!nversed Poignancy!

Dew and the Breeze...

2011-10-31T22:11:00.000+05:30

O'er the kiss of the his,
Her smiles breached the horizon.

He whiffs,
She flutters.

He twinks,
She winks.

Entwined are they
In a dream beyond reach

He never said,
What he felt.
She always felt,
What he never said.

Thus the story of love,
between the Breeze and the Dew.

-!nversed Poignancy!

Sleeping Time

2011-08-31T00:48:00.000+05:30

The pendulum sways in space
Unaffected by what it sees.
Twelve numbers watch
The two hungry hands
Alas! "sleeping time"...

-!nversed Poignancy!

Social (Net) Burden...

2011-06-05T08:41:00.001+05:30

It grieves us more
when some more get added
to the bunch of memories
we hold on to.

-!nversed Poignancy!

Prisoner's Dilemma and IPL Cartelization Theory

2011-04-23T10:13:00.000+05:30

Earlier this month, Sri Lankan(SL) Cricket Board had asked their players to return back home by May, 2011. Apparently, the Sri Lanka cricket board wants the team to focus more on the England Tour ahead instead of IPL.

The call from the country is blatant that they would want their players to return home for the practice, suspending IPL for a while. This decision would impact the IPL in what might be called a "significant game changer". With teams losing out on few of the key players ( Mumbai Indians without the Malinga, Kochi Tuskers and Deccan Chargers without their captains during the tournament), the team's balance might just get tipped.

Amidst all these, "tu-tu main-main" [http://dict.hinkhoj.com/meaning-of-tu-tu%20main-main-in-english.html] between the players and the boards.I felt that there was more to it than what meets the eye -- I felt that it was a torrid move by the SL to somehow hit back at India, for the alleged "ill-treatment" of the SL president during the World Cup Final -- and IPL, IPLs Big Bucks and the plausible state of it 'minus' SL players might have seemed like the only way in which SL Board could have it easy to give a 'cold-shoulder' to India.

The whole scenario reminded me of the multi player generalization of the Prisoner's dilemma (PD) -- with dilemmas surrounding multiple players and it ofcourse gets difficult to get rational,more so, in getting the selfish agents to cooperate for their common good.

Just when I was trying to segregate the in-roads and aggregate the flaws in this decision, I stumbled upon a view from elsewhere, which said that the entire situation might suffer "big time" if there is a formation of cartels. As we know Cartelisation[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartel] is said to be the best way to break Nash Equilibrium. Sangakarra, Jayawardene, Dilshan, Mathews, Randiv, Malinga, and Kulasekara form the core of the Sri Lankan national team. Still, the only way they can win this battle is by coming together. But, the cartel will be broken if even one of them defects. With a whole lot of discussions going on between these players, it of-course, is congruent to the mutiplayer variant of prisoner's dielemma, the game of commons.

The franchise owners will definitely not be happy with this. The aggrieved owners include are likely to support the players’ cartel.

The Sri Lankan ministry, on the other hand, would like to form their own cartel with anti-BCCI boards like PCB and ECB. And, they would like to identify the weak link in the players’ cartel and lure him to defect. National captaincy could be a significant incentive and Dilshan could be their target. But, given that the ministry has acted on ego rather than financial considerations, they may be entering the battle with little preparation.

While, in the ordinary , universal cooperation is a pareto-optimal outcome, i.e., there is no outcome in which each player is at least as well off and some are better off. But in the commons game the only pareto optimal outcomes are those of minimally effective cooperation. Whether universal cooperation is nevertheless desirable may depend on the nature of the choices involved.

None, the less, the entire story now seems to have ended with not much "game theory masala" to taste. But, it was nice retrospecting, none the less :)

Unsung Thoughts ...

2011-03-07T05:51:00.001+05:30

My thoughts leave
In mute protest
Of being confused
Until am left with
A blank expression

-!nversed Poignancy!

Starky Tragics...

2011-01-22T20:08:00.002+05:30

Tragic reflections mark my disappointment
I am

Unstable
Lachrymal
indisposed in my mordent resentment

unforgiving
unrelenting
the everyday thoughts of my loss

vivid and long-enduring memories of the past
flood my being

anger fuels my soul
my becoming is unreal

found discreetly crying
stumbling toward the Hell of mental collapse
over the securities I lack but demand

dejected by God
undemining regret
my patterns of thinking become more decrepit

confused and homesick
overwhelming disbelief

driven to covet
all the little things that remind me
of this shattered dream from which I awoke

unable to concentrate on anything but the lies
watching my accomplishments become what I despise

my heart - every beat hurting

only to
mindlessly self-reflect
as if I'd find the reason

treading over the fragmented pieces of hope
scattered all around me

immobilized by the realization of intention
& the future I'd be suffering

I feel it
this life

ripped from my sanctum
sick in my sadness

and I won't forgive
but I learn

a little over-protective and obsessive
because I'm scared

but I'm here

my mind - my fist
rightfully the reason
you should consider the consequence
when you say
"What if..."

-!nversed Poignancy

*Some random stark stuffs after a loong loong time of poetry, I guess :)*

The Game of Jokes, Jokers and the Dilemma...

2010-11-13T22:12:00.009+05:30

In my college, its a really common ritual to *more than* occasionally share PJs and P+iJs (Poor and Complex Jokes) to the mailing list..

However, as matter of time came a sort of metamorphism that made each of those so called *comedy* look like nothing more than a greater piece of sarcasm, greater insult and greater offensiveness ...
Thus, the phrases such as "your joke was awfully offensive", "your joke hurt my feelings and sentiments", etc soon became a word of mouth and the mouth of the words..

Although, at first things go brushed away easily, more so, because of the excessive citations and pointers towards statements like *ah!, I was just being political correct* or *Oh!, guess you are overly sensitive*. But, still the Jokes continued, and continued with some discontinuity, of-course...

As time passed and "work-flows" in terms of mind-maturities - the entire process of the *politically correctness* and *overly sensitiveness* pointing citations for once came hand to hand with "was (s)he really hurt?" and "oh, may be (s)he was hurt .." sort of emotions.

This said and done -- Today, I was kind of IETising (Idiotic Emission of Thoughts) about why such misunderstandings happen or is bound to happen and kind of felt that "Game Theory" might just give an answer to this sort of a dilemma..

For the uninitiated..the sender of the mail can either intend it to be a joke or serious. In turn, the receiver can either interpret the email as a joke or serious. There are four possible outcomes:

–If the sender meant it as a joke, and receiver took it as a joke, then both get a good laugh

–If the sender meant it as a joke, and receiver took it as seriously, then the emails would stop until receiver learned it was sarcasm–then they'd have a good laugh

–If the sender meant it seriously, and receiver took it as a joke, then receiver would probably get in trouble with the college’s residential staff

–If the sender meant it seriously, and receiver took it seriously, then both move on without incident

The game thus becomes..

Receiver/Sender	Joke	Serious
Joke	J	L
Serious	J	K

The chart illustrates the dynamics of the game: there are three good outcomes and only a single bad outcome–when a serious statement is taken as a joke. The good outcomes lead to a chuckle or a maintenance of status quo.

As a point of matter, the bad outcome can be really bad. I know people who have gotten in serious trouble with friends and they have had to attend sensitivity training to avoid being kicked out of the apparent *friendships*.

Therefore, the game suggests that it’s best to take most statements as serious. There is almost no risk to taking statements seriously because either it will be a correct assessment or it will get resolved on a double-check that the other person was sarcastic. This avoids the event of a blow-up entirely.

Conclusion: investigate unclear jokes and sarcasm until you’re sure. I wish many had known this in much before they had gotten themselves into a bit of trouble. I hope this post can spare someone else the same hassle.

What say?!

An Inception of Real Imagination..

2010-08-04T23:32:00.003+05:30

The whole sqrt(-1) imaginary number thing has always been pretty abstract to me (and probably most others who learned them, but then never had to use them in their job or anything). On the flip side, the very own concept of imaginary and imagination in itself is a kind of abstract things too. For the uninitiated, what is Imaginary?- something that cannot be perceived, something that is imaginary? (lolz!, its like telling to understand recursion, you need to understand recursion :P).

With stories charted and realities imparted - I kind of always pondered about this Idiotism [IET] for a loong period of time now, but, unfortunately didn't quite find the zeal to pen something about it, until today, when I seemed to have a quibble with a friend of mine about the same issue. And the rest as they say was history, with me having some sort of a "halo" around me to at-least come out and "try" to define why we have something called "imaginary" and "imagination" at all?!

Let's now start with the basics..imagination for all practical purpose is considered "a power of the mind", "a creative faculty of the mind", "the mind" itself when in use, and a "process" of the mind used for thinking, scheming, contriving, remembering, creating, fantasizing, and forming opinion. On the other hand, as a medium, imagination is a world where thought and images are nested in the mind to "form a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses". In the sense of the word as a process, imagination is a form of mediation between what is considered "externalized" reality and internalized man and finally, imagination is a term that circulates forms of mass media when the "internalized" private imagination is presented as public, or expressed in a media form, such as film or in virtual reality technology.

But, all said and done - is it not true to assume that the concept of imagination is nothing but a fight between our sense of what we consider private and essentially humanistic. Dosn't imagination challenge the technology to explore what media can do: how far inside man can media extend itself, and how far outside man can man bring what is considered his internalized self? Are these processes transmutable through media, and if so, what kinds? Can imagination be coded? Does technology employ imagination in its productive and innovative capabilities? Or is imagination a human faculty only? If the latter, than to what extent can media technologies mimic imaginative functions and/or expressions? And, if media technologies can mimic 'products' of the imagination, what is the essential difference between 'having' imagination and producing imaginative qualities?

I kind of feel that imagination is nothing but a mere matter of "reproductive projections". One's perception of the Imaginary is an essential stage of recognition of what is real and what is unreal. If the Imaginary is the reflected image in the mirror, it is probable that the imagination is the mental faculty for integrating this 'represented' image into the person's experience of himself in the world. If the imagination is a counterpoint to perceptible reality,then, implication is that the Imaginary is in fact representational. This representation, is a kind of mirror, a mirror that shows all your "reproductive projections".

So what exactly is that I talk about when I say "reproductive projections"? Well, I would say that its a simple concept of "filmi flashbacks", whose basis lies in a given or experienced knowledge that must be reproduced to 'short'(as in Electronic Circuits) the proof posited by the senses. For example, shouldn't one use her/his powers of imagination to deductively reason that even though s/he cannot see all sides of a cube s/he is looking at there are six sides to the cube. For, based on the viewer's experience, a cube factually and observably does have six sides. Were s/he to pick the cube up and examine it, s/he should see and note it as fact observable by her/his senses. However, since the viewer has the faculties of her/his reproductive imagination, s/he need not rely on her/his senses. Thus, if reality can be observed by the senses, imagination addresses a certain no-man's land between what is observably "true" or "real" and that which is considered totally "fictive" or "false," in a sense, imagination provides a shortcut. Imagination in this sense, fills in what could in all likelihood be observed by the senses, and apprehends a sense of reality based on the experience of the proof of his senses, without the executed proof.

Although, it would be really abrupt to end at this point - I still have no option but to end it (Thanks to the dearth of imagination(s) within me :P).However, I would sort of leave the entire quibble- still open ended- as to whether, imagination is indeed the ideal communication- to supercede our romantic notions of the untranscendable 'imaginations' or is a pure form of built in "Inception"?

How about Agreed Marriages?

2010-08-03T16:24:00.004+05:30

I was kind of rambling about some serious stuffs and got into thinking about some strange thoughts connecting "Agreement" and "Marriage". Not sure if Mr. Krishnamurthy (Who thought us the basics of Legal Issues and Agreements) had a kind of induced inception into me, but, I some of felt that there's some connection between these two quoted words.. I am not sure if this would be turning into a reality someday (Maybe not on this level) But, a food for thought none-the-less..

My thoughts were could two people agree to make a relationship work and succeed. Think about arranged marriages. Two people basically agreeing to make a relationship work. Is it more likely for a commitment like that to work than for one built on emotions. Emotions will screw you up every time.

But if you have a relationship without the emotions and feelings and only on "agreement" to have the relationship work will it be a happy one? Will love grow between the two people? Marriages are entered into every day and broken everyday.

I know this doesn't make sense...but this is one of my rambling thoughts......

Does it really matter?!

2010-08-03T16:18:00.002+05:30

You never know when someone might catch a dream from you.
Or something you say may open up the windows of a mind that seeks light
The way you live may not matter at all,
But you never know, it might.
And just in case it could be that another's life, through you,
might possibly change for the better with a better and brighter view,
it seems it might be worth a try at pointing the way to the right;
Of course, it may not matter at all, but then again, it might.

-!nversed Poignancy!

Twist in the Tale..

2010-08-03T16:13:00.001+05:30

At the 1994 annual awards dinner given for Forensic Science, AAFS President Dr Don Harper Mills astounded his audience with the legal complications of a bizarre death.

Here is the Case:

On March 23, 1994 the medical examiner viewed the body of Ronald Opus and concluded that he died from a shotgun wound to the head.
Mr. Opus had jumped from the top of a ten-story building intending to commit suicide. He left a note to the effect indicating his despondency. As he fell past the ninth floor his life was interrupted by a shotgun blast passing through a window, which killed him instantly. Neither the shooter nor the deceased was aware that a safety net had been installed just below the eighth floor level to protect some building workers and that Ronald Opus would not have been able to complete his suicide the way he had planned.

"Ordinarily," Dr Mills continued, "A person, who sets out to commit suicide and ultimately succeeds, even though the mechanism might not be what he intended, is still defined as committing suicide." That Mr. Opus was shot on the way to certain death, but probably would not have been successful because of the safety net, caused the medical examiner to feel that he had a homicide on his hands.
In the room on the ninth floor, where the shotgun blast emanated, was occupied by an elderly man and his wife. They were arguing vigorously and he was threatening her with a shotgun.
The man was so upset that when he pulled the trigger he completely missed his wife and the pellets went through the window striking Mr. Opus. When one intends to kill subject "A" but kills subject "B" in the attempt, one is guilty of the murder of subject "B".
When confronted with the murder charge the old man and his wife were both adamant and both said that they thought the shotgun was unloaded. The old man said it was a long-standing habit to threaten his wife with the unloaded shotgun. He had no intention to murder her.
Therefore the killing of Mr. Opus appeared to be an accident; that is, if the gun had been accidentally loaded. The continuing investigation turned up a witness who saw the old couple's son loading the shotgun about six weeks prior to the fatal accident.
It transpired that the old lady had cut off her son's financial support and the son, knowing the propensity of his father to use the shotgun threateningly, loaded the gun with the expectation that his father would shoot his mother.Since the loader of the gun was aware of this, he was guilty of the murder even though he didn't actually pull the trigger. The case now becomes one of murder on the part of the son for the death of Ronald Opus.

Now comes the exquisite twist-
Further investigation revealed hat the son was, in fact, Ronald Opus. He had become increasingly despondent over the failure of his attempt to engineer his mother's murder. This led him to jump off the ten-story building on March 23rd, only to be killed by a shotgun blast passing through the ninth story window. The son had actually murdered himself, so the medical examiner closed the case as a suicide.

Theory of Inverse Depression..

2010-07-04T16:27:00.004+05:30

The other day in one of my Technical Communication class, I happened to meet head-on with this topic called "Emotional Intelligence". It kind of really seemed way beyond the traditional psychometrics,et al.But, nonetheless - somewhere down in my ganglions I felt that metrics like Emotional Intelligence could not be used to measure a person's level of happiness or sadness per-say; Atleast it isn't the right tool to get such things measured..On the other hand though- I could more conspicuously see the OOBT tableau of it...Hmm..Why can't someone use Emotional Intelligence to feel better? Why can't someone use Emotional Intelligence to come out of depression? And with it did my IETs(Yeah!, the same old Idiotic Emission of Thoughts) flow and thus leading to painting my rectangular parchment of space on my blog with some thoughts to ponder..

For the uninitiated,if we do step back and see the very "grass-root" level definition of EI (Emotional Intelligence) it says - and I quote "a self-perceived grand ability to identify, assess, manage and control the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups". Voila! So, EI as I learnt is not all about mere digits indicating some "quotient", but, about the state of mind!

Further research revealed that the human mind tends to behave in an entirely-different manner when the body builds a different environment around it. Now, what that means is that- If a person is depressed (low EI), then, if s/he manages to forcefully move into an environment that is filled with a high EI. Then, it seems, the EI of the depressed person is at a pseudo-high EI. Now, another rule says that if a person spends a more than 15.7 mins in an pseudo-high EI environment,then, s/he crosses a threshold barrier to reach a quasi-stable state of mind.

Now, that's revalation, I felt!. Man!, what if we fake ourselves into the quasi stable state? Wouldn't we be able to overcome depression? Wouldn't we be able to achieve a temporary control over our emotions?

So, what I thought was that one of the best techniques to temporarily control your emotions is simply to fake them. Feigning courage when you’re scared can make you feel more confident. Faking enthusiasm when you’re down can give you the extra push you need to keep going. Acting happy can get you out of a brief emotional slump.

Why would you want to fake your state? The emotional state you have at any particular time will have a tremendous impact on your effectiveness. Your speech will sound more convincing and effective if you’re speaking with confidence rather than trembling with nervousness. State control is essential for communication because people want to be around people who feel good. Even personal activities like exercise, work and reading benefit from the right emotional background. The way you feel determines how effectively you act.

And meanwhile, at the back-end all that you have done is to have moved into a quasi-stable state. Voila!, you have faked youself out of depression isn't it?

The idea of faking your state can seem a little like cheating. Aren’t your emotions there for a reason? But few people recognize how malleable their moment-to-moment feelings are. If you’re caught up in a lousy thinking pattern and someone gives you a small compliment, what happens? You’re entire world changes. As soon as your focus shifts from a small negative to a small positive you start feeling good.

In the long-run our emotional well-being is relatively smooth. But in the short-run emotions often fluctuate heavily. Depending on what you focus on you could feel the range of depression, anger, joy and pride all in the same day. Faking your state can’t change your life but it can change how you are responding right now.

And finally I felt that after all state change is not all about feeling good,but, it’s all about doing good.
A common mistake people make is that they want to change their emotional state to feel better. Remember that emotions are nothing more than chemicals and signals you are giving yourself. Your brain wouldn’t be giving them to you if it didn’t think you needed them.

The emotional part of your brain wasn’t designed to make you feel happy – it was designed to help you survive. Although most emotions are no longer matters of survival for the human species, your brain is still adapted to give you the emotions it believes will be the most effective.

Your goal with state control is to shift your emotional state into the most effective state. Trying to simply shift out of uncomfortable emotions because you don’t like them is likely to backfire. But shifting into emotional states you truly believe will be more effective can.

What makes an effective state differs depending on the situation. In social settings, an effective state can often be enthusiasm, fun or playfulness. Other situations might require courage, motivation or willpower. Trying to calm yourself down before a speech often doesn’t work because your brain wants you to focus. Picking an emotion like enthusiasm or being alert is more likely to hold.

So, dont make yourself come out of depression- fake it!

"Missed Call" Voting Theory ;)

2010-06-19T21:54:00.000+05:30

Vote via SMS is the most commonly used voting system these days. From reality shows to surveys & contests everywhere it’s been used. But, I personally don’t vote at all using this system since it uses 5 or 6 digit short code which my service provider will charge around 5 to 6 Re per SMS. Because of this pricing, participation in voting becomes very less.

But, somewhere down the lane I fel that there should be a revamping added to this idea. Why not use the technique of the so-called "Missed Call" to make votes?. The concept of "Missed calls" is of-course a "great invention" by the Indians!! We are so fond of using this “Missed Call” technique in our daily life that none of the home-based person in the family calls a worked-based person in the same family, instead they always give a missed call and the other usually makes the call back! Just because they don’t want to burn their currency from their home-based mobile(which apparently has substituted the tradtional 'land-line' phones). Taking this forward into a global market why can't we come up with a “Missed Call to Vote” system!

For Ex:

Q: Should ABCD become Governor of XYZ company?

If YES, give a missed call to +91 12 34 56 78 90
If No, give a missed call to +91 12 34 56 78 91

All that you are doing here is just giving a missed call, so you wouldn't be charged anything to vote! And isn't this system simple? you don’t even have to remember the “Send XX to YYYYY” and blah blah part to vote! It is just different numbers to dial for different options.

A Theory in Practice ;)

2010-06-10T12:01:00.001+05:30

Just about a week ago, I was in conversation with a friend of mine- about what sort of active thinking needs to be inculcated in Undergrads before they go ahead and pick their majors.

This is a sentiment of a cry that usually lurks behind academia at large—for classics and philosophy majors who do not know what to do with their majors, for social science majors who become frustrated with the gap between jargon‑intensive theories and real‑life phenomena, and so forth. Except, perhaps, for premedical students, the academic journey taken by most students in college is fraught with questions of purpose.

In the past people have attempted to bridge the gap between academic theory and practice. One of the major points was that “in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.” In other words, if the theory is well‑supported with evidence from reality, it should naturally have relevant implications for practice.

But on the other hand, I would like to point out a subtler undercurrent of student attitudes towards academic texts like those read as part of the Core. The attitude, which I argue changes over time, goes something like this:

We enter into college, or for some of us, high school, excited about discovering truth and enriching our minds. We soon discover that we can’t agree amongst ourselves on interpretations of texts, let alone on fundamental concepts. Does “thou shalt not kill” apply to acts of self‑defence? To animals? What about capital punishment?

Frustrated with the ambiguity and dissonance, we throw our hands up, sighing, “It’s all relative. It’s all the same. Who cares?”

I think that this disillusioned response is due to a previous presumption that there must be one coherent theory that contains all truth. With this presumption framing our minds, the conflicting plurality of theories bowls us over—we swing over, deflated, to the other end, denying all truth. But to maintain this presumption would be to reject Newtonian mechanics simply because they do not work on the atomic level. It would be to deny what each idea and person has to offer. At its worst, this attitude becomes an ear‑closed arrogance, but a polite one at that—a kind that often takes a variation of the response, “Oh that’s interesting. Well, that’s just what you believe.”

