The most evil, duplicitous statement of all time

We have given to the Iraqi nation more than any other nation could have asked for in the world.
-- Richard Durbin, US Senator

So much BS, so little time

I came across this article about the calibre of students from IIT.

Let me start by taking a deep breath, exhaling slowly, and calling BS.

The real reason companies like Tata Steel don't recruit IITians is that they will not join them if offered employment there, and not because we are not good enough. (Disclaimer: I was not considered good enough for Tata Steel during my campus interviews at IIT Madras; I had already gotten placed at SAIL, and Tata Steel was my -- ahem -- dream company then).

Re the ranks of IITians being filled with crammers from coaching centers: I have said this before and I'll say it again, no amount of coaching in the world can polish a turd into anything else.

While I do concede that getting through four years at IIT is a lot easier than passing the JEE, one cannot get by without knowing the subjects at least a bit intimately; "the students were able to clear the tests without having to read books..." sounds like an extreme generalisation to me. It is possible to get passing grades with minimal study, but to go from there and extrapolate this behaviour of a minority of students to the entire bunch is not correct.

To narrate a personal experience, some students from IIT Madras interned under me recently, and I could find a marked difference in the way they were able to understand and tackle problems when compared to others. I'll take this affirmation of the continuing excellence of the students any day over a brief, non-representative experience mentioned in the article.

And what about this:

Instead of giving ranks purely on the basis of JEE performance, IITs can adapt multiple criteria, giving a weighted score. Some of the criteria are JEE test scores, some marks for showing leadership qualities, marks for demonstrating social concern and talents in sports, music, arts, etc.

Here's a suggestion: why not go one step further, and rename the IITs as "Indian Institute of Performing Arts and Social Sciences"?

Lies

From a Microsoft anti-piracy ad:

Pirated or counterfeit software could have critical bits of code missing, allowing viruses and other malware to enter your IT systems easily, putting your data at risk.

(Falls off chair. Gets up, dusts self, and reads on)

With original Microsoft software you are assured of a highly reliable & secure IT environment.

(Falls off chair again)

He gets paid to write this crap?

From Paulo Coelho's column in DC:

A lion met a group of cats having a chat. "I'm going to eat them," he thought. But then he began to feel strangely calm. And he decided to sit down among them and pay attention to their conversation.

"Good God," said one of the cats, "we have been praying all afternoon! We beg you to make it rain rats from the sky!" "And up to now nothing has happened," said another. "What if the Lord does not exist?"

The sky remained silent. And the cats lost their faith.

The lion rose and went on his way, thinking, "Funny how things are, I was going to eat all these cats, but God stopped me. Even so, they stopped believing in divine grace. They were so worried about what they were lacking that they did not notice the protection they received."

Reminds me of a story I submitted as a kid to a competition that, in its entirety, went something like this: Ramu was a bad boy, God punished him, Ramu became a good boy. But there were two differences: a) I didn't win the competition b) I was five years old at that time.

Movie Review: Music and Lyrics

Hugh Grant with his understated British humour
Drew Barrymore - oh I wish I could do 'er

The movie was very good, felt my S.O.
While I thought it was only so so

Good in parts, but never rises to great heights
Wish Ms Barrymore had worn tights

Can't hold a candle to Love, Actually
Come to think of it, neither to A Lot Like Love, actually

What's with all the crappy verse, you ask...

(runs out of rhyming lyrics)

thecinema.in

I came across Bruce Eckel's post on Flex yesterday, and this brought to mind my recent e-commerce experience with Satyam Cinema. The site uses Flash and is a good example of how an RIA should be done. It was easily the best online shopping experience I've had in quite a while.

Note to self: Movie review of Music and Lyrics due on Friday

Helmets

From a letter to The Hindu:

Helmets may bring down the number of fatal accidents but they will certainly increase the number of accidents, given the weather in south India, especially during summer. Most of those who advocate compulsory wearing of helmets travel in air-conditioned cars and hardly have any first hand experience of wearing a helmet and riding a two-wheeler.

In any case, what is the need to wear a helmet in cities where the roads are in such a pathetic condition that speeding is impossible?

(Cough. Splutter. Clears nose of morning coffee)

1. Pray tell, what is the connection between summer weather and helmets and accidents? Poor visibility due to sweating?


2. I rode a bike for eight years before changing to a car, and I wore a helmet for all of those eight years.


3. Roads in pathetic conditions lead to the two-wheeler rider falling and hurting his ...

Why do I even bother replying to shoo-ins for the Darwin award?

It had to happen, didn't it?

Bloglines introduces something called The Wall of Images, you click on it and are shown a collage of interesting and not-so-interesting thumbnail images, changing in real time, but wait, after a minute or so you see a preponderance of pictures of breasts, which are from a porn site called Goddess. Sigh.

