Where do we go from here.....

Mental health

2010-12-17T00:30:00.000-08:00

I was at a middle school in Bellevue today. It's striking how there are predominantly 2 types of pamphlets on the message board there: those talking about therapists/mental health and those about domestic abuse.

This, in one of the top school districts of the the nation.

Also, check this trend out. This is from all the books scanned by Google written from 1900. It clearly tells us what people are more interested in.

Expected? Or do we take ourselves more seriously than we have to?

Social Q&A Systems

2010-12-01T21:22:00.000-08:00

A lot of times you need answers to long or open ended questions. e.g. "How are hiking trail distances calculated?" or "Are there any places where you can watch the 4th of July fireworks over Lake Union while avoiding the crowds? " or "Any good popular science book recommendations?" (all questions which I've had in the past).

Current search engines don't do great for these queries, since they search by keywords aim for speed. But there are a lot of Q&A systems such as Yahoo Answers, Quora etc. out there which are meant to help you with these. Having tried out a few over the past 2-3 years, here is a rundown on them:

Yahoo Answers

Pros: Lots of users, has been around for a long time.

Cons: Not really useful for genuine questions. Funny/not so useful answers tend to be voted up.

Yahoo Answers is a good example of "what doesn’t work".

Twitter/Facebook status messages

Pros: Asks questions to your friends. Decent search capability.

Cons: Asks questions to your friends, which for most people is a limited set of folks with little or no subject expertise.

Quora

Pros: Focuses of collaboration. Almost wiki-like

Cons: No user-reputation system makes answering questions less gratifying. New and hence not many users.

Aardvark

Pros: Asks questions to topic experts as determined by their internal algorithms.

Cons: Not as many users. A lot of questions go unanswered. No reputation system.

Facebook Questions

Pros: Lots of users. Uses the social graph information for question discovery.

Cons: No reputation system. Very poor search functionality.

Stack Exchange websites (e.g. StackOverflow)

Pros: Very detailed reputation/badge system which incentivizes people to give good & thorough answers to questions. Decent search functionality.

Cons: Niche set of websites for specific topics like programming, hence not generic. Not many users because of being niche websites.

So based of these experiences, here is what I think will make an ideal Q&A system:

1. Has a lot of active users

2. Has a reputation system which incentivizes good "answerers".

3. Easy to use, via Desktop/Phone/IM.

4. All the questions and answers are well-tagged and easily searchable.

5. Seeks out topic experts for answering questions.

6. Has a social element (people prefer answering questions from their friends instead of random strangers), but does not overdo it (since you might want real experts a lot of times).

Points 2, 3, 4 are achievable design goals for a startup. 1, 5 and 6 are much harder since you need a critical mass of users to achieve them, which would be tough for a startup to achieve. So it has to come from one of the big players. Or a startup bought over by a big player (Aardvark was bought by Google recently). That said, Facebook seems to be best positioned to build such a system if they wish to. Yes, it's Facebook's world, we just live in it.

Dark side of the moon

2010-03-03T21:39:00.000-08:00

No, this post is not about the awesome Pink Floyd album. It's about the real dark side of the moon. As some of you well know, the moon has a dark side or a "far" side, which constantly faces away from the earth. And a "near" side which constantly faces the earth. In other words, it takes the Moon exactly the same amount of time to rotate around its axis as it does for it to go around the Earth once (~27.322 days). Ever wondered why this happens?

This phenomenon is known as synchronous rotation and it is quite common between planets and their satellites. It is caused due to something known as tidal locking. Just like the moon affects the tides on the earth, the mass and speed of rotation of the earth influences the moon, but in a much larger way (because the earth is much more massive). Early in its life, the moon spun much faster. But slowly, its rotation locked in with its revolution around the earth due to the tidal forces, and we got the "near side" and the "far side". The Wikipedia link above has more info if you are interested in further reading.

Turns out almost all moons in the solar system are tidally locked with their corresponding planets. In fact, Pluto and its moon Charon, are tidally locked with each other i.e. both of them show just one side to other and revolve around each other as if joined with a rod. Astonishing!!!

On Natural Selection and Free Markets

2010-02-14T19:24:00.000-08:00

Since 4 billion years, life has evolved on this planet by a process called natural selection. Simply put, the individuals and species best adapted to their current surroundings survive and propagate their traits to their offspring, while the other struggle for survival and die out.

I think at some level, the concept of free markets is similar to natural selection. The people or enterprises best suited to the current market conditions survive and thrive. (Note that I am not saying that free market theory = natural selection, but merely that they are similar to some extent). And the one thing we know from our 4 billion year history is that the system works. Give it enough time and space and we might end up with something rich and diverse, like life on planet earth.

Does that mean laissez-faire free markets are the way to go for the various national economies today?

I think this is where we should think about this problem a little bit more. Here are a couple of my thoughts on this.

The first is that natural selection works, but only for the species best adapted to their surroundings. The rest die out. It is estimated that around 99.9% of all the species that ever lived are now extinct. Similarly free markets may not be the kindest to the folks who are least fit to survive in the market: people who are currently unemployed or poor, especially the kids born homeless and poor. Most of us don’t fall in this group, so we might not be the best set of people to decide for them.

Also natural selection kept species interdependent via the food chain i.e. change in the population of one species caused a change in the population of the other species up and down the food chain. This was only true until humans evolved and made all their scientific progresses. Now food can be produced in factories. We don’t need to keep the millions of species around to survive. A parallel can be drawn between invasive species like humans and the big monopolies which are bound to arise in a free market without regulations. A big enough monopoly can take control of the market and bend it to its will. It can kill all the competition exacerbating the problems I mentioned in the paragraph above.

So what’s the best solution if we had the option of choosing one? I’m not sure. Clearly the other extremes (e.g. communism) don’t work either, and have been utter failures wherever employed.

One thing I am fairly confident about is that in the long term, we cannot have a perfect system (economic or otherwise). Perfect systems are a myth. And in spite of the criticisms, I think the current American system is pretty good and ideal results might be achieved by making small incremental changes to it. Obama’s “reforms” might serve as a good experiment to test whether moving to the left of the current system works or not. They might succeed or they might fail, but we will come out wiser on the other side.

A Change is gonna come

2008-11-08T21:37:00.000-08:00

USA finally elected an African-American president. Even if the pre-election polls virtually guaranteed an Obama victory, I was afraid of the so-called Bradley effect coming into play. It's the theory that "some voters tend to tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, and yet, on election day, vote for his white opponent.". Thankfully it never happened. Maybe it is a sign of the changing America.

At the same time I'm still surprised that after 8 years of Bush, after such a negative campaign run by the McCain camp and such a poor running mate choice of Sarah Palin, 46% of popular vote still went to the McCain-Palin ticket.

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Losing my Religion: A brilliant piece in Cricinfo about the beginning of the end of era in cricket. For all of us who grew up watching Sachin and Kumble and Dada and Dravid, cricket truly is never going to be the same. Change is happening in cricket too, a slightly sad one.

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Finally a word on the global financial meltdowns. Some say this is the death of the free-market ideology. Some say this is further proof that we need totally unregulated free markets. There a whole bunch of "I told you so" opinionating, and very less rational thinking. It should be interesting to see how the Obama government handles this. If more regulations indeed fixes the mess, does that mean the free-market experiment is over? I hope not, but would not be surprised if we come out on the other side with a completely different way of running the economy.

Nexus

2008-08-24T15:11:00.000-07:00

Another cool data visualization tool. This one graphs out your friend network from Facebook. Here's my friend graph. It's is pretty cool how neat clusters are formed between different sets of your friends, like your old school buddies, undergrad/grad school friends, work friends/colleagues etc. And how some people act as "Connectors" across multiple groups. Studying social graphs has been around for a while now, and it is nice to have simple visualization apps which everyone can use easily.

Wordle

2008-08-02T16:07:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of the most commonly used words on my blog, courtesy the cool app "Wordle". Looks like I talk a lot about Federer and science fiction and winning. Who would have thought....

Xenophobia

2008-07-29T23:15:00.000-07:00

But a fair-minded person can look around and see that it really is too crowded. Somebody needs to go. But who? Well, you start with the poorest. Or the newest. Or the one farthest away from yourself, however you define yourself. Immigrants hope, ultimately, to be in a position where they have the right to keep out new immigrants, to tell the next person to get off the train in your city that he must go back, he can't stay. That's when you know you're truly native.

From Maximum City by Suketu Mehta

So true for Mumbai or any other community/city/country in the world. This kind of xenophobia is a natural instinct, honed by generations of human evolution. Can we triumph over this instinct?

Wimbledon's gonna be fun...

2008-06-19T22:08:00.001-07:00

We have 3 people who have a very good chance of winning at Wimbledon. We got Novak Djokovic, a great all-court player, the Aussie open champion and arguably the next world no. 1. We got Rafael Nadal, who is on cruise control right now, blowing past Federer in the French Open and then running though the draw on the grass courts at Queens. And then we got Roger Federer, the 5 time defending champion, one of the best tennis players of all time.

Going by current form, I would not bet against Nadal actually winning Wimbledon. He is playing the best tennis of life, even on grass, where he beat Roddick and Djokovic back-to-back at Queens. Federer, on the other hand had a horrible start to the year, but is playing much better now having made it to the French Open finals and winning the Gerry Weber Open on grass. Is this going to be the year Federer is finally toppled at Wimbledon? Or is Federer going to turn around the year, with his 6th consecutive victory at his favorite venue?

RIP Arthur C. Clarke

2008-03-19T14:35:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite science fiction authors, Arthur C. Clarke passed away yesterday. Back in my school days, his book 2001: A Space Odyssey (the book, not the movie) was probably the first book which had a major impact on me, challenging my preconceived notions about the universe, god, religion etc. It also got me hooked on science fiction books: the smart ones (Clarke, Asimov, Niven etc.), not the Star Wars/Star Trek types. I believe good science fiction is probably the only genre which lets you 'stretch your imagination' beyond what you thought was possible.