So reading and thinking about theory does inevitably translate into an attitude and, consequently, a practice—the question is, what sort of attitude? A retreat into cynicism can become, I argue, a thinly veiled intellectual laziness that does not actively engage ideas different from one’s own. An active engagement means a critical assessment of ideas to judge whether or not one would subscribe to them and often involves a revaluation of one’s ideas. Such a mental exercise of reflecting, judging, and even imagining is useful in its own right. It trains the mind’s faculties and the heart’s toleration of difference—“mental gymnastics,” as my geometry teacher once said.

Theory may enlighten our understanding, but it ultimately trains our way of thinking. It is left to us to strike the right balance between contemplation and action and to translate the mode of thinking into practical action—a frustrating and ambiguous responsibility, certainly, but ours, and only ours, nevertheless.

The Era of Socially Transmitted Diseases..

2010-05-22T22:02:00.002+05:30

It kind of seems contradictory when you talk about loneliness and contiguousness in the same breath. But, I think that there are a whole lot of integral elements that would infact lead to enhancement of the so-called "loneliness factor" via Social Communications - What I call the Socially Transmitted Disease..

For the uninitiated, how can the lonely their loneliness through social networks?

It makes sense when you think of people’s movements in social networks over some period of time. The lonely may not always have been lonely, but gradually, they tend to cluster together on the periphery of social networks, suggesting that the social connections with other lonely people exacerbates any de facto loneliness they experience. That the lonely would be somewhere on the periphery of social networks is somewhat tautological, but that the lonely would cluster together at the periphery is not, and is surprising.

We’re all aware of how contagious diseases can spread through social networks; when individuals interact, they transmit pathogens back and forth in apparent ways, such as through physical contact or the air. But it’s less obvious how emotions and behaviors spread between people. The idea of spreading loneliness initially seems counterintuitive. After all, don’t lonely people normally keep to themselves? Aren’t they socially isolated, away from where they can spread anything? Not exactly. As the article notes, loneliness and solitude are two different things. Even if people are not physically alone, they can still feel lonely if they perceive their social ties to be weak.

So how might loneliness spread within a social network? Lonely people tend to interact more negatively with people they encounter; they are more unfriendly, more anxious, and in general, more unpleasant to be around. These negative emotions not only induce others to feel and act negatively, but also, over time, they can erode relationships between friends. Strong positive ties grow weaker and weaker, and may even turn negative. Social bonds are lost, leaving the non-lonely people with fewer strong connections and therefore pushing them one more step towards loneliness. Then the cycle repeats itself with those who were “infected” and loneliness spreads throughout the network. A lonely person can easily get stuck in a downward spiral, becoming lonelier as more friends are lost. As a result, lonely people are likely to get pushed to the fringes of the network as they cut ties with friends. Ultimately, you have a weakened network, frayed at the peripheries.

The "Saving Face" Syndrome on Facebook!

2010-04-25T08:19:00.003+05:30

The other day I was reading the personal blog of an old acquaintance of mine who’s currently going through a rather painful breakup. She’s in her mid-20s, has been married once before and has children , so clearly this is a road she’s at least a little un-familiar with, which is why I was so surprised by her recent breakup confession. She wrote on her blog that the hardest thing she’s done so far — that one thing that has made this breakup “real” in her mind — was changing her Facebook status from “in a relationship” to “single.” Really? I thought. It wasn’t telling him you can’t see him anymore, or getting the key to your apartment back from him, or returning the clothes he kept in the corner of one of your dresser drawers that made you realize how over and done your relationship is? It was changing a line in your Facebook profile that sealed the deal for you and made it real?

Maybe I’m just out of the loop. Since the time I signed onto Facebook a couple years ago, I have never got an opportunity to make any kind of a transition from my being "single" status (*Lolz, thats confession!!*) , so I missed out on any potential Facebook-related relationship anxiety. The only status updates I’ve made are from “none” to “songle”, which was met with a chorus of sarcastic “congratulations” and bland question marks. I guess the public notice of a relationship that’s gone in the opposite direction is met with its own chorus of comments from the peanut gallery — comments that while perhaps well-intended can make a breakup seem more devastating than it has to be?

All of this has me wondering about how and when a person decides to update his or her status to “in a relationship.” I imagine that could be as nerve-racking as changing it to “single,” right? Like, what if you haven’t defined your relationship yet? What if one person thinks she’s in a relationship, but the other person disagrees? Is Facebook sort of like a passive-aggressive way to make a point with the person you’re dating that you’re ready to be exclusive? Or, is it more like a way to announce to people that you’re off the market? Those of you who have navigated the waters of awkward or painful relationship status updates on Facebook, what have been your experiences? Did Facebook really provide the closure and answer you needed to move on?

Why dont we have some research in this regard :) :)

The theory of g = pi squared!

2010-04-11T22:36:00.001+05:30

The hard facts:
(a) The acceleration of gravity on Earth is g ~ 9.8 m/s^2;
(b) π^2 ~ 9.87.

The question: Is that pure chance?

The naive answer: Sure. Just change the units, the similarity is gone. Just change the planet, the similarity is gone.

Yet… a little bit of historical research tells us that it is not pure chance. How come?

Of course, if there is a connection between the two values, it must be historical, not physical. The similarity between the two values is just on Earth, and with our units. But how is the meter defined? The definition has evolved with time (and in the US they still use units related to the lengths of their extremities… ains…). For a long time, it was one ten-millionth of the length of the Earth’s meridian. So the relation to the Earth is ensured in the definition, no doubt.

No magic involved, just history. It was the French National Assembly, during the Revolution, defining the meter. They wanted a universal definition, and they came up with that one. But it was not the first one… Before, there were others.

As far as we know, it was the marvellous mind of John Wilkins the first to conceive the idea of meter. And what was his definition? No wonder, the length of a seconds pendulum. That means: a pendulum whose period is two seconds. Now, for a bit of physics, remember that, within the small angles approximation, the period of a pendulum is

Now, imagine that we were using Wilkins’ meter. Then with a pendulum of length 1 length-units, we would have a period 2 time-units. Just solve for g and… hey! You get… π^2.

Wilkins’ idea went all the way down to Huygens, and to Talleyrand, who proposed it to the French revolutionaries. Technical difficulties, mostly the fluctuations of length with temperature, made them change the choice, but nonetheless picking up a close value.

Social Network tending to Anti-Socialism?

2010-03-21T18:53:00.000+05:30

The Facebook statistics recently provided by Alexa--such as that the site adds an astonishing 600,000 users per day--are worthy of serious contemplation by social scientists still playing catch-up when it comes to this and other forms of online communication. But at the risk of seeming curmudgeonly (I imagine my fellow friends, Facebook devotees all, rolling their eyes), I want to make a prediction. Social scientists are very fond of "capital," which is a type of resource with a plausible connection to some desired outcome. These include economic capital (money), human capital (skills), cultural capital (powers of discernment vis-a-vis cultural objects), conversational capital (interesting things to talk about) and social capital (social connections). To this list I predict that we will eventually want to add something that I am tempted to call anti-social capital, which is a snarky (and imprecise) term for the absence of ties of a certain type, namely those whose main consequence is that you spend a lot of time online communicating with people who, like you, have a lot of time to spend socializing online. It's not hard to foresee why someone without such connections would fare better at school, in the workplace, and in their family relations than someone with them, other things being equal.

Of course, the problem is not merely time diverted from more serious pursuits--exercise, learning, thinking long and hard about life's problems, interacting with those with whom one shares microbes--but also the disclosure of personal and potentially damaging information. That might point to yet another kind of capital, which I'll call non-self-disclosure capital, which is the state of not having made public (especially online) information about yourself that could result in a serious loss of face, life prospects, and possibly safety if the information gets circulated beyond its intended audience.

The Socially "Real" Network!?

2010-03-21T18:37:00.003+05:30

All too frequently, someone makes a comment about how a large number of Facebook Friends must mean a high degree of social capital. Or how we can determine who is closest to who by measuring their email messages. Or that the Dunbar number can explain the average number of Facebook friends. These are just three examples of how people mistakenly assume that 1) any social network that can be boiled down to a graph can be compared and 2) any theory of social networks is transitive to any graph representing connections between people. Such mistaken views result in broad misinterpretations of social networks and social network sites. Yet, time and time again, I hear problematic assumptions so let me start with some claims:
1. Not all social networks are the same.
2. You cannot assume network transitivity.
3. You cannot assume that properties that hold for one network apply to other networks

To address this, I want to begin by mapping out three distinct ways of modeling a social network. These are not the only ways of modeling a social network, but they are three common ways that are often collapsed in public discourse.
(a) As a Sociological "personal" Netwrok
(b) Behavioural Social Networks
(c)Publicly articulated social networks

At this point, I would hope that most of us would realize that Friends != friends. In other words, who you connect to on Facebook or MySpace or Twitter is not the same list of people that you would say constitute your closest and dearest. The practice of publicly articulating one’s social network can be quite fraught because there are social costs to the process of public articulation. Issues of reciprocity emerge and people find themselves doing a lot of face-work to navigate the sticky nature of having to account for their social relations in a publicly accountable way. Thus, the list of who you might list as a Friend is often a mix of friends, acquaintances, family members, people from your past, fans, professional colleagues, familiar strangers, and people you don’t particularly like but don’t want to offend. Oh and the occasional celebrity you think is interesting.

These networks are NOT the same. Your mother may play a significant role in your personal network but, behaviorally, your strongest tie might be the person who works in the cube next to you. And neither of these folks might be links on your Facebook for any number of reasons.

Our instinct then is to ask: which is the “real” social network? Frankly, it depends on who you ask. Your mother may be cranky that you don’t talk to her as often as your colleague and she may resent your refusal to Friend her on Facebook, but this doesn’t mean you love her any less. Of course, this doesn’t stop her from thinking you don’t love her. If we’re trying to understand emotional affinity, the behavioral and publicly articulated social networks aren’t particularly helpful. But if you’re mother thinks that time is not only a proxy for emotional depth but a proof of it, your behavioral social network might really upset her.

The truth of the matter is that there is no “real” social network. It all depends on what you’re trying to measure, what you’re trying to do with those measurements.

Peer2Peer Social Network, Possible?

2010-03-06T23:13:00.001+05:30

Today I found an invitation to a Facebook group "We will not pay to use facebook, we're gone if that happens".

I guess this echos the sentiments of a generation that believes that it should get stuff for free. But really, can this really be so? Facebook, google, yahoo, etc can only survive given revenues that may be used to cover costs. Web portals with mounds of data are not easy to maintain.

On the other hand, people are concerned by the concentration of huge amounts of personal data, especially with the social networking sites. Who owns the data?

It briefly hit me that the P2P infrastructure may work reasonably well for social networking. The idea is for the network to be built up in overlapping pieces. Each indivdual stores his own information and those of his/her friends. The informing of others that information has changed may be done through a series of pings.

Naturally, a big issue is that of the storage and transfer of data. A LOT of data may have to be stored for each contact. Furthermore, one has to ask oneself to what extent does one desire to be a conduit for people to contact one's friends and how much bandwidth one is willing to dedicate to that end. Another is that of "closed cliques" being inaccessible to the world.

The latter problem would probably be solvable after some brief thought, but not the former. People are selfish by nature, and the amount of storage space and bandwidth demanded by such an application would be non-trivial.

Well then, is Facebook's current setup as near optimal as we expect? It's hard to move away from a central repository. It makes things so much easier. We can decentralize a little though... Who knows?

Kind of Pollution?

2010-03-06T22:44:00.000+05:30

I used to go for a walk every night. It was a pleasant habit—exercise, fresh air, quiet time alone to think. I made a point, whenever possible, of walking in an area away from the city lights, where the sky was dark enough that I could get a good look at the stars. I knew how to pick out some of the constellations, though I could never quite understand how anyone could see a goat or an archer in the patterns of stars. Seeing shapes in clouds is one thing, but mentally connecting the dots to form a complex picture didn’t really work for me. That’s not to say I didn’t see anything in the stars, though. As I looked at a particular star, I would think about the possibility of life in outer space, the chance that a planet circling that star may be home to people like me—or unfathomably different beings. I’d think about how Earth is just another one of those countless planets and the sun just another one of those countless stars. And picking my favorite star of the moment, I’d say to myself, “Someday I’ll find a way to go there.”

Looking at the stars and thinking about them in this way always had a very calming effect on me. I felt as though it gave me a sense of proportion, that it put my own crises and ambitions in perspective. It didn’t make me feel insignificantly small; instead, it made me feel somehow privileged to be able to see and understand what may be out there, and to realize I’m a part of something so big.

Nowadays I don’t notice the stars very often, and when I do, I don’t usually think about them as I once did. But every now and then, I’ll be on a trip—an island, a desert, a rural getaway somewhere—and again the stars will catch my attention. Invariably I’ll wonder why I hadn’t noticed them in so long. Is it just that I’m older and busier? That may be part of it, but a bigger part is that the lights of the city often make it very hard to see the stars, always focusing my attention on the surface of my own planet. This is one consequence of the increasing problem of light pollution.

The term “pollution” is apt because excess or unwanted light can be an irritation or even a safety hazard. Like air pollution, light pollution is typically a by-product of machines and devices that were intended to make our lives easier, more convenient, and safer. Another similarity is that light pollution can be reduced greatly with careful attention to design. But because most people have become accustomed to light pollution as a fact of life, there is usually little incentive to worry about it when designing or purchasing lighting products.

A boulevard of broken thoughts..

2010-02-21T10:20:00.004+05:30

.
.
Twist your arm!
Hold a hammer with your muted hand,
There is nothing charming about this wall,
There is noting here to keep me amused,
I am bored with it,
I want to say I am finished,
And have you agree,
With my Pastels.

Your breath I mean,
What could you have been thinking?
Put your two hands close together,
And pretend them to be mine.
You might be disappointed,
But,there is no solace -
No consolation in getting it right
No matter how soft the colours return to you.

Then, I tried to paint,
I force my fingers to make a fist
But oh! - they refuse to bend..
They simply refused their mark.
I then reach for the colours,
There were none on my pallet,
I reached for other colours,
And there I found RED...
.
.
.

Failed Thoughts for the Day..

2010-02-07T09:58:00.002+05:30

I was faintly IETisng and marginally wondering about what a real failure is? I mean, how on earth could you definitively conceptualize the indefinitively conceptualized term ‘failure’?? Is it the image of a man with hands on his head sitting without a job in his mid thirties with all of his life's flashbacking to-and-fro and fro-and-to in a total helter-skelter just to make him believe that he did nothing worth blabbering and tagging about the so-called "great-things" in life or is it failing to pass in an pass oriented scheme of failure centric examination paradigm of failure [;P] or is it some sort of a non-convex entity(as someone says!).

I thought over it again and again in some sortof a complexly aligned unsorted idiotismic concoctions, and realised that failure is not a complete thing in itself. You always fail in something. But nobody cares for something. The sentence never reaches beyond the word ‘fail’. Just the mere acoustics of the word 'fail' is negative, the vibes it emanates is negatively odd power of negative[;-p].And all these coagulative summation of simplistically complicated 'failures' lead us into a world of pathetic self-findings and shell binds. We start finding the reasons for our failures. It even haunts you more if you dont have a so called stud act in your pocket to keep their 'fail' blabbers mouths shut.

I have never ever failed in life. Well, may be it’s like I never accepted any failure in life because I was happy with the kind of success ratio I had. If you fail two times out of ten, you were good. Events like Javelin and long jump have six attempts. (*Lol!*) Well the only thing is who should decide what’s really important for you and what is that which is not!. Sadly, the biggest problem is that- most of us let others decide that for us. Everyone has got their own scheme of fundas.

I dont want to try and beat-around-the-bushes for long. All I wanted to tell is a few little three liner.

I think we’re constantly failing in a lot of things (and thats good!). But, the sad part is that we are not realizing it since we are getting good results elsewhere. What if someone is a day-to-night-to-day slogger of the books and fails getting along with friends/family or perhaps even vice-versa as well. What do you think a real failure is? How do you get your lessons to move on?. The question seems tough, but, the answer is quite unambiguous!

A Love, A Thought, A Day..

2010-01-28T08:33:00.001+05:30

The eternal question we all carry around deep within our hearts. Love is the eternal search. Love is eternal when we find it. But do we really ever find it? When we define it, do we negate it? When we set limits on what we believe to be love do we begin to destroy it by hoping to understand or own it for ourselves? We offer it through our actions, through our gifts, through our poetry and songs, we give it with our lives. Through all of our relationships we vary our giving, often by what we hope to receive in return. But is this really love?

I recently overheard someone saying in a conversation that there is no such thing as "unconditional love". I would have to agree, although for different reasons. Love within itself is unconditional. Anything else is only an attempt to love, a learning to get us nearer to the one true knowing of love. It may be honorable, well intentioned, passionate and desiring, courageous and pure. It may be felt as temporary, but if lost easily it may not have been love at all. Love can not be corrupted, but attempts to know love can be thwarted and often fall short of what we hope love will be. This is where we learn we are human.

Love has been experienced as a life of living poetry. Love has been experienced as being the very notes of song, uplifting and generous to the wanting ear. Love has been experienced as the final act of giving one's life for another in battle. Love has been experienced as choosing to give new life to another. Love has been experienced as a devoted oneness with God. Love has been experienced as an endless passionate overflow of emotion in the arms of a waiting lover. Love is defined for us as "strong or passionate affection for a person", or "a warm liking, fond or tender feeling", or " a genuine emotion, emphasizing strength, depth, sincereness, devotion, loyalty, reverence, or passion, as for God, a man, a woman or a belief." Powerful ideas all. We know each of these definitions or ideas for ourselves. What we do with them is what makes us who we are in our lives. And what do you do with the love granted to you each day? How many times do we deny its expression from others because we fear what our own expressions will bring? Are we not denying our creator every time we deny the expression of love?

For the individuals who have experienced separation or divorce, or even the loss of a loved one to death, the separation can be the most traumatic experience we live through. The heart wrenching pain that seems to never really go away, the enormous waves that hit us daily, the times we hit the wall right after a strong and uplifting experience reminds us that we are learning. We are learning about strength, passion for our own life, about our own sincerity in our beliefs, about our loyalty to who we are, and certainly about our own genuineness. We search for that day when love will come again. We search everywhere, everyday, almost every hour. It has been said for centuries that "love is where the eyes meet with passion, for the eyes can not hide what the heart feels." So we have learned to look outward for this eternal love that will fulfill us, forgetting that it must first fill our own hearts. Perhaps that is why we fall into such pain and agony and sorrow when a love affair fails?

It is at that moment that we realize we did not fail the other person we expressed love to, but we have somehow not fulfilled ourselves once again. We combat failure with a misunderstood unfulfilled promise. We lose it, not knowing if we will ever find it again. The emotional tides lift and fall, crash and settle, then lift again. No one else, no matter how much we talk or cry, can pull us through the anxious hours of soul repair and growth. It is our own fire within that needs rekindling, guarding against the winds that would blow it out and leave us dark, cold and helpless. It is at this time we find the love that binds us together with every other being that surrounds us on the planet. Eventually we find the sun still rises to meet us in the morning and the stars continue to show us the way each night. The rivers still flow downstream into oceans that will never turn them away. The trees still reach upward every day praising the God that made them. We stand up straight and take a lesson from it all. What if you woke up one morning and realized that you were the only person left on the face of the earth? Who would you love? Why do we wait so long to start the journey that begins in the same place that it ends?

Love, in all its endlessness, unboundedness and failed definitions is this experience. And in opening up to let it go, without need of owning or even sometimes knowing its return, we open ourselves up to experiencing it more. We expand with the universe and not against it. We feel the stars for the first time. We feel the night for the first time. We feel God for the first time. Love doesn't ask why. It doesn't come. It doesn't go. It just is. It is not only in our hands, it is our hands. It isn't only in our heart, it is what makes our heart beat every beat. It wraps itself around us so securely that all we need to do to survive against all odds is to recognize it as the very breathe we just drew, and the last breathe we just let go. Love is the very Power of the Universe, every beat, every spin, every pulse, every move. And this is what you have to give.

Of seeing "Bondas" as "Pee-it-zaas"

2010-01-26T17:38:00.006+05:30

I am so very annoiyed by the waiy our so-called uber-aurban-lads and lasses speak English using faike Aussie or American accents. Infact, its so damn annoiying to the heights!, especially, when some freaky a-word comes up and blabbers somethings that sounds like a piece of s-word coming out of a key-hole!.

And what's more?, the syndrome is soon turning pandemic!. Now, I am getting to see a wee-bit of it in everyone - ranging from the watchman at ***** (I mean five stared hotel ;-p) to people at Academical Institutes to the global studs of these Academical Institutes! and to the people driving cabs.

I have indeed been following the metamorphosis over the years, more so, during the few times when I have travelled on flights. I have always been blessed to have some sort of a stoopid "chick" sitting besides me and be talking all sorts of chickly-chickking-chicken matters to her coursemates, mostly with girls in a faike Amei-ri-caan or Ouss-trai-lian accent, with a mix of a very localized Kannada or a dialect of "Madras Baasha". I swear!, the accents would be like --

"Owww!, chooo chweet- I yam missing ya. When are you cam-ming to some dumb plaice?. Whay, dant ya gimme a kaal sum-taime tomarrow?"

or much worse when they call the hostress and say

"Haw much auf moi taime wood be waisted on ower jerni? You knowing aa?".

Holy cow!,they would try to roll their tongue and talk like some freaky coconut tree is venturing from their throats. Everytime when these "fake dumbasses" talk, they would talk and show his/her fake accent as if their stereotypically-pathetic-throats are made in America. I'd feel like spanking their heads and telling them how how they would insult themselves, their mother tongue, their Country as well as insulting the American and Australian culture!

I mean..I don't blame them if they are from overseas or they are very fluent and been able to converse in such way, but still..What is so wrong about being what you are!? What is wrong in conversing in English Language as the English that they know and as the English that they speak? Infact, isn't this some sort of a "self racial abusing"? Isnt this racism at its grass roots? Isnt this a case of peremptoriness on ones own culture, country and language?. What is so trendy in losing out on your native accent? What is so stylish in trying yo imitate someone else's accent? Moreso, with some of them being so very "adulterated" that those stupid fake accent and end up being mumbling instead of speaking, as if they were stuffing some bondas or pee-it-zaas in their mouth.At the end of all this,the worse thing is that they already look like some deep stupid snob.

