Nonlinear Web Droppings

Vedam: Movie Review

2010-06-05T22:59:00.011-04:00

Vedam is the best Telugu or Indian movie I've watched in a long time. That is for the impatient review searcher and surfer. There's much to love and lovingly unpack here.
The writing is a lot more sophisticated than the usually linear Telugu protagonist's trajectory from rural poverty to urban love and prosperity or some tired permutation (OK, unnecessary snark alert). Evoking faint whiffs of Crash or Innaritu's recent oeuvre, the screenplay deftly weaves in the stories of multiple lives and keeps you guessing at the inevitable collision of their trajectories. You know it is going to happen, and most often you would have seen that a mile and three songs away (one in the monsoon rains, another in the Alps...) , but props to Radhakrishna Jagarlamudi for not giving away the final setting. Radhakrishna is also the director, which means I must see his directorial debut Gamyam.

Going into the Fresh Pond theatre a trailer and review virgin, I hadn't heard much about the movie except for reassurances from my fellow movie watcher, who, it must be said, is not above concocting reviews to lull friends into co-watching all sorts of unintentionally horrific dreck. And so it was with a sinking feeling that I greeted the opening rock ballad led by Vivek Chakravarthy (Manoj Manchu). Not to worry. The movie quickly elevates above what began to look like a perennially-sleeve-rolled-Venkatesh-strumming-a-guitar-badly (Venki?) movie, and into possible epoch marking territory.

One of the five protagonists, Vivek is an aspiring singer with mean guitar riffs, mean rocking posture and silhouette, and a menacing dimple to boot. He smokes and fumes to the foreground of Bob Marley posters and an Elvis bobblehead -- a really neat visual touch by the way, more on that later. Vivek feels stifled by his widowed mother's wishes for him to follow his father and grandfather's illustrious and honoured army careers. Having lost his dad early on, Vivek would rather let others play hero and make sacrifices, he'll stick with Guitar Hero, a chance at musical fame, and angry self-absorption. We journey with him and his band as they make their way to Hyderabad for a music gig that could potentially kickstart their musical careers. This, as we will learn, is also a journey into maturity --long journeys are always good for personal growth, inside the head and in the facial hair department as well.

Serving notice for more lushly shot scenes and superior cinematography, we cut to the life of a hustlin' Cable Raju (Allu Arjun) who is trying to bargain for some more time to pay back dues to the local goon (who I guess pays homage to Mr. T from the A-team.) As Cable Raju (don't you love the flavorful authenticity of that name?) attempts some amateur parkour to escape Mr Local T's sidekicks, we are allowed to feast on -- if one can use such terminology when talking of these desperate locales -- gorgeous sweeping shots of the dense urban warrens of Jubilee Hills slums a la the favelas in the excellent and visually stunning City of God. There were a few other moments when the camera intruded into my conscious because of how arresting, in true fidelity to the word, of how arresting the framing and capture were. A second viewing will help me list those. Cable Raju is all about faking his way into the heart of his aesthetically and monetarily loaded girlfriend and, along with his friend and 'driver', provides excellent comic relief as he sets about scheming his way to a large pay day to indulge in some additional and ultra-expensive new years eve fakery with his girlfriend. Color me a fan here -- Allu Arjun displays all the ingredients that go into making The Megastar: A comic touch, believable tenderness, limber moves, and enough intense acting chops to tug at the already swooning hearts (and there were many).

He is not the only one after a quick buck. Making up the most harrowing storyline are the father and daughter-in-law duo who set out to make enough money to emancipate her son from bonded labor. This is especially wretched and reflection-inducing when contrasted with the shallow opulence that Cable Raju aspires after. Forty thousand rupees is the price of two tickets to a new years eve bash at a gaudily lit star-laden hotel. Forty thousand rupees is also the price of a kidney in the organ market and the cost of insuring a bright kid's dreams, and a prostitute's freedom.

Then there are the equally interesting stories of Amalapuram Saroja (Anushka Shetty) and Raheemuddin Qureishi (Manoj Bajpai, whom I had just seen in a rambling, pretentious, and bloated Rajneeti. Ah, Vedam is so refreshing in comparison. A lime and lemony Limca to viscous Chavanprash, to use an ill-fitting analogy.) There's just so much good stuff packed in here it is a surprise bordering on shock to someone used to being let down by Telugu movies that peter out after a promising bang. Despite having all the spots of a successful and commercial crowd-pleaser, Vedam also invokes topical themes--trafficking in organs and humans, and theft by a youth enamored by glitz--that deserve attention and debate.

So yeah the verdict is emphatically yes and yes, two thumbs up, a sure-fire winner. There's this funny dialogue about people only belonging to two castes: the haves and have-nots. This movie is a well bestowed member of the former and has it all.

P.S: And wow! The cute female bandmember happens to be Lekha Washington whom I met back in college when she was charming her way through Saarang. And by met I mean gawked from a distance. My talented friend B did meet her in the usual sense of the word and was impressed (and trounced in competition) by her sculpting skills.

Fantasy

2009-08-29T00:32:00.003-04:00

What's a fantasy. What purpose does it serve? We devote large parcels of our lives dreaming these up and chasing after them. It parallels the pursuit of evening shadows that keep getting farther away till all fades into dark. We are unique as humans; meat mated with minds. We seek simple pleasures adorned by the mind's inventive tassels. If we are to strive for a consciousness not made murky by the fumes of desire arising from the more animistic parts, should we strip down fantasies into their elements to dissolve and delusions that block our view?

We chase fantasies all through our young adulthood. We might be far too self-absorbed to realize so, only to be forced to look through someone else's lens later on. Does that happen? I hope it does! Fantasies in movies, especially Bollywood ones, are absolute sucker punches derived from squeezing together every attribute attractive to man or woman. What do the people sitting in projector beam lit dark of the theater lust after? The stud with the expressive eyes and malleable facial expressions that constantly morph into quasi-equilibrium facets of love, stable barely long enough for us label before melting away? Or do they lust after the gorgeous girl who interestingly is often boringly attractive. The fantasies peddled to men seem far too predictable, and often nothing beyond the physically attractive. Brat packs sell independence and a surfeit of sex, which is again boring. Fantasies peddled in the package of the male protagonist are far more interesting and, it seems, numerous. A studly stubble, alternating with a clean chiseled chin, and abs if this is the post millennial generation--the older ones only needed anger and passion lasered from smoldering eyes. A glamorous occupation that allows for an indie fashion sense, some sweeping shots that zoom in from panoramic expansion into the intense and commandeering facial twitches of the actor. Then, more sweeping shots of starkly sterile European streets and the Alps and skyscrapers, a layering of machismo enabled by a fleet of stunt performers, and the deal clinching voice of Sukhwinder Singh. You have this fictional construction that absolutely hits every key on the neural keyboard and is enthralling, and continuing to hold you in thrall long after in the warmth of this figment's memories. Interesting, this thing that exists only in the interiors of our minds holds us so powerlessly captive. Is this unreachable fiction pulling us taut in different directions, or a balm that soothes the rude impression reality has made on our skins. Are we still that delicate and body-bound that things can so easily prick us so? Do fantasies disappoint us by providing an illusory context to reality? Or do they help keep our dreams, and by extension us, afloat by making vivid a hope that compels us to trudge on? And what is to be made of the weird misery of one who actually has it all? Or the placid hesitation of one who suddenly wakes up realizing any more would be in surplus?

A pointed puzzle

2009-07-20T13:57:00.001-04:00

Here are two trend graphs for the same search phrase, but one for the US, and the other for the UK.

Can you guess the search phrase?

What data corpus would you need to automate the detection of this search phrase? That is, assuming you were looking to spit a plausible answer based on a high regression coefficient or something of that ilk.

The suspect messenger

2009-07-19T16:21:00.003-04:00

Sordid reality behind Dubai's gilded facade

Interesting article. I usually find the comments on such articles a little less prone to sampling bias; they offer the usual dissenting counterpoint and nuance. The truly interesting and amusing thing about the article is the author's domestic saga (assuming it is the same guy). And no, I am not going all Ad Hominem on him, for this. Found this dailymail screed by his ex-wife grousing about his marital infidelity and remarriage to a hot young thing. Reading the middle-east article, I had this vision of a young Britisher, possibly fresh enough to be outraged by the serrated edges of capitalism, but no, this guy seems to be quite the old English rogue.

And this one has many more interesting comments. Outrage is always more illuminating :)

How could my ex-husband Rod Liddle give his young floozy the white wedding I was denied - and make my children lie about it

A review of Create Your Own Economy

2009-07-09T07:37:00.004-04:00

You can also find the review here. On skimming this book, your first reaction might be bemusement. What does this book have to do with the economy, when the most common theme threading the rather diverse chapters is autism? Only reading through will finally make you realize that the economy Tyler Cowen talks about is not the one defined classically ( and now in its death throes ?), but the one that broadband connectivity and non-rival goods have made possible. The goods we consume are increasingly virtual, indestructible in that they are bits of information, and yet ephemeral in value because of the low latency of cultural communication. Stuff becomes too passe, even retro-chic perhaps, all too soon. Lolcats are so 2008.

How does one cope in this new economy defined by the transaction of small cultural bits like Youtube videos, phatic Facebook status updates, blogs, and tweets? Tyler Cowen suggests that people endowed with autistic cognitive styles, and he self-identifies as one, are well positioned to take advantage of this incarnation of the economy.

Much like his blog Marginal Revolution, which is remarkable in its eclecticism and frequency of updates and perhaps demonstrative of the information ordering abilities of an autistic cognitive style, the book offers a smorgasbord of cultural bits, but these bits also ultimately make for a meaty thought stew. In ten diverse chapters, Cowen flits from a comparison of marriage to modern culture, to an analytical demonstration of Sherlock Holmes's autistic ways. Rather than simply and linearly describing the chapters, I will point to some of the many bits that interested and provoked me into exploring further.

Cowen suggests that "culture has in some ways become uglier because that is how the self-assembly of small bits looks to the outside observer. But when it comes to the interior dimension, contemporary culture has become happier and more satisfying. And ultimately, it has become nobler as well an more appreciative of the big-picture virtues of human life". There's obviously no mathematical derivation of this statement, but it plausibly extracts meaning from the dizzyingly fast changes broadband connectivity have wrought in the last decade. Youtube may have pushed attention spans downwards; The New York Time recently reported on how even porn has had to do away with its already minimal narrative to accommodate the new distribution channel and its consumptive consequences. However, Youtube also allows us to (almost) costlessly glimpse a one-man-band street performer in Croatia or an exceptionally talented Filipino amateur's mashup of the NBA playoffs (look for renhigotrare). At the risk of making this argument uni-dimensional, it is in ways increasing the variance of cultural quality we can experience, while possibly lowering the mean. Is that true? Who knows, the internet just got started with us.

The internet also already is a recognizable if distant cousin of the experience machine postulated by Robert Nozick that Cowen discusses elsewhere. Nozick wondered if we would choose fantasy over reality if this machine delivered fantasies tailored to dovetail into the most deep-seated of our desires. The old blue pill or the red pill question; will we crowd out the real organic world with a dense and enveloping collage of these cultural bits? Cowen's critique is reflected in the 11.5 million World of Warcraft players who log in daily to inhabit a fantasy landscape, slay monsters, and complete magical quests. We are perhaps neurologically diverse enough to allow for every argument and critique to find supporting exemplars. Cowen does suggest this, and possibly comes closest to describing why the book concerns the economy, in stating that "more and more art forms will be directed at pleasing people with unusual neurologies as cultural production becomes more diverse".

Most intriguing of the hypotheses in the book is the "audacious" prediction offered in the last chapter. Disclosing it will be a disservice to you and the author--pick up the book if only for this one--but it does remind me of the short story The Immortal by Jorge Luis Borges. In it Borges describes the predicament of Troglodytes who, escaping the inevitability of death that makes us precious and pathetic, become ascetics devoted to the now unparalleled complexity of thought. Cowen offers a related, economic analysis inflected take on the future of the universe itself.

Regrettable Reviews

2009-07-06T16:32:00.002-04:00

In this advanced age of low-latency connectivity, one must really strive hard to find objects to derive pleasure from. Luckily for me, and similar others who derive a certain thrill from schadenfreude and gleefully stabbing at others' mistakes, I've discovered a new hobby: Finding negative reviews of iconic movies fit to be part of the canon. Check these out.

There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome.

...soars with its feet in the air -- the rest crash-lands.

It's astonishing that so much money, talent, technical expertise and visual imagination can be put in the service of something so stupid.

Silly and dense!

Any guesses on the movie under the microscope? Here's another hint.

A blast of Holly-Kong glitz that never approaches the stylistic cohesiveness of, say, John Woo's Face/Off or the charisma of that film's propulsive star John Travolta.

....

It is the tenth anniversary of this movie. To have watched it back then, and not come away delighted, you had to be something of a ... I think the other gleefully obnoxious folks commenting on the rotten reviews piece the answer together.

How much of this appreciation is a positive feedback reinforcement of a good movie? Does it truly rise above greatness on its own merit, or is it propelled into the rarer atmosphere by consumers hungry for epochal anchors?

Tittering about twitter?

2009-06-28T23:50:00.003-04:00

My initial thoughts on T when it came out were that it should be pit in ridiculousness rumblemania matchup against that other dead-on-arrival video blog-comment enabler seesmic (It allows blowhards in pajamas to scrunch into a camera and pontificate; after 12 million dollars they realized there wasn't yet a market for such exalted levels of narcissism).

Why, I wondered, would anyone be interested in something as banal and vain. While I am sure there are geniuses who can consistently condense wisdom into 140 character gems, about 9 billion of the rest aren't.

And yet, Twitter rocketed into the public sphere. Some dude on CNN stands by a screen with scrolling tweets and shags. Or something like that, I've only watched it on mute in Airports, restaurants, and my gym.

And then, Oprah, the one remaining arbiter of monolithic cultural significance, launched into it. The twitter subscription graph looks like a cliff upside down. Given all this madness, I was compelled, obliged by my duty towards sharp and current cultural critiques, to give it a try. And so I fleshed out yet another digital avatar, epigrammasai

After about a month of sporadically trying this new protocol, and trying to make sense of it, I still think the Onion article was on the mark.

But that's too cavalier. I don't have friends who twitter much, and following celebrities--I followed Mindy Kaling and Neal Gaiman, both literary spark plugs in their own right. And then I unfollowed. Their everyday banalities are not much more interesting. --. Yes, to continue, following celebrities was a drag. But then again, I am not the kind who reads People and I suspect that their readership might attribute a higher value to this magnified and possibly unfiltered view that celebs permit.

Also, twitter is the first protocol that allows for a supereasy way to track the number of people interested in you, and celebrities who transact in the currency of fame must find this intoxicating, even necessary. Blogs have RSS feeds and webpages have counters, but you need to be somewhat of a technophile to understand and use these (And that explains why RSS never really took off). Twitter on the other hand has a detailed viewership count built in. CNN and that Demi Moore plaything even engaged in a visible risible fight to follower count supremacy.

Twitter obviously helped spread the word on the Iran election aftermath, but even this shows how the underlying protocol could be focused better. What twitter aided could simply be allowed by baking in an option of publishing texts made by any and every mobile user. These could be anonymyzed by default (How do Twitter identities help anyways?). Twitter's true strength shine through when instant, decentralized group formation is required, whether at the small scale of organizing meetups of a few tens or protesting unfair elections by the tens of thousands. Groups and group identities coalesce and melt in the space of a hashtag. That truly is revolutionary.

And yet, on a daily basis, Twitter's perhaps useful in broadcasting links (but I have Reddit for that) or narrowcasting links (I don't have a fan following. Yet) or sharing links (My friends shoo my emails into spam folders anyways). Ardent twitterers must therefore be tweeting for some other reason. Is it the most effective way to navel gaze and communicate in some new age form of a constant celebratory campfire? Omphaloskeptic, now here is a pertinent username for you if you are inclined to dive in.
In the interest of objectivity, I must perhaps add a counter explanation. It is also possible that my extreme levels of narcissism were offended by the lack of interest in my tweets as demonstrated rather cruelly by my stagnant follower count. (Such a cold lack of interest hasn't stopped me from blogging, and I've valiantly hung on for five years! But then there's no cold harsh negative feedback of reader enthusiasm that I cannot ignore...)

