The 2006-2007 season turned out to be a magnificent one for Manchester United and I thoroughly enjoyed the ride. These were for me the moments that defined our season and yeah finally .... We have got our trophy back !!
# Old Trafford - EPL -- Date: 22nd October, 2006
Rio Ferdinand scores the second goal against Liverpool (2-0), his second goal against the scousers in two seasons and Old Trafford erupts like what I have not seen for a long time.
# Old Trafford - EPL -- Date: 4th November, 2006
Ronaldo free kick against Portsmouth ... it had tremendous power and wicked swing and the celebration was awesome
# Old Trafford - Champions League -- Date: 6th December, 2006
Vidic heads Manchester United into the knock out stage after being one down to SL Benefica ... what a header and what a center back Vidic turned out be.
# Old Trafford - FA Cup -- Date: 7th January, 2007
Larsson scores his Manchester United debut goal against Aston Villa (1-0), it was literally a pass into the goal !
# Craven Cottage - EPL -- Date: 24th February, 2007
Ronaldo produces a magical moment (to me the season defining moment) to carve through the Fulham defence and score one of the most important goals of the season
# Anfield - EPL -- Date: 3rd March, 2007
John O'Shea gets the winner in injury time against Liverpool and stuns the Anfield crowd
# Old Trafford - EPL -- Date: 17th March, 2007
Rooney scores against Bolton in the best counter attacking move of the season involving himself and the peerless Ronaldo
# Old Trafford - EPL -- Date: 31st March, 2007
Scholes cuts through the Blackburn defence and scores a super goal in the 60th minute. United were trailing the Rovers by a goal and this Scholes special inspired us to a 4-1 victory
# Old Trafford - Champions League -- Date: 10th April, 2007
Alan Smith scores against AS Roma on that wonderful night (2-0) as Manchester United announce their European ambitions in style ... this match could be catalyst for a United revival in Europe in the seasons to come
# Old Trafford - Champions League -- Date: 24th April, 2007
Rooney scores the third goal against AC Milan (3-2) in the 90th minute to give United a win against the eventual winner of the competition
# Goodison Park - EPL -- Date: 28th April, 2007
What a day ! ... United and Chelsea were playing at the same time and and at one moment Chelsea cut the points gap completely. Rooney scores against his old club (3-2) and Bolton hold Chelsea ... you could see Ferguson gesturing tothe players towards the end of the day ... '2-2 Chelsea ! ... its finished'. Man United finished the day 5 points ahead of Chelsea and the title race was almost over
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Sunday, May 27, 2007
The beauty of Functional Programming Languages
I was always and will always be an admirer of the C programming language. It is the language of hackers and it is a language from which I got so many of my 'aha' moments. You tend to keep getting surprised by C all the time and the journey never ends.
However, today I was thinking of a problem, a simple one --> to find all permutations of a given list of numbers. I tried to solve it in C and realized how ugly it would get. Then I sat and coded the problem in Python and it reminded me of the good old days of CS 152 programming, a freshman course in my college. I present the code here .... just look and marvel at the elegance of Functional Programming (FP) . Python is not a strict FP language but it has inherited a lot from Lisp, so it has a good number of FP abstractions built in.
Here is the code
The best part is that the code follows the inductive definition of the permutation itself !!
However, today I was thinking of a problem, a simple one --> to find all permutations of a given list of numbers. I tried to solve it in C and realized how ugly it would get. Then I sat and coded the problem in Python and it reminded me of the good old days of CS 152 programming, a freshman course in my college. I present the code here .... just look and marvel at the elegance of Functional Programming (FP) . Python is not a strict FP language but it has inherited a lot from Lisp, so it has a good number of FP abstractions built in.
Here is the code
The best part is that the code follows the inductive definition of the permutation itself !!
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Determinism and Causality
Its time to look at some of questions which perplex me the most which are -> " why are we there here in the first place ? " , "Is there any purpose for human existence ? " , " Are there any reasons or answers for this ?"," Is it reasonable for everything to have reason ?", Why am I searching for reasons for everything ? It seems that we are locked or bound by the law of causality which is why we keep searching a cause for every effect. This is a possibly endless chain which starts from an axiom. The axiom is the only statement or truth we accept without any cause. So it seems that organic-carbon based logic is constrained by the cause and effect principles. The question is whether everything can explained by such logic , now this statement is ridiculous as "explain everything" inherently means finding the cause for a perceived universal set of effects. Is this thinking attributed to carbon based organic thinking , What if had a silicon based brain , would I still be constrained by causality ?
Coming back to axioms it seems that human beings are surprisingly different in the set of axioms they start off with. There are these religious people (the worst of the lot) who have a zillion axioms which begin with the concept of god, then we have the mathematical/rational people who accept only the most atomic truths as axioms. Yet the rational man as well as the religious one has to accept that inbuilt in our brains is the notion of survival , ultimately a man only strives to maximize those objects that increase the chance of his survival and this unfortunately has been programmed into us through the complex and chronologically gigantic process of evolution.
