Lawyers, MBAs and Engineers

From an interview with the president of the China Investment Corporation in The Atlantic:

The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too! Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, “Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school.” I say, “Why? Why not science and engineering?” They say, “Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money.”

Nothing new in this, except that the part in italics is a near-verbatim quote of what someone said to me yesterday, after meeting one such MBA.

Well

...now the Videocon offer doesn't sound so bad, does it?

With the handset unit continuing to bleed cash, Motorola was planning to spin the division off into a separate company and focus on its remaining two businesses, which focus on home entertainment and emergency-response communications. Those plans have been scrapped for now given the lack of interest by investors.

It's All Very Well

... doing macho stuff like sinking pirate mother ships and capturing pirates, but it would also be nice if the Indian Navy could turn their attention to protecting the Indian coastline once in a while.

Pop Quiz

What do these words and phrases have in common:

puissant, rascally, indolence, diabolical, instrumentality, Kilkenny cat functionalism, nocent, pachydermic

Option A: They were all taken from the Reading Comprehension section of the most recent edition of the GRE.
Option B: They are all from V R Krishna Iyer's article in yesterday's Hindu.

There is a lot of sense in what the retired judge has to say, but this gets buried (should I say 'interred') in the pompous verbiage. To be fair, I get a sort of perverse pleasure watching these words jostle for space before making an uneasy peace with their cohabitants whom they would rather die than share a sentence with normally -- it's almost like reading bad poetry -- but the message gets lost. Some sample sentences:

Are our expensive defence systems so goofy and gullible that hostiles in guile, with brute objectives, can reach a busy city, march inside a seven-star hotel and indulge in diabolical destruction with vindictive terrorism?

Even where Ministers and bureaucrats wine and dine, nocent neglect is writ large

The perspective of the executive at the State and Central levels is bureaucratic and pachydermic; pomp and power of office is the focus.

I wanted to add a few more examples, but for some reason, I seem to have developed a headache all of a sudden.

Somebody please tell her

... that no, it's not OK for her to start prescribing medicine:

"When I started to play tennis, I wanted to be a doctor. I had to choose between tennis and being a doctor and I chose tennis. Now, thanks to MGR University, both my dreams have come true," said tennis star Dr Sania Mirza, HDFTBU

(Alright, I added the prefix and degree to her name. Readers who figure out what HDFTBU stands for will win an honorary doctorate from... never mind)

... And They Come Out of the Woodwork

Some false flag conspiracy talking points about the Mumbai attacks that are doing the rounds:

1. Hemant Karkare was killed because he was close to exposing the truth about the involvement of the establishment in the Malegaon blast.


2. One of the pictures of the terrorists shows him wearing a red thread on his right arm, so the whole thing is a right wing Hindu conspiracy.


3. Some of the terrorists were seen ordering liquor (gasp!), so again it's an indication that it's a right wing Hindu conspiracy.


4. All the Jewish/Israeli hostages at Nariman House escaped (factually incorrect).


5. To top it all: India had a hand in 9/11


6. Update: The hits keep coming: India, with its large foreign exchange reserves, is pressuring the United States into doing its bidding (whatever that is)

I used to have a lot of respect for Whatreallyhappened.com and Rigorous Intuition, but some of the posts there have left me shaking my head in disgust. There are questions still to be answered, no doubt, but it doesn't behoove folks calling themselves rigorous to jump to conclusions before all the facts are in and start mouthing off (BTW, the tone of certain comments in the Mumbai attacks thread at RI border on the antisemitic).

Jargon, Jargon Everywhere

Fund Manager Speak:

The macro headwinds for equities are strong with the Reserve Bank of India, in their first quarter review of the annual monetary policy for 2008-09, lowering the growth forecast for the financial year 2008-09 by half a percentage point from 8.5% to 8%.

Translation:

Bad time for equities -- RBI has forecast that this year's growth will be 8% and not 8.5% as previously thought [*].

Fund Manager Speak:

The investment objective of the scheme is to generate capital appreciation from a diversified portfolio of equity and equity related securities.

Translation:

This scheme hopes to make money by buying shares low and selling them high; we are also not putting all our eggs in one basket.

[*] Note the use of the word 'strong' in a negative context; one can almost be mistaken into thinking that some good news is being delivered.