And finally, an exciting new development in my life means that I will have to use Twitter in the future and must continue to restrain this pessimistic sour grape sentiments and chug along.

Oh wait, that wasn't final. I have also observed a healthy number of Af-Am twitterers, more than I've ever stumbled across in blogs. Is this simply because searching on Twitter is far easier and allows for effortless access to people's networks? More grist for this profitless publishing mill...

Update: And what do you know? After having snobbishly railed against its uselessness in Pundit-like fashion, I am now hooked to the million specks of phatic beeps it continuously pipes into my browser. It really is the rawest precursor of Matrix-ian brain plugs isn't it? As some commenter on marginal revolution said, it still does seem like all positive externalities and no play making @Jack an accidental altruist.

The Chasedown

2009-06-01T15:41:00.002-04:00

Noun Chasedown
1. The chilling spectacle of a supremely gifted predator calculating the precise twin trajectories of itself and its lithe prey before launching its shiny unfurled musculature into the skies and ripping the very life force from the bewildered prey's grasp. Also very dispiriting for other conspecifics watching helplessly from the sidelines.

Building boundaries from bits: class and distinctions in this digital age

2009-05-31T19:46:00.005-04:00

Miguel Garcia, a class valedictorian accepted by 13 eager colleges, felt like an outsider at Harvard and Boston.com explores the reasons. The reason is predictable and yet poignant when seen through his eyes. Class disparity. Scholarships are not immediate levelers in a world inundated with numerous methods of signaling--seasonal junkets, clothing, transportation, you name it and there is an exclusive and exclusionary way to indulge that it. Cultural transplants face this too, though it might not strike one as prejudiced. All this is by way of introducing not the article over at Boston.com, but the rather fascinating diversity of opinion in the comments section. Some empathize with Miguel's struggle, while others snicker at the tragedy! of not being able to afford a suit as they remind Miguel to look at the bigger picture in which he inhabits that most desirable island of elites, an address that is sure to open all kinds of doors later. ( And still other commentators sniff a an anti-Harvard bias in these articles of this kind.)

Why are so many differing perspectives held? Or to have a different perspective on that question, why are all these people right? Humans are labeling fetishists, and yet rail against otherness. The general unspoken and strongly held consensus is: Exclusion is wrong especially if it is done on the basis of wealth. Brash Boston Brahmins. And yet we readily glue multiple labels on, even literal ones like brands, and feel free to typecast on their basis. It may even be necessary to prevent a cognitive overload. How can you greet every stranger with tabula rasa and patiently tabulate his or her characteristics without recourse to any guesses. Labels allow guesses and we are constantly refining our own labels to make it easier for people to guess our location in the culture space. Some labels like intelligent and knowledgeable are acquired, while others are stiched on, maybe loosely, at birth. Acquired labels for reason are more defensible and people have no qualms about bashing others over the head with these. I do this myself when I see moronic comments on Youtube. Perhaps I shouldn't, or perhaps I should better understand the true reasons for this disdain.

Labels allow us to gravitate faster towards a community based on commonalities. Is it wrong for physicsts to interact mainly with physicists? Or Scrabble enthusiasts, or knitting fans? Class provides similarly ready labels, but these are harder to acquire, or at least were, but they stand for commonalities nonetheless. And all these different forms of shared understanding and appreciation seem to provide that same warmth of connection and allow for that state of flow us social beings need. Those who support and empathize with Miguel seem to share a background, while those who do not see Miguel as a different grain hewn from the same rock. It is scale-space theory applied to society.

The digital society makes it so much easier, dizzingly easier, to erect and formalize communities, connections, and boundaries that the question of otherness pops up more often. The comments section on the Boston article allows these different perspectives to wrestle and recognize difference. Pornographic websites force the entire spectrum of sexual identities into visual arrays, asking consumers to piece together their own, and Facebook compels us to recognize and approve any sentiment of connection another individual might perceive by friending him. Twitter breaks this symmetry and allows us to follow and peer in, but also creates and defines transient commonalities every second with hashtags and searchable labels. Where are we headed? Will this ebb and flow of friction between boundaries lead to an understanding of this fundamental need to connect allowing for more fluid and (for lack of a better word) compassionate understanding, or isolate us into ever small groups ending in the unit cult? Repositories of cultural fragments like Youtube allow everyone to join in, but embedding of these cultural fragments in walled gardens and moated forts allows for a shared stagnant identity that one can luxuriate or wallow in. What will we make of these dueling forces?

Entertaining Excerpts (Morbidly)

2009-05-29T12:52:00.004-04:00

Baechler described 4 distinct types of suicide: escapist, aggressive, oblative, and ludic. The ludic type is subdivided into the “ordeal” and the “game.” The “ordeal” refers to risking one’s life to prove oneself to oneself or to seek the judgment of others. He postulates that participants in Russian roulette desire to prove something by challenging probability: A “winner” of this activity is alive; survival rests in the hands of fate. The customary attributes of a successful sportsman, speciﬁcally, skill, bravery, and intelligence, play no role. Baechler’s suicide as a “game” involves the sole purpose of playing with one’s life in recognition of the chance of a fatality. The ultimate stakes of life versus death constitute the thrilling appeal of Russian roulette.

link Via Kottke

Dan Ariely: On our buggy moral code

2009-05-14T18:43:00.000-04:00

Dan Ariely's Blog

Dan talks about the pitfalls of handling tokens that are exchangeable for money, but removed from the implicit affective relationships that have been forged with the concept of money. Credit card users surely face this. What is insidious about credit cards is that the motor action accompanying a purchase remains the same, no matter the amount being forked over. Real paper money forces you to make a stronger motor correlation. More money implies more bills, or bigger bills.

This effect might be stronger in those making the leap from cash to cards. (I suspect that there is also a perceptual difference (aside from the obvious factual one) between credit cards and debit cards. Do debit cards automatically elicit visual episodes of logging on to see dangerously depleted balances? ).

Technology, in making the process easier, may also make it easier for us to spend. In fact, it makes it easier for us to consume by eliminating or relegating the concept of spending to a quick swipe of a magnetic strip. Technology, however, can also help resuscitate the connection. Will an iphone app that automatically pops up your balance, not as a number, but as a bar or other spatial entity presented in the context of your preset savings goals, also shown as a spatial entity, nudge us into being a bit more careful? I guess it is interesting that these technological advances will have to come from outside the bank or credit card issuer as it isn't in their interest to make the consumer more prudent.

Update: Jonah Lehrer points to some studies that look at recklessness induced by the abstractions that are credit cards.

Preemptive apologies for excessive basketballography

2009-05-09T19:06:00.002-04:00

But this has to be said. The NBA playoff adverts have been great. Last year's "there can only be one" series was directed by the creative couple behind Little Miss Sunshine. I haven't been able to discover the agency behind these :

The foreground figure extraction is beautifully done; wonder how they accomplish it.

Artest is Awesome

2009-05-07T23:36:00.000-04:00

Entitlement

2009-05-06T19:02:00.002-04:00

Being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple. source

Funny tube copypasta

2009-05-04T18:33:00.002-04:00

99.5% of all teens would cry if the Jonas brothers were on a 20 story building about to jump.The other 0.5% would bring a chair and popcorn.Copy and Paste if your one of those 0.5%

I just noticed while trying to attribute this that the Tube doesn't permalink comments. Why come? But this should be easy enough to Google.

I also just realized that I am not a teen anymore. Every passing second changes culture on the outside, and the neural webs on the inside. Bit by bit that teen spirit becomes distant, opaquer, and ultimately impenetrable. And thus the hour glass flips...

Sakshat, the ten dollar laptop

2009-04-29T12:23:00.000-04:00

Updated (see footnote)

Ten dollars? How are they going to pull that off? If the website that probably defaults as the homepage is any indication, they might ship this with a coarse screen or a no-screen TV pluggable. Text on TV screens is obviously a concern, and hence the absolutely bizarre synced narrative that sounds like it was mecha-turked to be read into cheap microphones?

Despite all that, this could still work. We are nothing if not ingenious in working around technological obstacles. What is the most common use of this laptop going to be? IIT Madras was involved in the project. If past projects are any indication, this will involve some crazy, creative, but ultimately workable hacks.

Western design is hobbled by aesthetic constraints. Developing nations can't afford that a lot of the times and something that just works, however pathetically inefficient it is, would still be a lot better than nothing. I know nothing of the OLPC design, but I would speculate that having it conform to current ideals of what a laptop is, added to the cost.

And now the government, or whatever sleazy agency was responsible for the 10 dollar stunt, has backpedaled and ordered 250,000 OLPC laptops. This is both infuriating and heartening. Infuriating because of the ineptitude it highlights, and heartening because the whole cycle starting at bombastic blunder and ending in a bashful backing off did not take the usual decade. But still, 250,000 OLPC laptops is a lot of money; the kind of amount that screams scam and ghapla when the Indian beauracratic machinery is involved. I am expecting some unexpected setbacks here.

He's Attorney James Sokolove

2009-04-21T23:57:00.003-04:00

James Sokolove is an almost avuncular presence in my life. He was there for me when I first moved to Boston in 2002 and his soothing voice was still calming me and assuring safety right until I got rid of my TV sometime last year.

Every New Englander knows him from his ads on TV, but I never thought of Googling him to look up his back story, which turns out to be pretty damn interesting; goes to show that there's a tale under every unturned rock.

The most fascinating part? His firm doesn't actually take on any cases, but simply passes them on for a juicy affiliate fee to other lawyers who are too chicken to indulge in the (apparently) morally dubious business of advertising on TV!

Full Story

And, of course, the commercial on the Tube :)

What about the Baileys?

2009-04-17T14:09:00.006-04:00

I am a huge LeBrawn fan. Not just because of his basketball prowess, which is off the charts, but also because of how he has managed to surpass an almost insurmountable mound of expectations heaped in front of him by all comers, and then lit into a giant flaming pyre by media outlets. He managed to do that as a nineteen year old entering a league where a 6 foot 3 inch, two hundred pound sleek slab of muscle is considered a weak misfit.
His story also serves to remind us of the many threads that do unravel, as would be the norm. For, really, how many high-school phenoms hoisted on the shoulders of adoring but uninformed fans actually make it to the big leagues AND make it big.

Ever heard of Damon Bailey? He was a Lebron to his Indiana hometown and then state. I came across this mention of him in the (wonderful | awesome| amazing| supercool) times archive.

For Damon Bailey and Eric Montross, the distinctions between basketball myth and basketball reality sometimes blurred during their last three seasons in high school.
From their first year in high school until graduation last month, the two prep all-Americans had become legendary figures in the rich lore of Indiana basketball. Much of the legend had to do with talent, though much of it also had to do with the hunger of in-state Hoosiers for new hot-shot heroes.
This week at the Olympic Festival, however, the mythology of high school has been replaced by the bruising reality of big-time college basketball. link

He first shone in the public eye when anointed a "hot prospect" while still in eighth grade, by Bob Knight. According to Wikipedia, he was drafted 44th by Indiana, and then cut after one year on the injured list. However, he is still big in Indiana.

How humbling it must be for Damon to have to push back his pride and appear at McDonalds to sign autographs. Bailey was Lebron James before there was a Lebron. His every move was watched as he caught the imagination of basketball fans across the state of Indiana. After all, Bob Knight said he was a better player in the eighth grade than the contemporary IU point guard, Steve Alford. The only difference between the basketball careers of Bailey and James is Lebron can actually play.
The moral of this story is twofold. First, if you try to live off of past glories in high school, you’ll probably end up spending some time working at McDonalds. Secondly, if you fit the mold of what an Indiana basketball player should be (Caucasian, short, slow, from a small town), even if you had a mediocre college career and non-existent professional career, the state will still love you and there will always be a place for you in small town fast food restaurants.

Ouch!

These slips and slaps are what high-school phenoms risk for all the transient glory that shines so brightly, ever so briefly. Fascinating.

Source

Damon Bailey sounds like a nice, not-too-bitter guy though...

The news distillation process

2009-04-12T21:32:00.000-04:00

The New York Times is publishing pro- skilled immigration articles to go along with Obama's political maneuvering. A recent article had this amusing, obviously exaggerated account of an engineer's ingenuity.

"the company’s map-making team faced a problem that even the best and brightest could not solve. Maps produced by the service were taking too long to download and appear on phones. Enter Mr. Mavinkurve, who floated an alternative: cut the number of colors in each map section to 20 or 40 from around 256. Mr. Mavinkurve used a rare combination of creativity, analysis, engineering and an understanding of graphics [emphasis mine] to find a solution that had eluded the rest of the team."

Sharp-eyed Redditers are obviously not going to let something that juicy pass by unmolested :)

Redditer millstone provided this hilarious reconstruction of the editing process leading into the luminous outcome:

I think it probably went down like this:

Reporter: "Give me an example of something Sanjay did."

Sanjay's manager: "He reduced the color palette to improve download time."

Reporter: (dutifully writes it down)

Editor: "This is boring. Can you add some drama?"

Reporter: "Ok...the BEST and BRIGHTEST were HELPLESS in the face of this mind-bending enigma. But suddenly, when things seemed at their darkest, a proud figure strides PURPOSEFULLY from the mist. He pulls back his hood, and it's SANJAY! He quickly COMBINES his powers of creativity, analysis, engineering, and graphics, forming a Molotov cocktail of sheer software brilliance. Diving behind a table, he HURLS it onto the slow download times, which run SCREAMING from our cell phone bills. Also Sanjay's hair blows majestically at all times."

Editor: Good.

link

And, of course, this being Reddit, the Graphic Guru in question, Sanjay, stops by to corroborate the account :)

Sanjay here. This is exactly what happened. Completely serious. I was mortified when I read this!

link

Odd one out

2009-04-08T22:06:00.000-04:00

Only one dog in this picture doesn't mind vegan hippie-enforced Yoga.

And it is not the one wagging her tail.

2009-03-31T09:44:00.000-04:00

Watching hoops mashups on the Tube is my favorite between-work blocks indulgence. This Tubester has elevated a grungy basement genre into an artform.

Sampling Bias Bitten

2009-03-29T15:34:00.000-04:00

During summer vacations, Chamberlain worked as a bellhop in Kutsher's Hotel. Red Auerbach, the coach of the Boston Celtics, spotted the talented teenager there and had him play 1-on-1 against Kansas University standout and national champion, B. H. Born, elected the Most Valuable Player of the 1953 NCAA Finals. Chamberlain won 25–10; Born was so dejected that he gave up a promising NBA career and became a tractor engineer ("If there were high school kids that good, I figured I wasn't going to make it to the pros").

From the Wilt Chamberlain bio. Many other interesting tidbits in there.

Playoffs!

2009-03-16T19:24:00.000-04:00

Don't watch it here if you are not on a smartphone. The widescreen HD version is awesome.

