the little voice

Reciprocity

2008-07-25T14:27:00.000-05:00

There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters.

- Alice Thomas Ellis

Gaps in History

2008-07-23T09:53:00.006-05:00

Junot Diaz who won last year's Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a not-so-brief but wondrous book, says that he is fascinated with gaps in history. His book was is set in Newark and the Dominican Republic during the time of the infamous Trujillo. A dictator so brutal and merciless that there are almost no true reports of his republic. He once had a graduate student murdered for writing a thesis on the true nature of his regime. Junot Diaz's point is that if you look at somebody's or a country's history, the gaps in the reporting are the most interesting.

The current presumptive Democratic candidate oozes so much charisma that people who never voted before are now lining up to help him get elected. Of course, armed with an incredible story like Obama's, impossible is nothing. The image that is portrayed is that of a newcomer, a fresh face, someone who represents a new kind of politics. In the same breath one also cites that as a sign of his inexperience and naivety about Washington and the world.

Obama and Trujillo has poles apart, but there is a certain gap in Obama's self-reporting. The recent controversy over the satirical cover of last week's issue of the New Yorker obscured, in ironical fashion, facts that are relatively unknown about the junior senator from Illinois.

Ryan Lizza's story traces the making of Obama in his years as a Chicago politician. To forge an identity as a a nobody in in a city "which doesn't take kindly to political carpetbaggers" would be commendable enough, but Obama's sights were always higher than the tallest buildings in the Windy City. He always knew that he was slated for bigger and better things. People have been calling him President Obama for over a decade.

Of course, politics is always a Faustian bargain. On his way up, Obama has eschewed many of his old principles and let his old friends down. As President, things are not going to be any different even if Obama projects a different sort of image. Lizza writes:

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago’s churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. “You have the power to make a United States senator,” he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.

Like many politicians, Obama is paradoxical. He is by nature an incrementalist, yet he has laid out an ambitious first-term agenda (energy independence, universal health care, withdrawal from Iraq). He campaigns on reforming a broken political process, yet he has always played politics by the rules as they exist, not as he would like them to exist. He runs as an outsider, but he has succeeded by mastering the inside game. He is ideologically a man of the left, but at times he has been genuinely deferential to core philosophical insights of the right.

Only the naive would call Barack Obama naive. If he does win in November, like all victors he can write his own history.

Speed dating issues

2008-07-11T16:39:00.007-05:00

I would like to think that my dating days aren't over, but just in a perpetually suspended state. However, I was at a speed-matching event yesterday which attempted to have a bunch of people meet everybody else one-on-one in a space of an hour.

First, there were only fifteen ppl and it was apparent that at every round someone would have to sit out. Then another guy showed up and we were sixteen. Since that was an even number no one would have to sit out. The person in charge did the obvious thing - he made two concentric rings of chairs splitting ppl two groups - 'inners' and 'outers'. The 'outers' rotated around the inner ring. After the first rotation, everybody had met half of the people in the group, except the ppl in their own ring. Then he did the next obvious thing, made another two concentric circles of the rings themselves and repeated the process. After the second rotation, everybody had met 3/4th of the ppl. For the next round, these rings needed to be split further into similar rings. As you can see, this process stops when each of the two concentric rings have exactly one person.

Of course, since we had the fourth power of 2, i.e. 16 ppl, this scheme works beautifully. Since, I was part architect of the idea, I wondered if this arrangement would work for other even numbers, leaving the rather odd case of odd numbers aside for now. Very quickly, you can see that this scheme breaks down for 6 people.

Round I Round II
A D A-B D-E
B E C (sits out) F (sits out)
C F

After the first rotation, you have Ring I meet everyone in Ring II. Proceeding as before, you end up with 3 ppl (an odd number) in each new sub-ring. Now every subsequent iteration will have one person in each group simply sitting one session out. As you can see from the example, we can form a pair with C and F in Round II, but they have already met each other in Round I. So, every subsequent period, one person will be sitting out and wasting his time. This would require 6 time periods.

Thus, the concentric circles thing is inefficient for all non 2ⁿ even numbers. I tried to come up with a pairing scheme for n=6. Since ⁶C₂ = 15 total pairs, and we have 3 pairs at each stage, we should need at a minimum five rounds. With the schedule below no one sits out and we achieve efficiency.

*Table for 6 ppl*
Station	1	2	3	4	5
S1	AD	AE	AB	AF	AC
S2	BE	BF	CE	BC	BD
S3	CF	CD	DF	DE	EF

The movement of people is non-intuitive and the schedule is complicated. You would need to hand people a schedule map: A would not move at all. B would move to stations: S2-S2-S1-S2-S2. I was certain that there was a solution to this problem, floating in graph theory or combinatoric literature. And indeed there is! But, this is no simple can of worms as I was to discover.

