October 2006

The myth of prodigy. Precociousness as a child is no indicator of future success.

Here is the background music from some Hindi songs between 1995-1999. Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments Sarvadamana 13 Oct 2006 7:38 pm: 9/10 in the previous and 8/10 in this one. Is it possible to mail the answers for numbers 6 and 7 of this quiz and number-6 of hindi songs 2000s? amitabh biyani 21 Oct 2006 5:28 pm: 10 on 10 here :) good quiz sourish 21 Dec 2006 3:01 am: 10/10 deepak joshi 6 Oct 2012 5:49 am: thank you

These are pavement drawings. They are NOT 3D objects. But it’s hard to believe. (Even the shadows are perfect.) See more at Julian Beaver’s site. Comments Abbie 9 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: hey these are cool drawing they actualy look 3-D and like the come right out of the ground alex meneses 9 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: UNBELIEVABLE……AMAZING…..WISH I CAN SEE YOUR DRAWINGS IN PERSON….

I talked about my approach for multicriteria decision-making, and mentioned that it was fundamentally flawed. Here’s why. The charts above compared two industries. The bigger the area, the more favourable the industry. The underlying assumptions being: The criteria are comparable. (Points at the same level are of comparable importance. Twice as large is twice as important.) All (and only) relevant criteria have been included. In this particular example, I know for a fact that both these assumptions are invalid. And in every case I used this methodology, the assumptions fail. ...

1.5 million internal e-mails of Enron were released after it collapsed, to help figure out why. The UC Berkeley Enron Email Analysis Project has some links analysing these emails. Check out the visual analysis. Comments Prakash Ayer 9 Oct 2006 3:03 pm: Hi Anand, Did you mean Enron instead of Amazon here? Take Care S Anand 9 Oct 2006 3:15 pm: Gosh, yes – sorry, typo on my side. (Wonder why that happened… must’ve been sleep-typing :-) Ravi 16 Oct 2006 6:51 pm: Along the same network visualization lines, http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html and http://liveplasma.com/ are pretty interesting too. Or if you like Digg, http://labs.digg.com/swarm/ works too. (drop me a line some time Anand - kumar (pulli) venkateswar (at) gmail (pulli) com) Irrexu 27 Oct 2006 5:06 am: Long time since you’ve posted any article on your site.. Anand, just a suggestion though.. I think you should start writing more about yourself and the latest in your life.. I am sure there are a lot of takers for that like me. Cheers!

Here is the background music from some Hindi songs from the 2000s. Can you guess which movie they are from? Don't worry about the spelling. Just spell it like it sounds, and the box will turn green. Comments Mihir 13 Mar 2009 6:44 am: Hey, Anand.Great work !!! Keep it up… One question, from which song is the 1st piece ? Dhar 8 Oct 2006 9:29 pm: A friggin 0 outta 10. :( S Anand 9 Oct 2006 7:13 am: You really need to start watching Hindi movies, buddy ;-) Dr. Atul Garg 9 Oct 2006 10:56 am: Pretty good quiz. I scored 5/10 and I think I recognised a few other tunes but couldn’t guess the movie. I couldn’t even cheat from the page source code, couldn’t be bothered to go into JS scripts to get the answers. Thanks. Nice one !! Good website too. S Anand 9 Oct 2006 12:04 pm: Thanks! (I did go to some pains to encrypt the answers, so the JS scripts wouldn’t have helped either :-) Venkatesh S 12 Oct 2006 12:17 pm: Hi Anand, This is Venky, Batch of 2000 from IIMB…good to connect after ages! Great Quiz..I got 6/10..let’s keep in touch. Cheers! S Anand 12 Oct 2006 8:12 pm: Hi Venky! Great to hear from you. Will mail you. Sandeep 20 Oct 2006 2:16 pm: 9/10 mate. But could not guess the first one. amitabh biyani 21 Oct 2006 5:37 pm: 9/10 here too. don’t know the 1st one Rajesh 1 Nov 2006 3:00 pm: 9/10: Whats the first one? SHAMIT 27 Apr 2007 1:36 pm: First one is Swades ;) sonu goyal 20 May 2007 3:13 am: aaaa anusha 8 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: I scored 9/10…whats the 4th one…. nabanita 8 Oct 2006 12:00 pm: hehehhh it was gr8….!! nice test..!! hav sum more?? Anson 22 Nov 2008 11:09 pm: Scored 9/10… the 4th audio is a bit difficult. Anyway, good work, Anand… Keep it up. Rivjot 12 Mar 2009 8:57 am: 10/10 too easy, should have made a little harder appreciate the efforts for putting the quiz though, i love ur blog :D Anup 4 Nov 2009 11:13 pm: 10 on 10. Very easy ones. Anil 8 Jul 2010 3:59 pm: got all ten.. 1st one confused me for a while though.. nirmala 18 Dec 2010 8:34 pm: 5 n 10 coulndt find…help pls

Video of Guy Kawasaki’s talk on The Art of the Start at TiECon 2006. It’s informative, even if you don’t want to start a venture, but I didn’t know Guy was such a funny speaker! He begins with: Early in my career, I sat through many keynote speeches – at Comdex, at Mac Road Expo. I saw many many hi-tech CEOs speak, and I have to tell you, one thing I noticed is they pretty much sucked as speakers. And the second thing that I figured out sitting in these audiences of sucky keynotes is that if there’s anything that’s worse than a CEO who sucks as a speaker, it’s a CEO who sucks as a speaker and you have no idea how much longer he or she will suck! And so, I have adopted the top 10 format for all of my speeches. This way, if you think I suck, at least you can track progress through my speech. ...

When I wrote my Tamil song lyrics quizzes, I had two problems: I can't write in Tamil (not on paper, nor on a computer) I can't spell right in Tamil (ந vs ன, ர vs ற) I overcame the first using a Tamil transliterator. I write in English, and you see it in Tamil. The problem of ந vs ன was simple. ந occurs as the first letter of a word, and just before த. Nowhere else. (Is this always true?) ...

Have a look at this infinite depth painting. You can zoom in forever. At some point, you realise, you’re back where you’re started. Almost like going around in circles, except that you’re zooming in.

Jason Kottke finds interesting code search hacks, ranging from the WinZip key generation algorithm to programmers who want a new job.

Guy Kawasaki on Mumbai via Kaps @ DesiPundit

Cool abused amazon images.

I had to screen resumes from a leading MBA school. I’m lazy, and there were hundreds of CVs. So after procrastinating until this morning, I decided on 2 principles: I will not spend more than 45 minutes on this. (That’s the duration of my train ride to office.) I will not read a single CV. (I would write a program.) The CVs were in a single PDF file. I saved it as text (it shrunk from 66MB to 1.6MB without the photos). Then I wrote a Perl program to filter CVs by keywords. We were looking for people with an interest and/or experience in IT consulting, so I picked “technology”, “consulting”, “SAP”, “IBM”, “Accenture”, “Deloitte”, etc. ...

Netflix has released a sample of its customers’ movie ratings at Netflix Prize. You can download these (700 MB), create an algorithm that rates the training data, run it against the test data, and see if you can get better ratings than their algorithm. If you do, you win $1 million. (Chris Anderson explains why.)