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!

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

more on god

George: God will never let me be happy and successful. He'll kill me but not let me be rich and happy.
therapist: I thought you didnt believe in god.
George: I do, for the bad things!

web browsing and counter-intuitive strategies

counter-intuitive strategies are a pretty powerful concept. sometimes situations demand doing the exact oppposite of what would otherwise appear to be an insane option.

heres a case study with web browsing. suppose you wanted ad-free and popup-free browsing, but still want the infotainment you want from the web. the intuitive option is to confine yourself to a whitelist of safe websites that do not have aggressive and annoying ad-strategies. well, it turns out the way web economics works is not entirely amenable to this strategy. most websites make their revenues primarily off of ads and thus its suboptimal for you as a consumer to wait for nice websites to offer content of your choice (google is an exception..)

now.. suppose you had an option like Firefox's Adblock plugin. the intuitive option is to go browse the websites of your choice and then block annoying content from these. now turns out that websites and ad-strategies evolve, so your coverage over ads is often incomplete. the counter-intuitive option is to spend some time on absolutely annoying websites which have a lot of ads. of course you may not be interested in the content of the websites, what you are really interested is in the gamut of ads and adversarial strategies that are out there. this grants you much more efficient and much quicker coverage over the space of ad-strategies employed out there. chances are if you visit one of these annoying sites, they ae likely employ a much greater diversity of tools, ad-referrers, banners etc.

gist of the whole rant: to get faster coverage over a blacklist, visit arbit websites aggresssively :-)

kaif..

Heres a toast for the strokeless wonder, the fielding captain, that has been haunting indian cricket for quite a long time now:

The Strokeless, Baffled, Confused, Mysterious, Lucky, Troubled, Haunted, Stupid, Enigmatic Untalented Mr. Kaif.

The batsman most likely to get out LBW in world cricket. the perfect sitting duck for bowlers around the world.
The guy with the worst technique against any form of bowling.
The guy with the worst pull shot that does not even cross the 15 yard fielding restriction circle, but still fancies a go at anything short.


from Taxi 9211:
"Tendulkar banneka; Kaif nahi banneka"

lukka chuppi is..

by far the best song in RDB ..

ost in transation

my aptop keyboard has suddeny decided to screw me and doesnt seem to ike the etter "" anymore. as you can obviousy see i am severey handicapped by the ack of a rather usefu aphabetica feature, the abiity to type a "".
ife is beautifuy sucky.

grad students and the aviation industry

the aviation industry owes us grad students bigtime. we make up for their lack of good in-flight entertainment and reading material and provide advisors with entertaining,
and often humorous reading and viewing material.

RITA ROCKS!!

go figure :-)

ode to spam

spam is one of these things that makes you feel important in life

if you dont receive academic spam inviting you to conferences in exotic places and
publishing in obscure journals your standing in the research community is questionable
if you dont receive credit card applications then you dont exist in the view of the
financial world
if you dont receive email spam then you dont have an online presence

today, i have finally been granted a status in the research community -- i have got my first piece of academic spam .. hooray!!

the battle between intelligence and erudition.

there are two kinds of cleverness -- the stuff that arises out of your natural
intelligence, and the stuff that arises out of knowledge/wisdom that you have gained over time.
to kickstart some form of intelligent thinking some learning is required, since it
is often necessary to learn the language/formalism and the tools of the trade
before one can apply the intelligence usefully to problems.
beyond a point however i think learning begins to stifle creativity, and hence
affects your intelligence. there can be many reasons for this, one possible
hypothesis is that the desire to learn outlasts the desire to think, since it
is easier to get engrossed in the knowledge pool out there and it is large enough that you can spend an entire lifetime trying to learn it. the other reason could be that the knowledge begins to affect the way you think -- it rewires your brain in some
subconscious way forcing you to think exactly the way that the sources of wisdom thought. the third reason could be that, too much knowledge can introduce some innate cynicism and scepticism regarding your own competence, you start to feel
that most of your "original" thoughts cease to be original since they would have been stated in some context or another, with high probability. and thus it ceases to incentivize original thinking.

random mental associations

school days:
independence day -- 10 paise orange candy
republic day -- not knowing if green is on top or orange is on top (still cant figure!)
7:00 am -- mr belvedere

school teachers:
"minus half"
teacher: yes yes that u will get only with experience
student: sir, how do we get the experience
teacher: that u will get only with experience


coaching-classes -- "kavalapadathe sagothara" gaana paattu from nearby slum
maths "anusha vidusha and burly badushah"
physics "the cancelling is counselled"
chemistry "you have practically missed the bus"
songs:
europe final countdown -- ace of base
chumbawamba tubthumping -- sachin at sharjah

will keep adding as things unearth themselves

(de)addiction strategy

the sure shot way to cure an addiction is to overdo it until the point when it becomes boring.
try it .. works every time .. at least with things like games/songs ..

