Confusion

Last night, I was reading this and this. I was confused. To briefly (and in an extremely oversimplified way) summarize, some people were saying women should play it safe and not do things like go out alone at night so as to reduce the possibililty of being subject to sexual assault. And others were saying, "You cannot say that because by inference this means that if you do fall victim to sexual assault, then you are partly or wholly to blame for this because you did not take the said precautions". I could see the point made by both sides and was not able to reconcile the different thoughts running through my head. Then, this morning I walked in to the department to find the following next to the elevator (Poor quality cell phone pics, sorry).

Does this mean the University is engaging in “blame the victim” game now? I am even more confused.

Happy Birthday!

To cc (my blog persona) and the Curiosity Shop. We have been in existence for a year and we had fun! When I started blogging, I said “I don't know why I am doing this”. I still don’t. But it has turned out to be a lot of fun. In the year that was, I have made friends and foes, I have laughed and cried, even awarded titles and been asked to “kneel down and beg forgiveness”, pretty much the whole spectrum you would go through if you had a real life (I clearly don’t).

And I found one side benefit. The blog has become a compendium of odds and ends that catch my attention (not comprehensive though, for, whole months went by when I noticed things and thought about them but did not blog about them). For example, the other day, I was looking for a Scientific American article on creationism I had read a while back to revisit something. I did what I always do, go to the filing cabinet and reach for the folder “This and that: Colloquium”. It was not there. This usually means I was reading the said paper in a plane or a train and did not bring it back. Under normal circumstances, the next step would have been to google. But now, I have a blog and I know I said something about it here and so I went to the Shop and looked and there it was! So, just for that reason, the Shop should become a more complete and better organized filing cabinet for the junk in my head!

Anyways, thank you to my readers who stop by here to say things to me and help me keep up the necessary illusion that other people read this stuff as well. Now wish me well for the future (most of you are my seniors in the blog world, right? So this is asking for “aashirwaad”). And do come back to read some more.

Politics of the blogsphere?

Apparently people either love Amit Varma or just plain hate him…strange. No wonder comments are off on his numero uno blog. As I said, strange…

Monies, memes and such

As (the mostly imaginary) readers of this blog would have realized, I am a person that is obsessed with understanding, and this obsession extends to understanding human psychology as well. And the way to go about this task is to take a lot of data from the world around me and build models that explain this data. As with all things, I share this obsession with some of my friends. So, a few years ago, a couple of my friends and I came up with a strategy for collecting such data. We decided we would come up with a few questions that we thought were “penetrating” in some sense. It was decided that we will ask these questions to all the people we met and we will catalogue and keep the answers for analysis after we had accumulated statistically significant amounts of data (or rather as many of the people we met as possible, I mean, if we really liked them we would not want to risk scaring them away for ever, would we?). This process will help help us get a statistical grasp of the human psyche (paah!! day dreams realizable only in utopia as you will see). I had forgotten all about this for a while now, but recently Bongo tagged me with a meme and this caused all our idealistic planning to come rushing back to my mind! Ok, you are allowed at this point to decide I am crazy, but read on anyway, it might amuse you.

Quite early on in this endeavor of gathering data, we realized of course that the problem was the absence of any “right” questions. For example, one of the questions a buddy came up with was some slight variation of “What would you do if you got a million dollars tomorrow”. We got answers that ranged from “Retire and move back to India” to “Oh! After capital gains and state taxes, that would let me clear may be 600000$, I guess I would pay off my house and three cars and add the rest to my portfolio in the form of some blue chip security or the other”. Clearly the only things that the above two answers told us was that the person with the first answer thought a million dollars was a lot of money and the second one must have a really large income and hence thought of a million dollars as an “everyday sum”. It later turned out that the second guy had a yearly income that was a little more than half the amount, vindicating my earlier statement. This was not useful. We could have found that out by just asking them how much they made every month.

