Over at xkcd, the kilobyte abbreviations sorted out. Fun stuff.
Kilobyte
14-Mar-08Trading vs. Indexed Funds
09-Mar-08I had heard Russ Roberts interview John Bogle for his EconTalk podcast a couple of months back. Bogle is the man behind Vanguard, and he is an indexing evangalist. His book The Little Book of Common Sense Investing is a defense of the indexing investment stratergy. Today, NYT ran this[*] and it seems to bear out his argument. Need to revisit Bogle’s conversation with Russ Roberts and analyze it again, more so in the context of this article.
[*]: via Marginal Revolution
I took a look at the HCL MiLeap ultra mobile PC. The screen is just 7 inches wide and the keys resemble those of a calculator. The PC is similar in size to those fat exercise books one used to carry in school. I am not talking about registers here but those fat books between small copies and large registers. You can’t really feel the weight of the machine. I even tried installing a screen reader namely Jaws for Windows on it. The installation took a lot of time but in a brief test, the screen reader behaved as it was supposed to. I then tried the vOICe which was why I was looking at Ultra Mobile PC(s) in the first place. That worked too. All in all, the MiLeap is a good option for any one looking for a light weight laptop. I wish it were smaller so that it could fit into my pocket. The model for Rs. 17500 (approximately) comes with LINUX. You can get Windows XP loaded on to it for a small fee. My tests in the shop were done on a MiLeap Y series laptop which is around Rs. 35000.
I was impressed with the prompt presales service of HCL and the patience of the staff who allowed me to test my programs on their computers.
Mobile Asia 2008
04-Mar-08I paid a visit to Mobile Asia 2008. All I can say is that it was a very “me too” affair. All the vendors had the same kind of phones with touch screens. Everyone was showing off their cameras and music playing features.
Samsung had an interesting Haptic phone while Nokia was betting big on it’s maps. The Haptic phone was interesting but I suspect it’s true capabilities were not being shown since there were no real applications that could take advantage of the technology. Nokia maps are ok and resemble the maps used by Wayfinder. The Wayfinder maps are quite good but as of now, in India, there is no address level navigation.
Randhir Singh defends socialism
03-Mar-08Randhir Singh, former Professor of Political Theory, University of Delhi, defends socialism as an ideology and talks about it’s future here [*]. I cannot claim to have an in-depth understanding of different economic systems, but from whatever I do understand and from all the evidence around me, I do not see socialism as having done so well. Particularly in India, where I see it as a spectacular failure in seeding a political and social environment that can support an efficient economic system. Randir Singh says that,
Socialism failed primarily due to the inadequacies of theory and practice, to the mistaken choices that the Communist parties in power made.
If this is the main argument being presented to give socialism a second chance, then it’s is a poor case indeed. By the logic of this argument the state is key to the success or failure of this system. Since the state is not a single organism or a dispassionate machine but a composition of hundreds and thousands of people, how are we to guarantee ideological purity throughout the state? Surely, that’s necessary since without that socialism would not have a chance. Contrast this with capitalism where one of the key concept itself is that there is no central planner. It is supposed to be a self-regulating self-adjusting machine that maximises efficiency for the use of scarce resources avaialble to us.
For now, I am just putting this up here as a reminder to myself to dig a little deeper into this topic and to investigate arguments both for and against the idea that socialism is not a discredited ideology at all and that capitalism is not the success it is made out to be.
[*] Link via booksforum.
American Gods – for free
02-Mar-08Neil Gaiman has put up his book American Gods to read for free at the Harper Collins site. You can get to it here. American Gods is very enjoyable fantasy-fiction with a plotline featuring Gods from various cultures tranplanted to American soil (the immigrants bought their Gods with them). The Gods live among people and are duking it out amongst each other for relevance and survival in modern time and settings, the key conflict being among the Gods of yore and the new Gods of the technology. If you wish to look below the surface there’s a commentary on America’s identity as an immigrant nation and what immigrants bring to the cultural. I would recommend it to anyone who has an interest in the fantasy-fiction genre and/or wants to read a good story.
Neil Gaiman is among my favorite authors and I have read (and own) almost everything put out by him. He is a fantastic storyteller with a prodigious imagination and he along with Terry Pratchett wrote my all-time favorite Good Omens – a funny, masterful and intelligent satire that combines Terry Pratchett’s zany humor and Gaiman’s dark atmosphere and character constructions. Gaiman also built the elaborate mythology of the 10 books of the Sandman graphic novels, a series that is reputed to have lifted the comic book format to appeal to a more mature audience (and in the process turn into graphic novels). A lot of his work, including Neverwhere, Stardust, and now Coraline has been translated to celluloid and television.
