Breaking News

Hello and welcome to this week's episode of "All that you can think".

After a long period in hibernation, there are reports of unusual seismic activity emanating from a human brain in the SFO area. At present a consensus cannot be arrived at on the possible effects of such frenetic activity in brainwaves. Experts speculate that an alien attack could be responsible. Sources from the neighborhood seem to confirm the alien angle. As the world is coming to grips with this unusual activity, several questions remain. Why did the alien chose "brainwaves" as their source of attack? Is this likely to be the first and last or do we have more to follow? Has the attack ended? Are we likely to see more activity in the near future? If you have answers to these questions, please feel free to write to us at "All that you can think".

Reporting for "All that you can think" - Mad Max

(Very) Short story

This is the story of two aliens

I say we will wake him up now. It is just 4.26AM, the first one said.
I have a better idea. Let me make him write story about us, the second one said with playful smile

He started typing..."This is the story of two aliens"

Walk-in Traffic court

To cut a long story short, I got a red light violation ticket (381$) for taking right turn on red without stopping. (For those who don't know, it has to be treated like Stop sign) Since the ticket cost is high and I see a reasonable chance of reducing the fine (based on feedback from friends) I decided to fight it out (at least beg it out) at court.

1) When you get a ticket you have 3 options
a) Plead guilty & pay the full fine through mail and request traffic school
b) Plead not guilty by written declaration. i.e. Mail your case and hope you will get concession
c) Plead guilty - but try & reduce the fine by appearing in the court.

2-a) If you are choosing option 1, it costs you money but saves your time. And if you can apply for Traffic school then you can clear your points

2-b) If you are opting to plead not guilty by written declaration, then write your reasoning and sent it by mail. If accepted then you are free. If not accepted you are left with option a or c

2-c) If you choose c, then you should either get a court date of go to walk in court (in Alameda county it was on Tue & Thursdays).

3) Based on the suggestions to go early, I reached the court by 6.45AM for 8.30AM court. Apparently, they open they issue 50 (or so) tokens at 8AM and inform others to go home.
- There were atleast 70 people in front of me. I hoped that 20+ people would have come to support their dear ones. I figured out at 8AM that I was 10 people away from getting the coupon. 10 poor souls did come to support their friends :)

- The second attempt was more painful, I took a chance by going at 7.45AM on a very cold day (with mercury struggling to get out of his 0 degree celcius position) and was 2 people away from getting the token. (Damn! if only...) But I ended up taking the court date which was given a well 8 months away.

- The third attempt was planned to perfection. Thick jacket to negate the cold & Ipod to kill the boredom. Well almost perfect prepartion, apparently Ipods are not that useful without head phones :) I had to call Saumya to bring in the Ipod headsets and hot coffee. I reached the court at 6.15AM this time and had 30-35 people in front of me.
Tidbits:
- Afgani women in Traffic court line are no different from Indian women in water queue. They get upset if someone tries to cut the line. Even scary(?) looking Blacks were little bit scared
- Polish (or some Easter european) moms are identical to Indian moms. They show lot of affection but don't shy away from putting their kid in their place :)
- Camaraderie between people of different race, age and strata are easy to build when you have one common enemy - Cop or Traffic ticket :)

4) Finally I got the much awaited coupon. I entered a court for the first time in my life. Clear instructions were given on dos & donts by a professional clerk. Tape was played to tell what are the options we have (Plead not guilty, Plead guilty and No contest)
No Contest: It is almost like pleading guilty except for one thing. If someone sue you for the same reason you are pleading guilty (like Red light violation etc) they can use your guilty plea against you whereas with no contest, they cannot do that.
In that sense, no contest is better

5) Since they don't have appointed judge, they got a temporary judge that day. Only bad thing about it was, that judge relies more on the secretary (who happened to be a stricter one)

6) People are called in batches of 3-4 (with everyone else watching from their seats) to sit in front of the judge. One by one they were told their ticket reason and asked what they want to do.

7) New court date was given for people pleading not guilty (bcoz this judge was temporary - I guess)

8) Pleading guilty was the only option and the secretary was telling 381$ is a mandatory fine for red light violation. That means there is no chance of reducing that fine

9) In some random order I was called as 10-15th person. I pleaded "No contest" and then told the judge that I was taking right turn (and not shooting the red light) and still got the 381$ fine. Before the secretary could chime in, I said, my friends came and got their fines reduced.
The judge requested the picture/mail and after investigation reduced the fine to 125$
(First one on that day to get their fine reduced). I was happy that the time spent meant something :)

Here are my take

- Given the circumstances, it was definitely a good experience (not that I would look for one)
- If it is red light shoot (not right turn) OR <100$ ticket, then you don't gain anything for that 4 hour wait.
- If there is a traffic school option (by mailing), then paying 250$ more is not a bad option

Bottom line: DONT GET A TICKET! It is not worth it!

What are you gonna do?

(Speech by Alpacino from the movie, Any Given Sunday (1999))

"You find out life's this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game - life or football - the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don't quite make it. One half second too slow, too fast and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They're in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when add up all those inches, that's gonna make the f--king difference between winnin' and losin'! Between livin' and dyin'! I'll tell ya this: In any fight, it's the guy who's willin' to die who's gonna win that inch. And I know if I'm gonna have any life anymore, it's because I'm still willin' to fight and die for that inch. Because that's what livin' is! The six inches in front of your face!! Now I can't make you do it. You got to look at the guy next to you. Look into his eyes! Now I think you're gonna see a guy who will go that inch with you. You're gonna see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team because he knows, when it comes down to it, you're gonna do the same for him! That's a team, gentleman! And, either we heal, now, as a team, or we will die as individuals. That's football, guys. That's all it is. Now, what are you gonna do?"

Have a wonderful new year !

Obsolete Skills

As I was about to dump the paper with the hotel to airport direction written on it, I remembered a distant friend who used to keep all the direction print-outs he ever took in his car and reuse them. But in these days of navigation systems, what will you do with that piled print-outs? I know I know the organized skill set is applicable universally. But still...

There are people who can recite Shakespeare's play without missing a word, remember all the cricket score, be proficient in one specific skill etc. What will they do when the world changed and lost interest in that skill? The same skill once was praised, respected and admired. The same skill which provided positive feedback to their self-esteem.

Of course there are some core competencies which led you to develop these specific skill sets which will make you adapt and learn new ones based on the trend or there are timeless skills which could be learnt. Or we can stop caring about what others think and learn & repeat (even if there is no one to listen)

Even in our careers when we step out of our comfort zone we may have the same question hanging around. Is our skill relevant or obsolete? But again in careers the time it takes to become irrelevant is little longer and hence we may be safe.

New year coming around which triggers the resolution part of the Brain which was rusty with lack of use for an year :) So the ramblings..!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Spotlight

I went to a store over the weekend. Things were all glittery with christmas festivities represented everywhere by stripes of red and white. I thought to myself, the american flag is red and white striped too. Is there any relation as to why US of A and Santa chose the same color? Anyway, I completed my shopping, after a long 10 minutes of stroll of which 90% was spent in trying to figure out the aisle to find what I wanted. Finally, I found my way to the paying counter. The lady at the counter was wearing christmassy suit to reflect joy when in reality was looking rather serious. May be, she just wanted to get the hell out of there and find her solace at her home with her family and friends. She started scanning all the items. "Is that all, Sir", she asked with a monotonicity that only folks at the counter can come up with. I said, "No, thanks"... As I said it, I wondered, why is there a custom to add thanks to an otherwise, display of negative answer. She was trying to sell me more which meant more profit to the store. It is not like she was going to give something for free? A simple "No" would have been sufficient, I thought. While my thoughts meandered over my own revelations of the world, she interrupted again. She asked me, "Would you like to buy one of these cards. They are for Children Education.." and the remaining words just vaporized before it reached my already feeble ear. I looked around and everyone in the line were looking at me. The guilty consciousness in my mind kicked in. It seemed like everybody was looking at me trying to convey something with their faces. A voice sounded in my head, "Aren't you going to help out a kid who probably doesnt have parents and the only thing in the entire world for the kid to look upto is to study and create a life?"... Not that I am averse to making donations, but, the lady at the counter pulled a weak nerve of mine which fluttered and cried out for help in the quietest way possible manifesting itself as a thoughtful facial expression. As it did, I couldnt help but notice the bold "$1" sign in the card. It is nothing compared to a lot of insignificant things that I do for myself... It probably costed them atleast 5-10 cents to just print the card. The kid's picture in the card looked pitiable. Without much thought, I said "Ok". I started thinking, how many times am I coerced into doing something "good" only when put on spotlight? How many times have I volunteered myself into doing some act of goodness just out of my own will? Is it just that we do good things just so that we will look like a better person in other's eyes. Does it matter?

Trafficking...