Joel on Friedman

Probably the most succinct, yet devastating critique of Thomas Friedman I've seen, Matt Taibbi notwithstanding:

... Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random gibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur

Steps to Build and Run SUIF in Linux

1. Install these packages:
   
   * bison
   * flex
   * graphviz
   * gcc-2.95
   * tcl8.4
   * tcl8.4-dev
   * tk8.4
   * tk-8.4-dev
   
   
2. Extract the contents of basesuif-2.2.0-4.tar.gz to a directory of your choice


3. export NCIHOME=<above directory>


4. cd $NCIHOME


5. /bin/sh ./install --with-CC=/usr/bin/gcc-2.95 --with-CXX=/usr/bin/g++-2.95 \
   --with-CXXLINK=/usr/bin/g++-2.95 --with-TCL_INCLDIRS=-I/usr/include/tcl8.4 \
   --with-TCL_LIBDIRS=-ltcl8.4


6. make setup


7. make


8. . nci_setup.sh


9. make test

To install other packages (I used these steps to build dataflow, suifbrowser and tclsuif):

1. Extract the .tar.gz file to $NCIHOME


2. Edit each package's makefile and:
   
   * Change occurrences of '-ltcl8.0' and '-ltk8.0' to '-ltcl8.4' and '-ltk8.4' respectively.
   * Add -DUSE_NON_CONST to the CXXFLAGS environment variable


3. navigate to the package's directory and type 'make'

To run the SUIF binaries, set the following environment variables: LD_LIBRARY_PATH ($NCIHOME/solib) and VISUAL_TCL ($NCIHOME/suif/suif2b/suifbrowser/visual_tcl_lib/).

The Global Financial Crisis

Some random thoughts on the global financial crisis:

1. People keep calling it a liquidity problem, while it's actually a solvency problem. But in a world of fractional reserve banking and insane leveraging, there's not that much difference between the two, I guess.


2. Fractional reserve banking may be the root cause of all the evils by causing unchecked expansion of credit and money supply, but would a world where all the currencies are backed by gold be capable of sustaining the prosperity of everybody (or even lifting more people out of poverty), when considering the rapid rise in the world population in the last hundred or so years?


3. I was impressed enough with the tenets of Austrian economics -- due in no small measure to reading Mike Shedlock's blog -- to go out and buy Economics in One Lesson. While the arguments against government meddling for short term gains are impeccable in theory, one wonders whether it is possible to apply the theory to the real world without causing misery to large segments of the population. Consider this argument against minimum wages:

   When such consequences are pointed out, there are those who reply: "Very well; if it is true that the X industry cannot exist except by paying starvation wages, then it will be just as well if the minimum wage puts it out of existence altogether." But this brave pronouncement overlooks the realities. It overlooks, first of all, that consumers will suffer the loss of this product. It forgets, in the second place, that it is merely condemning the people who worked in that industry to unemployment. And it ignores, finally, that bad as were the wages paid in the X industry, they were the best among all the alternatives that seemed open to the workers in that industry; otherwise the workers would have gone into another. If, therefore, the X industry is driven out of existence by a minimum wage law, then the workers previously employed in that industry would be forced to turn to alternative courses that seemed less attractive to them in the first place.

   In reality, how easy is it for someone to change their career midway through? Unless the assumption is that since it's a minimum wage job we are talking about, one does not need significant retraining for a new career. Also, people sometimes don't want to relocate in favour of a higher paying job, and are forced to put up with lower wages.


4. One keeps reading about the next round of CDS auctions being the ticking bomb that is going to blow us all sky high, but these D-days seem to come and go without much ado.

Drowning in Oil

From Caroline Baum:

All speculative bubbles have a kernel of truth behind them to justify their existence. This time around it was China and India. These emerging Asian giants were gobbling up all the commodities the world could produce to fuel their rapid industrialization.

It wasn't that the story was untrue; it was old. Growing global demand probably was the reason for the gradual rise in oil prices from $20 a barrel to $40 earlier in the decade, and even to $60 by mid-2005.

It was the moon shot to $147 that took on a life, and a litany, of its own. Emerging nations didn't start gobbling up crude, coal and copper all of a sudden in the middle of 2007.

That sure rings a bell.

Near-Death Experiences

There's an article about research into 'out-of-body' experiences in yesterday's Hindu (note: the online edition is a truncated version of the print article). I have been fascinated with NDE for quite some time, and so I was looking forward to knowing whether there is any conclusive evidence one way or the other. Sure enough, there is mention of an objective method to collect evidence (emphasis mine):

I wanted to investigate if these experiences could be attributed to the drugs that we gave the patients, to abnormal levels of oxygen or carbon dioxide in the blood and was there a way of verifying the out-of-body component? So I hid symbols on top of cardiac monitors at each patient's bedside which could only be viewed from an out of body perspective.

