Vitamin C can help beat cancers

Not a very catchy story, is it? Let's spice it up a bit -- "Munch on: Potato chips can help beat cancers":

The mouth-watering chips have long been labelled as a "junk food". Yet, experts have claimed that gorging on a deep-fried potato diet can help people in beating certain cancers.

According to them, chips are rich in vitamin C, which tackles dangerous free radicals associated with cancer growth, and those suffering with the disease can even shrink the size of their tumours by eating wafers, the Daily Star reported.

Why do I get the feeling that this news item has an ulterior motive of persuading people to eat more of a) potatoes or b) junk food? The conspiracy theorist in me leans towards (b) -- potatoes, after all, are proven to be a good source of nutrition (including vitamin C), and there are other, much healthier, sources for vitamin C as well.

Slumdog Millionaire

Note: Please refer to this for more on the evaluation parameters.

Question #1: The ability of the movie to hold your attention is:

A. Huh, you were saying? C. So so

B. Very good D. Let's go out for pizza

Question #2: The quality of stunts/effects/action sequences is:

A. Excellent C. So so

B. Very good D. Not really applicable

How can there be two correct answers to a Who wants to be a millionaire contest question, you ask. Bite me.

Question #3: How would you rate the crispness of the dialog?

A. So crispy I thought it was the popcorn C. So so

B. Very good D.Stilted and soggy like a wet samosa

Question #4: What about the clicheness index?

A. Completely refreshing and original C.It's a Bollywood movie. Need I say more?

B. Very good D. Danny Boyle directed this? Seriously?

Question #5: How would you rate the originality of the plot?

A. Very highly C.It's a Bollywood movie. Need I say more?

B. Quite original D. Danny Boyle directed this? Seriously?

Question #6: Believability of the plot:

A. Same thing happened to me a while ago C. It's a Bollywood movie. Need I say more?

B. Heck, I know Jamal D. CowboyNeal

Question #7: Quality of the cast and their acting:

A. I am uplifted C. It's a Bollywood movie. Need I say more?

B. I've seen better D. Abysmal

If you banish the thought that you have to like the movie -- it's won ten Oscar nominations, A R Rahman put together the music, so you better leave the country if you don't like it, you dirty traitor, and so on -- Slumdog Millionaire is a very average movie. The choice of English for the dialog reminded (I should say brought bad memories, rather) of Sins, another movie I remember for all the wrong reasons.

Except for the younger versions of Salim, Jamal and Latika, everybody else turns in pretty crappy performances. Irfan Khan's talents are criminally underutilized, and as for Anil Kapoor, can't really blame anybody -- there's not much talent to utilize, is there? He could have gone easy on all the sneering, though.

The climax reminded me of The Truman Show, with everybody glued to their television sets, watching the fortunes of their hero ebb and flow, but here the suspense and drama are inherited (stolen?) from the Millionaire contest format than anything else.

BTW, the best scene in the movie is the Bollywood dance in VT right before they start rolling the credits. That says a lot.

Thanks guys

Nice to know that I'm your most valued customer:

It's all about the money (well, for most of us)

From a post by an ex-Google employee:

In one TGIF in Kirkland, an employee informed Eric Schmidt that Microsoft’s benefits package was richer. He announced himself genuinely surprised, which genuinely surprised me. Schmidt, in the presence of witnesses, promised to bring the benefits to a par. He consulted HR, and HR informed him that it’d cost Google 22 million a year to do that. So he abandoned the promise and fell back on his tired, familiar standby (”People don’t work at Google for the money. They work at Google because they want to change the world!”). A statement that always seemed to me a little Louis XIV coming from a billionaire.

Amen to that. I too have heard about similar stories of senior management folks who, having made their fortunes in stock options, feign incredulity and exclaim, "Don't tell me you are in it for the money!", when the sorry fact is that if the next month's paycheck isn't in, it's a question of which bill can you postpone payment for.

New arrival

FUD statement of the day

"We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet."
-- Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS

That's right, all free software is baaad.

Gaza

Why does Hamas still persist with not recognizing the state of Israel and calling for its destruction, thereby providing a fig leaf to Israel to carry out its genocide? Hamas' hatred may be justified, but pragmatism dictates that they do what is best for their people. Of course, it's a moot point that Israel would come to reason and start conforming to internationally accepted standards of behaviour once Hamas does this.

Deccan Chronicle 1 - 0 Hindu

Headline in The Hindu:

Order allowing plea challenging appointment of Ananth stayed

Head hurts, trying to figure out whether this is good news for the director or not.

Deccan Chronicle version:

HC reprieve for IIT-M director

Thanks, got it.

Oops

Is 'ou812' that common?

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.