A walk

http://xkcd.com/77/

Eating junk

NY Times just published an article on why monkeys and humans eat junk food.

“These results may not surprise any stressed-out wage slave
who has polished off a quart of Häagen-Dazs at midnight while contemplating the
day’s humiliations. But the experiment intrigues scientists studying human
junk-food binges, which are hard to understand because there are so many
confounding factors.”

“The stress seemed to affect snacking in different ways for
each sex. The women given solvable puzzles ate more grapes than M&Ms, while
the women under stress preferred M&Ms. The men ate more of the high-fat
snacks when they were not under stress, apparently because the ones who
got the easy anagrams had more time to relax and have a treat.”

Read more

We will not request the cars we need

In a brilliant move, the Bangalore powers that be have decided to engage in “commandeer vehicles in the national interest".  Read on.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/hindustantimes/20080509/r_t_ht_nl_politics/tnl-flaunt-your-car-get-it-snatched-b610e63.html

 

I love the language and sentiments expressed in the quotes.  They’re sufficiently archaic to be funny - as long as it’s not your car getting “commandeered”.

 

Ready to Rot

Tired of your furniture? Have you tried composting it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/garden/08biodegrade.html

 

 

Microsoft's Woes

The problem with Microsoft is that it has a single strategy – ride on the back of Windows OS.  Ever since Bill Gates’ DOS ended up in the right place at the right time and got adopted by IBM for its PCs, the company has struggled to find its footing outside of operating systems and “hygiene” software.  Its Office Professional application suite took off only after it offered deep discounts to computer manufacturers (OEMs) and, in those days, assembler/resellers (VARs) for pre-installing the software on all systems sold. 

 

If you leave out forays into hardware (mouse, X-box), all other Microsoft software is sold on the basis of its linkage to Windows OS.  And, if anti-trust regulation limits the company’s ability to bundle in more software at deep discounts to its retail price, Microsoft is obviously left in a bind.

 

It hasn’t really figured out how to make a dent in other spaces.  The software remains woefully archaic, and the attempts to update it every 3 years only end up frustrating users who have finally managed to figure out how to get the software to do what they want it to do.  By the time your efficiency reaches an acceptable level, your IT department has been cajoled by deep discounts for early-adopters and mirages of future super-efficiency, to upgrade all users to Windows 2020.

 

In Excel, if you have to convert a number that has been designated as text (for what-ever reason) back into a number, you have to first type 1 in a new cell, then multiply the cell in question by this ‘1’.  If you are lucky the original cell will now recognize that its content is a number not text.  If you are unlucky, status quo will remain and you in frustration will re-type the content as a number. So, after 20 odd years of development investment into Excel, this is the best the thousands of researchers and programmers at Microsoft have come up with.

 

In today’s “collaborative” world, it is surprising that Microsoft hasn’t provided simple features to make people’s life easier.  Such as turning an email into a item on the calendar – in ONE step.  Or, easy-to-use annotation abilities in Excel (not cell by cell comments) for easy sharing of ideas among teams spread across continents.  The majority of corporate communicate today happens in PPT slides, but the annotation capabilities are pathetic.  The microscopic yellow tab can’t be seen without a strong lens… and you can’t circle something and put a comment around it.  Buying add-ons are not the answer since most corporate IS teams are on a crusade to surreptitiously remove all unauthorized software from corporate hard-drives.

 

And as for entering the Web 2.0 age, buying Yahoo is not the answer. Providing a Facebook-Youtube-whatever, suite of applications that corporate IS departments are not petrified of, is.

 

 

Mumbai street kid

A street kid in Mumbai who's apparently picked up the basics of several languages just by talking to tourists. Imagine what he could have accomplished if he got proper education and found a way to enter the mainstream society.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgJkjfG4hFU

Waste less, eat more

Several African countries and Sri Lanka have asked the Indian government for about 1million tons of food grain. It seems they are not asking for the grain free of charge, but they are asking the flow of grains to continue.

