learningniv-blog

[learningniv-blog]

The Misery Saga | 1

Prologue

Quiet interestingly, this is the 3rd time I am writing this. I actually intended to put it up on my little tumblr site, which I still will. However, the first time I crafted an elaborate description of what am I trying to do and why am I even trying — I was blessed with a power cut. Thus I learned the lesson that Tumblr, unlike Medium here doesn’t save draft on it’s own. The second time I started, I took special care to avoid issues with power cut — I wrote on my cellphone. To check if the tumblr app let’s me save draft, I save a draft after a paragraph. Thus I learned that the Tumblr app has a bug that doesn’t let me retrieve the saved draft.

Hence, I am here in the Medium app, again writing all of this. Please stay patient while I explain what is this.

It has been a long while since I had some personal projects going on. I also have been detached from programming or academia for a long time now. My knowledge around those now are rusty as an anchor sunk in the ocean since 1680. Things started to change to a positive note at the beginning of this year and took off a rapid transformation in last few weeks. With the encouragement of a few potential collaborators, including one of my dearest friend Talha Siddique, possibilities of few proper personal projects were really good. So I made a quite ambitious or downright impossible plan. Trust me, even John Wick, a man with focus, commitment and sheer will find it a little tougher than usual. I am not John Wick, I am rather a John Weak. So it’s nearly impossible to reach goals, but even if I finish half of it by the end of this year, I will be better than last year’s version of myself.

This saga, is my way of curating my experience during my journey through my plan. This will be my place to vent out, share, reach out, and keep a piece of myself preserved.

Interestingly enough, I will not be showing or telling anyone what is the plan actually. There are many good reasons to that. First of all, throughout my experiences over the past few years I became skeptical about sharing goals and plans. That expectedly allows people to have an expectation from myself. That adding to my pile of expectations from myself, creates a little too much pressure to handle. I am not eager to deal with those. Secondly, the plan is actually an amalgamation of 5 different plans, making it the most ambitious crossover after Avengers Endgame. Each different plan gets it place in it’s own pace. I have actually taken months to think it through, and it may turn out to be quite incomprehensible to a lot of people. And finally, the plan has milestones and rewards set for those milestones. However a lot of them are highly personal and it’s far more comfortable for me to not share them.

Satisfy your curiosity with my uninteresting description of my experiences.

So yes, welcome to the stories of my miseries.

Out in the Field

The first day of jumping into the black hole of my plan gave me enough miseries that if there is slightest strain on truth in the proverbial “Morning shows the day”, I am doomed. The journey started around the noon, in 37 degree Celsius. I sat down with a book of Linear Algebra, which has gathered heaps of dust by sitting in the same place for ages. I love Linear Algebra, and this love increased after I was out of the university. I wanted to get my brain out of the calculation based style of teaching maths which infected me through general pedagogy. This particular book actually starts with more general concepts: Fields, Vector Space and Subspace. That’s just the first chapter. Half way through I was stuck while I was trying to wrap my head around a quite trivial and simple fundamental concept. The lead me through an hour of Google searches and ultimately made me learn some concepts of Functions.

It has happened due to language barrier. You see, English is my second language and math is my third language. So when I encountered a quite concise sentence partly written in mathematical notation and partly in English — it gave me some trouble.

After that, I thought it was enough conceptual punishment for today. It is time to “Pause and Ponder”.

So I gave myself a pat on the back and went out to have a cup of tea.

Windows and Doors

Talha, one of the closest friends I have proposed me to do a project to brush up programming skills. To which we came up to a small project idea: to create a small calculator program, with trigonometric functions and root finding. Adding GUI to it, it sounds like a small thing but can be a whole lot of programming. To notch up the challenge, along with Java we both are tackling one programming language we haven’t got much experience in. I chose Python and Talha chose C++.

After finishing my pondering, I came home and started setting up my PC for development. Thus I learned why people in dev circle prefer Linux a lot.

It’s absolutely bonkers to find a good editor/IDE keeping in mind that my machine is almost a decade old. I tried atom, which confused the hell out of me. Git gave me a good headache while connecting to the remote repository — I ultimately failed to have a SSH connection. If Vim wasn’t a pain in every sense to learn, I would have just decided to go with it. Finally chose to calm down and get good old Netbeans — which recently became Apache Netbeans.