The Tao of the Cube

Be bent, and you will remain straight.
Be vacant, and you will remain full.
Be worn, and you will remain new.
-- Lao Tzu

I bought myself a Rubik's Cube the other day. I was never very good at solving the darn thing when I was a kid; I could only get one side right however hard I tried, so I wanted to see if I could do better now. It looks like my cube-solving skills as an adult are even worse, but I devised a better way to have fun with the thing: instead of trying to solve it, why not try to unsolve it, i.e. tweak things such that one ends up on the other end of the scale, with maximum entropy? My first goal was to end up with nine unique colours on each side, but a quick calculation indicated that there are only six colours to play with (duh). I have a feeling that this is easier than it sounds, but let's see how it goes. One way to spice it up would be to achieve maximum entropy in the least number of steps.

More Kalam-bashing

Here's yet another inane quote from you-know-who:

Thinking should become your capital asset, no matter whatever ups and downs you come across in your life.

Holy matrimony, Batman!

Regular posting will resume shortly.

BlogMailr

I registered with BlogMailr and tried to email a post, but gave up after I received 38 (!) automated replies that informed me that they were unable to post my messages after several attempts. Ignoring this for the moment, the following are my initial impressions with BlogMailr:

• The customised email address is too complicated to remember

• There are no instructions on how to compose your email so that it is fit for publication

The POP protocol

I recently upgraded to Nokia N73 and set up email on it yesterday. I was able to retrieve and view new messages (Gmail), but there's a problem here: when I try to retrieve messages from Thunderbird, these new messages are not retrieved because they are no longer new. The issue (I think) is that the 'state' -- i.e the ID of the most recent message that a POP client has retrieved -- is not stored in the client but in the mail server instead. Therefore we cannot synchronise multiple POP clients simultaneously with the contents in the server. I've read that IMAP is a superior protocol, so maybe it has this feature.

Cult of personality

Sri Sai Baba is spending ten days at an ashram very close to where I live. The entire area is chock full of cars parked at every available space and there are hundreds of thronging devotees. This puts us residents to a lot of hardship, because we have to a) convince the policemen/volunteers that we do have business in this area because we have been living here for something like ten fricken years, and our vehicles should be permitted to enter the side streets around the ashram and b) wend our way through already-narrow streets narrowed even further on account of the parked cars.

Having said this, I must mention the excellent behaviour of the volunteers -- whom a part of me considers as cult members, with their all-white attire and weird blue scarves -- who are very courteous and well-mannered as they go about controlling the traffic and the crowds. I really don't know more about Sai Baba to comment further, but it looks like a lot of good work is being done by channelling the devotees' energies. More power to them.

Paging Freud

I have noticed something of late: when I open my desk drawer to take something out, I invariably forget to close it. This is not general absent-minded behaviour, because I am not forgetful about other things. Oh well.

Nitpick

If you click on any of the Blogger labels, the URL is of the form <blog address>/search/label/<label name> (e.g. http://shikantaza.blogspot.com/search/label/stupidity) but where is the search here? Since I don't have any option to search for a term in posts within a label, shouldn't it be 'browse' instead?

Some more Kalam-bashing

President Kalam recently gave a speech that attempted to lay out the new challenges faced by law enforcement personnel and how they can better equip themselves to tackle these challenges. It was a very insipid and inane speech, with generous dollops of vague generalities and cliches. Some samples:

Our police force needs to be friendly, corruption-free, responsible, tolerant of ambiguity and pressure, and must have compassion and empathy for the people. It should be efficient and time conscious, stress tolerant, mentally and physically fit and robust, able to provide high quality leadership potential at all levels of the hierarchy, and be a model for conduct and discipline.

If wishes were horses...

Those who threaten our security and our peace often can intermix with our public and may become indistinguishable particularly in the cities. They use very high-end technologies. Innovative flow charts have to be evolved with experience to find how this phenomenon is taking place and how intelligence agencies can counter it.

Innovative flow charts? Huh?

One of the major revolutions in information has been the advent of the World Wide Web. It contains a vast amount of information.

No sh*t, Sherlock.

A master plan for a city traffic system should be evolved for the short term, medium term, and long term — using a mathematical model ... Long-term infrastructure development for traffic decongestion has to be planned and executed, taking into account the growth of the city's population ...

Well, duh.

Why I think India will continue to remain a developing country

Yesterday I was waiting behind a car at the traffic lights. A hand appeared outside its driver's window and casually dropped a matchstick on to the road. I was mildly disgusted by this uncivic behaviour, but worse was to follow: a couple of seconds later, the still-smouldering matchstick was joined by an empty cigarette packet.

To add insult to injury, a big plume of smoke then emanated from the car, even as the culprit gave me a bored look in his rear-view mirror.

Migrated to new version of Blogger

Well, it happened finally: an easier, two-step process to migrate to the newer, better version of Blogger.

President Kalam poses question on Yahoo Answers

With all due respect, aren't there better ways for him to spend his time, instead of posing such questions? I'm sure he would be monitoring the answers too (Kiran Bedi, Leander Paes and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar have posted answers -- which brings me to my next question: don't you guys have nothing better to do?), so that's even more time spent unproductively surfing the web, when he could have been creeping small schoolchildren out instead.