Random Ratiocination

Correlation and Causality

2006-09-15T19:27:00.000-07:00

They just don't seem to get it. Just because events A and B occur together does not mean that A causes B. This Yahoo story claims that alcohol use helps boost income. And what do they cite as evidence? The fact that alcohol drinkers earn more than teetotalers.

Did it ever occur to them that the causality -- if any -- could run in the reverse direction? Or that there is no direct causality at all but merely common drivers like education, opportunity and social strata and norms?

What would be interesting is if they were to study the set of heavy drinkers and segment them. How much would poor undergrads and celebrity has-beens distort the picture? I wonder.

(The story is based on a published paper in a journal. I don't know if the paper has stronger evidence but somehow I doubt it when the words "libertarian thinktank" and "contradicted....Harvard School of Public Health" show up in the article.)

Update: The paper (pdf link) does a better job than I gave it credit for, controlling for age and religion among other things. But its methodology would still appear to be flawed. It seems to think that the result is implied if social drinkers earn more than people who drink alone!

Ranking Colleges

2006-08-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

It's apparently that time of the year when U.S. News and World Report releases its annual ranking of U.S. colleges. There is little doubt that the rankings are very dubious, although that hasn't stopped them from deeply influencing the choice of universities for a great many students (besides strongly influencing the marketing material churned out by a good number of these universities).

Some people appear to generalize from this state of affairs to claim that ranking universities meaningfully is fundamentally impossible. David Leonhardt in the New York Times rightly debunks this view with counter-arguments that point out the utility of ranking in other equivalent spheres (e.g., students are graded all the time based on test results that may have little to do with their abilities).

One effect to keep in mind in all this, however, is the non-linear nature of the bias induced by rankings, and the socially sub-optimal consequences that may ensue.

Here is how this works: A key determinant of student performance is the level of performance of his/her peers. Many of the benefits of studying at a top school emerge from the presence of other smart students at the same school -- be it due to a higher level of competition, the cultivation of "higher quality" social networks, or the non-linear improvements from collaboration. Therefore, the definition of a "good" school is partially recursive: A "good" school is one that attracts "good" students; "good" students are those that go to "good" schools.

In such a recursive system, bad rankings can significantly distort the assignment of students to schools. Imagine the rankings rate an "innately bad" school higher than an "innately good" one. Now, innately "good" students are going to drift towards the higher-rated school, causing an increase in the overall quality of the "innately bad" school and a decrease in the overall quality of the "innately good" school. This effect feeds back into providing an even better ranking for the "innately bad" school the next year. Which means that even more "good" students will gravitate towards it the next year! And so on...

Is Wikipedia criticism justified?

2006-07-10T18:44:00.000-07:00

(Via Slashdot) Frank Ahrens of the Washington Post adds to the growing criticism of Wikipedia for its lack of accuracy at all times. The case in point this time around is the death of Kenneth Lay, and the ensuing sequence of often erroneous updates to Wikipedia's Lay entry. The chronicle of events described by Ahrens paints a very interesting picture:

10am, July 5, 2006: News organizations report Lay's death due to an apparent heart attack.
10:06am: First Wikipedia update on Lay. Wrongly claims his death was "an apparent suicide".
10:08am: Updated to say cause of death was "an apparent heart attack or suicide".
10:08am: Updated again to say cause of death is "yet to be determined".
10:11am: Comment added to imply that guilt from the Enron scandal caused the suicide.
10:12am: Cause of death correctly identified as being due to massive coronary, as reported by Lay's pastor.
10:39am: More speculation as to the cause of the heart attack, but clearly identified as such.
Afternoon: Stable entry with correct facts.

Ahrens looks upon this series of events as a negative -- proof of the inherent untrustworthiness of Wikipedia -- and even goes so far as to call it "an active deception, a powerful piece of agitprop...".

This attitute would appear to get the whole story backwards for two reasons:

First, the story here is not that anyone can deface Wikipedia with blatant untruths. (After all, that is an obvious consequence of global editability.) The story is the rapidity with which correct information percolates into the system and falsehood is eliminated! It amazes me that the information on Lay was updated within twelve minutes of his death and that it was fact-checked and corrected within a few hours. What other knowledge repository has this kind of latency to correct information?
Second, Wikipedia should be treated as what it truly is, not as what we'd like it to be in an idealized universe. What Wikipedia is, is an unimaginably broad repository of community-edited documents that is generally accurate on most matters. What it is not is the final word on a subject that bears the reputation of well-known editors or publishers behind it. Sure it would be nice if Wikipedia could also have the latter characteristics but it does not; if a reader assumes that it does, the fault likes with the reader, not with Wikipedia.

I do see interesting efforts under way to lend Wikipedia more of the reliability associated with editorial oversight and make it even more useful than it is today. Articles within Wikipedia undergo different levels of peer and editorial reviews and make their way into an upper echelon "core" that is tagged as such.

It would certainly help if more of an effort was made to clearly label each article with the level of peer review it has undergone, and the amount of stability that it has achieved. One can even conceive of simple automated evaluations based on the recency and frequency of updates to provide the reader with better guidance on the likely accuracy of an article.

Airplane Boarding Woes

2006-05-05T08:20:00.000-07:00

I was taking the flight formerly known as Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco last week, when I had the opportunity to encounter an extreme example of the silliness that passes for boarding policy. Here is the chain reaction of events as I saw them unfold:

Gate invites passengers in "Seating Area 1" -- corresponding to the Economy Plus seats in the front of the aircraft -- to board.
Small set of Seating Area 1 passengers with many, huge carry-on bags rush to be first to board (having stood in line for multiple minutes to obtain the privilege).
Some passengers not in Seating Area 1 but with lots of baggage also squeeze through in the melee.
The less antsy Seating Area 1 passengers trail the above and enter the aircraft, only to find that the rack space above their seats is already taken.
Undeterred, these passengers march further down until they do find an open space for the carry-on bag.
As they wend their way forward to their seats, they encounter a stream of passengers attempting to get to their seats in the rear of the aircraft.
New batch of passengers find their own rack space occupied by the luggage of the people described in (4), forcing them to adopt the strategy described in (5).
Having learnt from the mistakes of (6), these passengers are nice enough to close a rack once they realize it is full, in the hope of saving those arriving later from having to make the effort to find out.
The next batch of passengers arrive and the results are surprisingly similar to (6), only worse as the subtleties of buffer space makes the congestion worse.
This batch encounters closed racks above their seats and, since this makes little sense to them, proceed to open them and try squeezing their bags in. Needless to say, they have little success.
Repeat, ad infinitum.
Throw in the occasional late-arriving poor soul with a seat up front. He makes his way all the way to the rear of the aircraft in the hope of finding an open space, fails to find one and works his way forward frustrated. The manoeuvre lasts 15 minutes.
Plane leaves the gate 20 minutes after scheduled departure.

Here is the question that crossed my mind then, as they had many times before with lesser vehemence: Why wouldn't you start boarding the plane from rear to front instead of the other way round? Choices:

No, that's too easy. We don't want a scheme where passengers actually don't get in each other's way.
No, we need to perpetuate the illusion that boarding first is a privilege. How will we have long meaningless queues to board otherwise?

Never mind that the plane won't take off until the last passenger is aboard.
Or that stretching your legs in the airport lounge is much superior to cramping them in an airplane seat for any longer than necessary.
Or that arriving late at the airport would be a much better privilege.
Is there an example of any other event which creates queues, even though seating is reserved and the event won't begin until everyone makes their way in? I don't know one.

No, if passengers board from rear to front that means there is no chain reaction when we run out of overhead rack space. What's the fun in that?

On a more serious note, one potential flaw with the rear-to-front scheme is that people with seats in front get the worst deal in terms of likely space available for their baggage. It's not necessarily a bad deal since they receive shorter entry/exit times in the bargain. Of course, it's always easy to fix even that negative by just reserving the overhead space to go with the corresponding seats/seating class.

Do women tennis players deserve equal pay?

2006-04-25T17:40:00.000-07:00

Over the last few years, few prize-money announcements at Grand Slam tennis tournaments have gone by without a number of tennis "feminists" raising a hue and cry about women players being paid less than men. The occasion this time: Wimbledon's announcement that it would continue to preserve its asymmetric pay structure.

Of course, the difference in pay is so marginal as to be little more than symbolic, which probably (and rightfully) causes further aggravation to the feminist movement. After all, how can the Wimbledon officials possibly justify paying the ladies' champion exactly 4.5% less than the men's?

The traditional argument against equal pay for women usually involves an allusion to two things:

That men play 5 sets whilst women play 3 and, therefore, that men deserve more money.
That the "depth" of the men's game is much higher than the women's and, therefore, that men work harder than women to win and deserve more money in consequence.

Neither of these two arguments makes any sense at all. (The only argument worse than (1) was when Martina Navratilova offered to play 5 sets in exchange for equal pay!) The reason: players are paid for the entertainment they deliver (and the secondary market therefrom, e.g., television spots), not for their labor! These aren't workers on minimum wage, they are performers. Making a pay-for-play argument is as silly as arguing that Roger Federer should make less money than Lleyton Hewitt because Federer keeps winning in straight sets while Hewitt always struggles through five-setters.

So, does this mean women do deserve equal pay after all? A tricky question, because it is hard to estimate the fraction of the tournament's market value that derives solely from the men and solely from the women. Instead, I used a different metric: Compare the prize money of all tournaments on the WTA tour excluding the Grand Slams, to the tournaments on the ATP tour. The advantage of making this comparison is that it's easy to get "pure" data on the value of women's (respectively, men's) tennis alone, since a WTA (resp., ATP) tour tournament needs to market itself, sell tickets and find sponsors without the aid of men's (resp., women's) tennis.

A quick analysis of the 2006 WTA and ATP tour, culled from their web sites, provides the following statistics:

WTA tour: 61 Tournaments; Avg. Prize Money = $650,000; Total Prize Money= $39.6 million

ATP tour: 64 Tournaments; Avg. Prize Money = $929,000; Total Prize Money= $59.5 million

The winner, in a TKO by a factor of almost 1.5: The ATP tour.

Conclusion: Until the WTA tour can get its act together and match the ATP tour's prize money, the argument for equal pay at Grand Slams is dubious.

The Tax Paradox

2006-04-07T16:10:00.000-07:00

As I started doing my taxes late yesterday, I stumbled upon an interesting paradox involving human emotional reaction. If one is given a choice between living in the following two alternative worlds:
(a) one in which they do their taxes on April 14 every year and find that they are owed a nice big tax refund; and
(b) one in which they receive a slightly larger paycheck every fortnight, but find on April 14 that they owe the government a little money.

Why do people prefer (a) to (b), given that world (b) offers them more money (thanks to the loss of interest income on owed tax refunds)? I suspect it's because people prefer the high of one big, pleasant surprise to the even-keeled happiness of a fatter paycheck.

The Population of Europe

2006-04-05T23:02:00.000-07:00

Back with a quick link after a long hiatus. Rather interesting discussion over at The Reality-Based Community on the state of European population growth, or the lack of it.

Bonds and the Steroids Scandal

2006-03-14T21:46:00.000-08:00

Scoop Jackson makes a very important point that appears to have been lost on most major sportswriters: the real culprit in the steroids scandal is Major League Baseball.

The Year's Best Movies

2006-03-05T00:33:00.000-08:00

My Top 10 list for the year 2005.

Crash: Powerful parable about racism. Quite the antithesis to "Good Night, and Good Luck" in its ability to create brilliant scenes of overwhelming realism out of a manifestly artificial and overtly manipulative plot.
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: This poetic and moving pseudo-Western plays like mellowed-down Peckinpah. I'll let Jim Emerson sing its praises.
Sin City: A visual marvel by a master of pastiche.
Munich: Spielberg continues to dabble with greatness while mixing in the occasional stinker like War of the Worlds.
Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story: Delightful British comedy that I saw last week. Equal parts Truffaut and Charlie Kaufman, with a number of filmic and literary allusions thrown in.
Syriana: The best George Clooney film of the year.
Brokeback Mountain: Good but overrated. Review here.
Batman Begins: Worthy continuation to the franchise created by Tim Burton.
The Constant Gardener: One of the smartest, best-made movies of the year.
Match Point: Woody Allen's best movie in ages. Wickedly ironic and displays Allen's usual brand of nihilism.

Other notables: Cinderella Man, In Her Shoes, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

The following movies might well have made my Top 10 had I gotten around to seeing them. In alphabetical order:

Capote, Cache, Grizzly Man, A History of Violence, Hustle & Flow, Junebug, King Kong, Murderball, The New World, The Squid & The Whale.

Good Night, and Good Luck, Revisited

2006-03-04T22:52:00.000-08:00

Back in December, I criticized Good Night, and Good Luck for embellishing its story by straying from the facts, citing a Slate article by Jack Shafer for evidence. But my pal Mor has a rather different take on matters. What Mor seems to be objecting to are two elements of Shafer's article:

One of the more dramatic incidents in the movie revolves around McCarthy's attack on Annie Lee Moss, a Pentagon clerk whom he accuses of being a communist spy. The attack backfires spectacularly and is the beginning of the end for McCarthy. Shafer points out that the movie chooses to ignore the fact that Moss did indeed belong to the communist party, although she denied it under oath at the committee hearings.
Shafer criticizes Murrow's actions in sympathetically portraying the case of Lt. Milo Radulovich, an officer in the Air Force who was thrown out because his family members were "suspected" security risks. Shafer makes his "argument" by quoting a Miami Herald critic who said, "Will we be comfortable these days with an Air Force officer with a security clearance whose father belongs to al Qaeda?"

Mor objects to (2) by pointing out that Shafer's "argument"/analogy is deeply flawed -- because Lt. Radulovich's family is only rumored to be a security risk, with no accusations proven in a court of law. I could not agree more. I'd add another objection to Shafer even bringing up the topic: any criticism of Murrow's actions is completely irrelevant to Shafer's analysis of the movie, so long as the movie faithfully represents what Murrow did in real life (which it did in this case).

With respect to (1), Mor feels that the movie -- being more of a parable about the state of the world today -- has a right to hide the truth in order to reinforce its message that everyone is entitled to a fair trial. I must disagree strongly, primarily on moral but also on artistic grounds.

