outlook Weekender review says environmentalism is often mistakenly believed to be a theme only in poetry. The scenic beauty of mountains, rivers, and flowers isn’t what constitutes the environment. Environmentalism includes polluted rivers, decaying mountains, continued desertification, poisonous air, heat waves and drowning cities due to increasing water level of the sea because of climate change. How does one write about these “non-poetic” issues?

He quotes the great poet Ghalib: “I need a broader expanse of the horizon to express myself.” While the poet Sukant Bhattacharya has written that “the Earth is non-poetic in the realm of hunger.”

The Earth faithfully follows scientific laws. When we understand science, we can put Spirit and Opportunity on Mars and discover what Mars was like in the past. In the same way, we can predict what the future of the Earth be like. Sadaneera’s issue is a literary perspective having both prose and poetry which highlight this topic so relevant for today.

Thoughts on Climate Change in Berkeley Marina

Pictures Taken at Berkeley Marina

Beautiful summer sunset in Berkeley Marina, as I take a walk around the Cesar Chavez Park loop. Walkers, some with dogs, amble past. Like me, some people are snapping pictures. On the eastern side, you can see the city of Berkeley with the signature clock tower, the Campanile, of the UC campus. Towards the western side is the gorgeous beauty of the sunset. The trees on the hill where Kite Runner movie was filmed make a picturesque silhouette against the sky.

Blue slowly changes to orange, in sky and reflected in water. Air is not transparent as most people think. It has a color which we can see at grand scale. And the color changes depending on the time of the day.

On one side is the skyline of San Francisco. On the other side, that of Mount Tamalpais. Man-made versus nature-made. Both magnificent in their own way, with survival odds greatly in favor of the latter when we think in terms of millennia to come. High-tech companies in San Francisco and the intellectual world at UC Berkeley represent accomplishments of humanity. With all its brain power, can it reverse the climate change and environmental degradation? Can it succeed in helping to create political will to overcome the short-term interests in favor of the long-term ones?

In many cities around the world, due to air pollution one can’t see the blue sky and the orange sunset anymore. Sacramento river flows into San Francisco Bay not too far. Fresh water may become precious in coming decades. The historic drought in California is a warning that humanity precariously depends on the earth for its survival and prosperity. As temperatures rise, mild weather of California coast may become an exception in a world where summers will get very hot.

Here we can relate to a song, written by Sahir Ludhianvi, which I listened to in my childhood which approximately translates to:

Under the blue sky,

The Earth cares for us.

In this world,

That’s how the mornings visit us,

And that’s how the evenings set.

The water of the streams,

Merges with the rivers,

And flows towards the ocean.

Under the blue sky,

The Earth cares for us.

Well, if we want the Earth to support us with clean air, water and land, for millenniums to come, where humanity can achieve heights far greater than exemplified by today’s San Francisco skyline and UC Berkeley, it is time for action now rather than when problems become even bigger.

Trinity College Library : 3842 AD

430 Years Old Library of Trinity College, Ireland

A spectacular picture in today’s newspaper, which unequivocally demonstrates the true achievement and potential of humanity, is such a welcome relief from the other news about what is wrong with the world. What a pleasure it will be to visit the centuries old library of Trinity College, Ireland, and study there. Perhaps you may want to work out a new mathematical theorem or ponder over neuroscientific basis of consciousness or just read meditative Sufi poetry.

It has been speculated by many, often in desperation at the current state of things, with climate change, environmental degradation and broken economic-political systems, that Homo Sapiens, the wise one, may not be wise at all and is therefore destined to become extinct.

The above picture provides a counter viewpoint. Even if Homo Sapiens were to become extinct, perhaps the new wiser species will forgive the flaws of humanity and remember its achievements captured in the collection of the library.

And, the new species may not be a biological one. It may be AI machines which will carry out the dreams of people forward.

Of course, the best path forward is for people to ensure that world is a better place and we work together with such intelligent machines. In the futuristic libraries, there will be books written by AI. Imagine walking in such libraries, where there will be signs for “Books written by AI” and “Books written by Humans.” The most interesting section will be marked “Books jointly written by Humans and AI.”

If Homo Sapiens were to really become extinct, then its legacy in the form of libraries preserved meticulously by AI machines will endure through time.

Penrose and Gödel: What does it mean to “understand” and “see”?

“Consciousness is the phenomenon whereby the universe’s very existence is known”

Roger Penrose

“Either mathematics is too big for human mind or the human mind is more than a machine.”

Kurt Gödel

Roger Penrose has a theory about human consciousness,  which is claimed by him to be strictly larger than Artificial Intelligence, where he makes use of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem along with certain theorized extensions of Quantum Mechanics. The incompleteness theorem, which is related to Alan Turing’s undecidability results in theory of computation, asserts that if a mathematical system with its axioms and rules of inference has to be consistent then it has to be also incomplete. There will be mathematical statements which can not be proven or disproven. Gödel meticulously constructed the following self-referential statement in such a formal system:

“This statement is not provable”

The statement is not provable or disprovable, because if it were, then we have contradiction. Is it true? Yes, it is obvious to us, but an AI system can’t infer it based on an algorithm which works with axioms and computation steps. One has to step out of the proof machinery to see its truth, which we can do.

