Embedded Files
29th Nov 2008: My first song.
After years of listening to music, today was the first, yes the very first time that I actually purchased music. Ya, I am a sucker for sharing it from friends or borrowing their CD/Music collection. But my first $$ spent on a song is exciting and that too on a song protected by DRM and a million strings attached. (Itunes, where else?). So which song? You will love the beats. Listen to Michael Franti: Say Hey (I love you) on Youtube.
6th Oct 2008 The Ig Nobel.
A while back I read a very interesting book “Predictably Irrational” by Dr. Dan Ariely and cited an Economist Advertisement that the book had. So I was surprised when I saw his name under the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel prize for Medicine.
“Dan Ariely for demonstrating that expensive fake medicine is more effective than cheap fake medicine.”
For those of you who do not know what the Ig Nobel Prize is, here is an informal description.
The award are given each year for scientific achievements which "cannot, or should not, be reproduced".
While the award is given at the (some would say) prestigious Harvard University, it is merely a mockery for the wasteful research that some people/groups do. So here is an interesting questions that I have for Professor Ariely, “Does the ignominy of winning this award make his book less pleasurable to read?”. That is probably a research topic for his next book :D.
Read all the interesting awards for 2008 at the BBC website.
22nd Sept: Know what you earn.
For many of us who slog day in and out, it would be interesting to learn that the green back ($) is actually backed by... well nothing... The New York time editorial had a very interesting article by James Grant, "The Buck stopped Then". Here is an excerpt.
"We Americans, constitutionally inattentive to developments in the foreign exchange markets, should be grateful for what we have. That a piece of paper of no intrinsic value should pass for good money the world over is nothing less than a secular miracle. We pay our bills with it. And our creditors not only accept it, they also obligingly invest it in American securities, including our slightly shop-soiled mortgage-backed securities. Every year but one since 1982, this country has consumed much more than it has produced, and it has managed to discharge its debts with the money that it alone can lawfully print.
No other nation ever had it quite so good. Before the dollar, the pound sterling was the pre-eminent monetary brand. But when Britannia ruled the waves, the pound was backed by gold. You could exchange pound notes for gold coin, and vice versa, at the fixed statutory rate...."
11th Aug, 2008: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)
When I saw this 2 months ago my jaw dropped. Actually when you see it on the TED talk, you can hear many jaws drop, so it is not that I am easy to impress. This is from the Microsoft website: "PhotoSynth Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next. In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor."
Each outline is a unique digital image that has been rendered to fit the big picture. You ask, "How is the software so smart?", frankly I don't know! but it is very impressive. Try it to believe it.
6th July, 2008: "The greatest match I've ever seen," John McEnroe (Wimbledon '81,83'&'84).
Who am I to dispute McEnroe? I can only agree to him in offering our sincere thanks to Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, for showing the greatest dual of my generation. (Again, I haven’t seen Mohammad Ali and George Foreman fight in “the rumble in the jungle”, but then I digress). What I witnessed today is something fathers’ pass on to their sons as stories of a generation gone by, what press reporters reminisce in their retiring speeches, what defines great players like Björn Borg. You can read in words, while always keeping in mind their limitation, what a spectacle this match was, in some of these good articles, but you had to see it to believe it.
San Francisco Chronicles : Greatest Match Ever.
Chicago Sun Times: Nadal over Federer: The sports world stands still.
ps: if you find a better description, please let me know, it would be very kind of you.
24th June: What have we done?
I saw this in the NY Times captioned “Young boys collected plastic bottles from a polluted river in Jakarta, Indonesia”. The sad truth is that this picture is not unique to Indonesia, every lake, every river in India at one stage of its life looks as ugly as this picture. It is depressing, it is disheartening; what mother nature took 4.5billion years to create, we have annihilated in just 60-70 years. Is this what we intend to pass-on to the generations to come?
14th June: Davies Symphony Hall
Tryst with Mozart, Britten, Bernstein, Schubert, Ginastera, Tchaikovsky, Copland, Sibelius Gould and Bartók. Pix at
9th June 2008: Words of wisdom.
From Mikku (Vivek Gupta) "Most desirable things are either fatty, expensive or just immoral..."
3rd June 2008: Change we can believe in!
and hello Innovative Silicon Inc
1st June 2008: Weather Forecasting for 20th Century
From somewhere on the web
26th May : The Difference Between Men and Women in a Conversation
read more here. very funny, alas very true...
16th May : Yes, Children do go to school like this.
Many of my readers are used to those big voluminous yellow school bus, which can stop traffic, which have cushioned seats, which at time are used to host young rich college kids to parties and high school proms. Well, where I grew we went to school like this.... Once you have seen things like this every thing is a luxury.
Image from pixdaus.com
23rd April: Why Firefox?
21st April: Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
While doing marketing, we implicitly assume that the consumer will take rational decisions. Real life: Not True.
Here is a great example given in this must read book (Sorry, I don't get any money from the author). I just started this book over the weekend and felt that I had to share this.
The Economist Magazine ran these two sets of Advertisements for their annual subscription.
Print Ad I
Get an annual Subscription to the Economist Magazine using one of these 3 great ways
a) Complete Online Access for the year for $59 only
b) Magazine delivered at your door for the year at $129 only.
c) Complete Online access + print magazine delivered to you for $129 only.
