I've had enough!

I've had enough of having people react - instantaneously - to it when I play some classical music. These people can tolerate Bollywood, and aaaaall kinds of music, endlessly ... and NO, I'm not a kid anymore, that I don't react to their choice in music and I DONT ask them to turn it off, but their inability to listen and their disrespect of MY choice of music ... makes me feel quite sad :(

This rant is not really related to the person in question - it's a sort of letting-it-out for every time that this has happened.

I guess it's a pointless rant too. But I had to let it out. :(

WOW

Vizualization, Interaction, Beauty, Data, Web, Metaphors and More


One element is surprisingly missing though - Sound.
Another is Smell - which maybe doable in this day and age!

the girl effect

The Girl Effect at girleffect.org.

nirvana

since Thanksgiving night, i've been going back to my favourite songs from class XI-class XII. it's been sooooooooo long. and i've changed so much. here's some favourites by nirvana. really like these songs. the wierd thing is that when i listen to these songs, i feel like i'm in the presence of another me - someone from long ago, who's unfamiliar now, but still, it's someone i like.

in pursuit of laughs

i have a daily diet of web-comics that i follow very, very religiously.
indexed,
xkcd,
the superest,
geek and poke,
phd comics,
dilbert.

breaks are always spent in pursuit of further breaks. and so on one of those sojourns i found - isitfunnytoday.com. it's kinda like reddit for comics. sad part is - there aren't too many people on the site. and not too many of my fav. comics. but, as they say, the more the merrier.

IGNOU - The Really Open University

Thanks You, reddit. found this article there and i absolutely have to - have to - read it, when there is more time and space.

http://reganmian.net/blog/2008/12/05/worlds-largest-university-opens-almost-all-its-materials/

mumbai

with tears in my eyes, i read about this horror.

shashi tharoor writes ...

Hilarious Programmer Jokes

Discovered on reddit. Available at stackOverflow.com.

Hilarious. Bordering on self-revelation.

electroacoustics: resources

software
the FIELD system
processing

places to go
bitforms

people
r. luke dubois
Daniel Schiffman

books
on processing

i think have a crush on obama

and for all those of my friends who share that ... a friend brought to my notice some gorgeous pictures of his. first of all, there's this set - i first saw this Time fauz-cover the weekend Before the election! and then there is this set. and then, if i'm perfectly honest - i can never get enough of as many sets as there could possibly be.

maybe that's what a celebrity is. maybe he is a celebrity. maybe i am a fan.

shashi tharoor

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-11-09/india-and-the-meltdown/ on India and the economic meltdown in what seemed like half an rticle really, where he puts down what seems like his first impressions seen through the lens of his how-many-ever-decade-long career.

still, i wanted to take account of it.

in these times

Bill Ayers says that he knew Obama only slightly: “I think my relationship with Obama was probably like that of thousands of others in Chicago and, like millions and millions of others, I wished I knew him better.”

but seriously speaking ... bill ayers finally speaks out.

she looks like the future, reaching out to heal the past.

Finally, an article that brought tears to my apathetic eyes -
http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/title/

OBAMA

Election Obsessd

... PhD Comics. Sometimes, this dude captures my state of mind. Actually, it's more accurate to say that he's captured my state of mind from a few days ago. Now, I'm cold, I'm sick, and I'm bed-ridden.

Stocks

I have about 1/3rd of my savings in stocks. So today! those stocks are at the price I bought them. And so today! my savings are finally going down the drain.

When I discovered this, I did something decidedly odd. I laughed out loud.

A little later, it sort of sunk in. I'm found myself reading the new york times and wondering when the market will bottom.

The future looks decidedly bleak.

Something in it for everyone!

It's XKCD that makes me laugh today...

Cooperatives come to America

Read here, from the New York Times.

Btw, the conservatives were actually annoyed(!) that Obama pronounced Pakistan correctly. This is so fun!

i Loved this story

I am sitting in the CLIC lab doing - guess what - I'm reading an article about Michelle Obama in the Washington Post. How it made me gasp in wonderment - romance, idealism, ambition, everything you can possibly want in a story! Maybe I'm really thirsting for some fiction - I haven't read a novel forever. I mean, that's what a 'story' is, right - a product of blinkered sifting in complex facts, lives and events.

