Zuoz summer school.

Adam's belly button

According to certain religions Adam is supposedly the first human being created by god from mud and clay and breath life into his nostrils. I don't know if there is a more precise version of the story, but in any case the above statement is sufficient to grab the whole idea.

One fine day some body asked, did Adam really have a navel (belly button).  Yes we are talking about that dent on our belly caused by the umbilical cord that was our lifeline once when we were in our mother's womb. I hope now you can clearly see where the argument is heading to. If Adam (and for that matter Eve as well since Eve was the first women and god created Eve from Adams ribs) did not have belly buttons, then how could we, the descendants have belly buttons?. If Adam did have belly button, then it was pure case of false testimony from god (I mean the misleading belly button on Adam). If god is really "capable" of giving false testimony is something that is beyond the scope of this article.  Any way this is essentially the essence of the argument.

You might be thinking it is silly of me to write on something like this. But this is an interesting argument which was around for centuries, and I came to know and think about it only lately. So I thought I should write on it.

Apart from theologists and church, the renaissance painters as well had difficulties in painting Adam. But renaissance painters like Michelangelo  and Raphael were brave enough to paint Adam with navel, like this on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel, Vatican.

Creation of Adam: Michelangelo, Courtesy Wikimedia Foundation

However Michelangelo was careful to clad god in a robe, so that he could be silent about the belly button on him. I am also sure that it would be odd to look at a naked human like figure without belly button

The debate on Adam's belly button had surfaced in US congress during the second world war. The house of representatives military  committee refused to authorize a small booklet "Races of Man" to be distributed among US armed personnel on the grounds of belly buttons in the paintings of Adam and Eve.

(to be updated)
Sources: http://www.gracecentered.com/did_Adam_and_Eve_have_belly_buttons_navals.htm

Paradigm Shift

All this while I was writing only about the new stuff that I come across in my work life. Now I've decided to extend to it anything new that I come across. New thoughts, new insights, something that strikes me in the current affairs, something that I ignites a spark as I browse through hundreds of web pages that I come across through Google.

I''ve decided to write about everything that I have an opinion about. It could be a highly assorted cross section of the state of my mind. It could be truths, half truths or lies.

Posts to follow... :).

Deleting files from a directory.

On a linux shell deleting files is quite straightforward as it is expected just do rm fileName..

And if you have group of files which has a particular pattern and if you want to delete them, you do rm * < pattern >. But what do you do if you want to retain files with a particular patter and remove all other files in that directory.. This happens to me when I run some code for my work. My folder gets completely loaded with lot of log and tmp files which are produced by the main program. So how do I remove them ?

On a zshell its quite easy.. Say if you want to retain the files starting with the name mypetfile.

just do rm ^mypetfile*..

all the files which are not starting with the mypetfile is gone !!!

Parallel processing on bash shell

Straight to the idea:
suppose you are working on a machine which has some 16 cores. And you have a heavy program which generates particle events and outputs to a file. You can make the whole thing parallel process on the shell.

Here we go.
The program name toyMC
the program is run with an argumen n_events. The program reads this number and generates "n_evetns" number of MonteCarlo evetns and writes it into and output file evGen.txt

How do we parallelize this

Say we run 100 parallel instances of this program:

first creat 100 directories and then "cd" to these directories and run the code.

It is safe to do it this way.. otherwise multiple instances of the program might access the file and it will be a great mess.

The Full command on bash:

for i in `seq 1 1 100; do (mkdir job${i}; cd job{$i}; ../toMC 100 & ); done

thats it...

warning: the macro is not tested.

Checking memory usage of a particular process in Linux/Unix

When you write codes which are to be performance enhanced, taxing only a few on the the host machines physical memory, you need to think a lot and come up with a smart design. I am not an expert in software design. If at all I know something about this field its all through the book which Sebastian gave me[Don't remember the name of the book ].

Alright... Today I found out how to log the memory usage of a particular process on Linux. Here is how it works

The linux command pidof aprocess will return the process id or job id of the process.

Then all you have to do is to check the status of this process in /proc/jobid/status.

cat /proc/`pidof aprocess`/status.

Just try it out. Will explain later what are the parameters listed in this file..