I was crossing the street yesterday, when a car was pulling out from an underground garage. He did not notice us, and pulled out onto the street as we were walking. It seemed like a legitimate mistake (giving him the benefit of doubt) Imagine a person with his neck craning to gain visibility when he is peering out from the car at some place much higher than his perch.

At this a man kicked the rear of the car really hard - and swore that this should teach him not to be rude!

Hmm.....if rudeness would teach a person not to be rude.........

Maybe, a war on terror would terrorize terrorists into not terrorizing innocent people!

God?

Ever since I had learnt to ask questions, this is one question that I have posed to myself and others the most. Better part of my childhood was spent believing in a God (thiest) that oversees, intervenes, grants and denies. Late teens were spent being an agnostic and devouring literature on arguements that talk for and against. Most of my adulthood- I decided I knew the answer and I thought of myself as an atheist.

Recently, I have come to believe that the question itself is irrelevant. The real question that I find interesting now is- "What belief empowers me?" and I have come to realise that being an agnostic empowers me. Ofcourse this is a personal choice, but I suppose in a way I found for myselt that being either a believer or a disbeliever were closed doors. In both states I assume I have the knowledge and stop questioning with an open mind. But when I decide that I actually don't know either way- I thirst for knowledge and seek different opinions.

Just a random rambling ...

King/Queen Puzzler

This is a puzzler that I got from someone a couple of weeks ago. It was quite interesting to solve it. Thought I will share the puzzler with you. If no one solves it, I will post the solution coming Tuesday...

Assume that there are 3 pairs of King/Queens in a shore. They have to cross this river with a boat which can accomodate a maximum of 2 people at a time. Following is the only rule that needs to be followed at either end of a shore: No Queen should be left alone (without her King) with another King (even if the other King's Queen is around)...

Focus

I happened to see this Successories poster after a long time which reads, "If you chase two rabbits, both will escape". It does make a lot of sense, atleast to me, since I am not really good at multi-tasking. For lack of tasks in my thought queue (thanks to Shoba who took up cooking today..:)), I decided to "focus".

If everyone works on just one single task, how good can one get by the end of their lifetime? It could begin with simple tasks such as dicing vegetables uniformly, growing a plant to the biggest size, touching the tongue to tip of nose, reading the maximum number of books and the list could go on and on. I think we all should formulate atleast one task that we should perfect over time. If you think about it, we already do that in everything we pursue. Just that we dont consciously realise that. I think, if we consciously focus on perfecting, we will certainly be magnitudes apart from any of our couterparts. Not so much for the bragging rights (which is ofcourse a bonus), but, we should be able to prove to ourselves that we are capable of doing more than what we think we can and execute it as well.

As this thought process came to its logical conclusion, I happened to see this poster from despair.com which reads, "Dreams are like rainbows. Only idiots chase them"..:)

Sequel to What-IF?

As a sequel to Mindframe's "What-If", I got thinking:

The flogging NSA is receiving for the fact that millions of phone numbers have been tapped, without judicial permission. Nothing has been analysed, but what-if it is used by the wrong people for the wrong means?

Sources that don't wish to be named (I am seeing this phrase so often these days, that I am wondering about free speech, but that is a whole different blog by itself) reveal that the NSA had the information tapped a day before 9-11 that the attack was planned. But the information was in Arabic, and by the time the translators got to decoding the message, the twin towers were already ruined. What-if they had decoded the message in time, could they pieced together the plot and prevented it?

I was at the Doctor's office yesterday, and the Dr told me she is building a comprehensive database with her patients photographs, so that she may easily be able to link the person when you call. The paranoid me, started thinking: What-if the information in this database is leaked, could it make ID theft easier? What-if the person subsitutes their own photograph in the database and produces photo IDs?

Then again, every now and then, I receive a letter from the Chief Accountant or Lawyer from Burkina Faso, South Africa, offering me a fabulous deal of 23 million USD, because somebody dies leaving the millions in the bank with no known beneficiary. I promptly delete it. What-if it is true? (Laugh out loud!)

Root Cause

I have always wondered how things would turn out to be when people say a lot of "what-if" stuff. What if I can go back in time? What if I have all the money in the world? What if I can fly? Also, there are a lot of questions in defining the being of a certain type of person. For example, how would you characterize a person who is all bad or who is all good? What if someone always chooses to do something that is not the normal way? I was trying to think through it at a very high level. I am sure I am deriving a lot of generalities. But, the key is in looking at a problem in a different dimension.