In the same vein, there's this new book - True Enough, by Farhad Manjoo. I just read this review and man! I so want to read it. Here's another review.

कवि कौन?

मेरे कई दोस्त कवि बन गए हैं।
करियर फेयर पर यह पहली कविता है अर्विन्द बत्रा द्वारा रचित|
दूसरी लिखी है सुमित ने। कविता अंग्रेज़ी में है, विषय है 'चाय'|
इस श्रंखला में तीसरी कविता अमन राठी की है । आराम, आलस्य और निद्रा के बीच, अमन ने कुछ समय निकाला और चलती-फिरती, दौड़ती-भागती दुनिया की थोड़ी सी तारीफ़ कर दी |

my impressions from watching Jaane tu ...

NOTE: Spoilers ahead!
Maybe I'm watching too many random hindi movies. But really, you have to agree that this is a currently popular Bollywood movie, which is many steps ahead of the rest.
Ratna Pathak is a widow who's not, lo and behold, graying and wearing a white sari! She is struggling to deal with her past, tradition, loss and trying to do whatever she can for her (and her son's) future.
And guess what! The girlfriend doesn't actually turn into a vamp the moment she is dumped. She's in a really sticky situation and she says - I'm alright, I'm the way I need to be - and if you can't deal with it, so be it. Without you, my world won't end, Surprise!
I liked the brother too. They all called him crazy and then finally ate their words. People are different and everyone cannot fit into the mold. His obsession with his art, his fascination with the rat - were all very endearing.The exchanges between the aforementioned girlfriend's parents are downright disturbing - but you don't see her getting too melodramatic about it.
When the hero finds out about his father, he's not wailing or weeping!These are all people with very serious, very real problems. But they're not painting the town red. People go through severe, brutal personal tragedies and still go on - if they didn't it would cost them their sanity. Besides, maybe I needed some of that thing too ...
D'uh, of course the movie was cliched. And puh-lease, you cannot call it great art. Besides, it's Bollywood. It's bashing the Box Office! But you know what! I thoroughly enjoyed the movie for all the little things that it was able to say under the garb of a Bollywood hit.

TED Talks

i have a tendency to keep telling the same people about TED Talks. and so i always start with - did i ever tell you about TED? so i'm going to stop this practice - by writing a post on www.ted.com. Ted Talks is an online resource for talks/presentations by people who participate in the annual TED conference. their catch phrase is - Ideas Worth Spreading and their method is by getting people worth listening-to to talk.

it all began with Larry Lessig talking about creativity in these times in an awesomely creative way.



another talk on creativity and education - this one is positively hilarious.

Majora Carter speaks on Environmental Activism - and her story is truly amazing, and so is she.



i have seen really amazing stuff on TED - a wonderfully inspired view of the world. my recommendation is - click on this, register, sign up for weekly updates and - i promise that sooner than later you will find your own favourite 10 talks that appeal specifically to your interests.

i watched the following talk recently - the most beautiful statistics i've seen - presenting an amazing picture of the world the world we live in.

happy watching :)

Taal Refresher

I seem to have lost ability to connect taals with their names. It's been quite a few years since I gave exams in which I effortlessly mugged up n taals, complete with their bol. Anyway, it's past time that those days are back, so I'm writing this refresher that I hope will clear things up for good.

When I got back to music, the first composition I learnt was in tivraa tal which has a cycle of 7 beats. To my mind, 7 is a really odd number. How can you possibly cycle repetitively in rounds of 7 without yielding to the temptation of adding just one beat!

तिवरा ताल
धा धिं ता तिट कत गदि गन
ताली दो तीन ताली दो ताली दो

It didn't simplify matters to realise that the taal with seven beats that I was previously familiar was called roopak.

रूपक ताल

तिं तिं ना धिं ना धिं ना

खाली दो तीन ताली दो ताली दो

The second source of immense confusion has been the fact that ek taal and chau taal have the same number of beats in a cycle - 12. The number 12 is not really a problem, except that I can never which is which.

एक ताल

धिं धिं धागे तिरकट तू ना कत ता धागे तिरकट धिं न

ताली दो खाली दो ताली दो खाली दो ताली दो ताली दो

चौ ताल

धा धा दिं ता किट धा दिं ता तिट कत गदि गन

ताली दो तीन चार ताली दो तीन चार ताली दो ताली

It turns out that if you surgically remove the second dhin taa from chau taal, you actually get sool taal which has 10 beats. Like so ...

सूल ताल

धा धा दिं ता किट धा तिट कट गदि गन

ताली दो तीन चार ताली दो खाली दो तीन

Btw, jhaptal is also 10 beats, but it is very easy to identify and pretty common too.

And then, there is dhamaar with its 14 beats. The compositions/the style with which this taal is played are also known as dhamaar. The lyrics of these compositions usually descrive the charm and beauty involved in the raas. I do keep practicing keeping these odd beats in my head - but it is never enough somehow.

धमार

क धि ट धि ट धा - ग दिं के दी न ता -

ताली दो तीन चार पाँच ताली दो खाली दो तीन ताली दो तीन चार

Just for the sake of completeness (?), two simple taals are daadra with 6 beats and teen tal with 16. You could look these up at http://www.swarganga.org/taalabase.php or http://www.chandrakantha.com/tala_taal.

To moderate or not to moderate

A friend had left a comment and I had totally omitted to sign in and check if there were any comments to moderate. I had setup an alert so that I respond immediately to any new comments but it turns out that I get an alert only After I approve the comment. The irony is that the reason for setting-up comment moderation was essentially to moderate my (own!) tendency to react too quickly without pausing to reflect.

Apologies!

not a sure-footed blogger yet ...

i've always been pro-choice. or so i thought.

in a utopian world, choice would come out of some unknown distribution that is a function of an individual's constitution and nothing else. unfortunately, an individual's constitution is also a function of socio-cultural influences that they accept or oppose. as a result, Choice turns out to be a function of socio-cultural trends and influences, rather than conscious radical, tailor-made stands taken as per individual characteristics.

so, where am i going with this? choice is, unfortunately, shaped by trends and cultural backgrounds. therefore, when someone says 'matter of choice', i'm compelled to smirk snidely.

as one of my professors sometimes says - do i believe what u just said?

Find of the day!

Check out this link for the most hilarious comments on things that captured our

popular imagination as kids!

Ps: u can tell i have an exam tomorrow ;)
Pps: reminded me of a certain mr. caulfield from a long long time ago...

waiting ...

Tibet

Free the Press in Tibet ... in pictures.

omg!

Alan Perlis once said - A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.

Will I ever get this?

In a statistical classification task, the Precision for a class is the number of true positives (i.e. the number of items correctly labeled as belonging to the class) divided by the total number of elements labeled as belonging to the class (i.e. the sum of true positives and false positives, which are items incorrectly labeled as belonging to the class). Recall in this context is defined as the number of true positives divided by the total number of elements that actually belong to the class (i.e. the sum of true positives and false negatives, which are items which were not labeled as belonging to that class but should have been).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_Recall

I turned pro-reservation yesterday.

Yesterday was the day that we had a dosa-fiesta in college. It was also the day I turned pro-reservation. But you know what I am not a sociology student, and know nothing about what 'really' goes on when it comes to dalits and OBCs, I'm not a social worker, I am not even a capitalist, and so I probably don't deserve to have an opinion. Plus, my opinion is not balanced and comprehensive, and so I totally don't deserve to express it - but anyway, I want to and it's my blog, so what the heck. I am also a grad-student - so first and foremost - about the dosa-fiesta.

it was the NYC Dosa Cart, serving a hot and crispy masala dosa, with sambhar, chutney, with an mini uthapam and vada thrown in for good measure, for $5. The event was from 6-8, it was publicised on Facebook, and was a stone's throw away from the CS Dept. It was the perfect recipe for festivities and incidentally, for disaster as well.

We landed up at 6:15 and began waiting in the already snaking long line. The Dosa Cart hadn't warmed up yet. Apparently, they forgot to mention 6-8 Indian Time on that Facebook page. Never mind - aaye hain tho kha kar hi jaayenge. Meanwhile, it was almost a mela. The people in the line, before and after us became kindred spirits joined in their anticipation and devotion to the Dosa. All the while people were pouring in. It was a reunion of sorts with missing room-mates, their friends, cousins, ex-lab-mates, buddies - it was veritably a distinguished social gathering of brown people.

