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.

Update (May 6, 2010): Vindication from a University of Michigan study.

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.

Nation.pk

There's this web site called nation.pk that keeps passing off lies as news. The latest one is a news item that Seymour Hersh claimed in an interview to an Arab TV channel that Dick Cheney ordered the assassination of Benazir Bhutto -- a claim that has been debunked quite thoroughly. I would have let this go if it had been a one-off thing, but these guys did it earlier too, trying to pass off a controversial but unattributed quote to Robin Cook (I tried searcing for this in their web site, but it looks like they pulled that story).

Prabakaran

The Hindu is carrying a 1986 interview with Prabakaran as part of the news coverage of his death. While one must take his answers with a pinch of salt -- he was living in India at the time, and this was before the IPKF operations -- I can't help but think that republishing the interview is going to have the unintentional effect of building sympathy for him, and gloss over the transmogrification that has happened over the 23 years since then.

Party's over, folks

Time to say goodbye to the easy money.

Huh?

According to this story, retail sales fell in April by 0.4%, while according to this one, they were up by 1.2% in the same month. Both stories are carried by Yahoo Finance (sourced from Bloomberg and NYTimes via Indian Express), and both were posted within minutes of each other, probably by the same journalist -- as indicated by the URL. Mind you, it could be that one of these numbers is year-on-year while the other is month over month, but it's still sloppy journalism if I have to figure this out on my own.

Here we go again

The reason for Monday's fall in the Sensex is the "uncertainty over government formation". Which brings up the question: what was the level of uncertainty a few days ago, when the Sensex was moving upward? I don't know who is to be blamed for this: the market players who try to pass off such after-the-fact rationalizations, or the reporters who quote these jackasses mindlessly.

A Recent WTF

This DailyWTF story reminds me of something similar that happened to me recently. I created a user account in one of the government web sites -- I think it was to pay the water tax -- and there was no option to specify a password during account creation. I thought I would receive an email containing a link for activating the account and specifying a password, but nope, no confirmation email. When I tried to log in using the newly created user name, however, I found a password field guarded by the usual annoying JavaScript alert. I guess you can see where I'm going with this by now: disabling JavaScript bypassed this validation and I was shooed in without any ado.

I haven't tried accessing the site again after this, so I don't know whether this state of affairs persists. Considering that this is a government web site, I wouldn't be surprised if it does.

As a long time Linux user, that hurt

...but there is an element of truth to this humorous comment.

Dude, I think you're missing the whole point

From a letter in The Hindu:

Ajmal's trial is nothing but taking democracy too far. Only a person whose guilt is in doubt should be given an opportunity to defend himeself, not one who is is responsible for killing innocent people indiscriminately.

Pray tell, how do we decide that someone's guilt is in doubt or not, without going through the whole judicial process (a.k.a. 'trial')?

IPL 2.0

Random thoughts:

1. Quite a few of the umpiring decisions have been abysmal. Is it because they couldn't get the good ones to travel to South Africa at short notice?


2. Where did they get the cheerleaders from? Hookers 'R Us?


3. The commentators, as usual, outdo each other with their cliches and insincere attempts at drumming up the excitement (see #5 and #6).


4. You have great ads like the Vodafone zoozoos that cost next to nothing, and then you have Airtel's contrived romantic crap featuring jaded, overpaid stars.


5. A team needing less than ten runs in the last over with four or more wickets in hand does *not* constitute a thrilling finish in T20 cricket, contrary to what Ravi Shastri or Harsha Bogle says.


6. It's not a DLF Maximum, it's a fricken sixer, dumbasses.


7. It's been more fun reading the Fake IPL Player's blog than watching most of the matches.


8. Speaking of the KKR, I haven't experienced this much schadenfreude in a long while (evil grin).


9. Trivia: The father and son in the ad where the mother berates the father for being irresponsible are father and son in real life too. I think.

Easy there, Sparky

From The Independent:

The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Revolution: check. Holy Grail: check. Massive interest among pundits: check. Evolutionary leap: check. New paradigm: check.

