recipe for the great indian story

ingredients:
1. politics
2. religion
3. family
4. partition
5. temple-mosque fights
6. cricket
7. romance

method:
mix all ingredients together. order, quantity, quality dont matter!

garnishing:
a. throw in references from the ramanyana and the mahabharata, and occasionally the quran
b. sprinkle some undertones of suppressed homosexual tendencies

how to consume:
burn it, smear some ashes on your forehead, mix the rest with water and drink it

p.s: source of inspiration = Vikram Seth :-)

mein kampf

Contrary to the seriousness of the title this is yet another flippant reference to Seinfeld..

Im eternally grateful to my ex-roomie for indoctrinating me with the Seinfeld-phenomenon. I've been an ardent almost
rabid follower for the last 2 1/2 years now, and needless to say have pretty much seen all the episodes at least
thrice. Unfortunately, it also seems that there might be a few episodes that I may have missed despite my steadfast devotion
and strict adherence to the daily evening and nightly rituals of watching old-reruns on fox. There is some amazing appeal to
Seinfeld, practically knowing each episode by-rote does not seem to in any way lessen the fun in watching it again.

And so the quest for the unseen seinfeld episode continues...

mangoes

"To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman"

-- from "A Suitable Boy" by Vikram Seth

more on mangoes later.

the opposite

made an incredible number of bad judgement calls over the last week..

reminded of this seinfed episode where george decides to the absolute opposite of whatever his mind tells him to do
http://www.tv.com/seinfeld/the-opposite/episode/2326/summary.html

maybe i should take a cue from that and try it!

Joblessness: harry potter alter ego

You scored as Severus Snape. Well you're a tricky one aren't you? Nobody quite has you figured out and you'd probably prefer it stayed that way. That said you are a formidable force by anyone's reckoning, but there is certainly more to you than a frosty exterior and a bitter temper.



Now .. I have to wait for many more months before I find out if Im a hero or a villain.. Any thoughts?

defining god

heres a rather amateurish attempt;

god = argmin_h L(h), the hypothesis with minimum description cost over the
set of all possible hypotheses.

L is the description length of h -- the number of bits required to explain different
observations with hypothesis h.

L(h) = sum_o {l_h(o)}, where o ranges of the set of observations you want to explain, i.e, each observation o has some description cost l_h(o) to be "adequately" explained by the hypothesis h.

Now, the hypothesis h which requires the smallest effort to explain the observations is 'god'

does this seem a reasonably meaningful description of god?

Where I see it failing:
1. modeling appropriate cost functions
2. handling observations that may contradict each other
{modeling contradictions would incur infinite cost, implying that either god doesnt exist or everything is god}

p.s. its a bloody pain to typeset math!

interesting news article

posted on slashdot.org

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060211/sc_space/mindcontrolbyparasites

now I finally have a rational explanation for my behavioral patterns :-)

tick-tock vs tick-tick

Does the second hand of an analog clock go tick-tock or tick-tick? I dont know the answer to the question and my initial experiments with my alarm clock suggest that I can convince my brain to perceive it going both ways.

karakkatakaran

I dont know why Im even doing this .. but I was reminded of this pretty old tamil movie and I thought I should enlighten the world on this "piece of art".

The Hero:
Ramarajan --> If you can tolerate his tight-fitting, obscenely colored silk kurtas
you must either be color-blind or be a part of the Parisian fashion elite.

The Heroine:
As usual a nonentity who can dance a bit and run around, and needless to say shed a lot of glycerine induced tears under stress.

Enter The Sidekicks:
By far the most interesting part of the movie. The rather legendary "vazhaippazham" joke was the contribution of this movie to tamil literature.

The Plot thickens:

Nothing much to say here unfortunately. Hero, heroine with some dance-rivalry and
ancient connections. In the end all ends well (otherwise the movie wont sell in India) and the villain gets impaled by an enraged bull in front of a temple (now if thats not imaginative what is!)

Asides:
The reason I got reminded of this movie was this song "ooru vittu ooru vanthu kathal keethal pannatheenge" --> if you dont know tamil dont bother.
{or if Im allowed to make a more outrageous claim .. if u dont understand tamil ur existence is even more meaningless than it already is}

how a cs guy interprets life

1. Soccer vs. American football:

Soccer is infinitely more interesting than football. There is only so much you can achieve with a single hop communicatio channel (football). Multihop channels (soccer) have significantly more interesting patterns and more importantly failure modes which make for more interesting viewing.

2. Chinese vs. Indian languages:

Chinese tends to have very small description length words for many situations and objects. Native speakers can compress ridiculous amounts of information into a small written piece or spoken conversation. Naturally, chinese is harder to learn because it involves building up a much larger dictionary than most other languages. Compression using a larger dictionary intuitively will be better (indices into dictionaries only take logarithmic space).

3. Sampras vs. Agassi:

Sampras is a pain to watch because he had no evident failure modes in his game. The lack of any perceivable vulnerability makes him a not-so-interesting entity. Agassi on the other hand is exciting to watch because his game has visible failure and success modes, and the distribution varies game to game.

life is over-rated