karma, reincarnation, and conservation

suppose you believed in reincarnation -- in that case, is there some sort of a law of conservation of "souls"?
that is, the total number of "souls"that exists is a constant, its just that the manifestations are different.

couple of thoughts:
1. the definition of what has a soul is fuzzy -- does a single-celled amoeba have a soul?
2. it seems that the total number of life-forms is in fact increasing over time (even not counting bacteria, amoeba etc). this seems to contradict what little i understand of karma etc, the number of souls is strictly decreasing over time (some attain moksha).

qotd

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

--Upton Sinclair

via "Super Crunchers" Ian Ayres

depressingly true ..

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=944

crossie spam

im getting spam with subject lines looking like cryptic crossword clues :-).

"food in order left children in Langley"

hilarious :-)

public libraries and piracy

the music/movie companies seem hell-bent on going after p2p apps. i wonder how much market share they lose because of public libraries -- i would imagine that many decent public libraries have a good music/movie collection and that members can easily rip/copy the songs/movies when they check them out.

wonder if these folks have looked at how much revenue they lose because of public libraries.

i guess the riaa/mpaa could
a. go after public libraries to shut them down or stop supplying them with audio/video content
b. introduce specialized drm-ed versions for public libraries/lending services

in hindsight
a. this also applies to dvd/cd sharing services that are physical p2p apps
b. book publishers as well -- why wouldnt they want all readers to purchase rather than use libraries .. and why dont they make nearly as much a fuss as the riaa/mpaa folks?

the answer seems to be that electronic media significantly reduce the overhead of sharing and amplify the potential revenue loss .. and so theres not much to be gained by going after the physical p2p/sharing models.

piecewise linear vs smooth interpolation

suppose you are given a bunch of points on a plane. is the natural thing to consider a smoothly interpolated curve passing through the points or do a piecewise-linear join of the points

(it seemed to me that when the points have an naturally appealing polygon shape, then the piecewise linear interpolation occurs, otherwise the tendency is to draw a smooth curve through the points)

confusing energies

why it there a temptation to press harder against a button in the hope that the bulb burns brighter -- must be case of the brain misfiring, and mixing up different forms of energy.

motd

"Keeping up the appearance of having all your marbles is hard work but important. Anyway, Im not really addled. I just have more facts to keep track of than other people"


-- "Water for Elephants", Sara Gruen

qotd

it is melancholy to think that such wonderful perseverance should have been wasted in so vain a pursuit, and that energies so unconquerable should have had no worthier field to strive in.

-- charles mackay in "extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" on the alchemist bernard of treves

(could just have well been someone talking about me and minesweeper :-) )

research extending life

is it just me -- why is it that most of the research around us is primarily focused on extending life?

twinkle twinkle little star

what the heck does it mean for a star to twinkle, i have no clue what twinkling means and ive not seen a star "twinkle"

evolution ..

in high school when we were taught things about evolution/natural selection -- i somehow got the impression that species were explicitly trying to adapt to their environment, i.e., each animal somehow consciously tries to grow a longer tail or sharper claws or change its color to survive better.

now that i understand it slightly better this mistaken notion has since been dispelled -- its not the case that each species/animals consciously try to adapt -- the truth couldnt be farther away from this. the truth is that random shit happens, and the random shit that turns out to be best adapted to the current environment has greater probability of survival and there is an observational bias -- we only see those species that have the beaks/claws/colors best suited to the environment (the rest have been exterminated!), giving us the impression of some conscious effort by species to adapt to their surroundings.

optimally sizing free samples

whats the tradeoff between how many/much of a free sample give away. presumably you want to give enough so that it is sufficient to get the user to form a habit of using the product and then have them hooked on (not addicted just mere habit forming). at the same time you dont want to give away too much since it obviously eats into a potential market and also incurs losses.

wonder if there are some studies on how long an activity should be sustained for it to become subconsciously ingrained as a habit?

reality check

"There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed."

--"a mind of its own", Cordelia Fine

impact of comp.sci on life

"If you can put in 10 numbers in this survey, that would be great. Just
wanted to know how much impact computer science technologies have
w.r.t. life. This is as close as pure computer science can get to
`saving lives' and so I was curious to see what sort of numbers we
might get."

