chakravyuha

So, people have begun streaming in. They are all sitting in the lobby talking in hushed tones. The phones have wrung almost every 12 minutes. Some callers are very persistant. How does one handle them nicely? I can smell a lot of incense so I guess things are ready for the next phase. The certificate of death needs to be stamped and photocopied. Someone should make a manual for all this. I wonder which ancient text of ours has all this documented.

My grandmother died this morning around 07:45. It was not sudden and everyone knew that this could happen. What is to be done now? Everyone is calm and mom is busy in arranging the body etc. Is there a point to all this? Perhaps the point is to be busy doing something so that the sharp edge is taken off one’s grief. Yet, I don’t know.
I feel adrift like a bark tossed on a medium lighter than air. Do I work, do I study, and do I read? What do I wear? As it happens I am wearing jeans and a shirt. I always thought one wore black clothes on such occasions.
I have also become the local “telephone operator” which is ok. Note: find out when the prayer meeting is. Some people want to know.
I seem to have gone into a self analysis mode. It is if everything has become tasteless or toned down. I can still laugh but my laughter lasts a few seconds longer. I feel solemn and at rest in a void.

One of my relations is under going Laser lithotripsy as I write this post. The family is in a state of controlled panick even though this procedure is quite safe and is considered minimally invasive. As usual, it is only yours truely who has done some research on the whole thing. I should have done this some time ago since I could have asked the doctors some “interesting” questions on why such a procedure was necessary. My main question would have been why could the stone not be shattered by using shock waves as described on the below links?

Some links with information on Laser lithotripsy follow.

http://www.cornellurology.com/stones/treatments/surgical.shtml

http://www.ehealthmd.com/library/kidneystones/KS_treatment.html

Amazing pictures of a burning gas crater in Turkmenistan.

[via]: IndiaUncut

A post I made to the seeing with sound list about my eating noodles and watermelon with the vOICe.
Hi all,

I have just finished eating breakfast. The different thing though about this breakfast was that I was wearing the vOICe while eating. I breakfasted on noodles and watermelon. When I eat food, mostly, I need to grope for the food on my plate. I do know where it is but I still need to utilise my hand to find the food. The idea was to eliminate the use of the hand. I set a zoom factor of 4 to restrict the camera view to my plate. This was pure guesswork but it seems to have worked well. I was able to sense the noodles falling into the plate as they were being served. I was also able to sense how the noodles were scattered. The main difficulty I had was figuring out what was in the radius of my plate and what was peripheral. Another problem was that even though I was using a headmounted setup, I had to look down directly on my plate to see the food. The next item of food that I had was a watermelon. It was cut into bite sized chunks. Things here worked a little better as in I was able to find the general concentration of pieces. I moved my hand in that general direction on the plate and was able to snag a piece of watermelon with my fork. Things did become a little difficult when I only had very small pieces left. By difficult I mean I had a hard time finding the smaller pieces of watermelon on my plate.

See the video clip of me eating noodles. The clip has been taken from my perspective so you can’t actually see me.
A video of my eating noodles with the vOICe

A sound scape of the box of spicesThis image shows a box of spices. There is one big box and every individual spice is kept in its own box. You will be able to sense the different circles belonging to different boxes.

a humorous illustrated narration of the  history of Physics.

One of the best short story I have ever read. Issac Asimov was good.

… art, because Jackson Pollock pulled this off.

To all the desis out there… Happy Holi !! 

My brother is not particularly fond of the Holi mess and sometimes the celebrations can turn rather nasty (what with people sailing on bhang and all that) but I love it and that’s one of the things that I miss living here in the US. Just try this Flickr link for tons of Holi photos from India and elsewhere.

Had to post a pointer to this.

While we are talking about graffiti, if you’ve not already seen it, check out this artist who goes by the pseudonym of Bansky here and here. His (her?) art is breathtakingly simple and carries an underlying idea most of the times.

IRS sent me a notification yesteday regarding my stimulus package. It seems I could be getting somewhere in the range of $300 to $600. Yay! It goes straight to the bank of-course and that of-course is not the intention of the package. The bill for the package passed with bipartisan support but amazingly there seems to be no clinching evidence that that this scheme works. In fact, here’s an argument against it. It seems that it’s more symbolic than actually carrying a real expectation of directly injecting adrenaline into the economic system by encouraging people to spend. People like me are not going to and I am sure a lot of other are not going to blow away the amount on frivolous expenditure either. It could, however, send signals to the market that the government has your back. This ties in with what Ben Stein was talking about a while back in a session with the Commonwealth Club. Also, here’s Brad DeLong on the same subject.

A view of the teraces facing my house. This photograph has been taken from my terrace. The image is extremely complex because it shows a variety of roofs of houses and I suspect, some other things.

Wheel valves for the uninitiated

A picture of pipes and veal valves on my terrace. These valves resemble miniature steering wheels. They are used to control the flow of water A overhead tanks to my house.

A water tank and it’s associated down take pipes

Sound scape of water tankThis image is of a water tank on top of my house and it’s down take pipes. This was the first image I took using the latest version of the vOICe and my Nokia E51.

Terrace panorama

A view of the Street facing my house. This photograph has been taken from my terrace. The image is extremely complex because it shows a variety of vehicles and I suspect, parts of people.

Hehehe… vote for Amitabh Bachan for the Prime Minister of the US. It’s hilarious how he compares himself to Optimus. Also watch how they poke fun at both Elliot Spitzer (his sex scandal) and the Hillary Clinton (her 3 A.M ad) in the same sketch. Clever.

