This and that

Fate of Norns Bass

2007-05-11T13:48:00.000-07:00


Intro to Amon Amarth's 'Fate of Norns'.

The Drapery Falls Bass

2007-03-25T22:04:00.000-07:00


Intro to Opeth's 'The Drapery Falls'.

Protest Idea

2006-05-23T16:05:00.000-07:00

Just thought of this interesting new way to protest the reservation bill. What if all future students marked the 'OBC' column in their application forms? It should be fairly simple to obtain appropriate documents, albiet illegally. Maybe they can even change their caste? Surely the government cannot have a say in conversion, since that interferes with personal choice. I know this is not a really practical idea, but am intrigued as to what the government can do to counter it if it is done en masse.

My Own Reservations

2006-05-15T10:05:00.000-07:00

The proposal for increased reservations in higher education institutions including IITs is causing much furore in India. Thousands of medical students have gone on various forms of strike causing much hardship to patients. This begs a discussion on the topic of reservation.

What is the supposed intent of reservation? It is meant to help groups that have suffered historically and provide them with opportunities to make a living. My contention is this: if a person has had enough opportunities to be at the doorstep for higher education, he/she is equipped enough to further his/her own cause without further help from the government!

To help the most backward parts of society, one must try reservations at the lowest levels i.e. primary and secondary schools. The cost of one semester of college is somewhere around Rs. 20000 which may be used to educate another child for 3-4 yrs of primary schooling (possibly more). Therefore at the cost of 8 semesters, around 8 children may be provided primary schooling. This is not only good for the society as such, it will also be a more popular policy, garnering more votes!

Reservation at higher education institutions is flawed both as a benevolent and populist policy. Ofcourse, it may be my own biases talking here. Somebody who has suffered through his entire life may feel that this could be a blessing for his progenies. So how do we resolve this? With the advent of electronic polling, it may be feasible to seek "actual" public opinion on such contentious issues. It would be interesting to see what the actual voting population thinks. While voting for the state/central elections once in 4 years, the population could be asked to vote on such issues. This will ensure that a few individuals don't hijack the Indian public.

South Park goes after censorship

2006-04-06T15:04:00.000-07:00

Last night's episode of South Park dared to poke fun at Prophet Muhammed.. well.. not directly. Read about it here.
It was quite bold and intelligent. It used the 'Family Guy' to do the actual jokes! Even the most religious fanatic will have trouble pin-pointing the "infidel" here :)
So, should TV shows and the like be allowed to make fun of religious symbols?
In my humble opinion, most definitely! It is a cartoon for god's sake. There is an 'off' button for those who find this inappropriate.

ABC's 'Extreme' exploitation

2006-03-28T10:57:00.000-08:00

Read this article recently. For those of you too lazy to follow the link, it's about the reality show "Extreme Makeover:Home Edition" on ABC. To quote the article:

"Families featured on the program have their often ramshackle homes renovated for free by a platoon headed by handyman/heartthrob Ty Pennington."

The article cites an internal memo from one of the show's executives that compiles a wish-list of ailing people for the upcoming season. I encourage you to read it as it is guaranteed to produce a strong response.

After a minute of feeling outraged, I started wondering if it is justified. It was always a commercial venture. There are bound to be such internal communications. The inevitability of the situation, in my case, mitigated the outrage.

This article also has a strong connection with one earlier article on whether the motivation for an action must be separated from the act to judge it.

Post in your comments on this one, preferably 5 mins after reading the article :)

Mallu Metal

2005-11-13T14:38:00.000-08:00

Found this video by a mallu band called 'Avial' :) Pretty cool song. The mallus have shown their metal....

Parallels

2005-07-05T20:36:00.000-07:00

Finding a mate is sorta like choosing a research topic.
1. Has to be exciting.
2. Should be within your means.
3. Need to check out references.
4. You don't want something that's been investigated by too many others.
5. Could be one paper thing or if worthy enough, could result in a long term grant.
6. Have to be ready for paper rejects.

Marriage

2005-01-18T18:42:00.000-08:00

Let us briefly review the concept of marriage and speculate freely on its origin. In ancient times, it was legal to be polygamous. For some inexplicable reason, people decided to put an end to it. Some blame it on the communists. I seriously doubt it, coz they could very well demanded 2 spouses per person and still guaranteed equality.

In any case, man stopped puttering with polygamy. It was to be one spouse per person. They probably decided that such a huge sacrifice deserved one last bash. A party obviously requires one to invite one's pals. Note that in early times, communication time was largely determined by the disposition of one's pet pegion. So invitations had to be sent out at an early date to allow for the slackness of the less athletic aves. Thus was born the concept of engagement - the day the pigeons were sent out.

