Half dome

Just noticed on a recent trip to yosemite that you can actually see an old man on the half dome when viewed from glacier point. I have attached the actual half dome and one with my impressions :)
p.s Interestingly, I subsequently checked wikipedia, and found the following:
"Half Dome was originally called "Tis-sa-ack," meaning Cleft Rock in the language of the local Native Americans. Tis-sa-ack is the name of a mother from a native legend. The face seen in Half Dome is supposed to be hers"

Dryer etiquette

If you ever lived in an apartment with shared washing machine/dryer room then you would know that one of the common etiquette's followed is the current user cleans up the lint caused by the previous user. In my opinion this is effective and fair since you will not be penalized. What I mean is that if the etiquette were that each user cleaned up the lint after their use, it is most probably going to happen that someone will forget. So you as a good user would have to clean the lint twice in this case, once before use and once after use.

I wonder which aspects of life follow the "dryer etiquette"?

Home remedies

Everytime I fall sick in India my dad and mom huddle together and start going into the kitchen to come back with some concoction for me to drink. Most of my ailments are digestion related: gas, loose motion etc. Anyways just anecdotally from my experience it looks like some of these ailments actually work. So I thought I would just list some of these remedies in one place for me to refer back to:
- mild diarrhea: boil skin of pomegranate and water and drink the resulting syrup.
- fever associated with cold and shivering: drink coffee without milk boiled with chukku which is the malayalam word for dried ginger, black pepper and some sugar or honey.
- gas problems: lemon tea

Top results on google

Just noticed that my blog comes up as the top result on google for the following search terms: "aaroosh", "extinct names", "how do you make a 200 meter track"

World is flat or World is round, in economics?

It came as a surprise to me that there is one scientific endeavor in the 21st century that is still debating the equivalent of "earth is flat" or "earth is round". I am referring to economics. The two schools of thoughts are the Keynesians and the Austrians. The Keynesian school claims spending is the way out of the current financial crisis. The Austrians claim that saving is the way out of the current financial crisis.
In fact the prescription offered for the current financial ailment by the doctors of the two schools are complete opposites. Clearly economic theory is still in the middle ages.

Better to live for a cause than die for it

Is a quote from the novel "Catcher in the Rye". I write this after we have seen the unfortunate sacrificial weapons of terror being unleashed on India in Mumbai. But my blog is about how to make an idea live long. You can either force it down the throat of someone (i.e violence) and subdue them to accept your idea. The other way is to let the idea speak for itself by resonating with logic and reason. There is no greater marketing strategy than a viral one, one in which people take it upon themselves to spread an idea since they find it useful, interesting, valid etc. The violent method might have some success in the short term but it will never live long. So if you have an idea (good or bad) and you care for it to lay down your life, I would think it is a better, effective way to live and try to propagate the idea. If it is not a good idea, then you can learn from your mistakes. If it is a good idea, other people can learn from the idea. Either way the world is a better place for it.

States created per economic school

I believe there has never existed a country that has followed a pure free market theory as espoused by the Austrian school of economic thought. So there is no way to know if the theory is just idealistic and will fall apart in the real world.
So here is my proposal. Just like the Mormons settled in utah, it would be interesting to see a few states that are formed with their economic thought as part of the state constitution (if there is such a thing). The other economic thoughts would be the progressives, keynesians etc. And say in 10 years time we will know which system fares better.

Iceland: most developed country in 2007, bankrupt in 2008

I just came across http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceland on Iceland. Apparently Iceland was ranked the most developed country in 2007. In 2008, Iceland also happens to be be the first country to be victim to the global credit crisis and declare bankruptcy. One wonders what measures were used to rank Iceland?

Hybrid images illusion: thumbnail images that turn out into a different image

Scientific American has a series of optical illusions including this one concerning hybrid images. The image from closeup looks like Einstein whereas from far it looks like Marilyn Monroe. Well I discovered that this same illusion holds if you shrink the image down to a small size. The smaller size image looks like Marilyn Monroe whereas the bigger size image looks like Einstein. The best way to see this version of the illusion is to take a picture of this on your phone. The thumbnail image on the phone will show up as Marilyn Monroe whereas when you open the image it will turn out to be Einstein. Pretty cool?

What is running track constructed out of?