First, I'd respect the film a lot more and would have found it more powerful had it revealed the fact of Moss' membership in the communist party. By portraying her as completely innocent, the film reduces itself to propaganda instead of making a principled statement. Funnily enough, the perfect analogy here has to do with anti-capital-punishment movies and Tim Robbins, another famous liberal. The George Clooney version would make the prisoner be a victim of wrongful conviction, just like in the hilarious movie-within-a-movie in Robert Altman's The Player (starring Tim Robbins). The truly principled movie would have the prisoner be an apparently unredeemable murderer, like in the Tim Robbins-directed Dead Man Walking.

But my objection to Clooney's work -- and all its embellishments of the truth -- runs much deeper. I believe the movie cheats the viewer unfairly to obtain his emotional investment. The film clearly wants its viewer to believe in the truth of the events transpiring on screen; everything is shot in stark documentary-style black & white, there are real documentary clips of Sen. McCarthy, the characters portrayed on screen are historical, and no disclaimers are provided up front about the story being a work of fiction (at least, none that I recall). So, the viewer's experience of the film is deeply colored by his belief in its veracity. Given this situation, there is absolutely no way that the filmmakers can hide behind any excuses for being creative with the truth. If they were more interested in making a parable than a real docudrama, one would expect them to make that extremely clear up front. Not doing so is as unacceptable as an author promoting a work of fiction as a "non-fiction" book to increase the emotional impact of his story. We all know what Oprah thinks of that.

Brokeback Mountain

2006-02-11T17:46:00.000-08:00

After weeks of planning, I finally managed to catch a show of Brokeback Mountain last night. The verdict: Pretty good, but overhyped.

(For those of you who prefer sci-fi, and even for those of you who don't, check out this free alternative: Brokeback to the Future.)

Ang Lee has always had a knack for unpredictability when it comes to his films' subjects. He has glided effortlessly from Jane Austen (Sense & Sensibility) to Chinese martial arts (Crouching Tiger) to super-hero movies (Hulk), all of them distinguished by strong characterization, smart screenplays and a sense of being ''weightier'' than they had any right to be. Brokeback Mountain continues the tradition, an almost-traditional romance with one twist -- the lovers happen to be a pair of cowboys, neither of whom is much into speaking. (Nor, for that matter, is anyone else in the movie -- with one memorable exception.)

There is much about the film to appreciate -- the delicate, unhurried manner in which it reveals the depth of its characters, little moments of drama full of keen observation, and a screenplay that trusts its audience to read between the lines. But for all its virtues, the film doesn't rise to the realms of greatness. For one, it is painfully slow. Deliberate artistic choice or not, the film felt interminably long -- with little of note happening most of the time -- despite a storyline that spanned nearly twenty years and a runtime of right around two hours. I could also not help but think that the gender of its protagonists had too important a role to play in making the film feel better than it really is. I wonder how it'd have been received had it been about a straight couple instead.

Super Bowl Pick

2006-02-05T14:57:00.000-08:00

Seattle (+4.5) over Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh has proved to be my bete noire this post-season with my only two missed calls both being on games in which I picked them to lose. I have decided to go down swinging, picking against them one final time. Why?

I've already clinched a winning record for the post-season. So, I might as well bet on the long odds and go down swinging. At least, I'd be consistent.
Seattle is underestimated because of the fact that they've only beaten mediocre teams so far. If Seattle goes ahead early, the Steelers will be in deep trouble.
Troy Polamalu is only listed as "probable".
Even the Patriots didn't win the Super Bowl by big margins. 4.5 points is a large spread.

Where is the iPod camera?

2006-02-02T09:35:00.000-08:00

Lost amidst all the hype surrounding each one of Apple's iPod-related moves is a question no one seems to have bothered asking: Why isn't Apple building a combo iPod-Digital Camera?

On the face of it, such a product would appear to be an absolutely perfect fit. The iPod already has a large, bright LCD screen for framing photos, a gigantic hard drive that can store your entire photo collection, built-in software to do slideshows, etc., a battery that is much more powerful than four AAs, and is a highly mobile device that people carry around with them all the time. Anyone else think that these would also be the specs for the ideal digital camera?

I think Apple has missed a trick for once.

Why Windows on a Mac?

2006-01-24T08:52:00.000-08:00

Slashdot reports on a bounty for successfully booting Windows XP on an Intel iMac. One wonders exactly why such a hack would be of the least interest. Certainly not because one wants a Windows PC and finds that buying hardware from Apple is cheaper than a Dell purchase. In fact, given the hardware margins on the Intel iMac, Apple would probably be laughing all the way to the bank if this hack were actually used by people.

Wouldn't it be far more interesting to try and hack a Dell/Walmart PC to run Mac OS? That would at least save people a few hundred dollars. (And if the goal was to create a dual Windows/Mac boot, such a hack would probably help too.) On the other hand, Apple probably devoted a lot more attention to making it difficult to pull this off.

Football: Quick Picks

2006-01-22T12:06:00.000-08:00

Denver (-3.5) over Pittsburgh:

I just don't see Pittsburgh -- which holds the dubious distinction of being the only team to lose a playoff game at home to New England in the Tom Brady era -- putting together three consecutive good games. They managed to beat Indy despite their best efforts to choke it away; I think they will succeed in choking this time around. Denver's offense also ought to be much better than Indy's proved to be last week.

Seattle (-3.5) over Carolina:

Why?
(1) Bill Simmons picks Carolina.
(2) DeShaun Foster is out. When means that Jake Delhomme is going to throw Carolina out of the game.
(3) Seattle is a strong home team.
(4) Carolina can't win three in a row.

Last Week's Picks: I went 3-1 thanks to Indy's screw-up (which I'd like to think was because of the rust that I had predicted parenthetically in my evaluation of the game).

On Chucking in Cricket

2006-01-18T19:48:00.000-08:00

Prem Panicker protests against the new chucking law that bans players for a year when they are caught chucking, instead of merely requiring umpires to no-ball the specific deliveries that are chucked.

I'm afraid I'd have to disagree on that score. What's missing from the equation is the issue of how difficult it is to accurately estimate whether a specific ball is chucked or not (which has finally been defined somewhat objectively as elbow flexion greater than 15 degrees). It's simply impossible with the naked eye.

What's the solution then? Look at the video after the game and evaluate the footage to make the determination. The problem then is that the bowler gains an unfair advantage during that game. Bowlers could then chuck with impunity in critical junctures and get away with it scot-free.

In consequence, there would have to be sufficiently large disincentives that prevent the bowler from attempting to use such a strategy. Banning him for a couple of years fits the bill perfectly as a good disincentive. Hence, the rule we have in place today.

Such an incentive system is hardly uncommon. For example, a ticketless traveler on public transport, when caught, has to pay a fine tens of times higher than the ticket price. Again, the reason is to ensure that the "expected cost of cheating" -- the product of the price when caught, multiplied by the probability of being caught -- is high. When the probability of being caught is low, we need to boost the penalty you pay! (Of course, we might wonder why the probability is low in the first place. The answer is that we can reduce enforcement costs this way! In fact, we can spend less and less money enforcing the law by proportionately increasing the fines more and more until we run into the problem of people not being rich enough to pay up!)

For the record...

2006-01-14T12:31:00.000-08:00

Given how predictable NFL playoff games have become, I figured I should take a leaf out of Bill Simmons's book (his picks here) and make my picks against the Vegas line. (For those who don't know what it means, a margin of victory is predicted by the oddsmakers for every game and you get to bet on whether the margin will be larger or smaller. So, if I do better than 50-50 on my bets, I get to make money!)

Seahawks (-9.5) over Redskins:

The end of the road for the offensively-challenged Washington squad. Seattle is going to trample all over them, winning by at least two touchdowns.

Broncos (-3) over Patriots:

This is a close call, given Denver's history of playoff collapses and the Patriots' impeccable record, but I'm siding with the home team. Denver's unstoppable running game is going to dictate play and leave New England's already depleted secondary even more vulnerable to the play-action pass.

Colts (-9.5) over Steelers:

This one is more a pick against the masses than anything else. Everyone has been overpraising Pittsburgh the past few weeks and overconcerned about Indy's finish. (Aside: What's the deal with resting players for the playoffs anyway? My theory is that it causes much more harm than good, taking players out of the winning rhythm that they had worked so hard to build up over the first 15 weeks of the season. How often have we seen the hot wild-card team ride its streak deep into the playoffs? If Indy gets off to a slow start, I would be vindicated.) So, I'll make the safe assumption that the line is a little too generous to Pittsburgh and go with Indy.

Panthers (+3) over Bears:

I'm picking the Panthers to cover. Why?

(1) Carolina played their worst game of the season the last time they were down in Chicago and I just don't see them playing that badly twice in a row. Even though they played well last week and usually blow hot-and-cold with breathtaking periodicity.

(2) What are the odds on Chicago scoring more than 13? A 3-point spread against such an anemic offense seems like a lot.

(3) Bill Simmons has gotten every pick involving Carolina wrong for the last 3 months, and he's picking against them this week.

Starvation on City Streets

2006-01-08T17:01:00.000-08:00

No, not of the gastronomic variety. I mean the Computer Science version.

I was driving south on the three-lane Paradise Road in Las Vegas yesterday when I encountered a curious phenomenon: the right (and right-turn) lane was extremely slow and barely crawled along while the traffic on the left two lanes was perfectly smooth. My initial hypothesis was that the intersecting road (Convention Center Drive) must be clogged badly, which in turn must have caused right-turn traffic to back up on Paradise Road. But that hypothesis was soon given the lie when I noticed cross-traffic zipping by whenever it had a green light!

And then it hit me. The fault, I realized, lies not in cross-traffic but in pedestrians! I remembered that a green light for a right turn is coincident with a green light for pedestrians wishing to cross straight on as well. And pedestrians have right of way. So, what happens when you have an immense amount of foot traffic looking to cross at all times, as was the case yesterday with CES in town? Traffic going straight on was fine, as were left turns (which had dedicated signals) but the right turns were completely trumped by the pedestrians. (What of a right turn on red, you wonder. That option was comprehensively ruled out by the volume of cross-traffic from the other two directions.)

Unfortunately my powers of deduction did not help me extricate my car from the jam, trapped as I was in the right lane with traffic whizzing by my left far too fast for me to venture a lane change. And so, it took on the order of 15 minutes to travel 25 yards for a turn.

Moral of the story: We need dedicated right-turn lights!

NFL Picks Update

2006-01-08T16:51:00.000-08:00

So, I was wrong on Cincinnati beating Pittsburgh. But at least I can hide behind the injury to Carson Palmer. I'm picking Indy over Pittsburgh in the next round. I'm also going to make Denver the favorite over New England. Their run-heavy, play-action offense matches up very well against New England and, despite the presence of Tom Brady, New England's offense was nothing to write home about in the wild-card game.

On the NFC side, I did have both the Panthers and Redskins winning (I note, however, that I'd failed to update my predictions since Tampa Bay and Carolina swapped places). Next Round: Carolina over Chicago by a whisker and Seattle over Washington by ten.

Weekend Sports Update

2005-12-25T16:44:00.000-08:00

NFL:

Right when I thought I had the AFC playoff picture down pat, the Bengals threw a spanner in the works by deciding to lose to the Bills and squander a first-round bye in the process. I'm sticking with the Bengals to make it to the AFC championship game, upending both the Steelers and the Broncos, but I might change my mind if they lose badly yet again next week.

My NFC picks are looking fairly solid with the exception of Carolina, which will probably end up switching places with Tampa Bay after dropping a home game to the Cowboys. But I'll blame the umps for that one -- an unwarranted "roughing the kicker" penalty was the culprit. (What's the deal with "roughing the kicker" rules anyway? If the kicker is so scared of being mauled, he should just try kicking from further behind the line of scrimmage!)

NBA:

After their manhandling of the Spurs today, the Detroit Pistons should be getting pretty reasonable odds on a 70-win season. Given the state of the rest of the conference, they might even have an outside chance to make it all the way to the NBA finals without dropping a playoff game.

Miami and their long-in-the-tooth coach Pat Riley are in pretty deep trouble. After the humiliation of Friday's home loss to Vince Carter and the nets, one would have expected the "angry" and motivated Shaquille O'Neal, going up against the hated Lakers on national TV, to lead the Heat to a blow-out win. Instead we saw the thin and cold-shooting Lakers, with Kobe Bryant having a terrible second half and with practically no contribution from their bench, nearly pull off a win, denied only by a few unlucky breaks towards the end. Worryingly for Miami, Shaq looked old and immobile as he strugged to score against -- don't laugh -- Kwame Brown. If Shaq's decline is as permanent as it seems to be, this year might be Miami's best shot at winning it all. And if they fall short of the NBA finals, Riley would bear the blame both for assembling a roster that failed to match last year's performance as well as for forcing out a coach who is arguably better than him at this point in their careers.

Cricket:

Sourav Ganguly makes a comeback into the Indian team. It's going to be fun to watch the selection of the playing eleven for the test matches. Given the lunacy gripping Indian cricket circles, I wouldn't be shocked if he ended up as an opener, or if Pathan is drafted in to open. The former option would spell Ganguly's doom -- imagine him facing Shoaib Akhtar with the new ball -- while the latter would be a bad idea for the team as a whole.

NFL: NFC Playoff Picks + Superbowl Pick

2005-12-18T15:18:00.000-08:00

Seeds:

1. Seattle 2. Chicago 3. Carolina 4. NY Giants
WC1. Tampa Bay
WC2. Washington

I'm picking Washington to squeeze into the last wild-card spot, ahead of Minnesota, Atlanta and Dallas.

Wild Card Games:

Tampa Bay over NY Giants: The Giants' dream season comes to an end as Eli Manning is repeatedly pressured by the Tampa Bay rush and a worn-down Tiki Barber has too little left in the tank to carry them. Tampa Bay wins 20-14.

Carolina over Washington: In a game that's a lot closer than anticipated, Carolina squeezes out a 27-24 come-from-behind win, overcoming an early interception from Jake Delhomme. Washington puts up a strong fight but the limitations of their conservative passing game finally catches up to them.

