…and so I treat you all to a late night, unedited, rambling as I sip on herbal tea and listen to “More Than a Feeling” by Boston. Over the years I’ve developed a multitude of tricks to get up on time – sometimes with limited success, but at least I know what works and what doesn’t. Through setting 5 alarms on every electronic device I own and having at least two friends give me wake up calls, I can usually get up reasonably close to when I need to. (I did say usually.)  This problem of needing to find a way to drain myself so that I can fall asleep is new.

Whenever I used to get into this predicament, I would just let my system deal with it naturally, which usually meant staying up the entire night and getting back into the swing of things the next day. At least, that’s what I used to do during undergrad. In fact, this used to be my way of making sure I got up on time – I’d stay up all night to make sure that I’d be on time for my obligation the next morning – be it a plane flight or conference or just needing to meet someone really early. It doesn’t work any more – mainly because I’ll fall asleep sometime between 4 and 5 AM nowadays and not be able to wake up until 10 or 11 the next day. I’d be well rested with between 5 to 7 hours of sleep, but there goes any chance of making that 8 AM meeting.

You’d think travel or observing would screw me up then on a usual basis – but surprisingly not – I don’t seem to have a problem with jet lag (crossing fingers) and the fear of something going wrong with a multi-million dollar telescope ensures that I stay up for the entire observing session. When I came back from Italy and Tunisia, it took me no more than 24 hours to get back into the right time zone, and less than a day when I got back from observing in California. It’s just when I’m home, and I do something stupid to screw up my sleep cycle do I suffer. As great as listening to Don’t Stop Believing by Journey at 2 AM in the morning is, I’d rather be asleep so that I can get up at some reasonably sane hour.

The stupid thing that I did last week (now a week and a half ago I suppose) was pull an all-nighter between Thursday and Friday to get a paper done. In truth, it was only a half-all-nighter as I fell asleep on a futon in the office next to me by 4 AM and I was up by 8 AM. I did, however, get the paper done (and so begins the revision process). Success? Yes – but now I pay for it. Damn this productivity (and I maintain that “damn”, while not the most polite language, isn’t a swear word – long story).

And here’s the big problem, because the university’s technically closed, not many people are around – so I can’t even use the presence and biological clocks of others to synchronize myself. It doesn’t help that those people that are around are even bigger night owls than I am.

Anyhow, I’ve finished my herbal tea and I’m going to see if I can lull myself to sleep with my guitar.

Sweet dreams.

Mubdi

I’ve had many role models in my life, and humbly, a few have taken me as their role model. In some cases, it has been something formal like a mentorship, but in most cases it comes about naturally. We all choose role models and aspire to follow in their footsteps – it’s how we learn and grow as humans. No amount of insular study will prepare you for the world in the way the simple guidance of another can. For everything we find written and recorded can not replace the experience of another. Life is built upon it. Even academics are based upon it – where as you progress to higher and higher realms, we are placed under the individual supervision of one who has come before us. The most important aspect is that a role model is not one who teaches you those principles recorded from generations prior, but rather guide you through the aspect that aren’t recorded and only taught through the school of hard knocks.

No one signs up to be a role model and no one can be trained for it. Even in the cases of formal mentorship or supervision. You can be some one’s mentor without being their role model. The only way we have any expertise in it is because it is profoundly simple; you just do what you do. Being a role model is inherently passive; we learn the most important lessons in life not when we’re taught them but rather when we see them in action. I think everyone who has mentored me knows what they’ve tried to teach me, but little do they know just how much I’ve learnt from them.

The beauty of it is that we never know in advance what we are going to learn from our role models. We don’t even know what we want to know. We’re often pulled to these people because of some aspect of theirs that we’ve seen, be it success, their interactions, their strength, their integrity – whatever it may be, we’re pulled towards them and become perceptive to the very habits that they consider natural. Because of this connection, we try to emulate them – we try to become them. What we forget in the middle of all of this is that they’re human and their actions are not for the purpose of our emulation – they’re for the purpose of living their lives. We put them on a pedestal and treat them as perfect even though we know logically that this can’t be the case. We create roles for them that they don’t even know about and derive offense when they don’t fulfill them. In some cases we ignore their shortcomings, and in others we move onto other people to emulate. We do this because we see some aspect of ourselves in them – that they’re the perfected version of us in some way and we can’t bare to see them as human in that respect.

