Life, Time and Kerberos Servers II

Part 2: Time

Before you plunge into the madness that is this post, answer me this: “What time is it right now?”


If you’re just continuing to read this without bothering about the question, then shame on you for spoiling my upcoming AHA moment! And if you did bother to glance at the bottom-right of your screen or any other device purported to “give the time”, then AHA! You have just fallen victim to one of the biggest scams of human civilization. Because time, my friend <cue dramatic music>, is an illusion!

What’s that I see on clocks and other tick-tocky things then, you ask! Good question! But ask yourself this – what is time? A 4th dimension, arbitrary numbers, a calibration of human events? Yes, yes, you nod – all that stuff! Ah, but these are mere slippery definitions – and if you have consulted lawyers of the highest caliber (as I have), they will agree that they are circumstantial at best to prove that time exists. Can you really answer the question – “What time is it now?” without referring to some sort of relative reference (like the number of seconds since 1970, which begets the question – when was 1970!)?

Heck, look at the things we do to keep up the fragile illusion of time! There’s the poor international date-line which is tugged and twisted until it looks the frantic readings of a heart monitor. The unfortunate inhabitants of Kiribati used to switch days while walking across the island – until they decided in 1995(which half’s 1995 you may ponder) that enough was enough and started following the same time. Israel demands by law that summer last 150 days, though I’m not sure if rogue seasons have been prosecuted. And in the pre-recession era, how unnatural was it to land before you started on a trans-Atlantic Concorde flight!

Worst of all we’ve set up institutions to keep the farce going! Ft. Collins, Colorado burps radio signals at regular intervals so that the world can synchronize to the “right time” known as UTC. But they couldn’t even figure out what to name it! The English abbreviation for coordinated universal time would be CUT, while in French it would be TUC. The military was like, “Screw you guys!” and went ahead and called it Zulu time, which made a few tribes in Africa really happy until they realized it was just a phonetic placeholder for the letter Z. And even if you ignore the atrocities in appellation and shakily point out that the array of NIST’s 300 atomic clocks can’t possibly be propounding a myth, Einstein will rise out of his grave - his silvery locks waving grandly as he punches you for being ignorant of his famous time-dilation hypothesis in which he proposed that the flow of time depended on how fast you were zooming relative to someone else.

And all of this for what?! The wars, the death and destruction, the pain and suffering induced by a charade! Think of all the poor eastern Kiribatians who lost their jobs because they were always accused of being a day late to every meeting! The miserable students of distributed computing who have to read through reams of encyclopedic books on synchronizing algorithms while wading through shocking terms like vector time-stamps and Lamport’s logical clocks. Feel for the Zulu tribesmen forced to live by South African Standard Time instead of Zulu time. Think of poor Bert who stayed back on Earth and aged 50 years while his gallivanting twin brother Al took off on a round-trip to the Alpha-3 star system nearly at the speed of light, only to return half-a-year older.

And it’s not like you haven’t fallen victim to this illusion! As probably every student will tell you, there’s an uncanny way how you barely drop dead on your bed that your alarm starts ringing almost immediately. It’s like Time was waiting stealthily for you to fall asleep and then decided to zoom ahead when you weren’t paying attention. And its tricks don’t stop there! Oh no! So many innocent souls have fallen into the snooze-warp wormhole, never to recover fully. It’s a little known fact, closely guarded by the world’s top physicists, but research has shown that after the snooze button has been pressed five times, a temporary warp occurs in the space-time continuum, known as the Snooze Criticality or SC. At the SC, one wrong move can change everything: a grudging upwards motion directed towards getting up causes the wormhole to close and to the casual observer it would seem nothing significant has occurred. However, (and this is where many people have not survived), a curling motion sideways with all the good intentions of getting up in the next five minutes causes the wormhole to gape and the timeline splits. You wake up barely “2 minutes” later, but half the day has gone and you sit staring at the time, wondering what happened. What you can’t see is the faint snicker as Time stares back!

You have been warned – and perhaps this message will limit the chaos that a fickle illusion has inflicted upon us. Before signing off, here’s a pretty profound line from a lawyer friend of mine that I think best describes the reason why the myth has remained: “The reason we have time," he said, "is because we have memories”. Think about it.