Psychometrics of Employee-Employer Trade-off

2010-01-24T18:36:00.000+05:30

It’s a shame that a shifting economic climate changes the dynamic of the employee – employer relationship.

When market conditions are pristine and employment is low, the power sits firmly with employees. Companies stressed to deliver on the goods and services sold increase compensation, deliver a broad array of benefits, and serve up promotions even if the title exceeds the employee’s competency.

Despite these lavish efforts to retain, employees are often quick to jump to a new opportunity even if it only modestly increases their take-home pay.

In today’s trying times, its management that stands in a position of strength. Those wonderful benefits? Tabled for budget reasons. Salaries? Frozen and, in some instances, reduced. All the while the specter of layoffs hangs across the organization.

In the past few months, I have read numerous articles and blog posts in which corporate executives suggest their employees should be thankful to simply be on the payroll.

Rather than defining this situation as dysfunctional, I will take it a step further and argue that there isn’t (nor should there be) a relationship between an employee and their employer.

Relationships involve intimate emotional connections that thrive even during periods of stress or turmoil. Personally, I have a relationship with my parents, my brother, my family and a select set of friends. I stand with them 100 percent…regardless of life’s variances.

But, what would happen with the people a company employs? A company's goal would be to maintain a productive business agreement defined by shared interests and expectations. Its responsibilities are straightforward:

*Maintain an environment in which they are set up for success
*Provide a reasonable level of support and resources
*Deliver an honest assessment of performance, even if it is not what they want to hear
*Strive to provide fair compensation

In return, it expects each member to embrace the organization’s core values and standards for performance; to represent themselves and the company in an acceptable manner; and, ultimately, to care about their development as a professional.

If the company falls down on some part or the employee perceives that their needs extend beyond what my company can provide, then it’s understandable for them to seek other opportunities. (In fact, I encourage it.)

Yet, it’s also important for employees to recognize that difficult decisions often must be made based on the macro needs of the organization. Yes, its a fact that the company at time would be forced to fire people. And forced to cut staff. It’s never personal.

No one at a company should ever be thankful they have a job. Their employment is well earned and, as long as they deliver on their responsibilities, the company's commitment to their professional success is resolute.

There’s no moral obligation about it. It’s simply a business agreement.

Socially "Networked" Racism ?

2010-01-24T18:23:00.004+05:30

Are social networks inherently racist? How about being sadist? Anti-Semitic?

Before you discard these questions as merely inflammatory, take a few moments to study your own collection of friends and contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn and the other online communities you participate in.

I’m going to bet a fair number of the faces gazing back at you from the screen mirror your own. The same can most likely be said about their backgrounds, interests, and professional and personal affiliations.

It is understandable. Social media is merely the online extension of the age-old human attribute to align oneself with others who share a similar background and belief system. The problem that arises in a homogeneous community is those who fall outside the accepted norm tend to be shunned and, in extreme cases, even ridiculed.

Let’s not pretend this doesn’t happen – regardless of who resides in the White House.

I consider my views on race, religion and gender relations to be rather contemporary. Yet, I have also found myself at times in somewhat questionable situations.

For instance, in college I was a member of a predominantly "some" fraternity. It was not uncommon to hear a derogatory put-down about those who chose a different religious path.

More recently, I stood with a group of male executives at an industry event who found amusement in inappropriate comments about a female attendee.

I’ve been thinking about the issue of bias in social networks since coming across an article about a new online community created by American Airlines for African-Americans. Branded “Black Atlas,” the content of this social network caters to the supposedly unique interests these travelers have in destinations and accommodations.

While in no way do I mean to imply that American Airlines is a racist organization. However, I do question the viability of a marketing initiative that is so ethnically centered.

Ultimately, I do not believe racism, sexism or religious intolerance permeates most social networks. Online communities reflect the natural bias and preferences that come with a gathering of individuals who share so much in common.

Social media is about people and, after all, we are only human.

Thought for the Day [Part 2 of IET]

2010-01-01T21:58:00.002+05:30

Ok, this one is perhaps onDemand economics. Here's a second derivative of my Thought for the Day, and yup!- Its a kind of the same Exception!

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favour in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

New Year's Paradox!

2010-01-01T01:20:00.004+05:30

Beginning a new year often brings forth a review of our expectations and I thought it might be a good idea to briefly examine this topic. As with many concepts in our culture, we tend to fall well short of fully appreciating what these terms truly suggest and at times, the apparent contradictions that they may evoke. This is certainly the case with the word expectations. Are they to be valued and embraced or do they impede us and distort our life experiences? The answer depends on a host of things.

One size doesn’t typically fit all and we need to look at how we employ the word expectations. From the perspective of some spiritual traditions we should be disinclined to attach to expectations as they may block our direct experience of life and impose a bondage of belief upon us. Traditional western values that inculcate and reward achievement honor high expectations, for they drive our culture and our economy.

Some people suffer from a lack of healthy expectations and thus limit their potential and others set unattainably high expectations for themselves and thus assure their frustration and unhappiness. Often, expectations get in the way of our being present as our mind distorts our current experience through the filter of our needs. In this case, we are confronted with a paradox. Are expectations good or bad? The zen answer to this questions is simply, yes. The seeming paradox around this term that may lead to much confusion. A good starting point is to ask if your expectations–or lack thereof—enhance your life experience? Do they assist you in the unfolding of your life or do they justify your unhappiness?

The paradox of expectation shouldn’t be resolved by simply saying that they are good or bad. They are neither and they are both. They are what me make them and what we make of them. The responsibility lies within us. As the architects of our lives, we need to be the master of our expectations, rather than be ruled by them. If after a thorough examination, we conclude that our expectations are authentic and self-generated and yet we still struggle in their attainment, we have an opportunity to look at why that is so. On the other hand, if these wishes are not of our own making but merely imposed upon us, we can unshackle ourselves from this burden.

India and the Demi-God Psychometry!

2009-12-30T18:39:00.004+05:30

I discover that we Indians have devised a new way of mourning death. Apparently,following the death by heart attack of the Kannada film icon Dr. Vishnuvardhan, grieving fans shut down the nation's knowledge capital. Bangalore's streets, which usually imagined as paved with hi-tech gold, but today it turned into a place that seemed like Baghdad!.

To a bemused world, this fiery convulsion triggered by the death of an old actor was just another example of Indians' idiosyncratic, borderline-religious love for their movie stars. But what is it that actually triggers these kind of behavioural patterns in people?!.

Is it that the fans are angry because he died a natural death?!. Or is it that they are ithching to get involved in some sort of a throw-stone activity since the city is full of glasswares?!. or is it that they assume that the government and the IT companies are responsible for the actors "heart-attack"?!

What actually makes these people get satiable by rioting and savaging and breaking the public properties(buses),stoning companies and ravaging hotels and shops?.

A little introspection+retrospection makes me IETise that all this is a bi-product of a jobless and sadistic being, who always feels angry,angry at this world; Angry for being miserable and poor; angry for not getting a 'fixed and heavy-paying' job,angry because "I am lazy",angry because "cigarette costs 3 bucks", "paan costs a whopping 2 bucks", "teasing girls is an offence", and simply because "there is no way to end 'my' anguishes on the Govt. and others who are enjoying a lavish lifestyle".

I do agree Vishnuvardhan died, we will all miss him, we'll miss the great actor in him. I will miss him too and in fact, everyone should miss him. Its unfortunate that its happened but, what is it that can be done? Death is a part of life cycle after-all..

The explanatory power of the 'two India's drifting apart' theory is limited, however, by the fact that 20 years ago, years before the economic reforms that unleashed India's current uneven boom, the Karnataka film board opted to edit out a scene depicting the dramatic death of Vishnuvardhan, for fear that it would spark riots.

Whatever peculiarities of the riots arise from the Indian cultural politics and the resentments of Karnataka's left-behinds, few deny that Indians generally have a deeper, more complex and more personal relationship with their film icons than Western audiences. Few years ago , when Bollywood heartthrob Salman Khan spent three nights in prison on charges of illegal poaching, thousands of his fans spent nights outside his jail cell. In 1982, when iconic Bollywood leading man Amitabh Bachchan was injured on a shoot, the nation practically came to a stop. (But not for the Bachchan fan who walked half of the length of India backwards as a show of penance.)

Why do such gruesome practices occur more in India than in other country?

Is it the low literacy level in the country?

Is it a desperate cry for mental help?

Is that the only way for the people at the lowest rungs of the social and economic hierarchy to draw attention of the top political leaders/actors to their plight?

Frankly speaking, we have no clue.

The Morphology of "Missingness"..

2009-12-20T21:18:00.004+05:30

Well, I often don't mess up with intertwining the personal blog to a "personal" blog. However, today I thought I should just linger on the contour a wee-bit. I was 'eventually' feeling 'void' today, well, no introspections on that as yet and I don't think that it would last longer enough to whip in a probe. On the other hand, I developed an IET [Thats "Idiotic Emission of Thoughts" For those who know not what that is *Its my invention by-the-way*;-p] of other sorts.( actually it was an IET with Introspection sorts)

Ok, seems like I am beating around the bushes. Hmm, let me come to the IET- I had a short chat the today with a friend of mine over the phone and that triggered some sort of an idiocy in me and made me go bong over "what actually missing someone means?". Is it like you are having a deja vu and amnesia together? or is it like the past suddenly oozes out of your grey matter and stings that portion between your eye and the brain- causing unplanned patterns to hover over and towards your eyes?!. Or is "missing someone" just a matter of some mere hoaxical illusion which was a result of either you having a good memory-unit or a bad processor pipe-lining. But,what I felt was that missing doesn't always relate to "missing someone/something" neither is it a some sort of a "yearningness" or "craving". Its something else. Something more than all of these.

I was wondering if my feelings like "I am missing my 'hi' and 'hellos' with a friend with whom I am hi-bye types" or "Thinking about some chick in my class who never seemed to be one when she was around me" or "Just a lame voidness over someone" is a inference of the "Real Missing feeling"?.

I actually felt that I badly missed being struck with those millions of "hi" and "bye" that were thrown upon me during my school days-*from a few of them specifically ofcourse :P*. I felt like I wanted to talk to that little girl from the other school who only said "Hi" all through our facial bombardments and I missed hearing a simple hello from her again. And now sitting here, I am just thinking as to how many people have crossed my life and somewhere all of them have left an impression. Some are the ‘best things’ happened to me. Some have made me to cross the road, taken my hand and then hidden somewhere...where? I don’t know !. And some of them who have been the limits of my para-emotional integration and derivatives of my ortho-emotional derivations. But,the best thing is that I hardly remember even a handful of them at this point ,but, I do miss all of them.

So, what started as a voidness, then turned into a "IET" ,finally turned into a nice little blog post :P and a nitty conclusion which says

May be the purpose of the entire process of "missing" and "voidness" is a well wrapped element of higher order 'process resynchronization' with each of their entry into your life being acknowledged by you missing them. May be they have taught us what you needed to learn, may be they have nothing more to give…and so they leave.May be they’re moving on to be part of a different plan, just as you and I move and influence others.But, at the end of the day its all a kind of a realization behind a simple one-liner --
“You can never replace anyone because everyone is made up of such beautiful specific details”

The 50% Divestment Story Part 2.

2009-12-17T22:35:00.003+05:30

Its been raining marriages around me over the last 7 months. Lolz, to continue to the beating started by Pooja and Padmav --> My Bro and Manni --> Doggy and Sana --> Price and Sharon --> Sherry and Flaunty --> My cuz and his girl --> Choms and R... The journey has been fascinating and absolutely awesome.. I'd previously shared a piece with my emotions painted when my Bro sold his stake to my manni; and now, to follow it up- I just want to paint an another parchment of emotions of how it feels to have you "chaddi-dost" and "best-pal" get knotted..:P..

Ever since I’ve known Chomy(Yup!, thats 18 looooooooong years now! :P), she'd always wanted to find the man of her dreams and get married. I’ve rarely met someone with that objective so clear in their mind! I remember She and me watching the movie "Life in a Metro" together and me telling her how much Konkona’s character reminded me of her.

Over the years and our 'singlehood', Chomy and I have had many discussions on finding "the right one". One question she often had was how she would know for sure when he came along! How does one know, really? Much airtime has been wasted (or not) in discussing the lack of good 'ones' (really, where are these lads and lasses?!) and the fact that our good years were slowly fading away.

I mostly enjoyed playing an elder brotherly role and (in my infinite wisdom!) usually tried to impart, what I hope, was good advice. You will know, when you meet him, I said. Things will fall into place. When the stars align everything will work out! And so on and so forth. Through our heartbreaks and setbacks, I often told her that things that are destined to happen, will happen and surely they would happen to her too. Very soon. "You can’t rush things", I said, they will happen when the time is right. I even remember Shylaja Aunty(Chomy's Mom) took us to the some temple and had gotten our futures read to assure both of us that good things were in store.:P

Over the years, despite all my outward reassurances, I must admit that my own belief in love and romance, the institution of marriage, in happily wedded has received quite a knocking. Much as I would like to believe I have also seen so many signs to the contrary, resulting in cynicism creeping in and the rose coloured spectacles I wore when I was younger getting clouded. From being let down, from expectations not being met (and what is life without some expectation?) and from a lot of disconnect. Do I expect too much or are people just not interested? :-p

I would, of course, like to believe in love and romance, in finding "the one", but it’s difficult to muster that blind faith anymore. When I was eighteen and starry eyed, yes. But older and wiser, as they say, and things don’t quite seem the same.

So despite it all, it gives me small pleasure that eventually "Chomy-Dumbo" did meet the man of her dreams and now is about to tie the knot. While I watched — sometimes in admiration and sometimes in fascination at how fast things can move in someone else’s life (at least compared to mine!), I was thrilled to see Soumya's and R's relationship develop, mature and go straight to the altar!

I for one, am so glad that she is finally hitched. At least that way we will now be spared of her existential questions (and multiple smses) like, "err..bw does it happen in fairy tales..?", "Where's my man?!" and "when will I ever meet him?" and "ho!-c'mon- tell me Bags!"... These kind of questions, as you can imagine, are quite hard to answer ;-p

Through these years, Chomy never gave up hope though. She went about her mission with admirable enthusiasm despite the many roadblocks! I think one thing I admire her for is her single minded focus about what she wanted. And maybe that worked in the end. She did find the man and she did make everyone including herself happy.

Meanwhile, I still wonder sometimes about life and love and its related complications. Infact, one thing that Padma Aunty(Poo's mom) complains constantly about the "single status" of both her daughters, I jokingly ask her "why change what is working fine?" I try and convince her that at least we’re happy. But I realize that her goal is not our happiness, but of changing our status.

I still remain unsure about marriage and wedded bliss. (Or it might be for the simple reason that no one’s actually asked :-). Have I been on my own for too long now and gotten too used to it? What I do miss though is someone being an intrinsic part of my life and sharing and doing things together. And that is a partnership that is so much harder to achieve.

But a friend’s wedding always makes me happy. It’s a time for celebrations, for love, laughter and friends to get together. And to reinforce some of those faded beliefs.

For Choms & Mr R, wishing both of them loads and loads of happiness and good times together.

Chomy babe — the singles club will miss you! *Hugs!* :-)

Mr. R : I’ll be there when you need a shoulder to cry on dude:-p

The "fast" Politics!

2009-12-13T23:30:00.001+05:30

I was inspired to write this blog after reading a news feature in today's (11.12. 09) Times of India. The fast undertaken by the TRS Chief, K. Chandrasekhar Rao that led to deterioration of his condition, causing threat to his life, made the Centre to take a late night decision of splitting Andhra Pradesh to carve out a separate state,Telengana.

Let us first have a look at the history of some "fasts" that had taken place in the past. Apart from being called "The Father of The Nation", Mahatma Gandhi may conveniently termed as the "Father of Fasts", who used it as a weapon. Of course, before him, it was the revolutionary, Jatin Das who gave up his life in Lahore Jail as a prisoner of the British Government, after going on a hunger strike from July 13 to Sep 13, 1929. His death left a deep impact on the minds of the Indian youth to start a new war of violent protest against the British government.

In 1932 Gandhiji went on a 'fast', protesting against the "Communal Award" of colonial British rulers to give separate representation to the "untouchables" in Provincial Legislatures, that led to Poona Pact which made the untouchable leaders to renounce separate representation. In 1943, Gandhiji undertook a fast for twenty one days as a "penance for deadlock" between the Viceroy & Indian leaders. It became a turning point in India's struggle for freedom.

After independence, the first person who gave up his life in a hunger strike was the Gandhian leader, Potti Sriramulu. He began his "fast" on Oct 19, 1952 protesting against the Centre's indifference to the demand for a separate Andhra Pradesh & succumbed to it on Dec 15,1952. His death led to violent turmoil resulting in the creation of Andhra Pradesh.

In the recent past, Mamta Bannerjee's hunger strike for 25 days against land acquisition in West Bengal, changed the colour of Bengal politics forcing the CPM to see red.

It is a well known fact that Mahatma Gandhi mostly used this weapon of "fast" as a means for self purification. He was magnanimous enough to hold himself responsible if anything went wrong & took it unto himself to atone for it by undertaking a "fast". But can the leaders of today honestly claim that their "fasts" are that, what appear to our naked eyes or there is anything more to it which we, the general public are not capable enough to perceive? Can they honestly say that their "fasts" are not less for the "cause" & more for scoring a point or to gain political mileage over their political rivals? How is it that, if there is no problem in creating a separate state now, what prevented the Centre to wait for decades, until a certain K.C.Rao staged an indefinite fast unto death? Honestly, I don't know. Can anybody among my friends, please tell me? .

The Absurdity of Sixth Sense!

2009-12-13T14:10:00.001+05:30

I don't know why "the sixth sense" refers to something paranormal, since there are a lot more than five normal senses.

I think the problem is that whoever started out numbering these things somehow confused the senses with the sense organs. There are five sense organs that I'm aware of: the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue, and the skin. And there are five corresponding senses: vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.

But there are a lot of senses that don't have a corresponding sense organ, or at least not always a very obvious one. And I'm not talking about subjective or non-quantifiable senses like a sense of humor or a sense of style or a sense of obligation or a sense of self-worth or a sense of right and wrong -- I'm talking about senses that detect measurable physical phenomena.

For example, you probably have a sense of temperature, which allows you to tell when it's hot or cold outside. The skin is the sense organ here -- it does double duty as the organ for both the sense of touch and the sense of temperature. But despite the organ in common, those are two very distinct senses, so it's not clear why the sense of temperature never made it on the list.

You've also got a sense of size. You can tell if one thing is bigger than another. This sense doesn't have a sense organ as such, but it relies on some of the other senses that do, like vision or touch, since you can tell the size of something by looking at it or by holding it.

You also have a sense of weight, of course. You can tell if something is going to be heavy or not by looking at it or by trying to pick it up.

You also have a sense of quantity or amount. You can look at two glasses and tell which one has more fruit juice in it, for example, or you can look at two bookcases and tell which one has more books on it. This relies on your sense of vision, or your sense of weight, but it's distinct from either of those senses.

Okay, what else? Well, how about your sense of speed? This one isn't very well-developed, since we can't tell how fast we're going when we're flying in a jet, for example, but still, most of us have a pretty good idea if we're going fast or slow.

And then, of course, there's the sense of time. It can be fooled as well -- when you're bored, time seems to pass much more slowly than it does when you're having a good time -- but you can still probably tell the difference between a minute and an hour, no matter how bored you get. And the interesting thing about the sense of time is that as far as I know, it doesn't rely on any other senses or any sense organs, which technically qualifies it as an extra-sensory perception.

So, here's our new list: vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, temperature, size, weight, amount, speed, and temperature. That brings the count up to eleven, and there are probably some that I missed. So what we commonly refer to as "the sixth sense" and which we somewhat confusingly label as "extra-sensory perception" would more accurately be called "the twelfth sense."

But even that's not a very good idea, because if we're going to include paranormal senses on the list, we should probably include things like sense of humor as well. But maybe there shouldn't even be a list. Or maybe we should have three lists: one for the physical senses, one for the subjective senses, and one for the paranormal senses. I don't know what the best thing to do is, but fortunately, it's not very important. That's another sense, by the way -- the sense of importance. You can add it to the list of subjective senses if you want.

Thought for the Day! :P

2009-12-11T17:13:00.004+05:30

Apparently I'm not a big fan of posting "Thoughts for the day" as such, but, today as "class I threw ExceptionOfTotalOutOfOrderness ;" I just wanted to throw it out..:P
And here we go!...

Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But, it ain't how hard you hit; it's about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done. Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain't where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain't you. You're better than that!

HackU,HackedMe and HackedUs!

2009-12-11T15:04:00.004+05:30

I have to admit — since HackU ended, I have been struggling with how to contextualize it. It’s hard to put a nice neat wrapper around something that was so profound for me. For the people who were there (and you can read for yourself), it felt like a defining moment. The best way for now is to point out some of the people who made it happen and tell some of the inside story. In some later posts, I’ll probably go through some of the principles that guided us in planning Hack Day (e.g. who we invited and why, approaches to making such an event work), but for now, I just want to provide some backstory and point out some of the people who helped make this happen. There are literally hundreds of people in the mix, so I apologize in advance for those who I have missed. This will be my first attempt “official recounting” . Like all good stories, some things will be left between the lines, of course.

Before I get into the narrative, if anyone out there is wondering how we pulled this off, I offer one clue: total pros rolling up their sleeves to do whatever needed to be done. I’ve always been surprised at how intelligent people ascribe self-limiting qualities to organizations that they don’t really have to accept. Large companies are “slow.” Small companies are “agile.” “They” would never let us do this. What happens when you work in a large company and you are able to leverage the size of the organization to form a lean-and-mean ad hoc team with broad expertise (technical, management, legal, security, networking, etc.) on a moment’s notice? Something pretty powerful — you turn the cynical “they” who won’t let you do anything into the unstoppable “we” that won’t take no for an answer. I learned that inspiration might be the world’s only renewable energy source and it scales like a bank's interest rates!!.

