March 26, 2013

"I personally believe that Hugo Chávez was murdered by the United States"
-- William Blum

I have been meaning to mention this earlier, but got around to it only now: kudos to William Blum for stating something that is on every progressive's mind but not voiced out loud for fear of being accused of tin-foil hattery.  From the referenced essay:

Chávez said he had received words of warning from Fidel Castro, himself the target of hundreds of failed and often bizarre CIA assassination plots. “Fidel always told me: ‘Chávez take care. These people have developed technology. You are very careless. Take care what you eat, what they give you to eat … a little needle and they inject you with I don’t know what.”

 Six words for doubters: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

March 24, 2013

After seeing that their whining full page ads (grammatical errors, misplaced commas and extra-liberal application of exclamation marks and all -- couldn't such a wealthy industrial house afford a decent copywriter?) failed to elicit any support or sympathy for their cause, the Sahara parivar have resorted to more blatant means: flaunting their political connections by publicizing (through full-page ads, natch) pictures of the movers and shakers who attended the rice-eating ceremony of one of their scions (didn't know the rich and the famous celebrated something as mundane -- and yet out of reach for millions of Indians -- as eating rice; maybe that's why they're rich).

March 23, 2013

From a column (via Deccan Chronicle) about the Sri Lankan issue:

What’s clear is that India’s ability to influence the course of events in the island nation is negligible. Sources close to the powerful first family have told this writer that they see India as an “irritating gnat that can be smacked away at will”.

This is exactly what's wrong with journalism, something Markandey Katju can train his guns on: quotes -- inflammatory ones, at that -- attributed to anonymous sources that only the journalist is privy to. Do we have any way to distinguish genuine quotes from those that are simply pulled out of journalists' asses, journalists serving interests other than that of the public? We don't, so just stop using such quotes. We may lose the insights that genuine quotes provide, but this is a small price to pay to ensure the integrity of the press. On a side note, the incendiary nature of the quote makes it all the more likely that revealing it to the public is meant to elicit reckless action, either from the government or from jingoistic elements outside.

The CBI inquiry scandal throws up an interesting thought: were the raids/investigations initiated by somebody against the UPA? Maybe somebody with leanings towards the BJP? What better way to make the Congress tie itself into knots, trying simultaneously to condemn the action (and protect its erstwhile allies) and to show that it doesn't pull the CBI's strings? Our politicians' actions are a conspiracy theorist's delight, aren't they?

March 18, 2013

The Cyprus bailout fiasco is being described as " the single most inexplicably irresponsible decision in banking supervision in the advanced world since the 1930s.":

[EU officials who engineered this weekend's Cyprus bank bailout] have weakened – perhaps catastrophically – the principal pillar supporting modern banking. This pillar is deposit insurance. Ordinary savers who had received a solemn assurance that deposits up to 100,000 euros were safe are now being asked to take a haircut. This raises questions about deposit insurance throughout the EU and invites runs on banks not only in the most “financially-challenged” nations such as Greece and Spain but even in Italy and France.

Methinks life will go on. They said the same thing about the sanctity of contracts and the credit markets when holders of Greek bonds were made to take haircuts; the haircuts were 'voluntary' to avoid triggering credit default swap payments.

Welcome to Flight Club, where the only rule is "We make up the rules as we go".

March 13, 2013

Leaving aside the emotions, jingoism and nationalism on both sides, what could be a possible solution to the Italian Job controversy? Well, here's a part-pragmatic, part-diplomatic and part-mafioso proposal that our MEA boys can reach out to the Italian government with:

1. Send the two marines back to India (no, hear us out, seriously).


2. We will pull strings here to make sure that they will return to Italy for good, within two months. You can trust us on this -- after all, we're talking about a sovereign country here, an upstanding member of the international community that honours its commitments... oh wait, never mind. On to the next point, anyway.


3. As escrow/guarantee, we will depute one of our respected diplomats -- maybe even the head honcho himself -- to spend the two months in Rome, all expenses paid by us, of course. He/She will return to India only when the marines make it back to Italy. Heck, the same flight can do both legs of the journey, with the personnel exchange being witnessed on the tarmac by a designated and disinterested third party. We know we're preaching to the choir, but still: if you have any clarifications, please refer to The Godfather for modalities and variations on the theme.


4. Coming to how we will pull off #2 above, the case against the two marines is not watertight, anyway. If there's still any uncertainty, leave it to us; we have handled such things before.


