911 call

A real 911 call (heard in Jay leno show)

911 operator (911 from now on): Hello.
Person calling: Can you help me? (small kid's voice)
911: What is the problem?
Kid: I have math problem
911: Mouth problem?
Kid: NO!! Math problem
911: ......What kind of math problem
Kid: I have always have problem in subtraction
911: What is the problem
Kid: What is 16 minus 8
911: What do you think is the answer
Kid: Hmm...one?
911: How old are you?
Kid: I am 4

Background voice:
"Jack..how many times I told you not to pick the phone. what are you doing?"
Kid: I am getting some help from police on my math problem
"Background voice is shocked :)"
Kid: You asked me to call someone if I need help
"I did not mean police...hang-up"
Phone: ...............................

Vacations- work in disguise?

If you read a P.G.Wodehouse book, you would think vacations are all about salt airs or the country sides- eggs for breakfast, heavy lunches, afternoon siestas under some shady tree (not that kind of shady) and dinners with wine and some suitable post prandials like brandy suitably followed by deep dreamless snoozes.

Of the many years I have been in US, I have rushed through vacations. Vacations and sight seeing have been indistinguishable from each other. Result? I come back a lot more tired than I left..... All this changed recently in Hawai'i (yes, for all you mainlanders-- its Hawai'i not Hawaii).

We really really chilled out. No schedules of what to visit and when., there were times I woke up to an idyllic day with nothing but the sound of waves seeping through the window pane and not having a clue what day or what time it was. I did exactly what I loved to do on a vacation- run in the mornings, drive around a bit, lunch well, watch t.v/post processes pictures in my laptop taken the previous day with a beer in hand, sleep, drive around a bit, photograph during the golden hour, wine and dinner, t.v or a book and sleep. Repeat and rinse for 8 days.

I was surprised when some of the folks i spoke to thought I was crazy to:
- Run on a holiday
- Use a computer to go online on a holiday
- Didn't fill my day with places to visit...

Oh well! All I can say is that- it was my vacation doing what I love with whom I love in a place that I loved.

Thinking through

This might be the weirdest and most stupid question but I'm tempted to put this forward (LoL). The story of apples and Newtons theory that it was because of gravity is known to one and all. However has research ever looked at the question is what is Gravity? While there is substantial evidence on how gravity is functionally related to existence, has research ever asked the fundamental question "What is Gravity"? To me that is an unanswered question and possibly an unanswerable question.

His and Her Closets

I walked into the house, and surveyed the surroundings. I was out looking for a house that would satisfy my desires of a dream home. The living room was large, with a minor raised level constituting the family room where the family could have their meals. The kitchen needed some upgrades, but roomy and airy! I stepped into a pretty large room that was ridden with cobwebs.

"Is this a walk-in closet", I asked?

My realtor nodded, while the old lady, who lived in the home, looked at me quizzically and decided to ignore my question. We stepped into another bare room, and I exclaimed :

"WOW! A HIS and HER closet. This is lovely!"

The old lady, who now bore an uncanny resemblance to my grand-mother, looked at me like only a grandmother can look at a grand-child, and said she has around 10 sarees that she folds and keeps in her steel gray trunk. The first room was used to store the bags of rice after a harvest, and the smaller room was for storing maize. Why did she need such large rooms for clothes?!

At which point I burst out laughing, and got up from my sleep. I kept thinking about paati's face and smiled to myself!

The day is not far-off when folks walk into village houses in Singaperumal Kovil (a tiny village near Chengalpet) with similar comparisons, since Chengalpet has now opened up to IT firms!

Cholesterol and fiber

I was reading about how exactly fiber reduces cholesterol and it turns out that the reasoning is very simple (atleast the main effect). There are two kinds of fiber- the soluble in water kind and the other that just doesn't want to mix with water. The soluble kind thats typically found in oats, barley (yes, beer too) etc., mixes with water and forms a gel like goo which absorbs the cholesterol in food thats in our digestive system (much like a sponge) before the cholesterol even has a chance to get absorbed by our body. They say as a rough rule of thumb that this mechanism reduces absorption by about 10-15% (not bad at all).

