The Dream Worker

(A very short story.)

It was the last day of high school. And that meant only one thing to Cindy: the school ball. There she was that evening, dressed in a beautiful gown with her friends. As she strutted around in her heels, her eyes looked for him. Where was that stupid guy? Hadn’t she explained to him so many times how much this evening meant to her? Hadn’t she told him how she wanted to dance the night away with him?

“Zhishang station! Zhishang station! Please mind the doors.” Cindy was rudely awakened from her day-dream. She quickly stepped out of the train and took the escalator down to the mall. The ball was a week away and she still didn’t have the money for her dress. It was ridiculously expensive, but the moment she had seen it she had known that it was the one for her. The photos from the ball would go on Facebook, but she believed that the memories would last her lifetime. The only problem was the money. And that was why she had decided that she would dream-work all through this week. Eight hours a night, for seven days straight.

She walked into a 7-Eleven store, and looked around for the soft drinks section. There it was, back against the wall, a row of glass-doored refrigerators. She quickly found what she was looking for: red cans of Redbull Buzz. She paid for ten cans of Buzz and headed home. She still had a few hours of homework to finish before she could plug in.

Redbull Buzz, curiously enough, did not carry the popular “gives you wings” slogan. That was because it did not. The packaging was dull and it was not advertised anywhere. In fact, it had not been launched anywhere outside of Asia. Executives at Redbull were not sure what side-effects might bring down the product, if the US FDA were to put it to rigorous trials. Why kill the golden goose? Buzz was outselling the original Redbull already. It had become the drink of choice of dream-workers.

Chance discoveries had always happened in science. And so it was with Caffeine-497. It and over 40 other variants of the original Caffeine molecule had been extracted out of coffee beans a few decades ago. Their properties had been thoroughly studied and their 3D structure had been cataloged in molecular databases. Unlike the Caffeine molecule, 497 did not keep you alert or awake. Deemed useless, it had been forgotten. What had brought it back was a bungled project by a group of sleep-research interns. Mistakenly using 497 instead of Caffeine, they had discovered that the molecule allowed the body to fall asleep, while keeping the mind clear and free of dreams. Since it was just as easy to produce as Caffeine, a couple of enterprising young guys had successfully pitched their idea to Redbull. The result was the success of Buzz.

Cindy was an intelligent girl. The year-end homework was pretty easy and she quickly dispensed with it. She finished dinner with her parents and said her good nights. She closed the room to her door and headed to her desk. She slowly drank down two cans of Buzz. It tasted like cough syrup. She opened the Dreamist app on her smartphone and set its worklist quota to eight hours. She watched as it loaded up her worklist for the night over its 3G connection. She plugged in the earphones, switched off the lights, wrapped the sleep-mask around her eyes and lied back on her bed.

“Welcome to Dreamist. If you are ready for your work, roll your eyes to the right once.” said the soft and soothing female voice in her earphones. She rolled her eyeballs to the right, underneath her closed eyelids. This motion was registered by her eye-mask which transmitted the result over Bluetooth to the smartphone app. “Good. We begin with 500 Facebook comments posted on the Nike page. I will read out each comment. If you feel the comment would be liked by you or your friends, roll your eyes to the right. Else roll to the left.” Boy, this is going to be a long night, Cindy thought as she started to work through her quota.

The Caffeine-497 in her Buzz was already working through her body. She felt extremely relaxed and numb and so was her mind. But, it was clear enough to make simple decisions. She had tried dream-work before, actually everyone at her school had. It was an easy and risk-free way to earn some pocket money. There was virtually no side-effect, since the 497 allowed the body to release all the right sleep hormones needed by the muscles for rest and repair. The only aspect it controlled was the mind, which it gently held back, just enough. Not enough to really think things through, but just enough for making rudimentary decisions.

“You guys are capitalist pigs” said the female voice reading out the comment. Cindy rolled her eyes to the left. That was not a real comment, she thought. Must be one of the randomly inserted test comments used by the app to make sure the worker was not faking it. Facebook comments, Twitter tweets, blog comments, anything that could be read by a text-to-speech converter and needed a bit of human judgement was fair for the game in this work. Decisions in marketing, advertising, design, all were now being put through A-B testing of this type to prove their worth. With no physical harm caused to the workers and only small amounts of money being earned, this underground economy had escaped regulation. Virtual workplaces, like that of Amazon Mechanical Turk, has already created the online task division, doling, processing and payment systems needed for such work. People were ready to work all their waking hours. The only territory left now was their sleeping hours.