Boy, everyone must be breathless by now, from all the Web 3.0 bubble-blowing.

Reddit vs Slashdot

I had stopped reading Slashdot a while ago, as Reddit had started having more interesting/new stuff. Things have changed between then and now: Reddit has morphed into a sort of dumping ground for all kinds of crap -- witness the number of 'Vote up if you hate...' and 'Dear Reddit, I wrote a new JavaScript Sudoku solver. Tell me what you think' posts that make it to the front page. Slashdot continues to have more focus, with a much higher signal to noise ratio -- no doubt owing to more editorial control over the content. It also continues to be one of the few places where the quality of the discussion consistently exceeds that of the content.

To be fair, Reddit does provide some value with the NSFW^H^H^H^H funny pictures and videos, but a good source for the latest news? Not anymore.

Get off my lawn

I have been meaning to write about this for a long time, but considering that the size of my friends list in Facebook has exceeded the magical number of four, now is as good a time as any other: this may just be a generational thing, but every time I see a Facebook/Orkut page with the pokes, scraps and assorted other crap, my fingers start twitching involuntarily, trying to reach for the nearest neck to choke. The exposure of the messages in one's scrapbook/wall/whatever to everybody in the friends list is, to me, the equivalent of making the password to your email account public. Even if the messages are in the nature of 'Hi!!!! Great to get in touch with you!!! lol!!' (I'm not even going to comment on the language or the presence of the extra exclamation marks), I still consider such exposure a violation of my privacy.

P.S. And dude, there's a word for using $HOT_HOLLYWOOD_HUNK's picture as your avatar or whatever the fsck it is called: loser.

Gah.

Dear Tata Sky

The way you disallow any control of the content for the first ten seconds or so after switching on the set top box and ram your promos down the viewers' throats is extremely presumptuous and shows that you don't give a tiny rat's ass about your customers. Believe me, the last thing a person wants to experience just as he's sitting down for some hopefully decent entertainment is impotent rage at the non-functioning remote.

You give research a bad name

I don't think they could have picked a more irrelevant topic for research if they had tried. Coming soon to an academic journal near you: 'Correlation between the colour of the suits worn by CEOs and the year-on-year growth in the quarterly profits reported by their companies'.

Kamran reported

Rajastan Royals' Kamran Khan has been reported for a suspect bowling action. Excuse me, if Kamran's action is suspect, Lasith Malinga should be banned from coming within 100 yards of the bowling crease. I can't for the life of me imagine why no umpire has had the guts to report him so far (unless it's because of the power wielded by the Asian lobby in international cricket affairs). Staying on the subject of cricket affairs, Lalith Modi is beginning to look more and more like a Mini-Me version of Jagmohan Dalmia.

Government launches new pension scheme

Ignoring the convenient timing of the announcement -- frankly, the postponing of the announcement by a month doesn't really cut it -- the idea of a pension scheme in which one can invest up to 50% in the stock market is simply abominable. Here's a suggestion: why don't they rename it from NPS to 401K?

Update: Now the IT sector is contemplating a switch to the new scheme. The article touts a number of benefits of the new scheme over EPF:

NPS scores over EPFO on several counts. While EPFO follows a moribund investment pattern with no equity exposure, NPS allows members to design their own retirement portfolio and offers six different fund managers to choose from. EPFO's service delivery and account keeping is de-centralised and a recent audit found that over 90% of EPF members' accounts are inaccurately maintained. With a professional central record-keeping agency in place, NPS is better placed on this front.

Workers can check their pension fund balances online, far advanced than the delayed annual contribution slips EPFO sends.

Frankly, except for the better record-keeping, the rest of the reasons are in no way deal-clinchers (note how the EPFO's lack of exposure to the equity market is dismissed as a "moribund investment pattern"). Also, good luck with backing the horse -- aka 'fund manager' -- most likely to win.

The family that flips together

Check out this picture of Amitabh Bachchan proudly giving the bird to everybody (I couldn't locate the online version of the image where the entire Bachchan clan is indulging in unintentional rudeness). Somebody in the polling booth is having a good laugh about the whole thing.

