The Phoenix

It has been quite sometime now that I have put pen to paper- courtesy of a certain monsieur mandaya who had succeeded spectacularly and temporarily in completely demoralizing my efforts to get published, with a stone hearted, systematic, malicious, spiteful and of course needless to say, purely arbitrary decision making as to who should or should not get their names embossed on the two penny burlesque of a magazine that we issue at the taxpayer's cost come festember- and my regular readers- that would encompass me and sni who proof reads every one of my articles (the price he pays for friendship) and proclaims at the end of these reading sessions that the sentences are quite frightfully long but he no likey long sentence so he'll pass- had quite begun to wonder if I had lost the will to wield the pen anymore(I know, I've got the Caesar complex sometimes- at the end of this sentence I suspect Sni is going to kill me for my verbosity and I will probably go down in a saying "Et tu Sni!!").
And so as I was saying…. I’m Back.(And I did say it with a heavy Austrian accent)

An Able leader

Reminiscing about the entire SriLanka-LTTE episode, my entire attention was demanded by the actions of one man. In a time of international pressure and Natinal difficulties, Mahinda Rajapaksha deserves accolades.

Standing tall among the ruins of the wasted efforts over the past twenty years, he did what no one else dared to do before him. He took the initiative and pressed forward wihtout regard to the international damnation to which he and his entire nation would be condemned to in the face of failure.

Today as he stands victorious, many of his country men pat him on the back, but just as easily these could have been the very people who could have publicly condemned him for taking a decision on their behlaf.

His recent interviews to the Hindu and the Times leaves you in awe of the man. You know he speaks the truth- a bitter truth. A political situation is the best option-if both sides are reasonable. When any side of a discussion is dominated by hardliners who will resort to violence, someone must take the responsibility to put things right.That if terrorist organisations are surviving today, it is due to the weakness of the home governments to some extent. It takes nerves of steel and guts of adamantium to pull of what he has in the island nation.

And what leaves the west staring is his outrageous openness and pointed questions at their own campaigns. If the war against the Taliban as a terrorist organisation is justified why not the LTTE which has been identified in many countries, including the largest in the world, as a terrorist organisation? His reply to the threat of sanctions was remarkable in its bravery-some would call it foolishness. "Why do oyu punish the people for the decision of one individual? If they want to punish me they will find ways of doing it. And now that I have said it they will."

where does all of this leave us?

Every so often in our own lives we are faced woth making decisions for others. Against their own wills because you KNOW in your heart that this is the right course of action. You KNOW that this is how things are meant to be. At those points we must take the initiative without fear of failure because we know then that the outcome is assured. Victory becomes an inevitability in such times.

DOTA!!!!

Hey!!! DOta 6.60 released today!!! read the change log, a lot of nerfing has been done and quite a few things have been worked over completely...(i mourn the death of razor though(sniff sniff))..

the tauren' s spells I can make head or tial of.. have to play and get a hold of those..

Medusa's ulti is now what??? You cant gank anymore...Infair!!!

And ya that's right.., Everyone get a n Aghanim's except the ogre.... Thats Racist I tell ya...

But at the end of the day I just really want to play the map... to get a feel of things.. And not suck royally when back in coll....

Check this out....

Hey check out this link... No wonder indian products are looked down upon in the world market....Just click on the blog title....

Guys Cooperate!!!!!

Ok... The heading has got nothing to do with the fact that none of you guys are reading my blog.(Humph)(though it would be very nice if all of us folks followed each other around[in a non gay way of course])

Th heading is actually a reference to Monsieur John Nash(I do believe the movie "A Beautiful Mind" has made him science's new Feynman). game theory has a very interesting if somewhat downright absurd and chilling proposition called Prisoner's dilemma.
The problem statement is this. Two prisoners are caught but the police doesn't have enough for a conviction. They are each offered a deal. If one person "defects" (i.e gives away his partner) he gets to go free while the other person gets 10 years. If both "defect" each gets five years. If both "cooperate"(with each other) they get six months. each does not know the decision of the other before the court room is entered. According to game theory, the best way to play is to defect("Holy Shiiii!!!!" is what i said.) since it offers you a better than the worst solution irrespective of the other player's choice. And guess what.. If this is iterated, with you given the option of changing your decision after you know his, the best way is still to defect(At this point I thought it became plain dumb.)
Whatever happened to the good ole Omerta I ask ya?

