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}