Now I was thinking about this mechanism a bit- and if the above logic is the main mechanism of cholesterol reduction by fiber then it seems that for the above to work the cholesterol should still be unabsorbed by our digestive system. Meaning the fiber and the cholesterol food should be consumed within the window of our digestive process to have effect- in other words if I ate ice cream for dinner and oat bran for breakfast it may not be effective at all. Now if that where correct, I'm better off eating dessert after a meal (or before If I want to reduce my appetite) and still have the absorption of cholesterol reduced as opposed to eating ice cream by itself.

Why do women cry more than men?

I was watching American Idol yesterday. Not that I am a big fan of it or anything, for lack of any other interesting TV programs, I ended up watching it. Simon displayed his usual atrocity towards the weaker contestants. Anyway, whenever a girl got rejected out of the show, they displayed intense emotional outbursts (most of the time) which included crying. Most of the guys either just walked out or yelled at the show organizers. I do have the backgrounds of the men are from mars and women are from venus thingy. But, that said, I was wondering why women, who are supposedly very stable at handling a lot of things cry?

I was trying to find a rationality behind the crying process. In some cases, I do think it is a strategy to make the opponent emotionally weaker. But, in other cases, it just seems like women are emotionally weaker. But, is it true? I for one dont believe that women are emotionally weaker. Is it just that crying is just their way of displaying sorrow ? It is possible that men are inbred with a notion that crying displays weakness, and to establish their "cool" factor, they stop crying unless it is an extreme circumstance? One could just display an emotion or rather respond to situations in different ways. Is it just that, men consider crying to not be one of them and women dont? I do think that crying carries more weightage than keeping quiet when you are sorrowful and hence some advantage. I dont understand why... Yet another thing that I dont understand and there stops my babbling...

Effects of a good economy...a thought process...

While everyone is raving about how well the economy is doing, in terms of job growth and lower unemployment numbers, I was wondering about the outcome of such a state... When the unemployment numbers are low, it is obvious that the salary should rise since the demand for an employee grows. If salaries were to raise, then the company is forced to either increase the price of the product or increase the productivity of the employees. In a perfect competition, prices have high sensitivity. So, the only way for a company to increase productivity is by firing employees. When enough companies start firing employees, the demand for an employee will go down and the system will achieve stability... The above situation also explains why inflation is high these days. When job market is strong, the buying power is strong which explains why inflation is high. This is one of the reasons why housing market didnt go down as much as it was thought to be. Also, this is why Fed is very careful with the interest rates. If they increase it, there might be a huge surge of unemployment. At the same time, if they reduce the interest rates, it will further the inflation.... So, a good economy need not necessarily be good for the masses....

The Beginning

The cricket bug has caught on and I could not resist doing some basic stuff today. The topic was based off the article on cricinfo (rather the reasoning behind the selection of some players). For instance the choice of Robin Uthappa over Gautam Gambhir was interesting. The claim is that Robin was going great guns in the domestic circuit. Therefore I did a little experiment today.

The idea is to see what is the propensity of scoring a half century or century based on ones performance in all first class matches. The basic model is as follows.

Data: N = Number of innings and Y(i) = Number of 50's or Number of 100's (i compute for both cases). I just set 'theta' as the parameter that I'm interested in estimating which is the propensity to score a 50 or a hundred.

Distribution: I let the y(i) 's follow a binomial distribution and choose an uninformative prior distribution (one that does not influence the probabilities and therefore is useful in just making the model tractable) in the form of a Beta distribution with parameters (1,1). I intend to change this view of zero prior information soon. The idea is since I have only considered first class games, the level of performance might actually be different when they move to the international scene. Apriori we expect the performance to be weaker but that need not be universally true. Therefore the new prior for the next analysis will actually factor in the international performances till date of the players in question. But as i said i reserve that for another blog.

The probabilities are as follows

	50's	100's
	P(theta)	P(theta)
Sachin Tendulkar	0.17	0.25
Rahul Dravid	0.13	0.25
Virendar Sehwag	0.15	0.18
Sourav Ganguly	0.08	0.22
Robin Uthappa	0.12	0.22
Mahendra Dhoni	0.06	0.23
K. D. Karthik	0.06	0.16
Yuvraj Singh	0.14	0.18
Gautam Gambhir	0.15	0.18
Mike Hussey	0.23	0.39
Ricky Ponting	0.19	0.21
Brian Lara	0.15	0.20
Inzamam Ul Haq	0.12	0.22
Kevin Pietersen	0.16	0.20

I find this table intriguing. Among the Indian players the choice of Yuvraj Singh over Gautam Gambhir can be questioned if we go purely by domestic performance. In fact the choice of Dinesh Karthik is even more intriguing. While Robin Uthappa can be justified, the wider variation in his probabilities as compared to Gambhir kind of indicates that risks are higher. Considering the type of player Robin is, this is not surprising. Therefore the question begs as to why was Gambhir not given enough opportunities, considering that his domestic performance is fairly good.