Vikram Pandit and the Indian mafia

2009-03-06T14:58:00.001-05:00

The phrase Indian mafia does appear in the article. It was also used in a humorous, unknow

Ghettodawg Chamillionaire

2009-02-20T00:27:00.000-05:00

This latest offering from Danny Boyle is a visual feast. Set in gritty West Baltimore, the protagonist Jamaal comes of age during the crack epidemic of the early nineties. The director is unflinching in showing Jamaal's horrific childhood lived in sumptuously saturated shots of dilapidated brownstones, boarded doors, and urinated alleys. An 8 year old Jamaal fleeing the projects while his parents are being slaughtered by a rival gang, or Jamaal being subject to unspeakable sexual indignities during his time at a foster home-- Danny Boyle almost makes us squirm in our plush seats. But virtuoso that he is, the scenes are shot at a rapid clip and set to pulsating hip-hop beats that are synchronously lively and pop-menacing
Particularly magical and joyous are the scenes where Jamaal and his brother, after finding their way to New York City, manage to reinvent themselves as guides, picking up an impeccable east coast preppie accent in the process.
Oh Danny Boyle! An utterly unlettered black kid from West Baltimore donning an east coast preppie accent? You never fail to amaze!
The movie skirts surreality at all times and heartily indulges in the buffet of caviar battered fried chicken and magical realism when Jamaal manages to find his way into Regis Philbin's hot seat while working as a mortgage repackager at Fannie Mae. In a deliciously inspired sequence of lucky strokes, the questions asked of Jamaal resonate soundly with memories from his absent-childhood. Jamaal instantly recognizes Richard Wagner as the composer of The Ride of the Valkyries as that was the ringtone the drug dealers he worked with set up as a code on their burners.
And so, the movie titillates, pleases, pleasures, in ways so desperately sought in these uncertain economic times. As I gushingly committed my trembling pen and fluttering heart to pen an ecstatic review, the theater jived and grooved to the song sequence in the closing titles. Without giving too much away, I will add that Soulja Boy, High School Musical, and Miley Cyrus combine swimmingly well!

Siiigh

Slumdogs

2009-02-19T18:49:00.000-05:00

Article in The New Yorker by Katherine Boo

"...This was the marvel of many great twenty-first-century cities, including New York and Washington, whose levels of inequality now match those of Abidjan and Nairobi. Maybe they should have looked like [violent video game] Metal Slug 3. Instead, ingenious social constructions--democracy, charity, subtle and blatant articulations of caste, hope, electrified fences--were keeping things more or less in order."
(link)

Why is it that I haven't come across any Indian journalists writing about class resentment. Is it considered too obvious, simple-minded, socialist? Arvind Adiga's White Tiger does, but in an almost garishly caricatured fashion. And it is fiction. All that Valentine's day fundie brouhaha probably stems from some resentment towards the excessively rich and lavishly consumerist. India is only nascently capitalist and one can't attribute riches and assuage resentment by reminding oneself that the wealth being flaunted and uglily consumed was made justly and through channels open to all.
In India, that is still far from true.

Allen Stanford reveals the secrets behind his sucess

2009-02-18T22:07:00.000-05:00

4. What event will touch off the next economic crisis?
Poor global leadership, nuclear or biological war, man's inhumanity toward man, greed, religious intolerance, exponential growth of human enterprises. I could go on, but they are all overshadowed by global climate change--the environmental time bomb that began ticking with the start of the Industrial Age. I am not talking about saving earth. I'm talking about saving civilization. For the next generation to have a future, we--as nearly 7 billion people living on a planet with finite resources--must immediately begin the process of restructuring the global economy before we reach the tipping point of massive market failure and the collapse of social, economic and government structure. I strongly encourage everyone to read Plan B 3.0 by Lester Brown. (More)

Via

I first became suspicious when I heard he was pouring money into a twenty20 match involving England. Picking the most boring international team isn't a sign of business savvy! :)

The Indian Railway King: Hathi ko cheetah bana diya

2009-02-18T12:01:00.000-05:00

How did India’s Huey Long become its Jack Welch?

NEW DELHI—In his boyhood, long before Lalu Yadav became India’s most unlikely management guru, he sometimes strayed from his cows and scampered barefoot to the railroad tracks. Dodging crowds and porters, he made his way to the first-class cars and, for a few glorious moments, basked in the air conditioning that blasted from the open door. Then the police would spot him and shoo him away, into the moist trackside cowflap where he belonged.

The boy has grown up, but when I meet him in his New Delhi office, he’s still barefoot, and a headache for train conductors everywhere. Lalu Yadav, 61, is now the boss of all 2.4 million Indian Railways employees. When he wants air conditioning, he nods, and a railway employee hops up to twist the dial. As minister of railways, he rules India’s largest employer—one with annual revenues in the tens of billions—from a fine leather sofa, his sandals and a silver spittoon on the floor nearby and a clump of tobacco in his cheek....(More)

Dilution of quality in social aggregators

2009-02-06T23:27:00.000-05:00

The bemoaning of degrading quality is a staple across many domains. The older generation waxes nostalgically about the golden age of yore, alums say they same about their schools, and so on. Keeping with the incredibly short life cycles of internet-based systems, it is no surprise really to see users airing similar complaints, whether it be on reddit, digg, hacker news. Quality, however, should be far easier to measure when everything's in bit form already.

We must define quality however, and also ask whose definition we must heed, for there will invariably be multiple perspectives. It is a social news, wisdom of crowds, collective intelligentsia, thing after all! :)

For a first-pass definition, I'll start with interesting in a non-trivial way. That definition is quite akin to pan-spermia in foisting the heavy-lifting on other terms. To end that, I'll further define interestingness as something that educates or informs, and non-trivial being contextual. That is, politics, puns, Palin jokes, and Paul (Ron) screeds are very within the realm of non-triviality for reddit or digg, but not for Hacker News.

A caveat that immediately comes to mind is that people seem to have a perception of quality that is anchored by their own value. That can be still be dealt with in the simple thought experiment that follows.

Given the common knowledge/myth that most interesting web 2.0 sites are pioneered by smart early adopters, it might be fair to assume that the initial set of users is smarter than average. A counter to that would be an example of a site that started with Youtube's average comment quality and evolved into something like vimeo. Or myspace metamorphizing into facebook. Note that both examples are derived from subjective value judgments, but ones that are quite widely held

So, the question then is given an intial user base of smart people, how does the average quality of the community evolve as the knowledge of this community's existence spread through friend networks. Yes, to simplify things, I'll assume that new users are inducted only from the friend networks of existing users, and also that a person's friends all fall within a finite neighborhood of quality relative to the person's quality.

And what's quality, in this exceedingly simplistic analysis, it is a two dimension vector comprising os the scalars average post value and average comment value. The assumptions in a nutshell are that initial user communities are smart, and that smart people have similarly smart friends. Given these assumptions, what does the community cluster look like at various points in its evolution?

As evinced by the mean comment and post values, it does seem like the average quality does go down. The variance, however, indicated by the size of the cluster, increases.

These are rather obvious results because high quality, implying a position on the right tail of a normal distribution, is in short supply and will eventually be depleted. Even if the rate is slow, new users, who are within some finite quality distance of a user through whose network they were inducted, will on average be of lower quality. This is just the bell curve working its inevitable logic.

The more important question, however, is whether new users can be induced by the community into moving to the top-right corner of the above graph. And if not, can they be effectively filtered out?

Old and repetitive arguments about the dynamic or static nature of these curves/distributions are easy to find elsewhere on the net. Assuming that both inducement and filtering are necessary for effective maintenance of the community, what should the incentives and disincentives look like?

The art of the highlight reel

2009-02-06T10:50:00.000-05:00

This video so wonderfully captures the drama that is basketball; the greatness at its center and the rightful idolatry. NBA, like every other behemoth, might have been late to the Youtube cultural but they are catching up. I guess background mood music is another cultural fork that is here to stay; it runs right through LeBrawn's monologue.

Deconstructing A Disgraced Chairman

2009-01-11T00:56:00.001-05:00

Indian journalists, and fledgling writers of Indian descent in general, have this amusing tendency to chunk words on the fly and repeatedly abuse these newly minted phrase. The terrorist attacks in India gave renewed vigor to that periodically dusted civic cry "Enough is enough", and now the Satyam controversy gives us disgraced chairman. This may have a lot to do with Indians (and perhaps other ex-colonies where English is lingua economica) coming in contact with more infrequent words in peculiar usage, and not having a more general definition of that word handy. Contrast this usage with the more diverse adjectival nomenclature applied in Bernie Madoff's case

Cognitive chunking of words into phrases removes conscious access to member words. The phrase becomes a convenient label for an event or a set of events, making it likelier for the event to be viewed non-introspectively in the guise of a spectator. The phrase disgraced chairman then makes it harder to introspect on the fall from grace and the commonalities it might share with traditional Indian business practices. Greasing official government cogs was a part of these practices. The high tech boom made us feel that with this new economic wave also swept out these parasitic practices, at least from certain arenas, but this saga of disgrace reminds us how hard it really is to wiggle these off.

Other instance of disgraced that have entered collective memory as a subconscious modifier are interesting too.

These are probably American trends, and almost all modify groups often in the focus of cultural battles. What does that tell us?

Witness, finally

2009-01-10T13:25:00.001-05:00

Lebron James was simply spectacular in last night's game against the Celtics. Boston's in a woeful slump, but that shouldn't detract from the intensity with which King James lorded over Pierce and the rest. They simply withered in the face of that relentless offensive onslaught and rebounding. Watch the play at 1:10 where he steals a pass from Pierce and then races back with two Celtics in pursuit, does a behind the back exchange to the left to cut one defender out, and then a left-handed layup from a crazy angle to beat the other one. Divine

recap at nba.com

Candidate Job Under Stimulus Employment Creation Program

2009-01-08T23:32:00.000-05:00

Barack Obama and the invention of self

2009-01-04T02:46:00.000-05:00

Here's a remarkably good article that discusses in detail, a facet of Obama's much discussed persona. However Sue generis he may be in the context of American politics, I must note that intelligence, ambition, and a mastery of human psychology have given India many priests and God men over the centuries. Most religions are perhaps founded in the wake of a charismatic figure's unprecedented effect on the masses. That, however, does not tell us anything about the morality of the person. It is along another dimension and can help or hurt depending on how self-serving it is. O is surely unique, but only time can really tell if he is good in the moral and ethical sense. You also have to ask the question whether it matters, and if the current economic scenario makes it matter more or less.

And another begins!

2009-01-01T13:55:00.000-05:00

Many in my peer group are struck by the rapidity with which time goes/passes/flows/ by now, so it must be an age thing. Newer experiences become rarer to come by as we put on the years, and new experiences are what seem to be the main markers that pin down slices of time for posterity.

So, I decided to rely more on digital markers to rejig this crustier brain and train myself to remember that 2008 wasn't the 13th month of 2007. Question: How long will it take me to write 2009 on my notes and checks? Checks, I am willing to be more relaxed about wrongly dating :)

Digital markers: Youtube was the obvious choice; the orchestral combination of the visual and auditory does much more for us than text. Text is still good in its own languorous pace, but a hasty year demands a rapid memory Rolodex.

And lest we forget, this is what passing time means

Obama: "I am the Juggernaut of Change!" I paraphrase, but O didn't realize how much of that change would be wrought by complicated financial externalities.

Hillary: Cry for me America! uhh I mean I am crying for America.

She should still be a formidable Secretary of State

Cory Worthington shows the world how to throw a Paahty

You don't Intrade once you star in mega-hit mixtape sampling your seminal speech.

This was the most memorable moment. And to make this happen in the Superbowl, on the way to winning it, against an undefeated team!

Wall Street is behind the counter selling derivatives, timidly and stupidly waiting for its future to be decided by the capricious throw of dice by cruel chaos. Actually, that was some convenience store guy being scared out of his suspenders by a menacingly awesome Javier Bardem

Client No 9 went down in month 3

The Changer goes into second gear

Celtics win the Championship right after their worst season, which included a 0-16 run. Historic and histrionic play by Pierce helped.

Dan LaFontaine ain't doing his legendary voiceovers no more

Palin! Palin! Palin! rears her head and enters the cultural airspace of America while singing You Betcha!

I am rooting for an Edwards/Spitzer versus Palin/Plumber 2012/16 RumbleMania

The Economy tanks and the disaster results in a new government acronym or word being added to our lexicon every day. A few local wars and atrocious terrorist attacks flare up. Global stag-deflation sets in. All this, His Divinity can handle, but then, HE finds out that Americans are buying SUVs and monster trucks again as gas prices go down below 2 dollars a gallon...

We are resilient if nothing else. We will soon recover and walk the planet again, if in slightly changed exoskeletons. Here's to the future!

Made me laugh

2008-12-30T12:07:00.000-05:00

Q: I had a stunning realization when I awoke this morning: Isn't Greg Oden the real Benjamin Button? I mean the injuries, the 45-year-old face, the creaky knees and geriatric hobble? This means for us Blazers fans things will only get better as he gets "younger." Phew.
-- Phil Taylor, Brooklyn, N.Y.

link

2008-12-26T13:19:00.001-05:00

9. "In today's regulatory environment, it's virtually impossible to violate rules." —Bernard Madoff, money manager, Oct. 20, 2007

Other wise men

2008-12-24T12:50:00.000-05:00

Discovered this great artist/cartoonist on Flickr

Adam Koford aka Ape Lad

His flickr page

I think I have it all figured out: Edition 28

2008-12-23T23:39:00.000-05:00

Progress, technological or otherwise, either creates or renders more efficient. In working for companies that had their genesis in the formulation of such progress, we effectively buy morsels of this progress to trade with similar others who have formulated different kinds of progress. The process is based on this axiomatic entity 'progress'. In effect, we spend about two-thirds of our waking life in collecting these morsels, and the remaining third trading these. Yes, we manage to lengthen the duration for which we play this senseless trading game, but only so that we can trade and titter longer. Sadly, this game doesn't even keep us entertained all that long. It has us fuming at inequity, mostly because we are at the poorer end. It has us yearning for more. If, for a moment we could step outside the playground that is the world we inhabit, we may see the the toddlers we are, digging up dirt to receive some cards, which we run off with to trade for others.
If this is all, why must highly optimized and advanced western playgrounds be preferred over primitive tribal ones? A difference in inequity? A greater control over game duration?
The more likely answer is delusion. Greater playing time, the thinking goes, prolongs the joyous pursuit of this trading game thus increasing the net enjoyment derived under some utility function. If sustainable pleasure or hedonism is what we all commonly seek under the hood, then why must we prefer indulgence in a real-er game to the ones operating virtually. Why are World of Warcraft-ers shunned? Only because they aren't productive in the real-er trading game?
If, delusion is focal to life, why not seek different modes of delusion? Is religion all that bad, especially when the delusion lasts right until that last flickering ember of the id dies out in our cortex? Citizens of modern societies now seek flow in inane and dubiously healthy pursuits like marathons. Why must the more innocuous religious trance be laughed at? Speaking in tongues is worse than running thirty miles in a circle?
I am reminded of my dog's incredulity at understanding that there is always more than one way to the ball. The directly visual, and the others that navigate whatever obstacle makes the first path impossible. But dog that she is, she repeatedly assaults the first without making much progress. We are all dogs relative to a more intelligent being aren't we?
In a universe, a multiverse, with no beginning or end or absolutes or limits, we construct entire lives worth of relative merits, only to see it all dissolve at the end. And yet, it makes equally little sense to opt out and stay in low entropy. It's a delusion. Jagam Mithya. So why not spend time constructing more elaborate ones?

Paraphrasing Eminem: It's yours for the taking

2008-12-23T16:02:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, it's not enough to give kids who come from a world like "The Wire" the chance to get out. They also have to be convinced that they deserve it. link

2008-12-18T09:11:00.000-05:00

The year in pictures P1

Indian Writing and Writers

2008-12-17T14:09:00.000-05:00

A profile of Rohinton Mistry by way of which, I discovered the June, 97 edition of The New Yorker celebrating 50 years of Indian independence.

Catastrophe & Class

2008-12-11T14:16:00.000-05:00

Usually, privileged English-speaking Indians have the tact to be politically correct in their public statements; but in the middle of terror and tragedy, the sense of social self-preservation that keeps them from crassness, disappears. “Go to the Four Seasons and look down from the top floor at the slums around you.” That ‘you’ is us: Telegraph-reading, hotel-going people, who, in the heat of the moment and because of the death of people we know (or know of), become the world. Full article

The Adolescent Generation

2008-12-10T12:42:00.000-05:00

Top 'how to' searches (India) from Google Zeitgeist 2008

1. how to reduce weight
2. how to kiss
3. how to earn money
4. how to get pregnant
5. how to learn english
6. how to gain weight
7. how to play guitar
8. how to create a website
9. how to impress a girl
10. how to tie a tie

Virtual Worlds

2008-12-05T12:59:00.000-05:00

Virtual worlds will definitely stick around and become as central as a browser. You don't have to go too far to see why. Just step into Second Life and use the short cut to soar into the virtual sky. It is magical. Apart from being cool, it symbolizes for me our transcendence of physical limitations. The new perspectives such freedom offers are not just visual but deeper and conceptual.