That sounds promising; reading on:

In June 2008 my book, an academic monograph, "The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five Year Clinical Study" was published by The Edwin Mellen Press. The reason that I chose to publish an academic book is because I believe these experiences need to be taken seriously.

The article then goes into the details of the study, its purported benefits, and so on, but there is no mention of whether any evidence supporting these experiences was found.

Methinks there's no conclusive evidence; or, it's a "buy my book to find out all about it" ploy. Also, what the heck is an academic book? Has it been peer-reviewed like an academic paper?

Predatory Lending

Just when the whole world is waking up to the fact that too much of leverage is a bad thing, there's an ad in today's Hindu for home loans with a 3% down payment. The lender is none other than ICICI Bank, who is also in the news today for the wrong reasons:

Mr. Chidambaram pointed out that the country’s public sector banks, in which the government holds the majority shareholding, did not have any “undue exposure” and whatever they had were in accordance with the Reserve Bank of India guidelines. ICICI Bank, however, did have some exposure and it had made the necessary disclosures.

No surprises there.

The Best Argument Against Democracy

.. is a five minute conversation with an average voter.

Here's a letter to Deccan Chronicle in favour of the Indo-US nuclear deal:

I have been following (Brahma) Chellaney's articles on the nuclear deal. From the beginning he has been assiduously following a line quite opposite to the one held by the government. In a democratic country, every citizen has a right to express his or her opinion, and Chellaney is one among them. He, however, appears to be a diehard critic of the deal for reasons best known to him.

Excuse me, "reasons best known to him"? Here's this guy, who has been busting his hump, wading through the text of the various documents pertaining to the deal and the NSG waiver, and putting down bulleted points for why he is against the deal, and we still get questions like this.

Reminds me of the Friends episode where Phoebe announces that she wants to carry her brother's baby, and Ross lists a number of reasons why she needs to think this through, and Phoebe's reacts "What's your point?"

Staying on the nuclear deal, there seems to have been a sort of realignment among the supporters and opponents. Hindu started out as a critic, then revised its stance, and is now once again giving prominence to things that are wrong with the deal. DC, on the other hand, started out negative, but is keeping quite nowadays -- Chellaney's columns notwithstanding -- about the various bits of bad news (no columns from Seema Mustafa, too).

Of Objects, Classes and Metaclasses

"The greatest talents are slowly mastered" (Lao Tzu)

It started with the metaobject protocol, moved on to metaclasses, and culminated in this paradoxical statement from Wikipedia: "[T]he metaclass of Metaclass is an instance of Metaclass."

• An object is an instance of a class.


• A class is a singleton instance of a metaclass.


• A class is also an object.


• A metaclass is also a class (as well as an object, of course).


• A metaclass, being a class, is a singleton instance of a metaclass.


• Metaclasses are instances of the class Metaclass.

Which, I think, leads us to the Wikipedia quote.

Class diagram (Smalltalk-specific, with a few bits omitted for clarity; also, NumberMetaClass isn't named as such):



I started off with the profound quote from the Tao Te Ching, but I'm not really sure what the utility of this stuff is, unless I'm implementing a Smalltalk virtual machine. Well, I can at least sleep peacefully at night, knowing that if ever I run into the Wikipedia quote again, I know that I can figure it out. Sort of.

Staying on the subject of objects (pun unintended), here's a delightfully candid quote from an interview with Alexander Stepanov (emphasis mine):

Question: I have done a search on Lycos for your papers and I only found two titles: the STL manual and a resume of you presentation of STL to the standardization committee.

Answer: Well, I am lazy, but not that lazy. I probably published 20 papers and a book. Many of them are on different STL sites. (Dave Musser's site probably has several.)

Question: Which book?

Answer: The book is "The Ada Generic Library: Linear List Processing Packages", by David R. Musser and Alexander A. Stepanov, Compass Series, Springer-Verlag, 1989. It is not really worth reading.

Trivia: there are 23 occurrences of the word 'class' in this post.

Movie Review: The Dark Knight

The first thing that comes to mind when I think of The Dark Knight a week after watching it is the great role played by Heath Ledger. The scene where he talks about his drunk father had me involuntarily touching my face, in anticipation of the gore that mercifully remains off-camera. All in all, a great villain. Pity we won't get to see him again.

