A post a day

Sorry once more

2011-04-27T21:10:00.001-04:00

miaow

Okay ready?

2011-04-27T21:06:00.000-04:00

 Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.  You're twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.  No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll  Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.   The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.  This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:  To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,  Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

-- Vikram Seth

Once more, with feeling

2011-04-27T18:21:00.001-04:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jmyV2-2R28

Lets try another post

2011-04-27T17:45:00.002-04:00

vuvuvu oontz and meh

OMFG

2011-04-27T17:41:00.003-04:00

Here is a pretty post featuring a picture.
(Sorry this blog has degenerated into a testing platform)

Overhead in California

2009-02-01T20:34:00.003-05:00

Me sitting on the Caltrain to San Francisco. Behind me, 4 ladies: 2 old and 2 young.

Vaguely remembered snippets

Oldlady1: So what do you think of Obama's first few days.
Younglady1: I think he has been inspirational. He makes me want to face up to the challenges in my life.....
Oldlady2: You go girl..
Younglady1: .... yeah, I think he should close each speech with an inspirational section ... like that MTV (goes on about some MTV show) ... Or maybe each morning he should give an inspirational speech to the nation... like at 8:30 ... I know I'd watch it everyday.
Oldlady2 (to Oldlady1): What about you ...
Oldlady1 : I think he's been good for my weight loss.
All the other ladies : Reaalllyyy ??
Oldlady1 : Yeah, I just feel so inspired by him. I see him facing these great challenges of the nation with such confidence, and I think ... if he can face these big problems .. then I too can face the smaller issues in my life ... (goes on this vein for a few more minutes).
Oldlady2 : Plus he's so cute ...
(Collective sighing from all the women)
Younglady1 : And his family... they're so normal ... no airs, so happy... its like no Drama Obama.
Oldlady1 : Yeah girl ... it makes you believe that you can have it all .... that its all possible ....... (after a while) But you know what... my family has no drama as well ... we let the girls bring guys (and some other similar stuff)
Oldlady2 : Mine too ... but I got big drama with my sister.

Safin's kid sister

2009-01-25T15:34:00.002-05:00

Dinara Safina in her press conference after nearly losing against Alize Cornet. No "drawing positives" and suchlike. Just pure verbal self flaggelation. I lurve it.

Choicest quotes:

The game is there. I just don't know what's going on through my mind....

He (Her Coach) said if I play like this, you gonna leave home......
Come to the court and completely like just shadow is playing. Like, you know, Dinara is there, but just not me. So he's like, Okay, if you continue playing like this, I mean, it's better that I go home. I cannot tell you anything from sitting there.....
I mean, he's telling me at 5‑4, Hit the ball. I telling myself, Hit the ball, and just arm doesn't go because my mind is just stupid...
... Either somebody just smacks me so hard in my head that something shakes finally and I put the cables together.

Legendary

2009-01-15T23:35:00.002-05:00

I'm very easily amused.

Plus, when I did my swiss trip in 07, I really loved the trains (although the above might be German). I once spent half an hour at a tiny little station, Epesses, waiting for a train to stop. But meanwhile many many really fast trains raced by on the Montreaux-Lausanne line. The line curves about a few hundred metres east of the station. When those tilting trains took that curve at full speed, on a bright summer afternoon, with vineyards above and an sparkling blue lake below, it was quite a thing of beauty.

Travel

2009-01-04T23:51:00.004-05:00

2008
Jan: A week in India (carried over from the previous year), mostly spent finishing up a paper. But I was at home!
Jun: A week in vancouver, conferencing, walking around, and watching whales.
Sept: 4 fun days on a canoe.

Thats it!

Compare it to
2007
April: A week in Istanbul, conferencing and having fun.
May: A weekend in Montreal for a friend's bachelor party.
June: 10 days in China: Beijing, Shanghai, the works. Conferencing + Eating.
August: A week in Switzerland, backpacking around.
Dec: A month in India. Home (and nearby) + Bangalore + Coorg + Cochin + Kolkata.

2009 really really really needs to make up for 2008. Something suggests that this is a bit cyclical. 2006 was a pretty quiet travel year too.

Bombay

2008-11-30T21:55:00.002-05:00

For almost three days, the only I thing I did was to follow news.

Of course, part of it was because I had realized I was missing a paper deadline, and therefore using distraction as a means of combating frustration. But still, this terror strike struck much closer to home.

In september there had been blasts in Delhi. One of them in a market 10 minutes away from my sister's home. Where she goes regularly. But the thing with blasts is that they are over at once. You don't realize what happened. This one was prolonged.

And I knew people who were close (for some definition of close) to what happened.

The elder brother of one of my school friends, whom I've known since forever worked in one of those hotels when I last heard. I have no clue what happened to him, although I think (and hope) he should be fine. Bad news travels fast and I haven't heard anything.

A close friend was going to be attending a wedding at the Taj the very next day.

A friend was on a vacation which he had to cut short because his co-traveller lost his uncle in the attacks. His uncle was one of the top policemen killed.

And then today I found out that my undergraduate roommate for 2 years was in Leopold Cafe when the terrorists fired many rounds with an AK 47. He was there with two of his current roommates. One got hit in the head. One in the thigh. Both are no more. And somehow my roommate survived. Somehow no bullet hit him as he crouched and hoped.

I am shaken a bit. Its time for work to serve as a distraction instead.

On Social Engineering

2008-11-27T19:29:00.002-05:00

Ever since California voted for Proposition 8 I've been reading articles in the media about the Gay Marriage issue. Both the sides of the debate seem to see the other as fairly demented and unfit to live. Plus, the tipping point seems to have been the support of the Mormon Church. Yes the guys who apparently support polygamy.

Here is a thought experiment. Polygamy/Polyandry is banned in most parts of the planet. Banning it seems to be as discriminatory for polygamists, as banning gay marriage seems to be for gay people. Was this a tactical move by the Mormons to heighten their own plight? If they can't have their cake, nobody else can? What percentage of the pro gay marriage bloc would vote to repeal the ban on polygamy? I haven't really seen this mentioned anywhere.

My personal preference? I don't really care. I personally think that Marriage is a social construct, and most of the debate about its legalization comes from the social implications of the word. If the government doesn't want to burn its hands on social norms, it should be out of the business of "marriage", and just allow any two consenting adults to form a common law union with the associated legal rights. If the person is a poly-gamist/andrist then he/she can be a part of multiple such 2 way unions.

If you claim you are liberal then why not go the whole way.

Blank Page

2008-11-23T00:59:00.002-05:00

I found this quote in Russell Cox's Phd Thesis. My dad used to say something very similar (not in as dramatic a way though) when I was a wee lil kid.

‘‘See this page of paper? It’s blank,’’ Scull said. ‘‘That, sir, is the most frightening battlefield in the world: the blank page. I mean to fill this paper with decent sentences, sir—this page and hundreds like it. Let me tell you, Colonel, it’s harder than fighting Lee. Why, it’s harder than fighting Napoleon.’’

-- Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon

Don't ask me why I was looking at his thesis. I have very very strange interests.

Random Sports Stuff

2008-11-15T13:12:00.004-05:00

Two sports articles, one old and one new which I really really liked

Christian Ryan in the Cricinfo magazine, succinctly describing what makes Test Cricket beautiful, and why all the brouhaha over its imminent death (especially during the recently concluded India Australia series) is ridiculous.

Steve Tignor (who is a stellar tennis writer) writing about his love affair with Squash.

And since we're talking about sport here anyway. Kolya faces the Djoker in the finals of the year ending Tennis Masters Cup tomorrow. A tournament, that is very prestigious (only the top 8 players in the world get to play it), and also rather meaningless. Please please please please let Nikolay Davydenko win. It suits him perfectly: An incredibly brilliant player, who also happens to be an outrageously underachieving character who doesn't seem to get any respect from anyone, and who doesn't seem to mind this as well. A confusing identity winning a tournament with a rather confusing identity.