Divisional Playoffs:

Seattle over Tampa Bay: Seattle and Shaun Alexander come storming out of the gate to take an early lead and force Chris Simms throw the ball. The result is a series of fatal mistakes by the Tampa Bay offense, as Seattle blows them out 28-10.

Carolina over Chicago: A team can only go so far with a rookie quarterback and without any offense to speak of. Carolina wins 17-6.

NFC Championship:

Seattle over Carolina: Tight game with strong performances from both offenses. Ultimately, Seattle's running game proves to be the difference as they trot out 27-23 winners.

Superbowl:

Indy over Seattle: Peyton Manning wins the big game, finally. Indy 31-20.

Good Night, and Good Luck....Learning the Truth

2005-12-17T18:17:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, I happened to catch George Clooney's docudrama "Good Night, and Good Luck" purportedly describing CBS television journalist Edward R. Murrow's crusade in bringing down Joe McCarthy in 1954. The movie boasted excellent production values, strong performances from the cast and quite a few powerful scenes involving footage of the real Sen. McCarthy. However, it eventually proved to be a little disappointing due to a curious lack of focus or a strong story arc. Clooney's earlier Confessions of a Dangerous Mind struck me as being a superior effort.

Today, I came across this two-part criticism by Jack Shafer at Slate which casts quite a different light on the historical events underlying the story. If you believe Shafer's account, and there is good reason to believe it, one must raise serious questions about the ethics of Clooney deviating from facts to the extent that he has while continuing to sell the movie as a docudrama. Michael Moore has just lost his party crown.

NFL: AFC Playoff Predictions

2005-12-17T12:22:00.000-08:00

The Oakland Raiders have failed to sell out their Sunday game, which means Bay area fans will not only be relieved of the burden of watching them on TV but also get to view some real football instead.

Here are my playoff predictions.

AFC Seeds:
1. Indy 2. Cincinnati 3. Denver 4. New England
WC1. Jacksonville WC2. Pittsburgh

Wild-card Game:

Denver over Pittsburgh: Tight game with Denver winning 23-20 despite a couple of early Jake Plummer interceptions. Ben Roethlisburger throws a game-altering interception in the final minutes and blames it on a broken appendage in the ensuing press conference.

New England over Jacksonville: New England lives to fight another day with a hard-fought 17-10 win in the snow. David Garrard's mobility is negated by the cold weather and playoff inexperience as Jacksonville succumbs despite a strong defensive performance.

First Round:

Indy over New England: Indy wins 34-20 as the New England defense gets shredded by Peyton Manning and company. Tom Brady attempts to author a single-handed comeback but is let down by his porous defence as Indy controls the clock after going up early.

Cincinnati over Denver: Cincinnati wins 31-27 behind a strong playoff debut by Carson Palmer. Denver gets down early, and mounts a furious comeback in the fourth quarter before running out of time.

AFC Championship Game:

Indy over Cincinnati: The shoot-out that everyone anticipates materializes, with Indy trotting out 38-31 winners, thanks to a crucial third-down sack by Dwight Freeney with two minutes to go in the fourth quarter.

Given that the NFC is a nightmare of mediocrity, I'm waiting to see the results of tonight's games before committing to my playoff seeding.

UPDATE: Fixed typos in spelling Cincinnati! You live and learn.

On The Ganguly Controversy

2005-12-16T22:12:00.000-08:00

The latest controversy doing the rounds in cricketing circles is the unceremonious dumping of Sourav Ganguly, despite a reasonably good performance in the second test at Delhi. Former cricketers cried foul as did some Board higher-ups as well. And, in reporting completely devoid of irony, multiple news sources reported on the storm raised in political circles over Ganguly's axing without pausing to ponder for one moment why the protesters happened to hail from the state of Bengal.

In purely cricketing terms, there is hardly a need to justify dropping Ganguly. Yuvraj Singh has clearly shown that he is a superior batsman and fielder. Ganguly might have made a case for himself as a superior player of spin a year ago, but he now seems as much at sea against spin as Yuvraj usually is. One could also argue that, given Ganguly's selection as a batting "all-rounder", he hasn't really delivered on the bowling end of the bargain either. The crazy ravings of the former cricketers about not changing a winning combination appear to forget the inconvenient fact that one of Yuvraj and Ganguly needed to be dropped in any case.

The only legitimate objection one may raise is with the manner in which Ganguly has been treated. At the very least, he deserved to be informed in person of the decision and given the opportunity to bow out gracefully. However, rants of fury at selectorial misconduct are best reserved for the now-ousted selectors who chose him in the test team in the first place.

Random NBA Notes

2005-12-14T00:24:00.000-08:00

It has been a rather interesting NBA season thus far. A surprisingly large number of close games. The Warriors winning for a change. Steve Nash proving that a white guy can really deserve to be the MVP, no really. Pat Riley demonstrating the fine art of backstabbing and setting himself up for a big fall. Shaq making Jerry Buss look smart. Flip Saunders proving how overrated Larry Brown was, and how underrated Rick Carlisle was.

And some things, of course, have remained the same. Lousy referees. Grant Hill on injured reserve. Criticism of Kobe for keeping a mediocre Lakers team at .500 in the competitive West. Praise of Iverson for keeping an underperforming 76ers team below .500 in the lousy Atlantic (now renamed Titanic) division. Ron Artest being Ron Artest.

The Curious Case of Cory Maye

2005-12-13T23:37:00.000-08:00

The blog world is aflame with the story of Cory Maye, a black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death for shooting a white police officer who broke into his home with a no-knock warrant. Crooked Timber has the details.

While the specifics of the case pose many problems -- a black man convicted by a predominantly white Mississippi jury for the death of a young, white cop who happens to be the son of the police chief just doesn't reek of fairness, especially when you consider that the search warrant was issued to nail Maye's neighbor, not Maye himself -- there is a larger question at play here: do no-knock warrants make any sense at all?

It seems to me that any armed person awakened in the middle of the night by an intruder would be tempted to shoot in self-defence. And, at least in America, being armed and shooting in self-defence are both considered perfectly reasonable. How, then, is a cop who enters a home without knocking supposed to protect himself? I suppose he could shout "Police!" but that eliminates the surprise element and, furthermore, opens the door to any smart burglar to use the same tactics to avoid getting shot. My conclusion: no-knock warrants should be outlawed.

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

2005-12-04T18:25:00.000-08:00

I had the opportunity to watch the latest installment of Harry Potter this weekend. I went in with high expectations given the high praise the movie received from critics and the quality trajectory that the series had been on to date. Alas, what a disappointment "Goblet of Fire" turned out to be! Granted, the movie is even darker than its predecessors in its subject matter, but it seriously lacks in the shades-of-gray department. Not only is the story cliched and formulaic (should I be blaming J. K. Rowling for this?), but the character treatments are so ridiculously poor that calling them one-dimensional would be an undeserved compliment.

The story revolves around the Tri-Wizard competition in which young wizards square off in a competition that is half treasure hunt and half Circus Maximus. Surprise, surprise, Harry Potter ends up taking part despite being under-age. He has to contend with competition from Russia and France besides an in-house rival as well. Is the Russian an all-brawn Adonis? Check. Is the French lass dainty and the first to lose? Check. Is the in-house guy a lovable loser who can be counted on not to win? Check.

All in all, a giant step backward from Alfonso Cuaron's rather excellent "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban".

Bucking Football Convention

2005-12-04T18:16:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has an article today on Mike Leach, the maverick Texas Tech football coach who appears to manufacture offense out of whole cloth. In a sport as old as football, it is exceedingly hard to innovate on strategy to a point where the game dynamics change completely. Leach appears to have done exactly that with his refreshing approach; it's a pity that more people aren't paying attention.

Movie Review: The Battle of Algiers

2005-11-12T17:21:00.000-08:00

Last week, in an ironically topical twist, I happened to watch The Battle of Algiers, Gillo Pontecorvo's masterpiece set amidst the late-'50s Algerian struggle for freedom. Shot on location in Algiers and so starkly realistic, especially in the crowd scenes, that one might mistake it for a documentary, The Battle of Algiers views the struggle dispassionately, calmly capturing moments of terror unleashed by both sides while simultaneously painting an intensely human portrait of the perpetrators. Rumor has it that the movie has become a training video for government agencies thanks to its thorough explanation of urban warfare and cellular terrorist organization.

Two thumbs way up!

In other news, I have also been watching a couple of David Cronenberg films, Spider (2002) and Videodrome (1983). The former is well-done but too grim and depressing for my taste while the latter is a decently entertaining off-beat horror movie about television and mind-control. Also worth watching:

Flirting With Disaster (1996) is yet another deliciously offbeat film by David O. Russell -- think Three Kings crossed with I Heart Huckabees.

Killing Zoe (1994) is an ultra-violent heist movie set in Paris that makes up for its lack of substance with style and snatches of interesting dialogue. If you see shades of Tarantino, it is not a surprise since the movie was made by Roger Avary, one-time Tarantino collaborator and co-writer of Pulp Fiction.

A Quiet Morning Drive on the Streets of Paris

2005-11-12T17:14:00.000-08:00

(Via Crooked Timber) This is the most spectacular video I have seen in a long time. French filmmaker Claude Lelouch films a car (Ferrari?) hurtling through the streets of Paris at nearly 140MPH, cross-traffic, red lights, pedestrians and all.

Intelligent Design in Kansas

2005-11-09T18:59:00.000-08:00

The Kansas Board of Education has now decided to learn from the Dover School Board -- which decided to include Intelligent Design in the school curriculum only for the culprits involved to be promptly voted out of office -- and mandate the teaching of intelligent design, while also deciding to redefine Science along the way in a little footnote!

I see only one logical methodology for putting the debate to rest. Split off Kansas into a country of its own and let it evolve! And while we are at it, perhaps we should create a separate nation for the 50% of America that believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible as well.

What is inappropriate about the truth?

2005-10-30T16:30:00.000-08:00

A curious controversy cropped up last week in sporting circles when Fisher DeBerry, the coach of Air Force Academy, blamed the lack of African-American athletes in his program for his team's inferior speed. To quote DeBerry:

It just seems to be that way. African-American kids can run very well. That doesn't mean Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me that they run extremely well.

News organizations immediately picked up on the remarks and deemed it newsworthy enough to make it a national headline like this one here. The reports were all careful to not criticize DeBerry directly but the very fact of the story being newsworthy spoke volumes about what they thought. And then, rather predictably, the official reprimand came through, with athletic director Hans Mueh denouncing DeBerry's remarks as "seriously, seriously inappropriate".

Mueh didn't care to elaborate on exactly why the remarks were inappropriate nor who exactly found the comments offensive. Were African-Americans insulted at being praised for their superior athletic prowess, or were white Americans upset at being called less athletic?

Did it matter that the allegedly controversial statements made by DeBerry are actually true and plain obvious to anyone who has watched American sports? Did it matter that barely anyone in the country can name a Caucasian wide receiver in the NFL? Did it matter that no one remembers the last time a white American ran a sprint at the Olympics? Dit it matter that "White men can't jump" is a cliche?

Or did it only matter that the Air Force doesn't like being portrayed as being unfriendly to the minorities?

The Losing Battle Waged by Law Enforcement

2005-10-23T09:28:00.000-07:00

The FCC has recently issued an order requiring ISPs as well as universities, libraries and airport wi-fi providers to ensure, paying out of their own pocket, that their networks can be tapped by the federal government to monitor subjects' e-mail and web access (New York Times story here). The thought process behind the order is pretty clear -- the CALEA act of 1994 effectively enforced the same requirement on telephone service providers and the government figures that what applies to phones should apply equally to VoIP and e-mail. According to the US government, expanding the scope of this act to include the internet is designed to help catch terrorists.

One small problem, though. The terrorists have to be stupid enough to use unencrypted e-mail. Moreover, the implementation of such a tapping system would definitely have the consequence of making encrypted e-mail and VoIP sessions much more pervasive than they are today, especially when it comes to nefarious activities. I wonder if anyone has considered the possibility that the government is better off with today's system, where people don't feel the need to encrypt everything, and the government can still get at many people's e-mail by subpoena-ing ISPs to look at the content in their mail servers.

The root of the problem lies in the fundamental differences between telephone and internet-based systems. Telephone systems were designed for an end-to-end application terminated by humans on both ends -- carrying voice traffic across a wire. The only way to obfuscate communication was for the humans to speak in an invented foreign language that no one else understood, and this was very difficult. (You could also do some basic scrambling with automated devices that could be screwed on to the phone, but they were pretty complicated as well.) On the other hand, the internet is designed for applications terminated by programmable computers at both ends. Individuals can easily protect their communication by the simple expedient of using custom software that runs on both ends to encrypt and decrypt what goes out the wire. There isn't much use in tapping the communication channel if the channels are terminated by modifiable software!

Cricket: More Luddite sentiments

2005-10-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

Rudi Koertzen thinks that extended use of technology to make umpiring decisions is a bad idea. In his own words:

We all make mistakes and I think the players actually make more mistakes than the umpires do. So they should leave it up to us to make the mistakes. We've got to live with that.

This argument is not too far away from the other nonsensical arguments one often hears about technology eliminating the "charm" of the game, or robbing it of its "glorious uncertainties". There are some basic facts that appears to elude such luddites:

Cricket is a game that involves players scrapping with each other. Umpires are not participants; they are external arbiters whose role it is to make sure that the game is played according to the rules. That umpires are human is a necessary evil created by the lack of technology to automatically adjudicate games.
Mistakes made by players are part of the game and is exactly what people pay money to watch; people don't pay money to watch umpires make mistakes. People don't pay money to watch the umpires make mistakes; they do pay money to watch the players make mistakes.
Umpiring errors may add to the uncertainties of the game, but there is nothing glorious about it. Cricket is a game of skill involving a combat between batsmen and bowlers/fielders. Umpiring errors are just as extraneous to cricket as the idea that there will be a coin toss after every ball to determine -- by chance -- whether the batsman is out. If the latter idea looks silly, so should the idea that umpiring errors enhance the game.
Officials often like to quote some statistic like "The umpires get it right 94% of the time.", as if everyone must stare at the 94% number in awe. The right question to ask is not what fraction of umpiring decisions are correct, but what fraction of umpiring errors are of a game-changing, or career-changing, nature and whether the use of technology to improve accuracy leads to a significant improvement in enabling fair outcomes.

