the brook

In terms of chronology, this is the oldest authorized Star Wars fiction novel. Written by the writer of the KOTOR games, it describes a period even before the Old Republic when the Sith and the Jedi were numerous and warring against each other – and the story is about how the well known Sith principles of only two Sith Lords arose.

The main character starts from humble beginnings in a cortosis ore mine and ends up training on a Sith academy by accident – and later goes on to become the most powerful of them all.

The book deals mostly with dark side, of course. We’re shown the motivations and thought processes of the Sith, which is the really interesting part – most Star Wars books actually involve the Sith only as the enemies but this is a book written entirely from their perspective. So the “enemy” are the Jedi, and the “good” qualities are betrayal and treachery and the “weakness” is compassion.

The writing is decent, but it isn’t as good as say Matthew Stover or Timothy Zahn. But it’s definitely a page-turner for any Star Wars fan.

Rating: 4 / 5

I thought Guns, Germs and Steel was a brilliant book; and this work from Jared Diamond far surpasses it.

We hear many important messages all the time, but there’s nothing like a good story to add impact. Except, maybe, a true story. Or maybe a dozen true stories. If you pick up this book in a bookstore and read the jacket and the cover, you’ll know that this is a book describes societies in the past and the present that have faced challenges to their survival, mainly due to exhausted or severely depleted resources that they were dependent on. Each story is wonderfully told, as gripping as a fantasy epic. Yet through his writing, the author manages to convey that these were humans, just like us and lived through choices just as we do. Jared Diamond critically analyzes all known aspects of a society and condenses to a few major points the salient reasons why a society collapsed, or why it survived. That in itself is a great read, always thought-provoking and often mind-blowing.

Then we come to the smaller, but far more impactful part of the book; where we’re shown the resource management problems of today’s world – growing population, reducing soil fertility, loss of biodiversity, air pollution, forest cover reduction among others. We’re told how each one of them are created, how people, nations and business are trying (or not) to solve them, and how significant the potential impact on our lifestyles can be. In his words,

Our world society is presently on a non-sustainable course, and any of our 12 problems of non-sustainability that we have just summarized would suffice to limit our lifestyle within the next several decades. They are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years.

…because we are rapidly advancing along this non-sustainable course, the world’s environmental problems will get resolved, in one way or another, within the lifetimes of the children and young adults alive today. The only question is whether they will become resolved in pleasant ways of our own choice, or in unpleasant ways not of our choice, such as warfare, genocide, starvation, disease epidemics, and collapses of societies.

And well, at the end of the day, all I can say is – he proves his point. This is not environmentalism for it’s own sake; the arguments made are scientific and rock-solid. Just reading about the collapses made me think of how little attention we pay to how our resources are consumed. Coupled with the analysis at the end of the book, the overall effect is extremely sobering.

I feel there isn’t a single person who will not benefit by reading this book – it’s message is too important to ignore, and too well-conveyed to resist.

Rating: 5 / 5

I came across Swivel today, and it’s a fascinating place. It’s a repository of publicly-uploaded data (and corresponding auto-generated graphs, it seems like) on anything under the sun. Today’s front page shows me interesting graphs on the falling US contribution to physics, top reasons why books get banned, and airline accidents and fatalities over the years.

The graphs are all Javascript (mouseover actions over a bar show the actual value), and there seem to be some basic manipulations you can do because of this. It’s still not very clear to me how they intend to ensure the reliability of data as service use increases, though. And I’d like for the graphs to be embeddable in web-pages as well as exportable in various (Swivel claims all data is Creative Commons).

Although I’d vaguely heard of it before, I just tried it out, and it’s great. If you use Firefox, the better gmail extension is a must have! Some of the things are really useful – like Saved searches (I’ve actually written feedback to Google to include this feature) and displaying the unread message count first in the title bar. I like their “Super clean” skin as well (except that it doesn’t skin the Saved searches box).

Here’s a screenshot (click to view large):

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.

At first sight, the scorecard is hard to believe. Scotland made 152 in 30 overs, and yet the target for the Windies was a “revised” 165.

Turns out it’s due to the Duckworth Louis system, as the match suffered from two rain delays and was twice reduced in the first innings, first to 42 overs, then to 30. It does make sense, though – if a team knows there are only 30 overs to bat, they’ll be more aggressive.

As it turns out, the Windies just about survived.

A nice touch by Google – they now have a flash-based web viewer for powerpoint presentations.

James Earl Jones, whose lent his voice to the unforgettable Darth Vader, will read the Declaration of Independence at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, USA (via).

