May 29, 2012

IPL 5 is over. While the matches provided a lot of excitement, I would be more convinced about the genuineness of the whole thing if someone did an analysis of the numbers and proved that there were no match/spot fixing shenanigans. One thing that comes to mind is no balls: some statistical significance studies on the number of no balls bowled versus the bowlers and at what stage in the match they were bowled, was it a touch-and-go decision or was it blatant overstepping, and so on.

Having recently witnessed the scenes of celebration at the Etihad Stadium, the contrast with the IPL final could not have been starker. The inordinate focus on the owner -- who might as well have worn a clown costume, by the way -- instead of the players who made it happen, the lack of genuine grassroots support (Usha "Look at me, I have a whistle in my mouth" Uthup, Juhi Chawla and other assorted celebrities trying to warm themselves in the spotlights do not count), the contrived joy and enthusiasm of the players who did not figure in the playing eleven -- there is a difference between waiting 44 years for a trophy as compared to five.

May 14, 2012

"Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that"
-- Bill Shankly

You don't care about the quality of the passing, the skills on display, or the individual brilliance. The only thing that matters is that the ball crosses the line between the goalposts, and twice at that. The tears that slowly begin to roll when it looks like it's all over, the look of despair that turns into joy (and vice versa for the United fans -- a bonus if you're a staunch anybody-but-United guy like me), Aguero's shirtless run towards the corner flag, Joey Hart terminating the interview on account of becoming overwhelmed by the situation, the commentator's schadenfreude ("How will the fans face somebody in a red shirt this evening? How will they have the moral fiber to get up tomorrow morning and go to work...?" Fuck you.) turning into astonishment.

The Beautiful Game? No, but this is football.

On a personal note, I'm not even a City fan, but the euphoria I felt when they scored the winner was comparable to what I felt when Del Piero scored in the 2006 World Cup semi-final.

Oh, and by the way, I stubbed my toe quite hard when I jumped up from the couch to celebrate. Still hurts, but totally worth it.

May 10, 2012

The Times of India might as well rechristen themselves as The Pimps of India.

There is a reason they sell the paper for less than 25 bucks a month: it isn't their readers they make their money from.

May 9, 2012

Yesteryear's heartthrob
Is it trademark shake of head?
Is it Parkinson's?

The Havells ad featuring Rajesh Khanna has to be the most depressing thing I've seen on TV for some time.

April 30, 2012

This is probably a hoax, but intriguing all the same.

Staying on the subject of pop culture and hip hop, have you ever watched a movie that was so bad that it went around the world and became good when it came back? Something along the lines of music that gets voted the worst and climbs the chart because of this? Well, I watched such a move yesterday (Torque, in case anyone's interested). Bad (or non-existent, since we're talking about Ice-Cube here) acting, cliched dialogue (case in point: "Don't pick on girls", says the resident bimbo after boinking a bad guy -- my brain cells are still tingling at this repartee), you name it, this movie had it. My only regret is that I couldn't watch it till the end. Just kidding. Maybe not.

Happened to me recently

Link

Near death, explained

I have been skeptical of NDEs in the past, but this article pretty much nails it in terms of evidence.

March 15, 2012

I have said this before, but my comment bears repetition in light of today's cartoons. Why do the folks at The Hindu give pride of place (i.e., the op-ed page) to insipid crap like this:


when they have a much better talent on their payrolls, producing stuff like this, stuff which has to languish in the inner pages:

Quote of the day

"I am getting out in funny way, like flicking to point"
-- Virender Sehwag on his recent form

Don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

The Goonda Regiment

The men in uniform are at it again, demonstrating that pesky little things like respect for the rule of law don't apply to them. A couple of questions for them: didn't you swear to protect the country -- which, last time I checked, includes its citizens -- when you signed up in the army? Does beating up innocent civilians who had nothing to do with your tiff with the police jibe with the oath you took? The excuse that the police behaved in an abusive manner does not cut it: two wrongs do not make a right. The particularly galling thing is that the violence was perpetrated not by jawans, but by fricking captains, who are supposed to set an example for the men they command (Update: it looks it was jawans). But then again, I guess this is in keeping with the state of things when you have a Chief of Staff hell-bent on clinging on to his position at any cost.

Where are we going?

(Warning: I don't know where I'm going with this post; I guess it ends when it ends)

I used to read Clusterfuck Nation and Club Orlov on and off in the past, whenever somebody in one of my regular haunts made a mention of one of their more noteworthy posts. I subscribed to their RSS feeds a while back (RSS is just like Twitter, except there is no 140 character restriction, and the content is slightly more meaningful than updates about celebrities' breakfasts *snark mode off*). A regular dose of doom and gloom stuff (maybe I should include Mish Shedlock's blog here as well), while fulfilling its disaster porn role, doesn't result in any constructive or positive outcome; for someone in India, being exposed everyday to the 'things have never been better, buy your dream car, your dream house, take your dream vacation, and while you're doing all this, tweet about it to your 1579 Facebook friends in real time using your ultra slim shiny smartphone' hard sell, this seems a world away, but is it really so? What would happen to us if the eurozone crisis finally comes to a head and countries start defaulting? If the price of oil goes through the roof because the USS Enterprise is torpedoed in the Straits of Hormuz? If there is a global ban on travel because of the next outbreak of bird/swine/monkey/rhino flu that came about because some scientist in a lab somewhere was wondering 'Gee, what would happen if I take this test tube of monkey piss and slightly shake it above the head of this disgruntled pigeon who has been looking askance at me since yesterday morning?'? What if the Indian real estate bubble finally bursts? What if the Sensex tanks? What if our exports took a nosedive, taking along with them the aspirations of the newly rich middle class? What if we run out of drinking water? Electricity?

