The CRU Data Leak

I began to have doubts about the whole global warming *ahem* climate change thing since becoming exposed to the arguments on the other side, but what has tilted the scales firmly is the recent exposure of the internal CRU emails. No, not the contents of the emails themselves -- damaging as they are -- but the deafening silence from the mainstream media about this. Hopefully they're waiting for confirmation that the contents are not fake (which, by the way, is already available).

Update: Call me paranoid, but it looks like the Star Tribune story on this has been taken down. Google cache to the rescue. The doofuses forgot to take down the comments page for the story, however.

When play becomes work

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.
-- Jerome K Jeorome

We've all heard of situations (and have probably even experienced them ourselves) where someone liked their work so much that it was almost like play. Well, the reverse happened to me recently: I was working on my entry for the Intel Threading Challenge, and I was nearing the contest deadline, with my entry still missing the key bits of the algorithm. I was almost at the point where I thought I'd put in as much time as it took -- even if it meant staying up half the night -- and finish the damn thing, when it suddenly hit me: I'm supposed to be enjoying this; I'm working on this in my spare time, after all. I switched off the computer, and next morning, well past the deadline, when I thought I'd experience a pang of guilt at missing the submission, all I experienced was the thought of hacking together the code at my own pace, enjoying myself, and well, having fun.

Rukhsana appointed special police officer

I think this is an acid test -- how well we're able to protect Rukhsana and her family from the militants' vengeance will have a significant impact on the efforts to contain the militancy. Here's a thought (armchair punditry notwithstanding): provide her and her family with Z category security right in her home, instead of hauling her off to Delhi. If we're short of personnel, we can always pull them from our dear netas' entourages -- the cost of this protection is well worth the message this sends.

Jail term for thowing footwear

I think we just lost the right to condemn the treatment meted out to Muntadhar al-Zeidi.

Here's a thought experiment

From an article about Iceland's huge debt to Britain and the Netherlands and how it's trying to wriggle out of it:

Icelanders for their part feel that the EU has treated them as a financial colony while backing a neoliberal kleptocracy preying on an increasingly indebted population. In many ways Iceland is the tip of the iceberg – the proverbial canary in the coal mine showing the need to better cope with over-indebted economies. The EU and IMF-style austerity programs to pay off foreign debts that corrupt insiders have run up is not what was promised in 1991 (to) the post-Soviet economies or Third World debtors. It is not the promise of industrial capitalism. It is a financialized post-industrial dystopia, an imperial neofeudalism.

...

 Instead of imposing the kind of austerity programs that devastated Third World countries from the 1970s to the 1990s and led them to avoid the IMF like a plague, the Althing is changing the rules of the financial system. It is subordinating Iceland’s reimbursement of Britain and Holland to the ability of Iceland’s economy to pay

Do you think any of the Third World debtors would have gotten away with it if they had tried to pull the same stunt as Iceland? Any talk about how their "position as a sovereign state precludes legal process against their assets which are necessary for them to discharge in an acceptable manner their functions as a sovereign state" would only have elicited a "Nice try, just STFU and cough up the money". However, I'm sure the fact that they are not denizens of the civilized white western world would not have had anything to do with such a response. Not.

For a second there I thought you said '14 lakhs'

From The Hindu:

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s iconic Dandi March in 1930 to protest against the British salt tax has inspired pen-makers Mont Blanc to come out with a limited-series pen on the Father of the Nation.

The high-end pen is priced around Rs.14 lakh, according to a watch retailer.

The pen comes with a gold wire entwined by hand around the middle, which "evokes the roughly wound yarn on the spindle with which Gandhi spun everyday."

You can't make stuff up like this even if you tried: using somebody whose life was the epitome of simplicity to sell a fricking designer pen that costs Rs. 14 lakh.

There's a bright side to this, though: all we have to do is hook up some magnets and coils of copper wire to Gandhi's mortal remains in Raj Ghat, and voila, an instant solution to our perennial power shortages.

Somebody please take the keyboard away from him

At this rate, he's not going to last long in politics. I think it's time the writer in him is locked up in a closet, at least as long as he's a minister. Here's an idea: whenever the urge to tweet seems to become overwhelming, summon one of your minions in the ministry and bawl him out -- this will have the added benefit of bringing in some discipline as well.

