abolish periodicities

all periodic events should be banned
especially festivals, recurrent holiday themes, weekly cycles etc
life should be poisson

difference between

a good player and a great player:

A great player makes every failure of his look like it was due to bad luck or some extraordinary event!


Case in point: Sachin tendulkar -- every time he gets bowled/lbw he makes it look like the ball kept low or had some exaggerated movement or the umpire made a mistake!

random idea for nfl

maybe they need something like this:
chuck

find a really light guy .. launch him along with the ball into the end zone to score touchdowns :-)

one line summary of my life

I refuse to be a member of a club that would have me as a member -- Groucho Marx

wish list

get smarter
work harder
be happy

rediscovering ilaiyaraja

currently ringing in my head

yamunai atrile -- dalapathi
do anything -- how to name it
yerikkarai poongatre -- thooral ninnu pochu
how to name it -- how to name it
kanne kalaimane -- moonram pirai
thenpandi seemayile -- nayagan
maniye manikuyile -- nadodi thenral
ponmalai pozhuthu -- nizhalgal
ilaiya nila -- payanangal mudivathillai
pooongathave -- nizhalgal
inji iduppazhaga -- devar magan
anthi mazhai -- raja paarvai

on a different note: apologies for poor adherence to capitalization on this blog

copter game

http://www.seethru.co.uk/zine/south_coast/helicopter_game.htm

used to be a long-time addiction of mine -- awesome game

one of the nice things about the game is that its memoryless -- the amount of time/distance
that you will survive henceforth is independent of how long you have covered so far

update: I think I was blabbering there is a tangible increase in difficulty
with increasing scores

continuing on games try 3-D table tennis on www.mousebreaker.com

1 down, 1 to go

had two things on my todo list at the beginning of the semester

1. get a google t-shirt

2. find a thesis/graduate


first has been achieved today (dont know how much credit I can take for it though) ..

Definitely dont know how long item 2 will take ..

cribs with hitchcock

imdb/other reviews rave about hitchcock movies -- commending thrill/suspense/storyline/film making etc

ive seen the following movies: the man who knew too much, vertigo, north by northwest, rear window (in that order)

the plots were very ordinary, the suspense was non-existent, there was absolutely no twists in the tale .. the film making is hard to comment since it requires a deeper understanding of the context and the technology available at the time

only thing that was marginally interesting -- the dialogues

obituary of an unknown paper

this is to announce that all life support systems were summarily withdrawn..

may it and i rest in peace!

interesting links..

http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/proof.html

http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/parable.html

ambition ??

ive been told this many times by many people that I appear to have no ambition whatsoever in life and lack initiative/motivation

im open to ideas on what a good ambition would be ...

turing machines for paper generation..

Well .. we've heard about the random paper generator .. which i dont think deserved the kind of publicity it got because there was nothing particularly interesting in the kinds of tricks the folks used to generate the text !

was wondering if someone could come up with a good algorithm for automatically generating papers for certain types of conferences.. most conferences appear to have fairly set rules and
pre-conditions for acceptance ( x pages of evaluation, y graphs, z amount of related work, a fairly area sensitive set of buzzwords (incremental deployment, adversarial analysis etc etc ) )

remember reading some roald dahl story about a guy who came up with a machine to generate novels/stories (you could specify the genre, the length etc) and bought authors to just endorse the stories

wonder if someone could come up with this .. would help researchers spend their time more usefully in doing actual research than having to spend ridiculous amounts of time writing just to make sure the paper is accepted !

euphemisms for joblessness

two interesting ways of saying you are jobless:


1. I am evaluating heuristics for NP-hard problems ( == playing minesweeper)

2. I am in deep introspection, reflecting on my work and productivity

playing for fun vs. playing to win !

In most cases you would imagine that a person plays something to have fun predominantly ...
unfortunately my brain isnt quite wired with a good definition of fun .. so i have to resort to the mercenarial attitude while playing too -- its kinda sad coz that completely rules out games/activities without a statistical scoring function


Even while playing silly online games against totally unknown opponents (or against none !)-- where there seems to be really very little incentive to win (other than possibly increasing ur score in someway ) I end up getting stressed when things get close ..

Enough Said -- I SUCK !

more thoughts on life/research

important principles to adhere to ..

1. risk minimization/diversification -- self-explanatory

2. adversarial analysis -- thinking like your adversary(= reviewer) and addressing his concerns

3. look and feel / feel good factors -- way more important than one might imagine them to be

4. persistence -- if all else fails this is surely a clincher

on a less serious note ..

here are two amazing examples of my incredible incompetence ..

