desperately seeking to lose an umbrella

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

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!

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

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

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

maya.

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"

--from "proof"

knot-free headphones

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!

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 :-)

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

levis

why imprint the sizes outside .. either people dont care or they explicitly try and hide what their true size is. in either case it doesnt make any business sense to actually visibly display the size. unless its just a historic brand symbol that they have come to be associated with -- sort of the rugged/utilitarian feel that we dont give a damn about the fashion sense given the background in which levis/denim came about it makes some sense (they were meant as workwear for hard labour .. not the casual wear that we have come to think of it as).
wonder if they do the same thing for women's wear or the more upscale denim varieties or if its only for the basic line?

more quotes

"Truth, in matters of religion, is simply the opinion that has survived".
--oscar wilde

"The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next"
--ralph waldo emerson


(via "The God Delusion" - Richard Dawkins)

blogs and web graphs

i wonder if the amazing rise in the number of blogs has significantly altered the structure of the web-graph. extrapolating from a limited perspective of the blogosphere there seem to be more small-cliques forming this way than in the "regular" (if ever there was such a thing) web structure. i imagine at the macroscopic level (degree distributions and powerlaws) it wouldnt have any serious impact because those are just simply how natural human pheomena seem to manifest themselves .. but at some finer granularity are there a lot more (semi-)partitioned small communities in the graph now ?

one thing is certain .. im sure some data mining grad students out there are churning out papers on this

buses, thrills, and happiness

is there more reason to be happy if something happens by accident as opposed to be design .. theres some inherent thrill/greater sense of happiness in catching a bus just in time and sprinting for it rather than looking up schedules and landing up at the bus stop at the prescribed time.

somehow goes back to my earlier thoughts on happiness/RG -- there are few absolutes, most are only relative measures. happiness essentially translates into a effort vs. reward tradeoff or expectation vs. realization tradeoff.

"jesus is alive"

so am i .. whats the bloody point

{response to a sign seen on the highway}

first names

ive recently come to realize that its very rarely that i use the first name when referring to people. im more comfortable using pronouns or whenever possible completely avoid nouns. when i email/chat its usually "hey, hi" not "hey joe or hi joe". somehow subconsciously the use of the first name seems to imply some degree of familiarity with the persons and that the familiarity falls into some well-defined role. incidentally, the use of terms of like "dude, man, da" are amazingly useful substitutes for a name when talking to a guy.

what is additionally enlightening in this context is the fact that my nephew consciously avoids using my name when referring to me in a conversation, not only in a one-on-one conversation but even when trying to use a name whie talking about me to someone else. In this case I think the kid is confused on the actual role and the nature of the interaction between us -- Im supposed to be the "older uncle" but I also happen to play (reasonably competitively i may add :-) ) at his level so he probably also views me as a play buddy. Im assuming that there is a fairly decent level of familiarity so the only confusion arises because of the fuzziness in the definition of the roles.

In my case, the reluctance to use the first name has little to do with the definition of the interaction (i think this is a reasonable assumption to make). It just seems to me that using the first name is a big leap for me in terms of familiarity/conversational commitment so its a safer bet to avoid it. The other serious difference is that I have no problem using the name in a conversation with a third-party (as opposed to my nephew who doesnt .. whether hes making a conscious attempt to be funny or whether hes actually confused on how to refer to me i dont know for sure)

"Whats in a name" you might argue: I agree there is nothing in the name per se, but the process of using the name seems to be associated at some lower level with other things. If all of us had number tags (for those close to networking research you might think of "semantic free referencing" :-) ) , would I be comfortable referring to you using your number? I dont really know ..

So
1. if we are on talking terms, and
2. youve never seen me referring to you with your first name, and
3. have actually noticed it, and you have a problem with it
please let me know :-) and i shall re-evaluate the situation and/or consciously try and use your name more often.

pleased with self

" thunbam nergayil yaazh yeduthu nee inbam serka maattaya" i have been thinking that this song was in Desh for the last week or so ... finally got around to confirming it .. pleased with a sense of achievement for the first time in many months :-)

YALFM*

at some point you stop learning new things and just become more efficient at applying what you already know. thats the point at which you cease to be human and become just a mindless automaton. time to move on.

{* -- yet another lesson from minesweeper}

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 ..