By the way, studies have shown that cutting down your twittering by even as little as five tweets a day can allow one to fit in an average of 1.2 extra engagements in an already 'ridiculously full' day.

Question

If The Lost Symbol is so hot, why am I being spammed with so many emails offering the book at big discounts, including exclusive offers from my credit card company (yeah, exclusive as in "only for our two million cardholders")?

Indiaplaza even went so far as to send an email masquerading as a review of the book, with the reviewer practically wetting themselves in their praise. Wait, I think I was too harsh -- reading the review more closely, it looks like a really different plot this time: last time it was a French scholar who requests a meeting with Langdon and dies before the meeting could take place, leaving behind a tantalizing clue, while this time it's an American professor who pulls more or less the same shit. My bad.

Update:The Onion chips in:

Most chillingly, many agreed, is that while Michael Crichton's death has been a positive step, Dan Brown remains very much alive.

World Bank approves $4.3 billions in loan to India

Nothing particularly significant in this, except what a portion of the loan is meant for: to shore up the capital of some of the state-run banks. Two questions: 1) What is the need for a loan from the World Bank for this insignificant -- relatively speaking -- amount when we have something like $258 billion dollars of foreign exchange reserves? 2) Do these loans come attached with any conditions related to deregulation or 'financial innovation' that these banks must agree to?

The hydrogen bomb controversy

Today's Hindu carries an article about the controversy generated by Santhanam, in which M K Narayanan defends the government's position about the success of the thermonuclear test. Unfortunately, nearly all the points are pretty much untenable (unless he said something more, and it was not published). Samples:

The thermonuclear device had a yield of 45 kilotons. I have chosen my words carefully — 45 kilotons and nobody, including Mr. Santhanam who has absolutely no idea what he is talking about, can contest what is proven fact by the data which is there

I find it hard to believe that the DRDO project lead in charge of the whole thing (i.e. Santhanam) doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

Asked about the doubt the former Army Chief, V.P. Malik, had raised about the efficacy of the hydrogen bomb, he said: “I think the person to answer that, is the present chief and not the past chief…”

Just because someone has retired from his post, he doesn't lose whatever credentials he may have built up over his career. Reading along:

“We have thermonuclear capabilities. I am absolutely sure. We are very clear on this point. If you hit a city with one of these you are talking about 50,000 to 1,00,000 deaths,” the NSA said.

Just saying so repeatedly will not cut it. Also, does anybody else find such casual mention of deaths more horrifying than Santhanam's statements?

One can understand where Narayanan is coming from: after all, proclaiming to the whole world that our hydrogen bombs are duds is not exactly good for the morale of the country and would cause our enemies quite a lot of satisfaction, but going after those who are interested in the truth doesn't serve any purpose, either.

Haskell, monads, graph theory and the puzzle that took 19 years to solve

Well, 'solve' is actually a misnomer, since it turns out that the puzzle doesn't have a solution (at least that's what my code tells me). Here's the puzzle:

Given the figure below, find a path from point A to point B that crosses every edge line segment exactly once:

I came upon this when I was in college, and spent an hour or so on it, trying out different paths by hand, but could not find a solution.

Nineteen years later, The Communications of the ACM carries an article on the P=NP question, which triggers an impulse in me to read up more on the complexity of algorithms, and I learn about graph theory, DFS, BFS, the entire works. Quite a fascinating subject. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I realize that there is a formal method of solving the puzzle that had piqued my curiosity nearly two decades ago.

Coincidentally, my copy of Real World Haskell arrives at my doorstep at around the same time I am thinking of whipping up some code to solve the puzzle. Learn Haskell, solve puzzle. One stone, two birds.

The first thing is to come up with the data structures. Not too difficult (apologies for the screwed up formatting -- getting all the tabs correct in Blogger would probably take me four hours):

type Node = Int
type Edge = (Node, Node)
type Path = [Node]
type Graph = ([Node],[Edge])

theGraph :: Graph
theGraph = ([1,2,3,4,5,6], [(1,2),(1,3),(1,4),(1,2),
(2,3),(3,4),(1,4),(2,5),
(3,5),(3,6),(4,6),(1,5),
(5,6),(1,6),(1,5),(1,6)])

One of the options I considered initially was to model the direction of the path, something along the lines of

type Path = [(Edge,Direction)]

with Direction indicating whether we are going forward or backward, but it turns out that this was not required.

