Author: Anand Philip

is it not more cruel to eat plants?

we know that plants (Archaeplastida) are alive 1 2

we know they form memories 3

we know they can react to their environment in the short medium and long terms 4

we know they communicate 5

we know they have melatonin, serotonin, and a host of other chemicals that our own brain uses to convey information and do its sentience 6 7

we know they experience discomfort or some subjective experience 8 9 (counterpoint 10)

they are a living thing that has survived 2300 million years of evolution which is enough time and complexity to evolve sentience

it is possible they have language that we do not think of as symbolic representation.

in fact its entirely possible that they not only possess sentience in botanic terms, but also in neuronal terms.

it is possible they have volition and agency that does not fit the animal mechanisms of these, these are all possible and not all that difficult to imagine

all of these put together indicates that they are highly likely to be sentient even if not in the human/animal sentience spectrum or mechanism terms. 11 12

the thing that makes them different from animals, and animal sentience and their pain different from animal pain , is that we do not have sensory immediate direct empathetic (SIDEy) access to it.

empathetic access to animal pain is why we consider them sentient. there’s a model of pain in our selves that has an uncanny resemblance to the model of pain in almost all other animal bodies which we are able to access or simulate or react to via empathy (and experiments).

so the reason why we think its OK to eat plants is really that we feel no empathy for them that is automatic and hardwired the way a mirror neuron 13 is hardwired. (it’s not, i know, but you know what i mean)

we find it problematic when people and governments do not listen to those without a voice or the people without a voice that we understand, those who do not have guns, have the wrong germs and no steel. do we not have an entire industry or two built around just giving voices to those who do not have voices?

we do recognize that committing violence on them is wrong and reprehensible.

so do plants not have a good reason to have rights?

at the very least the right to be recognized as alive and possibly sentient

and the right to be not snuffed out thoughtlessly

and the promise that we will do everything we can to hear their voices and one day the confederacy will have voting plants and not just planted votes.

Note:

For non-facetious reading material from real professionals, consider the following instead:

Hansen, M.J. A critical review of plant sentience: moving beyond traditional approaches. Biol Philos 39, 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-024-09953-1

Myers, N. (2015). Conversations on Plant Sensing : Notes From the Field. Nature and Culture, 3, 35-66. Link to PDF

Hamilton, A., & McBrayer, J. (2020). Do plants feel pain?. Disputatio, 12(56), 71-98.

The minimal Intelligence lab – they try to figure out what intelligence is. Rigorous and philosophically exciting.

Footnotes

  1. Because they have an entry in the EOL: C Michael Hogan (Lead Author);Daniel Robert Taub (Topic Editor) “Plant”. In: Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Cutler J. Cleveland (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment). [First published in the Encyclopedia of Earth July 19, 2010; Last revised Date August 15, 2011; Retrieved September 27, 2012. Encyclopedia of Earth. https://eol.org/docs/discover/plants ↩︎
  2. Also here: https://www.eol.org/pages/42430800 ↩︎
  3. Gabriela Auge, Valentin Hankofer, Martin Groth, Rea Antoniou-Kourounioti, Irja Ratikainen, Christian Lampei, Plant environmental memory: implications, mechanisms and opportunities for plant scientists and beyond, AoB PLANTS, Volume 15, Issue 4, July 2023, plad032, https://doi.org/10.1093/aobpla/plad032 ↩︎
  4. Baucom RS, Heath KD, Chambers SM. Plant-environment interactions from the lens of plant stress, reproduction, and mutualisms. Am J Bot. 2020 Feb;107(2):175-178. doi: 10.1002/ajb2.1437. Epub 2020 Feb 14. PMID: 32060910; PMCID: PMC7186814. ↩︎
  5. Farmer EE, Ryan CA. Interplant communication: airborne methyl jasmonate induces synthesis of proteinase inhibitors in plant leaves. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1990 Oct;87(19):7713-6. doi: 10.1073/pnas.87.19.7713. PMID: 11607107; PMCID: PMC54818. ↩︎
  6. Ramakrishna A, Giridhar P, Ravishankar GA. Phytoserotonin: a review. Plant Signal Behav. 2011 Jun;6(6):800-9. doi: 10.4161/psb.6.6.15242. Epub 2011 Jun 1. PMID: 21617371; PMCID: PMC3218476. ↩︎
  7. Baluška, F., Mukherjee, S., & Ramakrishna, A. (Eds.). (2020). Neurotransmitters in plant signaling and communication. Springer. ↩︎
  8. Appel, H.M., Cocroft, R.B. Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewing. Oecologia 175, 1257–1266 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-2995-6 ↩︎
  9. Anda-Larisa Iosip et al, DYSCALCULIA, a Venus flytrap mutant without the ability to count action potentials, Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.12.058 ↩︎
  10. Draguhn, A., Mallatt, J.M. & Robinson, D.G. Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness. Protoplasma 258, 239–248 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00709-020-01550-9 ↩︎
  11. Trewavas A (2016) Intelligence, Cognition, and Language of Green Plants. Front. Psychol. 7:588. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00588 ↩︎
  12. Baluska, Frantisek. (2016). Should fish feel pain? A plant perspective. Animal Sentience. 1. 10.51291/2377-7478.1052. ↩︎
  13. Lamm C, Decety J, Singer T (February 2011). “Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain”. NeuroImage. 54 (3): 2492–2502. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.10.014. PMID 20946964. S2CID 6021487. ↩︎

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin 1986

This is an essay about what fiction means to humanity, and how it might have been critical for our evolution.

In the temperate and tropical regions where it appears that hominids evolved into human beings, the principal food of the species was vegetable. Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food. The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fat was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains, adding bugs and mollusks and netting or snaring birds, fish, rats, rabbits, and other tuskless small fry to up the protein. And we didn’t even work hard at it — much less hard than peasants slaving in somebody else’s field after agriculture was invented, much less hard than paid workers since civilization was invented. The average prehistoric person could make a nice living in about a fifteen-hour work week.

Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things. So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn’t have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn’t the meat that made the difference. It was the story.

It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrestled a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats… No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood sprouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.

That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.

When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, “Glossary”; she had thought of reinventing English according to her new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as “botulism.” And hero, in Woolf’s dictionary, is “bottle.” The hero as bottle, a stringent reevaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero.

Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.

If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you — even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn’t it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container.

A holder. A recipient.

The first cultural device was probably a recipient… Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.

So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper mur-der, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.

And yet old. Before — once you think about it, surely long before — the weapon, a late, lux-urious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger — for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in — with or before the tool that forces energy out-ward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.

This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. (“What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization,” Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.

That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.

It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story.

It sometimes seems that the story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe.

The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

It’s unfamiliar, it doesn’t come easily, thoughtlessly, to the lips as the killer story does; but still, “untold” was an exaggeration. People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels…

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.

I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato. That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible.

Who ever said writing a novel was easy?

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. “Technology,” or “modern science” (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the “hard” sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy.

The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).

If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.

It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.

Source of Document: The Anarchist Library

Citation: 

Le Guin, Ursula K. "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction." 1986. The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org. Accessed 14 July 2024.

कुछ सूचनाएं by सुदामा पांडेय धूमिल

सबसे अधिक हत्याएँ
समन्वयवादियों ने की

दार्शनिकों ने
सबसे अधिक ज़ेवर खरीदा

भीड़ ने कल बहुत पीटा
उस आदमी को
जिस का मुख ईसा से मिलता था

वह कोई और महीना था
जब प्रत्येक टहनी पर फूल खिलता था
किंतु इस बार तो
मौसम बिना बरसे ही चला गया
न कहीं घटा घिरी
न बूँद गिरी
फिर भी लोगों में टी.बी. के कीटाणु
कई प्रतिशत बढ़ गए

कई बौखलाए हुए मेंढक
कुएँ की काई लगी दीवाल पर
चढ़ गए
और सूरज को धिक्कारने लगे
— व्यर्थ ही प्रकाश की बड़ाई में बकता है
सूरज कितना मजबूर है
कि हर चीज़ पर एक सा चमकता है

हवा बुदबुदाती है
बात कई पर्तों से आती है —
एक बहुत बारीक पीला कीड़ा
आकाश छू रहा था
और युवक मीठे जुलाब की गोलियाँ खा कर
शौचालयों के सामने
पँक्तिबद्ध खड़े हैं

आँखों में ज्योति के बच्चे मर गए हैं
लोग खोई हुई आवाज़ों में
एक दूसरे की सेहत पूछते हैं
और बेहद डर गए हैं

सब के सब
रोशनी की आँच से
कुछ ऐसे बचते हैं
कि सूरज को पानी से
रचते हैं

बुद्ध की आँख से खून चू रहा था
नगर के मुख्य चौरस्ते पर
शोकप्रस्ताव पारित हुए
हिजड़ो ने भाषण दिए
लिंग-बोध पर
वेश्याओं ने कविताएँ पढ़ीं
आत्म-शोध पर
प्रेम में असफल छात्राएँ
अध्यापिकाएँ बन गई हैं
और रिटायर्ड बूढ़े
सर्वोदयी —
आदमी की सबसे अच्छी नस्ल
युद्धों में नष्ट हो गई
देश का सबसे अच्छा स्वास्थ्य
विद्यालयों में
संक्रामक रोगों से ग्रस्त है

(मैंने राष्ट्र के कर्णधारों को
सड़को पर
किश्तियों की खोज में
भटकते हुए देखा है)

संघर्ष की मुद्रा में घायल पुरुषार्थ
भीतर ही भीतर
एक निःशब्द विस्फोट से त्रस्त है

पिकनिक से लौटी हुई लड़कियाँ
प्रेम-गीतों से गरारे करती हैं
सबसे अच्छे मस्तिष्क
आरामकुर्सी पर
चित्त पड़े हैं ।

Source: Hindi-Kavita.com

A call for radical Unforgiveness

Source: Azaad, Amba. “Fire to the Grass.” The Massachusetts Review, Volume 65, Issue 1, 2024, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_65.1Azaad.pdf.

IN this essay Amba Azaad makes a strong and comprehensive case for radical unforgiveness.

It’s a gorgeous gorgeous essay and everyone should read it, the following are some quotations that spoke to me.

Resentment and bitterness are treated like bruise marks—evidence of a past crime, but of no further use, meant to be erased as soon as possible.

Victims of abuse have been told so often that true love is forgiving that it feels like a lie to state that their love and unforgiveness can coexist, equally authentic

Just as you cannot truly envision the complex reality of what abuse is without granting that a person can be both loving and abusive, you cannot begin to talk about battered love without talking about unforgiveness.

To love someone who has harmed you, and to fully name and recognize that harm, and to deem it unforgivable, and to continue living in some relationship with each other: that is what the vast majority of people in abusive relationships do. As we come to more open and investigative reckonings of abuse, it behooves us to treat unforgiveness as praxis of survival—not as a dirty byproduct of harm, but as a multifaceted philosophy worth theorizing.

Forgiveness certainly has a place in our social strategizing and mental toolkit; however, deglamorizing its status as a mark of born-again Bodhisattva will help to prevent abusive demands for it. To legitimize unforgiveness, it is necessary to start by toppling the idol of forgiveness: a virtue enshrined in several religious traditions and wielded with particular brutality by modern Christian ideologies against anyone with the temerity to hold the powerful accountable. If we remove divinity from the equation, it is clear that both “to err” and “to forgive” must be analyzed strictly in profane terms of power.

Radical unforgiveness renames your experience from acceptable, and therefore good enough for others, to unacceptable and not to be replicated.

We have been told that unforgiveness is useless so often that it can be hard to redefine what productivity looks like when marginalized and derided forms of labor are taken into account. Holding space, bearing witness: these are seemingly passive forms of productivity. It takes energy to stand still in a crowd that pushes you to move on. The unforgivers are the ones who stay petty, who don’t just get along, and they are the ones who force changes through in organizations where it is easier to let it go.

Here’s a freeing thought: What if one has a responsibility to unforgive, what if one is achieving some measure of restitution by being a stone against the flood that tries to wash away the evidence of wrongdoing? By not being able to forgive, you are not failing at humanity. You are reforming humanity—by being a record keeper, by bearing witness.

Unforgiveness is not the negative space of the absence of a thing; it is a concrete, voluntary action, a choice. Broken relationships are not failures; they are proof of the work of unforgiveness.

I really want to add more quotes but I think this is enough.