It was Saturday noon, bright and sunny, as Cindy took the train to meet her friends at the mall. She had put in extra hours of sleep and work during the week and had accumulated enough money in her Paypal account to buy the dress. Her teachers had been a bit puzzled to see her being dull in class during the week. Her eyes had been a bit red all day too. Other than that, the work had no side-effects. Looking around curiously at the other passengers, she wondered how many of them were trading in their dreams for small change.

She mindlessly flipped through her phone, checking articles shared by her friends. There was one by the Economist, claiming dream-work as the unconquered Wild West of labour and said cheesily that “counting sheep for big bucks” was the way to go. Apparently, researchers were already looking for unintrusive methods of playing images to the mind during sleep. Judging Facebook photos, image commercials and other vision-based decision-work was far more lucrative and it was where this industry is headed said the piece. As the train nodded off, cutting through the city, Cindy closed her eyes and, for the first time that week, started to dream of the ball.

Craving for some pho

A few days ago, I started to crave badly for Vietnamese food. What sparked it off was my reminiscing about a backpacking trip in Vietnam I did a few years ago. And the highlight of that trip for me had been Vietnamese food.

Deciding to satiate this craving, this Saturday we searched for Vietnamese restaurants in Singapore. The number is surprisingly few, considering how many Vietnamese are here. A small joint named Long Phung came highly recommended and we headed off there.

It is located in Joo Chiat Road, an area off Bugis which I had never explored. The region is full of old two-storey Chinese longhouses which have been converted into small restaurants, bars and hostels. We arrived at Long Phung at 6PM, but the place was already packed. The customers were mostly Vietnamese, which I noted as a good sign that the food would be close to authentic.

Gỏi cuốn (salad rolls)

Chả giò (fried spring roll)

The menu is in Vietnamese, but thankfully it has photos, so I knew what to order. We started off with Gỏi cuốn and Chả giò. Gỏi cuốn is rice, prawn, pork and herbs rolled in rice paper. With the accompanying peanut sauce, it was delicious and quite heavy. Chả giò is a fried spring roll of minced pork. This was just right, crispy and not-so-oily.

Phở Gà (chicken noodle soup)

Gỏi cuốn was quite filling, but I had to have my pho. We ordered Phở Gà, the chicken version of the Vietnamese noodle soup. It is a bowl of chicken, rice noodles, various herbs, onion and broth. The taste was quite similar to what I had eaten in South Vietnam. The flavor of the herbs was a bit muted though.

Cà phê sữa nóng (Vietnamese coffee)

We ended the journey with the closest cousin of South Indian filter coffee: Cà phê sữa nóng. You choose whether you want it hot or color and with or without milk. Every cup of Vietnamese coffee comes with its own filter. The cup is filled with cold milk, you place the filter on top with coffee powder inside it. Pour hot water into the filter and it drips down and you have your coffee. The coffee was rich and a pleasing end to the meal.

When we left, the joint was full with a crowd waiting outside for a table. The weather was cool and windy and we took a walk along the road. Though there were a few other Vietnamese joints nearby, this was the only one which was full. Waiting for our bus, I realized how you could relish so many old memories with just some food.

Ubuntu Made Easy

I recently started to use Linux, specifically the Ubuntu distribution, as my primary operating system after a hiatus of many years. Finding Ubuntu and Unity quite a different world from the my years with RedHat and SuSe, I decided to pick through Ubuntu Made Easy by Rickford Grant and Phil Bull. The only other contender which seemed relevant for the job was The Official Ubuntu Book (7 Ed) by Matthew Helmke.

Ubuntu Made Easy is just the latest in a series of introductory Linux books written by Grant. The book covers everything: installation, Unity interface, keyboard shortcuts, installing applications, all kinds of usage scenarios and even a very helpful chapter on how to get involved with the Ubuntu community. The book is hands-on, so newbies can try various projects to get familiar with the OS. The chapters on Unity, keyboard shortcuts and Ubuntu community were the most useful to me. I just flipped through the rest since either I knew it or was irrelevant to me.