But they are human.

Our role models will fail our platonic vision at some point, and sometimes they’ll even fail themselves. One of my darkest moments was when I had both failed myself and those that had looked up to me in one fell swoop. At that time, what gave me the strength to move forward was seeing those faces and having the tables turned on me; they reminded me about aspects of myself that I had forgotten amidst my devastation. I was grateful to them, and still am, as they taught me lessons I will not forget. I learnt that it’s not the degree of success for which I choose my role models, but rather their strength during the struggle and in the face of failure. At that dark moment I was afraid of my image being diminished in the eyes of those who had placed their faith in me, but I was reminded of my persistance that has rarely failed me. The pedestal I thought I had been knocked off was never the one that those kids placed me on, and to them, I was a success.

To those of you who have been my role models, knowingly or unknowingly – thank you. Thank you for those things you’ve taught me, but more importantly, those things you’ve shown me. I have learnt from the best and hope that I can emulate you with the strength and integrity that you’ve always shown me. 

To those of you, those I know and those I don’t, who have ever or ever will take me as a role model, know that I’m human and recognize my mortality and flaws as they are. I’ve made many a mistake (and orchestrated a handful of full-on disasters) in my life and will make many more. I am not particularly qualified to be a role model other than by being a kid chasing his dream. But please take from my successes and learn from my failures. That is all I can ask.

Mubdi

Growing up, we’re taught that the world is filled with the idealists and the pragmatists; those with lofty visions of what the world should be and those who make the world what they want it to be. Somewhere along the waywe’re told that you have to choose. Keep those immutable ideals and be cast as irrelevant to the world around. Seek to affect change in the world around you and be reduced to a moral vagabond. All too often, the choice is forced by human mortality; we take the bait, choose to survive and are controlled by those that lord a higher ideal over us, not by an inherent superiority of being, but rather the stroke of luck that grants them the privilege to face a different reality than our own. We grow up with a finite, absolute set of ideals and allow them to be sullied by our circumstance. We are then told that this series of events are merely a sign of our weakness and we are to feel guilt due to our lack of choice. We may go even further and mute that background hum of guilt that informs us that we’re not being the people we expect of ourselves. This adds the convenience of avoiding disappointment in ourselves.

I refuse to accept this.

A possible solution that we sometimes choose is to alter our ideals, allow them to flow with the very time that threatens to cause us to betray our ideals in the first place. You solve many problems this way; no longer can circumstance be the cause of contradiction because circumstance automatically corrects your ideals to avoid the conflict. We never have to feel guilty again. Arguably, this is the balance that many find today. Those that so violently protest the use of racial profiling, yet clutch their handbags just a little closer to themselves as they pass by a person in an ethnic minority group. You change your ideals based on the circumstance you’re in. However, you do this, and suddenly an entire host of problems emerge, beginning with the question of why these ideals are necessary in the first place. By attempting to correct one inconsistency in your ideals, suddenly the inconsistency is the ideals themselves. I reject this notion.

I view the problem not so much as one of idealism versus pragmatism, but rather, we grow and mature, but we expect our ideals to remain the same. The same as when we were 7 and the greatest moral judgements we had to make were about sharing a pail in the sandbox with the kid that ate paste. These schoolground morals are a great place to start, to learn, to investigate, but they’re not the end of that process - a process that it seems most of us do not progress through.

Largely I argue this in this fashion because much of human growth is stimulated by the incredible notion that we are not the only living, breathing entities in this world with free will. There’s a whole world of people out there that we have no direct control over, many of whom we don’t even have the slightest influence on. This excludes further the physical world, which we have even less control over minus the modern pieces of flint that we rub together for the sparks that we live by. Why, pray tell, do we base our ideals on entities outside of our own control?

