Social networking sites have been springing up everywhere like ATM's did a few years earlier. Initially viewed with skepticism, then with wonder, and finally everyone asks "How did we do without them?". So now we have Orkut, Facebook, and just a few million more.
I've joined Orkut. Made new friends. Regained contact with old ones. Maintained contact with existing ones.
So, instead of dissecting how and why orkut was made (see wikipedia) [read there only if you wish to accumulate trivia & impress (or drive away) your friends], I will discuss certain features provided.
Connected with google accounts / GTalk
This little feature was added as Google is the owner of Orkut, and what better way to increase the number of users (and further your plans of world domination) than by adding a social networking site to your portfolio?
Messages
Irritating little things that show an icon on your homepage to act as an in-built orkut e-mail. Essentially worthless and inadequate as it is much easier to use GMail to send emails to friends.
Scraps
One of the most stupid and slowest IM-substitutes. The scrapping mechanism works as follows:
- Choose whose scrapbook you want to defile with your scrap.
- Go to his (or her)... (or it's) profile and click scrapbook.
- Write derogatory and/or accusatory statements in the reply text-box and click post.
Then, the person at the other end will recieve your scrap. Read it. Grow angry. And Reply. Of course, as it is not exactly live chat where you can keep asking a person "Why don't you reply?" (until he/she/it replies out of sheer frustration or has a brain aneurism and dies in which case you don't recieve any reply), the person can eat/sleep/bathe/go mad/kill 34,678.8 people and then reply.
Till then, if you're desperate enough, you wait for their scrap while scrapping a few other hundred people you know/are acquainted with/want to irritate.
Testimonials:
Developed so that everyone can exaggerate about their friends, put them on pedestals (while considering them . . . you know what I mean). I was going to ask my friends to write normal, accurate testimonials but realized that if the testimonial is not exaggerated, people will consider the normal one exaggerated. (Thus, on passing through the mental testimonial filter -- developed by everyone to glean a few grains of truth from beaches of praise -- the fact that I occasionally read books will be translated as : reads 1 novel per year).
Ranking Friends:
One of the most devious, despicable, deviated inventions by the (human?) coders at Google. While I sympathize with their plan of World Domination (cue strange music) the system of ranking friends seems too low a blow. If, or rather when, (for those among you who rank their friends) this privileged information is revealed to all, be prepared to be ripped limb from limb or be rendered friendless (which is worse).
There are many more features but listing these and exposing their true purpose has exhausted me.
(Note: I am a member of Orkut, visit it daily, scrap friends, wait for testimonials, write testimonials, send messages, swear by GMail and Google Talk. So sue me.)
Orkut
As can be evinced by the lack of posts for so many days (for any of you who actually noticed), my little, broken, overworked brain has stopped working (the change was barely noticable).
Thud! by Terry Pratchett
'War, Nobby. Huh! What good is it for?' he said.
'Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?'
'Absol-- Well, okay.'
'Defending yourself from a totalitarian agressor?'
'All right, I'll grant you that, but--'
'Saving civilisation against a horde of--'
'It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together,' said Fred Colon sharply.
'Yeah, but in the long run what does, sarge?'
Passage 2
Whenever I make a psot, I check it with my eagle eyes (which are unable to discern a pen kept on an empty table) to find spelling/grammatical errors. Then I publish it, and then re-read it. Then I correct the errors I can find and edit them. This method levaes approximately 100 errors per line of post (which have around 40-50 characters). (also proving my genius: I can make more than 1 eroor per character I type). If anyone does read my posts, kindly point out any factual / language errrors in comments to earn my unending gratitude (which, unfortunately, is not much of an incentive).
Thank You.
ReAdproofing
Whenever the machinery I call a brain breaks down (which is often) I shall unabashedly commit plagiarism. My sin shall be exculpated by the fact that I will give the source.
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett
Life in this world,' he said, 'is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say, humbly, "Go on, do Deformed Rabbit . . . it's my favourite. " '
Passage
The internet: a network of networks. Connecting hundreds of thousands of computers around the world. Sharing terabytes of information. Used for everything from scholarly research to crime. Guarantees pseudo-anonymity to all users.
Freedom of Speech: Introduced in all democracies. Considered a basic freedom for complete development of individuals. Allowed, but never completely implemented in most countries. Point of controversy on how far freedom of speech can be allowed.
Mix these two? Big Bang.
The internet has allowed everyone with internet access, a moderate knowledge of computers to express themselves freely without restrictions on the internet.
No editing. No censorship. No control.
Is that good? or bad? or neither?
Good? It allows people to express their feelings and share information even in countries where freedom of speech is not allowed. Case in point: China. The authorities do censor all that is available on the internet blocking all sorts of sites. Hackers copy the data to more servers and re-route traffic. End of problem.
Everyone can criticise anyone. Any event can be publicised. Everything is available to everyone to read, judge, comment on, criticise and add to. Censorship is made virtually impossible. The respect for freedom of speech can be seen in the major protests whenever certain blogs are blocked on the internet. Or videos. Or websites. Even social networking sites.