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=FqsjTtMwGQAHpSR46_2bsG2A_3d_3d


(posted for a friend)

woodpeckers and moral victories

flashback:
http://nicertry.blogspot.com/2006/10/ignobel.html
(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7112/full/443616b.html)

today:
this months natgeo is carrying a short blurb on how the research into woodpeckers headbanging is useful.

i feel like i can claim a moral victory.

credit cards and rental insurance

why do credit card companies cover some portion of the rental car insurance -- it seems like they shouldnt be in the business of doling out rental insurance.

probably, many of the claims that people made for having been wrongfully charged on the credit card had to do with rental car companies (who are known to be pretty strict about damages etc) which id imagine that customers would claim they were wrongfully charged by the rental company and the credit card folks figured it would be cheaper to offer the insurance rather than spend the money in fighting the claims over unfair transactions.

anyone have better ideas?

web crawler question

can search engines find pages that are not linked from anywhere else?

if so, what sort of crawler functionality do they need to achieve this.

slowing down ..

why do i invariably slow down to be extra careful in situations even though there is evidently no threat of physical danger, and there should (theoretically) be no correlation between the speed and accuracy of mental computation!

{again based on observations from minesweeper}

fan speed ordering

the fans ive observed in the US have the fan speeds ordering: (off, max, max-1, max-2,...)

--> this makes sense if there is a binary choice users want -- either you want the fan turned on at full-speed (e.g., in summer) or turned off. makes sense in that it minimizes the number of state changes between desired and undesired states.
but if for some reason, users wanted an intermediate speed, then it is suboptimal since it may require more state changes


the fans ive observed in India have the fan speeds ordering: (off, 1,2,..,max)
--> this makes sense if the user wanted to figure out what speed-level wants, and then wants the fan in that state for a long time. but i cant figure out why users in India would want this -- presumably they want a fan with just a binary choice (off or on-at-highestspeed) given that summers are more brutal in tropical climates.

mast kalandar!

aug 27, scene 1: random thought at work

was listening to some hindi song with the refrain "mast kalandar" .. got me thinking -- who/what is this kalandar thing? and more importantly why is it "mast"?

aug 27, scene2: reading an article about pakistan in national geographic sept 2007

"whirling dervishes glorify the shrine of lal shahbaz qalandar, a 13th century sufi saint who preached peace between muslims and hindus. a faith embraced by most pakistanis, barelvi islam combines sunni with shiite and sufi mystical traditions. believers flock by the millions to such zones of peace where the oppressed and the powerful worship side by side"

{dervish: a member of any of various muslim ascetic orders, as the sufis, some of which carry on ecstatic observances, such as energetic dancing and whirling or vociferous chanting or shouting.}

ok .. so the mast kalandar could actually be mast qalandar, and "mast" could be some reference to a state of spritiual enlightenment/fervour associated with the qalandar thingie.

aug 27, scene 3: wikipedia to tie the loose ends

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalandar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_Qalandar

postscript:
actually, i lied a bit. even though i presented the events happening in the order scene 1/2/3 .. reality is that physical access to wikipedia is nearer than to the latest issue of natgeo .. thus the real events went scene1/3/2 -- but the weird coincidence that i should think about qalandar in 1 and see it in part2 on the same day still holds!

the sequence of events presented above (1;2;3) make for more interesting reading than the sequence 1;3;2. ive taken some creative liberty in narrating the events in the order 1;2;3 as it does not take away the essence of the interesting coincidence.

desperately seeking to lose an umbrella

i am desperate to lose my current umbrella. it gets stuck but its still functional enough that i dont want to throw it away but its irritating enough that i want to get rid of it.
any novel ideas for how to lose an umbrella without feeling guilty about the loss ,i.e., new and interesting ways of being absent minded

lax policy enforcement

A. How to steal a book from a library:

If you happen to take a book that has not been officially checked out the library has some sort of detector that checks if the item has been demagnetized or not (something that happens only when you officially checks out). in case the item has not been demagnetized an alarm goes off and a security guard asks for your receipt .. theres apparently a non trivial false alarm rate which entails the manual check.

however, heres a simple trick: officially check out item A but steal items B,C.... when the alarm goes off show the receipt for item A and the guard will let you go.

easy fixes:
1. always check all belongings when alarm goes off (high cost for consumers and security guard)
2. keep item A aside and make you walk through the detector again (if it still rings do step 1)


B. How to get free soda at a fast food joint:
simple thing is to ask for a cup for water -- they obviously wont deny you a cup. then you can easily get anything you want from the soda vending machine.

fixes:
1. make all filling (soda/water) go through a salesperson (i have seen these in some places)
2. have special water glasses that will make a loud noise if you fill anything else and thus serve as an embarrassing deterrent.
3. make only bottled water available!

in B the cost of implement it seems that the cost of implementing the fix is greater than the perceived benefit, so it probably justifies why stores dont care about the occasional guy stealing soda, but it doesnt seem to be the case in A (since a book/dvd lost means denying access to a potentially large userbase and high overhead in replacement etc).

