Anas Ismail Khan

You’re not your face
Yet it defines you
You’re not your body
Yet it forms you
You’re not your soul
Yet it gives you life
You’re not your thoughts
Yet they drive you

You are none of them
Yet all of them
But none of them
Are all of you.

Imagine an infinitely long flat runway. You are running through it. At the speed of light. Let’s ignore the effects of relativity and resistance. The visible spectrum is painted on the runway, all the way from the start to the finish, meaning there’s infinitely many shades of all the 7 colors of the rainbow painted on the runway, each one easily distinguishable from the next. Yes, we are also assuming this is possible. An infinite number of trees are planted along the edges of the runway.

The speed of light is 300 000 000 m/s. Which means that any objects at a distance of 300 000 000 m from you will only be visible for a second after which you’d already have passed them. Any objects along your path relatively closer to you than the refresh-rate of your brain or your eyes or both, will not be perceptible.

You are standing at the starting point. On both sides of the runway, you can see a row of trees extending as far as the end of the runway, all of them look same age and length and appear to have the same amount of shrubbery. In short, they look identical. Your family and friends came to wish you good luck and are standing right behind you. Along with a whole crowd of people who paid to witness this miraculous feat. You got on your left another in runner, wearing red, who will start exactly one second after you and on your right is a runner, wearing violet, who will start exactly one second before you. All three of you have the same acceleration. All 3 of you are wearing heat and radiation resistant clothing.

The runner on your right has started. You see him become a red streak and disappear. The moment he disappears, you get hit by a wave of heat. Not that you should be looking at him cause after exactly one second you follow. Start running. Immediately after you start running, look at the runner behind you, you’d see him wearing violet instead of red as you get faster and depending on the shade of the red in his clothes, he may or may not completely disappear. This is due to the Doppler Effect.  You will know you’ve reached the speed of light when all you see behind you is an abyss of blackness. You might observe a flash of violet before that happens. The light from anything behind you never reaches you. Your field of vision is limited to 180deg from your immediate left to your immediate right. On your right you can see a purple streak extending all the way from slightly less than 260 000 000 m ahead of you to exactly 300 000 000 m ahead of you. That’s the runner who started before you. That streak is simply multiple images of him running.

If you look down at the painted ground, instead of seeing the colors change smoothly, you’d see them flickering into each other. Kinda like jumping straight from bright red to yellowish orange, because you are moving faster than the time it takes for the brain to “refresh” the image you see. The smaller the angle between your line of sight and the ground, the smoother the transition from one color to the next. Meaning, if you look directly at the ground and then slowly move your eyes upwards, you’d see the change between colors getting smoother, however the rate of that change would keep on getting smaller, and eventually, you’ll be able to see each shade for almost a whole second. But you will be looking at the color of the ground 300 000 000 m away from you.

Now look at the trees. They no longer look uniform and similar. The ones farthest from you still look like they did when you started running but the ones closest to you look very different. They look older and yellower and less leafier. The farther you go, the less leaves you see on the trees and more on the ground and the farther you go, the older they get. If you look at the tree farthest from you and keep on looking at it until you reach it, you’d see it smoothly lose leaves and colors and life.

I forgot to warn you to not look straight ahead. The Doppler’s effect needs to be taken into account also for objects that you’re running towards. Remember that radiation proof suit you put on? It was for a reason. The light from the objects that you are running towards has been blueshifted out of the visible spectrum. Any part of the electromagnetic spectrum travelling towards you now carries an infinite amount of energy. Not only would it be impossible for you to _see _it, your eyes would probably burn, if not along with the rest of your body. In truth, as soon as you approach a significant fraction of the speed of light, everything in front of you would turn blue and then eventually violet. But the other parts of the spectrum that you shouldn’t really be able to see, will now be somewhat visible. First the infrared waves would make an appearance followed by the radio waves. Yes, they’d look red at first but eventually they might get blueshifted out completely and then there really won’t be anything left for you to see.

In truth, there really won’t be much time between when you start running and when you blackout and also get obliterated as a result of the radiation but I wanted to make a post about what you could see, if you could keep on running at the speed of light for a while. That’s why I didn’t mention the blueshift until the end. There are better posts than I could ever come up with about the same concept but with relativity taken into effect. My favorite one being Relativistic Baseball. Yes I know they set the speed at 0.9c but then again, it’s because they present actual math and wanted to avoid infinities resulting from using c as the speed. An example of such an infinity would be trying to calculate the blueshift of an object approaching you at the speed of light.