The authors have a fun and laid back tone to their writing that makes the book a joy to read. There was a lot of trivia about Ubuntu that I was not aware of that made Ubuntu quite interesting in my eyes. At ~480 pages, the book is quite a tome. It is aimed at the new user and seems to get that job done well. But if you know the ropes around Linux already, I recommend picking it up at the library for a few quiet hours.

The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology

The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology is one from the many in the manga series by No Starch Press. For a while now, I have had my eye on these English translations of works by and from Japanese. This particular manga on molecular biology is written and illustrated by Masaharu Takemura. The motivation is to use the story-telling, action-oriented and illustrative powers of the manga to introduce a science that is quite hard to grok.

Though weak and laughable, there is a story and a few principal characters here to support the cause of the manga. Ami and Rin are two students of molecular biology who have not been attending classes regularly. In order to help them, their Professor, named Moro, brings them to his private island where he has a lab. Over the next few days, his assistant Marcus uses the virtual reality machine in their lab to help these two students understand this science.

There are 5 important entities of molecular biology that the manga sets out to explain: cell, protein, DNA, RNA and gene. These entities are present in every cell of our body and are constantly in action. In every being on this planet, cells are working hard producing a myriad of proteins and are reproducing all the time. By literally taking the students (and the reader) on a trip inside the human cell, employing the virtual reality machine, the manga quite successfully brings the world of a cell to life.

I liked this manga maybe due to the fact that I did not study biology after class 10. There are a few compelling reasons why I think this manga was really good. The author has a real intuitive understanding of the science. Cells are not static, but are composed of molecules moving around and accomplishing work. The reader gets to view this action, both at the atomic-molecular level and the cellular level. Almost all textbooks restrict themselves to boring 2D figures. In this manga, we get to see how everything is organized and working in 3D. And finally, all of this content is nicely organized so that the reader is gently taken to complex concepts like DNA replication, DNA-RNA transcription and RNA-protein translation.

You might be wondering that you already know many of these concepts. So, why pick this manga? I thought so too. Here are a few tit-bits to titillate you. The cell has a cell wall. If it is a wall, how do proteins and other molecules move in and out of cells? DNA is a double-helix string. If you peek into the nucleus of a cell, will you see DNA strings floating in goo like seaweeds in water? The answer is no! Chromosomes are typically drawn as X-shaped entities. Why? During cell division, DNA replicates by making a copy of itself. If you were to zoom down to the DNA-level during replication, what would you actually see in action in front of your eyes? What is the factory-robot-like molecular machinery that is holding a DNA string, like a person holding a beaded string and methodically copying over every bead (alphabet) over to a new string? The answers to this and more will literally blow your mind!

Manga is typically read very fast. I have seen manga readers on Tokyo trains flipping a page per second. Here though, every page takes time for the mind to visualize and to imagine how the machinery moves and interacts in 3D. This manga of ~256 pages took me 2 days to read. I must also warn that the drawings, while sufficient, are not as fantastic as what is in popular manga series. Given that Takemura is a lecturer, I think this is easily forgiveable.

In conclusion, the concepts in this manga might be rudimentary for a person knowing molecular biology. But for me, it was so revealing that I had to, yet again, question the origin, the why and how of life itself. Inside every cell on this planet, is an incredibly complex molecular machinery whose working is nothing short of amazing. Pick up the manga and dive into this tiny cosmos!

Pragmatic Version Control Using Git

Pragmatic Version Control Using Git

With open-source version control systems, I started many years ago with CVS, moved to SVN and a few years ago to Mercurial. Transitioning from SVN to Mercurial is easy, because Mercurial is designed to make this particular transition easy and also because it is actually a simple and elegant tool. Git however is a different beast. I made a mistake falling for the tables which show Mercurial commands and their equivalent ones in Git. I had to perform a simple pull and merge on GitHub recently and I discovered that Git is nothing like Mercurial. Since GitHub is all-pervasive now, I decided to learn the basics of Git at least so that I can work with other people who use it.

