Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Insights

It's been a while since I posted. Graduate life does not leave you with too much spare time. It does give you a fair amount of time to think (since you have no money to do much else), just not enough time to be amusing. The following are some of the insights I've had over the past few months.

Time spent studying to performance graph


Speed of work is inversely proportional to time to deadline.

Happiness = e^x
A friends insight this one. Say something makes you happy at a point of time. After a while you get used to the feeling. Then, you're no longer as happy as you were at the earlier instant. You need something better/bigger/different to make you happy again.
Happiness = Derivative of happiness, he said.
This line from Grey's Anatomy made sense. "Why do I keep hitting myself with a hammer? Because it feels so good when I stop." It's all about the change.
PS: Here I speak only of external sources of happiness.

The fight
"TA ke liye fight nahi mara", he asked. "Didn't you put up a fight for a TA", it translates to. Fight? I thought. Is that what it takes? Is that why some get ahead of others? (We can discuss what we want to define as "ahead" in a later post) Because they fight for it?

Competition
It's a double edged sword, this competition. It gets you to work really hard and achieve great things. You probably end up leading a miserable life.

For respect or envy?
Is everything we do just so that we have the envy or respect of others? Just so that others think of us as an awesome, all knowing or accomplished (whichever floats your boat) person? If that is the case, and it can't be helped, I'd rather work for respect than envy.

Stable matching
I've mentioned the stable matching algorithm in an earlier post. The classic example involves pairing men and women. The conditions to be satisfied and the algorithm to get there is explained here. I wonder if real life works this way as well. Men propose to woman starting from the lady on the top of their "preferred women list". If rejected, they move on to their next preference. Women trade up. Whenever proposed by a man higher up on their "preferred men list", they break their current pairing and pair up with this new person. (This analogy does bring out women in bad light). The point to be noted is, this algorithm is "male-optimal and female-pessimal", which translates to, "each man is paired with his highest ranked feasible partner and each female is paired with her lowest ranked feasible partner". Women, think. Maybe this tells us something. Maybe we ought to change how we work. Maybe actively seek rather than passively wait?