to cut or not to cut that is the question

arguments for cutting:
1. brownie points with folks at home
2. avoid questions like "yaaru intha paiyan"


arguments for not cutting:
1. "effort" spent over the last 6 months
2. last chance to appear pseudo-intellectual
3. pseud value
4. can say been there done that at the end of it


not cutting wins unanimously 4:2

what is to be cut is open to imagination

desperately seeking depression

what is it about the human psyche that makes us go search for sad/depressing stuff?

case studies: books, music, movies

the best music (at least in indian films) seems to be those that have a depressed protagonist (preferably drunk beyond redemption).

the best books seem to be ones that are absolutely wrought with depression and thought-provoking stuff.

the best movies seem to be inspired by human tragedy and war.

inspired by current addiction to kabhi na kabhi ..from sharaabi

maybe its just me ...

easter

the only useful festival in the calendar is easter -- only time theres a wide variety of sweet and sour candy, jelly beans in the market in abundance.
all other festivals suck.

research

"Of course, my task was not to invent a new theory but to assemble the existing knowledge, quite doable if one could write clear English"

--quoting herb simon out of context :-)

more quotes

"much hostile and aggressive behavior among animals is the expression of social insecurity"

"when two creatures meet, the one that is able to intimidate its opponent is recognized as socially superior, so that a social decision does not always depend on a fight, an encounter in some circumstances may be enough"

"socially inferior animals are the ones that make the most strenuous, resourceful efforts to get to know their keepers. they prove to be the ones most faithful to them, most in need of their company, and least likely to challenge them or be difficult"

-- "life of pi"

thanks to wikiquote!

"This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V."

qotd

"he had fought so many wars not out of idealism, as everyone had thought, nor had he renounced a certain victory because of fatigue, as everyone had thought, but that he had won and lost for the same reason, pure and sinful pride"

-- "one hundred years of solitude" gabriel garcia marquez

V

long time since i used truly positive adjectives ... v for vendetta is absolutely awesome

p.s: reminded me of an old vinod kambli ad .. v for victory, v for veedol .. poor chap had to make do with cheap motorcycle
lubricant ads, while his schoolmate got all the big bucks :-)

greatest game ever .. i dont think so

In reference to this:
http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/rsavaus/content/current/story/240507.html

Calling it the greatest game ever is a grave injustice to the game. No doubt, it was close, nail-biting, exciting, and had most ingredients of a masala-packet encounter. But, the game is supposed to be a contest between bat and ball, and the last I heard it was not a contest between bat and bat. Unfortunately in recent times ODIs have become increasingly a contest between bats on either side, and bowlers are reduced to pale shadows of themselves with little or no assistance from the pitches. Flat track bullies like Younis Khan, Veeru Sehwag (the list is long..) dominate the game with absolute nonchalance and rake up averages and astonishing scores entering themselves in the record books -- but whats the net worth of these records? I hope this game serves as a wakeup call to administrators and viewers all around the world to re-think what cricket is supposed to be about.

I will have at least one person to agree with me, the pitiable Lewis, who suffered the ignominy of scoring a century for the wrong reasons.

All said and done, its good to see the Aussies are mortal (with even playing conditions, unlike calcutta/madras dustbowls, with umpires like bansal and jayprakash who are ever trigger-happy with lbw and bat-pads) ..

quote of the day

"thats the trouble with you sad city types: you think a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real"
-- "Haroun and the Sea of Stories"

you know you are in trouble when..

you are half-asleep in the morning and you see a screensaver in your head!

sorry for my..

incompetence
indolence
insolence
insouciance
ignorance
irreverence

cranial conundrum

assume the existence of some person X. X cannot be happy because X's brain gets
worried when X is happy that X is not worrying enough about things that X should be worrying about. For the exact same reason X cannot have fun, because whenever X has fun the brain's response is to drive X into depression for not being depressed enough.

Is there a solution to X's dilemma?

self-contained/self-referential/self-consistent

"he was in the throes of composition, in a wilderness of doubts and misgivings - not only about the material and its validity but a fundamental harrowing doubt about his competence to write at all. What evil genius impelled me to undertake this task? What conceit? Waste of time ... With all the self-criticism on one side, he was still struggling to whip the pen on, not having the heart to stop it. But it was a torment."

-- R. K. Narayan, "The world of Nagaraj"

42

the optimal answer to any question is:

"I dont know"

straight answers beget more questions

(feigning) ignorance begets annoyance (pessimistically) annoyance or (optimistically) sympathy,

joy is..

finding a long-lost pack of chewing gum in your backpack

money

Everything needs a performance index (whats life without scores!) . Money is a performance index for estimating the life-sustaining ability of a society. Of course, why life should be sustained is entirely questionable, for the moment lets assume that there is some meaning to life and that sustaining is worthwhile. That raises the natural question of how should money be defined.

