We are many. This is us.

My first post on the blog: Three Months @ ISB. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

stay tuned for more EPIC happenings.

Will writing itself be revived? (Photo by jjpacres on Flickr)

I’ve heard the arguments much too many times to count. Facebook splinters human attention. Twitter lowers the literary standard to what we can spew out on the way down the escalator to take the tube, spelled in SMS English, with the thought investment of a catchline from an impotence infomercial. The death of journalism as instant news and burns the crafted article at the altar of the here and now.

Well, it’s all bunkum. A full reparte to this general propaganda will wait for a time when I have more time. Suffice to stay, that it is not the duration of attention that has dropped, but the quality of attention that has risen. It is not the intellectual investment in the word that has reduced, but the ideas and methodologies of the writing which deserve full intellectual investment has reduced. The quality of thought is not strained. It has been distilled.

One such form, and the focus of this post, is a recent discovery of mine – Long Form Journalism. In essence, journalistic work far too large for the standard 600-words-ish magazine / newspaper article and of course much too short to be a book. Articles which, unlike the standard-issue state-and-embellish-the-facts-and-report idea of journalism, develops a story. Stories of the journalistic method, of the stories behind events, of the evolution that which are deemed to be considered news.

A good example is the story of Air France Flight 447. A veritable Illiad of an article, it covers the mysterious circumstances of the crash, the ongoing search, and even the commercial / political fallout of the crash. It clocks in at over seven thousand words.

Another example, one which is destined to pull the heartstrings of every cricket, nay, every sports fan around, is the Saga of an American journalist from ESPN visiting India and his coverage of the Cricket World Cup. It is a truly masterful rendition of what cricket means to this nation, the cultural iconography of Sachin Tendulkar, the evolution of the game and its future fate(s). In terms of length, this too is a monstrous article.

Even I would not be so bold as to attempt to summarize, at any level, such Epic works. It would be best, dear reader, if you read them for yourself. I will end here, and return to address both the Cricket article, and the argument at the beginning of this post at a later time.

One last thing: Amazon recently launched Kindle Singles – one-off pieces of longer fiction / non-fiction priced from $1 to $5. The latest in a series of sites riding (and building) the revival of Longform. More here. More from me once I get a good read of all these sites.

If this post is bad, send me money

I’m plowing through a class on ‘Global Economics’ at Business School nowadays. A euphemism for a class on Macro-economics for Managers, aka How to interpret complicated Economic Times / Financial Times / Economist articles and make sense of really. really, really, smart guys. I am being uncharitable of course, the class is a lot more than that; but the immediate marginal benefit (see what I mean) is being able to make sense of the economic-goings-on in the world and no longer have a ‘whaaat?’ expression on one’s face when reading Mankiw.

Of course, macro-economics cannot be complete without some Cow jokes. They proliferate like randy heifers in mating season, with nary a thought towards political correctness, good taste and most certainly not the vaguest political sense. This latest wave of cow’s opinions (to channel the Joey gene, present in us all) instigated this post, a collection of the higher epic-hilarity rated cows jokes I’ve come across.

To begin, the latest are some gems from a link I received recently:

Lebanon
You have two cows. Syria claims ownership over them. You take them abroad and start successful cattle farms in Africa, Australia, and Latin America. You send the proceeds back home so your relatives can afford cosmetic surgery and Mercedes-Benzes.

Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt
You have 10 cows. Neglect to tend to them, but prevent them from fighting Israel in order to get milk from America.

Post-Mubarak Egypt
You have 10 cows who think they now own the farm. There’s still no milk.

Israel
You have two bulls. Pretend they are helpless calves.

The next set are a series of jokes / images authored by the Economic Times, which I am unfortunately unable to find on the first page of Google (the marginal cost of checking page 2 tends to infinity). These went viral on corporate emails and other places a few years ago, and now appear to have proliferated everywhere. Except at the Economic Times website itself. Of course. Anymoo, with no further udder:

My personal favorites are Citigroup and our beloved Tatagroup.

Of course, the nature of a virus is to mutate. This is another hilarious take on the cow idea, but with dishwashing courtesy ThePaperWall: (clickage for FULL size)

Whats your ism?

Thats all folks.

Me: That’s an Ipad? Hmm…smaller than I remember it. (Aside: Ignoring the entire tablet product category is a patented personality trait. I’d last paid attention to any Ipad several months ago)

Friend: Yes. Yes it is.

Me: Smaller than I remember it. I thought the Galaxy Tab was this big. (Aside: I remembered them being ‘larger than a mobile’, and little more)

Friend: Nah, the Tab is smaller,

<other minor talk about the merits of Tabs and Pads. Apparently, they are different>

Friend: The Ipad is awesome, it’s designed at the perfect size for people to read digital magazines.

Me: (Confused) Who figured that out?

