The Blog at the End of the Internet

Brady goes down, another season starts

2008-09-07T21:33:00.005-05:00

this is the first post being written in San Diego, almost a year after the last one. yes, i am a prolific blogger. see, i had this notion of staying true to the origins of blog - as in weblog - as in, a log of things seen whilst traversing the Web. like a captain's log - where a captain records the sights of his travels - the serpent headed monster of the sea (particularly after a few bottles of rum), the walrus seen trimming his moustache, etc. a list of places on the web that I record for my own posterity, in case I want to visit them later on for a second view - and perhaps to direct some of my friends or the occasional googler who ends up on my blog. so i made a point to make each post contain at least one link leading somewhere, a post with a story, and not my story. my story is too boring for public consumption, and my story doesn't have a link that will take you somewhere else. of course, it's easy to finagle a link in that's totally unrelated, but that would be cheating. unless - and by now you must be wondering the post title is unrelated too - the link is related back to the title. well yea that's cheating too but who cares? so here are a couple of short (<1 min) football-related memorable videos, Jim Mora and Dennis Green. Hope Brady gets back in the game soon.

Harvest Moon

2007-09-30T09:45:00.000-05:00

Another equinox passes by, as the Sun makes its annual circumambulation around Earth. A chinese friend of mine offered me some kind of an egg cake, in celebration of their Autumn Moon festival. Our lunacy with Earth's closest neighbor in space continues.
Harvest moon is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox (~sep 23) - when the moon rises very soon(~15-30 minutes) after sunset and stays low on the horizon for a while. Due to it being low on the horizon, we see the Moon Illusion - the light passes through a lot more atmosphere making it appear golden and slightly larger - exacerbated by the fact that the moon being on the same level as land features (hills, houses, trees etc) gives us a sense of scale that is otherwise absent for a moon high in the sky. The additional brightness past sunset due to moon allowed farmers to work more hours during the harvest in autumn, hence the name.
The full moon closest to the vernal equinox (~mar 23) swings moonrise time to the other extreme - it rises about 1.5 hrs later in the night, but stays quite bright for a while. Back in the dark ages, where there were no neon lights and high speed trains, pilgrims traveling on foot/animals chose the vernal equinox full moon for their pilgrimages so that they could travel by day and night (or only by night if traversing a hot desert), which is designated as Easter.
The photo was an amateurish experiment at astrophotography - I used a 100x telescope and just took a photo of the magnified image in the eyepiece using a regular camera. (Sounds simple but it took 4 people, 45 minutes and infinite patience to get this fuzzy looking image).

Peru - Machu Picchu - 222 Megapixel | Andre Gunther Photography

2006-06-23T08:29:00.000-05:00

Ahhh, Machu Picchu!

How many wanderlusts lust for you!

For devotees like us, who can only aspire to visit this indescribable beauty of a place at some point in our lifetimes, a kind soul has created a 222 megapixel zoomable/browsable picture , using a mosaic of 35 high-res photos. This is the closest many people would possibly get to seeing this ancient Incan city high in the Andes. This is probably the closest i would get, though I sincerely hope I would be able to make the pilgrimage some day.

Flock!

2006-06-10T23:33:00.000-05:00

So I recently came to know of this wonderful browser called Flock that's based off of firefox, but has a lot of cool web 2.0 features like blogging editor that lets you post directly, drap-dropping photos into Flickr and an in-built RSS reader, to name a few. Think of it as firefox with a lot of those wonderful extensions built-in. They have a dev version to try out, and apparently they are getting ready for a big Alpha release soon. It is available for Windows/Linux/OS X. I am running 0.7 on linux.

It looks amazing, light, and fast. and the pleasant surprise for me was that it auto installed Flash plugin directly on my AMD64 machine! I think it is a 32-bit version of Flock and that's why flash was set up in a, umm, flash, but I have been proved wrong too many times in the past to have any faith in my assertions myself.

But however it works, it works - i now have a web browser with Flash on my 64-bit linux machine, and that's all i care about! I can now watch youtube, read www.nba.com without impairing my eyesight and am now posting this using the blog tool in Flock.