I leave you with a video he broadcasted on his 90th birthday, just 3 months ago, in which he talks about the past, present and especially the future. Great stuff.

The Ring, meet Youtube

2008-03-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

Another one from xkcd. Click to expand:

I am not running for vice-president

2008-03-11T23:52:00.000-07:00

I hate politicians and their doublespeak and false promises. Unfortunately, they are a necessary evil in today's world. I couldn't help posting this brilliant reply by Barack Obama to some cheap tactics Hillary Clinton employed to get one-up with the voters.

First seen here

Gamesmanship... or cheating?

2008-01-27T23:50:00.000-08:00

In today's ultra-competitive world of pro-sports, gamesmanship is becoming a bigger and bigger factor in the outcome of games. Here are some things which tread the fine line between gamesmanship and cheating:

1. Sledging (or trash talking) is rampant in cricket. The motive is most often to disturb the concentration of the batsman.
2. In tennis, players grunt loudly when hitting the ball, wear squeaky shoes or annoy the opponent by varying the number of times they bounce the ball before serving.
3. In NFL and college football, coaches routinely take a time-out just a split second before the opposing kicker is going to kick a game winning field goal, thus making him kick again.
4. In basketball, fouls are an integral part of the game plan, especially during the closing seconds.
5. In soccer, players fake or amplify injuries, to pressure the referee to penalize the opposing player.

I'm sure there are many other such instances in other sports too.

So, whats the solution? On one hand, we could have stricter rules to prevent these things from happening. Or we could adhere to the principle: If you can't take it, you don't deserve to be there. I think there is no simple solution to this problem. Making rules stricter would take the fun and emotions (and ultimately spectators) away from sports, while keeping them unchanged would lead to more and more players finding inventive ways of gamesmanship.

The African question

2008-01-13T22:44:00.000-08:00

Here is a TED talk by Andrew Mwenda, about how the well-intentioned aid to African countries, in the long run, is actually hurting the people it is supposed to help. The solution, he proposes is to enable measures to boost entrepreneurship, rather than simply provide people with food and medicines. A thought-provoking talk, which at first might sound counterintuitive to many.

P.S.: For some reason the video does not show up in a feed reader, so view the post to view the video.

Sydney test

2008-01-06T12:11:00.000-08:00

All hail Mr. Jonny Fairplay, Ricky Ponting :) :

The Sydney cricket test between India and Australia had some really shoddy umpiring. 7 decisions went against India, and one against Australia. Why does this happen to every touring team in Australia? Isn't it time for cricket to come out of its stone age 'gentleman's game' era and embrace the fiercely competitive world that professional cricket is?

Expanding Circles

2007-12-26T13:30:00.000-08:00

One of the stories making headlines in the past couple of days is about a tiger escaping from a zoo and killing a person.

I think the question screaming at us here is: Is it ethical keeping animals caged in zoos, away from their natural environment, just for our mere pleasure? I realize that many people think of hunting/caging animals as no big deal. But to put in perspective, 200 years ago, hunting/caging/enslaving people of races supposedly "inferior" to your own was no big deal either. Case in point, check out this instance which seems utterly horrifying today: In 1906, an African man from the Belgian Congo was caged with an orangutan at Bronx Zoo.

Thankfully, things are improving in the long run. Check out Amit Varma's column on "Expanding Circles", a concept first introduced by WEH Lecky in 1869: .

Lecky wrote that the number of people we consider worthy of our moral consideration has expanded through history like a circle. “At one time,” he explained, “the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world.”

I'm glad that we have come a long way since 1906. And I'm sure with the global boundaries falling fast, we will continue on this path for a long time to come. We just need to be aware of the bigger picture and do our bit to keep the circles of sympathy and benevolence "expanding".

Update: A similar incident.
As an aside, the article is pretty poorly written, which is surprising coming from the BBC. "The dog was destroyed....."?? And how about "The death follows the unlawful killing of five-year-old Ellie Lawrenson who was killed by her uncle's dog......". Unlawful killing by a dog?? You gotta be kidding me.

On Evolution

2007-11-18T00:20:00.000-08:00

I often hear people asking the question: Do you believe in Evolution? Well, for starters, Evolution happens. It is a fact, not something you believe or not believe in.

Evolution is one of the topics not taught in schools in India. As a result, many people I speak to have an incorrect notion of evolution. Back in high school, I remember learning about botany and zoology and the difference between classes of animal kingdom, but nothing about how this variation came about. We learn the answer to the 'What' question, totally sidetracking the more fundamental 'How' and 'Why' questions.

In reality the process of natural selection (via which evolution occurs) is a simple and fascinating concept. Unfortunately most of the literature on the net, like this Wikipedia article, is rife with scientific terminology, making it too intimidating for a layman to understand.

Here is an amazing clip from Carl Sagan's Cosmos series where he explains natural and artificial selection using the Heikegani crabs as an example in a very clear and lucid manner. Check it out...

Carl Sagan is one of my favorite authors and the entire Cosmos series is worth watching. Or if you prefer the book, it is equally good. Definitely something worth checking out.

Quiz questions

2007-10-26T23:26:00.000-07:00

A few questions from a quiz I set a few days ago. Try and answer them without using help from the net.

1. Olórin, Mithrandir, Stormcrow, The White Rider, Incánus, Tharkûn. These are the other names of which character?

2. This 6 time pro-bowler running-back was the first NFL player to rush for 2000 yards in a season. He was inducted in the pro-football hall of fame in 1985. He later turned to acting and was considered for the title role in The Terminator, but producers feared he was "too nice" to be taken seriously as a cold-blooded killer. Nowadays he is famous for completely different reasons. Who?

3. Connect

a. Napoleon
b. Pink Floyd
c. Four legs good, two legs bad.
d. Eric Arthur Blair

4. Many novice guitarists try to learn this song, and most end up messing it up. In the movie Wayne's World, it is banned in the guitar shop where Wayne starts playing it. In the movie, Wayne clearly plays the first few notes before being scolded, but due to legal issues, the video version was changed so Wayne plays something incomprehensible. On an episode of South Park, the character Towelie tries to play this in a talent show and screws it up. Which very famous classic rock song?

5. X is credited with leading the fight for independence in what are now the countries of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Bolivia, using sometimes-brutal guerrilla warfare tactics as outlined in his "Decree of war to the death". He is revered as a hero in these countries and throughout much of the rest of Hispanic America. Who's X? (Hint: He has a South American country named after him.)

6. X is a platform game developed by Jordan Mechner in 1989 and was widely seen as a great leap forward in the quality of animation seen in computer games. Mechner used a process called rotoscoping, in which he studied many hours of film of his younger brother David running and jumping in white clothes, to ensure that all the movements looked just right. Mechner has said that when he started programming, the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark had been one of the main inspirations for the character's acrobatic responses in a dangerous environment. X=?

7. up, down, charm, _____, top, and bottom

8. The element Uranium (atomic number 92) has the highest atomic weight of the naturally occurring elements. What are the elements with atomic numbers 93 and 94?

9. Complete the series. Canas, Canas, Nadal, Volandri, Nadal, ________

10. Daughter of Echidna and Typhoeus, she is best known as the riddle-loving monster that terrorised Thebes until Oedipus came along and answered her question correctly. Who is she?

11. Complete the series: Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, ______

12. X was born as John in 2511 and spent the first part of his childhood on the human colony planet Eridanus 2, where he lived with his family. He was large for his age at the time, approximately a foot above his school peers. In his 27-year career, X has been involved in over 200 engagements, and has been awarded all of the UNSC's major Decorations except for the Prisoner of War Medallion. Incidentally, in another world, X was the first of his kind to become a Madame Tussuad's waxwork. Who's X? (Think recent events)

13. This famous sitcom utterance is typically represented in the show's script as "(annoyed grunt)", and is referred to similarly in the official titles of numerous episodes. Which sitcom and what utterance?

Ellen Says No

2007-10-21T01:12:00.001-07:00

Here's a homemade video from a local Alternative Rock band that I listened to live a couple of times and took a liking to: Ellen Says No.
Neat stuff!!!

The Halo 3 buzz

2007-09-30T00:02:00.000-07:00

With Halo 3 being touted as the biggest entertainment launch ever, I did a little trend analysis with the other big entertainment launches of this year.

Not surprisingly, the final Harry Potter book outshines both Spiderman 3 and Halo 3 in terms of buzz in the blogosphere. Not being restricted to a niche audience (Xbox console gamers) definitely helps. Of course Halo 3 might still be the winner in terms of sheer monetary value. After all the game ($60+) costs way more than the book (~$20).

I wonder which one is more addictive.....

Watching Federer live

2007-09-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the 2 people who actually read my blog, for egging me on to write this post. It has been long overdue.

The big story is of course that I went to see the US Open mens semis and got to see Roger Federer live. The GOD himself. Now I can strike that one safely off my list of "Things to do before I die". It was a simple 3 set affair in which Roger easily beat Nikolay Davydenko. At the end of it, I was actually rooting for Davydenko to take a set, just so that I can see more of Roger. Not to be. Anyways watching Federer live is a treat, as he stands out from the rest of the field with his graceful and elegant strokeplay, if not anything else. Something not to be missed even if you are even a casual tennis fan.

Here are some pics:
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The other semifinals Djokovic vs. Ferrer was decent too, with Djokovic showing some big time potential. While he does not have the finesse of Federer, he looks to be the next great all-court player, more so than Nadal who is by and large ineffective on hard courts, where his top spin isn't as lethal. Lets see if Djokovic can back his potential with some Grand Slam wins.

Back to Federer, we should consider ourselves lucky to be around watching him play. In the 90s it was Sachin Tendulkar with his batting masterclass and this decade it is Federer with his flawless tennis. Here's hoping that such geniuses continue to be born, regaling us with their wizardry....

Prank calls

2007-07-27T20:46:00.000-07:00

With The Simpsons' movie out today, here is a video compilation of Bart's prank calls to Moe. This thing never gets old.