Now, getting into the world of "thank yous" and the world otherwise. I feel that it’s an almost impossible task to get this right, but there are some specific people I wanted to thank. First, there's my team mates Madhan, Smitha and Spoorthy. It was such a great team to work with that, when we moved over to begin , we started talking about our goals almost immediately and the ideas started crystalizing no sooner than late. I honestly don't remember exactly how the "crazy" Mail Template+GreaseMonkey idea crystalized, but when it did, it was Madhan who gave us that patented Brad Pitt look that said, “dude, this is TOTALLY POSSIBLE!” and quietly lit the fire under us and himself(!) to make it happen. I’m hoping that everyone out there has a boss like this one day. Then Smitha well she's a full-swinger!. She has the most versatile brain, she used to flip her thoughts to sync the ideas that popped and parally thump in her understandability of the APIs and how they could help us move ahead(Infact, her duties also involved handling of the entire event as a volunteer too!- Man, that was real tough one!).Finally, Spoorthy- err!, this lady was the one behind the ideas, she'd generate the ideas faster that you can sync them in!!. Some of our fondest ideas of this whole process were her brain-child(ren);

Then once we got the verbal commitment done on our events, the lads and lasses were gracious enough to pick up that ball and run with it, dealing with the production issues, the code, the debugging, the betas, the alphas and anything else related to the hack, smack and crack of the code!. It was a gargantuan task that had never been done before. One of my favorite moments happened about half an hour before the show actually ended when I bumped into Arun Raghavendar and Tom Praison for a last miniute buckle-up tricks on the final hack that involved combining the hover-effect of the YUI into an Y-BOSS image search. And there it was- "Phew!" Tom and Arun got the lids shined and placed a crystal on it!. Imagine, they just ran through a 400 liner in about 5 mins and got their acts together and cracked the bug in just about 20 mins! (Where as I took a whopping 12 hours to get the code done! :P).

And last but not the least can we forget Paul Tarjan(Head Technical Monkey :P),Mr. Nagarajan, Rajesh(He's my super senior at UVCE too!),Jayasurian and the entire bunch of the Yahoo R&D team put the whole excellent Saturday agenda together along with other classmates of mine at IIITB. In one of the key roll-up-your-sleeves moments in my and perhaps our lives!.

To the extended HackU organizing team,well, you guys totally rocked — all several tens of you . And a gigantic thanks to all of you who cam over and made this developmental spree a great fun to cherish for several years to come , if not life time.

As a chorus, i would love to thank my team,yeah the team that I am so freaking proud of you. Its was a real fun time with you people out there!.

FaceBookadiction!

2009-11-29T21:36:00.001+05:30

Machine v/s Humans ( :P v/s N:P ) ?

2009-11-15T00:34:00.001+05:30

I used to believe that one day all human labour would be automated. Upon further reflection, I realize that I am wrong. The question of whether or not machines will someday replace all humans depends crucially on whether or not P is equal to NP. Jobs that will eventually be automated will be the ones that can be solved easily with an algorithm. In computer science parlance, these are problems in the computational complexity class P (solvable in polynomial time). For example, traditional travel agents have disappeared faster than bluefin tuna because their task is pretty simple to automate. However, not all travel agents will disappear. The ones that survive will be more like concierges that put together complex travel arrangements or require negotiating with many parties.

Eventually, the jobs that humans will hold (barring a collapse of civilization as we know it) will involve solving problems in the complexity class NP (or harder). That is not to say that machines won’t be doing some of these jobs, only that the advantage of machines over humans will not be as clear cut. While it is true that if we could fully reproduce a human and make it faster and bigger then it could do everything that a human could do better but as I blogged about before, I think it will be difficult to exactly reproduce humans. Additionally, for some very hard problems that don’t even have any good approximation schemes, blind luck will play an important role in coming up with solutions. Balancing different human centric priorities will also be important and that may be best left for humans to do. Even if it turns out that P=NP there could still be some jobs that humans can do like working on undecidable problems.

So what are some jobs that will be around in the NP economy? Well, I think mathematicians will still be employed. Theorems can be verified in polynomial time but there are no known algorithms in P to generate them. That is not to say that there won’t be robot mathematicians and mathematicians will certainly use automated theorem proving programs to help them (e.g. see here). However, I think the human touch will always have some use. Artists and comedians will also have jobs in the future. These are professions that require intimate knowledge of what it is like to be human . Again, there will be machine comics and artists but they won’t fully replace humans. I also think that craftsmen like carpenters, stone masons, basket weavers and so forth could also make a comeback. They will have to exhibit some exceptional artistry to survive but the demand for them could increase since some people will always long for the human touch in their furniture and houses.

The question then is whether or not there will be enough NP jobs to go around and whether or not everyone is able and willing to hold one. To some, an NP economy will be almost Utopian – everyone will have interesting jobs. However, there may be some people who simply don’t want or can’t do an NP job. What will happen to them? I think that will be a big (probably undecidable) problem that will face society in the not too distant future, provided we make it that far.

FreeWill Theory!

2009-11-15T00:31:00.002+05:30

Given that a materialistic theory of mind is becoming more and more mainstream, we must face the prospect of living our lives without free will. That is not to say that our lives will be predictable or even determined. Given what we know about dynamical systems, computer science and quantum mechanics it is almost certain that life is completely unpredictable and undetermined. However, there is no “you” or “me to make decisions about what we do. Results from neuroscience (e.g. Bill Newsome’s lab at Stanford) show that there are neurons in cortex that fire before a monkey makes a decision and the simulation of some of these neurons can influence a monkey’s choice. We too are at the mercy of our neurons.

So the question I have is once a large fraction of the population believes that free will does not exist, will that change society. Although this is a dynamical systems question where the belief of free will is some aspect of the state of the system and what I ask is how the system evolves subsequent to reaching a state of no belief in free will, I will address it using language that still connotes some sense of agency or directed action since it is more convenient to do so. However, keep in mind that everything I say is with respect to how society will evolve after it attains a state where there is no longer a belief in free will.

One possibility is that people will become more relaxed and not worry so much about the consequences of their actions since they have no control anyway. I doubt this will be the case because people are so hard wired biologically to believe in control of their actions that intellectual knowledge will not affect their day to day life. People will still feel regret and remorse, joy and sadness. So, I don’t think society will lapse into a hedonistic free-for-all for example.

I think it could change the legal system though. As I posted before, if there is no free will then it will become less useful to view crime in terms of intent and motive but rather on what should be done for maximum benefit to society, including the perpetrators welfare. However, the emotions governing fairness, revenge and vindication will still exist so people may still want to keep some aspect of punishment. This may end up in a political stalemate where some fraction of the population will insist on maintaining the need for retribution whereas the rest will simply view justice in terms of containment of defective machines.

Will it affect personal relationships? Will it take the bloom off of love and romance? Will people still treat one another in the same way as they do now? My sense is that people will still basically do what they do now although with a meta-level twist to it. Some may not take insults so personally. The knowledge of no free will may actually reinforce the notion that communication between people is important and desirable since people will be more attune to the fact that their words can impact a person’s behavior. How a person acts will depend on their internal states and the external inputs they receive. People may become more strategic in providing those inputs, something masterful manipulators already do today.

Will it make people more open to socialistic notions since a person is not responsible for their successes or failures? People are just cogs in a big machine rolling along after all. They have no control over how hard they work or how creative they are. Those things are just a combination of genetics and environment. Like in a restaurant where the waiters pool their tips together and share it equally, would people be more inclined to share the wealth of society? I have a feeling that this issue will remain as divided as it is today. So, my guess is that knowledge of no free will won’t affect our lives dramatically.

Lovely and the Lovelie!

2009-11-15T00:16:00.001+05:30

‘If you can’t win over her, kill her’- that’s what seems to be on the minds of people in love these days. In fact, it’s ignominious to identify them as lovers. People no longer seem to understand the sanctity of love.

Talking of love, the Taj Mahal should certainly light up your mind, now that it’s become the talk of the town. The sheer radiance of this marble-clad massive mausoleum basking under the sunlight or its sparkling reflection rippling through the adjacent Yamuna river by the moonlight are inspiring enough to make one fall in love. The Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan made this architecture over the tomb of his beloved wife Mumtaj Mahal to exhibit his eternal love for her.

On the one hand, we talk about voting for this epitome of immortal love to bring it into the new Seven Wonders of the World, and on the other hand we hear about people resorting to killing their love in desperation. Well indeed, love has diverse definitions; that’s the parody of life. Anyway, the news channels are making big business either way!

Cases of people slaying down their own fiancées have increased multi-fold. It’s almost become an everyday episode. It was barely a couple of months from now when this 24-year-old software professional Kaushambi Layek, a TCS employee was murdered by her boyfriend at a suburban hotel in Mumbai. And now it’s this girl, Sushma Nikam who was brutally stabbed to death by her ‘lover’ on the busy streets of Thane amidst all the passers-by rushing to their workplaces. But despite their busy schedules, the otherwise-always-on-their-toes Mumbaikars did find the time to watch the ‘tamasha’, though they refrained from coming forward to the victim’s rescue. Due respect to the one lady who lent a helping hand – laudable! (I think everyone should start wearing ‘choodiyan’, if that makes one brave!) The victim was stabbed 21 times by the attacker in broad daylight, and that’s precisely the kind of social situation where we prefer to stay mum and stand as oblivious onlookers. Well, no one can be blamed. The sight would have been gruesome enough for anybody to think of taking instantaneous action. Picture ourselves witnessing such cruelty. We never know how we would react given the same circumstances - terrified…petrified…mortified…stupefied? A real situation is not an ideal situation! But people will be people – great talkers, little doers, especially when it comes to condemning each others’ doings. And the Press will be Press, when it comes to dramatizing the audience's reactions to add some spice to their hottest selling news!

Anyway, returning to my point, I was mentioning the different dimensions of love, or is this a typical case of pure love versus lust? Cliché as it may sound, but that’s the fact! Desire - want – get – acquire, these are the thoughts occupying people’s minds. Whoever said, one should learn to give in love. Forget giving one’s own life, even that’s an offence punishable by law! But taking away someone else’s life? This only confirms that we show no concern for anybody but our own selves. Self contentment is all that matters and we can stoop to any level to acquire that, though that may account to somebody else’s grief.

Can we still call ourselves humans or are we turning into callous and cold-blooded creatures, heartless hooligans? All said and done, one thing is confirmed – ‘All’s fair in love and war’, and people seem to have taken that a bit too literally. When this was phrased, little would the author have expected that there would be a phase, where love would lose its face following this very adage. And with many more ‘lovely’ centuries to go, even God might not be able to answer where mankind would lie and where humanity would be…

Money YenoM!

2009-11-08T23:15:00.000+05:30

I do hope Professor Armin Falk of the University of Bonn was paid exactly what it was worth for this study showing that money, or even the thought of it, can makes us high.

It's hard to put a price on such knowledge but it does provide great value for headline-generators such as myself.

"Money like a drug," the Herald headline begins and it's an apposite analogy for the times, as governments around the world inject cash into the banking system while everyone else is suffering from withdrawal (or maybe 'non-withdrawal' is better) syndromes.

Back to the study itself, which, according to the Herald story, suggests "that the human brain is innately susceptible to the illusion of wealth that money can bring".

At its core, Falk's study supports the notion that most people are distracted by headline numbers and pretty crappy at applying simple maths to reality.

But as this story on US website Portfolio.com demonstrates, sometimes investment professionals are pretty crappy at applying reality to mathematics.

You may be sick of reading about credit default swaps and collateralised debt obligations - the financial instruments copping the blame for our current little financial crisis - but the article (originally published in 'Wired' magazine) is particularly illuminating about the way financial types measure risk and how the beauty of a single formula blinded many to the ugly - statistically speaking - real world.

"They think they can model just a few years' worth of data and come up with probabilities for things that may happen only once every 10,000 years," the Wired story concludes. "Then people invest on the basis of those probabilities, without stopping to wonder whether the numbers make any sense at all."

Now that's a real money illusion

Inverse Paranoia?

2009-10-10T23:29:00.003+05:30

Well, there was something(know not what) that kept my thoughts inversed today (Perhaps, I suspect the involvement of my Algorithm Teacher's "preachings" on the complexities and the treasures that are hidden in these problems!or on the flip-side it might also be due to lack of tests and assignments this week!).So, today I felt that I had to get some thoughts in and extract some really serious inverse algorithms,if not for algorithms that are worthy enough for a patent;). And guess what?!, the thoughts did flow and the thought flow did work!- and what followed that is this post which forms the basis function to an extrapolation of these little seemingly brilliant myriad "thought flows"...

Imagine how much easier it would be to succeed and be happy in life if you were constantly expecting the world to support you and bring you opportunity. Successful people do just that. This sixth step for creating the life you want, Become an "Inverse Paranoid", isn't about being self-centered, it's about being self-confident.

Too often people who believe in themselves and their purpose (see yesterday's post for more on finding your life's purpose) are sometimes labeled as arrogant or just plain cocky and stuck-up. The opposite couldn't be truer. Those of us who expect great things out of the world, each other, and ourselves realize the importance to focus inwards to build and create the necessary energy to tell the world what we want and to help others do the same. As a result, Inverse Paranoids are not afraid to speak their minds or stand up for their beliefs and for what they want out of life.

Typically the word "paranoid" means suspicious or fearful. In this context, however, the word takes out a whole different meaning. Truly paranoid people, in the sense we usually think of, are always expecting something bad to happen to them. In terms of creating the life you want, Inverse Paranoids are expecting good things to happen to them. They expect to have strong relationships and nurturing families; they expect rewarding careers; they expect to be happy and successful. Why? Because they have told the Universe this is what they want and they are taking the necessary steps and doing the necessary things to make it happen.

You can easily spot Inverse Paranoids. These are the people who take the time to improve themselves. They read, take courses, and attend lectures and seminars. They reach out to others who have achieved a particular success in order to soak in all they can from the people who are accomplishing the same things they want to achieve.

The encouraging point here is you can learn to become an Inverse Paranoid. Start by believing you deserve to have good things happen to you. Put yourself out there and begin to do the things successful and happy people do. It's about taking time for you and investing time in yourself. However, it can be hard to do. Early on it may feel like you are being selfish and self-absorbed. But, as you begin to make progress and learn to balance all of the demands for your time in a more productive manner, it will become more natural.

After all, by taking the time to improve yourself will have positive, residual effects for everybody in your life. From an inverse focus, you can tap into your life's desire and passion, expect it to happen, and then share it with any one you choose. That, my friend, is not selfish at all. It is a gift.

Irrational Rationality ;)

2009-10-09T01:19:00.006+05:30

I happened to have a trade-off rant today in my ~~Algorithms~~ Programming Application Software! class (*Now aint that exotic?!*), I got a metaphor involving the undescribable numbers for my teacher. An interesting confusion came up from him in the comments about just what that meant. Instead of answering it with a comment, I decided that it justified a post of its own. It's a fascinating topic which is incredibly counter-intuitive. To me, it's one of the great examples of how utterly wrong our intuitions can be.

Numbers are, obviously, very important. And so, over the ages, we've invented lots of notations that allow us to write those numbers down: the familiar arabic notation, roman numerals, fractions, decimals, continued fractions, algebraic series, etc. I could easily spend months on this blog just writing about different notations that we use to write numbers, and the benefits and weaknesses of each notation.

But the fact is, the vast, overwhelming majority of numbers cannot be written down in any form.

That statement seems bizarre at best. But it does actually make sense. But for it to make sense, we have to start at the very beginning: What does it mean for a number to be describable?

A describable number is a number for which there is some finite representation. An indescribable number is a number for which there is no finite notation. To be clear, things like repeating decimals are not indescribable: a repeating decimal has a finite notation. (It can be represented as a rational number; it can be represented in decimal notation by adding extra symbols to the representation to denote repetition.) Irrational numbers like π, which can be computed by an algorithm, are not indescribable. By indescribable, I mean that they really have no finite representation.

As a computer science guy, I naturally come at this from a computational perspective. One way of defining a describable number is to say that there is some finite computer program which will generate the representation of the number in some form. In other words, a number is describable if you can describe how to generate its representation using a finite description. It doesn't matter what notation the program generates it in, as long as the end result is uniquely identifiable as that one specific number. So you could use programs that generate decimal expansions; you could use programs that generate either fractions or decimal expansions, but in the latter case, you'd need the program to identify the notation that it was generating.

So - if you can write a finite program that will generate a representation of the number, it's describable. It doesn't matter whether that program ever finishes or not - so if it takes it an infinite amount of time to compute the number, that's fine - so long as the program is finite. So π is describable: it's notation in decimal form is infinite, but the program to generate that representation is finite.

An indescribable number is, therefore, a number for which there is no notation, and no algorithm which can uniquely identify that number in a finite amount of space. In theory, any number can be represented by a summation series of rational numbers - the indescribable ones are numbers for which not only is the length of that series of rational numbers infinite, but given the first K numbers in that series, there is no algorithm that can tell you the value of the K+1th rational.

So, take an arbitrary computing device, φ, where φ(x) denotes the result of running φ on program x. The total number of describable numbers can be no larger than the size of the set of programs x that can be run using φ. The number of programs for any effective computing device is countably infinite - so there are, at most, a countably infinite number of describable numbers. But there are uncountably many real numbers - so the set of numbers that can't be generated by any finite program is uncountably large.

Most numbers cannot be described in a finite amount of space. We can't compute with them, we can't describe them, we can't identify them. We know that they're there; we can prove that they're there. All sorts of things that we count on as properties of real numbers wouldn't work if the indescribable numbers weren't there. But they're totally inaccessible.

The Four Astriks of Publishing a Technical Paper!

2009-10-04T19:03:00.001+05:30

Here is a paper from the Autumn 1997 issue peer-reviewed journal Population Trends by J. Haskey:

Spouses with identical residential addresses before marriage
an indicator of pre-marital cohabitation

In case the title is too obscure, the abstract offers this helpful clarification:

It outlines previous background research which has provided good evidence that identical addresses (before) marriage are likely to be ones in which the couple pre-maritally cohabited.

God, I wish math papers were this easy to publish. I’ve already got a stack of potential papers:

Number theory — Divisibility by 2 an indicator of being even.
Algebra — The presence of = symbol an indicator of equality.
Calculus — The existence of a derivative an indicator of differentiability.
Meteorology — The sky is blue, unless it’s night or it’s obstructed by clouds.

What would you write about?

Mathematico-Homourology!

2009-10-04T18:50:00.003+05:30

Abstract

In this article, we discuss the classic proof that girls are evil. The author will briefly discuss the origins of the problem and review the classic proof. The author then indicates a mathematical flaw in the argument, invalidating the statement. The article concludes with a revised and corrected statement of the result.

I. Introduction

I recently received an email discussing the differences between men and women from various mathematical and engineering points-of-view. Most of it was extremely funny, and sooner or later all shall certainly appear within the mathematico-humorist community, properly researched, and appended with standard references in the literature.

However, one portion of the email included a mathematical “proof” of the fact that girls are evil. This proof is doubtless familiar to many readers, having circulated a few times in mathematicians’ inboxes. However, for those readers unfamiliar with this well-known proof, we present it now.

II. Statement and classical proof of result

Theorem. Girls are evil.

Proof. It is axiomic in all cultures that girls require both time and money, and any man with either a deficiency in available “quality time” or “disposable income” knows that this a joint-proportion, whence

Similarly, it is has been proved that “time is money”..

Therefore, the Substitution yields

We also know that “money is the root of all evil”, whence

Substituting again yields

Squaring on the right-hand side of the equation yields

establishing the result. Q.E.D.

III. Identifying and resolving the flaw

The above “proof,” so-called, is widely known to mathematicians, leading to the widespread belief that girls are evil.

It will therefore come as a surprise to find that the proof above is flawed, and indeed, the result is incorrect. There is a subtle flaw in the above argument that seems to have escaped most diligent readers for quite some time. In the interest of correcting this mis-truth, which has improperly vilified girls as being evil, we present now the correct statement and its proof.

Theorem (Corrected). Girls are absolute evil.

Proof. Arguing as above allows us to conclude

However, let us more intently examine the consequences of money being the root of all evil. A moment’s thought shows that it is incorrect to conclude that

To see this, recall that evil is a inherently negative concept . We cannot take square roots of negative quantities in the real world, lest we are will to assume that money is imaginary. (Graduate students in particular may choose to investigate this concept further ) Thus, we are therefore forced to conclude that

Substituting again yields

Squaring on the right-hand side of the equation yields

establishing that girls are absolutely evil. Q.E.D.

IV. Conclusion

We sincerely hope this clears things up.

PS: Well, nothing here is intentional. Just take em with a pinch of sarcasm(not essentially as a gender bias:P)

Functional Relationship..:P

2009-10-04T18:42:00.000+05:30

If only I could get to the derivative of you,
To navigate your slope just like I used to do,
Your sine curve so smooth, so well elevated,
Just waiting for me to come and make it integrated.
Remember how during our second differentiation,
I'd derivate and agitate until I'd reach acceleration?
My little pet parabola whom I so much adore,
Why can't we have a functional relationship once more?

reCAPTCHAring ;)

2009-09-22T23:10:00.003+05:30

We’ve all seen CAPTCHA’s — those distorted words that function as a cut-rate Turing test, separating humans from spambots on any number of websites.

About a mweekend I was at MSR Summers..and of the participants was Luis von Ahn — the guy who was responsible for inventing the CAPTCHA idea. He gave a great one-minute talk, in which he traced his personal feelings about being responsible for something that is so useful, yet so annoying.

CAPTCHA, you will not be surprised to hear, is ubiquitous. Luis figured out that the little buggers are filled out about sixty million times per day by someone on the web. So, as the inventer, he first felt a certain amount of pride at having exerted such a palpable influence on modern life. But after a bit of reflection, and multiplying sixty million times by the five seconds it might take to fill in the form, he became depressed at the enormous number of person-hours that were essentially wasted on this task.