Of the many books that try to teach Git, I picked Pragmatic Version Control Using Git by Travis Swicegood. Published in 2008, the book is a bit dated, but it promised to be gentle on beginners and offered to teach by using hands-on examples, which I prefer. The book follows the typical style: a few introductory chapters that introduce the very basic commands and later chapters which take a deeper dive into each of the basic operations of a VCS. The Git repositories for all the chapters can be cloned from GitHub and so following along with the examples in the book is very convenient.

Since I use Mercurial regularly, I noted a few fundamental features of Git which are different from Mercurial:

1. Staging area: Also called the index, this offers the user a buffer to capture one or more changes, before committing them to the repository.
2. History: In Mercurial, history cannot be changed, it is sacrosanct. In Git, you can do whatever you want with your history. You can go back and edit commits, merge commits together or split an old commit apart into multiple commits.
3. Branches: Branches can be fused (rebase) and local branches are easy to create (but need to be named). Also there seem to be subtle and important ways in which local and remote branches differ among Git and Mercurial.

Many of these Git features are available in Mercurial through extensions. Since Git offers them built-in, there is an explosion of basic commands and this is why it appears much more complex than Mercurial. Also, since these features are built-in, people use them and this is why working with Git repositories is harder for Mercurial users.

As an introduction, I found that this book fulfils its purpose. Following along the author by working on a simple repository is essential to learning a VCS. Just knowing the features or commands is pretty much useless. This book covers these bases well and I recommend it as a good introductory book for learning Git.

Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫)

In East Asia, animated movies are created for and enjoyed by adults and children alike. Every year or so, Studio Ghibli from Japan releases an animated movie that garners critical acclaim across this region. I have read quite a few manga and watched a few anime series, but somehow always missed out on Studio Ghibli. Seeing some of their creations in the library recently, I picked out Princess Mononoke (もののけ姫).

This movie deals with the conflict between man and nature, that has only exacerbated with technological progress. When a tribe that is leaving in harmony with nature is attacked by a possessed animal spirit, its prince Ashitaka decides to find its cause. This quest takes him far away from home to Iron Town, a fortress town which has discovered how to convert ore to iron and make guns. Their rape of nature in their surrounding forests turns out to be the cause of all the chaos in the spirit world. Iron Town is at war with Princess Mononoke, a human raised by a wolf spirit, who wants to destroy it to save the remaining forest spirits.

I do not know how well Princess Mononoke will be understood in the Western community. The concept of worshiping spirits of objects like trees, rocks, and forests should be quite familiar to Indians who have been from or traveled to mountainous rural areas. Due to the spread of pan-Indian mega-God brands like Rama, Vishnu and Shiva, these too are disappearing quite quickly in those places. In Japanese culture, these kami (spirits) reign supreme even today. This was one of the pleasant surprises on my travel in Japan, that they continue to believe in and worship kami of everything from forests to buildings. Kami are an extremely popular entity in manga and anime too, though there they are usually villainous. Princess Mononoke is completely built around the existence, behaviour and manifestations of the (forest) spirit world and its interaction with the human world.

There is a lot of creativity at work in the movie, in the plot and also in the fetid imagination of how these concepts would look to a human eye. The story is intriguing in the beginning, but I found myself getting quite tired towards the end, as it is too long drawn out. There are many interesting characters, too many in fact, and it spoils the entire experience of the movie. It also becomes hard to draw clear lines between good and bad, maybe this is intentional, but also confusing. Critics seem to love this movie, but I found that Princess Mononoke was a bit too complex and confusing for my taste.

Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu

I wanted to like and love Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, but sadly I cannot. Kareena Kapoor and Imran Khan star in this romantic-comedy from the Karan Johar camp. Imran Khan has led the clean and proper life his parents wanted him to lead for all his life. When he loses his job at Las Vegas during Christmas, he has a wild night out on the town with Kareena Kapoor. They become good friends, she showing him how to break out of his shell and live freely. He finally stands up to his over-bearing parents, but his feelings of love towards Kareena turn out to be misdirected.

EMAET is disappointing. It is created around what seems like a good idea, but the plot is tepid even in its best moments. Imran is flat and uninteresting while Kareena is over-the-top. Other than the title track, none of the music is memorable either. The camerawork is quite beautiful, evoking interest that is rarely satisfied by the characters or their predicament. There are better ways to kill your time than with Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu.