221B

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears–
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

– Vincent Starrett

A Neat Solution

A long while back I posted this question to which I found a clean answer today.
Here's one of the coolest tools: Sawstop. It will stop the moment it senses your finger. Neat!

Another Theory

I had this theory that the more you think the more energy you should consume. Simply put, look at your laptop with no programs running and watch how long the battery lasts. Run 3 programs and watch how long it lasts. Another way of proving this is "Show me one overweight intellectual?".
Both of these lines of thought induce fallacious logic (the classic correlation isnt causality principle).Anyhow today someone sent me the following on the gender difference w.r.t intelligence: Are men more intelligent than women :)


The answer is: They aren’t.

The orthodoxy in intelligence research for the second half of the 20th century had been that men and women had the same average intelligence, but men had greater variance in their distribution than women. Most geniuses were men, and most imbeciles were men, they said, while most women were in the normal range. This conclusion, however, was manufactured out of political expediency. Not wanting to discover, or a priori denying, any sex differences in intelligence, psychometricians simply deleted from the standardized IQ tests any item on which the performance of men and women differed.

More recently, however, especially since the turn of the millennium, there have been an increasing number of studies that cast doubt on this politically correct conclusion. Studies with large representative national samples from Spain, Denmark, and the United States, as well as meta-analyses of a large number of published studies throughout the world, all conclude that men on average are slightly but significantly more intelligent than women, by about 3-5 IQ points. So this has now become the new (albeit tentative) consensus in intelligence research.

However, these studies do not answer the ultimate evolutionary question of why men should be more intelligent than women. General intelligence likely evolved as a domain-specific psychological mechanism to deal with evolutionary novelty. However, unlike populations in different geographic parts of the world, men and women within a population have always faced the same level of evolutionary novelty throughout evolutionary history, because they have always migrated together. If general intelligence is a function of the evolutionary novelty of the environment, why then are men on average slightly more intelligent than women?

My LSE colleague, Diane J. Reyniers, and I offer one possible explanation in our article, forthcoming in the American Journal of Psychology. Psychometricians have known since the end of the 19th century that height is positively correlated with intelligence: Taller people on average are more intelligent than shorter people. And men in every human population are taller than women. So one possibility is that men are more intelligent than women, not because they are men, but because they are taller.

Our analysis of a large representative American sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health shows that this is indeed the case. In fact, once we control for height, women are slightly but significantly more intelligent than men. Further controlling for health, physical attractiveness, age, race, education, and earnings does not alter this conclusion. Height has exactly the same effect on intelligence for men and women: Each inch in height increases the IQ by about .4 point. The partial effect of height on intelligence is more than three times as strong as the partial effect of sex.

So it is not that men are more intelligent than women, but that taller people are more intelligent than shorter people, but net of height women are more intelligent than men. Women who are 5’10” are on average more intelligent than men who are 5’10”, and women who are 5’5” are on average more intelligent than men who are 5’5”. But, more importantly, people who are 5’10” are significantly more intelligent than people who are 5’5”, and most people who are 5’10” are men and most people who are 5’5” are women.

A 10th Century Blog

The Japanese have the oldest company running in the world . Then, they invented the modern literary form of a 'novel'. So, naturally I would expect the oldest blog in the world from them :-). Here's a link to that blog.

The Center of the Universe

Of Tailors and 2008

The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew every time he sees me, while all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

— George Bernard Shaw

I miss those old days when you had to visit a tailor to stitch your clothes rather than buy the so called 'ready-made'. Now a days its almost a luxury to have one, thanks to economies of scale.

Each year is like a tailor in that it takes some sense of measure of what makes you 'you'. 2008 was a thorny year it was but sure makes it possible for a rosy 2009 given what we all have been through. These kinds of situations force 'clarity' upon oneself and we definitely need that in tons at this moment.

Broadly my measurements for this year include:

* Geo : started this year in wintry Boston, and ended back at sunny silicon valley

* Career: work for a different employer than the one I started the year with.

* Finance: I lost 44% of my net worth but gained the trust of few special people

* Motor: I have one more car . One Diesel and another Gasoline. I am hedging my bets

The cake albeit must go to this find-your-mate-via-the-internet thingy. Despite meeting some very interesting women and somewhat promising relationships that had to be nipped, the year ends with the same status as I started. But then its a source of joy that'll flow into the next year

It was also a good year for discovering things, authors, blogs and people. For example, it was very stimulating to have discovered George Gamow. I am seriously committed to reading more often and more variety in 2009. This article here tells you why its preferable to other media.

The other thing that needs revamp is my value system which seems pretty outdated. When the facts change, I think value systems should too.

Anyways, Here's wishing you a lovely, event-filled, full-of-things-to-look-forward-to type of an Year that we enumerate as 2009.

Happy Holidays

Version Two

I got a new car but that raised a few questions among my friends saying I sould have done otherwise. I could mention  a few practical reasons ( which would have made Warren Buffett happy) but geberalising it, I would resort to that fact philosophically as follows:

"among horses, those of the finest breeding, which are the most spirited and mettlesome, become the most useful and the best horses if they are broken in as colts; and if they are not broken in, they are intractable and very poor. ... It is the same thing with [people] of the finest breeding, that is to say the bravest in soul, and the best able to carry out what they undertake. If they are educated and learn what they must do, they become the best and most useful, and they do the greatest and the most good. The uneducated and untaught become the most evil and the most harmful, for they do not know how to judge what they should do. They often take part in evil undertakings and, because they are high-spirited and energetic, they are very hard to restrain and very stubborn; therefore they do the greatest evil."

 -- Xenophon, "Recollections of Socrates", Bk. 4, Chap. 1,  

Shorting India

Here's a very different take on recent attacks by Ms. Roy
First off, the chord she strikes is very resonant with another favorite author of mine: Meena Alexander.
Second, The significance of TV is underscored which was absent from other discourses on the attack
Finally, a key takeaway that emerges from the essay is that we have everything necessary to solve the problem except the 'will' to do so.

Some quotes to get you to read the whole monograph:

"We've forfeited the rights to our own tragedies."

"That war isn't on TV. Yet. So maybe, like everyone else, we should deal with the one that is."

"Though one chapter of horror in Mumbai has ended, another might have just begun. Day after day, a powerful, vociferous section of the Indian elite, goaded by marauding TV anchors who make Fox News look almost radical and left-wing, have taken to mindlessly attacking politicians, all politicians, glorifying the police and the army, and virtually asking for a police state."

"If Kashmir won't willingly integrate into India, it's beginning to look as though India will integrate/disintegrate into Kashmir"

"A country where the line between the underworld and the Encounter Specialists virtually does not exist. "

If 10 men can hold off the NSG commandos and the police for three days, and if it takes half a million soldiers to hold down the Kashmir valley, do the math. What kind of Homeland Security can secure India?

"One sign says "Justice," the other "Civil War." There's no third sign and there's no going back. Choose. "

The Mother of All Demos

Yes.This demo really featured really new things like the mouse, the first networked computer, a graphical instead of commandline interface and the concept of hypertext
It all started on December 9, 1968 which is just 40 years ago :)