I am someone who likes to understand concepts through analogies. If I can't get to analyse a problem using an analogy that everyone can relate to, I will try to refrain working on it. The corollary is that, if someone cannot given me an analogy for a problem or solution, I will be more inclined to think that they dont have a clear understanding of the problem at hand...Anyway, being in the networking world and talking all about traffic engineering for a living, it is very logical for me to analyse these problems using the real life traffic. I found some of the results amusing...:)

While we have figured out how to get the internet traffic to get faster and more reliably decades ago, we are still getting stuck in our regular traffic to work. As you all know, a given networking link is characterized by how much traffic it can carry (bandwidth) and how much time it takes to carry (latency). Reliability is a relative word and I dont think it has much relevance to my following analysis. The question now is, what is the bandwidth of a freeway? Well, we measure network traffic is bits per second. For freeway, let us assume that it is cars per second. We could later change that definition to be passengers per second. For now, assume that there is 1 passenger per car.

Let us do some math. At 65 miles per hour speed, and an average car length of 5 meters, the number of cars per second is about 5.72, we can approximate it to 5 (since the trucks and the minimum gap between cars should be discounted for fairness). If we have 4 lanes, this comes to 20 cars per second or 1200 cars per minute. The two sided nature of the problem is that, the traffic is really heavy only 2 times in a day for around 6 hours. Provisioning the road to account for the peak case is the obvious solution, but a bad one too. In the networking world, we call it bursty traffic. Let us say, we want to double the traffic in a given freeway, what are our options? The obvious ones are (i) Make the cars twice as fast (ii) Make the road twice as wide, change it from 4 to 8 lanes (iii) Accomodate 2 passengers on each car (iv) Make the car half the length. Knowing what we know, (i) & (iv) are not easy to do, (iii) is the equivalent of enforced car pooling and (ii) has a cost associated. We could have different priorities with high priority cars or vehicles being the ones carrying more passengers versus ones with smaller number of passengers which in turn can transport more passengers per second since the larger passengers are grouped into a single lane. We could have alternative modes like trains and hope that passengers would take trains instead of cars, in which case the problem centers around how many passengers we can transport per second.

Ideally, if we make a big enough vehicle that can accomodate all the passengers to a given destination city, that is the best we can do. I just checked up that BART service here in bay area can carry a comfortable load of 700 people in a 750 feet train (225 metres) at an average speed of 36 mph (considering stops at stations). Now, if we had enough trains to carry people around, the ratio between car-passengers/second and train-passengers/second is 20 versus 50 passengers. Only a 2.5 speedup and the extra wait time in station to get into the train and back. Again, we can try to optimize by double-decking the train since adding additional railway line can be quite expensive, assuming the rails can handle it. Also, having non-stop service can increase the speed by 2 or 3 fold which can give benefits too. Remember that, the more the wait time to get to a train, the latency increases. In some cases, the bandwidth can look great if we wait long enough to accomodate as many passengers as we can. But, the time to get to a destination will suffer terribly.

Now, if you would substitute cars with packets, passengers with cells (fixed size units which makes up a packet), transmission rate or capacity to bandwidth, the same kind of problems exist in networking and the same kind of problems are applicable there too. The parts that are easy in networking are that, creating wider lanes with high capacity is becoming increasingly easy and cost effective. The part that has always been difficult is to handle burstiness of traffic. Though there are many solutions, optimality is questionable. Another thing that is possible in networking is the use of a scheduler. If we exactly knew which routes were free and how many people want to get to a given destination ahead of time, we can allocate their paths for optimality. But then, when everybody is bursting in all at the same time, scheduler optimality is not guaranteed and that is still a problem. Well, that's all folks. You have survived yet another round of my random rambling session...Congratulations!

Rice and Turkey

What did you guess from the title? If you had guessed that this blog has something to do with thanksgiving, you are wrong. If you want more clues, checkout the following headlines.. I couldnt control my laughter as I read the following google news headlines today...

Rice in Baghdad as Tensions With Turkey Rise

Iraq Kurdish leader snubs Rice over Turkey raid

The other one that I found interesting was...

WHO probes Pakistan's first bird flu death

Who cares? WHO cares...;)

Genes

I've been reading about genes lately (inspired by the book "Next" by Michael Crichton). It is interesting and scary at the same moment to think about the way gene studies can emerge. My aim is to present a simple framework to think about gene research and it's possible outcomes. By no means, I can call myself anywhere close to knowing how it all works out together. So, take my words with a grain of salt and pepper and some sambar podi...:)

The fundamental question is, what determines us to be the way we are as humans, the way we look and think and so on? It was found that, proteins in our body (consider this as a big molecule) is composed of a linear array of amino acids. Based on the proportion and alignment of these amino acids, one can determine the answers to the aforementioned fundamental questions. The linear sequence of amino acids (the strand of DNA as it is often referred) forms the so called genomic sequence. There are approximately 30000 genes in the human body. Doesnt look like a very large number now, does it? As a matter of fact, chimpanzees and humans only differ in gene counts by a meagre 1.5% if you compare the absolute number of genes. As a matter of fact, an earthworm has around 20000 genes. So, what does these count really mean? If they differ only by a few percentage, why do humans have an order of magnitude difference ?

For a s/w programmer, one way to visualise is to consider a protein coded gene as a big library module with individual strands of amino acids as various functions/methods within the library. For a given individual or an organism, at any time, only a few functions's run. Each function has the ability to call functions from other libraries too. So, if there are 2 protein-coded genes which have a certain composition of genomic sequence, they could influence each other. So, the net effect is that there are various combinations in which they could interact. Environmental stimuli can also affect the way the genes work. In humans, one can think of it as more functions running which in turn fires a lot more stuff in the genomic sequence than other organisms.

Once we have that framework of thinking, the next question is where do we stand in terms of gene research. One central goal is to identify all the gene sequ
ences, which in human's case has mostly been done and named. The next thing is to associate each gene with it's associated set of characteristics and functions that it can do (partially done). Then, the third thing is to study the association between different genes (very much in the development phase). If we can do all three, then, for a given disease or ailment, we can figure out the gene sequence that causes it and then remove it or suppress it from the system. This series of study is about how an already grown adult can be fixed if there is a gene related issue.

The other aspect of the study of genes is cloning. As you might know already, the embryonic stem cell contains the entire set of protein coded genes which later determines characteristics of human beings. This concentrated potion that contains all our information can be obtained from the blood from umbilical cord during birth. If you have embryonic stem cell, you could take an egg and suppress it's default gene-signatures and inject embryonic cells to produce a clone which carries the same gene signature as yours. Think of it, you can pretty much take an egg and populate it with the genes that are termed "good" ones and create a new being... What if you dont have the embryonic stem cell? What if the blood was not frozen and stored at the time of birth? Scientists have figured out that, they can use skin cells and still construct a clone... So, if that is the case with humans, what about inserting a gene or two from humans to other organisms to see if they can do what we do, like speaking or learn math or whatever? That is proven to be possible too... Infact, just yesterday, I read an article that says that, scientists were able to populate cats with a fluorescent causing gene which makes them glow in night (don't ask me who in their real mind would do such a thing...ofcourse, it is the koreans...no pun intended..:))...

A lot of cloning related study is dangerous from the perspective that it could cause off springs with all kinds of defects and at that point, it is newly created human life at stake, which is why it is highly debated...The proponents claim that, one could develop organs which are a direct match to an individual and do transplants....Till a decade ago, what I used to imagine as fiction seems to be transforming into reality. Movies like Gattaca which focuses on gene based profiling is probably not far from future... Is it good or bad or ugly? Only time will tell.... You can too...:)

Enjoy!!!!!!

Dubai: A Reminscence

I am very reluctantly back in the US after the most invigorating holiday I've taken in perhaps a whole decade. I visited my family in Dubai. While there, I could not help admiring the thought and planning that goes into making an inhospitable desert a place you would want to live in. The city has large expanses of greenery in state maintained parks, lots of trees and given that it is winter now, does not feel like a desert.

Just to give you a broad background of UAE. Seven emirates make up the UAE:Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Fujairah, Umm Al Quwain and Ajman. The emirates unite and elect a Prime Minister and President primarily for Foreign Affairs, but within the UAE, each of these Emirates is ruled by their respective Sheikhs. There is an election to the council, but election of the PM and President is based (typically) on the Economic wealth of the Emirate. Therefore, currently the Abu Dhabi ruler is the PM and the Dubai ruler is the President (or vice-versa!)

There are some things that I must mention with respect to Dubai. The vision and the effort to build Dubai into an inviting cosmopolitan city is fantastic.

1) The buildings are all nice looking. Most of them by themselves look good, but collectively they don't gel all the time. For example I saw cases where there was a Hawa mahal-like palace near a very swanky looking modern building. It was like Noor Jahan linking hands with Madonna - bad analogy, but you get the picture.

2) The tunnels or bypass roads have both sides of the walls lined with tiles. These tiles somehow give an illusion of driving through a rather large bathroom corridor, but that's just me!

3) Dubai is one of the few cities in the Middle East where purdah (i.e. the portion covering the face) is banned in Government offices. The women you see clad in robes do so of their own accord in this city.

