Lies in your living room

The pervasive influence of the advertising industry cannot be denied. That they can have a seriously deleterious effect on the ability of a kid to distinguish between a reliable source of information and something that is a lot of just nicely packaged lies is also obvious. But what is to be done, especially now that very few parents have the time to attend to their kids properly and use the TV as a parent/babysitter surrogate? This article talks about a parent who tried something different.. and it worked!

yeah, amongst other things

I was going to blog about our Pittsburgh trip over the weekend, but this caught my attenshun and I don't have too much time. Let me summarise this: Islamic law (Sharia) reportedly frowns upon interest gained from money in a bank account. So, Lloyds TSB provides 'Islamic banking' services which include zero interest savings accounts. The BBC reports here. For comparison, here is the webpage of the Islamic Bank of Britain. I just want Terry Pratchett to incorporate this into his next work. Something is fundamentally skewed with this turn of events. If I may make a suggestion, there are many people in the world who can use some largesse: why not directly send the income derived from capital belonging to our Muslim brethren who would wish to abide strictly by the 'no interest rule' to Muhammad Yunis' Gramin Bank?

Ewwww dirty UNIX!!!

why geeks love UNIX...


who | grep -i babe | talk; cd ~; touch; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; make clean; sleep



also.. someone posted a random thread on reddit asking 'how many people randomly type ls into their terminals when they are bored?' The replies are here.. it is very strangely interesting to read them.. but I mainly found the following comment hilarious..

"I hate it when I'm not in vi.

It's such a nice place."

A word about Universities.

Universities exist to explore the boundaries of knowledge and pass on some of the same to young people. Or so they say.

There are several caveats to this:

Universities need a lot of funding to function: especially the experimental sciences. Funding is usually forthcoming from the government, and to a lesser extent, private enterprise. Private entities will always take their pound of flesh: any benefits coming out of research performed will go the the funding entity. In those happy circumstances when individuals donate monies to universities asking for nothing in return, things are different. The West has long has such philanthropists. People like the Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie, and in more recent times (also, in relation to UM) Stephen Ross and Alfred Taubman are people who have really made a difference. Indian schools have rarely been as lucky. Certainly, in colonial times, Rajahs have donated huge sums to education and in more recent times, people like the Tatas have done their bit. But for the most part, Indian businessmen rarely seen the point in funding education.

It is perhaps this and other factors which have led to education being viewed as a service industry more than anything else. For a country which churns out tens of thousands of engineers each year most of whom are employed in turning the wheels of the global techno-economy, the highest one can aspire to, from a middle class background is the monetary security which comes with a decent B.E or a a B.Tech.

The price that we have paid is that the basic sciences, the social sciences and the humanities have been neglected to an extent which is criminally irresponsible. And now that everyone has woken up to the spending power of the slightly better off people in the Third World, we have education fairs sponsored by Australian and British diplomats set up stalls and woo Indian students who have the moolah, but not enough brains to make it into the IITs. At this point, of course any self respecting Indian student looks down his or her righteous nose at a non Oxbridge degree, from anywhere else in the Commonwealth.

For all that is purportedly ill with the US system, the quality control system in place is perhaps far more effective than elsewhere in the English speaking world. But, say what we will.. in an era of dwindling budgets (where is all the bleedin' money goin'???!?) all schools are defaulting to a business model of imparting education. And of course, academics are screaming bloody murder. The question remains: can we put a price tag on education, apart from the one the student chooses to put upon it himself? Yes, we can, and the figure runs into the tens of thousands per semester. The recent appointment of a controversial candidate as the President of the University of Colorado has made waves.

Here is what I think: academia could do with some reform, but more often than not it is the administration which holds all the cards. Amongst the schools I have seen, there is only one place where it is clear that the administration holds that its job is to smooth the life of the faculty and students. This is the Physics department of the Indian Institute of Science. At the end of the day, viewing Universities as part of the worldwide service industry devalues the one thing which makes us most human: the pursuit of knowledge... for as Tennyson put it in "Ulysses":

'And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.'

Travel tips

How to make sure that you and your luggage get to the same place. An expert's advice is here.

Saraswati Pujo pictures are here

See this link..

Also, I decided to include these two pictures, which I have also loaded on Flickr, along with their captions...


I was indulging in some stage photography at the Mitali Saraswati Pujo cultural programme last weekend. During the Sarod recital, this leetil kid who was fast asleep in his pram woke up and decided to go take a walk. He strolled up to the stage and then stood enthralled by the music. I saw a wonderful photo moment here. Before his grandma could wise up to the fact that he was off and put him in the pram again, I had to take a picture. So I folded up the tripod and sat down on the ground so that I was actually below the kid's eye level. I opened the tripod at minimum extension and waited for my moment. The problem was that he was so close to the stage that I knew it would be impossible to frame him and the performers at the same time, atleast not with the lens I had. So I crossed my fingers and waited. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes (which feels like much longer with the eye on the viewfinder) he turned slightly. Then I waited a wee bit longer until he turned around completely and took this shot.

