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?????????????????????