In the current context, money is defined largely on the basis of non-renewable resources such as gold, oil. Historically, humans have had an obsession for gold and its sort of natural for gold to continue to play a crucial role in our notion of money (in today's context the role of gold is significantly diminished, except of course for Indian women :-)). A more recent important resource are fossil fuels, and the fact that it is scarce, and we have grown increasingly dependent on them to support our extravagances, increases its value rather inappropriately. So, the money index is then based on fuel resources a society has. As the society diversifies more, and evolves over time, different resources assume greater significance, and the resources used to define the index change over time. What is interesting however, is that traditionally the resources that have been used to define the index have had little or nothing to do with fundamental life-sustenance and knowledge growth.


As an alternative, assume that the total amount of useful resources in the world is X. I am punting on how X can be defined, but a general guideline is that X should be based on renewable sources that have direct impact on life-sustenance.
Why shouldnt these resources be distributed uniformly among all interested participants? Theres no obvious reason to not do a uniform distribution, modulo concerns that not all participants are honest/intelligent and may misuse/abuse/waste the resources allocated to them. If the distribution is uniform, then there is no need to define a performance index to decide how much of the resource belongs to a participant at any given point in time. Of course, most participants in the society are rational, and more importantly selfish and will never agree to the uniform distribution of life-sustaining resources.

Money, then is just a means of perpetuating iniquities in society. It ensures that there is an inequitable distribution of resources among different competing entities in the economy. And worse still its defined on indices that have little or no relevance in the long-term to life-sustenance and knowledge. SCARY!

P.S. Im not a commie!

athithidevo bhava

Indians are the most gracious hosts. Nothing exemplifies this more than the generosity of Indian bowlers towards visiting batsmen on subcontinent pitches (save for a brief period of time when Ajit Wadekar and Mohammed Azharuddin decided to play all home games on cow-dung pitches that would crack as soon as the sun would show up). Historically we have been very good at bringing back to form discards and fringe players from opposing teams time and time again. Case in point: Saeed Anwar, the guy was good but obviously had his share of weaknesses against good bowling, but Venky and Sri ensured that he continued to be listed among the top left-handed batsmen in the world. And now, messrs. Pathan, Harbhajan, and Kumble have donned the mantle of generous hosts. Now, which team in the world consistently allows the opposing tail to spend ridiculous amounts of time in the middle and get as many (if not more) runs than the top order. Why the opposing top order fails to capitalize on the generosity occasionally is a mighty conundrum beyond my comprehension (maybe suicidal tendencies are infectious?).

The point of having a leg-spinner in the team is to ensure that he cleans up the tail, with his guile and variety. Someone should tell the honorable Mr. Anil Kumble, that the ball is supposed to have some semblance of turn off the pitch, it doesnt suffice for the ball to be turning in his hand (if there was an award for maximum torque before delivery and minimum turn after, it would surely go the bespectacled engineer from namma bengaluru). And not to forget his googly, didnt someone tell him that its supposed to be difficult to read from the delivery stride, the hand position, and the wrist position. Even I, sitting thousands of miles away watching it on pathetic 100Kbps streams (illegitimately I may add) on winamp, can pick the googly even before he is into his delivery stride! Not to forget the rambunctious Sardar, ever since the 15 degree rules came into effect he has been a shadow of his old self, very conscious of his continued existence in international cricket.

The remedy:
1. Pick one fast bowler who can bowl yorkers at will (how srinath and co never managed to learn this skill over many years is inexplicable!, maybe the likes of ganguly always wanted juicy wide half-volleys delivered at them in nets to boost their already bloated egos).
2. Pick a leg-spinner who can actually turn the ball, maybe not as much as warnie, but at least as much as Sachin! Whether Piyush Chawla fits this bill, only time will tell. but its high time Mr. Anil quits and starts a coaching camp on how to get labeled as a leg-spinner without actually bowling a leg-break.


Of course we can continue to good hosts -- feed them properly, house them properly, and ensure that they dont get any gastro-intestinal problems, and in the case of a certain Mr. Warne get him his supply of baked beans on time. But for god's sake kill the tail -- its a bloody shame to let them wag!

travails in crocin country

call me ismile [1]. i embarked on this journey 2 1/2 years ago. The last two years have been spent assiduously searching for that elusive great white-whale of lactose-free breakfasts: JUICE!

Unfortunately, everything in the us of a that has to with berries and cherries reminds me of "Crocin" [2] syrup from my sickly childhood days. That leaves very little choice -- I can either pick artificial, saccharine, mixed-fruit concoctions, or stick to and get sick of OJ and its numerous siblings/cousins.

