A Wakeup Call or a Blast from the Past?

Today, I was feeling a little naughty. I felt like it was time to stop being serious and have some fun at someone else's expense. So I visited omegle.com, the website for the free people of the world (mostly single men) whiling away time and looking for love! I too logged into its chat mode and starting the process of nexting others and getting nexted myself. As I have told previously, I was feeling adventurous, so I decided to break the social protocol of a chat. I started my chat not with a "Hi" or "Hello" or "ASL?" but rather with this rather amazingly simple question, "Hi, do you know what is the tenth power of 2?" .
       Now, at this point you may be wondering one of two things. You could be passing a judgement on my moral character for admitting that I visited a chat site made for lovelorn single men, or giggling at my sacrilege of asking such a base math question on a hallowed forum of love. But whatever it is, you sure understand something explosive was about to happen! I did get the initial curse words which I totally understand. Math and sexual desires don't normally go well together. One of the guys even told me a flat, "I don't know". I was disappointed but I decided to dig deeper. After asking why, my chat friend told me because he was 16 and still in school. Now understand, the beauty of such a social network is that if you don't explicitly say that you are a guy, a male, M.. in someone's face they typically assume that they are talking to a female. And so, with a teacher at heart and no conceit intended, I coaxed him to recite the powers of 2 from 1 to 1024 using this subtle thread of uncertainty. I even coached him the next five powers of 2 and then bade him goodbye, which possibly broke his heart!
       But the very next chat that I had, reminded me that there is a lot more intellect in the world than is visible. It felt to me like a wake-up call to buckle up to compete with the coming generation. In some ways it also felt like facing an alter-ego from the past. Take what you can from this conversation, but I find it very refreshing and reassuring. I wrote this post to share with you that sometimes you can find inspiration in the most unlikeliest of places. Here is how the chat went.

You're now chatting with a random stranger. Say hi!

Stranger: hi

You: Hey do you know what is the tenth power of 2?

Stranger: hold on

Stranger: 1024?

You: Yeah . Thanks. Howd you get it?

Stranger: or 10to the power

Stranger: oops

Stranger: mental.math

You: ok what is (sin x)\x as x approaches 0. :D

Stranger: I have no clue I'm only 14

Stranger: a 4.0 student

You: Good job. The answer for the second question is 1. You have to use L'opital's rule.

Stranger: oh ok

Stranger: I haven't.learned that yet

Stranger: ill use that though thanks

You: Do you know any function can be accurately represented by an addition of infinite number of sinusoids?

Stranger: No not yet

Stranger: anyway

Stranger: I'm barely heading to high school so

Stranger: yeah

You: Ok. Do you know probability?

Stranger: ish

Stranger: I remember a little

You: ok let me put you a question.. I haven't solved this myself .. How many ways can I distribute 5 chocolates among 3 kids

Stranger: 1 2/3 each

Stranger: have you solved it?

You: Good choice. But I am asking how many number of ways are there to distribute it to these 3 kids assuming you can' t break the chocolate

Stranger: Ohhh ok

Stranger: aren't there 2 ways?

Stranger: or more?

Stranger: ahh I lost it

You: There are many. You can give 5-0-0.. 4-1-0.. 4-0-1.. and so on..

Stranger: oh

You: Its tricky..

Stranger: well it wouldn't.be fair.to the others considering that you only have five and there are three so wouldn't you have to evenly split it to have equality and not have a fight break out

Stranger: between them

You: Well I am a mathematician not their mother. They can fight if they want to :D

Stranger: that's not what I meant though if you put it as a worldly problem then you'd have to

Stranger: like if they were poor

Stranger: they had no parents

Stranger: living off themselves

You: ok get it.

Stranger: yeah

You: You got me! But sometimes there can be a value in counting.

Stranger: yeah

You: For eg. if the kids were containers and I was counting how many ways can I arrange five cards in three containers.

You: Or put five oranges into 3 containers..

You: makes more sense

Stranger: yeah

Stranger: im more of a worldly problem solver so i take example of the world rather than what it gives me

Stranger: so that's why I was confused

You: hmm thats a good approach

Stranger: that's how I was thought

You: ok Lets start counting the ways. I think we can crack this.