4) The Arab nationals wear a spotless, clean WHITE robe. I was amazed to see not one of them had a crease or a speck of dirt on them. Apparently, my sister had the same doubt, and she asked somebody who works in an Arab family how they manage that. The lady confessed it is a full-time occupation just to clean the robes and maintain it at that sterling white at all times. If you ask me, you could pay a maid a month's salary just for that! I was also wondering why the men wore white robes, while the women wore black robes in a desert.

5) Dubai is undergoing growth pangs like any other city that has tripled its population in the last 5 years. The metro railway is under construction, and the city has been dug up through all major roads. The vision is to promote suburban areas, and encourage people to commute to Dubai for work. While this is being implemented, roads are clogged and parking is a nightmare.

6) Citation required here: Apparently, when the temperature hits 50 C, all construction workers need to be given the day off. Officially, the temperature had gone up to 49.2, but not 50 quite yet :)


Just a pic of a signboard!

Highlights of my trip (not necessarily in the order mentioned below)
Desert Safari
Jet Skiing
Ibn Batuta Mall
Al Ain trip
Khor Fakkan
Shopping
Al Sooq Al Rasheed

The Ibn Batuta Mall:
The mall is built on a sprawling 1.6 million sq ft space with parking for 4000 cars available. The mall is themed after 6 different countries: China ,India ,Persia ,Egypt ,Tunisia , Andalusia. Walking proved enjoyable in the mall, but after a couple of hours we discovered we had only covered 4 countries, so we beat the retreat passing up the mall areas looking like the other countries.


Al Ain & Khor Fakkan:
The trip to both places involved driving through towns built around an oasis. The beauty of the place if definitely unlike any other I've seen, spotted with Arabian architecture (like huge lanterns, pots in the middle of the road!) The beach water is inviting and warm, and all of us had quite a time. It was at Khor Fakkan that we went jet-skiing for the first time. I remember it like it was yesterday - the sea breeze, the salt water spray, and then getting hit by another scooter, and tumbling head first into the Arabian Sea!

Desert Safari:
Here is the one of the gems on the crown of my visit. This was so amazing that I fear I cannot do justice with mere words and a badly taken video. The drive through the dunes was in a regular 4 wheel drive vehicle. Right before we hit the sand, the driver coolly deflated the tires, and my brother helpfully explained that this was to increase the surface area of contact to avoid toppling over the dunes during fast turns - gulp! Thankfully, we had my sister in the car who isn't frightfully fond of automobiles. She would rather take a horse buggy than a car to get from point A to B, so you can imagine how she was on the safari! That made life simple for me: I just swallowed my apprehension and put on a brave face to keep her alive.

While on the safari, you have to trust the ability of the driver. If not, you just cannot enjoy the ride. The jeeps keep together in a large convoy, and space themselves enough so that if the car ahead of them skids, it does not crash into the next one. We got chatting with our driver Salim, a young Pakistani national who does this everyday for a living. He explained that there are 3 dunes that are slightly taller than the rest. So, their job is to follow these larger dunes, and turn right once you cross the third dune. As usual, I had to ask him what happens if we turn left?

Ans: You are doomed to die, and will be devoured by vultures by sunset the next day, if your troop doesn't realise you are missing. But of course they would realise, and you would be rescued via helicopter, as a family was 2 weeks ago at 1 a.m. five hours into their ordeal. I explained to him that I have a three year old waiting for me to come home that night, so let's turn right at the dune.

"Yes Ma'am" , he earnestly replied. Every time the tires turned left to avoid a rock or something, I yelped- "Right Salim, Right!"

What happens when a sandstorm comes along, and the height of the dunes change? Apparently, they survey and study the landscape again, before opening the route out to tourists. While on the trip, I had to admire the tenacity of the generations of humans who lived and prospered in the Arabian desert with nothing but the stars to guide them.

We watched the sun set over the dunes, and then moved to a desert camp with henna stalls, drinks and a Belly Dancer! This belly dancer was hugely talented, and controlled not ony her movements and her body, but also the crowd with her breath. The Arabian music was scintillating, and the Lebanese dancer's movements made it an exhilarating experience. It didn't help my bachelor brother that he was watching this belly dance with his two married sisters - but hey, he invited us over didn't he?!

Al Sooq Al Rasheed:
Arabic has a soft spot for Q - pronounced as 'KH'. I found it quite amusing that English has so few words in Q, while every sign post has at least one word starting or ending with 'Q'. I digress : this Sooq is the famous gold bazaar. The gold bazaar was brimming with people, and here is the thing: not a single store had metal shutters for protection! Gold shopping in Dubai is an experience by itself. I am not very fond of jewellery - or so I thought till I saw the patterns. You can imagine what would happen when a person who likes gold goes there.

Shopping is a pleasant mix of shopping in India and in the US. It was only when was I packing up to leave did I realise that I had shopped quite a bit!

A vacation with loved ones would have been fun if it had been in Alps or Ranganathan Street in Madras or a quaint village near Trichy. Nevertheless, I was immensely glad I took a vacation in Dubai. All I have to do is think back, and I smile instantly - now, that's what I call a good vacation!

I cant think of a title

This blog was prompted by comments from Mindframes and Survivor on the blog by Mano related to the recent marathon. Mindframes states that "the real value can only be perceived by a runner". Survivor counters "any one can understand shaving off time...need not be runners alone". This stream of conversation is interesting because there seems to be some tension (in the sense that each statement has its merits) between the arguments.

I found this stream of thought very interesting. For instance there is lot of talk about professor's sitting in the ivory tower and creating theories out of thin air without ever having any work experience in the "real" world. Hmm...Now lets think about this. Imagine you are a biologist working with say Apes. Is it a requirement that you live like or socialize with an Ape to get an understanding about its behavior?

Surely no! I agree that it is difficult to have any understanding about the animal if you have never been closer than 100 feet to an Ape. But if we have observational data say collected by a zoo keeper, we can always run a few regressions and claim that here are some empirical regularities. Hence, not living or being near the ape does not mean one cannot draw valid inferences but the real question is does this suffice? Not really! Data can only tell you as much. The critical aspect is, sometimes what we miss is intuition and feel for the problem on hand. This leads to to mechanical use of tools which may or may not be relevant. The only solution in my view is that it is essential to mingle once in a while with the Ape to get a feel for what it really is. Essentially this is what biologists tend to do (or so I believe).

In that context, there is merit in both arguments.

Is it just Meat?

I have always been a believer in mind over matter. But, when people suggest that you can control your body, where do you draw the line? How do you define "you" and "your body" ? I am not talking about souls etc...which is more spiritual.

We all believe that the love of a mother is full of feelings which surpasses most of the other categories of love. For some lizards, where the neocortex is not fully developed, the young ones have to start defending themselves from birth for fear of cannibalism .Yes, their mothers can eat them. For humans, these are very well developed as we are supposedly somewhere in the top of the evolution chain,and so we can feel these emotions. Now, what was mind again? If we did not have a well developed brain, we may not have any emotions after all.

Taking it one step further, there is a region of the brain called the Amygdala , which stores memories of the emotional events occuring in our life. If you think you can never forget what someone did to you, blame it on the amygdala. Sometimes, amygdala can even hijack your neo cortex ( the thinking part)and make you too emotional.

If you think - Brain
If you walk,talk (motor control) - Brain ( neocortex)
If you feel - Brain (amygdala)
If you cry - Brain (amygdala)
If you feel like writing a blog - (amygdala) (For Mindframes, this function is stored as a memory in the amygdala :-)
If you love - Brain
If you feel paranoid - blame it on a parasite
** Recent research suggests that parasites, in particular toxoplasma, form cysts in the brain, often taking up residence in the amygdala. This may provide clues as to how specific parasites manipulate behavior and may contribute to the development of disorders, including paranoia.**

Coming back to my original question, what am I controlling ? My brain seems to be doing everything....So, do I categorize my brain as "I" or "Part of My Body" . To me, everything finally seems to be just meat. And my mind seems related to how well my brain has developed.!!!!

Happy Diwali!

The legend goes that Diwali is celebrated to honour the return of Rama with his wife Sita (after vanquishing Ravana) to Ayodhya. The legend also states that Rama after vanquishing Ravana refused to take Sita back as his wife, and she was upset and cleansed herself in fire, emerging unscathed to prove she was pure. Evidently when they got back to Ayodhya, they weren't on the best of the terms. We celebrate Diwali anyway.

Another legend goes that Sita gave birth to 2 sons Lava and Kusha, and something happened in the form of a row, and Mother Earth swallowed Sita yet again.

As a human race, we never tend to speak evil of the dead. I can well imagine how Rama became Lord Rama over time, giving us yet another excuse to eat and make merry.

Well ... I don't know how or when Diwali celebrationa started. I do know that it was one of my favourite festivals. I grew up in a residential school, and most holidays were not declared holidays in our school. Diwali was. (Well...what would you do with 750 children on campus if there were declared holidays for Mahaveer Jayanthi etc? ) It was also one of the opportunities to wear new clothes, and attend the Diwali puja in School. 10th and 12th grade students wore sarees and dhotis, and I can't tell you how wonderful the whole scene looked.