The blueshift equation is as follows:

F = f * c / (c-v)

The variable v is the relative velocity of the object moving towards you. When moving at the speed of light towards a stationary object, this v is equal to c. Which means the denominator becomes zero which means we cannot determine the new frequency or as some of you would like to conclude, the frequency is infinite, meaning the wavelength becomes zero. Any photon with zero wavelength would have infinite energy which is not possible.

Sorry for wasting your time.

In Men In Black, we see J and K chasing down Edgar The Bug to recover the “Arquillian Galaxy” which is a minuscle galaxy inside a glass sphere resembling a marble. As the movie ends, the camera zooms out from J’s car and keeps zooming out and eventually we zoom out of the earth, the solar system and finally the galaxy which is  revealed to be inside another glass sphere which is then picked up by some giant being and used as a playing marble alongside countless others.

In Men In Black 2, we are introduced the the C18 locker aliens, who are tiny creatures, about a few centimeters in height that live inside a locker in NYC. This was slightly different from the Arquillian Galaxy in that the beings were far bigger and their “colony” resembled a fair-sized city. Their origin is unexplained but it is safe to assume that they weren’t always there and were relocated and perhaps recolonized at some point in time prior to the events of the movie. At the end of the movie, J insists on showing telling them that there’s more to the universe than just the inside of a locker at which K proceeds to open a mysterious black door that says “Do Not Open.” As we zoom out of J, K and Frank standing in the doorway, we see a whole array of giant lockers inside a giant station and giant humanoid aliens walking around in it, which basically was meant to show that the humans themselves are living inside a giant locker.

Now what does it all mean together? Do we live inside the locker or the marble or both? Considering both concepts were boldly put forward by the movies themselves and assuming that they haven’t made any continuity errors, it is relatively safe to say that we are inside both. When we zoom out of the locker, we can still clearly see Jay and K and Frank standing in the doorway of the locker and they are scarcely smaller than the locker itself. This suggests that the locker doors are not containers but mere portals to worlds whereas the giant station is kind of an intermediary “world between worlds” just like the forest with pools from Narnia. This portal could be located in virtually any of the planets or worlds or galaxies shown or mentioned anywhere in the trilogy or it could be an extra dimensional thing that manifests itself as a station with lockers to 3D beings.

Building upon the fact that the lockers are portals, we can assume that each portal leads to a separate galaxy considering how all galaxies are supposed to be packed inside marbles and therefore don’t really allow the inhabitants to just fly out of them.

This post does a great job at explaining how so I am not gonna bother.

This is the shortest and most effective comparison that aims to make the decision making process easier.

Angular: 

Pros:

• The oldest and therefore very mature.
• A complete framework in itself and ideal for large projects.
• The MEAN stack remains, to date, one of the most popular stacks for web-development so finding jobs is never tough for Angular developers.
• With NativeScript, you can use it to develop smartphone apps.

Cons:

• If you don’t know, don’t like or don’t want to learn TypeScript, I would suggest staying away from it because the current releases are TypeScript based.
• Packed with features, it’s a huge framework and therefore takes a fair amount of time to learn and master.

React:

Pros:

• Been around for a fair amount of time and therefore can be said to be just as mature as Angular.
• Smaller than Angular and therefore easier to learn.
• Just as popular, if not more, and therefore has a well-developed community.
• Just as many jobs out there for it as for Angular.
• React Native allows for it to be used to make Android apps.

Cons:

• You will have to learn JSX. Basically the idea is that in ReactJS, you try to maximize your use of JS and minimize your use of HTML. JSX kinda merges both. Obviously this adds to the learning curve.
• Not a complete framework. React Developers almost always use Redux or some other flux implementation for state management. Code often becomes a real mess with large projects.

Vue.JS:

Pros:

• Has just as many features as React, if not more.
• Small enough for you to be able to learn it in a single day.
• Great for small projects.
• Gaining popularity real quick.
• Resembles the original Angular.JS so if you are familiar with it, you’d love Vue.
• Unlike React, with Vue, the goal is to maximize the use of HTML and minimize the use of JS.
• Although not a complete framework, it comes with it’s own router and flux implementation, that, although independent projects, offer seamless integration with Vue itself.

Cons:

• Relatively new and therefore has a small community and fewer jobs are available.
• NativeScript has a plugin for Vue support but it not supposed to be ready for development yet. Although, it seemed pretty functional when I tried it.

This post assumes familiarity with “Two’s Complement”, “One’s Complement”  and an understanding of “Positional Numeral Systems”.

Why is the Two’s Complement called the Two’s Complement?

Ever wondered why the two’s complement and the one’s complement are named as such? We were told that to calculate the two’s complement of a number, you add 1 to its one’s complement. But why? When calculating the one’s complement, we simply subtract every digit from 1, so why don’t we subtract every digit from 2 in two’s complement? And maybe, you tried to reason with yourself about how there’s no “2” in the binary system and so that mehtod would not work anyway. There is however a much better way to understand and explain it. To understand this, you need to understand the difference between the radix complement _and the _diminished radix complement. 

