How would you solve this multiple-choice problem: What is 12345 x 45678? 201932843 563894910 402394820 384718349 938491834 It always amazes me when people try and multiply the two numbers. In any objective-type test (multiple choice question), the aim is not to solve the problem – it is to pick the correct answer! Most people don’t seem to realise the difference. If I had to solve the problem, I’d look for shortcuts. For example, ...
Malcolm Gladwell argues that knowing less can be an advantage. This is based on a study in which kids in the US were asked which was a bigger city: San Antonio or San Diego. Many didn’t know. Kids in Germany were asked the same. Most knew: San Diego was bigger. Why? Because they’d heard of San Diego, but not of San Antonio. P.S: A comment mentions that the actual difference in population between these cities is only 2%. So maybe the US kids were right to be unsure… ...
India Poised: a video featuring Amitabh Bachchan. Here's the transcript. There are two Indias in this country. One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us. The other India is the leash. One India says "Give me a chance, and I'll prove myself." The other India says "Prove yourself first, and maybe then, you'll have a chance." ...
These are the most bookmarked pages on my site: My home page Excel tips Calvin & Hobbes quotes (I typed them all) Indian torrents (I have a search engine for Indian torrents) Tamil Transliterator (Lets you type Tamil in English) Tamil songs quiz Movie quote quiz My best links Top 10 lists But this post is not about these links. It’s about how I found this out. Think about it… how could I know what pages have been bookmarked? The browser doesn’t send any information about bookmarks. ...
How to hurt the RIAA. … I think its high time that the RIAA is not referenced by its name but rather by its members. Imagine how much it would hurt someone like Sony if each time a bad article, comment or story reached the masses it had the words representing Sony in the title. Enough of that would force a brand to leave the RIAA group because it was too damaging to their brand name. ...
This is the 12th of 15 articles titled Classical Ilayaraja appeared on Usenet in the 90s. I’ve added links to the songs, so you can listen as you read. You could also try my Tamil song search. Thamizh film actress Kushboo has been deified to the status of a Goddess and a temple has been built for her in Trichi! Often I hear news like the deification of Jayalalitha, M.G.R., and other related “chota” news like a man in rural Thamizhnadu seeing God M.G.R in his cow’s eye! These are all instances that narrate the conspicuous births of Gods, or rather, the conspicuous deification of ordinary human folks. Given the evidence that these farcical news items do happen in the gullible Thamizhnadu, one has the right to make conjectures that Jesus Christ could have been a very very ordinary man, just like Kushboo. He could have had good human qualities and could have helped his neighbours to buy kerosene from ration shop and old ladies to cross busy roads like Bhagyaraj in Inru Poi Nalai Vaa! His unfortunate, pathetic death at an young age at the hands of local villains could have created a sympathy wave. And now, in this 21st century it will be castigated as an outright act of profanity, if someone dares to question the divinity status of the messiah. ...
A map of GDP per square kilometer across the world.
Firstly, believe that Excel can do anything. It’s true. Excel is a functional programming language. Not with the same power as some programming languages, maybe. But power is just a way of making a little go a long way (power = succinctness, according to Paul Graham). And Fred Brooks, in No Silver Bullet, argues: I believe the single most powerful software-productivity strategy for many organizations today is to equip the computer-naive intellectual workers who are on the firing line with personal computers and good generalized writing, drawing, file, and spreadsheet programs and then to turn them loose. ...
If you don’t know your interest rate (IRR), but only have your APR, there is a way of figuring out the actual interest rate on Excel. For this, you need to know your EMI (monthly payment), duration of the loan (number of months) and principal (amount you borrowed). Let’s assume your EMI is 2,000 and you are paying over 5 years (60 months) on a loan of 100,000. Use Excel’s RATE function. In this example: ...
This is the 11th of 15 articles titled Classical Ilayaraja appeared on Usenet in the 90s. I’ve added links to the songs, so you can listen as you read. You could also try my Tamil song search. V.G.Pannerdass has got an experimental animal in his V.G.P Golden Beach near Madras! That is his “goorka”. He pays that watchman only to stand near the gate with an expressionless face. Whatever the passersby do, he would stand there with the same old expressionless face! Let Kamal Hassan do all the “seshtai” that he does in the last scene of Moonram Pirai, the VGP goorka’s mask like face would show neither happiness nor sadness! He’d neither cry nor laugh. The VGP management is so proud of this guy that it is even ready to bet a hefty prize money if that would motivate somebody to make this guy cry or laugh. I cannot help wondering at VGP’s morbid taste in having this kind of a person at their gate. ...
Firstly, views on the Apple iPhone: great. Next impression: not so great. You can’t use it with your eyes closed. And yesterday, Cisco sues Apple for iPhone trademark infringement. In a video on intellectual property, James Boyle at Duke Law School says, when a company starts suing over intellectual property, it’s a good time to dump their stock.