Diwali is here again. Celebrations have been pushed to the week-end for those of us who don't have declared holidays on Diwali.

Happy Diwali Folks!

San Jose Rock 'n' Roll Half Marathon- The best party this side of town

Summer this year, I ran my longest training run for the San Fran marathon, the day before my son was born. I ran the second longest training run the week after we all came home from the hospital. Yes, it was a heady time and I had lots of fun running and completing the San Francisco Marathon on June 29th. Most importantly, I ran and completed sans injury- a record breaking first. Efforts at researching biomechanics were paying off finally. As a matter of fact, I ran almost 10 miles the week after the marathon. Compared to weeks of no walking after my prior marathons, this was definitely a big win and I was euphoric. I had to up the ante.

Sriks and Suresh were talking about the San Jose Rock 'n' Roll 0.5 marathon as their next run. I got drawn in and with the slight high that the confidence of finishing a marathon well, induces, I decided to set a goal for myself that would have me run a minute faster every mile (as compared to the prev year). Another major motivation, my parents were going to visit us and would be able to stand at the finish line.

Thrilled would be too unenthusiastic a word. I trained with enormous gusto and slowly my speed improved... but not enough to run 13.1 miles at a pace that would bring my average time to 1 minute/mile faster than the previous year. It constantly chewed on my mind as I wrestled with time and my own limitations.

D-Day minus one came and I picked up my folks, brought them home, went to the expo etc., etc. My friends from Southern California planned their trip to coincide with the half marathon. The house was lively with people and I was the only one rather silent. My longest training run of 11 miles was not fast enough to give me my desired race goal speed. In my usual style I had already announced to the better part of the world my intended goal time. Big dinner (read carb loading). Butterflies in stomach galore. Fitful night's sleep though.

Drive to San Jose downtown was uneventful. The usual jovial bantering between me, Sriks and Suresh. Jabs here and jabs there- we were enjoying the empty stomach (at least mine) and nervous laughters. Race line was long (about 15000 runners I think). Above mentioned butterflies turned out to be a rather persistent stomach upset. With 20 minutes to go for 7am (gun start), I head for the porta potty's and inch up to them in a rather longish line. As I finish the necessary things, I hear the gun go. Damn- I'm late again. I run out of the porta potty, much like a bat out of hell and run up the lines to find my pace group. I choose the long side of the line to try to enter- its all chained up. In my hurry, I don't notice and run right up to the start line only to discover that I can't joint the throngs of avid runners. All entrances this side are blocked and my only option is to run back to the end of the runners (a quarter mile back) and come up the other side. Damn and I'm already panting from the full sprint I gave. Eventually I join the sea of runners and slowly inch my way forward and finally hit the starting line.

My immediate task for the next few miles is to run fast and catch up with my pace group. I dodge the initially concentrated group of runners as I try to maintain a faster than usual pace. My face turns red with the effort.

Aside from my minor fiasco at the start line, here is the deal with the 0.5 marathon. Its a rock 'n' roll marathon--- dig? Every 2 miles (or so) has a band playing rock music. Surrounding that area, usually, there are a whole lot of really juiced up spectators. Yes, its like a party every bit of the way.

Mile 4, I cross Sriks and ask him if he saw my pace group go by. Sad to hear that, yes, it went past a few minutes back. That would require me to run much too fast to catch up- and I won't be able to muster that. I fall back to backup plan-- try to maintain my goal pace myself. Sounds easy- probably is easy- but I struggle a bit.

Every rock band rocked and the people rocked harder- I started to really draw their energy and was actually enjoying myself as we moved on. San Pedro square was an absolute riot. The spectators made us runners feel like olympic stars. We really got a hero's welcome as we passed that spot.

Mile 10, I'm a little behind my goal pace and I decide I can't afford to stop for water any more. So I pass up the chance and move fwd. Mile 12., redemption time- Last year at this point, a minor upslope had me all fatigued out and I had broken up into a walk. This time around, I power ran thro'..... yippeeeee. It felt great

Finish line was somewhere nearby, I couldn't see it, but I could definitely hear it. A distinct unmistakeable roar, that only 1000's of spectators can generate. I crank up my speed- I want to show off to my parents my new found fitness. I see the finish line and the density of spectators on either side catches my unprepared. There are just too many people and all I hear is a roar. The sound is enough to get me to sprint hard and I finish with my tongue hanging out in fatigue. I notice I didn't meet my goal time.

A little dejected at that., but on the other hand I realised I had a really good time running. I told myself I had pushed myself hard and at the end of the day thats what really matters. Putting on a smile, I walked on thro' to meet the home crowd. The usual congrats done and my thank you's done to people for coming, I have a sudden inkling of a doubt. The finish time I saw was my gun time. I still didn't know my chip time. Enter Shoba and her really cool iPhone. Suresh logs in to the race website for live results. Tense moments pass by (at least for me) and yes the pigeons can be set free. I come just within my goal time. I almost felt like jumping up and down till I dropped.

As we drive home, I realize that although I'm ecstatic at finishing what I had started in the way I had wanted. For that few moments when I thought I had not finished within my goal time, I was still very happy. Because all that matters at the end of the day is that for some strange reason, we runners enjoy the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other, over and over. For some really strange reason, that gives me so much joy.

Circle of life

Me-t-1: I love Rajini movies. I whistle because it is fun and people around me are whistling too. Awesome thalaivar
Me-t0: How shameless this whole tamil movie industry is? Some oldie is running around the tree with girl.
Look at Hollywood, they are awesome, Reasonable.
Me-t+1: Hey what is not to like about Rajini movies? It is cult classic in the same mould as star wars. Why should
entertainment be intellectual? Hollywood is just a glorified Bollywood

This is just one of the thought processes. Almost every aspect of life my thoughts go through this cycle. Accepting something at one level and going to other end (or different view point) and swinging back to the old view point OR aligning with the old view point with different rationalization.

Another good example is cultural values (esp. Indian values). Treating Indian values as the greatest thing long back (and bashing "floating" American values) and standing by American individualistic values for a period of time and rethinking whether family ties (group) may be better for my way of life etc.

With every transition back to older (almost opposite) view point, even with proper rationalization, it feels like a hypo critic thing to do. But still I do it.

May be maturing is nothing but finding this multi layer nature of life!

Burglar Alarms

I have a car remote that has a mind of its own. It decides when it wants to work. I went grocery shopping the other day. Not my favorite kind.

The grocers had a store-full of stuff I needed, or rather my house-keeping has fallen on bad days. All on a sudden I was spotting a trend to anything I wanted to make. I would suggest a dish, and then realise one tiny but important ingredient is missing. So, I would happily switch to another dish without batting an eyelid. When that happens thrice the same day, the mind's eye discerns a trip to the grocers. I don't know how my car senses my mood, but it seemed reluctant to go along as well.

I digress..but the point of the matter is, I came back with bags hanging from very limb (also 1 bag per finger on the hand) and attempted to open the car, and it wouldn't budge. I tried from every angle, and it refused to emit the necessary rays. Another sigh, and I finally opened the car manually.

It was totally unresponsive to my remote, and when I opened it manually, it screamed and shrieked and shook violently. Well...not really, the car alarm went off, but the screaming, shrieking and shaking pretty much summed up my reactions in the parking lot. I finally cajoled it into staying quiet, but it whimpered.

"Blip Blip" it said every 2 minutes and started the alarm again. It was like a child remembering the candy snatched from its hand every 2 minutes.

I attempted to show it my face, and say -
"See, this is me, you idiot! You see me everyday! Stop wailing!"

When the nerves are wracked, it takes a while to reset the burglar alarm, and by the time I had figured out how to do it, cops from San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego were piling into their cars. I exaggerate but you get the drift.

A month ago, my dear friend's car was stolen from his community. The same model as the one I was pleading and cajoling with. Apparently, that car went without a squeak! Why did that car not go crazy? Or maybe the car thief knew exactly how to turn the burglar alarm off before the sirens wailed.

SIGH! Remind me why burglar alarms are there again?!

Future of Evolution...

We talk a lot about Darwinistic theory of evolution and how we as humans transformed into the way we have. One thing that puzzles me is the future of evolution, especially for humans. I think, we have come to a conclusion that the current form is the most optimal form, in terms of bodily characteristics. Whenever we talk about evolution, I for one thought only about the smartness part which relates mainly to the evolution of brain. But, shouldnt it be true that, based on our current life style, our bodily characteristics as a whole should change as well ? If so, how abrupt such changes will take place? If it is gradual, starting from random cases, will it be interpreted by the currently trained medical professionals as an evolutionary change or a disease? Couldn't it be construed that rising rates of diseases resulting in physical abnormality be related to random mutations misfiring as part of an evolutionary process? Given the fact that we suppress such random mutations, is it possible that we are thwarting changes to our evolutionary bodily characteristics? Can we speculate that, such suppressions could be an input to the evolutionary process resulting in no changes to our current form? Or, is it that, we have developed a medical specialisation to safeguard our evolution process as part of evolution to control something that could be detrimental to humans ? As usual, I dont know...;)

On Cognitive Dissonance

I came across this term recently and was instantly hooked onto explore more information on this field of Psychology. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon which refers to the discomfort felt at a discrepancy between what you already know or believe, and new information or interpretation. As you can see, this is something that we experience in our day to day life. I will let you read up more on the topic by googling. But, following are some interesting examples/findings that I thought was worth sharing...