But before that...

The initial step is still a hurdle, but the kind that is easy to conquer. The hurdle is the installation of a client necessary to view and operate in the world. This takes about 5 to 10 minutes to install, but that is what separates a creative niche from an indispensable focal point around which quite a bit of your day, and eventually life, revolves. Think Google or Youtube. Even social news websites, based on the really simple idea of voting for what you like, became viable only after asynchronous Javascript was usable in a majority of browsers. Sharing video, another D'uh idea became viable after Flash was commonly installed.

Taking care of that initial hurdle will go a long way in wider adoption, but there's still a gap to be bridged. Walking (or flying) around in Second Life, I see the influence of a 3D gaming aficionado's in the attention giving to atmospheric detail. This is, of course, important, and central to your experience if you are primary interest is visual. I imagine it is a boon for architects to collaboratively actualize their conceptions.

Link

However, a platform vying for universality has to make communication easier, and if possible, and it most definitely is, make communication "better" and "constraint-free" in ways that are difficult in the real world. Second Life already allows that in enabling instant text translation allowing for users without a common language to converse. How cool is that!

There is much more that can be done to enhance communication and make it more intimate. Literal physical realism can be sacrificed to make emoting of character faces possible. We humans use our impressive visual bandwidth to communicate non-verbally and the information transmitted in this channel may be far more meaningful than what is communicated by text. How difficult is it to use machine learning techniques to have the character face wireframes learn the lip movements that are correlated with speech. Hard as it may be, I would guess that communication accessibility would improve extra-linearly in relation to the accuracy of facial movements.

The access to a user's datastream, the digital form of his or her entire existence in the virtual world should and will enable a match with like-minded users and stimulating virtual events. Such learning capabilities can already be put to use to initiate and entice new users into quickly realizing the amazing potential that virtual worlds offer. As of now, Second Life starts new users at a teleport hub with a brief tutorial on how to navigate and explore. Why not just land a user in the epicenter of what is computationally determined to excite the user most?

As I write this, I realize that even the critiques and suggestions I can come up with are a testament to the amazing potential that awaits us at this frontier. Coupled with advances in neuroscience and neural interfaces, the virtual worlds we hurtle towards are going to be indescribably awesome!

2008-12-03T18:51:00.000-05:00

Also reminds me how much I loved the music in this movie.

2008-12-02T14:36:00.000-05:00

NSA, the National Security Agency, has the technical means to retrieve all calls made from satellite and cell phones in the south Asia region. Holy Crap!

Imagining alternareality

2008-11-23T12:55:00.000-05:00

If I were writing one of those inane statement of purpose letters again (I wonder how many of those started with some variant of "Ever since I was X years old, I have wanted to do Y in beginning the domination of the world Z), I would try to make case for how my interests across the board can be captured by a holistic fascination for systems. Neuroscience? Systems are more important that individual neurons, which are complex in boring ways. Similarly, history, science-fiction, and culture appeal to me because of the novelty of systems, of settings, that they introduce. What is culture but the emergent patterns in a system. A system evolves and the cultural patterns shift as a consequence, or a fore-sequence. History and science-fiction are fascinating for the same reason. As different systems in which very similar human agents operate, the constraints of the system (church, kingdom, city-state, space-city, post-apocalyptic city) nudge behavior into a different phase-space, in turn forcing other inhabiting agents to compete, adapt, change.

Unfortunately, most science-fiction tends to lean towards enchantment for the more sterile aspects of a new system. The new, cool spaceships or gadgets or gizmos. These are the least interesting and most inevitable by-products of our continuously striving for material betterment. Most early science-fiction has some form of the flying car, the most literal translation of a desire to transcend today's limitations, to leap over the barriers to a easily imaginable, better world. As visual metaphors go, it is the easiest one to lust after. And yet, there have been some fascinating behavioral changes in the wake of seemingly minor technological changes.

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is an example of a science-fiction that conjures up clever worlds at the expense of understanding and exploring characters. The main character, Hiro Protagonist (get it? heh sigh) is really unidimensional in his reactions to the events around him, which surely are cleverly construed, but being clever gets old very fast. To engage, we must be allowed to relate to characters in at least being able to compare the complexity of behavior to our own.
I am reminded of my eager impatience for fights when watching mythology as a kid. All the dialogue was mere filler that adults, for some bizarre reason, enjoyed. Now, as the curtains covering human psychology part, I find the interplay of characters emotions more fascinating. Are people compelled to react in ways that now seem constrained, even farcical, because of the hidden constraints that society then imposed? What are these constraints? Does it require major fundamental shifts in our material and technological way of life for these constraints to lift?

Textspeak evolved through the dance of cheap communication technology and inherent limitations to typing on small surfaces. This is an outcome that could have been guessed at, and yet I don't recall any old sci-fi coming up with this idea (It surely would have been fascinating to imagine, or convey this imagination of, mangled speech in the Victorian era ) . Lolspeak is another outcome of easy access to visual and textual communication. The juxtaposition of cute pictures and imagined feline speech allows for a surprisingly stong, non linear combination of two much-in-use processing facilities in our brain, the textual and visual, which were previously used in isolation or correlation, but not in ways that evoke dissonance or surprise.
Wikipedia, the accumulation of the world's knowledge, hinges on a very simple technological adaption -- the ability for multiple users to effortlessly edit a single page. This tiny change may eventually change organized schooling and education itself.
An even simpler technoligical tweak is that of comment threading. Most blogs list comments chronologically. Threading them as conversations with responses clustered together, instead of chains is a matter of simply rearranging comments. And yet, this has led to the evolution of pun threads. In this case, it is the juxtaposition of linked comments by various users that has led to the emergence of a new semantics for linking, and the community of users unconsciously knows whether a thread has an underlying theme (the first-order themes being puns).

History, for the simple reason that it has already passed, is easier to flesh out. It is like science-fiction in that it describes an alien setting, but the human elements are much better described because the people usually interested in history treat it as a study of our older selves. So for someone interested in history, what is the best way to indulge this interest, apart from reading up? You can sit back and enjoy the ride as someone entertains you with their description/interpretation? (Deadwood, Tudors, Bleak House, and perhaps Carnivale too). Or, if you are more hard-core, you can participate in a Historical reenactment. Picture what a re-enactment of the American Civil War must look like when put together by a bunch of rag-tag, middle-aged amateurs.

My previously held assumptions about these re-enactments being the province of lonely uber-nerds are obviously wrong! (I came upon this link by way of this post) This interest seems to require a level of dedication that goes beyond my speculative, systemic exploration of the past present and future. And yet, much like the process of writing, centrally locating in the world you hope to create, being in the midst of a reenactment, exposed to period constraints in as real a way imaginable, probably helps arrive at a finely etched rendering of your fictional creation.

This season's NBA.TV commentators are awfully bad

2008-11-20T12:02:00.001-05:00

This sounds like an initial attempt by a nerdy suburban kid in caffeine withdrawal (Or Redbull, what do kids drink these days, swaddled in their Cheetos strewn leather couch while playing Guitar Hero)

Compare that with this one from last year by Rick Kamla.

Please, can we have him back

The first one's auditory assault is as bad is this one:

Actually not. One begins to feel bad for this guy.

Peter Schiff was right on many specifics

2008-11-14T16:39:00.000-05:00

Peter Schiff; watch the whole thing. Ron Paul, whom Schiff advised in his presidential campaign, it turns out, was right on a whole bunch of things. Sadly, we are just not built to analyze and introspect exuberance or generic giddiness.

What do people search for in a recession?

2008-11-13T15:56:00.001-05:00

Just as Google aims to predict flu outbreaks using search data, we should be able to mine rough insights into a variety of viral phenomena, right?

Are the following trends leading indicators or merely recession fear fueled searches?

Search terms are indicated at the top left in images (and all trends are limited to US searches).

"im broke"

"make money"

"save money"

"affordable" (usually peaks after Christmas binge spending)

"food stamps" (sharpest increase among all)

"payday loans" (puzzling why people even search for these; there's more than one friendly corner shark in every blighted neighborhood)

"jobs" (of course)

"vacations" (fuel is cheap, camping?)

Post Mortem Art

2008-11-12T11:26:00.000-05:00

Wall Street Lays Another Egg - Niall Ferguson

Collapse of Wall Street - Michael Lewis

Niall Ferguson and Michael Lewis are the most appropriate analytical surgeons I can think of to carry out the autopsy. Any other?

Screenshots

2008-11-05T11:31:00.001-05:00

One website mirrors the confused and frantic search for its candidate's central theme. And it hasn't really been updated yet, but I imagine it would take a tragically heroic view of duty on the webmaster's part to do so :)

Props to Nate Silver

2008-11-05T10:45:00.000-05:00

Young (30!) turk behind fivethirtyeight.com

Almost...

2008-11-03T22:19:00.000-05:00

The longest presidential campaigns ever are a day away from ending. The folksiest presidential campaign is going to start the day after, or is probably under way. I have no vote, which does not make me all that different from a resident of my solidly blue state.
I can't deny being excited by the possibility of a black president, but not because I attach any special, watershed moment in history, kind of significance to it. It'll just be cool to see the global reaction and document how the reaction mellows (or sours) as time wears on and economic realities hit the windshield. Intrade has Obama at over 90%, a number that seems safely outside the archaic pull of the Bradley Effect (If it does exist, I think Arizona should turn out to be the clearest indicator as its denizens have no reason to lie about their preference for its resilient-like-a-cactus senator; Is it nonsensical to ask if the positive portrayal of fictional black presidential reigns on TV (excepting the unfortunate chap in Independence Day) paved the path in at least the slightest way?)
I am also utterly fascinated by the public persona of Obama, the campaign his team has run, and their dazzling mastery of media old and new. Most politicians are easy to bin. Cheerfully charismatic, phlegmatically experienced, heroically credentialled... Where does he fit in? The duration of the campaign helped him flip his inexperience into a refreshing positive. His brand was superbly managed. If all a president does is steer the nation only in times of crisis, and look smart and able while it operates in cruise mode, he has already proven himself able for the second part.
What can we expect from an Obama presidency? It is fun to look at the whole spectrum of possibilities including the kooky conspirational ones.

Is he a secret muslim puppeteered by sinister forces? I doubt an ethnic minority can pull that Manchurian Candidate shit. And besides, the two party system allows for the opposition to be a good counter even at its lowest ebb. Unless massive economic destabilization results in mass hysteria (There's always a caveat). However, instability and insecurity result in a retreat to primal instincts and banding together as a racial, ethnic, or tribal group is a common one. Banding together under a leader who "looks different" is decidedly not.

Is he like most other politicians, but in a slickly done package? This is my Occam's razor bet. It could also be filed under some Newtonian inertial laws where political traits are dominated by overarching ambition and nothing else. Here's the only book (intriguing and stimulating, I may add) I know of that comes close to considering this or a more negative character assay, suggests this with bits of democratic radicalism thrown in.

Is he really going to change the world? This is both a matter of perception and actuality. How many politicians in the last fifty years, can it be said, have changed the world in a significant (and positive) way. Most often, they are mere bookmarks in the unfolding of events they have no control over. Gorbachev? Rabin? Reagan? Mandela? Gandhi?
Countries seem to yearn for generational beacons and anchors to lessen confusion and better define the bounds of their timelines. The fact that there has been such a requisite refractory period after the last arguably iconic political figure (Bill Clinton, who, unfortunately sullied a nation's perception along with a blue dress ) bodes well for Obama. The change slogan is pitch perfect in its resonance with a generation still adrift. He could be the American Tony Blair before the Iraq war sullied his rep.

There's still the economic crisis to deal with though.

Knowing what you don't know

2008-10-25T11:42:00.000-04:00

There are both logical and emotional reasons for this being a tough problem. What I term emotional is the faith placed in selecting one alternative above others when the decision neurons flicker weakly for all. That is, the objective reading of facts determines certain probabilities for events or outcomes. And, assuming for a moment, that your neuronal activity at some level faithfully renders these probabilities, there still remains a need to pick one over the other. The sharpening process that iteratively allows the signaling for one outcome to peak and the rest to dissipate is what I'll term confidence. I think confidence is partly innate and partly shaped by experience.
There is the oft-quoted Dunning-Kruger Effect that speaks to the importance of experience in calibrating this quality. The Dunning-Kruger Effect itself is, however, about pricing relative ability, and it is not surprising that we tend to shy away from thinking of ourselves as at the bottom of a pile. That seems like a start-at-defeat strategy if the skills are survival related.

This is about the other abilities that have to do with pricing risk and gauging opportunities in not men but arenas, ones you are expert in, or know little of.

As a kid, I remember suggesting the Y2K bug would lead to an enormous increase, and subsequent decrease, in the number of software jobs. I remember idolizing Gorbachev for Glasnost and Perestroika. I now know that I simply had no basis for my opinions. Yet, they were stated with immense assurance. I also remember receiving a lot of stupid advice. Assuming that the more you know, the more prudent and reticent you become about advising people, you can be sure that most unsolicited advice are strongly held unsubstantiated opinion. You can only offer examples that seem related.

Alan Greenspan recently admitted to a flaw in his ideology.

I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said. “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.

This is from someone who has been central to monetary policy making for forty years, so the cracks in his ideology have affected the very financial foundations of the country.

Here are Greenspan's Randian views on banking regulation.

Years in the making, the Financial Services Modernization act finally did away with the Glass-Steagall act that limited the ability of banks, investment firms, and insurance companies to enter one another's markets. Banks and other companies were eager to diversify--they wanted to be able, for instance, to offer customers one-stop shopping for financial services. They argued that they were losing ground to foreign competitors, especially European and Japanese "universal banks," that operated under no such restrictions. I agreed that liberalization in these markets was long overdue....Historians view the Financial Services Modernization Act as a milestone of business legislation, and I'll always remember it as an unsung moment of policymaking for which there ought to be a little song.

link to book excerpt

It seems obvious now to many economists and commentators that banking deregulation was directly responsible for the mess and that it was screamingly obvious that self-regulation that banks were supposed to commit to through independent risk appraisal was always heading towards disaster. Yes, when compensation for risk appraisal is directly tied to how low you estimate the risk to be, AIG, Standard & Poor's, or Moody's would have to be remarkably immune to incentives and un-economic to price risk objectively.

So why did Greenspan and the entire Fed ecosystem fail to see this. They have experts who intimately studied past bubbles and are well aware of their human roots. Why did they assume the structure to be immune to infectious greed and irrational exuberance? They are too smart and experienced to blame it on oversight. Perhaps, staying afloat in vast amounts of detail makes one take a static view of fundamentals. Sanity requires some assumptions, but a tweak here and a quirk there, and soon, the axioms your assumptions rest on morph swiftly. What does structure mean in a deregulated world where all that remains is enlightened human self-interest?

Knowing what you don't know seems tough(er) even after forty years of studying precisely what you might not know.

Is he the real deal?

2008-10-22T19:41:00.000-04:00

McCain amazes me

2008-10-17T17:03:00.000-04:00

No. Not in the left leaning way that professes horror. He is an amazingly vigorous, even fiesty person for someone who is 72, wrecked his body in three crashes and a long tenure as a POW.

Maybe, intense ambition does will your body into good health.

2008-10-16T15:43:00.000-04:00

Tips for Graduate Students

Dilution, what dilution?

2008-10-15T23:18:00.000-04:00

I have retooled an earlier posting at the insistence of a friend.