Watching Usain Bolt shatter the world records this olympics and seeing the close up of the track he is running on, has made me wonder what that track is made of? I did a google search but the results were not immediately available. Finally I found the answer on this site. To quote from that site: "An all-weather track is one that is topped with a coating of rubber chips that are bonded together with a cementing agent. These rubber coatings are installed to a depth of 3/8" to ½" over an asphalt or concrete base to provide a soft running surface. "
There is also more information on the Beijing running track here.

200 meters race is run at faster pace than 100 meters

Thanks to New york times and their beautiful charts I discovered today that the 200 meters track and field race is actually run at a faster pace than the 100 meters. The current world record for 100 meters is 9.69 sec. The world record for 200 meters is 19.32. Probably the momentum of crossing the 100 meter mark in the 200 meters is just enough to make this happen. No wonder though that this year (2008) the 100 meters world record was shattered by Usain Bolt who is actually a 200 meters racer.
I wonder if the same would be true for swimming. For a fair comparison though the swimming track would have to be really long. For example we could compare 50 meters pace versus 100 meters pace in swimming if one lap in swimming was actually 100 meters. So we basically discount the part where the swimmers have to decelerate and bounce of the walls at the 50 meter mark.
Or make the 200 meters track and field such that the runner runs 100 meters till a wall, touches the wall and runs back :)

How long for swimming world records to plateau?

Olympics 2008 in Beijing saw the most world records ever set in swimming events. And it seems like these records are not going to hold up for too long either. Why? Here is a hand waving proof.
The extreme case of a race is that an athlete completes an event and drops dead (i.e he has spent all his energy in the event). Now currently in this olympics, an athlete like Michael Phelps can set a world record and come back after 30 minutes to take part in another event. It seems possible, theoretically, that there is still room for some more energy expenditure. So it should be possible for an athlete to expend more energy than Phelps, i.e such that the athlete takes maybe a day to recover back his lost energy and not 30 minutes like Phelps.
My prediction is that until we reach a day where each event has a different winner swimming world records have not plateaued.

Olympics 2008, Microsoft Silverlight and fullscreen mode

If you are trying to watch olympics online using IE7 on NBC you might have downloaded Microsoft silverlight. You might also have tried the enhanced player mode of the video player only to discover there is no full screen mode. And this can definitely be annoying if your computer is also connected to a TV. So if you are trying to figure out how to get full screen mode then you have come to the right place. I will give you a short and long version of the solution to see the Olympics videos on NBC full screen.
Short version is: Press F11 after starting the enhanced player (This puts your IE v7 browser in full screen mode). Then magnify the browser window (usually present at the right bottom) from 100% to 150%. Then you have an almost full screen experience.
The long version: The IE v7 browser has a full screen mode which basically gets rid of the toolbar/titlebar at the top of the browser. To enable this mode you can press F11 with the focus on the browser. The silverlight enhanced player opens in a browser window with fixed size (so you cannot resize it). But F11 still works on the browser window in which the enhanced player is opened in. So you can use F11 to make the enhanced player browser window full screen. Then you can magnify the video by changing the zoom level (bottom right corner) .

Tailor made musical instruments

You can walk into a department store and pick up a t-shirt that fits you perfectly. You can also go to a tailor and have a shirt stitched up for you with your body measurements. So is it possible to have a musical instrument built just for you?
If you look around the world of musical instruments you will see that there are so many musical instruments ranging from piano, violin, flute, guitar. Now each of these instruments require a different technical/physical aspect to be mastered to ensure you to play the instrument well. For example in case of piano, you need to master playing with both hands. In case of violin you need to master finger positions and bowing. In case of flute you need to master breathing. Now given this wide spectrum of instruments, you would wonder how they came about? My hypothesis is that each instrument got created by someone to match their most natural ability to play music. So when you go to join a school to learn a musical instrument, you are trying to master an instrument that might not be the most natural fit for your ability. So that begs the question whether it is possible to make tailor made instruments that suit your physical ability the best? After all eventually the music that all these instruments create is what matters...