After dealing with that, it was time to setup Python. I decided to just install Anaconda distro and keep it. I’ll go and check on it later.

Opened up a Java project, did some playing around, and decided it was enough for today. Pushed all the commits, updated the Contribution Guidelines of the project, and peacefully went of to write about today’s experience.

End of the Day

I have already discussed what a day full of miseries it was, and the end of the day was the peak of it. Third time writing this, while forcing myself to stay awake way past my bed time is a bit annoying. Also I am very crossed about the fact that the power cut took away my gaming time.

Hell, my mind need to relax and prepare for more miserable days like this. So here am I, already in my bed, writing the finishing sentences before I press publish and relax.

Note: This will also be there on my Tumblr. I’ll probably put Tumblr as the main hub, where more unfiltered contents will also be there. However, summarised posts like this will appear in both Tumblr and Medium.

Also a big thanks to GBoard for Android. The suggestive system is brilliant.

[learningniv-blog]

Mind Dump: Investments

One of my friend's father wanted to invest money in a business (or stocks, I am not sure. But that is not important). The problem was that he was had one of the lowest paying jobs in one of the lowest paying government firms of my country. The money was enough for the survival, and some small savings he had were enough for the emergencies given that he got all the other benefits government provides to its staffs. But he was adamant on investing his money in a business. He well understood that he will never have enough money to invest on something big with the current state of the financials, so he opted for something small like a small shop. Again, this small scaled down version of his ambition was ambitious enough to look like a battle against the gravity. He kept on saving whenever he could, and he almost went innovative over it. He saved the money for transport by walking to the office and back. After some money saved, he invested them in growing vegetables on the little piece of land in front the quarter he lived in. That saved him some money. But these plants don't grow well all by themselves, he made it a ritual of taking care of them on the early morning and right after he came back from office at afternoon. With some money saved, he invested in planting trees at his house at the village. These were primarily for wood, so it grew well enough by themselves after some initial care. By the time they grew taller, five years passed. He also maintained all the savings he used to do. Although two big disasters took away most of it, he kept on saving. Finally, after selling those trees (as woods), he got enough to invest for a small shop. I will spare you the rest of the success story at the moment.

At this point, I want to ask you what do you think about the investments he made? Well, if I go around from answer mostly I would hear is applauds for his commitment, smart use of money, and his dedication. But I am sure most of us missed a crucial point of the story. What did he invest in all of those efforts?

From my short experience of life, I believe, human actions are carried out at the expense of three resources -- time, energy, and money. And mostly you can only save one.

Let's revisit the story again. When he saved the money for transportation, he invested time and energy on walking. When he saved the money from not buying the vegetables but instead growing them, he invested money first, then energy and time. Then he invested on trees for wood, and then he invested his energy. Some might argue on this point that he technically did not invest any time. But I believe holding patience is an investment of willpower, and it requires mental energy. To avoid further debate, mental energy is also a legit 'thing' like physical energy -- one does not have an infinite source of these, it gets exhausted, and it needs to be replenished after a while. All these energies channeled together gathered money for his dreams to come true.

Also, this is also a case of incremental investment. The concept I am talking about is not the typical definition of incremental investment known in financial investing. The concept I am talking about is - you start by investing in something small, carry forward its return as an investment to something a bit larger or something else. Then you carry forward the accumulated return of these to something else. Baby steps to success. Interestingly, this is how skills grow as well. You invest in small things and start the carry forward chain. You want to be a singer, you start investing in getting the basic right. You start investing on eating healthy which keeps you in better health for singing. You take the accumulation forward, you start investing in learning compositions and carry out greater deals of your skillset. However, in real life, most of the cases are either investments on wrong things, or scattered and half finished investment. First one generally results in no success, and the second one results in something more vicious - mediocrity. I am not saying or implying that everyone can be the best of their passion or profession - if everyone is the best then everyone is actually the average. But let's be clear about the difference between average and mediocre. If someone is average in some skills, that means they are somewhere in the middle range of excellence in a population of a context. Now if the context is Ph.D. holders in Physics from Princeton, the average ones are generally far above from a Ph.D. holder from the highest echelon of my country. Let's spare the debate, exceptions are not examples. Mediocre is something else, mediocrity makes one settle for not being the best version of themselves. It has nothing to do with the population in context. Mediocrity is not opting for incremental investments with focus and full dedication. What is scarier is the celebration of mediocrity as the standard for excellence - which happens after too much mediocre emerge in one context.

