How does knowledge grow?

The Name of the Rose is a staggeringly marvelous book that has just about everything imaginable in it; insofar as this is true, it is a veritable bestiary of literary and theological ideas about pre-Renaissance Europe. Like the Sanskrit mahākāvyas, it has everything; but it is nevertheless novel in that it questions the pre-existing order in ways that older, more conservative works don’t.
For now, I wish to point out a fascinating passage from the book, addressed to the reader by the narrator Adso:

Learning is not like a coin, which remains physically whole even through the most infamous transactions; it is, rather, like a very handsome dress, which is worn out through use and ostentation. Is not a book like that, in fact? Its pages crumble, its ink and gold turn dull, if too many hands touch it.

This passage would have caught my eye on most days, given that it strikes me as (understandable but) entirely wrongheaded, but it struck me all the more forcefully since I had earlier been translating some Sanskrit subhāṣitas. Specifically, this one:

“The Limits of Science”

This is somewhat dated, but since I just saw a copy of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s new book, The Grand Design, on the latest hypotheses of cosmologists, in the window of my favorite bookstore, I thought I would put this up. Hawking and Mlodinow state that the latest pet theory of the cosmologists, M-brane theory, establishes the absence of God. The Economist took a very dim view of this in its rather harsh critique of his book, and then followed up with another post on the same controversy.

I should mention that I haven’t read Hawking and Mlodinow’s book yet, so I cannot fairly comment on its content or arguments.

Along similar lines, here’s a short, interesting article on the limits of science, titled “On the Limits of Science”. While pointing out that scientific endeavours, by their very nature, are likely to posit incomplete, inaccurate models, the author concludes (correctly, in my opinion, at least with regard to a very wide class of phenomena) that

the shortcomings of science do not make it rational to believe cranks instead. It’s a fair bet that many of today’s scientific beliefs are wrong, but only your grandchildren will know which ones, and in the meantime, science is the only game in town.

Whether scientifically investigable phenomena are the only kinds of phenomena there are is of course an entirely different question—and one that is not itself subject to scientific investigation. (You may therefore either dismiss it as an entirely meaningless question, or hold it up as proof of “the limits of science”.)

“Is wealth alone happiness?”

nidhi cāla sukhamā

rāmuni sannidhi-sevā sukhamā

nijamuga palku manasā

dadhi-navanīta-kṣīramulu rucō

dāśarathi-dhyāna-bhajana-sudhā-rasamu rucō

dama-śamamanu-gaṅgā-snānamu sukhamā

kardama-durviṣaya-kūpa-snānamu sukhamā

mamatā-bandhana-yuta-nara-stuti sukhamā

sumati-tyāgarāja nutuni kīrtana sukhamā

I should begin by admitting I don’t actually know Telugu! However, the lyrics of Tyāgarāja use enough Sanskrit that I can usually figure out what’s going on. If I get something wrong, please tell me and I’ll change it.


This beautiful song, said to have been composed by Tyāgarāja in response to royal pressure, contrasts the pleasures of the material world with the pleasures of immersing oneself in the Divine (for Tyāgarāja, the form being Rāma in this case).

What’s the greater joy: wealth alone,

Or proximity and service to Rāma?

Tell me honestly, o Mind!

Call me a nerd, but this is awesome

A team from Sapientia University, a Hungarian university located in Transylvania, Romania, has released some totally amazing videos on YouTube, in which a row of dancers demonstrate different sorting algorithms.

• Bubblesort
• Insertion sort
• Mergesort
• Quicksort
• Selection sort
• Shell sort

I’m in a bit of a rush right now, but I’ll put up descriptions of, and code for, the algorithms as soon as I find time. (Yes, I know Wikipedia already has excellent information on all these sorting algorithms—and others! But points for effort, no?) For what it’s worth, I sorted this list of algorithms into alphabetical order using manual bubblesort.

This actually reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, where monks solve problems in differential geometry by using dances to represent raising and lowering indices, tensor contraction, and the like. (Yes, I am a nerd.)

Updated:
Here’s a little bit on quicksort and insertion sort, the first two that come to mind. I’ve written up the code in Haskell because (a) Haskell is great to code in if you’re lazy, and (b) Haskell code looks like pseudocode anyway. Granted, that means the code might not always be optimized for killer speed, but it is guaranteed to be functional (pun intended!) and will convey the basic insight of the algorithm. Most of the pseudocode for these algorithms available online is usually written with some sort of heavily imperative language like C in mind. That’s fine, because imperative languages give us much better performance and are far more common in the real world. However, such languages also usually force us to get our hands really dirty with all sorts of messy details. Functional languages like Haskell, on the other hand, make us really think about the purpose underlying the algorithm. (I have seen some people call Haskell descriptive, as opposed to the prescriptive way that imperative languages work.) In other words, functional languages force us to get away from implementation-level details and to think about the actual algorithm itself. This is ultimately why I decided to try to write this code in Haskell.