(i) When trying to join a group, the harder they make the barriers to entry, the more you value your membership. To resolve the dissonance between the hoops you were forced to jump through, and the reality of what turns out to be a pretty average club, we convince ourselves the club is, in fact, fantastic.

(ii) People will interpret the same information in radically different ways to support their own views of the world. When deciding our view on a contentious point, we conveniently forget what jars with our own theory and remember everything that fits.

(iii) People quickly adjust their values to fit their behaviour, even when it is clearly immoral. Those stealing from their employer will claim that "Everyone does it" so they would be losing out if they didn't, or alternatively that "I'm underpaid so I deserve a little extra on the side."Once you start to think about it, the list of situations in which people resolve cognitive dissonance through rationalisations becomes ever longer and longer.

Monty Hall Problem

I came across this puzzle yesterday which was quite puzzling. It is termed the famous Monty Hall problem. It goes like this.

There are 3 doors one of which contains a "car" and the other two have "goat". The contestant has the option to choose a door. The host, before opening the opted door, opens another door which always has a goat. Remember, the host knows what lies behind all the 3 doors. Now, the host asks the contestant if he will be willing to switch his earlier decision about the opted door. The question is this. What is the probability that the contestant will win by switching his earlier decision versus going with his original decision?

I will give you the solution. But, the more interesting part lies in understanding the solution. It looks like, by switching the earlier decision, the contestant has a 2/3 probability of winning when compared to going with his original decision which only has a 1/3 probability of winning.... Our intuition might suggest that, after the host revealed 1 door, we have 2 doors and the probability of winning, irrespective of switching should actually be 1/2. But, that is not true... Something to think about....or not....;)

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Click to Enlarge (the picture of 2 people crying)
Kristina Ford, right, hugs friend and neighbor, Fran Meyers, as they watch efforts to save Ford's home and others in the High valley area of Poway, Calif., where at least a dozen homes were destroyed Tuesday, October 23, 2007. Meyers did not know the fate of her home.

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Oct. 23 - At least 300,000 people were evacuated as a dozen wildfires engulf Southern California. With hotter temperatures and stronger winds forecast for Tuesday, the fires could worsen.

As you figured by now, the topic of the news item was "Calif. fires force nearly 1M from homes" from USA News today...

One Million People have been forced out of their homes by raging fires...

Stereotypes...Myth or Reality?

Knowingly or Unknowingly, I do tend to stereotype certain behavioral traits with a person's ethnicity, especially Indians. May be, my bias is an outcome of the number of times I have been correct. For example, if I see a really slow driver on the road, I decide that it should be a chinese female or an indian female. The only time when I have been deceived is when I see a old man/lady drive the car. If I see a car in a non-parking space/corner with a hazard light blinking, I conclude that it must be an Indian guy. For some reason, I believe Indians think that hazard light is a panacea for any parking irregularities. If one asks, "Isnt it absolutely crazy to park your car in this weird spot which is dangerous to oncoming traffic?...", the answer would be, "Dont you see, I have my hazard lights on.. I am untouchable now...I can park anywhere now..". These generalizations don't stop here. It goes all the way to Indian colleagues, Indian Managers, Indian CEOs so on and so forth. You may all be wondering at this point. Dude, you are an Indian too.. I know. But, I do try to correct myself from the common criticisms if it makes sense to me. Though I am not perfect, it still cringes to see people whose definition of being perfect is imperfect.

I recently read an interview from one of the freebie indian magazine. This guy (Raghunathan) has written a book called "Games Indians Play". It is an elaborate interview. But, it centers around 2 major points. (i) Indians have a mentality to look for short-term gains even if it means that they are forfeiting long term profits (ii) Indians are not self-regulated and the actual regulation (in India) is not strict enough to impose self-regulation. In other words, the laws in India are not strong enough that people have little/no willingness to follow the system (his analysis is based on games theory, so mad-max, you will certainly be interested to read this book). I do agree with both of his observations. While many talk in great lengths about how good democracy is. The way democracy has unfolded in India is pitiable. Common good for everyone is a topic that is completely forgotten.

My theory is that, Indians are very aggressive. As Indians, especially from the lower to middle class families, daily life revolves around fighting for meager resources. Whether it be getting a ticket in a cinema theater or getting a seat in a bus to getting an engineering seat. It is always about how aggressive you are to survive the odds of being successful. As a result, we rarely trust anyone. We rarely accept or praise someone since we think that it represents weakness. We tend to be more selfish about our personal lives and end up optimizing resources for ourselves and seldom care about how it impacts the society. Western culture is the entire opposite of what we experience(d). The fundamental reason being, everybody believes in the system, which works. Also, they hope that, by being good at micro level, the macro level outcome will turn out to be good. I am sure that there will be exceptions, but then, exceptions are just exceptions and not the norm. I can continue my rant on and on. But the fact remains the same.I can only hope that the future generation will be better.

Less May Be More !

I've been reading a lot of stuff lately. One thing that struck me was the number of unknown words that I come across as I read through articles/magazines. To my surprise, I found that there were very few words whose meaning I wasnt aware of. Not that my vocabulary is any better, as a matter of fact, it is poorwhen compared to a lot of people that I know. But then, the interesting part is that, atleast 99% of what we read contains words that are common among manypeople (ofcourse, I excluded saumya's blogs..:)). I did a quick search and found that oxford dictionary has about 600,000 words. Apparently, 25000 new words are added each year. I am pretty sure my vocabulary is limited to may be 4000-5000 words (I am probably being optimistic here..:))... The next obvious question is why do we need these many words?

Well, I thought about it from 2 different perspectives. One perspective was to view it as a layman. My immediate answer was that, let us take a quick summary of the usage of each word and sort them based on the year and the number of times it is used. If a word has been used very rarely in the past 50 years of publication, remove it... Archive it for historical purposes so that when someone really needs to figure out something, they can look at it. While I was in the thought process, my natural inclination was also to think that, if people dont use certain words, they will eventually disappear no matter whether they are present in a dictionary or not... But, the irony is that reality doesnt seem to reflect my intuition.

The next view point was to think about the role of linguists. I was wondering, what do these people do? If I were a linguist, I will learn the grammar thoroughly and the continuous learning process for me will be to learn newer and newer words and may be even use them. As a linguist, the more and more words I know and use, I become more specialised. My major aspiration would be to add new words that I find from other languages or through historical references because I do want to contribute and make the language "richer". Why would I want to jeopardize my specialisation by removing words from dictionary? Think about who has the right to add words to dictionary? Guess what, linguists... I dont mean to degrade their job. But, I see very less rationality. The only place where I see all these inane words being used are in spelling bee competitions and may be for certain language exams. People who have prepared for GRE know what I am talking about. A language can boast all it wants about the number of words it carries. But, simplicity can also make a language elegant and easy to learn. May be I am missing something very fundamental that others could enlighten...

Legend about Legends...

I am not particularly proud about the fact that my scepticism and criticism takes a front seat when it comes to judging people's words. Whenever I hear that someone is legendary or that someone achieved something great, my immediate response is one to think about how difficult I perceive that "act" to be and if it is not worth for what it is claimed, I try to be brutally blatant in my response. But then, if not for the brutal part, I think many of us are like that. Anyway, when I talk about judging great people, I am talking about people whom everyone considers legendary, like Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Einstein and so on. Most of us havent met any of these people. Most of what we perceive is based upon stories that we read from books. We do need legendary examples to motivate us. But, I do think that books hype things a bit more about great individuals? Do we hail them just because everybody else does or for what they are really worth? Lot of times, I have observed that, when it comes to taking a critical stand on great people, we refrain from it just so that we avoid conflicts. But, I am sure if you look into the lives of great people, there are lots of things that are not noteworthy which the great people themselves are not proud of. Knowing that I am not the only one to question conventional wisdom, these great people still survived all the odds of criticism and are still esteemed very highly. I decided to continue with my quest to know what is so great about these people that I am not aware of. Okay okay, it was nothing close to a quest as much as it was my curiosity..:)...