Way cool.

What She Doesnt Know Will Kill You.

2006-06-10T17:13:00.000-05:00

Matt Brochu is a columnist at the Daily Collegian, our (UMass Amherst's) college newspaper. Whenever I pick up a copy of the Collegian and see his weekly opinion piece, I read it without fail - his writing is sharp, insightful and humorous. I recently came to know (old news) that an article by him had become a kind of internet meme, and was so popular that it was mentioned in the Washington Post, apart from being circulated among countless dorm rooms and universities all over the western hemisphere. Unfortunately the article had to be taken down from the Collegian's online archives, but I found many places (blogs) where his article was saved in its entirety. Being a fan myself I decided to give this wonderful article a home of its own, and here's where you can read it.

And the truth shall set you free.

Are Brahmins the Dalits of today?

2006-05-28T22:49:00.000-05:00

This thought-provoking article written by the popular Francois Gautier appeared in rediff a few days ago. He raises a pertinent question in light of the recent OBC reservation hullabaloo, and makes his point with studies and statistics, demonstrating how the once upper-caste brahmins are now working in public toilets, railway stations etc., and how their per capita income is way less than the supposedly backward castes.

I am of the opinion that it is not just the brahmins that are affected by the whole reservation scheme. Sure it makes more sense to victimise them because (a) they appear to be the most high-handed and, ironically in a sense, 'untouchable' by the lower echelons of society and (b) because they symbolise Hinduism, as Gautier rightly pointed out in his essay

When they attack Brahmins, their target is unmistakably Hinduism.

when talking about anti-brahministic groups. It is ok to use brahmins as a figurehead in order to propagate the argument, but in a realistic discussion, the other forward castes which are suffering equally, cannot be left out of the equation.

Getting back to the brahmin issue, I found an interesting set of questions on this topic in a forum, and I am picking a few to answer them in my way.

Q.Why do poeple get surprise if a brahmin eats non-veg or takes liquor. Why should a Brahimin by birth follow any discipline? Why should Vedic students who know that the profession does not ean them much of money spend/ waste their time memorising and analysing vedas? Do these students and their parents believe that the society would protect them? If yes, is their faith misplaced?If the social system does not want brahmins and associated system, it should be removed and forget all the rituals, vedas, teaching, mentoring etc. Let brahmins who are committed and disciplined also enjoy their time/life.
When there is no demand for a service, there is no point continuing it.

A. Brahminism is a way of life. Just like every other cultural stream, it has its customs, its purpose, and its failings. The brahmin tradition will continue to grow within those cultural bounds that, by the day, stretch a little, tear a little and mend a little. It may not be as dynamic as some other streams - hence there would not be any radical changes such as every brahmin suddenly discontinuing his/her rituals, but it is slowly changing too. It is also very erroneous to assume that brahmins are doing a service, their holistic practices are performed as a drudgery and that they are not 'enjoying' their life. To brahmins these characteristics are undercurrents in their lives, and will continue to exist, with or without an obvious purpose. This is how they pledge their allegiance to their heritage of their past, how they recognise themselves in the present, and how they attempt to survive the culture for posterity. To change their way of living in order to prove a point (or because it is going unappreciated) is absurd and meaningless.

Thus Spake Linus

2006-05-19T10:11:00.000-05:00

This is a very good interview with linus torvalds and where he stands about the whole linux thing. from his responses you can't help but notice how sensible he is in his arguments, and how he doesn't have (at least, doesn't show) strong fanatic sentiments - especially his opinion about the rampant anti-microsoft feelings that seem to characterize (and unfortunately, esoterize) most of the open source community.
CNN.com - Reclusive Linux founder opens up - May 18, 2006
It is heartening to see that he gives due credit to open source initiatives, and acknowledges firefox as another key player. he seems to have captured the basic instinct that drives open source - it is not warm community feeling or general philanthropy, but the desire to show off. show off enough to say you are proud of what you did, but not so egoistic as to not share it with others.
FTA:

I didn't start thinking I want to give out the source code [for linux]. To a large degree open source was just a way to allow others to look at
this and say, "Hey, this is what I've done -- I'm proud of this."