Father's Dilemma

I felt an instinctive gut-wrench as soon as he started – this was going to end badly. For a few seconds it seemed as though things were going smoothly – then I watched in mute horror as I saw him crash.

Images were flashing by in my mind at light-speed. What had happened between us? Where had those days gone, when he was small and manageable? When I could just look at him and figure out if something was wrong. When coming home didn’t mean avoiding a monster. But then he had grown into a hulking behemoth that I couldn’t begin to fathom. A rebel - he seemed to almost always want to go against instruction. To be fair, it’s not like I wasn’t one of the guilty parties – they say inheritance plays its own role as much as the environment. But had I screwed it up so badly?

The first ripples in the calm started some time back. I had assumed he’d been growing normally and things were fine between us. But he had started hiding information and his behavior had also slowly started changing – growing more abstract and aloof. Warning signs were flashing all over the place but I was in denial and took no notice of them. Then a series of disturbing developments shook my assumption – the link was broken and I had no idea how to repair it.

He had always been kind of strange – you couldn’t categorize him into any one type. One day he’d be playing with bugs and the other he’d cry if you forgot to take him to the library. But however strange his behavior was, I would try to patch things and move on. I guess patches last only so long.

I’m still staring at the wreck in front of me, not knowing what to do. What can one do in this situation? So I just hit F6 and hope my program runs normally this time.

The Highest Form of Art

Life for most of us can be quite mundane; and you could either take comfort in the monotony, or if you’re like me, you can feel very suffocated by the endless routine. Which is where art comes in. It’s what I feel defines us as a civilization. I’m not going to pontificate on the subject, so this post is going to be very short, but hopefully you’ll appreciate its depth.

You’re at your [desk/table/cubicle] staring at a [paper/computer screen/assignment] while keeping a [Facebook/Email] tab open simultaneously. The clock is ticking loudly. The humdrum around you is merging into an incoherent din and you’ve just [refreshed your inbox/stared blankly at your work] for the nth time. Now even the clock is slowing down and each tick is growing louder and slower. You have a million things to do, but you seem oddly trapped.

Version 1:

So you close your eyes. The walls fade away and a soothing calm comes over you. Your body seems light and you’re suddenly gliding – sailing over the apartments and the office blocks, the winding roads and the angry traffic. You’re out of the city and you drift lazily over the tree-tops and the rolling fields as you spot the ocean calmly lining the horizon. The rich blue of the sea is beneath you and you feel you’re being transported into a higher dimension. You’re at the beach taking a stroll with your friends. Dark clouds gather in the distance. A sudden summer storm breaks, and you’re drenched by a sheet of driving rain. It pounds the ocean and you stretch your arms, looking upwards, feeling each drop splatter on your face. Just as quickly as it came, it passes and the ocean is at peace again and so are you. You open your eyes and you’re free within your four walls.

Version 2:

So you click on this and close your eyes.

You open your eyes and you’re free within your four walls.

Life, Time and Kerberos servers

Part 1: Life

28^th September, 2010 was supposed to be like any other normal day. It had begun normally enough as students poured into the sprawling campus of the University of Texas at Austin. There was a full day ahead – lectures to attend, labs to be completed, papers to be written, coffee to be enjoyed along with the many hundreds of small things that clutter the average student’s daily agenda. But for Colton Tooley, the agenda was terrifyingly simple. At 8:12 am, wearing a dark suit and a ski mask, Tooley started firing a loaded AK-47. Within minutes, wailing sirens rent the air and the entire campus was forced into a lockdown as the gunman walked down the streets with his weapon.

Back home, I was preparing to go to campus when my mobile phone buzzed in a message:  “Armed subject last reported at Perry Castaneda Library. Shelter in place, STAY WHERE YOU ARE. If you are off campus, STAY AWAY”. Even as the UTPolice alerted more than 50,000 students, the campus shuttles and city buses started diverting students from the campus perimeter. At 9:53 am, police found Tooley dead on the 6^th floor of the library.

As the hysteria dies down and more witness reports come in, it seems that Tooley could have killed dozens if he wanted to – yet in those moments of sheer desperation, ended up taking his own life. And people are bound to ask why. What could have driven a quiet, studious math major to pick up a gun and end his life? We may never fully understand the story behind the terror, but it made me wonder (trained as I am by 2 close friends, whom we shall call SoA and SoL) what it meant in the first place, to be living.