A recent article in the Times of India pointed to what seems like an arbitrary lowering of thresholds in order to fill up the increased number of seats. Some critics point to this as evidence for the dilution of standards, and of the IIT brand. And curiously, the raging debate, much like that of a gaggle of blind men attempting a consensus description of an elephant, centers not on facts, but on insinuations. Dilution and standards have bounced enough in this echo chamber to take on a certain resonance without any underlying definitions. OK, enough with the ill-fitting metaphors. What does the data, if any, reveal?
Thanks to lonely and heroic efforts by Professor Rajeev Kumar of IIT Kharagpur, a few scraps of data are finally being untangled from reams of red tape (OK, no more metaphors!). IIT Roorkee has released aggregate totals for every 500th ranked score in the pool of candidates selected in the year 2006. Not too many data points, but our speculations will have to rest on these for now. One observation is quite obvious for those schooled in elementary statistics; this looks an awful lot like the tail of a normal distribution. Here's the tabulated data on a graph:

The IIT-JEE is an aptitude test, a timed aptitude test (and not standardized! something that merits a different discussion thread). This is not a very novel, or even recent method, for selecting able candidates. Our northern neighbors have been doing it since the time of the Han dynasty. Performance on aptitude tests is translated into what has been popularized (more recently by a certain Internet dating website) as an Intelligence Quotient (IQ). An IQ is simply a dimensionless number in a normal distribution, centered on a mean of 100, and with a normalized variance of 15. What if try something similar with the aggregate scores above. Picking every 500th sorted score from a normally random sample of 150,000 scores gives us this graph:

Not only does it look a lot like the above graph, the underlying numbers correlate rather well (an R-squared of .9995). Multiple trials demonstrate how it is possible to get a lot of variance (gray skin on the line below) at the top while getting almost none at even the 500th rank. The highest score varies in the range of [150 185], while the variance at the 500th score (the second point on all the graphs and the second row in the aggregate table linked above) is about 1! [140 141].

Reminding ourselves that our analysis is based on a handful of numbers that the IITs have let trickle out, what can we say about the process?
If, indeed, the JEE does measure engineering aptitude remarkably well, only a few candidates are predestined for significant achievements, the kind touted in the news and resulting in a sad sampling bias for parents all over India who assume that selection into one of the IITs is all that separates their ward and success. The data tells us this is false. A vast majority of every incoming pool of students falls into a significantly lower band of aptitude relative to the best performers. More importantly, this majority differs very slightly in tested aptitude, and increasing the intake by a few thousands only lessens the aptitude threshold by less than half of a standard deviation.

And this is even when assuming a strong correlation between JEE aptitude and engineering aptitude or, let me coin a term, life aptitude. Most organizations seem to have reached the consensus that other personality traits are far more important. The dilution argument is, well, diluted further in the absence of a strong correlation. Throw in the heuristic that a student body really is a social network and that the strength or influence of a network increases non-linearly with its size, the dilution argument now holds no water.
Undermining the entire debate, however, is the apparent reality that life really is a marathon, and the JEE selects the best sprinters. So, yeah, go ahead and select more sprinters, it won't really hurt, but it won't really help either.

How to not suck (too much) at choosing books

2008-10-15T13:20:00.000-04:00

A trip to the public library is rather paralyzing. Too many seemingly good books to choose from right? Well, No. I think book goodness follows a power law distribution too. And yet, those irresistible claims, those enticing blurbs. I hoodwinked myself into selecting Superclass over others in my recent hunt. The book sucks. Reading a few pages makes the "why" clear too. I expected some insight into, and concrete examples of, how the global elite came together and utilized their hyper-powerful network. That sentence should actually make clear that their is no insight to be gleaned; networks are the insight. Networks matter, and networks happen with inevitable cohesion of like minded individuals and minds are shaped into likeness by circumstances and wealth, in this case, is that overwhelmingly powerful circumstance.
Did I need a book for that? Did it help? Superclass could still redeem itself by offering choice instance of how power is solidified by the use of information coursing in the veins of that network. All there is some tabloid worthy gossip of the elite and how they all dine and wine together.
Let me repeat my reasons for picking the book: expectations of insight and examples. This was only made conscious in hindsight. If I did have these reasons as part of my selection filter, flipping through a few pages would have made it clear. But conscious reasoning is hard for the untrained. The amusing retorts of some of the commenters on Rotten Tomato reviews make this clear. They diss reviewers by pointing out obviously awesome movies that they happened to review poorly. This is criticism by collaborative filtering, not reasoning based on the merits of the actual review held up in isolation.
And thus, I need to force a comparison with a mental bulletin list before I internalize the process. Arrive at the fundamentals for my liking a book, while leaving enough space for novel dimensions.
Here are some I can think of:
*What-if analysis
*Why-not analysis
*Psychological imperatives of characters (whether fictional or not)
*Observational humor
*Descriptions of cyclical currents of history and culture

The Age of Turbulence, I am finding out, is one that fits all. I kept avoiding this because of some review that described it as boring. Well, it is my kind of boring! A fascinating bore...which makes me think I need a similar list for unpacking reviews and reviewers. A simple one might suffice. Separate a review into the descriptive and subjective, and use history to judge if the reviewer's subjectivity aligns with yours.

That most important, and pointless, Red Queen's Race

2008-10-12T01:10:00.000-04:00

I have been interested in getting my hands on some JEE entrance examination data for a while. This is one of the largest (by number of takers) aptitude tests around, and also happens to be the most intensely competed one in India. The high stakes have lead to a coaching cottage industry. Coaching has been shown to help in aptitude tests of a different kind, and I don't doubt that it does in this case too. However, to what extent are they leveling the field, smoothing out raw talent, squelching innate ...ok whatever your choice metaphor is ?

This article finally gave me a lead that I could plug into Google, leading me to this table. Ah, raw numbers at last!

Before I get to that, a possibly important aside. The Right to Information Act (RTA 2005 on Wikipedia) seems like a wonderful way to get access to all kinds of data that was previously tucked away under our famed red carpets. I wrote to Professor Rajeev Kumar, mentioned in the above news article, requesting data he successfully managed to corral using this act, and he responded with this link . I love the mythological connotations of naming the candidates Ekalavya and Arjuna.

Back to the data: The steep fall-off is an immediate hint. Graphing it shows the gradient deceleration rather well.

Tilt your head sideways, and this has the appearance of a classical Gaussian tail, and that calls for the inevitable IQ comparison. The Notorious biG. One can profess agnosticism regarding its roots and merely try to correlate IQ test-taking and JEE scores. IQ tests, presumably, are taken without rigorous preparation boot camps. Does that intense bout of training lead to a leveling of some kind?

Here's what a comparable distribution of IQ scores of a similarly sized population (150,000 test takers) looks like. IQ scores are assumed to have a population mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 (This is how they are classically normed). The mean guesstimate is far higher than the putative Indian average of 81. This includes a significant chunk of India's poor, rural, and undernourished, who I assume are not part of the test taking population.

As expected, this is almost identical (an R-squared of .9995). Also, the above graph doesn't seem too far off qualitatively. The highest 10 in the randomly generated sample fall in the 165-155 range (two-thirds of an entire standard deviation), and that gels with frequency of these outliers doing well at the Math Olympiads. And by dint of their scores, and where they lead them in life, almost all on the lucky part of that curve have stumbled across/been spammed by this :)

Averaging across multiple simulations demonstrates how much variance you can get at the top, and how little as you go further down.

The highest score varies in the range of [150 185], while the variance at the 500th score (the second point on all the graphs and the second row in the aggregate table linked above) is about 1! [140 141]. Of course, all bets are off when you are talking about the tails in human psychometric probabilities. There is no reason to assume fidelity to a normal distribution in that range.

The flattening around the cutoff level does make the relevance of coaching moot. Even if they lead to an across the board rise of a few marks, it puts the similarly able at the lower end (and without access to these institutes) at a much larger disadvantage.

(Changing the numbers does give graphs that look different; does that mean the initial guesses of 100,15, and 150000 are serendipitously right?)

Here, have a tweak:

%++++++++++++++MATLAB+++++++++++

function b=plotRank(varargin)
close all;
if nargin==0
avg_iq=100;
std_dev=15;
num_testers=150000;
else
avg_iq=varargin{1};
std_dev=varargin{2};
num_testers=varargin{3};
end

a=[1;433;501;287;1001;263;1501;248;2001;236;2501;227;3001;219;3501;212;4001;206;4501;200;5001;195;5501;191;6001;186;6501;182;7001;179;7501;175;7903;172];

b=sort(randn(1,num_testers)*std_dev+avg_iq,'descend');
b_500=b(1:500:8000);

figure(1)
plot([1:500:8000],a(2:2:end-1),'linewidth',2,'color',[.3 .3 .3])
xlabel('JEE Rank','fontsize',14)
ylabel('JEE Marks','fontsize',14)
set(gcf,'position',[31 478 560 420]);
figure(2)
plot([1:500:8000],b_500,'linewidth',2,'color',[.3 .3 .3])
xlabel('Theoretical JEE Rank','fontsize',14)
ylabel('Posited IQ','fontsize',14)
set(gcf,'position',[736 482 560 420]);

%++++++++++++++++++++++++

Into death, may he be damned with the faintest praise

2008-10-11T10:40:00.001-04:00

He was neither outstandingly brilliant nor very notorious.

...he was not the type who would do this (kill his family members and commit suicide)...

Unlike some who, the commenter counted among friends, would surely do such thing.

link

Exploring the Netflix Prize dataset

2008-10-09T22:54:00.000-04:00

Cross-posted here. Follow the discussion there if you are interested in this kind of thing.

I put together a viewer to make the dataset more accessible (for lack of a better word). While tweaking my algorithms and looking at recommendations it offered for certain users, I often felt it would help to know more about the movie and its neighbors in the assigned category. (*-More about neighborhood calculation towards the end).

http://gflix.appspot.com allows you to do just that.

You can either just search for a movie in the dataset by throwing in keywords. For example, typing in the keyword unfaithful not only returns the movie with that title, but also every other movie that has the word in its synopsis.

Entering multiple keywords (e.g. football and drama) fetches all the movies with both keywords.

You can directly access the neighborhood of a movie in the Netflixprize dataset by accessing gflix.appspot.com/netflix/movie_index
(e.g. http://gflix.appspot.com/netflix/3150 )

When looking at the neighborhood of a movie, you can access the synopsis of a particular movie by hovering your mouse over it for a bit.

Movie info can also be accessed directly at gflix.appspot.com/netflix/movie_index/info
(e.g. http://gflix.appspot.com/netflix/3150/info )

Oh, and you can add any movie to your Netflix queue by clicking on the plus sign :)
(Design caveat: It looks better on firefox because I didn't spend time twiddling with CSS stuff in IE)

Now that Netflix has offered an API, a lot more things can be done. I'd like to hear your suggestions.

-CS

*Neighborhood calculations are not user-specific and are based on number of users in the intersection of movie vector. These numbers are normalized by user and movie rating-frequencies to account for the overemphasis of widely watched movies.

And on a personal note, I like playing with data! So if you are looking to hire a soon-to-be PhD for that some interesting project involving reams of data, please let me know.

Reductive Economics (or Doll House Economics): Introduction

2008-10-05T22:46:00.000-04:00

All ecologies with transacting, intelligent agents must participate in trade. And if most of these traded goods are finite, then we have ourselves an economy. Now, in the tradition of physics, where we reduce beasts to spheres in analysis using limited minds and tools, why don't we turn our reductive, analytic, lights on economics? If others have, I haven't turned up any papers or essays in my search. It seems like a relatively painless exercise, and one that can be simulated without too much knowledge about economies.
Here's the central kernel: Create each individual agent as a pseudo-periodically (I define pseudo-periodicity as be probabilistically periodic) trading entity with a finite set of interests, appetite for these interests, and a bounded aptitude for a range of skills that they try to specialize in and monetize (assuming a fiat currency (or they would barter) read ahead).
How would I begin? I'll seed my ecology with agents Adam and Eve who, at the beginning, only need to eat. Hmmm. No. I must resist the temptation to throw in a Divine Serpent and a tree of temptations, and instead zoom a few hundred generations ahead and assume the existence of a village with a few hundred of their descendants and few tens of medievally common professions. Farmers, accountants, security agents, entrepreneurs, and creative risk arbitragers. Note to self: How far back does one have to go to find the last kind?
Now, we assume a rich part of the village, and a poor part of the village. For tangible demarcation, we'll have them inhabit the upstream and downstream regions of the river that runs through.
Fertile and silted lands right by it are the envy of all. And that means they are predestined to be at the epicenter of our soon-to-come speculative bubble and mortgage crisis. And lastly, our quaint little town/village, fathered and mothered by Adam and Ave, will have a commercial bank and unseen, almost divine, central bank that issues a fiat currency.
This setting, I believe, is rich enough to study quite a few phenomena. First up will be monetary policy, whose history I hope to get well acquainted with before the next chapter.

El NINA

2008-10-02T11:05:00.000-04:00

Newly self employed, difficulty in documenting income sources or the desire for discretion in your financial affairs... there are many reasons people choose the No Income/No Asset Verification Loan. At Mid-Island Mortgage Corp. we've helped hundreds of customers get their home without sacrificing their privacy.

link

Search trends for NACA (Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America)

Web log to promote independent analysis and foster creative thinking among the working rich

2008-09-29T21:48:00.000-04:00

This is awesome. Enough so that I am following suit with my titling needs. The actual name of the Bailout Bill is....

To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes

via

Scared of HyperInflation?

2008-09-28T10:51:00.000-04:00

Invest in calling cards!

2008-09-21T09:56:00.000-04:00

Up(2)date: And yet another article blaming the Reserve Fraction; a different author though: link (pdf)

Update: Here's another, much more concise article, from the same author. link

Here's a highly entertaining, disgustingly logorrheic, and (apparently) partly true account of the current financial malaise. link
As many respond, the first trillion words explain Fractional Reserve Banking. The whole story (apparently) includes well-meaning, home-ownership abetting policy changes that allowed greed to run unchecked by the fear of a monetary downside for mortgage brokers who don't care about the payment of mortgages, only the commission. In short, some of the shit hitting the Wall Street chandeliers is metaphorically a result of people buying, insuring, re-selling cars because the car salesmen assured their quality. The problem is compounded by the fact that when it comes to houses, people magically assume different demand-supply relationships and they also cost twenty times as much. Is there a reason to assume that car and house prices would decorrelate immensely?
Yes, both McSized in the form of SUVs and McMansions and sold at inflated prices (Interestingly, the highly profitable Ford Expedition sold crazy well while being an overpriced tin can), but there's no speculator's market in cars. Is there no warning signal indicating the fraction of speculative buying in a housing market? Did policy makers instead go wild eyed and frothy in the mouth seeing rising home ownership numbers? It is all very entertaining and enjoyable in a puzzle-like fashion.
And coming back to Fractional Reserve Banking, it seems a lot like phone switching network, which are never built for 100% demand. However, the nervous fallout of an unintended (and probabilistically rare) maxing out of capacity in a credit network seems to fatally convulse any linked system. Weird...

The Cognitive Luxury of Atheism

2008-09-21T09:54:00.000-04:00

I don't wear my atheism label loudly. In my incomprehension of literal believers, however, there surely is a creep of smugness. A contemptuous emphasis is placed on the they in a disbelieving How can they believe in this?. It would seem obvious that a trail of logic should lead to inevitable conclusions about the lack of a counterparty insuring us in the daily trade of life (Yes, I have been trying to become more familiar with the financial Armageddon).
Why would anyone really believe in a benign presence willing to load a situation in the favor of one or the other? Egoistically, why should we slavishly attempt to curry favors if were guinea pigs in a cosmic experiment?
Yeah, so logically, there is no reason for Divine Invocations. The Logical Way, however, is a rather poor paradigm in the face of randomness. The taut thread of logic is mightily frayed in chaotic winds. Choking in the panic of not knowing if your loved ones survived the walk home, or a trip to the mall now being shown on TV bedecked in torn and bloodied bodies, logic seems cruel. That shit happens and can affect anyone seems like an obvious statistic on paper, but when it is the blood of your familiars blotting the graphs, it is mighty tough to swallow. Senseless tragedies tug the heart in twin directions. Helpless outrage is soon followed by silent gratitude for not letting the dice toppling your carefully held-together world. How horrid must life be in a war zone?. How long can one live fearfully, knowing that things can come crashing down in an instant. Not long. You either accept randomness, or dress it up and stash it far away in mythology. Assurance by proxy also provides the added benefit of altruistic behavior, that ultimately leads to the lessening of randomness if the construction of mythology is done well. The roots of a society's increasing atheism lie in religion, but a modern society can only afford it as the predominant paradigm, once the seeds of stability have been sown in both man and tribe via the diffusive mechanism of religion.

