Zero knowledge proofs

 This is my comment on Amit Sahai's wonderful YouTube video on Zero Knowledge Proofs 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c&t 

2 years ago

My father was born in 1920 in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, the youngest of five siblings, homeschooled by my grandfather and doted on by the whole family. Little wonder then, that he was something like a child prodigy, good at everything he tried his hand at. He could read both Bengali and English when he was about five and one day, when his maternal uncle was visiting, his father decided to show off his youngest son's English reading skills by taking the day's newspaper and having him read a headline to his Boro Mama (oldest maternal uncle). His Boro Mama was suspicious of the display and thought that his brother-in-law might have made the kid memorize the headline. So he asked the kid to get a sheet of paper and a pair of scissors, opened the newspaper to a middle page, cut a little hole in the sheet of paper, which he placed on a headline, so that the boy could only see a letter at a time and then asked him to read. Which he did, to everyone's surprise. A nice variation on the theme of zero knowledge proofs, that occurred nearly ninety years ago!

@Anonymous-sb9uh

2 years ago

Hmm... Good story! Now it would be very impressive if you can prove this happened with zero knowledge proof. I.e. No video, no photographs etc. Just kidding. Nice one

@PristinePerceptions

1 year ago

Ah, Asian relatives! The pressure to perform is high! :D

A história da origem de um nome

 

A história da origem de um nome[i]

[ii]

 

Era uma vez, mais precisamente na época pré-cambriana, uma gangue do subúrbio carioca Bento Ribeiro, muita numerosa e bem-organizada, porém de baixa estatura. Os membros da gangue se intitulavam “Os Bentônicos”. Havia uma pequena dissidência que se desdobrava para dar a impressão de estar em muitos lugares ao mesmo tempo, e por essa característica, seus membros eram jocosamente apelidados de “Os Plancktônicos”[iii]. Depois de algumas brigas, as duas gangues resolveram se juntar, mantendo seus apelidos, para invadir um outro bairro a beira-mar. O objetivo era ter domínio do acesso ao mar e, consequentemente, domínio do mar em si. Chegando lá, foram hostilizados pela população local (os cleptoplásticos e os dinoflagelados[iv]) aos gritos de “Fora! Mini-feras!” e outros xingamentos menos republicanos. Entretanto, a gangue do subúrbio prevaleceu e adotaram o grito de guerra dos “clepto-flagelados” como o novo apelido: Foraminifera! Eis a origem do nome do nosso grupo mais querido de microfósseis.

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                         

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[i] o autor agradece a ajuda generosa do verbete Foraminifera da Wikipedia.

[ii] Fonte das gravuras: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foraminifera

[iii] A ortografia era essa mesma, em homenagem ao físico Max Planck, pai da teoria quântica, pela qual uma gangue poderia estar em uma superposição de múltiplos estados. Posteriormente, foi aportuguesada para planctônicos.

[iv]O primeiro grupo pertence à cleptocracia e havia se apossado dos terrenos à beira-mar. O segundo grupo era um subgrupo da cleptocracia, que se intitulava “centrão” e adotou o nome dinoflagelados protestando as medidas do ministro Flávio Dino contra as emendas “secretas”.

Discovering Portuguese and Kriol

 I have now lived in Brazil for thirty odd years, and learned how to speak, read and write Portuguese quite fluently. This has been a revelatory experience, even for someone like me, who grew up multilingual in an India, where 60 years ago, English was a dominant language. Even though I came from a Goan-Bengali background and was aware of the richness of literature in Bengali and so many other Indian languages, the dominance of English worldwide was such it felt that almost all literary and maybe even intellectual activity had to be in English. In this sense, coming to learn and appreciate Portuguese through the medium of music (MPB, Música Popular Brasileira) was my first awakening. Then, as I got more proficient, reading Brazilian literature (Machado de Assis, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, to name just two) was an education and a realization of the Anglocentrism of part of the Western world. It was wonderful to get to know a world of excellent literature in a new language. Later, I slowly became aware of the vibrant literature from the former Portuguese colonies in Africa. This was another revelation, and a new opportunity to see how other colonies had created their own expressive versions of Portuguese, in literature and music. The wonderful Kriol of Guiné-Bissau and the Kriolu of Cabo Verde, with the memorable music of Cesária Évora; the mixture of Kimbundu and Portuguese that results in the expressive Angolan Portuguese, in which Ondjaki  and Luaty Beirão create their prose and poetry; the distinctive prose of Paulina Chiziane and Mia Couto from Moçambique: all this captivated me and, at the same time, made me aware of how little of this universe is visible to the Anglocentric world. My new mission is to learn as many of the Creoles as I can: for me, learning Haitian Kriyol would be preferable to learning French. Similarly for the Creoles from Bissau and Cabo Verde, as well as the Noling from Chaul near Bombay.