Recently the Indian government had banned exporting of food grains after the continued rise in prices. The diplomatic requests put us in a bind, given the hesitance of the government to risk further increase in prices in an election year. Additionally, the Indian government has recently made some friendly trade overtures to Africa in the hopes of strengthening relationships and counter-balancing China’s oil investments and trade.

It seems to me that the solution out of this bind is actually quite simple.

But before we go into that, let’s put the 1 million tons in context. India produced 227 million tons of food grain per year in FY08, of which about 140mt is rice. India has 13mt of rice stored with the Good Corp. of India and state warehouses. So the amount needed by Africa is less than 1% of total production of rice and about 8% of stored rice.

But about 10% of the grains produced in India are lost post-production: wheat 8%; rice 11%; pulses 9.5%; and all food grains, 9.3%. Most of this is lost due to poor storage – either the grain is not dried sufficiently before storage or because of lack of adequate storage facilities.

If we manage to reduce wastage even slightly from 11% to 10% of production it would be more than enough for what Africa needs. And if we reduced it further, we could even add more rice to India’s food supply.

So instead of traditional knee-jerk measures of banning exports changing the amount of grains stored in govt warehouses, if we invested in proper grain drying and storage facilities, we’d have more than enough for everyone – India and Africa, alike.

Add to that the remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the "growing Indian and Chinese appetite is contributing to the global food crisis"… Tell me again, which country has the largest percent of overweight people on the planet? Jokes aside, probably what she meant to say is that millions of people slowly coming out of poverty is raising the demand for food, putting pressure on food prices. The US can no longer assume it can continue to consume the largest portions of the world's food and energy production. Progress made by developing countries will inevitably lead to less distorted consumption patterns around the world.

Sources for food production and waste data: CommodityOnline, UN Food and Agriculture Organization

Re-writing history

I was sitting in my high school class a few months after arriving in the US, when I suddenly realized that for the first time in my life I actually finding a history class interesting. History! Who knew, you could like history?

It occurred to me that just a few months before that, as part of my UP Board syllabus, I was busy memorizing a bunch of dates which I could still easily rattle off without any effort. 1776 Declaration of Independence. The war of 1812 with the British. The Boston Tea Party. And on and on. But this was different. We were discussing the pros and cons of a decision taken by General Lee during the American Civil War. Studying history could actually involve discussion…

The teacher even rented “Gone with the Wind” and discussed the historical setting of the movie. By that time I had just about managed to get the hang of American accent and I understood very little of the movie. But I could still appreciate what he was trying to teach us -- history is a matter of perspective; and it's about people, more often than not, ordinary people...

And years later, in Berkeley, one day I discovered Columbus Day was no longer observed as Columbus Day but Indigenous People’s Day… And it stopped being a holiday. That was also history in the making, or rather, re-making. We were rewriting history: the hero of my own high-school text books from only a few years ago was now a villain…

...

You’re probably wondering what’s the reason for this daydream about history. Well, I got an email the other day regarding a high-school reunion. If I was in the US, I would have certainly attended and if the history teacher is still there, said ‘thank you’!

What if...

A really funny post from a blog I follow. My favorites are Hitler looking up Invading Russia in Google search, and Gavrilo Princip's Facebook status: "Gavvy is in a murderous mood".

http://krishashok.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/help-i-am-a-hypowebiac/

Not quite doomsday yet

The doomsday predictors may not like it, but it seems the US economy actually grew last quarter.

The 0.6% sequential growth of real GDP corresponds to 2.5% YoY growth from March 2008 to March 2007. This 0.6% growth is higher than the US Fed’s own projections (made in Oct and revised down in Jan). To be fair, the Fed didn’t provide projections for growth by quarter (only annual), but if we interpolate the quarters through a simple straight-line approach, this quarter should have been flat – that is, 0% sequential growth. Caveat: We should keep in mind that the numbers released yesterday are “Advance” numbers. There are two more rounds of refinement to come: “Preliminary” and the “Final” estimates of GDP growth for last quarter.

The bad news: The US Fed is indicating that it expects a business-side spending slowdown as a risk. And inflationary pressures may finally be leading the Fed to putting a pause to recent rate cuts. So the doomsday people may still have a chance to rejoice later in the year :)