During the course of one of the parties, some enthusiastic guest probably brought along a stripper. One may question the validity of this claim, since the ancients were notorious for frugality in their choice of attire and a stripper was, therefore, redundant. I will however counter that argument with the fact that in some cultures, especially ones residing in the cooler parts of the world, people were usually amply clothed. So the act of removing one's clothes would have been a valid, even popular profession in such places. In any case, the women folk were probably aghast at this act and reprimanded the men. The menfolk, in turn, decided to have a more raucous pre-marriage extravaganza called the bachelor party. The choice of nomenclature was a stroke of genius, one must add, for it kept the women under the illusion that it involved only men. Little did they know that a few women from houses of ill-repute were regularly a part of these fests.

I must add that there are no universally accepted theories about the origins of bridesmaids and best men. Some say that these posts were the creations of some power hungry group that just wanted a piece of the limelight.

The need for identity

2004-12-29T01:11:00.000-08:00

In all stages of life, we are forced into categories. We are associated with certain groups. In school, we are grouped into classes. In college, we are grouped according to our branch. At work, we are bracketed by our designation. We are also bracketed by our performance in various aspects - "He is a gold medalist" or "She sucks at chemistry".

However, we have this driving need to establish our identity in society. How can we achieve this? We try to associate ourselves with a certain set of categories that will uniquely identify us. For e.g. 'He is a god fearing, heavy metal fan'. Or maybe, 'She is an engineer who writes poetry'. The problem is, its quite difficult to determine this unique set of categories. We are aware only of the small set of people we have been exposed to. So. we concentrate on distinguishing ourselves from the set of people we know.

This need is probably what inspires us to learn new skills, read vague russian authors and the like. The urge to learn is probably a secondary need.. a by-product of the need to establish one's identity. This hypothesis is the result of the following observation. The rate of meeting new people grows rapidly from infancy to teenage years, peaks at about the age of 25-30 and then dips. This trend mirrors our urge to learn, to try out new stuff. Some people peak earlier, some later.

The above hypothesis has an interesting ramification. The more unsocial we are, the less likely we are to evolve, to learn. So folks.. go ahead, mingle and learn :)

A feline encounter

2004-12-23T15:23:00.000-08:00

Recently, I happened to have a chance meeting with a friend's cat. Now, I have limited experience with pets and was justifiably uncomfortable. The cat was much more confident as it was accustomed to humans. So, it decided to jump on yours truly who in turn jumped onto the couch. When the chain-jumping ceased, I realised that it wasn't a bad beast. It slowly dawned upon me that it lived my notion of an ideal life. Food and drinks are available at will. Somebody else does the dishes. Massages are given frequently. You can do stupid things and people will think its cute and not brand you an idiot.

Anyway, as I dolefully compared our lives, I started wondering how did we ever think of domesticating animals. I think it is because we like to have dependents. Dependents make our lives worthwhile, provide some sort of a purpose. I know it might sound cold-hearted, but I'm inclined to think this is the same reason why people want to have babies. I'm not saying people love their kids because they are dependent on them. The thought of having a baby probably originated from the need for dependents. Love then, probably takes over. Because, you can't love something that doesn't yet exist (or can you?). As you can see, I'm working quite hard to extricate myself from this mess I've landed in.

Reaffirmation of one's worthiness is probably the cause of several social phenomena. We could hypothesize that large families are probably a sign of greater self-doubt of the procreators. We could maybe even stretch the theory to say that people in countries with large populations are probably less sure of themselves (on an average).

Ok, we have strayed from the cat :) As I was saying, the audience with the cat went pretty well and we agreed on more frequent meetings.

Judgement day

2004-12-18T14:10:00.000-08:00

Recently, I had this discussion with Padma about how we judge people. During the course of the conversation, some interesting points came up.

The point of separating action from motivation was discussed at great length. Should we judge the act alone or consider the motivation for the action? The first case is very clear. If we can come up with a 2-partition of the set of all actions, it is a simple problem to decide if an act is right or wrong.

Alas, life is not as simple. We often consider the perceived motivation/reason for the act in our judgement. Waking up a friend at 3 a.m. in an emergency is acceptable, but to discuss a football game is probably not. Therefore the judgement function's signature looks more like:

JF: {set of all actions} X {set of all motivations} --> {right,wrong}

However, this opens up a pandora's box. The true motivation of the person committing the act cannot be ascertained. All we have is a guess (albeit intelligent) as to what the motivation might be. We are limited by our communication faculties. An incorrect guess could therefore lead to an incorrect judgement.