Amba ends the essay with acknowledging how unforgiveness has been misappropriated by revenge, and what we can do to prevent that.

Overall, I think this is a call I will be thinking about a lot.

I like writing poetry and I am not good at it at all

So I threw some of these lines at Bard and true to its name, it made stuff that is better than my lines. Still not sure if any of it counts as poetry but there are definitely a line or two or a metaphor or two here that are interesting.

What I wrote:

Read Nietzsche the first time to appear well read and find confusion
The second time to appear serious and find epiphanies
The third time for yourself and reject the overman
 

What the LLMs rewrote:

Nietzsche’s pages turn,
Confusion sparks enlightenment,
Overman dismissed.1

First, a borrowed cloak,
Nietzsche struts, impressing crowds,
Empty, echoing.

Then, a seeker’s beard,
Epiphanies sought in smoke,
Ashes in his hand.

Finally, unmasked,
He laughs, tears off the false skin,
Free, and only man.2

Tried Nietzsche to swagger, impress the crew,
Brain scrambled, left me scratching my shoe.
Second go, all earnest, brow furrowed deep,
“Aha!” moments came, then went to sleep.
Third and final, just me and the page,
“Übermensch” baloney, turning the cage.
My own way to go, the hype I dismiss,
Nietzsche’s a puzzle, not some hip abyss.3
 

First dive into Nietzsche for some street cred,
Got lost in the jumble, scratching my head.

Round two, looking serious, seeking insight,
Epiphanies popping up, left and right.

Third time’s a charm, just for myself,
Overman? Nah, put that book on the shelf.
Finding my path, rejecting the hype,
Nietzsche, my guide, in this philosophical tripe.4

Thought Nietzsche cool, like shades and a scowl,
Read, got lost, felt like a clueless owl.
Tried again, serious, highlighter in hand,
“Deep thots,” I’d shout, then couldn’t stand.

Third time, alone, book open and worn,
Overman stuff? Nah, more like a yawn.
My own truth’s out there, beyond borrowed gleam,
Nietzsche’s a teacher, not some grand scheme.5

(Verse 1)6
Caught a freight train down to wisdom’s depot, Nietzsche in my pack
Heard the hipsters talkin’, thought I’d join the existential act
Cracked the spine, let words like shadows crawl across my mind
But meaning danced like dust devils, never could I pin it down

(Chorus)
First time through, a borrowed mask, words I didn’t own
Spouted wisdom from the rooftops, just another crow cawin’ alone
Second time, all furrowed brow, highlighter in my hand
Epiphanies like lightning bugs, sparklin’ on the promised land

(Verse 2)
But lightning fades, and truth ain’t found in borrowed sparks
So I stripped it back, raw wood and nails, no fancy, gilded arks
Read for me, not crowds, not critics with their sharpened quills
Just a man unmasking shadows, climbin’ his own personal hills

(Chorus)
Third time round, the book worn thin, spine crackin’ with each turn
No more Übermensch charades, let the embers of my spirit burn
I ain’t no superman, don’t crave Olympus’ golden throne
Just lookin’ for a path of my own, where the wind whispers in my bones

(Bridge)
So thanks, Nietzsche, for the storm, the tangled mountain trail
You showed me wisdom ain’t a summit, but a fire that never fails
I may have borrowed your compass, but the stars I follow now are mine
Each scar a map, each breath a song, this journey’s truly divine

(Chorus)
First time blind, second time blurred, but now the focus clear
No borrowed wings to lift me up, my feet planted right here
So long, Zarathustra, your shadows fade in the mornin’ light
This path’s mine, and I’m walkin’ on, the stars as my sight


  1. Brief and bloody well summarized ↩︎
  2. My favorite: borrowed cloak, seekers beard, ashes in hand. ↩︎
  3. I do like a hip abyss ↩︎
  4. This was weak, i know. but of the 15 odd poems i generated this was in the top five ↩︎
  5. A teacher, not a scheme. damn good ↩︎
  6. and finally as a bob dylan song, can’t be sung to Mr. Tamborine man’s tune tho ↩︎

A conversation about odorless blue thoughts

The following is a conversation with a LLM chatbot Llama, which is just funny. using the model llava-v1.5-7b-q4

User: what is a category error in logic and give some examples as well as examples of what is not a category error although it looks like it

Llama: In logic, a "category error" refers to an argument that appears valid at first glance but actually violates the rules or structure of a particular logical category. It's essentially when someone tries to apply one type of reasoning to another situation where it doesn't belong, resulting in a fallacy.

An example of a category error is trying to use deductive reasoning (which relies on general principles and specific premises) to prove an inductive conclusion (where the truth of the conclusion follows from the truth of its individual instances). This would be considered a category error because deduction and induction are different logical methods, each with their own rules for drawing conclusions.

Another example is using the fallacy of false analogy or comparing apples to oranges (using an inappropriate comparison) instead of comparing them within the same category. For instance, you might say that a politician's actions are like those of a thief because they both break laws; however, this would be a category error since politicians and thieves belong to different categories with distinct characteristics and rules for their respective behaviors.

On the other hand, although it may seem similar at first glance, an example that is not a category error is comparing apples (fruit) to oranges (fruit). Although both are fruits, they have different properties like taste, texture, and nutritional content. It's important to recognize when we're using the correct logical method for drawing conclusions based on available evidence or reasoning about a particular situation.

User: is the following sentence semantically accurate? "Odorless blue thoughts run lopingly"

Llama: The sentence "Odorless blue thoughts run lopingly" is not semantically accurate, as it contains several grammatical and semantic errors. Firstly, there's a missing article ("the") before the word "blue," which should be "The." Secondly, the verb "run" doesn't agree with its subject "thoughts" in number; it should either be singular or plural to maintain consistency (either "Run lopingly" or "Runn lopingly"). Lastly, there is no clear connection between odorlessness and running.

To make the sentence semantically accurate, you could rephrase it as: "The absence of scent in blue thoughts allows them to run freely." This version maintains grammatical correctness while also conveying a meaningful message about how thoughts can move or flow without any obstruction.

User: what could the phrase "Odorless blue thoughts run lopingly" mean?

