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!

surprising!!!

I seem to have an obsession with the footnotes/fine print stuff ..

Heres what i found at the bottom of the cricinfo page ..

Top 5 player searches
Sachin Tendulkar - Chris Gayle - Graeme Hick - Virender Sehwag - Shaun Pollock
I can understand Sachin, Gayle, Sehwag --> basically indicating a substantial bias in the demographics of cricket following.

Pollock and Hick are absolute surprises -- who cares about Graeme Hick?? Probably the brits are more online-savvy than I imagine them to be .. but still the population would be dwarfed by a single indian metro following cricket online!
Maybe cricinfo being a uk site is fudging around with results to make the english better than they acually are in the true spirit of the uk media and their sportsmen.

Im stumped on Pollock -- dont think hes done anything worthwhile for a long time now and his position even within the SA team has been relegated to one of a supporting bowler/handy batsman rather than leading all-rounder, and hes clearly not raking up enough controversy like someone like warne :-) even while he isnt playing -- any one willing to proffer a reasonable explanation is welcome to do so..

us soccer commentary

sucks bigtime .. dont know how long it will be before they stop using american sporting terms to describe soccer events (assist, turnover etc etc) "when in rome be a roman" -- please learn the proper terminology.

its official ..

i have nothing interesting to tell

via "the argumentative indian"

quote attributed to ram mohan roy :
"Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be.
Others will go on speaking, and you will not be able to argue back."

no more reasons to fool around

they are here .. they have taken control .. no more reason for loitering around ..
hope the world is listening .. 'coz i am not hearing anything!

minesweeper and life

optimizing max/min X requires luck
optimizing avg X requires talent/hard work

elaborating: assume you want to minimize the completion time for a game of minesweeper. if your objective is to minimize your best completion time a good strategy is to click aggressively in the hope that you hit upon a lucky/easy configuration earlier and then you can click away to a glorious finish. on the other hard if you want the minimize the average completion time (assuming that not completing incurs an infinite penalty) the key to achieving this objective is to have talent/ and persist with tough configurations, whereas for minimizing the best completion time the best strategy is to be carefree with the clicking early on in the game.

ratings

sorry if im spoiling anything for anyone..
sorry for using this blogspace as a public scratch-space..

author, title, myrating (scale of 1--5 5 being best), two-second summary

vikram seth, suitable boy, 3, post-independence soap dragged to infinity
gabriel garcia marquez, one hundred years of solitude, 2, give people different names else history repeats itself
salman rushdie, shame, 2.5, not enough fundaes to appreciate pakistan's history
salman rushdie, midnights children, 3.5, post-independence india through the eyes of a sorry dude
salman rushdie, haroun and the sea of stories, 3, should have read it 15-20 years back
daniel keyes, flowers for algernon, 4, dumb-->smart-->dumb;smart aint good
robert kanigel, the man who new infinity, 3.5,
levitt/lubner, freakonomics, 3.5, correlation != causality
varian/shapiro, information rules, 3.5, economists are intuitive but highly repetitive
herbert simon, models of my life, 2.5, didnt try to be especially ambitious did whatever was the right thing to do at a given point in space-time
jhumpa lahiri, namesake, 3, nice story not enough fundaes to appreciate parallels
yann martel, life of pi, 1.5, arbit
paulo coelho, alchemist, 2, bordering on self-help crap
rk narayan, the world of nagraj, 3, timepass
rk narayan, mr sampath, 3, timepass
rk narayan, talkative man, 3, timepass
david davidar, house of blue mangoes, 3, first chapter reminds of ramarajan movie
anton chekov, collection of comic stories, 1.5, most of them are abrupt prefer roald dahl anyday
shashi tharoor,the great indian novel, 3, cute tricks in drawing parallels
mark haddon, the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, 4.5, scary similarities (minesweeper, emotions as being just reference models in brain, belief in MDL etc)
jerry seinfeld, seinlanguage, 3.5, nice collection of witticisms only caveat is it gets predictable after having watched (alomost) every seinfeld episode 5-6 times
hardy, a mathematicians apology, 3, interesting rant
will clarke, lord vishnus love handles, 1, masala
salman rushdie, satanic verses, 2, confusing
amartya sen, the argumentative indian, 2.5, repetitive number of theories is >> number of actual facts
bill bryson, a short history of nearly everything, 2, remember this quote from an eminent computer scientist "people can sell you fantastic stories by multiplying large numbers"
jared diamond, guns germs and steel, 1.5, it takes an academic to write a really really long book based on just one really really small idea!
malcolm gladwell, tipping point, 3, small hypothesis many anecdotes but nothing conclusive well written though
malcolm gladwell, blink, 3, decent attempt at trying to elaborate the mystery of intuition
gita mehta , karma cola, 0.5, absolutely arbit
keith donahue, stolen child, 1, requires tremendous patience to read this

unrated:
shyam selvadurai ed, storywallah
jerome k jerome, three men in a boat

the trouble with consumerism..

In consumerist economies it appears that the price difference between perishables and non-perishables is neither non-existent or counter-intuitive.
in particular the price you pay for something is hardly ever appears to be the real cost of production or the amount of resource (natural/human) that took to produce the thing, rather the price seems to be determined by what the consumer is willing to pay for it. i do find it extremely odd that i can buy electronic equipment for the price of a meal!

somehow there is a marked difference between the cost of perishables and non-perishables in semi-socialistic economies.
i dont know if its because these economies deliberate add levies to "luxury" goods to subsidize the price of the "commodity" goods so that they are affordable to every one in society.

somehow my gut feel is that perishables (e.g. good) should be "cheaper" than imperishables (e.g. appliances, electronics).

im running a serious risk of mixing cause and effect here -- are the prices different because of the policies enforced or is it because my gut feel for price of production is inherently wrong?

weird coincidence

spent the best part of lunchtime today ranting to a fellow inmate about the futility of most of the work we do .. out of nowhere decided to spend the energy gained from the lunch in spewing a lot of venom on absolutely miserable undergrad "research" if i may abuse the word and how not a single soul cares about it ..

and to my absolute astonishment i get a mail from this dude (?) in france asking about this long-forgotten paper from the above-mentioned undergrad "research" and if i could provide him the implementation of the same ..

well, the quality of the work in question is in no way going to be altered by this anomalous request from the french-dude
i was really tempted to write the dude an elightening, life-saving mail on why he shouldnt be wasting his time on this piece of crap, in the end professional etiquete demanded that i just write to him with an apology that i had no clue where this implementation was rotting right now ..

asides:
either someone overheard our conversation and is playing a mighty-mean trick on me (unlikely..) or i should be using my telepathic talents to better use in the future.

how to make yourself better than the competition..

1. Change the bloody performance metric

If the competition beats you .. then simply report a different metric you are better at. Works amazingly well for research papers.. and recently I noticed that this holds true in the real world also.

e.g. Cingular the network with the fewest dropped calls -- of course if they dont connect you in the first place then the probability of dropping a call is going to be substantially lower than if you connected the call in the first place. Even within this narrowly defined metric, they still have the latitude to alter the definition as they please.

I have nothing particular against cingular just the first time that I have noticed this in mainstream advertising.

2. Put enough qualifiers so that you are the only one in the category ..

Get rid of the competition by defining your position in the market uniquely

examples in the auto industry -- e.g. the best entry-priced mid-size sedan in town, the best selling cars and trucks in north-western alaska etc etc