The only valid objection I have found for the use of technology is the amount of time that is wasted in referring decisions to the third umpire. I don't understand why more effort has not been expended in speeding up this process -- giving the third umpire access to replays immediately -- so that the decision can be made in a matter of seconds rather than in minutes.

The New York Times and Judith Miller

2005-10-13T23:37:00.000-07:00

If your sole source of news is the New York Times, you might be justifiably surprised at the news that has had the rest of the world abuzz over the past week. Judith Miller has suddenly gotten a whole lot less self-righteous and a whole lot more cooperative in the Valerie Plame case; she even discovered some rather intriguing notes about a previously unpublicized conversation with Scooter Libby. You could do worse than go over to Mark Kleiman's blog to read about the whole intriguing story. And today's update on the Mousetrap theory.

Of course, if you are a poor NY Times reader, you would be confronted by drivel such as this (registration reqd.), an entire article about Rove and the White House that somehow fails to even mention anything about Judy Miller's latest escapades. Where is the public editor?

The blog in defence of grassroots democracy

2005-10-12T19:46:00.000-07:00

The biggest recent event in the Indian blogosphere revolves around the IIPM controversy. Amit Varma provides a detailed storyline but the big picture is pretty straightforward: magazine publishes expose on the so-called Indian Institute of Planning and Management, blogger links to said expose, blogger gets threatened by a hilarious ransom note demanding that the link be removed, IIPM threatens blogger's employer with bad publicity, blogger resigns to defend his principles. All very familiar, and all very depressing.

But there was one difference this time: hundreds of reputable blogs with high PageRank that carry the truth and cannot be suppressed. Grassroots democracy has finally arrived.

Cricket: Why Ganguly can no longer be one-day captain

2005-10-11T21:36:00.000-07:00

I'd been watching the new one-day cricket rules at work over the last few months when something suddenly clicked into my head: the rules effectively imply that Sourav Ganguly cannot stay on as India's captain, even if he were to regain his form as a batsman!

To understand how I arrive at this conclusion, we need to start with the new substitution rule: each team is allowed to replace one of its eleven players with a pre-designated "super-sub" anytime during the match. I have already commented in the past about the flaws introduced by this rule and how they need to be fixed (delay announcement of the eleven until after the toss) but those turn out not to be relevant for what I am discussing today.

The best way for a team to exploit the substitution rule is to use different batting and fielding XIs, replacing a batsman with a bowler between innings when batting first, and vice versa when batting second. In either case, the key observation is that a player from the batting XI should not be present in the fielding XI.

Now, for the sake of argument, let's assume Ganguly is a fantastic batsman and therefore certainly deserves a place in the batting XI. Who else is going to be in this XI?

First, we've got to have at least four specialist bowlers on it since the whole point of substitution would be to have five specialist bowlers in the fielding XI. [ One could argue that the batting XI should just have three specialist bowlers and the fielding XI can make do with four, but this is a bad strategy for three reasons: (a) the fifth bowler has always been a major point of weakness for India and becomes crucial to have when one bowler has a bad day; (b) eight batsmen in the batting XI is way too many; (c) if the toss goes awry and the team finds itself having to bowl first when having a bowling substitute, they are forced to use the substitute up front and are still left with a poor bowling line-up, instead of having a choice between 4 and 5 bowlers that they can exercise depending on how well the first inning is progressing. ]

Throw in a wicketkeeper (Dhoni) and that leaves five batting spots open besides Ganguly. These spots are taken up by automatic selections Tendulkar, Sehwag, Dravid, Kaif and Yuvraj Singh.

Now, which of these eleven can stay out of the fielding line-up? Obviously not the four bowlers or the keeper. Not Tendulkar or Sehwag who are both valuable part-time bowlers; moreover, Tendulkar is India's best boundary fielder while Sehwag is also a competent outfielder as well as a second-slip specialist. Not Dravid, who is a masterful slip fielder and is probably the best strategist on the field as well. Not Yuvraj or Kaif who are the two best fielders in the side. And who does that leave us with? Sourav Ganguly, the worst fielder in the side by a mile.

So, we conclude Ganguly needs to be substituted out when India is bowling. (Or subbed in when batting, depending on which scenario we are looking at.) But what's the point of having a captain who is never on the field? Therefore, it follows logically that Ganguly can no longer be captain even if he deserves his spot in the batting eleven!

Now let's see if the selectors understand this. One can always hope.

Wherefrom the liberal agenda

2005-10-03T20:24:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Kristof begins his New York Times op-ed today by stating:

The main mode for seeking a more liberal agenda should be the democratic process, not the undemocratic courts.

Unfortunately, the rest of the article is on Times Select and I haven't found the content worthy enough to pay for. But that shall not hold me back from taking issue with that one flawed statement.

I do not believe a majority vote can ever be relied upon to create fundamental human rights. If the constitution of nations had been drawn up solely by majority vote, I'm willing to bet that slavery would be omnipresent. As recently as fifty years ago, a majority of Americans in many states thought that desegregation was a terrible idea as well. And, of course, children in the USA would be required to learn creationism in science classes, since 55% of Americans want it that way.

The whole point of liberalism, or at least my idea of it, is to endow each individual with the right to pursue their own lives in any manner of their choice, so long as it does not interfere unduly with anyone else's fundamental rights. The democratic process equips the majority with the ability to mandate away the rights of the minority, thus conflicting with the goals of a liberal society. The only way to pursue the liberal agenda is to enshrine these fundamental human rights in the constitution and control the courts interpreting this constitution, until that far-away day when they can rely on an enlightened public. This is also the reason that constitutional amendments are designed to require a significant majority to be approved -- it should not be easy for a partisan majority to rob the minority of these fundamental rights.

More Movie Reviews

2005-10-01T22:44:00.000-07:00

Quick capsule reviews of movies I've seen in the last few weeks:

Fresh: A surprisingly good adventure/drama from the '90s that deserves to be known much better. "Fresh" is the right word, for it is a unique blend of the authentic Brooklyn settings of Spike Lee with the clever double-crosses of Kurosawa's Yojimbo with some characters right out of Scarface thrown in for good measure. The story revolves around Fresh, a smart, twelve-year-old schoolboy in a Brooklyn neighborhood who strives for a normal life while learning chess from his hustler dad (Samuel L. Jackson), squeezing in drug runs into his daily schedule while becoming the right-hand boy of the local kingpin, and protecting his elder sister from the clutches of the big bad men.

The Constant Gardener: Based on the John le Carre novel, this stylish and strongly scripted drama from director Fernando Meirelles is the most intelligent film to have emerged from Hollywood this year. Meirelles combines the soulful melancholy of the le Carre novel with the vibrant earthy portrayal of the third world that characterized his earlier, and superior, effort City of God. The movie eventually runs on too long and its artiness wears thin at times but it feels unfair to quibble in a season full of unworthy trash.

Short Cuts: Yet another of Robert Altman's large-canvas productions, telling the intertwined tales of nearly two dozen people over a few days in L.A. While not all of the stories are compelling, Altman does a fine job of sketching three-dimensional characters and keeping us engrossed. I would rate the movie a notch below his best work in M*A*S*H and The Player but your mileage may vary, depending on how much you care about plot versus characters.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: Disappointing British crime drama from Mike Hodges and Clive Owen, the same tandem that brought us the far superior Croupier. There are some good scenes here and there and the story builds a fair bit of atmosphere and portent but fails to go anywhere and collapses in an air of muddled confusion.

Ed Wood: Tim Burton and Johnny Depp team up for yet another home run in this hugely enjoyable biopic of the infamous Edward D. Wood, Jr., acclaimed as the worst director of all time -- and with good reason. Right from the inventive opening credits, the film blurs the line between author and subject by mixing in a surreal atmosphere and overwrought acting that might almost belong in an Ed Wood-directed movie. Almost being the operative word, for the movie also boasts of some excellent performances, most notably by Martin Landau as the fading star Bela Lugosi. Vincent D'Onofrio is also quite good in a cameo as Orson Welles.

Million Dollar Baby: Overrated. Clint Eastwood reprises his usual role as the strong silent type, and Morgan Freeman does his by-now-familiar voiceover commentary that lends an air of majestic solemnity to proceedings, and I must say that the duo do quite a good job of holding up the picture -- with help from the always impressive Hilary Swank -- until about two-thirds into the movie. There were just too many shades of "Unforgiven", too many silly boxing scenes and poor caricatures passing for characters that robbed the film of its authenticity, and it didn't help that the story was robbed of all its suspense by that lunatic Michael Medved. Not that it would have changed things much even if the twist had been a surprise, as I failed to empathize with the emotional complications involved in the story.

Unmemorizable Unique IDs

2005-09-29T13:40:00.000-07:00

Have you ever ordered some service, or lodged some complaint, with a utility company over the phone and received an "order number" or a "ticket number" in return? Have you ever been tricked into reaching around hurriedly for pencil and a scrap of paper in order to write it down for future enquires? Have you ever wondered why you would need to provide the order number for an enquiry instead of just your name and address, or any of the million other pieces of personal information that they will ask you for anyway?

I have. And it struck me today, while I was wading through a call with SBC, that I cannot come up with a single sensible explanation for this behavior, beyond the possibility that they have no understanding of database normalization and keys.

An expert on global warming

2005-09-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

Hmm. If the Senate wanted to learn more about global warming, if they had the time to read exactly one book on the subject, what would they do? The answer is as predictable as it is ludicrous, given that committee chairman is an Oklahoma Republican. Welcome aboard, Michael Crichton.

How to make Baseball a saner sport

2005-09-22T00:21:00.000-07:00

Baseball, like most American sports, struggles with a surfeit of silly rules drawn up by people who probably never knew the meaning of the word "consistent". Here are four proposed rule changes that would make it a saner sport, without the need for weird special-case rules. From the least important to the most:

Stealing First Base: For some strange reason, the hitter is not allowed to run to first base on a wild pitch. Never mind that any other runner on base has every right to run. And never mind that if the hitter strikes out on a wild pitch, he can then try to get to first base. What kind of crazy rule is that? Why not let the hitter run to first base no matter what, if he so desires?
The Foul-tip out: Why is it that a foul ball that pops up and is caught by the catcher results in an out, but not a foul ball that "deflects" off the hitter's bat into the catcher's glove? And, of course, just to throw an additional twist, the latter results in an out in the special case that it happens on a two-strike count. Why on earth would it not be out every single time?
Eliminating the Force-Play: Anyone know the infield-fly rule? The idea is that a ball that pops up could be deliberately dropped by the in-fielder in order to help him get a double-play when there is (typically) a runner on first base. How does baseball try to stop this? Create an "infield-fly" rule by which the umpire declares the hitter out even before the ball descends, arbitrarily deciding that the ball is catchable! My solution would be to get rid of the force play -- the idea that a runner on first is forced to advance to second on a ground-ball (and similarly when there is a runner on second with first base occupied, etc.). Instead, why not let a runner always have the option of staying at the base he is on? In case, multiple runners end up at the same base, the trailing runner would be counted out. Some tricky details are involved here that I won't elaborate on, but the basic idea is that all baserunners need to be tagged in order to be out.
The Mega-Walk: The greatest abomination in baseball is the intentional walk. How crazy is it to let a team walk its opponent's best hitter without giving him a chance to swing the bat? And all they can do is complain about how it's such dishonorable behavior! If you had the misfortune of watching the Giants in 2004, you probably also saw how much the intentional walk can hurt the hitting team -- just recall the 232 or so times A.J. Pierzynski grounded into a DP after a Bonds walk. Instead, let's institute the Mega-Walk. The hitter no longer needs to walk to first base after 4 balls. He also has the option of receiving more pitches! If he gets up to 8 balls, he gets 2 bases; 12 balls will give him 3 bases, and 16 balls would be the equivalent of a home run. Of course, if he strikes out, he strikes out. The hitter also has the option of cutting and walking whenever he wants to. For example, when the count gets to 10-2, he might decide to just take his 2 bases instead of risking a strike-out. Now, let's see people trying the intentional walk!

Movie Review: Nine Queens

2005-09-18T18:22:00.000-07:00

One of the movies that has long been on my yet-to-see list is "Nine Queens", an Argentinian crime caper dating back to 2001. I finally watched it this weekend and it was well worth the wait. Nine Queens is very much in the tradition of David Mamet's flicks, with a story revolving around a pair of con men trying to pull a fast one selling fake stamps to a billionaire philatelist. Of course, the story gets more complicated in a hurry with cons within cons within cons as a diverse cast of colorful characters try to outwit one another. All very Mamet-esque, except that the setting is the vibrant city of Buenos Aires, the people are more interesting, the plot is cleverer, and the dialogue, while not as sharp, still crackles with energy.

As with most post-1995 movies, Nine Queens also has a case of the Keyser Soze syndrome, feeling the need to conclude with a twist that sheds new light on the proceedings of the entire movie. As is usually the case with such movies, the twist also does not make sense and opens up huge holes in the storyline. However, such overzealousness is more easily forgiven in this film that hardly puts a foot wrong in its clever plotting right till the very end.

At the end of it all, what we are left with is a highly enjoyable film that is guaranteed to both entertain and exercise the mind. On the other hand, the movie is highly plot-centric, limiting its rewatchability quotient and placing it a clear notch lower than more well-rounded films such as The Usual Suspects, Fight Club and Seven.

Was/Were the Ashes settled by the toss?

2005-09-14T21:11:00.000-07:00

As most of you cricket fans out there know by now, England finally regained the Ashes after a gap of 18 years, beating Australia 2-1 in the five-test series. There is no doubt that the English team is far better than it has been in ages, just as there is no doubt that the Aussies are finally on the decline. Their ineptitude in the absence of McGrath was exposed as early as a couple of years ago by the touring Indians who nearly pulled off an upset win before settling for a drawn series.