Let us consider a simple example. What can I possibly do if I go back in time? Will I be able to correct all the wrongs and do all the rights? If you think about it, you will realise that there is no optimal solution. If you do something right, something else is going to be wrong. If you think through each and every what-if type of questions, you will realise that things will certainly have a different outcome, but not the way one would wish for it to be, for we all assume that the universe is a constant when it is not...

Next, to the question of someone being all bad. How will you define someone to be all bad? If you write down the list of things that would characterise someone to be bad and draw a dependency chain between the different bad characteristics, you will realise that several things will be masked out. For example, if one aspect of "bad" is to not to talk to anyone, then anything that you would characterise in terms of interpersonal relationship will be masked out. Eventually, the perfect bad person will be an isolate. It is left as an exercise to you to think of who would be a perfect "good" person...:)...

To sum it up, if you recursively apply certain simple rules that characterise a particular person, then you will find that the entire behaviour will lead to a singleton. The converse should also be true. If you focus on some of the simple rules, then all the random outcomes that spawn out will evolve correspondingly. In other words, there is no complex problem. Or rather, any complex problem is a manifestation of a simple problem. Finding the root cause is the key !

Negative Attraction

I was listening to NPR today and I heard about the amplification effect caused by Global warming. One part of me thought about the negative effects of global warming and how bad things could happen. The other part didnt feel the same way..Have you ever felt that when you come across something terribly negative, almost always, there is something very interesting hidden underneath all the negativeness ? For example, when the temperature gets really cold and one is helpless and shivering, I cant help but notice how the body is built by nature to shiver to generate heat. Another example is the baby's crying. I heard that the baby's cry is designed by nature to make sure that you cant ignore it or get to sleep. Infact, one of the torture that is used for prisoners is to generate the baby's cry randomly when they sleep. Okay, bear with me on this one more example... I was just kidding... I hope you get the point.

Anyway, in the Arctic, the polar ice cap melting is one thing. But, it seems to create a temperature amplification as well. The ice caps in the arctic reflect a large portion of light that falls on earth. When the ice melts, it exposes water which doesnt reflect the light as much as the ice caps do, thus causing the temperature to rise even faster. And, all it takes is to trip the temperature to slightly above 32F inorder to melt the ice. Many of you might think, Yeah, Yeah, as if its going to happen tomorrow... May be, it wont happen tomorrow...Day After Tomorrow ?

Say what?

The house-fly is a big nuisance and annoys me to no end. As a kid I was quite mean to many a fly and now thy are getting back at me. When they fuss around windows, I would trap them in a transparent cup and observe its reaction. And of course, I would let them go. But it was an interesting hobby because it as quite challenging to trap these in a cup. I had the fly-catching wisdom passed down by my brother who trained me about the flight-pattern of flies. I digress. But as I out-grew my childishness, the most I ever do is to shoo away the fly even if one sits on me.

Until recently, I thought they were annoying because they make that humming noise as they fly, and sit on you and move around etc, but I found there are some flies that bite. I didn't believe it when my husband said that. I ridiculed him, but one just bit me this morning. And they bite quite well. It was weird to get a fly-bite and also painful. The annoyance of a house-fly combined with the biting power of a mosquito. Thats a strange hybrid, I thought. Thankfully, they are less swift (like mosquitoes) and bulkier than the regular house-fly, so revenge is much easier. I learnt while browsing for biting-fly related topics that these biting flies are not house flies, rather these are stable flies, deer flies, horse flies etc. The key distinquishing feature is the proboscis of the house-fly, basically the house-fly does not have biting equipment.

I conclude that as annoying as they are, I prefer house-flies to biting stable flies.

Last names - the lighter side

Last names have always interested me as have car name plates. But let me stick to one topic to make it easy on the readers. The responses I hear when I say my name or hand my credit card/license to the person behind the counter are quite standard and must be quite intuitive to you as well. "oh! That's a long last name, how do you pronounce it" and about my first name "you have such a pretty name, what does it mean?" Its so cliche, I don't know whether the comments are for real. No, not the one about last name.

How many times have I asked someone what their last name meant? Brown, Coltrane, Farmer, Baker, Whitehead, Thatcher, Bush and the list goes on. Many of the last names seem to actually be professions, some identify colors it seems, and others god knows what their origin might be.

Some names certainly fancy my imagination. By itself these names may not evoke peeling laughter, but when used in the right context, they can evoke some levity - I let my imagination wander. The funniest (to me) by far, is the last name Roach."Mom, I am visiting the Roaches" or "Honey, I have invited the Roaches to dinner".

Or the last name Rice - "its a Rice-based diet", "the Price-y family got a new cadillac", "the new Bushes look terrible" and so on.

