disgusting science

A 60% real – 40% fictional conversation.

She: Why did you fall in love with me ?

He : If you think about it, it is all about survival. Human beings for the matter of the survival of their genes, need to find mates. Driven by such a survival instinct, they choose their mates, have kids, and pass on their genes. Did you know, scientists have found that the activity in brain when you fall in love, is similar to the activity of a person on Cocaine ?

She : Well, that sounds true – you laugh and cry without any reason. But my question is : Why did you choose me ? Why not some one else ?

He : Again, scientifically, there are many reasons – First, the sense of being physically attractive. We tend to think that by choosing attractive people, it can lead to a better chance of survival of our progeny. Studies have shown that one of the most common trait of attractiveness is symmetry.(Think: Survival) Second, there are other non-physical traits like kindness. We tend to see these traits, because, physical attractiveness may be faked. Any kind of difficult experience would make us more mean. Kindness is a trait that has a better chance of survival. Third, bandwidth of risk. Empirical studies have shown that we are likely to choose some one in a high-risk environment than in a low-risk environment. We tend to believe that some one with a higher bandwidth for risk has a better chance for survival.

She : Is this your idea of being romantic ? OK. I will humor you. There are scientific reasons for you falling in love with me. But, Why are you still stuck with me ?

He : Well, after making a choice, there is a need to stick together until our progeny is able to survive on its own. It is all hormones all the way from there.

She : You are disgusting.

He : No, science is disgusting.

about:me

A few thoughts, I had written down from time to time. I have intentionally left out the context.

• Just when you think you have a pretty good understanding of how things are, you suddenly realize (or made to realize) how fragile things are.

• Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. This quotation can be improved by appending “in bed”/”except in bed”, as the case may be. (Derived from this comic.)

• Revolutions are so natural. Proof: World sucks! Q.E.D.

• We are inherently stupid. That is why it takes a lot of effort to be/appear smart.

• But again, being smart makes you unhappy(or restless) most of the time.

• All subjects, except sex, are dull until somebody makes them interesting. (I wrote it down once. Recently I found that Paul McHenry Roberts wrote it long before I thought of it)

• And that somebody could be you. (follows the last line)

• Fall in love, at least once. Fall in love, at least to fail.

• Because, as Chuck Klostermann once said, “Meaningful failure trumps meaningless achievement every time.”

• I am ready for a meaningful failure.

pretension

The most difficult thing in being a parent: It is easier for the kid to “pretend to be” that to “really be”.

I understood this just by observing a few parents(including mine) and kids(including me). And since I am not a parent, I don’t know how it feels like to be one. But I believe, this is a serious impediment to understanding.

But you know what ? It is easier of the parent too, when the kid is sold to the idea of pretension.

contemplating glory

I was reading the blog Happiness Project today. I was reading this long quotation from Victor Frankl’s book – “Man’s Search For Meaning.”. The quote is a great read. This line at the end of the post was thought provoking. I had read that book long ago, but didn’t contemplate this much about these lines, then.

For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”

Perpetual Contemplation of an Infinite Glory – Moments of glory can be infinite in the dimension of space, but it can not be perpetual. They can’t perpetuate, can’t last forever. Only thing that is left then is the contemplation about such moments. I think, that just means that memories of the past and hope for the future makes us happier than the moments themselves.

Happiness is what happens between. Because when those moments happen, we know very little about how good or bad they really are.

two percent

I don’t know how far I would get with this line of thought. I have just started writing this without any idea of how is it going to go. It started with a light bulb. I had to replace the light bulb, the one thats right in front of my house. Well, it was the kid who had been the guest for or neighbors. The switch was right by our door, and He was just playing with it – switching on and off, again and again, and When he switched the bulb on for the 378th time, it blew the filament off. The last time I had to buy a bulb, as I could remember, the price was the same as that of petrol (gasoline). No, not at today’s price tag of 49 rupees/liter. I don’t remember the date or year, but the price of both the bulb and a liter of petrol costing somewhere around 15 rupees. I also guess, at that time the exchange rate for a dollar was just around 18 rupees. I may be wrong about exchange rate, but I am sure about the price of bulb and a liter of petrol.