Props to Priya Dutt for realizing the stupidity of holding up a finger (middle or otherwise) and showing her whole hand instead.

MARIE Simulator for VisualWorks

Here is a VisualWorks implementation of the MARIE Simulator that I put together. Compiler included.

Why am I not surprised?

After sleeping for three years, the CBI wakes up and questions the jurisdiction of the trial court hearing the case against Jagdish Tytler. Does this have anything to do with the fact that the Congress party feels that its poll fortunes are in jeopardy because of the clean chit given to Tytler? Of course not -- the CBI is an independent agency, not under anybody's control. Right?

Yeah, right

From The Hindu:

Real estate developers are warning that if (potential home-buyers) wait too long, there could be dire consequences for a number of support industries, millions of unskilled labourers and the wider economy itself... (Prakash Challa) warned that the confused consumer could push the market too far.

I don't even know where to begin. Now home-buyers are supposed to throw prudence to the winds and jump into the market in the broader interests of the economy, never mind the uncertainty over their paychecks and whether they would be able to afford the astronomical EMIs. Also notice how their caution is characterized as confusion.

Backups

1. Get hold of a Maxtor 320 GB external drive.


2. Plug it into Linux and find out that the capacity reported is actually 300 GB. I have experienced this before as well -- my Acer laptop's hard drive was touted as 60 GB while the partitioning software reported it as 55 GB. (Update: When it comes to disk sizes, 'giga' means 10 raised to 9, and not 2 raised to 30. Duh.)


3. My intention was to use the drive for both the personal and work laptops by dividing it into an NTFS partition and an ext3 partition. To do this you need to add NTFS support to gparted by installing the ntfsprogs package.


4. Use gparted to resize the existing NTFS partition and create an ext3 partition from the freed up space.


5. Using rsync to back up the data partition in Linux is a breeze -- the whole thing is over in about 15 minutes.


6. Now attach the drive to the work laptop and find that the drive is not recognized at all, except to report an unknown device called 'Maxtor Basics'.


7. Tear hair out for a half day or so trying to figure this out, including a) upgrading to Windows XP Service Pack 3 and b) running Mepis Live CD on the laptop and confirming that the drive is compatible with the laptop's hardware.


8. Fix the problem finally by deleting a file called 'infcache.1' in c:\windows\inf. Now the drive appears in both Windows Explorer and the disk management snapin. Also change the access permissions for usbstor.pnf and usbstor.inf, to be on the safe side.
   


9. Waste about half an hour trying to use the built-in Windows backup utility -- get errors like 'delayed writing failed', etc.


10. Download Cobian Backup and complete the job -- the backup process is nowhere near as fast as using rsync in Linux, but it does the job adequately.


11. One minor issue still remains; I'm unable to remove the drive in Windows using the 'Safely remove hardware' option -- Windows reports that the device cannot be stopped now and asks me to try later.

Why do I even bother?

Spotted in DC in an article about the rupee (italics mine):

In nominal terms, it has fallen from Rs 39.27 to the US dollar on January 15 to Rs 51.10 to the US dollar by March 3 -- a decline of more than 30% in less than two months.

The time it took for the rupee to fall 30% is actually 13 months, since the January 15 refers to 2008, not 2009. It wouldn't have mattered so much if this was from a regular news item (what with reporters facing deadlines and all), but the sentence in question is from the first paragraph of an op-ed piece, where one would assume more care would be taken to ensure accuracy.

Naked short selling brought down Lehman?

The Deep Capture guys must be feeling vindicated. On the other hand, is this just blame-shifting by the folks at Lehman?

How to spot a hidden religious agenda

From How to spot a hidden religious agenda:

Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

Yes, you there in the last row, I'm talking to you.

Wild Fire

I have read a couple of Nelson DeMille novels before, and have found them quite readable. I picked one up -- Wild Fire -- after a long gap. I have not made it through Chapter 1 yet, but I have already been assaulted by a combination of cliches, trying-too-hard-to-be-clever quips, an overdose of testosterone and plain old jingoism. Some samples:

• "We are now a mostly paperless organization, and I actually miss initialing memos. I had an urge to initial my computer with a grease pencil, but I settled for the electronic equivalent. If I ran this organization, all memos would be on an Etch A Sketch."