Disclaimer: I mean no offense to anybody with specific last names, this is just me being light-headed (as usual) and silly.

Cost of getting things done ...

I was browsing through an year old IEEE Spectrum and the news that caught my attention was the article on Hydrogen based fuel. From a layman perspective, it is very attractive. Hydrogen is available in abundance. Once you produce hydrogen and liquefy it and burn it as a fuel, it will produce steam which in turn gets put back into atmosphere. With such an ideal picture, why isnt such a technology being adopted for mass consumption? The reason lies in the cost involved... (storing, transporting and creating a new infrastructure). It is not that I am against hydrogen based fuel. I am just talking about the cost involved. If hydrogen based fuel would cost us $10/gallon equivalent of gas, will we buy it? How much will we be willing to pay ? Anything less than the current gas price?

The important issue at hand is the real cost. For example, if you can get gold somewhere around 10 miles under the earth, does it make sense to get the gold ? Same is true with the cost of venturing into anything. At a very high level, a lot of times, things seem a lot simpler and easier than what it really takes to get it done. Why am I suddenly talking about all this stuff? If you havent guessed already, which I am sure you havent..:)..Yes, I am talking about Shoba's achievement of completion of her MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. I know what it takes (some CP..;)) to complete an MS from Stanford. It is hard. Not just from an academic sense, but also in terms of the dedication and discipline it takes to sustain the momentum. You've been a constant inspiration to everyone around you. And, I salute you for this monumental achievement....

Ek..Ek..Ek...

Year: 1996
Place: City of Joy

Little background before I enter into this story. I along with 8 others were the selected few to be positioned in City of Joy during our first job.

Being from the great state of Tamil nadu, most of us "choose" not to take up hindi in our school. Only 2 out of those 8 had any level of expertise in hindi. There was this little problem. Bengalis share our passion for language and decided not to speak anything other than Bengali. Life was not difficult in our office, since it was multilingual anyway. But at home, it is whole another issue.

While we dealt with neighbours in universal sign and hinglish language (and with their beautiful daughters in eye language), it did not work that well with doodh-walas and dobhi-walis. So, we decided to invent a plan. We (6 of us whose combined hindi knowledge is slightly lower than 6 month old north indian baby) decided to put one of the only 2 hindi speakers to be our liasons to day-to-day world.

Ofcourse, we wanted to interview both of them before offering the position and was devicing set of questions. But one guy dropped out of the race (fearing rejection?) and left the decision to be unanimous and unopposed.

We put our liason-dude to test the very next day. Dhobi-lady walked in to get our clothes. Go dude, we all blessed him. "Guys, if you are in the hall, she may ask something in hindi to you and you may be embarrased so why don't you guys stay in your rooms", our liason told us.
We thought that was very thoughtful of him and stayed in and continued watching the movie.

Half way through the movie, we could hear our friend still talking to that lady. Not to invade into his privacy, we continued. He came and announced that his first task was successful. We teased him about his long chat he had. (Secretly admiring his hindi speaking ability)

Next week came and we are all ready with our next load of clothes(almost 50 of them). And by now, we started trusting our friend's ability. We got the same instruction from him to go to our room. We suspected something J (jollu) is going on and checked in to our room.

After what seemed like an hour, we sent one of our spy to see what exactly is happening. And we all put our ears to the wall and started listening. What we heard made even the hindi-language babies in us to roll on the floor and laugh our a** off. It was stream of "Ek..Ek..Ek..". One Ek for every cloth :)

We had two options,
1) to tease the hell out of him (that means he will not do the work)
2) Keep quiet and keep the teasing for later.

We prudently chose the latter. Aur aaj tak har ek baar usko "Ek Ek" ke bare mein yaad
dilate hain! (I am Prathmik First class you know)

Now this story is told to so many people so, I won't be surpised if you heard this from one of us somehow in past 10 years :)

Note:
1) Just for the record, he later excelled and started using Panch & Ek combination to convey
the numbers
2) I got the Hindi sentence about from my wife and I totally got the meaning wrong (I blame the
government)
3) Most of it is a work of fiction based on some truth ofcourse. (Aka Da Vinci Code)

What is your pick?

" Sir..I can sell you these legs ( wooden legs ) for 50 dollars . I bought it for my mom. She rarely used it.It is in very good shape"
"No thanks..I have legs of my own for now."
" No sir..The desert is filled with mines. You can lose yours anytime.You would have to wait 1 year to get a new leg from Red Cross."