World's greatest compression

The world's greatest compression is the one designed by nature. I am referring to the fusion of a sperm with an egg to form an embryo. It is amazing that this single cell is capable of dividing, differentiating and developing into a small baby and with time into a human being. It also highlights the power of exponentiation whereby one cell can divide multiple times and reach a count of a few trillion in such a short time. I think somewhere in this mechanism is hidden an extremely efficient image compression algorithm

Parva: a review

Parva is Kannada author Bhyrappa's interpretation of Mahabharata (Mahabharata in my opinion is one of the greatest epics in this world). It has been written with a curious mind, re-reinterpreting the various stories/episodes of Mahabharata, that we all have come to know, in it's barest form. By bare I mean the stories have been made naked of any adornments and mystical properties. Of course since it is his interpretation he has added in his interpretations to the mystical events that might not be what really might have happened. But the interpretations do make a lot of sense. So if you wonder how Gandhari being one woman can have 100 children when clearly she is so much less than 100 years old, there is a logical explanation for this. If you wonder who the Deva's were in Mahabharata there is a logical explanation for it. If you wonder how could a 100 year old Bhishma fight a war, there is an explanation for that. If you wonder why Draupadi had 5 husbands and how she managed with 5, there is a good description of the arrangement. The war itself is depicted in its bare naked goriness with the resulting carnage, corpses, vultures, stench and all that.
It is a great work. It does raise a lot of questions that are left unanswered. There are parts where Yuyudhana (Krishna's friend) starts asking questions to himself and then says he will get it clarified from Krishna. But that never happens and the reader is left to their own imagination to answer these questions. But once you are exposed to Bhyrappa's interpretation, reading another version of Mahabharata will definitely be interesting.
Anyways, my random thought is that it would be interesting to see a timeline "diff view" of this epic with it's various modifications.

p.s I bought the book online at biblio.com

My pet dog kameena..

If I ever have a dog, I will name it kameena and I will call it Kutta Kameena.

Pandu was impotent

There is a very interesting article containing a discussion on Pandu in Mahabharata. It also hypothesizes that Pandu was impotent. It is a very interesting observation that makes perfect sense and fits all the incidents that occur in Pandu's life as noted in the article.

It also highlights the embellishments that the great epic has gathered on its long oral journey. Mahabharata has been passed down orally and like DNA mutations there has been changes and additions to the core of the story. Also many modifications would be sugar coating the actual version to conform to the prevalent social mores.

Mahabharata and DNA testing

The following blog is about Mahabharata.
Would the outcome of Mahabharata have turned out differently if there was the technology of DNA testing during those times?
It was a secret that none of the Pandavas were Pandu's sons. But if the Kaurava's could actually prove that the Pandava's were not actually Pandu's son, then would the story of Mahabharata have turned out any different? Would Bheeshma have then supported Duryodhana instead of Yudhishtra for the position of Yuvraj of Hastinapur.

Aaroosh or Arush

An internet search of this name says that it means first rays of the sun. I dug in a little deeper and found that it is derived from two sanskrit words: aaroo that means golden orange color and usha means dawn. So I guess it means more like the golden colored early dawn.

References:
(http://www.aa.tufs.ac.jp/~tjun/sktdic/)
meanings of "aaruu" [1]
a.{c-stem}
1.of a tawny colour (A light brown to brownish orange.)

and Ush means dawn.

Relevance of Analog Technology i.e interoperability

As the world moves from analog to digital technology it might come as a surprise when the analog technology sometimes enables features that are not possible in digital. An example is books on tape (yes the soon to be obsolete cassette tape). Interestingly, the analog version has the bookmark feature inherently built into it versus a CD for example. So I can stop the tape at any time and the tape keeps the state information of where I had stopped last. This feature is obviously not available in a CD.

Another example to illustrate the point is the extremely ingenious cassette player adapter. With the explosion of use of digital mp3 players, there has been a technology gap between the players and enabling their use inside cars. The cassette player adapter is this cassette with a jack that can be hooked into your mp3 player. It bridges the gap between the explosion of storage in mp3 players and the old school car stereo. And the enabler here is analog again. It is the way analog technology works in this case.
"The coil of wire you wound around the cassette pins is an inductor. When energy from your CD player's output is fed into the coil, a magnetic field is generated. The energy in the coil corresponds to the energy coming out of the CD player's audio output and it is picked up by the cassette player's playback head without even touching the coil. It doesn't have to touch because the magnetic field is big enough to encompass the tape head."

