19-Jan-18 Leave a comment
Or, insulin vs. investing.
Gaining weight is like a stock market correction. Happens so swiftly that even before you know it your center of gravity and your wealth would have shifted down. On the other hand, losing weight and the climb of prices is a gradual process. I don’t know about the markets but i wish dropping weights would be as simple as lifting them.
09-Apr-17 4 Comments
It is surprising that someone is even posting about things that computers cannot do. It speaks volumes about the advances in computing power humans have seen. This post is in response to a similar but reversed post by Seth Godin titled “23 things artificially intelligent computers can do better/faster/cheaper than you can” [link].
So here is my counter list of 23 things that computers (still) can’t do:
yet.
🙂
19-Mar-17 1 Comment
A team from India wants to brew beer on the moon [link]. This has got the politicians very interested and all sorts of updates and details are being sought on the program – deadlines, plan B, risks, implications etc. I don’t have the details of the questions asked but I wonder if an inquiry about the percentage of alcohol content was included. But I was a bit confused on two counts as I read this “news story” a couple of days back:
Firstly, I fail to see what is so path-breaking about this experiment. Many microgravity studies have been done on biological processes on terra firma itself. A range of “g” values can be simulated on Earth itself – why waste so much of fuel and money to do this on the moon? And the Prime Minister’s time as well!
Secondly, and more importantly I feel that the process chosen is ‘alien’ anyways. Why beer? Why not dahi? Dahi, or yoghurt is much more Indian than beer anyways. The process to make both involves post digestive effects of microscopic beings. Yeast for beer and bacterium for dahi. Maybe that is the reason: that the need was felt to examine the affect of microgravity on yeast’s business. We already seem to have a good ‘gut’ feel about bacteria anyways.
No civilization worth its archaeology would be as sober as to not have any native methods to produce alcoholic drinks. The Mexicans even had chocolate – which I feel is more potent and damaging than alcohol as it always comes packed in pockets of sugar. Historically, India has largely used rice, plant & fruits (sugarcane molasses, grapes, apples, apricots, cannabis, cashew nuts, toddy sap, mahua etc.) and other biological ‘degradants’ to produce alcohol, but not as much of barley and malt. Sikkim and Nepal so use millets and barley but that’s small and relatively unknown.
When writing this post, I reflected and sobered up on noting that I personally consume more beer than dahi! Duh. I buck the national trend. The per-capita consumption of dahi (in its various forms) is 2.3 kg per year. Beer on/in the other hand is being gulped at the rate of 1.6 liters per Indian person per year (the rural reverential picture above notwithstanding). The density of beer is just a little bit higher than that of water so Dahi, paradoxically, is ‘still on top’ but just by a few hundred per capita grams. Indians are socially arriving on the scene with their ales that are no longer pale and this is nevertheless good for the infantile craft beer scene in India. I have had a Bira 91 [link] just once which is like nothing when compared to the countless Hoegaarden’s and Asahis and Tsing Taos and Kingfishers and Cobras that I have downed– that’s how nascent the craft beer movement is. I need to get more of these. Making beer on the moon makes news, which is good for the category.
I still think dahi would have made for a less kitschy proposition. But to each team its brew. Good luck, team India. Cheers!
15-Jan-17 Leave a comment
Dr. Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s 86th birth anniversary is tomorrow. A simple but a great man. Remember the movie, “Ek Doctor Ki Maut”? It’s a sad story: it’s a story of a brilliant mind, Dr. Subhas Mukhopadhyay. It is also a story of bigotry, biases and bureaucracy. I made a small info-graphic to tell his poignant story to elucidate my point: that exemplary talent and brilliant achievements are not enough to get you the ultimate peer recognition prize in your domain. Storytelling, connectedness and the company you keep and cultivate is also critical.
We are being told these days that more and more Nobel Laureates (NLs) are likely to come up from India. Huh. And how? If this topic interests you, then do glance at the data I culled from Wikipedia on past award winners’ “countries of association”. Click on the picture below for an enlarged view. I use the term “country of association” to mean either the country where the NL is either born in, studied in or worked in. I obviously do want us Indians to stake a claim on Rudyard Kipling, right? 😉
It’s a typical power law distribution: where rank of a data attribute x its frequency = constant. What this means to me is that India will NOT start loading up on Nobel Medals the way USA started piling up from 1950s onwards. The story of Dr. Mukhopadhyay is the reason why our ilk will not be able to succeed any time soon. The jury of the Nobel Prize selection committee may or may not be secretive and insular, but there is a certain amount of core research, infrastructure, appreciation and salaries for scientists, freedom from bureaucracy & above all independence from meddlesome governments which is required for basic academic research to flourish and develop. I don’t think announcing grand prizes of Rs. 100 crores will do the trick [link].
01-Jan-17 Leave a comment
Wish you all a very happy new year. 2017 is a prime number and I hope that it becomes a prime year for you. Let’s all work in a hurry to achieve our dreams because the next “prime” year will only appear ten years later, i.e. 2027. 2017 is also a “sexy prime”, coupled as it is with 2011. Sexy primes are primes that differ from each other by 6. So remember what you did or what happened to you in 2011 – rinse, repeat and raise higher the good stuff of 2011 and sieve, spit and sink the bad things of 2011. Some numerology this!
Here is a visualization of the full text of the PM’s address to the nation on new year’s eve. Note the complete absence of the word mitron – that’s so sad. It’s been usurped by the inexpressive “friend”/”friends”. The picture below clearly shows where the thrust of his speech was. I hope you appreciate the background colour I chose for the visualization. 😉
25-Dec-16 3 Comments
Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa is a psychologist who courts controversy. He has gone into sufficient level of detail to explain why certain type of women are unattractive and predictably kicked off a good deal of protest in the process. [link, link]
While I personally haven’t looked at, not do I have any interest in looking at that aspect of his research, there was this other observation made by Dr. Satoshi which made me pause and think. It was about the link between intelligence and loneliness [click here for the research paper]. If my understanding of what I have read is correct, then Dr. Satoshi suggests an un-insignificant correlation between simplicity and stupidity. Less intelligent people are simple. They think simple thoughts and make more friends and are therefore less lonely and happier. Ignorance seems to be bliss indeed! They also seem to like the daily soaps more! There is a postulate which seems to negatively correlate IQ with affinity for watching the “saas – bahu” type of soaps. If you believe in the power law of distribution, then the below seems to be the reason why advertisers flock to buy ad spots during weekly soap opera runs.
It therefore seems that the following hypotheses shouldn’t be dismissed at first glance as outright heretics:
If leadership is a lonely place and if intelligent folks are unhappy and lonely, then it must mean that leadership is positively correlated with intelligence – which we generally know. However, I would be surprised if someone told me that all intelligent people are successful. Perhaps it is the weight of early expectations on sharp men and women (i.e. those endowed with high IQ), that seems to be making them gloomy.
I have however one question – if villagers are happier than their urban cousins, then why are they killing themselves? Is suicide so exhilarating? 😐
15-Aug-16 Leave a comment
A word cloud of PM’s I-Day speech.
The Third I 
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