Famously, in 1850 Reverend Thomas Kirkman sent a query to the readers of a popular math magazine, Lady's and Gentleman's Diary:

Fifteen young ladies in a school walk out 3 abreast for seven days in succession: it is required to arrange them daily, so that no two will walk twice abreast.

1 of 7 possible solutions

The more general case of problem is called the Social Golfer Problem: Determine the maximum number of days 'w' that 'n' golfers can play in groups of 'r' each without meeting each other. This is still an UNSOLVED mathematical problem!!! If you are interested in reading more see: Social Golfer Problem

My original question of dividing 'n' ppl in pairs has been solved at least up to n=200. Round-robin scheduling is a wonderful site for those scheduling matches, or speed-dating style events. There is no simple movement order that can be prescribed. You have to pretty much follow the schedule blindly. Some schedules are unique, in other cases there are over 1000 solution, usually when 2ⁿ numbers are involved.

Yeah! Even speed-dating has issues!

Ignoble Research

2008-07-10T14:48:00.005-05:00

While my so-called 'real' publications are limping along, one of my side-projects got published in this month's Annals of Improbable Research. A journal that is self-styled as " the journal of record for inflated research and personalities" . These are the good folks who dish out the Ig Noble Prizes each year

For the past three years, at the Society for Neuroscience conference my labmates and I present a 'joke' poster in the vein of The Onion. The Cingulate Cortex Does Everything started off as a satire on the field of fMRI research in neuroscience. There are tons of papers in journals like Nature and Science that implicate the cingulate cortex in all kinds of behavior. Brain fMRI scans detect oxygenation levels in the blood and determine if blood flow to particular part of the brain increases or decreases with respect to a behavioral event. It seemed rather interesting to us that the use of fMRI correlates so strongly with cingulate cortex sightings. We suspect that since the cingulate cortex is above the saggital sinus, a major drainage vessel for the brain, it seems to light up in fMRI studies as an artifact.

On scanning recent literature on the subject, we saw an explosion in cingulate cortex research and reached our startling conclusion - "Cingularity", i.e. if current trends continue the cingulate cortex will not only take over neuroscience research, but everything!!

Another interesting fact is that the word cingulate is derived from the Latin word cingulum meaning belt. Specifically, a belt protecting your family jewels.

Quiz blog

2008-07-08T18:31:00.002-05:00

Dinesh K. aka Dinky has set things rolling with the U of M Quiz blog. And for all you shameless people out there - Googling is allowed!

Dawkins's Mirror Question

2008-07-03T12:11:00.011-05:00

A really good book is one that makes you want to put it down for a while so that you can think.

This is taken from Richard Dawkins's latest book The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing. See the review in Science (Mail me if you need access).

For years as a college tutor at Oxford, I would try the intelligence and reasoning powers of entrance candidates by asking them at interview to muse aloud on the conundrum of why mirror images appear left-right reversed but not upside down. It is a provocative puzzle, which is hard to situate among academic disciplines. Is it a question in psychology, in physics, in philosophy, in geometry, or just commonsense? I wasn't necessarily expecting my candidates to "know the right answer." I wanted to hear them think aloud, wanted to see if the question piqued their interest and their curiosity. If it did, they would probably be fun to teach.

The book is maybe good bedtime reading, but not the paragraph above. I read the paragraph and I couldn't sleep till had some sort of satisfactory answer. It's rather intriguing and wanted to discuss this below. My friends in Mathematics have a better idea of this, but I am taking a stab at it here.

STOP HERE IF YOU WANT TO THINK ABOUT THE PROBLEM ...

It is about particular symmetry? That lead me away from thinking about mirrors to drawing mirror images and considering that we reflect images about a particular axis. This is a practical issue when it comes to making stamps, or printing for example.

(Pardon my sloppy drawing. It's much harder to draw accurate mirror images than is popularly believed.)
Upon drawing this simple figure, I realised that mirroring (reflection) is a not really a 2D transform, but is a 3D transform since there is no strictly planar or 2-D operation(rotate, shift) can be performed that convert A to B. Of course if you reverse the X-axis then you automatically reflect. It's like looking at the 2-D figure from the bottom instead of the top.

Thinking about it in another way, if you had simply an outline figure (shown on top), you wouldn't really see any lateral inversion. If viewed from one perspective, there is no lateral inversion. That's because the figure being hollow does not have a correct viewing side.

So, according to me it boils down to a frame of reference. By imposing your frame of reference onto the mirrored image you get the perception of lateral inversion. In that parallel universe of mirror images, the X axis is reversed and hence correctly speaking left is actually right! The absolute values of all the points along X have not changed, only the signs have.

Coming back to the other question of top and bottom inversion, the simple four figure shows that top bottom is achieved by rotation around the Z-axis, or by two repeated mirrorings on the Y and X axis. So, you can ask why rotation only changes top and bottom, but not left and right. They are simply two different transformations.