Hawk-Eye in tennis

2007-07-15T18:47:00.000-07:00

Recently the Hawk-Eye technology has been used in tennis to judge close line calls. I had previously posted about Hawk-Eye, thinking at the time that it was the right way to go for tennis. In this post I will try and make a case otherwise :).

The problem with using Hawk-Eye in tennis lies in the fact that what it shows us is the 2d projection of the tennis ball. This is fine when the ball is traveling through the air. But when the ball hits the ground, it is not the 2d projection of the 3d ball which is the point of contact of the ball with the ground. The soft tennis ball gets partially squashed when it hits the ground, & it is the squashed portion of the ball which touches the ground. Thus the point (or region) of contact is actually a fraction of the 2d projection shown to us by Hawk-Eye. Moreover such a fraction would be hard to figure out using simple physics, since it's a chaotic system depending on a lot of factors like speed, spin, angle, surface, temperature etc.

Of course, one can argue that Hawk-Eye need not be perfect, but merely better than the human judges for it to be used. But testing such an assertion would be very tough, simply because there is no ground truth in this problem. Even if such a test comparing Hawk-Eye and human judges were to be performed, who decides whether Hawk-Eye or the human judge is "more right"? That would have to be a system better than both Hawk-Eye or humans. The existence of such a system would imply that we wouldn't have this argument in the first place. Ah paradoxes :).

Pictures that changed the world

2007-06-25T00:42:00.001-07:00

Jan Rose Kasmir confronts the National Guard outside the Pentagon during the 1967 anti-Vietnam War march, 1967

Stunning collection of "stories best told via images that capture the political and cultural zeitgeist of our time." Check it out at: Magnum: Photos That Changed the World

Update: This set is even better. Do check it out.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

2007-06-16T14:04:00.000-07:00

Most of you must have heard of the "Six degrees of separation". Wikipedia explains it thus:

Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that, if a person is one "step" away from each person he or she knows and two "steps" away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is no more than six "steps" away from each person on Earth.

Social networking site Orkut lists the steps if they are less than 2, but that's as far as it goes. With hundreds of people in the "friends" list, there are millions of links between people. This makes the problem very expensive computationally to solve, and it's no wonder Orkut gives up at 2.

A related concept for movie roles is the Kevin Bacon number i.e. if actor X acted in some movie with actor Y who acted in a movie with Kevin Bacon, the Kevin Bacon number of X is 2. For e.g. Al Pacino has a Bacon number of 2 since:
Al Pacino was in Godfather: Part III, The (1990) with Eli Wallach
Eli Wallach was in Mystic River (2003) with Kevin Bacon

I stumbled upon a cool site by some folks at the The University of Virginia CS department called the The Oracle of Bacon at Virginia, which lets you calculate the Bacon number of any actor you can think of. The Advanced Search option lets you find the separation between any 2 actors not just Bacon. And since they get their data from IMDB, the site works with Indian and other international actors too :). Really cool. Check it out.

My generation

2007-06-08T23:32:00.001-07:00

This one's called "With apologies to The Who" :). Via xkcd.

Memorial day trip pics

2007-05-29T00:34:00.000-07:00

A few pics from the small roadtrip to Central/Eastern Washington that I went to on the Memorial Day weekend. Most of the pics were taken at Leavenworth, and some at the Grand Coulee Dam. Unfortunately no pictures rafting the Wenatchee, or jetskiing in Lake Chelan (need a waterproof camera for that).

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And a video of musicians playing a polka at Leavenworth.

A musical offering

2007-04-11T00:23:00.000-07:00

Washington Post did an interesting experiment when they had the great violinist Joshua Bell perform at a crowded metro station during the rush hour. Number of people who stopped and listened: 3. Number of people who passed by without giving a second look: More than 1000.

Read the article and watch the videos here. Smart, poignant piece of journalism. Definitely worthwhile.

It raises a number of important questions:

Is context important for a piece of music to be deemed great?
Do we have a tendency to associate familiarity with greatness? Do we tend to ignore the unfamiliar, no matter how good it is?
In this day and age are our priorities so messed up that we fail to appreciate beauty in life?

Tough questions these....

The history of violence

2007-04-02T18:28:00.000-07:00

This article by Steven Pinker confirms using facts and figures what many of us already know. That mankind on the whole is moving towards becoming less violent, and a more peaceful species.

Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

I suggest reading it in full.

The basic yardstick that we can use to evaluate such claims is to compare our generation with the generations before. Do you think that we are on the whole more peaceful than our ancestors? Barring a few notable exceptions, the answer is a resounding "Yes" almost everywhere in the world. Is there a convincing reason that this trend which has been going on for centuries is going to overturn? With nuclear weapons and more powerful technology to produce weapons of mass destruction, probably there is. But the more powerful and faster moving trend of globalization partially negates that threat too.

Somewhat similar to "The law of accelerating returns" for progress, the law of decreasing violence probably follows the inverse exponential trend. Continuously decreasing but never quite reaching zero.

My blog is a spam

2007-03-19T23:22:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, I found out that Blogger has blocked by blog as spam. I could not add posts anymore.

I had to go through

Step 1 - a CAPTCHA to prove that I am indeed a human, followed by
Step 2 - a wait period while some human actually verified that my blog is not spam.

Good...
Step 1 eliminates all automatically created blogs. Which also reduces the number of supervisors at Google who need to do step 2.
Step 2 eliminates all human generated blogs which are spam

But then the question bugging me is: Why the hell did their algorithm think this blog is a spam? I'm sure they have some probabilistic algorithm to detect splogs based on simple features. But what features do you think this blog has which could characterize it as a spam?

This is a case of a spam detection algorithm throwing up a False Postive. False positives should be a big no-no for any spam/splog detection system. The algorithm error should incline on the side of having some false negatives rather than false positives, for e.g. have some spam show up in your inbox rather than good mail going directly to your junk folder.

All this talk of false positives remind me of the statement that is the basis of judicial systems around the world: "It's better for ten guilty men to go free, than for one innocent man to be convicted.". Same concept, different context.

Us

2007-02-18T23:08:00.000-08:00

I like this image of the earth taken by one of the Voyager spacecrafts. From Carl Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Really puts things in a perspective, doesn't it?

P.S. "thousands of confident religions"?? Nicely put :)

Why can't I tag music?

2007-02-06T22:57:00.000-08:00

I wonder why songs are not yet 'taggable'. For the uninitiated, a 'tag' is a word or a short phrase describing an entity. For e.g. this blog post is tagged (labelled) with 3 tags: 'Tags', 'Music' and 'Technology' which describe what it talks about. Tags are now ubiquitous in the Web2.0 world. Photo applications like Flickr, Bookmark managers like Del.icio.us, Blog platforms like Blogger and Wordpress etc. use tags. Google is so sold on tags that it did away with folders altogether in Gmail and replaced it with tags (or 'label's as they call it).

Individual songs should be taggable. It would help a lot while playing music which transcends genres. For e.g. many of Eric Clapton songs can be tagged as Classic Rock or Soft Rock or Blues and should be played even if we select either of these 3 genres. Neither iTunes nor MediaMonkey (the app I use to play songs on my laptop) let me do this. Sucks big time.

Cool new way to search

2007-02-03T22:17:00.000-08:00

If you are like me, you use the search bar in Firefox at the top right to do your search. If you are like me, you also have a number of search engines which you use pretty frequently e.g. Google, Wikipedia, Weather.com, Amazon etc. etc.

Enter Yubnub. YubNub is a cool engine that allows you to search multiple websites for anything from one place. If defines shortcuts for each search engine e.g. If you want to search "Seattle" in Google all you type is "g Seattle" in YubNub. "wp Seattle" does a Wikipedia search. And it's pretty comprehensive. All the search engines I use, I could find shortcuts for. Just go "ls <search engine name>" to search among existing shortcuts. In the rare case that you can't find a shortcut for your favorite search engine, you can create a new shortcut in minute.

Now all you have to do is add Yubnub as your only Firefox search engine. Then go Ctrl+K and type on. It's gonna save you hundreds of clicks a day.

The shortest (flight) path problem

2007-01-19T15:56:00.000-08:00

While on the unbelievably long India flight, I was thinking about flight paths that planes take when they travel around the world. I stuck upon this easy way of finding the shortest path between any 2 cities in the world.

Most people believe that the shortest distance between any 2 cities in the world is via the path obtained by drawing a straight line between them on a map. Take for instance Seattle and Paris. Both lie roughly on the 48th latitude. Seattle around 120 E longitude, while Paris roughly near 0 i.e. Greenwich Meridian. So the fastest way to go from Seattle to Paris is to simply go east along the 48th latitude till we hit Paris. Right? Wrong..... The truth is, that unlike a map, the earth is not flat. It is a sphere (It is actually a geoid, but for the sake of argument here we will assume it is a nice symmetrical sphere).

So what is the shortest distance between any two points on the surface of a sphere? Here is a simple way of finding it out:
Draw a circle, centered at the center of the earth and passing through these two cities. The smaller arc of the circle joining the two points is the required shortest path. The 3d symmetry of a sphere dictates that this should be the right answer and I am not gonna take the pains of proving it :). It is true at the poles and true at the equator and you could possibly prove by induction that it is true every point in between.

Thus for any 2 cities in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest flight path curves northwards and vice versa for cities in the Southern Hemisphere. For cities on symmetrically opposite longitudes, e.g. Seattle (~120 W) and Dubai (~60 E), the shortest path passes through one of the poles (in this case, the North Pole).

Line Rider

2006-12-26T20:50:00.000-08:00

Many of you must have already played the super-addictive time-waster Line Rider. Too many people (myself included) have spent too much time trying to keep the little guy alive, bumping around in his sled. And if you need inspiration, Line Rider videos are all over YouTube.

So, without further ado, presenting one of the most awesome Line Rider video ever:

Hindsights and world-tours

2006-12-20T21:24:00.000-08:00

Stumbled upon a blog post titled 'The best blog posts of 2006'. A couple of them really caught my eye:

The first one is titled Hindsight, by Guy Kawasaki and it's his advice to young people.