Llama: The phrase "Odorless blue thoughts run lopingly" appears to be an intentionally nonsensical and humorous construct, likely meant for entertainment purposes rather than conveying a meaningful message. It combines elements from different domains (odorlessness of the color blue, running as an action) in a way that doesn't make sense semantically or logically. The intended effect is to evoke amusement and curiosity by presenting an absurd phrase rather than adhering to any strict rules of language or logic.

User: What does the phrase "The absence of scent in blue thoughts allows them to run freely." mean

Llama: The phrase "The absence of scent in blue thoughts allows them to run freely" is a revised and semantically accurate version of the original nonsensical sentence you provided. It suggests that without any distractions or obstructions (represented by the lack of odor), one's thoughts can move freely, unencumbered by external factors like scent or other sensory stimuli. This metaphorically connects the idea of running as a physical action with the freedom and clarity that comes from having undistracted thought processes.

Featured Image is by Meenakshi Payal from Flickr. It shows a Bharatnatyam Performance by Sneha Chakradhar at India International Center

Stochastic parrots no more

Tech is heavily invested in giant language models.

This is because, with transfer learning, language models suddenly started being able to do a LOT more. And a lot better.

A lot of high citation publications have also been an outcome of this exploration of language models

For most parts in NLP engineering, LMs went from being cute to being the standard model from which you build solutions in the last three years. And it’s not just in NLP, the language model approach (use large amounts of data to train a network to do specific tasks, and some approximation of the underlying first principles will be approximately encoded into the model) seems to work well for images as well (stable diffusion).

And given that all of deep learning and the engineering approach to AI seem to be approximate/mimic till you make it, this is a powerful learning.

For academics, in a sense, iterative improvement, criticism, existential threats etc. are part of the publish-perish cycle. For the engineer, iterative improvement is, but it is driven by entirely different incentives.

When the ethics people started talking about bias, the engineering world was not very happy about it, well no one likes the police. More so because bias is not easy to tackle, its not easily quantified, its not something you can fix with a software update. And because there doesn’t seem to be any consensus yet about how to deal with it.

I think there are distinct parallels here from the early days of medical ethics and evidence based medicine. No one likes to hear that their life’s work is actually harming people despite having honorable intentions. We’d all like to be told that well, this is OK, you were doing the right thing, and we can fix it, easy.

But as the decades of literature in medical ethics and the history of clinical medical practice shows, ethics isn’t easy but is also not optional. The medical world was brought kicking and screaming into getting its shit together and behaving.

 

What is semantic search and why do we want it

Table Of Contents
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You’re searching for poems that talk about cutlery. Because you can. Also because a lot of times you don’t remember the precise detail or term used in a document that you want to find. And also because compiling a list of poems about our relationship with food-ingestion-tools would be fun.

Maybe it’s not poetry you care about but the name of the company your boyfriend works at which he told you about three months ago but cant find on your Whatsapp. And obviously, it would be super awkward to ask him now.

We have disparate search needs is what I am trying to say.

Lexical search: or how most search works

Definitions:
Query: The text we enter into search fields when we want stuff found
Document: The file, website, chat, image, meme stash or entity that has the terms or could have the the right answers to your search
Corpus: The collection of  all the documents that need to be searched across various searches. (your whole website for example)
On with the show!

The standard way in which we do search is by matching the words or terms in a query with the terms in the corpus. So if you search for poems about cutlery  the search will look for documents that have the words poems and/or cutlery and try to find ones that contain both the words.

Imagine, though, that the program has to scan through every document every time someone searches for something, hunting for instances of the word from scratch. This would be pretty time-consuming and also slightly stupid. So we need a way to store what words are in what documents.

Besides just matching or finding the word, we also need some way of knowing which document matches it better. This is called ranking. To solve both these problems  people came up with the idea of indexes (or indices, if you’re a Latin snob).

What an index does is, it look over all the documents in a corpus, and creates a brief representation of the content of that document. So instead of searching over the whole document, now you just search over the representations. These representations also have some way of ranking the quality of the fit between the query and the document.

An example of such a representation1 is TF-IDF (Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency). What this does is,

  1. Lists all the words in each of the documents in a corpus and how frequently the occur in a document (term frequency).
  2. Calculates how common or how rare of each of these words are across the whole corpus. The common words get a score of 0, or close to zero and the rare words get high scores. 2

Why do we do this? In most documents, the words that appear most frequently would be things like the, and, is and stuff that doesn’t add any discriminatory power to the retrieval.

When I search for poems with cutlery  there are going to be a whole lotta  poems with the word with in them, so I can’t use with to rank the documents in any way. But the word cutlery probably appears in a small number of poems, so it is a good word for ranking the results.

So now your index of poems doesn’t just have the whole text of the poem but a list of the non-zero scoring words along with the scores, which allows us to get the top matches.

The most used and probably the best of these TF-IDF  algorithms is the  Okapi BM25  family of algorithms. They are absolutely fantastic in finding you the documents that are best matching the words you search for.

But what if you don’t know the precise thing you are searching for? This is also a problem as old as misplaced keys. One way to solve this would be to have some kind of a thesaurus. You search for cutlery  and we expand the terms to include all the synonyms of the word. This is called query expansion. So instead of sending the term cutlery to the index, we can send cutlery, knife, fork, teaspoon and see what the index gives us.

But that means now you need to figure out which words you want to find synonyms for, how to store them, how to update them periodically etc. And what if you need to find synonyms of phrases, not words, eg. our relationship with modern day digital technology. That would make very large search term if we expanded each word. Still, this is a pretty damn good method and is used widely and is what Google uses to return close matches.

Another problem could be that you might misspell the word, or that your way of spelling antidisestablishmentarianism3 is different from the way it appears in the text, say “anti-dis-establishmentarianizm” or whatever.  The usual solution to this is to add some “fuzzy” logic or approximate matching. This works by searching for words that are off or different by a few letters. Unfortunately this means that if you search for costly coat cuts,  you’ll also get results for costly cat guts 4.  Still, this too is pretty damn good and is usually  a part of most search systems.