Now here is a scenario where analog technology surpasses digital technology (i.e CD in this case) in being able to interoperate with a new technology (digital mp3 players). Such interoperability, specially one without design or a standard body is unimaginable in the software world.

Why are there only two sexes in general?

Ever wondered why there are only two sexes? What is so evolutionary about the number 2? Since your sex is determined by the two chromosomes X,Y, I guess my question boils to why are there in general only 2 chromosomes determining the gender? Why not 3 for example?

So in a hypothetical world in which 3 chromosomes determine the gender, there would be 9 genders. Ofcourse taking this wild idea further, it would be interesting to ponder on the sexual habits of the people in this hypothetical world... :)

(Shyam has a nice proof in the comments)

I also found an article on bbc about the same topic: Why are there only two sexes?

There is an article in slate on the same topic.

Green man

My idea of a super man is a green man who can produce his own food by basking in the sun. The green man would have enough chlorophyll pigments in his skin to absorb solar energy and obtain enough nutrition for his day-to-day activity.
Now just imagine a world of green men. Starvation would be unknown in this world. The green man would eventually also get bored at doing nothing and basking in the sun and work on interesting ideas and discover new things (in this world, boredom might substitute necessity as the mother of invention).

But of course in case you are thinking in the back of your mind why a green man is not found on this earth here is a scientific explanation.
The Case Against Little Green Men

Indian cricket and 20-20

Indians were always the 20-20 champions way before anyone even dreamt up of this format. If you look at most of the regular 50 over matches, Indians do play like champions for the first 20 overs or so and then there is the great Indian collapse. And it leaves the ardent fans wishing, oh if only the matches were 20 overs only. And lo behold, now that the 20 over format is here, it is not surprising that the Indians actually did well. The reason is of course that they have have been playing this format all along their careers (and they just did not know it).
The other countries have some catch up to do.

What you see is not what is there (WYSINWIT)

Am stating the obvious here:
If you are seeing a green leaf for example, it is green because the leaf absorbed every other wavelength of light except green (i.e it reflected the green wavelength). So in effect the leaf is actually anything but green (since it rejected/reflected the green wavelength). From this dawns the fact that what you see is not what is really there. Since the leaf itself is hardly green though we see it as green. So even though we say the leaf is green, in reality it is hardly anything but green.

Does color green provide an evolutionary advantage to leaves?

I am just going to make a statement that sounds true (though I have nothing but empirical evidence to corroborate it). It seems that nature prefers green to be color for leaves for the majority of cases.
The preponderance of the color green in the plant kingdom begs the question as to what advantage does this color provide to the plants as far as absorption of energy from the sun is concerned. Clearly nature seems to have chosen this color, so there must be an evolutionary reason for it being so.

Every answer has the right question

I believe.

To get the right answer you need to ask the right question(s). This is true with solving puzzles or logical problems and it is true with people too. I guess the puzzle solving part is well known. But the people part is probably not as well documented and more what you learn in life as part of your people skills. Wish there were a "How to solve it" written for the people part of the puzzle..

Politics and contradictions

This post is about US politics. My 20000 feet understanding of US politics provides me the following data.
- The Democrats are in favor of the theory of evolution, Republicans are opposed.
- The Democrats are kind of opposed to free market, Republicans are in favor

Now the theory of evolution and free market theory are similar in concept in that both do not have a central authority and has the notion of survival of the fittest.

But it is interesting to see that both the prominent parties like one idea and not the other.

Free market theory at workplace

Is it possible to implement free market theory at workplace. What I mean by free market theory is to let each employee barter or trade currency for the work they do. So effectively the compensation of each worker is tied to the work/value add they put in. Would this result in anarchy or an efficient self organizing structure in which no managers would exist?

Washer and Dryer trick

I discovered a nice trick over the weekend regarding drying your clothes. I have quite a few cotton clothes and they come out very crumpled at the end of the washer-dryer cycle. I noticed that the crumpling actually happens at the end of the washing cycle. So I uncrumpled my clothes after the wash cycle and laid out the clothes flat in the dryer and lo! my clothes came out uncrumpled at the end of the dryer cycle. So this sounds like a good 2-3 minute investment compared to the mundane task of ironing your clothes.