Ben Stein at the Commonwealth Club
28-Feb-08Ben Stein will be recognizable to most as the monotonic, hilariously laconic psychiatrist from The Mask. He’s also a recognized economist probably making him a unique species – an economist actor. He spoke at the Commonwealth club on the 24th of January 08 and here’s a summary of the facts he presented and his arguments and opinions. The emphasis in places is mine.
- It’s very very hard to forecast the market. The only way to correctly forecast is to forecast often! (pun intended by him). The markets are way oversold and there’s no justification for a drop of this magnitude. The only way to square off this drop is with a 20% drops in profits for 25 years consistently. Which clearly not happened in the near past.
- The economy is nowhere near as bad as it looks. The losses in the sub prime mess are about 100 billion so far. Even if the losses were double of that, it’s still a tiny fraction of what was lost in the tech collapse of the 90′s. Another way to put it in perspective is to consider the losses as a fraction of the entire size of the US economy, which is an aggregate of 65 trillion. Yet another way to put it in perspective is to consider that the entire mortgage market is about 20 trillion. If you put 100 billion alongside 20 trillion the picture does not look that distorted. On a lighter note he said that maybe we do not consider these as losses at all. It’s just a lot of people who borrowed money that they did not have in the first place and the now they do not have to pay it back!
- The US is probably not in a recession. Recession is defined as 6 months of continuous declining economic activity. We cannot know if we were in a recession since it’s only been a few weeks since the start of things going south. He thinks that even if what’s happening currently can be considered as a recession, it need not have happened in the first place. The average duration for a recession in the post war period has been 10 months. The average period in the past 25 years has 6 months and there have been only been 2 of them. Clearly those were bad but even those periods were not the end of the world.
Here, he brings up the role of the media. One of things that he mentioned more than once in his discussion was his displeasure with how the new media peddles bad news, hypes it and sells it, creating more fear and further bad news to sell. The media profits from peddling fear and uncertainty. The media put the fear in and fear affects the velocity of money and every part of the economic eco-system and that’s part of the reason of the current economic climate, not any real underlying problem.
- The Fed is actually doing a good job. The fed can supply liquidity into the market and he feels that the Fed can indeed go one step further and openly assure the banks that they have their banks. He thinks that the banks, in the way they are structured, are already pretty socialized so an open assurance by the Fed would not be too much out of line. He also suggests that maybe the Fed should bail out the mortgage industry too.
The Fed’s 150 billion stimulus helps with the mood. The the interest rate cut along with the stimulus handouts does not do much because there’s already a great deal liquidity in the market, but it does make the people feel that there is someone on their side and hence lift the general sentiment.
- Ben Stein spoke out strongly against the financial sector. He considered the role of the traders, speculators and short sellers highly avaricious and irresponsible. These people have enormous power because they are literally controlling the flow of money and the rices on securities by controlling trading on the options/futures/stock exchanges in tremendous volumes. These people are pushing push the market up or down depending on which direction they think they can make more money, moving the market up buy buying up or moving the down by selling.
- He talks about Goldman Sachs reported as having simultaneously selling mortgage backed securities and at the same time doing short sales on that sector. Not illegal but probably unethical and definitely cynical (read more about this here and a defense of what Goldman did here). People running these companies did not understand the risks properly and were also culpable. He goes on to talk against fat CEO exit options and compensation packages even in the face of poor performance. Case in point, the former chairman of Merill Llynch (Stanley O’Nea) who oversaw losses in billion during 2007 on his watch, but still got a sweet $160 million in compensation ($24.7 million in retirement benefits, $5.4 in deferred compensation, and $131.4 million in stock and option holdings)!
- Oil prices are a concern but it’s nothing catastrophic. Oil prices cannot be controlled by Washington so why not let the market handle it. I guess the rationale is that the prices might go higher but then market economics will have people buying less of the scarce (and consequently higher priced) commodity or maybe seek alternatives and the prices would even themselves out (in the worst case we all end up driving horses to work).
- On a non-economic note, he mentioned being very proud of the progress made in moral and ethical sphere by the US. He considers the fact that in a country this size everybody has legal rights and freedoms and despite it’s size the country is very well governed (I totally concur with him on this). He mentioned the Civil Rights movement as being pivotal in shaping the morals of the nation.
