loved PK because

- happy to see indian films get mature. The promos before the movie promise of an interesting 2015. 

- The story is so simple - one person wants to go back home and sees this new crazy place that he has to survive until he finds a way back. 

- I love the use of Bhojpuri - brilliant !! Relatable to the North Indian audiences and funny for the city dwellers. 

- I loved the idea that they were trying to tell a story where Anushka's character is trying to tell a story. Fun little Russian doll type story telling. 

- The approach to the topic of blind faith in india as an outsider was done by this funny alien. A complete outsider passing comments on us in a funny way really gets people thinking. 

- Beautifully touches on how Indian parents can completely get off course in their "love" for their children. The father who takes pride in a child's creativity, feels shame when she uses the same tools to examine his own beliefs. 

- The face off between the guru and PK actually dealt with the classic irrational argument that people make about "what is the harm if god gives people hope". He turns around to agree that god does give hope but not by blind faith. "which god should I follow" 

What can praying do ?

Can it help you handle things better ? 

meritocracy in silicon valley

Silicon Valley's Mirror Effect http://nyti.ms/1wsbYyX

Jodi Kantor http://on.cc.com/1ihg1sM 

http://www.stanforddaily.com/2013/03/16/maddow-visits-stanford-for-first-time-since-graduating/

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/23/us/gender-gaps-stanford-94.html

[AoTD] Poverty in NY

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2013/invisible-child/#/?chapt=1

• One in five American children is now living in poverty, giving the United States the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania
• wiry girl whose proud posture overwhelms her 4-foot-8 frame
• It is an ironic fact of being poor in a rich city that the donated garments Dasani and her siblings wear lend them the veneer of affluence, at least from a distance. 
• By the time Mayor Bloomberg took office in 2002, New York's homeless population had reached 31,063 — a record for the city, which is legally obligated to provide shelter.
• Dasani possesses what adults at McKinney consider an intuitive approach to learning, the kind that comes when rare smarts combine with extreme life circumstances. Her intelligence is "uncanny" and "far surpasses peers her age," one counselor writes. "Student is continuously using critical analysis to reflect upon situations and interactions.

[source : http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-best-business-writing-2014/9780231170154]

Tagore on Love

http://www.iop.or.jp/Documents/0818/mukherjee.pdf

O what is this !

Mysterious and uncapturable Bliss

That I have known and yet seems to be

Simple as breathe and easy as a smile

And older than the earth.

Home

Home is an emotion
Not tied to walls and a roof.
For those who learn to stop and smell
This notion turns to truth

For some it takes a cradle
For some it takes a grave
Very few can realize it
Without a close shave

Home is also the people
Who you call your own
Some of whom
you might like to disown

It's a place
Where families thrive
Doing all that they
Need to survive

Home is a shelter
From all that's out there
But don't they say
The truth is out there

Home might be
A notion in our head
But a child
Would have nothing instead.

Facebook graph search for recommendations

Hands-On With Facebook Post Search: Strong Recommendations, Yelp Should Worry http://tcrn.ch/1zlTEwW via @techcrunch
Hmm how likely are people to post bad experiences on their facebook profile pages. They are more likely to Crib on yelp and more likely to praise on Facebook.

Calling Out Bill Cosby’s Media Enablers, Including Myself - NYTimes.com

And then he dropped the bomb. "Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches." http://nyti.ms/1xLTnCV

I actually had to muster courage to click through on these articles lambasting Cosby. Ruins the cosby show for so many people but then deservedly so. Hopefully there is a way that emerges to allow using the cosby show as instructional while denouncing the actor. The Huxtables are still something to aspire for. 

Chris Christie Sports Gambling Case in New Jersey: Keep It Illegal | New Republic

Maybe they should just enable betting on things which arent as popular now. Things like "will congress do anything useful this session" - or - "will gov christie pay in some way for the accusation of the bridge gate". That way the state can make money and get civi engagement at the same time. 

But then the intention is different here - you are trying to profit thats the main aim of gambling. You are not "just rooting" for a particular side. Somehow gambling seems to be wrong in any arena. It doesn't serve the larger groups interest at all. 