This is what I’ve come to believe is the next stage of growth, but by no means the final stage of growth. Our ideal world isn’t one based on circumstance or especially things we have no control over; it makes no sense to place avoiding death as an ideal, as at the very end, we have no choice in the matter. Further, our ideals cannot reflect a reality that does not exist; it cannot deny inherent emotions and desires that exist within our species, good or bad. My ideal cannot be to live a life where even the sense of a negative emotion, be it malice, jealousy, anger, or hatred, is considered contrary to my ideals.  Rather my ideals must be based on the action or reaction to my reality. I’m not assuming I’m something I’m not, thus I can’t expect myself to do something I can’t. At the end of the day, isn’t that the definitive ideal circumstance?

The beauty of this situation is that a number of difficult conflicts resolve themselves; no longer is there the question of whether the ends justify the means as the ends are the means.

What this doesn’t do, however, is make life inherently easier – in this circumstance, you need to be very thoughtful about your set of ideals and ensure that they are self-consistent. This also doesn’t eliminate guilt entirely. Rather, what it does is force you to live by your own self-consistent ideals and the sense of guilt only comes when what I choose to do conflicts with these notions I have developed. I do not feel guilty because of the outcome of the choices, but only do I feel it when it assists me in making those choices.

In my world, the ideal world already exists; we live in it. What this paradigm of idealism allows me to do is fulfill my life and affect change around me without subjugating myself to a more juvenile notion of ideals that no living person can stand up against.

Peace,

Mubdi

You can imagine where on this graph I was today…

Considering how many hours a day I spend in front of one, interacting with computers is a big part of not just my science but my life as well. For a long while, refining interactions with computers hasn’t been about the big things but rather the little ones; developing easy and intuitive methods of scrolling, rather than bringing back the debate between QWERTY and DVORAK. What anyone who deals with computing on a daily basis realizes, it’s the small things that make or break an interface – and one of the reasons I don’t currently see Open Office as being a real viable competitor to Microsoft Office any time in the near future. Every ounce of efficiency makes a big difference in not only the amount of work you’re able to get done, but the experience as a whole.

However, there’s often moments for the big changes – the new paradigms. These are the innovations where the jump in efficiency outweighs the inertia of the way we currently view the system. Arguably, this occurred with the development of graphical user interfaces. If you look at software applications prior to the days of a common GUI under a Windows or Macintosh system, say something like the original versions of Lotus 1-2-3 or Wordperfect, they may not have been intuitive but once you were proficient, you could do pretty much anything with incredible speed and accuracy. I’d argue that it was the intuitiveness of GUIs and their ability to make computers accessible to the general public that tipped the scale.

As for a potential new paradigm, I’d like to introduce 10/Gui. It’s a system that’s based on using all 10 fingers to increase the amount of interaction that you can have with a computer at any given time. I’m not sure if I’ll see anything like this in my next laptop search, or even the one after that, but I can already see the advantages of a system constructed this way. Take a look:

Watch the video!

My first answer would be to stop using IDL and move to something better, like python. But, if you can’t, you may be using the default settings for the IDL postscript driver – which specify 4 bits per pixel. You can specify 8 bits per pixel using:

DEVICE, BITS_PER_PIXEL=8

Why this isn’t set to default to 8 in this modern day and age, I don’t know. (And you may be lucky enough to be using IDL 7.1 or greater, which you can set it to 24 bits per pixel). It’s a noticable change when you’re talking about greyscale images. You go from something like this:

The Crappy Version

to something like this:

The slightly better version

It’s not the greatest, but when I get pyastrolib up and running, it’ll be goodbye to IDL forever!

Mubdi

Growing up, Ramadan was always a special and exciting time for me. As a kid, I started fasting young, much to the opposition of my mother. Being the youngest of four by a fair bit, I’d see my sisters fasting and like any younger brother, I’d want to do as they were doing. In fact, when I was 8, I began fasting despite my mother’s protests. She thought I was too young, but even then, I was stubborn. In factto prevent me from fasting, she’d avoid waking me up before the sun rose to eat a meal before the day began, an event known as suhoor. She figured that I’d eventually get too hungry and break my fast sometime during the day – but I didn’t. When this continued for a couple days, she gave in and I was fasting along side the rest of my family. Even then I was excitable about Ramadan – even then I felt that the fast empowered me.