I did not intend this write up to be a rant against mediocrity --- in a way it is about mediocrity --- but it is more about my understanding on incremental investment. Necessarily all the investment out of the skill set is not wasted investment. Each investment has some additional return that is somehow overlooked. While telling the story, the fact that the habit of walking he took helped him to stay active, the fresh vegetables he grew helped his family to stay healthy. These also --- I like to believe --- helped him to reach his goal as well. Staying healthy and fit gave him more energy to invest in what mattered most. Similarly one can ask how in arts can help with learning maths. Firstly it broadens one's perspectives - letting one see things from different dimensions. It helps to grow the sense of imagination. British mathematician and logician, Augustus De Morgan, who introduced mathematical induction once said,

"The moving power of mathematical invention is not reasoning but imagination."

Also, you can look into this Wikipedia entry on Mathematics and Art.

I have the belief that learning helps learning. Learn one thing and the brain receives some training on learning that you can take forward to learning something else. That is one kind of incremental investment as well. And that's how one grows.

End note:

Mind Dump is just an unfiltered collection of my thoughts. Some of them might be confusing, provocative, arguable, or downright wrong. I hope you treat them with kindness and forgiveness on the basis of human flaws.

“To err is human; to forgive, divine.”

Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

[learningniv-blog]

It's not Linear

I had the fortune (some believe it is a 'misfortune') of being a Computer Science (and Engineering) student. Predictably, it had a Linear Algebra course. It is freaking important. Also, as it happens with every "freaking important" course, it was assigned to a very crappy faculty. She had made all of the one hour and twenty minutes classes analogous to the stages of hell. Like the journey written in Dante's Inferno, each stage was torturous in its own way. After all the struggle and pain, I did shit on the exams.

Well, it is not like I hated the subject though. The subject itself is damn intriguing. However, the perilous journey through the classes often left me confused, scared, infuriated, and perplexed. And I was so terribly in shock after the semester, I needed counseling for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. It was like my classroom was a medieval torture chamber led by the evil faculty of the course. Hell, I am even shivering thinking about her.

Days passed, wound healed. Scars stayed. It was the final year. I was completing my thesis with my group. But some unfortunate strokes of luck ended up making our existing project mortally wounded. Panic ensued, the group got broken, and I was left with one partner - who is, by the way, is freaking awesome! We eventually ended up finishing a thesis on Machine Learning. And there I could really see why Linear Algebra was "Freaking Important" - this time with capital 'F'.

To relearn the topics that once put me face to face with the devil, I retook the course. And then, I promised myself that I will never play Russian Roulette - because I will definitely be the one getting the bullet. You must be asking "Why?" Because I got the same faculty. (PS: Stop laughing.) My state there can be summed up with one word starting with capital 'F' and ending with a 'D'. I was revisiting the hell as if I was the sinner who committed all of the seven deadly sins! However, I have fought the war before. I knew where the artillery is kept. I knew the attack patterns. I knew how and when the bombs are going to be dropped. This time, surely I was going to win.

That's what I thought but it never happened.

Why? Because when you are fighting against gun using fork and toothpick, you are just an idiot when you think that you are going to win. I was up against guns of stupidity, big bombs of unnecessarily complex definitions, missiles of rules that did not make any sense, and monotonous, dull, snobbish speeches.

God, my head hurts thinking about it.

As I said before, the topic was intriguing. So I revisited it again after I was done with my undergrad. Never give up! This time I was accompanied by better resources. Then again, I believe it is harder to relearn than learning for the first time. Because I have to force my neurons to remove the previous connections it made. I need to forget the craps I was taught which I never understood. And it is excruciatingly hard. It is like you have a cancerous arm and now you have to amputate it before you can get the new and improved version. (Note: it is only possible with learning, not with the actual physical limbs mostly.)

Challenge accepted.

Now another painstakingly difficult journey has started. But this time it is literally leading to heaven. It is far far away, but it is at the end of the road.