To make this muddled blogpost even more muddled, Sourav Ganguly, Indian cricket captain extraordinaire and a God of the off side retired last week after a ruthless and almost perfect mauling of the Aussies. Which was quite appropriate since the new Indian team under Dhoni seems to have finally acquired the steel that Ganguly tried so hard to give it. Many many many articles have been written about him, as a great captain, a controversial character, an outstanding one day cricketer and a somewhat underachieving test cricket player.
Few of the articles mention this incident though. It was 2004, and India had just drawn a test series with Australia in Australia. One of the hardest things for any team to do. In fact, India had nearly won the series, and almost ruined Steve Waugh's farewell. After the series Ganguly was asked how he felt. Any other cricket captain would have looked pleased with the result. Dada instead looked disappointed. Somebody asked him if he would consider this a moral victory. Dada's answer: "I don't believe in moral victories". All hail.

Daily dose of cuteness

2008-11-12T12:10:00.002-05:00

In a dark, dreary and depressing november, it is good to see that there is still hope in the world

Awesomeness

2008-11-07T01:47:00.000-05:00

Fun facts about my country

2008-11-05T19:58:00.010-05:00

After having heard so much yesterday about how democracy in the USA is alive and kicking and huge etc, I was curious enough to dig out some statistics.

All of them are approximate, and may be wrong.

Population of USA: Approx 300 million.
Voter Turnout in yesterday's "Once in a generation Election": Approx 130 million i.e about 64% of voters.
Voter Turnout in 2004: 122 million.

Population of India: 1150 million right now, 1070 million in 2004 (No kidding!)
Voter turnout in the last major national elections (2004): Approx 380 million out of 670 million eligible voters.

No other election even comes close. The mind. It boggles.

-x-

Since I was digging stats anyway, I found some more fun numbers. Stuff I always kind of knew anyway, but now I had sort of close to precise numbers.

There are 22 official "Indian" languages plus English. 6-7 with at least 50 million speakers, and 13 with about 10 million speakers, and 26 with a million speakers. To put this into perspective, there are 23 "official" languages of the European Union which consists of 27 countries.

Lets move on to the other thing that divides people. Organized religion.

Okay it unites people. In some sense, against other people.

There are about 6 religions in India with 5 million or more followers. Many people are stunned when they hear this but India actually has almost as many Muslims as Pakistan (150-160 million), i.e the third highest Muslim population on the planet. Oh and about 25 million Christians.

Which basically means:
- The next time you make a generalized sweeping statement about all Indians, I will get pissed off.
- There is no real strong reason why India manages to exist as a country. As I once explained to a European friend, me and a Tamil roughly have as much in common as a Greek and a Swede.
- Indian democracy, for all its gazillion flaws, somehow manages to function and function pretty well. The country manages to stumble along somehow. We should be astonished by this. Really.
- And, for all the crazy stuff that keeps happening within, it really is amazing how stable India is.

Now of course, generalizations happen the other way as well. Indians in India kind of tend to think of the world as: (1) All of Europe and North America and Australia (2) all of Africa (3) Latin America isn't really even on peoples radars (4) The Arab world i.e the Middle East (5) All of east asia including Japan is conveniently labeled as China (6) Desis: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

The assumption being that the culture of each of these places is basically the same. Which come to think of it is kind of true, depending on which level of granularity you're thinking about.

-x-

Going back to the elections.

For all those authors writing nauseating articles about how Obama's election signifies a major cultural milestone, and a fundamental change in the country.

Yeah right. One swallow does not a summer make.

Think about why neither side ever used his full name Barack "Hussein" Obama without it raising flags. Or as Colin Powell said: what if he were a Muslim, is that supposed to matter?

Songs for coding

2008-10-31T03:21:00.004-04:00

Two new discoveries while hacking lots of code and listening to weird stations on last.fm. Cool Songs. And cool videos, especially the second one:

Doo Uap. Gabin.

My Friend. Groove Armada

Connecting Lines

2008-10-18T23:47:00.004-04:00

Ages ago, when I was a wee little kid (I think this was grade 6 or 7), I once filled up several pages of a notebook making graphs like the first one on this page at the New Yorker Cartoon Lounge. Seeing it there made me very very happy:

Forget the labels on the axes, and look at how it is structured. Take k equidistant points along the x and y axes starting from (0,0) and connect (0,k-r) to (r,0) for all r between 0 and k.

Why? I think it had something to do with me watching either a car (like NASCAR) or bike race which uses banked tracks at the curves. Quite likely it was a result of watching Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikander too many times. Basically, the entire track isn't banked; only the turns are. Doing the above construction closely approximates the point where the banked turning segment curves out to the flat straight.

In any case I distinctly remember learning fun stuff like: increasing k makes the curve smoother. That is, you can approximate a circle with smaller and smaller straight lines. I even wrote a BASIC program to do this a while later. Also, the distances between the points on each side do not need to be the same. You can vary them to get varying curvatures. And there was some other fun stuff. Much ink was spilled for quite a few hours.

What, you thought I wasn't a geek back then?

Conservatism

2008-10-17T22:33:00.004-04:00

When you read about US elections you keep reading about "Conservatives" vs "Liberals".

I truly honestly don't think I know what these terms really mean.

And this bothers me quite a bit. Another similar thing that bothers me is when someone tells me she (sometimes he) is a "feminist". I usually ask if that means that men and women should be treated equally. And I always get a response on the lines of "That trivializes feminism." But I've never managed to suss out what the extra stuff is.

But I digress. Getting back to the point, today I read something interesting. William F. Buckley's mission statement for The National Review, the premier conservative magazine of America. Super-interesting reading. In particular I liked the magazine's Credenda:

It is the job of centralized government (in peacetime) to protect its citizens' lives, liberty and property. All other activities of government tend to diminish freedom and hamper progress. The growth of government(the dominant social feature of this century) must be fought relentlessly. In this great social conflict of the era, we are, without reservations, on the libertarian side.
The profound crisis of our era is, in essence, the conflict between the Social Engineers, who seek to adjust mankind to conform with scientific utopias, and the disciples of Truth, who defend the organic moral order. We believe that truth is neither arrived at nor illuminated by monitoring election results, binding though these are for other purposes, but by other means, including a study of human experience. On this point we are, without reservations, on the conservative side.
The century's most blatant force of satanic utopianism is communism. We consider "coexistence" with communism neither desirable nor possible, nor honorable; we find ourselves irrevocably at war with communism and shall oppose any substitute for victory.
The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).
The most alarming single danger to the American political system lies in the fact that an identifiable team of Fabian operators is bent on controlling both our major political parties(under the sanction of such fatuous and unreasoned slogans as "national unity," "middle-of-the-road," "progressivism," and "bipartisanship.") Clever intriguers are reshaping both parties in the image of Babbitt, gone Social-Democrat. When and where this political issue arises, we are, without reservations, on the side of the traditional two-party system that fights its feuds in public and honestly; and we shall advocate the restoration of the two-party system at all costs.
The competitive price system is indispensable to liberty and material progress. It is threatened not only by the growth of Big Brother government, but by the pressure of monopolies(including union monopolies. What is more, some labor unions have clearly identified themselves with doctrinaire socialist objectives. The characteristic problems of harassed business have gone unreported for years, with the result that the public has been taught to assume(almost instinctively) that conflicts between labor and management are generally traceable to greed and intransigence on the part of management. Sometimes they are; often they are not. NATIONAL REVIEW will explore and oppose the inroads upon the market economy caused by monopolies in general, and politically oriented unionism in particular; and it will tell the violated businessman's side of the story.
No superstition has more effectively bewitched America's Liberal elite than the fashionable concepts of world government, the United Nations, internationalism, international atomic pools, etc. Perhaps the most important and readily demonstrable lesson of history is that freedom goes hand in hand with a state of political decentralization, that remote government is irresponsible government. It would make greater sense to grant independence to each of our 50 states than to surrender U.S. sovereignty to a world organization.