You: If first kid gets 5. The others get 0 and 0.

Stranger: okay

You: That's 1 way.

You: 5-0-0.

Stranger: 4-1-0

Stranger: 3-1-1

You: Now 4-0-1 and 4-1-0 are there.

Stranger: 2-2-1

Stranger: 2-1-2

You: I suggest we take a systematic approach like first kid gets 5, then first kid gets 4, then first kid gets three and so on..

You: and count the ways to distribute the rest among the other two kids

Stranger: yeah I've already started

Stranger: I'm at 0-4-1

Stranger: there are twenty one ways

Stranger: so far

You: 21 ways

Stranger: yes

You: yeah I think thats it

Stranger: there could be more if you were to take fractions in it

You: Yeah then it could be infinite assuming you could make infinitely small fractions.

Stranger: yeah

Stranger: wait how old are you may I ask?

You: 26.

Stranger: are you a teacher?

You: No, I'm a PhD student .

Stranger: oh well that's great!:)

You: Do you know what a PhD is?

Stranger: yes sort of

Stranger: my principal had one

You: ok yeah its the highest "degree" one can get before you get kicked out of school

You: But it was nice lerning with you today.

You: What class are you in?

Stranger: heading to 9th

You: are you preparing for any olympiads?

Stranger: No but I have to go thank you for teaching me that

Stranger has disconnected.

So, who's the teacher?

The Awakening- Questions in Past and Present Tense

STATUTORY WARNING: This Post can be harmful to your mood. This post is like coming out of a closet. I do not feel I have enough interesting things in my life to write down on a blog and share it with the world. Most of the times, my life is just in the making and half cooked things are not so beautiful to see. But just now I realized that by living in the closet and not coming face to face with the bad decisions in my life, I am living with my eyes closed. I have tried long and hard to overcome the past with many activities that give a short term excitement and take my attention away from all that's not fixed. But take it from me, you cannot fool your mind. And I need to face the burning questions and find answers to them, something that I am not too sure of. But what are these questions or events that I am rambling about. Well let's see. Maybe you can find a silver lining here, if you do let me know in the comments.
I started out in college in a pretty happy state and things went well till the end, though I didn't do everything I would have loved to do, but I got somethings I cherish and I can live with that. Now towards the end I really wanted to open a startup company. You ask why? Because of the thrill of doing something new and impactful. Because I so dearly want to build something that people start using in their daily lives; it helps me find a purpose to myself and to my education. My dedication to Cognitive Radios was the lighthouse which led me to leave the job and start as a project scientist. (Cognitive Radios are a form of intelligent radios that can enable communications between anything from your fridge and router to stranded family members in a flood, they are a really flexible design.)
But as it turns out academia isnt really the best place to test out ideas for entrepreneurship. So I enroll for a PhD as a safe option but soon enough I find this is not what I desired for myself. I get more happiness during a two week summer course doing something I love than I get doing simulations 8 hours a day, a whole semester. So I decide to take a final try for going to the US hoping this would satisfy my educational thirst leaving me atleast as happy as I was just after college. God has his own plans and after twice foregoing the chance, I am finally aboard a plane to the US to pursue PhD. And then I realize that my decision was motivated mainly by the years old desire to study in the US and that does not really match my much increased intensity for doing something fruitful and valuable for the future. So I come back to where I say, I have to face the hard questions and find answers. How do I do something that really interests me and I genuinely believe will interest me 10 years down the line. At some level I do want to do a PhD but I want to work on challenging problems in neuroscience, machine learning, compressive sensing and statistical signal processing. I want to move away from wireless communication because so much work has been done in it and people don't really know why they are doing something. I want to move from finding challenging solutions to trivial problems to finding simple solutions to challenging problems. I hope and I will work hard to find a niche where I am happy and I can continue with my PhD. Till then life is a sculpture in the making, and it changes interpretations from day to day.
Also I miss India and the coziness of home in Ludhiana. Thank you for reading my ramblings.