Having gotten the data structures in place, it's just a question of routine code to put together the helper functions that will be needed:

-- to check whether two edges are the same [(1,2) is equal to (2,1)]
edgeEq :: Edge -> Edge -> Bool
edgeEq e1 e2 = e11 == e21 && e12 == e22 ||
e11 == e22 && e12 == e21
where e11 = fst e1
e12 = snd e1
e21 = fst e2
e22 = snd e2

-- get all the edges joined at a node
getEdges :: Node -> [Edge]
getEdges node = [edge | edge <- snd theGraph, fst edge == node || snd edge == node]

-- get the node at the other end of an edge
getOtherEnd :: Node -> Edge ->Node
getOtherEnd node edge = if fst edge == node then snd edge else fst edge

-- get all the neighbours for a node
getNeighbours :: Node -> [Node]
getNeighbours node = map (getOtherEnd node) (getEdges node)

-- converts a path into a list of edges (e.g. [1,2,3,2] to [(1,2),(2,3),(3,2)]
buildEdges :: Path -> [Edge]
buildEdges path | null path || length path == 1 = []
| otherwise = (head path, head (tail path)) : buildEdges (tail path)

-- get the list of neighbouring nodes that are yet to be visited in the current path
getUnvisitedNeighbours :: Node -> Path -> [Node]
getUnvisitedNeighbours node path = map (getOtherEnd node) untravelledEdges
where untravelledEdges = deleteFirstsBy edgeEq (getEdges node) (buildEdges path)

-- check whether a given path is a solution
isSolution :: Path -> Bool
isSolution path = head path == 5 && last path == 6 && length path == length (snd theGraph) + 1

The astute reader will observe that the graph object -- is it OK to call things 'objects' in Haskell? -- is baked into the solution; I initially had a version where the graph object was passed as a parameter to every function, but this made things more verbose, and anyway, my objective was not to produce a graph library, but to solve the puzzle.

With that out of the way, time to move on to the actual algorithm. The algorithm is a DFS brute search, where we start at a node (note that the area outside the figure is also modelled as a node), choose one of its unvisited neighbours, choose one of the neighbour's unvisited neighbours, and so on, till we run out of neighbours to visit. Check the path to see if we have covered all the edges and if the path is bookended by the start and end nodes that are of interest to us, and we have our solution. An NP-hard problem, BTW.

It's obvious that recursion is needed here, but I was not sure how to handle the enumeration of the different branches, the backtracking from a dead end, and so on in Haskell, considering that looping is frowned upon, and the strongly typed nature of the language implies that both the if and else clauses should return the same type, i.e. you cannot do the equivalent of:

if <path is a solution>
then <print solution>
else <add next neighbour and try again>

While working on the solution, I was also reading up on monads, and man, are they a pain to wrap your head around. But luckily I ran into [*] Monads as containers (and its sibling Monads as computation, which I'm still digesting), where I learned that a list is also a monad, and we can do stuff like take a list, apply a function that produces a list, and end up with a flat list, so to speak (yeah, we don't need monads for this, a simple map and concat are enough, but I learned this in hindsight, after realizing that >>= was exactly what I was looking for). Anyway, that sort of nails the algorithm:

-- build a list of candidate paths for a given path
getNextChoices :: Path -> [Path]
getNextChoices path = nub (unvisitedNodes >>= (\x -> [reverse (x : reverse path)])) -- hack to append to end of a list
where unvisitedNodes = getUnvisitedNeighbours (last path) path

-- filter out all the solutions from a given list of candidate paths
findSolutions :: [Path] -> [Path]
findSolutions paths = filter isSolution (nub paths)

-- find all the solutions starting from a given list of candidate paths.
-- invoked with a single node path, i.e. solve [[1]]
solve :: [Path] -> [Path]
solve paths = if null choices
then findSolutions paths
else solve choices
where choices = (paths >>= getNextChoices)

solve' :: [Path]
solve' = solve [[5]]

From All About Monads:

One use of functions which return lists is to represent ambiguous computations -- that is computations which may have 0, 1, or more allowed outcomes. In a computation composed from ambiguous subcomputations, the ambiguity may compound, or it may eventually resolve into a single allowed outcome or no allowed outcome at all. During this process, the set of possible computational states is represented as a list. The List monad thus embodies a strategy for performing simultaneous computations along all allowed paths of an ambiguous computation.

