0. 0 Introduction

0.1.   I started these blogs on a whimsy. I did not have a sequence or organization of thoughts in mind when I started. I didn’t even make a draft copy on my computer. I started writing as the spirit took me. Now, after having written 1.0 on the Enigma of the Database, I am writing 0.0, the Introduction!

0.2.   If these writings seem to be rambling, it’s because they are rambling! I start with a logical sequence (Chapter 0, 1 etc.) only because it is comfortable to most, but as I have discovered time and again, logical sequences are not an intrinsic property of thought, but a convenient necessity for most, living in an ordered society. I am perfectly comfortable with bits and pieces of seemingly unconnected facts and processes; comfortable with the idea that at some time, they will all come together in ways more elegant than an externally imputed logical sequence early in the exercise. This Blog entry system does not display this sequence in ordering the posts. Nor does it allow me to order the posts in any sequence I wish them to appear. It assumes I know what the last post number is going to be before even starting.

0.3.   My mother was a mathematician (still is, at 90 and sharp as a tack) and I have inherited some of “me” from her. She was probably one of the first Fortran programmers in India in 1964, when she topped her class of programming at a course in Delhi. I get my abstract thinking from her. We built binary computers at home with flashlight bulbs and switches to represent binary bits of 1’s and 0’s before the time when Steve Jobs and Wozniak were puttering around in their garage building the first personal computer, but we sat back and marveled at our creations and did not create a marketable product.

        0.4.   As far as I can remember, I have always been a curious person, by nature, not readily accepting everything presented to me. This was not distrust, but a healthy curiosity (healthy disregard for the impossible , as Larry Page of Google, said). I had to indulge in deconstructing everything, much to the chagrin of all those around me, including my parents and my brother. Thus, a radio was not just a radio, but something to be dismantled to discover what lay within - The programming content of the radio held some interest for me, and I did enjoy the commentary of cricket and tennis games, the weekly programs with the popular music of the day, the news at 9:00 PM with the six prior bleeps by which you set your watch etc. Of course, in order to avoid upsetting my father, I would open up the family’s vacuum tube radio when no one was around, stare at the glowing valves and, miraculously, not electrocute myself with all the high voltage components within. Most people, I discovered, are more satisfied with higher level ontologies than I was. For most, a radio is a radio, to be listened to, sitting prettily in the corner, with lace doilies on top of the wooden cabinet. For me, the definition of a radio was less succinct. It had circuit diagrams, electrical smells, and little buzzing noises among the tubes that were warm to the touch, a loudspeaker with a paper cone and a powerful magnet that your screwdriver stuck to; things you discover only if you open up the perforated cardboard back of these things. My forays into the innards of the radio may have been influenced by my father periodically opening up the back and brushing out the accumulated dust using a sable haired brush. I was about 9 or 10 years old when I first started examining seemingly whole manufactured objects like this. I had to do this by myself because most people freaked out when you started dismantling things by yourself, especially when young, but I have noticed this among my contemporaries who would rather a “repair technician” (there is that distorted ontology again) opened the back of things! I never destroyed anything, but fixed many things, through this exercise, I must hasten to add!

0.5.   Life too, is like that. For most people, life is clearly defined with not much variance; meant to be enjoyed if you are on to a good thing. And there is a darker side to this, but life too can be described just like a radio can be with its circuit diagrams. I call this description of life, the “Symbolic Language of Life”. Bits and pieces of observations and factoids, hardware, bio-chemistry, molecular biology, genomics, and proteomics to be elegantly put together at some later stage through an appropriate ontology. Many really smart people have developed this language over centuries, only, it is not called “Symbolic Language of Life”. I will not use the common term for it because, like with many other concepts, there is a powerful bias that sets into most people when they hear the word that describes the method for describing life, the human condition, in combinations of symbols. Given the inclination and the time, a massive volume such as “War and Peace” can be derived from a symbolic language representing the cast of characters and events that they were embedded within.

Note: all pictures are copyright J Devasundaram. Do not use without permission and attribution