Really want to go to this place.

Check out...

About computers

Turns out that I am a git. Also turns out that my laptop is playing silly buggers with me. The battery problems which it louvvs to display around me magically disappear when I take it to the SysAd. Treachery! Also turns out that by means of using a Microsoft keyboard with a Mac (which makes me mildly schizo in the middle of the workday), I inadvertently turned on the magnification function (how??!?!?!?), and hence thought the display card was on the blink. Yeah. shite happens!

Why read?

It must be a coincidence: last night, I finished watching 'Farenheit 451', a cinematic adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel by the French avant garde director, Francois Truffaut... and today, the first eye catching article on reddit was this: The Dumbing Of America

So... what do we say to this... it is certainly not a uniquely American phenomenon. The plain fact is that multimedia resources have so far trumped print media that any comparison on the impact that they respectively have on an average citizen's life is ludicrous. F-451 is the temperature at which paper burns.. this film is about a dystopian future in which there is music and TV and even interactive TV (which is a reality at this moment), but no books. Books are viewed as evil, as they cause unhappiness and sow the seeds of elitism. Anyone found hoarding and reading books will be punished and the books burnt. And during the relentless execution of his tasks, one of the enforcers begins to doubt the system. Anyhow, I will not talk about the entire plot, I would much rather you went ahead and read the book.

We have witnessed a systematic dumbing down of all popular media, be it news or entertainment. As we move towards a more machine driven society, it becomes all the more necessary that humanity acquires the wisdom to transcend this technological adoloscence. Alas, I don't believe that 9 second sound bites on our most respected news channels and the persistent apotheosis of delinquent celebrities is doing anything toward that goal.

Topological thoughts during office hours and what they lead to.

My boss asked me to take a visiting scientist out for lunch. This gentlemen works in a well known group at Harvard. We had an excellent lunch and then, as he had lived in Ann Arbor years ago, spent a short while walking around Central campus. We got back, and I started working on this thing I had been tweaking yesterday. The script works fine, things are just peachy.

In the meantime, my hard working laptop, a beautiful Macbook has been screaming for attention. It refuses to boot off the battery, a problem I have been pretending does not exist. Might be a motherboard issue. Anyway, today it decided to grab my attenshun by refusing to connect to the external monitor properly. Any movement of the mouse makes the whole display shake. It made me seasick. So I moved to a fairly old, but well behaved Linux machine.

Then things went wrong. I started randomly thinking about the old 'how many road must a man walk down', and then thought about Mobius strips, and then about the Koningsburg seven bridges problem. If this chain of thought is difficult to follow, don't be surprised.

So I started to try solving the Seven Bridge's problem. Now obviously, there is no solution to this problem,but let me just direct you to an excellent page which discusses this. Then a student who I am helping with some work walked in. We started talking about his work and before we knew it, it had been quite a while and our visiting scientist's seminar was over and done with.

That was pretty bad.

The Operating System Jihad

If you have ever been friends with people who are hooked on a particular operating system and hate and despise any other, you will know what I mean by OS Jihad. Simple admission here.. i used to be a Windows hater... I mean, it is ubiquitous, it is easy to hate it. I won't claim to understand technology... to me computers are black boxes.. but here is my take on things:

Windows is convenient, it is everywhere. But it is like taking the bus, you get to where you want to, but sometimes not on time, and you may get shoved around a bit. But everyone uses it, and it is not too expensive.

Macs are awesome. They are custom limos which will take you anywhere and in great comfort too. But they are bloody expensive.

And then there is UNIX. Sorry, there ARE UNIX. Which can range from a jury rigged Fedora system, which I would liken to the DeLorean running on plutonium in 'Back to the Future' to a standard implementation like Solaris 10, which is like Starship Enterprise.

I think it is simply wise to retain familiarity with all the systems out there so that one can work on whatever platform is around at the moment. But some people disagree. The comments on this blog entry are worth reading for an example of the heated debated which arise when OSs' are debated.

And this long article is an excellent history of the development of the personal computer. Definitely worth a read.

At the end of the day, perhaps the wisest comment in this context was made by my friend Pradeep: 'there are no bad users, there are only bad interfaces!!'

What do you mean, I can't have it?

The US is probably slipping into a recession as I write this, and one of the main reasons for this appears to be the sub prime lending crisis. In layman's terms, this means that banks and other moneylenders have been lending money to people who can probably not afford to pay them back. This has lead to widespread that the moneylenders have overstretched themselves and they way to recover is to withdraw funding from the worldwide investments that they have made. Which would spread the pain all over the world instead of just the US.

Now what did things come to this? The credit history of an individual is a fairly important barometer of his personal future. This is the only country in the world where the following conversation would make sense:
A: I want to buy a car.
B: So you need a loan.
A: No, I have the money. I have saved up for five years.
B: So, now you should take a loan and return it in a year.
A: Why?
B: To improve your credit history, obviously!
A: Why do I need to do that?
B: So that you can get a loan easier!
A: But I don't need a loan.
B: But you may, later.