Today a bulb a the ‘Lakshmi hardware store’, here on the Madhapur main road, just costs just 10 rupees. What ever the inflation is doing to everything else, it ain’t doing nothing to the bulb. I had a conversation with my room mate. Both of us work for IT companies. Here I go…

“Do you know, the bulb costs only 10 rupees ? Now a days, you don’t even get a kilo of rice for that price” (Unless, of course, there is a government’s subsidy. You can get a kilo of rice for two rupees. Or thats just part of our politicians rhetoric. My point is – You don’t get that price in a “free” market)

“You sound quite positive about the trend. But I don’t think its really positive”

“Uh, Ohh. A lot of times, my modulation deceives my intention. No. No, its not your ears. I am just bad ‘punching’ my dialogues at the proper moment. I was, in fact, trying to sound negative. I mean, look at this irony. Our GDP has grown to 9%, primarily because of growth in Industry and Services. But our agricultural growth in just around 2%, driving prices of agricultural commodities. Both, you and me work in services industries actually driving growth in services, which is already growing at 11%. Hence, If you really want to contribute to our economy, I advice you this – Get some land and start farming.” (OK. The actual number is 2.7%)

My intention was to sound sarcastic about the role of our jobs in our economy, and probably sound it as a pun. But my room mate, whose father is a farmer, took my words seriously, and replied “You are right”. I wasn’t surprised. He often wonders about the future of their farm and their farming, after his father is done with it. He belongs to that generation in his family, that departed from farming, and chose an option for the only reason that is economically sexier to be some executive in an IT company, than be one of the few farmers in his village. He reflects about it a lot. Accidentally, I had found the serious audience for my satire.

But I wonder, what is that I can really do, other than just paying taxes, to improve that 2.7%. In a sense, it is true that just by working in a services industry, and learning, discussing about the 2.7%, I am indirectly contributing for the paltry growth of agriculture. Looking beyond this observer-observed philosophical dilemma, What can I really do ? I thought I would get some ideas if I look further in this year’s Economic Survey of India. Hey, look at that !! Services account to 55% of our GDP! When we were studying at school, we were told that India is an agriculture based economy. If some one is still telling you that, they are lying. We have already become a services based economy. I wonder, what they are teaching in Schools, now a days. Probably that a student should learn Java/C++ and make himself/herself “employable” by Infosys/TCS/Wipro ? (Yeah, I learnt the same thing at college.)

Probably a little bit of history would make me wise! If I knew the growth rates of agriculture, and overall GDP, probably I could know where we went wrong. Well, there are too many resources on the internet to analyze Virendar Sehwag’s past batting averages and make suggestions, but are very little resources when it comes to analyze our country’s economic indicators. Irony is that – I think I can make a real and direct contribution to the Indian Economy, than to Virendar Sehwag. So lets go for the official web site of Indian Economic Survey to learn some numbers.

Year	2003-04	2004-05	2005-06
Growth in GDP %	8.5	7.5	9.0
Growth in Agri %	9.3	0.6	5.8

I got that numbers from Table 16, but I am not sure if it is right table. But one thing is sure that compared to our agricultural growth, Sehwag’s batting average seems consistent. I would love to dig deeper to really understand this numbers, but I am short of time.

And so, I went looking for ideas in our national budget. All over the forums, there has been insane amount of whining about 3% educational cess. Actually, that explains nothing but the demographic of bloggers and internet users in India. I just searched for the words “agri” in the highlights.

• Rs 100 crore for recognising excellence in the field of agricultural research.
• Manufacturing sector grows at 10.7 per cent, agriculture at 1.5 per cent during October-December 2006-07.
• A number of proposals to perk up agriculture to be announced.

