motd

"Keeping up the appearance of having all your marbles is hard work but important. Anyway, Im not really addled. I just have more facts to keep track of than other people"


-- "Water for Elephants", Sara Gruen

qotd

it is melancholy to think that such wonderful perseverance should have been wasted in so vain a pursuit, and that energies so unconquerable should have had no worthier field to strive in.

-- charles mackay in "extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" on the alchemist bernard of treves

(could just have well been someone talking about me and minesweeper :-) )

research extending life

is it just me -- why is it that most of the research around us is primarily focused on extending life?

twinkle twinkle little star

what the heck does it mean for a star to twinkle, i have no clue what twinkling means and ive not seen a star "twinkle"

evolution ..

in high school when we were taught things about evolution/natural selection -- i somehow got the impression that species were explicitly trying to adapt to their environment, i.e., each animal somehow consciously tries to grow a longer tail or sharper claws or change its color to survive better.

now that i understand it slightly better this mistaken notion has since been dispelled -- its not the case that each species/animals consciously try to adapt -- the truth couldnt be farther away from this. the truth is that random shit happens, and the random shit that turns out to be best adapted to the current environment has greater probability of survival and there is an observational bias -- we only see those species that have the beaks/claws/colors best suited to the environment (the rest have been exterminated!), giving us the impression of some conscious effort by species to adapt to their surroundings.

optimally sizing free samples

whats the tradeoff between how many/much of a free sample give away. presumably you want to give enough so that it is sufficient to get the user to form a habit of using the product and then have them hooked on (not addicted just mere habit forming). at the same time you dont want to give away too much since it obviously eats into a potential market and also incurs losses.

wonder if there are some studies on how long an activity should be sustained for it to become subconsciously ingrained as a habit?

reality check

"There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced, they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed."

--"a mind of its own", Cordelia Fine

impact of comp.sci on life

"If you can put in 10 numbers in this survey, that would be great. Just
wanted to know how much impact computer science technologies have
w.r.t. life. This is as close as pure computer science can get to
`saving lives' and so I was curious to see what sort of numbers we
might get."

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=FqsjTtMwGQAHpSR46_2bsG2A_3d_3d


(posted for a friend)

woodpeckers and moral victories

flashback:
http://nicertry.blogspot.com/2006/10/ignobel.html
(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v443/n7112/full/443616b.html)

today:
this months natgeo is carrying a short blurb on how the research into woodpeckers headbanging is useful.

i feel like i can claim a moral victory.

credit cards and rental insurance

why do credit card companies cover some portion of the rental car insurance -- it seems like they shouldnt be in the business of doling out rental insurance.

probably, many of the claims that people made for having been wrongfully charged on the credit card had to do with rental car companies (who are known to be pretty strict about damages etc) which id imagine that customers would claim they were wrongfully charged by the rental company and the credit card folks figured it would be cheaper to offer the insurance rather than spend the money in fighting the claims over unfair transactions.

anyone have better ideas?

web crawler question

can search engines find pages that are not linked from anywhere else?

if so, what sort of crawler functionality do they need to achieve this.

slowing down ..

why do i invariably slow down to be extra careful in situations even though there is evidently no threat of physical danger, and there should (theoretically) be no correlation between the speed and accuracy of mental computation!

{again based on observations from minesweeper}

fan speed ordering

the fans ive observed in the US have the fan speeds ordering: (off, max, max-1, max-2,...)

--> this makes sense if there is a binary choice users want -- either you want the fan turned on at full-speed (e.g., in summer) or turned off. makes sense in that it minimizes the number of state changes between desired and undesired states.
but if for some reason, users wanted an intermediate speed, then it is suboptimal since it may require more state changes


the fans ive observed in India have the fan speeds ordering: (off, 1,2,..,max)
--> this makes sense if the user wanted to figure out what speed-level wants, and then wants the fan in that state for a long time. but i cant figure out why users in India would want this -- presumably they want a fan with just a binary choice (off or on-at-highestspeed) given that summers are more brutal in tropical climates.

mast kalandar!

aug 27, scene 1: random thought at work

was listening to some hindi song with the refrain "mast kalandar" .. got me thinking -- who/what is this kalandar thing? and more importantly why is it "mast"?

aug 27, scene2: reading an article about pakistan in national geographic sept 2007

"whirling dervishes glorify the shrine of lal shahbaz qalandar, a 13th century sufi saint who preached peace between muslims and hindus. a faith embraced by most pakistanis, barelvi islam combines sunni with shiite and sufi mystical traditions. believers flock by the millions to such zones of peace where the oppressed and the powerful worship side by side"

{dervish: a member of any of various muslim ascetic orders, as the sufis, some of which carry on ecstatic observances, such as energetic dancing and whirling or vociferous chanting or shouting.}

ok .. so the mast kalandar could actually be mast qalandar, and "mast" could be some reference to a state of spritiual enlightenment/fervour associated with the qalandar thingie.

aug 27, scene 3: wikipedia to tie the loose ends

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qalandar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_Qalandar

postscript:
actually, i lied a bit. even though i presented the events happening in the order scene 1/2/3 .. reality is that physical access to wikipedia is nearer than to the latest issue of natgeo .. thus the real events went scene1/3/2 -- but the weird coincidence that i should think about qalandar in 1 and see it in part2 on the same day still holds!

the sequence of events presented above (1;2;3) make for more interesting reading than the sequence 1;3;2. ive taken some creative liberty in narrating the events in the order 1;2;3 as it does not take away the essence of the interesting coincidence.

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