The other is a quite famous YouTube video about a man who traveled the world and did a silly dance at every place he visited. Set to an amazing background soundtrack. Watch on:

2006 in review

2006-12-12T21:26:00.000-08:00

Jibjab is at it again with a funny review of the year 2006. Watch it below.

Nuckin' Futs - The JibJab Year in Review | Send To Friends | Funny Animations at JibJab

Damien Martyn retires

2006-12-07T21:58:00.000-08:00

Damien Martyn announced his retirement from test and one-day cricket today. Martyn was one of my favorite batsmen to watch when in full flow. His shots were a treat to watch, played with exquisite timing and lazy elegance. Very similar to the way Herschelle Gibbs and VVS Laxman play. Though he didn't possess the technique of a Dravid or even Mark Waugh, he made up for it with pure shotmaking skills. He made batting look easy, a lazy Sunday afternoon walk in the park.

I have practically given up watching cricket in the past couple of years, but I hope we have more like him, who make watching a whole day of cricket worth every moment.

Update: Now Warne also announced his retirement.

Convergence of technology

2006-12-05T22:28:00.000-08:00

Recently the President of India Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam gave a speech during the laying of foundation stone for the International Institute of Information Technology at Bhubaneswar. It is a remarkably clear and wide-ranging speech about emerging technologies and their impact on the world.

Some quotes:

The information technology and communication technology have already converged leading to Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Information Technology combined with bio-technology has led to bio-informatics. Now, Nanotechnology is knocking at our doors. It is the field of the future that will replace microelectronics and many fields with tremendous application potential in the areas of medicine, electronics and material science. When Nanotechnology and ICT meet, integrated silicon electronics, photonics are born and it can be said that material convergence will happen. With material convergence and biotechnology linked, a new science called Intelligent Bioscience will be born which would lead to a disease free, happy and more intelligent human habitat with longevity and high human capabilities.

Convergence of bio-nano-info technologies can lead to the development of nano robots. Nano robots when they are injected into a patient, my expert friends say, will diagnose and deliver the treatment exclusively in the affected area and then the nano robot gets digested as it is a DNA based product. Convergence of ICT, aerospace and nanotechnologies will emerge and revolutionize the aerospace industry. This technological convergence will enable building of cost effective low weight, high payload, and highly reliable aerospace systems, which can be used for inter-planetary transportation.

He talks about emerging sciences like bioinformatics, nanotechnology, alternative energy sources etc. and even goes into details of futuristic applications like Nanorobots, Gene Chip and Carbon Nanotubes. He goes on to mention Richard Feyman (referenced earlier here and here), Eric Drexler and CNR Rao as some of the pioneers of these fields. What struck me here is the technicality of a speech coming from the president of a country. Of course him formerly being a scientist helps.

He also makes a point which I find controversial:

[Economic prosperity] has to be complimented with the value systems and our five thousand years old Civilizational heritage which has genetically shaped the Indian people.

I think 5000 years is probably too less a time to genetically imbibe us with any kind of a "civilizational heritage" given then fact that in the past 5000 years we were anything but an isolated civilization. But then being the president of a country, I guess he has to infuse some nationalism into his speeches.

Read the full speech here.

All in all it's an amazing speech coming from the head of the state of any country. Sadly for all of us he is but a titular head.

Federer v Nadal, for the final time this year

2006-11-19T12:29:00.000-08:00

The setting was the semifinals at the season ending Master's Cup at Shanghai, the biggest tournament of the year outside of the 4 Grand Slams. It pits the top 8 players of the year against each other in a round-robin followed by the semis and finals.

Federer won 6-4, 7-5 in a match that was way more competitive than the scoreline suggests. It featured some ridiculous hitting from both the players, and some of the rallies were just out of this world. Especially the last 3-4 points of the last game with Nadal serving at 5-6 were just incredible, given the kind of pressure these guys were under.

I have said this before and will say it again: We are looking at the best tennis EVER played. Better than Sampras, Agassi, Rafter, Becker, Edberg, McEnroe, Lendl, Borg or Connors.

With this victory, Federer has won the last 2 matches against Nadal, after losing 5 consecutively before that. I can't wait for next season and Federer's quest for the French Open and a place in history as the greatest tennis player ever.

Here are the highlights.

P.S: Federer went on to blow away Blake 6-0, 6-3, 6-4 in the finals. As if anyone really had any doubts.

Milton Friedman no more

2006-11-16T20:46:00.000-08:00

One of the great economic theorists of the 20th century, Milton Friedman passed away. I leave you with one of his famous quotes:

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government.

Are you bright?

2006-11-06T23:32:00.000-08:00

Our nations, cultures, politics, genders, occupations, interests, and so on differ widely. However, we are generally “in sync” with one another because we share a worldview that is free from supernatural and mystical elements. We are set apart in a broad sense from those who have worldviews that embrace such elements, whether entities such as deities, or forces, or both. Most of us find our naturalistic worldview regarding “ultimate beliefs” marginalized in the society in which we live (perhaps utterly disparaged, or even proscribed). Our common interest is to work to in varied ways to change this situation for the better.

Does this describe you? Then you can be a "Bright". I think I am. So are some of the best minds in the world: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, James Randi, Steven Pinker among others. Are you one too?

The book of life

2006-10-22T23:42:00.000-07:00

In the beginning were the replicators. Their sole purpose of existence was to make copies of themselves. Survival was tough. The environment, the primordial soup was harsh.

As time went by, the replicators became more and more efficient. Some of them roped in the elements and developed effective ways of prolonged survival. Some others found strength in unity and formed extensive colonies of similar replicators. The colonies evolved into complex survival machines. The replicators controlled everything that went on in these survival machines. Survival was easy for the ones better designed, others slowly died out.

The quest for perfection continued. The replicators became sufficiently ingenious to build the most complex machine ever built. They built the "Brain". Deeply embedded in the survival machines, the brain created a process called "thought". Thought was a complex process, which lead to formation of other forms of replicators, such as the memes. They made the machines ignore their real masters, the replicators and made them worship the new ones, the memes and their derivatives. Chaos reigned. The machines misconstrued it as Order......

While my guitar gently weeps

2006-10-21T10:55:00.000-07:00

Check out this amazing ukulele (not guitar) rendition of George Harrison/Beatles' classic While my guitar gently weeps. Makes you wanna weep and all.

The pleasure of finding things out

2006-10-09T16:57:00.001-07:00

Here is an excellent interview with Richard Feynman (previously posted about him here), one of the great physicists and characters of the 20th century. This seems to be one of the interviews which lead to that magnificent book: Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman (which is high among my Librarything top rated books). The book is not too scientific, but is rather cheerful and humorous for the most part. A must read!!!

Anyways, I digress. Check this video out. Especially interesting are his views after the A-bomb explosions at Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the bombs which he helped develop.

Skydiving

2006-09-28T20:58:00.000-07:00

So I went skydiving over the weekend out in Shelton. It is an hour and half from Seattle on the edge of the Olympic National Park. I had been wanting to do it for some time now, but couldn't find anyone who was ready to skydie.... oops, I mean skydive.... with me.

For those of you who think its scary, believe me, it's not. It mindblowing. Well, when you are freefalling from 13,500 ft you have no idea how quickly the ground is rushing up to you. It's just like flying. Or being in a zero gravity environment (excluding the air resistance), whichever you prefer. That's the best part about in. Unfortunately the freefall is over very quickly, in less than a minute. But then the 4-5 minute parachute ride is not too bad either. Being a sunny clear day, the view was amazing and I could catch spectacular views of Mt Rainier, Mt St Helens, Mt Baker, Mt Adams, the Olympic Mountains, the Seattle bay and the Pacific ocean. Is there a place in US more naturally beautiful than Washington (when sunny ;))?

Bottomline, this is one of the things that you should do at least once in life. (That's coz doing it often is gonna burn a deep hole in your pocket)

Anyways, enough talk, here's the video & pics:

Pics: http://nikhilbd.zoto.com/galleries/skydiving/
Video:

Think different

2006-09-17T11:49:00.000-07:00

An amazing Apple ad from yesteryears. Inspirational. Click here

23

2006-09-16T02:03:00.000-07:00

Can you reach it? Kinda fun... click here
(Link via India Uncut)

Is Mumbai past its peak?

2006-08-20T22:32:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong, I love the city, I have lived most of my life here. But I can't help thinking that for Mumbai, the glory days are past it. There are a number of reasons for this and I will outline a few important ones:

Infrastructure: The first impression you get of the city is that it is overcrowded. There have been some positive steps taken lately with the Bandra-Worli sealink going strong and the Mumbai subway project underway. But considering the fact that Mumbai is filled to the brim, there is no great potential for growth. The only open spaces are far off from the city and hence weakly connected. Add to that the bloated property rates and this makes Mumbai unattractive for large corporations and multinationals to set their base at.

Technological growth: Technology is the new superpower. With technological advances just hitting the knee of an exponential growth trend, we are in for a technological revolution in the next few years. Unfortunately as mentioned above, due the infrastructure (or the lack of it) and less potential for growth, most of the technology companies (especially the multinationals) have kept away from Mumbai.

Weather patterns: Another reason is the unpredictable weather patterns that Mumbai has experienced lately and the inability of Mumbai's infrastructure to cope with it. This was seen during the heavy rains last year on July 26th and this year in early July. If the unpredictable rains are indeed due to global warming (hence human activities), we can only expect more in the years to come.

Political instability: The political scene hasn't been helpful at all with vote-bank politics ensuring that reforms occur only at a cosmetic level and before election times. Lack of political stability has lead to the ruling party systematically looting the treasury in the name of reforms. The bomb blasts and the looming presence of the underworld doesn't help either.

All these factors lead me to believe that the prime of Mumbai is past it. Unless some radical changes come about, twenty years down the line Mumbai will be just another Indian city sharing the spotlight with other cities like Bangalore , Hyderabad, Pune etc.

Every great city in the world experiences a peak after which it goes into a rut and then slowly fades into a has-been. Mumbai is at this peak, waiting slowly for the fall.

I sincerely hope I am wrong......