Backpacks

 Adopting the coy style of turn of the century writers, a good friend R., who lives in S., sent me a piece he wrote called “…Backpack”. R’s style is to choose a subject for each of his short essays. The essay is structured in a few short paragraphs, which all end with an ellipsis and the title of the essay (thus, in the piece he sent me, each para ended with …Backpack).

This piece set me on a long train of thought, which I’m going to detail here, just to unpack my backpack obsession.

Growing up in India in the 60's all the way to the mid 70's, neither I nor anybody I knew had a backpack. We schlepped our stuff to school in clunky box-like cases or jholas. The latter could be slung nonchalantly over your shoulder or clamped between your feet in a crowded bus. In fact, public transport was so crowded that you couldn't think of getting on a bus or tram with a backpack taking up extra space behind you. As an undergraduate on a campus in the countryside, bicycles were the main mode of transport, and jholas were still the mainstay of most students, and no backpacks were to be seen anywhere in the early 80's. In graduate school in the US in the mid 80's, I was introduced to backpacks and immediately became addicted to them. Not just for their practicality (for cyclists, like me), but also because of the feeling that your newly acquired detachable hunch contains everything you can possibly need for an impossibly nomadic life, within easy reach.

But then the whole thing escalates. You start to cram more stuff into your backpack, because you’ve convinced yourself to believe that you need all of it. Eventually, in my case, coupled with a difficulty in defining one area of work for the day, I ended up carrying almost 15 kilos of books and paper, usually using only the right shoulder strap. This led to a weakening and finally a rupture of the rotator cuff ligament in my right shoulder. After getting this fixed, I started using a lighter backpack, organizing myself better and eventually recalling a passage in Jared Diamond’s preface to Guns, Germs and Steel, now well known as Yali’s question: “Why is it that you (white) people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” This led me to question the cargo in my backpack, and in my life, in general.

My earliest memory of a minimalist experience is secondhand, related to me by an uncle who received an unexpected visitor in his small, joint family home in Bombay. The visitor expected to stay with him for a few days and his mantra was that he needed “Only a mat and pillow” – enough for him to get a comfortable sleep, causing the least possible impact on the household. And of course, the background narrative of sannayasa or the fourth ashrama or stage of life, a state of disinterest and detachment from material life, generally without any meaningful property or home always appealed to me. There was also the legend of Erdös Pál, the famous Hungarian nomadic mathematician, who traveled around the world posing and solving problems. “Erdös traveled with two suitcases, each half-full. One had a few clothes, the other mathematical papers. He owned nothing else. Nothing.” (From his Washington Post obituary by Charles Krauthammer, posted at https://www.fmf.uni-lj.si/~mohar/Erdos.html). Then, more recently, I became aware of the Japanese minimarisuto (minimalist) movement, through Fumio Sasaki’s book, “Goodbye, Things” in which he delineates his minimalist manifesto to give his solution to a version of Yali’s question: “Why do we own so much stuff?”

Finally, as noted by the minimarisutos of Japan, convergent technology is the big minimalism driver in the arc that leads from jholas to backpacks to laptops to airbooks to tablets to (plus size) cellphones, which are now the one stop substitute for watches, agendas, alarm clocks, timers, calculators, yellow pads, mirrors, cameras, libraries, bookshelves, gossip sessions, banks, TVs, GPS, interpreters, photo albums. Just think of the weight of all the stuff that I no longer need to carry around in my backpack, assuming that I still feel the need to have one.

Notes:

1. By "cargo," Diamond writes, Yali meant material goods, the trappings of technology, "ranging from steel axes, matches, and medicines to clothing, soft drinks, and umbrellas." As Diamond perceived it, this very simple question "went to the heart of life as Yali experienced it," and it raised very significant questions
2. The transcript of the Yali episode in the PBS version of Guns, Germs and Steel is available at: http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/show/transcript1.html
3. Another view on Yali’s question can be summarized as:  “No offense to Yali, but his question should be: Why is cargo distributed so unequally both within and between our societies?” see: https://savageminds.org/2005/07/25/whats-wrong-with-yalis-question/
4. Yet another view: In Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture and History, anthropologists Frederick Errington and Deborah Gewertz tackle the crucial issue of how we think about inequalities of wealth and power worldwide. In contrast to deterministic narratives of human history, like the geography-is-destiny explanation offered in Jared Diamond’s widely read Guns, Germs and Steel, Errington and Gewertz argue that historical outcomes must be understood as the result of the actions of actual people. To understand these actions—and to enable an evaluation of accountability for harms done—we must take seriously the historical and cultural contexts from which these people come and what it is that they desire and think of as feasible to do. Like Diamond, they use Yali’s question as a jumping-off place for a larger discussion but drawing on their more than 30 years of experience working in Papua New Guinea, Errington and Gewertz argue that Diamond fundamentally misunderstood Yali’s question. It was not actually about Western goods, or “cargo,” at all, they argue, but rather about the nature of colonial relationships between white and black people. An influential cargo-cult leader in his day, Yali actively protested such colonial power dynamics, engaging in ritual practices that focused symbolically on Western things, but did so to effect social parity with Westerners. In their own effort to respond to Yali’s question, Errington and Gewertz explore a particular slice of Papua New Guinean history, one in which the struggle for social status and equality on the global stage has been a paramount concern from the outset. Their analysis focuses—perhaps somewhat surprisingly—on a sugar plantation, Ramu Sugar Limited, or RSL, a large-scale national development project created in order to free Papua New Guinea from dependence on sugar imports. Source: https://www.amherst.edu/amherst-story/magazine/issues/2005_spring/amherst_creates/yali
5. On Erdös, also see: https://www.privatdozent.co/p/the-mathematical-nomad-paul-erdos
6. For a review of Sasaki’s book by the sloww movement people see: https://www.sloww.co/goodbye-things-fumio-sasaki-book-summary/
7. For more on minimarisuto “interiors” (Minimarisuto implements the Zen philosophy & culture into the aesthetic, design and aroma of candles) see https://www.instagram.com/minimarisuto_official/ 

The Unwomanly Face of War

 

The Unwomanly Face of War

I was reading Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War, which I got from genlib (of course!) [Mir & Progress Publishers are dead! Long live Alexandra Elbakyan! Elsevier Murdabad!], when I discovered that, at the time I looked, the only other translation of this book into a language other than English had been made by the Peoples War Group in Telengana, into Telugu, of course! So I decided to make a draft of a (future?) poster, using Google Translate, to render the original Russian title of Svetlana Alexievich's book into several different languages, partly because of my fascination with (old fashioned, classical) linguistics (= the learning of many languages, a la Suniti Chatterjee), as opposed to the modern version, which studies their structure. Most of the languages I chose were languages spoken in republics of the former Soviet Union, now independent countries. I left Hindi out, because the Google translation was inaccurate (युद्ध का अस्वाभाविक चेहरा), but I'd be happy to add better Hindi and Urdu translations, if someone suggests them. I was particularly taken with the Tajik version (çang cehrai zanona nadorad, which as you know, should be read, like Turkish, as jang chehrai zanona nadorad), which can then be seen to be almost Urdu/Hindi. The highlighted word in each different language is the word for woman and is an interesting exercise in (classical) linguistics! So, without further ado, here's the result of my little exercise:

 у войны не женское лицо [u voyny ne zhenskoye litso] (Russian)

у вайны не жаночы твар [u vajny nie žanočy tvar] (Belarusian)

vojna nemá ženskú tvár (Slovak)

válka nemá ženskou tvář (Czech)

рат нема женско лице [rat nema žensko lice] (Serbian)

войната няма женско лице [voĭnata nyama zhensko litse] (Bulgarian)

rat nema žensko lice (Croatian)

războiul nu are chip de femeie (Romanian)

a háborúnak nincs női arca (Hungarian)

војната нема женско лице [vojnata nema žensko lice] (Macedonian)

karas neturi moters veido (Lithuanian)

karam nav sievietes sejas (Latvian)

sõjal pole naise nägu (Estonian)

sodalla ei ole naispuolisia kasvoja (Finnish)

ҷанг чеҳраи занона надорад [çang cehrai zanona nadorad] (Tajik)

the war has no female face

యుద్ధానికి ఆడ ముఖం లేదు [Yud'dhāniki āḍa mukhaṁ lēdu] (Telugu)

savaşın kadın yüzü yok (Turkish)

соғыстың әйел беті жоқ [soğıstıñ äyel beti joq] (Kazakh)

Urushning ayol yuzi yo'q (Uzbek)

urşuň aýal ýüzi ýok (Turkmen)

müharibənin qadın üzü yoxdur (Azerbaijani)

согушта аялдын жүзү жок [soguşta ayaldın jüzü jok] (Kyrgyz)

şer rûyê jinê tune (Kurdish/Kurmanji)

lufta nuk ka fytyrë femër (Albanian)

պատերազմը կին դեմք չունի [paterazmy kin demk’ ch’uni] (Armenian)

ომს არ აქვს ქალი [oms ar akvs kali] (Georgian)

যুদ্ধের কোনও মহিলা মুখ নেই

a guerra não tem rosto feminino

Insomniac musings (multilingual)

Trilingual haiku

मस्त with इश्क
मस्तिष्क decides
इश्क is a must.