We got some really “out there” answers as well such as : “I will buy a plane and live from October through March here (here being Gainesville Fl) and live March through October in a place of the same latitude in the southern hemisphere with all the same amenities, air conditioning, high speed internet and the VPN that will let me access all journals and such. This way I will have outdoor weather all year round”. May be you could infer from this that this geeky person is outdoorsy and is relatively happy with life as it is so that her biggest problem was the weather?

You see, the motivation behind asking the question was to see what people would change in their lives if money was not an object, but elicit the answer without explicitly stating the same. If you do explicitly state what you are asking, then their answer will be biased by what they think they can tell you about their pet peeves. You are more likely to see the truth if you can ask a clever indirect question from whose answer you could infer what you were looking for. And yes, you are right, what you infer will be biased by what you think about things and hence will not be a “one to one and onto map” that will be “invariant to changes in the reference frame” i.e., be the same irrespective of the mind of the person constructing it. So, after a very short while of trying to fine tune the questions we would ask and encountering the inevitable (in retrospect) frustration of not getting anything useful or trustworthy, we abandoned this scheme of ours.

Now what has this got to do with memes and tags and such? I have been away from the Blogsphere for a little more than a week, working too hard to have time left over to do anything other than check email. Then I try to reenter the world by reading the posts in my reader and find that there are such an overwhelming number of them that I was too lazy to even try. So, instead I clicked around to see the network created by the random facts meme. It lead me to the realization that this is such a rich hunting ground for psychological data! There are all manners of people being tagged, all manners of interpretations of any given tag and of course the value of the written word, where you can see what is being said without the burden of the real personality! So, now I have a new “holy grail” [1] goal for my blog life. After I become this famous blogger that everybody reads and people just love to get a link from me even if it is in the form of a tag because of the traffic I send their way, I will try and start memes with specific objectives and watch them propagate through the blogsphere and thereby acquire all the data I need!:))) . As the Thalaivar once said “How is it?”:))

[1] The “holy grail” idea comes from the lingo used in scientific proposals. You see, when you go asking for money for a project, you have three levels of possible results you predict will come out of it. The highest is the holy grail. This is a result you know you will not get, but if you do by some serendipity you will get the nobel prize as well. The second result, which is what you are really shooting for is called the “Nature” in that you would probably get a paper in that revered journal when you are done. And then there is the “fall back”, the minimum result that you are sure you will get irrespective of how badly things go.

I’ve been tagged – random facts

Bongo, as of now being awarded the title of second gentleman of the blogsphere (the first gentleman of course is the ever polite Patrix) has tagged me with the random facts meme. And I award him this title in spite of the fact that he tagged me only because “those who I can force into responding to a tag have mostly been tagged already”, for as is true for most people in most social situations, even virtual ones, I feel insecure and invisible and being tagged helps, right?:))

And now on to the meme. There is no way for a person to write eight random facts about themselves as it is bound to be biased by what they want people to know. But, I am going to try by picking eight random aspects of a person and writing down one fact about that aspect.

1. Appearance: I wore my hair in a “boy cut” of some form for the first twenty years of my life. Then one fine day I stopped cutting it and by the time I was 24 I had hair that fell below my waist. So I guess the fact is that my body produces way too much keratin?

2. Food: I LOVE “thaiyir saadam” and “avakkaai oorugai”, even more so now that I am attempting to be a vegan and it is “forbidden”. So the fact is that I am a dyed in the wool tam-bram.

3. Drink: Good coffee in the morning and good alcohol in the evening (no girly martinis for me, whisky neat or brandy with water preferable :))) So the fact is I am not that much of a tam-bram after all.

4. Music: With apologies to all the erudite and esoteric folks out there, tamil film music in general and by ARR my man in particular.

5. School girlish wish : I want to have had the genes of my father and his sisters instead of what I have now, namely my mother and her sisters. They all became fat as they got older. I am not that fond of eating but I hate to have to exercise!

6. Ms Universe type wish : Everybody in the world should have enough to eat so that “where is my next meal coming from” is not a thought of significance in their minds.