100 crores seems to be real good money, some money the Ocean’s Thirteen would love to have their hands on. Of course, I do not have any credentials to receive even a rupee of that research fund. But neither does our country’s babu-dom has any credibility to deliver it where its due. Well, to know about other proposals, I would have to read the whole Budget, for which, I am short of time.

The only idea that really makes sense for now, even though it was intended as a joke, is to get some land and do agriculture. But my education is of no use to do that now, anything useful . But, a really big but here… BUT, hey, what if some one decides to build a car factory, to satisfy the nonexistent need for a car costing Rs. 100,000 ? They, then, probably would grab my land. Uh,Oh! That isn’t so encouraging. If not me, what about others, especially children, who might still be able to choose their profession. What should I answer if those people ask me ‘What would it take it do agriculture in India ?’ ? I guess I should answer them that they should be ready to give their life to protect their land, and their profession.

spin

Last week when I was preparing my resume, I was carefully selecting only the projects, that would, er… well, look good on a resume. I wasn’t actually lying. I just was preparing a refined version of truth about my professional career to fulfill specific goals. But I didn’t have a word for this selective thing, I was doing. While I was searching the word and had almost given up after a while, Rands in Repose came to my rescue. Rands in repose is a blog on software engineering written by Rands, who – in his own words – is “an engineering manager of teams that designs stunning software”. The word I was looking for is Spin; And I found this, when I read his recent post – Truth vs. Spin. As Rands defines it,

Traditionally, the opposite of Truth is Spin. Spin is a pejorative term that comes out of Public Relations land. Spin is the deliberate selection of facts constructed to prove a specific point.

Rands gives an example for Spin – the weekly status report, the piece of literature from the cubicle-dom prepared with absolute indifference.

Go fire up your mail program and find your last status report… Does it represent everything you did in the last week? I’m not suggesting that you didn’t work, but is that all you did? Probably not, so what did you document in your status report? You document the stuff you were asked to document and you document stuff you just want to tell people about. A status report is your Spin on the last week. It demonstrates how you carefully select facts from the week to portray a specific version of the truth.

Of course, I was spinning on my resume. After reading Rands, I started to think of more examples of Spin. I thought I would just write these example all along. But, I am bitten by the Powerpoint bug… And so, Here are the bullets!

• commercials – the root of all spin. If there were ten commandments on Spin, the first one should be “Thou shall never forget the spin quotient of an advertisement” .
• profiles on social networking sites such as myspace, orkut etc. – The second layer in the hierarchy of spin is based on the simple question – “Tell us about yourself”.
• every thing else – media broadcasts, dates, interviews, mobile phones (the official device of spin), mobile phone conversations, sms, instant messaging, e-mail , snail mail, avian mails(pigeons), and telegrams
• and mysteriously in this is list is, that dinner you had with your girlfriend’s parents a few months ago. (Why did you smile so much ?)

According to a recent research conducted by Spinesian University of Spinville, the whole fabric and foundation of human communication is Spin. You just have to look around for spin, and understand the direction, that you are being spun. Understanding Spin is the only way to reach out to your soul and the glorious path to enlightenment – it is the Zen of all human interactions. After all, this blog post, you are reading right now is my flimsy spinning effort on Spin!(You saw this comming, right ? Come on, I mentioned the ultimate spin software – “the mighty Powerpoint”)

five random thoughts

I decided to walk from work to home the other day. It just takes twenty minutes, but walking on the Madhapur Road produces a lot of potentially harmful, but fortunately bio-degradable thoughts. Here are five of those still alive.