I think this makes me a conservative. I pretty much agree with every single point laid out.

Now I need a corresponding well specified outline of liberalism to convince me of my liberalism as well.

And then the two sides of my brain will fight with each other and there will be blood!

Perseverance

2008-10-14T22:36:00.002-04:00

Beautiful essay by Neil Gaiman on ideas.

The Ideas aren't the hard bit. They're a small component of the whole. Creating believable people who do more or less what you tell them to is much harder. And hardest by far is the process of simply sitting down and putting one word after another to construct whatever it is you're trying to build: making it interesting, making it new.

And fresh off the presses, Malcolm Gladwell on prodigies versus late bloomers. Or conceptual versus experimental creativity.

“I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’ ” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” He continued, “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. . . . I have never made trials or experiments.”

Where Picasso wanted to find, not search, Cézanne said the opposite: “I seek in painting.” When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.

Both worth reading. Like totally.

I love Bhelpuri and Dahipuri

2008-10-13T16:50:00.003-04:00

Isn't this ad awesome?

On Writing II

2008-10-13T12:40:00.006-04:00

A few weeks ago, I'd written about how painful and difficult structured technical writing is.

Today I stumbled upon a soft copy of a set of notes that I had stapled to the wall of my cubicle. I'd wrtten them up the day after yet another a particularly painful deadline. Will find out if I manage to stick to them sometime in the next month. Also if they are even "correct".

Without further ado:

Rules for writing a research paper.
Version 1

To prevent excruciating pain later

Every "concept" used multiple times deserves a clear definition and a mathematical symbol
Every non-trivially long algo deserves a separate Algorithm Box, and a name.
Actually, the whole framework also deserves a name.
Any non-trivial mathematical observation needs to be clearly stated as a property, or a lemma, or a theorem. Although honestly you probably don't do anything worth calling a theorem.
"We" refers to the narrator i.e The Authors i.e You. Not the algorithm or system or framework. You gave it a name. Use it. In other words: you try to avoid saying "We clear the buffer cache and scan the data."
Conduct Perform Utilize Observe Invoke. Not do, use, see, call.
Figures are awesome. So are examples.

Time to go back to proving theorems ... oops Lemmas.

On Weekends

2008-10-12T17:05:00.002-04:00

A nice article from the Aug 1991 issue of The Atlantic on the why, how and when of weekends.

Thought of the day

2008-10-11T14:16:00.002-04:00

Overheard in T.O. III

2008-10-01T16:31:00.002-04:00

Girl: I've locked out the internet. I've locked out facebook. I've locked out everything.
Her Friends: Yeaahhhh.

I like the order in which she mentioned locking things out.

For Guptaji

2008-09-23T10:08:00.006-04:00

If you aren't an Indian, you probably won't get this.

Yesterday I was walking by this Indian tapas bar/grill near my place. My eye caught the specials board outside.

I first saw the description of the dish: Cottage Cheese and Potatoes rolled into breaded balls, served with Kurma sauce.

If you eat lots of Indian food you probably know that this is Malai Kofta.

The name of the dish as written on the board: Malai Gupta.

Sounds like the name of an expensive stripper to me :)

On writing

2008-09-17T23:55:00.004-04:00

A few weeks ago, we were chatting around with this new Prof. here, asking him when he was going to expand his group into an army. It has around 5 students now. His response: "Probably not until my current students are in a position to write independently".

Now this was a very insightful reply. Note that he mentioned writing as the primary bottleneck. Not thinking up new ideas, or implementing systems, or anything else. Of course, its also because writing is primarily done in the few weeks before the deadline, so it doesn't lend itself to a high degree of timesharing.

Writing coherent, precise and formal technical prose is the toughest thing I've had to do in Grad school, and I still suck at it, much to the chagrin of my poor supervisor who reads my first drafts.

An hour ago, I said hi to the same Prof. sitting in his office late at night. Turns out he was editing papers for an upcoming deadline. It feels good to see your plight shared by others.

The essence of reality TV

2008-09-16T19:28:00.001-04:00

I love my India.

Especially at the 1 minute mark.

Free Speech

2008-09-14T21:37:00.000-04:00

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

— On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

Fun with bread.

2008-09-13T21:09:00.002-04:00

Tennis Terminology: When someone says: "The set should have been a bakery product", someone means: "It should have been a bagel or a breadstick", i.e someone means "The guy should've won 6-0 or 6-1"

Baguettes Rock.

Jerks in sports

2008-09-04T16:58:00.004-04:00

Late last night I was half asleep watching Rafael Nadal and Mardy Fish slug it out in a US open quarterfinal at 2 in the morning. Yes I live in the same time zone as NYC. Yes the US open scheduling is absolutely demented.

At 3-2 in the 4th set, an imbecile sitting in the audience shouted out just as Rafa was serving.

Two things.

The expressions on the player's faces are priceless. Disgust, WTFness etc all clearly etched. The audience too seems fairly pissed at the guy who shouted.

Secondly, listen to the commentators. I'm almost certain they aren't American. Listening to them on an internet stream last night reminded me of the time when watching sports was fun. When commentators knew when to speak, and what to say, and ... when ... to ... shut ... up. Why on earth do American sportscasters keep yakking away incessantly. And to think that I don't even watch basketball or baseball or football (the American kind) where they're even worse. Why do they think that listening to a bunch of hyperaggressive jerks screaming makes my sportswatching experience any better?

And props to Carlos Ramos for being a cool chair umpire.

The Design and Implementation of a Web Browser

2008-09-02T14:44:00.002-04:00

Google is releasing a new browser : Google Chrome.

Continuing with their tradition of being different, they've written up a webcomic describing the technical details of the browser.

And when I say technical details, I really mean technical details: Processes vs Threads, Memory management and Garbage Collection, Testing, Virtual Machines, Dynamic Compilation, UI design, Security through Sandboxing and Anti Phishing techniques... the works. All in a 40 page webcomic.

Discussing the design choices made here would actually make for a very interesting lecture in a systems course. Seriously. You read about all these tradeoffs, here is one system which has to worry about a lot of them.

On art

2008-08-31T02:28:00.003-04:00

Recommended by a friend. Seconded by me. The preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I am not sure if I have the paragraph breaks right since there are various versions on the net, but here goes:

Preface

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.

This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.

From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

-- Oscar Wilde

Guess the caption?

2008-08-24T14:54:00.004-04:00

Blonde chick with nice pussy.
Courtesy Urbandictionary.

I've got soul but I'm not a soldier

2008-08-21T17:24:00.000-04:00

Nike makes awesome ads.

Teehee

2008-08-19T12:02:00.002-04:00

China is sweeping these Olympics games, especially in Gymnastics. What do gymnasts of other countries say to themselves before stepping up to do their routines?

If not Mi, Hu?
If not Nau, Wen?

बकचोद

2008-08-17T23:39:00.006-04:00

Bajofondo live is awesome at an entirely different level.

The curse of 5 blades.

2008-08-14T11:55:00.003-04:00

NYTimes offhandedly mentions Rahul Dravid! OMG! Who'd have thunk!

A bit more context. After Federer's defeat at the hand of Blake (something pretty much unimaginable a few months back), the Rings blog wrote about "The Curse of the Gillete Ad". This terrible terrible ad:

features Thierry Henry, Roger Federer and Tiger Woods. Henry is injured. So is Woods (after a glorious last major though). And well.. Federer is no longer playing like Federer this year.