More generally speaking, there is really left or right, or top and bottom. It's all relative all perceptions are due to the frame of reference. So, if you perform a transformation then you have to choose the appropriate frame of reference or grid to view it correctly. In a more extreme case, even in case of a distortion, the square will be a square in the distorted frame, but appears warped only because you impose your original frame on the 'new' square.

So, I think the problem is one of pure geometry and not of psychology or even physics. Perhaps, humans are predisposed to think of particular frames of references which cause this effect.

The tall and and short of it

2008-06-22T16:53:00.003-05:00

Life is an escape. Everyone is trying to escape or hide from something. I am trying to hide from labels. The specific label I seek to be furthest from is 'Starbucks latte-drinking liberal'. The first thing I ever bought in the United States was a coffee from Starbucks. After seeing that on city street corners Starbucks joints sprout like weeds after the rain, I have been avoiding them ever since. I have embraced everything local (Yes! I am that guy now). I have other more legitimate reasons to avoid Starbucks. My problem with Starbucks is their pretentious fancy sizes - tall, venti, grande. Can you trust such a place to give you a honest cup of coffee when they can't their sizes right? The other is that the coffee is way too expensive. I also learnt that if you drink their grande Java Chip Cookie Coffee don't bother eating the rest of the day.

It is well-known that all size and flavors of coffee that you order regardless of the price advertised are within a few cents of each other. The different prices are to fleece the price-blind, but not lose the price conscious customer. What economists call 'price discrimination'. One would think that price range between the cheapest and the costliest of about $7 dollars would keep most coffee shops happy and in business. But, not Starbucks. They have one more trick up their sleeve in this sneaky price discrimination business. Their smallest size is never advertised. You can order it at ANY Starbucks, but you will fail to see any mention of it on the chalk board or menu. Why? Tim Hartford has discussed this at length almost two years ago, yet the word hasn't got out.

I have tried the Starbucks short twice already and I been served without the barista batting an eyelid. The second time I was offered a second shot or espresso - 'free'. For my Starbucks savvy, I presume. Besides, saving valuable cash in this oil-strapped world, it tastes better for the reasons the article explains. Trust the Americans (Texans in particular) to ruin everything by emphasizing size over substance.

*In some fairness to Starbucks: Most of the money made goes into the pockets of the owners of the real estate. Corner shops don't come cheap.

O Pato

2008-06-15T12:40:00.002-05:00

The great Brazilian guitarist Joao Gilberto and singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso singing 'O Pato'. Yeah! the song is in Portuguese and I when I first heard it I couldn't understand a word. But, the phrasing was so exquisite and the duet so lovely that it didn't matter. I like the look on Veloso's face at the end of the song showing his great admiration and respect for Gilberto. It's beautiful.

It's actually quite a fun bossa-nova song about a duck who goes samba dancing with another duck, a goose and a swan (Translation and lyrics).

Why the iPhone is like a razor

2008-06-10T13:57:00.004-05:00

Yeah, the inevitable has happened - Apple has dropped the price of the iPhone by a whopping $200, or caused AT & T to step in with a subsidy. I felt a malicious glee in imagining the faces of all the suckers who bought the iPhone last year. The shiny new 3G iPhone was now within the reach of even this mostly starving, Ramen-eating grad student.

Shaving this morning (I occasionally make time for this activity) I realised, as P.T. Barnum once said, I was almost about to be the sucker of the minute. It's the razor blades thing all over again. The price of the razor is subsidized by the blades. Even the printer-makers like HP and gang figured this out long time ago. No wonder that printer is ridiculously cheap at $60. It's the paper and ink that's gonna get yer wallet.

So, AT & T are selling their razor blades at $69.99. Without taxes and surcharges that is $840. Add another $200 for the hardware (trust Apple to make it obsolete in a year's time). So you are paying about $1040 for the year, or about $2.85 per day. If you factor in taxes, etc. it is about $3 a day. Which is about the price of a small cup of coffee, or 5 packets of Ramen. So, if I give up eating and drinking, I can afford it. I may be hungry and naked but at least I won't get lost with the GPS and I can always check my email, ANYWHERE!

Take your pick!

This Is Just To Say

2008-05-06T13:50:00.005-05:00

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

-William Carlos Williams

The poem above leaves me cold. To parody it was delicious and sweet. Some things are better appreciated in reflected light.

This Is Just to Say - I

William Carlos Williams
My poems
Are mere
imitations

Of the real which
readers were probably
savoring
last few seconds

Forgive me
and now listen to mine
so neat
and so bold

This Is Just to Say - II

I have drunk
the coffee
that was warming in
the pot

and which
you were probably
brewing
for yourself

Forgive me
I was drowsy
so tired
and the aroma so inviting

This Is Just to Say - III

I have run off
with that woman
that was in
my dreams

and so
you won't be
expecting
me for breakfast

Forgive me
It wasn't you dear
her lips are sweet
and alluring

This Is Just to Say - IV

We've gone and
wrecked this world
that was to be
your legacy

and which
you probably
wanted
to destroy yourself

Forgive us
we didn't wait
for you
and did it ourselves

My Ph.D. thesis

2008-05-01T21:34:00.003-05:00

Why does this ring a bell?

