towards more incomprehensibility

everything is linear on a log-log plot!

2011-09-20T15:05:00.001-04:00

portmanteau of the day

2011-09-19T22:16:00.001-04:00

{$deadline}stache -- effect of forgetting to shave close to deadline-x

the wall

2011-09-17T19:29:00.001-04:00

Throughout his career Dravid's was an image of a man unsatisfied, of a man who despite all his achievements and humility, was struggling to prove something to himself, more than to the outside world.

chi-ku-ba!

2011-09-17T03:30:00.001-04:00

feels like i got a (free) 1500$ carwash

2011-09-16T15:24:00.002-04:00

pictures and thousand words etc. etc.

2011-09-11T00:09:00.003-04:00

i dont recall having seen a movie from the title and the description, but 2 seconds into the movie, i realize ive seen it already.

(dis)agree

2011-09-11T00:03:00.001-04:00

sometimes the best way to disagree is to quickly agree

language skills learned recently

2011-09-08T12:02:00.000-04:00

TIL
STGM
TL;DR

Hyphenated last names

2011-09-07T18:25:00.001-04:00

Why dont we see hyphenated last names of length > 2?

Length is too easy an argument ...

trivia

2011-09-07T13:21:00.002-04:00

the problem with poor garbage collection is you never know what random historical reference will pop up

that's the frailty of genius john, it needs an audience

2011-09-04T01:48:00.001-04:00

-- via sherlock ..

law of inverse relevance

2010-09-11T17:56:00.001-04:00

"The less you intend to do about something, the more you have to keep talking about it.

(from yes minister)

qotd

2010-08-30T10:24:00.000-04:00

in the absence of choice, rationality prevails.

--anon

floaters

2010-08-30T10:22:00.001-04:00

why do these eye floaters appear orange/ant-like?

sleep in motion

2010-08-30T10:20:00.002-04:00

why does a moving car/bus/train cause people to get into sleep mode?

is it related to why babies are put in rocking cradles etc?

(for some reason the movement does not really extend to airplanes)

does being in a bigger vehicle make people more rash drivers?

2010-05-22T14:28:00.001-04:00

shuttle/truck/bus drivers seem more rash than those in compact cars :-)

maybe that size gives them a feeling of invincibility?

sizing toileteries in hotels?

2010-05-22T14:27:00.003-04:00

the things that hotels give you seem rather wasteful. maybe they should have variable sized soap/shampoos etc depending on the length of the reservation.

airline seat assignment?

2010-05-22T14:26:00.002-04:00

should airlines profile passenger weight/build etc before doing the seat assignments. makes sense to have "compact" people in middle seats :-)

randal

2010-05-22T14:25:00.002-04:00

why do there appear to be a more than normal share of people named randal/randalls in academia?

why do we sleep with eyes closed?

2010-05-22T14:24:00.003-04:00

is it because visual processing is (one of) the most expensive pieces of brain processing? shutting that input makes it easy for the brain to go into sleep mode?

recursion

2010-05-22T14:23:00.001-04:00

everytime i see the billboard for some eyeglasses on the way back from the airport, i think that the model there looks like "thirteen" from house.

now everytime, i see the billboard, i think that the billboard reminds me that i think that the model looks like thirteen from house ...

how to avoid check-in fees?

2010-05-22T14:21:00.002-04:00

airlines seem to be doing something dumb doing gate checks for baggage for free but charging for them at the ticket counter.

maybe they should check whether its carry-on-able at the security checkpoints?

to ski or not to ski, that is the question

2010-02-01T22:26:00.001-05:00

sidewalks and artificial constraints

2010-02-01T22:04:00.002-05:00

(yet another post in the funny how serious)

seems like i strive to contrive, take long strides, go out of step etc. to make sure that the start or end step coincides with the line between two stones/slabs.
is it just me, or does everyone like to synchronize their footsteps with the start/end of the sidewalk stones/slabs?

as an side, this reminded me that most constraints are artificial. no real reason to do what i do :-)

interesting sociological experiment

2010-01-25T22:50:00.003-05:00

imagine a hypothetical capacity-constrained facebook :-)

each person can only have a strict limit of k-friends, and your ex-"friends" can see your current selection/comment on it etc.

would be curious to see what happens!

left-handedness and making up stuff on the fly

2010-01-25T22:17:00.002-05:00

someone pointed out that the way left handed people write looks contrived.

knowing nothing left handedness, writing or anything close to that, i came up with 2 "theories" on-the-fly (that have withstood the cant-find-an-obvious-contradiction-in-10-seconds test of time)

