October 2002

India to go the Linux way. Department of IT will support Linux as the de facto standard in academic institutions. Possibly elsewhere in the future.

The Mumbai Bloggers’ Meet photos are out of action. The site should be back some time today. The page is about 1.5MB (including pictures), and my quota is 50MB per day. So about 33 hits is enough to kill the page.

India in the eyes of Al Beruni, an Arabic historian around 1000AD. It is interesting to note the reversal of several customs among Hindus and Muslims. Particularly that “In all consultations and emergencies they [Hindus] take advice of the women.” via Narayana Murthy’s comment

Tomorrow’s leaders: opinion on IIT/IIM grads by T N Ninan at Business Standard. From his interviews for the Aditya Birla scholarships, and observes that there is a lack of awareness about India among them, and that the real value of the IITs/IIMs is in the selection process, not the education. I disagree on the latter. I think the 4+2 years of intense competition also adds value. The curriculum, however, may or may not.

IGPC makes 65% of the world’s stamps. Their site has pictures of some recent stamps issued by India. via Metafilter

Escher’s Ascending and Descending in LEGO. Also Belvedere and Balcony. via Metafilter

Spotted this ad on Business Standard. It was at the bottom of the page, and initially, I thought it really was an ant crawling across my laptop. Incidentally, catching the ant is not all that easy. Took me a minute. But once you catch it, it stays put. Business Standard no longer has an ad with an ant crawling across the bottom of the page.

Amrita has mirrored pictures of the Mumbai Bloggers’ Meet. Since she has no bandwidth restrictions, please visit that site.

Yahoo’s “Magic Crystal Ball” New Age Oracle or Ouija2K? I got a mail from a Brian, who found my chat with [email protected] through a Yahoo search. I did the same, and came up with this even more hilarious conversation.

Growth, Form, Function, and Crashes: an article from the Santa Fe institute. It explains scale-free fairly well. The point is, scale-free networks have a few hubs. If you knock a hub out, the network is fragmented. But your chance of knocking a hub out by random is small, since there are so few of them. That makes scale-free networks reliable as well as vulnerable. Slightly more technical details at PhysicsWeb by the creators of scale-free networks. It also says that if you design a network, it may not be scale-free. But if you let it evolve, it probably will be.

The Internet is a scale free network.

Photos from the Mumbai Bloggers’ Meet.

The world’s funniest joke. The joke deals with a man getting shot. And when I think about it, I can’t phrase is better than Asimov did in Jokester. “The point is,” said Meyerhof, “that I have pictured a husband being humiliated by his wife; a marriage that is such a failure that the wife is convinced that her husband lacks any virtue. Yet you laugh at that. If you were the husband, would you find it funny?”. ...

Salomon Smith Barney sold the CEO of WorldCom lots of IPO shares at a low price. The CEO made lots of money. Technically, that’s a bribe to your customer. But then, so is every free offer, or cross-sale. What makes the SSB-WorldCom deals illegal, this article argues, is that they’re so BIG, and they’re made of OTHER people’s money.

The real reason for .NET: taking Windows to UNIX.

After reading my post on the ET article mentioning “expected to see a higher than expected rise”, a certain CA gold-medallist friend of mine wrote back this obscure note that I refuse to understand: … if you take it literally it is not possible. To put it more technically, something called a law of iterated expectation comes to play. Today’s expectation of tomorrow’s expectation about what will happen day after is just today’s expectation of what will happen day after. ...

Lavish weddings. Sounds a bit of a waste… but if I were offered a wedding in Disneyland, with “Cinderella’s Crystal Coach”, I’d probably pay the $40,000. If I had it, that is.

Indian TV commercial storyboards. The plots of several TV ads, in pictures and words. via Someplace Simple

RIAA sues radio stations for playing their music. (No, not really. It’s a spoof. But I wouldn’t be surprised.) via Scripting News

Reactions to Google’s revised search algorithm. People’s rankings on certain keywords appear to have changed. Mine hasn’t. So far.