Being a clever guy, Luis decided to make lemonade. What we have here is a huge number of people who are recognizing words that a computer can’t make out. Luis realized that there was a separate circumstance in which you would want the computer to recognize the words, even though it wasn’t quite up to the task — optical character recognition, and in particular the problem of digitizing old texts. Apparently, before the advent of the Internet, people would store information by binding together pieces of paper with words printed on them, forming compact volumes known as “books.” In the interest of preserving the products of this outmoded technology, various efforts around the world are attempting to scan in all of those books and store the results digitally. But often the text is not so clear, and the computers don’t do such a great job at translating the images into words.

Thus, reCAPTCHA was born. At this point you should be able to guess what it does: takes scanned images from actual books, with which optical character recognition software are struggling, and uses them as the source material for CAPTCHA’s. The project is up and running, and can be implemented anywhere the ordinary CAPTCHA’s are used. Now, when you get annoyed at having to make out those squiggly words with lines slashed through them, you can take some solace in knowing that you’re making the world a better place. Or at least saving some books from the trash bin of history.

What if..Time was a real axis!?

2009-09-18T12:53:00.001+05:30

A lot of people who think about time tend to emerge from their contemplations and declare that time is just an illusion, or (in modern guise) some sort of semi-classical approximation. And that might very well be true. But it also might not be true; from our experiences with duality in string theory, we have explicit examples of models of quantum gravity which are equivalent to conventional quantum-mechanical systems obeying the time-dependent Schrödinger equation with the time parameter right there where Schrödinger put it.

And from that humble beginning — maybe ordinary quantum mechanics is right, and there exists a formulation of the theory of everything that takes the form of a time-independent Hamiltonian acting on a time-dependent quantum state defined in some Hilbert space — you can actually reach some sweeping conclusions. The fulcrum, of course, is the observed arrow of time in our local universe. When thinking about the low-entropy conditions near the Big Bang, we tend to get caught up in the fact that the Bang is a singularity, forming a boundary to spacetime in classical general relativity. But classical general relativity is not right, and it’s perfectly plausible (although far from inevitable) that there was something before the Bang. If the universe really did come into existence out of nothing 14 billion years ago, we can at least imagine that there was something special about that event, and there is some deep reason for the entropy to have been so low. But if the ordinary rules of quantum mechanics are obeyed, there is no such thing as the “beginning of time”; the Big Bang would just be a transitional stage, for which our current theories don’t provide an adequate spacetime interpretation. In that case, the observed arrow of time in our local universe has to arise dynamically according to the laws of physics governing the evolution of a wave function for all eternity.

Interestingly, that has important implications. If the quantum state evolves in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, it evolves ergodically through a torus of phases, and will exhibit all of the usual problems of Boltzmann brains. So, at the very least, the Hilbert space (under these assumptions) must be infinite-dimensional. In fact you can go a bit farther than that, and argue that the spectrum of energy eigenvalues must be arbitrarily closely spaced — there must be at least one accumulation point.

Sexy, I know. The remarkable thing is that you can say anything at all about the Hilbert space of the universe just by making a few simple assumptions and observing that eggs always turn into omelets, never the other way around. Turning it into a respectable cosmological model with an explicit spacetime interpretation is, admittedly, more work, and all we have at the moment are some very speculative ideas. But in the course of the essay I got to name-check Parmenides, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Augustine, and Nietzsche, so overall it was well worth the effort.

"Under-promise and over-deliver"->"Under-perfroming and Over-rated!"

2009-09-16T23:35:00.006+05:30

“Under-promise and over-deliver” is a catchy and well accepted management maxim these days. It’s frequently found hand-in-hand with that other popular wisdom about the need to “constantly exceed customer expectations”. In fact many managers would argue that in order to constantly exceed customer expectations, you need to under-promise and over-deliver.

The marketing and management literature supports the notion that what is delivered to customers must relate to their expectations and this is in large part driven by what was promised in the first place. The real problem is how managers have blindly picked the idea up and assumed that it applies across the board.

Let’s explore the assumptions that underlie these traditional wisdoms and show how it adds up to nothing more than a pathetic set of fallacy!

Flawed assumption 1: That being positively surprised time and again is a sensible and sustainable thing to do

A common traditional wisdom is that one of the best things you can do is to “constantly exceed the expectations of your customers”. It’s like the customer management version of continuous improvement because it’s a stretchy and aspirational thing to do. But, given the earlier discussion about how customers dislike surprises, is this actually a sensible aspiration to pursue?

Look at the stock market example again- a blue chip stock is defined by the way it delivers the promised results time and again over the years as promised. As one web dictionary puts it- well-known common stocks with a long record of profit growth and dividend payment, and a reputation for quality management, products and services. What happens if a certain stock becomes renowned for beating expectations? Beating expectations quickly becomes the new expectation.

If for example, bank customers generally wait five minutes for teller service, their expectation will be to wait five minutes. To exceed their expectations, the bank will need to shorten the wait to less than five minutes. Perversely though, once customers experience a shorter wait, their expectations are generally revised. The inevitable happens- the bank creates a rod for its back and it feels under pressure to progressively reduce the waiting time, and following the logic, the waiting time will ultimately need to be zero.

One of the key points is that customer expectations are rarely static. The expectations customers hold will adapt and change according to what they hear in the market and what they experience.

Flawed assumption 2: That over delivering pays off

One of the biggest risks of over-delivering is wastage… the sort of wastage that cannot be seen.

It is a well known fact that some very high quality companies around the world have gone out of business. Even Baldridge award winners like Florida Power and Light have gone broke because their quality has been too good for what customers pay. There’s an assumption that great quality and service pays off, but ultimately it is about what the customer gets for what they are prepared to pay. Offer more than what a customer is prepared to pay and it will be the wastage that costs dearly.

Yet, if we explore the psychology and motivation of customers we get a picture why substantial wastage often goes unnoticed. What happens if a customer gets offered something positive they did not expect? First, they will of course usually accept it, especially if it comes with no strings attached. Unless the unexpected bonus is related to something really important and relevant to the customer, then it is likely, the customer will accept it without really thinking much about it.

Take the bank waiting time example again. If a customer comes in and this time goes straight to a teller without waiting, they will undoubtedly feel good about that for a short while. Importantly, the attitude of most customers is usually that this is a little win for them… some serendipity when “it’s usually me, the customer, who gets the raw end of the deal… so I deserve this bit of luck”. It’s likely they won’t attribute this to the good planning and management of the bank, unless it starts happening on a consistent basis. So isolated over-delivery will achieve little enduring behavioural modification for customers in the moderately dissatisfied to moderately satisfied ambivalence area of the satisfaction scale. Customers will take whatever is on offer though- they’d be crazy not too!

The main conclusion here is that over-delivery is a dangerous game. Most over-delivery will be happily accepted by customers, but don’t expect to get much back in return. To work, over-delivery must become part of a consistent, on-going offering that customers value and anticipate. And if that is achieved, that is no longer over- delivery, it’s simply doing what is promised and expected. So the emerging wisdom is don’t over-deliver, just “deliver on the nail”.

Flawed assumption 3: That under- promising works

This leads to another popular belief- that it is smart to manage the expectations of customers downwards, so that it is easier to delight them. Even better if you can delight customers by doing nothing different to what you are currently doing! This is so called “under- promising”- one half of the widely accepted “under- promise and over-deliver” approach.

On the surface of it, this seems a clever thing to do. Since the expectations of customers are quite fluid, it is obviously smart to keep them under control as much as is possible.

Let’s look at the bank waiting time example again. Imagine the bank has decided to manage expectations downward to ten minutes, but still deliver on a five minute wait. Note that in the past waiting times were one of those issues avoided if possible in any communications with customers. Obviously, it costs very little to explain to customers that they can realistically expect a waiting time of up to ten minutes. As the theory suggests, naturally, they will be pleasantly surprised if they only have to wait five minutes (the amount of time they have always had to wait)- or will they?

There are a few inherent dangers:

There’s a negative message to be communicated in order to manage expectations- that that the waiting time could be ten minutes. Keeping in mind that studies show that it takes about 11 positives to make up for one negative, there’s a very real danger that there could be a negative backlash against the bank which could be difficult to overcome. This will be especially so if waiting time is an important criterion for customers to evaluate the performance of the bank
What if another bank uses the opportunity to promote shorter waiting times? This might be an attractive proposition to the many ambivalent customers of the first bank, even though in reality waiting times in the two banks are the same. Under- promising on a systematic basis can open up an opportunity for competitors when really there is no difference between the two.

In this competitive world, it’s unusual to have the space to under- promise on an ongoing basis, especially to make enough of a difference for the under-promise; over-deliver strategy to stand out to customers.

Much more important to work on is communicating realistically what your firm is capable of, so that there is no misunderstanding with the customer. You could call this “promise on the nail”- the art and science of promising exactly what a customer is going to get.

Where does that leave “under-promise and over- deliver”?

It’s catchy, but it has no substance and it’s not sustainable- “under-promise and over-deliver” rarely works for all the reasons argued above.

Most success will come from promising what can and should be delivered and then doing it- “promise on the nail and deliver it on the nail”.

Effective “Promises Management” calls for finding the right balance between how the right promises are made and whether they are reliably delivered on. It is much more than a two handed balancing act though. Yes, one’s own promises must be managed on the one hand and delivered on the other, but what about the promises made to you? Two more hands are required to track and manage promises made to you and whether they have been delivered… unless of course the people you are dealing with can be trusted to do what they say they will.

To be or Not to be..:)

2009-09-09T22:17:00.001+05:30

"Our emotions, our sentiments, our thoughts, the whole paraphernalia of the mind, are manipulated and conditioned by the outside. Scientifically, it has become more clear now, but even without scientific investigation the mystics have been saying exactly the same thing for thousands of years, that all these things our mind is filled with are not ours; you are beyond them. We get identified with them, and that's the only problem."

Who you are not

You are not the body. If a doctor amputated both arms and legs, and if he transplanted into your body someone else's kidneys and an artificial heart, the essence of who you are would not change because you are not the body. You are not that.

You are also not your brain. Even if a doctor hooked up wires to your brain, and by applying voltages to different regions of your brain, forced you to move various limbs, or even to change certain emotional behaviors, the very essence of who you are would not have changed because you are not your brain. You are not that.

You are also not our mind. While asleep, your mind might take on the personality of a sexy model, or a dapper ladies man, or a silver-tongued international spy, or a bird in flight. But, the I that is you is merely the observer to the journeys your mind takes. The I that is the essence of you never changes. It is not the mind. You are not that.

Who you are

Who you are, the very essence of who you are, is Consciousness. The challenge for you, in this life, is to gain knowledge of Self --- to understand what, exactly, this Consciousness is that is Self.

Certain research into the functioning of neuromelanin over the past century has offered clues to guide us in our search for Knowledge of Self -- a search that Man has been on for as long as Man has been Man --- for as long as Man has possessed Consciousness.

The Self transcends the body. You are not that.

However --- and this is an important point --- melanin does have a critical role to play in the _functioning_ of our Consciousness. And, this role is consistent within All -- both Whites, and Blacks, and Browns, and all the other artificial subgroups of mankind. Melanin is an energy absorber. Skin melanin absorbs light energy from the rays of the sun, from without. And, neuromelanin both absorbs, and transfers/radiates, energy within the body. But, what is this energy that is both without, and within? What is this light that is the life of men?

The question is straight forward but the answer is ambiguous..:)

Diversifying Diversity..

2009-09-09T22:10:00.001+05:30

For our entire lives, most of us have depended on highly centralized systems. Our food comes from a thousand or more miles away. Our savings is shipped into distant financial centers and invested by strangers in enterprises run by strangers. We watch highly scripted news that serves the same spin no matter how many channels we try. We bank at impersonal global banks with criminal records that would make a felon blush and have no idea where our money goes, just that the government guarantees that we will get it back.

Within this centralized system, diversification means having your financial assets deposited into a “one-stop-shop” brokerage account invested in securities representing different global industries, the idea being when one industry is doing poorly, another “countercyclical” industry would be doing well.

But suddenly, we find that we may not be able to trust these centralized systems. Suddenly, traditional portfolio theory no longer addresses our anxiety. This is because we need to shift from diversification within a centralized system to real diversification in a decentralized, possibly “out of control” world.

If you study the investment patterns of families and wealth that has survived through the generations, including through periods of lawlessness and warfare, you come to understand that for those who want to thrive in all economic and political scenarios, diversification has had a far deeper meaning than what is commonly understood in the financial markets today. For the astute strategist, it means not putting all your eggs in one basket in every important aspect of your life. Given what is happening in our world and economy, it’s time to revisit the deeper meaning of diversification.

Diversification means that our assets are invested such that an economic, political, or natural event — particularly a catastrophic event — cannot wipe us out. So, for example, we don’t invest all of our savings in a single financial institution or fund. Investors who lost their life savings in the Madoff scandal were not practicing even the most basic form of financial diversification.

Diversification also means having multiple types of assets and custodians in multiple places. Custodians (i.e., those who hold our assets for us) might be brokerage firms, banks, depositories or our own safe.

Diversification by place means locating our assets in states or countries subject to different legal and political risks. It means denominating our assets in currencies of multiple countries. It means selecting assets subject to different risks of loss due to climate change, weather conditions, social conditions and other uniquely local vicissitudes. Local investment is a great idea, but the people who lived through Katrina can tell you why having all of your eggs in one local basket may not be the best idea.

Diversification means that we don’t have all of our savings in just one type of asset. So we don’t invest in securities only — we also invest in tangibles. If possible, we buy a house without debt, or with debt that can be serviced by one family member’s income, or invest in our home to lower energy and food costs permanently. We also maintain a sufficient inventory of household goods. And it’s a good idea to invest in disaster preparedness if we live in an area that experiences earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes or is prone to power outages.

Having all your money in one currency or one country is pretty risky – a risk many in the US tend to take. Ask your Jewish friends whose parents got out of Germany in time because they had gold coins or family and assets abroad. Gold coins may hold their value if the dollar collapses, but they can also disappear in a burglary or if you forget where you put them. Digital gold may be a great thing, but if the Internet is not reliable where you are, cold cash may be a good thing. Or if your cash is worthless, a stockpile of food, vitamins and liquor can be priceless. However, food, vitamins and liquor are only good when you are bartering with someone who wants them or is close by. Which takes us back to gold and thats back to square one! ;)

The Awareness of the Exponential..

2009-08-28T22:51:00.004+05:30

In Thomas Friedman's "Hot, Flat and Crowded" he refers to Ray Kurzweil's (see www.Kurzweilai.net) explanation of intuitive linearity vs. exponential growth as the way to explain our failure to anticipate the level and speed of climate change. Simply put, we tend to base our understanding of the future based on the events of the past and the rate of their unfolding.

In my experience, this is not the experience of the sensitive or the visionary. Part of the struggle for these populations is that their processing leads them to have a sense of the future that does not come from their experiences of the past or how events up until the present have played out. They have a natural capacity to see and feel ramifications of current policies that reach out far into the future.

While I do not begin to suggest that these populations know how climate change is going to play out, I would say that many sensitives and visionaries live with a sense of how large events will play out or come to pass that surpasses all logical explanation. In some ways it is as if they lack the filter that limits the ability of most people to see beyond the present.

If a pebble is dropped in the pond, it is as if the sensitive or visionary feels or sees as far out as the 100th ripple. At most, the majority of the population is just watching the pebble drop. With climate disruption, and economic policies that have global implications, the world's problems emerge onto a shared playing field. Cultures are being forced to see beyond the pebble that drops in their neighborhood pond. Yet, being forced to consider larger variables is profoundly different than having a natural affinity for sensing and moving into the ever expanding ripples.

I think it remains important for sensitives and visionaries to recognize this distinction. Otherwise, when they are around people talking about "green revolutions" etc., they can get confused as to why the level of conversation still seems to be missing the mark. It is as if the people seem to be talking about the ripples, but somehow, they are still only seeing the ripples nearest to them. (See "Hot, Flat and Crowded" for a superb explanation as to why the efforts in the at US towards green living have less than the impact of a pebble in a pond on a global level).

As crises spread, deep change is mandatory. Someone aware of the ripples can be confused as to why it takes such crisis for most citizens to even begin to consider the need for change. This is part of the pain of carrying a capacity for vision - or for the awareness of the exponential.

Contemplating on finding when d(Love)/dt=0?

2009-08-07T06:53:00.003+05:30

Two weekends ago I was visiting a dear friend in Mysore. She has just started a postdoctoral fellowship in Chemistry at an IIT and also she's has just started dating an engineering doctoral student.(Thats a dual degree for the taking!!) They are very smitten. It was disgusting.

During one of their goodbye smooch sessions (while I was attempting to melt beneath the floorboards on my way out the door), my dear friend, let’s call her XYZ, accidentally said “I love you” to the Engineer.

This was cause for great distress and she immediately “took it back.”

A few days later, consumed by the saying, taking back, and woefully lack of saying and taking back in return, XYZ broached the subject with the Engineer (I was thankfully hanging out with my 21-year old cousin, who's from a Arts background).

The Engineer, delightful and rational fellow that he is, made it clear that he would not be saying “I love you” until he was sure. Otherwise, he might waste this very important statement by saying it too early in the relationship, when his love was still growing rapidly, thereby taking away the significance in later weeks/months when his love was much, much greater.

XYZ, obviously disappointed by this response, pressed and asked WHEN exactly that would be. His response: when dLove/dt = zero.

For those of you who have forgotten your calculus (or blocked it out, or, lucky you, never took it at all) let me explain: he will say “I love you” when the slope of the tangent to the growth curve of his love has reached zero. This indicates of a local maximum and means that the rate of growth (the velocity of love, as it were) has slowed to a stop.

As XYZ and I were discussing his response, we found it concerning on several levels. Firstly, if the curve of his love is akin to figure (a) then after he says I love you, he will actually begin to love her less. Which bodeth not well for their long term relationship survival. So then, let’s be generous and suggest the curve of his love is better approximated by figure (b), where the plateau of zero growth might indicate the end of honeymoon/infatuation-type love (a bit late, but not a BAD time to say I love you), which then moves on promptly on to another growth phase, the build up of life-long-partnership-love and the having of babies.

But the second distressing aspect of the whole affair was that somewhere along the line XYZ had also mentioned the term “second derivative.” And neither of us could actually remember what this was. We both recalled HOW to take a second derivative (indeed XYZ and I took calculus together many years ago), but we couldn’t remember what it actually meant.

Enter massive calculus textbook from our 1st year class (XYZ hates throwing away text books).

After searching in the index and finding some helpful examples, we remembered that AHA! the second derivative is akin to acceleration: the rate of rate of growth. And by solving for the second derivative - d2 (love)/dt2 - we could ensure that when d(love)/dt = 0, it is a local maximum (the greatest love), not a local minimum (not the greatest love of all). For when the second derivative is negative = local maximum, as in figure (a); when positive, it’s a local minimum, as in figure (c) (Refresh your memory here). All is happy.

But, you see, I have come up with a better solution. The first few weeks or months of a relationship often result in a very rapid growth of love. Indeed you could even say love is accelerating at a break necking pace (oh har, sorry) not merely speeding along in a linear fashion. Of course this psychotic rampage in love growth can only continue apace for so long and eventually the acceleration will drop to zero, though the absolute value of love is still growing - ie the velocity or d(love)/dt is still greater than zero. An exemplary graph of said derivative can be seen in figure (d).

Try this math teacheresque example; it’s like XYZ and the Engineer have the pedal to metal, building up speed along the on ramp to the freeway of love. But once they merge on, and find a nice lane, they can continue traveling at a constant rate, save for pit stops (fights) and the occasionally passing of trucks (make-up sex). Or better yet, let’s say that falling in love is really actually like falling, wherein the acceleration = 9.8 meters per second squared. When you finally slam into the ground (or reach terminal velocity, which ever suits your particular romantic scenario) and start acting like a normal human beings, instead of a driveling, love-crazed sociopaths, then you know its really time to start saying “I love you.”

In either case, the Engineer should in fact solve for zero in the second derivative to the love-time function and say “I love you” when love has stopped accelerating. This solves the concerning problem of having to wait until his love has stopped growing. Because zero growth in the love function is likely to make any woman, chemist, calculus enthusiast or otherwise, pretty goddamn pissed off.

The Theory of Anti-Relativity..:)

2009-08-06T23:56:00.003+05:30

Although Einstein is best known for his theories of relativity, he was also the main driving force behind the advent of quantum mechanics (QM). His early work in photo-voltaic effect paved way for future developments in QM. And he won the Nobel prize, not for the theories of relativity, but for this early work.

It then should come as a surprise to us that Einstein didn’t quite believe in QM. He spent the latter part of his career trying to device thought experiments that would prove that QM is inconsistent with what he believed to be the laws of nature. Why is it that Einstein could not accept QM? We will never know for sure, and my guess is probably as good as anybody else’s.

Einstein’s trouble with QM is summarized in this famous quote.

"God does not play dice with the universe."

— Albert Einstein

It is indeed difficult to reconcile the notions (or at least some interpretations) of QM with a word view in which a God has control over everything. In QM, observations are probabilistic in nature. That is to say, if we somehow manage to send two electrons (in the same state) down the same beam and observe them after a while, we may get two different observed properties.

We can interpret this imperfection in observation as our inability to set up identical initial states, or the lack of precision in our measurements. This interpretation gives rise to the so-called hidden variable theories — considered invalid for a variety of reasons. The interpretation currently popular is that uncertainty is an inherent property of nature — the so-called Copenhagen interpretation.

In the Copenhagen picture, particles have positions only when observed. At other times, they should be thought of as kind of spread out in space. In a double-slit interference experiment using electrons, for instance, we should not ask whether a particular electron takes on slit or the other. As long as there is interference, it kind of takes both.

The troubling thing for Einstein in this interpretation would be that even God would not be able to make the electron take one slit or the other (without disturbing the interference pattern, that is). And if God cannot place one tiny electron where He wants, how is he going to control the whole universe?

The Movers of the Mobile Mania..

2009-08-06T23:37:00.003+05:30

Cellphone marketing seems to have undergone a change recently. Cellphones at first were a status symbol, something that only the supposed elite possessed. But thanks to good marketing, and of course the fact that they’re extremely useful, almost everyone who could afford one soon got one. As people eloquently point out, they became a necessity, with being late or unavailable without excuse no longer unacceptable in the business world.

