We watched the IPL T20 Finals yesterday. Some random musings:

• We had subscribed to Willow.tv but YouTube quality was way better even though free. Willow.tv was $60 for the entire season. I wonder if advertising can pull in that kind of revenue per viewer. There was a lot of wastage, I thought. That dual SIM ad with Gambhir and Sehwag is now deeply etched on my brain for no useful purpose at all.
• We were supporting Chennai but not really with any passion (I didn’t have a hoarse throat at the end of the game). We have supported an Indian team for so long that it is difficult to take sides when Dhoni and Tendulkar are on different teams. I wonder if this happens to other folks too. A friend from Bangalore was actually supporting the Chennai team just because they liked Dhoni. Another one, also, from Bangalore supports KKR for similar reasons. Is it because we so much identify with the Indian team or is it because we are all rootless, economic migrants who don’t identify with a particular city?
• When Raina [corrected from Tendulkar] was dropped off Zaheer Khan, you could read his lips so clearly it should have been bleeped out.
• The whole Shashi Tharoor matter has got me foxed. I cannot make head or tail of it. Some woman who had some connection with Tharoor got sweat equity in a company that was part of the consortium that won the bid for the Cochin IPL team. Now, I don’t watch Indian TV. Nor am I part of the grapevine on this kind of a thing. But from just reading online, I couldn’t make out why he had to leave. To leave he either had to have used his position as a minister to influence the selection process or there was some hanky panky going on between Tharoor and the woman which could not be denied. Or he chose not to deny it. If anyone can illuminate this clueless NRI with some links in the comments, it will be much appreciated.
• The IPL has too much money involved for politicians to stay away from it. BCCI is already in their clutches. Cricket is too important to mess around with. How about if someone with unimpeachable credentials who also cared deeply about cricket became interim Chairman of IPL. Just long enough to put a new charter in place and hire a Commissioner with great credentials. Running IPL is like running a mega corporation. Experience with regional sports bodies has no relevance to the job. The new charter should put the players and owners in charge with some other people on the board who will make sure that short-term greed doesn’t destroy the national pastime.
• The stats could be much, much better. The IPL website was pathetic on stats. Cricinfo was better, but not quite there. Or maybe I wasn’t looking in the right place.

Related posts:

1. IPL on YouTube
2. Why are IPL Cheerleaders all Firangis?

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A naming convention designed for a planet with 100 million people (as on 500 BCE) is hopelessly useless in the world where the number of people to be named has expanded 70-fold. What was designed to be a unique identifier (viz. “Gaurav”, son of the “Rastogi” family) is no longer unique now. By my reckoning, there must be another 5-600 people called “Gaurav Rastogi”, and another 5-10,000 people called “Amit Garg”. Living. Today. Waiting for their unique names.

I completely concur that this is a problem that needs a modern day solution. Many an email has been sent to the wrong Gaurav Rastogi or S. Raghavan. Sometimes, said Raghavan may not even be in the company. When said Raghavan got my second email meant for the internal Raghavan, he said something like “You think I left the company just to keep getting your stinking emails?!”

In a way he was kind. Most recipients of email not intended for them just keep quiet. They hope that no one will notice and they’ll keep getting copied on an entertaining battle for supremacy between two people who wouldn’t be quibbling if they’d just meet and talk. But where’s the fun in that.

The funny thing is that the very person who sends out an email screaming “Stop copying me on this s***. It doesn’t concern me.” will silently read every single email from some email chain in another company where he’s been copied inadvertently.

As far as misdirected email is concerned, MS Outlook is the culprit – specifically, the way it handles display names. If the name of the recipient is recognized by the type ahead, you press return. You never even see the email address. (I haven’t used Outlook in years now. They may have changed their design.)

Back to names. Gaurav is on the money – the two name convention no longer works. Inserting numbers is a good idea. Kind of like IPv6 – increase the number of digits and you have enough room for every man made object to have an IP address. The only problem is, people (unlike routers) might prefer not to have digits in their names. Unless of course Oprah (she of the one name only) goes for it.

Americans use the middle name to overcome this problem which would have been particularly acute because of the low diversity in first names in America (Jack, Bob, Joe…). But then they rarely use their middle names or initials and so the disambiguation problem remains.

Most North Indians have two names – first and last. Kumar and Singh can be common middle names in the North. But since as middle names they are so common they don’t go too far on disambiguation. In Maharashtra, your father’s name is generally your middle name. This is a good system and expands the namespace considerably.

But the best naming convention comes from Telegu land. The Gults have always had it right. A common naming convention is a name, or sometimes two, prefixed by a series of letters – T.S.P.S. Prasad, for instance. While they may get joshed about their names (Hey Prasad, what’s your full name, yaar? Come on tell, no!) their names are designed for the modern, Malthusian world.