The dictionary defines life as “an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli, and reproduction”. Very clinical. But would you agree? Am I really “living” if I satisfy those parameters? A car engine takes in petrol, burns it and produces a lot of energy. Infrared sensors can make your life hell if you’re a thief doing Mission Impossible-style stunts. And as for reproduction, would self-generating code be called “alive” (as if it already isn’t a programmer’s nightmare)? What silly examples, you remark! So I’ll make a better argument – would you say that the sulphur-based micro-organisms at the bottom of the ocean “live”? I’m not asking if they’re living organisms...technically yes, they satisfy all the biological requirements, but would you say that they are really any more remarkable than the rock on which they sit?

So let’s take on the big question. When do we transform from being a collection of coexisting organic and inorganic matter, to being a living intelligent organism? When you see a person walk by, if you’re remotely sane (a state I feel far from right now), you wouldn’t probably remark “That’s one hell of a collection of cellulose, keratin and active sodium, potassium, zinc and phosphorus working together as one cohesive unit”! Why - because we aren’t characterized by our flesh and bones. It’s not because I breathe in every second that I feel alive. It’s because I am capable of thought.

As Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am”. And it’s remarkable isn’t it – the way memories can surface, images flash by in the mind’s eye or even strains of music that can stay stuck in your head. And what is a thought? It’s just neurons firing, stupid, says the scientific me. But that’s the amazing thing isn’t it. Elements have evolved and formed a structure that we call our body, but to manipulate the same elemental matter into something as abstract and diverse as thought is hard for me to comprehend. We can take plastic and metal and fashion a computer out of it, we can even write code that makes it do things, but a computer isn’t capable of booting up one fine morning thinking of why it exists.

Which brings me to the other part of this rambling – being aware of one’s mortality. A very controversial subject if there ever was one. Humans are one of the very few species who are aware of their own existence. We may laugh when we see the Youtube video of the puppy yapping away at its reflection, but the fact of the matter is, perhaps that ignorance is bliss. Being aware of our existence implies also being aware of our mortality. For a very long time, we denied the existence of animal suicides. If they aren’t aware of their lives, how can they know to end it? Yet, a few very strange cases have been studied. Forty years ago, animal activist, Richard O'Barry watched a dolphin in the 1960s TV show Flipper, kill itself. It looked him in the eye, sank to the bottom of a steel tank and stopped breathing. And such cases are typically seen in animals capable of intelligent thought depressed beyond repair. Perhaps a tipping point is reached when you’re breathing in and breathing out but you’re really just dead inside. The body remains but the mind has stalled. It’s when thought has dimmed to a darkness where expiration seems a more profitable release than continuing horror. Reality, as we know it, is the interpretation of our surroundings through our five senses. Imagine being in the dark forever – no sound, no light, no surface to touch or feel. No sense of time. The crushing pain of a dead mind and a blank soul.

We will never fully appreciate why Tooley did what he did. The entire machinery that swung into force that day was to protect other lives from being abruptly cut short by another’s actions. Lives that were to be treasured and valued for what they should be – a collection of moments that can be looked back upon and bring up happy memories. But what if there’s a dark void instead? Tooley didn’t die suddenly by gunshot wounds at 9:53am Tuesday; he probably died a painful death long before he took up a gun. 

In the words of William Blake:

“Every night and every morn,

Some to misery are born,

Every morn and every night,

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night”

Stranded at Styx

You're sitting beside a crackling warm fire, pulling the blanket round close and trying to balance a mug of hot coffee as the rain lashes the windowpane. Ready? Here's a story from more than 5 years back:

James Farthing woke with a start. He was feeling hot, very much so. He wasn’t much of a sleeper and he went to the window for a breath of fresh air. It was snowing outside and James watched the snowflakes dance as they fell to the ground, blanketed by a thick layer of snow, which had been falling for the past couple of days. The village clock began chiming; striking eleven in slow, deep booms which resonated through the decrepit walls of the old manor. 