The truth we deny

2006-08-04T18:17:00.000-07:00

Link via here.

The car of the future

2006-07-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

Won't you just love to drive this car?

Home

2006-07-05T22:59:00.000-07:00

This is where I live in Mumbai: http://wikimapia.org/#y=19099547&x=72853228&z=18&l=0&m=a

What a site!!! Wikimapia is a wiki + maps, a Google maps mashup which anyone who visits the site can edit. You can mark your home, your school and all the important landmarks you have known and visited. So click away & Enjoy!!!

Another feather in the cap for user-generated content. It is changing the face of Internet for good, and boy it's happening quickly.

Heaven or hell

2006-06-26T23:31:00.000-07:00

This article from CNN speculates about our possibly exciting, possibly scary near-future. Lots of quotes from Ray Kurzweil, one of the most brilliant futurists out there and one of my favorite authors:

"Humanity is on the verge of an incredible future. Technologies that seem like science fiction are already becoming science fact as researchers develop innovations that will transform the very essence of what it is to be human.

"The pace of change is exponential, not linear," says inventor, entrepreneur, author, and futurist Ray Kurzweil. "So things fifty years from now will be very different. That's pretty phenomenal. It took us fifteen years to sequence HIV, we sequenced SARS in 31 days."

Nanotechnology, genetics and cybernetics will mean that we will become faster, stronger and more beautiful; we will live longer and banish disease; we will be more intelligent and quicker-witted with photographic memories and the ability to go days without sleep.

"We're doubling the power of computers every year for the same cost," says Kurzweil. "In 25 years, they'll be a billion times more powerful than they are today. At the same time we're shrinking the size of all technology, electronic and mechanical, by a factor of a hundred per decade, that's a hundred thousand in 25 years."

Kurzweil argues that the growth of computing power, miniaturization and increased technical prowess will turn the world into an incredible place -- free from the conflicts over resources and wealth that have plagued it and in the last century and almost led to our obliteration in the fires of global thermonuclear war.

That is, if you believe one particular school of thought.

Other, equally eminent, minds believe we are on the cusp of an incredible disaster -- possibly even our own extinction -- as the technology we are so rapidly giving birth to moves beyond us, and self-replicates, casting us aside or even exterminating us."

What kind of future do you envision? Where do we go from here?

Summertime

2006-06-16T00:13:00.000-07:00

Sports season is here in full swing. Lots of exciting stuff happening all around the world that you can tune to.

French Open is over and Rafa ruled all over it, again. Wimbledon is just around the corner. India-WI cricket test series is midway through, India coming very close to winning both the tests, but WI holding on to draws in the end. NBA finals between Dallas & Miami is tied 2-2. And the biggest event of them all, the World Cup of football (the one played with the foot) is well underway. Teams like Spain and Czech Republic are off to dream starts, while pre-tournament favorites like Brazil and Argentina have looked less promising.

So I am gonna make some predictions of my own about whats gonna happen in the next few weeks:
1. Fed-man wins Wimbledon. Neither Rafa nor Roddick make it to the finals. Nadal falls in the 3rd round.
2. India win the test series 1-0. They come close to losing the other test, but hold on.
3. Mavericks win 4-3. It is a tight contest till the very end.
4. Brazil wins!!!! OK so this one is a real toughie, and by the law of averages, Brazil is not winning this year, but hell it's my prediction.

BTW, ICC is considering Hawk-eye for LBW decisions. As I mentioned previously here, Hawk-eye for LBWs will not be exact. But the question we care about is: Will it be more correct that the human umpire?

Update: Spoke too early. Argentina just blasted Serbia and Montenegro 6-0.

Italian World Cup practice

2006-06-05T19:24:00.000-07:00

Watch and enjoy. :)

Mt Si

2006-05-25T21:16:00.000-07:00

Pics here

Quote of the year

2006-05-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

The two most important inventions of the last few centuries are the concept of a protected wilderness, and the concept of nonviolent resistance.

-Bill McKibben

From here

The greatest tennis match of 2006 (so far)

2006-05-14T13:02:00.000-07:00

The best player in the world on clay courts against possibly the greatest player ever. This time Rafael Nadal won 6-7 (0-7), 7-6 (7-5), 6-4, 2-6, 7-6 (7-5) on clay against Roger Federer in the final of the Rome Masters.

This was possibly the greatest match of the year (so far). At 5 hours and 5 minutes, it was the longest match of the year. With the win, Nadal equals Guillermo Vilas' record of 53 consecutive clay court wins. Barring a first round upset in his next tournament, he will go on to break it. You can find the highlights of the match here.

But with this one, Federer also proved that he is capable of going the distance with the best player in the world on clay courts. Every game they play, Federer is inching closer to matching Nadal on clay. Now I wouldn't be surprised if Federer actually wins against Nadal at the French Open and proves himself as the greatest tennis player... EVER.

Indians.... world beaters?

2006-04-29T23:58:00.000-07:00

Finishing off on "Guns, Germs, and Steel", I began wondering: why is it that Europeans and not Indians became world conquerors? Why did the Europeans sail their big ships and come to India and not vice versa. Why weren't Indians the one's to colonize the Indonesian islands or Australia the way Europeans colonized the Americas?

Come to think of it, 2000 years ago, India (and by India, I mean the Indian sub-continent) and Europe were very similar to each other. They were (are) roughly the same size. They had similar political structure (warring states), which should theoretically encourage similar patterns of innovation by competition.

So what went wrong?

Was it the rigid, socially ingrained caste system, which essentially isolated chunks of people into predefined roles which they could not break apart from? The Europeans came to adopt a single religion, Indians essentially had 4 (castes). Was it the agricultural self-sufficience, which meant that Indians essentially never had to look for greener pastures? Did the sedentary life leave Indians under-prepared when the Mughal conquerors and eventually the Europeans came? Most probably the answer lies in a combination of this and a number of other social/political/environmental factors.

I guess Indians had made their peace with the world, way before the world had even heard the term.

Mumbai in a nutshell

2006-04-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

Beautiful pic, aint this one?

(Click to enlarge). Pic via here

There is plenty of room at the bottom

2006-04-15T12:49:00.000-07:00

Even more today than in 1959. It's only a matter of how fast we can dig......

Here's the seminal speech by Richard Feynman about nanotechnology, a field which is about to explode today, almost 50 years after the vision.

Italians vs Europeans

2006-04-07T23:16:00.000-07:00

Could easily be _____ (fill in your nationality here) vs Rest of World. Funny flash video comparing Italian people with the rest of Europeans. Now does it ring a bell somewhere?

Link via here

The Top 15 Skylines in the World

2006-03-28T22:44:00.000-08:00

The Top 15 Skylines in the World. Seattle is No 15 :). Nice panoramic photographs in the article.

Hawk-eye

2006-03-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

Today I saw the Hawk-eye technology in action in tennis for the first time, in the game between Federer and Clement. Now players can challenge upto 2 line calls in a set (3 if there is a tie-breaker). I think it is a cool technology given the fact that we get the results right away (less than 10 seconds). And it should also reduce player tantrums on disputable line calls. If you are not happy, challenge the call. Doodh ka doodh, pani ka pani right away. But that also leaves the budding McEnroes going "You cannot be serious" :)

There were talks of using hawkeye for LBWs in cricket. But that one's a bad idea, as unlike tennis, in cricket you have to predict the path of the ball after it hits the pads. And since we still do not know the exact physics behind the swing of the ball, any technique will essentially be non-deterministic. There are just too many variables for it to be an exact system. Also it will introduce unnecessary delays in the game as the third umpire will have to make decisions in this case.

Technology is useful... but we should take care it does not make us stupid.

Have a nice day

2006-03-12T11:41:00.000-08:00

Pics here

Imagine, no countries

2006-03-08T21:13:00.000-08:00

Here is the natural progression of human political structures through the ages.

A million years ago humans lived as hunter-gatherers. We foraged & hunted for food. Humans lived in tribes, each tribe going up to a maximum of 50 to 100 people.
Sometime around 10,000 ago, we had advanced to an agricultural lifestyle. Agriculture gave humans more control over their food supply, required settled occupation of territory and encouraged larger social groups with the emergence of towns & city-states.
From couple of thousands to hundreds of years ago, the world progressed to having kingdoms & territories. Mostly imperialistic, a king or queen ruled over a certain territory exercising absolute control.
Kingdoms evolved into nations. With a few exceptions, most of the present day nations are a collection of kingdoms we saw in stage 3. A perfect example would be that of India.

What’s next? Following the simple progression, here’s what next:

Some years from now we will have even larger political groups. Power could be distributed among continents or some other larger divisions. We are seeing this effect already in some cases such as the European Union.
And very soon after that, we will have the world as a single political unit. Of course, it sounds absurd and preposterous at this time, but the time will come.

We can see an exponentially decreasing time span through stages 1-4. So we can really expect to breeze through stages 5 & 6, possibly in this century itself. Of course we may have achieved Singularity till then, which might put all of this in an entirely different context.

If countries themselves are so ephemeral, most of them not more than a hundred years old, where does this put concepts like “pride for my country” & “greatest country in the world” & “country with a rich culture”?

Vancouver

2006-03-06T01:01:00.000-08:00

My Vancouver pics.

My Web 2.0

2006-03-02T00:57:00.000-08:00

With a whole slew of Web 2.0 sites (next generation, social, interactive, "AJAX"y sites) coming up by the day, here are the ones I frequently use. A couple of them are very popular, the rest not that commonly used. And I am not including obvious ones like gmail & Live maps

Bloglines: RSS Aggregator. All my news, blogs, photo-feeds, weather at one place. Probably my most visited site of the day. Cons: The site could do with a visual makeover.
Rememberthemilk.com: It's a very cool, online todo list. Very helpful since I don't have to bother remembering chores anymore. It has a whole lot of keyboard shortcuts which makes using it a breeze.
del.icio.us: Bookmarks manager. Anyone adding sites to browser bookmarks (IE Favorites or Firefox Bookmarks) will know how quickly it becomes bloated & unwieldy. With del.icio.us, your bookmarks are stored online & you can associate tags with them, so storing & searching them becomes so much easier. You can also search through other people's bookmarks & check out the most popular ones.
Zoto.com: Online photo storage. It doesn't have the upload restrictions that Flickr has. It also has an option to view full size pics which most of the other sites lack. Other features include a multiple photo uploading tool, tagging & feeds.
Librarything.com: A social book manager. For each book you add to your catalog you can add one or several tags that describe the book. You can then compare tags with other Library Thing users, search across tags, books, authors, see who else has read the books you have, which books are most popular among users etc.