Recently, I got to meet Dr.Shantha. She is a cancer specialist and serves as the chairperson of Adyar cancer institute, Chennai. She has won several accolades including Padma Bhushan, Padma Shri and the well renowned Magsaysay award as well. Some call her the Mother Teresa of South India. I had the greatest privilege of meeting her in person. There is always some sort of fantasy that overwhelms me before I get to meet someone famous. But then, when it happens, it's not as eventful as I imagine. Same was the case with me when I first met her. The best I could come up with was a smile and a half-baked hello. But then, I got to attend a dinner event sponsored by the bay area cancer institute foundation (CIF) the following day. She gave a talk about what her institution was all about and how everyone could help her cause. Following that was a Q&A session. A rare oppurtunity knocked my door to ask the question that I always wanted to ask a person of her cadre... I asked her, "What motivates you? To me, working on the same topic for a few years becomes demotivating after a point.. You have been leading this organization for the past 55 years. Every morning when you wake up, what is it that motivates you to keep doing what you do, constantly ?"... (Did I tell you, Dr.Shantha is 80+ yrs old). She initially said that it was a difficult question to answer. Then, she recited a few words from Bhagvad Gita, the gist of which translates to, doing one's duty and not expect results. I wasnt convinced with the answer, but then, I nodded as if I was convinced. Time went by and the dinner event concluded and there she was sitting in a chair talking to volunteers and guests in a more informal setting. I stood close to her. When her eyes laid upon me, I reminded her about the question I asked and said that I did like her answer, but still was highly puzzled on where her motivation came from. She looked at me straight in the eye and said, "You know what. I wasnt entirely honest earlier. People normally see only the brighter side of things. I have certainly had my ups and downs. There are times when I have thought about why I do what I do. But then, you see the positive outcomes and how it changes people's lives... And that, brings hope and happiness to me and I continue..." I was quite impressed with the answer. I realised, great people are afer all human too. The only thing that is different is the fact that, she chose a path and stuck to it, with complete belief that it is the right path. Irrespective of what happened, she stayed in the path and still does... Ofcourse, there are irregularities, anomalies, controversies and so on. But, the one thing that remains constant is that great people like Dr. Shantha have very strong will...One could interpret that strong will to be dedication, kindness, focus, stubbornness or just plain ego. In my opinion, such focus is what differentiates legends from normal people. Whether it be Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Einstein or Bill Gates, I think that is the commonality. I think, leadership and legendary attributes are cultivated by egoistic minds working towards the welfare of society...As Teddy Roosevelt rightly said, as long as we strive to be the person in the arena and by continuously doing so, we are all legends in our own ways...

Frame of Mind

The wise man donned his pedagogical tone, and started writing. His followers looked on eagerly. This person was known to have a fertile mind, and discussed topics that could be ascribed to an oasis in a dreary desert plain.

He delved into the why and whats of the most inane things, and the followers lapped them.

The Year was 2007 - the Chinese year of the Pig, the month was October - the month of Ramadan. The internet, voice over IP, wireless networks were normal words - not buzzwords anymore. When the master penned his thoughts that day, and introduced a concept called the 'Network', the crowd waited with bated breath. They thought something more was coming. The network was too simple and self-explanatory. But there was none. Maybe, the master was trying to teach us to read between the words and find a hidden meaning said one. Immediately, his writing was scanned with a new purpose to no avail.

The crowd was getting imaginative. Maybe, the master was experimenting with time travel, setting himself back by a couple of years, and seeing if he could invent these things over by himself again. But can the mind unlearn what has been learned, even though the time machine sets one back?

We would never know the frame of mind that prompted that blog from Mindframes.

Mindframes had taken up his marathon form of penance again, and the crowd gathered to cheer him on. He sailed through like always. The limelight shone on him when the questions commenced:

Following: What prompted that post from you?
Mindframes: Sometimes, the obvious seems obvious, but it isn't really obvious unless we think of it as an obvious thing

Following nodding sincerely....
Following: But, were you trying to infer something, or were you intending for us to infer something. Did you want to introduce a complex topic?
Mindframes: There is nothing complex about anything. All you have to do is apply your mind. The mindblock can be removed if you start analyzing and applying your analysis in a logical manner.
The following has read that theory before, and they are trying now to analyze and apply their analysis to the latest post.

Mindframes continues.."Maybe, the mind limits itself at something when we hit something a little less than obvious. I don't know. .."

With these words of wisdom ringing in their ears, the crowd dispersed to pore over the latest interview ending with the now famous words "I don't know" (The crowd knew that was the Master's nurturing way of inviting conversation)

If time travel did work, what would be unleashed next? Theory of Relativity.....Quantum mechanics....I don't know.

Regardless, the crowd awaited his next post with fervour and enthusiasm.

PS: Credits (Seed of thought: Manohar)

Transcendence and Preferences

Everything in life is relative. Whether we realize it or not relative evaluation is the key to nearly every activity in our life. For instance, I'm trying to go through a weight loss routine and always want to measure how I did this week relative to last week. Similarly relative performance is in play at your work place, in school, in sports etc etc etc. I'm sure Saumya will agree that shopping too is a game in relative evaluation.

Let us consider two specific examples.The first is ranking in school. Suppose Suppandi does better than Muniyandi and Muniyandi does better than Perandi, does that imply that Suppandi has done better than Perandi? Of course the answer is yes, because of the fact that such preference orderings were computed at a given point in time when all the competitors took the test at the same time. Now assume a new test is given a week later. Is it necessary for Suppandi to do better than Perandi? Not necessarily. However transitivity of preferences would seem to suggest that such a relationship should hold.


The crux of the matter is relative measurement and it relies heavily on preference ordering. For instance consider an alternative example such as making a trip to the grocery store. The chore on hand is to buy fruits. Money or no other factor is important. The only issue is preferences. Your choice is limited to three fruits; Apples (A), Oranges (O) and Water Melons (W).

From the set {A,O,W} you choose A and O. This implies that the preference ordering could be A>O and A>W and also that O>W where the symbol ">" refers to the "preferred over" (i.e.) if A>O this means that Apples are preferred over oranges. The above ordering also implies by transitivity that A>W.

Do we adhere to the same principles on subsequent visits to the grocery store. Does your preference has to stay constant. In the case of the tests described above, we can argue that ability might not change and one test might be sufficient to ensure that the preference ordering will hold. But in the grocery store example where pure preferences play a part, is it always the case that A>W?

Now switching to a real life analogy from college football. This year is special in the sense that in the first half of the season, three teams have been ranked No. 1. BCS ranking depend heavily on transitivity. For instance given three teams A, B and C. If A beats B and B beats C, we would expect that A is better than C. But that never seems to be the case. Consider this. LSU beat South Carolina. South Carolina beat Kentucky and then Kentucky beat LSU. If it was a round robin between these three teams, then each one ends up with equal points.

Can we say that if team A beats team B and team B beats team C, team A is better than team C? Transitivity seems to suggest we can. But reality seems to be different!

Inspirational note from Teddy Roosevelt

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

(From his speech "The Man in the Arena" April 23, 1910 Sorbonne in Paris, France)

The Shopping Cliche

I love shopping, and it is not one of my husband's favourite activities.

When I say I love shopping, I am not an obsessive shopper, who shops 8 hours at a stretch, or demagnetizes the credit card with use. Every once in a while I love to stroll through the aisles, just looking at the interesting things out there, browsing if you may - but not necessarily online.

When something attracts my attention I alert the better half to take note. All I have to do is say is:
"Isn't this nice"
I can reel the reminder of the conversation in my sleep:
"Yes, it is....Why don't you buy it?" he quips.
"I only said it was nice, I never said I wanted to buy it!"
"Well, if you don't want to buy it, why bother telling me?"
"Because I thought of sharing my obs."

Oh well....I never learn, and he never learns. I may be generalising here, but when women shop and say something is nice, it is not always with the desire to acquire the article. There are times when the intention is to buy, but THAT, you can sense in the tone and eyes. (In such situations, regardless of what you say, we buy the article.)

Here is my theory with shopping: you have to browse around to see what you like enough to buy.
Here is my better half's theory: you have to browse around only when you know you like something well enough to buy.

My question is: how do you know you like something enough to buy, unless you spend some time aimlessly looking around?

RSS Feeds

Recently, I came across the term called RSS which denotes Rich Site Summary. All it means is that, you can keep track of websites for its contents without having to manually visit the list of websites that you normally read. You just log-on to this one site which keeps track of all the latest information from the sites that you are interested in. There are several feeder/aggregator software out in the web. Some of them run on your PC and downloads the feeds as and when you log-on to internet so that you can read the information offline. Some of the web-based software needs you log-on to a site which will contain the feeds from your preferred websites.

I tried Google Reader and it has a descent interface that is simple to use. The log-in is the same as your gmail-account. Try using it and I am sure you will like it...No more worries about missing a blog or news from your favourite website, unless you have too much time at your disposal and you insist that you like to manually type the web site every few minutes...:)... If others have suggestions/experiences about using RSS versus Atom versus XML, do share it.

A Moral Dilemna - Should I lead or follow????

Should I lead or should I follow? Sometimes this is a moral dilemma which we face. Consider this situation. It is your anniversary today and also a public holiday. You have promised to take your spouse out to a movie. If you defect on your promise a potentially unbearable cost is imposed. Hence you decide to go to the movie theater and buy tickets in advance rather than risk bearing the cost. Assume that the theater only sells 100 tickets (5 movies 20 seats each) a day of which only 25 tickets (5 tickets for each movie) are sold in advance. Also assume that you did not choose the movie you want to go to in advance. You do not have any information on the relative merits or demerits of a given movie. Hence one optimal selection rule could be to follow others making the choices. For instance if you find that people are quickly making a bee line for one movie, the likelihood of the movie being good is higher and hence you choose to go for that. Like you 50 others are also celebrating their anniversary and the same rules of the game as above apply to them.