Trail Half Marathon

2008-04-30T20:38:00.002-05:00

They said that this Trail Half Marathon would kick your butt! And it sure did! After running a whole bunch of road halfs, I decided to do the non-wimp thing - run on dirt, through forest, and around lakes. (It was actually half wimpy, because some people ran the course twice for the full marathon)

I have been running trails for sometime now. They more fun and easier on your feet than the pounding on the pavement and roads. It was only last month after the ice melted that the trails were safe to run again. Snow on the streets melts, but due to the trees and a lower specific heat, the trails are still icy. A slip can land you in the Huron river!

I wasn't up to the miles for a half and then you train like you were cramming for an exam, I added hills, speedworkouts. After I ran 10 miles on the hills, I knew that at the very least, I would come out of it alive (Never forget that!).

But, hell the race course was tough! The course goes around the famous Potowatomi train in the Pinckney Recreation Area. At no point was the course flat. Either you were going up or down. In total, the course has 7,000 ft of vertical climb. Since the race began and ended at the Silver Lake, you had also 7,000 ft of downhills. While the downhills were welcome, a hasty step would be your downfall, literally. I saw a bunch of people trip and fall. The last thing you want, is to get injured and hobble through miles of forest. That would be a meditative experience in the forest.

Oddly, some miles are shorter and others feel longer. Up and down, then up again. Legs cramp up. Something aches. It goes away. Then after a point you are running from water-stop to water-stop, wondering when the torture will end. And there are people are still in bed somewhere. After a point, your mind shuts down and you are just running. You have no idea where you are, but just following the person in front of you.

But, like all races at the end you are mostly by yourself. At mile 11, I hit a root sticking out of the ground and that was really painful! Nature is beautiful, but you can't be idiotic out in the wild. My shoes have an ID tag, so they know where to deposit my body.

At mile 12, I think I hit my limit! But, who gives up with one mile to go? You calculate that it won't be more than 10 minutes. And then suddenly, you see the finish line. You get a sudden burst of energy to sprint to the finish. The race ends on 100 meters of a grassy flat and that was a relief after the relentless hills. The best part of the race? To ice my legs in the Silver Lake.

Twenty minutes later, it all seems worth it and you find yourself saying something that you would have never thought - "I should do this again!". The harder the race, the sweeter the taste of a finish.

A House of our Own

2008-04-22T11:08:00.002-05:00

NY Times Magazine:

Atheists are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don’t feel like they need an organization ... they’re so independent that if they want to get involved, they usually don’t join an organization—they start their own.

- Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists

I never thought that atheism equated with nihilism. But, organized institutions?

Was Proust a neuroscientist?

2008-04-04T13:33:00.006-05:00

Recently there as been a spike in number of popular books on the brain and a lot them have made it to the best seller list. Everybody wants know how the body's CPU works. The most ambitious of these projects has been the one by Jonah Lehrer, editor-at-large for SEED magazine, a Rhodes scholar and neuroscience blogger.

His basic premise about neuroscience is: Sub sole nihil novi est. (meaning, There's nothing new under the sun. It's remarkable how intelligent everything sounds when you quote in Latin, or talk in a BBC accent). Lehrer claims that artists and writers were incredibly prescient and had long discovered basic neuroscientific truths. He ascribes each of the following artists with different discoveries in neuroscience: Proust (memory and recollection), Woolf (mental states), Escoffier (taste and smell), George Eliot (neurogenesis), Whitman (unity of body and soul/mind), Gertrude Stein (internal grammar/syntax), and Stravinsky (neural plasticity). All modern science is currently doing is simply rigorously verifying their discoveries by rigorous testing, or re-discovering it.

Jonah Lehrer writes beautifully and the anecdotes of the giants of the arts are interesting to read. There are no new facts and the juicy anecdotes will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the particular artist (available cheap and free on Wikipedia). For example, the background on Stravinsky's premiere of The Rite of Spring was identical to the one I read in Alex Ross's excellent book on music in the 21st century, The Rest is Noise. I guess it is hard to come up with unique historical quotable quotes.

Where Lehrer's really contributes is in highlighting interesting experiments in neuroscience and explaining them. There is a great deal of misinformation and school textbooks have not been updated for decades. Why was Einstein smart? People believe that we use only 5% or 10% of our brains, and that Einstein used 20%, or some such figure. This is utter nonsense. But, someone has to inform the people and science is not always easy to explain and is not sexy. To complicate matters further, science is always forging ahead, not really waiting for things to be digested. The perverse nature of science overturns conventional wisdom and even central dogmas of science to create the 'latest' science.