But for all that, I can't shake the feeling that this Ashes series was eventually decided by the toss. Of the five tests, the team winning the toss either won or held the upper hand in every test but one. The lone exception was the Edgbaston test where Ricky Ponting went temporarily insane and put England into bat. As Geoff Boycott put it, "He's a lovely guy, that Ricky Ponting. He likes the English so much he changed the series for them with the most stupid decision he'll ever make in his life."

This series is hardly the exception when it comes to the toss playing a significant role in the outcome in matches between evenly matched teams. We need only to look back to the Australia and Pakistan tours of India in the 2004-05 season to find that all five decisive tests were won by the team winning the toss.

Tom Coburn on the Daily Show

2005-09-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's show was truly hilarious. See the video here. And wait till you get to Tom Coburn's emotional outpouring towards the end. This one has to be seen to be believed.

IIT JEE reforms

2005-09-13T08:57:00.000-07:00

So, it looks like the admission process for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has been revised yet again. And I must say I am very unimpressed with the consequences. The reforms have the ostensible goal of reducing stress levels for students. I completely fail to see how this goal is being satisfied by the proposed reforms. But I want to ask a more fundamental question: Is the reduction of student stress levels an achievable goal at all, and should we be targeting achieving it?

Frst, some background. At its heart, the IIT Joint Entrance Examination is a means to select 4000-odd top engineering aspirants in the country. About 200,000 candidates appear for the exam annually, resulting in a highly competitive selection process with a 2% acceptance rate. (Note that the candidate pool is actually even higher, with many students self-selecting by not bothering to appear for the exam at all.) Furthermore, the exam is also required to rank these 4000-odd students, with higher-ranked students getting first tilt at selecting their major and the location where they want to study. (There are now 7 IITs across the country.) Both these are fairly crucial variables for a student setting out on his/her undergraduate career, so that people aspire not only to qualify but to do so with as high a rank as possible.

Now, creating a ranked list of 4000 students from a ridiculously large candidate pool is a complex task requiring a highly objective test methodology; mere subjective evaluation of resumes simply will not cut it, providing scope for serious abuse of process and corruption and also leading to great resentment among the rejected. Just using high-school performance results does not cut it either thanks to (a) the bugbear of grade inflation due to which zillions of people are separated by statistically insignificant margins on the tests; and (b) the diversity in school boards, each with its own grading system and policies that make it hard to compare across them.

The only solution is to conduct a common, independent test that truly separates the top 4000 candidates from the rest, while also doing a reasonable job of ranking those 4000 candidates. Now, almost by definition, this means that the test ought to be made hard enough that the majority of candidates score close to zero on it, because any exam has a limited resolving power and this one needs to be calibrated to resolve well among the top 2% of the examinees. The age-old IIT JEE system has gotten this right so far!

Of course, a consequence of having such a difficult exam is that students force themselves to train harder in order to have a better shot at doing well. While this may admittedly lead to higher "stress levels", it is a natural consequence of market forces at work. When you have a limited supply of seats, and a large demand for it, the people who work hardest at getting the seats are the ones who will get them.

Now we have new-fangled ideas doing the rounds about "reducing stress levels" by instituting reforms to the exam process. But how exactly does it help if it does not change the fundamental balance of supply and demand? Sure, we could institute a lottery system to replace the exam thus reducing the "stress levels" of students, but why is that the right thing to do? Wouldn't we rather have people working harder to succeed in a fairer process? All of the recent attempts to make the IIT-JEE "easier" suffers from this kind of myopic thinking.

If we really wanted to reduce stress levels, a good place to start might be to reduce the need to rank people based on the test and focus instead only on selection. Students could be allowed to join without having to choose a major ahead of time, and be provided reasonable freedom to study the major of their choice. This would certainly help reduce the pressure on students by enabling them to put in just enough effort to cross the threshold rather than to go all out to rank highest. (And given the law of diminishing returns, it should be less work to make the top 4000 than to make the top 100.)

It is another matter entirely that the proposed reforms do little to even advance the goal of reducing stress levels. There are now rules in place restricting the number of times a person may appear for the JEE, when he/she may take the exam and so on which would appear to violate the cardinal rule for rulemaking: "Don't make up a rule unless you have to."

NBA Salary Cap Issues

2005-09-05T18:21:00.000-07:00

It has been an interesting off-season in the NBA and the player movement I've seen so far confirms some of the problems I've noticed with the salary cap system over the years. Loosely speaking, the NBA salary cap works as follows:

All teams have a "soft" salary cap that is set annually based on league revenue.
A team exceeding the cap basically cannot sign free agents to contracts, with some exceptions.
Each team has a mid-level exception worth about $5 million (the avg. annual player salary) that it can use to sign one or more players even when it is above the cap.
With some caveats, a team can always re-sign its own players at any salary, even when it is above the cap. (This is called the Larry Bird rule.)
A team exceeding the cap significantly beyond a "luxury-tax" threshold, has to pay a dollar-for-dollar luxury tax on the amount by which it exceeds the threshold.
The luxury tax collected is redistributed across all teams using an elaborate formula that favors teams under the cap.

The ostensible goal of this elaborate system is to ensure parity among all teams, denying the advantages that big-money teams in large markets would otherwise have in hoarding talent. There is no denying that the rules have helped smaller teams be competitive -- one need look no further than the last few years where San Antonio and Detroit dominated while the big-spending Knicks and Lakers were crippled -- but there have been a number of negative effects as well. I list some of them below:

The Sterling strategy: While most teams are in the business of trying to assemble the best team they can given the limitations of the cap, some owners such as the L.A. Clippers' Donald Sterling have figured out an alternative path to profitability that has little to do with winning: put together a mediocre team at a low price and wait for luxury tax payments from the other teams to boost revenue. Notable examples: L.A. Clippers, New Orleans Hornets.
Cap-less hell: One of the consequences of a soft cap is that most of the teams are over the cap, and need to be so in order to stay competitive. The consequence, of course, is that these teams have to go through hell in order to improve via free agency. Often, the only way to improve is to rely on trades that bring in highly overpriced talent that some other team is willing to get rid of to obtain cap relief. Of course, if the talent doesn't work out, the team is stuck in hell even longer. Notable example: New York Knicks.
Rich-get-richer syndrome: One of the consequences of Cap-less hell is that very few good teams are capable of handing out big contracts to free agents. The consequence is that the non-superstar free agents, perhaps starting on the downhill side of their careers, are starved of any meaningful contract offers. And given a choice between going to a bad team for no money and going to a good team for no money, they choose the latter. The consequence: the really good teams keep getting better via these underpriced free agents, while the bad teams just stay bad. Notable examples: L.A. Lakers (Karl Malone and Gary Payton, 2003), Detroit Pistons (Rasheed Wallace, etc., 2004), San Antonio Spurs (Michael Finley, Nick van Exel, 2005)
Inequitable salary distribution: Related to the rich-get-richer syndrome is the fact that players do not get paid in accordance with their abilities. Since there is a loose "limit" on the total amount of money that goes to players, the fact that one player is being overpaid today means that another player is going to be underpaid tomorrow for no fault of his.

The ideal solution would be to release the limit on player salaries but to transfer the loss burden to exactly those teams that ended up overpaying their players. I am not sure how this would be done but perhaps the elimination of the salary cap combined with a much steeper luxury tax might be a start.

Speaking of spartan...

2005-09-05T12:43:00.000-07:00

...my posting on this blog could also begin to be described by the same adjective. Now that I have a real job, most of my writing will occur on weekends with only sporadic activity during the week.

Movie Review: Spartan

2005-09-05T12:36:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I finally got around to watching David Mamet's Spartan (2004), a stylish thriller that opened to good reviews but sank without a trace before you could blink. First, some rather copious background.

My experience with Mamet films has always been something of a mystery to me. On the face of it, Mamet's artifice-filled dialogue and convoluted plotting ought to have dovetailed perfectly with my love for narrative complexity and preference for form over content. In practice, however, most of Mamet's films -- including House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, not to mention the considerably inferior Heist -- have left me vaguely disappointed. The problem, I've concluded, is that I am simply unable to suspend disbelief enough to revel in Mamet's narrative twists. Much as I like manipulative plots like that of The Usual Suspects or Fight Club, the fun is in the storytelling process rather than in the surprises themselves. Movies like Heist leave me cold because the twists exist in and of themselves; not only are they too arbitrary to be enjoyable as sleights of hand, but they are also far too inconsequential to provoke thought or shed any new light on the proceedings.

Back to Spartan. The first hour or so of Spartan was a superbly paced, brilliantly shot B-movie, full of delicious dialogue and with an offbeat narrative structure where the audience hurtles through an episodic sequence of events with little by way of exposition to provide context for the events occurring on screen. With strong performances from Val Kilmer and the supporting cast, each scene crackles with intensity as the audience is slowly allowed insight into the logic that glues the episodes together.

Alas! Things begin to unravel somewhat in the last half hour as Mamet starts to fall in love with his elaborate conspiracy theories, and the story peters out into a conventional resolution, redeemed occasionally by some interesting moments of improvisational ingenuity. Despite its failings, Spartan remains a movie worth watching for fans of gritty filmmaking and chewy dialogue.

Update on Airport Shoe Checks

2005-08-28T11:09:00.000-07:00

I have been travelling quite a bit in the last week and came across the following incongruity: LAX appears to have stopped requiring passengers to take their shoes off to clear security. TSA staff in San Jose, on the other hand, still insist on it despite the friendly instructional video insisting that removal of shoes is only "recommended". So, yesterday, as I was flying out of San Jose, I decided to ask the staff why they needed to keep putting us through this hassle when LAX was not doing so. The answer I got: "Welcome to San Jose."

Of course, from a security standpoint, it is a dumb idea to have inconsistent rules in place. A "shoe attacker" could simply enter the airport system via the most lax checkpoint and is then free to roam wherever he wants via connections without ever having to go through security again.

Movie Review: Broken Flowers

2005-08-22T22:23:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I got around to watching Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray, Jeffrey Wright, Sharon Stone, Julie Delpy and a host of others. The film is pretty much dominated by Bill Murray who pulls off yet another performance rooted in a combination of deep melancholy and amused disinterest, playing a semi-retired Don Juan(-ston) stirred into action revisiting his former girlfriends thanks to an anonymous letter that implies he has a nineteen-year-old son. Jeffrey Wright plays Murray's amateur-detective neighbor who goads him into action to investigate the source of the letter. Everybody else makes little more than a cameo appearance while Murray drives around from place to place checking on his former girlfriends' choice of stationery and their color preferences.

The movie is rather funny in its own off-beat way and may even be Jim Jarmusch's most accessible film to date. I wasn't particularly happy with the ending which seemed more ambiguous than it had any reason to be. Overall, I would certainly recommend it as an interesting movie worth watching although I'd rate it a notch below Jarmusch's superior Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.

Islamic Law in Iraq?

2005-08-20T13:45:00.000-07:00

The irony is simply overwhelming. The U.S. invades a bastion of secularism in the Middle East and successfully enables an Islamic constitution in its "global struggle against Muslim fundamentalism".

Twenty 20

2005-08-20T13:36:00.000-07:00

The latest cricketing rage Twenty20 -- a three-hour version of the game in which each side plays out just 20 overs -- is making its debut in India this week. In this article on Yahoo India, a correspondent quizzes a sixteen-year-old spectator on what he found attractive about the game. He says, "It's like buy one (ticket) and take two free! In other words, we get to see two more matches for a single ticket of Rs.50 on the same day."

I don't know whether this is an example of the general Indian attitude or just a case of bad reporting of non-mainstream opinion, but I thought the whole idea of Twenty20 was to create a game short enough to attract spectator interest, not to squeeze multiple games into a day!

The Infatuation with the Neighborhood Store

2005-08-14T10:37:00.000-07:00

Since time immemorial, the Mom & Pop neighborhood store has been venerated as symbolic of all that's good, with the big bad chain-store retailers painted as the villains. (The most recent, and weird, example is I Heart Huckabees.) To a certain degree, the logic is understandable: people may dislike the impersonal nature of large stores, and everyone likes rooting for the underdog anyway.

It'd be perfectly reasonable for people to put their money where their mouth is and let supply and demand do the rest: if enough people wanted to shop at a neighborhood store, it would continue to survive and hold off the evil megastores. However, people often take this argument to the next level, advocating the weighting of the scales towards the neighborhood store. (Think politicians or activists crying out shrilly about local businesses being destroyed.) It is far less clear to me that there is an economic or social justification for this (unless there is a danger of monopolization and a destruction of choice). After all, we do want society to evolve to a more efficient state.

What is even worse is when people start arguing for what they consider a utopian world where online shopping becomes deprecated in favor of the local store. Personally, I prefer shopping online because I find it a more attractive and convenient proposition. If someone doesn't feel that way, they have the option of not shopping online. Arguing that a measure is good because it discriminates against online shopping is a rather unreasonable stance to take.

Hypocrisy and Political Correctness

2005-08-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Followers of Giants baseball might have heard about the recent controversy stirred up by KNBR talk-show host Larry Krueger's intemperate remarks criticizing San Francisco's "brain-dead Caribbean hitters hacking at slop nightly". The remarks understandably touched off a storm with Felipe Alou, the Giants' manager of Caribbean origin, going so far as to condemn Krueger as "the messenger of Satan" and refusing to accept Krueger's apology.

Krueger originally received a one week suspension from KNBR, but now comes news that the radio station has now decided to fire him. The action was apparently precipitated by a morning program that parodied Alou's Satan remark -- two other people associated with the program were fired as well -- although Krueger himself had nothing to do with it.

I'd have no issues with the firings had they been motivated by KNBR's ethical stance, but politics appears to have played a much larger part than principle in the whole story. As early as Sunday, Ray Ratto pointed out that KNBR did not find Krueger's remarks particularly bothersome and suggested the likelihood of a power struggle breaking out between the Giants and KNBR. That seems to be exactly what has transpired.

Where does KNBR get off with its holier-than-thou attitude when it was perfectly content to defend Krueger just a week earlier? (Quote from SVP Tony Salvadore: "Larry's been a terrific employee here for eight-plus years. This is a severe financial penalty and a blow to his professionalism. If this had been a repeat offence, it would be different.") Now they want to make the public swallow the idea that the suspension was to help them "weigh[..] the gravity of his offense"?