This is a follow-up to a previous post of mine. John Bogle is the father of the indexed fund and the founder of the largest mutual fund organization in the world – Vanguard). Russ Roberts interviewed him about a year back on his podcast EconTalk and here’s the gist of what he said. For wherever he does offer opinion, you can take it as unbiased and honest because I did not find him pushing any agenda beyond advocating something he really believes in.

• Bogle calls the stock market a “a giant distraction”. His main argument is for owning businesses as opposed to owning stocks. Buying into the indexed fund model of investing is a way to achieve that. Potential investors invest in businesses and they enjoy returns on their capital via the dividends (which investors can re-invest, put in the bank etc.) that these businesses are supposed to pay on their earnings.

• The idea rests on the following premise. Economics has very little to do with the stock market. Economics and stock market are not correlated, however, economics and businesses are. In terms of earnings per share, the businesses can be shown to grow at the same rate as the economy which is a historical 6% nominal growth rate per annum.

• Bogle is (conservatively) invested 60% bonds (fixed income) and 40% stocks (equity), all at Vanguard. He mentions that he follows a self imposed rule of “do not peek at your portfolio”. Since this is not the stock market, investors do not need to obsessively track their stocks.

• The secret to investing is that there is no secret. Investing is locking and tackling – making sure your costs are low, asset allocation is right, making sure your risks are commensurate with your ability to deal with risk, diversifying, and investing for the long term.

• Bogle says, most of the bond funds are not “worth the powder to blow them to smithereens”. The main reason being that in the bond market the returns are pretty much predictable from one manager to another, so a managed fund is not really adding any value. If the bond market deliver a (say) 7% return (on, let’s say investment quality bonds – treasury, investment grade corporate etc.) you are not going to have managers presiding over returns of (say) 0% or 15%. Managers add very little value to bond funds, so why pay them any money. Bond market is very homogeneous so most of the returns center in a very narrow band. Managers can, in fact, detract from value.

• All bond funds are load funds (sales commission). The load fees is approximately 5% per year which is about what the yield is these days. So your first year income is gone. Besides, bond funds have expense rations of 1% per year on average. Add to that the transaction costs (trading bonds), it implies another hidden costs of a ¼% per year. So in now you are seeing actual returns of 3 and 3¼%. One side affect of all this is that the managers might take more risks with the portfolio to compensate for the costs.

• If you do want to buy bond funds, buy lost cost offered by reputable organizations. The first thing you think about then is the maturity, short term (maturity of about 5 years), intermediate term (maturity of about 6-8 years) or long term (with maturity of about 15-16 years). If you have money in the bank, a short term bond fund with a maturity of about 5 year will be a good idea. Their value will fluctuate but over a few years the fluctuations will inevitably be overwhelmed by the higher return over a money market account. Intermediate term bond finds involve a little more risk to the principle but the records show you get a small premium for the longer term you sign up for.

• Bonds are very sensitive to interest rate fluctuation but they should not concern a long term bond investor. On the contrary, one of the things that you want to pray for as a bond investor is for interest rates to go up! Sure, your principle will go down for a year or so but they will gradually come back up because the bonds will be retired at their maturity for their par value, but the re-investment rate for your bond portfolio will also go up.

• A typical fund investor earns about 3 percentage per year points less than the typical fund. So if we are looking at a fund with returns of about 5½% a year, the typical fund investor will actually earn 2½% per year. Adjusting to inflation of about (a projection from historical data into the next decade) 2½% per year, the real return is approx 0 for the coming decade!, and that’s not taking into account taxes on the mutual funds.

• A good fund will under perform one year out of three. It has been observed that after the two good years the money pours in and after the one bad year money pours out. So buying a fund when it’s high and selling it when it’s low is not exactly a very profitable strategy.

• Bogle’s says that investors are terrible stock pickers because they (inevitably) look backwards and that’s why he wants investors to steer clear of the stock market. He cites an example of how the best 10 mutual finds of 1996 and 1999 ranked roughly from 790 to 800th when the market went down. So performance chasing is the investors worst enemy, because you can never predict the future. Never think you know more than the market.. nobody does. At this point they cite Bill Miller and how he has incredibly beaten the odds for a long time. (You can read more about Bill Miller here if you are interested).

That festival is just around the corner again. Yes, I am talking about Holi. I appreciate the sense of community, the triumph over good and evil etc., but please, one water balloon is one too many and don’t spray water and or color on me without asking!

Yes, I have played holi with gusto many times and wont mind doing it again but it was with a group of people who had consented to play. There is an assumption on holi day on the streets of Delhi that any one walking is desperate to play and in a spirit of fellowship, must be obliged!! Just because it is holi, people will not stop taking their constitutional though they may do so at an unusual hour and mundane things like going to a grocery store (I wonder if any will be open) still have to be done.

Here and here. It’s interesting to see the extent of the Fed’s involvement. Should it not have been allowed to go bankrupt??

Side view of car

This image shows the view of the side of a car. It has been taken from the backside passenger window of an other car. I have used the vOICe to take this image. You can clearly hear the doors of the car. I suspect most of the image is of the part of the door that is just below the passenger windows of the car.

Soundscape of an autorickshaw

The image below shows an autorickshaw from the side. You can clearly make out the dividing bar between the back and front halves. For more information on autorickshaw’s, see the following link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw

A soundscape of the same image can also be downloaded here. I took this image using my Nokia E51 with the very latest version of the vOICe. Again, I was looking out the left side passenger window of a car.

Soundscape of a complex street scene.

Above is a complex street scene captured at a red light. There are a number of vehicles visible in the image.

Over at xkcd, the kilobyte abbreviations sorted out. Fun stuff.