• "Also included in our collegial group are people who, like ghosts, don't actually exist, but if they did, they'd be called CIA."


• "Also, this guy has a bad habit of coming back from the dead - he's done it at least once before - and without a positive body identification, I'm not breaking out the champagne."


• "My wife is a beautiful woman, but even if she weren't, I'd still love her. Actually, if she weren't beautiful, I wouldn't have even noticed her, so it's a moot point."


• "The message read [Ed: It's in all caps in the novel -- BTW, somebody please tell the author that normal people don't type in all-caps anymore -- but in the interest of not hurting the eyes too much, I've changed it to normal text]: Let's knock off early, go home, have sex, I'll cook you chili and hot dogs, and make you drinks while you watch TV in your underwear. Actually, it didn't say that. It said: Let's go away for a romantic weekend of wine tasting on the North Fork. I'll book a B&B. Love, Kate."


• "Like most men, I'd rather face the muzzle of an assault rifle than a pissed-off wife."


• "... who I strongly suspect was once romantically involved with my then future wife. This is not why I disliked him - it was why I hated him. I disliked him for professional reasons."


• Never referring to Osama bin Laden without the prefix "scumbag", a derogatory reference to the Middle East ("Sandland"). We get it -- you are a red-blooded American.


• "Not one of my better cases, but it brought me and Kate together, so the next time I see him, I'll thank him for that, before I gut-shoot him and watch him die slowly."


• "This was one of the reasons. we got divorced. The other was that she thought cooking and f**king were two cities in China."

I think it would have been easier to scan the pages and put them up, as someone recently did for a book with really bad porn.

Update: Surprisingly, the book turned out to be an entertaining read, the Bollywood style climax notwithstanding.

Investors' dilemma

Olga Tellis' columns (by the way, I've always wondered about this: what's a Russian doing, writing finance columns for Deccan Chronicle?) usually make a lot of sense, but I don't agree with this:

A study of asset class-wise returns between 1998 and October 2008 by Fidelity International shows that equity has out-performed all other asset classes, followed by gold, fixed deposits and lastly, gilt.

But one has to have a long term horizon of seven to 10 years.

Tell that to an investor in the Japanese stock market: the Nikkei, after reaching an all-time high of 38,957.44 on December 29, 1989, is currently languishing at 7,376.12. An investor with a time frame of say, 19 years, would be really sore from all the ass-reaming.

She continues:

For an individual, it is difficult to time the market, namely to buy at the lowest price and sell it at the highest.

One has to know one's risk and reward profile and invest accordingly.

That is why it is better to go through the mutual fund route.

Many mutual funds may be performing badly in the present scenario, but it is not true of all mutual funds.

There are several who are doing well and giving good returns even in this scenario.

A quick glance at the financial pages shows that there are approximately 57,483 mutual funds to choose from, run by fund managers with varying levels of competence. In what way is this better than choosing from an even larger list of individual company stocks? Also, unless a mutual fund is able to short stocks, I do not understand how it can give positive returns in a bear market; it's not a hedge fund, after all.

The more and more I think about the whole investing thing, I can't help but come to these conclusions:

1. Investing your money is not a way to become rich. Your aim should be two-fold: a) ensure that you don't lose your principal and b) beat inflation. A regular saving habit [putting your money in rock solid investments (and no, I don't mean mutual funds or stocks)], coupled with the under-appreciated magic of compound interest, will take you a long way.


2. Earn your money by the sweat of your brow, not by clever, get-rich-quick schemes.

If you feel that this advice does not hold good, and inflation is still going to screw you over, blame the government for its deficit financing policies and printing presses (I know, this is not a solution; but hey, there's always Kaun Banega Crorepati).

Quote of the day

Dude, feed him some moon pies and oxycontin and call him Mini-Me. As bread'n'circuses go, it couldn't be beat.
-- Reddit comment about Republican wunderkind Jonathan Krohn.

