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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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: ...
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… ...
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.
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. ...
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? ...
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. ...
A bunch of kids draw a collage of Angelina Jolie. Interesting kids’ project for schools.
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: ...
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?! ...
A cool psychology experiment. A student asks someone for directions. People carrying a door pass between them. Students switch. They check if the person giving directions has noticed that it’s a different person. Many people don’t notice the switch.
This is the 9th 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. There was a great furore in the Indian parliment a couple of years ago. Since the daily scene there is pretty much so, does this furore need any special mention? Yes. This furore was a meaningful one! It happened when the Indian government signed the GATT agreement. No wonder, the stupid “swadeshi” oriented parties like the Bharathiya Janata party opposed the selling of India to the “videshi” through GATT. But as an aftermath, signing the GATT agreement had a terrible effect on the interest of India in certain areas. For example, the medical value of neem oil has been well known in India for centuries. It seems some of the western pharmaceutical companies re-discovered the medical value of neem oil and started proceeding to claim patent for the product! In that case, any Indian company which tries to “manufacture” neem oil and tries to market it has to pay money to these western companies! Is it not funny and outrageous at the same time? Patenting is a powerful tool to protect ownership. It seems that it will be better if we patented both of our meaningful and meaningless traditional techniques to protect our interests. You may not know what will be re-discovered (and patent claimed) in the western hemisphere in days to come! Maybe, some scientist here will discover that giving unboiled rice with its hard covering (husk) to new born babies will result in the immediate death of those babies within few hours and secure patent for this finding! Conisder how this will affect the interest of our Indian mothers in the far south, who have been using this traditional technique to “close the chapter” of their unwelcomed, stigmatic female children! Poor mommas! ...
This is the 8th 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. South Indian classical music has got an excellent treasure of superb names. Most of the raaga names seem to be Sanskrit derivatives. Even though there are some Thamizh equivalent names for raagas such as Sankarabharanam, nobody uses them. Ki.Veeramani is probably very sad about this. Maybe, Vairamuthu has some plans like translating all the raaga names into Thamizh as he tried translating Thyagaraja’s ’nee dhayaradha’ in Sindhu Bhairavi movie as un dhayavillaiyaa (if only Ki.Veeramani was ready to fund the project, from the 5 lakh rupees that he got for perpetrating the deeds of thandhai Ee.Vae.Ra. Periyar, from Selvi Jayalalitha). Alternatively, Ki.Veeramani may get somewhat sensible and appreciate the high-level idiocy in trying to translate the proper nouns in raaga names. And he may rather to encourage a lower level of idiocy by goading his clan to replace all the Sanskrit sounding sounds like ‘ksha’, ‘jha’ etc in all the raagas to their Thamizh equivalents and then accept the raaga names. Then, Shanmukhapriya would be called as Dhanmukapriya (as Vibhishanan in Valmiki Ramayanam became Vibidanan in Kamba Ramayanam)! ...
This is the 7th 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. Kanakangi is the first melakartha raagam. It is also called as Kanakaambari (what a wonderful name!). While man’s aesthetic sense gave birth to raagas like Mohanam, Sudha Saveri etc, his increasing scientific knowledge about the structure of music over a period of many centuries gave birth to raagas such as Kanakangi. In the days of yore, when man began exploring the music world, there was no Kanakangi. All he knew were those tunes or raagas that were immediately appealing to his mind. No wonder, simple pentatonic raagas like Mohanam made their genesis during that early period of man’s irresistable pursuit for melody. Later, as is usual, science took over the aesthetic sense. The dominance of MOOD, which often served the purpose of being the mighty commander of raaga creation, was pulled down by the even mightier science. That the central theorm governing the whole of music was only simple mathematics became evident. The tip of the iceberg eventually lead to the unearthing of the whole of the rest! String instruments like the veenai and gottu vadyam etc., helped the ‘music thirsty’ thathas of yesteryears apply some good logic and figure out the progenitor raagas of the already existing raagas and narrow it down to the 72 melakartha system. It became a relatively simple task like filling in the unknown elements in the periodic table once you knew the general structure of the atom in various elments! The first melakartha became christened as Kanakangi. ...