The Gult name disambiguates very well. With three or four near random letters, there is ample scope for disambiguation. But it does another thing well. The name is typically a common name like Prasad. Which makes it easy for the people around Prasad to remember and pronounce his name correctly. Unlike say a name like Basab which disambiguates well, but nobody knows how to pronounce. Meanwhile, the preceding initials allow for unique identification by email and other systems.

In the short term Gults may face some trouble in countries like the US where they will want you to neatly fit into the first-name-last-name box. But they should take solace from the fact that theirs is the superior system and one day the whole world will follow it.

By that time, of course, graduates from Osmania university would have taken over the US, so it’ll be easier to mandate a change to naming conventions. I hope they’ll also mandate a change to the metric system.

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Everything in the IPL seems to be well thought out and well executed, for an operation that’s in its formative stages. So there must be a good reason why all (or at least most) of the cheer leaders are firangi (I hate the term ‘non-Indian’ which is more PC. Here firangi is more apt anyway.)

I asked a few friends why this was so. There’s a cap on the number of foreign players that a team can play. But when it comes to cheer leaders, there are no rules. Nobody knew exactly why this is so. But some of the hypotheses were:

- Indian women would never do this. Goes against the grain of our culture. Besides, who would marry them after they did a gig with IPL?

- Indian women can’t do it. The problem is not that they can’t do the moves. It’s that with their body types, those moves would send the men folk amongst the spectators into orbit. That’s not good for business. Just ask the English football clubs about their rampaging drunk male fans.

- Security reasons. Shiv Sena and other cultural police pretenders threaten physical harm to women who showed that much leg and midriff. The culture cops apparently have no problem with firangi women debasing themselves.

- Economics. If you have the figure and the moves, becoming a Bollywood item girl pays much better. And is less hazardous.

- Cheerleader positions have been offered to cricketing nations whose players have not found enough spots on the IPL teams. (OK I made this up)

None of these ring true to me. But if I had to pick one, I’d go with the “afraid of Shiv Sena” reason.

Any thoughts?

Photo by S V Jagadeesh

Related posts:

1. Sena Mobocracy

For a while I thought that this was my problem. I do know that my reading speed is generally less than my friends. My wife reads at twice the speed that I read, for example.

But that is not the reason. I have compared notes with others who read non-fiction. And most people don’t finish their non-fiction books, especially if they read a lot of non-fiction and there’s another book waiting for them. The problem is widespread, if not universal.

I have a hypothesis for why this is so. Non-fiction books are typically written around a set of concepts, notions, historical perspectives etc. Often these concepts, while original, can be concisely written in the form of an article in a journal or a magazine. Or just a blog post. However, there is no model to monetize that other than the ridiculously low fee the print media industry, itself under threat, might pay you.

If you think that your ideas have power, the only way to monetize it in any substantial way writing about them, is to write a book. A book has certain definitional boundaries. It has to be say a hundred pages or more. The fatter it is, the more justifiable is the price of $20 or $30 or whatever. So you end up writing page after page, chapter after chapter on ideas that don’t really have the legs to go that far. In the process you make a book that can’t hold the reader’s interest till the end.

I am being a little foolhardy in bringing this up right now, when I am writing my maiden book myself. It’ll be a business book, and I can just hear you say, “Well let’s see what your book turns out to be, Basab.” Well, Gaurav and I are hoping it will be packed with insightful goodness and will hold your attention till the end. And now that I’ve put this post out there, it gives us a goal – get the reader to finish the book.

Related posts:

1. Kindle Doesn’t Quite Work for Non-Fiction
2. What I Am Upto

For me personally, this has been a challenging year. I started out the year looking to switch gears and do something else after my four year stint at Gridstone. But a family health issue has become a priority that trumps everything else. This will require my wife’s and my full attention for a while. If there is one thing I hope the next year will bring is better health for my son.

In the meanwhile, I am working with startups and interesting companies, helping them to the extent I can. It keeps the juices flowing and hopefully I can add some value to their business.

This blog is now like an old friend to me. A constant companion, through good times and tough times. Always there for a couple of hours of enjoyable company. By extension, you, my readers are like old friends too. I feel like I know the regular commentors well even if I’ve never met you.

And the silent majority, the readers who read but never join the discussion, thank you for coming back again and again. Here’s a humble suggestion. If you do one thing in 2010, join the discussion. Not necessarily on this blog. On any blog. On issues and topics that matter to you. Be heard. And hear yourself. It will feel good. Like you are plugging in to this massive collective brain that is humanity online. Like exercising your vote. It can be empowering.

I hope all of you have a great 2010. Or just a better year, perhaps. Happiness is a choice. I hope you choose to be happy.