• I can not stop wondering, Why private hospitals, now a days, have blinking neon signs on top of their buildings ? For some reason, these signs reminds me of “Kahoots” sign(a strip club in East Hartford,CT) or some of those “Hotel Marriott” signs. Even Marriott doesn’t have its sign blinking!!! I can learn to accept Neon signs. But, Why make it blink ? Shouldn’t the advertisement be more professional ? Or Is it just me who thinks such frivolous entertainment elements should not be a sign of a hospital ? Anyways, this is another reason, Why I think the next big thing is neither the hospitality industry, and nor the aviation industry, but the health care industry!!! I know what I am going to do, if a well-known hospital in big city goes public with an idea of building a chain of hospitals all over the country. By the way, I think a better way to indicate the location of an hospital is put signs on the roads indicating its way, rather than put up blinking red/blue lights like a Wireless tower.
• The logo of Airtel is another proof for the theory on branding, I have been thinking about : To be a successful brand in a common market place, the brand logo should be so simple that you can draw it with your own hand. Or using Microsoft Paint – No, not Photoshop, but just the default Paint software that comes with Windows. No obscure fonts. No transparency. No reflection thingy. No shadows. No layers. No millions of colors. Just the basic 32 colors, fundamental shapes and a few basic fonts. Of course, this works only for common marketplace brands, not specialized brands developed for specific markets like – developing roller skates for the hobbits in the Middle Earth. Another example for the theory is Google – OK, you can forget that thing I told you about shadows. By the way, if you, like me, are wondering what exactly the font of _Airtel_© is, it resembles more like Centry Gothic, and not Arial. Yes, I too thought it was Arial.
• While the passenger cars in India have been forced to adopt Bharat III auto emission norms, I don’t know what emission norms do Auto rickshaws conform to. I don’t think anybody would dare to develop a standard for these three wheelers. Only thing anybody could do is give a name to the level of emissions, that they already produce, and issue that as a “standard”. If you ask me, such a standard would be the minimum emission standard for a tear gas, and would be called as Bharat Smoke Screen 1.0. But, you didn’t ask me though.
• Have you ever noticed that it is very easier to cross a road with crazy traffic(a fast flowing traffic with high frequency of vehicles), when you cross it with a group of people, and majority of the group are colorfully dressed women ? It might sound obvious to you that it is easier to cross the road if you start from NIFT (National Institute of Fashion Technology) rather than from Govt. Boys Higher Secondary School. But my point is – I didn’t say good looking woman, I said colorfully dressed women. Because those who drive in crazy traffic don’t really have time to see the details. When they see a sea of colors, they go 100 to 0 in less than a second!!! My grand father once said, the actual brake inspector of a vehicle is not sit at the motor vehicle dept. office, but it is the buffalo that comes to the middle of the road out of no where. Yesterday while I was crossing the road, the brake inspector for that moment was a wall of women wearing pink, magenta, green, yellow, red and their million respective shades. (My eyes work only with some 7-8 colors)
• Speaking of women and dresses, Have you ever noticed that most of the women, we think look good on the street, are actually only well dressed ? It seems to me that, looks really doesn’t matter. In the sense of capturing your momentary attention, what matters is the appearance of looking good.(If you think this is a shallow and superficial line of thought, I am with you. You can skip this point, and write your angry comments to me.) From a blog written by a gal, I remember that, the most important thing in a movie, with a theme of a girl going from not-so-good-looking to absolutely-n-stunningly-amazing, is just the dress upgrade! She also wrote that the English movie “Pretty Woman” is a good example. Apart from being the touchy love story it is, the most important thing in “Pretty Woman” is Fashion 2.0 of a hooker.

For no reason at all, I would augment the last two points with this news story: Fertile women dress to impress, U.S. study finds. I did think of combining this news story with last two points into a different blog post, but it probably would destroy me. Yeah, the battle of sexes that nobody wins.

gandhi-giri and new york subway cars

I saw a Hindi movie on Friday called “Lage Raho Munna Bhai”, directed by Rajkumar Hirani. It was smart, hilarious and very interesting. In the movie, the protagonist Munna Bhai uses Gandhigiri, Gandhism equivalent of Dadagiri, to solve his problem. Even though the movie is about social transformation, it doesn’t get as preachy as the tamil director Shankar’s movies. But the significant difference between Raj kumar Hirani’s Munna Bhai and Shankar’s Anniyan/Indian is that Shankar uses the philosophy of fear (as typified by the cliche “An eye for an eye”) and Hirani tries the antithesis of fear – love, as manifested by the principles of Gandhism. But, if you don’t want to get so touchy by using the word “love”, feel free to give your own name. In the movie, Munna Bhai appears in his friend’s on-call radio program, to provide solution for the callers’ problems based on the principles of Gandhism.