Anyway thats not what this blog is about so chill..... All I ask is this. Seeing as our college intends to make murderers out of all our batch students(yup they're "Offering" us Beryl again) and if I may say so myself we'll probably pull off those heinous acts of crimes without planting too much evidence(Heck! in a mob everyone's safe) I only ask that yoll cooperate . Dont rant on your partners.... If everyone cooperates(though by theory no one should) it offers the best possible Nash equilibrium. Yup that s right... the best equilibrium is not by defecting but by not following the the original game theory and cooperating... communism on the rise??

Big Cities Small hearts

The thrill of living in a big city is lost on me. Everytime I visit Chennai, I feel a deep sense of despair, bordering on hate toward the city. Not towards its residents per se, mind you. A lot of nice people I know live in Chennai and their living in the city has not made them any less nicer. But there is a feel.... Like when someone walks into a room and you immediately feel uncomfortable, though you might never have met the person before. Some call it "a gut feeling", some prejudice, but be that as it may, in the past I have trusted it and it has worked for me so I have no reason to stop doing so now.

But please dont get me wrong. Its not the vastness of the city that scares me. A guy from a small town, it is easy to write me off as just not fitting in and quibbling about it. But I think today in the age of the internet and cable TV that would be a crass and pompous statement to make to anyone. Everyone has access to everything. Small towns no longer plead guilty to ignorance.

Enough with the flyovers and the bazaars and the "culture centres" I implore you. whenever I come over,my state is reduced to that of an observer, recording each individual happening to be perused upon by the subconscious at its own leisure, to shape it into a lesson, to mould my "gut" for the future.

The city itslef seems to be a giant machine, involuntarily turning its mechanical cog-like people. As the day dawns, every day brings a hope for me. A hope that somehow, somewhere, magically, it will become a utopia. That when I help a person of my own accord, I will not be looked upon with mistrust or as being downright stupid. But everyday, the hope is broken as I look into the eyes of those around me.

Knit eyebrows,the banging of the head to music heard through the head phones, flustered phone conversations, somehow, they all seem to me to be fronts. All affected personality masks put on by people too scared and scarred to find themselves. no one meets yor eye for to long. Afraid, that they may inadvertently make a human connection? Gone are the days of casual acquaintances made at the bus stops or in the buses, (if there were such days in the past).

As I return home, i hope once more. Hope that when i look up, I can take refuge in God's wonderful display of the constellations. But each day that too is laid to waste as the city's polluted skyline offers no more than a glimpse of a handful of stars which you can count on the fingers of any hand of your choosing(I'm glad at least this much choice is left to me after a tiring day of accepting the "wide"range of choices: a)that food that fills your stomach and food that satisfy you are not necessarily the same, each of which may again either burn a deep hole or an abyss into your pocket. b)The maximum retail price on any product is only for all other cities in India-( you can take it for two more bucks than the listed price or leave it, I dont give a hoot, I got five lakh mindless consumers who can make me happy.)

Thoroughly disgusted, I simply wish to fall off into dream land where i can roam free and gain respite if only fantastical and for a few hours;but of course, I cannot be allowed to do that.. My sleep must be ceremoniously spoiled every few minutes by screaming airliners showing off to everyone how busy and imortant the city is. so important that its 5 million inhabitants simply cannot afford a decent night's sleep.

So from break of dawn to the early hours of the morning(at which point my body simply refuses to be subordinated by the city's will any longer and falls off to a slumber disturbed by the lateness of the hour and the prospect of not getting enough sleep), basically the city SUCKs...your energy.

Hats off and good luck to people sentenced to a life term in this place. See you in Hell... Oh wait you're there already???

I just found out how much our lives are governed by what we see and hear in the media. I'm not talking just print media, newspapers here. Movies, songs, they all add to the list.

Consider for instance, the notion of eating a lollipop. everyone enjoys sucking on it every once in a while. Unless you've watched the onion movie. Suddenly lollipops become so much more than simply sugar coated savories for the innocent. They become a metaphor for all that s vile in our society. Of the world of rockstars and drugs. I need a moment alone.... AFK........