I didn’t realize back then, but this form of devotion was not about the abstinencefrom food or drink from sunrise to sunset , it was about self-control. If you can control those desires and needs that are intrinsic to being human, very little in your life can be difficult. The skeptical amongst us often question what good devotion to God does for the person beyond the spiritual. What they don’t seem to get is that the methods of ritual devotion such as prayer or fasting (which are not limited to Islam) benefit the devotee in very physical ways more so than they do God. Self-control, the lack of which is a source of much human conflict, is one of the many ways that religious devotion improves the devotee. In fact, the requirement of this devotion isn’t a curse or an obligation on followers – rather, it’s a blessing – so long as it is recognized as this.

Many of my most deeply held memories of growing up come from this month, and to be honest, few of them come from Eid-ul-Fitr, the celebration afterwards. I remember waking up long before the Sun, inching my way towards my parent’s kitchen – half due to my sleepiness, half due to the cold floor - for the first meal of the day. Sometimes I’d be first to wake up but often I was second to my mother. It was often touch-and-go if my sisters would wake up. We were all in the habit of skipping breakfast back then, skipping suhoor was  instinctual for them. (To be fair, one of my sisters almost always would wake up for this meal, and one of them, almost never.)

The food was usually leftovers from the night before, or sometimes my mother would cook something new before she went to bed the night before. My mother was always an incredible chef, and she’s the reason I have such a passion for cooking. We’d all eat around the kitchen table – growing up, eating together with my family was rare – so this was always significant for me. Suddenly, my mother would realize just how close to Fajrtime it was and we’d have to finish our meal fast. She always made sure that we drank a glass of water before we went back to bed. Just as the start of the day would come, she’d turn on this Urdu radio show that was on only for Ramadan (which was always amusing since only my mom and dad knew some Urdu – I had a hard enough time with Bangla, which was my mother’s tongue), and right before it was time to pray, they’d play the naat (or religious song) Nabi-un-Nabi. It was always a hauntingly beautiful melody – and while I’ve never understood the language, just listening to it reminds me of Ramadans past.

As we all grew up, as I moved out, and as life progressed, Ramadans changed. The realities of life and our schedules meant we were less likely to be able to break fast together. In my last year of high school, I remember breaking fast at school more often than at home. When I moved to University, I remember barely being able to wake up for suhoor and often just stuffing a breakfast bar into my system minutes before I was to begin my fast. Now being a grad student, I’m constantly breaking my fast at the office more so than at home. But regardless of what I need to do for practicality, whenever Ramadan comes around, my sense of nostalgia will bring me back to the days I was 8 and beginning fasting for the first time.

Ramadan Mubarak,

Mubdi

There may well be no such thing as a stupid questions, but there are still some times when you’d prefer to not make yourself look silly by asking the wrong questions in a very public forum. I’ve run across this problem numerous times at colloquia, seminars and conferences, and still don’t quite know how to deal with it.  After all, authentically asking questions helps satiate curiosity (or perhaps even builds it further), gets you known amongst your peers and is a great way to stimulate and direct further discussion. But no one wants to be that annoying person who fires off 50 completely unrelated questions with complete disregard to everyone who’s sitting there bored. Personally, I also don’t want to look like a fool in a large group - I’m completely okay with looking like one in a smaller group, but when there’s some illustrious or argumentative people around, I always like thinking twice before something comes out of my mouth.

I suppose in an ideal case, one would start out with a large ratio of dumb to reasonable questions and as time goes on and the amount of knowledge one has increases, this ratio would go down further and further. Unfortunately, very rarely do people ask enough questions fast enough to get this ratio down quickly, adding to it that when you’re new to the game, you want to test the waters lightly before you dive in.

My strategy has become to try to talk to the person privately or in a small group afterwards. This way, I can spark discussion, and like I said I’m willing to make myself look like a fool one-on-one. This has the added benefit that I’ll have the ability to think about the question(s) for a while longer before they leave my mouth. I know that this isn’t the final answer, but it’s (mostly) kept me from looking like a fool in colloquia and conferences up till now.

