batteries ..

the profit margins on batteries must be unreasonably high .. cant imagine any other reason why radioshack reps are hell bent on selling you batteries irrespective of the actual product you set out to buy!

hairy business ideas

suppose you are in the business of making shaving products (cream, aftershave etc) one possible business strategy is to add some secret ingredients to your product that actually promotes hair growth. it can increase your revenue and guarantee a limitless demand (until the nature of the secret ingredient in the product is exposed)

a cynic

someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing

--oscar wilde

nicetry's first law of ignorance

the less you know about something .. the more it entitles you to make the most outrageous strong-sounding statements and have strong opinions with no rational basis.

learning: from politicians, self.

when in doubt ..

use a chorus!

when a musical composition seems to be drab and going nowhere throw in a chorus .. with high probability choruses sound good..

on a related note i wonder if the nicesoundingness of choruses has anything to do with gaussians and the law of large numbers (if you throw in enough noise eventually something nice will emerge that will be appealing in its simplicity)

note to self .

diving head first into a wall has undesirable consequences.

I

I = union_x say(I,!x)
I = U - union_x say (I,x)
please solve for I.

moksha ...

the soul has been freed from its irritating existence.

from monotony to novelty

it is funny how kids like to do repetitive things (like watch the same movie, listen to the same song, play with the same toy over and over and over again) .. but when you "grow up" you suddenly feel irritated with repeats and crave for newness/novelty. leaves you wondering why ..

novel spam?

Hi nice try,

Greetings

Let me introduce myself , I am BLAH, a Bangalore based consultant. I happen to view your profile while surfing on the net and thought if I could suggest a few opportunities which I am currently working on in the area of Research and Development for few of the premier and most admired companies.

Kindly get back to me with your contact number and a available slot to call so that we could discuss and take it forward.or updated profile which I can take into procees.

Thanks & Regards

BLAH

Associate Manager - Executive Search


Heres what I would have liked to write as a response -- of course didnt think it deserved a reply :-)

Hi BLAH,

Much as I would like to believe that your esteemed and most admired companies would be interested in hiring a random person whose profile you found on the web, I believe it my responsibility to inform you and your ilk that I have absolutely no intentions whatsoever of gettting out my current coccoon to enter the bad bad world of the businesses you are referring to. I appreciate your most nobel and altruistic endeavor in trying to make my life better, but you havent made an offer that I cannot refuse :-).

Thanks,

nice try

education

sambar vada: its vadas dipped in sambar!

weekend joblessness

tried this .. http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

Your Type is
INTJ
Introverted Intuitive Thinking Judging
Strength of the preferences %
78 38 88 11


not sure what i can make out of this .. opening it up for public scrutiny.

kids as multiplicative adversaries

if you ask a kid to give you a tough multiplication problem .. it is likely that the kid will ask you multiply two large numbers with lots of zeros .. its funny that the brain doesnt come wired with a model of its own processing complexity

some consolation

should you be pleased if you lost to the two best teams on display that went on to contest the championship?

discomforting comforters

its disconcerting to note that you went to sleep without having your comforter over you and without a conscious model of where it is on the bed, but you wake up finding yourself within the comforter and with no knowledge of how it got there. disconcerting because it is possible that you have no control over your actions while sleeping

gait

was amazed that it is possible to identify an acquaintance (not someone that i meet very often) from a reasonable distance just from the gait!

introductions

why bother introducing yourself, when the probability of a repeated rendezvous is negligible?

life

accurately depicted here

early vs delayed decision making

do we want to get answers early and know that we have failed earlier .. or do we want to delay decision making until either the situation changes so much that the original decision-question disappeared or the decision made itself thanks to the actions of external forces? i guess a related question is how much control do you want or how much do you trust randomness in the environment? i appear to have argued in the past that delayed decision making is good ( here )

p.s: someone actually had a thesis on a strategy called "win or lose fast" for playing AI games and managed to get an honorable mention for it

p.p.s: its funny the amazing consistency with which i write the p.s/asides before writing the actual content (not that there is much anyway)

unpardonable

just because your login-name is surprisingly close to ur real name doesnt give one the right the arbitrarily chose to assume that the login name is the real name :-(