From its East Wing, where James stood, only the yard could be seen. In fact, only James’ room had the doubtful privilege of having a view of the garden. It wasn’t much of a sight, uncared for and allowed to run wild with weeds, fading into the thick mist, which would curl up from the marshes to the north. The manor too, was in disrepair and people would associate it with its shrouds of dust and cobwebs, nooks and niches where jackdaws built their nests and the ominous caws of the rooks, swept away by the wind.

James sighed. He loved the manor and was sorry to see its condition. Earlier it had belonged to a retired army officer; but ever since he had died, the manor was never really looked after; and even though James loved the manor, he was in no position to do anything about its maintenance. There was a maid in the house but she was old, hard of hearing and incapable of moving even from one wing to the other. She stayed in the manor because she had no place to live in ever since her master’s death and she felt it her duty not to let the house fall in ruins, although most of it already looked as though it was part of some ancient civilization.

That night, after making sure each door in the manor was locked and bolted, she made her way to the hall in a painstakingly slow manner. Midway she remembered that she hadn’t taken her knitting with her and thanked her stars that she hadn’t already gone down the stairs. She turned to the left and groped for the antediluvian knob-like switch on the wall. Having finally found it, she waited a bit, adjusting her eyes to the dim glow of the lamp at the end of the pitch-black corridor. She then walked slowly towards the light, her short footsteps echoing on the wooden floor, thickly covered with dust. She fumbled for her keys and opened the lock. The door unwillingly creaked open and the maid went to the table by the window. She looked out and cursed the state of the garden, the cold and everything rotten that winter was usually accompanied by. She picked up her knitting and plodded out; making sure to lock the door before leaving. She finally reached the hall, catching her breath after the expedition down the stairs and resting her aching body on a monstrous armchair. She fed the fire some more wood and then sank down peacefully in the chair to her knitting. About fifteen minutes later, James entered the hall, making his way to the cane chair, the only other piece of furniture close to the armchair. The maid had fallen asleep, but she woke with a jolt, muttered something and pulled her shawl closer. James waited, expecting her to speak. The maid was silent for a few seconds, staring at the fire for some time. She sighed and looked at her knitting, fallen to the floor. “If only master were here. The house was so full of life back then. Now…”, and she broke off. James gave a smile –  one that masked great sadness - “How right you are”, he whispered, “How right you are”. He looked at the dying fire and rose. Then he left the hall and made his way back to his room. The night passed uneventfully.

That morning, much to the maid’s surprise, she heard a knocking at the door. She hurried as fast as she could to open it. A decent-looking couple was standing outside and they introduced themselves as Mr. and Mrs. White, who were looking forward to buying the manor. They were interested, apparently, in old houses, and the real-estate agent had confirmed that the manor was practically from the Mesozoic Age. The maid hesitated a bit, but asked them in. They made some perfunctory comments as to how huge the house was, the good old oak doors and so on. They were then shown into the hall. Mr. White let out a slow whistle of appreciation. He walked over to the mantelpiece above the fireplace and admired the huge muskets hung on the wall. “They’re the master's, them guns”, the maid said. “He belonged to the army, you know”, she added. “Oh!”, exclaimed Mrs. White. “Are you saying these actually belonged to the Captain Farthing the agent was talking about?” “Yes, yes, Captain James Farthing, isn’t it?”, Mr. White turned to the maid.

The maid nodded, “Great man, Mr. Farthing, sir. If only he was with us now…”

***

Hello hello hello!

Hello World! (I'm a CS major, in case that didn't click)
I've been contemplating setting up my own blog for quite some time now - and it's not just because I like jotting down random facts of my life, but it's also somehow a very therapeutic experience to put in words the things swishing through your head.

Also, having finished vlogging the last semester of my undergraduate life, I know it gives me a weird kind of joy doing this. Hats off, also, to Kushal Shah, whose blogs have been both entertaining and deep, and I hope to be able to achieve the level of candidness and humor I enjoy in his posts.

So what  can you expect from this blog? Frankly, I don't know myself - I'm doing it more as an experiment and hopefully a lot of creative stuff will come through. If you want to see something special or pick my brain regarding a particular topic, leave it in the comments below.

Until then, I'll leave you to puzzle over Steven Wright's deeply philosophical question:
"What's another word for Thesaurus?"