Here is an example of such a Gandhi-an method, Munna advises. One of the callers’ problem is that his neighbor spits pan right at his door, making the door and the area around it look like cat puke. The caller says he had tried to tell the neighbor, but he doesn’t stop spitting. The Munna Bhai’s gandhigiri solution caller is this: After the neighbor spits in front of the door, smile at the him, and Clean the door. The idea was to send a message to the neighbor by cleaning the door over and again, and thus producing a transformation in the heart of the neighbor. I agree its touchy. In the movie, Munna Bhai shows that Gandhi’s method works, when the neighbor stops his spit act. While watching this scene at the movie, I hear murmurs among the audience questioning if such a solution would work in real life. I would be one of those audience, if I had not read the book “Tipping Point” written by Malcolm Gladwell.

The book “Tipping Point” is about an interesting phenomenon defined by the moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like an wildfire – like an epidemic. In this book, Gladwell discusses about such a phenomenon that happened in New york city in the 1990s, causing the crime rate to plummet. In the city, during a period of five years, murder rates fell by two-thirds, and total crimes fell by half. Gladwell says that this crime drop has the same characteristics of the spread of epidemics. He defines three principles of epidemics – The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and the most interesting one I think is, The Power of Context. My point of interest is the the “The Power of Context”, which says “Human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they seem.” and “A small change in a person’s immediate environment can cause big effects”. For the other two, here is an writeup of these principles in the context of marketing.

While discussing the power of context in the case of New york city, Gladwell produces examples about the small changes brought about in the New york subway systems that helped reverse the city’s crime epidemic. David Gunn was appointed the new subway director. He insisted that they have to start with the small things that symbolically indicate an environment for crime to happen. Graffiti being painted on the subway cars is such a symbol. Gunn decides to take on graffiti before anything else. He says

The graffiti was the symbolic collapse of the system. When you looked at the process of rebuilding the organization and morale, you had to win the battle against graffiti. Without winning that battle, all management reforms and physical changes just weren’t going to happen.

How did Gunn handle the problem of Graffiti in New york’s subway cars ? He drew up a new management structure aimed at cleaning the system line by line, train by train. On stainless-steel cars, solvents were used. On the painted cars, the graffiti was simply painted over. OK. What if the cars were vandalized again ? They cleaned again, and again. They were religious about their cleaning. At the end of the line, where the trains stopped and turned around, Gunn setup a cleaning station. If a car came in with graffiti, the graffiti had to be removed during the changeover, or the car was removed from the service. They make sure dirty cars are never mixed with clean cars. The idea was to send a clear message to the vandals – by cleaning over and again.

I was totally struck the method Gunn used to make the subways clean – not harsher punishment for the vandals, but to send a message to them by cleaning the cars. Of course, there is a difference between the tone, the kind of the message (or even a subtle difference in the motive), Gunn and Munna Bhai conveyed to their subjects. But the action point is the same – If you want to stop people from making dirty of public places, you just have to keep it cleaning – rigorously and continuously.

If it works for the multi-billion dollar cars of the New york subway system, it sure would work for everyone.

obesity, an epidemic ?

The International Congress on Obesity starts on September 3 in Sydeny, Australia. Here is a news piece about the “epidemic of obesity”.

“Obesity is an international scourge,” Prof Paul Zimmet, chairman of the meeting of more than 2,500 experts and health officials, told delegates in a speech opening the International Congress on Obesity. “This insidious, creeping pandemic of obesity is now engulfing the entire world.”

