An Inconvenient Truth

I am not a huge fan of movies. Every once in a while, a movie comes along, that brings about the following conversation in our household:

Man of the house: Saumya.....I've played the movie. Could you come and watch it?
Self: I can see it from the kitchen, while I am loading the dishwasher.
The titles start, and the man of the house glimpses in my direction, and he cannot even see me, so, how could I be watching a movie?: Can you come here now?
Unfazed, I reply that I can hear the conversation while wiping the floor.
Man of the house: GRRRRRRRRRR....No, this time you are coming here and watching it properly.
Self: What's the BIG Deal??? I don't enjoy movies as much as you do - so you go ahead, I'll join you in a moment.
10 minutes later, the tone hints on exasperation: For heaven's sake, come here, and watch the movie.
Self: Okay, okay...am almost done. I just have to <insert 6 totally unrelated, mundane task list here>

It is at this point in the proceedings when you can see a grown man pull a grown woman from the kitchen, and switch off the kitchen light. The grown man then follows aforementioned grown woman closely to ensure no u-turns are taken, and plays the movie. Usually, I sulk for the first few minutes before getting immersed in the movie. Invariably, I end the movie by thanking him for making me watch the movie. You see, my husband undertakes great pains to select movies I like and am sure to enjoy. I really appreciate that - I really do! He not only knows my taste, he actually makes me enjoy my life.

After scene above was enacted successfully on Friday night, we sat down to watch Al Gore's documentary: An Inconvenient Truth.

Let me just say this: my thought process has been altered. I don't think I see the world with the same eyes anymore. To those of you who have not yet seen this movie, please do so as soon as possible.

We owe it to ourselves, and our children.

I won

I have been wanting to share this good news from last week. Yes, finally I have won an award. I never had any presumptions about my blogging and was really thrilled when my name was announced. I saw it first on TV in CNN. YES ! I finally made it to the cover of TIMES. Now, what were those guys thinking? What are they trying to accomplish by catering to our collective narcissism? Does this show how irrelevant the Person of the Year award has become?.
Confused !?@X - Check out Times Person of the year

Time-Space Tail...

We all have heard about different facets of self realisation. One could argue that trying to know oneself is a tough process since we may not try to acknowledge our negatives even if we might acknowledge it internally. As always, corners can be cut and we can obviously find situations where we can still use the concept. I think, one way of self realisation is to be self-aware. For example, look at situations where we are prepared for a given interaction, like attending an interview, addressing a crowd, talking to a group, etc., In such situations, we are not only prepared to say what we have to say but are also prepared for the other person's response. When we are prepared for other's responses, we are not emotionally attached to "us" but rather the situation and that makes a big difference in keeping us more rational. Especially, in professional scenarios, as most of you might agree, EQ takes a person to greater heights than IQ.

One of the take-aways from a recent course that I took was this. There are a lot of soft-skills that one could master easily. Though skills such as leadership are perceived to be natural, studies have shown that following key set of characters can groom the leader in you. Though the initial bringup and socio-economic factors play a major role in influencing someone, practicing a skill consciously can get you to greater heights, much greater than what you might imagine. Easier said than done..But then, nothing is easier... Doing nothing is the easiest decision one could make to avoid getting into lot of troubles. But, is it what we do ? I think, we all leave a trail of legacy behind us. Even if we dont do anything, we will leave a legacy that we never did anything..:)... And, thinking about legacy at a ripe age is not going to make a difference to the way we live. So, I think living for what we truly believe in, living for what everyone wants us to be remembered for, living a life that makes a difference in other's lives is important and will leave a trail for who you really are. So, to grow a long distinct tail (of legacy), Self-Awareness is the key.

Another realisation on running...

I know you folks hear a lot about running and may be bored to death. But, I have to write about it since that's all I am doing these days..:).. Well, I recently had a different perspective on running and I thought I will share it with you all.

If you think about long distance running, I think there are only 2 factors that are very vital. One is the cardio factor and the other is the muscle factor. It is all about sustaining a higher heart rate for longer periods of time and having the muscle power to endure the distance. What it means is that, for being a good long distance runner, one need not run several times a week, but rather, mix it up with other activities which can get your heart rate to increase or get your running muscles worked up. Running performance will be an immediate by-product!

