Google Print

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Check http://print.google.co.in/

All you require is a login id (any valid google id that you have will do).
And once logged in, you have complete access to an amazing array of texts (full length).

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Dear Google,

Hope you continue to amaze me forever!
I had hardly realised till recently that whatever I'm doing, at one stage or the other there is a search. And that's been quite a realisation!
Can you come up with a search engine for a physical search of my room? I have so much stuff in it that I have to be either very organised to find stuff that I want (don't enjoy that too much!) or spend hapless hours trying to find a piece of scrap that's distinctly placed in my memory but fuzzily placed in the room.

sincerely,
Ayan

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Well, after a few hours of using Google Print, I'm frustrated. Only limited pages available for viewing for most decent books.
And that inspired me to go through the Google Print FAQ. To quote Google:
"In general, Google Print aims to help you discover books, not read them from start to finish. It's like going to a bookstore and browsing – only with a Google twist."
And they keep track of the number of pages viewed in a particular book from a login. So you require an amazing number of different google logins to read more than a few pages of a copy-righted book (and most books are copy-righted).

Hmm, I'm not thrilled, and my earlier request to Google stands cancelled.
I'm better off searching my room without a Google Room Search. What if I search for my entire camera and it tells me where my camera batteries are (it's could be a discovery service)...that'd be worse than losing the camera!!!
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And is there no way I can print the page???

NASA+Google=??

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Well the MoU for collaboration between Google and NASA has been signed and Google is to develop 1 million square feet of offices at NASA Ames Research Center.

Collaboration in a range of areas including IT solutions, data management and nanotechnology, massively distributed computing and the entrepreneurial space industry.

Google searching the universe now ;-).

Check http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/google_nasa.html

Inspiring stuff, right?
Two grad drop-outs creating a tech company from their dorm that amazes the world!
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Well probably there comes moments of extreme clarity in your life when you're sure that this is what you've wanted to do, let the rest of the world go to hell, and then:
It's time to drop-out, TO BREAK FREE!
and take on the world.

Ah, for that moment of clarity!!!

A rolling stone

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A rolling stone gathers no moss,
So roll on my friend, roll on, roll on...

The untold treasures as you roll on, my friend,
The thrill, the fear, the risk, the fall,
The joy in chartering terrain unknown.

Yet a tinge of yearning for that moss you left,
How would life be as that moss-covered stone?

Can I love you when I know you?

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The new, the unchartered,
The paradise undiscovered,
Or the hell waiting for me,
Or maybe just like my familiar neighbourhood...

But undiscovered,
Waiting to be uncovered.

As long as I don't know you, I love you,
Can I love you when I know you too?

I live, I eat

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You live to eat...

Study, inspiration exam,
Participate, inspiration marks,
Contest, inspiration bio-data,
Girlfriend, inspiration display,
Praise, inspiration work done,
Smile, inspiration the silent kill,
Love, to get ahead.

As you live to eat...

I have breached your norm,
I am guilty of felony.
For I live, I eat,
But can't live to eat.

Will not confirm

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This necessity to confirm...

This necessity to talk to people,
To confirm to their whims,
To try to explain what they'll never understand,
And bear the ignominy of being slammed for they couldn't understand;

This necessity to sit through classes,
To sit through teachings,
To write exams,
Regurgitate and compete,
Witness those processions of victory,
And the ignominy of being slammed for not joining in dances of hypocrisy;

The free flow of my mind,
Hindered, maimed, bruised, castrated,
In these necessities to confirm,

Will not confirm,
For the sake of my sanity,
For the sake of my living,
For that one last outpost of independent thinking that this soul possesses,
Will not confirm to the necessities.

Way and the wayside

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As I more do what I like,
So as to like what I do,
On the wayside leave that I dislike

The wayside grows,
The wayside blocks my way,
They value the wayside,
They block my way,
They urge reformation,
They urge the wayside,
They urge the routine,
They urge boredom,
They urge certainty, success,
They urge the wayside,

My way, my way...
I'll walk down my way
And leave them by the wayside.

The endless loop

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I, on my own,
On this road unknown,

Wandering the endless loop,
For the beginning,
For the end,
For the endlessness in the loop,

A meaning unknown,
A joy all alone,
I on this journey,
On my own, all alone.

What a Coincidence!!!

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Guess what, received a gift (token of appreciation for doing a good summers) from HLL today (ok it was at the Program Office on 19th but I collected it only today) and what's the gift???

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Can you believe it? After blogging about the book yesterday, lo and behold it's in my room today!

Don't believe in luck or prayer or god, yet sometimes when such things happen and with very little apparent logical basis, there is that faint yearning...if only some of the things that I really want(ed) happen(ed) the way I want(ed) *sigh*.
Maybe I should blog about them eh ;-).
But then would life be as much of a rollercoaster/interesting as it is now???

SoJo, journalism and the truth

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Check http://hotzone.yahoo.com/

Another tool from the Yahoo stable to make a splash.

In a world driven by profits, it is interesting to understand the mechanisms by which news reaches and impacts the masses through the fourth estate.

Will news - which does not make business sense - ever get reported? Will we - the public - respond to news which is not sensationalised or made interesting? Hasn't "the marketing of news" destroying our sensititvity to this world around?

Try watching an Indian news channel for a day and then maybe you'll get a hang of what I'm trying to say.

Blogs as a means to news, yes upto now they remain an authentic source. But again, in case of many blogs, as the writer gains/realises popularity, the temptation to use it as a tool for things other than just speaking the truth increases. If you tried following multiple blogs during the Iraqi crisis you'd know.

Grassroots level journalism is a hope for truth and blogs are one way of empowering that; there could be other means too. And what could those other means be???

