Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
[ Italo Calvino ]
Apr 302012
Apr 242012
یکی از بدترین کارها، خوبی کردنِ کسیه که عملا می‌خواد با این کارش وجه‌ای برای خودش، اون هم نه در نظر بقیه، که در نظر خودش دست و پا کنه!
این یجورایی دیگه تهِ بدبختیه! وقتی بدبختی مخفی باشه (شاید بهتر باشه بگم اینقدر عمیق) انگار زهر و قدرتش چند برابر می‌شه…
Apr 172012
Jesus said, “Become passers-by.”
[ The Gospel of Thomas: verse 42 ]
عيسی گفت: «رهگذر باشيد.»
[ انجیل توماس: آیه ۴۲ ]
Apr 172012
Last week, I have found that Abbas El Gamal (in collaboration with Young-Han Kim) published the book “Network Information Theory” which is based on his lecture note he already put it on arXiv. This is a really great book as it covers both classical and recent results in information theory and network information theory. This book was missing in this field and I am happy that an expert gathers some of the most important results in a book and present them in a unified manner.
Apr 142012
… من به نسبی بودن ارزش فرهنگ‌ها معتقد نیستم، به این که همه‌ی فرهنگ‌ها معادل یکدیگرند از آن هم کمتر معتقدم و به ادعای اغلب توخالی و بی‌مایه‌ی هواداران افراطی و آشتی‌ناپذیر چندگانگی فرهنگی نیز به همان اندازه بی اعتقادم. من معتقد به وجود تعدد سطوح آگاهیم (از بدوی‌ترین آگاهی‌ها تا مدرن‌ترین آنها). این آگاهی‌ها نه در سطح واحدی قرار دارند و نه وجودشان یکسان است. این گفته بدان معنا نیست که بعضی از آنها «بهتر» از دیگران‌اند، منظورم صرفا آن است که این سطوح هر یک در زمینه‌هایی خاص درست و استوارند؛ که بین آنها شکاف، جداییِ تاریخی و گسستِ معرفتی وجود دارد.
[ افسون‌زدگی جدید، هویت چهل‌تکه و تفکر سیار*: ص ۳۰ ]
*: داریوش شایگان، ترجمه فاطمه ولیانی
Apr 052012
Jesus said, “I took my place in the midst of the world, and I appeared to them in flesh. I found all of them intoxicated; I found none of them thirsty. And my soul became afflicted for the sons of men, because they are blind in their hearts and do not have sight; for empty they came into the world, and empty too they seek to leave the world. But for the moment they are intoxicated. When they shake off their wine, then they will repent.”
[ The Gospel of Thomas: verse 28 ]
عيسی گفت: «من در وسط عالم جای گرفتم، و با جسم گوشتين بر آنان ظهور يافتم. همه ايشان را مست ديدم؛ هيچ يک را تشنه نديدم. و جانم برای پسران انسان‌ها غمگين شد چون آنان در دل نابينايند و ديد ندارند؛ چون تهی به دنيا میآيند، و تهی هم میخواهند از دنيا بروند. اما چند صباحی مستاند. چون از مستی شرابی که نوشيدهاند به خود باز آيند، توبه خواهند کرد.»
[ انجیل توماس: آیه ۲۸ ]
پی‌نوشت: جمله آخر خیلی برام آرامش بخش بود!
Apr 052012
You might have heard about Stephen Boyd who is a professor in the department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He came here to EPFL about a week ago to give a talk about “Convex Optimization” problems. I had already heard that he was a great lecturer but his teaching abilities were beyond my expectations.
During his talk he mentioned to one of the toolboxes which have been developed in his group to solve Convex Optimization problems. I have found this package sometime ago to solve a rate optimization problem and fount it quite convenient to use. After the talk, I thought that it would be good idea to introduce it here. The name of the package is CVX and it is written under MATLAB.
As an example, in order to solve the following problem
$latex \mathrm{minimize}\ ||Ax-b||_2$
$latex \mathrm{subject\ to}\ l \le x \le u$
one can simply write the following lines of code in MATLAB:
10 cvx_begin
20 variable x(n);
30 minimize( norm(A*x-b) );
40 subject to
50 l <= x <= u;
60 cvx_end
For more information and documentation you may want to refer to the CVX Research page.
P.S.: One thing I’d like about Stephen Boyd is that all of his books and softwares are available online for free.