the brook

Cooking for yourself can be addictive. It’s easy after a while, doesn’t force you to think every day about finding food, makes you crave simple food if you’ve eaten out too much, but most of all it makes you do crazy things at times.

Yesterday I was feeling mighty adventurous and in the mood for trying something different. So I headed to the grocery store and came home with some cabbage.

What induced me to buy cabbage I do not know. Maybe it was some shred of memory of being advised to eat green leafy things. I don’t believe that I could identify cabbage the day before yesterday if my life depended on it. I’ve been trained to eat, not to remember and identify leaf names. In fact, on my way back I read the label on the packet and it said “Wong Bok” which nearly made me decide to get my head examined. A quick Google, however, assured me that the now ominous oval in my hand was indeed cabbage.

I describe the vegetable as ominous because I was now at a stage familiar to nervous bungee jumpers who, having made a painful climb to the top of some bridge or ravine, now ponder the wisdom of letting mindless gravity take charge of their lives. Here I was, someone who barely knows how to cook an omelette and who forgets how many cups of water are needed for one cup of rice – handling a vegetable that in everything but taste was as alien to me as multilateral diplomacy is to George W. Bush.

Like your foolish but egoistic bungee jumper, I decided to take the plunge. Let me warn fellow non-cooks – all the health benefits you may accrue from cooking and eating cabbage cannot make up for the rise in blood pressure that must occur when untrained folk try and get this herb to behave in the kitchen.

A vague intuition told me that I should probably cut this thing before trying to cook it and so I dutifully picked up a knife. If you want to analyze how to cut a raw food item, I doubt you’ll find anything as unyielding as cabbage. Apples are easy, tomatoes are messy but simple, cucumbers can be dangerous but obvious but cabbage… cabbage is a total mystery. I stood there for a few minutes, knife in hand, my mind in knots about the right approach. I was so bashful you’d be forgiven for thinking that I was planning to ask this vegetable out to dinner. Come to think of it, I was. From a certain point of view.

I managed to cook it somehow; though words cannot express how glad I am that no authorities on cooking were on hand to observe me and laugh hysterically. As for the the result – suffice to say I ate what I cooked and lived to tell the tale.

So this morning I was told by someone that they had a slice of bread and half a slice of cheese for breakfast. Half a slice of cheese. I don’t know about you, but this novel idea left me dumbstruck.

Maybe its because I’m a computer scientist and I tend to discretize everything; or maybe it’s because I’m a glutton – but I simply cannot fathom anyone halving sliced cheese. A slice of cheese to me is like a 1-cent coin. It can’t be broken, and it’s way too little to bother breaking anyway.

I know, to some of you out there this post will seem ridiculous. Hindsight is 20/20, once somebody tells you that a slice of cheese can be cut, it seems obvious. I like to think that my state of mind is akin to Rutherford’s after conducting his alpha-particle experiments and realizing that even an atom is made up of tinier parts. Sure, today every 12 year old knows what an atomic nucleus is. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t a big discovery. The guy got an element in the periodic table named after him.

I do not, of course, plan to use this information in any way. Just because you know that an atom can be broken, doesn’t mean you go ahead and try. Bad things have been known to happen. I’ll leave slicing the slice to the experts. But if somebody wants to name a fine cheese after me, I promise I won’t complain.

Yesterday evening, the nation of India watched yet another display of Just In Time Harakiri™ from their cricket team. The fans’ anger, however, was partly directed at the game’s referees, whose actions a viewer mailed in and charitably described as mentally retarded. Indian authorities and fans have complained bitterly not only to the ICC, but also Human Rights Watch, SightSavers International, Help for the Deaf and Dumb, and about twenty-two million gods and goddesses. It’s quite clear that umpire Steve Bucknor is not winning the Bharat Ratna anytime soon.

Every cloud has a silver lining however, and today ought to find Steve Bucknor smiling from ear to ear. A team of scientists have nominated him for the most prestigious prize in mathematics, the FIELDS (Fatally Idiotic Exhibition of Lousy Decision Schema) Medal. Apparently Stevie compares favourably with comsic gamma rays in at least one respect – generating random numbers.

Picky Ronting (name changed to protect identity), who nominated Steve Bucknor and is clearly in awe of the guy, explained. “True random number generation is one of the hardest challenges in mathematics. The best hope we’ve had so far have been purely physical phenomena – the amplitude generation of cosmic rays, for example. But even they have problems – the folks over at the SETI project keep finding patterns even in these signals and tell us about alien communications. We took a string of decisions given by Steve Bucknor and had the SETI folks run it using their distributed computing network of 50,000 computers, and it turns out his decision-making ability is unique for its pure, unadulterated and utter randomness.”

In a world where reasonable accuracy is so easy, we must applaud Mr. Bucknor for risking his outstanding position for the sake of service to science. Let not a few raised eyebrows stop the randomly raised fingers.

The Fake But Possible News Network asserts that any remote similarity of the events reported to reality is purely coincidental.

So I’m in the queue at the Indian food stall in the canteen during lunchtime when this scenario unfolds. A couple of girls up ahead in the queue are chattering ecstatically, as girls are wont to do when a friend of theirs comes and stands right behind me. There was the usual wave of delightful glee and the torturous over-extending of the word “Hiiiiii” in chorus; I’m referring to the kind that must have convinced the apes to evolve away from humankind.

Then the inevtiable happened. The ladies up ahead made a tiny gesture of come-join-us with a perfectly matched roll of the eyes. People who invite other people behind the queue do so in complete confidence. Complete confidence that if someone’s caught and humiliated, it won’t be them. The response of the invitee, however, varies with queue-cutting skills and experience. Real experts can simply melt away from the back of the queue and smoothly appear in front in a process thats similar to gaseous diffusion and is still being examined by many scientists.

The dame behind me, however, after a hesitant glance left and right (I’ve no idea why, all the queue members were in front) shook her head no, and mouthed in a very low voice, “Log maarenge!” I was impressed. And wondered what other things she learned at her mother’s knee. For about twenty seconds.

So our hitherto courteous lady tells her friends surreptitiously in Hindi to just order an extra plate for her. A tactful gesture, assuming nobody figures out what she’s saying. Unfortunately, while this is Singapore with a dominant Chinese-speaking population, the queue is in front of a North Indian stall. All of this becomes irrelevant, however, as soon as this plan is given swift approval in the committee and the question of whats to be ordered crops up. At which point our heroine taps me on the shoulder, asks me to please keep her place in the queue (in English), and moves right up to the stall for the special preview of the chef’s recommendation. Returning, she helpfully translates terms like “chicken”, and “egg” into Hindi and shouts out her order to the co-conspirators in this subtle deception. An order which subsequently gets changed only twice as the lead implementers move up to the front.

By this time everyone in the queue is either trying to hide their smiles or their scorn, depending on how their pre-lunch class went. We’re Indians, queue-cutting is built into our DNA. It’s not that which worries us. It’s just that this particular damsel was saved from being in distress only because we’re way too civilized to helpfully point out glaring errors in queue etiquette. A concern about a fellow Indian who’s clueless while cutting a queue. A concern which only deepens as her two friends come down the queue with three plates of food, and suddenly, she seems to have an idea. Brightly she makes a double circular gesture with her hands and says, “Why don’t I come with you gals?” and walks away leaving behind some people with a palpable mix of emotions, ranging from homesickness to amusement.

I couldn’t hear the mutters of everyone in the queue, but I did hear someone who had to be a Star Wars fan say in a low voice, “Much to learn, she still has.”

The Economist writes:

Indeed, this is the nub of the nurturists’ argument. Natural selection should have pushed intelligence genes as far as they will go, so all variation should be environmental. That it is not suggests there is some unknown countervailing advantage—at least in reproductive terms—to being less than averagely bright.

In India, we used to celebrate the 14th of November (birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru) as Children’s Day in school. It was one of the few days when wearing our uniforms was not compulsory, and instead of classes we used to have games and fun all day long. Truly the good old days.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

– Khalil Gibran

The photo is a mosaic of snaps taken from my Flickr stream.

Here’s one article on rediff:

Here’s another:

Looks like our two esteemed world leaders have decided to make love, not war. The happy couple are, of course, to be applauded except that I wish they would, maybe, find a room? And no thank you, Rediff, one can do without the images.

In a startling discovery made by combining the latest artificial intelligence technology and data mining of health news sources, it has been shown that being charged with possession of assets disproportionate with one’s known sources of income is the leading cause of high blood pressure and coronary problems in India. See here for an example.

A high-level parliamentary committee has been formed to investigate such distressing cases and is widely expected to recommend that CBI teams start having emergency medical training and carrying defibrillators, and offer the accused a stiff drink while reading them their rights which include, ‘You have the right to go to hospital in case jail is a bit too harsh for you.’

If I had known that what I’m doing would one day be labeled by one of the world’s biggest companies as “Tafiti”, I can assure you I would have reconsidered a foray into research.

So Microsoft has debuted a beta of Tafiti (which means “do research” in Swahili). I can’t run it yet – of course it doesn’t work on Linux – but from what I’ve read, it can be summed up as “Copy and Paste from the Web”. Couldn’t they find an African word for that? Oh, wait… they did.

I have a theory behind African naming. Quick question: What’s as rare as in the Internet in Africa, other than matter in the universe? Answer: Good domain names in normal languages, of course. In a world where even http://www.wednesdaynightcheese.com/ and http://www.ifoldspacewithmymind.com/ are taken up, it’s not too hard to understand why someone rushed out and bought http://www.thegoodnamesweretaken.com/. And of course, this is true for almost every language in the world which is spoken by Internet accessing folks. We now have no choice but to turn to Africa; our last remaining resource of domain names until someone starts giving them cheap Internet access.

This grows into a rather neat startup idea. Start up a firm and buy domain names and transferable trademarks of words in any and all African languages, even those spoken by now-extinct gorillas in the disappearing forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Then start charging exorbitant fees for “brand consulting in the next century”. Your contribution will be to analyze market trends and shifting paradigms to maximize perceived identification with customers for a more human-centric branding strategy.

For example, if MSN and Yahoo join hands in search, the resulting engine could be called “Jomaiglooeghatahata”, an Angolan word for “We tried to beat Google but couldn’t”. The newest iPhone accessory range could be branded “Yootodomiyooto”, a poetic Gabonese word which elegantly translates as “We fleece you some, then we fleece you some more”. The phrase “Inev Idiv Iciv Ucho”, hailing from Burkina Faso, would serve as the perfect momentum-giving tool to Operation Iraqi Freedom, conveying unequivocally “We came, we found nothing, we keep getting hit and now we’re stuck”. And… well, you get the picture.

The business, of course, could use a professional sounding catch phrase like “Roonimoondonakagutu”, which in an ancient Namibian dialect that means “We know it sounds ridiculous, but trust us it works.”

There. I was planning to do all this myself but I decided to give it away. I feel generous today. No not lazy, generous. Go and make your billions. Drop me a penny or two after.

The Washington Post is an oasis of sanity in a desert of inexplicable fanaticism:

Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy “The Deathly Hallows” on a single day. There’s something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the unique pleasures of reading a novel: that increasingly rare opportunity to step out of sync with the world, to experience something intimate and private, the sense that you and an author are conspiring for a few hours to experience a place by yourselves — without a movie version or a set of action figures.