Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Started Reading

I decided to continue my reading this month with spy fiction and zeroed on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I have seen the movie but luckily I forgot who was the mole. I remember the actor who played the mole but I don't remember name of his character. So it is still a mystery novel to me. But more than plain spy fiction, I have so far really enjoyed the novel for its detailing of back office process. While the reading is still progressing, I came across this review in my rss feeds of LitHub. As if universe was conspiring for me to read this (and if it was, couldn't it find a worthier aim to conspire for !!).

Goodluck Longreads

Story or information is not everything. its presentation matters a lot. A well written piece can make an otherwise mundane news read worthy whereas a badly written piece can convert an interesting news into trash. I first noticed in Readers Digest many years back the style of giving all the background information, projecting the personality of main characters, and other such quirks which would bring alive  the story being depicted in front of reader. I have had the god fortune of reading many more such stories in past few years and they are a joy to read. lately, one source of such stories has been weekly newsletter I receive from Longreads and therefore I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they are also into funding original pieces. More can be read here. I really liked the idea that readers contribute but they do not decide what gets funded. I fully support this. Not just because, as the article reports, that it is not yet known how the report will turn out to be. Rather, I have come to see division of labor as a very important and useful idea and therefore in today's world of information overload, we should let professional editors take decisions about what gets funded and what gets curated. 

Very impressive

This is sweet.

Week two of 2017: In Cold Blood

My reading in second week of 2017 was of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. It is reporting of a crime incident which took place in Kansas in late 1950s. I am currently incompetent to comment on writing and content. I liked the book and enjoyed reading the description of scenes and events.

Book Review: Beyond the lines by Kuldeep Nayyar

Kuldeep Nayyar (KN henceforth) was an information officer with Government of India and a journalist/columnist who had a front row seats to many important events in independent India. He wrote many books and columns in his life time. I am currently reading his autobiographical memoir titled: 'Beyond the lines: An Autobiography'. 

Book starts with brief description of his days in Sialkot in Pakistan where his father was a physician and describe the changes in environment as partition day approaches. After the partition, KN had a chance to meet and work closely with many people who were responsible to take many decisions concerning partition and he very skilfully explains the situation as he observed and then justification which people gave at some later day behind their decision which led to those situations. This reflects badly on my lack of knowledge but I was not aware that there were many variables and possibilities considered before partition and although I don't have any deeper understanding of Kashmir issue, at least now I know that I don't know much about Kashmir issue.
 

   

Google Translator and Deep learning

I was in Santiago, capital of Chile, in November 2016. It was the first time when I had difficulty in communicating with people because not many speak or understand English. Once I wanted to order pizza and for that I first typed things into my google translator and converted it into spanish and then the nice guy at reception ordered the pizza for me. I like to think of myself as quite technologically literate -- I can design neural nets and what not -- but this was the first time when I realized its power in helping people get through with their day to day work !!! 
NYT has an in depth article covering the introduction of deep learning to google translator with lots of background. It can be accessed here. While I knew almost all the technical information provided in the article, actual implementation in Google was new to me. I am looking forward to many more improvements in future. Good luck to all the people working out there in this field. 

P.S.: I found that comments on blogs on my website are not yet functional. I have therefore  decided to switch back to blogger for now.

Blog alt

It has been long time since I posted anything. Not that I have been not writing. But what I am writing is not relevant to blog. Not that what I have posted yet is relevant to anyone. Yet it feels good to post something. I don't know why. Anyway, I happened to chance upon a tweet which linked to an article and article was interesting and part of it discussed origin of blogger and I felt like sudden urge to come here and type these words and post it. So here I am. Link to the article is this. I am immensely grateful to countless people who posted one thing or other on the net through their blogs. Of course I have come across many useless sited too. But for me experience has been net positive. Apparently people are moving to other mediums of expression. Sited dedicated exclusively to photo sharing, sites where you can pin things etc. I have a personal domain and I also toyed with the idea of moving all my posts their but somehow could not do it. May be it was laziness. Most probably it was laziness. So here I am still posting the post from my blogger account.   

Intelligent Octopus

Article in nature. No wonder. They did invent deodorant.

FORTRAN founding team

Someone posted the 2007 obituary of John W. Backus on reddit recently. I was introduced to Fortran in 2009 spring semester, almost two years after. One bit I found interesting was the team which created FORTRAN. As per the article, it consisted of:

...included a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee on loan from United Aircraft, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar College...

PK highly overrated

 PK is highly overrated. A very nice subjected dealt tritely. Does not deserve all the praise. Almost everything, be it acting or direction or locations or story, appears to be thought of in one sitting. It is as if people sat and implemented first thought which came to them. Will add. 