Early Spring Break

2008-08-11T22:43:00.000-04:00

(What, I can't live in the Southern Hemisphere?) House cleaning will be restricted to the mind. I'll be back here on September 15th. (I could move it by four days to make it a month, but the meaning that date has taken on must not be toyed with in an arena as easily Google-able and archive-able. No vacation at Guantanamo for me!) I'll resist, not without trying mightily, the banal urge to make meaning out of the mundane. Deconstruction is now declasse. If I must conjure up fictive meaning, why not just dispense with all pretense and go right to the root? Yes, all henceforth will be now be rooted in unreality. I would not hold myself to that if I did not make a grand silly and public statement.
Old Chinese, single alphabet saying: If you must eat crow, eat it publicly; pigeons, would make a better, more ecologically conscious meal.

On Western Soil

2008-08-10T20:41:00.001-04:00

Taare Zameen Par is that rare Bollywood movie that proves the existence of a remorse fueled appetite for exactly one socially conscious movie every year. It is like the imagined absolution felt when indulging beggars on a Thursday visit to the temple. Seriously though, TZP is wonderful movie and there is no reason why there shouldn't be more like it.
Derek Kelly of Variety, however, thinks it is "so resolutely caring -- and devoid of real drama and interesting characters -- that it should have 'approved by the Dyslexia Assn.' stamped on the posters." link. I sympathize with this western perception of a socially conscious movie; there really isn't any character development. The intelligent, weepy, smart mother, the tough-loving father, and the bright and loving brother are all kind of typical. But Mr. Kelly must understand, the current formula of Indian cinema cannot bear the weight of more than one fully fleshed out character. We are still in the nascent part of that evolutionary trajectory, and formula avoidance will ensure change as we go along. That might take time though. Formula in Bollywood is akin to rhythmic structure and scaffolding in poetry. We employ our craft within these parameters in ways so nuanced that it makes a verbal conscious analysis, that a review tends to be, quite superfluous. I don't fully believe in that thesis myself, but the unpredictable returns at the talkies seem to suggest that.
The more interesting thing to ponder here is, what would the American version of a movie about a kid with dyslexia be like?
A very similar one that comes to mind is Little Man Tate. (This came out in 1992 and I probably first watched it on Star TV in the late nineties. I didn't remember the name, but there's one dialog I love and still remember. The kid insults his mother saying she is a Lepton, implying that she is the smallest being in the universe.) It is about a child prodigy, advanced to university studies, struggling to fit in and discover himself. Jodie Foster plays the mom, and interestingly, like with Aamir Khan, it was her directorial debut. Keeping with the norm of multiple fleshed-out characters, Jodie Foster's mom is a hard-working single mother with the requisite character strength and emotional heft. There's also this college kid who adopts a protective role, and the director of the gifted kids program. Here's an exercise in deconstructive silliness: Little Man Tate could be thought of as a supremely gifted but young nation struggling to find its role in the world of grownups, while Taare Zameen Par is a metaphor for a nation befuddled by the demands of a modern, quantifying world while its ethereal and more ancient spiritual skills languish in relative anonymity till they are brought to the fore by a newly appreciative world. Why must you find this any more silly than any other review? :)
Another American movie that comes to mind is Half-Nelson. It has a similar teacher-student relationship, but keeping with the norms of new cinema, it is gritty! Want more character ooomph? Let us set the stage in the inner-city and throw in a drug problem for the teacher. Ah, the ghetto. All Indie roads to stardom lead to the ghetto, and go right through. The non-cliche is the new cliche. In running hard, trying to avoid the dreaded formula, you run smack into the next one.
Are there any inspirational movies involving kids, that come out of Hollywood? I can't think of too many (The Great Debaters, Freedom Writers; I don't think Stomp the Yard, or How She Move count, but there's that inner-city theme again.) Mainstream America doesn't traffic in feel-goody inspirational. This is the land of plenitude. As Sergeant Espera tells Evan Wright in Generation Kill:
"All these countries around the world, nobody's fat. Back home, fat fuckers are everywhere. Seventy five percent of all Americans are fat. Do you know how hard it is to put on 30 lbs. ? A fucker has to sit on the couch and do nothing but eat all day. In America white trash and poor mexicans are all fat fuckers. The Americans created a system with so much excess, even the poor fuckers are fat."
In such a world, it is the gritty and thin that are novelties.

An honest gaze

2008-08-10T11:00:00.000-04:00

John Edwards has finally put to rest the silly notion that you can gauge the honesty of a statement from the unblinking stare of the statesman (statement-statesman ?)
This son-of-a-mill worker's signature sincerity reminds me of Nick Naylor in Thank You for Smoking. There are many reasons we should forgive this Grinning Apostle. That he did what he did when his wife's cancer was in remission is around No. 17 on this rather long list.
Edwards attempted to answer why he did what he did, but the warring ids of the politician and the repentant sinner only managed to produce another gloriously ridiculous statement that says nothing we already did not now. He came to think of himself as invincible. Duh. Unless you are sinning in desperation to put some food on your family, you are assuming you wont get caught.
Edwards assumes (as in donning the public personage of an introspective sinner) that the journey of his life from (cringe) the son of mill worker to an ambulance chaser to a young senator to a presidential hopeful, gave him that false suit of invincibility, only to encounter Kryptonite from alien hunting National Inquirer.
He may have gotten it backwards. You can only chose a path as rare as that if you discount the exceedingly slim chances of succeeding at those odds. The personality makes the path possible, not the other way round.
Even so, it is common knowledge that the politician is a peculiar beast with a fetish for fame and a necessary appetite for risk. But, amazingly, we need one with these qualities in moderation. John Edwards the adulterer would be fine, just fine. We have come to believe that the adulterer niche fits cozily inside the politician maw in the Venn diagrammatic view of our world. Hilariously, he wasn't just that. He also became the reckless idiot who came into the primaries without the necessary pre-purging that is now ritual. He is also the foolish idiot who still believes he can get away with half-truths or 99% non-truths. Not his baby? Riiiight.
The modally reckless risk-taker turned politician will only commit adultery and corruption. The dangerously reckless one will also bomb countries apart from proving to a far greater nuisance.
It still remains unclear to me if recklessness is a measure of appetite for risk or a pathological underestimation of risk.

John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer to run in 2012 on REDEMPTION platform

2008-08-08T16:41:00.001-04:00

Waiting for more updates

Two monster rejections

2008-08-05T12:04:00.000-04:00

I loved the second one, and so did McGrady.

P.S: The second one also gives me this really cool idea. The next time you see a guy proposing to a woman in an arena as public as this, run up screaming and sobbing why he lied was single last weekend! It'd be even better if you were a dude too.

Secular vegetarians look away

2008-08-05T11:29:00.000-04:00

The rest of you, gnostic meat eaters, hypocritical meat eaters, religious vegetarians, you need to see this video :)

I love the aww-to-gasp reaction time of the female audience the camera picks out. A brief moment of disbelief when the veneer of modernity and the supposed uniqueness of humanity are ripped out and stuffed in a little chamber along with those chicks. There's that classic look of shocked denial where we refuse to accept the supposedly ugly egalitarian nature of our behavior in the animal kingdom. The fashionable liberal winds of the past few post-war decades go cold for an instant, but now that our glittery gaudy existence depends on it for shallow sustenance, we have to disbelieve and deny. And surely, the civil twitter-laughter rushes in to soothe and cover up and lull into proceeding as before. Where did you think your food, your cosmetics, your pharmaceuticals, and most everything else came from? Death is definitive and there's no reason to believe and desire a null intersection of the cute and the dead. We all freaking die! Some young, some old, some violently. We were meant to die, and while we might very well subvert this predestined apoptosis some day soon, we will die. Why not younger, valiantly, perhaps for an ecological purpose too? These people see a tiny bit of themselves in those suffocating cuties. An empathetic sense of a life taken too soon rears its head. No, no death can be too early. Only too late, when wrinkled, raisin-like, demented, you cling on the metal posts of your bed with skeletal hands, having pills popped and needles thrust into graying, crusting, half-dead veins, you still refuse to let go. Those chicks lived a life as good, as fulfilling, and as pointless as yours.

2008-08-04T11:16:00.000-04:00

Of course, every so often a homosexual couple openly flouts convention and declares their love for each other, as in the famous case of two policewomen in MP in the late 80s. Here a uniquely Indian solution has been to see it as "unfinished business" from a previous life, where the two were surely husband and wife, separated and united again by destiny.
That Inimitable Indian Inventive Impetus.Simply awesome. A++. More here

P.S: I stay intrigued by some of Sudhir Kakar's psychoanalytic explanations (he is mentioned in the article above), but I've only read them in secondary sources and never directly. Boston Public Library, you need to make those books available for loans.

Another of those stack overflows

2008-08-04T00:32:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, I wonder if I am a warrior waiting to blossom while I bide my time blogging. And then, I repeat that sentence slowly, mull it over, and quite admirably judge the chances of it to be close to nothing. But. What if? Would the progeny of a few thousand generations of warriors be shaped to have a different, more immediate, and more wanton outlook in life? What does that line of occupation select from the chemical broth? A disregard for planning into the future? A distaste for the prole way of living with sole survival in the cross hairs? A manic dance of morphing flames of glory and fame, always holding court in unfocused eyes? A love for competition and organized brutality of the pack and the lone soldier?
What do these men, meant for different, more chaotic times do in this world tamed by concrete, canals, causeways and air corridors? Where is that wild beast, man or animal, still waiting to be harnessed?
I love the Bush era phrase, soft bigotry of low expectations. Leaving public policy aside, what individual policy must we hold ourselves to? The answers vary with the person offering up the question. In the decadent recklessness of an earlier decade, I quite wantonly picked the hard edge of high hopes. And damn, is that edge hard!? A bit chastened by the rigors of that terribly lonely path as I am, I'd still keep running away from the dreaded numbing comfort of that softness. Why must comfort and happiness be so premium? Disappointment is so much more complex. It enlivens you more than the primitive wag of your happy bone; and so are other emotions that have been labeled as somewhat negative. Why must you be a prisoner of someone else's labels? Dude! These come from a society geared for simple survival! Where does the transitory line between happiness and its negative lie? Are they a bit more wiggly and accommodating in a rapidly changing, more giving, fattening world?
When you question limits, you are examining the jagged edge of arbitrary dicta, and the skin of fuzziness around them seems to expand. Straddling these arbitrary contours, you soon reach the one girding sanity. What lies beyond? Or just outside? What if the two warring parts of your id take up opposite banks? Will a prolonged war between the two lead to a peace enforced by a necessary trade of ideas? Ids do survive only on ideas, you know. All things animate and imagined must feed on their own specific, peculiar sustenance.
Now, intimately acquainted with intricate variants of disappointment, intellectual isolation, and a frontier insanity, I can assure you that peace and a weird calm prevail alongside more conventional desires for survival and the webbing of human bonds.
So what are some of the other occupations a more adventurous me should venture into? Here's one: A writer of individualized alternate histories of people, forcing them to examine the specifics and spillovers of vague what-ifs. That comes with the power of saving people from their own fantasies by thrusting the magnified warts of that overripe dream in their faces. Perhaps, just perhaps, I am a warrior after all, training with ideological warfare waiting for 3.0 that connects the information corridors to the heart of our being, bypassing all that meat and meatspace.
Ah. System so refreshing purged.

Another sports movie

2008-08-02T22:05:00.000-04:00

Hoop Dreams (link to movie). A three-hour long flick that is far more engaging than Friday Night Lights despite being a documentary. Not that it matters; King of Kong quite hilariously dispelled me of that notion. You can take a bare thread of a story and weave it into intricate and suggestive (perhaps falsely) patterns if your thread of videotape is long enough. It doesn't look like Hoop Dreams is doing anything of that sort. It was shot in the early to mid nineties (five years, 250 hours worth of tape!), a time when the art of the documentarian had not yet become Machiavellian. The pioneer Michael Moore had just begun practicing his art :)
Hoop Dreams follows the teen lives of two promising African American ballers who were both recruited to a basketball Magnet school as freshman. It, more importantly, documents the larger meaning of the game,in the lives of inner-city kids, and the players who don't don jerseys or even hold the ball. Unlike the white kids in FNL who have the luxury of at least a poor job and basement anonymity after a life in the lights, these kids have to grow up fast and it is surely disorienting. Some are already fathers. They are also kids sobbing into the shoulders of their consoling mothers.
The filmmakers succeed in making you root for the players and their families. That these elite kids still need rooting for to have a prayer in life is unsettling; they are among the top few hundred kids among the 500,000 who play high school ball (These statistics only reinforce my belief of an organized school sports system as a mistake). When these kids act out in class like divas, ignoring the most simple of instructions, you want to drag them out by their ears and show them the same sobering documentary they are the stars of a few minutes from now. That cliched fame really is fleeting and in the compressed life of a movie or a documentary, even more.
The documentary also makes vivid some of questions raised and answered in the ethnography Chutes and Ladders
What does welfare do and does not? Should its merits be measured in longitudinal frame of a single generation, or as a force tilting the moral compass of a community across many generations? The inner-city life depiction will be bleakly familiar to the fans of The Wire. The outrageously flamboyant ghetto fashions of the nineties also struck me as being useful generational markers; what are the fashion markers of our generation? Crocs? Uggs?
The reviews of the documentary, all positive, astonish me by not asking the obvious Heisenbergian question. How much of an influence did an always present camera have on the maturation process of these kids. Despite all that swirls around them, yes, they still are kids. Arthur Agee clearly seems to be playing to the camera at times in class, but can we blame him? Ask yourself what it would have felt like to be followed everywhere by a crew when you were sixteen. Many girls in their twenties or thirties would still kill for that and spoil rotten in a charming second :) It is a wonder these kids kept their heads screwed on, or just plain on with all the drug deals and muggings that were and are a daily constant around their public housing units.

Petite like a potato

2008-07-30T10:14:00.000-04:00

High School Popularity Contest

2008-07-27T23:35:00.000-04:00

I came to Friday Night Lights, the book, via the movie. I loved the movie, and I loved the series in its first season before it morphed into High School Musical with dancers costumed in shoulder pads. I was always going to like the movie if the football (the American version) sequences were filmed well. There is something about football that is very different from all the other sports I grew up with. A sudden release of bottled energy exploding in perfect synchrony. It is a gladiatorial simulation with all its attendant sideshow spectacles and baying bloodthirsty audiences. The excitement of watching and cheering a team is more a tribal bonding emotion than the surging adrenalin-fueled thirst for victory and the blood of the vanquished. It is bone roped in muscles and sheathed in spandex buried noisily and violently into another. And none of this can be fully captured by the Hawkeye or the lusty cries of those watching. Which is why I get off on the simulated action provided in staged sequences with the artificial rawness magnified and glorified further.
The same reasons also make organized high school sport very mystifying. The book clearly depicts the implications of anointing fresh young heroes every academic year, urging them on to the parochial summits of state championships, bathing the select few in dazzling glory for an entire season, lulling mere kids on to false pedestals of success, only to strip it all suddenly. Then, it is rinse and repeat all over again with another fresh batch of recruits.
Not surprisingly, this system affects not just the few who are lucky/unlucky enough to play, but creates at school, an entire ecosystem centered on sporting celebrity.
Kids are adults in waiting and are training to be equipped with the tools to succeed in the world at large. The glorification of high school sports and the sporting heroes constructs a false world where the one true measure of success is victory on the gridiron or preening just off it. Alpha prestige still holds sway over all, and especially over impressionable teenage minds. Nothing seems sexier and more glorious than a victor. And the allure is irresistibly magnified when high school sporting heroes are treated to an entirely different set of rules. If only the world was contained to that pond. All the bitching about precipitiously dipping SAT scores and scholastic achievements? It doesn't matter much if the portioning of school funds clearly indicates the supreme importance given to sports over everything else. To be sure, sports are a definite means to success, and many of these kids are sporting talent of the highest order (The book describes how some of these 17 year old kids can bench press 265 pounds and run the 40 yards in 4.5 seconds). But sporting success is only possible for an exceedingly tiny number. A handful among the millions who aspire. Such odds are impossible to convey in the glare of the friday night lights. One can only hope to channel the raw and nascent urge to conquer established hierarchies in a direction that allows diverse future outcomes; there are many many niches for success in the modern economy. (Why do Finnish kids do so well on international tests? It is because school there is a popularity contest of a different kind. One that emphasizes qualities necessary in succeeding in the wider world.)
It still doesn't answer how we prepare kids for the wider world. How is one to internalize that success in a small group of local kids does not linearly translate into anything remotely as good in a wider world? It is tough. We didn't necessarily have to deal with the wider world back when we forged our genetic identities and proclivities foraging in small tribes. Or even when the world was limited to the village or town we lived in. To be allowed a whiff of all the possibilities that widely celebrated success unleashes, at that young an age, is oh so wonderful and oh so cruel.

