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 ..

batteries ..

the profit margins on batteries must be unreasonably high .. cant imagine any other reason why radioshack reps are hell bent on selling you batteries irrespective of the actual product you set out to buy!

hairy business ideas

suppose you are in the business of making shaving products (cream, aftershave etc) one possible business strategy is to add some secret ingredients to your product that actually promotes hair growth. it can increase your revenue and guarantee a limitless demand (until the nature of the secret ingredient in the product is exposed)

a cynic

someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing

--oscar wilde

nicetry's first law of ignorance

the less you know about something .. the more it entitles you to make the most outrageous strong-sounding statements and have strong opinions with no rational basis.

learning: from politicians, self.

when in doubt ..

use a chorus!

when a musical composition seems to be drab and going nowhere throw in a chorus .. with high probability choruses sound good..

on a related note i wonder if the nicesoundingness of choruses has anything to do with gaussians and the law of large numbers (if you throw in enough noise eventually something nice will emerge that will be appealing in its simplicity)

note to self .

diving head first into a wall has undesirable consequences.

I

I = union_x say(I,!x)
I = U - union_x say (I,x)
please solve for I.

moksha ...

the soul has been freed from its irritating existence.

from monotony to novelty

it is funny how kids like to do repetitive things (like watch the same movie, listen to the same song, play with the same toy over and over and over again) .. but when you "grow up" you suddenly feel irritated with repeats and crave for newness/novelty. leaves you wondering why ..

novel spam?

Hi nice try,

Greetings

Let me introduce myself , I am BLAH, a Bangalore based consultant. I happen to view your profile while surfing on the net and thought if I could suggest a few opportunities which I am currently working on in the area of Research and Development for few of the premier and most admired companies.

Kindly get back to me with your contact number and a available slot to call so that we could discuss and take it forward.or updated profile which I can take into procees.

Thanks & Regards

BLAH

Associate Manager - Executive Search


Heres what I would have liked to write as a response -- of course didnt think it deserved a reply :-)

Hi BLAH,

Much as I would like to believe that your esteemed and most admired companies would be interested in hiring a random person whose profile you found on the web, I believe it my responsibility to inform you and your ilk that I have absolutely no intentions whatsoever of gettting out my current coccoon to enter the bad bad world of the businesses you are referring to. I appreciate your most nobel and altruistic endeavor in trying to make my life better, but you havent made an offer that I cannot refuse :-).

Thanks,

nice try

education

sambar vada: its vadas dipped in sambar!

weekend joblessness

tried this .. http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

Your Type is
INTJ
Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging
Strength of the preferences %
78 38 88 11


not sure what i can make out of this .. opening it up for public scrutiny.

kids as multiplicative adversaries

if you ask a kid to give you a tough multiplication problem .. it is likely that the kid will ask you multiply two large numbers with lots of zeros .. its funny that the brain doesnt come wired with a model of its own processing complexity

some consolation

should you be pleased if you lost to the two best teams on display that went on to contest the championship?

discomforting comforters

its disconcerting to note that you went to sleep without having your comforter over you and without a conscious model of where it is on the bed, but you wake up finding yourself within the comforter and with no knowledge of how it got there. disconcerting because it is possible that you have no control over your actions while sleeping

gait

was amazed that it is possible to identify an acquaintance (not someone that i meet very often) from a reasonable distance just from the gait!

introductions

why bother introducing yourself, when the probability of a repeated rendezvous is negligible?

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!

is research the art of ..

finding correlations where none exist

retro-fitting hypothesis to observations

extrapolating to large sample sizes from small subsets of data points

manipulating visual evidence to suit hypotheses

changing definitions to suit what you can prove

changing metrics to suit what you can show

lulling oneself into a false sense of intelligence

balancing on the shoulder of "giants" while being careful not to tread on their toes

"dumb"found

dont know how common this is .. but ive always felt more comfortable with the written means of communication as opposed to spoken means of communication ..
couple of immediate reasons ..
1. the written form allows for objective/impersonal communication as opposed to the
spoken form
2. the spoken form is often not amenable to monologues, at least not very interesting ones
3. it appears much easier to get distracted in the spoken form -- its a low-bandwidth, and low-compute process that often is easy to get distracted from to other threads running in the brain
4. the written form allows deletions!