And so, the quest continues....

[1] due apologies to herman melville
[2] for the uninitiated Crocin is Glaxo's brand of paracetamol

finally an explanation for "indian standard time"

``no people whose word for 'yesterday' is the same as their word for 'tomorrow' can be said to have a firm grip on time''

-- from 'Midnight's Children'

did southies escape the timelessness?

recipe for the great indian story

ingredients:
1. politics
2. religion
3. family
4. partition
5. temple-mosque fights
6. cricket
7. romance

method:
mix all ingredients together. order, quantity, quality dont matter!

garnishing:
a. throw in references from the ramanyana and the mahabharata, and occasionally the quran
b. sprinkle some undertones of suppressed homosexual tendencies

how to consume:
burn it, smear some ashes on your forehead, mix the rest with water and drink it

p.s: source of inspiration = Vikram Seth :-)

mein kampf

Contrary to the seriousness of the title this is yet another flippant reference to Seinfeld..

Im eternally grateful to my ex-roomie for indoctrinating me with the Seinfeld-phenomenon. I've been an ardent almost
rabid follower for the last 2 1/2 years now, and needless to say have pretty much seen all the episodes at least
thrice. Unfortunately, it also seems that there might be a few episodes that I may have missed despite my steadfast devotion
and strict adherence to the daily evening and nightly rituals of watching old-reruns on fox. There is some amazing appeal to
Seinfeld, practically knowing each episode by-rote does not seem to in any way lessen the fun in watching it again.

And so the quest for the unseen seinfeld episode continues...

mangoes

"To steel yourself against mangoes showed a degree of iciness that was almost inhuman"

-- from "A Suitable Boy" by Vikram Seth

more on mangoes later.

the opposite

made an incredible number of bad judgement calls over the last week..

reminded of this seinfed episode where george decides to the absolute opposite of whatever his mind tells him to do
http://www.tv.com/seinfeld/the-opposite/episode/2326/summary.html

maybe i should take a cue from that and try it!

Joblessness: harry potter alter ego

You scored as Severus Snape. Well you're a tricky one aren't you? Nobody quite has you figured out and you'd probably prefer it stayed that way. That said you are a formidable force by anyone's reckoning, but there is certainly more to you than a frosty exterior and a bitter temper.



Now .. I have to wait for many more months before I find out if Im a hero or a villain.. Any thoughts?

defining god

heres a rather amateurish attempt;

god = argmin_h L(h), the hypothesis with minimum description cost over the
set of all possible hypotheses.

L is the description length of h -- the number of bits required to explain different
observations with hypothesis h.

L(h) = sum_o {l_h(o)}, where o ranges of the set of observations you want to explain, i.e, each observation o has some description cost l_h(o) to be "adequately" explained by the hypothesis h.

Now, the hypothesis h which requires the smallest effort to explain the observations is 'god'

does this seem a reasonably meaningful description of god?

Where I see it failing:
1. modeling appropriate cost functions
2. handling observations that may contradict each other
{modeling contradictions would incur infinite cost, implying that either god doesnt exist or everything is god}

p.s. its a bloody pain to typeset math!

interesting news article

posted on slashdot.org

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20060211/sc_space/mindcontrolbyparasites

now I finally have a rational explanation for my behavioral patterns :-)

tick-tock vs tick-tick

Does the second hand of an analog clock go tick-tock or tick-tick? I dont know the answer to the question and my initial experiments with my alarm clock suggest that I can convince my brain to perceive it going both ways.

karakkatakaran

I dont know why Im even doing this .. but I was reminded of this pretty old tamil movie and I thought I should enlighten the world on this "piece of art".

The Hero:
Ramarajan --> If you can tolerate his tight-fitting, obscenely colored silk kurtas
you must either be color-blind or be a part of the Parisian fashion elite.

The Heroine:
As usual a nonentity who can dance a bit and run around, and needless to say shed a lot of glycerine induced tears under stress.

Enter The Sidekicks:
By far the most interesting part of the movie. The rather legendary "vazhaippazham" joke was the contribution of this movie to tamil literature.

The Plot thickens:

Nothing much to say here unfortunately. Hero, heroine with some dance-rivalry and
ancient connections. In the end all ends well (otherwise the movie wont sell in India) and the villain gets impaled by an enraged bull in front of a temple (now if thats not imaginative what is!)

Asides:
The reason I got reminded of this movie was this song "ooru vittu ooru vanthu kathal keethal pannatheenge" --> if you dont know tamil dont bother.
{or if Im allowed to make a more outrageous claim .. if u dont understand tamil ur existence is even more meaningless than it already is}

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