A story of satanic convenience

Struggling in a pensive quicksand, he drew his last strength to trudge uphill in a remote hope of finding his horizon; only to meet an ashen sky drenched in an early morning fog with a dull greeting reflection from an ocean now at his feet. His mind wondered if he had a choice while his body prepared for the chill and impact of his imminent plunge. Light, sound and regret all submerged in a deafening silence and apathy. He had again opted for the default- a path of least action, presuming he had an option.

With a few rehearsed motions of his lean frame he found himself regaining balance and breath, so he paused to collect himself. Meanwhile in close vicinity, a fairy had fallen, not to her sins but at the caprice of the ocean. As natural order would have it- The silence and apathy of solitude gave way to shared warmth of mutual embrace.

To each lick of her sore, she asked who he was. "Satan" he diffidently replied each time. Fixing each other they began to converge. In the stupor of this merging existence he thought to himself if they were anything more than conveniently arrayed on this wave of time. Little did he know that the albatross of convenience borne by him; was secretly endorsed by her too. It all came down to one question: could he love the Satan in her and could she love the Fairy in him?

Supercondensed summary: A story of a selfish guy who does whatever is convenient to him, but he's faced with his own hypocrisy when he finds it uneasy to accept that he's not the only one who does "what's convenient". The selfish guy is me.

The K-Map Minimizer

Motivation: The K-Map minimizers I found over the net had an upper limit to the no: of variables they could handle in a Boolean expression. I could not grasp why something that’s based on an axiom as simple as X+X'=1 has not been generalized for n variables, where n is arbitrarily large.

On closer examination I found what kept us from finding a generalized solution. Often we look at things not as they are but as we are. We (humans) follow a Top to Bottom approach to solve Karnaugh Maps i.e. finding patterns on a '0' '1' matrix. That’s not how computers need to solve it. K-Maps are visual aids for humans, which are redundant for computers. Here I present a Bottom-up approach at solving a Boolean function which treats minterms as elements that "mate" to evaluate the function. A pdf elaborating my approach can be found here.

Fatal Approximation

I stood in a corner of a room a little too dark for my weary eyes and fuzzy state of mind to determine its shape. Its smokiness resembled the chaos the day gone by, particles drunk on the idea of Brownian motion. A familiar tune played in a distant background, a little too distant to be generated in the same space as me.

With each sip of my drink, my senses made truce with the smokiness and pungency of the room and my mind with the haunting uncertainty that precedes a tomorrow.

The light source in the room shied, creating a perfect canvas for human outlines ending changing moving at the whim of the spirit in my glass, save the blue one.

It seemed to grow, unhurried moving towards me. My pupils could dilate no further to see the sly on the face enveloped by blue proclaiming its independence from the liquid now in my stomach crunching my guts, but my heart felt it.

Mumbled words "Love is a fatal approximation of reality" knocked on my ear drums with a husky female voice, part of me that was still awake confirmed registry. I wondered if the words were a part of the song or emanated from the outline that now had a scent.

"It has a will of its own, it makes you believe what it wants" I answered more to myself than the scent and the outline.

"What does? Love or reality?"

"How does it matter now? I made the approximation dint I?"

"Men live by choices and approximations; it’s wiser to avoid the fatal ones"

My lips contorted in a scorn "Only if you know which ones are fatal" I muttered.

"Are you ready to make another one tonight?" she asked, but the tone lacked the expectation it generally carries with that particular question.

My hand sandpapered in a deliberate move against the contour of her spine, feeling the metallic friction of our bodies or of the choice we just made.I moistened her neck with warm vapors of my breath as if compensating for the previous gesture.

We kissed...as if writing an endnote to a century of romantic literature. She convulsed in a loose frame made by my arms around her hip. We kissed again as if writing an endnote to each other.

Supercondensed summary:I am drinking in a smoky room after a hard day, a girl walks up to me, we talk nonsense and then we kiss! Twice!

Well, the shirt doesn't seem to come off!!

as the young men forage at a hard earned supper,
street dogs gape with mixed emotions of fear and anticipation,
lights ebb in a calculated rhythm of their cautioned footsteps,
corners lose their distinct geometry; milestones...their measure,
silhouettes of men dissolve in a typical blue murk,
and the clamor of garbled voices is unusually absent,
in revolt of this nothingness, someone hums a flat tone :

...hmmmmm...
will i be missed?
the air wont care...
who's lungs it fills..
saline lips..
funny thing in my eyes..

Supercondensed summary: I am drunk on false collage pride and shit scared of taking on the corporate world. Also theres a sense of nostalgia.