Cheers!

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Fremont has a very high percentage of immigrants among the city residents. Especially North Fremont, where I live has a sizable Indian crowd. Most, like us are immigrants. Because of which Indian food, groceries and Bollywood movies are all within a ten minute drive, which is nice. Recently an Indian Church has come up close to where I live. I have never seen one before.

The proportion of Indian Christians amongst immigrant Indians may be higher than in India but still should not be more than say 10%. And given that there will be plenty of options on churches to join in the US, I wonder what drives the need for an Indian church. Could it be that Syrian Catholics (or other Indian Christian communities) from India practice their faith differently enough to feel the need for a separate church? Or is it the need to share their common, distinctive culture which an American church does not fulfill?

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Here goes (alphabetically, of course):

Drunken Ultimatums. Revenge trumps rationality. An experiment with drunks shows how.

Empty Beer Bottles Make Better Weapons. The fizz in the full ones causes them to break at lower impacts.

Forensic Polling Analysis. A pollster is being accused of cooking up the numbers based upon non-random trailing decimals in their data. Fascinating work from Nate Silver.

Glow in the Dark Dog. The first transgenic dog with a gene from a sea anemone. A world of possibilities open up.

Google Algorithm as Extinction Model. Applying Google Page Rank algorithm to a food web in nature to determine which species are most at risk. My personal favorite.

Infant Sleep is Destiny. Poor sleeping habits in infants in the first 18 months correlates to lower executive function later in life.

Killer Earth. Man is not unique in propagating its own species to a point that its own survival is threatened. Over the life of earth, near “biocide” has happened many times before.

Massively Collaborative Mathematics. An unsolved math problem called Density Hale-Jewett Theorem was solved by mathematicians collaborating on the comment section of a math blog.

Myth of the Deficient Old Employee. Rejoice, those of us over 40.

Printable Batteries. If batteries can go flat (the screens and circuit boards already are) we could be looking at a new age of flat-electronics.

Random Promotions. A simulated computer model shows that promoting people randomly in an organization can lead to better results than promoting them on performance in current job (Peter Principle). Don’t try this at home!

Resomation. Cremation takes too much energy. Burial, real estate. The answer is Resomation – liquefying the remains and sending them down the drain.

Subscription Artists. Microfinance for creative pursuits.

Weapons for Mosquito Destruction. Using lasers against mosquitos.

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The team analyzed 132 genotypes from 25 groups in India. The findings are quite interesting.

The key finding is that there are two distinct ancestral populations for most Indians

… two ancient populations, genetically divergent, that are ancestral to most Indians today. One, the ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI), is genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans, whereas the other, the ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI), is as distinct from ANI and East Asians as they are from each other.

Most Indians have an admixture of the two ancestral genomes. The Onge of Andaman are purely ASI.

The proportion of ANI in the genome is higher for North Indians and upper caste groups. Also, the data indicates a high degree of ‘endogamy’, or marrying within ones group. The jaati boundaries have been rigidly maintained in India for millennia.

The findings are not very surprising for those of us who learned about the Aryan invasion in school. The higher proportion of ANI in the north, ties in with the direction of the invasion/migration. The higher proportion of ANI in upper castes also agrees with the invasion theory. However, the paper makes no conclusions about an Aryan invasion or the timing of any such migration from Central Asia/Europe.

The paper does however go against the Out of India theory that has been promoted lately primarily by Hindu nationalists. This theory says that Indo-Europeans originated in India and migrated from there to the rest of Europe. If that were the case, along with ANI, ASI would also be found in the rest of the Europe. ASI is found only in India.

Razib Khan has written a few posts around the paper and its themes. This search query should get you to the posts quickly, if you are interested. Khan, however, does not jump to the conclusion that ANI equals Aryan invasion. He talks about some his reservations in this video conversation. (Go to 42:10 for the discussion on Indian genetics).

Another interesting video conversation is Razib Khan with Greg Cochran (author of The 10,000 Year Explosion). Cochran posits that the mutation that allowed human beings to digest lactase could have been the “killer app” that allowed Central Europeans to spread out and dominate much of Eurasia.

Related posts:

1. Indian Church in Fremont
2. Management Consulting in India

In the last two months I have gotten hooked on to a puzzle called KenKen. It is similar to Sudoku, but different. I never played Sudoku much so I am not the best person to do a compare and contrast. But like Sudoku it comes to us from Japan. It was invented by Tetsuya Miyamoto, a Mathematics professor.

Will Shortz of the New York Time explains how to play it.

The New York Times has other coverage, besides hosting new puzzles every day.

Try it. It’ll give you hours of enjoyment. Also, if you have school going children, especially elementary school kids, this is a good way to make practicing arithmetic or logic, fun.

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