the only argument i find in favor of the spoken form is that its a stream, which makes it more suitable for a memoryless world than the written form.

should patent a syndrome for this before some psycho-psychologists make it theirs!!

aside: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0650971/

life and sampling ..

for most things in life sampling suffices .. couple of reasons
1. information content in life is low
2. the brain for better or worse is equipped with very good error detection and error recovery processes. so even if you miss data points, its quite easy to interpolate between sampled points. it could be that 1 leads to 2 ..
3. if something is bleeding important the content provider will make sure that its noticeable either by provisioning redudant replicas of the content so that sampling will still guarantee at least one sampled data point, or by making the content strikingly different from the filler material ..

e.g.
1. watching a movie
2. studying for a exam
3. reading a book
4. conversations with people


this doesnt apparently work for tasks where form is more important than content to borrow the discussion from a few posts earlier. sampling content is easier than sampling form .. as some wise man said the devil is in the details ..

academics and the peter pan syndrome

academics refuse to grow up, and refuse to get out into the real world, preferring instead the well-understood precincts of their office spaces and esoteric research topics. however it is the very refusal to grow up that gives them the competitive edge to indulge in eccentric pursuits. there are however, quite a few disturbing examples where people seem to be forgetting this very latitude that academia provides and turning it instead into an industry of churning out results as demanded by external sources. may be every one entering grad school must be administered an E.Q test and only those matching the emotional maturity of 7-year olds should be allowed to get in. its clear that low emotional maturity does translate into childish behavior but its not entirely obvious that there is a causal relationship between the two. the same can also be extended to those in the creative arts and in sports also .. but that will be a bedtime story for another day.

p.s:
And now.. for something completely different ..
as i finish writing this i have followed the advice of a few wise men and done a google/wikipedia search on the title to reveal this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan_Syndrome
darn it .. ive been scooped!

non-determinism

most of the scientific world strives for determinism, even though the best results from deterministic endeavor point towards the power of non-determinism

p.s: inability to understand theory does not in anyway inhibit an idiot from making fuzzy rants about theory.

blogger and infinite monkeys

if the web-surfing/blog-viewing population is best modeled by an innumerable number of monkeys randomly clicking at most recent content, irrespective of semantic intent, then an optimal revenue-generating process based on a per-view/per-click model is to keep generating random junk as fast as possible

questions

the better questions have short descriptions and longer answers.
the fuzzy, ill defined questions have longer descriptions, and presumably shorter (or no) answers.

more self-referentialty ensues ..

on intelligence

how do we evaluate intelligence, either real or artifical? are there sufficiently objective metrics for this task. attacking the definition of intelligence from a computational perspective, is easy to define on many objective dimensions including
speed, memory, precision/recall. unfortunately/fortunately the objective criteria do not necessarily give real intelligence an edge over artificial (i.e., machine) intelligence. of course we have more fuzzy criteria like algorithmic ability, creative
potential etc.

from a computational perspective its nice to believe that on purely objective criteria there is no distinction between real and machine intelligence, but from a human perspective its hard to accept since we can always come up with many subjective metrics on which machine intelligence comes up a cropper. if we have a battle between human and machine intelligence, both sides would never reach a consensus on who would win, because the machine intelligence does not accept the human criteria as valid metrics since it cannot objectively understand or interpret them, while the human intelligence will claim victory since it can always create more metrics on which it can claim superiority.

maybe never the twain shall meet ... and we can all have a good nights sleep without worrying about the toaster turning into a tactful adversary tomorrow morning.

thin red line

the line between ignorance and incompetence is pretty flimsy

books vs movies vs music

appears to be an inherent difference in the way we (or at least me) treat these different forms of entertainment. books and movies which are visual are relegated to the status of one-time events --> once you know the story/plot/main theme you are unlikely to read/watch it again .. whereas with music you tend to repeat the stuff you like and listen to it over and over again .. is it because auditory phenomena are treated fundamentally differently from visual phenomena or is it because books/movies are interesting because of the plot/storyline and once it is revealed they lose the charm ..

of course it can be argued that if you are reading/watching from the point of view of understanding the aesthetics behind it then nothing prevents you from going for it a second time .. unfortunately these things seem to be secondary if not completely irrelevant

paradoxes

are there purely syntactical paradoxes .. as in every paradox i know of seems to arise from semantics of the statements .. can there be something paradoxical within the realms of syntax without associating semantics

the impostor

you end up becoming a close approximation of the deception that you set out to be.

from woody allen

how could you listen to me .. you know how crazy i am!