7. Siddhartha/Vivekananda type wish : That I had more concentration, more presence of mind and more rational thinking capacity than I do.

8. WTF fact of the day: It is raining outside now.

Ok, that did not turn out to be that random after all. But am too lazy to go back and rethink it and I should be working and not blogging anyways. And finally, on the need to propagate the meme. I have so few readers I don’t want to risk scaring them away by tagging them. And what if I am imagining that they read me and they really don’t? Horror of all horrors! But, I don’t want to be a spoil sport either. So, I (with great trepidation and anxiety) tag vatsan and tangled.

Come one come all

Just in case you missed it, there is a comments party on here. Please, don’t feel left out…join in! Let us all strive to give confused the all time record for number of comments to a blog post!

Random stuff

Being slow on the uptake on most things I did not hear of image macros until recently and the whole LOLcat thing until today. There are a whole bunch of images here. The one below is one that I liked a lot.

Also, I watched Shrek the third and it sucks. I hope this is the last movie out of the franchise as the writers seem to have run out of witty ways to implement their whole anti fairy tale thing. Falstaff has an eloquent rant on this you might want to read.

And just in case you did not read this, here is a hilarious take by J. A. P on the whole MS university, nude art controversy. I went back there yesterday to look at the comment thread and found a statement by J.A.P that resonated with me enough that I will now have to make a post out of it…He said “I'm not an advocate of democracy, really - I believe in benevolent despotism. Preferably mine”. More on that later.

Ode to the unknown reader

As I had said in an earlier post, I have not been here, in the blog sphere very long. So I don’t know anything about anything and am too lazy to educate myself. But, as a matter of routine I had created accounts on a couple of the free web stats services out there. And then promptly forgot about them. Yesterday, I was badly stuck on something and needed to kill some time to allow my subconscious to mull over my confusion (that is my excuse for browsing instead of working while in my office :)) So, I went to these websites to look at the stats for this blog. Now, my lack of knowledge on how these stats are acquired prevents me from really understanding what they mean (for example, if somebody reads me through their feed reader, as some of you do, how would this show up in the sitemeter stats?). But to the extent that I do understand them, it appears that I have more readers than I know of!

Everybody knows that we see things not as they are, but rather as we are. So, my model blog sphere inhabitant is based on me. And when I read someone’s post all the way through and like what I read, 9 out of 10 times, I leave a comment, even when I don’t have anything intelligent to contribute to the topic being discussed in the post. The exceptions to this being if the blog writer is one of the more famous ones like my reptile object of admiration Sunil or the master of logic with a really erudite audience (going by his comment threads) Falstaff just to name a couple, or there are already a number of comments to the post in question and I don’t wish to add to the already redundant thread. So, I assumed that this was true for everybody else as well.

But that is surely not the case according to my stats. For example, I appear to have a couple of regular readers from my alma mater, the school that is the defending NCAA football AND basketball champs this year. And I don’t think I know who they are! And another surprise I found was that people stumbled on some of the posts from google searches! It is a surprise in two ways, one, just the fact that a page shows up within the first few results of any search at all and the second, the reader actually spent five minutes on the page they landed!

I guess that just as in real life, not a day goes by without learning something new and hence finding one more piece of a puzzle that is just beginning to take shape. Anyways, just wish to say thank you for reading. One needs at least an illusion of an audience to force oneself to think clearly and if they have a real one, all the better!

Circular Logic

Recently DP posted its survey results on their head honcho Partix’s page and since I was one of the persons to take the survey, I thought I will go and take a look at it. The first thing that struck me was the fact that in almost all of their questions, my answer coincided with the histogram with the biggest peak. So, I guess I am either precisely the average DP reader or I am precisely the average DP reader that is likely to take their survey. Which of the above is true? Or rather how large is the intersection between the two sets?