So where does Rahul Dravid come into the picture? Well, the complete campaign features a fourth player: Rahul Sharad Dravid. Once the core of India's batting lineup, and the Indian Cricket Captain. Now a player who for the past 2 years seems a poor shadow of his former self.

The curse holds!

1000 words

2008-08-10T14:30:00.002-04:00

New York Times has the best graphic design department anywhere. Their interactive election graphics are awesome always. But they also manage amazing clean and intuitive graphics for other stuff. Once for instance, they'd put up the best description I've seen of the difference between hard, grass and clay courts in tennis.

Today's graphic describing Michael Phelps victory in the 400m medley at Beijing is pretty much up there as well. Unfortunately I can't find a way to embed it in this page.

Kanpur

2008-08-09T22:53:00.003-04:00

I haven't seen Tashan yet, but my roomie told me this line in the movie

In logon ke beech mujhe zinda rehna hain, to mujhe akalmand banna padega, khatarnaak banna padega, Kanpuriya banna padega.
-- Bacchan Pandey in Tashan.

Translation: If I have to stay alive among these people, I'll have to be smart, be dangerous, be a real Kanpuriya (resident of Kanpur).

All hail the city I was born in, where I spent nearly every summer till my teens, and where I finally returned for my undergrad. My mom grew up in this city. By a strange coincidence, my dad did his PhD here (they didn't meet here though). The city is a dump. Everyone, and I really mean everyone swears enough to make a sailor blush. And any close relatives we had there have left, which means I probably won't be visiting again soon.

But its the place where I've spent the second longest time in my life. Which, for better or for worse makes it an indelible part of who I am.

How to share a secret?

2008-08-07T23:14:00.002-04:00

A classic result by Adi Shamir which I stumbled upon a couple of days back.

The problem: Given a piece of data D, and n people, share D among them such that any k of them together can reconstruct D, but k-1 of them can't do so.

The solution: Generate a k-1 degree polynomial q(x): D + xp(x) i.e D = q(0). Person i gets the value q(i). Given any k of the these values q(1), ... , q(n), there exists a unique k-1 degree polynomial which passes through them. Compute the polynomial. Extract D. Done.

There are a few more minor details, but thats pretty much it.

Elegant eh?

The Way You Do the Things You Do

2008-08-04T09:52:00.003-04:00

"That guy has too much spare time" is one of the most odious, intellectually dishonest, dismissive things a person can say. It disguises a vicious ad-hominem attack as a lighthearted verbal shrug. The subtext of the remark is that the subject's passions -- this remark is almost always directed at someone engaged in some labor of love -- are so meritless that their specific shortcomings don't even warrant discussion. The subtext is that any sane person who considers these passions will immediately see their total worthlessness. To direct this remark at someone is to utterly dismiss their personal fire and so their ability to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy.

Cory Doctorow ranting.

Yeah!

2008-07-28T16:15:00.002-04:00

In 2004 Usher with Lil Jon and Ludacris released Yeah!, an almost perfect club track.

What I hadn't ever seen was Dave Chappelle's awesome skewering of Lil Jon

On Taste

2008-07-19T21:04:00.004-04:00

Time to pontificate.

A few days ago, I was having a chat with a friend and was reminded of these three blog posts, in which Luca Trevisan, a complexity theorist at Berkeley writes about what makes some results better than others. Since complexity theory rarely has any direct applications, judging the value of any correct new result becomes a question of taste. I imagine similar concerns apply when people judge the worth of a maths result (Complexity theory is math really). In the three posts, Luca beautifully outlines his view of what constitutes a good result.

Now I work in the area that can broadly be termed as "Data Management". An area, that at least claims to be practical. Pretty much every paper written in our conferences typically has some practical application (sometimes rather contrived) as its driving motivation. Which leads one to the question: what constitutes a good result in this area?

Although we claim to be a practical area, my guess is that not more than a quarter (and I'm being very generous here) of the papers published at any leading database conference are really practical. Real systems are built using simple ideas that work. There aren't that many simple ideas you can have in any area.

Then why do the remaining papers get through? A small minority propose new and interesting problems that are different. And even though their solutions are not really awesome, these papers open new research directions for other people to explore, and hence should be accepted.

But what about the remaining papers? The ones that study a sub-case of a variation of some other case of something? Or, as a presenter at a recent database conference joked "There has been lots of work in this area, and we were lucky to find a piece of the cake which no-one had looked at". Why were there so many spatial indexing, histogram, XML, streams and transactions papers in the past? Why are there so many papers these days on skylines, ranking, uncertainty management and privacy ? Do all these "incremental" (a word that really junior grad students, and very senior profs seem to use the most) papers really deserve to get through?

In general, Yes.

Because one goal of research is to understand a problem. And therefore, even though TA should suffice for anyone needing to do Top-K in practice, it still is worth examining the effects of the various assumptions one can add to or drop from the original version of the problem, and see what effect this has. And how does this understanding help? Because you never really know which set of incremental steps together opens the doors to something big.

So to come back to the original question, what constitutes a good result? My take is: a paper that either improves the practice, or introduces a novel and interesting problem, or is technically elegant.

This doesn't really answer the question does it? What if the improvement to practice comes via some clunky bit level operations that add a few percent decrease in execution time? What constitutes an interesting problem? And what do I mean by technical elegance?

I'll try to get out of this by paraphrasing Luca (he is a superstar prof and I am a terrible grad student) : Reading a good paper for the first time should be startling and exciting, like hearing a good joke for the first time.

That is, at the end of it, one should have an "Aha" instead of a "So what" moment.

Which really goes back to taste doesn't it?

The greatest match of all time

2008-07-06T22:52:00.002-04:00

From about 9:30 AM - 5PM (with rain breaks) I watched Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal play tennis at a level never seen before. Blessed are we indeed.

Vamos!

2008-07-04T13:42:00.003-04:00

Wimbledon finals weekend is here. I don't really care which of the Williams sisters wins it. But I do hope to catch the Federer Nadal final. The last one was pretty close to awesome, and Nadal has just somehow managed to get even better over the previous year.

Who do I support? Isn't it obvious from the title!

Marat Safin lost to Federer in the semis today. His was the "personal-interest-story" for this wimbledon. Here is a lovely Q&A from his presser:

Q. You said earlier something like you have the money to do whatever you want, and right now what you want to do is play tennis. Talk a little bit about your passion for the game. When did you felt you lost that passion?

MARAT SAFIN: I never lost it, otherwise I would have stopped long time ago really, because for sure I'm not doing it for the money. Nobody's doing it for the cash. I think there's plenty of players that they are doing it because they love the game. Like Ivanisevic. He was ranked a hundred something in the world and he asked for the wild card. He was not doing it for the money.He doesn't really need the paycheck by winning Wimbledon. One million more, one million less doesn't really make a whether. But just we love the game. We love to go on the court. We love to play great matches. We love to suffer and we love to win. That make a huge difference, because after tennis you gonna miss that adrenaline. You know, it's just like point by point, and you are playing, you are playing the game. When the it's over, it's over. That's why it's a little bit tough to leave. It's not about the money. It's not about anything. It's just -- to be able to play and perform on the court I think is a very strong feeling.

Amen to that.

Thought(s) of the day

2008-06-24T05:26:00.002-04:00

Body clocks are for wimps.

Amy Winehouse truly rocks.

Age of Conan

2008-06-21T21:49:00.002-04:00

Gaming company shrinks size of breasts on the female models. Gamers are furious. Company apologizes for glitch. I love their statement, especially the last line

"Funcom can confirm that some of the female models in the game have had the size of their breasts changed," the statement said.

"This is due to an unintended change in data that was introduced in an earlier patch, data which controls the so-called morph values associated with character models and the size of their respective body parts.

"We are working on a fix for this and your breasts should be back to normal soon."

