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Last night, I was at a networking social with the Olympic Opening Ceremony on an enormous screen. But I was there strictly to socialize and catch up with good friends. I could not bring myself to enjoy the opening ceremony, flamboyant and ostentatious as it was, in light of the appalling abuses of human and animal rights in a country where, at the very least, all this money could have been put to much worthier use in improving the human condition!

People might say that it's my loss for missing this magnificent display of oneness and splendor. But I don't see it. Fortunately for me, there is no dearth of interesting alternatives in today's world that can equally well and guiltlessly take up my time. Fortunately, I suffer the ancient Chinese curse. I live in interesting times. I must boycott the Olympics to protest in what little way I can against such appalling cruelty as PeTA exposes.

Continue reading "Deanimizing - A necessary first step to dehumanizing?" »

Fuck! I cannot think of any other word. Sorry.

I don't know about you, but I couldn't watch past the midpoint of this video. I was hoping to vent some in this article, but it doesn't seem to help! Perhaps the least I can do to show my support to PeTA (where I am a member) and to other animal rights organizations is to spread the word.

I bet half the people who wear fur will give it up if only they knew what went into making it for them, just as Erwin Schrödinger hypothesizes in his famous essay that half the people who ate meat will give up if only they had to kill the animal themselves!

The following video is not for the weak-hearted. Click not if you can stomach not. Instead just read the equally compelling but less shocking text at: http://www.peta.org/feat/ChineseFurFarms/index.asp

Again, here is a link to the full article at PeTA's site:

http://www.peta.org/feat/ChineseFurFarms/index.asp

Please support PeTA!

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Ori Brafman asked on Linkedin: What are your best examples of irrational decision-making in the workplace?

I answered thusly, though not to his point:

I believe, perhaps irrationally :-), that we all make two kinds of decisions regularly in our life. Well-founded, data-driven and reasoned decisions are the most common and form the first kind. The much rarer second kind is driven by instinct, gut feeling and perhaps no more than a deep sense of passion and belief in the long-term success of what appears, on all immediate counts, to be unfounded.

Continue reading "Irrational decisions in the workplace" »

How often do you google yourself? Other than for reasons for plain vanity, I think it important to do it often enough to ensure your online identity isn't hijacked. Since I have multiple online aliases, some of which I share with others, I have an automatic system that googles my online avatars every once in a while, reporting any "anomalies".

Imagine my surprise when I found that I had, unbeknownst to myself, given some lame-ass kissing advice on an eHarmony forum. After several email messages to the moderator, I decided to take matters into my own hands and just made a half-decent post myself, pointing out that I if I were to post, I'd have posted something that at least took a few minutes for me to pen, like the poem below:

Continue reading "The kiss you can remember" »

Continue reading "Calculating the median of a MySql table column" »

Continue reading "How to browse the Internet perfectly anonymously" »

In what may be Governor Schwarzenegger's most sympathetic move yet to make housing more affordable for potential home-buyers in California, he does what he can to encourage young Californians to migrate away from the state, thus setting the stage for home-prices to spiral downwards.

With already ailing education budgets slashed even further, convicted criminals let loose to terrorize innocent citizens and 20% of state parks closed, the Governor hopes that more productive Californians will be encouraged to seek domicile in Oregon and nearby states. This calculated and clever move will enable property prices eventually to reach levels where the 22,000 inmates, who will be in dire need of good housing after their early releases, can afford them.

Forget OLAP cubes and pivot tables! As is the case most of the time, 90% of the insight can be gleaned from very simple data plots. To be sure, the remaining 10% does shed valuable new light, but is also orders of magnitude relatively more tedious to distill.

One of my favorite tools for performing quick sanity checks on data and even for inferring high-level trends is a histogram; it simply partitions your data points into a fixed number of buckets, with each bucket holding points that fall within a given range. The resultant bucket sizes are then available to eye-ball, often plotted as bars whose lengths are proportional to the number of elements in the corresponding buckets.

Continue reading "On Data Analysis" »

Today, Linux is a beautiful thing and I typically waste no opportunity to evangelize it to friends considering a new desktop purchase. I mean, if the average user today calculates how much of his or her computer time is spent either on-line or within office applications, it seems like common-sense to buy a Linux desktop with Firefox and Open Office rather than buy expensive Microsoft products. Homer Simpson captures the sentiment best in the opening line of the latest Bart Simpson flick. Why would someone pay hard-earned cash to get something we can get for free? We're all giant suckers!

Continue reading "Fixing Fontconfig on Linux with strace (Unable to load default config file)" »

Last weekend, as I was munching away on a sweet home grown carrot from our own backyard, I let my mind wander with the wind and ponder pointless profoundities. An interesting, but totally useless statistical question occurred to me.

That we are all ultimately made of dust from the distant stars is indisputable. But what, I pondered, might be the odds that an atom of carbon in my crunchy carrot was the same atom in a molecule of CO₂ I had exhaled earlier?

Continue reading "Communing with Carrots" »