Which ones do you find cool & useful?

It's getting funnier....

2006-02-23T11:23:00.000-08:00

Ganguly dropped from the Nagpur test. Brace yourself for the backlash, the obituaries and the unasked-for opinions from journalists, ex-cricketers and maybe even politicians all over the Indian media.

Why suddenly don't I even care?

BEST goes digital

2006-02-22T22:04:00.000-08:00

Just saw that BEST (local bus transport in Mumbai) has a website now. They have all the routes, maps, fares, timings etc. and also have a cool history page. Now all that is left is an online bus tracking system.

Staying on the topic of Mumbai, here is a nice aerial view of the heart of Mumbai. Click to enlarge & view the details. Link via Nandan.

Leading the way

2006-02-20T18:22:00.000-08:00

Vancouver has Prius shuttles......

and Prius cabs

So are Microsoft campus shuttles at their headquarters at Redmond. Very noble indeed. Thank you for doing your bit for the environment.

End of an era

2006-02-02T22:28:00.000-08:00

It's the end of an era: Western Union Stops Sending Telegrams. Soon we will see an end to telephones as they are replaced by mobiles & VOIP phones. Then CDs & DVDs & their kind. The next few years will kill off most of the technology we grew up with.....

Quoth the Matrix:
Neo: It's impossible...!
Bane/Smith: Not impossible. Inevitable.

More sports stuff...

2006-01-22T19:03:00.000-08:00

The Seattle Seahawks killed the Carolina Panthers 34-14 to win the NFC championship game. Now history and Superbowl XL await. Standing in the way are the giant killing Pittsburgh Steelers....

Australian Open is underway at Melbourne. As always Federer is on a roll. And none of his main competitors remain. Nadal & Safin backed out due to injury, while Roddick & Hewitt crashed out. Now I can see just two tough matches for Federer: the next one against Tommy Haas, who is capable of pulling up some surprises; and David Nalbandian, who is one of the only three guys to defeat Federer in 2005 (in the season-ending Masters).

On the other hand the women's draw is pretty open. Any one among Davenport, Henin-Hardenne, Clijsters, Sharapova can come through and win. Go Maria!!! Or will it be the "Swiss Miss" Martina Hingis who's making a comeback? Hmm, unlikely, but if it happens it would be like a dream comeback for her.

Skiing is fun!!! I tried it today and WOW!!! If you are up for some thrill, you should definitely try it. But be prepared to take a fall or two along the way :).

Courageous fellas

2006-01-19T01:20:00.000-08:00

It's a bit dated.... But you gotta admire Rahul Dravid for leading from the front opening the innings against Pak in the 1st test. According to India Uncut:

Turns out [Rahul Saurav] were arguing about the opening position, but not in the ways earlier speculated. Ganguly was upset because he was apparently told only on the morning of the match that he would have to open, and he said that he should have been told about it and given time to prepare. Dravid then apparently offered to open himself. And so on.

Now that's something.....

Also showing great courage was Graeme Smith in the last test against Aussies. SA were down 1-0 in the series when he set the Aussies 287 to win in 76 overs in the last innings of the last test. Now of course his decision to declare at that point looked stupid after the Aussies ambled to another victory. But I think 1-0 is as bad as 2-0. A loss is a loss. A 1-1 result would have proved a lot of things about the character of the SA team and I thought it was an extremely brave decision, a decision deserving respect as opposed to the ridicule it eventually received.

And congrats to Nandan for winning the Indibloggies award for the best Marathi blog for his blog Marathi Sahitya. Now I can brag that I have a friend who is an A list, award winning blogger. :)

My car

2006-01-16T23:35:00.001-08:00

Finally picked up my new Prius today. Too cool!!! Time to save the world is here.

Snow Art

2006-01-08T12:58:00.000-08:00

Click to enlarge:

Courtesy : Calvin and Hobbes Snow Art Gallery

Free will..... or the lack of it

2006-01-05T00:17:00.000-08:00

What do you mean when you say that you have free will? That you did something out of your own volition. Are we capable of independent thought?

From childhood we are influenced by a number of factors. By our parents, by our friends, by our sphere of such influencers. All the decisions we take all through our life are influenced by these influencers.

So the question is: How much of the decisions we make, are our own? How much is free will? Or is there any? Does the concept of free will only exist in our minds so that we can feel good about ourselves? Do we have any individuality of our own? Or are we a sum of individualities we have learned through our lives, each of such individualities also a sum of some other individualities, ours being one of them.

Why do most people in the world follow the religion of their parents? Why are people willing to follow the leaders of their nations, ready to kill other people to defend their "country"? Why do we take similar decisions that our influencers took and then say that it was "my own" decision? Think about all the beliefs you have ever held in life. Aren't these beliefs that of your influencers rather then your own? Where is your free will? How much difference really exist between you and the people you call 'blind followers'?

A few pics

2006-01-01T23:42:00.000-08:00

A few snaps from my California/Arizona/Nevada trip here. For those of you who are tech-savvy, here are the feeds for my pics: RSS, Atom. (Courtesy zoto.com)

The Wikipedia Controversy

2005-12-22T01:24:00.000-08:00

A recent online phenomenon has been Wikipedia: the free online wiki/encyclopedia. What makes Wikipedia different from all other online encyclopedias is the fact that it is also a wiki i.e. users can edit entries and add new entries whenever they find that the information currently displayed is inadequate.

As a result of this user-generated content Wikipedia is the number 1 online encyclopedia with over 4 million articles in over 200 languages (including most of the Indian languages). If you need specific information about any topic, Wikipedia is where you go to. I personally use Wikipedia much more than Google or any other search engine. (Well actually answers.com which gives me Wikipedia+other results).

There has been a recent controversy over a certain article by John Seigenthaler Sr., an American journalist who's Wikipedia entry had some erroneous and potentially damaging information. All this controversy raised the issue about the "correctness" of Wikipedia & whether it should be banned.

I think that this controversy is pretty stupid. User-generated content is what gives Wikipedia its depth, its flexibility, its sheer volume of information about every conceivable topic on the planet. It you take away the power of editing content from the users, then that will be the end of Wikipedia as we know it. In fact a recent study by the journal Nature concluded that Wikipedia is as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. The errors in the entries seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

Of course all this raises the issue of how do we define "correctness" and what do you mean by "true". But I'll reserve that controversy for some other day :), the caveat here being whatever controversy we raise up always ends up with an unanswerable question at the end.

P.S.: I'm off to San Diego on a holiday, so no entry for a while :(

Da Vinci Code

2005-12-15T22:43:00.000-08:00

Following up on the geekiest review of the book possible, the Da Vinci Code movie trailer is out. Coming from Ron Howard & starring Tom Hanks & Ian McKellen, this one will be good. The trailer looks great, but then most trailers look great. The plot of the story begged for a movie and here it is. Here is the movie site which is cool too.

Boy, you just dropped the World Cup

2005-12-04T00:26:00.000-08:00

Finally, Steve Waugh admits that he never said these very famous words to Herschelle Gibbs when he dropped Waugh's catch at short mid-wicket.

Here is the text from the Inside Cricket interview with Steve:

Did you actually say to Herschelle Gibbs "You just dropped the World Cup" in 1999?
No, I wasn't quite that clever. I wish I could claim that and the myth is sort of perpetuated and I'm going to break it a bit but it wasn't quite that, I just said: "Look, do you realise you've just cost your team the game." We were having a battle at the time and Herschelle is a fantastic player. I gave him a bit of stick when he was batting and of course he got 120. When you've done that you've got to cop it when you get back in and he gave me a gob full all the way through and I got to 56 and he dropped the catch and he walked past me at the end of the over and . . . well we had to say something.

Finally this will end the countless arguments I had with my friends that he never could have said these words (even a born sledger like Waugh) in that situation (semis of the World Cup with Aussies on the backfoot). So anyone who argued with me, I TOLD YOU SO :P

Music Links

2005-11-30T21:52:00.000-08:00

A cool video clip where all the four members of Pink Floyd talk about their Dark Side of the Moon album (courtesy brain-damage.co.uk). It's been nearly 25 years since John Lennon was murdered (Dec 8th, 1980). Here is a nice article about the legend that was John Lennon. Also here's an insightful interview of U2's Bono.

O God, where at thou?

2005-11-26T13:11:00.000-08:00

What is God? Does there exist an all powerful entity, who controls everything that happens? What came first - Man or God?

Well, look around you. Do you see anything in your immediate vicinity that seems to be divinely controlled? Does anything that you hear in the news seem to be a doing of a superbeing? Or is it just human activities influenced by the laws of nature acting the way they should act. Most so called "miracles" are either coincidences or flukes. Somewhere on the edges of a (0,1) range of mathematical probabilities for all possible occurrences. There can never be a 0 nor a perfect 1. Most of our everyday events lie in the middle of this range & so are not attributed as miracles.

So does this mean that there is no such thing as god, is there no superbeing influencing our lives? But as Carl Sagan has said "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".

So if there exists a superbeing, what exactly does he do? Does he go about sowing seeds of life on different planets and then watches them grow into thinking beings? Or does he create universes as points in a hyperdimensional plane and allows them to wax & wane. Does this superbeing have his own theories of god? Are there multiple levels of superbeings, each god having his own god. If so, who's the ultimate god? And who created that ultimate god? Was it just chance, some random occurrence?