I remember being told a few years ago when I was resisting being given a cellphone by my parents, that I was being selfish, not by my parents, but by a friend, annoyed she couldn’t get hold of me as easily as she could others.

Parents on the whole seem to have bought into the belief that teens have to have a cellphone, mainly for safety reasons. Makes me quite nostalgic for my wildly irresponsible kido phase when I could leave the house with no way of being contacted.

But it’s the ads that interest me right now. I must be strange, never having been much interested in material things. I argue it allows me to focus on more important things, and has allowed me to “retire” with an income a fraction that of some friends who’re juggling their credit card debt with their overdraft debt. The ads clearly aren’t aimed at me then. But I find it hard to believe that people actually fall for them, in the sense of unconciously and unquestioningly accepting the message without any further awareness.

The first is an ad for a particular brand of cellphone, I forget which, perhaps Siemens, which very loosely goes something along the lines of:

Some think it’s your watch that gives you status, others your sunglasses, or your car. They’re wrong.
On first viewing, at this point I thought they were being consciously ironic, and there was to follow a clever punchline about the really important things in life, and the ad would actually be for the Nelson mandela Children’s fund. But no, it continued:

It’s actually your cellphone.
I had to stifle my gagging reflex. Surely an advertiser cannot be so purely vomitous? Are people really that stupid? Is the irony intentional, people being aware of it, and thus rendering the ad humourous. I fear not. Either way, it’s quite a depressing ad, and the manufacturer must be grateful I’m reeling so much I’m not entirely certain of the brand.

The second ad features an archetypal American dream family in the car. The dad puts on some old music, and the kids start laughing. Then the dad, slightly balding, brushes his hair trying to hide his bald spot, and the son laughs at him. The dad then walks in with an outdated suit, gets laughed at again, before finally pulling out an ancient cellphone, and again getting laughed out. The punchline indicates that MTN (I think) allows you to upgrade regularly to avoid such embarassment. Clearly aimed at teenagers, the messages are that cellphones are a status symbol, they must be new to be good.

I feel that the cellphone boom must be most credited not to the time,destiny or to the mindset of the present generation..but to the most creative types are being lured into the advertising industry, with its large budgets, and many are putting their best efforts into propaganda of the most subtle kind. The other side of the destroyed are those who do not find lasting happiness from buying the latest trinket, but again fall for the followup ad, and replace “I’ll be happy when I get X” with “I’ll be happy when I get Y”. Listen out for that phrase. It’s amazing how often it appears in conversation.

The Fallacious Fallacy!

2009-08-02T23:06:00.003+05:30

…I think it's finally over. Our reactionary emotional response seems to have stopped it dead in its tracks. If I'm right, all we have to do now is smugly reiterate our half-formed thesis and—oh, no! For the love of God, no! It's thoughtfully mulling things over!

Run! Run! It's making reasonable, fact-based arguments!

Quickly! Hide behind self-righteousness! The ad hominem rejoinders—ready the ad hominem rejoinders! Watch out! Dodge the issue at hand! Question its character and keep moving haphazardly from one flawed point to the next!

All together now! Put every bit of secondhand conjecture into it you've got!

Goddamn it, nothing's working! It's trapped us in our own unsubstantiated claims! We need to switch fundamentally unsound tactics. Hurry, throw up the straw man! Look, I think it's going for it. C'mon…c'mon…yes, it's going for it! Now hit it with the thing that one guy told us once while it's distracted by our ludicrous rationalizations!

Gah! It's calmly and evenhandedly deflecting everything we're throwing at it. Our deductive fallacies are only making it stronger! Wait…what on earth is it doing now? Oh, no, it has sources! My God, it's defending itself with ironclad sources! Someone stop the citing! Please, please stop the citing!

The language is impenetrable! For all that is good and holy, backpedal with all your might!

Where are the children? Someone overprotect the children! They cannot be exposed to this kind of illuminative reasoning. Their young, open minds are much too vulnerable to independent thought. We have to shield them behind our unshakeable intolerance for critical thinking.

What?!? Noooooooooo! Richard! For the love of God, it's convinced Richard!

No time for tears now. Richard's mind has been changed forever. But we mustn't let it weaken our resolve. Mark my words, our ignorance will hold, no matter the cost. Now, more than ever, we have to keep floundering ahead with blind faith in our increasingly fallacious worldview.

For Richard's sake.

What's that? Now it's making an appeal to reason? Never! Do you hear me, you eloquent, well-read behemoth? Never! We'll die before we recognize what we secretly know to be true! The cognitive dissonance only makes our denial stronger!

We have but one hope left: passive-aggressive slights disguised as impersonal discourse.† Okay, everyone, careful now…careful…if this is going to work, we have to arrogantly assume that it won't be smart enough to catch on to our attempt to salvage some feeling of superiority and—oh, God, it's calling us out! Quick, avoid eye contact and stammer an apology! Tell it we were just joking! Tell it we were joking!

Arrgh! Our pride! Oh, Lord, our pride! It burns!

All is lost. We don't stand a chance against its relentless onslaught of exhaustive research and immaculate rhetoric. We may as well lie down and—Christ, how it pains me to say it—admit that it's right. My friends, I would like to take these last few moments of stubborn close-mindedness to say that it's been an honor to dig myself into this hole with you.

Unless…wait, of course! Why didn't we think of it before? Volume! Sheer volume! It's so simple. Quickly now, we don't have much time! Don't let it get a word in edgewise! Derisively cut it off mid-sentence! Now, launch the sophomoric personal attacks! Louder, yes, that's it, louder! Be repetitive, juvenile, and obstinate! It's working! It's working!

We've done it! It's walking away and shaking its head in disgust! Huzzah! Finally—defeated with a single three-minute volley of irrelevant, off-topic shouting!

Ironic, really, isn't it?

The Wonder Years!

2009-07-24T08:34:00.002+05:30

You know they say time flies. They couldn’t have been more correct! It’s been almost four years and we have just another month to go. Batches have come and gone, but each batch has given the college what it rightly deserves. We are too. Placements are just one of the things. But that is not what I am talking about.

After four years, I often ask myself; what am I taking home? I don’t know how many would agree with me. But this degree is just an excuse to teach us the bigger things in life. You learn technical skills when you want to, while on work. Half of us won’t remember what we had done in these four years after 10 years. What we learnt are not technical skills but survival skills. But unfortunately, that’s no longer the case. With an effective ban on any kind of an interaction with the juniors the skill sets no longer go down the pyramid, it unfortunately goes only with us.

College life seems hard, but the fact is that we have a tougher life ahead. A life governed by your rules. You set them, or you break them too. Its clichéd to say “rules are meant to be broken”, but the fact of the matter is that if you do, you just break your own rules. Would you be willing to risk it? No one will call your parents to set matters right, no one will ask for an apology letter to be written for missing a lab. You write your own apologies, you stand up for your mistakes. It’s a wild world out there; and like I said, a degree is just an excuse to teach us to live in it.

It’s funny how aspirations change in four years. Back in first year we wanted the world. We thought of us as the best. We freaked out and had the best time of our lives. By second year we started getting used to the system. It grew on us; or rather we grew on it. Third year, we saw what great placements our seniors got and were enthused to beat them. (We did, but that’s not the point!). Fourth year, more than half the brats has a job in their hands and they know what awaits them (a smaller chunk missed out on jobs, thanks to the R word!). No more dreaming, no more fantasizing. Plain simple truth, you know where you stand in the heap of 500 students. Eventually we learn to live with them. We have to, have no other choice do we?

Ten years down the line, things that we crib about would hardly make a conversation. These are just passé. We are a great batch, and we will forever remember the good times, the bad times and the fun times. I can picture it, some days down the line we would be chatting away in the same olle gallery about the good times wishing that they would never end. Talking hours about how we made the best of what we got. The classes bunked, the night outs, the beer parties at Brigades, the road trips down the nooks and corners of Bangalore rural, the ‘acoustics’ in class…we had our share of both good and bad.

Sitting around lazing in our rooms we dream about what might be in store for us in the future. But having been in college for four years, we know it’s just a futile attempt. We can’t change who are. College either makes you breaks you. We just walk into the vast empyrean hoping for the best.

There is so much here. And we do take a good share of it. We take our friends and all the good times we shared with us. We only hope that one day we all might get together over a beer and catch up and relive those memories and rekindle the spirit of the Wonder Years at UVCE!

The "Foodalgia" Principle..

2009-07-18T10:23:00.002+05:30

For the past few hours today(yeah, I happened to have a nightmarish leap from the bed at 3am!!) , I’ve been trying to figure out what makes food taste incredible as opposed to merely good or great. And now, I think I’ve found the answer. (Although, I am not sure what really prompted the thought. But, since I am wheezing and I am sleepy, I felt that the only way that I can make myself sit upright is to write some dumb thoughts o'er here at my blog page) As always, one step for a dumbness there would implicitly be one giant leap for idiocy!- So, what followed the dumbness was this little theorem of mine..:)

It’s often said that great cooking is a combination of great ingredients and technique. Unquestionably, the quality of produce and skill of the cook* both have a tremendous influence on the final dish. But incredible food often contains one additional element – nostalgia. Like flipping through an old photo album, food has the power to arouse memories and bring us back to special moments in time.

Incredible food, in my opinion, has at least as much to do with nostalgia, as it does with ingredients and technique. To anyone else, the rice and sambhar cooked at my place are probably not the best in the world. But they are the best to me, because of the memories I associate with them and because they’re the rice-sambhar associativity that I’m most familiar with. So even if a dish doesn’t use great ingredients and technique, it’s possible for these limitations to be overcome by the nostalgia that a diner brings to the table. Understanding and taking advantage of your guest's food-related memories is cooking’s secret ingredient.

Food can be incredible when it exceeds our past experiences (our expectations) or when it reminds us of a past experience (nostalgia). By itself, exceeding expectations is a function of better ingredients and technique. It will be much harder to exceed the expectations of someone who has dined at many fine restaurants compared to a person with limited experience. Nostalgia, on the other hand, is based on food-related memories from which the diner can draw upon. So whether or not you've eaten at the world’s best restaurants, it’s likely that you have special food memories that mean more to you than solely the food itself.

So suppose you’re cooking for someone who’s dined at many great restaurants. In order to create food that your guest will consider incredible, it’s intuitive to think that you’ll have to cook at a level that rivals the best food she's ever had - not an easy task. But if you’re able to tap into your guest’s memories and make a dish that’s special to her, your food will mean much more, and she might even find it incredible! (Well, well..I suppose I am using a lot of she's here, so that should tell mammoths about the plot. *lolz!!*)

Now, there's a catch here, however. The inherent risk in cooking with nostalgia is if your guests(well, I mean...any one for that matter :P) don’t get it. For instance, if I were to visit some road side dhaba and have a spaghetti at some Italian Resorante, I’d probably just think it was interesting and strange because I’ve never had the dish elsewhere before, nor do I have any memories associated with the dish. So in order for a dish to appeal a wider audience, it’s important that the food actually tastes good, with or without nostalgia.

Being somewhat of a food geek, I thought I’d take a stab at quantifying nostalgia as it relates to deliciousness. While this isn't really meant to be a formula for plugging in actual numbers, it shows the extent to which nostalgia can influence delicious food. It’s also important to note that you can have negative associations with foods – so no matter how good the ingredients and technique are, you could still dislike a dish because of the unwanted memories you associate with it.

And, tadaan! here I come with a brand new formula which for the temporal reference would be termed as the "Foodalgia Priciple" (Yup, a combo of Food and Nostalgia)

D = (I*T)^N+1

where:
D = deliciousness (higher is better)
I = ingredients (0 < I < ∞)
T = technique (0 < T < ∞)
N = nostalgia (-∞ < N < ∞)

Finally to sum it all up. If molecular gastronomy is loosely defined as the science of deliciousness, then perhaps cooking with nostalgia or more generally, cognitive gastronomy can be thought of as the psychology of deliciousness. Within cognitive gastronomy, we could also consider other factors such as how a person’s mood and state of mind affects their enjoyment of food.Lolz!!

Theory of "Binary Search" Reproduction..

2009-07-17T22:55:00.003+05:30

I was sitting here bored and started thinking about the difficulties that would ensue if we reproduced simply by splitting down the middle. You know how you can cut flatworms down the middle and each half will grow back another half? Like that. There are physical issues, cognitive issues, and even legal issues that come to mind. Nature made a wise choice in having us multiply the way we do. I just thought I’d give some reasons why.

Starting with the physical reasons why our reproductive method is better than fission, let us start with the difficulties involved. As creatures with skeletal structures, we require use of our skeletons to keep us up. It would be damn inconvenient for walking while you are growing a new spine. At some point, each half would have to grow a new leg. Imagine the inconvenience of waiting for your digestive system to get sorted out. There has to be some disability time in all of this. We’d also have to regrow teeth or else there would be people with rotten teeth on one side and new ones on the other. Finally, we would not require genders as we’d all be the same.

Mentally, there have to be issues as well. First, reproducing half a brain can’t be that easy. Of course, the joke is most people don’t even use half their brain. The possibility of crossed wires would increase, in my opinion if we simply split in half. Then, there is an issue of memory. Would both halves have the same memories? If so, would all people share a common history? In cases of mental illness, wouldn’t that perpetuate with each division? Would the dominant side of the brain be determined by which side was the original one?

The biggest curiosity for me is property rights. How would the two new people with equal claim to property divide it? This goes for physical property and intellectual property. Would one half keep their name and the other choose a new one? Who gets to keep the job and who has to look for a new one? What about education? Who keeps the diploma? Simple organisms don’t have to worry about these things.

Splitting in half is no doubt much easier for simple organisms than it would be for us. I only mentioned items off the top of my head that pertain to physical, mental, and legal issues. I’m sure there are plenty other considerations I have not mentioned. Nature did us a favor in not making us reproduce that way. We like to think we can improve on nature; but perhaps in its brutal, messed up way, nature has it all under control. This is the stuff I think about when I’m bored.

If you’re bored, chime in with your ideas on what would be involved in this type of reproduction. What else do you have to do?

Pigeon Head Theorem..:)

2009-07-15T04:55:00.000+05:30

Recently, I’ve started to wonder why pigeons bob their heads in such a violent manner when they walk. This habit seems like it consumes a lot of calories… don’t they need every bit of energy in order to fly? I don’t understand why natural selection hasn’t bred pigeons that walk without bobbing their heads. Wouldn’t they be more efficient and therefore more fit?

Here are some hypotheses I’m toying with to explain this behavior:

Maybe this actually is the most efficient way for pigeons to walk. Perhaps they’re counterbalancing themselves the way a cat does with its tail.

But, if pigeons bob their heads when they’re standing still, this hypothesis wouldn’t explain why they do that. I haven’t been able to watch pigeons standing still long enough to see if they continue to bob their heads, though. (And even if they do, I guess it could be an instinct that’s only useful when they’re walking, but it’s too ingrained for them to stop when they’re just standing around…)
Because they’re not predators, pigeons’ eyes are set far apart on their heads. This gives them a wide field of view which helps them to see approaching hawks. As a side effect, their binocular vision is quite narrow (anyone know how narrow?). This means that both of their eyes can only focus on objects directly in front of them. Objects that are slightly off to the side can only be viewed by one eye, impairing depth perception.

I was standing on the sidewalk one day watching a pigeon bob its head when I decided to close one eye and see how my depth perception was affected. I still had to focus my eye’s lens to see an object clearly, so my depth perception wasn’t completely gone, but it was greatly diminished. Then I tried to mimic the pigeon. If I bobbed my head towards the object and then away, I got a better sense of how far away that object was. Closer objects appeared to get bigger when I bobbed towards them, while objects farther away didn’t.

(Now that I think about it, I probably looked a little odd doing that…)

Anyway, maybe pigeons are compensating for their poor binocular vision in a similar manner. Their quick motions could be an attempt to gauge the distance to the nearest scrap of food so they can accurately peck at it.

Does anyone have a better idea?

My Beta of Meta-Belief..

2009-07-13T23:38:00.002+05:30

I have a tendency to get attached to my beliefs, because in a very real sense they’re the only possessions that can’t be taken from me. I’ve poured countless hours of effort into them, whether I derived the belief independently or found them in another person’s writings. I find it easier to be an intellectual parasite in this sense, because independently deriving beliefs is much harder. But some beliefs can’t be easily falsified, so critically examining them is often just as difficult as independently discovering them. Either way, the prospect of abandoning any of my beliefs is painful because it involves admitting I was wrong. I always find that difficult; the shame of admitting my mistake and the difficulty of re-aligning my worldview pose serious challenges.

I’ve come to see my beliefs as priceless glass sculptures; I instinctively treasure them but shouldn’t hold them so close that they’ll hurt me if and when they shatter. As a result, I’m suspicious of all my beliefs to varying degrees. I hug beliefs in lower, less doubtful levels closer to my chest, but only after examining them carefully for cracks. Beliefs in higher, more doubtful levels remain at arms’ length in case they shatter.

This strategy helps to avoid pain, but I suspect it also makes me more intellectually… nimble. Less attachment to any particular belief makes it possible for me to change my position with greater ease when new evidence is uncovered. If new evidence is never forthcoming, that’s either because I completely understand the universe (which is a “problem” I’d really like to have) or because I’m ignoring evidence that I simply don’t want to see.

I can’t conclusively tell the difference between those two possibilities, which terrifies me…

Fundamentals of "baby sleeping"

2009-07-12T23:14:00.004+05:30

Whomever coined the phrase “slept like a baby” must have never had any kids. In fact, I’m pretty sure that person was never a kid themselves and is in fact some type of alien. I’m pretty sure this is gonna be part of my agenda in my second term of education(erm! thats my PG!).

Actually, my baby nephew (now a year old!) does pretty well sleeping. Much better than my sister at that age*hehe*. Still, I would hardly call the way a baby sleeps anything but a fragile situation, just one floor squeak, or big sister scream, or ant landing on a bed of feathers away from awake baby time.

It’s even more amazing to me the process involved in getting a baby to sleep. I’m convinced they are all different. Our first ate to sleep. Always. It was the only thing other than a half hour car ride that would get her to sleep. The boy is different. He eats to sleep, but sometimes as soon as he’s put in the crib he wakes up. Then Daddy gets his time for action.

In the past week or so, I’ve found my nephew wrangling touch. I’ve been able to rock him to sleep. It’s silly, but it makes me feel good that I’m able to contribute a bit to our rest. There’s nothing worse than a wide awake baby at 4:00 AM when you have to wake up at 6:30. Every tick of that clock is a tick you aren’t going to be able to use for sleep. Very rough.

Well, I hear the guy now. I may have to work my magic. In conclusion: guy who coined the phrase “slept like a baby” is an alien, and I am awesome.

Care,Commit,Live..

2009-07-09T17:09:00.004+05:30

It is a common desire for most people as they embark on this journey of life to attempt to do so with some sense of purpose and meaning. The idea of aimlessly wandering through days, months and even years of existence without ever really weaving the sum of our experiences into the fabric of who we are leaves us feeling somewhat unfulfilled.

We spend the majority of our time and focus on collecting the dots of life, unfortunately we run out of time and energy to be able to actually connect them. It is the connecting part that puts the smile on our face, the spring in our step and the very real sense of wellbeing down in our soul.

After all, we know the real good stuff about life, the stuff that invigorates and energizes us has much less to do with places and things and much more to do with people and purpose. Intangible qualities like caring and commitment oddly enough lead us toward a sense of meaning in life we so earnestly want.

If purpose is ultimately realized through caring about something or someone, then the question becomes how do we learn to care? After all, if I feel passionately about a person or a cause then the logical progression would be to make a commitment to what I am feeling. It is this “cart before the horse” mentality where emotion clouds logic and betrays genuine commitment.

Real passion, that is to say caring with an emotional component, follows our commitment to simply act. It is when we are moved to act that enduring, meaningful feelings kick in like an afterburner to sustain our initial decision.

Love is s an action word. Caring comes in waves as we are doing. Strong feelings always follow our decisions to participate in those things that matter to us the most. A life lived on purpose is achieved through conscientious and intentional decisions to commit ourselves first and care as a result.

On the other hand, fading feelings often reflect wavering commitment. It is predictable to say the least that our feelings about something or someone would begin to subside as our choices to actively care diminish.On a final note, just remember that if you stop doing the things that created the passion;the passion becomes anemic.

Fictions of Imaginations..

2009-07-06T22:08:00.001+05:30

"But you've never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes, feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of hell. And you wouldn't know what it's like to be her angel, to have that love for her, be there forever, through anything"
-Good Will Hunting

I have always liked the line I quoted above. Some people get it and others understand it. But I kind of suspect that only a few really get it. That is a special sort of love. A different kind of love and if you have had it I hope that you were smart enough to recognize it while you did.

Because if you lose it than you start to understand a different sort of loss. Than you start to understand that there is an ache that never goes away and a hole that can't just be filled. There is an empty place in your heart and no matter what you do or where you go the loss goes with you.

If you are lucky it is a temporary thing. Circumstances or some such thing pull you apart and you are given the hope that maybe, somehow, someway you can bring it back. Sure, there are no guarantees. It may not ever happen. It might be something that becomes a memory of a special time and place.

But then again maybe not. Maybe it is something that can be done. Because if two people love each other in that way and have that sort of you know in your gut it is real magic then maybe there is enough stardust still floating around to bring it back.

At least that is what I think. Because in the end I believe that there are people you fight for. There are relationships that are so important you jump into the fire and burn so that you have the chance to look them in the eye and see how they respond when you tell them that you love them and don't want to miss out on life.

So that you can look them in the eye and see if the flame still burns or if it is truly extinguished.

Relationships are funny things and not always in the way that makes us laugh. Sometimes you have to shake up the dynamic. You have to walk away to regain your perspective no matter how much it hurts. You walk away so that you can catch your breath and recharge your batteries so that you are strong enough to carry the two of you.

And maybe, just maybe you'll be proven right. Or maybe you'll find out that you were wrong. But the bottom line is that you have to figure out what it is that you need to do so that you can sleep at night.