Right, something is seriously wrong here. Let me try to put my finger on it. I don't think people in this country have ever heard of the word 'austerity'. Simply put, the culture of the US appears to be one of immediate gratification and continuous consumption. The old idea of 'saving up for something special' seems to simply not exist. Hence lending agencies. Hence, people overspending and transferring debt from one credit card to another. And speaking of which, what is the deal with so many different credit card products anyway? I personally think this whole crowded market full of different lending products is just a minefield waiting for the unsuspecting and naive consumer.

Anway, I want to finish with this story about a lady who lives on a 2500$ a month disability payment, and went ahead and leased a 100 000$ BMW with a fake credit application.

Saraswati Pujo and beyond...

The Greater Bengali Community at Ann Arbor (I just louvv putting the capitals in) put together this year's Saraswati Pujo on Saturday. Pictures will shortly follow. Right now, I am still recovering from the event... I have always been a big fan of this particular Pujo.. ever since the Institute days. This was something that we had put together back then.. and it is of course the thing to do for a group of students. This time, we did maintain all the glorious traditions of the Pujo including the "late night e labour-dewa," the "uposh" on the day of the Pujo and finally the "parking lot e dnariye counter e dhumpaan kora". Yes, all the way.

Explaining the wurlde, one Venn diagram at a time: softwares

Towards Empire

This Scottish gentleman, Iain M Banks has been one of the most prolific writers of the last two and a half decades, or so. He writes science fiction under the pen name of Iain M Banks and literary fiction under the name of Iain Banks.

I have so far only read two of his novels. The second is 'Excession'. The first is the 'The Algebraist', which deals with a multi-species pan galactic civilization in which much of the current economic and military concepts and ideals hold true. In a sense, it is merely a vastly scaled up empire, but fundamentally no different from any contemporary or historical civilisation that you may care to mention. Transport over huge interstellar distances are achieved by tunneling through artificial black holes called 'Portals'. The construction and maintainance of these Portals is extremely difficult, and they are as jealously guarded as any Roman highway through barbarian territory would be, or National Highway 1 through Kashmir is guarded by the Indian Army. Peace is guaranteed by the overwhelming superiority of the 'Summed Fleet', the strong arm of the political structure, which is called the 'Mercatoria'. Mercatorial forces are always engaged in low intensity conflicts at the periphery of the controlled Galaxy with breakaway populations which do not wish to join the Galactic mainstream. A parallel
may be drawn to the last decades of the Galactic Empire by Asimov (think of the Prefecture of Anacreon). The wildcard in this tableau happens to be the 'Dwellers', who live in gas giants. Theirs' is a very widespread and immeasurably old civilization. While their very age almost guarantees their technological superiority, their enormous lifespans also give them what is almost contempt for pretty much any other short lived species, whom they term 'Quick'. This translated into a couldn't-care-less attitude towards the Mercatoria and the rest of the Galaxy. Banks brings all these participants together in a beautifully complex mileu, rivalling anything that our twin gods of SF have ever dreamed up.

More will follow....

Funny Indians?

Everyone knows that Desi's take themselves waaaay too seriously. Indians have little, or no sense of humour at all. Apparently that is changing. There is this bloke called Russell Peters, a Canadian born Indian (a contradiction in terms, you think? Maybe we will call him a CBCD. I am SURE you know what that would mean. Hint: what does ABCD mean?). Anyways, I think Peters is funny, but only to a point. His act pulls on all kinds of racial stereotypes (a fairly common thing in stand-up comedy: the truly worst and quite disgusting example is Carlos Mencia). But Peters has a gift for comedy, far better than Mencia and he manages to get across to the audience with his imitations of different accents. Check him out here.

This new bloke just appeared on my radar, called Papa CJ. UK based, and nowhere near Peters, but he may get there.

Its Monday!!

Yeah, big fat hairy deal.. the gawd-awful joke of the previous week is :

Q: All the molecular dynamics people of the world get together and have a big party. What do you call the event?

A: 'The Penalty Function'.

Young Karthik's much more intriguing (and raunchy contribution): 'The Scoring Function'.

Some people have such amazingly complex minds.

This dude, great friend of mine, extremely smart fellow... well, I messaged him 'ki korchhish', which is Bangla for 'what are you up to?'

Here is what he had to say:
whats up

re: "ki korchhish", does that translate to a "whats up", or a "what the fuck do you think you're doing"

regardless, the answer is "i dont know"

Green Patches.

Someone sent me a 'Green Patches' invite on Facebook. Apparently, it has something to do with stopping global warming. Without going into a discussion about Global Warming (see, I think the topic deserves capital letters), I wonder how just joining a group on facebook (note small letters here) will help. I don't really see how. Ok, I appreciate the general effort in that it is good to educate people about issues affecting the environment, but I doubt that just being on Facebook and creating a community will help. My point it that it might assuage whatever latent guilt there is in people who might actually make a difference without making that difference. By the way, Green Patches was the name of a short story by Asimov which did make quite an impact on me, a long time ago.

Life is a recursive sequence....

as seen here.