Experiments have overturned what many believed to be true for a long time - "We all start with a set of neurons and they all die. No new neurons are created". This has been proven to be false. There is a great deal of life in the brain. Such experiments are fascinating to read and this book performs a great service in taking neuroscience to a broader audience.

The spectacular failure of the book is in putting the its title claim together. It's easy to find correlations if you look hard enough and the ones that Lehrer seems to suggest are rather tenuous and require a tremendous leap of faith. To reverse engineer Monsieur Proust and Ms. Stein as neuroscientists is more poetic license than science. The cover notes that Leher worked in Nobel prize-winning Eric Kandel's lab, but it is disappointing to report that he missed the essential lesson of the scientific method - framing a good hypothesis and then collecting data to confirm or disprove it. It is rather plain, even to a non-neuroscientist reader, that his hypothesis is weak and his conclusions are based on rather weak correlations.

This would all have still been okay, but then Lehrer goes on to commit parricide. Drawing from C.P Snow's Two Cultures theory, scientists like Dawkins, Pinker and Gould formed the 'Third Culture', scientists who bridged the gap between science and the lay audience with their cogent writing. Lehrer faults them, however, for viewing everything from the lens of science and missing the arts and humanities completely. What is needed, is a new'Fourth Culture', one that combines the arts and sciences and brings them both to the lay audience. This book and Saturday by Ian McEwan are examples of such writing, Lehrer goes on to write in his Coda to the book. Anyone who has read Dawkins, Gould or Pinker would suggest to Lehrer that he first work on coming up with a decent thesis for books before trying to create a new genre of writing. Clearly, Mr. Lehrer does not believe in half-measures when it comes to being audacious. He's young, the severe panning won't kill him and hopefully make him stronger.

On the Two Cultures, I think
Salon.com put it beautifully:

Science is material for the arts and art is material for the sciences, yet each must maintain its own integrity. After all, each has its own virtue: The sciences lift us outside of experience, so that we can more clearly survey it. The arts immerse us in experience, so that we can more fully encounter it.

My perception while reading the book was that I was reading two separate books at the same time. One on art, and the other on science. Take any random set of artists and you could come up with essentially an identical book. Maybe this book is a grand joke on everybody; if not, it's ripe for parody.

A few selections:
Genghis Khan was a cell-biologist, or
Napoleon was an investment banker,

There are others, which I will get to once I, like Monsieur Proust, am in bed.

Store for Later Use

2008-03-29T10:37:00.004-05:00

It's been ages since I have conducted a quiz. I have been mooching off other people for months... err years. A quiz has been in the works for a long time and I am reminded of the fact every time I visit our quizclub page. It was last updated in 2005 and I have not done what was promised. It has been pricking my conscience every since. Finally, the gnawing into my brain along with collective shame brought upon the folks I have been mooching past the many months has resulted in actually conducting this Sunday's quiz.

Whether you are an active quizzer, a quizzer-in-exile, or quizzer-in-hibernation, once you have taken the plunge as a quizzer you will always be one. Anything you read and hear (no, not touch!) will be stored away for future use. It is an unconscious and automatic process to store all kinds of useless facts.

Now, having to set questions puts all this at a more conscious level. Now you are aware of this automatic filing process. After struggling to make the first few questions, the process becomes easy, too easy. Suddenly, everything you read or hear becomes a potential question. It's not the finding of the information that is hard, it is the framing of it: getting the right images, facts to make the question interesting, workable and informative at the same time. I have some a number of potentially awesome questions getting wasted because of poor framing.

Sample question (any guesses?)

while(1) {
Stephen Hawking ;
Eric Schmidt;
Adam and Eve;
a picture of Zeus;
}

The best way to set a quiz is to set questions in way that you like them best. I like questions like the previous one. At first, it makes no sense. Then the pieces connect and it all makes sense. In a few moments, you instantly know that you have the right answer.

At the end of the weekend, I had way more questions that I could fit into 2 hour slot. So, I have archived them. Stored for later use.

Sacks's Musicophilia

2008-03-26T00:36:00.004-05:00

Review of Oliver Sacks's latest book - Musicophilia on the book blog.

Economics of God

2008-03-23T09:10:00.004-05:00

From The Economist:

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

Scientists in Europe have embarked on scientific quest for God. Even if religion or God are scientifically baseless, there can be numerous economic and social benefits. It is said that humans and chimpanzees are the only species that laugh; religion separates us from our cousins on the evolutionary tree. Really, a sticky 'meme' such as religion could not have survived if it did not confer any evolutionary benefits.

(the) long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on.

Indeed, research has shown the religion-based groups tend to survive longer as compared to secular groups, which are four times more likely to break up. The fear of the supernatural, or the after-life makes people cooperate. God is the ultimate stick and Heaven the ultimate carrot. We all know that incentives work!