Among the immediate challenges facing the US:
- 7-8 million baby-boomers are nearing retirement. Their average savings are $15,000. If you include home equity, assuming all have a home, it’s about $115,000. These are hard figures to make a decent living on, especially for people in their old age who might have more pressing medical needs. Among these ~8 million, 40% have no real savings. Ben then encourages people who make savings instruments to design ones that are specially targeted to the boomers and asks the baby-boomers to think more on saving.
- Medicare. The indebtedness is so large that it exceeds the entire income of the US. If you put the entire economy of the United States, every car, every silo, everything that’s produced, every stock, every bond, everything into one big bond, even that does not produce enough income to pay for the Medicare liabilities.
- The US is borrowing somewhere in the vicinity of 1 billion dollars a day for oil. That’s a a LOT of borrowing and because of this the foreigners are owning a lot of the US. At a certain point they can just up and leave and decide against holding dollars anymore. They might think the the dollar is constantly going down and might decide to hold Euros instead. This in turn might cause the dollar to sink even more and could form a vicious circle. What’s the entire set of reasons for the dollar depreciating is something I do not understand very well and will explore a little more in another post.
- The United State is a fantastically prosperous. The average real wages (after inflation) have tripled in the last 50 years. On a per capita basis, the US is way richer than Japan and much much richer than Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. That said, there is great income inequality and wealth is very evenly distributed and that’s a cause for concern but it’s potential for great social friction. He cites the statistics of 1/10th of 1% owning 43% of all the financial assets in the country and the bottom 20% owning a paltry 1% (and most of that too in the form of cars).
In 2004 the top 130 thousand wage earners in this country earned more than the bottom 120 million. In 2005 the top 300 thousand wage earners in this country earned more than the bottom bottom 200 million. Ben Stein sees this disparity as a large force undermining social cohesion, something on which he lays a big emphasis on as being one of the core values and strengths of the nation.
Songs of the Week (Wk. 9 / 08)
27-Feb-08Bjork – All is Full of Love
The accompanying video features two lesbian robots.. but this is Bjork who has even turned herself into an art piece. I’ve never really understood her art or her music but this song is ethereal, haunting and quite simply the most beautiful piece of music I have heard in a long time. Considering this is Bjork, the lyrics are fairly accessible.
Eddie Vedder – Hard Sun
Eddie Vedder – End of the Road
Both songs are from the soundtrack to Into the Wild and I must say go a long way towards restoring my interest in contemporary rock music. I was afraid I was turning into an ambient/atmospheric/light-groove music sissy (current interests include Royksopp, Air, Eluvium etc. so that should tell you something).
Kenny Wayne Shepherd – Blue on Black
One of my favorite rock songs (and has been for a long time)… It’s slightly bluesy in tone and the lyrics are killer.
Supergrass – Fin
mmmm.. moody..
Grant Lee Buffalo – Fuzzy
Grant Lee Phillips has one of the most distinctive voice.
Explosions In The Sky – Your Hand In Mine
God Is An Astronaut – Remembrance day
Euphoria – The Road
Nightmares on Wax – Les Nuits
Instrumental goodness. The Nightmares on Wax number is fairly old (and my favorite among these) but the rest are fairly recent.
Conjure One – Center of the Sun
Man.. Poe’s voice is beautiful.
MIA – Paper Planes
MIA is psychedelic.
Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros – Bhindi Bhagee
A brilliant, quirky and fun song on the immigrant neighborhoods of London. This is so removed in style and mood from The Clash that there’s no way to know that you are listening to the guy who was The Clash. As to the title, “Bhindi” in Hindi is “Ladyfinger”.. yes.. as in the vegetable ladyfinger. Lord know what “bhagee” means though… “bhag” means “run” in Hindi but I am not sure that that’s what he intended. Otherwise the song would translate as “The Ladyfinger Ran”.
Gotye – Heart’s a Messs
Gotye is an Australian artist. I checked a couple of places (iTunes included) and I could not find his songs for sale easily. However, here’s the video of this song.
Queensryche – Scarborough Fair
Queensryche is a band out of Seattle that was born the same time as the grunge phase. They were overshadowed by other grunge heavyweigths (Pearl Jam, Nirvana etc.) but have a pretty solid body of work. Although Simon and Garfunkle set the traditional folk song in counterpoint (the Canticle part of Scarborough Fair) which made it unique and beautiful, I like this re-imagining much much better than theirs. Queensryche have taken the old folk song and have adapted in into a rock format very very effectively. There’s no counterpoin here but it’s short, sweet and heavy – all at the same time, so good.
