how a cs guy interprets life

1. Soccer vs. American football:

Soccer is infinitely more interesting than football. There is only so much you can achieve with a single hop communicatio channel (football). Multihop channels (soccer) have significantly more interesting patterns and more importantly failure modes which make for more interesting viewing.

2. Chinese vs. Indian languages:

Chinese tends to have very small description length words for many situations and objects. Native speakers can compress ridiculous amounts of information into a small written piece or spoken conversation. Naturally, chinese is harder to learn because it involves building up a much larger dictionary than most other languages. Compression using a larger dictionary intuitively will be better (indices into dictionaries only take logarithmic space).

3. Sampras vs. Agassi:

Sampras is a pain to watch because he had no evident failure modes in his game. The lack of any perceivable vulnerability makes him a not-so-interesting entity. Agassi on the other hand is exciting to watch because his game has visible failure and success modes, and the distribution varies game to game.

life is over-rated

underdog vs champions

who would you rather support -- an underdog or the obvious champs?
trying to take a break away from rational behavior ..
would prefer a generic argument rather than a specific instance

personally i have always found myself rooting for the champs just because they have a proven track record and provide a better expected return of investment of support -- but given the recent tendencies to break away from rational behavior things have become a little blurred of late

p.s: anyone know how to track ip addresses in blogger?

abolish periodicities

all periodic events should be banned
especially festivals, recurrent holiday themes, weekly cycles etc
life should be poisson

difference between

a good player and a great player:

A great player makes every failure of his look like it was due to bad luck or some extraordinary event!


Case in point: Sachin tendulkar -- every time he gets bowled/lbw he makes it look like the ball kept low or had some exaggerated movement or the umpire made a mistake!

random idea for nfl

maybe they need something like this:
chuck

find a really light guy .. launch him along with the ball into the end zone to score touchdowns :-)

one line summary of my life

I refuse to be a member of a club that would have me as a member -- Groucho Marx

wish list

get smarter
work harder
be happy

rediscovering ilaiyaraja

currently ringing in my head

yamunai atrile -- dalapathi
do anything -- how to name it
yerikkarai poongatre -- thooral ninnu pochu
how to name it -- how to name it
kanne kalaimane -- moonram pirai
thenpandi seemayile -- nayagan
maniye manikuyile -- nadodi thenral
ponmalai pozhuthu -- nizhalgal
ilaiya nila -- payanangal mudivathillai
pooongathave -- nizhalgal
inji iduppazhaga -- devar magan
anthi mazhai -- raja paarvai

on a different note: apologies for poor adherence to capitalization on this blog

copter game

http://www.seethru.co.uk/zine/south_coast/helicopter_game.htm

used to be a long-time addiction of mine -- awesome game

one of the nice things about the game is that its memoryless -- the amount of time/distance
that you will survive henceforth is independent of how long you have covered so far

update: I think I was blabbering there is a tangible increase in difficulty
with increasing scores

continuing on games try 3-D table tennis on www.mousebreaker.com

1 down, 1 to go

had two things on my todo list at the beginning of the semester

1. get a google t-shirt

2. find a thesis/graduate


first has been achieved today (dont know how much credit I can take for it though) ..

Definitely dont know how long item 2 will take ..

cribs with hitchcock

imdb/other reviews rave about hitchcock movies -- commending thrill/suspense/storyline/film making etc

ive seen the following movies: the man who knew too much, vertigo, north by northwest, rear window (in that order)

the plots were very ordinary, the suspense was non-existent, there was absolutely no twists in the tale .. the film making is hard to comment since it requires a deeper understanding of the context and the technology available at the time

only thing that was marginally interesting -- the dialogues

obituary of an unknown paper

this is to announce that all life support systems were summarily withdrawn..

may it and i rest in peace!

interesting links..

http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/proof.html

http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~fleck/parable.html

ambition ??

ive been told this many times by many people that I appear to have no ambition whatsoever in life and lack initiative/motivation

im open to ideas on what a good ambition would be ...

turing machines for paper generation..

Well .. we've heard about the random paper generator .. which i dont think deserved the kind of publicity it got because there was nothing particularly interesting in the kinds of tricks the folks used to generate the text !

was wondering if someone could come up with a good algorithm for automatically generating papers for certain types of conferences.. most conferences appear to have fairly set rules and
pre-conditions for acceptance ( x pages of evaluation, y graphs, z amount of related work, a fairly area sensitive set of buzzwords (incremental deployment, adversarial analysis etc etc ) )

remember reading some roald dahl story about a guy who came up with a machine to generate novels/stories (you could specify the genre, the length etc) and bought authors to just endorse the stories

wonder if someone could come up with this .. would help researchers spend their time more usefully in doing actual research than having to spend ridiculous amounts of time writing just to make sure the paper is accepted !

euphemisms for joblessness

two interesting ways of saying you are jobless:


1. I am evaluating heuristics for NP-hard problems ( == playing minesweeper)

2. I am in deep introspection, reflecting on my work and productivity

playing for fun vs. playing to win !

In most cases you would imagine that a person plays something to have fun predominantly ...
unfortunately my brain isnt quite wired with a good definition of fun .. so i have to resort to the mercenarial attitude while playing too -- its kinda sad coz that completely rules out games/activities without a statistical scoring function


Even while playing silly online games against totally unknown opponents (or against none !)-- where there seems to be really very little incentive to win (other than possibly increasing ur score in someway ) I end up getting stressed when things get close ..

Enough Said -- I SUCK !

more thoughts on life/research

important principles to adhere to ..

1. risk minimization/diversification -- self-explanatory

2. adversarial analysis -- thinking like your adversary(= reviewer) and addressing his concerns

3. look and feel / feel good factors -- way more important than one might imagine them to be

4. persistence -- if all else fails this is surely a clincher

on a less serious note ..

here are two amazing examples of my incredible incompetence ..

1. I went for taking the written driver's licence test -- the guy asked me to look into something and read line 4 .. I look in rather casually (assuming that it was a iris scan) and said "line 4" (assuming that was for some voice recongnition/recording) .. needless to stay the guy was stunned beyond imagination at the total absence of intelligence and was even more shocked to see that i passed (only by the narrowest of margins )

I swear this is true .. and I did not do it on purpose (unlike a few amazing guys I know who would deliberately do such things)

2. Got down at an amtrak station and needed to take a bus to get home .. bus stop in downtown is a not-so-unreasonable 4-5 blocks away from the station .. Well .. I spent 1 hour finding it .. (with a heavy 50 pound loaded suitcase dragged) all over downtown at night


more reasons for me to avoid getting into the real world ..