MVP

2008-06-20T18:06:00.002-04:00

Today, a speaker in a seminar said "Steve Nash introduced the notion of a Nash Equilibrium as .... ". And I had to try so hard to not burst out laughing. Did have an insanely big grin on my face for a few minutes. Who knew he had these hidden talents?

Three Tiers

2008-06-18T22:41:00.003-04:00

Back in the good old days when one was in one's undergrad, one had a prof. whose favourite phrase was "Three Tier Architectures". One never understood exactly what the prof meant by this phrase, but well... one never understood much of what happened back then anyway.

Today one read a post by Anand Rajaraman (He of the Junglee + Cambrian + Kosmix fame) which describes why twitter sucketh (two tier arch.) and an indian company SMS Gupshup with 3 times the usage of twitter not sucketh (three tier arch.). One experienced Deja Vu. One still does not quite completely understand why three tier architectures rock, but one believes it even more fervently.

A few of my favourite things

2008-06-01T00:43:00.007-04:00

Salon asks its readers to summarize classic books in 6 words. And puts up a list of the best. My personal favourites:

Twelve people tried to return it.
Fellowship of the Ring
Man catches fish. Sharks eat it.
The Old Man and the Sea
Desperate, noble poor get shafted. Repeatedly.
The Grapes of Wrath

Life's not worth it. So what?
L'Etranger

And now for something completely different. The nytimes bits blog talks about Jim Gray. Writer of awesome research papers, and apparently a legendary connector of people. My favourite Jim Gray papers... The 5 minute rule, Alphasort, and his database generation papers. Oh and the data cube and parallel database manifesto, and anon et al. benchmarking papers were great as well. And I haven't even talked about his work on transactions, for which he was most famous.

And today I heard this guy sing this song live

Cutting Corners

2008-05-29T02:23:00.004-04:00

Today a friend who works in another lab commented on how much natural light our lab manages to get. Our conclusion was that since we have a corner office, we can place two large windows instead of one, which makes life much nicer.

Which reminded me of this interesting tidbit I learnt a few days back. The Scotia Plaza, one of the prominent skyscrapers of this city, has a very distinctive profile. It is very thin along one axis and elongated along the other. Additionally however, it has what the building website terms a "multi-pleated vertical shape". Now while this makes the building look quite nice, the real reason for having this structure is that it allows each floor of the Scotia Plaza to have 22 corner offices. Corner offices are nicer. Ergo rents are higher. And in the end everyone is happy.

Adios Guga!

2008-05-26T00:09:00.002-04:00

1997. The French Open final. Me supporting boring old Sergi Bruguera. My mom and dad supporting flashy Brazilian Gustavo Kuerten. My strategy of picking boring players usually worked. Sampras would always beat Agassi. Stich beat Becker at Wimbledon 91 (the first tennis match I actually remember staying up to watch).

Anyway, Kuerten won that year. And proceeded to win the championships two more times in the coming years. And yesterday he bid goodbye to Roland Garros after a wildcard entry, losing in the first round. The flashy claycourt champ mantle has passed on to Rafael Nadal. Who should most likely pick up his fourth consecutive title this year. If not him.... I definitely hope Federer doesn't win this one. Yes he may be the Greatest of All Time, but I am a little sick of hearing it. Djokovic wouldn't be too bad as well, although its a bit of a pain that he is on the same side of the draw as Nadal. Nobody seems to get the GOAT as pissed off as Djokovic. But wouldn't it be awesome if we went outside these guys, and someone like Davydenko or Nalbandian manage to win this year? Seriously, Davydenko has been in the top 5 for way too long to not win a major.

Yet Another....

2008-05-24T00:25:00.002-04:00

Isn't it incredibly appropriate that I was listening to "You'll never walk alone" when a conference (as expected sadly) kindly decided to reject my favourite paper once again?

When you walk through a storm
hold your head up high
And don't be afraid of the dark.
At the end of a storm is a golden sky

And the sweet silver song of a lark.
Walk on through the wind,
Walk on through the rain,
Tho' your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone,
You'll never, ever walk alone.
Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart

And you'll never walk alone,
You'll never, ever walk alone.

The Candidate

2008-05-20T12:39:00.002-04:00

A 'West Wing' writer scripts the upcoming democratic convention in Denver. Fun. Fun. Fun.

Incredible Hulk

2008-05-19T20:28:00.000-04:00

What happens when you do 16 weeks of steroids.

Sommerzeit

2008-05-15T20:56:00.002-04:00

I say, if you knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.
-- Calvin

Today, while playing ultimate, I tripped and scraped my knee turning it into a lovely mix of red (blood), brown (dirt) and green (grass). Summer is here!

Overheard in T.O. II

2008-05-12T16:55:00.003-04:00

Late Saturday night near my house. A group of extremely hot ladies headed out to clubland, splitting up into 2 cars.

HotGirl1: (shouting to someone in the other group) My number is blah blah 8008
HotGirl2: (Standing next to HotGirl1) boob
HotGirl1: What?
HotGirl2: (with a slightly more evil smile) boob
HotGirl1: (Looking down her awesome decolletage) My boobs are fine..
HotGirl2: (Tracing letters in the air) 8 .. 0.. 0 .. 8 ..... B .. O .. O .. B
AllTheHotGirls: Hahahahahaha

Remains of the day

2008-05-07T01:41:00.002-04:00

... is one of a rare species, a novel that is both thin and brilliant. Other examples in this category that come to mind are Camus' Plague and The Stranger, and Orwell's Animal Farm.

Ishiguro does a brilliant job pinning down the tone of the narrator, a butler reminiscing about his life and some of the choices he and the people around him made. And manages to convey themes of unrequited love, devotion to one's job/country, idealism, dignity and failure in a very sparse clipped manner. And yes it did remind me of The Stranger in the sense that the book doesn't really seem to be saying anything much while you're reading it. But once you put it down you're amazed by how much was said, and how simply it was expressed.

Yeah I'll never make a good book reviewer. But the book was really nice.

Keep Walking

2008-05-06T17:28:00.002-04:00

Why I wear sandals, from nymag. Although I'm not too happy with my current ones..

Six Degrees

2008-05-04T03:34:00.005-04:00

In the spirit of this post.

X is this really smart guy I know. "I know" as in both of us did an internship together about 5 years back (man I'm old!), got along really well, but haven't ever met or talked since then. X used to be in tech then, although now he has an MBA. X writes a pretty entertaining blog though, which I follow regularly enough. X has a friend A who he refers to all the time, and who also writes a rather ranty ravy kind of blog. I don't really follow A's blog, although I hop over there once in a while.

Y is journalist who also writes a blog. In which he writes at length about movies and books and other fun stuff. No I don't know Y at all, just follow his blog. Y has a friend B who is a young lit graduate, who also blogs. To use an expression of one of my friends, B is a bit of a feminazi. I don't really follow her blog, but yeah I hop over once in a while.

Today I found out that A and B are a couple. At least an year after I came to know of their existence.

More connections? Y is great friends with Z (both are members of the lit scene). Z has a friend C who is a humanties grad somewhere in the states. C is within 2 hops of at least 3 people I know (Apparently every smart person from C's city knows every other smart person from there).

There are many other weird connections I can come up with. Like this guy I met once whose brother turned out to be going out with one of my friends (all 4 of us lived in different cities back then). Or this friend who visited one of her friends in some university. I mentioned that I knew a guy there. It turned out that some of her friend's friends had come over when my friend was there... and they all had been talking about that guy for a bit, in not very nice terms though.

Social networks are fun in truly pointless ways.

The Kitten

2008-05-02T16:18:00.001-04:00

The trouble with a kitten is
THAT
Eventually it becomes a
CAT

-- Ogden Nash

google ads weirdness

2008-04-28T00:30:00.002-04:00

I was looking at the chat log of a conversation I had with a girl some days back. My eyes wandered to the google ads around the log.