I am India

2006-05-09T23:14:00.000-05:00

a beautiful video from bharatbala productions (yea, vande mataram). could not find any info on this piece, not even on bala's site - i wonder if the music is by ranjit barot...

thoughts after watching the video: this is an India that we don't get to see too often. this is a different India, a positive India, an India that's growing and moving forward, a technological India that appears polished and modern, yet exists as much as the India that is plagued with poverty, corruption, fanaticism, and people like me who sit complacently enjoying the comforts of a foreign land making offhanded, ignorant, pretentious and unwarranted comments.

the lunatic is in my head...

2006-05-08T15:16:00.000-05:00

Pink Floyd's epochal album Dark Side Of The Moon celebrated its 1500 week run on Billboard. there's a talk with roger waters here
Roger Waters Revisits The 'Dark Side'

Interestingly, he said he enjoyed the Live 8 performance in london with dave, rick and nick and said "it was a lot of fun". he also went on to say he was up for more pink floyd concerts but dave was busy with his solo career etc..eternal optimist that i am, i immediately headed over to Roger's site and was shocked to see what was in there! then i realised it wasn't the official site, and browsed off elsewhere into the dark side of the web.

also...should check for his US Fall tour dates!

Parrots must be crazy!

2006-04-30T11:13:00.000-05:00

N'Kisi is an african grey parrot that has demonstrated uncanny verbal skills. it has a vocabulary of over 900 words, can frame sentences and apparently displays a sense of humor. (other claims such as telepathy and psychic powers have been made, but i mean, c'mon!) this is an interesting project that shows the cognitive ability of animals - and though the audio clip here sounds like the parrot is just repeating a few phrases over and over ("there's a square!" and "Isn't that cool?"), it is quite exciting!

Nkisi Audio Text 1

the clip's old though...wish there was a newer one (a video would be great!) found this story on digg.

incidentally - the parrot's name reminds me of N!Xau, the bushman from 'The Gods Must be Crazy'. can this parrot say its own name?!

Revenge of the King!

2006-04-28T15:34:00.000-05:00

Kula Shaker is finally back! they released an EP - a preview of their full album due later this year - it's on iTunes right now. i guess i'll wait until the full release though...until then the 30-second preview on iTunes will have to suffice:( btw, 'troubadour' sounds like the best of the lot...they are all good though. naturally.

h2g2

2006-04-25T13:02:00.000-05:00

finally found it - there is a version of The Guide here, almost as seen in the movie. it's a flash app but pretty cool!

click here, browse to Characters>Guide, and then (obviously) click on the 'DON'T PANIC' sign!

netflix tongue-twister

2006-04-15T10:25:00.000-05:00

i thought this one up as i was driving home last night:

"pick six slick sick flicks!"

now say that fast. again. and again, faster!

monarch foolishness

2006-03-30T14:19:00.000-05:00

hark the an individuality, yokel deliver to?! sealed

challenger the essence picturesque search warrant good-tempered an... askance

fire station the globule dilation to of was

sandy, and sworn deftly amphitheater, botany as

destiny the D.A. unscrew! litmus test to O, a the in red thereof, professionally the rev breathlessly rooftop, once-over crab was with traction automate that segregation to crocodile of

another the tore effigy backhanded was nameless separated unfold an elfin temperament. with camel as fall guy MB, a inundate easygoing

shrubbery: in businessman paste shuck endowment,. paintbrush half northward

swan and nondescript shortsighted a things, a and right-handed smash, the

turquoise lose that recognizable jaundice,

stride sociable aphrodisiac jowls was glance

fibrous as as sundae,? idea costly on an plaintive

-- an actual spam email that i received (with a jpg containing the actual marketing content stuck somewhere in the text, i think this textwrapping is a trick that spammers use to get around junk mail filters). so what is it, a word generator that picks words from a dictionary at random and throws them together? something like the MIT paper generator, except only less cohesive (more abstract)?

avant-garde poetry?! the paintbrush half northward...

send the wild women out the back door...