According to wiktionary:

• The radix complement is the number which, when added to an n-digit number in radix-r, results in r^n. An alternative way of looking at it is that it is the smallest possible (n-1)-digit number in radix-r. The radix complement for radix-r is called r’s complement. We get it by adding 1 to the diminished radix complement.
• The diminished radix complement is the number which, when added to an n-digit number in radix-r results in r^n -1. An alternative way of looking at is is that it is the largest possible n-digit number in radix-r. The diminished radix complement for radix-r is called (r-1)’s complement. We get it by subtracting every digit from (r-1)

Sybill Trelawney, the Divination teacher at Hogwarts, was poorly received by her fellow staff, her students and the fans of her universe for reasons that all translate to “She was a fraud. She wasn’t a true seer and therefore not an eligible candidate for the job.” I however have always had a very different opinion about her. I believe that not only was she not a fraud but also a perfect candidate for the job, not to mention the fact that she did actually possess a gift.

We know that she was the great-granddaughter of some celebrated seer named “Cassandra Trelawney” and that Dumbledore went to meet her at the “Hog’s Head” and that no sooner than he met her, he realized that she didn’t possess her great-grandmother’s gift. Then she went into a trance and made the prophecy about Harry defeating The Dark Lord, and Dumbledore decided to hire her because he could tell that she was gonna make more of these prophecies and wanted her to be close to himself when that happened.

Now I want you to think. You are the headmaster of a school, and you want to hire a teacher for a karate class. You have to choose between a guy who is incredibly strong and can pick up and throw around the room just about anyone who picks a quarrel with him regardless of how good their karate is and a guy who spent years learning and mastering the sport and is a great fighter. Who will you choose? True that the first guy has the gift of strength and therefore has a good chance of winning most fights but he may not know anything about the sport, whereas the second guy has nothing except for a thorough knowledge of exactly what you want him to teach to your students. I don’t know about you, but if I was you I would probably hire the second guy, unless of course the first one demonstrated better karate skills than the second one.

Let’s try a different situation. You are the headmaster of Hogwarts and you want to hire a divination teacher. You have to choose between a woman who is well-versed in all the practices and techniques of divination (e.g. reading tea-leaves and making predictions from a pack of cards or dreams) or a centaur who, like all centaurs, was born with inexplicable knowledge of the cosmos and unfathomable divination skills that only require for him to look up at the sky. The woman doesn’t possess any magical powers that allow her to tap into the spirit world but she knows all that is known to man about the art of divination whereas the centaur who doesn’t have any need for those human methods probably doesn’t even know them. In fact, in the potterverse, the centaurs mainly, if not only, use the skies to predict the future and that too with seemingly minimal calculation or effort. It may be safe to assume that they aren’t even aware of the other methods used by humans. So, if it was for me to decide, I’d hire the woman, because she knows her stuff and so should be able to teach it whereas the centaur may not even know shit about the subject and is just naturally gifted at predicting the future by looking at skies.

We saw enough proof in the book of the fact that Sybill actually did know a lot about divination. She was accustomed to using all the techniques that she taught in class, and a whole lot of her predictions came true. She predicted the death of Dumbledore a few hours before it happened, predicted the order of death of certain groups of people. There are better posts about her predictions coming true so I’m not gonna list all of them here. So we know that Sybill certainly did have the knowledge, and that makes her a good candidate for the job. And we are also aware of the fact that she actually did possess a gift. That makes her a perfect candidate for the job.

One thing to note is that she herself was totally unaware of her gift. Clearly she had no control over it but given time and practice, it could be possible for her to get a handle on it. If Dumbledore wasn’t such a jerk, he’d have told her and tried to help her but he chose to not only keep her in the dark but to also make sure that she was one of the least respected members of the staff. Dumbledore and the Teachers routinely spoke ill of her and didn’t shy away from telling their students that she was a fraud and that her predictions weren’t to be taken seriously.

Let’s address the “fraud” question now. She did, at times, make predictions that sound way too ridiculous and didn’t even come true. Why? The answer is very simple. Entertainment. When you have a job like hers and everyone expects you to make cool predictions every once in a while, you have to have a mysterious air around you and you have to make predictions and you have to say stuff to make sure you have the required amount of attention. Come to think of it, she once predicted that Harry will have 12 children. Everyone knows that sounds made up including herself and so the whole point of saying it was to entertain students with some mildly humorous predictions which was a good change from the darker predictions she used to make, two of which she made in her first class and went on to become popular gossip topics.

