airline seat assignment?

should airlines profile passenger weight/build etc before doing the seat assignments. makes sense to have "compact" people in middle seats :-)

randal

why do there appear to be a more than normal share of people named randal/randalls in academia?

why do we sleep with eyes closed?

is it because visual processing is (one of) the most expensive pieces of brain processing? shutting that input makes it easy for the brain to go into sleep mode?

recursion

everytime i see the billboard for some eyeglasses on the way back from the airport, i think that the model there looks like "thirteen" from house.

now everytime, i see the billboard, i think that the billboard reminds me that i think that the model looks like thirteen from house ...

how to avoid check-in fees?

airlines seem to be doing something dumb doing gate checks for baggage for free but charging for them at the ticket counter.

maybe they should check whether its carry-on-able at the security checkpoints?

to ski or not to ski, that is the question

sidewalks and artificial constraints

(yet another post in the funny how serious)

seems like i strive to contrive, take long strides, go out of step etc. to make sure that the start or end step coincides with the line between two stones/slabs.
is it just me, or does everyone like to synchronize their footsteps with the start/end of the sidewalk stones/slabs?

as an side, this reminded me that most constraints are artificial. no real reason to do what i do :-)

interesting sociological experiment

imagine a hypothetical capacity-constrained facebook :-)

each person can only have a strict limit of k-friends, and your ex-"friends" can see your current selection/comment on it etc.

would be curious to see what happens!

left-handedness and making up stuff on the fly

someone pointed out that the way left handed people write looks contrived.

knowing nothing left handedness, writing or anything close to that, i came up with 2 "theories" on-the-fly (that have withstood the cant-find-an-obvious-contradiction-in-10-seconds test of time)

1. teachers in early classes are primarily trained/overfitted to right-handers. so they end up not knowing the optimal smooth strokes for different alphabets for left-handed kids (i recall that there was a time that left-handedness was considered evil ..and teachers forced kids to become right handed .. but i digress)

2. its easier for a right handed person to write left-to-right (less constrained stroke). so our writing style is pretty much designed for the common case. so left-handers have to contrive to write in the direction that is not entirely natural

if anyone knows any better, id like to know. would also like to hear more cant-find-an-obvious-contradiction-in-10-seconds theories as well :-)

the last bite problem

funny how no one wants to finish the last chocolate or the last bit of some snack. somehow, even though there is less than a mouthful, when it comes to the last few bites, the lifetime of the snack seems to get prolonged. somehow, the act of "finishing" must create a sense of guilt! surely, some diet experts must exploit this somehow?

buses and insects

funny how a bus smells similar to when an insect gets squished. reminded me of this little-black-dot-of-a-creature that used to give out this most obnoxious smell when squished (incidentally, this is what i was doing in some "classes" --tracking/squishing insects :-) ). cant describe either the smell or the insect (didnt have any distinguishing feature beyond just looking like a black dot). but if anyone has any clue what the heck im talking about, id be very curious to know the name of that insect.

"projects"

Project is a self-contained phrase and may or not be capable of elaboration. I come across the word in newspapers and among academicians, engineers and adventurers. One might hear the word and keep quiet, no probing further. Sometimes a project might involve nothing more than swatting flies and sending reports to the headquarters.

-- the talkative man.

irony

everyone strives/claims to be different, in that respect they are all alike

definining pride

surpassing your own expectations of yourself

known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and unknown knowns!

the line between what you know and what you are guessing is often blurred!

based on my own experiences from quiz/trivia contests and minesweeper -- i have vague guesses that i cant possibly have pulled out at random -- must have been the case that i subconsciously know some connection but do not consciously realize it.

problem is that explicitly keeping track of what you know is hard! some stuff gets internalized to the point where its not clear if its some guesswork/luck or if its some subconscious
knowing

does dhoni read gladwell?

http://www.cricinfo.com/wivind2009/content/current/story/410717.html
"He's good. He will improve, the more international cricket he plays the better
for him," Dhoni said, suggesting that youngsters ought to be given more
exposure at the international stage. "Most of the players who play at the
international level have the talent - it's just that some players get more
backing than others. Some are considered match-winners and often match-winners
are given more time compared to others."

strangely reminiscent of the basic hypothesis/claim in "outliers" by malcolm gladwell

qotd

History is an unforgiving laboratory. Its experiments can be run only once, and never again under precisely the same conditions.

-- Blunder, Zachary Shore

ski tags on jackets

why dont people remove the ski tags on their jackets?

i can think of three reasons:

1. some sort of medal of honor/badge of courage that people like to flaunt?
2. do the ski folks make it very difficult to remove to get free advertising?
3. the tag actually helps by making it easy to zip/unzip your jacket even with your gloves on. so people leave them on for utility!

2 seems a bit far-fetched and too much of a conspiracy theory. 1 doesnt make sense; skiing seems commonplace enough that its not a uniquely distinguishing feature to flaunt. so im going with 3. if 3 is true, it makes a strong case for jacket manufacturers to adopt this.

p.s. im ignoring the possibility that people are lazy/dont care enough to remove them.

hack to break reviewer anonymity

a rather straightforward hack to break the anonymity of reviewers for peer-reviewed publications (most places at least ensure single-blind submission -- author names are public but reviewing is anonymous)


wonder if this has been tried before to figure out who is reviewing your paper?
1. put some results/theorems in a separate file (preferably these are genuine)

2. give a url submissionid_conference.googlepages.com/filename for the file (probably works much better if the submission is double blind -- if author names are also suppressed and all hints to author identity are explicitly removed, then you can just create something and justify why you created a webpage for the additional stuff from 1 -- linking to your homepage would sacrifice author anonymity :-) )

3. add some webtracking thing to the url and see where you are getting hits from

assuming you can filter out spurious hits/click spam and check for actual views (e.g., .edu or city names), you should have a fairly reasonable idea of who is reviewing

(inspired in part by a recent paper that cited itself for motivation :-) )

qotd

We zone out, we chicken out, we deceive. To be human is to fight a lifelong uphill battle for self-control. Why? Because evolution left us clever enough to set reasonable goals but without the willpower to see them through

-- Kluge, Gary Marcus