1. teachers in early classes are primarily trained/overfitted to right-handers. so they end up not knowing the optimal smooth strokes for different alphabets for left-handed kids (i recall that there was a time that left-handedness was considered evil ..and teachers forced kids to become right handed .. but i digress)

2. its easier for a right handed person to write left-to-right (less constrained stroke). so our writing style is pretty much designed for the common case. so left-handers have to contrive to write in the direction that is not entirely natural

if anyone knows any better, id like to know. would also like to hear more cant-find-an-obvious-contradiction-in-10-seconds theories as well :-)

the last bite problem

2010-01-23T12:44:00.002-05:00

funny how no one wants to finish the last chocolate or the last bit of some snack. somehow, even though there is less than a mouthful, when it comes to the last few bites, the lifetime of the snack seems to get prolonged. somehow, the act of "finishing" must create a sense of guilt! surely, some diet experts must exploit this somehow?

buses and insects

2010-01-23T12:39:00.002-05:00

funny how a bus smells similar to when an insect gets squished. reminded me of this little-black-dot-of-a-creature that used to give out this most obnoxious smell when squished (incidentally, this is what i was doing in some "classes" --tracking/squishing insects :-) ). cant describe either the smell or the insect (didnt have any distinguishing feature beyond just looking like a black dot). but if anyone has any clue what the heck im talking about, id be very curious to know the name of that insect.

"projects"

2009-11-01T15:32:00.002-05:00

Project is a self-contained phrase and may or not be capable of elaboration. I come across the word in newspapers and among academicians, engineers and adventurers. One might hear the word and keep quiet, no probing further. Sometimes a project might involve nothing more than swatting flies and sending reports to the headquarters.

-- the talkative man.

irony

2009-08-24T08:07:00.001-04:00

everyone strives/claims to be different, in that respect they are all alike

definining pride

2009-06-27T16:08:00.001-04:00

surpassing your own expectations of yourself

known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and unknown knowns!

2009-06-27T16:06:00.004-04:00

the line between what you know and what you are guessing is often blurred!

based on my own experiences from quiz/trivia contests and minesweeper -- i have vague guesses that i cant possibly have pulled out at random -- must have been the case that i subconsciously know some connection but do not consciously realize it.

problem is that explicitly keeping track of what you know is hard! some stuff gets internalized to the point where its not clear if its some guesswork/luck or if its some subconscious
knowing

does dhoni read gladwell?

2009-06-27T16:05:00.002-04:00

http://www.cricinfo.com/wivind2009/content/current/story/410717.html
"He's good. He will improve, the more international cricket he plays the better
for him," Dhoni said, suggesting that youngsters ought to be given more
exposure at the international stage. "Most of the players who play at the
international level have the talent - it's just that some players get more
backing than others. Some are considered match-winners and often match-winners
are given more time compared to others."

strangely reminiscent of the basic hypothesis/claim in "outliers" by malcolm gladwell

qotd

2009-02-19T23:05:00.001-05:00

History is an unforgiving laboratory. Its experiments can be run only once, and never again under precisely the same conditions.

-- Blunder, Zachary Shore

ski tags on jackets

2008-11-30T11:20:00.003-05:00

why dont people remove the ski tags on their jackets?

i can think of three reasons:

1. some sort of medal of honor/badge of courage that people like to flaunt?
2. do the ski folks make it very difficult to remove to get free advertising?
3. the tag actually helps by making it easy to zip/unzip your jacket even with your gloves on. so people leave them on for utility!

2 seems a bit far-fetched and too much of a conspiracy theory. 1 doesnt make sense; skiing seems commonplace enough that its not a uniquely distinguishing feature to flaunt. so im going with 3. if 3 is true, it makes a strong case for jacket manufacturers to adopt this.

p.s. im ignoring the possibility that people are lazy/dont care enough to remove them.

hack to break reviewer anonymity

2008-10-29T22:48:00.002-04:00

a rather straightforward hack to break the anonymity of reviewers for peer-reviewed publications (most places at least ensure single-blind submission -- author names are public but reviewing is anonymous)

wonder if this has been tried before to figure out who is reviewing your paper?
1. put some results/theorems in a separate file (preferably these are genuine)

2. give a url submissionid_conference.googlepages.com/filename for the file (probably works much better if the submission is double blind -- if author names are also suppressed and all hints to author identity are explicitly removed, then you can just create something and justify why you created a webpage for the additional stuff from 1 -- linking to your homepage would sacrifice author anonymity :-) )