The answer to these questions is pretty simple, really: a lot of people will be screwed, some more so than others. But how many of these scenarios will actually play out within the next year or so (ignoring the bits about electricity and water; I think we're safe on both fronts for another decade)?

One can go about analyzing these issues in a rational manner and doing our research, but this is not really needed; we can figure things out if we keep in mind certain things:

1. If bad things are coming down the pike, they will invariably be dumped on the people at the bottom of the food chain, those who cannot complain too much.

2. People in positions of power and wealth will game the system and get away with it every time.

3. No one can be proven right or wrong when it comes to principles of economics and ideology. The world is too complicated, there are too many variables, you cannot do double blind experiments with control groups, etc. In practical terms, this means that no philosophy or approach can ever be definitively disproved and jettisoned; any pundit worth his salt can rationalize away the failures and non-conformances to the 'model'.

4. People keep expecting the next messiah to solve all their problems. Not going to happen.

5. The kind of hyperinflation or currency crash similar to the experiences of the Zimbabweans or the Wiemar Republic will not happen with either the dollar or the euro.

6. When people in power are in trouble, watch out for distractions, both catastrophic (Iran vs USrael) and merely irritating (retail FDI controversy, Salman Rushdie). Also be prepared for dirty tricks. These people have too much vested in the status quo to go without a fight. They're are also very smart (which is a given considering where they are and how long they have remained there). Cf. Women's reservation bill, Lokpal bill.

7. Everybody has their price.

Applying these, for want of a better term, principles, to all the questions raised above is left as an exercise for the reader.

The Retail FDI Controversy

With all the noise and disruption of parliament over the allowing of FDI in the retail sector, who's now talking about the Lokpal bill? Mission accomplished.

pLisp v0.1 released

pLisp (The 'p' stands for 'personal', at least as of now) is an interpreter for a Lisp-1 dialect I have been working on. I had four broad objectives when I started out:

1. Use the experience to learn Lisp at a much deeper level than what a casual user would attain
2. Build my own language/development environment, one that I would use for all my personal projects from now on
3. If I manage to take the project sufficiently forward, build a Lisp development environment for newbies that rivals those of Smalltalk
4. Use pLisp as a test bed for new research ideas related to programming

I think things are sufficiently mature enough to warrant a 0.1 release, although a not-infrequent assertion failure or segfault cannot be ruled out.

These are the features currently supported:

1. Basic operators like CAR, CDR, and other language primitives (cf. Paul Graham's 'Roots of Lisp')
2. Other operators and utility functions written in pLisp itself (there is a rudimentary library at present)
3. Error handling in the form of an '(error "...")' operator
4. Garbage collection
5. A somewhat buggy foreign function interface
6. Ability to store and load images (aka serialization)
7. Macros
8. A rudimentary debugger (step, break, resume, abort)
9. A package system

TODO list:

1. More comprehensive error handling; there are a lot of places where sanity checking of parameters is absent, leading to assertion failures or core dumps
2. Enhancements to the core library
3. Graphical development environment
4. Compiler
5. Continuations and implementations of other 'cool' research ideas

pLisp uses tpl for serialization and libffi for the foreign function interface.

October 9, 2011

Some random thoughts on the ongoing Rugby World Cup:

1. I've really made an effort to understand the nuances of the game and enjoy it, but it's not easy. The most important thing to keep in mind is that there is only a single line of defence to stop the attacking team from piercing through and running all the way to score a try. This, coupled with the 'no forward passing' and offside rules, pretty much dictates the dynamics of the play. But there is still an element of ugliness to the game, most notably exemplified by the pile of bodies that takes place during a ruck. We have no idea what's happening inside, where the ball is, and so on (wonder how the referee keeps on top of things, short of jumping into the orgy himself). Things are not clean and simple, so to speak (compare this to football: 'you can only kick the ball with your foot; now try and put the ball between the two posts'). The skill displayed by a player is not readily apparent to someone who is not a fan of the sport.

2. Speaking about the refs, it's refreshing to hear the referee (and the adjudicating referee) on the microphone most of the time. More transparency this way.

3. The small number of fouls is quite amazing when compared to, say, football (not talking about technical violations here). My theory is that the 'almost anything goes' nature of the game does away with the need to commit physical fouls. Who needs to break the law when you can legally do a number on your opponent? Rugby players can both dish out and take stuff, unlike footballers who writhe on the ground in feigned agony if an opponent so much as looks at them funnily.