I like to think the inherent randomness in everything, the chaos, as superpowerful, as god. It is what creates all our miracles and all our mundane. It is what drives evolution, thus it is what drives life as we know it. It is what leaves questions unanswered, which compels us to think, which drives us to progress.

All said and done, I like to imagine some being on some planet far, far away searching for this own god, making theories no one of us can even imagine............

P.S. Comments, opinions, counterarguments welcome.

Graeme Smith's diary.

2005-11-20T12:34:00.000-08:00

Gotto link this one. Too funny. Graeme Smith's India tour diary part 1. Tongue-in-cheek. :)

Australian Pink Floyd (Clips uploaded....)

2005-11-15T17:49:00.000-08:00

Went for an Aussie Pink Floyd concert at Seattle Center yesterday. It is a Pink Floyd tribute band acclaimed for their honest reproductions of Pink Floyd numbers.

They started off with Breathe, then played a lot of PF numbers ending with Run Like Hell. They even played some relatively less popular songs like Fletcher Memorial Home and Have a Cigar, which was good. Here is the list of songs they played (though not in the original order. I may have missed a couple):

breathe
time
money
astronomy domine
us and them
learning to fly
shine on...
wish u were
pigs (3 different ones)
another brick in the wall
comfortably numb
have a cigar
fletcher memorial
brain damage
run like hell

They had visual effects like the circular visual display showing weird (read subtle :) ) videos and they also had props like the inflatable pig and the inflatable rabbit, like the original PF. All in all a pretty amazing experience, the closest you can get to hearing the actual Pink Floyd in concert. Wondering if any Pink Floyd tribute band can perform Careful with that axe, Eugene. Now that would be a real tribute band.

Here's the link to the pictures, and I took some clips from my camera which are here, here, here and here. (I was sitting at the right side of the auditorium so the view is real crappy :( ).

Total cricket???

2005-11-12T18:04:00.000-08:00

India thrashed Sri Lanka 6-1 in cricket, one of the most comprehensive series victories for the Indian team in the recent past. Also one of the very few series I was able to watch live in the past 2 years.

What was noticable was the amount of experimentation that the coach Greg Chappell did. The batting lineup was different for every match. For e.g. we had 5 different players coming in at no. 3 - Pathan, JP Yadav, Dhoni, Yuvraj and Sehwag. The question is - Is this experimentation a means of finding the best player for a spot, or Is there some sort of a permenance to this unpredictability.

Isn't this akin to 'total football'? Total football was a strategy implemented by the Dutch football (soccer) team in the 70s in which every player was capable of playing (and played) in every position on the field (barring the goalie :) ). It was a huge success, as the team reached unprecedented heights, reaching the World Cup finals twice consecutively in 74 & 78 (they never reached the finals before or after that).

'Total cricket' would be something very refreshing, something which the stale game of One day cricket desperately needs....

Soft’war’s??

2005-11-03T20:34:00.000-08:00

With Yahoo releasing the new Yahoo maps, it seems like a three horse race for the dominance of the web. Microsoft vs. Yahoo vs. Google. All 3 are developing similar applications looking for more and more people to use their products. Here are my preferences in various categories they are feuding:

1. Search Engines: Google wins hands down. Both MSN & Yahoo claim to be developing “Google-beaters”.
2. Maps/Local Search: The new Yahoo Maps (Beta) is just kickass. But I couldn’t find where the satellite map is. Anyways it’s bye bye Google Maps for the time being. MSN Virtual Earth comes a distant third.
3. Email: Gmail seems to be the best right now. (I still use Yahoo though :) ). But from what I have heard both the new Windows Live Mail and the new Yahoo mail (both almost ready) are far more better. Look out for them very very soon.
4. Instant Messenger/Chat Client: MSN messenger is the one I use the most. MSN & Yahoo are going to collaborate for a common IM mid-2006. Then what is Windows Live Messenger? I’ve never used Google Talk so can’t really comment.
5. Windows Live seems to be much sleeker than either My Yahoo or Google Reader in the race for the best start-page/RSS aggregator. But we’ll have to wait and see how it shapes up when it goes fully functional.

There are rumors about Google Office and how cool that is gonna be. Also both Google & Microsoft are serious about the book search. So the question is fairly unresolved. WHO WILL WIN THE WEB?

BTW, LIVE is opposite of EVIL. Hence Microsoft = Google. ;)

That’s my geeky post for the day. Adios…..

Seven and Oh

2005-10-31T23:26:00.000-08:00

“A win is a win. A loss is a loss.
But no matter what, you better come with it or don't come at all,
Because it's 90 feet to first no matter where home is.”

Ended the fall cricket league yesterday, undefeated - seven wins no losses. We literally dominated the rest of the teams, and I ended up as the top scorer for the team :). Of course, it helps having a good team in a sub-standard league ;).

India on fire, "three and O" and Pathan and Dhoni have come good up the order. Great going.... Gibbs and Boje pull out of the Indian tour. This really sucks. I thought that I would get to watch Herschelle Gibbs bat after a really long time, but it wasn't to be. Gibbs is one of the most amazing players to watch when in flow, and the balance he has when he plays his shots is simply unsurpassed. He rates very highly among my "very watchable" list of batsmen, others being Damien Martyn, Sachin, Ponting, and lately Graeme Smith and Andrew Strauss.

Delhi bomb blasts. Sad... When is this going to end.... Terrorism is hurting Pakistan much more than India. Hope they realize this sooner rather than later. Of course I might be misinformed or biased when I say this.........

A nice link - The world according to Jose Mourinho, the manager of Chelsea and the self-proclaimed "The Chosen One".

Underdogs

2005-10-25T18:56:00.000-07:00

The "second team" from the "second city" are the champions of baseball. Today the Chicago White Sox took the World Series 4-0, by defeating Houston Astros. After years of being overshadowed by the more popular Chicago Cubs, they have finally achieved the ultimate.

Who would have put money on the White Sox at the beginning of the season? They came out of relative obscurity to win the World Series. That said, this has been the year of the underdogs, the unknowns. Who would have put money on Liverpool to win the Champions league? On England winning the Ashes? On Alonso winning the F1 drivers championship? On MSN search beating Google? (Oops, that one's for the future :) )

Anyway, here's a clip of how the gods deliver. And Graeme Smith's Super Series tour diary spoof (Part 1 & Part 2) make for a real funny read.

Asha for education

2005-10-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

Asha for education is a charity for the education of underprivileged children in rural India. A friend of mine, Pravin is running a marathon for Team Asha in New Jersey. I urge everyone to help the noble cause. Here is the info about the marathon and here's Pravin's page regarding the same. Of course you can donate to any of the runners taking part in the event. And if you work for any of these companies, your employer will match your contribution penny to penny. Pravin has a blog on the marathon here, but I'd suggest he write more about the charity & the cause rather than his daily running log.

Grand Prix

2005-10-15T23:43:00.000-07:00

Why MotoGP kicks F1's ass:
..coz there is more action happening on the track
..coz there are more overtaking maneuvers happening every lap than the 2/3 maneuvers which happen in an entire F1 race
..coz bikes are much cooler than cars
..coz the "doctor" Valentino Rossi is much more clinical than any Schumacher/Räikkönen /Alonso
..coz it is infinitely more edge-of-the-seat thrill than F1
..coz the driver’s skill is a more important factor than which car you drive
..coz it is much cleaner environmentally

Then why is F1 more popular around the world? Is it cause people are inherently stupid & just watch what the networks promote more?

P.S. - I am writing this while watching Chinese GP, so yeah, I do watch F1 occasionally.

And good luck George Weah (football great/world footballer of the year 1995), a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. You are a true winner.

Where do we go from here?

2005-10-12T22:55:00.000-07:00

"We know what we are, but know not what we may become"
- William Shakespeare

Ray Kurzweil:
Yesterday I attended a talk by Ray Kurzweil, a visionary in the field of Artificial Intelligence and a pioneer in technologies for speech and character recognition. The talk was about his new book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. The guy made some pretty interesting claims about where we are headed in terms of AI. He believes around 2030, we will be successful in building machines which will be able to replicate all the possible aspects of a human brain (will pass the Turing test too) and pretty soon go past it. No, this is not a trashy sci-fi movie story. His findings are based on very convincing arguments about the exponential growth of complexity and intelligence since the evolution of life. A very exciting and scary concept.

I am halfway through his earlier book, The Age of Spiritual Machines and I must say it is really overwhelming. None of his extrapolations seem out of hand. They seem to be simple extensions to the technological progress made so far. The book is pretty complete and exhaustive in a scientific perspective. I remember being similarly awed when I read Carl Sagan's Cosmos (which is an absolute must read for anyone and everyone who has cleared 12th grade. If you haven't read it yet, all I can say that is you haven't yet looked at life the way it is meant to be looked at.)

Stephan Wolfram:
On the topic of REALLY smart guys, I remember another talk I attended back at Rutgers, that of Stephen Wolfram, about his New Kind of Science. In the book, Wolfram proposes his fundamentally new theory explaining the Universe (or God, whichever way you see it). The main theme of his theory is that everything in the Universe - the matter, the energy, the forces, evolution, life, the transience, all can be explained using a very few number of simple patterns. A few simple patterns arranged differently lead to immensely complex systems. A parallel theory is an entirely more courageous and difficult thing to propose, but Wolfram does it with amazing lucidity. I don't believe his theory is widely accepted among traditional physicists, but then it could very well be the case of a genius not being recognized in his time.

Kudos to those brilliant minds who dare to dream.....

Where have the bowlers gone?

2005-10-05T01:07:00.000-07:00

It stuck me the other day. Where have all the classy bowlers gone?

Compared to the mid-90s, consider the number of match-winning bowlers the top 7 teams in the world now have:

Australia:
Then: McDermott, McGrath, Warne
Now: (Still) McGrath, Warne

SA:
Then: Donald, DeVilliers, A young fast Pollock
Now: A clearly underperforming Pollock

India:
Then: Kumble, (Srinath ??)
Now: (Pathan ??)