Print Ad II
Get an annual Subscription to the Economist Magazine using one of these 2 great ways
a) Complete Online Access for the year for $59 only.
b) Complete Online access + print magazine delivered to you for $129 only.
Rationally, there is no difference between the two Adverts (as no one chooses option b in Advert I anyway), but here are the results from the study. They found that a lot more people choose the $129 subscription when they saw the Advert I (translating to more $$), than they did when they saw Advert II.
Why? Simply because people thought that they were getting a better deal with option (c) in Advert I and they went for it. While in option II they brought the cheaper subscription.
What does this tell us? Some times with the same print space, offer and budget, we can get a better return for our money spent by being creative and understanding the psyche of the consumer.
20th April: The World food crisis: The New York Times reported this from Haiti which has been affected by the raging food crisis around the world. If this doesn't make you think twice before throwing food the next time, I am not sure what will!
Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”
19th April: The world is Just Awesome
Check this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5BxymuiAxQ
12th Apr : Smile and say Cheese
sorry could not find the credits
30th March: Tax Season
Excel/CVS to TXF Format.
The dreaded tax season is here again and as I started to fill in numbers, I realized that the whole system is money sucking machine where all these companies and the IRS collude together to make parts of the answers but go out of their ways not to provide the whole answer!
The IRS will give you a W2 but make it so complicated that, it takes great effort just to fill a two page 1040 form. Then even if you purchase Taxcut from H&R block or TurboTax, they will have different packages, with/without E file, with/without stock support etc. Then again, as I started filling the stocks traded section I realized that there was not way to import the entire list of gainlossdownload.csv file generated by Etrade into Taxcut! What a scam! Now you can fill in the Schedule D yourself, but if you are enterprising, this is what you can do. Either spend $5 by buying convertexcel2txf or do it the way I did: all by your self. It looks a little intimidating, but don’t worry it is very straight forwards. Lets convert a csv file to TXF format (detailed specifications here)
Change the original csv to something that looks like this
# For the dollar amount, add the “$” sign
# Change the column to this order
# ----------------------
# Add this line to the top
# 2007 is the tax year and D--/--/-- is the date the file was created
# this could be any date
V035
ARealized Gains/Losses 2007 TLA R1
D03/30/2008
^
# Commands to be run on vim or you can write
# a very simple perl script that does the job
:set list
# Add “P” to all beginning of lines with stock traded
:'<,'>s/^/P/
# N321 for short term gain and N323 for Long term gains
# N628 for wash sales, ^M in new line char and ^I is Tab char
:'<,'>s/$/^M^^MTD^MN321^MC1^ML1/
:%s/\$/^M$
:%s/^I\(\a*\)^I/^I\1^M/
:%s/^I\(\a.*\)/ \1/
:g/\//s/^I/^M/
:%s/\s\+$//
:%g/\//s/^ /D/
:w Desktop\2007etrade_2.txf
The transformation should be something like this (from bottom window to top window)
Viola! The file that you get is easily importable in to Taxcut or Turbo tax. Drop me a line if you have any questions, I will provide free support till 15th April :)
24th March: In to the Wild "HAPPINESS IS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED"
13th March: The Kaleidescope never looked so beautiful
You can create more Shapes at this location some thing like this: (it is very addictive)
March Forth : Earth and Moon, say cheese .... (courtesy of NASA.)
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth and moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail. On the day this image was taken, the Japanese Kayuga (Selene) spacecraft was en route from the Earth to the moon, and has since returned spectacular images and movies (see http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/selene/index_e.html). On the Earth image we can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features. These clouds are so bright, compared with the moon, that they are saturated in the HiRISE images. In fact the red-filter image was almost completely saturated, the Blue-Green image had significant saturation, and the brightest clouds were saturated in the infrared image. This color image required a fair amount of processing to make a nice-looking release. The moon image is unsaturated but brightened relative to Earth for this composite. The lunar images are useful for calibration of the camera.
25th Feb: Making of the Lego Mindstorm Humanoid
Uploaded these pictures from Dk's visit to the Bay Area on 18th Feb
Here is an animated gif of the making, Enjoy!
and the video of the first "Walk" Program
24th The Elusive
AMD Barcelona Native Quad Core
22nd Feb: Day before Oscar: A great dialogue from a cult movie:
"I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables—slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war . . . our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."
—Fight Club, 1999
from the www.alternativereel.com
16th Feb: Tell me more...
Hopefully I won't be labeled as salesman for the New York times, but I have fallen in love with the things that I learn every day. Like this great article on 12th Feb, on building rapport with people by "mimicking" them to an extent or how the Moose population in Yellow Stone shows refinement of instincts from generation to generation.
13th Feb: Resurrected from the dead
A quick phone call to the great folks at UCLA (Mira Jung), helped me retrieve all my files from the former UCLA account. Now the web page is mirrored at DivvymyRide
9th Jan 2008: The 'Morning Edition' Theme by BJ Leiderman
I could not find where to buy the Theme Music, not on NPR, not on iTunes, not on Leiderman's website. So I had to find an ugly way to get the same. Grab the online stream via HiDownload and convert it to mp3 via Wavepad.
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