The Best Non Fiction of the Year

I think Traffic is the best non fiction read of my reading year so far. It has a lot of counterintuitive stuff that I long suspected to be true but he lendd authority to his claims by poring over reams of data collected from all over the world. Some of it is even useful in my job (like adding an extra lane is only going to increase the mean waiting times for cars overall albeit looks like it should reduce)

What more, if you are a Data junkie like me the author even has a companion blog to the book which is even more mind tickling..Enzoi..

Bloodbath in the Markets

Its strange to see that you get numbed to your losses after a certain point. While the US is still reeling, I am over it (my net worth halved from the beginning of the year to now)

That said, there is this beautiful theorem which gives us hope there may be a bright new future for those who stand long....

Overdrive on the Edges

To most readers it will be easy, after reading this tale, to accept Rover's theory that Man is set up deliberately as the antithesis of everything the Dogs stand for, a sort of mythical straw-man, a sociological fable.

This is underlined by the recurring evidence of Man's aimlessness, his constant running hither and yon, his grasping at a way of life which constantly eludes him, possibly because he never knows exactly what he wants.

                --- Clifford D. Simak, "City" , 1952.

I feel like a young dog given my past experiences in the last decade. I caught up with things I have chased without knowing what to do with them. I made many a mistake and learnt from very few of them. Its almost like one big journey that I have done on an overdrive mode. Thats what happens to rookies like me when they face something for which they dont have any experience.

After a while, you learn to use gears, not to zoom /pan constantly on the camera and pleasantly shift from that of being a young dog to that of a young man. Yes, that time has come for me. By abusing power I learnt the use of it. I always thought that only when you reach  'n+1' you know what n is. No, Sir. The trick is to given enough of such past experiences, you should predict 'n' when you are at 'n-1' (or atleast the probability of it even if that doesnt happen). Reminds of this joke: The difference between a good student and a bad student is that a bad student forgets the material five minutes before the test, while a good student five minutes afterwards.

While I was a bad student in the past, the situation isnt all that worse as I sense that I can still be redeemed. Time for another transformation (the alternative being a slow extinction path) and am looking forward to it. 

A Thing of Beauty

can last more than 20 years. Look at Madras circa 1982

Links Du Jour

Do Good Grades Predict Success?
How to Elect the 2008 President ?

Imagine

if Hattori Hanzo´s sword was a version of Damascus Steel (contrary to its name the steel came from India although the swords were popular among the syrians)

Hush Hush!

This article truly has stuff that you can't talk about it in public

A Refreshing Century of Ads

Not sure how many of you know the old hovis ad:



Now watch the new breathtaking one (particularly has a desi couple in the midst of a 2 minute history of modern england)

The Farce of Capitalism

Here´s a nice questionnaire that speaks the mind of many people currently
watching the circus of Wall St.

True Freedom

I havent know a lot about David Foster Wallace but since he died recently I had to look him up and read a bit. He had a fantastic commencement speech that I urge you to read

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And here´s his final punchline which I totally subscribe to

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

RIPDFW