If only we could hear a slightly modified version… “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to dissolve Rebel scum…”

From The Economist:

The danger in developing a gadget that tries to be a phone, internet appliance and iPod all in one is that it can fail to accomplish each as well as it might… simply making a phone call is more cumbersome than it should be, requiring up to half a dozen different steps.

I use my phone for maybe minutes a day, and I’d really like to keep it that way. No matter how gorgeous the screen may be, does anyone really want to spent more than half an hour a day staring at a 3.5 inch screen? 95% of the calls I make from my phone require two clicks (speed-dials). By now, I can type an SMS without even looking at my phone (I have a 3 year old Nokia 7250i by the way). No matter how innovative or great looking a phone is, I feel it’s important to get the basics right.

If you really think about it – the iPhone is sort of an “attention hungry” device. Because it has no keys a user must use the touchscreen to operate it. Here’s a test – can I write an SMS with just one hand? Can I at least make a call? How about change the volume of the currently playing song? I suspect the answer is “probably not”. An innovative new interface doesn’t mean the old ones aren’t useful. What do you think of someone who uses the mouse to go to Edit->Copy and Edit->Paste instead of pressing Ctrl/Cmd + C and Ctrl/Cmd + V?

For a convergence device which is supposed to do “everything” and run OS X, I really hope Apple does provide a real programming interface for the iPhone other than web apps. I cannot understand their point of view that third-party apps are a security concern (after all, Windows mobile phones have been around without serious security issues for years, is Apple saying OS X is more insecure?). Not only are they preventing serious users (who want things like SSH) from buying the iPhone, they’re also pretty much trying to cut out a large part of the mobile-phone software industry, which is no good thing given that it’s a market that Apple has just entered.

It is quite probable though, that second generations (and smaller version) iPhones are already in the design stage and hopefully they’ll address some of the issues around the first-gen iPhone. I would certainly love to see an iPhone with full-fleged Safari running on hardware that has some basic keys as well as the touchscreen interface.

A great book. The author clearly feels that the Indian national character has some fundamental problems – we are free-riders, seek to serve self over society, are way too intelligent for our own good. These traits lead to the phenomena which plague Indian society – things like corruption and it’s general acceptance, unhealthy levels of public hygiene and pollution, the pathetic state of core systems like education, and the tendency to pursue loopholes relentlessly even when they do no good in the long run. These points, while perhaps not representing the complete picture (India has improved a lot, in my opinion) are still very hard to argue against.

He explains this in terms of a game-theory concept called Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD), which is basically a story about how two people have a choice to either co-operate with each other or betray – and it turns out that the overall best case scenario happens to be when both cooperate, although it could be argued that it would seem more self-serving for each to betray. Of course, the link is that Indians tend to betray (society) to achieve personal gains – like throw garbage on the road for personal convenience, or cut queues where ever possible – but which lead to a non-optimal society and thus reduced benefit for all.

The example is used convincingly to address a lot of issues; however the author stops at making any scientific claims (he says in the prologue itself that his ideas are not exactly backed by scientific data but could be valid hypotheses for constructing tests). However, he does talk about studies done to solve PD, and explains that entirely self-serving strategies tend not to do too well.

A classic example that I can think of (though not mentioned in the book) is the use of “water pressure amplifiers” in some communities. As all Indians know, water can be a big problem in India and it’s common for the water pressure to be low during summer. So someone installs this device which, when inserted into the plumbing, amplifies the pressure into your house – at the expense, of course, of slightly decreased pressure to everyone else. Short-term gain for sure – but soon enough everyone’s heard about the device and every household has it’s own. The end result? Back to square one, since there is only so much water pressure available, and everyone is now drawing it equally. Oh, except that everyone has spent a certain amount of money buying the device, and everyone is continuously paying electricity bills for it. And of course, nobody will dare stop using it because if you’re the only one without an amplifier, you can forget about getting any water at all in your house!

In the last chapter, he explains how this modern version of game theory ties in perfectly with ideas conveyed in the Bhagvad Gita. The Gita encourages one to just abide by “dharma” (or right action) – and promises that this will achieve the “highest good” – which is presumably the highest good in terms of society and even the person in the long term. Given a problem like PD, it turns out the most optimal actions are in fact those that are taken in good faith, and not ones immediately self-serving even though plausible arguments can be constructed that one stands to gain more in the short-term by taking the “selfish” action.

A very readable, short book, not only with interesting discussion on game theory but also on the state of India – the work is full of examples of just how much Indians can be self-seeking while ignoring the greater good. At once poignant, humourous and fascinating.

Rating: 4 / 5