You could also offer spelling correction, as google often does. But problems with autocorrect are well known

I am compelled to point to yet another problem: Besides synonyms, there are words that are structurally similar, or stem from the same word. These too might make a good fit or a bad fit for a particular search query based on the context, for eg. if you’re searching for load bearing walls, it might be good to get results for load bearing tiles, but not good to get bear loading 5

Anyway, so what we need is a way to represent text that can account for

  1. Variations in the way a word is written
  2. Contextual meaning of words (A coat of paint vs a coat of mink)
  3. Spelling mistakes
  4. Synonyms

All these things are present in the way we write and store information. So if you were to take a sufficiently large sample of things people have written, you would find all of these things in this sample. This idea is what gives us semantic search.

Enter AI!

Created with Dall-E

Kidding, AI is a marketing myth, who wants to buy “statistical-learning models”?

But that is what we do, we take a large corpus of text, and then derive a statistical model of the relationships between words in a multi dimensional space. And we do this by masking text and getting a model to fill in the blanks. No, seriously, that’s it. This is the basis of all LLMs.

What this does is, make a model memorize and therefore extract all the million ways in which any given word can be used in a language and also how each word in the corpus is related to every other word. This is not something we can manually compute and that is why we throw artificial neural networks at it.

Now, most LLMs and other things that are called AI these days don’t stop here, and have to predict specific things. But if you take off those prediction bits from the model what you have left is called an embedding. Which is a multi-dimensional representation of whatever it is that you trained the thing to do. Engineers, like many of us, suffering from grievous mathematics envy, call these representations vectors.

The way these work is that words and documents that are similar in meaning are represented closer to each other, or clustered. But this happens over many dimensions, so it’s not a simple 1 or 2 D relationship it captures.

See how the word noticed is close to, and connected to all the words that are similar in meaning. The above is a screenshot of one such embedding. I strongly urge you to explore this. Link: Word2Vec Tensorboard

Another tool to understand how words can be represented in multiple dimensions is this embedding explorer from Edwin Chen.

What is most interesting to me is that this rich and pretty accurate representation is produced using something as simple as fill-in-the-blanks.

Searching for things using the information implicitly encoded in these vector spaces is called semantic search by software and ML people.6

So if you don’t want to manually manage everything from synonyms to contextual meaning, you could take a vector space trained on a very large corpus, convert your corpus into those kind of vectors, and then search over those vectors. This conversion just borrows the relationships that are already discovered by the model, which means its representations will be much richer than the ones in your corpus.7

These vector spaces are not like the indexes we spoke of earlier, they don’t have any explicit way of saying word x is present in document z and the score is high.

The search works by identifying documents that are “close” to the query in the vector space. The most commonly used metric to determine this distance is cosine similarity . But even if you can calculate the cosine distance between two words, doing this calculation for every word in your corpus against every word in the query would be mind-numbingly boring and also time and resource consuming. So we need some way to find the location in the vector space that is most likely to have good results, and get there quickly.

This is called approximate nearest neighbor search, and there are a bunch of great algorithms that have come up in the last few years that let you search over humongous datasets really fast.

The ones I like the most are Neighborhood Graph Trees and Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW)

Both of them work by dividing up your data into small clusters, or trees and then searching in those trees or clusters. But really, it’s a lot more complicated than that and to be honest I don’t really understand graph theory enough to know what they do. But what they do they do do well.

This might remind you of indexes, and that is what these create, just, vector and tree representations, not words.

image from Pinecone’s guide to semantic search, linked below

Summary

  • You embed your corpus onto an existing language model’s vector space
  • You then index your embedding using a ANN algorithm like NGT or HNSW
  • And then you can search your corpus using semantic querying.

A demo

If you’ve managed to stay here this long, I urge you to explore the subject using a live demo. MoodMuse is a small app I made to learn and demonstrate the topic. It finds you poetry, based on the meaning of your words, not the terms alone.

Thanks for reading.

This cat does not exist. Created with https://deepai.org

Further reading and resources

Footnotes

  1. This is not the most commonly used representation, sometimes you just store the title of the document, somethings you store a description, it depends on the need of the system and users. ↩︎
  2. Engineers really love logarithms. We should too ↩︎
  3. I am, of course a disestablishmentarianist and several centuries behind on news ↩︎
  4. If you’re into coat cuts. Whatever they are, no judgement here. ↩︎
  5. I know, my metaphors need work. They are unemployed ↩︎
  6. Complicating the matters is that before there were large neural network based embeddings, there were the semantic web people and the ontology people and other people who wanted to solve this using structured representation of text. So software people are kinda stealing the term a little bit. More info: A survey in semantic search technologies ↩︎
  7. Thankfully there is a huge community of NLP nerds who like making these kinds of models easy to use (if you can Python, that is). ↩︎

Sultana’s Dream (1905) by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain

This story was originally published in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, Madras, 1905. Taken from WikiSource.

One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood. I am not sure whether I dozed off or not. But, as far as I remember, I was wide awake. I saw the moonlit sky sparkling with thousands of diamond-like stars, very distinctly.

All on a sudden a lady stood before me; how she came in, I do not know. I took her for my friend, Sister Sara.

‘Good morning,’ said Sister Sara. I smiled inwardly as I knew it was not morning, but starry night. However, I replied to her, saying, ‘How do you do?’

‘I am all right, thank you. Will you please come out and have a look at our garden?’

I looked again at the moon through the open window, and thought there was no harm in going out at that time. The men-servants outside were fast asleep just then, and I could have a pleasant walk with Sister Sara.

I used to have my walks with Sister Sara, when we were at Darjeeling. Many a time did we walk hand in hand and talk light-heartedly in the botanical gardens there. I fancied, Sister Sara had probably come to take me to some such garden and I readily accepted her offer and went out with her.

When walking I found to my surprise that it was a fine morning. The town was fully awake and the streets alive with bustling crowds. I was feeling very shy, thinking I was walking in the street in broad daylight, but there was not a single man visible.

Some of the passers-by made jokes at me. Though I could not understand their language, yet I felt sure they were joking. I asked my friend, ‘What do they say?’

‘The women say that you look very mannish.’

‘Mannish?’ said I, ‘What do they mean by that?’

‘They mean that you are shy and timid like men.’

‘Shy and timid like men?’ It was really a joke. I became very nervous, when I found that my companion was not Sister Sara, but a stranger. Oh, what a fool had I been to mistake this lady for my dear old friend, Sister Sara.

She felt my fingers tremble in her hand, as we were walking hand in hand.