Eliminating (?) Discrimination in News Coverage

2005-08-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

From the IMDB today:

NBC News President Neal Shapiro on Friday appeared to agree with minority activists who have accused the news media of focusing their attention on missing white, attractive women while ignoring missing black, attractive women. Appearing on NBC's Dateline, Shapiro, who is rumored to be leaving the network, remarked, "Our mission is to try to cover America. And that means all facets of America. And when our coverage doesn't reflect that, it distresses me. That said, I think it's important that people in the industry talk about it. I think the fact that I'm talking about it, I think the fact that Dateline NBC is devoting airtime to it, means we take it seriously. And we have to do better." Shapiro's remarks came as Fox News personality Greta Van Susteren returned to Aruba for additional coverage of her ratings-grabbing investigation of missing teenager Natalee Holloway. She told the Associated Press: "I obviously don't program for the people in the newsroom or my friends or the people I went to law school with. I program for the viewers." Asked about Dateline's report, Van Susteren commented: "I wish we did more on missing minorities. But I'm not going to be bothered by the critics."

Anyone else notice something funny about the first sentence?

Cricket Updates

2005-08-07T09:55:00.000-07:00

England managed to squeak by Australia in the second Ashes test, thanks to a dubious caught-behind decision that ended the match with Australia two runs short of the target. While England strove hard to be credited with the biggest collapse in Ashes history, the tendency of the Australian batsmen to commit hara-kiri eventually proved to be too much. With Glenn McGrath in doubt for the third test, and the once-overpraised Matthew Hayden revealing his feet of clay, England ought to fancy their chances of giving Australia a run for their money.
India squeezed by West Indies in an elimination match at yet another no-name triangular one-day tournament in Sri Lanka. I happened to follow the match live on Cricinfo towards the end and remain completely puzzled by Rahul Dravid's captaincy, which is usually impeccable. What was he thinking bowling the expensive Ashish Nehra in the death when he could have turned to his strike bowler, Irfan Pathan, who appeared to be bowling brilliantly (at least as far as I could make out from the text commentary)? Was he trying to boost Nehra's confidence by showing some trust in him, or was Pathan injured? Anyone have any ideas?

The Return of the Thin Client

2005-08-01T23:46:00.000-07:00

(Via Zoo Station) It looks like a number of start-ups in India are looking at building a sub-$100 PC, targeted at making a computer accessible to the masses. Prominent among these is Novatium, a thin client running Linux, built on a DSP with flash memory substituting for DRAM, and with no hard drive. The idea is that the client will, for the most part, act as a dumb terminal with all the heavy lifting being done at back-end servers. The target price is about $100 -- if you can lay your hands on a used monitor for about $25.

While I must admit that the idea does have some potential deployment advantages -- ease of maintenance and potentially cheaper software being the most prominent among them -- I can't help thinking that the whole project is rather misguided and doomed to fail. After all, $225 will buy you a full-fledged PC in India today -- complete with a 1GHz Via processor, 40GB hard disk, a CD-ROM drive and a decent new monitor!

If the aim is to take computing to villages, wouldn't we be much better off setting up cheap community PCs time-shared across the populace, instead of getting everyone a thin client? It's not like anybody require a machine to themselves all the time, especially if the primary intent is to provide people access to information on the internet. Not to mention the fact that even thin clients requires fancy infrastructure -- both a back-end and networking -- and we all know how hard it is to get any kind of infrastructure working reliably in India. True, it may be far trickier to divide the cost of community PCs across the populace than to simply sell thin clients to each interested family, but I wouldn't think the problem is insurmountable given the cost savings that ought to result from time sharing, not to mention the savings from using commodity software on commodity hardware, instead of having to rely on some complicated, specialized Linux kernel running on a DSP.

If, on the other hand, the goal of thin clients was to target cottage industries that couldn't afford a PC, I'd think it's a non-starter. Who wants their business data to be stored on a shared computer for any hacker (or the government) to get hold of?

Perhaps the aim is to sell a full client-server solution to small businesses as an alternative to using PCs. But something tells me we've been down that path before. Isn't this the same as Sun's thin-client disaster?

What Google Maps really needs!

2005-08-01T21:45:00.000-07:00

A list of features I wish Google Maps would implement:

Driving directions that actually make sense.
Time estimates that are within a factor 1.5 of realistic.
Allow me to set start and end points for driving directions by clicking on the map.

Stanford Tennis

2005-07-28T23:33:00.000-07:00

Yesterday night, I watched India's Sania Mirza take on Venus Williams in the Bank of the West Classic tennis tournament at Stanford. Although Venus won comfortably 6-3, 6-2, the match was far more interesting than the scoreline suggests. First of all, the spectator demographic was far from traditional -- never before have I seen either Indians or African-Americans turn up in such numbers at a tennis match -- and made for a rather amusing experience. Mirza probably had the bigger fan contingent, backed by a vocal desi crowd that thought nothing of cheering Venus's errors. I was seated around a big, fairly vocal contingent of Venus supporters -- all but one of whom hadn't seen a tennis match before -- who spent more time debating whether they could spot Venus's mom than they did watching the match or learning the rules.

The match itself was fun as well, thanks mainly to the gunslinger mentality that Mirza brought to the table, time and again uncorking spectacular winners to outhit Venus. (What a refreshing change of pace from the stereotypical Indian "touch artist" game of Vijay Amritraj, Ramesh Krishnan or Leander Paes!) On the flip side, the slew of unforced errors flowing off Mirza's racquet sealed her fate pretty comprehensively. The match was very reminiscent of the Australian Open Mirza vs . Serena Williams match where, once again, Mirza used her powerful groundstrokes to dictate play against a hard-hitting opponent but ended up succumbing tamely due to a failure to curb her own aggression.

Unless your name is Roger Federer, it is hard to win consistently at the top level without a percentage game that allows your opponent to make mistakes and offer you free points. There's simply no way Sania can beat top-ranked talent such as the Williams sisters by outslugging them going for winners in every single point. Sania would do well to take a gander at the modern Andre Agassi game -- his success is the strongest proof yet that precise percentage play pays off in spades compared to the spectacular winners that he preferred to try pulling off in the earlier stages of his career.

Killers vs. Franz Ferdinand

2005-07-27T23:30:00.000-07:00

As I've been giving my hard-earned PC-to-home-theater wiring a workout, I had occasion to go back and listen to the debut albums of two of the biggest successes of 2004, Franz Ferdinand and The Killers. Which, of course, inevitably led me to debate which of the two bands is better. As I weighed the case, I was struck by how eerie a parallel I was able to draw with my grappling over the Beatles vs. Stones question.

Franz Ferdinand is like the Beatles of the new age -- all the way from their sharp dressing to their sizzling tunes that catch on at the first listening -- but with a better sense of music and no annoying "Yeah Yeah Yeah" chorus. The Killers, on the other hand, are more like the Stones -- darker, grungier, high on the hirsuteness, and with songs that tend to grow on you more slowly. If I had to choose today, I'd go with Franz Ferdinand for the sheer joy and inventiveness of their music, but I reserve the right to change my mind in a few years as the bands evolve.

Home Theaters and Levels of Indirection

2005-07-25T22:52:00.000-07:00

After nearly a year of inactivity, I had occasion to mess with the wiring of my home theater system yesterday. The problem at hand was to hook up the 5.1 channel analog audio output from my new home PC to my receiver, so that I could play multi-channel audio off the PC and listen to it on my 6-speaker home theater.

There was only one catch: the receiver had exactly one set of 5.1-channel analog inputs and that was earmarked for the input named "DVD". Since I had already hooked up an optical digital out from the DVD to the receiver via S/PDIF, there was a problem. The solution? Plug in the digital DVD output into the CD input, and the PC's output into the analog DVD input. Of course, in the process, I have also made entirely certain that no one else in the world can figure out how to configure my home theater to do anything at all, just in case anyone thought they could earlier.

Any computer scientist would know exactly how to solve the nightmare of nomenclature that results from hooking up AV equipment in these crazy ways: use a level of indirection!! Why did the receiver manufacturer have to hardwire the name "DVD" to the multichannel analog input? If only the input had been named something harmless like "Input 7" and the receiver menu let you associate different names ("DVD", "CD", "Tape", "AUX", etc.) with different inputs, life would be so much nicer. It'd be even cooler if I could punch in my own names instead of having to hope that the manufacturer had figured out all that I'd want to do.

Ditto with remote controls. Hard-button universal remotes never work because no one can ever anticipate all possible buttons that a device might require and put them all on one remote. My universal is slightly better with semi-programmable "soft" keys but it still leaves a lot to be desired. I have no way of creating my own names for the keys, and macros for performing complex tasks are given names such as "Macro 1" and "Macro 2". I think it's high time all devices migrated to the following system:

There is a uniform on-screen menu system on all devices that can be used to perform all functions via a small set of arrow keys plus some additional selector keys.
Complex functions, consisting of long sequences of key presses, can be programmed into macros stored on the device itself.
Each of these macros is given a short IR code which can be programmed into the remote control. (An alternative would be to store the macros on the remote and use RF to transmit the commands to the device and get it to react super-fast.)
The remote control has a surface providing tactile feedback, but comes with soft keys whose names can be programmed by the user.

Anyone reminded of instruction sets and programming languages?

Dealing with Terrorism

2005-07-23T17:30:00.000-07:00

The New York Times describes a police decision -- presumably in response to the London bombings -- to start random inspections of bags on the city subway system. In my opinion, this decision is a classic example of how not to deal with terrorism. One of the central objectives of terrorism is to introduce discomfort and pain into the average individual's way of life. All that is achieved by random inspection is that life just got a whole lot more annoying for a whole lot more people, with no accompanying improvement in overall human safety. There are just so many ways for the determined attacker to cause destruction that stopping some people on the subway will make no difference at all, beyond incentivizing the public to stop using public transport and burn more gas made from imported oil.

Every time I go through the hassle of removing my shoes to clear security at an airport, I visualize Osama dancing with glee at the havoc he's wreaked on easy air travel. (By the way, have you noticed how the security personnel always say, "We highly recommend that you take off your shoes" and never, "Please take off your shoes"? One slow day, I asked one of them what "highly recommend" meant. Did that mean I had a choice? She looked slightly taken aback by the question and turned to talk to her supervisor. He came over and told me, no, I didn't. Well, thanks for being upfront about it. )

Here come the A's

2005-07-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

After a terrible April & May when Bay area baseball turned unwatchable, the Oakland A's have come to the rescue with yet another of those patented summer comebacks that you can set a wristwatch by. At last count, the A's are just one game out in the Wild Card race and are poised to clamber over the Yankees and Twins to make it to the playoffs.

As usual, their off-season trades look better and better by the minute, what with Tim Hudson having disappeared off the radar screen in Atlanta, Mark Mulder having a so-so season in St. Louis, Zito rediscovering his form of old, and Danny Haren sporting the longest winning streak in the AL this year.

A Recursive DUI Problem

2005-07-23T16:26:00.000-07:00

When it comes to football players, improbability and truth go hand in hand. Whether it be Randy Moss taking a meter maid on an open-air car ride, or Koren Robinson's hilarious recursive DUI problem. (via the Bill Simmons Intern)

An Indian Film in Ebert's List

2005-07-17T16:49:00.000-07:00

Roger Ebert, in his fortnightly column on great movies, discusses Santosh Sivan's "The Terrorist" this week. The movie is the first Tamil film to make it to Ebert's list and only the fourth Indian movie to do so, after Satyajit Ray's masterful Apu trilogy. Ebert's review provides a nice analysis of the film's strengths. (However, his side-commentary on terrorism and suicide bombing is oversimplified and not entirely logical.)

When I first saw the film three or four years ago, I was struck both by its overwhelmingly beautiful cinematography and by its subdued, neutral intellectual style that let the viewers navigate their way without being biased by a prescriptive moral stance. On the flip side, Sivan tends to crank up the artsiness quotient one time too many with fancy camera work and deliberately long cuts. The sin is easily forgiven, however, in a film which magnificently avoids the pitfalls of cheap melodrama that has laid low many a good Indian movie.

The iPod Flea

2005-07-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Rather interesting innovation from Apple. Very plausible.

Space Age Anachronisms

2005-07-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

I just moved to a sleek, new Thinkpad T43 laptop a few days ago. Thanks to Centrino, it came equipped with a generous package of networking options built-in. On the left side of the machine are two ports -- one for Gigabit Ethernet and the other for a 56K modem. (The intervening Megabit rate is covered by my 802.11a/b/g wireless.) I'd be curious to know if any one person has used both options on the same machine.

The Evolution of Safety Margins

2005-07-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

The NY Times reports on research in Australia that purports to show that the use of hands-free cellphone devices while driving is as unsafe -- in terms of the statistical likelihood of an accident -- as speaking on a regular cell-phone. At first sight, the results might seem counter-intuitive, given that using a cell-phone uses up one whole hand and probably a few more brain cycles as well. Ananthan's explanation of the numbers is that people simply tend to multi-task even more when using the hands-free device. Now that both hands are free, I can drive and talk on my phone while simultaneously reaching for my cup of coffee with one of my free hands!

The introduction of safer means of carrying out tasks already perceived to be relatively safe rarely has the effect of improving overall safety. For example, the invention of better brakes or a fancy new computer-assisted collision-avoidance system would simply mean that people will tailgate the car ahead of them even more closely than they already did, retaining the same probability of error.

Safety in the Third World

2005-07-12T08:48:00.000-07:00

In a demonstration of typical colonialist claptrap, the English Cricket Board wants the right to make last-minute venue changes in its upcoming tour of Pakistan, allegedly for reasons of security. Last I checked, the bombs were going off somewhere else. Maybe we should give everyone the right to re-vote on the Olympic venues for 2012.

Karl Rove is outed

2005-07-11T11:14:00.000-07:00

It is now official. Karl Rove was the source who leaked the Valerie Plame story. The New York Times has an interesting story on Matt Cooper's decision to testify. The blogosphere is alive trying to make sense of the sequence of events. (Mark Kleiman, as usual, has a number of interesting observations on why Matt did it and whether Bob Novak is a target.) Newsweek has a story on what Rove told Cooper.

