holy cow!

(OR) how economics drives religion ..

consider the religious importance associated with the cow in india. how did the cow get bestowed on itself an important status in religion? there were 3 obvious uses for the cow -- meat, milk, domestic labor. between the three resources provided,
there is an evident tradeoff between immediate return vs long term returns, and individual good vs. greater common good.
one rational alternative is always to pick the immediately optimal/ individual good solution . i.e. to slaughter a cow. the long term/ societal good option is to milk the resources as much as possible (pun intended!) until it is no longer useful and then slaughter it. even if the long term returns outweigh the immediate benefit, it requires some sort of external agency to prevent principals from entering a locally optimal state or to be reasonably altruistic. by associating a divine status to the cow the economists of ancient times effectively ensured that people were forced into the longer-term option which is also more useful for the society.

forex and total order?

does the relationship between currencies follow a total ordering .. otherwise it seems conceivable that one can take advantage of non-monotonicity to make money by simply converting from one currency into another .. and this can be done in an infinite cycle ..

there is one inhibitor though .. every forex transaction involves a surcharge which may possibly nullify any source of profit

bg

does the human brain have a concept of a process .. in particular the notion of a background processing job..how else can you explain the fact that you spend lots of time thinking about a crossword clue and fail to solve it but you get the answer while seemingly doing something totally unrelated?

on religious bias in the creative arts ..

it seems rather conspicuous that the vast majority of musical compositions have a religious bias. it seems rather contrived to assume that spirituality/religion/god provides the best possible motivation for creativity .. from my limited knowledge of modern artistic creations it seems that this is not a pre-requisite and quite a substantial number of compositions are non-religious. why then is the overwhelming majority of creative work in the medieval ages purely religious -- this is not a geographically localized observation .. indian music, western renaissance painting etc have a significant bias towards religious themes. one possible explanation is that the support for the creative arts requires "leisure" in the true sense of the word and unquestioned financial support from someone which is most likely to be the religious/political heads of the time given that they also controlled most of the economies -- the religious heads had an obvious immediate incentive to publicize themselves the political heads naturally used the divine right theory to perpetuate their hegemony and hence also leaned towards religious themes to avoid conflicts with the clergy. art seems like a natural ally to religion .. it enables the
public to swallow the stories with little objection .. in the process get entertained. reminds me of the mary poppins song "a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way" and the gecko ad where the gecko says that the aim is to fool the people into a sense that they are being entertained when they are actually being sold something.

deification ..

imagine you are to become a glorified deity/demigod in the future .. would you consciously change the way you go about things? would you even want to be remembered or would you rather that your existence fades into obscurity?

p.s: {reflections on the ramayana..}

sustainable growth?

if you reflect on the status of the human race almost everything has seen incredible growth in the last century or so .. be it population, pollution, war/conflict, scientific and technological growth .. one cannot but wonder if this growth is sustainable there must come a point where either the growth saturates or becomes unstable or starts to go in the negative direction.
pessimistically speaking, it does appear that we are headed for doom .. and theres not much we can do about it.
maybe we should introduce legislations to force people into exponential backoff, slow down every possible avenue for work, slack off to reduce prooductivity so that we can extend the lifetime of the civilization as we know it.

economics of religion

reading about network effects, network externalities, and price of switching from economics immediately makes one think about how certain religions/religious leaders get substantial following and are able to sustain themselves both during the inception and for extended periods of time .. does seem that at the time of inception there should be substantially favorable conditions for the new religions to hold their own against incumbents and more favorable conditions to survive .. what is indeed amazing is that given the paucity of rational arguments to convince people to gather a following how can one religion differentiate itself sufficiently from the competition to make itself attractive .. i think folks found an easy way out by mixing religion/ethics/society to gain a large enough spectrum of features for differentiation.

silence is golden

often the best tool available to a composer to enhance the quality of a composition is silence .. interspersing bits of silence amidst music can significantly add to the overall effect .. kinda ironic though ..

chicken or egg

is language a prerequisite for intelligence? realized that when i imagine something im thinking in ascii .. the letters spelling out the thing im thinking of show up instead of some physical memory of that object .. its not clear if knowing a language is necessary to carry forward intelligent thought .. language seems to help communicate ideas and bring some rigor/clarity but its not entirely obvious if its necessary

variables vs constants

suppose you were to try and give a mathematical model for something .. in theory the important thing is to identify the variables and dependencies/constraints among the variables .. in practice the most important thing is to identify the constants in the formulation.

decision making

other day .. went to a restaurant the waitress enquires if i want my water with ice or no ice -- my answer to her was "i dont care!" which made me realize that all my life's decision making has come down to one of two things -- a long list of items on a dont-care list and an even longer list of items that i genuinely dislike .. these lists are about the only things that control my activities as of now .. im guessing given the rate at which these lists have been growing, soon the entire universe will be in one of these two lists .. and then moksha!

good luck is a bad thing

dont be happy when you are lucky .. good fortune is irritating .. it never reveals the true pitfalls that lie ahead, it doesnt help you callibrate your effort/return of investment, it causes an overwhelming sense of guilt of getting undeserved success, its a blinding opiate that hides the true troubles

imperfect world

from http://us.rediff.com/sports/2006/jul/06paes.htm?q=tp&file=.htm

"In another doubles match, Mark Knowles of Bahrain and Daniel Nestor of Canada, seeded third, were stretched into the longest doubles Grand Slam match by Simon Aspelin and Todd Perry."

A little googling reveals that knowles plays for bahamas not bahrain .. they do have the same three-letter abbreviation in country codes though ..

all of us are conmen

some better at it than others. all your life you are conning people .. first you con your poor mother to bear you for nine months of torture, then you con your parents to support you socially/financially, then you con the school academic system into believing that you understood their ideas, then you con the workplace into a sense of indispensability, you con society into providing you with resources at your disposal, you con yourself into a state of meaningfulness of existence, by the time you are dead you con people into remembering only nice things about you (i do believe that by and large it is still unacceptable in society to insult the dead..)

p.s. (i dont know if there is a gender-neutral version of the word conman)

poetry ..

is not unlike a badly written research paper.

it is the art of obfuscating the obvious, obscuring the most evident of facts in complicated jargon and meaningless juxtaposition of words, often with unnecessary adjectives and adverbs.

never really understood why people rave about poems -- prose is a much better medium to get the message across, and often since theres not much of a message to put across in the world most of the time, theres not much to gain by hiding it!