At the top of the screen was an ad saying "What do women want". Fair enough I guess.

The sponsored ads on the right panel were more interesting: "Be the woman men love", "Dumped?", "Men in trees", "Understand why men leave?" and "Understanding men".

Is Google hedging its bets on whether I'm a guy or a girl? And/Or straight or gay?

Oh, and while the rest of the ads were from sketchy looking sites, the ad which said "Men in trees" was from Dove. The makers of fine cosmetics who apparently believe in "real beauty". Whats the link?

Boneywasawarriorwayayix

2008-04-26T02:17:00.002-04:00

In the latest New Yorker, there is an awesome article on revenge between tribes in Papua New Guinea by Jared Diamond.

The article by itself is extremely interesting. But if you've read Asterix in Corsica, you would see striking parallels between the Corsica depicted in the book, and the New Guinea in the article. To name a few common themes: Vendettas, wild pigs, clans, inter-clan marriages, treachery and alliances, and crazy rules of engagement.

Of course, modern day society doesn't really leave one with many sources of physically taking out anger. Which is partly why people work out in gyms or play sports. Probably the most mentally soothing activity I've done in the past few years would be a session at a golf driving range last winter. A large basket of golf balls and a nine-iron in my hand. Once you get a hang of how to smoothly swing the club, the activity is a quiet rhythmic almost-meditational experience punctuated with brutal strokes of the club on the ball. Few things would come close to this. On similar lines, a long time ago in high school, our Taekwondo instructor hung a gunny bag packed with sawdust and got us to compete on who could hit the most roundhouse kicks (Dolyuhchagi) in 30 seconds. I managed 47. When I looked down at my foot, I had 2 parallel red lines where skin had scraped off, and blood was beginning to leak. But the high I got through this was totally worth it. Maybe its time to get a fast bag at home.

Stupidity can be subtle and malicious

2008-04-25T07:02:00.002-04:00

You write some code for some project. The code is really complicated "systemsy" code, which you then proceed to debug until it sort of works. That is, it isn't exactly production level, but its enough to generate nice performance graphs.

A few months later you are working on a new project which is closely related to the previous one. Closely related, not the same! You figure that you can use the framework you built for the previous one in this new setting. After a couple of nights of hacking, things sort of fall in place. And the code works. Sure bugs keep popping up. But you find ways of dealing with them. Somehow.

Until it crashes on 37th case of a 100 case experiment. When you run the 37th case by itself, it runs though. After much head scratching it turns out there is some error introduced by the 36th case which affects the next one. You stare at the code and think... This isn't supposed to happen, I had coded it to shield myself from my own stupidity. The code was modular. I was shielding myself from memory leaks by letting the system take care of it. Etc etc etc.

And then you realize that yes, your code is modular and idiot proof. But in the context of the previous problem, not the new one. And in this new setting, you didn't reinitialize one of your variables, which means that state passed between independent test cases. Which is why the 37th case crashed because of the 36th one.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of fools. Even yourself.

QOTD 4

2008-04-22T03:26:00.003-04:00

Working is like riding a bicycle. If you fall off, you die. -- Beat Takeshi

At this point, work is seriously fubared.

In non work news, finished Nick Hornby's "A Long Way Down" a couple of days back. The book starts off with a high-concept premise. Four extremely different people decide to jump off the top of a building at the same time. Hornby takes this idea and runs with it as much as he can. The story does wear a little thin, and the book doesn't really seem to achieve closure. But what Hornby does is to add a dash of pizzazz on top of the high concept theme. Each chapter of the book is told in the voice of a different character, rotating among the four protagonists of the tale. The four startlingly different tones making similar noises makes for a reasonably nice read.

Started Kazuo Ishiguro's "Remains of the day" some time back. I'm loving it, although I can't seem to read more than 20-30 pages a day. And something makes me suspect that the upcoming Save PhD campaign will ensure that this book stays at a low priority for a while.

The Beat Goes On

2008-04-16T20:23:00.004-04:00

The video above has a "feature" which makes it pretty seriously cool. I've been showing it to quite a few of my friends, and hardly anyone manages to catch it. Although if I tell them the feature, they can see it at once. Can you?

No? Listen to the music and look at the video. Carefully.

Still can't see it? Really? The video is Star Guitar by the Chemical Brothers. Go. Click and read. And then watch again. Go.

And apparently, this is how he did it.

This..... is my boomstick

2008-04-15T00:09:00.004-04:00

Saw Evil Dead, the musical.

From the second row.

Yeah I was in the splatter zone!

i.e I have a white tee stained with lots and lots of zombie blood.

I can't remember laughing this much in a long long time.

Look who's evil now.

Hey Boy Hey Girl

2008-04-14T01:46:00.003-04:00

A couple of days ago I was at the gym, working up my serotonin levels with a 20 minute wamup on the bike. A guy and a girl were slowly walking around the track, carrying rackets, and probably waiting for a court to clear up. They passed me 4 times.

1st pass

Guy: She is such a wonderful person, isn't she....
Girl: Yeah she's so nice, and she ....

2nd pass

Guy: I hate that girl, she is so rude.
Girl: I don't believe her... you know she said ...

Wouldn't it be awesome if they were talking about the same lady both times?

Oh and in the third pass they were talking about some ex of the girl, and in the fourth it was something to do with how expensive some bag is. What else is there to talk about. Seriously.

Gratuitious advice

2008-04-06T19:27:00.003-04:00

Neil Gaiman's Nanowrimo pep talk is fabulous. And though it is about novel writing, it holds true for pretty much any non-trivial thing to be done over a non-trivial time scale.

Thou Rocketh

2008-04-05T21:11:00.003-04:00

This Ruleth.
Which comic is this from?

p + j

2008-04-04T13:00:00.003-04:00

From a slashdot story:

"'We are creating a set of intellectual properties and software assets that can be employed to gauge and improve levels of preparedness to tackle unforeseen natural disasters,' says Dr. Gyana Parija. 'Most real-world problems involve uncertainty, and this has been the inspiration for us to tackle challenges in natural disaster management.' In the case of flooding, for example, the stochastic programming model would use various flood scenarios, resource supply capabilities at different dispatch locations, and fixed and variable costs associated with deployment of various flood-management resources to manage various risk measures. By assigning probabilities to the factors driving outcomes, the model outlines how limited resources can meet tomorrow's unknown demands or liabilities. In this way, the risks and rewards of various tradeoffs can be explored, IBM said."
And anyone and everyone who has ever used probability in any form is astounded by this incredibly insightful view.

By the way, the story was titled "IBM using complex math .... ", and the first thing that popped into my mind was complex numbers. You know, a + bi, or if you're an engineer, a + bj.

The title of this post is a complex poor joke.

Linklust

2008-04-03T22:50:00.005-04:00

From the blog of the H&FJ type foundry, a pithy skewering of the new US greenbacks, and of big government in general.

And today, an awesome discovery, the editors of playboy actually maintain a blog. A fairly well written blog I'd say. Yes, for those of you who've never seen beyond the pics, the old adage about reading it for the articles is true. Playboy generally does carry fairly insightful articles, and its monthly interview is often extremely well done. Oh, of course, the naked women don't hurt.

For the vision geeks out there, the largest selling playboy issue of all time is the Nov 1972 one, carrying Lena as its centerfold. Who knew there were so many of you.

Saturday Night

2008-03-30T01:50:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, on the phone with my parents, I was kindly informed that I manage to live a more boring life in this exceptionally happening city, than my more than twice as old as me mom and dad manage in their exceptionally unhappening city.

