the you’re going down

the i’m ready

the hey wtf

the fight

the break

to be repeated…

*The above pictures were taken in the neighbourhood of Sadashivnagar in Bangalore, India, using a Nikon D40 with a 35mm/1.8f lens. You can find larger versions on my photostream.

FC Barcelona's Stadium (Camp Nou)

FC Barcelona has been the beneficiary of controversial, if not totally wrong, refereeing decisions in key matches in the European Champions League over the past few years, including the recent match against Real Madrid which featured a red card after one of Barcelona’s players faked contact with a key Madrid defender. Although I am neither a statistician nor a psychologist, I will explain why Barcelona’s style of play attracts favourable refereeing decisions using a little bit of probability and a little bit psychology. I will then generalize and answer the latter part of the post’s title: What does that tell us about how to live?

In almost any game against any team, Barcelona will have about 70% of the ball possession over the course of the game – even in the 2009 game against Chelsea where they played a 1/3 of the game with 10 men. What this means is that most of the time a mistake made by the referee will be against the defending team (not Barcelona) since these are the mistakes we remember. We remember red cards that were given by mistake, but not those that were not given, by mistake. And since Barcelona’s opponents are defending for more than 70% of the time, they will be more prone to negative refereeing decisions. Nothing new here, you buy more lottery tickets, you increase your probability of winning.

But not only that, the referee is not a machine, he’s human, and as he sees Barcelona continually in control of the game, and the other team continually defending and tackling, he will feel compelled to punish them, or conversely, reward Barcelona. Usually this happens with a red card or a penalty kick for an undeserving tackle. It is like many wars where the relation between two nations is very tense for a long period and then a stupid incident lights an endless fire. So the lottery analogy that I previously used understates the Barça effect: as the game progresses, the referee is more likely to make mistakes!

This reminds me of a discussion in Nassim Taleb‘s blockbuster book on unlikely events and randomness, The Black Swan, where he at some point says that life in big cities with all its activities and cocktail parties leads to more opportunities due to constant exposure to many different people and things. This also reminds me of an advice that the mathematician Richard Hamming gave in his famous lecture, You and Your Research, where he advocated keeping office doors open:

“He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.”

So what does FC Barcelona’s style of play tell us about how to live? The more you expose yourself to the world, the luckier you get, the more the world rewards you. You can’t really score a goal by spending your life defending.

Let’s see what the title and date will be at the end …

I usually start my answer to this question with a dramatic story about the prominent role software plays in an airplane or a nuclear plant these days and how verifying its correctness is absolutely essential to avoid disasters…terrible ones.

But given her background in EE, I decided to give her a concrete example of the types of properties software model checking is used to verify. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done that. Here’s how our conversation went:

Aws: So assume there’s an array of size n, right, now let’s say someone tries to access element n+10 – that’s a problem.

Sally: Why?

Aws: Well, because the array is of fixed size and you can’t access something outside its bounds.

Sally: Oh ok, yeah yeah…so why would someone do that, that’s stupid!

[hmmmm...]

Aws: Let’s say a programmer uses a variable i as the array’s index, now say i at some point during the execution increases above the array’s size, then the program would crash! So the job of the software model checker is to detect that or prove it can’t happen.

Sally: Aws, there are people in the world who are trying to cure cancer, and you’re trying to make a programmer happy!

My response was a big laugh followed by a big sigh. Having taken programming with Sally in our first year of general engineering, I should’ve seen that coming and stuck to my usual disaster spiel.

Tracking Heaps That Hop with Heap-Hop

Such articles and news reports hail these protests’ nonviolent nature as the right way forward. But that’s not the problem. The problem is in the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of the origins and causes of such nonviolent acts of resistance and why they are now showing up in mainstream western media.

These increasingly popular, isolated, yet somehow synchronized, protests are portrayed by the media as the Palestinians’ new found weapon. As if the Palestinian – at least in the West Bank – has just decided to exchange the gun for an olive branch.

The use of nonviolent resistance by the Palestinians is not new. In fact, unlike their Israeli counterparts, the average Palestinian has never touched a gun. The first intifada, which was almost entirely nonviolent, is the biggest example. Large parts of the second intifada were nonviolent – although this facet of the second intifada was eclipsed by the rise in suicide bombings which gave the Israeli occupation forces the cover to violently put an end to any form of civil disobedience. The list does not end with the first and second intifadas and is not constrained to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, but also includes Palestinian citizens of Israel.

“Israel’s biggest fear is nonviolent resistance,” you hear in the media a journalist surprised by the power of this new weapon. This is probably true, and I might agree, but I don’t like the tone. I don’t like how it sounds like a game changing revelation. We know that, we’ve known that forever. In the first intifada, Sari Nusseibeh, one of the unsung heros and behind the scenes protest organizers, was considered by Israeli intelligence as “the most dangerous Palestinian.” See, even Israel knew that. The main problem that stood in the way of such protests, especially in the second intifada, was the presence of violent resistance that stole the light and seemed more effective against F-16s. Simple.

After the second intifada died down and Hamas took over Gaza, a sense of calm (calm, not peace) spread through the West Bank. This gave the protests, especially in villages like Bil’in and Nil’in on the path of the apartheid wall, a clear space to be heard. Moreover, the continuous stream of international and Israeli activists has given these protests more attention and definitely a different flavour.

These protests, along with the unified grassroots Palestinian call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, and the the rise in international activism, particularly with international events like Israeli Apartheid Week that have a clearly defined message (BDS), have together worked miraculously to lift nonviolent resistance in Palestine to the centre stage of the Palestinian struggle, and subsequently reshape the Palestinian struggle in eyes of the western observer.

Yes, these protests are gaining more and more (mainly positive except if you’re the NYT) attention. Yes they are well organized, well supported, and increasingly popular. But no, Palestinians didn’t discover nonviolent resistance yesterday.

So praise nonviolent resistance, but don’t talk about it like it’s the latest discovery.

1. Keeping track of how many reps I do or how many laps I run allows me to monitor my progress and push the bar a little higher every week. Moreover, if I see no progress, I try to alter my exercise routine to figure out why. Without a record of previous performance stats, it is hard to remember how much you lifted or how long you ran last time.
2. Knowing that I’m going to write down the number of repetitions I did after finishing a set forces me to go for more. I hear a voice inside of my head saying “Are you seriously going to write down 7 on that piece of paper? Go for 10!” Writing down a small number is just embarrassing.

When it comes to working out, measuring progress is trivial – it’s quantitative. But most of the work we do in grad school can only be measured qualitatively. It’s hard to compare two papers, two proofs, two programs, two studies…

So I suggest, as a start, at the end of each day, write down what you’ve accomplished. Hopefully the thought that you’re going to write down what you’ve done at the end of the day pushes you to do more during the day. You don’t want to have a blank page …

Any suggestions?

“…Microsoft researcher Byron Cook and his colleagues did the unthinkable — they hacked a fix. When Cook tried to describe the workaround, however, he found it impossible to explain with existing mathematical symbols. His only option, he decided, was to invent new ones…” – from Wired

Rejecta Mathematica is an open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences.

I like their philosophy…