The above algorithm is not exactly an ambiguous computation, but the bit about "performing simultaneous computations along all allowed paths" sure resonates with its structure.

And now for the denouement, which by the way, takes a looong time (remember the NP-hardness):

*Main> solve'
[]

Nope, still no solution.

[*] It doesn't reflect too well on a book if I still have to rely on Google to help me out. I'm looking at you, "Real World Haskell".

Thank you

Here's an example of what's wrong with our country:



Salsa-dancing, shopping-at-Marks-and-Spencers investment bankers -- yeah, this is the most representative Indian demographic.

And using Phil Collins' Another Day in Paradise as the investment banker's favourite song? These guys won't know it if irony jumped up and bit them on their asses.

Thought for the day

A helpful analogy to understand the value of static typing is to look at it as putting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle. In Haskell, if a piece has the wrong shape, it simply won't fit. In a dynamically typed language, all the pieces are 1x1 squares and always fit, so you have to constantly examine the resulting picture and check (through testing) whether it's correct.
-- From Real World Haskell

Little things

Firefox: Allow one the option of saving the password for a web site after the site has received the password and has indicated successful authentication.

IE: Prompt for saving the password before sending the request, which may result in storing an incorrect password (because of a typo).

Is it just me

... or does this image remind one of -- never mind.



(yeah, that's right, guy #1, move your left hand towards guy #3, just a little higher... perfect! Hold it right there. Guy #3, take your left hand, and...)

Exports to touch same level as last year?

... according to this story. Quite unlikely, considering the quite steep year-on-year dips in the export figures for the initial months of the year.

Bloggots

Dear Farrukh Dhondy,

I have been a regular reader of your columns in The Deccan Chronicle, and have always enjoyed your wit and intelligent insights. However, you have outdone yourself today:

Neither is there much evidence in favour of the bloggots (blogging idiots) who contend that Afghanistan is strategically important because someone somewhere wants to lay a pipeline through it to send petrol or gas to someone else and earn zillions of dollars thereby. Look at a contour map of Afghanistan (and get a life)!

Bloggots. Take two unrelated words, 'blogging' and 'idiots', conflate them together, thereby forming a new word that was simply begging to be coined, a word that succinctly captures the misplaced contempt that professional columnists (aka people who have a life as compared to us poor bloggots) have for folks who are doing an end run around them, and that too for free, and voila, there's your winner for the next year's competition.

Sincerely yours,

Bloggot #76981

P.S. About the whole Afghanistan thing: I suggest you Google for these terms: "grand chessboard", "Melvin Lattimore" and "Ali Mohammed". Spending some time at History Commons and the RI Data Dump won't hurt, either.

P.P.S. And I have been wondering about this for a long time: who the $%@& is Bachchoo?

Pension funds

Here's an example (via Mish Shedlock) of the dangers we would be exposing ourselves to if we allowed our pension funds to be invested in -- ahem -- "non-moribund investment patterns":

As of March 31, Calpers's $17.6 billion real-estate portfolio, a majority of which is invested in commercial properties while about 5% is invested in residential, reported a one-year decline of about 35% in its value.

I'd take a measly inflation-adjusted single digit return any day, thank you very much.

India aims for robust GDP growth despite drought

The Commerce Minister has opined that we can maintain our GDP growth in the current year at the same level as the previous one. Good to know that; the only problem is that the entire article contains not a single factual argument that supports his statement. Things like

"Our domestic demand and consumption is strong. Fundamentally, our economy is strong"

and

"India keeps substantial buffer stocks of food grains after our two successive years of buffer [Ed: I think he meant 'bumper'] crops. We have enough of what we have to sustain availability of food"

and

"We are not overlooking the challenges that we have. At the same time, we are not overwhelmed by them...we hope that this situation will not be there when the next sowing season comes in January"

are not exactly confidence-inspiring, absent any convincing arguments.

I came across this piece immediately after reading an investment advisory about the impact of the drought on the economy -- the detailed analysis it contains shows up the hollowness of these statements even more starkly.

Adieu to social networking

Last week I deleted my Facebook and Orkut profiles, for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere. I am going to delete my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts as well, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Maybe I'll spare LinkedIn, but Twitter has to go -- no two ways about it.

