## OOMAAAIGAWD!! I AM IN FINAL YEAR!! (Part One)

“The end is nigh.”

“This is the end. My only friend.”

Damn it!! Strike that out. Tear the sheet.

Burn it. Out!! Out, you foul, filthy, defiling stench of clichés.

I started writing this article thinking that I will write spectacularly and drown the reader in that sweet feeling of nostalgia without being cloying or nauseating, but the final product turned out to be a massive junk of clichés. Damn, even saying cliché is such a cliché.

Let me tell you, gentle reader the reason behind writing this article. It is almost mandatory for every final year chap with a functioning blog to write a post describing his time in the institute. I am no different. Like every other final year guy, I tend to picture myself as a wise grand old man handing out “wisdom” to juniors. In the first draft of this article, I delved deep into the waters of nostalgia and as I found out later much to my disappointment, they are not unchartered waters. Nostalgia is a sin every man has been committing since the birth of time(or is it the time of birth?). Hence, any new articles on nostalgia can be expressed as a linear combination of writings on nostalgia of the entire human population since the beginning of time.

So, to do justice to my engineering education, which I am afraid I may forget too soon, I have mathematically modeled Nostalgia:

${\bar{{\eta}}_{i}(t)=\int_{\tau=0}^{t}\sum_{j=1 j\neq i}^{N}{A}_{ij}\bar{{\eta}}_{j}(\tau){\delta }_{ij}d\tau + \bar{\epsilon}_{i}}$

where,

• $\bar{{\eta}}_{i}$ represents the Nostalgia vector of a person i.
• It spans the Writing Space, ${\Omega}^{f(\bar{{\eta}}_{i})}$ where $f(\bar{{\eta}}_{i})$ is a function which gives the number of elements in the vector $\bar{{\eta}}_{i}$.
• It should be noted that the $\bar{{\eta}}_{i}$ has been integrated over time to give the vector at the present time t, for nostalgia is a sin man has been committing since the birth of time.  😛
• An assumption that I make is that while writing an article on nostalgia, the content will depend only on other articles which induce nostalgia.   I am neglecting other possible influences like Characteristic Writing Equation and other quirks out of it for the sake of simplicity.
• The total population of the world is N.  Assuming that a person i has had finite time to go over articles written by the total world population, we would like to define a ${\delta}_{ij}$, which takes the value 1, if the person i has read the article written by j, 0 otherwise.  I call it Nostalgia-Delta function.
• A person i is influenced to different extent by different people.  . This dynamics is captured by the matrix ${A}_{ij}$.  I do a summation over the entire population and integrate over time to get the nostalgia vector for person i.
• The term $\bar{{\epsilon}}_{i}$ signifies the error.  If I neglect model errors, I can assume that this term quantifies the originality of the article.

You may be wondering why I am writing this….this…for lack of a better word… mathematics taken from a mad hatter’s hat.   To satiate your curiosity, I would like to state my objective function.  I wanted this post to be different from those millions of other nostalgia-inducing-boring-inane-silly-stupid-posts on the web.  So my objective would be to:

$max({\parallel \bar{{\epsilon}}_{i} \parallel}_{F})$

where,

${\parallel A \parallel}_{F}$ denotes the Frobenius norm.

I hope I achieved my objective.  🙂

You didn’t read the equations, did you? What do you want me to say? You want to read that stinking cliched article, don’t you? Meh Fine. It will come.  Soon enough.

If there exists Gods, the most powerful ought to be the God of clichés.

PS:  Don’t call an ambulance and admit me to the hospital for being a cuckoo.  I just wanted to test this script called LaTeX2WP to convert documents from LaTeX to WordPress style.  It works fine.  🙂

## 12 thoughts on “OOMAAAIGAWD!! I AM IN FINAL YEAR!! (Part One)”

1. Jojo says:

This reads like an Ignobel entry :P.
Why do you say “nostalgia is a sin man has been committing since the birth of time. ” Maybe a tan that man has been commenting since the birth of time. 😛

• #thoo

I am wondering whether it is “since the birth of time” or “since the time of birth.” 😛

You are a ditcher. Didn’t even include me in the ignobel team.

2. It is almost mandatory for every final year chap with a functioning blog to write a post describing his time in the institute

Not true! At least, I don’t think I ever made such a post.

• As Akila said, “functioning blog” it ought to be. 😀

3. And btw, with regards to the LaTeX2html, why not use MathML instead? That allows cleaner rendering since you’re equations are like “text” and not “images”.

• Hmm..Haven’t tried it out. Will do it soon. 🙂

The rendering is pretty crappy, isn’t it? 😦

4. AKILA says:

@ Siva he said: functioning blog. You and I don’t count 😛

@ Samaadhi: Hurry up with the goddamn cliche-post. I rest my case. (I think my geekiness levels have dropped a bit (if that was possible) since i last spoke to you 😐 )

• ^Conformist cupper.

Maybe you can model how your “geekiness” level over time and thereby increase your “geekiness”.

Damn, it is sort of a catch-22 situation, isn’t it? 😮

5. Twister says:

aah.. the vettiness nd peace of final year at iitm.. #Nostalgic.. 😛

PS: i was afraid ur epsilon myt increase a little more coz of this comment but u are done writing the article already nd i think u only integrate upto the point whr u finished writing the article.. so its ok 😛

6. Twister says:

Also am curious as to why you chose Frobenius norm as your objective. This is very debatable.. And I think your blog would not score much on the frobenius norm. I would suggest max norm.. Consider 2 cases.. one in where ur nostalgia vector differed from the integrated nostalgia vector by a small amount in each component. And another case where you have 1 large new component (i.e. a new dimension.. for example – the amount of geekiness in a nostalgia blog – which might have been zero in the integrated vector) . I would think the latter case is better coz it has more originality. But it might still lose out on the frobenius norm to the former. 😛 ..

Another example would be what if I wrote a very negative-nostalgic blog 😛 .. i.e a blog whose nostalgia vector is negative of the integrated effect.( epsilon = -2I, where I is integrated nostalgia vector) then ur blog might lose out coz ur error vector will be -I + Ln where n is a new dimension. Even though your L is large, you might lose out to the former case 😛 .. So max norm might be better for u 😛

• I am a sort of Jack of all trades, master of none. I tend to focus on all round performance, which I have achieved if you take my belly as an example. 🙂

And hence, I thought Frobenius norm was the most suited as it tries to improve each component. I would have agreed with what you, if my sole aim of the article was to make it extremely geeky. I would like to increase my geekiness component but at the same time I do not want to make other components of writing negligible. That was the reason there was a reference to “The Doors” in the beginning and a reference to “Fahrenheit 451” and “Burn after Reading” in the next paragraph. In this case at the least, I thought Frobenius norm would trump maxnorm in my case.

What you need to keep in mind is that the objective function can be different when someone else is writing the blog. For instance, if you want to impress your girlfriend, your objective function will definitely be something else. 😀