5. To sweeten the deal, and to pacify the natives, please deposit a sum of Rs 20 crores as compensation to the victims' families. The Rs 6 crore bank guarantee can be adjusted against this amount, of course.


6. If you would like to discuss this further, or propose changes, discuss logistics, etc., please don't hesitate to either call us at our toll-free number 1-800-WE-MAKE-DEALS or email us at mea@top-secret.gov.in. Thank you.

February 12, 2013

When we think of our government, what comes to mind is the avuncular and benign face of Manmohan Singh, who means well but is way out of his depth; Sonia Gandhi, who has experienced personal tragedies because of her family's involvement in politics, and who still perseveres in serving the country; venal politicians and bureaucrats, who engage in petty machinations in their quest for power and pelf.

But once in a while, something happens that changes our perspective; we see the government for what it actually is (whether this happens consciously or is, for want of better words, an epiphenomenon, or more accurately, an example of swarm 'intelligence'): a scheming sociopath. A government that keeps the rejection of a mercy petition secret and sets a date for the execution. A government that sends the intimation to the death row prisoner's family by Speed Post one day before the planned execution when it knows that Speed Post only guarantees that articles will be delivered anywhere in India in four to six days. A government that is so paranoid about its survival prospects that it is willing to end a person's life just to send a message to the voters that it is as good as the opposition in some nebulous metric like "Strong/Firm on terror". A government that pretends to be afraid of the backlash that would supposedly arise if news of the planned execution was released, but is strong enough and brave enough to face the backlash -- through curfews, preventive/house arrests and tear gas and lathi charges -- when the execution has been carried out. A government that is engulfed in white-hot rage because somebody dared to attack it in its own den, its seat of power.

Irrespective of how one feels about Afzal Guru's guilt and whether capital punishment should be abolished or not, one thing we don't want our government to be is a relentless, vengeful, all-powerful serial killer who also keeps stealing stuff, while occasionally shooting himself in the foot accidentally.

On a side note, Praveen Swami's demolishing of Arundathi Roy's melodramatic piece on the execution is a must-read, if only to avoid being misled by her half-truths and general BS (I know, I've said nice things about her in the past, so bite me).

January 18, 2012

Well, it looks like beheadings by both sides are pretty common:

Despicable as the alleged beheading of Indian soldiers by the Pak­i­s­t­anis was that led to the present military crisis, the fact is that both armies are or have been in it to­g­e­ther. India’s ace TV anchor Barkha Dutt will do the country and the community of journalists a great service by speaking up at this time. She gave the following eyewitness account of the Kargil War to more or less affirm a tradition of beheading the enemy that unfortunately seems to exist on both sides and pe­r­haps straddles other countries too. And I quote from writer-acti­vi­st Shuddhabrata Sengupta’s web­po­st for the piece Barkha Dutt published in Himal magazine in June 2001. 

“I had to look three times to make sure I was seeing right. Bal­a­nced on one knee, in a tiny alley behind the Army’s administrative offices, I was peering through a hole in a corrugated tin sheet. At first glance, all I could see were some leaves. I looked harder and amidst all the green, there was a hint of black — it looked like a moustache. ‘Look again,’ said the Army Colonel, in a tone that betrayed suppressed excitement. This time, I finally saw. It was a head, the disembodied face of a slain soldier nailed on to a tree. ‘The boys got it as a gift for the brigade,’ said the Colonel, softly, but proudly.”

January 11, 2013

If you gaze into the abyss, does the abyss also gaze into you even if you are an Indian? Is my country always right? If you are a 70-year-old grandmother sneaking into PoK, and nobody knows that you've sneaked in, are you an Azad Kashmiri, and is the ceasefire broken? Does it matter if Reshma Bi ran across the Line of Control 16 months ago or six weeks ago? Can we extradite her to India and request her to give a series of expert lectures on guerrilla warfare to our OTA cadets? Is constructing watchtowers a violation of the ceasefire? Even if the watchtowers are facing inwards? Is intimation through a public address system the only way to let somebody know that they're violating the ceasefire? Who pays the bill for the hot line between the GOCs? Is beheading enemy soldiers so common as to warrant something like "...both sides have engaged in cross border raids, which have on occasion included beheadings", almost as if one were referring to an exchange of sweets on Independence Day ("You must try these rasgollas... Oh, almost forgot..." <chop>)? What is a controlled retaliation? Does Praveen Swami have an inside track with respect to the Indian military establishment? Speaking of the establishment, what are the covert actions that B Raman is referring to as retaliation for the Pakistani action? Who are our prospective allies in Pakistan? Does Sarabjit Singh know what these covert actions are? If he does, what does he think of them? What does Afzal Guru think of all this? What about Rabbani Khar? Ban Ki Moon?