P.S: I havent really implemented these attacks in practice :-)

gotcha!

finally figured out and downloaded the really catchy tune that i heard last summer being played on hutch commercials

link for the non-classically inclined
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd8HhENZbYg

the classically inclined can continue to despise me.

nice quote from a lousy movie

from "the passenger" a stunningly boring movie starring jack nicholson

"your question reveals more about yourself than my answers will ever reveal about me"

--african witch doctor

news.google.sucky

how can the french open not be in the top-3 stories in the sport section?

maya.

before heading off to sleep last night i thought i saw a cockroach-like insect in the apartment and also thought i had killed it with a rather heavy book.
in the morning when i woke up the insect wasnt to be found -- either it had miraculously recovered and escaped, or the whole thing was just a figment of my imagination .. now im not so sure if i really saw and killed the insect.

made me wonder we need some sort of logging mechanism for the brain would be useful .. it would help to distinguish physically recorded events and things that are just figments of imagination .. which leads to the question of whether it is really possible to distinguish between observations and what we think to be observations (my intuition is that the neurological patterns characterizing real events and imagined events would be quite similar, i.e. the same set of neurons fire both in the real and imagined worlds) ?


p.s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_%28illusion%29

"crazy people dont sit around wondering if they are nuts"

--from "proof"

knot-free headphones

would be a really useful thing to have .. the stupid headphones keep getting tangled up all the time .. wonder if people can come up with simple idea to make these knot-free (the only idea i can come up with is use materials that have some sort of memory to retain shape http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_memory_alloy )

moong dal from australia!

was surprised to see the moong dal from the indian grocery store saying "product of australia" (its an indian brand though!)

it takes a good movie to break the silence :-)

das leben der anderen -- highly recommended.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/

levis

why imprint the sizes outside .. either people dont care or they explicitly try and hide what their true size is. in either case it doesnt make any business sense to actually visibly display the size. unless its just a historic brand symbol that they have come to be associated with -- sort of the rugged/utilitarian feel that we dont give a damn about the fashion sense given the background in which levis/denim came about it makes some sense (they were meant as workwear for hard labour .. not the casual wear that we have come to think of it as).
wonder if they do the same thing for women's wear or the more upscale denim varieties or if its only for the basic line?

more quotes

"Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived".
--oscar wilde

"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next"
--ralph waldo emerson


(via "The God Delusion" - Richard Dawkins)

blogs and web graphs

i wonder if the amazing rise in the number of blogs has significantly altered the structure of the web-graph. extrapolating from a limited perspective of the blogosphere there seem to be more small-cliques forming this way than in the "regular" (if ever there was such a thing) web structure. i imagine at the macroscopic level (degree distributions and powerlaws) it wouldnt have any serious impact because those are just simply how natural human pheomena seem to manifest themselves .. but at some finer granularity are there a lot more (semi-)partitioned small communities in the graph now ?

one thing is certain .. im sure some data mining grad students out there are churning out papers on this

buses, thrills, and happiness

is there more reason to be happy if something happens by accident as opposed to be design .. theres some inherent thrill/greater sense of happiness in catching a bus just in time and sprinting for it rather than looking up schedules and landing up at the bus stop at the prescribed time.

somehow goes back to my earlier thoughts on happiness/RG -- there are few absolutes, most are only relative measures. happiness essentially translates into a effort vs. reward tradeoff or expectation vs. realization tradeoff.

"jesus is alive"

so am i .. whats the bloody point

{response to a sign seen on the highway}

first names

ive recently come to realize that its very rarely that i use the first name when referring to people. im more comfortable using pronouns or whenever possible completely avoid nouns. when i email/chat its usually "hey, hi" not "hey joe or hi joe". somehow subconsciously the use of the first name seems to imply some degree of familiarity with the persons and that the familiarity falls into some well-defined role. incidentally, the use of terms of like "dude, man, da" are amazingly useful substitutes for a name when talking to a guy.

what is additionally enlightening in this context is the fact that my nephew consciously avoids using my name when referring to me in a conversation, not only in a one-on-one conversation but even when trying to use a name whie talking about me to someone else. In this case I think the kid is confused on the actual role and the nature of the interaction between us -- Im supposed to be the "older uncle" but I also happen to play (reasonably competitively i may add :-) ) at his level so he probably also views me as a play buddy. Im assuming that there is a fairly decent level of familiarity so the only confusion arises because of the fuzziness in the definition of the roles.