The current case for gambling, framed in progressive terms and emphasizing economic benefits, misses the underlying issue with mass sports betting. Betting should stay illegal not because it poses a dangerous moral hazard to individuals but because it leads to a marked increase in match-fixing.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119702/chris-christie-sports-gambling-case-new-jersey-keep-it-illegal

Lookie here

Why cant we make small projectors that can have 802.11ad connection to your main compute internet device. This way we can have way more screens and completely ignore the beauty of the world in front of us.

Comment: Matters of Privacy, by Margaret Talbot

From The New Yorker app

http://bit.ly/13UzSJl

What was often used to justify this paradox was obeisance to marital privacy. In a North Carolina case from 1868, State v. A. B. Rhodes, the State Supreme Court declined to enforce charges against a man who whipped his wife "with a switch about the size of one of his fingers (but not as large as a man's thumb)." It did so not because it was upholding the husband's right to chastise his wife "but because the evil of publicity would be greater than the evil involved in the trifles complained of; and because they ought to be left to family government." 

What are some of the most ridiculous proofs in mathematics? - Quora

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-ridiculous-proofs-in-mathematics?share=1


----
-rajan

Ghost Stories

I never took a fancy to ghost stories. I wonder if it was fear or if it was the bad stories we had in India. Even know the scary part is not what is more interesting. Benevolent ghosts are what draw me in. hmm maybe it was the fear .... :) 

Innovators dilemma

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/06/23/140623fa_fact_lepore?currentPage=all

I liked the part where she talks about 

Disruptive innovation is a theory about why businesses fail. It's not more than that. It doesn't explain change. It's not a law of nature. It's an artifact of history, an idea, forged in time; it's the manufacture of a moment of upsetting and edgy uncertainty. Transfixed by change, it's blind to continuity. It makes a very poor prophet.

Another part from the book that struck a chord was the point about 

"two models for how to make money cannot peacefully coexist within a single organization."

Looks like there is a rebuttal that I havent read yet. 

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-20/clayton-christensen-responds-to-new-yorker-takedown-of-disruptive-innovation

[fifa14] Brazil 3 - 1 Croatia

Good to see him scramble to 2 goals in the opener. Oscar was truly good in the first 20 mins that I watched. Croatia really looked good though. Brazil's defense has always looked so open to me. Oscar's goal was a bit of an embarrassment or croatia though. I hope I get to see the replay later tonight :) 

Stoner

"Stoner" argues that we are ultimately measured by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves

What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it. 

The 20th century ushered in a shift from a "culture of character" which emphasized the importance of private behavior , to one of "personality" in which the exalted social role was that of a performer. 

--
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The Streamlined Life - NYTimes.com

As the drive to compete intensifies, other things get streamlined away. In 1966, 86 percent of college freshmen said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was essential or very important. Today, less than half say a meaningful philosophy of life is that important. University of Michigan studies suggest that today's students score about 40 percent lower in measures of empathy than students did 30 years ago.

I'm not sure if students really are less empathetic, or less interested in having meaning in their lives, but it has become more socially acceptable to present yourself that way. In the shadow of this more Darwinian job market, it is more acceptable to present yourself as utilitarian, streamlined and success-oriented.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/opinion/brooks-the-streamlined-life.html?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

Uncanny Valley

The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of human aesthetics which holds that when human features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural human beings, it causes a response of revulsion among some human observers. Examples can be found in the fields of robotics,^[1] 3D computer animation,^[2][3] and in medical fields such as burn reconstruction, infectious diseases, neurological conditions, and plastic surgery.^[4]The "valley" refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of humans as subjects move toward a healthy, natural human likeness described in a function of a subject's aesthetic acceptability.

--
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Wright Interview 9/28/1957 clip1

More proof that religion and religious organizations hinder human development to their fullest potential. But can everyone rise to this without someone (some-body) to help you along. Fortunately we have ways to learn from people of the past.

Intel says something similar to Trusted Platform Module can provide

"a way to let valuable data be combined and analyzed without endangering anyone’s privacy. Its researchers are testing a super-secure data locker where a company could combine its sensitive data with that from another party without either side risking that raw information being seen or stolen." 