Off-balance sheet exposure

From Deccan Chronicle:

Among the bank groups, the off-balance sheet exposure of foreign banks was over 28 times of their total liabilities. Private sector banks and public sector banks had off-balance sheet exposures of 251.2 per cent and 61.5 per cent of their total liabilities, respectively.

That's right, it's not 28 per cent, but 28 times. Considering that Citigroup is supposed to have a trillion or so dollars in off-balance sheet SIVs, this is not surprising:

The top five banks with the largest off-balance sheet exposures in India were Citibank - Rs 16,44,729 crore; Standard Chartered - Rs 16,25,608 crore; HSBC - Rs 13,22,985 crore; ICICI Bank - Rs 11,51,349 crore and Barclays Bank - Rs 10,44,134 crore.

Like parent, like subsidiary. Also note that you-know-who is the only Indian bank in this sorry list.

Spot the odd one out

Three headlines:

• Unruly lawyers started violence, police exceeded limits: Srikrishna -- The Hindu

• Srikrishna slams CJ for soft-pedalling row - SC puts ball in high court -- Deccan Chronicle

• Srikrishna report indicts protesting TN lawyers -- Times of India

The report places equal blame on both sides, but you wouldn't know it by reading the TOI or the DC versions (The DC version, by the way, is uncharacteristically wishy-washy).

Speaking of newspapers, is it just me, or has R K Laxman jumped the shark? The You Said It series cartoons are giving Sudhir Talang and Keshav a good run for their money in the "Which newspaper has the most insipid cartoon" contest. Time for graceful retirement, I think.

IIPM voted best B School in the country

... in the non-IIM category.

And by the way, if you didn't know it already, I have been voted the best batsman in the country in the non-Sachin Tendulkar category for the last three years.

LeT shuts down after anti-terrorism pledge

The Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba today announced that it was shutting down. This announcement came in the wake of the anti-terrorism pledge taken by the Orissa Chief Minister, Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar and a host of religious leaders. Addressing a group of reporters at a hurriedly convened press conference, Mohammed Aftab, the LeT spokesperson, said that this action left his group completely stunned. "We did not see this coming," he said. "We can handle a military raid, air strikes, even cruise missiles, but this is too much. I mean, how can we defend against something as deadly as a..." -- he quickly emptied a glass of water before continuing, "an anti-terrorism pledge"? He went on to add that they were planning to take this up with the International Criminal Court, claiming that a serious violation of their human rights had been committed.

In related news, the president of the Confederation of Indian Industry announced that an anti-recession pledge would be taken by all its members on March 15. This news was greeted by an immediate 230 point spurt in the Sensex. The rally could not be sustained, however, when the traders realized that the American President, Mr Barack Obama, would not be taking the pledge owing to prior commitments on that day.

Warren Buffet does derivatives?

From Bloomberg, via Mish Shedlock's blog:

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. posted a fifth-straight profit drop, the longest streak of quarterly declines in at least 17 years, on losses from derivative bets tied to stock markets.
...
Berkshire shares have fallen 44 percent in the past year as the value of the firm’s top equity holdings dropped and losses increased on the derivatives.

And here I was, thinking Warren Buffet was conservative and invested only in things he understood.

KDE 4.2

Well, most of the things I bitched about 4.0 have been fixed in 4.2. All in all, a much better user experience, except that things are not very zippy.

BTW, owing to MEPIS not shipping 4.2 yet, I have switched to Debian Lenny. It needed adding the experimental packages to apt, but no issues in the installation, as was the case when I tried it with MEPIS.

Definition of the day

Quantitative easing: A word invented by central bankers because 'printing money' smacks too much of Zimbabwe -- John Mauldin

Inflation, financial markets and fiat money

From a column in the latest issue of Outlook Money:

Don't be surprised if [educational] costs quadruple by the time you need to reach out for the chequebook for your kid's higher studies. This means that, unlike our parents, we can no longer invest in lower-risk, fixed income options since the growth of our investments will be hopelessly outsprinted by inflation.