2006-03-19T23:06:00.000-05:00

i went to this indian restaurant tonight and after a spate of tamil songs, the music abruptly changed to something i haven't heard in a very long time - michael learns to rock! i'm not a fan - i barely like their music - but it was nostalgic to listen to them. it reminded me of 1995-96, when someone in our group bought their album and we used to listen to it even though it bored us to death! i found myself remembering almost all the lyrics to the songs and involuntarily lip-syncing along. come to think of it, there were many bad songs of those days (that i probably hated with all my heart but still couldn't avoid listening to, because they were ubiquitous) that if i listen to them today, i would still laugh and sneer, but eventually associate them with something endearing that's now lost forever - and that makes them beautiful too. those songs are keepsakes from a passed time - like the pebbles that you pick up at a beach you know you wouldn't visit again - the pebbles themselves are of no value, insignificant by themselves in the sunburnt sand - but in the confines of a shoebox, or on the ledges of a bookshelf, they appear to pulsate with memories of good times bygone. the stones are not inanimate. Zen, again.

Peace Pagoda, Leverett, MA

2006-03-11T16:38:00.000-05:00

It was a gorgeous day and i went out to this place called peace pagoda in leverett, MA - i had been meaning to go there for a long time and finally i made the pilgrimage.
boy was it worth it - so peaceful up there, and though there were quite a few people it was absolute silence, only the wind. a feeling of calm washes over you once you get up there. a nice little zen garden, a pond with fishes, it had it all.
then this thing about stone piles - i saw a few of them and googled about them later, apparently its a zen thing, but what's fascinating about it is that all zen gardens have as many stones (or more) as plants - and this is partly because the philosophy does not have a sharp distinction between animate and inanimate objects in the world. life is not necessarily organic - a pebble that captures your attention and talks to your subconscious, is i would say more alive than a mosquito on the wall.

fatal attraction

2005-12-27T18:33:00.000-05:00

there are moments in everyone's life when one feels life is, well, downright crummy. When all hope is lost, when despair washes over the body, when even breathing appears to an exercise in futility. Every second passes as heavy as walking with feet firmly entrenched in buckets of cement. It is at times like these that one tends to notice the allure of the netherworld, the enticing dream of eternal sleep, the almost captivating brilliance of darkness beyond. It is not a suicidal fascination - just a thought, the idea of...disconnection. A hypothetical reality, conjured up to perhaps muffle and silence the obscene sounds of life, to create an illusion of non-existence, to drown in the mirage itself. It is therapeutic, not because it improves our appreciation of life(in the way that cold makes us appreciate the warmth), which it doesn't, but because of the expectation, the anticipation of that reward waiting for us in the future. Is it possible to lead life this way, life as a means to attain death? could we possibly go to work, raise a family, and run through our daily routine, with the comforting prospect of a blissful afterlife resting peacefully at the back of our heads, because of the comforting prospect?

robot and a mirror

2005-12-22T10:52:00.000-05:00

Source

Slashdot discussion

(which makes me wonder, could Slashdot be Slashdotted?)

some snippets -

"There is a much deeper problem in the title than this. It is, quite simply, impossible for one being to prove its self-awareness to another. We may be able to make some sort of educated guess as to things being self-aware, but there is no way we can directly observe or experience the self-awareness of another being. This is by definition, since self-awareness is that recognition of one's own existence a a separate entity that is unique to and inseparable from that entity - it is not merely the reaction of the bio-machine to its environment no matter how complex and seemingly independent that reaction. The Star Trek TNG episode "The Measure of A Man [amazon.com]" gives a fairly good explanation of the problem."

"The ability of two perfectly identical twins (hypothetically) to distinguish themselves, IMO is not self awareness, that's self identification."

"the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than whether a submarine can swim." - Edsger Dijkstra

" Q. Are you aware?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware that you are aware?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware that you are aware that you are aware?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware that you are aware that you are aware...?