Question: Would you want to wait for others to make a choice before deciding?

Obviously the answer is no. Given that there are 50 people and only 25 tickets, if you wait sufficiently long the likelihood of you getting a ticket (for any movie) is virtually zero. Hence this is a situation where leading seems to be better than following. But is this generally the case?

Now lets move to the later part of the evening. You decide that you like to delve into the wild west for the evening and buy tickets to watch the movie titled Crazy Horse. Leaving the cosmetics aside, lets get into the climax. The scene starts with the camera giving wide angle shots of this dusty lil town. People are lazing around with seemingly no work to do. The calm is suddenly disturbed as a fight breaks out between two people in the saloon over the barmaid. As was the case in the middle of the 19th century, disputes were settled with guns.

Let the protagonist be Mr. Sitting Bull and the antagonist be Mr. Crazy Horse. The two are staring at each other with murderous intentions. The townsfolk are scattered around watching. The wild west believed in fair play and there were rules for gun fights. A critical element in any gunfight is that both fighters should have a fair chance and hence drawing the gun too quickly results in foul play which in turn implies that the fighter who draws early will be lynched (implies death through torture of some kind in this situation) by the folks in town.

Now here is the dilemma facing Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. The only way to survive is killing the opponent. But either of the fighters do not want to draw early and risk getting lynched. Consider the case of Crazy Horse, if he were to draw he needs some reason to believe that Sitting Bull is making the attempt simultaneously. This implies that there is a good chance that he might not make the first draw. But we know that the person drawing first has the maximum chance of success but at the same time also has the maximum chance of being lynched.

And now with the tension gripping, you turn to your spouse and ask her. So my lady would you follow or lead? Essentially the question is put yourself in the shoes of either Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse and then decide what would your choice be.

And so the answer is?????????????????????

Movies..one after the other

After being married for several years, you would think you know your spouse and what his tastes are. I thought our tastes were largely similar, atleast when it came to movies and food! I don't know whether it got to be similar after so many years of living together and watching the same movies?

But of late, his tastes seemed awry when he picked up movies from Netflix. I remember thinking after a couple of rotten movies, and I am very wary of watching (in my opinion) horrible movies, how he could have selected these movies. I questioned him on whether he looked at the movie description before he picked it and so on. He reminded me that I was the last person to go into our account and modify what was in our queue. I was quite amazed that I actually picked an Adam Sandler movie. Could I have been so careless as to not notice that? I could not remember. These are the times when you wish that you had better memory. I blamed it on stress. It was not an isolated incident. More movies came along that had a bad after taste. We wondered whether we ran out of movies in our queue and the movies that were delivered were Netflix own picks? But the mystery continued, our hypotheses continued and neither of us found the time to solve it.

The last time I dropped of a movie after we had watched it, things finally made sense. The very next day we saw another movie in our mailbox. Boy! Netflix is fast I thought. Why did I ever consider switching to Block Buster? But the timing was suspicious all the same as I had dropped off the movie late in the afternoon. I picked up the envelope and looked at the address, it was addressed to someone else, it was the same street number and same zip code, but a different street! The mystery was solved finally. I can now stop questioning my own actions, my failing memory (!) and my husband's taste. Atleast when it comes to picking movies.

Hammer and Tongs

Saw this more than 10 times. AWESOME power hitting. Yuvraj Singh rocks. Hope yall N Joy

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20827350/

Senator sues God. The news item states it is an attempt to show how frivolous the lawsuit culture is.

So, God is summoned to the witness stand, and you just feel a cool breeze. The judge is leaning towards declaring contempt of court for filaure to appear, and a huge voice thunders from above

"GOD IS OMNIPRESENT. YOU MAY PROCEED"

Well....okay. Please take an oath in the name of God

ON WHAT?

The Bible

If it is on one of the books written on me, shouldn't you bring all the titles: Geeta, Koran and anything remotely religious?

You have to swear on God

I am God.....what use would an oath on myself do?

You would die if you lie

I don't live and I don't die. I am God

Well... are you refusing to take the oath ??

At this point thunder strikes the courtroom, and God is held to task.

Did you make thunder?

Yes that was me spattering in exasperation.

And so it goes ..

Illusion of Understanding

Though the recent renewed acquaintances from shelfari did embarass me a little, it was furthered when I tried to list the books that I have read so far. I wasnt too worried about the fictional bunch which, in my opinion, had very little value addition to my knowledge, other than the entertainment it provided. I was looking at all the technical or scientific books that I have read so far. From a mere bookcase point of view, it was quite impressive. But, I stopped for a moment to reflect on what I learned out of all those books. Yes, I did read those books. But, did I really understand everything that was conveyed? Very questionable...

I have always wondered about how people perceive about what they know. Someone once told me that, you have to have the power of unlearning things in order to learn something new. Though learning, implicitly assumes that you dont know about the thing that you are trying to learn from, reality is, we just try to fill in the perceived gaps that we have in our knowledge base. Most of us, inherently think that our gaps are very small..including me...:)... May be, that is the way human mind behaves... In my opinion, the smaller the perceived gap you think there is, the larger the gap becomes as you learn on top of it.

If such is the case with learning, what about understanding? I think, learning and understanding are two different things. Until someone really understands what they learn, nothing comes out of it. In other words, learning, in my opinion, is closely equivalent to storage of information. It does have it's benefits in certain topics. But, if you think about it, ideas evolve out of you only on things that you really understood. So, if I have never had any new ideas evolve out of me, it probably means that I didnt understand what I read. The only exception to this rule, is the generation of flawed ideas...:) May be, I should get back to school and try out those subjects to really check how far fetched my theories are with respect to reality. Now, should I take that risk... Knowing my capability, I think that wont be necessary..:)

If you are late, you are late..

I was in a hurry. It was a little longer than I anticipated at the post office and everyone was leaving for home! I hurried as much as the relentless traffic would allow, but was still 7 minutes late to my dental appointment and stressing over it. As I made a mad dash from the parking lot to the building as though the short sprint would earn me a few seconds in the stop watch of the imaginary record keeper. As I ran I felt like I was 11, but sadly reality struck. My brain's calculation of distances and the speed of my feet were out of sync. I missed my step and gravity brought me to hug the pavement. I felt the pain as I got off the ground in hurry. As I have done in the past (and I know I am not alone), I did not look at the ground at the imaginary obstacle that tripped me. But unconsciously I looked to see if the people in the building or in the parking lot took notice. Nope, nobody around. Satisfied about that and ignoring the fact that the fall cost me some 2 minutes, I went in.

Every move was excruciating. The kind of pain that makes you want to cry, but you don't because you are an adult and you realize these are insignificant and not tear-worthy. Fortunately, the dental work was painless. I was done with a good report and happy to be leaving. As I was signing the check, the receptionist spoke some sentence that ended in "fall". Did she see me take the fall? I am clumsy, but I don't like others knowing that.

I said "Excuse me", and she said "I said have a great fall". When you are in such pain, the context does not come to you quickly. Now I got it. I smiled in my head and thought, "I just did", I said "You too!". The irony of it all!

Did you know

Did you know that
(a) The gas-station 76 was named after the fact the Brits got kicked out of the US in 1776?
(b) Route 66 used to be from Chicago to LA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_66)

Oh Gee..! Mr. Gee

He was a man who was as contended with himself as a spectator of beauty peagent . Very few things stirred him. He was one of those not known for his humility. Even while counting sheep to go to sleep, he had a smile knowing that the sheep he conjured was one of the most perfect, beautiful specimen of this world. Yes, that was our man.

He got an invitation to join an online book club from a friend. Not a voracious reader himself, he still decided to join it. Hmmm…Now, he was one who liked stimulating his brain every now and then and was happy when he had to choose a name for the user id. Something that defined him just right, neither too flashy nor too humble. He was called a Geek by many and decided on the name “GeeKey”. Why, one may ask. Why not, Geeky? As I said, our man always has a smug look on his face, knowing that he is always a tad bit different than others and prides himself over it. Once joining the book club, he saw that there was a “Send Invite” button , helping him to invite his online friends. Little did he know that the software had automatically selected all the members of his contact list, a list which included a bunch of friends, professors, professionals, people he had rarely spoken a word or two to ,people he had never met, people he hated, people he would rather not keep in touch with, past colleagues and so on. And out goes this mail inviting every one to join his book club. Nothing embarrasses our man easily, but this one scored it. To mend things, out goes another mail to everyone apologizing for the previous mail. But, the contact list also had some persistent lot who wanted to know who Mr.Geekey was. Oh!! Gee !! What happened to Mr.Geekey , you may ask. He is busy answering to all the mails from friends, professors, professionals, people he had rarely spoken a word or two to, people he had never met, people he hated, people he would rather not keep in touch with, past colleagues and so on. And not so self-satisfied any more, are we Mr.Gee?