You have to be able lie in the dark and know that no matter what happens you did your best. And though it is certain that you have made mistakes, in the end you'll rest more comfortably knowing that it is better to have tried and failed than to have never tried at all.

50% Divesment and the 2nd QLC Blues!

2009-07-03T15:14:00.007+05:30

Err..! Its finally happened. My brother at last has divested his 50% in himself ;). Its been a super mid-week bonanza for me with hectic schedules and hyperly-hallucinating minds (Yup!, I'm hallucinating about my exams which are a week away and the fact that i am yet to buy "text books"). But, even amidst all these mid-week bonanzas and hallucination quibbles there were this ever oscillating emotions in me of nostalgia,depressions, sentiments,happiness, excitement pride and some hues of nervousness too (lolz!, BTW the nervousness has no symbolic link to my exams :P).

Infact, at the uninitiated spur- I was "awestruck!". Man!, this little guy with whom I used to fight, play,eat, learn, break-window panes,glasses, souvenirs and what not, is getting married!?. Shit! I still thought that we played and broke the show-case glass just yesterday!, I still thought that just a week earlier he was sitting right besides and teaching me "6th Grade Chemistry" involving what hypothesis, theory and equations were; And dint he teach me my 10th grade 'C programming' earlier this week?! I couldn't help recalling the feeling of long summer days playing with him inside the house, right there in the living room or even those days when we used to play table-tennis on the dining table or those hours we spent trying to plot a ploy to take as many kites as we could, that flew by our terrace. Lolz! my thoughts are getting thumply whetted by the droplets of nostalgia and Gosh! guess what?- there's nothing quite like a sudden rush of nostalgia. Not that's its particularly unpleasant but the desire it raises inside to go back to a simple time, is often overwhelming and for the briefest second, you can almost believe it is possible to go back, just once.

Just as these weird thoughts pushed me into a sea of past memories, there came a dosage of depression amalgamated with sentiment( Well, i know that most of my intra-circle friends associate me to being a rather "idiotic saint"--Ahem ahem, yes guys and gals- This time i was slightly away from the normal pH). And if you ask me as to what pushed me into depression?! Well, yeah!- Its simply because I also need to end up divesting my stake on him, specially those that I purchased as an IPO. Yup!, I realised that next time I give him a punch, I would have to tackle two punches coming from the other side :( ; The next time I call him by names i would have to end up getting belted twice over! ; More trucingly the next time someone calls me "uncle" I will have to bear it all and accept it (*Darn!,Phew!,Errrr!*)

Sans punches and boot-kicks- Let me move into a rather exciting and happiness provoking aspect of this bulk divestment. Hmm...well,did I hear someone talk about the increase in my channel capacity and my contention index being doubled?!; Err, the answer to that would be a simple straight face! :-|. Actually, there's more to it than just that!- There's this tsunami of happiness that took away all those hues of melancholy that I spoke about a bit earlier ; And thats the induction of a new dimension into the family. During the past two decades, my bro has been one of my role models (Perhaps,its a common phenomena that you have your sibling as your role model) and I feel that I have inherited a lot of characteristics from him. Now, whats exciting is that from now on I would be inheriting a newer eclection of his; Every decision he takes and every move that he makes will now have two discrete components and two mutually dependent dimensions and its really exciting to take em all, learn and store em in my kitty.;)

And finally the element of pride and with it some tinge of nervousness..;). Pride essentially because he'd now be a family man, and breaking his head and "Tail" on what would seem like some really crappy issues to me and more so because for some unknown reasons he'd be fully serious and stuff (*lolz*)..Hehe..That would actually be some real fun..holy cow!, I just cant imagine him being completely mumphed in voice and keeping is funny sarcasms and puns at bay!; On the same lane there's that speck of nervousness, which does exist for obvious reasons..:)

PS: Perhaps, most of you would be familiar with my "blog-post pricing index" and someone might even ask me about the pricing of this one. Well, the answer for that is pretty unanimous and unambiguous- its "priceless" and the fact that I am typing all this sitting crouched on the third tier of a second class sleeper should say more to it than just words..:)

Foot Notes :
1. The reason I remember '6th Grade Chemistry' and '10th Grade C Programming' is because I was poor at them initially and because at a later point I excelled at them be it for bagging a centum in International Chemistry Olympiad or for winning the Junior Code Wizard '07 ;) (Perhaps, a way to convey a gratitude).

2 : QLC stands for Quarter Life Cycle!. I just put that in to make sure that all those preps that I underwent for my IIM interviews doesnt go waste(*Lolz*)

3. If by chance my bro is reading this; I am sure that he'd be pissed seeing this looooong post. But, if soever he reaches this point- Here's a "Thanks" that I need to offer ;)

Other things that I learnt and still remember:

* Cycling in 1992 (Phase 1) and 1994 (Phase 2)
* Flying a kite during the summer of 1995
* Spinning the top in 1996
* How to weave a 'maanja' thread for kite in 1996
* Playing with water on the water thats poured on the terrace to cure the concrete in 1996 (I think that this was the time when the 1st floor was constructed)
* The word "Gee" and "Schedule" (To be pronounced as skedule) in 1997
* Some small Sanskrit verses in 1998 ( He was in his 10th Grade at this point)
* Playing "singleton" cricket with the wall as the bowler in 1999
* Electrostatics, Current Electricity during 1999 ( I learnt this when I was writing his Physics Lab Record! )
* Learnt how to write the "integral" symbol and also learnt how to apply "differentiation" in 1999 (Differentiation, I think, is his favorite topic in math)
* Learnt about circles and stuff when he was preparing for his CET and IIT-JEE exams during 2000.
* Learnt about Side view and Front view Graphics in 2k1 ( This prompted me to realise at a later point that engineering graphics dint require drafter and a drawing board!!- Guess what?, his drawing board was a "tea-poy" and drafter was my uncle's "Try-Square" (!))
* During 2k2 I learnt logic design. Courtesy his Logic Design Assignment which I wrote (!)(!) [I think i learnt something about synchronous and asynchronous propagations]
* During 2k2/2k3 I learnt C programming and I used to try and write C programs for his lab programs and then again debug my logics by comparing with his.
* 2k3 to 2k5 I was under a sabbatical, more so, cos of my 12th Standard exams.. BTW, I still remember learning about "packet switching networks" which was what his final year project was based on. (I also remeber learning how to make a report. Guess what, the day before his project submission I was also awake along with his friends and he till about 2am!(that was perhaps my first night out!!))
* 2k5 onwards, I have learnt a few trick of the trade in Core banking Solutions (Which after 2 years helped me to write a complete algorithm for my friend's company which worked in provided BBS to a small-sized bank. More over, I had already learnt a bit what a Perl, SQL and stuff meant :P)

Been there, Done that..

2009-06-20T23:03:00.000+05:30

You wanted a new spiral
A crystal born out of the fire
Was it for me or you?
This linear path is calling my name
And when i look back
It all seems the same

You never told me the difference
Between the sky and the ground below
Between destruction and growth
When the midlife crisis hits
And you've a baby on the way
All you'll hear me say is:
Been there, done that.

Scars of Insanity...

2009-06-20T23:01:00.000+05:30

On the edge
What's real...what's not
Insanity hovers
Ready to devour

I can't change what I have seen
what I've done
The scars tell the story
far better than I

I can't change what I know
what I've heard
The fear engulfs
wearing me down

The hurt is real
I'm broken and torn
The memories consume
the craziness returns

The battle is on
I fight to keep control
They can't win
not again

I can't make it stop
they're in my head
All that they taught me
rages inside

Numbness takes over
that's all that's left
They're in control
I'll never be free

Nostalgia!

2009-06-12T06:56:00.001+05:30

I revive

as I discover new growth

they turn in

and remind me of my own

isn’t it amazing

that there is a January after December

when spring comes

briging forth new flowers

with smiles of joy

and lil butterflies

isn’t it amazing

how the simpler

things in life

give us pleasure

and isn’t it amazing

how we finally know

What if recession prompts OS builders to build Airplanes?

2009-06-10T22:49:00.001+05:30

Mac or PC? Fess up, no need to be ashamed. You use a PC like the rest of us, don’t you? Fact is, every operating system is different, and every user needs something different to fit his/her needs exactly. That’s why there are so many different options (I mean, besides just bilking us for more money). Of course, with each new system come new problems as well. Nothing is perfect after all. Now the airlines are all in trouble. The government is bailing them out for now, but they really just need a change of leadership… So what happens if the operating system manufacturers built and ran airlines instead?

If Operating Systems Ran The Airlines…

UNIX Airways

Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS

Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on…

Mac Airlines

All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don’t need to know, don’t want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.

Windows Air

The terminal is pretty and colourful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.

Windows NT Air

Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.

Windows XP Air

You turn up at the airport,which is under contract to only allow XP Air planes. All the aircraft are identical, brightly coloured and three times as big as they need to be. The signs are huge and all point the same way. Whichever way you go, someone pops up dressed in a cloak and pointed hat insisting you follow him. Your luggage and clothes are taken off you and replaced with an XP Air suit and suitcase identical to everyone around you as this is included in the exorbitant ticket cost. The aircraft will not take off until you have signed a contract. The inflight entertainment promised turns out to be the same Mickey Mouse cartoon repeated over and over again. You have to phone your travel agent before you can have a meal or drink. You are searched regularly throughout the flight. If you go to the toilet twice or more you get charged for a new ticket. No matter what destination you booked you will always end up crash landing at Whistler in Canada.

OSX Air:

You enter a white terminal, and all you can see is a woman sitting in the corner behind a white desk, you walk up to get your ticket. She smiles and says “Welcome to OS X Air, please allow us to take your picture”, at which point a camera in the wall you didn’t notice before takes your picture. “Thank you, here is your ticket” You are handed a minimalistic ticket with your picture at the top, it already has all of your information. A door opens to your right and you walk through. You enter a wide open space with one seat in the middle, you sit, listen to music and watch movies until the end of the flight. You never see any of the other passengers. You land, get off, and you say to yourself “wow, that was really nice, but I feel like something was missing”

Windows Vista Airlines:

You enter a good looking terminal with the largest planes you have ever seen. Every 10 feet a security officer appears and asks you if you are “sure” you want to continue walking to your plane and if you would like to cancel. Not sure what cancel would do, you continue walking and ask the agent at the desk why the planes are so big. After the security officer making sure you want to ask the question and you want to hear the answer, the agent replies that they are bigger because it makes customers feel better, but the planes are designed to fly twice as slow. Adding the size helped achieve the slow fly goal.

Once on the plane, every passenger has to be asked individually by the flight attendants if they are sure they want to take this flight. Then it is company policy that the captain asks the passengers collectively the same thing. After answering yes to so many questions, you are punched in the face by some stranger who when he asked “Are you sure you want me to punch you in the face? Cancel or Allow?” you instinctively say “Allow”.

After takeoff, the pilots realize that the landing gear driver wasn’t updated to work with the new plane. Therefore it is always stuck in the down position. This forces the plane to fly even slower, but the pilots are used to it and continue to fly the planes, hoping that soon the landing gear manufacturer will give out a landing gear driver update.

You arrive at your destination wishing you had used your reward miles with XP airlines rather than trying out this new carrier. A close friend, after hearing your story, mentions that Linux Air is a much better alternative and helps.

Linux Air

Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself.

When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

Pseudo-Recessionular Economics!

2009-06-10T22:06:00.002+05:30

"In these tough economic times."

"How to survive the recession."

"Think like an entrepreneur."

"No recession here!" (And it's cousin, "What recession?")

We've made a bit of fun in the past about the tendency to fall back on certain catch phrases during "times like these." And it was funny to discuss while it was safely reduced to a bit on a marketing podcast. But having lived with it for a while, I'm not laughing anymore.

I'm a firm believer that advertising and news does more than just react to markets. What we read and see also shapes markets. And while I certainly wouldn't dream of laying the blame for our continuing downturn on the shoulders of a few writers, it's clear that this type of phrasing isn't helping.

Think like an entrepreneur? How does a phrase like this really help anyone? It's essentially saying that you need to be innovative and work hard, which is pretty much what every healthy business already does.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard this phrase as the cure to business ills — in both good times and bad. Yet the truth is that if things are going bad in your business, suddenly getting "innovative" doesn't change the economic situation of your core market. What does "get entrepreneurial" really say to a struggling business? It says, streamline, cut-back, layoff people and get lean, mean and aggressive. It's nothing more than a feel-good euphemism for what is already happening.

And don't get me started on the "What recession?" stuff! Talk about a mind-hump! Bravado like this ignores reality and encourages no one. Recession doesn't mean total collapse. Not every business is doing bad during a downturn. And taking this tact possibly even reveals a lack of foresight and planning for your own potential downturn in business.

Which brings me to my first point: Phrasing like this creates the false impression that you can "gut" your way out of the recession. It's more of the same "gung-ho, go after the big score" attitude that got us here in the first place. Instead, I believe that we should be taking a step back now and re-envisioning what the future of business will be. The real winners after the recession will be the ones who watch carefully and prepare themselves for the entirely new business landscape to come.

Trailing the Trails of Betrayals

2009-06-09T20:46:00.003+05:30

Well, until recently I had never thought about love,love-life, life with love,love without life..so on so forth of all the combinautrics that can be captured with these symbols of alphabets. However, just about a couple of days ago I was provoked [Well I mean provoked in terms of literature and mind flow :P] by a intruiging quote by a friend of mine, which basically involved the sophistications of quibbles with respect to why a person closest to you always hurts (in terms of betrayal) more than anyother jack-ass on this earth!. I felt that I would be able to put some thought flow on this and thus the prioritization factors earned it a place on my blog! [tadaan!]

Let begin it with a sense of uninitiation.Why is it that the intensity of hurt in betrayal is directly proportional to the love we had. Why does betrayal hurt so much, so much so that some people lose desire to love?. (PS : Well, the term "love" though through a lot of impurities and adulteration, [yeah, could mean adult-err-ation too :P ] has taken a different meaning oflate. But, the love that I am talking about can be of any form need not necessarily be the a love that defines a gender-binding realtionships)

When we love someone, that person becomes our own. There is always a sense of ownership. That is why one feels angry if one's loved one gets more involved with somebody else more than necessary. The sense of ownership and envy are essential to the process of love. It is easy to say that when you love someone, give him or her freedom, space and so on. But does that ever happen? That does not happen because we are asking for equal or more commitment from our loved one compared to what we give. I care so much for you; you are also supposed to care equally. I never hurt you; you are also not supposed to hurt me. We develop some kind of unsaid understanding. As the understanding becomes stronger, love becomes passionate and stronger. We all behave in this way in our life. Our loyalty to our school, our family, our country all comes out of this sense of commitment.

In love, the mind and the heart- logical and emotional feelings all are focused only on your object of love. It is an obsession when you think of nothing else but your loved one. This is main cause of pain after betrayal. Because you never could believe that your loved one could betray you. You had considered them to be far better and lovable than anybody else. How could he/she could this to me? That question keeps hammering your mind and you do not get any answer.

The grief of separation is equally strong. Your existence depended on your loved one and now he/she is no more there with you. That pain of separation is difficult to define in words. To avoid thinking about the loved one, people try many methods- join some group, do other activities, make new friends, and so on, but if the love was strong the person may remain a loner in a big crowd, because they have lost the foundation on which their life was being built.

Data Points of Disconnection!

2009-06-08T05:41:00.001+05:30

Since the terms "recession" and "depression" first started making headlines in late 2007 (+/-) I've watched with horror as countless traders, analysts, flapping heads, journalists and other market participants blindly extrapolate historical patterns and apply them to our current situation. The most recent example I've seen (and my apologies as this is nowhere near the worst I've seen), is over at Clusterstock where Henry Blodget quotes Merrill strategist David Rosenberg (who, in fairness, actually includes some caveats):

It was extremely difficult for equity investors to make money in the decade following the June 1932 bottom. After the three-month rally (+75%) off the bottom in 1932, equity markets were extremely volatile and largely sideways for the next nine years. Keep in mind that the jury is still out as to whether the March 2009 lows were in fact the bottom, as was the case in 1932.

Generally, we find such failed "analysis" takes the form of:

"In 19xx, the ____ Index dropped __ % over __ months, _________ economic indicators were _________, so judging from history, we conclude that now, we should expect X, Y and Z..."

Now, were conditions today exactly, or at least mostly the same as they were during previous recessions/depressions, I could see how this sort of analysis might make sense. Contrary to the claims of others, I think its quite clear that global (and regional) dynamics and fundamentals are materially different than they have been at any earlier period of human history, which means these analyses constitute at least one type of logical fallacy, and are thus of little or dubious value. No doubt, I'm guilty of some of these myself, but that's another story altogether.

I won't go so far as to claim that such claims are useless, since they may reveal some information about investor behavior and psychology, which is for the most part unchanged over at least the past few centuries. However, this is hardly a redeeming quality of these poorly conceived - and even more-poorly used - forms of analysis.

No doubt both those who present and heed these arguments are suffering from at least one form of cognitive bias, although both are similarly blissfully ignorant of their own psychological predispositions and the like.

I'm of the belief that such forms of analysis - and those who propagate their use - do more harm than good insofar as almost any conclusion reached is, at best, a non sequitur, and may introduce or reinforce false beliefs to the investor population.

Alas, despite the painfully obvious errors inherent in such comparisons, I still see them far-too frequently, in places and from people who should know better.

Tip of the hat to those who avoid such poor analysis, wag of the finger to those who don't!

Alpha Decaying of Age..;)

2009-06-07T21:36:00.002+05:30

Once upon a time there was fun and college and everything seemed like it would go one the same way forever. You'd whisper secrets in the dark with friends, about who wanted who. What she was wearing. Where to road trip to. Adulthood, while looming large, still seemed a long, long way off. So you are cruising, feeling like the world is your playground, and you are still as immortal as you were in ninth grade. And then it happens, you are out somewhere, with friends, and someone says those three words:

"We're getting married."

She's talking too fast and he has his arm around her shoulders, and they are both proud. They have expectant faces because they are waiting for their congratulations. I said the first thing that came into me head, spitting the words through my mouthful of chicken fingers.

"Holy crap," I yelled and everyone turned around to look at me. "Congratulations," I say then to cover my tracks, maybe a little too loudly, but I've already done it. I've already shown my true feeling: shock.

The girls (I mean the girls who aren't me, the real girls who know how one is supposed to react to that sort of news) are cooing and giggling. The future bride is gobbling this up, basking in the warmth such news will cause, making everyone everyone else's girlfriend. Looks are shot around the table between the men, and myself. They say many things with their eyes. More than a few echo my original sentiment. Some are cynical. Some of the girls get depressed. They are thinking about the fact that they don't even have boyfriends. The future husband is oblivious to all of this. He is looking at his bride.

Why are we so shocked? Why does the news evoke so many different emotions in so many people? Just minutes before I had been telling sick jokes and there had been a raucous debate on whether "hooking up" is cool. Just minutes before we had been kids. It didn't matter if I clock in as the youngest at twenty-two. Or that we are all college graduates (or should be). There was nothing to differentiate us from any other group of students.

When your first set of friends gets married, it marks a turning point. Suddenly your friends are old enough to be married, which loosely translates to you being old enough to be married. Which again means that you are old enough for a lot of other things, too. Kids, mini-vans and mammograms. A real job.

None of us have any of these things yet. Some of my friends haven't even finished school. Many of our cars are falling apart, and most of us still live at home. Then our friends announce their engagement and we all wonder: Is there something wrong with the schedule we are on? Should we be finding mates? Is it time to buckle down and grow up? This idea scares us. We want to go on road trips and drink until we throw up. We want to spend weekends high. Married friends threaten our way of life because they make us question our current existence.

We congratulate them again. We really are happy for them, but they scare us. And someday, we will be like them, and we know this to be true, even while we deny it on the car ride home. We will grow up, but not yet.

Mathematics of Illusional Beauty!

2009-05-30T07:57:00.000+05:30

Ever wanted to know why it is that the more you drink, the more attractive the people you see in a bar seem to be? Ever wanted to be able to precisely quantify the magnitude of this effect? Well, you need suffer from ignorance no longer: the site "Howstuffworks" provides precise answers to both of these vexing questions.

In fact, the answers provided are so precise that I'm calling "bullshit" on this one. Just look at the formula on that page and tell me that it looks even slightly plausible to you - who's ever known of a behavioral equation uniformly describing all humans without any variation whatsoever, and why does this one so serendipitously do so without a need for a fudge constant of some sort, something even theories as precise as general relativity and quantum mechanics can't do without? At best this is junk research, at worst a hoax perpetuated on gullible BBC reporters who seem to be the original sources for this nonsense; if the inventors of this prattle had really wanted to do a good job of fooling the less ignorant, they'd have used a linear regression of some sort with an error term, rather than an equation with no fudge constant, but quadratic terms in the numerator and the denominator (and the latter stuck next to a square root at that).

I predict that this ridiculous story will be propagated uncritically by many, many blogs over the next few days, just like the nonsense over "blondes dying out" from a while back. It will be interesting to see how my forecast pans out.

The Inheritance of Gain!

2009-05-11T08:35:00.003+05:30

From the moment she hears her child’s first cry, she is immediately encouraged to perform the role of long-suffering, ever-vigilant, hyper-nurturing and self-sacrificing mother. It begins with the breast or bottle debate and doesn’t end until she's are put to rest. Each decision she makes is put under a microscope and analyzed to see if it fits with the social construction of motherhood.

Instead of bonding over our common struggles, women often take the opportunity to rip each other apart. A school of piranhas can sometimes be more friendly than a group of mothers engaged in a “more motherly than thou” contest. We seek to find fault with someone else’s behaviour in the hope that the little mistakes and regrets that we make on this journey are somehow not so bad.

