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Lately I have been spending most of my time at the terminal

1. downloading 1.5 TB Media and Utilities from LAN and organizing it,
2. writing and editing code for my Dual Degree Simulation Project,
3. writing thesis,
4. organizing data in excel,
5. editing a blog template,
6. coding a website and a forum,
7. collecting pictures from friends,
8. editing pictures for websites

and realized that my keyboard is going to look like

I wish these keys work in the real life too.

A nice way to discuss both free-will and physics at the same time.

Yes, thats me. But this post is about why I thought of choosing this to be the domain name and why I ended up using something else.

It was September 2007. I co-introduced a new event in Shaastra, a Rubik’s cube workshop. I was supposed to give a small demonstration to the then event cores, Pota, TS and Sayan. I first met them with a weird shaped puzzle and Sayan introduced me as Shanmukh to the other two. Immediately Pota wonders, “I thought Shanmukh is cube, something with six-faces, but what is this weird puzzle?” After some bulbing, the deeper meaning was understood and Sayan explained, “Shanmukh is this guys name, not the name of the cube.”

I then realized that Shanmukh, being six-faced, is a Sanskrit word for cube. That was why I thought of choosing this for domain name. But since, a more general form of cube of higher dimensions is orthotope and for the reasons mentioned in the first post, I decided Orthotope.

For those of you, who didn’t know:
Shat + Mukh = Shanmukh (Anunaskika Sandhi)
Shat = Six
Mukh = Face

Ataraxia, a greek word, is a state of mind that is free from worry. It is some thing that anyone would ideally want to reach. In general we are ataraxic when we are happy.

I have been observed to be ataraxic more than most of the people. Reflecting how this happened reminds me of an incident from my 4th/5th grade when my mom took me to a hospital to get my tonsils checked. While we were waiting for our turn to go inside, my mom pointed to a poster saying something on the following lines,

“If you are healthy,
   there is nothing to worry about, but if you are not, there are two things to worry about.
If you get better,
   there is nothing to worry about, but if you don’t, there are two things to worry about.
If you live,
   there is nothing to worry about, but if you don’t, there are two things to worry about.
If you are going to go to heaven,
   then there is nothing to worry about, but if you are not you will go to hell and there is nothing you can do about it. So why worry?”

All I could fetch from this is that when there is nothing that one can do, there is no point worrying about it. It is something that anyone would accept, except for the fact that it is hard to follow for reasons specific to oneself. I remember a couple of incidents, where I consciously told myself I am stupid to be worrying. Soon I didn’t have to do it consciously.

If ataraxia is followed just to get rid of some momentary burden, it slowly leads to a state of mind which is characterized by a mixture of complacence and apathy and we start procrastinating. As long as it is rationally practiced it is safe.

Ataraxia kills many resource intensive worries. Considering the brain as the processor, and thought categories as the processes, this kills most of the heavy processes. Other processes, random thoughts, start in the background. As, I plan to use this blog as a screen to project these processes, the outcomes of ataraxia, I name it Ataraxia.

The perception of the space, we live in, has improved since ages known from being quantitative to qualitative over wide orders of magnitude^[1]. Our senses have been limited to perceive space only in 3 dimensions. Events need four parameters to mark them, three for space and one for time and yet, time (the fourth dimension, as some scientists would like to call it) is perceived in a completely different way.

For example, a 2D movie is three dimensional as it needs 2 space dimensions and one time dimension. But we wouldn’t look at it as we look at some object in 3 space dimensions. As an attempt to look at it that way, we can place the frames of this 2D movie in a 3D space such that frames are parallel to xy plane and the z-axis representing the time, we can probably have a different perception to this movie in space dimension and watching this movie can be looked at as a journey in z-axis with the known past buried under the current frame and the unknown future yet to be seen.

To project the same experience to the 4 dimensions, we better have a feel for 4-dimensional space and then probably do a similar exercise as suggested above. We can perceive orthotopes, rectangles of higher dimensions(cuboid in three dimensions) starting with a 4D hypercube as a projection on a 3D surface, just the way we are able to perceive cube from its projection on a 2D surface.

A rotating cube looks like	A rotating hyper-cube looks like

Courtesy: Click on the images for the source websites of the images
(They are modified from the sources)

As I plan to use this website to project my thoughts from yet another dimension (the discussion of which I save for another post) I name this website, Orthotope

1. In geometry, an orthotope (also called a hyperrectangle or a box) is the generalization of a rectangle for higher dimensions, formally defined as the Cartesian product of intervals.
2. A three-dimensional orthotope is also called a right rectangular prism, rectangular cuboid, or rectangular parallelepiped.
3. A special case of an n-orthotope is the n-hypercube.

^[1]Wide Orders of Magnitude: We, the human beings can now perceive time as small as 10^-44 sec(Planck Time) and as large as 10¹⁸ sec(age of universe), length as small as 10^-35 m(Planck length) and as large as 10²⁶ sec(Diameter of the visible universe), mass as small as 10^-36 kg(mass equivalent of 1 eV) and as large as 10⁵² kg(mass of the visible universe)

Tags: Introduction, Orthotope, Random thoughts, Science