Dont I love the numbers for Mike Hussey! A phenomenal player with an amazing average. We can also see why we consider the other internationals top players. It is interesting to note that the propensity of scoring a century for the other four international players align very closely to that of Sachin and Rahul. This kind of tells us that domestic performance is probably an excellent indicator for success at the international level!

Well, this is kind of a quick overview and the idea is just barebones probability. Please feel free to drop in your thoughts. Alternative interpretations/views/modeling strategy...anything and everything....

Crystal Ball

okie folks...the cricket world cup is a month away...i was looking at cricinfo today and just realized that there is a wealth of data available for download...r u the the betting type??? was wondering if there are any takers to look at the data and kind of snoop to see if we can get some sort of predictions...if there are any takers do post here...mebbe we can run a blog or something with what we come up with...if we can come up with a model, i will take the responsibility of maintaining and updating the prediction system...

i dont have anything particular in mind...what we have is the data...what we need is ideas....any takers?????

Jesse Owens snubbed by Hitler?

I was reading about James Cleveland Owens (J C Owens or Jessie Owens) in this month's issue of Runner's world. Lots of interesting stuff that you can google on the web., but here is the part that caught my attention.

The 1936 Olympics in Berlin was supposedly Hitler's hope for showcasing the superiority of the Aryan race. Ofcourse as we now know it Owens won 4 gold medals- 100m sprint, the long jump (a nice story here of how Lutz Long his adversary from German helped him with advice), 200m dash and 4x100m relay team of which he was a part of. Supposedly Hitler snubbed the black atheletes by walking away and not shaking hands with them.

Later in an interview with Jesse his reply to whether he felt snubbed by Hitler- his reply amounts to something like "I was snubbed by our President who didn't acknowledge victory with a congratulatory telegram".

Also here is a recollection of his from wikipedia-

Owens was cheered enthusiastically by 110,000 people in Berlin's Olympic Stadium and later ordinary Germans sought his autograph when they saw him in the streets. Owens was allowed to travel with and stay in the same hotels as whites, an irony at the time given that Negroes in the United States were denied equal rights. After a New York ticker-tape parade in his honor, Owens had to ride the freight elevator to attend a reception for him at the Waldorf-Astoria. He later recounted:^[5]

“

When I came back to my native country, after all the stories about Hitler, I couldn't ride in the front of the bus. I had to go to the back door. I couldn't live where I wanted. I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President, either.

Imperfect Planning

We all like to plan. Starting from a trip to a grocery shop to trips to other continents, we like to make sure that everything falls in place. Optimality being the key. Not just with travel, but also with a lot of day to day activities, planning remains to be a vital part of life. But, do we all enjoy the outcome of planning? I think, may be or may be not...

Most of the times when people come back from travel, I've always found that the majority of discussion will revolve around things that went wrong. Oh, so you went to Paris... What did you see there? If the answer was a vanilla list of all the places they visited, it is not all that interesting. However, as soon as a person starts talking about the places where they got lost or mugged or just couldnt communicate due to language barriers, the heat is on... Those irregularities seem to be the juice of the trip... I think this doesnt apply just to travel or any such planned outcomes, because when the end result is certain, there is no fascination. The moment uncertainities and imperfections kick in, everything becomes interesting. Looking back at life (makes me feel old...;)), I mostly remember such imperfections, which in a way summarizes the essence of life, inspite of all the careful planning that goes in at every inch along the path...

Quote from Good Will Hunting

Good Will Hunting is one of my favourite movies. Recently, I saw it again for the nth time and the following conversation between Will and the NSA guys was quite interesting. I found the quote from the web and thought you folks might like it.... Will says the following in an interview with the NSA. Interestingly, this movie came out in 97 and the content of the message still applies...For those of you who havent watched the movie, well....watch the movie..:)

"Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll give it a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Send in the marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number was called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some guy from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And naturally they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what do I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. Why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president. "