Penrose also speculates that Quantum Mechanics, which is currently incomplete (not in Gödel’s sense, but in the sense that it doesn’t unify with gravity and it has inexplicable measurement problem), can be extended in which some non-computational aspects will appear, at the very microscopic fabric of universe, where consciousness resides. There we “see” the truths, which AI will never be able to.

When you are reading something or working out math, what does it mean to understand? Many mathematicians state that lot of their thinking is visual. What is vision? What exactly does it mean to see?

One can refer to literature and mythology for some pointers, as this is a fundamental question, which all of us are interested in.

I was reading a book Unseeing Idol of Light  written by K. R. Meera.

It is a novel in which there is love and and there is loss. There are themes of light and darkness, of vision and blindness, in a metaphorical sense, and which really relate to the same topic which Penrose is interested in. What does it mean to feel, to know, and to see? The story moves you. Literature tells us that we “see” somewhere deep inside us, but we can also lose the capacity to do so. To see is to feel.

Emergent Gravity

I was watching on internet a public lecture by Erik Verlinde on Entropic Gravity which he recently gave at Perimeter Institute in Canada. Apparently physicists are struggling with some great cosmological mysteries. He has a new theory on gravity often taught as a fundamental force in physics textbooks. According to him, gravity is an emergent phenomenon which arises from entangled quantum bits. It is emergent because it is not a fundamental force, but arises out of more basic and microscopic fabric of the universe. Being a computer scientist, I am intrigued by the central role of entropy, that is, information content, in this new perspective. Only with time, further work and observations, we will know whether the new ideas will prevail. All part of scientific progress.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. ” Famous quotation by Albert Einstein. We are restless beings, propelled onward by desire to understand, create, express and explore.

M’illumino, d’immenso; by Giuseppe Ungaretti. I flood myself with the light of the immense. Beautiful exclamation by the poet.

What we understand about the universe is literally based on the light of the immense! But visible light makes up only 0.005% of the universe. Next 5% is matter, and the remaining 95% is complete mystery.

Even though it may be all very mysterious, it is great tribute to human mind to reach this stage in which we can formulate these mysteries and propose new theories. The light of the immense will continue to make us march onward!

Kabir on Transience

Had-had tape so auliya

Behad tape so peer

Had-anhad dono tape

Wako naam Fakir.

-Kabir

One who transcends limits is protector

One who transcends limitless is spiritual guide

One who transcends both limits and limitless

Is called Fakir.

-Kabir

Kabir, the ultimate Fakir and a renowned mystic poet from 15th century India, saw clearly how temporary everything is.  As children growing up in India, we had Kabir’s Dohe (couplets) in our textbooks. Here is translation of one of his poems Mat Kar Maya ko Ahankaar, Mat kar Kaya ko Abhimaan. Liberty is taken not to translate verbatim but to capture the meaning. It was fascinating to read 500 year old Hindi.

Kabir first tells about a powerful king in the past and how small is human life span in the larger backdrop of flow of time.

There was a strong emperor

All powerful and ruler of lands

Elephants in his majestic court

All in the end

As ephemeral as dew drops

Then Kabir reminds us that we all face grief over losses due to impermanence of things.

Parents and family

And all attachments

Why feel grief over loss?

Everyone eventually passes away

As ephemeral as dew drops

Finally, Kabir tells us that message of humility is what one should learn.

Don’t be so arrogant of wealth

Don’t be so proud of looks

This body is more frail than clay

Just a gust of wind, even a small one,

Can turn you into dust

Sahir Ludhianvi and Mystery of Time

When I was growing up in India, like everyone around me, I was fortunate to experience some great music from Bollywood. Wonderful voices of Rafi Sahib, Asha Ji, Kishore Da, Lata Di, Hemant Da and many other great singers, combined with poetry of many talented writers, provided a deep aesthetic experience for our growing minds. Radio used to be always on in my childhood home.

In particular, Sahir Ludhianvi’s poetry stood out. I remember two songs “sansaar ki har shay ka” and “aage bhi jaane na tu” which made me wonder as there seemed to be a jewel hidden in the songs.