" And that would be Sir Issac Newton. He was also a grandmaster of the Priori"
" You, my dear was the secret that the priori was protecting"

"Ennaku therinjadellam engappa, appuram andha padiayyapa..nee po paapa, illena pesuven cheapa.."

Dialogues from three different movies that I watched yesterday..

One was a reality jolt. You worry about a sprain in the leg when there are people who have their legs blown out by mines and really scramble and fight for artificial ones. - Movie : Kandahar ( Afghanistan in the Taliban era)

One was a thriller. You get lost in the world of mystery, christianity, mary magdalene ,priori. One of those movies where subtitles would certainly help if you have not read the book. Movie: Da vinci Code

The last one....Hmmm..I am not sure if it was a comedy, thriller, mystery or HORROR. I got too scared and could not watch it after 15 minutes.The dialogues were amazing though as you can see from the sample. Being T.Rajendaran' movie, lot of rhyming going on .
Movie: "Kadhal Azivadhilai"

For Kandahar, we rented a DVD, Davinci code - we went to the theater, Kadhal Azivadhilai - was transmitted in Sun TV. The line up obviously shows the interest. I would prefer watching a comedy or a thriller anyday but I think we all need to watch a movie like Kandahar every now and then to understand the pain that people elsewhere undergo and get a huge REALITY jolt.
What is your pick?

Stable Marriage Problem

I came across these terms recently. No, it is not about "real" stable marriages...Thats a generalisation that I wouldnt venture into. This is called the bi-partite matching problem. What the hell is that?

To simplify things, let us assume that you have 5 men and 5 women. Assume that each woman have a ranked list of preferences in marrying from among the 5 men. There are some interesting conditions to ponder. The first condition is about pairing. How do we pair the men and women in the best way possible so that the ranked list of each women is honored and everyone is treated fairly. The other condition is a little twist to the situation. At any time, one could assume that only a subset of men really propose a woman and the woman is given the choice of selecting only among the proposed set of individuals. The other condition ( a more realistic assumption..;) which contradicts the previous assumption, but added to make the problem simpler) is that each man proposes to the set of all women available (in this case 5 women) hoping that he will gain acceptance from atleast one. The final condition is that more than one woman has the same preferred man in their ranked list, or rather, the same ranked list for all men.

The solution to this problem is only mathematically interesting and I dont want to delve into that. But, I was thinking about the reality of the situation. Comprehending solutions for mathematical fairness is the ideality that a society would want to strive for. While, in reality, fairness is a very subjective term and preferences are a subjective term too. Quantifying subjective terms to derive mathematical solutions might only make a scheduler problem get solved. In the global scheme of things, I could only hope that each scheduler cycle depicts a life cycle and over many cycles, fairness is achieved for all the contentious resources in the society...

Blogdiac..?

When asked to peruse a two page document
"Hey! Shouldn't that be an "is" instead of "are"? "
When asked about the results of a facial..
"Hey! I think the beautician could have done a better job close to your chin there"
Welcome to the world of criticism. I call it the world of nitty gritty details. I commend myself on being a good critic , ofcourse blaming it on being a virgo. We call ourselves perfectionists too. Not that we are perfect all the time. Again, we have a virgo clan at work who may not keep their desks in perfect shape but think we have the perfect programs written. We like being perfect where it matters. Ha Ha..Linda Goodman says that Virgoes are not social animals and dont feel comfortable in a big crowd. When someone asks me about being aloof in a party, I blame it on being a virgo. If I had been a scorpio or a cancerian ,maybe things would have been different. If I find some trait not known to be a virgoan characteristic, I blame it on being a cusp and some of the libran sneeking in from time to time, though indecisiveness is not one of them for sure.
No, I am not blabbering...thats neither a virgoan nor a libran trait..just trying to write down my thoughts on being a virgo and a good critic and patting myself on the back...and to blog after such a long hiatus.
An interesting tidbit : I somehow dont get along well with virgo males...maybe 'coz they criticize too much and look for all the nitty gritty details..:-)

Confusions...

I always wondered about people who could solve tough and confusing problems. Not because of the fact that they are smart. But, more due to the fact that their mind is involved in solving confusions all along. If you plot it in a time line of things, it is intuitive to believe that, given a problem, it will take a finite time to solve it. So, a given person who solves a problem will also be confused for a finite time before he finds the solution to the problem. If one's job were to solve a series of problems and assuming that when one problem is solved, there is always another problem to be dealt with, the state of confusion should persist throughout. Does that mean that people who solve problems are always in a state of confusion? Does that also imply that people who dont solve any problems dont get confused about anything? Is that why "Ignorance is Bliss"? I dont know...:)