The journey started with finding 3Blue1Brown's videos about Linear Algebra where he explains concepts visually, making the concepts unbelievably intuitive and easier to understand.

This was life-changing. This was an enlightening experience. I felt like I was tasting holy grail. Also, numerous realization occurred.

No. 1: Technology can break numerous limitations of general methods of teaching. A lot of concepts in mathematics can be very easily explained with computer-aided visualizations. Days are heading towards a future when technology will be a must to educate a vast number of topics on various subjects. I also love how TED-Ed uses animations to demonstrate and explain concepts and topics, it makes things more interesting. Learning now happens on a global scale, beyond the classroom, and into the real life. So such technique is a staple to it.

No. 2: Mathematics - especially in the higher level concepts - relies on visualization. One of the key tools to make visualization internalized to oneself is imagination. Imagination is not only for the artists, the musicians, or the kid who is daydreaming. Imaginations make abstract concepts understandable, intuitive, and memorable. It is a world with no barrier. You can skew, morph, degenerate, regenerate an entire world there. Lack of imagination actually makes it a lot harder.

No. 3: Teaching relies a lot on storytelling. It makes rigorous and tedious works interesting enough to make the students get started. Once the barrel is rolled, the momentum takes it to a long distance. This storytelling will be one of the major things the teachers of the future have to adapt to get the knowledge across.

Being a designer professionally, most of my work relies on Human Centered Design. And in the design process, we always emphasize on ‘going visual’. Write less, draw more. Show. Tell the story through images. Most of the ideation and conception happens in doodles and sketches on the sticky notes. Sharpies and sticky notes are a designer's most important tools!

So, when going visual and Linear Algebra collided I felt so happy as if my payday arrived earlier.

Enters Graphical Linear Algebra, a fairly new branch of linear algebra where instead of writing equations we doodle them! Not doodle per se, but I really found the methods of using graphical drawings to work with linear algebra amazing! I don't explicitly remember how I bumped into it, or how it became a part of my life - but I am glad that I did. I am currently exploring it. The blog is written by Pawel Sobocinski (with the collaboration of a few others) and it is very carefully crafted with amazing storytelling and intriguing descriptions of concepts. It is divided into numerous episodes - topic by topic - and the episodes gradually grow like an ascending staircase to the higher echelon.

I suck at it as well.

First few episodes are building blocks of higher concept, and I am struggling with it. There are some reasons behind it. First of all, it requires me to substantially keep my previous understanding of various concepts aside and start anew. As I have said before, this is incredibly hard. We humans, once getting used to with one way of doing things, keep doing it the same way. I hold mugs on the right hand using the handle, while I hold the body of the cup if I use my left hand. Doing it the other way feels odd. Not only odd, it feels wrong! Our inner inertia of habit and existing knowledge force us to bring it back to the way we are used to. It is a battle against the force. A push against the gravity. Secondly, when we are learning new things - practice plays a key role. Call it a poor time management skill or just the way modern life works - I rarely find time to sleep. Making time for practice is increasingly hard these days.

It is my poor time management skill, isn't it?

I am just only on the 9th episode, where there are some proofs to be done using induction. And I am struggling with a relatively easy problem. I know it intuitively that it can be proven, but systematically putting things up giving me problems.

Interestingly, throughout my entire undergrad life, very few people have told me how important it is to learn how to prove things. Mostly things that are proved are taken for granted. It is already proved, why bother! But we need to interfere in this practice. Proofs are done in a systematic process that makes the brain understand the logical connection between things. Mathematics relies on it. Computer Science is nothing but an applicative side derived from mathematics. It also required a hectic amount of proofs to be where it is now. It will require millions more to progress ahead. There is no way around. So it is a necessary skill.

In the days ahead I will put things up about my journey of learning other things. Learning linear algebra alone showed me that learning is not linear at all. It requires one to restrain their previous knowledge. Going back to the basics, again and again, learning a new language of expressing concepts, understanding the flaws standing between mastering the steps and going back to fix the flaws - a lot of back and forth occur. It is almost like a loop, and that is what we call - "Unlearning, Relearning, Delearning". Interestingly the institution I work for has this loop as one of the core values. And certainly, I have to go through this entire loop again and again till I breathe my last.