Cricket's New Rules Claim their First Victim

2005-07-10T17:27:00.000-07:00

A month ago, I wrote about the rule changes to one-day cricket that had been dreamed up by the comedians at the International Cricket Council. The changes have since been approved on a trial basis for the period of a year. Today's England-Australia encounter marked the second cricket match played under the new rules and exposed the idiocy of the one-substitute option.

Both sides loaded the eleven with five bowlers in the hope of winning the toss and bowling first. Unfortunately for England, Ricky Ponting called the toss right and Australia got to unleash its bowlers first up. Which meant that England couldn't afford to substitute out a bowler for a batsman. Australia, of course, had no such difficulties when it became their turn to bat, as they replaced strike bowler Glenn McGrath with hitter Brad Haddin, and gained a significant advantage. It is another story entirely that they cantered to a win even without Haddin's services, thanks to the asymmetry of pitch conditions. (It remains something of a mystery why Australia would wait until the third over of their inning to undertake the substitution. Perhaps they were considering McGrath as a pinch hitter in case they lost a wicket early? :-) )

If the ICC desperately wants substitutes in the game, why not at least allow the eleven to be named immediately after the toss, instead of before? Teams could still be required to finalize their twelve prior to the toss.

Picasa in Mi Casa

2005-07-10T16:09:00.000-07:00

My collection of digital photographs has been growing at a pretty alarming rate over the last few years, and I've become increasingly tired of tweaking, organizing and publishing them manually with my own home-grown scripts. So, I finally decided to give Picasa a twirl to see if it really is as good as it's made out to be. There is much to like about Picasa, not least its elegant user interface, the neat classification primitives, and the ability to edit photos without overwriting the original data. (One of the banes of editing is that recompressing to JPEG after each edit is a sure-fire way of destroying quality.)

Unfortunately, there are some serious issues with Picasa's feature set which become apparent only as you start using it more extensively. First, Picasa ties you down into using it exclusively to manipulate photos, because your photo edits are transparent to other applications unless you export the pictures first. This wouldn't be a big deal, if not for the fact that Picasa's editing tools are simply not good enough. It does have a number of cool effects and adjustments that can be easily applied (saturation and color temperature are two things that come to mind), but the basic brightness and contrast adjustments are so terribly below par that it is almost unusable. This means I have to use a different editor to mess with photos, which is not only a big annoyance but also destroys the cool editing flexibility offered by Picasa.

But that's not all. Picasa has this cool concept of a "label" that can be associated with a set of pictures in order to create a "virtual" folder. You can even associate multiple labels with a picture so that you can have multi-dimensional views of your collection. All well and good, but I have already put in considerable effort into organizing my folders hierarchically by time periods and events. And Picasa provides no way of importing this structure to automatically create labels. Worse still, it destroys my hierarchical organization and provides no clean navigational aid to go through my pictures!! Somehow, I cannot imagine going through more than 100 folders to create an equivalent label for each of them. And using labels just for my newer pictures means that I have to contend with two different navigational modes for my photos -- a complete non-starter.

The final annoyance that sealed the deal was that there is simply no automatic way to select all photos in my collection. Picasa will only let me select from one folder at a time. There goes my idea of creating a Picasa screensaver with all my pictures. (You might be wondering why I'd need that feature, since Windows XP already lets me have a screensaver based on my pictures. Trouble is, Windows appears to use a horribly broken random number generator and a poor sampling algorithm that is badly biased by directory structure.)

Episode Two: Nature's Revenge

2005-07-09T13:51:00.000-07:00

Sequoia National Forest, July 2, 2005.

Anonymous Critic: The ironic juxtaposition of the gushing fluidity of the Kings river with the bottled-up flatness of defocused cola brings into stark relief the towering inconsequentiality of carbonation in Nature's grand design.

Pop Art Episode One: The Triumph of Consumerism

2005-07-09T13:50:00.000-07:00

Sequoia National Forest, July 2, 2005

Anonymous Critic: A meditative metaphor on the intrusion of consumerist symbols into the farthest reaches of otherwise pristine territory.

So much for a free press

2005-07-07T08:43:00.000-07:00

I've been patiently waiting for a story from a reputable newspaper on the Valerie Plame controvery that discusses exactly who the source of the leaks are. The blogosphere has been alive for a while with stories about Karl Rove being the mastermind protected by Judith Miller, which would explain why her withholding of information is serious enough that she's going to jail. See Mark Kleiman's extensive coverage (Was it Rove? , Steve Teles on Reporter's Privilege, No Crime in the Plame Case. That's not what the Judge thinks) for an overview.

Two interesting points emerge from all of this. First, the press has known the whole story for quite a while but has ganged up to studiously avoid any mention of it in a show of misguided solidarity. Second, with regard to Judith Miller, the courts have been extremely clear that "the information she was given and her potential use of it was a crime." It is disingenuous for the NY Times editors to argue (a) that Miller testifying would have a chilling effect on whistleblowers everywhere; or (b) that the shroud of secrecy around the investigation somehow privileges them not to cooperate.

With respect to (a), the presiding Judge was clear in drawing a line between whistleblowers providing information on governmental misconduct and government officials committing a crime in providing secret information to attack administration critics.

With respect to (b), the Times admits that reporters' privileges are not unlimited. It also admits they don't have the information to know what the implications of this particular case are. The natural solution in such a case would be to let the courts -- which do have the requisite information -- determine the limits of those privileges. Worse still, Judge Hogan claimed that the source Miller "alleges she is protecting" had already waived her promise of confidentiality.

A Confidence Trick

2005-07-01T09:02:00.000-07:00

From the Strange-but-true department. The BBC reports on the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's attempt to deliberately lose a confidence vote so that he can call early elections. Part of the attempt involved convincing his deputies and MPs to vote against his government, a task that he eventually succeeded at. Schroeder's motivations seem relatively above-board. His party is rather unpopular in Germany at the moment and is a long shot to return to power. Two-thirds of the country does want early elections, according to opinion polls. And finally, Schroeder claims he needs a fresh mandate in order to push through controversial reforms.

Nevertheless, deliberately losing a confidence vote seems to be out there in terms of strategies open to him. Wouldn't a mere resignation work? At worst, shouldn't he have been introducing a motion of "No Confidence" instead of one of "Confidence", since it seems clear that he himself had lost faith in his government?

Is Four One Leg Too Many?

2005-06-29T21:54:00.000-07:00

Roger Ebert, in his review of War of the Worlds today, complains about the aliens' use of a three-legged contraption:

And, for that matter, why balance these towering machines on ill-designed supports? If evolution has taught us anything, it is that limbs of living things, from men to dinosaurs to spiders to centipedes, tend to come in numbers divisible by four. Three legs are inherently not stable, as Ray demonstrates when he damages one leg of a giant tripod, and it falls helplessly to the ground.

I think I'll have to take issue with the above argument. Three legs, I think, are a better idea than four when it comes to building a stable structure, which is why chemists and cameramen both use tripods. The reason is pretty simple: three points always form a plane, which means the three tips of a tripod are guaranteed to sit stably on the ground. On the other hand, with four legs, you need them all to be exactly the same length to achieve stability on all surfaces. True, a tripod will collapse if one of its legs is hacked out from underneath but, in all likelihood, four legs won't help that much more.

Having said that, I started wondering about why so few animals are three-legged. I could conjecture two alternative explanations:

Quadrangular body shapes are more desirable than triangular shapes, leading naturally to four-legged animals in preference to tripeds.
When walking, animals would like to pull up a foot and still balance on the remaining three. Being a triped would complicate the situation somewhat.

Does anyone have better guesses?

Grokking the Grokster Ruling

2005-06-27T11:03:00.000-07:00

(via Freedom To Tinker) SCOTUSblog has an interesting and insightful discussion of the Supreme Court ruling on Grokster. I can't really comment on the legal wisdom or foundation of the court's arguments, but it is about as good as we could have hoped for from a policy standpoint.

It was clear that a balance had to be struck between the rights of the copyright holders (MGM) and the freedom for technological innovation. The worst that could have happened would have been for (a) the Supremes to rule in favor of Grokster, which would have set Congress off to draft a crazy piece of over-broad legislation that doomed technology; or (b) to have a ruling against the Grokster technology declaring it to be direct contributory infringement.

The court carefully sidestepped option (b), and focused on Grokster's business side in suggesting that there was enough evidence of inducement to warrant a trial. Some of those arguments don't really make sense as Ed Felten points out, but the ruling does have the effect of both staving off legislative action and clarifying the legality of the underlying technology.

Open the pod bay doors, blogger!

2005-06-26T10:23:00.000-07:00

Blogger has gone psycho on me, modifying the HTML in my posts in an insidious way that screws up its presentation. The worst part is that I have no control at all over the changes it's been making to my posts. So, if you see a large gap between the end of the first post and the beginning of its footer, you know whom to blame.

(For the curious among you, there is this nasty property clear:both that can be set to flush a division below any previous floats described in the HTML. For some reason, blogger has decided to insert this stuff at the end of each post. Trouble is, the set of links on the left side of the page is a float, causing the footer of my post to get flushed below the end of this float. And I don't know a non-float-based solution for creating two columns, if I wanted a fixed-pixel-width left column and a right column that takes up all that's left of the screen real estate no matter the screen resolution.)

UPDATE 6/27/05 12:00pm: I've now figured out a workaround to restore order and sidestep evil Blogger. I've discovered the joys of absolute positioning, with a little z-ordering and margin trick to make sure the left column can display on top of the main post column. Interested souls can look at the HTML source of this page.

How to lose credibility in scientific discourse

2005-06-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

Dan Burton, Representative from Indiana, is a champion of the alleged link between thimerosal -- a mercury-based preservative used in vaccines -- and autism in children. His first mistake was to call a series of hearings to test a theory that had zero scientific backing and has, in fact, been flatly contradicted by pretty much every reputable scientific institution. I'll let the New York Times describe his second mistake without a trace of irony:

In a series of House hearings held from 2000 through 2004, Mr. Burton called the leading experts who assert that vaccines cause autism to testify. They included a chemistry professor at the University of Kentucky who says that dental fillings cause or exacerbate autism and other diseases and a doctor from Baton Rouge, La., who says that God spoke to her through an 87-year-old priest and told her that vaccines caused autism.

For more on the whole autism story, see here.

Has Katie been brainwashed?

2005-06-23T09:29:00.000-07:00

Back in the tabloid world, Fox News is reporting on the mystery surrounding Katie Holmes' sudden romance with Tom Cruise. To me, the facts hint at the possibility of Holmes being brainwashed while held captive at the headquarters of the Church of Scientology. And the kicker: I am half-inclined to believe that theory.

Perhaps the Cruise-Holmes romance can serve as the basis of the next Batman movie. Exhausted from working long shifts to torture the meek inhabitants of Gotham City with their lousy acting, evil super-villian Cruise and up-and-coming villianess Holmes decide to get hitched in a diabolic plot to unleash their progeny on the unsuspecting masses and take over the world. Can the Dark Knight break them up in time?

Pentagon Humor

2005-06-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

(Via Slashdot) Yet another story in the Government's fascination with databases. Maybe they should just outsource the work to the Direct Marketing Association and save themselves the headache.

"The Washington Post is reporting that the Pentagon is working with a marketing firm to create a database of students ages 16 through college to help them identify recruits. A little chuckle from the Pentagon in the article: '...anyone can opt out of the system by providing detailed personal information that will be kept in a separate suppression file. That file will be matched with the full database regularly to ensure that those who do not wish to be contacted are not, according to the Pentagon.'"

What's the deal with Web ads?

2005-06-21T22:36:00.000-07:00

Today, for the first time ever, I let the New York Times play back an entire ad to me without trying to skip it to get to the article I was trying to read. I was struck by the fact that the ad played out for at least 8 seconds before I was led to my destination page. Does anyone seriously think that a web user would sit around staring at an ad for that long? Or am I just uncommonly impatient?

The Final Nail in the Coffin

2005-06-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

The NY Times reports on on the murder trial of former Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen, accused of masterminding the killing of 3 voter-registration workers working for civil rights in 1964. He escaped conviction on a 11-1 jury split back then when one juror refused to convict a preacher. Ironically, what could seal his fate this time is the last witness called by the defense. From the Times:

The final witness for the defense was a former mayor of the rural town of Philadelphia, Harlan Majure, who testified before a packed courtroom today that the Ku Klux Klan was a "peaceful organization that "did a lot of good up here."

Update 10:40PM: Killen has now been convicted. Edited to clear up the facts on the victims.

The Formula One Fiasco

2005-06-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

The Formula One U.S. Grand Prix race in Indy was thrown into chaos today with seven of the ten teams -- all running Michelin tyres -- deciding to withdraw due to safety concerns about the tyres. It turned out that the Michelins were ill-equipped to deal with a banked turn on the speedway, and a couple of cars experienced blow-outs in practice sessions. While Michelin had a different tyre compound that would've solved the problem, F-1 regulations prohibited teams from switching compounds during the race weekend.

The seven Michelin teams then demanded that either (a) the regulations be removed and the teams be permitted to switch to different tyres, or (b) a chicane be installed on the banked turn to lower speeds and make the circuit safe again. When the FIA rejected both these options, the teams chose to withdraw and released this statement explaining why they had no other option.

The statement conveniently and hypocritically ignores one perfectly viable option that they had, which was even pointed out to them by the FIA: they could just have instructed their drivers to slow down on the banked turn! The chicane wasn't needed to slow down their drivers and make the circuit safer. It was only needed to slow down their competitors racing on Bridgestone tyres. All in all, it was a disastrous weekend for F-1 and its future in the United States remains in peril.

Wacky Idea of the Week: The Cordless PC

2005-06-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

As I have been looking around to upgrade my home computing infrastructure, I've come to the conclusion that nothing out in the marketplace today satisfies my needs. The raw computing power and functionality I can get out of a desktop PC is really good but there's no way in the world I can live without internet access right next to me. After all, how am I going to be able to Google something that pops into my head when watching TV, or check e-mail every 5 minutes, if I have to walk all the way across to my desktop?