As Dr. Wilson points out "... Secularism is very maladaptive biologically. We're the ones who at best are having only two kids. Religious people are the ones who aren't smoking and drinking, and are living longer and having the health benefits."

It is hard to separate religion from culture and group membership. Even there was a God, or not we want to belong to some group. Atheism can be intellectually and scientifically more honest, but can lead to impoverishment and even alienation in other ways.

Spring in your step

2008-03-21T12:17:00.004-05:00

Officially, spring began yesterday. But, Michigan did not get the news. Just when you thought that the winter was over, it was finished, it comes back once last time with a snowstorm. Yet, the clearest sign that it has gone is that it is getting sunnier. The fabled grey skies are gone. We might have another winter surprise, but spring is finally here.

One of the great joys of this change in season is to be able to run outside. After slipping a number of times on the ice, I didn't thinking running outside in the winter was a great idea. You look forward to escape the forced circles around the indoor track to get a decent amount of miles in. Then there is the treadmill, but then there is no difference between you and your pet hamster.

Last weekend, when it was cheerfully sunny, I decided that it was time to finally hit the trail. No wimpy road-running for me. The Huron River Trail is beautiful. There was still some snow on the trail in isolated lumps. Due to the snow that had melted a few spots were turned into muck. It was a rather fun and muddy experience.

Getting down to a run is simply overcoming inertia. Once I am past that door in my shoes, I have never found cause to regret a run. After a couple of miles in the endorphins kick in and then you don't want to stop. I often wonder if I should take my camera along for these runs to record how beautiful it really is on the trail. I have run this trail a number of times in the summer, but early spring is something else. There is still a nip in the air. The leaves from the autumn are on the ground, dark yellow. The river is icy in spots and doesn't look very inviting for a swim. Puddles form below the tiny waterfalls created by the melting snow.

Running is a solitary activity. Even in a marathon when you run with thousands of people, you are still running your own race and alone. I used to run with music, but I have gotten out of that habit. There are plenty of sounds that you can listen to while running that can keep you entertained. Chief among them, being the sounds in your head. That's another reason you want to run alone, at least sometimes. After a while even that chatter in your head stops and you begin to hear other sounds. The sound of the Canadian goose, the branches breaking under your feet, the sound of another runner in the distance. Your lungs expand to take in the fresh air. Then you begin to take in the smells. There is a concert in progress and it took me so long to be aware of it.

Π Day

2008-03-14T11:20:00.004-05:00

Today is Π Day. I should do something to do with math to celebrate the day. For a start, I could calculate how much I need to pay my credit card bill. Or, do something that has nothing to do with math. Something really irrational. Running Π miles wouldn't be a bad idea. I find it an interesting coincidence that running Π miles is like running five kilometers(about 5.055K). So, Π is also the most popular running distance.

Perhaps, I should make this a yearly thing and run Π miles every Π Day to gauge by physical deterioration over time.

Punching Numbers

2008-02-26T17:18:00.006-05:00

This may be the most insane thing I ever did. Now you can call me using Grand Central. I one of those who will try anything, once!

What about noli me vocare, ego te vocabo? Throwing caution to the wind.

It was fun picking my number though which spells out: REHASH-5-PAD using phonespell.

On A Productive Day

2008-02-26T13:50:00.000-05:00

I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.
- EB White

Oscars 2008

2008-02-23T08:59:00.005-05:00

Has 2007 been a great year for the movies? I think so. Have the Oscars been reflective of that? Not so much.

Certain movies have overshadowed much of everything else that went on during the year. There are movies that are good, and those that do well at the Oscars.

In the former category, Before the Devil Knows You are Dead was largely unnoticed. It does have the oscillating non-linear narrative, but the dialogue is brilliant. Albert Finney, Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman are excellent in this fast-paced story of family, personal demons, and things spiralling quickly out of control. Nominations - 0.

Another movie that sort of died too soon was The Darjeeling Unlimited. Wes Anderson is the heir to Robert Altman in many ways. The soundtrack was a homage to the Merchant-Ivory 'Bombay Talkies'. But, India was simply a backdrop. With the same actors and the same sort of story, this is what can be called a paraquel to the Royal Tenenbaums.

In the Oscar-friendly category we have Exhibit A - No Country For Old Men - lot's of great actors, wonderful locations, complex plot with parallel stories. The Babel of last year. Then there is a new kind of movie that is gaining favour, Exhibit B - Juno - a dramatic-comedy on a serious issue, with very likable characters, an unusual soundtrack, and new actors. The Little Miss Sunshine of the year. These two represent the two extremes - the much larger than life and the true 1:1 scale that are very Oscar friendly. The old staple - the biopic also always works. Everything else seems to fall between the cracks. The real shocker has been Michael Clayton. A good movie, but far from outstanding that I feel has been undeservedly been overrepresented. Perhaps indication of the clout of the people behind the movie?

Predictions up next...

