surprises ..

"did people get less surprising or are we less easily surprised"

(house of cards, ch 62)

climate change and sports

wondering how the trajectory of outdoor sports has been affected by climate change  over the last few years and whether it has changed the nature of sports and what works

--- game delays (E.g., due to rain or other things),
--- quality of playing surfaces (E.g., cricket pitches in West Indies are dead),
--- nature of playing conditions (e.g., very little swing in England)

doubt/certainty

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd

--Voltaire, via "The undoing project"

academia and song lyrics

(was not one in the past to pay attention to lyrics, but now that i seem to, there are very nice parallels between academia and some famous songs)

1.The Rolling Stones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S94ohyErSw

"You can't always get what you want 

But if you try sometimes well you might find 
You get what you need "

Very true of writing grants :) 

2. Aerosmith https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZfZ8uWaOFI

"You got to lose to know how to win" 

Very true of getting papers past nasty reviews :)

randomness: big and small

"It's hard to know how people select a course in life. The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I become a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits"

-- Amos Tversky (via The Undoing Project) 

memory works in pretty weird ways ..

i was trying desperately hard to remember a old song i remember liking .. for some reason the word "summer" was stuck in my head and i was trying to figure out different combinations of "summer" and "time" in google to figure out what the song was.

then out of nowhere i remembered the song was "sunny road" .. google didnt really help. somehow it just came like a flash in the pan after 20 mins of absolute frustration. funny that the brain associated summer with sunny and chose to remember summer and time rather than sunny and road.

and now its even more frustrating because im unable to reverse engineer how it made a) the summer connection in the first place and b) how it landed on the sunny road answer on its own w/o google.

for reference/posterity here it is and simplifying future google searches: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyuL1z2tejs

everything is linear on a log-log plot!

portmanteau of the day

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

the wall

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!