Timbaland – Apologize (feat. One Republic)
Nelly Furtardo – Say it Right
Both under very heavy rotation on commercial (read that largely uninspired, payola-infested, lifeless non-visual broadcast medium) radio last year. That should, however, not prevent you from enjoying Timbaland’s signature snare drums and style. He produced Nelly Furtardo’s song too and features in her video for this song. Good stuff.
From There to Here
26-Feb-08I was running this blog earlier at theemptyvessel.info. The other posters were my brothers Abhishek and Pranav. That domain name expired and I decided to change it. The banner is from my previous site. It’s still here because it was done by a friend of mine and I really love it. The site name has changed, so sadly, I’ll have to replace it.
Update#1: The banner’s been replaced. For those who are curious this 
is what it looked like.
Update #2: Embedded links in the posts from the older site (that’s every post before this one) are not working still. Also, the “next”/”previous” pages link is absent so you’ll have to rely on the archives or authors pages to navigate to get to the older pages. (03/01/08)
Update #3: The “next/”previous” page links are now added. (03/02/08)
Brad DeLong on China and India
20-Jul-07Generally very positive on India. Negatives: Corrupt and Bureaucratic government, Illiteracy, Infrastructure.
Dying cells
13-Jul-07The average age of cells in your body is 7 to 10 years [*]. The resulting question might in reality turn out to be naive, but it does strike you immediately; “If all our cells are replaced eventually, how are we the same person after 10 years?”
Also, even though the number of cells in the body keeps changing, the size of your body is in direct proportion to the number of cells in it. This is, of course, true for animals too.
[*]: NYT
Songs of the week
12-Jul-07The Cure – Burn
Blistering licks from The Cure, from the soundtrack to The Crow. The way Robert Smith presented himself in all his goth glory, he could very well have played the Crow instead of Brandon Lee.
Gustavo Santaolalla – De Usuahia A La Quiaca
A beautiful, delicate instrumental from the guy who surely gained a lot of recognition after his contribution (another gem called Iguazu) to the soundtrack for this year’s Babel. The primary sound in his music is usually from an instrument called Charango which sounds very similar to the Santoor, which is used a lot in Indian (mostly classical) music. From the soundtrack of Motorcycle Diaries, the Che Guevara road movie.
Silversun Pickups – Rusted Wheel
A new(ish) band out of L.A. This is from their recent album Carnavas. Good stuff.
Matt Mays – When The Angels Make Contact
Matt Mays (w. El Torpedo) – On The Hood
Matt Mays is good talent but is not very well known stateside.
Catherine Wheel – Fripp
Remember Catherine Wheel, no? never heard of them? Well try this anyway, it’s one of their very best. If you need a category to place this piece in, well, 1990′s alt-rock would suffice I guess.
Pink Floyd – Pigs (Three Different Ones)
I recently gave Animals a re-hear (is there such a word?) and I really think it’s underrated in the Floyd discography. People talk about Wish You Were Here, Dark Side of The Moon, The Wall but this does not fare very well in conversations. Maybe it should, although my Floyd favorite Meddle probably fares even worse. Let me be a snob
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – All You Do Is Talk
Ooooh.. something semi-decent from a band from the Bay Area. That alone makes this worth putting on the list. Seriously, the bay area has a serious deficit of musical talent. I think the Jefferson Airplanes and Grateful Deads of the worlds sucked up the regions musical karma from the next generations quota too .. just kidding!
Porcupine Tree – Fadeaway
Have I praised this band enough? Have I probably listed this song earlier? Well who cares, the song is that good.
My Bloody Valentine – Soon
Shoegazing pioneers My Bloody Valentine’s landmark (and last) album Loveless has this kicker to close the album. I you ever need an introduction on what distortion is, please do hear this album. It will be very very instructional.
Slowdive – Soulvaki Space Station and
Slowdive – Shine
.. because I mentioned shoegazing.
Tears For Fears – Sketches Of Pain
You know Tears for Fears right? Them of the Everybody Want to Rule the World fame? By the way that song’s surely on the most overplayed songs of the century list. Tears for Fears have actually done pretty interesting things here and there that do not get much attention. This song is one example. The standout in this song is how it breaks into a flamenco style three-fourths of the way through. The sound is a bit processed but it’s pretty nevertheless.
Tears For Fears – The Working Hour
Pretty brass sounds tie this one together nicely. Again one of the Tears’ lesser known numbers.