Bitter truths

"Last year our college had Sidin Vadukut come over to give us a few pointers on becoming professional writer. His talk on how writing as a profession can be vastly different from writing for fun was enlightening. In fact it was his suggestion that we should probably start writing blogs first, see how that goes, whether we are comfortable with churning out a couple of pages a day regardless of our imaginative constraints(Wow that was oxymoronic!) .

wait(WHISTLE!!!!!) Stop!!! Why is this sounding like a live journal entry???? What is wrong with me ? Life is so much bigger than the infinite cyberspace! There are flowers to smell. People to meet. A life to live!!!!I have to go...."(Log Out)

(Log Back in) "Hmmmmm.... Apparently I needed a life to go back to...."
(This dream makes me twitch everytime...... )

webComics-A discovery

this is awesome!!!! Out there on the web, there is a treasure of really classy webcomics. I knew only one till recently(xkcd.com.... you should try it dudes.... I assure you Randall Munroe is not paying me anything to say this)
For gamer geeks penny arcade is THE thing.... tycho and gabe are your signature gamer addicts.
Buttercup festival is a bit more abstract but some of he titles ar brilliant in their simplicity.
And of course who can deny the dark side of humor in everyday lives as seen in A softer world. i know many of you guys will prolly be at home not knowing what to do... Do try some of these out... And you'll be hooked.
But of course like any gourmet chef I have saved the best for last.QWANTZ out of this world..... t-rex is THE DUDE.... Ryan Northis undoubtedly the king of comedy. And the mouse over texts.... GOD level.....(Sometimes quite literally) :)

Is VIKI finally coming?

Right now I'm in IIT doing a summer project. Over the past year or so I had added new words to my vocabulary. "Artificial Neural Networks", "Machine learning" were simply words which warranted a wikipedia article. But their full implicattin has hit me only now that I have gone through some of the amazing work that has gone into automating our world.
Gone are the days when we lived safely under the premise that fast as computers may be, they cannot match a human. today computers have acquired a new ability "Learning".
Machines can be trained into identifying and classifying data which they have never encountered before.
To the computer theorist, this is an enthralling prospect. to me its just plain scary.
we as humans hold ourselves above all creation because of our single ability to learn from our surroundings. Now imagine a whole population's experience being learnt by a computer in a matter of minutes. I'm not exaggerating. This is not a doomsday theory. It IS happening. Present tense. the guy sitiing next to me just trained a program to id a face, given hundreds of photos of human faces taken from various angles. it took all of 15 seconds. later it tracked my face input to it from a webcam.

As humans we go through a similar cycle from birth to death. everyday we come across new experiences which we upload into our database for reference at a later date. theoretically our brains are currently at the same level as these learning machines.But comps hold two distinct advantages over us
1)they do not forget experiences. Hence in the near future it will be near impossible to trick them twice.
2)they learn much much faster than any human could.
If you think this is not a matter to lose sleep over, think again. Our lives have already been invaded y technology in ways we do not suspect. For instance every web page in the whole world is reviewed by web bots which are in the constant lookout for extremist activities. A noble enough issue. now put two and two together. By scanning the pages if a powerful enough computer does figure out that the cause of human distress is in fact individualism(and it is mind you... Just look at every human revolution. from Napolean to gandhi , it has required the force of one man or a small group to turn the world on its head..... A simpler, more logical solution as anyone would agree, is simply to acknowledge that all humans are made equal and break all social barriers.... But NO.... we are constantly in the need to impress our peers), whats to stop it from organising the world for us? true, this sort of computing power is possible today only under distributed computing but for how long will that dam stand strong? I,Robot come to mind?

Human psychology has always interested me. I think it was ever since i took the psychometry test that said I could be a psychiatrist or a detective( I ended up in REC trichy.... If anyone can make anything of that please let me know. you can call me at 9787333333)

A lot many times I ponder about the importance of 'emotions'. As we evolved over time, natural selection(Creationists can log off right about now.) somehow decided that it might be a nice idea to develop our mental faculties to embrace emotions. but looking through time, we do notice that often we have acted as creatures of the heart rather than logic. this undermines every scientist's fundamental belief that reason is the highest form of inquiry into the laws of the universe. (Except monsiuer Pascal who wagered otherwise. [xkcd totally rocks man!]).
If reason does indeed take this pride of place, should emotions be curtailed by those seeking a page in the annals of history? If reason is not the supreme authority and if emotions take that crown, this raises even more questions, such as, Does the universe "feel"? Are there ways it circumvents its own laws in times of "distress"?