SL:
Then: Murali, Vaas
Now: Murali, Vaas

WI:
Then: Ambrose, Walsh
Now: none

Pak:
Then: Wasim, Waqar, Mushtaq, Saqlain
Now: Shoaib (Chucker)

England:
Then: Gough, Caddick
Now: Harmison, Flintoff (Flash in the pan types)

Most teams either have their old stars still chugging it out or have lost their bowling strengths completely (esp. SA & WI). I believe one-day cricket with its flat pitches, obsession with 300+ scores and a overall batsman oriented approach is the main reason for this decline. Good young bowlers are being smashed all over the park by mediocre batsmen. ICC will have to take definite steps to remedy this problem, which would seriously affect cricket enthusiasm in the long run.

On a similar note, check out Iqbal, a refreshingly nice movie directed by Nagesh Kukunoor. A great Hindi movie, for a change. Guess what? It is about a bowler.

(Too many blog entries on cricket......But I thought this one was worth it)

Another One Bites The Dust

2005-10-02T12:07:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of a special day.........

Another One Bites The Dust (Queen)

Steve walks warily down the street,
with the brim pulled way down low
Ain't no sound but the sound of his feet,
machine guns ready to go

Are you ready,
Are you ready for this
Are you hanging on the edge of your seat
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat

Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
And another one gone, and another one gone
Another one bites the dust
Hey, I'm gonna get you too
Another one bites the dust

How do you think I'm going to get along,
without you, when you're gone
You took me for everything that I had,
and kicked me out on my own

Are you happy, are you satisfied
How long can you stand the heat
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
To the sound of the beat

Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
Another one bites the dust
There are plenty of ways you can hurt a man
And bring him to the ground
You can beat him
You can cheat him
you can treat him bad and leave him
When he's down
But I'm ready, yes I'm ready for you
I'm standing on my own two feet
Out of the doorway the bullets rip
repeating the sound of the beat

And they lived happily ever after.....

2005-09-27T22:04:00.000-07:00

Ganguly & Chappell finally decided that they must bury their differences "in the interests of Indian cricket". This is a historic moment for Indian cricket, the chronicles of which should be etched in gold.

Now we have a team which will definitely win the World Cup 2007. We have a captain who is in tremendous batting form, the mere mention of whom strikes terror in the heart of pace bowlers around the world. We have a team packed with consistent performers, with amazing fitness levels. And we have a coach who has an unprecedented success rate in his previous coaching assignments. There are no egos, and every member puts his team before his individual opinions and who will support the coach and captain come what may.

And of course we have a very efficient and supportive board, with no infighting, and which only cares about taking Indian cricket to unprecedented heights.

All hail the champions of the world!!!

The Chappell-Ganguly saga

2005-09-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

Lots has been said about the rift between the coach & captain. So it seems one of the two has to pack his bags before we can actually start playing.

Personally I would love to see Ganguly go. I never thought he was a good captain, and of late he was batting pathetically; he didn't even merit a place in a Ranji side. Ganguly sprang into popularity as an extremely talented batsman, an off-side god, and had an amazing one-day and test run. It took some time for other teams to find his weak spots, but once they did they just latched on to them. And Ganguly crumbled....

He was a bad example as a captain. He was by far the worst fielder in the team. Not only was he unfit, he also lacked the commmitment to fielding that a captain should have. I firmly believe the reason India did well under his captaincy was more due to the emergence of a new breed of young talented players (Sehwag, Pathan, Kaif, Khan etc.) than his captaincy skills. I believe with Dravid as captain, we could have reached even greater heights.

If you think the problem lies with Chappell, read this to check out the problems John Wright had lately with the Ganguly camp. Any rationally thinking player would have agreed with Chappell's suggestion that the best XI does not feature a certain India player whose test average in the past year and half (before the Zim tour) is 33.84, one-day average is 29.66 and without a century in either form of the game.

Of course we will have to accept whatever decision the corrupt BCCI takes in this matter....

Global warming

2005-09-20T15:52:00.000-07:00

A storm hit the east coast of India & Bangladesh. Check out the news on BBC and Times of India. Also a fresh storm threatens New Orleans, stalling the ongoing relief efforts. Every other day there is a new storm wreaking havoc somewhere in the world. Tsunamis, Mumbai floods, Katrina.... the list goes on.

It seems that the number & intensity of natural disasters has increased steadily over the past 35 years. Many scientists argue that it is due to global warming caused by an increased greenhouse effect - a byproduct of the human "civilization". Check this article out.

Greenhouse effect is what maintains the temperature of the earth at steady levels. The presence of water vapour and gases like Carbon dioxide, methane & Nitrous oxide in the earth's atmosphere, traps the outgoing heat reflected off the earth's surface. Without the greenhouse gases, the earth would have been another Mars - cold and lifeless. But the recent human pollutants have lead to an increase in the greenhouse gases, leading to global warming and threatening the ecological balance. If it's true, expect the rate of natural disasters to escalate in the coming years making life tougher for us.

Our lives are so intricately dependent on the cause of these pollutants (cars, industries, daily luxuries), that we cannot stop the emissions but for a drastic change in our everyday life. With the world being ruled by major corporations in a cutthroat competition with each other, I don't see much chance. Tough times lie ahead for the future generations, unless the people act quicker.

Agent Smith to Morpheus (The Matrix):
"Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure."

Bodyline

2005-09-14T23:31:00.000-07:00

I stumbled upon the famous television series back when I was a kid - Bodyline : It's just not cricket. Yup, the serial about the infamous 1932/33 Bodyline series between England and Australia. The story of 3 individuals: The greatest batsman of all time - Don Bradman, the fastest bowler in the world - Harold Larwood and most importantly about the most hated man in cricket, the infamous English captain Douglas Jardine.

Guess who plays Jardine? Hugo Weaving. Yup Agent Smith from the Matrix trilogy (if you ask me, the real show stealer of the movie. He also played Elrond, the elf king in LOTR trilogy).

For the uninitiated, bodyline was a tactic devised by Jardine where the bowler bowled short and on the batsman's body. The fielders were then concentrated close to the batsman on the leg-side. With a really quick bowler like Larwood, it is virtually impossible to hit the ball on the off-side. Many of the batsmen ended up getting injured, being hit on the body. Most of the Aussie batsmen had no answer to this tactic. Even the great Bradman had a much lower batting average compared to his lofty standards (56.57 compared to his overall average of 99.94). Back in those days this aggressive tactic was "just not cricket".

The TV series is not technically sound (The wicketkeeper is shown standing up to Larwood, the pace bowlers bowl slow, flighted deliveries and a lot of similar bloopers) but still makes for a great watch, just to know the way the game was played back then.

More info on bodyline here.

Living legends...... (on the losing side, sadly)

2005-09-12T20:40:00.000-07:00

So Federer got Agassi in 4. 1 set more than I had predicted. Thanks to an amazing fighting effort by the 35 year old Agassi. Agassi played for his life in the 2nd and 3rd sets, but still fell short of THE GOD.

Agassi might probably retire at the end of the year. What a ride it has been for him. After turning pro in 1986 he played in the big league for 20 years. In a sport where an average player's career lasts for 10 odd years, 20 years is just mind-boggling. I remember the first time I heard about Agassi was back in 90 French Open finals. Andre Agassi vs Andres Gomez. Agassi lost that one. Then again one year later to Jim Courier. Then in 92 he defeated Goran Ivanisevic in an epic 5-set Wimbledon final and really burst into the real big league.

One of the reasons why Agassi did not win more Grand Slams (8), is the fact that he was in the same era as the great Pete Sampras. Agassi was good, but Sampras was even better. At the peak of his career he had to encounter the booming game of Pistol Pete. Their rivarly was legendary. I guess Agassi must be the guy with the most number of Grand Slam final appearances.

Hats off to the great Andre Agassi. Hope he retires now, when he is at the top....

----------------------------------------

An even bigger legend in terms of impact on the sport is Shane Warne. True, England finally won the Ashes and deserve all the accolades showered upon them. But at age 36, Warne took 40 wickets at an average of 19.92 to extend his lead as the greatest wicket-taker of all times. To put things into perspective, the next highest wicket-taker on either side was Andy Flintoff with 24 wickets. Simply put, Warne is the greatest spinner I have ever seen. He is single-handedly responsible for reviving the lost art of leg-spin bowling and giving faith to spinners all over the world that it is not all about bowling fast.

Now there is news that he might retire. End to another amazing roller-coaster career. The "ball of the century" to dismiss Mike Gatting, his problems with weight, his escapades, his steroid related ban, his amazing comeback and his race with Murali for the world's highest wicket taker, it has all been just one hell of a ride for him. If you ask me he was the number one reason for the Australian dominance in both test and one-day cricket the past few years(McGrath was 2 & Steve Waugh 3)

As Gilli oft says - Bowling Shane...........

Tennis updates

2005-09-10T21:51:00.000-07:00

So it's gonna be Federer vs. Agassi for the US open. Federer won against Hewitt today in 4 sets. That's the 1st time he has lost a set against Hewitt in 5 matches. This makes it 9 successive wins over Hewitt for him dating back as far as Australian open 2003.

Do you know against which other player does Federer have a long winning streak? Andre Agassi. Federer has a 7 game winning streak against Agassi, dating back even further: 2002. Yup, Agassi hasn't beaten Federer since 2002.

Today Agassi metioned during commentry: "One of the strengths of Federer which not many people are aware of, is his return of serve. He just gets a lot of those balls back in". True, not many people are aware of it....

Agassi has played 3 back to back 5-setters and a tough 4-setter before that. This at 35 should really have taken its toll on him. So tomorrow technically it should be a whitewash. But we cannot forget one important factor: crowd support. The Yanks will be totally supporting Andre, especially considering the fact that this may be his last year here.

Anyways, all said and done, I predict Federer wins tomorrow in 3 sets...

Also today, Kim Clijsters won her 1st US open and her 1st grand slam destroying Mary Pierce 6-3. 6-1 in an hour. Sweet victory for Clijsters who had earlier lost in the finals of 4 grand slam tournaments (FR 01, 03, US 03, AUS 05).