4. Notwithstanding the fact that it takes more strength and stamina to go through 40 minutes of non-stop action than to get through a comparable period in American football, American football is eminently more watchable. The skipping of the heartbeat every time the quarterback is about to pass the ball is missing. There are exhilarating moments in rugby too, like for example when a player dodges the defence and is streaking towards the tryline, but these are few and far between. The strategizing, playbooks, etc. of American football is missing (or maybe I can't figure things out on account of my noobiness).

5. The pre-match war dance (saw the New Zealand team do it today) is extremely silly. Sure, some opponents may get freaked out by a bunch of brutes grunting in tongues, crowing about how they will shove their brawny and tattooed arms up their opponent's asses and punch their intestines black and blue, but any half-intelligent person is more likely to struggle to not double up on the ground with laughter.

Obama's actually right

Peace will not come through statements and resolutions at the UN. Only wars of aggression, crimes against humanity, and the murder of innocent men, women and children do.

While asking for full membership at the UN is a positive thing, as long as things are decided by the five veto-wielding so-called superpowers, the UN is as good as non-existent. In fact, at least the child-trafficking and other abuse would stop if it were disbanded.

September 19, 2011

One of my pet phobias is large objects. It's not exactly a phobia per se, but more of a slight shiver that runs down (or up?) your spine for a fleeting moment and you quickly think of shining happy thoughts to distract yourself. I think this had its genesis in the movie The Independence Day in which, if I remember correctly, a spaceship a few miles in diameter fills the sky above Washington, DC.

Now just imagine that it's not a spaceship, but the planet Jupiter, and that it's not a few miles in diameter, but is 71,492 fricking miles from one end to the other, and is so big that your entire sky is but a closeup of the planet's terrain.

You don't have to imagine this, actually. You can see a simulation video.

Sweet dreams, here I come.

Speculators Behind 2008 Oil Shock

Via Rigorous Intuition:

Leaked Documents Reveal Major Speculators Behind 2008 Oil Price Shock

Last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) leaked confidential data about oil speculation to a number of media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal. Ordinarily, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulatory body that oversees futures trading, does not provide identities of speculators to the public. However, the data leaked by Sanders provides a rare snapshot into the trading volumes by major speculators right before the oil price spike in the summer of 2008.

As experts from Stanford University, Rice University, the University of Massachusetts, and authorities have concluded, rampant oil speculation was the prime driver of the record high prices for crude oil three years ago.

Ahem.

August 17, 2011

Simi Garewal's "India's Most Desirable" is my least favourite program on TV, even beating the likes of the 1876th rerun of the documentary "Hum Apke Hain Kaun". Sixty minutes of mindnumbing prattle from celebrities, interspersed with coy, pretending-to-be-hard-hitting questions from Simi (she must be, what, 98? Pity she wasn't born three thousand years ago in Egypt; she would have made a killing licensing the formula for her embalming potion to the pharaohs).

Not content with just Indian celebrities, there are plans to rope in Lady Gaga as well. That ought to be fun to watch: Queen Tut vs Lady Tut Tut...

August 12, 2011

I recently finished reading The Black Swan (well, I've yet to start the extended essay that has been added to the second edition, but still). A moderately interesting read, with a few intriguing and insightful ideas, but there is no satisfaction at the end, the satisfaction that comes from reading a book that puts its key messages in a tight-knit, coherent form and packs a good punch, so to speak. The book would also have benefited from a better editing process -- the language doesn't flow that easily in quite a few places. A good thing I got this book as a gift and didn't have to spend money out of my pocket.

The author's contempt for CEOs, Frenchmen, and academics (economists in particular) also comes through too strongly and bitterly -- this is probably his F*** You Money talking. Somewhat ironical, considering that there is a quote from a trader in the book along the lines of "Be nice to people on your way up, since you'll meet them on your way down". He could also have gone a bit easy on the frequent attempts at cheap titillation through mentions of prostitutes, how many lovers did Catherine the Great have, and so on.

With respect to the meat of the book, can't really disagree with the author's contention: we do not know what we're doing half the time, unknown forces are lining up against us as we speak, it's no use trying to do long-term (maybe even short-term) predictions, and our brains are hardwired to see patterns where none exist and are prone to all kinds of cognitive biases (on a side note, this paper does a more thorough job of this). Scalability is a theme that runs through the book -- be it scalable/non-scalable professions (the relation between the amount of money one makes and the physical number of hours put in -- e.g., doctors/plumbers vs hedge fund managers) or scalable odds (Gaussian vs Mandelbrotian).

While on the subject of scalability and the medical profession, today I learned that one can get an *ahem* discount of Rs 5000 on an MRI scan bill of Rs 8000 if the doctor is kind enough to not ask for his commission from the diagnostics center.

GitHub

I've finally gotten around to collecting all my code in a single place. This is a pretty much complete collection, except for my JSON implementation for VisualWorks. A recent scare with my home laptop (a faulty chip related to the display) is the reason for this. I have an external drive where I periodically back up stuff, but I was not able to access my files during the absence of the laptop. I could have taken them from the external drive, but didn't want the hassle of again bringing the laptop contents in sync; not to mention I didn't have much time during this period due to a family emergency.