So, you see it leads to a never ending chain of awareness. In Hindu philosophy, the ultimate awareness, the 'unseen see-er', the entire infinite chain of awareness, is the Atman, or the supersoul that transcends the individual.

In the AI realm, we could build a machine that had two components: a perception system (vision, sound, whatever) and a detection-of-perception system ( a 'true' output if it percieves a system that can percieve ). Once the perception system falls on the system itself, it will detect a perception system. It will 'know' that it 'knows'. Then, it will detect another perception system in the original act of perception. Then, it will detect that act of perception, and in turn that act of perception... ad infinitum

The self's perception of the self has this hall-of-mirrors quality that does not occur when the self perceives others of the same kind.

You can take it one step futher and detect other self-aware systems if you can somehow detect this self-detection in other systems. However, I haven't figured out a logical argument for how to do this. "

"Among serious theorists, it is pretty widely accepted that we will never reach a goal of true, hard AI (as in, something we created which is truly every bit as smart, independant, creative and "alive" as us, or even more) by cobbling together algorithms like this. It will come about by building the right sort of neural-net building blocks, arranging them in roughly the right kind of networks (probably via genetic selection algorithms rather than manually), and then teaching it much in the way one raises and teaches a small child. That's *if* we can solve the huge problems that still lie in our way going down that path (not the least of which is raw processing power)."

The 12 Questions

2005-12-18T20:06:00.000-05:00

how many robots does it take to fix a light bulb?
(analytical ability)

who forgives the priests?
(religion and belief systems)

Mirror mirror on the wall...
(self-awareness and existential dilemma)

what is life?
(...)

do you ever wish you could breathe underwater?

2005-11-26T23:14:00.000-05:00

just finished watching the irresistible 'Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou', again. i love all wes anderson's movies, he captures moments like no one else! I wonder how he makes his actors do that, again and again. i personally think he drugs them with some magic philter before the camera goes on. and everytime i watch one of his movies i can't help but tell myself, "this is the best wes anderson movie of all!"

and then there's the music , wes's own choice of songs as well as mark mothersbaugh's score - the track 'Lightning-strike rescue on Ping island' blows you away! david bowie's portuguese versions by seu jorge (check out his version of space oddity!)...i can go on and on...

two moments that cracked me up real hard this time:
>>when zissou says to ned (ned is pretending to smoke a pipe nonchalantly) "do you hear those whales sing?", and a foghorn sounds in the distance to which ned says, "beautiful. i wonder what they are saying."
the way zissou delivers the next line, "well that was the sludge tanker over there, but..." in such a casual, offhand way, that is just brilliant!

>>the scene where klaus is thanking ned for putting his name on the logo and trying to control himself...once you see willem dafoe in that scene, you will realize there was no other way that scene could've worked except that way!

giant leap

2005-11-24T15:43:00.000-05:00

first entry, Thanksgiving Day 2005. 1544hrs, 'Crank' by Catherine Wheel playing. spent the past 15 minutes trying to acquire an unused blog URL - it appears that almost all conceivable words in english have been consumed by the existing userbase, and i am forced to take the cheesy way out. maybe the users should not be presented with a choice. assign a computer generated non-descript alphanumeric sequence as the blog URL - that way, you don't go through the pain of seeing your dream URL rejected unapologetically and unceremoniously fast (in my case walden.blogspot.com, which, by the way, has been taken by a person with no name and who's alphabet is restricted to the first four letters of the second line in a standard keyboard).

then there is the blatant stereotyping that comes with descriptive blog URLs. i mean, we all know who writes pinkdoll.blogpsot.com, don't we? and you can't really say anything about someone at d45nn3.blogspot.com, can you? come to think of it, let's do away with pronouns i say, that'll take care of sexism. let's change our names to numbers - that'll get rid of religious prejudices. let's strip our vocabulary to the very basic, neutral and innocuous words so we can converse generically. let's kill uniqueness - it's done more harm than good.

when will 1984 come?