‘What is the matter, dear?’ she said affectionately. ‘I feel somewhat awkward,’ I said in a rather apologizing tone, ‘as being a purdahnishin woman I am not accustomed to walking about unveiled.’

‘You need not be afraid of coming across a man here. This is Ladyland, free from sin and harm. Virtue herself reigns here.’

By and by I was enjoying the scenery. Really it was very grand. I mistook a patch of green grass for a velvet cushion. Feeling as if I were walking on a soft carpet, I looked down and found the path covered with moss and flowers.

‘How nice it is,’ said I.

‘Do you like it?’ asked Sister Sara. (I continued calling her ‘Sister Sara,’ and she kept calling me by my name).

‘Yes, very much; but I do not like to tread on the tender and sweet flowers.’

‘Never mind, dear Sultana; your treading will not harm them; they are street flowers.’

‘The whole place looks like a garden,’ said I admiringly. ‘You have arranged every plant so skillfully.’

‘Your Calcutta could become a nicer garden than this if only your countrymen wanted to make it so.’

‘They would think it useless to give so much attention to horticulture, while they have so many other things to do.’

‘They could not find a better excuse,’ said she with smile.

I became very curious to know where the men were. I met more than a hundred women while walking there, but not a single man.

‘Where are the men?’ I asked her.

‘In their proper places, where they ought to be.’

‘Pray let me know what you mean by “their proper places”.’

‘O, I see my mistake, you cannot know our customs, as you were never here before. We shut our men indoors.’

‘Just as we are kept in the zenana?’

‘Exactly so.’

‘How funny,’ I burst into a laugh. Sister Sara laughed too.

‘But dear Sultana, how unfair it is to shut in the harmless women and let loose the men.’

‘Why? It is not safe for us to come out of the zenana, as we are naturally weak.’

‘Yes, it is not safe so long as there are men about the streets, nor is it so when a wild animal enters a marketplace.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Suppose, some lunatics escape from the asylum and begin to do all sorts of mischief to men, horses and other creatures; in that case what will your countrymen do?’

‘They will try to capture them and put them back into their asylum.’

‘Thank you! And you do not think it wise to keep sane people inside an asylum and let loose the insane?’

‘Of course not!’ said I laughing lightly.

‘As a matter of fact, in your country this very thing is done! Men, who do or at least are capable of doing no end of mischief, are let loose and the innocent women, shut up in the zenana! How can you trust those untrained men out of doors?’

‘We have no hand or voice in the management of our social affairs. In India man is lord and master, he has taken to himself all powers and privileges and shut up the women in the zenana.’

‘Why do you allow yourselves to be shut up?’

‘Because it cannot be helped as they are stronger than women.’

‘A lion is stronger than a man, but it does not enable him to dominate the human race. You have neglected the duty you owe to yourselves and you have lost your natural rights by shutting your eyes to your own interests.’

‘But my dear Sister Sara, if we do everything by ourselves, what will the men do then?’

‘They should not do anything, excuse me; they are fit for nothing. Only catch them and put them into the zenana.’

‘But would it be very easy to catch and put them inside the four walls?’ said I. ‘And even if this were done, would all their business – political and commercial – also go with them into the zenana?’

Sister Sara made no reply. She only smiled sweetly. Perhaps she thought it useless to argue with one who was no better than a frog in a well.

By this time we reached Sister Sara’s house. It was situated in a beautiful heart-shaped garden. It was a bungalow with a corrugated iron roof. It was cooler and nicer than any of our rich buildings. I cannot describe how neat and how nicely furnished and how tastefully decorated it was.

We sat side by side. She brought out of the parlour a piece of embroidery work and began putting on a fresh design.

‘Do you know knitting and needle work?’

‘Yes; we have nothing else to do in our zenana.’

‘But we do not trust our zenana members with embroidery!’ she said laughing, ‘as a man has not patience enough to pass thread through a needlehole even!’

‘Have you done all this work yourself?’ I asked her pointing to the various pieces of embroidered teapoy cloths.

‘Yes.’

‘How can you find time to do all these? You have to do the office work as well? Have you not?’

‘Yes. I do not stick to the laboratory all day long. I finish my work in two hours.’

‘In two hours! How do you manage? In our land the officers, – magistrates, for instance – work seven hours daily.’

‘I have seen some of them doing their work. Do you think they work all the seven hours?’

‘Certainly they do!’

‘ No, dear Sultana, they do not. They dawdle away their time in smoking. Some smoke two or three choroots during the office time. They talk much about their work, but do little. Suppose one choroot takes half an hour to burn off, and a man smokes twelve choroots daily; then you see, he wastes six hours every day in sheer smoking.’

We talked on various subjects, and I learned that they were not subject to any kind of epidemic disease, nor did they suffer from mosquito bites as we do. I was very much astonished to hear that in Ladyland no one died in youth except by rare accident.

‘Will you care to see our kitchen?’ she asked me.

‘With pleasure,’ said I, and we went to see it. Of course the men had been asked to clear off when I was going there. The kitchen was situated in a beautiful vegetable garden. Every creeper, every tomato plant was itself an ornament. I found no smoke, nor any chimney either in the kitchen — it was clean and bright; the windows were decorated with flower gardens. There was no sign of coal or fire.

‘How do you cook?’ I asked.

‘With solar heat,’ she said, at the same time showing me the pipe, through which passed the concentrated sunlight and heat. And she cooked something then and there to show me the process.

‘How did you manage to gather and store up the sun-heat?’ I asked her in amazement.

‘Let me tell you a little of our past history then. Thirty years ago, when our present Queen was thirteen years old, she inherited the throne. She was Queen in name only, the Prime Minister really ruling the country.

‘Our good Queen liked science very much. She circulated an order that all the women in her country should be educated. Accordingly a number of girls’ schools were founded and supported by the government. Education was spread far and wide among women. And early marriage also was stopped. No woman was to be allowed to marry before she was twenty-one. I must tell you that, before this change we had been kept in strict purdah.’

‘How the tables are turned,’ I interposed with a laugh.

‘But the seclusion is the same,’ she said. ‘In a few years we had separate universities, where no men were admitted.’

‘In the capital, where our Queen lives, there are two universities. One of these invented a wonderful balloon, to which they attached a number of pipes. By means of this captive balloon which they managed to keep afloat above the cloud-land, they could draw as much water from the atmosphere as they pleased. As the water was incessantly being drawn by the university people no cloud gathered and the ingenious Lady Principal stopped rain and storms thereby.’