In November 2000, I visited Paris one weekend. Two classmates, Anand Binani and Ram Venkat were studying there, and we roamed around the city. At around 6:00pm, we went over to Montmartre. It’s up a hill, and there’s a cable car that takes you up there. We went all the way up, and got out when a lady behind us asked: “Is that yours? We’d left something behind. Went back to retrieve it. The car was almost leaving for it’s return journey. We just got out in time… ...
Answer: use the CUMPRINC function in Excel Say you take a 10-year lease for 100,000 at an interest rate (IRR) of 10%, paid annually. The installment for this lease is 16,275. You can calculate this using the PMT function in Excel: PMT(10%, 10, 100000) = -16275 You've made 5 payments over 5 years. At this point, if you decide you want to repay the full lease, how much do you have to repay? In other words, what's the principal outstanding after 5 years? ...
When I moved to the UK, I was surprised to see mortgages advertised for 4.9%. ICICI Bank's HiSAVE account was offering 5.15% interest on savings. So if I borrowed at 4.9% and invested at 5.15%, I can make money for nothing! The catch, of course, is that the mortgage was 4.9% APR. Annual Percentage Rate is the total interest you pay on the initial amount you borrow, divided by the number of years. This has nothing to do with the Internal Rate of Return, or the regular interest rate we know of. ...
I am a vegetarian. More out of habit than religion. (I’m not very religious.) What that means, in practice, is that I don’t eat non-vegetarian food knowingly. But it has happened unknowningly. Many times. Until I was 22, I had not been out of India on my own, and things were fine. In 1998, I went to Charlotte, NC, for training. (On a KLM flight that placed me illegally in Germany, but that’s another story.) I was pretty groggy after an 8-hour night flight. So when I was woken up by the sound of breakfast, I bit into the big yellow thing on the tray in front. Sleepy as I was, I did feel a little suspicious. Didn’t quite taste sweet, like I was expecting it to. I saved it for the last, when Ram, my manager, walked past. ...
Periodic table of visualization methods. 100 visualizations (graphs, diagrams, etc.) organised into 6 groups (data, information, concept, strategy, metaphor, compound), and arranged exactly like the periodic table. (This, in itself, is a lovely visualization.) It includes diverse visuals from the Metro Map (e.g. London Underground Map) and cartoons to scatterplots and treemaps. Just browse it. It’s wonderful. Comments Rajlaxmi 16 Feb 2007 6:37 pm: gr8 link n well explained. wonder how u get these links
Since I like Tamil songs and statistics so much, I did some analysis on the ~1,400 Tamil songs I'd listened to in 2006. The trends are around the length of a typical film song are interesting. For example: Songs have gotten longer over time. On average, a song in the 60s was 4 minutes. A song in the 2000s is 5 minutes. Each decade adds about 14 seconds to the length of a song. ...
I didn’t realise the power of Google Coop’s custom search engines (CSE) until I watched Scoble interviewing Google’s Shashi Seth. In a nutshell, CSE lets you create a search engine that’s focuses on specific sites, like UK blogs or Photoshop sites Anyone can create these. You can edit other people’s search engines too. There are a huge number of custom search engines you can volunteer to edit. I’ve created a bunch of search engines myself: ...
A bunch of kids draw a collage of Angelina Jolie. Interesting kids’ project for schools.
This is the 10th of 15 articles titled Classical Ilayaraja appeared on Usenet in the 90s. I’ve added links to the songs, so you can listen as you read. You could also try my Tamil song search. The mind is a wondrous subset of the terrific biological entity, the brain. Literally, the heart is often alluded to as the site of thinking. In old Thamizh cinemas, the heroine would invariably say to the villain at some point (like the inevitable rape scene!) “naasakkaara, unakku idhaiyamE illaiyaa?” while the unmindful villain would be busy disrobing her with a terrible “ha ha ha” laughter! Why does the heroine have to say this kind of a scientifically preposterous statement, while it was the villain’s brain that decided to rape her, and not the poor “heart”! Does the evil mind of the villain exist in his brain? If so, where is it in the brain? Or, is the mind just the product of the functioning of the brain? A disease process affecting the frontal lobe of the brain might make an individual loose all his social inhibition and pee in the public, or to go to Bourbon street in New Orleans, or to Mardigraz in Galveston! Damaging the visual cortex of a villain might make him blind, but he might still try to follow the heroine with the help of her bangle noise! Damaging his temporal lobe might render him hearing impaired, but he might still try to get to the heroine with the help of “koondal” scent cues (refer: Thiruvilayadal!). As a last effort you may want to damage his parietal lobe, but then he would still see the heroine, even though he might not know what to do to the heroine! So, where the heaven is the so called MIND?! ...