Thank you

Someone finally calls out on this pretentiousness:


This goes not just for tweeting twats, but also for blog commenters.

You give research a bad name - Part 2

From Yahoo:

A new piece of research suggests that what an organization promises to employees-training opportunities, benefits, compensation, etc.-do not matter nearly as much as what the organization actually delivers.

Samantha Montes and co-author David Zweig, professors at the Rotman School of Management and the University of Toronto Scarborough, have found that the influence of promises has little effect on employee's emotional reactions toward the organization, their intentions to stay with the organization, and intentions to engage in citizenship behaviours.

In their study paper, the authors write that people care more about what they receive from their organization, not what they were promised.

Gee, who would've thunk that?

Operators are standing by as we speak

Yeah, that's exactly what the world needs more of right now: a gold-plated guest house complex, when millions are suffering from disease, malnutrition and other crises.

Here's an idea

Abdul Kalam's supposed humiliation at the hands of the Continental Airlines security staff has kicked off a much needed debate on the privileges our so called VIPs enjoy. Here's an idea: instead of referring to these folks as VIPs, why not start calling them SLs (short for Security Liability)? This would a) take away the sheen associated with the original tag and b) lower the cost to the exchequer (the assumption being that the politicos would be shamed into requesting that they do not want to be provided security, owing to the negative connotation of the new tag).

The Rajapaksa interview

The Hindu is carrying an interview with the Sri Lankan president. Most of his answers are politically correct and are what we want to hear -- man, he's one smooth operator, alright -- but this one exposes his true colours:

Q: There has been international concern over the assaults and pressures on journalists in Sri Lanka. Some of these journalists were your personal friends, especially Lasantha Wickrematunge [Editor of The Sunday Leader] who was gunned down in January 2009. Then, in June, a Tamil woman journalist [Krishni Ifhan née Kandasamy of Internews] was abducted in Colombo by unidentified persons [who questioned her for several hours before releasing her in Kandy].

A: Most of these cases were created, I would say. If you fight someone in the street and that man comes and hits you, can the government take responsibility? But we have not done anything against journalists even when they attack us.

Nice dodge.

BTW, in case you haven't done so already, go and read 'And then they came for me', Lasantha Wickrematunge's voice from beyond the grave -- without doubt the most poignant thing I've read in a long while.

Eight queens problem in Lisp

(defun solve-n-queens (n)
  (let ((solutions nil))
    (defun solve-internal (board k)
      (if (eq k (- n 1))
        (dolist (x1 (solve board k))
          (push x1 solutions))
        (dolist (x2 (solve board k))
          (solve-internal x2 (+ k 1)))))
    (solve-internal (make-board n) 0)
    solutions))

(defun solve (board k)
  (let ((solutions nil))
    (dotimes (i (length board))
      (if (present? i k (get-safe-squares board))
          (push (place-queen (clone-board board) (list i k)) solutions)))
    solutions))

Helper procedures left as an exercise for the gentle reader.

Pop Quiz

Which of these two news items is from The Onion?

*This* is how you do it

Their names differ just by one letter, but their career paths can't be more divergent. While one is an over-hyped and pampered underachiever whose claim to fame owes more to her tight T-shirts and short skirts, the other has been quietly flying under the radar, establishing a name for herself on the world stage.

Judicial overreach

From The Hindu:

The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Centre to file an affidavit by June 26 on the steps taken to ensure the safety and security of Indian students under racial attacks in Australia and Canada.

It's nice that there's somebody to pull the government up for its non-performance, but is this the job of the judiciary? Last time I checked, their role was to interpret the law and the constitution, nothing more.

Harish Khare appointed PM's media advisor

Looks like all the years of slanted op-eds supporting the Congress party have finally paid off.

Subramaniam Swamy on EVMs

There is an op-ed by Subramaniam Swamy on EVMs in today's Hindu . He raises a lot of pertinent points, one of which is quite damning (italics mine):

For example, the respected International Electrical & Electronics Engineering Journal (IEEE, May 2009, p.23) has published an article by two eminent professors of computer science, titled “Trustworthy Voting.” They conclude that although electronic voting machines do offer a myriad of benefits, these cannot be reaped unless nine suggested safeguards are put in place for protecting the integrity of the outcome. None of these nine safeguards, however, is in place in Indian EVMs.