The housing bubble?

2008-07-25T02:03:00.000-04:00

It was only part of the historical build-up of foam giving the illusion of a full cup when there was (and is) almost no liquid left.

The essay, The Cost of Empire by Jon Taplin, is quite simply the best I've read. Every other semi-economically literate person should soon form the same opinion.

2008-07-21T22:44:00.001-04:00

August 29, 1997: The Day The World Ends. Tickets Available.

The uncomfortable proximity of unplanned social networks

2008-07-21T10:37:00.000-04:00

Is Andrew Keen right? I hated his book, but for its unnecessary word inflation and style. The central premise, that the democratization of opinion and cultural content creation is degrading, merits some analysis. He covers the central thesis in an awesome Colbert Report interview:

The choicest exchange:

Stephen Colbert: You are an elitist!!!

Andrew Keen: What's wrong with that? (Audience gasps)

Link

That the internet promotes a wanton sharing of intellectual property is obviously true (My second search engine is ThePirateBay; I should make a t-shirt of that slogan). But are the ripples it creates in economic exchanges going to effect art? The economics of non-rival goods is a different ball game and Andrew Keen is rather keen on tying economic outcomes of non-rival goods trade to cultural creation. That is debatable. Is cultural creation at risk? Does MySpace and YouTube really threaten cultural diversity by quickly accruing a critical mass of interest around mediocre creations leaving the more diverse, novel, and potentially wonderful elements to languish? I think Mr. Keen underestimates the stickiness of human behavior and our tribal affinities. More than social animals, we are all class conscious consumers. Even if stranded on an island, we will eventually fragment and coalesce into groups. There's nothing wrong with that. It may be necessary for survival where survival means more than the continuation of mere life, but that of every genetic variation we exemplify, and this means the physical, emotional, and intellectual traits (phenotypes) we stand for.

Mr. Keen also mistakenly assumes the current landscape of social networks as stable. No. We have just started defining our online communities and they will almost surely mirror ones in the real world. Take MySpace. Every one I know loathes it, but it has a user base in the hundreds of millions. MySpace was part of the first wave of social networks to embrace openness and democratic creation. For the first time in the history of the internet, designing your own corner of the world was as easy as painting your locker at school. And it is open for all the world to see (and in some cases dislike). So the median design aesthetic is that of a high school locker, and a randomly chosen community will more likely resemble a bunch of teenagers gathering after school to skate and tag walls. The second network to gain some traction, Facebook, came out of college. And the design aesthetic of a more private, more elegant community mirrors the environs of its creators, an ivy league community. Every other social network, centered around some other activity like watching videos or listening to music, has found a competing, smaller, classier network with the same purpose, but with loftier ambitions.

For every YouTube, there is a Vimeo, for every digg or reddit, there is a news.yc. This should be a theorem of sorts: For every democratic (proletarian) social network, there will exist a class conscious alternative. And if there isn't, there's a pile of money waiting to be made in that unoccupied niche. One of the main reasons dating sites suck is that no one has come up with a subtly class conscious alternative to Yahoo Personals, or PlentyOfFish. Subtlety is needed as dating seems to be the one activity where users want to understate their class preferences and appear more intellectually uninhibited Something as crudely obvious as this will not fly.

The comments on reviews at RottenTomatoes speak to concerns raised by Andrew Keen. They are a perfect example of what the uncomfortable proximity of otherwise distant spheres of ideas brings about. Check the comments on this review by David Denby, the New Yorker critic. 317 comments, mostly spiteful and directed towards the reviewer and not the review. It is quite amusing that every lukewarm or negative review of The Dark Knight, has a few hundred comments from outraged fans (link). According to Keen, such a backlash will corrode the independent analytical spirit of these reviewers, eventually creating a moronic majority of mediocrity. Well, I doubt that David Denby is going to be any less acerbic or caustic because of this reception. That is because this audience is an unintentional one foisted on him by a meta-aggregator of reviews that decided to network its audience. The conversation is entirely unidirectional. Soon, burdened by the sheer number of mediocre opinions, an aggregator that filters opinions of a higher class will emerge. In fact, it could be Condé Nast's very own, open, no scratch that, walled around the subscribers of The New Yorker. The comments there will on average be a lot more mature, a bit more thoughtful, and to a large extent mirror the implicitly walled communities of our physical world.

Star Trajectories

2008-07-18T15:52:00.001-04:00

Someone's star isn't exactly eclipsing, but the others are catching up. Does that mean that the young ones who have just started nursing at the tit of yellow journalism fancy the other two? Is it a coincidence that the other two are the ones with blogs? So many tough questions and no research grant money to throw at them. Travesty!
By the way, did you know that the phrase Yellow Journalism came from a proto-cartoon strip, Yellow Kid? En route Persepolis the movie, Persepolis the book, and The Ten-Cent Plague, this is the gilded age of trivia plucked along the path of attention deficit aided random walks.

August 23rd 2018

2008-07-13T19:54:00.000-04:00

August 23rd 2018: Another Fine Day

(Ajanta) Mendis Mania

2008-07-09T17:36:00.000-04:00

The forewarning
A star's arrival

via

Welcome Mendis
The Slow Killer
The future of Sri Lankan spin

This week in talented young people who make you stare long and hard in the mirror

2008-07-07T11:33:00.000-04:00

Radoslav Zilinsky

via

Gallery at deviantART

His website

Interesting that many of the talented young graphic artists on deviantART and cgsociety are from Europe and elsewhere. The global talent pool really is global.

Color Clouds or Spectral Sawdust ?

2008-07-05T03:03:00.000-04:00

Or a rather dull spectral scatterplots? What should I call these gorgeous babies, these nascent nebulae?

I'll call it a color cloud for now

Color Histogram

Parent Image

How hard can it be to produce distributions of various colors in an image, like the set above?
Well, I realized after some tinkering with the Aggregate Posters I had created it isn't a linear leap from one-dimensional histograms.
There seem to be two confounds. One is the obvious one of showing a three-dimensional distribution in two-dimensions. And the other is the perceptual confound of showing actual colors without contextual interactions (Here's the link to the abstract if you are blocked by a paywall).The usual method of plotting histograms separately for each of the three primary color bands is hardly optimal. There's no reason to believe that the peaks of the individual bands correspond to the same triplet of color, and the even the fundamental idea of showing spectral densities with graphs that could just as well be used for any universal triplet is dicey.Why not have the graphs speak to you in the visual language of color when they are supposed to be describing color?

As a starting point I decided to bin the color triplets into bands of 25 gray-scale values in each of the RGB band. That is, each (r,g,b) triplet is truncated as (r*,g*,b*) where each value can only be a multiple of 25 up to a maximum of 255. That gives you a resolution of 11^3 voxels in the entire color space covered by a 24-bit representation. The next step is deciding how to order the bins. Our perception of color difference varies quite a bit from the euclidean distance
between two color triplets. It seemed prudent to take brightness out of the mix by normalizing all triplets by the sum of their values, making them (r/(r+g+b), g/(r+g+b), b/(r+g+b)) and then ordering them with (1,0,0) (primary red) as the leftmost point.

We can do better. There's no reason to stick to a one-dimensional representation when we are so adept at analyzing spatial arrangments of colors. Why not try using this ability to our advantage?

Aside: Chernoff Faces are a lovely example of using our immense computing prowess in creative ways.
The color cloud depicted above is one attempt at obtaining two-dimensional representations. Color densities are converted into scattered random dots around the spatial position assigned to the color triplet, with the extent of the spatial position determined by the frequency with which that triplet appears in the image. So, more frequent a color, larger the pointillistic blot of that color. After multiple attempt at achieving a good separation of the three colors, I decided on the following x and y transformations for the triplet (r,g,b):

x= Sigmoid((g-r+1)/2)

y=(b+eps)/(r+g+b+3*eps))

Here are some examples (Ask me if you'd like the Matlab code used in generating them)

A gray-scale image: The light and dark colors overlap in the cloud because of the way x and y are computed, but this reflects a conscious choice to use the cloud to highlight actual color differences as opposed to brightness differences. The scatter has the benefit of showing both the light and dark in the regions of overlap, and the stark contrast of light and dark ensures that your perceptual filters don't ignore them.

Sepia Tones

Dark shades of blue

Bright shades of blue

A distinctly two-peaked distribution

Bright and multi-colored with one predominant color

Another bright, multi-colored image with one predominant color

For computational reasons, I use the same bins in graphing the clouds as I do for the histograms. However, the clouds are really scatter plots of the colors and using the same colors as in the image is possible. You would still need the scatter to convey the density of that particular color triplet in the image. I noticed in the course of plotting these clouds for numerous images that they all skew towards the left, which is the red end despite the x and y scales being designed to be symmetric. Does this indicate a general skew in poster creation? Is green eschewed for being hard to print or fluorescent in lamination? Whatever the reason, one could achieve more separation in the image by using a logarithmic scale that compresses the corners (primary color regions) that seem to be under utilized in general.

In the blink of an eye

2008-07-02T13:03:00.000-04:00

via

Conspicuous in absence

2008-06-30T00:42:00.000-04:00

Fans casual and fanatical, from many corners of this world ( flat and polyhedral; I like my metaphors precise) are saying this was a great edition of Euro Cup. Hmm, I wonder why?

Telling a movie by its cover: A clustering analysis

2008-06-28T00:56:00.001-04:00

Here's a sneak peek:
Movie posters aren't randomly chosen montages from a movie. They are deliberately crafted to broadcast a message, a meaning, that suggests in a blink what the movie is about. Does this imply that posters from different genres of movies have their own distinguishing signature?

Well, I decided to try and find out by using the Netflix dataset. The dataset contains about 100 million (100480507 to be exact) ratings on 17770 movies from 480189 users. That is a pretty large dataset but still quite sparse given the number of users and movies. Given the sparsity, one can still derive reasonably accurate movie similarities and most recommendation engines are driven by this idea (collaborative filtering). I used movie similarities (derived using a rough variant of Pearson correlation) to form clusters and then use the clusters to create the average of movie posters from the best exemplars within these clusters.

A few technical details here; you can jump straight ahead to the wonderful images if you'd rather not be bothered.

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The movie posters (150X100 thumbnails really) for all 17770 movies in the dataset were grabbed from the Netflix website using a python script. I must add that breaking these movies up into clusters isn't quite straightforward and susceptible to noise. I wanted to avoid storing the entire 17770x17770 similarity matrix in floating point precision and using a single byte for each similarity giving me a 255 partition precision. Also, the number of users who have watched any movie varies wildly (quite possibly as a power law distribution) throwing another confound into the similarity calculation mix.Iterating clusters with Lloyd's algorithm as-is was disastrous with all cluster centroids gravitating towards the most popular (most-watched) movies. I had to come up with my a variant that was more robust to the confounds and thus the average cluster posters are thus also a reflection of how well the cluster assignment went, and I am quite pleased with my home brew!

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On to the wonderfully abstract average cluster posters.

The most heartening affirmation of my cluster accuracy came from Dr. Who. The average poster pulls out the title rather beautifully.

Some of the best clusters were for television series, and this is reflected the posters:

Ultimate Fighting Championship

Discovery

None of the movie names have Discovery in the title, so you can confident I am not fudging the results here.

Some of the movies that make up that poster:

Inside the Space Station
Voyage to the Planets and Beyond
Sasquatch Hunters
Extreme Engineering: Tokyo's Sky City
Extreme Engineering: Holland's Barriers to the Sea
Architectures City of Steel: Carrier

Other remarkably good series posters:

Dark Shadows (I'd never seen or heard of this one before)

Ah, the Dragonball series. Anyone who has spent anytime with the Netflix data is bound to recognize these. The cluster is incredibly strong with this one. Lots of devoted fanboys perhaps.

Inspector Morse

Danielle Steel !!!

This one's intriguing. Why would anyone rent IMAX movies specifically? Is it the HD home-theater people?

Antarctica: IMAX
Blue Planet: IMAX
Grand Canyon: Hidden Secrets: IMAX
Galapagos: IMAX
The Great Barrier Reef: IMAX
Whales: An Unforgettable Journey: IMAX
Tropical Rainforest: IMAX

This one was useful. None of the movies in the Netflix dataset have PBS in the title and that made it tougher to validate some documentary clusters. Well they have it on the posters! (And after looking at the cluster exemplars, I realize I could look for the phrase American Experience)

Latham Entertainment Presents: An All New Comedy Experience
Bataan Rescue: American Experience
Ansel Adams: American Experience
Woodrow Wilson: American Experience
Seabiscuit: American Experience
War Letters: American Experience
Battle of the Bulge: American Experience

The above set of posters isn't all that interesting. They are what you'd expect if your clusters were populated with movies with similar titles or other identical markers. What we are looking for are more global signifiers. I decided to sort the image according to disk size and look at the smallest images. As I had stored them all as jpeg encoded. The smallest ones would be from clusters with many exemplars and, as a result, smoothed to some form of uniformity. The larger ones with more variance would be from clusters with too few exemplars. And this is what the two ends of the size spectrum look like:

Do the more uniform images show any distinct color signatures?

Well, the very first one looks rather sinister.

What are the exemplars in this cluster?

The Horror Within
Chupacabra Terror
Mosquito Man
Dracula's Curse
Blood Angels
Larva
Decoys
Dracula 3000

My hindsight based insight is that almost all horror movies seem to very predictably rely on blood tones and that font (Does it have a name? Count Drake font?) Here's a very typical exemplar (Larva )

And, continuing with the color theme, blue?

It is, of course, water

On Any Sunday Revisited
Jack Johnson: The September Sessions
The Endless Summer II
The Bruce Brown Surf Collection: Surfing Hollow Days
Billabong Odyssey
Slippery When Wet
Step Into Liquid
Barefoot Adventure

Any verdant greens?