Seeking to rectify this situation, I attended a free earth hour concert today. A few thousand people, almost sub zero temperatures, pretty nice music, featuring among others, The Philosopher Kings, and Nelly Furtado, who can sing quite well even without Timbaland's production. And a general feel-good-do-good thing in the air which we were making fun of. Oh and some free hot chocolate as well. Yum.

Which was followed up with a couple of hours at a coffee shop kind of place. Well, we were actually thinking of a dance club but were a little too early. Where my exceptionally cool friends regaled me with songs a cappella. And later we found an unused piano where we figured out how to get some fun tunes. I discovered a latent talent for being a bass pianist. Go figure.

All in all, the "whitest" evening I've had in a while

Tomorrow is a Sunday. And sadly, I might have to work again. But someday I might be singing this instead

I Heart the New Yorker

2008-03-28T14:38:00.005-04:00

Seriously.

David Owen on Pennies. Eric Alterman on newspapers. And, from a time long past, Malcolm Gladwell on Ketchup and Mustard.

Moving on to other fronts. At the Chepauk, Virender Sehwag is currently unbeaten on 309 off 292 balls. The Proteas have no clue whats hit them. His tenth successive 150+ score, second triple hundred, the fastest triple hundred and the third fastest double hundred ever. Everyone is going gaga over the innings and Brian Lara's record might be in touch soon. Uncle J Rod seems to have the best take on it.

And here's a video of the slaughter

גם זה יעבור

2008-03-28T00:17:00.003-04:00

or in English... This too shall pass.

What we tend to forget is that it holds true for both good and bad stuff.

Every hangover eventually ends.

On the plus side, the weather is getting better and better.

And Strongbow Cider seriously rocks.

Me against the music

2008-03-22T02:29:00.004-04:00

A couple of posts ago, I'd mentioned that I'm listening to Britney these days. Almost like a musical coming out of the closet. And while the song mentioned there "Gimme More" is pretty good, "Piece of Me" is an instant classic. Now, listening to Britney isn't exactly regular fare for me. But the songs in this album have been produced really well.

Today I stumbled on this review by Sasha Frere-Jones, which goes straight to the point.

The new Britney Spears album, “Blackout,” is good the way the Yankees are good. If you have enough money, you can buy more talent than the other guys. If all that talent doesn’t exactly hold together, it doesn’t entirely matter—alone or together, the stars have a tendency to deliver the hits.

Perhaps to offset consumer anxiety generated by Spears’s well-documented personal struggles, she and her advisory committee have spared no expense and have exhibited exceptionally good taste in hiring. The songwriters and producers who contributed to “Blackout” are as close to an all-star team as pop has right now: the producer Nate “Danja” Hills, a protégé of Timbaland who co-produced many of Timbaland’s recent hits; the proven songwriters Sean Garrett and Kara DioGuardi, as well as the up-and-coming and increasingly reliable songwriter Keri Hilson; the once dominant, now dormant super-producers the Neptunes; and, best of all, the Swedish production duo Bloodshy & Avant, responsible for older songs such as “Toxic” and “Me Against the Music,” which made Spears as deservedly ubiquitous as she wanted to be.

Sasha Frere-Jones is pretty much my favourite music critic ever since, in a piece titled "Warm Milk", he compared Coldplay's lyrics to "a thousand coffee-mug mottoes strung together".

Joins

2008-03-20T16:25:00.004-04:00

My PhD research involves something about databases. And in particular, one thing I play around a fair bit with is joins. Now, many people find joins to be a weird abstract operation. Why on earth would one look at two lists and return all possible matches?

Well, some days ago the US Govt National Archives released Hillary Clinton's schedules for her 8 years in the white house. People haven't exactly been able to find anything particularly harmful or supportive for her campaign, although her stance on NAFTA seems to be on somewhat shaky ground now. However, some particularly enterprising folks took Hillary's schedules and matched them up with Monica Lewinsky's testimony to Ken Starr to find out.... yes you guessed it right ... exactly what Hillary was upto when President Bill was ..... errr you know, improving president-intern relations.

And that my friends, is a join.

Oh, and since we're talking politics, I thought Barack Obama's speech on race was superb. Not that I know much about the story of race in America. But the speech (a) seemed technically brilliant, and (b) acknowledged the gray zone of racism, that nobody is perfectly race-blind.

Its 3 AM

2008-03-06T23:55:00.002-05:00

... somewhere over the Atlantic right now.

But it is midnight in the lab. And there is noone else around.

The coast should be clear for about 8 or 9 more hours, although I doubt I'll be able to last beyond 4 AM.

There is loud peppy music streaming from my laptop

Gimme More.. Britney Spears .... yeah I know .. Britney! .. sosumi.

And I just got an experiment to behave oh so sweetly.

While I'm editing the other paper into some sort of shape. At least the sort of shape that hopefully won't drive my boss to tears.

180 hours to the deadline. A million things to do.

Sometimes, high pressure situations can be so relaxing its almost like you're on drugs.

Measuring Beauty

2008-02-28T01:32:00.002-05:00

This is a wonderfully useless piece of information that surprisingly few people know.

Q: What is the basic unit of beauty?
A: Millihelen.

Q: Hunh?
A: Helen of Troy is the face that launched a thousand ships

Q: ..... ?
A: A millihelen is the amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

WhyBecauseISaidSo

2008-02-24T00:38:00.004-05:00

Saw this ad while I went for a late night pizza run. Something seemed a little odd about it so I read it carefully. Googled on my return, and it turns out that other people have noticed it as well. Genius.

Reality bites

2008-02-19T15:54:00.000-05:00

Teacher: Which state do you live in?
Calvin: Denial.

On rejection

2008-02-17T22:49:00.004-05:00

Probably its a function of how crap my PhD is, but one thing grad school has made me used to is the act of getting rejections from conferences. There was a time in the distant past when rejections would make me feel bad, but they don't seem to faze me anymore

Surprisingly enough, for a change, today I actually received acceptances from a conference. A friend however, did receive a rejection. To quote him:

I am getting used to it finally... my anger eases faster than before. Last time I wanted to kill their mothers, burn their houses. Now I just want to torture them.

When birds burp, it must taste like bugs

2008-01-28T17:43:00.000-05:00

In a conversation with a friend today:

There is this standard english expression... "A penny for your thoughts". A similar expression is when you ask someone for their "two cents". Is this because at current rates, 1 pound is approximately 2 dollars?

Madamina, il catalogo è questo

2008-01-27T02:27:00.000-05:00

In the past week, I attended three beautiful performances of this city's symphony orchestra. They were staging a really cool Mozart festival. As a freebie, today they also had an awesome informal jazz performance right after the concert.

Now when one hears the name Mozart, one thinks high culture. Similar to the standard reaction on hearing about Shakespeare. For Shakespeare, this notion was dispelled when I first read Othello, a play full of the awesome innuendos and double entendres. Today, the same notion crashed for Mozart. This isn't snobbish high culture, this is genius.

Without further ado, the English translation of the lyrics of "Madamina, il catalogo è questo" from Mozart's Don Giovanni. This song is also referred to as the Catalog Aria. You'll see why...

My dear lady, this is a list
Of the beauties my master has loved,
A list which I have compiled.
Observe, read along with me.
In Italy, six hunddred and forty;
In Germany, two hundred and thirty-one;
A hundred in France; in Turkey, ninety-one;
In Spain already one thousand and three.
Among these are peasant girls,
Maidservants, city girls,
Countesses, baronesses,
Marchionesses, princesses,
Women of every rank,
Every shape, every age.
With blondes it is his habit
To praise their kindness;
In brunettes, their faithfulness;
In the very blond, their sweetness.
In winter he likes fat ones.
In summer he likes thin ones.
He calls the tall ones majestic.
The little ones are always charming.
He seduces the old ones
For the pleasure of adding to the list.
His greatest favourite
Is the young beginner.
It doesn't matter if she's rich,
Ugly or beautiful;
If she wears a petticoat,
You know what he does.