Bad? Hate websites are allowed. Pro-Nazi websites are opened. Racial hate blogs are available. None of these can be stopped completely as they are simply moved to new servers. Sensible entries are written in deplorable English / [insert language of your choice here] and posted. Senseless entries are written in excellent English. Senseless entries are written in deplorable English (case in point: http://www.cynicscynosure.blogspot.com ).
This brings us back to the distasteful topic of limiting freedom of speech. Is it right? Shouldn't everyone be allowed to express their views? Irrespective of how they affect those around them?
Or should their speech be curbed?
Neither? Freedom of speech over the internet cannot be curbed without massive expenditure by all countries carrying web servers. We must learn to live with antics of comedians parading as Mahatma Gandhi and Anti-India sites. But we must also celebrate the medium which allows us all to speak out and be heard easily.
I feel that we must learn to Live and Let Live in the sense of freedom of speech: as long as the effects are not harmful, no site should be curbed. But this leads us to another difficulty: what can be decided as harmful? Sites propagating terrorism surely are. But what about holocaust-deniers? They may cause new generations not to believe in the holocaust. Is that harmful?
Such questions have to be addressed. Should countries be allowed to ban certain sites? How far does a country's jurisdiction extend over the internet? What about users' privacy? Without such guidelines clearly spelled out by some world wide body we will regularly have protests to ban Orkut and You Tube and perhaps even this blog (if more than 3 people read it that is).
I am surprised that no-one has asked for censoring the internet for protecting the Indian people (like the the guidelines laid down for TV) these days; just in case we see all sorts of sites and start following deplorable Western Values and lose our Indian morality and culture.
Freedom of Speech and The Internet
According to Wikipedia, fractals are defined as rough, fragmented geometric shapes subdivided into parts each of which can be considered (at least approximately) a reduced size copy of the whole.
Fractals have various unique properties and their study has started relatively recently as computers are an important requirement for analysing fractals properly. For example, the Julia fractals were created before computers were created and thus their real beauty was not observed until recently.
One of the most complex fractals derived from a simple definition is the Mandelbrot pattern, discovered by Professor Mandelbrot (who is currently alive and well: a strange anomaly in a world where whatever is interesting and understandable by normal minds is written by someone who passed away a century ago). The pattern is defined:
f: C -> C
function defined from set of complex numbers to complex numbers
fc(z) = z^2 + c
where c is any complex number
The sequence ( 0, fc(0), fc(fc(0)),...) either escapes to infinity or is confined to a particular radius. The mandelbrot pattern consists of all those points c where the sequence does not escape to infinty. (Yes, I agree that all those who consider this definition 'simple should be drawn, quartered and hung.)
The Mandelbrot pattern, courtesy Wikipedia:
Fractal pictures of the mandelbrot pattern are generated in an interesting way: every pixel on screen is assigned coordinates and evaluated; the colour displayed represents the number of iterations required to determine that the given point is not part of the pattern, with black points showing all points part of the pattern. Programmers generally set a maximum limit for total number of iterations of the algorithm at any one pixel, after which it can be safely assumed that a certain pixel is not part of the pattern. This is also helped by the fact that if any of the nth repeats while evaluating a pixel have an absolute value greater than 2, then that pixel will not be part of the pattern as then the sequence will escape to infinity; this can be observed by the fact that the mandelbrot pattern never exceeds a disc of 2 units from origin.
All this was about fractals and how they can be generated using a computer. What is far more interesting and slightly difficult to understand is how fractals have broken into the space in between dimensions, or rather, how mathematicians bound by euclidean geometry noticed that fractals could not be considered part of the 3 dimensions. In fact,
To consider this, imagine a straight line; divide it into 3 sections and take out the middle part. Do the same to the remaining two lines and carry this on as infinitely. What remains is neither a single point, nor a line but something in between. This is called Cantor's Dust, which is not 0 dimensional nor 1 but something in between.
Something clearer is perhaps the Serpinsky triangle: imagine an equilateral triangle. Remove the central triangle formed by joining the midpoints of the sides of the triangle. Carry this process on on each of the 3 remaining triangles and keep on repeating it. When you finish (at infinity) what is left is not a plane yet has infinite lines. Thus it is not 1 dimensional nor 2 dimensional but something in between.
Thus, according to Mandelbrot, the 4th dimension (Time which connects the present 3 dimensions to the past 3) infact consists of the space in between all the dimensions!
(To learn more and see a program on the Mandelbrot pattern, see Wikipedia and run a google search on fractals/ mandelbrot.)
Fractals and the fourth dimension
When I decided to let my rabid thoughts free in the world, my first decision was, to avoid at all costs, any cliches (something which is another cliche nowadays). Unfortunately, I could not come up with anything better than 'Introduction' for my first post. I looked up a lot of synonyms on the internet to display my erudition, but settled for 'Introduction'.
For those few who open this blog and do not suffer from a mad desire to throttle me to prevent further blog entries, I have given certain interesting links (so that you don't give read further and then feel a desire to throttle me).
I shall be posting ravings, rants on all sorts of topics (as can be determined from the heading), occasional book reviews (yes, I can read) and anything I feel like... including the occasional post containing only the words "Aargh", "Yahoo! (not an advert)" and so on.
About me: I am a qualified 'Mad genius'. Well, everyone will agree about one part and not the other... I won't specify which is which.
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