Sybill Trelawney is underrated an underappreciated and she deserves better than to be called a fraud and better than to be insulted by her staff members.

I’ve been reading books, more than I’ve been reading lately, lately. Very often, I read them onscreen. A while back, I was starting with H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine” and the PDF I found had about somewhere slightly above a hundred pages in it and it made me wonder if that was actually the whole book and not a truncated version and so I googled for the last sentence of the book to see if it matched the one in the PDF.

I ended up finding this tumblr blog called “The Final Sentence” that exists solely to serve as an archive of the final sentences of all books. I think it’s pretty cool actually and every once in a while, it makes me feel better about a crappy PDF.

I once wrote an answer on Quora about the improbability of a programming language to completely die out once it has gained popularity. The idea, not so original, was that there are two factors preventing a language from dying:

1. A significant amount of code is written in it and a significant amount of people or _other __code _depend strongly on it. An example is Linux. Now Linux has always been C and always will be. As long as Linux exists, it would be impossible for C to die out.
2. Everyone knows about it. The problem with a programming language being popular enough for it’s existence to be common knowledge is that there will always be people who’ll be fond of it and would want it to never die out. The best example would be Richard Eng, the smalltalk evangelist who has grown more popular than the language itself and likes to call himself Mr. Smalltalk.

This post is about the first reason. C, PHP and JavaScript are three of the most popular and most hated languages that are getting closer and closer to being about as old as time itself. For my own reasons, I both like and dislike the 3 and also rely a lot on them. Let’s assume everyone agrees to killing all 3 of them. Now the problem is that C is:

1. The language Linux is written in.
2. The language most programmers start with. (Often this is because universities prefer to teach it in the earlier semesters.)
3. More or less the only mature language that has the least amount of abstraction that one could ask for except for C++, which is a mess and an offspring of C itself and therefore not worth talking about in this post.

During lunch, I was reflecting on that day when my programming teacher asked me to come forward and teach “bitwise” operations to the whole class, and I remembered how, in my attempt to explain to them the basic difference between a regular “OR” and a bitwise “OR”, I had talked about value comparison being different from a bitwise comparison. Then I began to wonder. A bitwise operation on machine level is fairly simple to understand, but what about value comparison? What is it that happens at machine level when you check if two integer values are equal?

As I began my search for the answer, I pinged Vladislav Zorov, my mentor and friend, and asked him. He said that compilers mostly just subtract the memory addresses of the two objects being compared and returns true if the difference is zero i.e. if they are literally the same object. I couldn’t agree with this so I argued against it. I said that it is possible for two variables to point to identical objects without pointing to the same object and so I set out to prove it.

I wrote a very simple program:

import java.util.Scanner;  
public class HelloWorld {  
  public static void main(String []args){  
    // Created two strings using the same literal and an array with the second index set using that literal.  
    String x = “abcd”;  
    String y = “abcd”;  
    String[] z = {“asafaf”,”abcd”};

    // Printing addresses of all 3.  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(x.hashCode()));  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(y.hashCode()));  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(z[1].hashCode()));

    // Checking to see if the equality symbol works on these  
    if(x == z[1] && x==y && y==z[1])  
      System.out.println(“== works on the 3”);

    // Comparing the 3 using the equals method which will, obviously, work.  
    if(x.equals(z[1]) && x.equals(y) && y.equals(z[1]))  
      System.out.println(“equals method works on the 3”);

    // Creating Scanner object to read from stdin.  
    Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);

    // Taking two strings as input. Will test with  
    // 1. Two different strings  
    // 2. Identical strings  
    // 3. “abcd” for both  
    String j = input.next();  
    String k = input.next();

    //printing their addresses  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(k.hashCode()));  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(j.hashCode()));

    // Testing both comparisons  
    if(j==k)  
      System.out.println(“== working on input strings”);  
    if(k.equals(j))  
      System.out.println(“equals working on input strings”);

    // Initializing a string identical to x,y,z[1] but with the new keyword  
    String a = new String(“abcd”);  
    // Printing its address  
    System.out.println(Integer.toHexString(a.hashCode()));  
    if(a==x || a==y || a== z[1])  
      System.out.println(“== working with new keyword”);  
    if(a.equals(x))  
      System.out.println(“equals method working with new keyword”);  
  }  
}

If you run it, you’ll see that its output shows that all strings that have the same value point to the same address regardless of how they’re initialized. But the equality symbol only works when two strings have been created with the same literal. The fact that we’ve now proven that identical strings in Java do have the same memory address does perhaps imply that comparison is done simply by comparing addresses but then what about the equality symbol? Well, I’ll update this post when I find out.