Now comes the tricky part. To catch up with runaway costs, you will perforce need to mount the high-speed but higher-risk horse of growth investments such as equity mutual funds (MFs), unit-linked insurance plans (Ulips) that have a high equity exposure and perhaps some stocks.

Yeah, nothing like some good old fashioned scaremongering ("Think of the children!") to drive the suckers into the markets so that the insiders can make their killing. On a related note, consider this:

Under a commodity standard, people could save for the future by accumulating gold and silver coins. The coins’ value appreciated over time because of their natural increase in purchasing power, as the relatively slow increase in the production of precious metals was outpaced by the much faster increase in the production of other goods and services. Today, only a fool would try to save for the future by piling up dollar bills. Everyone is forced to enter the financial markets, which are risky even for knowledgeable investors, in order to prevent the value of his retirement savings from vanishing before his eyes

Something to think about.

Managing the jargon-mongers

There is an article entitled "Managing the slowdown" in today's Hindu that sort of sets the bar on how high (low?) you can go with just spouting jargon and still end up with a publishable piece. Rather than quoting portions from it, I'll just let the list of buzzwords do the job:

strategic management, effective management practices, effective management of various processes, operational efficiency, evaluation of all processes and systems, efficiency improvement, value-engineering, re-engineering, efficiency improvement parameters, SWOT, group discussions, formation of task forces, schedule for achieving better results, right sizing, managing human capital, upgrading of people's competencies, improve all round efficiency, human capital restructuring needs, exit route strategies, out-placement, talent development, Management Information Systems, Project and Office efficiency, Training Need Analysis, Train The Trainer Programme, feeling of ownership among employees.

Man, I wish I could write like that -- I would then leverage a synergistic win-win situation for all the stakeholders just like that -- *snaps fingers*.

It would be funny

...if it weren't so sad:

Asked by The Sun newspaper what (the 13-year-old father) would do financially to support his "family", the baby-faced father looked flummoxed and asked, "What's financially?"

Screw it, it is funny, bad karma notwithstanding.

Huh?

From an article about Ukraine's financial troubles:

Kiev Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky — a highly visible politician — had difficulty answering even the most basic questions about the capital's financial problems at a recent news conference. Asked about shortages of gas to schools, city doctors who hadn't been paid for months and a threatened strike by local bus drivers, Chernovetsky responded with mumbles and stream-of-consciousness riffs about the local zoo and his affection for elephants, the need for more trees and flowers in the city, his propensity to dry off naked on a balcony after showering and the importance of the Bible.

The end of the two-state solution

This article talks about how difficult it is to implement a two-state solution. What with Qaddafi's proposal for a one-state solution finding mindshare, the global revulsion at the Gaza war crimes and calls for boycott, it looks like the Israelis have been hoisted with their own petard -- all their efforts to squeeze the Palestinians into smaller and smaller swathes of land and make a Palestinian state unviable seem to be in the process of backfiring spectacularly, with the end result being a single democratic, post-apartheid state with a Palestinian majority. Watch out for a quick scramble to accept the 1967 borders.

Mahesh 'ditches' Mirza, takes Bopanna to movie

From DC:

Sania wanted to watch the much acclaimed film, directed by Danny Boyle, but instead of taking her along, Bhupathi and Bopanna went ahead and saw the movie. "Mahesh and Rohan ditched me and went to watch Slumdog Millionaire," Sania said on Tuesday.

She went on to add, "And they came back and had ice cream cones in their hands and I was very upset that they had ice cream without me and I got angry and I went to my mommy and told her 'Mommy, Mahesh and Rohan went to the movies without me and had ice cream cones. They are bad boys and I don't want to be friends with them', and my mommy said, 'Don't worry honey, you don't need them, go to bed like a good girl and mommy will find you much better friends tomorrow' and that made me happy and I was smiling and I got into bed and fell asleep and dreamt of hundreds of tennis balls with Mahesh's and Rohan's faces drawn on them and I was hitting them very hard with my tennis racket and I felt even happier".

For God's sake, grow up, woman.