Reading with writing

NYR Blog has a very nice essay about how to read and recommends always having a pen or some marking weapon while reading. I have also found this approach very useful but most of my marks were '?', 'why', and so on. Not like the image posted on the blog. I fully agree though that reading should always be done with writing. Here is the link: http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/dec/03/weapon-for-readers/  

(1/4) Intro/History: Introducing a 100-year-old mechanical computer

Happy New Year

I watched Happy New Year on the day of its release. It was all that I expected minus long overly emotional scenes. My expectations were based on previous Farah Khan movies such as Main Hoon Naa and Om Shanti Om. While these movies were high on entertainment value, they also had some scenes which seemed stretched. This was, thankfully, absent from Happy New Year. There was an attempt to provide emotional underpinning to overall heist plan and also loose patriotism at the end but it did not affect the pace of the movie. Actors were good. Or rather they fit their characters very nicely. There were more than its fair share of songs and dances. Story was normal but then one should not expect original story. There were some loose ends but then again one should judge a movie based on what is expected of it. Bullet points summarizing my experience:

• I don't regret watching it paying full price 
• I don't regret spending 3 hrs of my time watching it  

On assembly results of Aurangabad

2014 Assembly elections in Maharashtra has resulted in MIM opening its account in state. One of the seats it won is Aurangabad. Supriya Sharma has a nice write up on the candidate and relevant history. Article can be found here. Many interesting points: (1) Lack of reasonable alternatives for minorities when it comes to elections (2) Lack of reasonable alternatives for people who want to contest election (3) Compulsion of electoral politics in India. All in all a good and timely post. 

Google Scholar at 10

Google Scholar, that beautiful service from Google especially helpful for out-of-organized-research-community people like me completes 10 years in 2014. Medium has an article on it at here. 

Document management

I have been using Calibre for managing my ebooks. Recently I started using it to manage all my reading documents, particularly journal article. While it has good enough functionaliy, I find it liitle slow for my taste. May be about time I should write some document manager for my local machine. Fact that caliber was written and even today mostly maintained by an individual assures me that I can try to muild a rudimentary, local running, optimized for a single machine document manager. Till then, calibre is more than sufficient.

Sentences I would be happy to use - 1

'...it would be rude to blame individuals for the collective depravity of their genre...'

From this article in Atlantic. 

Unusual Job Description

Arrived in my mail box today, a recruiter's mail. Usual stuff, except when it was not. Company is in the field of assistive healthcare technology. Beside usual words like rockstar programmer, following line stood out:

"..Make products that win awards from the President of India and MIT and are subjects of TED talks..."

These are great things for publicity, but how do you predict which product has potential to win these kind of things or quantify it. Did someone run any analysis on list of Presidential award winners or TED talks?

Google unveils plan for voterless democracy

 

It may seem true, but is a work of fiction.

Mountain View Company, best known for making sure internet is working and for coming up with relevant Wikipedia pages for engineering course projects, has now started working on voter less democracy. Google has a history of venturing into innovative and potentially disruptive products. It has previously developed a userless social network (an internal memo accessed by this reported found that 'r' was a typo which stuck, nonetheless both name would have been true) and recently launched a driverless cars where no drivers are installed thereby eliminating need for automatic rebooting.

Google has been facing stiff competition from Facebook, another silicon valley based company which allows user to stalk other users. Internal study conducted by Google revealed increased user enthusiasm on Facebook during recently held Indian general election. With many states in India going to election in coming time, and many times after that, founders at Google have taken a long term view by working on voter less democracy. On condition of anonymity, a Google executive involved in this project confirmed and said they are getting full support from Indian political parties, particularly AAP whose leader who was shocked to find that 'Desh ki janta Modi ke sath mili hui hai'. INC has supported the idea on condition of Rahul Baba and his speeches on women, their empowerment, and state of mind being first search result whenever anyone searches something in form of a question. On being asked for a comment on this plan, congress spokesperson said that Party has always maintained that voting is nothing but just a state of mind. BJP, still unable to figure out where did they fucked up to land up with so many seats and now have no idea what excuses to make when they fail to fulfill their election manifesto given that they have no coalition pressure excuse to rely on, do not want to take a second chance. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO did not seem much perturbed though. 'Indian democracy has never been a voter driven democracy. It is family, caste, money, liquor, anything but voter driven. We have known this before and whole purpose of Facebook was to make people believe what they always wanted to believe that they have a say in Indian election by providing them a virtual wall where they can paint their political belief, just like Indian political parties paint real wall with hollow slogans', said Mark, sitting next to Teja.

While plan is out, there is still not much information how Google will pursue this. It can substitute real voters with its robots from Boston Dynamics or use algorithms developed at Deep Mind to figure out who should be in the new council of ministers. A notable development, after this announcement, was investment of an undisclosed amount by private equity firm into Radia's company which has previous experience in ministry formation without involvement of voters.

Constitutional expert were unanimous in their view, after searching in Google, that there are no hindrance in this approach which a small constitutional amendment can't take care of. 'It will still be for the people, just little off and bye to people' said one of the expert. Amazon, not to be left behind, has started working on adding a 'buy' to the democracy. Jeff Bezos said they have been working on a same day, drone delivered democracy. They have tested this in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Western Pakistan. Flipkart, with no idea how to respond to this, has raised another round of USD 376 Million.

 

Review of Four weddings and a funeral at Atlantic

I think it was Love Actually which first prompted me to go for all the Richard Curtis movies and I was not disappointed. Four weddings and a funeral was one of them. Since then, I think it is the second movie of Curtis which I have watched more than once, other being Love Actually. A nice review of movie at Atlantic appeared here.