Wilco – Impossible Germany
Wilco is a puzzle I am still trying to solve. I also plan to enroll myself in a learn-Wilco-in-21-days course to better understand what their music is about. Oh, I know I know, there is no such thing, but seriously, a lot of the alt/folk/country-rock bunch praised Being There and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to the high heavens. That means any self-respecting music-lover should try a little harder to see what’s really going on. No? Well, at least this song is more radio friendly than most of their products. It’s from their recent album Sky Blue Sky. Starbucks proudly displays this among their album wares these days there surely is something to Wilco. Right? No?
J-say enabling Powerpoint 2003
12-Jul-07The commandsI have written commands that J-say enable Microsoft Powerpoint 2003. Please try these experimental commands. Feedback is welcome.
These commands have been created by wrapping the jaws Powerpoint keyboard scripts from the *.jkm file in Dragon Naturally Speaking.
Sample accessible form
03-Jul-07The formI have created a sample accessible form. I need to check this though.
J-sayify
24-Jun-07A small j-say utility
How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra?
19-Jun-07First to break the recent drought posts, here’s an analysis of that scrouge of our times, the Viagra spam.
via: Arts & Letters Daily
Upgraded WordPress
12-May-07Just done a long overdue upgrade to WordPress 2.1. It was relatively painless but for some reason the theme I was using does not work properly with this new version. I am working on fixing that and till then the site will look pretty vanilla.
Update: Horray! Got the theme fixed. Most importantly the logo (of which I am rather proud). Now we are back in business.
Song of the Sirens
10-May-07My brother has been insisting for a while that I watch Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou. I am not a big fan of their storytelling or movie-making style but I finally ended up watching this
movie. Actually, I had seen it a long time back and at that time the movie did not quite register, because I have no recollection of either liking or disliking it. My brother alerted me to the fact that it’s loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey, something, which again had not registered earlier even though the beginning credits clearly say so. To be fair though you really have to have read Odyssey to draw parallels between the movie and the epic. Some parallels do not appear as characters or incidents but are drawn out as a subtext of some other incident in the movie. It’s not as if the Coen brothers have relocated the Odyssey to a more contemporary setting. Instead they have taken the base fabric of the epic, the travails of Odyssey (making an appearance here as a vain, pomade covered, hair-style obsessed convict on the run called Everett, played with relish by George Clooney) on the road home after exile, and taken characters and incidents in Odyssey and weaved them into a comedy drama of their own story of a man on the run. The conceit works really well here. The Coen brother’s story is funny and quirky. John Goodman turns up as a crooked one-eyed bible salesman, echoing Cyclops, the Sirens also make an appearance, and Everett’s wife Penny has a suitor in his absence much like Penelope in the epic.
Only a day or two after watching the movie I came across the Tim Buckley (Jeff Buckley was his son) song called Song To The Siren. As the name suggests the lyrics are about a guy who’s lured by the song of a Siren. Soon after, I heard a cover of that song by the group This Mortal Coil and I was totally floored. It’s an absolute beauty. Even though the lyrics would suggest that it’s a man singing, This Mortal Coil’s version has Elizabeth Fraser (best known as the lead singer of Cocteau Twins’), a woman, as the lead singer. Her voice has this quality that fits the mood of the lyrics perfectly and expresses capitulation to the Siren’s song beautifully. She just transports the song to a different realm entirely. If you get a chance give it a listen (A version with much below sub-par audio is here). Oh, and maybe brush up your Greek Mythology to get a little context before you listen to it, or read up the parts in Odyssey where Odysseus encounters the Sirens on his journey back home. In O Brother, Where Art Thou, the Sirens do make an appearance. Everett and his two companions-on-the-run, are driving on a tree-lined highway when one of them, spying these girls through the trees, yells at Everett to stop. They all rush out to near where three girls are. They are singing (very ethereally) and washing themselves and their clothes (very delicately) at a river bank. The fellows are enchanted and stare open-mouthed. These ladies walk up to them, not saying a word, still singing and swaying seductively. And boy are they seduced. During the course of their singing, the girls stiff them with some local wine and the next thing you know two of them (Everett and the slightly dense Delmar) find themselves waking from a deep slumber, near the same spot they saw the Sirens, and one of three is missing. It turns out much later that the girls had trussed up one of them (the hot-headed Pete played by John Turturro) and turned him in for a bounty on the heads of these runaway convicts.
tourfilter
02-May-07Tourfilter is a website that tracks tour dates of bands and singers. I think it’s a fantastic service and a great example of content aggregation by collaboration. This is AJAX powered, script driven WEB 2.0 stuff that really works and is useful.
Exponential moving average
30-Apr-07Exponential average workbookPlease review the attached Excel workbook. Have I calculated the exponential moving averages correctly?