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Otters and rotters

May Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro and their ilk be consigned to their Rotterdämmerung, where they can sing their Libelungslied!

Do bad otters have their Otterdämmerung? And lousy ceramicists their Potterdämmerung? Lotterdämmerung to go around!

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Mother-in-law's refrain?

জামাইs jamais!

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Uma manuelbandeirinha

Lixi-via (荔枝)

Oral-mente

Mata?

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Vegetarianism is coming to the USA

When the last Amish dies

America becomes Nir-amish!

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Noyce on Tik-Tok

Heart aches,

Lungs pant,

Kick bucket

Life scant!

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Война em Dimashq

Como damas?

Да!masco!

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Reflections

Daulat Beg Oldi?

Given pension levels

Oldi Beg Daulat!

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Romi-fications

Xixus make xixi

Xikxoks make TikToks!

(with apologies to Chico Science, who wrote Computadores fazem arte/Artistas fazem dinheiro!)

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Categories a la Asit Niyogi

বুদ্ধিজীবীs

Heebie jibis

হাবি জাবিs

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Rapper version of Itmad, ittefaq, kurbani:

I'm mad, Wotthefaq, kurbani!

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Miscellenea

Stages of life as perceived at 60:
Past the supercali*
Entering the fragilistic**
Soon upgraded to expialidocious***

*Cali IIT slang for Calibre, or from Kalos = beauty, or Kali as in জয় মা কালী।
**Bones or anxiety: will you still love me when I'm sixty four?
***Expire, in a manner that's utterly atrocious!

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बहुत ज़्यादे हरामजादे ।
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Supercilious DMIK
DMIK = দেখলেই মারতে ইচ্ছা করে।
In the superciliary area.
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Insomniac & dipsomaniac: neither is much good the day after.
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Need to hear the Kurd-বাণী and stop the कुर्बानी। In fact, मेहरबानी = Mehr বাণি (Deutsch-বাংলা)
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If Sukesh has a bad/smelly hair day, is he called Bukesh for that day? And if his hair curls in ringlets (=Greek hair day), does he become Mu-kesh (μ-kesh)?

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Hardly fools rush in where the foolhardy fear to tread.

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Bilingual rude and crude neologism. मुद्दा -fucka: someone who screws up every issue s/he is charged with (to solve).

Insom(a)niac musings during a corona(ry) attack

My insomnia was the result of drinking a flask of organic Darleeing Kalimpong tea (see pic) late at night. The tea I was drinking has the brand name Mighty Leaf, which is a pun (on My Tea Leaf?) and was part of the inspiration for the multilingual punning rant below.

When your ToDo list becomes longer than its creator, it's clearly because of procrastination. Deal with it by subjecting the lista toda (the whole list, in Portuguese) to a Procrustean transformation. For those who are wondering, Procrustes was the Greek dude who, when asked to make a sentence with the word fiddlestick, came up with "If you sleep in a bed that's too small for you, your fiddlestick out!" (To give credit, where it's due, this wonderful line came from The Little Book of Outrageous Puns, a mainstay of my father's comfort books, which began thus: Two old ladies went for a tramp in the wood, but, in the end, he got away ).

Was John Bunyan aware that the Slough of Despond was even worse than he thought (Slough of [Mr.] De's পোঁদ )?

Def: ভাজপাওয়ালা, ভক্ত = যারা খা মোষ  ( অর্থাৎ মোষ খাওয়ার আদেশ  ) কে খামোশ করতে চায় ।

Golshifteh Farahani (گلشیفته فراهانی) -- a great Iranian actress who played Elly in About Elly (Darbariye Elly, an Asghar Farhad film). Her name can be parsed as follows: 

From Persian گل (gol) meaning "flower" combined with شیفته (šifte) "loving, amorous, infatuated". A known bearer is Golshifteh Farahani (1983-), an Iranian actress and musician. 

 But in English the name reminds one of shifting goalposts?