life

accurately depicted here

early vs delayed decision making

do we want to get answers early and know that we have failed earlier .. or do we want to delay decision making until either the situation changes so much that the original decision-question disappeared or the decision made itself thanks to the actions of external forces? i guess a related question is how much control do you want or how much do you trust randomness in the environment? i appear to have argued in the past that delayed decision making is good ( here )

p.s: someone actually had a thesis on a strategy called "win or lose fast" for playing AI games and managed to get an honorable mention for it

p.p.s: its funny the amazing consistency with which i write the p.s/asides before writing the actual content (not that there is much anyway)

unpardonable

just because your login-name is surprisingly close to ur real name doesnt give one the right the arbitrarily chose to assume that the login name is the real name :-(

phonetic biases across language families

would have imagined that the frequency of distribution of phonemes/sounds across languages should be relatively identical. the reason being that i would imagine that there is little genetic variation in the structural makeup of vocal chords and other sound producing entities, which would imply that the sounds which are easiest to produce would find their way into a significant portion of the vocabulary to minimize the difficulty of communication. strangely i observe that different language families have very different probability distributions ( far-east have a lot of "n", middle-east have a lot of "h" etc) .. wonder if there is any linguistic/genetic basis for these or am i just imagining things? strongly suspect the latter (finding observations to fit hypothesis to justify the hypothesis :-) )

effects of globalization ..

i find it odd that the last three pieces of clothing ive bought in the us have all been manufactured in the middle east (jordan, uae, oman) .. surprising because i didnt particularly expect the middle east to have a manufacturing sector that would be profitable, least of all for garments!

music industry, persistence, and self-fulfilling prophecies

continuing in similar vein to the earlier post on music vs books vs movies -- it appears that the appreciation or acceptance of a piece of music often has to do with repeated listening. the more often you listen to something, you invariably end up subconsciously starting to hear it in your head, humming it, "liking" it etc. this has pretty positive implications for big-label music records and popular musicians -- by definition they have more resources at their disposal to ensure that they are very visible (or should i say audible) on radio shows, music channels etc, and thus perpetuating the popularity further .. how do the smaller bands ever manage to break up the monopoly?

deadlines..

geomblog had this interesting post about why deadlines make sense ..
http://geomblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/deadlines-manic-behaviour-and.html

one obvious reason why deadlines make sense is the 80-20 (or is it 90-10) rule .. more than 80% of the work gets done in less than 20% of the time before the deadline

why ignorance is bliss

again a lesson from minesweeper .. performance seems to at its best when you are completely unaware of either your current performance and the objective in mind .. if you know you are close to the target you may tend to speed up (this is common ive noticed this even in school days the temptation to cycle faster once you get near home is very high!) thereby increasing the risk of not reaching the objective.

"like"-minded

why do we like something we read/hear .. more often than not it is because we hear/see what we want to see .. especially in the case of non-fiction books -- invariably i like something because subconsciously/intuitively i already believe what the author is telling me to be true and the discussion serves as a coherent, well-elucidated confirmation of this intution .. i guess when people say like-minded they are implicitly conveying this?

the edge of losing sanity ..

when you dream about muthiah muralitharan scoring a odi century! (and thats the first dream you have remembered in a looong time..)

on avoiding temporal biases in ranking systems

looking at the imdb top250 list .. it is remarkable to see the bias towards recent releases .. for e.g the departed has already made it to the top 200 .. somehow the mechanism doesnt seem to be very robust since there is an inherently positive bias towards recent happenings .. wonder if there are standard statistical techniques to avoid such biases -- but again a classic counter-example is the shawshank redemption which was a huge failure but is still very high on the list due to subsequent dvd successes.

on sustainable eccentricity

how does one decide if a certain form of eccentricity is sustainable or not ..
there are obviously socio-economic factors that arise .. but it does some inherently dependent on the "i dont care/shamelessness" coefficient of an individiual to be non-conformist --> the "i dont care" value is what the eccentric person presumes to be the natural inclination to non-conformism, the "shamelessness" index would be a metric defined by the larger society for the same phenomenon but given a different name for obvious reasons.

aside: scientifically asymmetry seems to be associated with eccentricity .. why else would there be something called the eccentricity of an ellipse .. it appears to arise from a comparison with circles.

exploration styles

top-down vs bottom-up
breadth-first vs depth-first

many questions ..
which is the right approach if you are emabarking on writing a book/thesis?
which tends to happen more in practice?
which is more intuitively obvious?

timescales of religious upheaval

it seems that its been a long time since a major religion took root in the world ..
the time for the new messiah to arrive is quite ripe (at least on statistical evidence), especially since most people are arguably not happy with the state of affairs (both of their own and the world in general) so starting a new religion always makes a lot of economic sense since the incentive to switch is always higher for the consumer than sticking to the current product available.

ignobel?

who decides whether a piece of research qualifies as being ignobel or not ..

makes you ponder --> most research is never seen by the world do all those nameless works of research count as better research than the ignobel research?

also it appears that the committee for deciding ignobel awards tries to trivialize the nature of the research and makes it sound more funny than it actually may be ..

almost always the nature of ignobel research is decided based on the question that the research seeks to answer, under the presumption of course that the question is so esoteric to have no real impact .. this raises two questions
1. what about research that is ignobel because it suffers from methodological pathologies ..
2. a lot of pure-science/pure-math can arguably be quite easily categorized into the class of ideas that can have no tangible impact -- would these guys venture to classify that research as being ignobel?

as a last note .. the ignobel awards have a strong bias towards experimental/measurement studies -- dont see why this should be so!

p.s. the woodpecker research in this years ignobel sounds very legit to me .. this post sponsored (mentally not financially!) in part by that

nails and evolution

wondering why biting fingernails is a common means of expressing stress/tension in humans -- and this phenomenon doesnt seem to be have a cultural bias .. there must be some genetic/biological connection .. coz otherwise i would imagine there would be a wide diversity in the spectrum of symptoms that can be used to express stress.

lost ..

two consecutive days .. been losing stuff in a classroom .. remembering it 5 minutes after the class is over .. quite amazingly recovering the objects without any visible loss!
as a consequence started imagining that i had lost my laptop dongle while in fact i had not ..
senile dementia setting in .. running out of time :-(

did learn a lesson in this madness though --> doesnt matter if you do something wrong as long as you realize youve made a mistake quick enough to recover!