One would never realize that the first Sunday in May is for honouring mothers from watching the commercials that have been airing on television. Like every other supposed holiday it has been turned into a great consumer fest:

The greeting card, jewellery and flower industry go into over drive as they try to convince everyone that the best way to honour their mothers is to buy a card filled with words written by others, or flowers that will die in a week. The various industries play on your emotions, reminding you of all of the sacrifices that mothers make throughout the year to convince you that buying their item will be the strongest expression of appreciation and love that you can make

Meanwhile, now that the weather is getting warmer and park season has started, the community gathering and public shaming of motherhood has once again begun. How many times have we sat in the park and the conversation turns to how some woman isn’t watching her kids closely enough, or the kid with the grape juice stain on their shirt becomes representative of the various ways in which his mother is failing? A smudge on the cheek or some dirt under the fingernails can be enough to get you permanently labelled the neighbourhood slacker. It can make you scared to leave the park bench that you are sharing with these women as you know the minute you stand up, they’ll be gossiping about the fact that it’s been six months since you’ve had your second child and you are still carrying around the baby weight

Understanding Stupidity..

2009-05-06T21:23:00.002+05:30

To the extent that Western Civilization is a distinctly identifiable historical adventure, its origins are discernable in and associated with the rise of ancient Greece. As Greek culture developed and flourished, it became clear to all that an excess of power led to a comparable amount of stupidity. After first presenting his vision of the philosopher-kings in "The Republic", Plato had his doubts and concluded that laws were the only safeguard against abuses of power. Too much power concentrated anywhere is simply too dangerous, as it invariably leads to injustice. Arbitrary power was recognized as an inducement to stupidity which in turn undermined the effectiveness of power. Stupidity could thus be seen as a check on excessive power, rendering it counter-productive as it became unjust.

Since we still revere Greek thought and honor Greek ideals, it is worth noting that these ideals were not of physical objects reduced to essence but archetypical models of theoretical ultimates which could not possibly be realized. Philosophers reveled in associating such idealized abstractions but always in static, non-algebraic modes of thought, and in the purest philosophy of mathematics, the Greeks failed to develop any system of symbolic notation to express dynamic functions.

As mathematical idealists, the Pythagoreans, for example, were in love with whole numbers. A veritable crisis in doctrine arose when the square root of two was found to be irrational. This posed a threat to their schema, as it indicated that their mental world was somehow inaccurate, insufficient, incomplete and imperfect. Worse yet, it could not be made accurate, sufficient, complete and perfect by adaptation and/or expansion and still remain "Theirs". So, how did these great Greek mathematical philosophers handle this cognitive crisis? Pretty much as would anyone else: they suppressed knowledge of the square root of two.

Likewise, they suppressed that other scourge of Pythagorean idealism —the dodecahedron. In this, they were so successful that hardly anyone now knows much less cares what a dodecahedron is. Nevertheless, anyone interested in Greek stupidity should note that Pythagoreans knew of five perfect solids—the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the icosahedron and the dodecahedron. The first four were conveniently associated

Appu-Baggy Theory of Cyberpathy...

2009-04-29T22:49:00.003+05:30

Ok, I guess I'm looking to begin my (yet) another move into the aspects of Science and Con-science relativity principles. This time around, however, I had a team mate to have this theory made up. So, the credit would be shared by both of us and the theory (for a change) would be named as the "Appu-Baggy Theory of Cyberpathy".

Ok, getting our thoughts synced lets start with a quibble. While you are into chatting with a friend over the internet or over the mobile channel- have you ever felt that your thought pipeline has been hacked and suddenly both of you whip out the same one-liner or perhaps (in worst cases) the same curse word too? (:P Yeah, I see some of you nodding..See here also it works..:P). Hmm, I have experienced these a million times atleast.

So, somehow these simultaneous collision of thought processing elements in identically different pipelines creeped into unison, when Appu and I were in conversation (A month ago I guess),. It so happened that the so-called "thought pipeline hacking" seemed to hamper our astonishments one too many times; And for once, our usual and more often technical conversation now turned into some heights of some "Parapsychological Amalgamation of Discrete Mathematical Structures" (yeah, just to make things seem complicated :P :P). Our pathways of talkways changed from acoustics of Ubuntu to Open Office to Beers to Hard Rocks and Soft puns into an all new - "based multitudinal indicies" involving Psychology then to some hues of Mind Reading and to stuffs that were connecting Thought Transmissions et al. (yeah,some crap!).

Whoa!, it was one heck of a chat , more so because it was Appu's core and without doubt ( and without google :P) she started explaining the psychology behind the actual "Psychology" (- She's a topper you see..Ok, Ok, second topper it seems :P.) So, what followed this loong and exciting chat which was chronologically somewhere around the wee 00:00 hrs, were these scientifically mathematical thoughts of mine.

So, for the uninitiated, lets start by contemplating on how and why people think alike and emanate "Cybermatica Transmissions" over internet ( In short lets call this "Cyberpathy"). I have in fact (unlike the pressure question) thought many times about how thoughts are projected... I mean in terms of known science. Now here is my thought: When I send cyberpathycally transmitted thoughts, I would usually think and involve my body to some degree and I would focus on some discrete quantum of energy called (say) "the third eye"; I would actually to this initially and then trance. So there is some physical affect that has been imbibed into Cyberpathy and thats even if, hypothetically, the thought is transmitted non-physically (or dimensionally shifted). Let's step back a bit and think about simply how our mind and body connect...

There are two schools when it comes to mind-body problem: One is that the mind is our brain, and the other where the mind is connected but not fully contained in our body, e.g. we have a soul. I fall into the latter, where I believe the brain is a sophisticated sender/receiver.

Now, here is the thing: Some believe there is a physical connection our mind makes, and it interacts with the body. On top of that people have even been able to connect electrodes and control the body by creating signals in the brain that if this is true stimulate the same actions (or alternatively detect the same signatures caused by thought or action) as the mind does through its mysterious connection. I wouldn't be surprised that whatever this connection mechanism is, that cyberpathy simply works on the opposite side of this connection from where our physical body is. So it is safe to say there must be some Electro/ Magnetic [E/M] signature that can be detected from cyberpathy. The other possibility would be that cyberpathy is completely E/M, however I don't believe this to be the case since
(1) I have communicated with beings in other galaxies and the only explanation would be some inter dimensional gate which in and of itself makes it using something which is not strictly classical E/M energy usage
(2) Even assuming that locally cyberpathy is completely E/M, we have never detected a signal frequency through peer-reviewed science as far as I'm aware.

But here's the kicker: Even IF cyberpathy is non-corporeal and causes some kinds of E/M reactions at least locally in our brain, which is very likely if that's how our mind works, then there must be some leakage we can detect. So I have been thinking recently about whether anyone has sat there with someone sending cyberpathically(Hmm, did I hear someone say CYBERPATHETICAL? ) and listened on every frequency for some signature that is consistent. I have sometimes thought about doing this myself, though self-defeatism always takes hold and makes me feel like it's not worth it to bother. However, I have this strong urge to build computer programs and games in the future (more working on the software side) that can use this mind-body connection for more advanced user interfaces.

Additionally, assume that the transmission is not E/M but perhaps some other non-local connection on the other side from our body of this mind-body connection. Then it's safe to say that we have the ability to detect and tap into that energy scientifically simply because our body can. In fact, I imagine there is already some theory out there (probably mathematical and having to do with some very advanced physics) that has already unknowingly identified this energy in a theoretical construct.

One other thought I have is perhaps we could just through trial-and-error and a lot of luck develop some E/M device that sticks on top of the third eye and/or crown through electrodes that stimulates the right E/M signals to cause the mind-body connection to invoke cyberpathy. Now, that to me seems the very inefficient way to go about it, to be rather dangerous, and also does not produce true knowledge of the mechanism involved.

It's kind of sad that people like me who have activated their psychic abilities do not intuitively know what the scientific explanation is, however not surprising since psychicism is natural for us and science requires learning. Connecting what's intuitive to what requires esoteric knowledge isn't so easy.

What's the missing piece? Any thoughts? How long do you think until some scientist gets lucky and finds it? As I mentioned just a bit before, I want to design software user interfaces someday that doesn't require keyboards and mice, just cyberpathy. I want to develop games that help people strengthen their telepathic abilities. However, I DON'T want to get deep into how the actual connection works scientifically. For one thing, I'm good at math but I don't like doing deep math too much. For instance, the class I took on quantum computers was pure torture because aside from the esoteric theory, it was pretty much pure QM dirac notation mathematics :)

Have you ever found a channeling that goes really deep into the science of the telepathic connection and mind-body connection? I mean really in-depth, invoking string theory and some high-level mathematical summaries?

Or alternatively, have you ever found some promising scientific literature?

Theater Base Placement Theory!

2009-04-23T13:09:00.003+05:30

Have you ever gone to the movies and worried about who you’re going to sit next to? Well, about a fortnight ago, I happened to bump into a comic somewhere on the net( sorry I just couldn't mine back the link). This comic illustrates the common dilemma moviegoers face when filling the theater aisles. I was just contemplating on how to optimize the seating arrangements in a theater to solve this "comic problem"; And the result is this brand new theory that for now is termed as "Theater Base Placement Theory (TBPT)" *Lolz,lolz!*

The complex relationships between each pair of people in a group can be reflected in an acquaintance graph, such as the one shown above in the comic. Most people in such a network are usually acquainted with a majority of the group. Consequently, a problem arises when each person can sit next to at most two people. The question is: how do you convert a regular acquaintance graph (one where each person can be connected to an unlimited number of people) to a linear graph (where each person has an edge to a maximum of two people) while achieving maximum social enjoyment for each person?

In constructing our linear graph, we shall assume that maximum social enjoyment is achieved if each person is sitting next to the person they like most out of the group. Here is one possible method of constructing such a linear graph.

1) In the regular acquaintance graph, place a value on each side of the edge, representing how much a particular person likes the person on the other side of the edge.

2) Now, look at each node and circle the maximum value it has towards a node (in case of a tie, circle all the maximums).

3) Eliminate any edges which do not have any circled values. This should give us a simplified acquaintance graph (Note that the new graph can consist of more than one connected component).

4) If the graph is linear, we are done. If not, the problem boils down to finding a path within from one node to another that traverses all the nodes within the connected component exactly once. This is called a Hamiltonian path

5) The resulting Hamiltonian path is our linear graph. (Note: there are some cases in which a Hamiltonian path does not exist. However, we shall assume that group dynamics usually support Hamiltonian paths, because of the way friendships naturally unfold.)

This is a very simplistic approach towards constructing linear graphs, where many nuances have been overlooked. Also, a different definition of maximum social enjoyment can be used. However, this method is useful because of its simple approach, and will give a good result in most cases.

Vote-o-nomics!

2009-04-23T13:02:00.002+05:30

Until recently I’ve always understood voting to be very simple for the citizens; you pick a candidate whose views best represent your own, maybe you try and talk some of your friends and family into agreeing with you, then you head out to the polls on election day and put in your vote. Apparently it’s not so straight-forward. Consider a simplified example: Say there are 3 candidates: A, B, and C, such that A and B agree on a good deal of the issues, but do have significant differences, and C is completely different from both. Maybe recent polls predict that C will get 40% of the vote, and A and B will each get about 30%. If everyone goes to the polls and picks their favorite, C will win, and 60% of the population will be extremely unhappy. But if the voters who support A and B can play some sort of game, they could both do better. A’s supporters can do better by collaborating and voting for B, they’d be much happier with B in office and they can make it happen. The same goes for B’s supporters. A and B are pretty much playing a battle of the sexes, where they would absolutely hate having C win, which is what will happen if they dont collaborate, but neither will be too happy if they have to give up their candidate. I really know nothing about World History, but maybe this concept is what started the 2-party system…both parties realized that they could gain an upper hand with fewer candidates.

It can also get much more complicated. This article talks about possible strategies in the upcoming election, as well as in past elections.It’s interesting to see how much strategy matters behind the scenes in a campaign, and it’s strategies like these that manage to put people in office with less of the popular vote. What makes this related to what we study in class is that these campaign decisions dont just depend on statistics alone, they depend mostly on what the other campaigns decide to do. For instance, it’s not just because big states like U.P(india) have a high population, or that they’re more likely to vote one way or the other that makes everyone focus their efforts there. It’s because every other player is already focusing so hard there that each player needs to in order to stay alive. If no one else was putting much effort into U.P. and you could take it without too much funding, putting all your effort there is just wasting resources. And if the Congress decides to try this thing in and all vote for candidate X , maybe candidate Y supporters will see this as an opportunity to do the same thing and vote for candidate Z, since it’s unlikely that candidate Y will be able to beat candidate X's supporters AND candidate Z's supporters. If this happens then all the campaign’s will have to think and decide if they can make a better play. What this article doesnt mention about Lincoln’s campaign either is what Buchanan, Fillmore and Fremont did in response. I think it’s unlikely that Lincoln just got unlucky and his idea didnt work, but rather Buchanan played his best response to Lincoln’s strategy and it worked out in the end.

What makes this interesting is that campaigns clearly aren’t just about getting the majority to vote for you, it’s about using the votes you have effectively and getting the votes that count most. What makes this more interesting is that these strategies depend mostly on how the other campaigns play their cards. Maybe this is why incidents like watergate happen. In a way I guess it sucks that the best strategist wins over the candidate with the most votes, but it’s not horrible that our politicians are forced to understand strategic decision making.

The Oxymoron in Me..

2009-04-22T00:09:00.004+05:30

Acting Naturally
with
Genuine Imitation
I
Found Missing
My
Good Grief
all
Alone Together
with
Almost Exactly
the
Same Difference
of
Passive Aggressions.

Then,
Almost Suddenly
My
Peace Force
turned
Pretty Ugly
and
Gave Away
to
Affirmative Actions.

With it.
My Minds Anarchy Ruled!

The Italicized words are oxymorons.

An oxymoron is a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous, seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in “cruel kindness” or “to make haste slowly.”

Pseudo Demographics!

2009-04-21T07:48:00.005+05:30

Its a long driven defense and counter attack that are kept open for throws here in India. I am sure that each one of us would have encountered such counter arguments from our elders wherein they point out that in the "West" where love marriages are a normal ritual it s imposingly simple that the explicative divorce rate value there stands at a staggering 50%!.

Well, I was wondering as to why such things happen in the "west" and not back here in the "East"( Well atleast not upto a mark of a staggering 50%!). Does it really mean that the people in the eastern part of the world are really tolerant? - If so why is it that there exist the concept of utterly "petty wars" over here too?

How is it that we take pride in the "official" Indian divorce rate of only 8%?

Ahem ahem, I ran my thought meter on this and put in some contemplative investments and found the probablistic solution to the ambigious question. I felt that we could attribute this to the fact that in India 90% of the marriages (including mine perhaps!) are arranged marriages and that is why it is so low. We even say that it is better arrangement than love marriages.

But, are these stastitcs lucid enough or are they just yet another theory that contemplates on the height(or the depth) of the ice berg based on the 9/10th formula?. Well, the surprising conclusion that I figured out were rather astounding!

Recently I was going through some demographics and I found out the real truth behind this is nothing but a mere false statistics. How false are these real truths?- Just whim through these points-

1. The number of never married women (not by choice) is fairly high.

2. In many unhappy marriages they just stay in the house without living as husband and wife.

3. A number of the girls are simply sent to their parents' homes. Yet they are officially not divorced- If you dont believe, just ask around- you would even find this in your own neighboring sibling sub-family trees.

4.In small towns and villages (where the vast majoriy of the people live) the mrriages are unofficially dissolved without calling it a divorce.

When you look at the official divorces, they are almost always initiated by educated and economiclaly self-sustaining women like doctors or software professionals.For example when a doctor woman divorces she meets with no social ostracisation, simply because she can lead her QLC without a functional dependency and its as simple as that!.

This proves the theory that if India were to have the same conditions as the west(with respect to the economic and social environmental aura) wherein

1. Most of the people were living in anonymously large cities.
2. There were plenty of jobs for the taking(Ok Ok!, I am talking about the condition in the "West" about couple of years ago-Hmm, perhaps when DOWJONES was a 12k! ;))
3. Each job paid a life sustaining job( Yea!, again the parenthesized quote above can hold good here too!)

Then many of the unhappily married couples will call it quits.

The unnecessary bride deaths could be totally avoided and the cooking stove in the bridegroom's family won't get the bad name.

We got to look at reality and admit it before we can do something about it.

Thoery of Four Crap-tense..;)

2009-04-20T13:07:00.005+05:30

Kolkata Knight Riders coach John Buchanan felt the furor over his four-captain theory was because it was misinterpreted by most people.
He says that basically, he will not select a squad captain but will select a captain for each match. That captain will make all the normal decisions such as field placings and bowling changes.

Buchanan felt since Twenty20 was a fast paced game it was important to have a unique strategy every time so he wanted a number of minds to increase the rate of success and he felt that fast-paced Twenty20 version could be better compared to a battle.

My favorite book of all time is The Art of War by the Chinese military genius Sun Tzu, written some 5000 years ago. I think this book was written to describe Twenty20 cricket.The book's message is that instead of working on formulaic strategies, life requires rapid and appropriate responses to dynamic, ever-changing environments.It emphasizes that in times of order, structured planning is decisive, but in a competitive situation these norms are just not good enough and structure fails. Quick thinking, flexibility and the ability to adapt very fast are the new dictates.
-- Said Buchanan.

But, all said and done; I was into deep contemplation about the strategic feasibility of this theory and as to why people are so much into finding faults in it . However its not new that new theories always sound funny and unfeasible in the beginning. They continue to be ridiculed if they fail, but if they are successful - they change history!. This has happened with every invention in history. But, would this new theory be any where close to those "famous new theories" that changed the world?.

Well, actually I think that this is yet another crap on the Buchanan's cap!. technically speaking every strategy has two main goals- One that is short term for instant returns and maximum risk and other which is long term with a smoother returns ,minimal risks and higher support plus confidence index.

Now, what this "theory of four captains" suggests is that they want to round robinize the short term goals to achieve an accumulative long term support. So, its like instead of asking one person to shell out his luck by picking a "win" ball out of a box containing "Win"+ "loss" balls at a 50-50 Gaussian distribution; We now ask four different people to pick the ball from the same box using different strategy. Lolz!. Do you think that the probability of you picking a "Win" ball changes?. Well, certainly not!.

Hmm, on the other hand look at it this way-in a war if you have too many generals ordering the same group of soldiers, wouldn't the result simply be disastrous?. When a team is playing a game, isnt it that the team spirit becomes the most important aspect? and if you have too many leaders in a team, one will always try to suppress the others.

And if Buchanan goes with the idealization of the "The Art of War" then, he must have eleven captains and not four!- But why does he cut the verticals down to four?. Well, well!., I just think that its really surprising to see the multiple captains in the same version of game. It is understandable in the different version of game which require different long term capitalization over the short terms.But if its in a single version, well- It would be more like some Ekata Kapur's serial where the one role is played by the different actors.

If you ask me from a personal side. I would sum up the entirety of the theory in four tenses it is yet another way to tell India's most successful captain that "you-are-not-needed!".- and that's the theory of four crap-tense!

Yet another stab in the back for this poor guy..:(

Poetic Spoonerism..;)

2009-04-14T11:46:00.003+05:30

Bold me Habe
Hiss and Kear
My Beart Heats..
Heating and Bumming
Nour Yame..

But..
Just as By Meats tried to utter the "Wagic Mords"
my Zips got Lipped.

And Rhere we Temained
Sit me Winging
A Bad Sallad
.
.
Einally it Fended up as
a Dot in the Shark
and our Cale of two Tities
Hell through the Facks..

*Italicized consecutives are spoonerisms*

Spoonerisms are phrases, sentences, or words in language with swapped sounds. Usually this happens by accident, particularly if you're speaking fast. Come and wook out of the lindow is an example.

Of course, there are many millions of possible Spoonerisms, but those which are of most interest (mainly for their amusement value) are the ones in which the Spoonerism makes sense as well as the original phrase. Go and shake a tower and a well-boiled icicle illustrate this well (go and take a shower, a well-oiled bicycle).

Fatal Attraction...[ Double Acrostic ]

2009-04-12T21:03:00.012+05:30

For once I lost myself in her hand-ofF,
All my prowess' got diluted, what remained is just an iotA.
To and fro did my heart hubbub quibbling between a treat and a retreaT.
Ah!, I just got myself melted onto hers, was it an heaven that I saw from abscissA?
Lo!, or was it just another dream about my princess damseL?

Altercations continued. This time between her eyes and mine; Both in a perfect galA!
"Take me by hand darling,I am all yours"- did I hear her say thaT?
Tremors hit my hands,quakes shook my hearT,
Race had begun and my clutters began its clutters like a call stuck pageR
Ahoy! would I be really succesful? - would she accept my heart's pleA?
Coyish cabrioles I made, hoping towards her to utter my three worded macaroniC
Trusting with deep trusts that she would be mine and me her sweeT.
"I love you dear, Do you love me too?"- whispered I-extending the rose,more like an alibI.
.
.
.
"Ouch!!, that hurt" she said, blood oozed out of her palm[thorns had pricked], forming a capricciO..
.
.
"Never mind, Sir..I will take care, I am her maN"
...Said an obscure voice from behind. And thus fell my stillborn attraction into fatality...

Foot Note :
Intended meanings of italicized words.

1.Abscissa : from a distance
2.Pager : A small device (like cellular phone) that vibrates to inform the wearer about a text message.
3.Macaronic : denoting a language, specially burlesque verses.
4.Alibi : an excuse
5. Capriccio : A painting representing mixture of colors and imagination.

[ These meanings are the first meanings of the words' usage which I had learnt as a part of my curriculum. If there is any mistake please let me know. Since I have not verified them with a standard dictionary ]

Prompted at Acrostic Only

Circumspection..

2009-04-07T23:38:00.001+05:30

Watching the tainted sky,
Meandering from crimson to black.
.I decipher me.
Meandering from crimson to black,
Watching the tainted sky.

Prompted at NaiSaiKu Challenge-Week -08

Friendship..

2009-04-06T20:14:00.006+05:30

Fragile were my life's canoes,
Restless were my will's torments.
It was life at hell for me..and I stood there gazing at nothingness.
..(But)
Ever since I met you O' dear pal,
Neither sorrows nor gloom did I meet.
Darkness was just a mirage, and
Strength was the shadow that followed me.
..(As)
Humanity..is for humans,
Integrity..for the immaculate,
Perpetuity is for paeans;
...Friendship..is for the soul in me and the friendship in me is for YOU..!