92

conversation

when does a conversation officially end .. there are not enough
protocols.. connection closes need to be explicit. timeouts dont work
in the real world

humor anyone ..

is there a evolutionary reason for humor to exist

why the obsession?

why do people like symmetry/novelty .. why cant we accept randomness/mundaneness?

technology

is technology an inhibitor or promoter of talent? seems like a double-edged sword that can either push the limits of your capabilities or provide amazing means of masking incompetence ..

context: music performances .. before the digitization talent seemed to be paramount .. now the ability to modulate stuff in digital content seems to reduce the scope for inherent talent .. at the same time it enables substantially better quality music that couldnt have otherwise existed .

confused as usual

jacaranda

pretty much every piece of indian fiction ive read so far has some reference or other to a jacaranda tree .. i have no clue what the hell this tree is .. is it so ubiquitous that every novel must mention it .. or am i so oblivious to obvious implied references (e.g. mythological/emotional/romantic related to the tree) .. dont even know what that tree looks like!

very reassuring

http://www.phdcomics.com/blog.php (the post on sep 1 on "literal")

im not the only dumbo (http://nicertry.blogspot.com/2005/08/on-less-serious-note.html) out there!

perls of wisdom

too much perl causes a change in the default parenthesis from () to {} :-)

default-off vs default-on

if you have a choice between doing x and not doing x, where there doesnt to be a immediately perceivable risk-benefit function associated with x -should you "just do it" or not do it. default-off seems like a pessimistic approach {risk minimization}.
default-on seems like a optimistic approach {benefit maximization}. i vote in favor of risk minimization!

the impossibility of being earnest

there are fundamental limits on how much information needs to be revealed in any situation. obfuscation is inherently necessary for both selfish reasons and
for greater common good. from an evolutionary stance, it enables the power to
reason under uncertainty, and filters out those who can better reason under uncertainty. being non-earnest gives you the ability to indulge in self-indulgent incoherent babble every once in a while.

lessons from minesweeper

the power of procrastination {delayed decision making is very useful, often things take care of themselves}
the power of partial answers {a little knowledge is NOT a dangerous thing}
solving by reduction {reduce unknowns to known patterns and repeatedly apply the knowledge you have for those known patters}
speed != intelligence
learning from random things {it is possible to draw random inferences from the most uncorrelated of happenings}

puddings and proofs

in practice the proof is in the pudding
in theory the pudding is in the proof

sheer madness

the only reason many retain their sanity is because they refuse to take themselves seriously.

why do i have more questions than answers?

why do ..

all garbage bins on the street smell the same all over the world? are there specific dominant sources of junk which overwhelm the other sources of smell? or is it that the expected composition of garbage is always invariant?

business of probabilities

whenever there is a low probability event associated with a high service cost to the end-user there is a very good and highly profitable business model selling at that service purportedly at a marginal cost to the end-user

e.g. insurance, AAA

travel restrictions

its funny how things change so quickly .. a week ago i was trying to convince everyone that im not going to check-in stuff because its going to be easy to travel that way.. but now its the exact opposite .. weird!

a study in scarlet

its illegal to jump a red light
is it illegal to have a green light and not move ahead assuming that you are not causing any head of the line blocking?

attribution

scientific history is full of misrepresentations/lies/incomplete information .. things end up being attributed to individuals ignoring the evolutionary path that have led to their existence. people should cease to attribute inventions to anyone -- its a tremendous injustice to the many nameless faces that may have contributed non-trivially.

belief

what is belief .. do i believe what i say? what a damned conundrum to live by.

is memory a pre-requisite for humor?

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!