"Sweet Rascal" my ass

Today a biker overtook me dangerously on my way to work. Common occurrence, given the below-average intelligence of these Neanderthals, but one thing was different this time: the sticker on the rear of his bike that said "Sweet Rascal". Sweet Rascal? Try "F***ing Idiot".

That reminds me of a car that did more or less the same thing to me a couple of months back. This guy had a big sticker that said "Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven". Not quite, buddy. There is another way, too, and it looks like you've a head start, if you know what I mean.

What revival?

From The Hindu - Exports show signs of revival:

Halting the sharp fall for the past two months and giving indications of a revival, exports declined by a meagre 1.1 per cent in December 2008 over the same month last year showing a negative growth for the past three months but with signs of withstanding the worsening global economic crisis.

Not so fast:

India's exports in January are expected to plummet by more than a fifth as the global slowdown slashes demand for Indian goods, and the trade minister said further government aid for ailing firms may follow.

"We expect exports in January to be down 22 percent in dollar terms," Commerce Secretary G.K. Pillai said, indicating that overseas sales could decline to $11.5 billion from $14.7 billion a year ago.

Spot the hypocrisy

"Judges must make their assets public" -- Jayanthi Natarajan, Congress MP and AICC spokesperson.

In other news, "Ministers' assets not under RTI":

The PMO has decided to keep the assets of ministers and their relatives under wraps saying (this) information is exempted from the RTI act.

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.

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

Just Saying

Amazon has released information about the cause of the recent S3 outage and what they are doing to ensure that their "performance is statistically indistinguishable from perfect":

Here are the actions that we're taking: (a) we've deployed several changes to Amazon S3 that significantly reduce the amount of time required to completely restore system-wide state and restart customer request processing; (b) we've deployed a change to how Amazon S3 gossips about failed servers that reduces the amount of gossip and helps prevent the behavior we experienced on Sunday; (c) we've added additional monitoring and alarming of gossip rates and failures; and, (d) we're adding checksums to proactively detect corruption of system state messages so we can log any such messages and then reject them.

Except for (d), these actions don't really address the cause, but only mitigate the effects.

Quicksort in Lisp

Version #1:

(defun generate-lt (value)
  (lambda (x) (and (< x value) (list x))))

(defun generate-eq (value)
  (lambda (x) (and (eq x value) (list x))))

(defun generate-gt (value)
  (lambda (x) (and (> x value) (list x))))

(defun quicksort (list)
  (if (<= (length list) 1)
      list
    (let ((pivot (nth (truncate (/ (length list) 2.0)) list)))
      (append (quicksort (mapcan (generate-lt pivot) list))
              (mapcan (generate-eq pivot) list )
              (quicksort (mapcan (generate-gt pivot) list))))))

Duplication of code in the 'generate-' functions. Need a macro.

Version #2:

(defmacro generate-comparator (value fn)
  `(lambda (x) (and (,fn x ,value) (list x))))

(defun quicksort (list)
  (if (<= (length list) 1)
      list
    (let ((pivot (nth (truncate (/ (length list) 2.0)) list)))
      (append (quicksort (mapcan (generate-comparator pivot <) list))
              (mapcan (generate-comparator pivot eq) list )
              (quicksort (mapcan (generate-comparator pivot >) list))))))

Looks elegant, but can we make this even more concise?

Version #3:

(defun quicksort (list)
  (if (<= (length list) 1)
      list
    (let ((pivot (nth (truncate (/ (length list) 2.0)) list)))
      (append (quicksort (mapcan (lambda (x) (and (< x pivot) (list x))) list))
              (mapcan (lambda (x) (and (eq x pivot) (list x))) list)
              (quicksort (mapcan (lambda (x) (and (> x pivot) (list x))) list))))))

Seven lines of condensed confusion. Not to mention wreaking havoc with the layout of the blog.

(Blog post inspired by a) a rekindled interest in Lisp and b) a sudden urge to share the joy of having found a non-gratuitous use for macros)

Update: Version #4:

(defun quicksort (list)
  (if (<= (length list) 1)
      list
    (let ((pivot (first list)))
      (nconc (quicksort (remove-if #'(lambda (x) (>= x pivot)) list))
             (remove-if #'(lambda (x) (not (= x pivot))) list)
             (quicksort (remove-if #'(lambda (x) (<= x pivot)) list))))))

Who Moved My Chees(y Distro)?