Peace,

Mubdi

At the recent conference on the Star Formation Rate that I attended, one of the opening talks introduced a tongue-in-cheek concept that quickly became a theme for the week. The principle is this: the state of the science today is such that our modern observatories are allowing us to see detail in objects and phenomena that never before have been seen – so much so that we can do science by just looking at pictures. This, we call JPEG science. Further, the drastic improvement in computer technology has allowed for more detailed simulations than have ever been conducted before – so much so that we can do science by just looking at the videos. This, we call MPEG science.

Needless to say, this became a quick meme for every further talk to refer to. I’ll admit that I used this meme in my own talk. In my defense, it was to illustrate the problems with telling stories simply from the picture without any further detailed analysis. In the case I had illustrated, I presented an image of one of my candidate massive star forming regions, and it showed a number of bright spots around the bubble. In fact, they were so bright that everything else paled in comparison. I then posed the question: where was the majority of the light in the image coming from? Naively, one would argue from those points – but the reality was that the majority of the light was coming from the diffuse stuff – even though it looked dimmer. That’s because the area of the diffuse light on the image was much larger than those individual points. For the region in question, this told a much different story than what one would have otherwise assumed. Without that additional step of analysis, the story and the magic of this region would have never been discovered.

What this comes down to  is that JPEG science will tell us the obvious stories, but to appreciate the true mystery of many parts of our universe, we need to put our sleuth caps on and get to real story.

Cue the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego theme music.

Peace,

Mubdi

I’ve always opened myself to serendipitous adventures in all of my travels, and Rome has been no different. On my last night in Rome, I missed the last metro – compounded by the fact that this also meant I missed the last bus to my hostel from the Cornelia Metro station. Jessica, with whom I had dinner and spent my last night with, had urged me to take a cab, but having spent just about all the Euros I had, as I had planned, I took my chances with the night transit system. After all, I did buy a ticket by then, so why not at least try to use it?

 Perhaps it would have been a little different had we not got lost after dinner, taking a wrong turn, ending up in the middle of a celebration for what seemed to be the Democratic Party of Italy. Somehow, we missed the Coliseum, where Jess’s hotel was located. Don’t ask me how we missed it – we took a wrong turn, which is all the more embarrassing since we walked to the restaurant from the hotel not more than 4 hours earlier, and I had spent the entire day yesterday walking around Rome and playing the tourist. Thankfully, there were hundreds of people around – unfortunately, our skill of Italian left something to be desired. Mi scuzzi, parla inglezi? Eventually on our third try, we got the right direction from the locals after having done a circle. I’ve got to admit, as much as Jess was beginning to stress, I was authentically enjoying myself.  How on Earth did we miss something as massive as the Coliseum? I blame dinner, and the dinner conversation.

 Right as we finally realized we were on track, I saw just what time it was, and that in this very Catholic country, everything really shuts down on a Sunday night. We parted as Jessica made her way back to her hotel and I ran for the Coliseum Metro station about 100 metres away.

 As I approached the station, I noticed the bars on the door that I thought I hadn’t seen the day earlier. I was able to get into the station and buy my ticket, but as I approached the gates to the subway, a number of Italian service personnel indicated very clearly that we had missed the last train – and it wasn’t even midnight by then. I had heard earlier in the weekend that there was a bus that followed the two lines of the Metro system. Shouldn’t be too difficult – take the bus up to Termini, then take it all the way to Cornelia, and I’d figure out what to do about the last little stretch when I got to the station.

 I wasn’t the only one with this predicament. There were a number of couples, one from Russia, another from America, and a pair of girls from Australia, all in the same predicament. Admittedly, waiting for the bus in the warm Roman air right next to the spot lit Coliseum was far from painful. It was a good twenty minutes before we were able to get the night bus, as it wasn’t midnight then, and as I learnt the hard way, Italian buses never run on time.

 I felt the urge to just stick it out and explore more of the Roman core and catch the first bus in the morning. It would be at 5:30 AM, and my shuttle from the hostel didn’t leave for the airport until 6:45. But I did have to repack, and the city air made me want to take a shower before a nine hour flight – the least I could do for the poor person who would sit next to me – nope, I’ll find a way to get to my hostel. Note to self for my next trip; find accommodations that aren’t two subway lines and a bus away, regardless of how much more expensive it is. And perhaps a place that didn’t make me pay separately for towels, or get the top bunk in the triple occupancy room. But I digress.