‘Really! Now I understand why there is no mud here!’ said I. But I could not understand how it was possible to accumulate water in the pipes. She explained to me how it was done, but I was unable to understand her, as my scientific knowledge was very limited. However, she went on, ‘When the other university came to know of this, they became exceedingly jealous and tried to do something more extraordinary still. They invented an instrument by which they could collect as much sun-heat as they wanted. And they kept the heat stored up to be distributed among others as required.

‘While the women were engaged in scientific research, the men of this country were busy increasing their military power. When they came to know that the female universities were able to draw water from the atmosphere and collect heat from the sun, they only laughed at the members of the universities and called the whole thing “a sentimental nightmare”!’

‘Your achievements are very wonderful indeed! But tell me, how you managed to put the men of your country into the zenana. Did you entrap them first?’

‘No.’

‘It is not likely that they would surrender their free and open air life of their own accord and confine themselves within the four walls of the zenana! They must have been overpowered.’

‘Yes, they have been!’

‘By whom? By some lady-warriors, I suppose?’

‘No, not by arms.’

‘Yes, it cannot be so. Men’s arms are stronger than women’s. Then?’

‘By brain.’

‘Even their brains are bigger and heavier than women’s. Are they not?’

‘Yes, but what of that? An elephant also has got a bigger and heavier brain than a man has. Yet man can enchain elephants and employ them, according to their own wishes.’

‘Well said, but tell me please, how it all actually happened. I am dying to know it!’

‘Women’s brains are somewhat quicker than men’s. Ten years ago, when the military officers called our scientific discoveries “a sentimental nightmare,” some of the young ladies wanted to say something in reply to those remarks. But both the Lady Principals restrained them and said, they should reply not by word, but by deed, if ever they got the opportunity. And they had not long to wait for that opportunity.’

‘How marvelous!’ I heartily clapped my hands. ‘And now the proud gentlemen are dreaming sentimental dreams themselves.’

‘Soon afterwards certain persons came from a neighbouring country and took shelter in ours. They were in trouble having committed some political offense. The king who cared more for power than for good government asked our kind-hearted Queen to hand them over to his officers. She refused, as it was against her principle to turn out refugees. For this refusal the king declared war against our country.

‘Our military officers sprang to their feet at once and marched out to meet the enemy. The enemy however, was too strong for them. Our soldiers fought bravely, no doubt. But in spite of all their bravery the foreign army advanced step by step to invade our country.

‘Nearly all the men had gone out to fight; even a boy of sixteen was not left home. Most of our warriors were killed, the rest driven back and the enemy came within twenty-five miles of the capital.

‘A meeting of a number of wise ladies was held at the Queen’s palace to advise as to what should be done to save the land. Some proposed to fight like soldiers; others objected and said that women were not trained to fight with swords and guns, nor were they accustomed to fighting with any weapons. A third party regretfully remarked that they were hopelessly weak of body.

‘”If you cannot save your country for lack of physical strength,” said the Queen, “try to do so by brain power.”

‘There was a dead silence for a few minutes. Her Royal Highness said again, “I must commit suicide if the land and my honour are lost.”

‘Then the Lady Principal of the second university (who had collected sun-heat), who had been silently thinking during the consultation, remarked that they were all but lost, and there was little hope left for them. There was, however, one plan which she would like to try, and this would be her first and last efforts; if she failed in this, there would be nothing left but to commit suicide. All present solemnly vowed that they would never allow themselves to be enslaved, no matter what happened.

‘The Queen thanked them heartily, and asked the Lady Principal to try her plan. The Lady Principal rose again and said, “before we go out the men must enter the zenanas. I make this prayer for the sake of purdah.” “Yes, of course,” replied Her Royal Highness.

‘On the following day the Queen called upon all men to retire into zenanas for the sake of honour and liberty. Wounded and tired as they were, they took that order rather for a boon! They bowed low and entered the zenanas without uttering a single word of protest. They were sure that there was no hope for this country at all.

‘Then the Lady Principal with her two thousand students marched to the battle field, and arriving there directed all the rays of the concentrated sunlight and heat towards the enemy.

‘The heat and light were too much for them to bear. They all ran away panic-stricken, not knowing in their bewilderment how to counteract that scorching heat. When they fled away leaving their guns and other ammunitions of war, they were burnt down by means of the same sun-heat. Since then no one has tried to invade our country any more.’

‘And since then your countrymen never tried to come out of the zenana?’

‘Yes, they wanted to be free. Some of the police commissioners and district magistrates sent word to the Queen to the effect that the military officers certainly deserved to be imprisoned for their failure; but they never neglected their duty and therefore they should not be punished and they prayed to be restored to their respective offices.

‘Her Royal Highness sent them a circular letter intimating to them that if their services should ever be needed they would be sent for, and that in the meanwhile they should remain where they were. Now that they are accustomed to the purdah system and have ceased to grumble at their seclusion, we call the system “Mardana” instead of “zenana”.’

‘But how do you manage,’ I asked Sister Sara, ‘to do without the police or magistrates in case of theft or murder?’

‘Since the “Mardana” system has been established, there has been no more crime or sin; therefore we do not require a policeman to find out a culprit, nor do we want a magistrate to try a criminal case.’

‘That is very good, indeed. I suppose if there was any dishonest person, you could very easily chastise her. As you gained a decisive victory without shedding a single drop of blood, you could drive off crime and criminals too without much difficulty!’

‘Now, dear Sultana, will you sit here or come to my parlour?’ she asked me.

‘Your kitchen is not inferior to a queen’s boudoir!’ I replied with a pleasant smile, ‘but we must leave it now; for the gentlemen may be cursing me for keeping them away from their duties in the kitchen so long.’ We both laughed heartily.

‘How my friends at home will be amused and amazed, when I go back and tell them that in the far-off Ladyland, ladies rule over the country and control all social matters, while gentlemen are kept in the Mardanas to mind babies, to cook and to do all sorts of domestic work; and that cooking is so easy a thing that it is simply a pleasure to cook!’

‘Yes, tell them about all that you see here.’