3. add some webtracking thing to the url and see where you are getting hits from

assuming you can filter out spurious hits/click spam and check for actual views (e.g., .edu or city names), you should have a fairly reasonable idea of who is reviewing

(inspired in part by a recent paper that cited itself for motivation :-) )

qotd

2008-10-29T22:47:00.001-04:00

We zone out, we chicken out, we deceive. To be human is to fight a lifelong uphill battle for self-control. Why? Because evolution left us clever enough to set reasonable goals but without the willpower to see them through

-- Kluge, Gary Marcus

the only thing worse than having a bad idea is having no ideas

2008-10-23T23:43:00.000-04:00

anonymous

one more bit is enough

2008-09-20T15:56:00.003-04:00

i have this perpetual confusion with restrooms in restaurants/hotels in figuring if they are single-access or can allow parallel-access. theres always some doubt involved in whether the protocol should be to knock or try to open the door. if only they gave one more bit of information -- on whether the design is single/multiple access, the confusion would go away.

(this seems like an obvious thing to patent :-) )

words/phrases i hate in papers ..

2008-09-20T12:30:00.002-04:00

1. we present something "novel"
2. we are the "first" to introduce/solve the problem
3. we develop "sophisticated techniques/algorithm" to solve the problem
4. we make the following "contributions" (long list of trivialities..)

i guess what is irritating is that all of these are for the reader to assess and judge; not for the writer to claim/assume. sadly, with the realities of the the reviewing process and often the short-attention span of reviewers, the only work that sees that light of day are those that explicitly spoonfeed the reviewer with such keywords.

(im certain i have been/will be guilty of these at some point)

suboptimal routing

2008-09-12T13:39:00.001-04:00

September 12, 2008 10:22 AM Sortation Center Departure GROVE CITY, OH
September 11, 2008 7:50 PM Sortation Center Arrival GROVE CITY, OH
September 11, 2008 1:12 AM Sortation Center Departure ORLANDO, FL
September 9, 2008 9:13 AM Sortation Center Arrival LEETSDALE, PA
September 6, 2008 3:25 AM Sortation Center Departure NEW BERLIN, WI
September 5, 2008 5:38 AM Sortation Center Arrival NEW BERLIN, WI
September 4, 2008 5:08 AM Sortation Center Departure DALLAS, TX
September 3, 2008 3:34 PM Sortation Center Arrival DALLAS, TX
September 3, 2008 2:40 PM Pickup CARROLLTON, TX

the bloody place is 32mins from the intended destination. i could have had this shipment three days back!

on the brighter side ..

2008-09-09T21:33:00.001-04:00

my bad cantaloupe karma has finally decided to leave

qotd

2008-08-10T23:33:00.001-04:00

why is it that people who can't take advice always insist on giving it?

-- bond, "casino royale"

on father's/mother's day

2008-08-05T00:04:00.003-04:00

"this invented holiday was never part of our emotional calendar."

-- from "the diving bell and the butterfly"

real world hack .. free shipping

2008-07-28T15:05:00.001-04:00

imagine a store X that has both a physical and online presence. X offers only free shipping if your purchase exceeds Y$, however it allows you to return the purchased items in-store without charge.

simple hack (discovered by accident): purchase items worth more than Y$ (including whatever you really want). return the undesired items in-store once they arrive. u effectively got the desired item shipped for free :-) (modulo the cost of having to go and return in store)

driving violations

2008-07-28T15:04:00.003-04:00

do people driving fancier cars get bigger fines for similar violations compared to people who drive more ordinary/rundown cars?

irony

2008-07-28T15:04:00.001-04:00

pain forcing a cheery disposition

brain and time

2008-05-19T15:45:00.003-04:00

how does the brain keep time and identify periodicities -- especially with respect to music/beats etc?

also whats the finest resolution of time that the brain can keep track of -- second/millisecond?

update: well there seems to be a whole line of research on this topic http://ticktockbraintalk.blogspot.com/

random: swiss army laptop backpacks

2008-05-19T15:40:00.003-04:00

i have been recently amazed by the sudden apperance of swiss army laptop backpacks (well there is the possibility of a confirmation bias here .. but lets set that aside for now). too many people seem to have the same brand of backpack.

i figured there must have been some kind of promotion or sale forcing such a monoculture but couldnt find anything of note. a little bit of inquiry revealed that the bags were on sale at sams club (www.samsclub.com/shopping/navigate. do?dest=5&item=361436&pCatg=5791 ) and were a good deal.

for the record, i think the backpack looks good.

brilliant ..