Seems like baseless bragging to me. Something the first commenter points out very succinctly.

Gerome Miklau, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says that the approach Intel is testing does have the potential to reduce risks of disclosing sensitive information. But he adds that it could be difficult to a find third party that companies would trust to run such a service.

[via technologyReview]

Sadhguru | Does God test your faith?

unmai edhu , adhai ted-radaku dhairyam ilai , teramaiyum ilai - avangal dhaan aastik ilati naastik aagiduvaanga 

Ira Glass | Talks at Google

When May I Shoot a Student? - NYTimes.com

Sad Indeed !!

In light of the bill permitting guns on our state’s college and university campuses, which is likely to be approved by the state House of Representatives in the coming days, I have a matter of practical concern that I hope you can help with: When may I shoot a student? (via NYT)

AAP selling women's rights short

Long ago, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar warned of eulogising the local, when in response to the Village Panchayats Bill, which sought powers for Panchas, he said: “A population which is hidebound by caste; a population which is infected by ancient prejudices; a population which flouts equality of status and is dominated by notions of gradations in life; a population which thinks that some are high and some are low — can it be expected to have the right notions even to discharge bare justice? Sir, I deny that proposition, and I submit that it is not proper to expect us to submit our life, and our liberty, and our property to the hands of these Panchas.” (Bombay Legislative Council debates, October 6, 1932)

http://m.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article5610259.ece/

--
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Chang-Rae Lee - On Such a Full Sea

The NewYorker has a good review of this book - "On such a full sea ". Hopefully I'll get to it soon.

Apparently he named it after a shakespeare dialogue from Julius Caesar.

Soch mat ch.... !!

If you are a part of a whole, then don't you need to know your role,

Be the observer, but do not form impressions,

Rid yourself of existing impressions and you will be indistinguishable from the whole,

how now will "I" play a role,

and without me is there a whole ?

I am whole

what I do has relevance at a scale beyond my ken

I don't worry about the role

I thrill in the mysteries of the whole

wear them like shades and

take them off when I get home. 

Navier Stokes Problem - Millenium Prize

Good video to explain what the problem is :http://claymath.msri.org/navierstokes.mov

via slashdot:

"Kazakh news site BNews.kz reports that Mukhtarbay Otelbaev, Director of the Eurasian Mathematical Institute of the Eurasian National University, isclaiming to have found the solution to another Millennium Prize Problems. His paper, which is called 'Existence of a strong solution of the Navier-Stokes equations' and is freely available online (PDF in Russian), may present a solution to the fundamental partial differentials equations thatdescribe the flow of incompressible fluids for which, until now, only a subset of specific solutions have been found. So far, only one of the seven Millennium problems was solved — the Poincaré conjecture, by Grigori Perelman in 2003. If Otelbaev's solution is confirmed, not only it might be the first time that the $1 million offered by the Clay Millennium Prize will find a home (Perelman refused the prize in 2010), but also engineering libraries will soon have to update their Fluid Mechanic books."

Sarah Marquis - Adventurers of the Year 2014 - National Geographic

"After six months of an expedition, the noise stops in my head," Marquis explains. "I just go back to a basic animal connection.
http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/adventurers-of-the-year/2014/sarah-marquis/

Language Log | Because syntax

Many people will be somewhat surprised that the American Dialect Society's "Word of the Year" choice was because in its use with a noun phrase (NP) complement (though the Megan Garber's Atlantic Monthly article on it nearly two months ago should perhaps have been a tip-off).
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=9494&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Mama (2013 film)

I didn't like it when I watched it yesterday. But then thinking about it today makes me think it wasn't that bad an idea and was executed well. It somehow doesnt seem to fit well in an american setting - a latin american setting or an Indian setting would have made it more enjoyable. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_(2013_film)

Arvind Kejriwal Explained 'Why power/water rates should be very low in D...

Learning to form habits

Learning how to form habits :

1. Start exceedingly small.

2. Be Mindful of negative thoughts.

3. Savor the habit.

4. Have a plan for when you falter.

via Manshu @onemint