accidental discovery of the day

my elbow is stronger than a squash racquet :-)

Parthenogenesis

via: http://www.slate.com/id/2180956/fr/rss/

if i was part of the religious right, i now have an amazingly good argument in favor of the immaculate conception!

(i wonder who is funding the research :-) ?)


update: wikipedia suggests that the doctrine of immaculate conception should not be confused with the doctrine of virgin birth (who would have guessed they would have two low probability events?)

karma, reincarnation, and conservation

suppose you believed in reincarnation -- in that case, is there some sort of a law of conservation of "souls"?
that is, the total number of "souls"that exists is a constant, its just that the manifestations are different.

couple of thoughts:
1. the definition of what has a soul is fuzzy -- does a single-celled amoeba have a soul?
2. it seems that the total number of life-forms is in fact increasing over time (even not counting bacteria, amoeba etc). this seems to contradict what little i understand of karma etc, the number of souls is strictly decreasing over time (some attain moksha).

qotd

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

--Upton Sinclair

via "Super Crunchers" Ian Ayres

depressingly true ..

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=944

crossie spam

im getting spam with subject lines looking like cryptic crossword clues :-).

"food in order left children in Langley"

hilarious :-)

public libraries and piracy

the music/movie companies seem hell-bent on going after p2p apps. i wonder how much market share they lose because of public libraries -- i would imagine that many decent public libraries have a good music/movie collection and that members can easily rip/copy the songs/movies when they check them out.

wonder if these folks have looked at how much revenue they lose because of public libraries.

i guess the riaa/mpaa could
a. go after public libraries to shut them down or stop supplying them with audio/video content
b. introduce specialized drm-ed versions for public libraries/lending services

in hindsight
a. this also applies to dvd/cd sharing services that are physical p2p apps
b. book publishers as well -- why wouldnt they want all readers to purchase rather than use libraries .. and why dont they make nearly as much a fuss as the riaa/mpaa folks?

the answer seems to be that electronic media significantly reduce the overhead of sharing and amplify the potential revenue loss .. and so theres not much to be gained by going after the physical p2p/sharing models.

piecewise linear vs smooth interpolation

suppose you are given a bunch of points on a plane. is the natural thing to consider a smoothly interpolated curve passing through the points or do a piecewise-linear join of the points

(it seemed to me that when the points have an naturally appealing polygon shape, then the piecewise linear interpolation occurs, otherwise the tendency is to draw a smooth curve through the points)

confusing energies

why it there a temptation to press harder against a button in the hope that the bulb burns brighter -- must be case of the brain misfiring, and mixing up different forms of energy.

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.