2008-05-02T22:43:00.001-04:00

"Fewer than one in forty Biharis possesses a television. For entertainment, many rely on Lalu .."

-- In spite of the gods, Edward Luce

google checkout - bug?

2008-05-02T22:40:00.002-04:00

google checkout consistently gives out 10$ off for anyone signing up for a new google checkout account -- the cost of creating a new account is trivial. and as far as i can see there is no conscious effort to correlate credit card numbers or address information to prevent the obvious cheat of creating bogus identities to get 10$ off each time?

am i missing something

(only flip side is by signing up multiple accounts, u run the potential risk of compromising the private information more often if the account gets cracked)

no right to comment on ..

2008-04-10T10:27:00.001-04:00

i have no right to comment on people wearing non-matching socks

(my left shoe and right shoe today are different -- in my defense the two brands of shoes look very similar, but thats no excuse!)

happyness =

2008-03-30T17:54:00.001-04:00

splitting chewing gum wrapper cleanly into three layers -- paper,plastic,metalfoil :-).

accidental discovery of the day

2008-03-24T11:06:00.001-04:00

typing "www.url.com." or "www.url.com./" in your browser address bar gives same result as "www.url.com"

steam shadows

2008-03-23T09:30:00.002-04:00

as i watched water boil (no it doesnt affect it :-) ), i noticed that the steam/vapor induced a shadow on the wall but i couldnt actually see the vapors.
a. are there other such examples where things can be seen in shadows but through eyes?
b. is this because the human eye doesnt have sufficient resolution -- e.g. would a hi-fi camera pick it up?

any answers?

derandomization

2008-03-09T15:24:00.001-04:00

brain seems to be less inclined to random thoughts, hence the reduction in blogging frequency. dont know if senile degeneration has already set in :-(

HDTV

2008-03-09T15:22:00.000-04:00

same garbage, only sharper

--werner vogels, amazon

accidental discovery of the day

2008-01-02T19:58:00.001-05:00

my elbow is stronger than a squash racquet :-)

Parthenogenesis

2008-01-02T16:00:00.000-05:00

via: http://www.slate.com/id/2180956/fr/rss/

if i was part of the religious right, i now have an amazingly good argument in favor of the immaculate conception!

(i wonder who is funding the research :-) ?)

update: wikipedia suggests that the doctrine of immaculate conception should not be confused with the doctrine of virgin birth (who would have guessed they would have two low probability events?)

karma, reincarnation, and conservation

2007-12-31T12:53:00.000-05:00

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

2007-11-30T16:41:00.001-05:00

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 ..

2007-11-27T09:39:00.000-05:00

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

crossie spam

2007-11-21T20:34:00.001-05:00

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

"food in order left children in Langley"

hilarious :-)

public libraries and piracy

2007-11-10T13:46:00.000-05:00

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

2007-10-27T15:37:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-27T15:36:00.001-04:00

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

2007-10-27T15:35:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-10-20T00:36:00.000-04:00

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

2007-10-14T15:58:00.000-04:00

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

twinkle twinkle little star

2007-10-14T15:57:00.000-04:00

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 ..

2007-10-14T15:52:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-27T11:48:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-26T23:12:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-09-26T14:46:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-09-23T19:36:00.001-04:00

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

2007-09-11T23:06:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-03T09:42:00.000-04:00

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 ..

2007-09-02T16:20:00.000-04:00

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

2007-09-02T16:05:00.000-04:00

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!

2007-08-28T17:19:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-27T18:21:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-27T18:11:00.000-04:00

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!

2007-06-27T18:06:00.000-04:00

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

2007-06-27T18:05:00.001-04:00

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

2007-06-04T18:36:00.000-04:00

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

maya.

2007-06-02T14:26:00.000-04:00

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"

2007-05-27T21:11:00.000-04:00

--from "proof"

knot-free headphones

2007-05-27T20:41:00.000-04:00

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!

2007-05-26T15:42:00.000-04:00

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 :-)

2007-05-23T00:14:00.000-04:00

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

levis

2007-04-26T00:06:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-24T22:53:00.000-04:00

"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

2007-04-15T19:41:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-15T19:29:00.000-04:00

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"

2007-04-08T23:47:00.000-04:00

so am i .. whats the bloody point

{response to a sign seen on the highway}

first names

2007-04-08T23:28:00.000-04:00

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

2007-04-06T11:04:00.000-04:00

" 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*

2007-04-04T18:33:00.000-04:00

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

2007-03-31T12:49:00.000-04:00

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 ..

2007-03-31T12:44:00.000-04:00

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 ..