Batman, in contrast, is not so great. He is overshadowed in so many scenes; can't blame him really, when you have folks like Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman as co-stars (not to mention The Joker).

The movie may be topical for an American audience, in that it explores things like how too much focus on security could lead to fascism, what people are willing to sacrifice for their personal safety [*], and so on, but these things are of not much interest to somebody who is just looking for a good action movie.

One thing that strained the credibility a bit was the power wielded by the Joker, and how he gets access to all the resources that he commands. Would have been easier to believe if he were a traditional comic book villain with superpowers or a super-weapon.

Oh, I've mentioned this before, but what's with these superhero movies where people are not able to put two and two together and figure out that the caped crusader bears a more than passing resemblance (mask notwithstanding) to the well-known local billionaire?

[*] The denouement of the ferry scene, while inducing the intended swelling of hearts in the audience, seemed a trifle contrived. Maybe it's just the cynic in me.

P.S. The high-tech kidnap scene in Hong Kong would have looked more natural in a Bond movie or in an MI sequel, IMO.

WTF?

I received this in an email from Citibank (italics mine):

Dear Customer,

When did you last abandon the boardroom in pursuit of play? Forsaken corporate schedules in favor of a holiday itinerary? Swapped your starched suit for a glowing tan?
...

Dear Marketroid, if you click on the 'Profile' link on the top right hand corner of this page, you will see my picture. Please note that I am a dark-skinned Indian, and that a 'glowing tan' is the last fricken thing on my mind. Considering the fact that the email was sent from 'india.marketing@citi.com', you guys will have to either a) stop mindlessly using copy from your international marketing *ahem* collateral or b) kindly remind your copywriters that, while they are enamoured with all things western, it wouldn't hurt them to reflect once in a while on the fact that they are in India, where people buy Fair and Lovely, not Coppertone.

Lisp or Smalltalk?

I have been thinking about doing all my side projects in Lisp -- due in no small measure to taking the time to finally read Practical Common Lisp cover to cover -- and have been playing around with the various Lisp environments and libraries. Impressions:

1. Programming in Lisp makes one feel good (I know, this is about as touchy-feely as you can get). The constant effort to abstract things away, looking for ways to automate repetitive code fragments, and so on brings with it a real sense of progress (at least from a programming perspective).


2. Though Lisp shares the concept of an image with Smalltalk, this is not as readily apparent and IMHO as powerful as Smalltalk; for example, I need to load packages through startup files each time I start the environment.


3. The Lisp environments are not as friendly as the Smalltalk IDEs where everything hangs together, so to speak.


4. Library support also seems more cohesive in Smalltalk. asdf-install does provide a way to pull packages easily, but there is no way to see what packages are currently installed in the image, what *are* the 'right' packages to install, etc. Not to mention the need to load packages every time using the startup file.


5. File-based development seems like a regressive step after programming in Smalltalk. For one thing, I don't know if there is an easier way to load the code from all my files than calling load every time I start the environment.


6. I have a small homegrown wiki application running in VisualWorks which I wanted to see if I could redo in Lisp. After googling a bit and searching the Common Lisp web sites, two frameworks seemed worth pursuing: WebActions (modelled on Struts) and Weblocks (a Seaside-like continuations-based framework). Weblocks seems the more promising, no doubt owing to the advantages of using continuations.

From a programming perspective, I guess it does not really matter whether I choose Lisp or Smalltalk (unless I run into a situation where the use of macros is the only way to get something done), but Smalltalk does score from a convenience perspective. I think I'll stick with ST.

Joke of the day

From a Slashdot comment:

Where did you get your php info? foreach was introduced in PHP4...
I get mine from phpinfo();

Can you spell 'frame-up'?

From an article in The Hindu about Aafia Siddiqui:

...Ms Siddiqui was arrested by Afghan police in July along with her son — the date is unclear — after they found them loitering outside the compound of the Governor’s house in Ghazni. They questioned her, and on suspicion, checked her bag, in which they allegedly found “suspicious” liquids in glass containers, a bomb-making manual, and some material on New York and its landmarks. She was handed over to the U.S. authorities on July 17.

On July 18 , Ms Siddiqui is said to have fired at American soldiers who were present at the Afghan facility where she was being held, with a rifle that one of the soldiers had left lying around. A soldier fired back, wounding her. Charged in a criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of New York with one count of attempting to kill U.S. officers and employees and one count of assaulting U.S. officers and employees