 The Termini wasn’t too far away, and truth be told, I could have walked it faster than waiting for the bus. Thankfully, this city doesn’t really sleep and there were many native Romans heading home from their Sunday night events, including a large number of teens coming home from an Anastasia concert. Again, I break out my broken Italian to find that the direction I was going in was completely different from the majority of the crowd.

 The bus itself was exciting, as it rushed through the ancient streets of Rome, passing by many of the attractions I had spent the weekend roaming around. Fountains, bridges, statues, all along the ancient cobblestone roads. It was all incredibly beautiful, I had to admit, and the city shined through the night. St. Peter’s and the Vatican. Prior to my departure, many of my friends told me that I would be taken a back at just how different, how European it all was. Looking at the entire experience, I couldn’t help but disagree. Certainly, the language was different, the roads were worn from thousands of years of use, the streets were narrow and the buildings were old – but this was all a veneer – just a surface deep change of the setting – the plot remained the same. This put me at a bit of an ease – one of the questions that I had continuously asked myself is what aren’t we getting as North Americans? What does all of Europe realize that we’re completely missing? What is that solution to all of our civic problems? I came to find that Europe, or at very least Rome, has many of the same problems and few of its own that are a bit worse. It’s not so much that European society has the answers, but rather the humour and ease with which they deal with them (or simply put up with them) is the difference.

 As I progressed further from the downtown, the streets became more suburban, in a similar vain to any North American city. Wider, with more traffic, the buildings newer, and the culture more uniform. The use of English was less prominent, their facilities more modern, and the bane of North America, the parking lot, were attached to most buildings. It became clear to me that this was where the modern Roman lived, not in those ancient cobblestone streets shined and polished for the tourist, but in this gritty reality that I had been shielded from by the metro.

 The bus approached the metro stop that I had normally been getting off at. I knew that I would have to walk from here since the connecting bus had long ended for the night. It was 1:30 AM. This meant I’d have to walk the few kilometres to get to my hostel – not particularly appealing at this hour of night. The subway map seemed to indicate that the next (and last station) on the line was generally in the same direction as my hostel – and perhaps a bit closer. If only I had a map that actually covered the area around my hostel. Further, this station being the last, if I was wrong I could stay on this bus as it went back towards the city. Wrong on both accounts. Not only did the bus turn in precisely the wrong direction, taking me further away from my hostel, it stopped at the final station, and then proceeded to go out of service. There I was, left alone in a section of Rome that I had never seen, and this area looked a little rougher than any others I had been. That gambit clearly hadn’t paid off.

 I had some sense of cardinal directions and walked towards the better lit area. I ran into a man who seemed to be waiting for someone, and he was thankfully reasonably well dressed and looked about 30 or so. I approached him to ask for directions in the off chance he spoke any English. He didn’t – but he had some French. Anyone who’s seen my French knows that it leaves much to be desired, but I plugged away. He knew my hostel – it was right by his loft, but that was more than 5 km away now. But in an odd, appreciated, kindness amongst strangers way, he offered to drive me. On his Vespa.

 This ride was particularly amusing on the old roads of Rome. Thankfully, no one was around to watch. Me, holding on for dear life on the back of the kind man’s scooter. Remembering the casualty of my motorcycle ride with Dan to Peterborough, I kept my shoes (the only pair I brought) well away from the exhaust pipe. In this whole commotion, I forgot to look for foot grips on the back if there were any. This meant I had to keep my feet held high above the road, scraping my soles on every bump. I suppose this would have been comedic if I weren’t so tired.

We eventually made it to an area that seemed familiar, and made it to the man’s apartment building. I thanked him profusely and began walking towards my hostel. It was close now. One thing I had forgotten, however, was that the road going to my hostel turned into a bit of a highway. For this final stretch, there I was, walking on the edge of an Italian highway, with the crazy driving and the blind corners, just trying to avoid being blind sighted by a car or truck. I made it, eventually got some sleep, avoiding to fully wake up as my Aussie roommates entered the door going on about their failed exploits. I couldn’t help but smile a bit as I knew I too had a story to tell of an adventure of my own.