I googled for this article, to confirm whether there was any merit to his allegation, but the article is behind a pay wall. Another interesting point he raises is the employment of convicted hackers by a political party just before the elections (no prizes for guessing which party):

On the eve of the 2009 elections in India, I raised the issue at a press conference in Chennai, pointing out that a political party just before the elections had recruited those who had been convicted in the U.S. for hacking bank accounts on the Internet and credit cards.

If these allegations are true, my already low level of confidence in these machines just went down another notch.

A fool and his money ...

Today I shelled out $5 to buy the PDF version of the Blue Book when I could have had it for free. And to think that the money could have been put to better use, like helping out Arthur Silber, for example, makes it all the more painful. Grrr.

Here's a business opportunity

From an article in the latest issue of the Communications of the ACM that analyses the reasons for the limited success of the OLPC:

... if the machine fails, it is up to the family to replace it or the child must do without.

Time for someone to step in with an insurance policy, methinks.

Tin foil hat time

Considering that Tech Mahindra is facing difficulties in dealing with the spurt in the share price of Satyam, this statement by the Satyam chairman seems suspiciously like an attempt to drive down the price to levels comparable to the open offer price. I dare say anybody in his right mind would deliberately talk down a company this way otherwise:

"It is hugely overstaffed, costs are very high, and the revenue picture in the immediate future is not that great."

General Motors or Chevrolet?

General Motors have taken a full page ad in the newspapers to convince the world that their Indian operations are going strong, no reason to doubt their solvency, yada yada. If you look at the ad, you will find exactly one mention of 'General Motors': the line below the CEO's name and designation (well, two if you count the GM logo in a picture of one of their factories). It's 'Chevrolet' everywhere else: it's almost like they want to dissociate themselves from the G-word -- which is sort of schizophrenic, considering the intent of the ad.

EVMs

Both Jayalalitha and Subramaniam Swamy have questioned the authenticity of the recently concluded general elections. While they have not substantiated their allegations, consider these facts:

1. Media organizations were prohibited from conducting exit polls.


2. Navin Chawla was accused by ex-CEC Gopalaswami to be partisan, going so far as taking bathroom breaks during crucial election planning meetings, and passing on information about the happenings to the Congress netas.


3. There is no verifiable paper audit trail that independently proves that my vote was registered for the candidate of my choice.


4. The candidate's name is linked to the voting button via a strip of paper stuck to the top of the voting machine (rough analogy: numbers stuck to a phone keypad). How do we know that the paper is really in sync with the candidate details fed into the machine? For that matter, how do we even know for sure that two buttons are not connected to the same candidate?


5. There is a huge disconnect between then opinion polls and the actual results.

Got work?

From ABC News via Mish's blog:

Casey Savage graduated from Trinity College in Hartford with a 3.8 grade-point average and honors. What he doesn't have is a job.

"I've talked to 24 different firms so far. Hedge funds, investment banks, private equity shops," Savage said. "And I just feel that there's limited opportunities at this point."

It's a bad situation, alright, but I can't feel too much sympathy for someone whose goal -- right out of college, no less -- is to take up a career where one's job: a) doesn't add anything to the real economy b) involves either a Ponzi scheme or blowing up the next bubble and c) screwing over old widows and pensioners.

You can't make this stuff up

First IPL2 semi-final: Delhi Daredevils' Dilshan, a Sri Lankan, hits a boundary and is applauded by somebody holding a sign that reads (in Tamil) Tamizhanda!!.

MotoGP

I haven't been paying attention to MotoGP for a while, so I don't know how long the unedifying practice of changing bikes during the race has been in place. Doesn't really matter: it sucks big time, and takes away an important aspect where MotoGP scored over Formula One.

Maybe it's my belief in the KISS principle, but the idea of starting and finishing the race non-stop and relying only on your driving skills -- as opposed to the scheming and tactics associated with pit stops, fueling, tyre change, etc. -- appeals immensely to me. While we are at it, why not dispense with having two drivers and cars per team as well? It leads to charges of favoritism and ill feelings between the drivers, and results in violations of the spirit of racing when one driver is instructed to let his partner win in the interests of the team.

There is also a financial benefit to the no pit stops strategy -- think of all the money saved because you don't need such a large crew in every race.