Why do we do something that is clearly so error-prone? Is it that part of the brain that encourages us to drink and drive also encourage us to judge on flimsy evidence? Is there a part of the brain that decides to go against all that is logical? I strongly suspect that we all WANT to be wrong sometimes.

Now that we have lifted the discussion to a higher level of abstraction, let me elaborate on my pet theory. I strongly believe that all humans have a tendency to be masochistic. This is so fundamental to our nature that it cannot be explained by other characteristics. It is precisely this tendency that forces us to do the illogical occassionally - indulge in acts that can only hurt (physically or mentally) ourselves. Don't believe me? Just watch xtreme sports.

But I digress. Another interesting point, which I'm sure is reasonably obvious, is that as we grow older, the turnaround time to make a judgement is reduced considerably. We devise mechanisms to make the task easier. In our minds, we form categories or types of people and associate judgements with types and then place new people into those categories. We believe that the 'categories' will cover some kinds of motivations. "Oh, she's the jealous, bitchy type." or "He's a bossy, sarcastic type,". This way the number of possible motivations for each type reduces. This reduces the search space for our judgement, enabling us to 'execute' faster. However, this can reduce the accuracy even further. What is very interesting is that we choose to increase speed rather than accuracy!

Also, Padma Varadarajan has kindly consented to pen her thoughts on this blog henceforth.

--k2

Mid week update

2004-11-16T19:15:00.000-08:00

How many times has it happened to you discover something new about stuff you use on a day-to-day basis? In the last several months of using launch radio, i never realised there was a metal station. Instead I was trying to create my own metal station by eliminating unwanted songs like "Oops! I did it again". In any case, if you want to listen to my station you can click here .

In another shameless act of self-promotion, I want to announce the launch of my very own
webpage. To be honest, I scoffed upon html and related stuff not too long ago. That is why I never really had a website. (There's a song called "Cyberwaste" playing on radio right now. What a coincidence!!) Recently, I decided to give the whole website thing another chance and it worked out pretty well. I believe, it is time to give something back to the web community. It is only fair considering the amount of stuff I've googled in the last few years.

Why we must not work

2004-11-13T10:13:00.000-08:00

Here's an interesting line of thought that came up during my idle time i.e. anytime between 1981 and today.

I noticed that a lot of people are bored. Boredom is generally an offshoot of contentment. Also most (if not all) of these very people are sad that they're bored. Ergo, contentment leads to sadness.

Therefore, my suggestion is that we stop working towards what we wish to achieve. Coz we're gonna be content when we achieve it and thats gonna lead to sadness. Is it possible that we don't really want what we think we want. Does the previous sentence even make any sense? Why are you still reading this blog?

Thots on religion

2004-11-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

I have been always fascinated by religion. Not its teachings, but by its motive. Let's assume, a few millenia ago, bunch of folks were sitting around a tree smoking marijuana. What would've inspired them to start off the phenomenon that we now call a religion?
Here's my hypothesis:
The bunch of guys were actually logicians who were trying to build up a theory to describe society. Meaning, they were trying to come up with a set of axioms i.e. stuff that would seem obviously and undeniably true then. For e.g. parents would love their children. They would then have come up with a set of rules to derive more statements about society. For e.g. x is a friend of y and y is a friend of z, x will come to know of z's existence and vice versa. Substituting particular instances of x,y,z would give a statement: "Ganesh knows laxman and laxman knows ram => ganesh would know of ram's existence".

The motive behind this, as with all logic, would have been to come up with a concise way to describe their society, so that further investigations or maybe even predictions may be made.
Now as time went on, they probably realised that their theories are fast becoming inconsistent and/or incomplete. Meaning some statements are no longer true or some obvious statements are not derived from their theory. So, their pride in their work made them enforce a set of rules on people so that they would behave as per the their theory. Thus came the job of the preachers and the priests who would threaten you with dire consequences if u did (or did not) do certain things which is practically what happens in most religions on a large scale.

In some vague ways then: laws:police::religion:priests.

First blog

2004-08-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty new to this whole blogging business. Will be penning my thoughts on reasonably stupid things.
Recently I had this thought abt diets n weight control and all that. 1 gm of anything, be it chocolate or eggs or any thing cannot increase wt by more than 1gm as per conservation of mass, assuming there's no nuclear reaction taking place in ur stomach. So what's the big deal abt eating a li'l chocolate once in a while?