(Apologies to Crispin Glover)

December 20, 2012

Shame on you, Saina:

Cocking a snook at the Badminton Association of India, a defiant Saina Nehwal chose to withdraw when holding two match-points against Russian Ksenia Polikarpova in the first round of the $120,000 Syed Modi Grand Prix Gold badminton championship here.

The World No. 3 cited a knee-injury that had troubled her from this year’s Denmark Open as the reason for her decision to withdraw when leading 21-17, 20-18 against a rival ranked 165th.

“With many important tournaments lined up next month, I decided not to aggravate the injury,” said a smiling Saina after she waved to the disappointed crowd for cheering her all the way in the 29-minute encounter.

and

“Throughout the year, the BAI does everything that Saina wants. Government allows Saina economy class (airfare) but BAI helps her travel First Class by paying the difference in fare. In return, BAI wants her to play in a couple of events in the country. But that is not happening,” said a senior BAI official on condition of anonymity.

and

By the end of the day, a ‘chastened’ BAI must have realised that it is better to accept a firm ‘no’ than a reluctant ‘yes’ from Saina. As one of the BAI official put it, “Sadly, the truth is, the Indian badminton needs Saina Nehwal more than Saina needing Indian badminton.” 

Methinks somebody's shoes are getting too small for them. To be fair, it could be advice from questionable sources that is causing this kind of behaviour.

December 13, 2012

It may be possible to test whether we're living in a simulation.

An earlier article that says there may be a 20% chance that we do.

Via Rigorous Intuition, a mind-blowing argument.

Let's see:

1. This explains the Big Bang. Things started when the simulator program was kicked off.
2. Things are discrete in the quantum world because the simulation is, by nature, discrete -- whether it's event-driven or time-stepped.
3. Non-local connections are explained as well -- the 'master controller' is the CPU running the simulation, and it has access to (and is able to maintain) all the simulation objects and their dependencies, irrespective of where they are in the simulated world.
4. The usual paradoxes like wave-particle duality, the uncertainty principle, and so on are explained by the analogy of mathematical formulas and 'lazy initialization'.
5. Karma and synchronicity? Global state/memory/logic in the simulator program.
6. God is the entity running the simulation.

Of course, this still doesn't explain things like ultimate cause (is our God also a simulated entity? How many levels does this go?).

Related: good stuff from Reddit.

December 11, 2012

fool  

/fo͞ol/

Noun

A person who acts unwisely or imprudently; a silly person: "what a fool I was to do this".

id·i·ot  

/ˈidēət/

Noun

1. A stupid person.
2. A mentally handicapped person.

Effing idiots. Or are they fools? Now I'm confused.
Context: this and this.

December 4, 2012

Awfully decent of the Chinese, preferring to pay for stuff rather than pillaging and plundering the to-be-annexed Indian territory:

In 1962, for example, Deak warned the CIA that China was planning to invade India after his company’s Hong Kong branch was swamped with Chinese orders for Indian rupees intended for advance soldiers.

November 28, 2012

Sachin Tendulkar:

When I feel it is time, I will take a call. It is going to be a tough call nevertheless. It is going to be tough because this is what I have been doing all my life. It is going to be difficult to suddenly hang up my boots one day.

I have the highest regard for Tendulkar, but somebody please give the man a copy of Who Moved My Cheese?

Reason #1876 why I'm glad I didn't take the civil services exam -- questions like this:

Domestic resource mobilisation, though central to the process of Indian economic growth, is characterized by several constraints. Explain in ten words.

I made up the "ten words" bit, but I think I would have shown myself the door because my ten words would have been roughly divided as below:

• Babus
• Netas
• Corruption
• Nexus
• Six words unprintable in a family blog

November 26, 2012

One little-noticed wrinkle in the recent failed no-confidence motion is that it serves as 'inoculation': no other such motions can be brought up against the government for the next six months. Watch out for attempts to push through more audacious policies/legislation, without any worries about the government falling because of such attempts.