“It’s as big a threat as global warming and bird flu,” said Zimmet, an Australian diabetes expert.

Other experts at the conference said the cost of treating health problems related to being overweight was immeasurable on a global scale, but was estimated at billions of dollars a year in countries such as Australia, Britain and the United States.

The professor boldly said “pandemic…engulfing the entire world”, and I go like – “Did you mean, even in Africa and developing countries in Asia ?”. The last paragraph clarified that obesity, right now, is a huge pain in the (fat) butts of Australia, Britain and the United States. That is not actually so surprising. Development, naturally, causes epidemic of diseases of comfort – caused by imbalance due to surplus, and not scarcity. Personally, I think obesity is as much an epidemic as Chain smoking or Alcoholism.

So now, experts and health officials have gathered to “fight” Obesity. Now what ? A war against fat asses ? I believe obesity has a place in Capitalism. As a business, it makes a sustainable industry with such an wonderful prospects. First, you have fast food restaurants serving junk foods, and, then you have diet and other programs to work it out, and, then you have the biotech companies working for technological developments to fight obesity, and, then there are pharmaceutical companies making magic pills to thin you out, and then there are doctors and obesity specialists advising you, and then finally, you would soon have a special obesity-insurance – all of these contribute to an economical system rich and, well… obese. Obesity will live, because it will make money – a lot of money!!!

So, my advise to you is – Invest in Obesity.

sins of the fathers

When the recent Isreal-Lebanon conflict (12 July - 14 August 2006) was going on, there was an article in BBC about  debates in Germany over involvement of Germans in a Lebanon peace force, before steps were taken to create one. The article is about the debates in German Media on the ethical questions faced by a German soldier, if he is needed to fight an Israeli soldier.

“History is the past, but the history of the Holocaust belongs to the German present,” said the Frankfurter Rundschau. No German soldier should, even theoretically, “be brought into a situation where he has to aim his weapon at an Israeli”, it added. [...]

[...] Austria’s Der Standard said it was “unthinkable” that the grandchildren of Holocaust perpetrators might find themselves shooting at the grandchildren of victims.

Germany is a country with a dark period of history during the reign of Hitler, leading to the second world war.  When it all ended, there were trials, especially the famous Nuremberg Trials, incriminating the war criminals of Second World War. But the punishment for the sins of Third Reich didn’t end there. The most unfortunate were not those who were tried (deservedly so), but the sons and grandsons of the Nazi generation. That regime has left such a deep stain in the German history, that its descendants carry that even today.

In contrast, the way the Japanese handle their history is… well, not quite the same. There have always been questions about the accuracy of Japanese history textbooks, and the accusations that they “justify and glorify the wrongs committed in the past” (especially the Nanjing massacre. Wikipedia entry is here). Even after protests, those textbooks were never changed. Recently, there have been protests over the Japanese prime minister visiting the Yasukuni shrine, where war criminals are venerated. By such attempts, Japanese try to paint a different picture of history to their younger generation. Though their objectives on re-writing Japanese history are political, it probably would make the future Japanese generations carry less burden of the past. Unlike the Germans.

The question is how nations (and its people) choose to handle the sins of their history – either let it burden them for generations OR glorify the sins to make them proud. I couldn’t do an ethical analysis of the Japanese stand on its history OR the reasons why Germans has to confront their history head on (I don’t have access to a good library and, I am no historian. We can’t miss the cultural angle(east vs west) too). 

Bringing the same line of questioning towards ancestral histories, I think, our parents, grand parents, uncles, and aunts had the same two choices. When they had to tell us the inconvenient truths of the past, they either choose to bury them down or pass those burdens over. Of course, they would rather bury them, than do the dad-son karma-transfer. So… I wonder, Do I really believe in everything of what I am told about my family ? (or my country ?) And, Am I going say everything, most importantly every sin of my life to my next generation ?(if by an accident or some act of God, a next generation happens to me!!!)