Thought of the day

2008-01-21T15:54:00.000-05:00

While staring at some code I wrote a couple of months back, the following thought came to my head in a very apologetic tone...

I am not completely useless. I can be used as a bad example.

Me suspects my program is, if not anything else, at least telepathic.

Oh Sweet Heavens!

2008-01-19T09:59:00.000-05:00

India Win.
Australia Lose.
In 4 days .
In Perth.

If this is a dream, I'd rather not wake up.

The Alchemist is for losers

2008-01-16T15:30:00.000-05:00

Sweet little article in the NY Times on fortune cookies.

The story of the cookies is nice enough. What I found more fascinating was the fact that

Ms. Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, has spent more than six years trying to establish the Japanese origin of the fortune cookie

And since we're linking to articles anyway, there is a nice article in the New Yorker on Kahlil Gibran.

Now Kahlil Gibran and his book, the Prophet, are quite famous. In a very vague feel good sort of way. And for no real reason I used to think until a couple of years back that this guy was an ancient persian poet on the lines of Omar Khayyam. Well, he actually was a turn of the century Lebanese-American who wrote the Prophet in English. And to quote the New Yorker Article:

More than the soundness of its advice, however, the mere fact that “The Prophet” was an advice book—or, more precisely, “inspirational literature”—probably insured a substantial readership at the start. Gibran’s closest counterpart today is the Brazilian sage Paulo Coelho, and his books have sold nearly a hundred million copies

Whatever little desire that was building in me to read the Prophet goes out of the window with the last line written above. I distinctly remember sometime in the third or fourth year of my undergrad when I heard praise for Coelho's "The Alchemist" from multiple sources. Got the book from somewhere. Finished it soon enough. And absolutely hated it. This was the most terrible book I'd ever read. I've done a good enough job of expurging it from my mind but some stuff still lingers.

I don't completely hate "inspirational literature". I really liked Jonathan Livingston Seagull, although that might be because of the amount of time the book spends describing the technicalities of flying. But I still do think that "The Alchemist" is for losers.

Atonement

2008-01-15T02:03:00.001-05:00

One of the nice things that happened on the flight back was that I saw Atonement. Highly recommended. And it has a beautiful soundtrack which includes the best use of a typewriter ever. Sample this:

Thou shalt not...

2008-01-13T07:24:00.000-05:00

Very interesting article by Steven Pinker in the NYTimes Magazine on Morality.

Among other things, I liked this segment:

Putting God in charge of morality is one way to solve the problem, of course, but Plato made short work of it 2,400 years ago. Does God have a good reason for designating certain acts as moral and others as immoral? If not — if his dictates are divine whims — why should we take them seriously? Suppose that God commanded us to torture a child. Would that make it all right, or would some other standard give us reasons to resist? And if, on the other hand, God was forced by moral reasons to issue some dictates and not others — if a command to torture a child was never an option — then why not appeal to those reasons directly?

Life goes on

2008-01-10T16:42:00.000-05:00

Landed back in the city yesterday. Had this conversation with my boss today

Boss: So your vacation is over.
Me: Yes
Boss: Relaxed.
Me: Yes
Boss: Good... so lets kill ourselves till march.

Sigh

'appy noo ear

2008-01-01T12:08:00.000-05:00

Neil Gaiman writes a beautiful new years wish on his journal. I can't do better than quote him:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Timepass

2007-12-27T12:21:00.000-05:00

I can totally identify with this

“Q: How much time, if any, do you spend on the web? Is it a distraction or a blessing?

Jenny Diski: Acres of time, wasted, wasted. I play poker (and lose), I play ludo and mah jong. I check out MetaFilter. I buy frocks. Anything. It’s a kind of hell. I sometimes think I might go back to typewriting. But you can’t get the ribbons.”

From questionnaire on the New York Times book blog

E.T phone home

2007-11-26T18:44:00.000-05:00

In a couple of days I'm flying back to India after about 23 months. This time there isn't the excitement of the first trip, but yes I'm looking forward to a nice month of R & R. And this is the longest period away from home for me yet... although I guess I'm now reaching an age where the definition of home is changing.

I remember being much much more excited about the previous trip. It was my first trip after 15 months away, and to top it I'd just wrapped up my MS. And the first 24 hours of that trip were as magical as they come. First, I spent the flight learning the cyrillic alphabet from a pretty ukrainian lady. Then, the first sight of Delhi from above, with the associated identification of all standard landmarks. Then, a night at the airport, with my original flight cancelled, getting tickets for a new flight. And more amazingly.. Hindi... yes Hindi news on the TV. The flight from Delhi to Kolkata was memorable because I could see the plans of the Ganga and Yamuna below, while a couple of hundred km to the east, I could see the himalayas forming an incredibly high wall. It was like a school level geography lesson, only much more interesting. A few hours at Kolkata railway station eating some great food in an attempt to not fall asleep, and watching the crowds around and off I was in the train back home. Slept most of the journey, but the last 30 km stretch was a sequence of familiar landmarks which were like old friends. After all, this was a route I'd taken an insane number of times since childhood. A drive on streets that had changed a bit, while still preserving their old essence. And I was back home.

The fundamental interconnectedness of all things

2007-11-24T22:38:00.000-05:00

A is someone smart whose blog I like to read. A has been making lots of noises about some company X having a product that is pretty much snake oil. On A's blog, an employee of X named V wrote a couple of comments attempting to defend a somewhat flaky demo that X gave once upon a time.

Now Vs name sounded particularly familiar. Then I realized he was the brother of a friend C, who'd mentioned many months ago that V was involved in that presentation by X. I also recall telling C that quite a bit of what the company was claiming would probably fall in hyperbole territory. I then remembered that for all the noise V was making defending X, V was headed off to greener pastures elsewhere.

Somewhere Dirk Gently is smiling.

Romance and Cigarettes

2007-11-24T04:51:00.000-05:00

Highly recommended.

Status Updates

2007-11-22T15:45:00.000-05:00

Its snowing!
I haven't done a scrap of work in about a week.
I did much more than a scrap of work in the few weeks before.
Its truly remarkable how I can switch off the hardworking button on a whim.
Whether this is a gift is very debatable.
Off for a monthpluslong vacation in a week.
Where I'll actually have to do a fair bit of work since a new deadline has popped up.
But in between, I'll be taking a weeklong real vacation, with a fair bit of time on sandy beaches.
I lost my specs a month ago, and still haven't replaced them.
Fall is the season of revelations, I've learnt many many interesting things in the past month.
Its snowing!

I'm in love

2007-11-04T21:45:00.000-05:00

with the girl and the song...

Oh so true

2007-11-02T22:13:00.000-04:00

Most people start their day with work. And then relax at the end. You on the other hand, start your day by relaxing, and end it with work.

-- A labmate

SMS speak

2007-11-01T04:02:00.000-04:00

One of my pet peeves, which I can't quite stop ranting about is people using sms-speak to write non sms text. And today I saw one of the best examples of this genre in a comment by someone called "Filter Kaapi" in Baradwaj Rangan's review of No Smoking.

hvnt wtchd d movie yet..mebbe 2nite. 4m wer i see it, wuld dis movie figure on film skools’ curriculum wth ‘closely observd trains’ n ‘cries n whispers’ d types which ascribe an all2gdr difrnt meanin 2 cinema?
atlst we got an Indian film 2 write realms n realms of theory on nw!!

Maybe I'm just old. Maybe its because I've never used a cellphone for non trivial amounts of time. But still...is this really supposed to be readable? Is he trying to save time by typing in this language? Wouldn't his brain have to translate English to SMS-speak during processing? Or is this just supposed to be cool? And are vowels so expendable?