Kiriket

Staying up all night to watch a game of cricket has never been a cause for concern for me, even when I have to to go to work the morning after. I still remember staying awake the whole night to watch India take on Pakistan in the 2003 world cup. Fifty of us (including 3 pakistanis) crammed into a relatively small living room in rural Kansas to watch one of the most intense rivalries on the field. It was like watching the game live. The atmosphere was electric and every boundary, wicket or something eventful was greeted by thuderous roars. Luckily the apartment complex was filled with "desi" grad students and parallel shows were being telecast in other apartments. Hmm well the end result was of course favourable. Today, the environment was different but the outcome was the same. I was all alone and did not have live telecast but rather had to depend on text commentary through Cricinfo. But the fact was it was so much fun to watch both Australia regain the ashes and India outplay South Africa. Hmm..luckily I'm on a break now, so waking up at 4 in the afternoon can be forgiven (lol). Cricket is cricket. NFL/NBA will never get me to stay awake the whole night but a good game of Cricket sure will.

Decaf Coffee

I recently heard from a friend that Decaf coffee need not necessarily be a good alternative for coffee lovers after all. Apparently, there are 2 processes involved in decaffeinating coffee. The Swiss Water process cleans up the coffee seeds with high temperature water and steam to get rid of the caffeine. The other process uses solvents like dichloromethane (methylene chloride) to take the caffeine out of the coffee seeds. It has been proven that methylene chloride can cause tumor in humans.

One of my friend wrote to both Starbucks and Peet's coffee and he found that most of the decaf varieties use the methylene choride solvent. Their story is that, after treating with the solvent, they roast the coffee seeds at a significantly higher temperature (400 F, boiling point of methylene chloride is around 114 F) and hence shouldnt have any problems since the solvent will be vaporised. But, it is highly possible that there are residues (in the order of ppm (parts per million)). The reason why the water processed beans are not common is because they are not as flavorful as the solvent processed ones. So, if you are one of those people who think that decaf is the way to go and consume it in large quantities, be aware of this.

Following is the list of decaf coffee from Peet's. They have a total of 6 decaffeinated coffees. Decaf House, Decaf Special Blend, Decaf French, Decaf Sumatra, and Decaf Sierra Dorada all are processed with a "direct contact method". Decaf Mocca-Java is water processed. In Starbucks, Decaf Komodo Dragon Blend is the only water processed and all the others (House Blend - Decaf, LightNote Blend - Decaf, Shade Grown Mexico - Decaf, Sumatra -Decaf, Espresso Roast - Decaf, Caffè Verona - Decaf, Starbucks Decaf Christmas Blend) are solvent based.

From Newyork Times

Read these interesting exerpts from Newyork times and though of sharing

Art & Science (NY title: Air-Index impressionism)
Scientists are trying to figure out pollution levels in 1900 using Monet's impressionist paintings during that time. They say, he accurately drew the light, color, clouds and sun position. It may give lot of scientific data for the period which has no statistics.
But some are little worried about Monet's affinity towards pink (which apparently he tend to use mildly in his paintings)

MIT Geeks (NY Title: Ambient Walkman)
Criticism: iPod/headphones tend to tune people out of surrounding completely. (isolated)
Vawter, Graduate student from MIT media lab, is designing a headphone which has mike & speaker. It takes the background noise and convert into acceptable music background (using DSP). He even think of converting the noise and matching to the music you are hearing.
**Geeks!!

Ballot - Lottery
If Osterloh from Arizona have his way, there will be more than one winner in the state elections.
Yes. He is suggesting to print lottery numbers on the ballot and pick a winners from the voters to increase the voter count.
And he suggested using state lottery unclaimed funds for this purpose.
***Some argue against it. I wonder why?

Booemrang Drone - Remote controlled spy plane.
Let me leave to fellow bloggers to guess what it is!