November 23, 2012

Even when victorious, let there be no joy,
    For such joy leads to contentment with slaughter.
Those who are content with slaughter
    Cannot find fulfillment in the world.
-- Tao Te Ching

Something entirely lost on these joyous folks. Contrast this with the reaction of Major Unnikrishnan's father.

I think I've said this before, but will say it again: the best way to decide whether somebody gets the death penalty is the Arab/Shariah custom of putting the question to the victim's family. Needless to say, this is not a pardon, but only to decide whether the murderer is put to death or spends the rest of his life (life; not 14 years commuted to 10 on account of Gandhi Jayanti, good conduct, and so on) in prison.

November 21, 2012

Yeah, that about sums it up:

Let's clear this up again. The ECB is going to buy bonds of bankrupt banks just so that the banks can buy more bonds from bankrupt governments. Meanwhile, just to prop this up the ESM will borrow money from bankrupt governments to buy the very bonds of those bankrupt governments.

Another interesting tidbit from the report: the demographics are so bad in Japan that they actually have adult diaper fashion shows.

Quote of the day

[H]aving the career of the beloved CIA Director and the commanding general in Afghanistan instantly destroyed due to highly invasive and unwarranted electronic surveillance is almost enough to make one believe not only that there is a god, but that he is an ardent civil libertarian.
-- Glenn Greenwald

Predicting the English Premier League - Part 3

Having just completed the machine learning course in Coursera, time to put the knowledge to good use. Neural networks seem to be the most promising among the classification algorithms (logistic regression and SVMs being the others covered in the course) -- I did do bit of mucking around with logistic regression, but the results were singularly disappointing.

Since we're dealing with neural networks, no need to be picky with what features to use; in addition to the ten parameters considered the last time, let's throw in as many additional ones that we can think of, and let the algorithm sort it out. Here are the features forming the input layer (the features are normalized -- something I didn't do the last time):

1. Home record of home team
2. Away record of away team
3. Record of home team
4. Record of away team
5. Record of home team in last three games
6. Record of away team in last three games
7. Record of home team in last five games
8. Record of away team in last five games
9. Record of home team in last seven games
10. Record of away team in last seven games
11. Record of home team in last three home games
12. Record of away team in last three away games
13. Record of home team in last five home games
14. Record of away team in last five away games
15. Record of home team in last seven home games
16. Record of away team in last seven away games
17. Total goals scored by home team
18. Total goals scored against home team
19. Total goals scored by away team
20. Total goals scored against away team
21. Position of home team in points table
22. Position of away team in points table

We use one hidden layer with five activation units -- could've used more hidden layers, but the code I wrote for the course assignments is for a single hidden layer, and I'm too lazy to bother to make the code more general. Not to mention that the efficacy of using more layers is moot.

The examples are a total of 560 matches from the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons (we ignore the first few weeks of each season to a) get things to settle down and b) avoid division-by-zero errors for some of the features (e.g. when we're considering the first match a team plays in the season).

350 matches are used as the training set and 30%, i.e. 105, from the remainder form the cross validation set.

After a lot of number crunching, the results are not too good, at least not yet. It looks like I'll be needing more data (as indicated by the results from the learning curve plots). A lambda value of 0.16 or 0.32 seems to be the most promising.

The next step is to get the results for the 2009-10 season -- and earlier if required. More grunt work. Stay tuned.

Update: Well, I went all out and got the results for three seasons -- 2007-08, 2008-09 and 2009-10 -- but no cigar; the prediction accuracy refuses to go above ~50%, whatever values of lambda and feature list I consider (I added two more features to the above list: total games played so far by both teams). It might be possible to squeeze out a bit more by running a genetic algorithm and figuring out the best lambda value and features, but I don't think the effort is worth it. Question: what is the minimal prediction accuracy required to get a 20% return on bets over the long-term, e.g., over an entire season?

Question of the day

"After hundreds of drone strikes, how could the United States possibly still be working its way through a 'top 20' list?"
-- Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani to Adm. Mike Mullen

October 28, 2012

Imagine a slightly larger-than-life statue of a naked boy-man wearing only the remnants of a pair of jeans and a hat that looks like a flak helmet, his foot resting on the severed, blood-dripping head of a Roman legionary.

Oh wait, you don't have imagine it. Here's an actual picture:

Picture courtesy of the Rock Garden, Malampuzha, Kerala. I'm too lazy to google for it, but I bet there is a back story involving a twisted and diseased mind that spawned the whole house of horrors (the above picture is only a sample; there's a lot more cringe-inducing crap in my vacation pictures folder).