aBlog

Deanimizing - A necessary first step to dehumanizing?

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 13:39:43 -0800

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.

Skinned alive and tossed on to a pile of flayed friends?

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 23:08:04 -0800

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

Pledge to go fur-free at PETA.org.

Again, here is a link to the full article at PeTA's site: http://www.peta.org/feat/ChineseFurFarms/index.asp Please support PeTA! &

Irrational decisions in the workplace

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:46:38 -0800

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.

The kiss you can remember

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:10:56 -0800

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:

Calculating the median of a MySql table column

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:52:38 -0800

My staff are amazingly efficient at automating the various slices and dices of data for me. They like to do it in SQL scripts, MySql in specific, and as a consequence, the data I want to look at is automatically generated every night into various MySql tables. I, in turn, have my own scripts, and ye old console, to extract the information I want. However, one issue that bugged me early on was getting at the median of a set of numbers.

How to browse the Internet perfectly anonymously

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:31:02 -0800

Related website: Pippini.com

"Tell me Mr. Jones," said the public prosecutor, "All the evidence points to the fact that you were indeed contemplating the murder of your lover on that night. Were you not? Remember that you are under oath, and that your polygraph results have betrayed your innermost thoughts. You had the motive, ability and, in your judgment, sufficient anonymity to carry out the macabre act with impunity. And I admit that were it not for this mass of incontrovertible evidence we uncovered by following your intent, you might well have succeeded in pulling the wool over our eyes! Is this not what you are thinking?"

There it is. Fragment from a mystery novel as it were, when you gauge your own mental reaction as you read the passage, you will find it to be a clear example: Most reasonable people would not think twice about sanctioning techniques, including the administration of polygraph tests, that authorities may use to probe into and conclude on the conents of that innermost repository of our private thoughts - our mind. Yet, it appears unreasonable to most of us if authorities claim to have the ability, much less to use it, to determine probable intent in criminal behavior from one's behavior on the Internet. Is the Internet that different in people's perceptions as a place where absolute anonymity may be enjoyed regardless of disposition and intent? Indeed, do people honestly believe it is ok to probe one's mind, but not one's online behavior?

Governor Schwarzenegger helps to make Bay Area housing affordable

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:50:09 -0800

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.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/01/10/financial/f113022S86.DTL

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.

On Data Analysis

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 07:38:54 -0800

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.

Fixing Fontconfig on Linux with strace (Unable to load default config file)

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 09:15:56 -0800

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!

Communing with Carrots

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 01:25:39 -0800

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?

A Metaphorical Essay - Google News, Air, and TCP/IP

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 12:22:05 -0800

If you could see the individual molecules of air in a perfectly still room, you would see that the molecules are anything but still. They are moving in all directions, apparently randomly. Each has its own spin, and its own story to tell. Yet the room itself, made up of millions of these molecules, has the picture of perfect calmness as though nothing in it is even stirring. In the calm of this room lies buried the solution to the most pressing problem in objective journalism.

Ratatouille (2007)

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 09:45:45 -0800

Yesterday, we decided that my wife and son would go to see Harry Potter, while I would take our daughter Katya, too young for Potter, to see Shrek the third. That we were unaware of Shrek no longer playing in theaters signifies the inordinate infrequency with which we have been to cinemas lately, the last one being the rather unremarkable "Charlotte's Web". This time we were spurred into action by pressure from a long-standing promise we had made to the kids. Since Shrek was out, we decided that Mathangi and Panini (wife and son) would watch Potter and then snack, while Katya and I would snack and watch Ratatouille (in that order to fit slight mismatches in the movie schedules). Unfortunately, Katya was too young for Ratatouille also, for she said there was too much "talking" in the film; but fortunately, I was aged just right for it, or at any rate I enjoyed it so much that this is certainly one for my DVD collection.

Enjoyed, and plan to review

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 07:15:12 -0800

The following are films I have enjoyed, and recommend if your persuasion intersects with mine. I hope to write a review someday because the film lets me say something about an issue about which I have strong feelings.

Jun '07

...

The CPA Nube Lube Tube

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 18:11:50 -0800

Grease to ease the transition of newbies into the fascinating world of Cost-Per-Action (CPA) advertising

First appeared in San Jose Mercury News Forums, Nov 18, 2006.

Consider the following ad, the likes of which we are all only too used to routing promptly into our spam buckets.

"The sex of your baby predicted CHEEP! Guaranteed Results. 150% REFUND for wrong predictions"

There you have it - a simple and sweet business plan if ever there was one. But people who ponder can promptly peer past its imposturous garb. This is just gambling in disguise. Suppose the service costs $1.00 and a thousand naive couples paid for it. On average, five hundred of them will receive a refund of $1.50; the rest will presumably be happy to have been told the sex of their baby. Despite the refunds, however, the service provider is $250 better off than she was before, and for no more effort than flipping a coin for each customer. Immediately, one can tell that the scheme is a rip-off, aimed at defrauding innocent parents-to-be of precious baby-dollars.

To the uninitiated, that is exactly how CPA advertising is being framed by ad-networks steeped in profiting from traditional methods: "Give us your ads. We'll show them. You only pay for ads that result in a sale, but not a cent on the rest." On the surface, yes; this does look like a scam. But fortunately, this is not what CPA is about. In fact, CPA represents the exact opposite. CPA ad-networks don't just flip a coin to show an ad. Considerable effort and investment go into determining where each ad is most likely to appeal, and, of course, web real-estate on which to show ads does not come free either. A CPA network will actually "lose" money if you don't make it and therefore it is in their best interest to make sure you are successful.

The red button that vaporizes earth

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 12:00:00 -0800

Hi H I was troubled by your question. "What would an "amoralist" (Hindu/Buddhist) response be to the question: Should you press the red button that instantly vaporizes the Earth?" I realized that the reason I was troubled was that it was an unfair question. I think it is unfair is because it silently shifted the onus of answering this important question from the "personal god camp" into the "impersonal god" camp. The analogous situation would be if Einstein was asked by creationists "What happened before the Big Bang?" He does not have an emotionally satisfying answer, but recognizes the absence of it, in contrast to the creationist response that postulates an entity (itself questionable), in answer. So the Buddhist response to the Red-button question would be "This question is irrelevant philosophically", or "I don't have an answer, and I bet you don't either" or more typically Buddhist "I don't know and if you think you have a truly coherent answer I'd be very interested to benefit from it" :-) I am reminded of the joke wherein a bunch of creationists deride philosophers saying "You philosophers are like a bunch of blind people in a dark room, looking for a black cat that isn't there". The philosophers respond "That may be true, but you creationists would have found it." &