For example, let me take the fact that most of the survey takers were between 24-34 in age and they said post graduate as their education level. Now, suppose I loosely assume that all these people are grad students and treat Jorge Cham’s picture of a grad student as typical, then as shown in the PHD comic alongside, the chosen method of time wasting (which for those of you who don’t know is the primary occupation of most grad students most of the time) is web surfing. So I can conclude one of two things. Most DP readers are grad students or that among the DP readers the ones that took the survey were the most jobless folks, namely the frustrated grad students :). The two are dramatically different conclusions. Wonder what the pundits made out of these results? :)

Love in the BlogSphere

I have been around in the Desi Blogsphere for about 4 months now, since my new year’s resolution to pick up a leisure activity that can keep me from getting crazy when research is not going so well (Ok, I started doing this in November, but what is a couple of months in a life time?). Much to my surprise, it has been exactly like the “real world” in many ways. And the surprise is largely because I did not know what to expect, but found out that it was something very familiar in the end.

Just like when you step into a new community (say, people doing theoretical physics research) in the real world, you don’t know anybody. First you acquire the knowledge of who the famous people are, for example Ed Witten if you are talking about theoretical particle physics or Amit Varma if you are talking about the blogsphere. Then, you try to make acquaintances with the people that are already in the community, in the case at hand by reading what they have to say and commenting on their thoughts. Some acquaintances stick, either because you keep going back for more and/or they reciprocate by evincing an interest in what you have to say. And others don’t. And as in the real world, the probability that an acquaintance sticks is directly proportional to how much of your life experience is the same as theirs and how much you respect the person’s thoughts and how well the respect is reciprocated.

I am finding many similarities between my experiences in the Blogsphere to my experiences when I was starting out as a grad student in theoretical physics. I am a novice here just like I was a novice in physics. I don’t know what tags are and am unable to figure out the Technorati thing. I don’t know about RSS and Atom feeds and still read blogs the old fashioned way, by actually going to people’s pages. Most of Web 2.0 befuddles me. For heaven’s sake, I am not even able to embed a video in my blog that I uploaded into youtube several weeks ago! I like to write and read and that is the only thing that brought me here, just like I like thinking about, formulating mathematically and solving physics problems and that is the only thing that brought me to physics. But in physics I had an advisor who helped me a little with some of the other technical things and the rest kind of worked out on its own. And this blogsphere thing being a hobby and me being the extremely lazy bum that I am, I am just hoping that things work out here on their own as well.

I could go on and on about similarities, the Indibloggies being the Oliver Buckley prize in physics (that makes Falstaff and Greatbong this year’s Steve Girvin and Allan MacDonald) and the Bloggies being the Nobel (and that makes PostSecret the guys behind COBE) and so on and so forth. But, let me get back to what I was saying earlier and to the choice of title for this post. As in my real world, I have not made that many acquaintances. And all of them are in the “I know them but I don’t think they know me” stage. And 4 months is too short a time for me to able to see if any of them are going to stick. But the reason I started writing this little note is that I felt a new (for me, the novice) “emotion” in the blogsphere yesterday. The real world analogue of this is called “Love at first sight”. The object of this “emotion” was PrimalSoup. But this is rather inevitable in this case. How could I not fall in love with someone whose domain name is that of Rhett Butler’s darling daughter, whose screen name is PrimalSoup (I wonder if she was thinking about the carbon-sulfur dominated pre life era of the earth that Carl Sagan tried to reproduce in his lab in Cornell or the quarks-leptons mixture that was our early Universe? In either case, I loved it), who is a Madrasi living in the Madras I want to go back to? And the clincher here was that she chose the phrase “Kafka meets Johnny Depp” to describe her dream guy! Is this just an infatuation or will it last? Well, only time will tell.

Blogathon against Eve teasing

The people over at Blank Noise Project have announced this year's Blogathon about fighting back against eve teasing. I have had several nasty experiences myself. So I will share one, so I can be part of this online campaign against this disgusting reality in the urban streets of India. More on March 7th.