Our online id's

All right, dunno if this has been blogged before, nevertheless no harm in trying again. Several of us contribute to this blog. We all have our unique id's. Some prefer to keep their names (Mano, Meera and Saumya). Others blog under different names (mindframes, survivor, brainwaves and of course Mad Max). Is there a reason to why we choose to use a pen name as against our real names?

I'm a big fan of Mel Gibson and one of his earliest movies (that i saw) was Mad Max. Somehow liked the character and thought it sounded "chic". Gibson is Max and the movie really does drive you nuts. Cars, chases, fights blah blah. Neways, Mad Max it is for me.

On the Road

Several years ago, we were on a family trip cruising towards the Grand Canyon. Our car seemed to start losing control. My brother, the driver, managed to get it to a graceful stop on the shoulder. We realized we had a flat. The tire was like shredded cheese and we had a long distance to travel before the next city. I can't remember now whether we had a cell phone. The road seemed to stretch forever on both sides, walking was out of question, it was a mile or so before we could get to a public phone. We started flagging other drivers to see if they would stop. Finally a truck driver stopped to give us a hand with changing the tire - we did not even have the right tools - bad contingency planning! If not for that good hearted guy, we would have spent hours on the road trying to get help.

Ever since that incident, I pay attention to other cars that look like they may be stranded on the highway. But that is all I do, I pay attention, I feel sorry for them, but I never have stopped to offer help. I don't feel particularly proud of it. In fact, this irrational fear of strangers embarrasses me. Yesterday, there was a woman jay walking on the road, who seemed to be lost in her own world, she could have very well lost her way and seemed to be in obvious need of help. I felt sad and was hoping she'd walk away from the road rather than towards it, but I did not do much more. My capability to look away and ignore a situation amazes me and somehow, I wish that atleast sometimes I didn't have the "Namakku yen vambu" attitude. I would be really proud of myself the day I actually stop and help someone.

Memoirs

For all the cricket lovers, here is a treat of some of the best. The editing is really nice and the background track sits well with it. And watch for the grand finale. That is COMMITMENT!

A fifth of Americans can't locate US in the world map- Answered by a teen pagent contestant

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7620686268212703476

Food for thought

Here is an interesting experiment.

Background: Imagine that we are in a forest and there are N tigers roaming around. They have not eaten anything for the last 10 days and are very hungry. As a rule they will eat any meat except their own. Let us assume that rabbits are popular food among the tigers.

Constraint: If a tiger eats a rabbit, it will be automatically convert into a rabbit. Now it is fair game to other tigers. The tigers are aware of this constraint and will act rationally. Self preservation is more important than satisfying immediate hunger (thanks to Mano for pointing this out).

Scenario: One rabbit accidentally enters the area where the tigers are prowling.

Question: Will the rabbit ever be eaten? If yes what would be the general condition under which the rabbit is likely to be eaten or not?

Relatively Simple

We went to a Thai restaurant today. There is this person in our team who always goes for the spiciest version of the food. Believe me, this is the kind of spiciness that you should really avoid... This particular place even has a scale from Thai Hot to 1 star Thai Hot all the way to 5 star. This friend of mine was trying out the 5 star. In comparison, I was trying the mild version and was sweating all over... The idea of tomorrow morning is already haunting me..:)..Anyway, I was wondering what it would be like for him to taste my mild fried rice. Would it be spicy for him or just plain bland? There are often times when I have wondered why the quest for something, more often than not, changes our baseline definition of our current state. For example, when someone is poor, they want to become rich. But, when they get richer, they still want to get richer, or rather, they still think they are still poorer. Expressing one's thoughts is another example. The more effort one puts into understanding something that looks complex, their perception of simplicity changes.

I was reading up on Relativity by Einstein. For the person he is, he considers certain elements of his thought process to be very simple and rudimentary, so that even a caveman could understand it..:) But, my understanding, or should I say, my perception of what he is trying to say baffles me. If not anything, the only thing that I learnt from this book is that the perception of things change dynamically. In other words, nothing changes in absolute domains. It is just our perception. Think about it, when we get richer, our definition of richness changes. As we get faster, our notion of time and distance changes. As we learn something that is complex, our definition of simple changes. Complexity becomes the new simplicity. In Einstein's words, if Gulliver had shrunk or expanded when he entered Lilliput or Brobdingnag according to the scale of its inhabitants, he wouldnt have noticed anything different. In real life, interestingly, thats what happens all the time. Our scope and vision transforms itself based on what we know at that point of time. Though this might sound like a "simple" statement, this is one of the fundamentals which was key in formulating the principles of relativity.

Some fun for the summer

I thought this video was decently done thought others might enjoy it. The editing is pretty neat, though the dialogue delivery calls for more. But sure as hell was fun watching.

Video

Head over heels

A friend of mine suggested that I do a search on google for the word (retupmoc), computer written in reverse order and lo behold, the output

Google Search Results

Now click on the first link

Entering the first link

now that is super cool. I'm pretty certain you guys must have noticed this before but no harm in enjoying it yet again.

Time Flies?

I was thinking about the expression, "Time Flies by Quickly" slowly... One can look at it at a piecewise level of granularity or in wholesome. Let us try to analyse it. If time flies by quickly, that should mean that every day, hour, minute and second involved should fly by quickly too. Is it true? Usually, when we are less occupied, we feel boredom. What it means is that, we are striving hard for time to pass by and it really doesnt "fly" by quickly. However, when taken to macro level, we look back and if we dont have anything interesting to report, we think that time flew by quickly, when it really should have been the other way around... Another view on that would be, if we are very much involved in doing something, we dont realise how much time was spent. That would mean that, if we are doing something that we like, we lose the notion of time and time does fly by quickly. Interestingly, in this case, we have a lot to report as we look back. So, it seems to me that, our notion of time at a piecewise level of granularity is not the same as looking back after a period of time in its entirety. Where is the discontinuity? Something to think about??

Gotta Blog...

The fascinating thing about science is that, no matter how well I think I understand something, I always get revelations when I hear a different perspective. This perspective from a book that I am reading (Five Equations that changed the world - Michael Guillen) on einstein's (and 4 other scientists) life is too difficult to pass. The fact that I am writing about it makes me feel like I have understood it better, though, I am pretty sure I will blog something that looks very similar as time progresses. But, this one is a "gotta blog" thing... (Title has been used)..:)

What was the fundamental problem that einstein solved? There are 2 parts to this question. During einstein's time, there was a big confusion on how speed is measured. Also, there was a confusion of the way mass and energy were related. As we all know, speed is measured by distance covered divided by the time taken. This holds true as long as you are a stationary observer. What if you are moving too? If so, people thought that objects appeared to move faster or slower based on whether you move towards the other object or away from it. For example, if an object moves at 100 metres/second speed and if you are moving towards or away from the object at 1 metres/second, then you will observe that the object moves at 101 metres/second or 99 metres/second. As long as you account for your speed, the speed of the object is constant. The only exception to this principle was that, scientists observed that the speed of light remained constant irrespective of how the observers moved. That was the puzzle. Why is it that speed of light remains unchanged? Einstein started out with the premise that, light speed is absolute and doesnt change. When the observer moves, his notion of space changes. What it means is that, what is 1 meter for a stationary person isnt the same if he is moving at some speed. Then, the question is, how much does space shrinks/expands by? He found that it is equal to 1 - (0.5*v^2/c^2). What it means is that, if you are travelling at say, half the velocity of light, 1 meter shrinks to 0.875. Since the velocity at which objects move in earth is very small (even speeds of the order of 1000mph), the shrink factor is so small to be negligible. If one travels at the speed of light, the universe shrinks to 0 which doesnt make sense. So, einstein concluded that it is impossible to travel at the speed of light...

The next question was about mass and energy. Before einstein, the law of conservation of mass and energy had already been proven. But, no one knew how mass end energy were related. They seem to vary similarly under different conditions, but yet, the unifying knot wasnt identified. All conservation laws states is that, you can't destroy energy or matter. When you seemingly think you destroy matter, you just transform it to a different form. Thinking along similar lines from his space-time theory, einstein discovered that mass/energy expands (the reciprocal of space/time) as an object moves faster. If you think from that perspective, you would notice that, if a body travels at the speed of light, its mass should be infinity, which doesnt make sense either. But, it also affirms that a body cannot move at the speed of light. Anyway, what einstein did was to calculate the kinetic energy difference between a stationary particle that emits radiation with a particle that moves at a speed of 'v' and equated it to the amount of radiation emitted. This boils down to the equation 0.5 (R/c^2)*v^2 where R is the radiation energy emitted. Since kinetic energy is 0.5*m*v^2, he reasoned that the mass lost due to radiation should be equal to R/c^2 which infers that m = E/c^2 => E = m*c^2... When I started typing, I thought I was all clear... But now, I am not... I will let someone in the group to enlighten the last part of this blog...:)