As a kid, like everyone else, I believed that time is flowing universally in an objective independent manner at a constant rate and we are experiencing its present moment. Later I learned how physicists are grappling with the nature of time and how the common sense assumptions about time fall apart on closer examination. Whether it is Arthur Eddington’s Arrow of Time, or The Wheeler-DeWitt equation of a timeless universe, or emergent space-time in quantum theory, time remains a fundamental mystery. Even the notion of the present moment and how we perceive it, is amazingly not absolute as shown by Einstein in relativity of time and in relativity of simultaneity. Thanks to my daughter who keeps me updated with all this wonderful science. 🙂

In “sansaar ki har shay ka”, here is the translation of one of the stanzas:

where is this path from, where is it leading to,

nobody knows the secret of this mystery.

on the Eyelid of this moment, rests the cosmos,

till the closing of the Eye, all this is a beautiful game

and, here is from “aage bhi jaane na tu”:

you don’t know what is ahead, you don’t know what is behind you,

whatever is, is this moment alone

Sahir is expressing his awe and sense of mystery, and how our subjective experience of the present moment creates the magic of universe and brings it to life to us. What science has taught us even Sahir’s present moment is not absolute but depends on the perceiver. Every person has their own present moment. No two persons’ present moments are identical. In real life, we don’t notice these subtle differences because they are so nuanced giving the false impression that there is one and only one present moment. And, the passage of time contracts and expands like waves around each of us due to gravitational cosmic phenomena.

A poet’s expression and a theoretical physicist’s equation. Two sides of a great effort to understand.

I wish all the bright minds, and students in sciences, and new generations, very best to unravel this deep mystery.

A picture paints a thousand words …

A picture paints a thousand words. And words are painted across our brains.  In a paper titled “Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex” by Huth et al, and published in Nature in April 2016, authors have mapped words to different regions of brain using functional MRI data while subjects listened to hours of narrative stories. Interestingly, despite having our individual maps, our minds are organized in similar and consistent manner, and words cluster as per semantic domains. Here is the amazing video:

Nature video on how brain maps words to different regions

Here is a screenshot of part of brain and words mapping to that region:

(Figure Credit: Nature video on brain dictionary, April 2016)

One cannot help observing connection with current research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Machine learning models such as deep recurrent neural networks can work with words. But since computer models work with numbers, words have to be first converted into numeric representation in the form of vectors. Here dimensionality of these vectors can be large. In a way, the words are being converted into spatial points in a high-dimensional spaces and then semantics becomes spatial concept. Words which are semantically similar, map to close by regions, and their relative displacements capture semantic concepts. See the following reference for technical details of word2vec (word to vector) approach:

Vector representation of words

(Figure Credit: Tensorflow tutorial on word2vec)

It seems we are making progress in unraveling how mind works.

At the same time, a lot has yet to be discovered and understood.

How does a new born baby develop this semantic map within a matter of few years, which seems to be consistent across individuals?

And, where are our thoughts in all this?

In a semantic world, where words become colorful entities in space, perhaps our thoughts are nothing but mysterious dances in this surreal landscape.

And, where are our dreams in all this?

One can only wonder, as a wise philosopher did long time ago:

“Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was myself. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” – Zhuangzi, 4th century BC

Data Science for fighting Human Trafficking

 

Recently one of my dear friends has made me aware of human trafficking problem in India. Human trafficking is a global scourge with its roots in poverty, lack of opportunities, and related difficult socioeconomic conditions.

I am a data scientist and it makes me wonder if Big Data can be used to understand and to solve such social problems. How can we employ tools of modern data science for social good?

At New College of Florida, the honors liberal arts college of Florida, my colleagues and students and I were recently discussing about role of data science for socially relevant projects. This post is inspired by this discussion and my friend’s work in India.

It will have to be interdisciplinary work in which people from social sciences, computer science, economics, policy making, law and enforcement, and non-governmental organizations will have to come together to pool in their efforts.

First step will be data collection. Due to many stakeholders, the data can be collected at multiple points and in different forms. Data could be collected from hotlines, from monitoring of real-time microeconomic factors, and from census and surveys about detailed picture of local society, education, economy and employment.

More than 80% of data science is hard work involved in collecting data and cleaning it. The data will be in different formats, both structured and unstructured. Getting the data is truly a big task in itself. Having lots of real-time good quality clean data can go a long way in making the exercise successful.

The data can be then summarized and visualized. It will portray a complex picture of not only actual incidents and traffic patterns as collected by law and enforcement but of underlying economic, demographic, geographical and social factors.

One can then proceed to statistical analysis of the data to answer many questions:

• What are the patterns in human trafficking?
• How can human trafficking be detected?
• What factors correlate with high incidence of human trafficking?
• What are potential causes?
• What law and enforcement techniques are most effective?
• What is the profile of perpetrators? How do they operate?
• What is demographic profile of affected areas?
• What is the profile of victims?
• How can people in affected areas be educated to combat the problem?
• What are the sources and destinations of human trafficking at regional, national and international levels?
• Which programs for victim rehabilitation are most effective?

Here role of statistics and data science is to provide technological tools. These tools come in form of distributed data collection, database software, visualization software, geographical mapping software and statistical techniques.

Backed by data science and deep understanding of ground realities, one will be able to conquer this social evil which plagues humanity. My hope is that such effort will lead to application of data science for social good in many other projects.