1. I went for taking the written driver's licence test -- the guy asked me to look into something and read line 4 .. I look in rather casually (assuming that it was a iris scan) and said "line 4" (assuming that was for some voice recongnition/recording) .. needless to stay the guy was stunned beyond imagination at the total absence of intelligence and was even more shocked to see that i passed (only by the narrowest of margins )

I swear this is true .. and I did not do it on purpose (unlike a few amazing guys I know who would deliberately do such things)

2. Got down at an amtrak station and needed to take a bus to get home .. bus stop in downtown is a not-so-unreasonable 4-5 blocks away from the station .. Well .. I spent 1 hour finding it .. (with a heavy 50 pound loaded suitcase dragged) all over downtown at night


more reasons for me to avoid getting into the real world ..

pitfalls of derived existence

two diverse examples:

1. people's emotions and day to day lives driven by the success/failures of the sports teams/sportspersons they like

2. some "social activists" seeking to justify their existence by claiming to help the under-privileged

in both cases I would like to argue that the thing that you use to justify your state of existence
or use to give "meaning" to your life are questionable causes

the only self consistent philosophy appears to be meaninglessness of existence ..

reasons to go to grad school

1. its a sinecure ( if you are already in grad school theres a good chance that you saw this in your GRE word lists and know what that means)
2. you dont need a clock or a calendar -- time is one continuum
3. present the least possible threat to society -- nothing you do can impact the world outside !
4. minimze your social interactions with the real world -- no social obligations responsibilites
5. reducing your metabolism to absolute minimum levels
6. avoid sunlight/UV related diseases


will keep adding to this list ..

questions to workaholics ..

1. Is there really that much work to be done in the world?
--> Do you really need to put in 80 hr weeks , continuous all-nighters etc etc

2. What drives you .. Do you stop to wonder why you are doing what you are doing ?

this concept of heavy duty work or at least pretending to be working your ass off seems to be a recurrent phenomenon in different fields -- the most pronounced among them being people
in management, financial institutions, academia -- and arguably none of these categories of people do anything useful

I really fail to see answers to questions 1 and 2.. If you know any good answers please let me know

mercenarial approach to life

Warning -- this is a silly, illogical, irrational post

Heres a brief attempt at a description of a mercenarial approach to life:

Assume your current state of existence is y. Define some objective function , which obviously depends on the current state y. ( Given my proclivity to a memoryless approach, I will not allow the objective to be a function of history before y). Optimize the objective function f(y)

There are two clear problems:
1. suppose the objective function in state y is actually defined in terms of an ability to get to a state y' --> then it cannot be guaranteed that at every point along the path taken the similar objective will hold -- thus a myopic approach can lead to local sub-optimalities
2. suppose you are unable to define an objective function for all states -- then in such states your existence will become meaningless -- and my guess is that such states always exist unless you define meaningless objective functions , which then means that your existence is meaningless anyway.

one algorithm suffices for the brain

the only useful algorithm in the brain is nearest neighbor search

1. you can almost always con anyone into believing that you understand stuff by employing some variant of nearest neighbor search and yapping away nearest pattern matches to the topic of interest

2. it is of tremendous use in quizzes, trivia contests, examinations etc -- for most conceivable metrics used for measuring your "intelligence" a nearest neighbor algorithm suffices either for getting the answer or more importantly for convincing the questioner of your competence to answer to the question

3. it is amazingly useful for supposedly high intelligence examinations involving complex formulas

the only hard part then is building up a knowledge base and an appropriate set of distance metrics on which to operate

happiness == RG ?

If you do not understand RG -- dont read on

If you do -- and you havent read the last two posts -- go read them

Continuing on the ramblings about happiness/sadness , it can be abstracted into an RG function over either time (in which the relative grading is with respect to an instance of yourself ) or
space ( over the set of individuals/groups/communities that you deem as a good set for comparison)

RG is thus the all-encompassing phenomenon in life and possibly the only necessary concept a brain should come hard wired with
Long live RG !

random question of the day ..

ever seen the flashing lights on an ambulance or a police car ..
often its the case there are more than two flashlights on the same vehicle ..
would the flashing lights have maximum user impact if they flashed in phase or out of phase?
does the answer depend on the colors of the lights?

emotions are not natural

heres a possibly controversial hypothesis: the human mind does have a concept of emotion (happy, sad, good, bad, angry) by default. the mind only has a concept of physical senses .. all emotions are basically database lookups into historical associations with physical sensations. if you had no memory then you wouldnt be able to associate the current to any previously recorded incident to compare and contrast your current state of existence with respect to the recorded history.

life should be memoryless

the root cause of most sorrow is not desire as buddhist philosophy suggests. I would argue that memory is the root cause of sorrow. imagine you were memoryless .. you would probably have no concept of sorrow since you do not have a historical model of either sorrow or happiness to relate to. so live your life in a streaming model -- have only a small constant amount of memory and only spend a small amount of your resources thinking about the present cause you dont have too much time to process whats happening .

nihilism: the seinfeld approach to life

From Wikipedia:

Nihilism literally means belief in nothing. As a philosophical position, nihilism is the view that the world, and especially human existence, is without meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value.

From Seinfeld:
Everyone is doing a show about something .. lets do a show about nothing ..

research papers

most of the time the only thing that pops into my mind is hans christian anderson's "The Emperor's New Clothes" , people seem to be forced into seeing something glorious, fanciful, and absolutely new ... well I tend to agree more with the little kid in the story

blatant plagiarism from monty python

You see, our experts describe you as an appallingly dull fellow, unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab and awful. And whereas in most professions these would be considerable drawbacks, in grad school they are a positive boon.

time paradox

Time is funny .. especially if you are in grad school .. On short timescales time appears to move rather slowly (eg: i have to really struggle to keep myself entertained for the next 10 mins or until 5pm everyday, whichever comes first) On longer timescales time appears to move rather fast (eg: I have no clue what I have done in the last month, semester, year) etc.