Ah :)

VeggieTales Classics: Where's God When I'm Scared?
VeggieTales: Madame Blueberry
Franklin and the Green Knight: The Movie (And this one isn't a vegetable he's just an accidental green!) VeggieTales: Bible Heroes: Lions, Shepherds and Queens
VeggieTales Classics: Josh and the Big Wall!
VeggieTales: An Easter Carol

The obvious question: Any skin tones

But it isn't what I expected it to be; it is a Yoga/self-help cluster

Breakthru Pilates Sculpt
Denise Austin: Fat-Blasting Yoga: 21 Days to a Yoga Body
New York City Ballet Workout
Denise Austin: Yoga Buns
Leslie Sansone: Deluxe Walk

Most of the posters for the denser clusters look rather muddy, which is to be expected given that the median grayscale values in each band are bound to be dragged down to something in the middle of the [0 255] range. However, are there any that are peculiarly bright? Yes. Kiddie Clusters.
Baby Einstein: Baby Monet: Discovering the Seasons
Baby Neptune: Discovering Water
Baby Genius: Favorite Nursery Rhymes
Baby Einstein: Neighborhood Animals

Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus
Care Bears: Adventures in Care-a-lot
Strawberry Shortcake: Get Well Adventure

The Peter Rabbit Collection: The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny / The Tale of Mr. Tod
Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Kids
Pinocchio
Chrysanthemum and More Kevin Henkes Stories

So yes, not surprisingly there are across genre similarities in posters. None of those shown here are surprising, but I guess one could come up with convincing stories for some of the other ones. Here are two tales:

This is the poster derived from a cluster of Indian movies.

1942: A Love Story
Maine Pyar Kiya
Akele Hum Akele Tum
Raja Hindustani
Khuda Gawah
Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman
Virasat
Khiladi
Sharaabi
Dil
Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin
Beta
Hum
Yes Boss
Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai
Ram Lakhan
Chandni
Fiza
Yeh Dillagi
Mr. India

Being Indian myself, I can get away with saying that this aggregate poster reflects most of the early movie posters that had a certain format where the main protagonists would be shown centered in the poster with the names almost always at the bottom in blocky font. Here are a few examples:

Now consider this one from the Christmas cluster:

A Christmas Carol

Scrooge
Nine Dog Christmas: The Movie
Ernest Saves Christmas
Cartoon Network Christmas: Yuletide Follies
The Year Without a Santa Claus
Welcome to Mooseport
National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindee

The aggregate seems to have three bands of text across the top, middle, and bottom.

And looking at the some of the posters, that does seem to be the case

Christmas is typically a movie heavy season and I believe November and December are the densest months ratingswise in the Netflix dataset. Increased competition for eyeballs and a heavy demands for seasonal movies seem to combine in the form of text heavy posters that scream Christmas and suggest that the consumers not think anymore before reaching out for the dvd cases.

What other stories can we glean or weave from these aggregate posters?

Modeling communities with latent variables

2008-06-24T00:07:00.000-04:00

This article is hilarious. Some smart aleck tie-neck (my term for a lawyer) wants to prove that obscenities are well within the purview of what's wholesome by calling on google data to show that people search for orgies more than they do for apple pie. Well, warm apple pie is on all our minds all the time! Duh, how daft is that?
What's next? Porn on Nickelodeon because it happens to be the most downloaded thing on the net? This does raise an interesting question; In an age where little that can be hidden, can societies continue to define civility as the that which is found at the other, conscious end of the Freudian rainbow. That is, we lubricate the cogs our successive annuli of communities with niceties and white lies that are often patently false. Do not covet thy neighbors' things or wife, the commandment goes, but what does Google say about that? What happens when we know we are all grinning, lascivious barely restrained beasts behind the facade? Probably nothing. We have perfected the art of living with lies, in lies, in One Big Lie. And I don't mean this any negative misanthropic way, but more in admiration of what wonderfully sophisticated machinery can allow for such distortions of logic, of facts, to function even better with the added random noise of little lies that look away. Our next great challenge as a society that must examine its navel under the microscope at all times and come up with centrally planned panaceas Again, this kind of robustly flexed altruistic muscle must be inevitable after tipping a certain threshold on specie intelligence.
This deserves a slight detour. We've surely evolved to cooperate, and the signals that elicit cooperative tendencies surely exist. But our advanced technology allows us to boost these signals into cries of anguish that drown out all other rational, if cold hearted, damping signals that ask of us to carry out activities of self-interest? This heartrending set is a case in point. The anguish in the mother's eyes moves you powerfully, beyond words and into action. And yet, what action of yours can ease their suffering on a more permanent basis? Are we really at a stage where we can thrush needles into the veins of a complex ecology and expect to alter events in a predictable fashion? No.
So, fully aware of our limitations can we model our collective behavior better by throwing these limitations into the mix? We often deal with latent variables in pattern recognition. These are unknown factors that we suspect to be critical in determining the patterned response of systems. But these are known unkowns (caution: link isn't a definition, but may still be worth your time, and is pertinent as an example highlighting our limitations as planners), at least in that we know what me should be kind of looking for. However, what if we state some knowns to be swept under the carpet as unknowns. To look the other way in a polite way even in modeling our systems. Model our systems to factor in explicit politeness in our polity, and also to hold some Voldermortian variables as unmentionables that must be worked around but be made aware of in tertiary sense. This doesn't make too much sense at all in general terms, so let's be specific. Consider dating and coupling. By definition, there are fully fifty percent of us considered below average. Do we factor awareness of this and our own critical, objective, assessment of our standards before plunging into the pool or market or whatever? Nope, we are all sharks in our minds' eyes. And I strongly suspect that this adds to the health of the system. Neither does the advent of technology change these self-assessments in the temporal horizon. These definitions hold across the board, and in this light, does a policy like No Child Left Behind make any sense? Again, it looks like the data is saying no. An advanced society, however, refuses to disregard any such disheartening evidence, and we as a collective have to stop wringing our hands in disbelief and accept this tendency. Some call this tendency kindness. Accepting this will allow us to move forward and factor this perhaps positive inability of ours to take tough measures and work around it for a deeper global optimum.

Along came a summer breeze

2008-06-22T03:02:00.000-04:00

So here I am a score and odd years in, eternally restless, all triumphs always fading in the rear window of constant travel, culturescapes shifting, morphing like dunes with the changes in my environs and perception. What right do I have to peace? And yet I found myself lying in the grass, with this sudden pleasant thought wafting in with the nascent summer breeze. I am finally at peace with myself. My mind is lolling on his back with his tongue sticking askew in uncaring bliss. Now it surely had to do with the book I was reading, but only as a trigger. Epiphany struck with the passing of the passage on anti-social personality disorders.
My epiphany needs some exegesis. The laundry list of diagnostic criteria sounds a lot like a stark-tone picture of an independent minded person. A failure to conform to norms? A reckless disregard for others? And a lack of remorse? Why, it is a disorder! It is a disorder only in that it is a wrinkle in the orderly fabric of society ironed by the mores of cultural statists. Why must web 2.0 humans still insist on and conform to overt and explicit forms of cooperation? We are finally free to be true individuals in the collective. To undo the previously necessary shackles of mutual sureties of benefice and destruction.
This subjective understanding of our current world was quite extant and alive in gelatinous mode for a while. What revealed itself to me today was my constant battle with the idea, the third person view of the apologist defending the opposite. It must be typical of hastily anointed precocious teens, the struggle to find meaning in joyless successes. It wasn't too long ago, my attempt to etch a self-portrait using psychographic tools. What acronym fit me best, what method was most apt? INTP, MBTI? Pointless questions remain pointless even after donning scientific sheepskins.
At some point soon after, with the forced introspection that parrying expectations from all corners leads to, coalesced the germ of freedom. Why must there be an order of things? An anointed goal or prize? If I choose interestingness over the extension of life and survival and the Joneses, isn't the world safer, with the attendant risks of all eggs in the survival basket? An atheistic philosophy for life allows for all kinds of nifty divide-by-zero wormholes. All logic dies there, leaving all routes to salvation equally pointless, or more optimistically, equally wonderful.
The road less travelled is lonely. There are passers-by only with increasing rarity. And our biology screams for emotional companionship. It is a tough trudge but the psychedelic mirror of introspection, you will arrive at Dear Jedi. And truths you will face that will hurl in directions unknown. And today one feathered in gently telling me I was free. I had been free all along. To choose and to fail and to choose again and to wash myself in the joys of the unknown. Risk? Even that of death? Pfft. A life unwavering, leaving no recourse for remorse is worse. In my playbook. And that's the one that matters.

2008-06-18T18:41:00.000-04:00

"It's not the sex so much that does the damage, it's all the things leading up to it," says Jan Wohlberg, a Williamstown woman who was sexually abused by the psychiatrist she was seeing after her own husband, also a psychiatrist, was shot and killed by one of his patients. link

Jersey trilemma

2008-06-18T13:04:00.000-04:00

Should the decals be of Garnett, Pierce, or Rondo?

"Rondo was the star," Lakers coach Phil Jackson said. "He was the guy out there that made the plays, got the steals, pushed their offense into high drive and created havoc for us."

I have to agree with him. I really really hope he works on a jumper mid-range any-range this post-season. can't-get-enough

And... last video update; Much as anyone might dislike Kobe, he has to get a massive attack of empathetic cringing here...post championship game autopsies are just brutal for the losing franchise players.

Indiana Jones...

2008-05-27T12:38:00.000-04:00

The crystal skull belongs to an alien. There, I saved you ten bucks! Now go spend it on an actual movie like The Dark Knight. The thick skulls belong to reviewers who can't smell shit if it comes in a gilded platter.
Here's how it came to be:
Harrison Ford, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg hit midlife crisis. Incapable of dealing with it like other normal men, because they already have a Porsche and then some, they decide to reprise a movie from their glory days. No dice. The result is wrinkled, rancid, and made worse by CGI botoxification.
Do dismal economic scenarios make for a favorable environment for peddlers of fantastic illogic and nostalgia?

Boredom/Death n. A subconscious fear of encroaching entropy

2008-05-22T23:03:00.000-04:00

I figured I'd explore the topic of interestingness further as there's nothing really interesting on. The Pistons are playing the Celtics in Boston. Did I mention there's nothing interesting? And when I say interesting, it is a personal definition, not some universal entropic definition. And in the glorious philosophical tradition of subverting and corrupting terms from physics, is entropy inversely related to interestingness? A higher entropy indicates a leveling of energy or an egalitarian sweep of the closed universe. Wealth redistribution is an entropic policy! Being interesting is then a constant struggle to bunch up energy when all it really wants is to dissipate.
Plowing through research in summer is more than just boredom, it is a cosmic, eternal struggle being played out at a micro-level. There must be so many fractal scales to this. My neurons struggle against the sweep of some lethargy inducing transmitters, my immune system fights stupid allergens that seek to pollinate my body, my legs trudge, ever so unwillingly, to my desk where I ever so grudgingly attempt to work. And it all seems so pointless in the larger scheme of things. I'll die anyways right? That predestined struggle underscoring entropy's eventual triumph in all battles at all scales. And yet, GLORY! hails and beckons.
Ritual and repetition impinge so strongly on thought that for one reared in the temple of Math and grazed in academic pastures, it is inevitable that all uncertainties are framed with mathematical rigor. What is boredom? becomes If my interests are islands connected by trails of thoughts and memory acts as a depleting impedance in traversing paths already visited, is boredom a temporary situation where there's nothing to do that hasn't been done in the recent past? Recency is fuzzy, but the idea is that we eventually do what we already have a few hundred times, but the repetitions are spaced out enough so as to be faint memories if there's any trace at all. So how does entropy come into the picture? Well, high entropy activities (dumb, base pleasures) have a short memory trace, but also result in correlatedly small amounts of pleasure. And the internet is a dangerous force multiplier where a corrosive entropy increasing process of reducing all subtleties to tedious monotones takes place. I am Rick James Bitch!.
You are doomed to seek and be repeatedly disappointed if these islands of base pleasure are all you keep revisiting. Reading a book takes a long time and the expected net enjoyment is vastly underestimated. The imminent task and effort of reading weighs more heavily on the decision and the temporally distant pleasure on completion looks small on the horizon. Are we doomed to not seek out what will really bring us joy and pleasure because we fear the effort? In my case, Dash is the clearest example I can think of. There's no way I would have voluntarily, objectively committed to the perceived responsibility of caring for another being. Too much work. And yet here we are are four years later, with my life being better off. Endowment effect, it may well be, but this bit of cognitive self-deceit still leaves me better off than the high entropy condition of being alone, more like the median order of things.
And yet, knowing all this, I'll still be hesitant investing time in the unknown when all logic predicated on human impulses tells me I'll be better off, less bored, more interested, with the result immaterial. How do I act against my stronger temporally short-sighted self? He feels more real and akin in impulsiveness. Is he the real me?

A new species: preface

2008-05-18T16:19:00.000-04:00

I want to start down the path of inventing a new species. As a card carrying member of the Youtube generation, I just don't have the patience for evolution or punctuated equilibrium or whatever. Not snappy enough and I am frankly quite sick of my highly suboptimal experience as a human exemplar. A lot of stuff is confusing until resolved and just starkly depressing thereafter.
So what should I keep and what must be jettisoned? I am conflicted about rational intelligence. It seems to be self-limiting or we would all be smart enough to realize we are another life form and do something about all the fighting and other zero-sum shit. Or we must have been real thick headed and the merely smart ones made out like bandits and plain made out a lot. Resulting in babies.
The two selves that we seem be endowed with now seems to be the result of some sort of twisted genius. We do have two selves jostling constantly, the cortical and limbic, the primal and the rational. Cooperating in a world with limited supplies made the rational somewhat necessary and what should have been kept to a reasonable minimum could have gone haywire.
Some well meaning idiots think we should eventually all be uploaded as streams of pure consciousness all blending together in ether in gooey goodness. Blechyuck! Video game makers know how deathly boring it would be to create a game with no hurdles, no triggers of reward. One reason to embrace atheism is to avoid a similarly boring heaven where nothing can ever merit the verb awarded. Drab.
I can't think of anything better than two ids in a bod, well, maybe a few more. Hindu mythologicians must have known this to be a surely elevated form of life (Ardhanari).
Life should have a soundtrack. Merely average movies seem to be elevated by the addition of good soundtracks. The idiots can get laughtracks thrown in too. It would be interesting to see how the variation that novel sounds bring to ritualistically same everday events damp the boredom factor.
In fact, at this step of pattern analysis and understanding in the trajectory of life, it only seems obvious that we must bring synthetic pattern generation into the fold. Not only do we create music, we also create entire visual, aural, and tactile worlds celebrating us as their unique, shining centers. We are partways there with virtual worlds and intelligent dildos. But then, can we define life without the scaffolding of struggle?
That one's too tough to answer. The closest analogous experience must be that of a really spoilt pet. Do they have everything and are they blissfully happy? Or do their novelty seeking systems trip them up? Tough one.
Empathy must be more conscious. The boundaries of empathy differ, but almost always stop at the contour defining our species. PETA people, of course, must have a more infinitely extended empathy. Empathy dictates that we treat an other as our substitute. This is a cheapening experience on one hand and on the other allows a hypocritical differentiation of life forms. Bring the boys home, and butcher livestock in merriment! Hypocrisy is the negative space that defines empathy, and since one cannot have one without the other, the two are to be eradicated.
Death? The western world is obsessed with keeping it at bay. We want to continue experiencing the astonishing movie that must never end. Eastern philosophy reserves fully a quarter of life in preparation for eternal dissolution. Must have more than one variant of the species and have them duke it out?
Having survival equate success resulted in this horridly suboptimal world of ours. It's been done and the result? Meh. Interestingness could be a new goal, resulting in world full of strutting figurative peacocks. The world would look like Provincetown! Which isn't at all bad.
It is slowly dawning on me that all variants I can think up are already being tested in this world of ours. An unconscious attempt to speciate is being made while a nanny state thrusts stark definitions upon us and forces us to regress toward the same modal form. To ensure interestingness, we must also ensure the instability of any large organization that seeks to define and flash freeze a subsection of the population. How can my species be interesting if stays the same?

with no regard for human life!

2008-05-14T16:23:00.000-04:00

Latino soccer commentary is inarguably the best runtime narrative in any sport in any language. I'd watch golf if these ecstatically amped hombres snuck in under those snooty fences (couldn't resist that stereotype!). "And the ball's rolling down the green curving in, homing in with the white flag secure in its sights and...BIIIIRRRRRDIEEEEEE!"
TNT's Kevin Harlan seems to have picked up a lesson or two from el libro de asombro. His call on Le brawn's playoff postcard worthy dunk is just awesome.

And a lot of people seem to agree.