‘Please let me know, how you carry on land cultivation and how you plough the land and do other hard manual work.’

‘Our fields are tilled by means of electricity, which supplies motive power for other hard work as well, and we employ it for our aerial conveyances too. We have no rail road nor any paved streets here.’

‘Therefore neither street nor railway accidents occur here,’ said I. ‘Do not you ever suffer from want of rainwater?’ I asked.

‘Never since the “water balloon” has been set up. You see the big balloon and pipes attached thereto. By their aid we can draw as much rainwater as we require. Nor do we ever suffer from flood or thunderstorms. We are all very busy making nature yield as much as she can. We do not find time to quarrel with one another as we never sit idle. Our noble Queen is exceedingly fond of botany; it is her ambition to convert the whole country into one grand garden.’

‘The idea is excellent. What is your chief food?’

‘Fruits.’

‘How do you keep your country cool in hot weather? We regard the rainfall in summer as a blessing from heaven.’

‘When the heat becomes unbearable, we sprinkle the ground with plentiful showers drawn from the artificial fountains. And in cold weather we keep our room warm with sun-heat.’

She showed me her bathroom, the roof of which was removable. She could enjoy a shower bath whenever she liked, by simply removing the roof (which was like the lid of a box) and turning on the tap of the shower pipe.

‘You are a lucky people!’ ejaculated I. ‘You know no want. What is your religion, may I ask?’

‘Our religion is based on Love and Truth. It is our religious duty to love one another and to be absolutely truthful. If any person lies, she or he is….’

‘Punished with death?’

‘No, not with death. We do not take pleasure in killing a creature of God, especially a human being. The liar is asked to leave this land for good and never to come to it again.’

‘Is an offender never forgiven?’

‘Yes, if that person repents sincerely.’

‘Are you not allowed to see any man, except your own relations?’

‘No one except sacred relations.’

‘Our circle of sacred relations is very limited; even first cousins are not sacred.’

‘But ours is very large; a distant cousin is as sacred as a brother.’

‘That is very good. I see purity itself reigns over your land. I should like to see the good Queen, who is so sagacious and far-sighted and who has made all these rules.’

‘All right,’ said Sister Sara.

Then she screwed a couple of seats onto a square piece of plank. To this plank she attached two smooth and well-polished balls. When I asked her what the balls were for, she said they were hydrogen balls and they were used to overcome the force of gravity. The balls were of different capacities to be used according to the different weights desired to be overcome. She then fastened to the air-car two wing-like blades, which, she said, were worked by electricity. After we were comfortably seated she touched a knob and the blades began to whirl, moving faster and faster every moment. At first we were raised to the height of about six or seven feet and then off we flew. And before I could realize that we had commenced moving, we reached the garden of the Queen.

My friend lowered the air-car by reversing the action of the machine, and when the car touched the ground the machine was stopped and we got out.

I had seen from the air-car the Queen walking on a garden path with her little daughter (who was four years old) and her maids of honour.

‘Halloo! You here!’ cried the Queen addressing Sister Sara. I was introduced to Her Royal Highness and was received by her cordially without any ceremony.

I was very much delighted to make her acquaintance. In the course of the conversation I had with her, the Queen told me that she had no objection to permitting her subjects to trade with other countries. ‘But,’ she continued, ‘no trade was possible with countries where the women were kept in the zenanas and so unable to come and trade with us. Men, we find, are rather of lower morals and so we do not like dealing with them. We do not covet other people’s land, we do not fight for a piece of diamond though it may be a thousand-fold brighter than the Koh-i-Noor, nor do we grudge a ruler his Peacock Throne. We dive deep into the ocean of knowledge and try to find out the precious gems, which nature has kept in store for us. We enjoy nature’s gifts as much as we can.’

After taking leave of the Queen, I visited the famous universities, and was shown some of their manufactories, laboratories and observatories.

After visiting the above places of interest we got again into the air-car, but as soon as it began moving, I somehow slipped down and the fall startled me out of my dream. And on opening my eyes, I found myself in my own bedroom still lounging in the easy-chair!

Indian language NLP/NLU

I have been learning things about semantic search and somehow found myself back to wondering about how to train a Hindi or Malayalam language model. I have done this in the LSTM days, and while I’ve kept up with some research, I haven’t with the engineering. Anyway, so if you want to do some language modelling in indic languages, your best bet would be to begin with something that AI4Bharat team has come up with. This is a language modelling and NLP team at IIT Madras who have released what seem to be the latest and the largest models for Indic languages. Because of the sad  sad paucity of monolingual corpora in Indian languages, they have generally done multi lingual training.

 

To get an idea of just how bad things are,  these are how many tokens per language the largest models for indic languages have

Lets compare that with English, the C4 dataset based on commoncrawl is trained on 1.4Trillion tokens.

Several order of magnitudes larger

Even in terms of the variety of data, most English LLMs are trained on a mix of scientific articles, blogs, news, legal documents, books, novels etc. whereas AI4Bharat which collated the largest dataset is largely just news and Wikipedia.

Not only are the datasets small, the benchmarking tasks are also several order of magnitudes smaller. This means we can never really compare the performance of a indic model with an enlglish one.

Another problem : We don’t have good tokenizers for different Indian languages. The indicBert team uses the same bert tokenizer, designed for English,with some modification. Malayalam is an agglutinative language,it seems silly to represent it using a tokenizer made for enlish or hindi. There are several tokenizers who have tried to do this, but none seem to speak to larger models or with the transformers ecosystem and not too many people seem to be using them.

What all this means is that unless we really rally and get the datasets of our languages much larger, we are destined to have our languages represented exclusively with relation to English, which really is the approach google and others suggest for dealing with “low resource” languages. This is appalling.

I deeply appreciate the work the IITM team is doing, but someone needs to fund them and a dozen other labs like them several order of magnitudes more than they are.

 

 

citation for indicBert

@inproceedings{kakwani2020indicnlpsuite,
    title={{IndicNLPSuite: Monolingual Corpora, Evaluation Benchmarks and Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models for Indian Languages}},
    author={Divyanshu Kakwani and Anoop Kunchukuttan and Satish Golla and Gokul N.C. and Avik Bhattacharyya and Mitesh M. Khapra and Pratyush Kumar},
    year={2020},
    booktitle={Findings of EMNLP},
}