Laptops are very good in terms of portability (my laptop habitually sits on the coffee table in my living room) but what about all my functionality then? I don't really want to lug around a big fat machine with a DVD writer, a giant hard disk and the works. Moreover, a high-end laptop is likely to set me back by far more than I'm willing to spend.

I've decided the right solution is actually a combination of the above two: a heavyweight desktop "server" combined with a "thin client" laptop. (Drawing an analogy with telephones, I've chosen to call it the cordless PC.) The desktop piece will simply be a regular, powerful CPU with all the accessories, which can be stashed away in a corner of my bedroom. The thin client is a laptop-like device but with only an LCD screen, a keyboard, trackpoint, battery and a wireless card/chip. No processors or hard disks. (Well, we'll throw in a graphics processor to drive the display.) We also add a "charging" station to the desktop where the thin client is occasionally recharged.

All the processing happens back at the desktop with the wireless card transmitting all keyboard and mouse events across, and getting the screen data back in return. Such a solution comes with many advantages:

I get all the fancy functionality I want (CPU power, big hard disk, DVD and CD burners) without having to lug all of that around in a heavy laptop.
I get an extremely lightweight laptop that is super quiet (no fans or mechanical parts) and doesn't generate any heat.
I get great battery life (again, no processor or hard disk) assuming that the wireless transmissions can be optimized well enough with the right graphics primitives.
It shouldn't be that much more expensive than a regular desktop. I should be able to get one of those thin clients for under $200, a premium I'm perfectly happy to pay.

Steve Jobs Commencement Address

2005-06-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

In keeping with my habit of reporting on old news, here's a transcript of Steve Jobs's address at Stanford's Commencement ceremony on Sunday. No references to the Intel switch and only one potshot at Microsoft, but it was an inspirational talk anyway.

(Funny story behind the link. I'd, of course, listened to the talk live but had no idea that it was up on the web, until Dave Patterson pointed it out on a mailing list at Berkeley, from where it got forwarded to me via Karthik.)

A Letter to the Public Editor, New York Times

2005-06-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Public Editor,

As I was reading the New York Times today, I found the rather captivating headline "Studies Rebut Earlier Report on Pledges of Virginity" and was enticed into reading the associated article. Imagine my bemusement then, when I discover that the so-called "studies" were (a) undertaken by that conservative bastion of independence The Heritage Foundation with an obvious conflict of interest, (b) were not peer-reviewed by any members of the academic community, (c) flatly contradicted results published in a reputable journal, and (d) indulged in laughable calumny against the authors of the earlier study.

I suppose even The New York Times cannot always resist the tabloid urge to go after sensational headlines -- never mind the credibility of the facts -- but what I found mindblowing was that the article failed to provide even the slightest background on the funding source for the "research", The Heritage Foundation. Perhaps The Times expects its readers to have read the previous day's editorial "Next Generation of Conservatives (By the Dormful)" that supplied the aforementioned background?

Sincerely,
Prasanna Ganesan.

Full Metal Jacket blooper, etc.

2005-06-15T00:57:00.000-07:00

As I was catching a rerun of Full Metal Jacket today, I observed one sign betraying(?) the fact that the Parris Island Marine boot camp scenes were actually shot in London: the toilets all had black seats on them, something I've never encountered in the US.

The film itself is perhaps Kubrick's most complex creation, with a strange formal structure that relates in surprising ways to the actual thematic content of the story. Bill Krohn's article, archived at The Kubrick Site, probably sheds the most light on Kubrick's intentions with regard to structure. Contentwise, what distinguishes Full Metal Jacket from other, inferior Vietnam films is its studied neutrality and refusal to manipulate emotions, forcing the audience to make up its own mind on each of the characters.

I've always had difficulty fully comprehending the depth of information that the movie attempts to convey and, to date, I haven't quite figured out what the ending really means. The film is about the Jungian conflict between the individual and the collective unconscious, but who triumphs at the end? (See Michael Herr's essay and this newsgroup discussion.)

Graduation for Dummies

2005-06-14T23:58:00.000-07:00

How to Graduate from Stanford with a Ph.D.:

Join Stanford.
Write a thesis and defend it. Or vice versa.
Get reading committee to sign it.
Spend last day at the movies, utilizing student discount for the final time. (BTW, Mr. and Mrs. Smith was a surprisingly enjoyable Hollywood blockbuster.)
Wake up early in the am to show up at commencement in ceremonial attire.
If feeling bold, abandon ceremonial attire. (Wasn't feeling bold.)
If even bolder, nearly all attire. (Or bolder.)
Tuck into refreshments offered by non-CS depts. on the way to CS ceremony. (I wish I had.)
Wait to be called up, while acting as a blackbody seated in direct sunlight. (Sunscreen is a good idea.)
Wear sunglasses when picking up degree, enhancing coolness factor.
Freeze-frame the moment.
Pity lack of foresight of hungry mates staring in disbelief at the food lines.
Celebrate, but don't lose the degree in a barfight.

RFID Tags and Privacy

2005-06-13T22:41:00.000-07:00

Ted Koppel, in his NY Times op-ed today, writes about the threats to personal privacy from various technologies of convenience. One of his major concerns is the liberal use of RFID tags for various applications -- tags on cars to collect tolls, passport tags for remote reading and tags on pets to track them down when lost.

While some of his concerns are well-founded, I find that the threat of others is exaggerated. Personally, I see no reason to worry that much about RFID tags on cars that help track toll-bridge crossings. True, the toll collectors could find out which car was where when by looking at the logs, but it's not like all that is fundamentally private information otherwise. For example, I make liberal use of my credit card, thus allowing my bank to know exactly where I was when spending all that money throughout the month. That doesn't make me start buying things with cash instead. Moreover, I could always purchase "pre-paid" RFID tags anonymously by paying cash and use such a tag in my car. So, the tracker cannot link the tag ID to my name (although he could correlate multiple trips of mine).

On the other hand, RFID in passports seems like a bad idea. The only possible advantage of RFID over barcodes is that RFID doesn't require physical contact to be read. But there is probably no added convenience since people will still want to physically see my passport and verify that the photo on it looks like me. Worse still, there is a security headache of how to prevent snoopers from reading my RFID passport remotely. There is talk about how to cripple the set-up so that the passport is only readable at very short distances (see Ed Felten's old post here). But all this smacks of a NASA solution to a simple problem, as they might say in Primer. (The story goes that NASA did considerable R&D to develop a pen that could write in zero gravity. The Russians simply used a pencil.)

A Primer on Primer

2005-06-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

I organized a screening of Primer (Winner, 2004 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance) at our little Movie Club this week. The movie is prime fodder for all the geeks of the world with its exciting, relatively rigorous and novel take on time travel as well as its realistic portrayal of technological innovation. It also carries the honor of being the only film that has required me to draw on a whiteboard to explain its story.

Perhaps as intriguing as the movie itself is the story of how it was made by Shane Carruth, an engineer by trade, on a meager budget of $6500. The film effectively transforms its budgetary limitations into a stylistic advantage. Too expensive to shoot all the expository scenes? Skip them and make the narrative disjointed. Cameras and lighting too expensive? Use handhelds and go with a grainy look. Can't shoot multiple takes? We could just live with that first take, even if the actors do look a little confused. After all, time travel does confuse people, doesn't it? And the key to pulling it all off is the carefully crafted, special-effects-free sci-fi story that oozes just the right amount of disoriented confusion.

All of this is not to say that Primer is completely blemish-free, or even that it's a classic. But it is one of those rare movies that excite us by pushing the envelope of artistic possibility.

Google and the Prisoner's Dilemma, Redux

2005-06-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

A while ago, I talked about how easy it was to walk in relatively late into Google's midnight show of Star Wars at AMC Theatres and still find good seats, although the show was sold out. I speculated that the explanation must lie in Googlers being smart enough to cooperate in a game of Prisoner's Dilemma. (See here for the details.) I have since received a number of questions requesting further investigation, as well as some interesting comments proposing alternative explanations.

Anand suggested that the explanation might lie in central coordination, with all the Googlers being told to get there at a certain time, or perhaps through a carpool. A very plausible explanation (I am ashamed I did not suggest it myself) but I have now verified that this wasn't what happened.

Sriram suggested it might have something to do with parking difficulty, but that only makes my case stronger. First of all, everyone should have equal difficulty parking, whether they are from Google or not. Second, when I got to the theater at 11:15, the lot was brimming with more cars than I'd ever seen there before, suggesting that all the non-Google screens were already filling up. Moreover, we have evidence that many people turned up as early as 9pm and filled up these screens as you can see from this photo-journal of Merrie Ringel Morris.

Finally, I contacted a Google insider -- whom I shall only refer to as Sore Throat -- and asked her for her theories. Here is [a slightly edited version of] what she had to say:

First, this is a group of people who knew each other, so it is possible that some of them came early and reserved seats for others. Second, the composition of Googlers who came to the midnight show is different from that of non-Googlers. Googlers had easy access to the tickets and hence needed less activation energy than a non-Googler who had to reserve tickets to come to the movie. So Googlers who came for the midnight show were probably, on average, less interested in the movie than a non-Googler who came for the midnight show, hence coming late.

Both explanations sound interesting and plausible, although I like mine better. :-)

Two Rights make an....alliance?

2005-06-09T10:39:00.000-07:00

Those of you who have been following Indian politics know the big hue-and-cry raised by the right-wing leader L.K. Advani's remarks in Pakistan praising Muhammad Ali Jinnah -- the prime mover behind the Indian partition and father of independent Pakistan -- as "secular". (An early story on his remarks can be found here.) It's possible that Advani was merely being diplomatic and didn't really believe what he said. It's also possible that Jinnah was really a secularist at heart and his fight for Pakistan was a political game in religious clothing.

But the most interesting theory is that, by calling Jinnah secular, Advani has redefined the word enough to call himself secular as well! If I tell you that the other extreme right is really a centrist philosophy, then I must be centrist as well. No? Curiously, Advani's party is, I think, being short-sighted in its vitriolic reaction to his remarks (mostly fueled by silly delusions of a "united India") instead of embracing them as the canny political move they are.

Tired of the same old sports cliches?

2005-06-08T21:56:00.000-07:00

I've always held that all sports interviews should be combined with a game of Taboo to make life interesting. (The one exception would be to let Rasheed Wallace say "Both teams played hard.") But there are the occasional oddballs who make it worthwhile to hear them talk. First of all, I'm sure most people are familiar with Charles Barkley's musings but this fantastic site is a veritable treasure trove of the Chuckster's choice quotes that you can drown in for hours. (via the Bill Simmons intern)

The other thing is, y'all probably never heard of Christian Bimes, head of the French Tennis Federation, but you shoulda listened to his press conference at the French Open. From Jon Wertheim's column in SI:

In a de facto State of the Union address, Bimes -- how to put this?-- julienned few words. Assessing the play of the French players, he noted, "I would like to end by saying that we were disappointed by what Amelie Mauresmo did because, once again, she was not able to face the pressure." [...] Bimes also noted referee Stefan Fransson "is extraordinary because he's cold like a Nordic person, but he's friendly like a Frenchman or a Spanish man."

Why a coupon is like a Doomsday machine...

2005-06-07T19:32:00.000-07:00

I was buying posters at AllPosters.com yesterday when I got to the checkout page and noticed a field for coupons and promotion codes. So I immediately fired up a new tab and did a Google search for "allposters.com coupon". The first result was from a site called Cheap Stingy Bastard and told me that I merely had to type in "DADGRAD" to get 20% off on my entire order.

Now, there are many reasons a store offers coupons for its products. Often, the coupon is used to entice (a targeted set of) customers and get them to buy other stuff, to promote the sale of a particular product, or simply to build brand value for the store. But in all cases, the objective is to attract customer sales by advertising the great deals on offer.

So, why does AllPosters.com hide its coupon away instead of promoting the 20% off special on its home page? I suppose they could hope that regular visitors to their site would be happy to pay full price while the smart bargain hunters (or some limited market of targeted consumers) would be enticed by the coupons. But that strategy backfires spectacularly in the internet era where it takes only seconds to find the coupon once I've decided to make the buy. So, you might as well offer the discount prominently and tempt people to shop on the site!

As Dr. Strangelove might say, "A coupon is like a Doomsday machine. The whole point of it is lost if you decide to keep it a secret." The same law holds even more strongly for rebates, but that's a whole another story.

Gore: From Bore to Man du Jour

2005-06-07T10:44:00.000-07:00

(From the NY Times) Al Gore won the Lifetime Achievement award at the Webbys yesterday, and was limited to five words for his acceptance speech, as were all the other award recipients. So what did he say? "Please don't recount this vote."

An Intent to Cause Fear of Violence

2005-06-07T10:37:00.000-07:00

From the Strange-But-True Department at IMDB:

Two men have been charged with stealing copies of the next Harry Potter novel by police in Northamptonshire, England. Arun Lambert, 19, and a 37-year-old man appeared in court yesterday to respond to Friday's charges over theft and firearm offences. Author JK Rowling was granted a High Court injunction last week to stop the two men leaking details of Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince ahead of its official July release. Lambert is accused of theft and possession of an imitation firearm with intent to cause fear of violence, while his accomplice has been charged with possession of an offensive weapon and handling a stolen book. The men, from Kettering, Northamptonshire, are free on bail.

Isn't it enough to simply charge the guy with theft rather than "posssession of an imitation firearm with intent to cause fear of violence"? I understand why "threatening to shoot with an imitation firearm" might be considered a crime -- you could probably induce a heart attack that way -- but an "intent to cause fear of violence" is two steps removed from violence itself. The phrase also brings to mind the educational video in "A Clockwork Orange" -- that had an intent to cause fear of violence as well.

On the dangers of in-flight communication

2005-06-06T09:48:00.000-07:00

There has recently been a big discussion around the FCC's plans to allow cell-phone use on flights. The FBI, DoJ and DHS think there is a security threat with phone use, since terrorists could potentially coordinate action with them. See here and here for a good analysis (from Educated Guesswork) debunking that theory.

But at the same time, no one seems too concerned about internet access on the planes which, if anything, should be even more dangerous, since the FBI can't snoop on encrypted IP packets like they can with voice calls. The NY Times reports today on United's plans (registration reqd.) to roll out Wi-Fi. And nary a peep on "security" issues.