Now there arise interesting questions regarding rationality and human behavior. Its often seen that we criticize a person accusing him of taking incorrect decisions during a bout of emotional outburst. We tend to classify human behavior as rational or irrational as to whether the person's current action leads to a perceived increase of objects that lead to a greater survival probability (for example increasing his financial stability -> and note that concepts like finance , jobs etc are abstractions of basic objects needed for survival). Now looking deeply into this we find something quite funny. Was the person who took the so called "emotional" decision really in control ?. Lets define the state of the human brain in terms of a finite number of variables or parameters (most of these parameters would probably be electric potential values and chemical states of the brain). Now given a particular state of the brain (which is supposedly an emotional state) and the input stimuli to the brain it can be possibly predicted as to what the next state of the brain is. Thus the action taken by the person was not in "his" control but was predetermined. Now arises the bigger question -> does there exist anything called free will ? I will quote my friend's magnificent quotation here -> "Free will is merely the result of the computational complexity of determinism" .. yes given the millions of possible states and multitude of stimuli the problem is hard.
On a more observatory note (and assuming that people do have free wills) I feel amused on looking at the lives of so many people who wade through life , it makes me think that a majority of us are overgrown and biologically complicated ants running along dabbling in trivial things for survival or its extensions. I really appreciate people who strive to push the boundaries of thinking , reasoning or logic in any field from Computer Science, Neural Research to philosophy . Only an advancement in human thinking can be considered as a non trivial achievement (if at all there exists a notion of non triviality for triviality is relative) .. the rest of human actions are repetitive, predictable and boring.
Coming back to axioms it seems that human beings are surprisingly different in the set of axioms they start off with. There are these religious people (the worst of the lot) who have a zillion axioms which begin with the concept of god, then we have the mathematical/rational people who accept only the most atomic truths as axioms. Yet the rational man as well as the religious one has to accept that inbuilt in our brains is the notion of survival , ultimately a man only strives to maximize those objects that increase the chance of his survival and this unfortunately has been programmed into us through the complex and chronologically gigantic process of evolution.
Now there arise interesting questions regarding rationality and human behavior. Its often seen that we criticize a person accusing him of taking incorrect decisions during a bout of emotional outburst. We tend to classify human behavior as rational or irrational as to whether the person's current action leads to a perceived increase of objects that lead to a greater survival probability (for example increasing his financial stability -> and note that concepts like finance , jobs etc are abstractions of basic objects needed for survival). Now looking deeply into this we find something quite funny. Was the person who took the so called "emotional" decision really in control ?. Lets define the state of the human brain in terms of a finite number of variables or parameters (most of these parameters would probably be electric potential values and chemical states of the brain). Now given a particular state of the brain (which is supposedly an emotional state) and the input stimuli to the brain it can be possibly predicted as to what the next state of the brain is. Thus the action taken by the person was not in "his" control but was predetermined. Now arises the bigger question -> does there exist anything called free will ? I will quote my friend's magnificent quotation here -> "Free will is merely the result of the computational complexity of determinism" .. yes given the millions of possible states and multitude of stimuli the problem is hard.
On a more observatory note (and assuming that people do have free wills) I feel amused on looking at the lives of so many people who wade through life , it makes me think that a majority of us are overgrown and biologically complicated ants running along dabbling in trivial things for survival or its extensions. I really appreciate people who strive to push the boundaries of thinking , reasoning or logic in any field from Computer Science, Neural Research to philosophy . Only an advancement in human thinking can be considered as a non trivial achievement (if at all there exists a notion of non triviality for triviality is relative) .. the rest of human actions are repetitive, predictable and boring.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
No Title
Just set up this page and hopefully will start writing something here .. an interesting question arises immediately --> why do I wish to do this ... what is the need to write, what purpose is it serving .... how come humans have evolved so many abstractions. Communication in animals is purposeful and related to survival and we have evolved such complex networks of purposeless(?) interaction. Are we really successful as a species ... after all the aim of any species is to maximize its survival and dominate "nature" ... so how does one define domination ? Is our success and domination measured by our numbers ? I think it is .. our success as a species is commendable .. we have taken over this planet. What puzzles me is the fact that in order to be so successful we have had to develop so many complex abstractions while a simple virus does the same with much less complexity .... of course triviality and complexity are subjective issues and are hard to define.
So I join other members of my species and to try and broadcast some of my thoughts. Before signing off I ask a question that frustrates me --> Why is existence not like a computer program .. If I want to change the working of some program, I reverse engineer it ... wish I can do that with life.
So I join other members of my species and to try and broadcast some of my thoughts. Before signing off I ask a question that frustrates me --> Why is existence not like a computer program .. If I want to change the working of some program, I reverse engineer it ... wish I can do that with life.
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