Oscar 2008 - Predictions

2008-02-23T07:00:00.006-05:00

Updated:
It's a pity that The Diving Bell and the Butterfly walked away with no awards. It was one of the finest movies of the 2007. Tilda Swanson came from nowhere to win that award. I was glad to see that Marion Cotillard's performance did not go unnoticed. Ellen Page will have to wait.
Other than that, most awards went as expected.

Reportcard: 8/12

* *
This is now a yearly ritual (thanks to the insistence of JRR and others). Let's see what tomorrow will bring. Most of the categories have been quite easy to call in contrast to last year. This is not to say that the nominees lack quality, but rather that the relative differences are apparent.

Performance by an actor in a leading role
Daniel Day-Lewis has created a niche in playing deranged, driven maniacs and this is a role for him. It is more his voice than his acting that deserves the credit and There Will Be Blood is a movie that should be watched but also listened to. The others nominees can leave their speeches at home.
Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood

Performance by an actor in a supporting role
Philip Seymour Hoffman has had a fantastic year. If Daniel Day-Lewis is sheer depth, then Hoffman is breadth. His role as the cocaine-sniffing exec in Before the Devil Knows Your Dead did not get much notice, but was one of his finest ever. It took me a while to realise that he was playing the CIA-agent Gust Avakatros in Charlie Wilson's War. If acting prizes were handed out in terms of batting averages, Hoffman would win many prizes. Unfortunately for him this time, Javier Bardem is standing with a cattle-gun with a killer performance that has been bested by only Day-Lewis.
Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men

Performance by an actress in a leading role
Cate Blanchett is in her own Golden Age as an actress. Even her tiniest role as Bob Dylan earned a nomination. Do you need to say more about an actress who can embody - Hepburn, Dylan, Elizabeth and Galadriel? Another fan. I thought Marion Cotillard playing Edith Piaf poured her heart into role. But, there are a few things going against her - the movie was in French, about a French superstar, and the musician-biopic has become a tired genre for this award. Ellen Page (not Julie Christie) is the fresh face and her role as the flippant, pregnant teenager is the best one of the year.
~~Ellen Page in Juno~~

Performance by an actress in a supporting role
Ruby Dee's performance was good, but not great. I cannot say anything about Amy Ryan since I have not seen the movie. I was most impressed by Saoirse Ronan in Atonement. When I read the book, I had a Briony in mind. Now, after having seen the movie, I cannot imagine anyone but Ronan. She exudes that nervous energy, prodigious talent, and fanciful imagination of a thirteen-year old.
~~Saoirse Ronan in Atonement~~

Best animated feature film of the year
My real work involves rats, I confess to certain amount of Francophilia, and to being a foodie. Even if any of these did not apply to you, Ratatouille should convince you to save money to be able to eat once at a cafe in Paris. I did not have the opportunity (in terms of money) to eat at a Michelin three-star restaurant, but if the 'common' cafe food was so good, I cannot imagine what a real restaurant offers. I have missed the bus on rap-music and also on the graphic-novel genre. Persepolis stands an outside chance (it's the only movie that is really made in France!)
Ratatouille

Achievement in cinematography
Both, the American Westerns would not have been that majestic if hadn't been for the camerawork. But, Kaminski's job as portraying the life of man who can only blink his left eyelid is one of the finest achievements in cinematography that I have ever seen. It would be nothing short of travesty if the award goes to anyone else.
~~The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Janusz Kaminski~~

Achievement in directing
Schnabel's work is nothing short of spectacular. This is the movie that is going to make it to the textbooks. Juno has on outside chance, but the Coen brothers' tight, riveting piece of work in No Country For Old Men will most probably win.
If I had to choose I would give Schnabel the award and let the Coens take home the Best Picture. It takes a great deal of skill to portray the life of locked-in patient without pitying him and showing his spirit.
~~The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Julian Schnabel~~

Achievement in music written for motion pictures (Original score)
Incorporating the typewriter as part of the score is nothing but brilliant, and Marianelli's other selections, like the aria from La Boheme, will not go unnoticed.
Atonement - Dario Marianelli

Adapted screenplay
Ian McEwan's novel was written to be adapted. There are no challenges there. Large parts of the Diving Bell had to be written to show the second person perspective which was very nicely done. But, Cormac McCarthy's novel presented the greatest challenge and the end result speaks for itself. I cannot see Bardem or Lee-Jones being able to do what they do without this adaptation giving them the canvas.
No Country for Old Men - Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

Original screenplay
It takes effort to write a sentence with ten redundant 'likes', even if you are a teenager. The exchanges between Juno and her friends and Michael Cera are so uncannily real that you feel you have actually overheard them.
Juno - Diablo Cody

Best live action short film
It's a really pity that these gems are not as widely distributed. The Michigan Theater performs a great service by bringing these to Ann Arbor. There are novels and then there are short stories and these are truly the best of the best.