[Warning: boring post about Linux distros]

Kubuntu has been my distro of choice for more than a year; I had reached a point where the download-new-distro-spend-a-week-tweaking-it was no longer appealing. Every once in a while the urge to go distro-hopping would hit, but the comfort zone of status quo would prevail.

But the cheese did move one day: KNetworkManager would drop connections at random, not remember the wireless router's SSID, and so on, and things got fairly annoying. Not to mention the fact that things were, on the whole, not as zippy as they used to be. Time for a change.

I decided to give OpenSuse 11.0 a try. After a few false starts with the ISO download (see problem with KNetworkManager above), SuSE was up and running, but no go. What with my peeves with KDE 4.0 and the problems with the Java plug-in (1.5 would crash Firefox while 1.6 would make the applet disappear after one or two operations), I quickly abandoned it.

I have tried out MEPIS in the past, and except for the sound problem found it to be very good. True enough, 7.0 turned out to be equally good, but the sound problem seemed to have been carried over from 6.5. But this time a quick modprobe snd_hda_intel took care of it (Did I try this before? Not sure), and so here I am, with SimplyMEPIS 7.0 as the distro de jour (well, not exactly a day -- I plan to use it for at least six months).

Good things about MEPIS:

1. Very zippy


2. Comes with a lot of stuff already bundled, so you don't have to look beyond the CD for things like the Java Runtime, Skype, etc.


3. Better handling for wireless (KNemo in place of KNetworkManager)

The not-so-good things:

1. Some of the bundled packages are slightly outdated (Firefox, Postgres)


2. I found some random weirdness with the mounting of other partitions. For some reason I couldn't get them to mount on a directory I had created in the root partition. Instead, I had to allow them to be mounted as /mnt/sda*, and then create a symlink to this directory.
   

Put a Shark in Your Tank

There's this story about how Japanese fishermen put small sharks in their fish tanks to keep the fish fresh and better-tasting till they reach the shore. A Google search for the title of this post will give you the full story.

I have nothing against this story -- kudos to the Japanese fishermen for solving their problem in an innovative manner. What I do take exception to is holding up this story as motivational lesson:

Instead of avoiding challenges, jump into them. Beat the heck out of them. Enjoy the game. If your challenges are too large or too numerous, do not give up. Failing makes you tired. Instead, reorganize. Find more determination, more knowledge, more help. If you have met your goals, set some bigger goals. Once you meet your personal or family needs, move onto goals for your group, the society, even mankind.

Don't create success and lie in it. You have resources, skills and abilities to make a difference." So, put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go!

That's all very well, but there's another -- admittedly pessimistic -- way of looking at it, from the perspective of the poor fish: no matter what you do, nothing matters in the end; you will end up getting eaten anyway, so you might as well surrender to the shark and get it over with ("Oh, these poor humans will end up with not-so-great-tasting fish? Bite me").

Also, just because the fish taste better, it doesn't mean that they had a hoot, trying to save their asses from the %^&# shark.

Something to Think About

"Have you imagined commodities like steel, crude oil, red chilli, pepper and gold is [sic] a highly potential [sic] investment option. Read on to see why? [sic]" begins an ad in The Times of India today. It goes on to quote figures like 47.58% for cardamom, 25.22% for gold, and 23.80% for crude as the returns in the derivatives market for these commodities, and pitches for a training course on derivatives.

Two points:

1. Per a report by a United States Senate subcommittee entitled "The role of market speculation in rising oil and gas prices", a speculator 'does not produce or use the commodity, but risks his or her own capital trading futures in that commodity in hopes of making a profit on price changes.'


2. The folks who enroll for the above mentioned course are already suffering from the actions of people whom they are trying to emulate ("I guess I'll have to take the public transport to attend the classes because petrol is so expensive these days. Those ^&*$ speculators!").