If your messenger uses Jabber protocol...

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Then it's easy to configure Gaim for it, refer

http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=24073&query=import+all+contacts+from+Gmail&topic=0&type=f

which gives the details of how to configure Gaim for GoogleTalk,
but what if I use a different/unlisted protocol?

Books

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A few books which seem to be heavily recommended, don't know when I'll have the time to get hold of/look through them:

1. Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

2. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven Levitt

Sifted through a few pages of Blink at the Bangkok airport.

Disclaimer before you read on: I've read none of the above two books in detail and the comments below are not a review or reflection on these books.

Somehow I'm not too impressed nowadays with these "global", supposedly brilliant idea books not backed up by detailed theories, have come across enough of these in Management already and have enough of them myself :-) [In fact after reading most such books, it's like ah! only if I were lucky enough to have known big publishers or to have been born a few decades earlier so that I could have published before this guy].

Give me the hardcore stuff, it's more fun to bleed my head struggling against an insurmountable but "authentic" wall than the faked satisfaction of superficial knowledge which reading some of these books provide...though there was a time when I loved reading them :-).

When on books, the book I'm reading currently "Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics in the Financial Markets" by Robert Trippi.
Have just read the cover page till now :-) ; hope the 'real-read' proves interesting :-).

Confusion and Clarity

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Well another of my pet "wonder" themes. Exactly what proportion of confusion and clarity leads to breakthroughs.

People with too much clarity, they're rarely very successful on the innovation frontier. They're great sieves for the crazy ideas but as a source of those ideas, nope.
And the "confused" person, he'll come up with brilliant ideas but he's too confused to be sure of which is "the" idea to pursue.
People at these diverse poles could form ideal teams for crazy breakthroughs but more often than not, each does not understand/respect the other's shortcoming/strength and people at the extremes have huge egos!

But confusion leads to clarity. And perfect confusion is when there is perfect clarity in the confusion...achieving that is an art I guess :-).

Summer of Code and Gaim help!

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Check the projects on Google's summer of code http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html
Haven't had time to check too many but they are worth a look.
Google and its brethen seem to be occupying an inordiante amount of my mindspace these days!

Well, this blog has no readers (ignore those bots and their comments) as of now, but if it ever has...this is something I want to do but have little time for in this set-up, so help would be welcome.

Exactly what changes in gaim's source code do I need to make to make possible login to my own messenger through their interface.
Gaim code manipulation could be fun but the routine drudgery of this place gives little time for such pleasures!!!

Testing Random Walk in the stock market

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Well the weak form efficiency in the stock market hinges on the assumption that information flow is random. Information flow is the previous stock price.
So my current stock prices are random since they were previously random since they were previously random....
Ah, the familiar iterative cycle.

Now what if I set up my stock market such that, at the start prices are not random.
Or rather wouldn't the best test for weak form be to check the condtions at the origins rather than just checking the stationarity/non-stationarity of current market returns?

Have got my basics horribly mixed up???

Topology in Marketing

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Was wondering about this when waiting for my train from Hangzhou to Shanghai (China).

The coca-cola is almost the same as in India...well almost. It's a little less sweet. The bottle looked slightly less rounded and some other minor things here and there.
Well there are the variants that a company needs to customise for the specific market and there are the invariants.
A fit case (atleast in the abstract) for application of topology, wonder why Marketing Research people haven't yet started using it, or have they and I don't know.

Any MR person listening???

Yahoo Mail beta, Big G and Monopolies

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Yahoo has launched a new Yahoo Mail beta and it's available to only select beta testers as of now. You can click on 'What's New' after logging into Yahoo and sign-up for beta and wait for your turn. It's supposed to have many Outlook-like features and according to some users may be better than Gmail (better is very relative though) . For more on this refer http://ptech.wsj.com/archive/ptech-20050922.html .

Well it's funny to see Yahoo as a challenger and GMail as the benchmark when just a couple of years back it was vice-versa. But Google has become the benchmark in many fields, well it's fast emerging as the next monopoly in the computing space. Have nothing against monopolies as long as they give service greater-than-or-equal-to (opportunity cost :-)) the service I'd get without them.

This brings me to the basic issue which arouses my curiosity is this: Is it possible that monopolies continue to provide the best possible service in the absence of any threat. If no, what minimal level of threat is required?
Can one create precise realistic mathematical equations for this, don't know if Game Theory has anything related to this. Don't tell me to simulate the stuff, I'm not talking about that.

When displacing existing players, it is necessary to provide a level of satisfaction to users atleast equal to what is provided by these players, so there's a benchmark. Once a monopoly happens, how do I define a benchmark other than through hypothetical deductions. But a monopoly in a lucrative market which underperforms for long enough is bound to be threatened and eventually bow out if it doesn't improve. Well IE faces the threat of Mozilla now.

But it is during the monopoly and bowing out phase that the consumers suffer. Very few, whether organisations or individuals, have the gumption to gracefully accept shortcomings and bow out when they realise it. And this natural tendency combined with the unusual powers of a monopoly make things a little scary for the consumers.

Now to a more basic question, can normal humans or groups of humans associate/perform in the absence of external motivation?
And without a tendency to dominate, would there be any human progress at all? But what would all this progress lead to, some religions and doctrines predict a state of tranquility wherein humans would be at peace with themselves and with others, without any tendency to dominate.

Funny isn't it? Reminds me of Lord Shiva's dance and the hindu trinity.

Ah! where have I reached, from Yahoo to the Gods!!! That's the power of wandering while you wonder :-)).

A Feynman Quartet to start this blog

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I wonder why, I wonder why,
I wonder why I wonder...

I wonder why I wonder why,
I wonder why I wonder.

- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988)