In my case, the reluctance to use the first name has little to do with the definition of the interaction (i think this is a reasonable assumption to make). It just seems to me that using the first name is a big leap for me in terms of familiarity/conversational commitment so its a safer bet to avoid it. The other serious difference is that I have no problem using the name in a conversation with a third-party (as opposed to my nephew who doesnt .. whether hes making a conscious attempt to be funny or whether hes actually confused on how to refer to me i dont know for sure)

"Whats in a name" you might argue: I agree there is nothing in the name per se, but the process of using the name seems to be associated at some lower level with other things. If all of us had number tags (for those close to networking research you might think of "semantic free referencing" :-) ) , would I be comfortable referring to you using your number? I dont really know ..

So
1. if we are on talking terms, and
2. youve never seen me referring to you with your first name, and
3. have actually noticed it, and you have a problem with it
please let me know :-) and i shall re-evaluate the situation and/or consciously try and use your name more often.

pleased with self

" thunbam nergayil yaazh yeduthu nee inbam serka maattaya" i have been thinking that this song was in Desh for the last week or so ... finally got around to confirming it .. pleased with a sense of achievement for the first time in many months :-)

YALFM*

at some point you stop learning new things and just become more efficient at applying what you already know. thats the point at which you cease to be human and become just a mindless automaton. time to move on.

{* -- yet another lesson from minesweeper}

decision making

people think about making decisions under uncertain environments but with well defined objectives.

it seems that making decisions under poorly defined or undefined objectives is much harder (should i go eat good food or play .. how much do i value good food vs play?) .

joy is ..

finally getting rid of a can of shaving cream that youve had for a really long time that youve hated for ever but couldnt get rid of it because it would mean wasting resources

finally relieved of this misery ..

ADD

cant read any blog post more than 4 sentences long these days .. damn :-(

why do we have a predilection to eat crunchy things?

econ. books = treasure trove of nice quotes!

"it is said that figures dont lie but liars figure. perhaps a more serious problem is that honest people figure carelessly. the antidote is careful attention to exactly what is being measured and how it differs from what you would really like to measure if you could"

-- the armchair economist, steven landsburg

geek selling power

how would you like a large population of people who are willing to canvass and sell your product for little or no fee. even better if the opinions of these people are respected by others. pretty sure this is precisely the freebie ploy used by companies in colleges. im guessing that people would trust young/geeky folks on matters of technical advice and if these people are observed to be obviously flaunting some particular product (e.g. google t-shirts) then they are likely to trust the product even though the advertising media (the bearer of the freebie) is oblivious to the marketing ploy

ceo salaries and academic tenure

read an interesting argument in the armchair economist which tries to explain why the top ceos (even those in arguably failing companies) take home very high salaries and even if they are sacked are given very attractive severance packages. the argument is that most shareholders (at least the bigger players) have diversified stock holdings and the failure of one company doesn't affect them seriously. however they stand to benefit significantly if a particular risky investment pays off with huge returns. thus they have very strong incentives to encourage ceos to take on high-risk high-reward projects and the high salaries are essentially a buffer mechanism to assuage any fears the ceos may have of massive financial distress in the event of the project failing to yield the expected return.
couldn't help but imagine the parallels with the academic tenure system. faculty are evaluated after the tenure period and given academic tenure, essentially giving the guarantee the position for the entire lifetime even if they are absolutely unproductive. on one hand the system seems flawed, there is no real penalty for senior professors to become very unproductive. on the other hand the above economic argument would suggest that universities (the investors or shareholders) have massively diversified assets -- the non productivity of one faculty member does not devalue the universities reputation. but if a high risk high reward project succeeds bringing in huge visibility (and of course funding) the university stands to gain a lot -- tenure is essentially the buffer (similar to the high salary) to encourage senior professors to take on riskier projects (of course no one cares about graduate students, they are a low investment and low return of investment since they will graduate and go elsewhere!)

contradiction

http://us.rediff.com/wc2007/2007/feb/24kapil.htm

first half, says pick a young guy and groom him
second half, says pick sourav

as much as we would like it to be otherwise, sourav is not young.

one more quote via woody allen

The only absolute knowledge attainable by man is that life is meaningless

-- leo tolstoy via "hannah and her sisters"

who funds chocolate research?

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/16732194.htm

wonder who keeps funding these studies that keep saying chocolate is good for you, however reassuring these are it leaves you in doubt as to the motives of the research :-)

update:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/19/AAAS.TMP says:
"Scientists funded in part by the Mars Inc. candy company"

qotd

So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.
- ben franklin (via "The Omnivore's Dilemma")

going where the bus takes you

waiting at the bus stop .. one of two options . .given the inability to decide on the destination the best option is to hop on the first available bus and go where it takes you .. thats life ..