Candid Candy

What a paradox that 'Candy' and 'Candor' sound so similar, yet mean entirely different things. In fact, could there be such a thing as Candid Candy? Interestingly, these two words are etymologically different. Candy traces its origins to the French word, 'Candi' and the Arabic 'Qandi' made from crystallised sugar 'Qand'. Maybe that is the origin of names for the Indian sweet Kalakhand too.

Candor, on the other hand also traces its origin to French - 'Candeur' and Latin 'Candor'. Candor implies the absence of sugar-coating, or an honest opinion.

While I value candor, I love candy, and I need both in my life.

Looking up at Lookups

Being in the networking world, the only thing that I have been hearing about over the past several years has been the term "packets-in and packets-out", day in and day out. When I get to work, invariably the hallway tech talk will be about why packets are not coming out or why packets come out at a rate less than predicted or why the packets coming out mismatch with the packets coming in and so on.

If you are not onto internet technologies or routers, the only two things that you need to know is that any networking device (router, switch, etc.,) looks up for a destination address and sends it across accordingly. In other words, a lookup is made for the destination address and the packet gets routed until the final destination is reached (if you use windows machine, go to command prompt and type "tracert www.yahoo.com" and you will see the routers through which you get to yahoo's webpage. You can obviously try it for different websites as well). It kept me wondering. I think, we as humans, fundamentally do just that. Ofcourse, we bring in a lot of associativity to the contexts. But, at the lowest level, all we do is just store and lookup information. One could contend that we do perform processing of information as well, but when I think about it more, I think processing can in turn be categorized into a bunch of lookups based on information already stored in our database. In networking world, the one thing that most people work on is, how fast we can do lookups using the least amount of storage and thus cost. Just a rationale to the human context is that, our brain stores all the information that we care or we dont and processes items so fast using the least energy (when compared to a machine). Just a reality check on how far technology is off.

What do you want?

We all spend a lot of time in different types of organizations associating ourselves with different people. We have people whom we look up to, as a role model, as a leader. When I say role models and leaders, it indirectly maps to the company that one works for as well. What does one look for in a company? What does one look for in a manager/leader/role model? I had different answers to these questions based on different times along my career. However, the questions still mystifies me. Is it the money? Is it job satisfaction? Is it the quality of people around you? Is it about how trust worthy your leaders are? Is it about how friendly the environment is? I understand that everyone would like to have the best of all worlds. Without revealing what I consider to be the most important thing, I was hoping to hear some perspectives from people on what they think are important based on importance levels.... What do you all think?

Simpson's Paradox

Lemme talk about something which I thought was interesting. The best way to go about it would probably be through an example.
The subject for todays study is cricket. To be more specific batting averages and judging who is the better player. A particular statistical anomaly of interest is as follows. Sometimes we might find that the success rates of individual players over a period of time (individuals seasons), might be significantly better compared to the seasons combined. This seems like a mathematical impossibility! FOr instance, when compared in isolation or season by season, if Sachin Tendulkar had a lower average in both the 2004 and 2005 season as compared to say Mike Hussey, then how is it possible that When you combine both the 2004 and 2005 seasons, Sachin has a better average??

Let me illustrate with a rather simplistic example.

Sachin

2004 Season - Average 50
2005 Season - Average 40

Hussey

2004 Season - Average 60
2005 Season - Average 45

A simple examination would indicate that Hussey seems to be the better player and combining the 2004 and 2005 seasons would still imply that Hussey has the better average. But this need not be the case. Think about this.

Sachin

2004 Season - 100 games scoring 5000 runs at an average of 50 runs
2005 Season - 10 games scoring 400 runs at an average of 40 runs

Total combined average for both seasons ==> 5400/110 = 49 runs per game

Hussey

2004 Season - 10 games scoring 600 runs at an average of 60
2005 Season - 100 games scoring 4500 runs at an average of 45

Total combined average for two seasons ==> 5100/110 = 46 runs per game

Therefore despite the fact that the averages for each individual year are higher for Hussey, combining the two seasons leads to a reversal in inference. The key here is the difference in weights placed when calculating the averages. This gives us important insights into how to think about statistics.