As more and more people poured in, we gleefully realized we were amongst the early ones. But to my surprise, the line behind us never grew longer. It turned out that everyone who knew someone, and of course the everyone was desi and so was someone... actually stood exactly where their long-lost friends, relatives, neighbours, and TAs were. The line grew fatter not longer.

How desi is that.

Anyway, finally got to eat at 8:45. What was annoying was that My Very Own friends who strolled in at 6:45 were out by 7. Drat and double drat. Thanks to the awesomest principled yet devoted and entertaining company I had - I stood my ground. Where I would have left (much earlier) in utter disgust, I left (much later) freezing, but with my hunger satiated and my taste-buds delighted.

Now to make the connection with reservations ... I believe in social justice man, not in social acceptance of status quo. Which is what happened yesterday in the trivial circumstance of a Dosa Fiesta. It was easy, damn easy to do the right thing yesterday, which in my case included standing in line for 2.5 hours). When it is really time to stand up against deeply entrenched social biases who will stand up and how many?

Yaar, let's admit it. We're just so 'chalta hai' in our attitude, ki social justice ka ek hi tareeka hai ... laws and reservations.

I rest my case.

birthday!

it would be a bit odd if there were no mention of nandini's gregorian birthday on nandini-ki-duniya. so here it is. beyond celebrating undead, untiring youth - although, i am still a bit dazed and would love to sleep and get my homework done.

especially, now that i realise that the b'day is already over in my part of the world. and since the whole notion of day is so fuzzyily spread out, depending on calendar and time-zone.

lesson learnt of 2*th b'day. do Not be hungover on the Day of ur bday especially if it is also a wking day!

:) u know where that's coming from.

also, it's just another day, but it's ok to take another 30 odd years to totally figure that one out.

BREAKTHROUGHS

a short film by Jake Paltrow

talking to actors nominated for the oscars, 2008

about actors that had a profound influence on them

notice the typefaces, the shadows too

Transformation from one Coordinate System to Another

The Problem
We had some data that we knew was some kind of geographical data. But we didn't know which coordinate system it was in! We needed to convert it into the GPS coordinate system which refers to the longitudes and latitudes of that location.

Someone made a very reasonable guess that the data may be in the NY Plane coordinate system with SRID 2263. Now I needed to figure out how to transform the data from one coordinate system to another using PostGIS.

(1) Used the function makepoint to group x and y of the unknown coordinate system.
(2) setsrid of that point to 2263 to tell the system the (supposed) coordinate system to 2263.
(3) transform-ed the point to 4326 coordinates. 4326 is the srid for the GPS Coordinate system.

The resulting query was
select transform(setsrid(makepoint(unknownx, unknowny), 2263), 4326) as the_point from location_tbl;

Yippee!

प्रभु अजि गमला, मनी तोषला

 

एक मराठी नाट्य गीत, पंडित कुमार गन्धर्व की आवाज़ में सुनिए|

प्रभु अजि गमला, मनी तोषला ॥ 
कोपे बहु माझा । तो प्रभुराजा ।
आता हासला । मनी तोषला ॥
मृतचि हृदय होते नाथ, हे पूर्ण झाले ।
परि वचनसुधेने त्यासि जिवंत केले ॥
अमृतमधुर शब्द त्या पुन्हा ऐकण्याते । 

श्रवणि सकल माझी शक्ति एकत्र होते ॥

a marathi natya-geet - prabhu aji gamala, mhane thoshala... beautifully rendered by pandit kumar gandharv<-->

a song by sahir

साहिर लुधियान्वी की यह कविता सुनिए

चलो इक बार फिर से अजनबी बन जाएं हम दोनों

न मैं तुम से कोइ उम्मीद रखूँ दिल-नवज़ी की

न तुम मेरी तरफ देखो ग़लत-अंदाज नजरों से

न मेरे दिल की धड़कन लड़खड़ाए मेरी बातों में

न ज़ाहिर हो तुम्हारी कश्म-कश का राज़ नज़रों में

तुम्हें भी कोई उलझन रोकती है पेश्कद्मी से

मुझे भी लोग कहते हैं, की यह जलवे पराये हैं

मेरे हमराह भी रुसवाइयां हैं मेरे माझी की

तुम्हारे साथ भी गुजरी हुई रातों के साए हैं