Tanghi Argentini had a great twist at the end and Il Supplente was a Robert Benigni-style riot. Every frame in The Tonto Woman could be in the National Geographic and I would watch out for Daniel Barber in the future. Going with the Francophile theme, the pickpocket movie was clearly the best. A very human story, told with a lot of wit, wonderful dialogue and a nice end.
Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets)

Best motion picture of the year
Michael Clayton should not be here. I don't know what it is supposed to represent. Atonement was very tastefully done and, in this case, one can admit that the movie is as good as the book, and in some ways better. Using Vanessa Redgrave as the old Briony Tallis was a nice touch. There Will Be Blood fails to offer anything beyond the ambition and mania of two men - Paul Sunday(Dano) and Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis). No Country For Old Men offers a lot of different things and speaks at different levels. The story is both old and young. Javier Bardem is the Grim Reaper and Tommy Lee Jones is the honest sheriff, a composite from all Westerns. Josh Brolin is the Vietnam Vet who is more a cowboy than anything. The themes are huge - Good and Evil, Chance and Fate, Contemplation and Spontaneity. In contrast to this Goliath of a movie stands the charming Juno. It's going to be interesting to see if soaring universal themes are cut to size by a pint-sized pregnant teenager with an attitude. For now, like God, I am sticking on side of the big armies.
No Country for Old Men

Press One, then Press Five For...

2008-02-22T10:33:00.001-05:00

Sick of talking to machines?
Pressing one, then five, then six, yada...yada... yada?

Get me a human please!

In Defense of Food

2008-02-16T13:11:00.000-05:00

Grocery lines at the local Meijer can be quite long and what can you do while waiting in line? One, read the pulp magazines on the rack, or two, talk on the phone. My preferred way to pass the time is to look into other people's carts - it tells you a lot. How much soda-pop? microwave-ready food? fruits? fresh veggies or boxed? You can make a pretty decent guess about their health, wealth, and lifestyle. You can even tell if they are single or married without looking for the ring finger. Try it!

One day while eating Michael Pollan felt like asking, "What is it that I am eating? Where does it come from? He traced the story of four different kinds of meals - fast-food, organic, foraged, and hunted. Those simple questions lead him to discover some shocking and rather unpleasant facts and write the Omnivore's Dilemma. Most people think that they know what they eat, and where their food comes from, but they don't. For example, try looking at the package your bread comes in. How many of those ingredients do you recognize? Are you surprised to find some stuff you weren't expecting was in the bread you eat? If you are perplexed then grab hold of the book, or listen to this - NPR interview.

That book was the description, his latest book - In Defense of Food - is the prescription and it's bafflingly simple:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

There isn't anything more to it. How many books have you read whose first line IS the punchline?

Eat food
What food? you ask. Any food that is really food, says Michael Pollan. Much of what we eat is not food, but a 'product' of food science. Simple rules of thumb:

1)Anything with more than five ingredients is probably not food
2)Especially something that needs to advertise itself - low-fat, multi-grain, vitamin-fortified.
3)Something your grandmother(great-grandmother, if you are American!) wouldn't recognize

What you are left with after applying those three rules is very likely going to be food, whole food. I tried it this week and what you realize you are not left with much. As Pollan says, "The yam, sitting there silently in the produce section doesn't scream it health benefits" and I found, much to my shock, that my low-fat healthy yogurt contains high-fructose corn syrup. There is actually very little real food in the supermarket.

Mostly plants
I am what you call a 'flexitarian' - one who will eat meat if nothing else is available. People give different reasons for giving up meat or animal products - religious, ethical and health. I've discovered another, in my opinion, more compelling one - ecological. The entire livestock of the world emits more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation industry. I also ought to let you know that herbivores are being fed meat (mostly ground beef) for juicier steaks and cows drugged up with hormones. So, that bumper sticker you say is right - "Drink beer, not milk!"

Not too much
We all know this right? But, it's hard to follow it when the food is piled sky-high on your plate and you feel compelled to finish it. Okinawans who are known for their longevity as a community believe in hara hachi bu: Eat till you are 80 percent full. Again, hard to do since most meals are not consumed at dinner table, but are eaten in the car, in front of the TV and are eaten far too quickly or absent-mindedly that we cannot or don't respond to satiety cues. The French paradox is well-known. How do the French eat the most 'unhealthy' food and still manage to be so lean? First, they emphasize quality over quantity, second they don't take second helpings, and eat slowly and enjoy their meals.

Pollan says that - low-fat, low-carb, Omega-3, multi-grain, organic, etc. - are fads and not nutrition, but nutritionism in action. We have been eating food for centuries, and there is much evidence to suggest that most cultural practices are often healthier than the seemingly more healthy array of products of today. Food, real food, needs defending because it is rapidly disappearing from the marketplace.

So what's on your plate? - Make sure it's food, mostly plants, and not too much.