Friend: Steve Jobs said that its this size.

…

That got me thinking about the power of suggestion, especially when coupled to massive stature of the suggestor. The IPad may or may not be the perfect size for reading digital publications. Whether it is or isn’t is irrelevant. Steve Jobs, leveraging his (well-earned) stature as a technological prophet, said that it is so, and it is so. Would the other bald Steve (Ballmer) be able to pull off something like this? Probably not. Actually he’d probably ending ensuring the diametrical opposite of his prophecies.

Scene shift to college, both old and new. I’m studying at the Indian School of Business. The School prides itself on its intense, 1-year, “roller-coaster” program that compresses the value and learning of a full 2-year program into 12 months. This is true. The last 2 months have been a furious maelstrom of classes, parties, sports, assignments, projects, clubs, more parties and a chance to breathe every once in a while. However, I can’t help but wonder if maybe the schedule is suboptimal, and the powers-that-are have set up an intentionally roller-coaster schedule because the program is a roller-coaster? Or am I, under the power of potent suggestion, looking for ‘roller-coasteriness’ where it is no more than a normally hectic schedule? Previous college, which shall go unnamed, had built up, and was proud of, its reputation for being absurdly hard. Were things hard because they were hard or because they needed to live up to that reputation? I can’t answer that.

Uncomfortable flights, inertia-laden bureaucracy, wild-driving New York Cabs and rude new yorkers, stoned Jamaicans. Effect causes reputation or reputation causes effect?

Power of suggestions. Self-fulfilling prophecies. Directed willpower. Call it whatever, they certainly make the colors of reality a little more saturated.

This article from Ars Technica details a study where a bunch of scientists, simply put built an ‘unstable’ cycle. A cycle that defied all the hitherto-postulated theories for the tremendous stability of a moving cycle. (Ever tried to cycle without hands? It’s easy).

A cycle that still refused to fall over.

To test the relative contributions of these factors, the authors eventually built their own computer model of a bicycle and started playing around with various features. It turned out that they could eliminate both the gyroscopic and the negative trail factors, and the bike would still be stable as long as it was moving faster than 2.3 meters (7.5 feet) per second. They could even move steering to the rear wheel and produce a stable design.

The apparently unreasonable stability of different bicycle designs must have suggested that their model had probably lost touch with reality, so the authors went out and built a bike with a counter-rotating wheel to get rid of gyroscopic effects, as well as a negligible (4mm) trailing between the front wheel and the steering. As their model predicted, it tended to stay upright, and would steer into any falls that their grad students tried to induce.

As someone who’s spent a LOT of time on a cycle and in the pool, here’s my armchair-physics theory:

A bicycle’s stability is based on its center of gravity being under the bike. Move the CoG out from underneath it, i.e. – tilt it, and it topples.

cycle CoG

A cycle is stable a lot in the same fashion a pro swimmer does not wobble and twist when swimming. While the latter is a result of training, the former (imho) is a result of no more than a simple and rigid design. Take away the rider, and there’s almost nothing left to influence the the CoG of the bike. The only ‘unstable’ part of the bike is the front wheel, which again is akin to the head of a swimmer, and ‘leads’ the entire body in a direction rather than destabilizing the system.

I’m sure real physicists could do math and prove (or more likely, debunk) my thoughts, but such is as they are.

The one you get when you faced the 3 bull gods in the final level of DOOM?

When Theseus faced the Minotaur?

When Kratos faced Aries?

When defenders faced Ronaldo?

Well, that feeling is back. Geneva Motor Show 2011. The new Bull god is revealed. The Lamborghini Aventador:

Lamborghini Aventador

700 HP V12. Son of the Murcielago. Descendant of the great Diablo. Unlike its weak uncle the Gallardo, this God does right by its ancestry.

Kneel before your god.

Disclaimer: The book is still in the mail.

The author, Jaron Lanier, posits that the web has not liberated creativity in the species, but has stifled it. That by making universal distribution and access of music (as a nameplate for creativity, one supposes from the set of the article) has made it well-nigh impossible for the artist to sustain himself (or herself) of his (or her) art. That the web, as a collective lacks the underlying design or purpose needed for such a system to foster complexity and ingenuity.

Disagree.

We can take immense pride in the fact that, as a species, creativity is a primal trait. It was born when ancient man looked at the thundercloud and heard the wind in the tree and made music. It was defined by fire and the wheel. It was and is not facilitated by the presence of the barter system, the monetary system, the music label system or any other system. As Alan Moore put in V for Vendetta:

We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of ideas, I’ve seen people kill in the name of them, and die defending them… but you cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it… ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love…

The author (from my reading of the article) appears to misdiagnose the transition of the economics of creativity for the death of creativity itself. Yes, it has become a lot harder to become famous and financially solvent on the basis of one’s creative genius alone. But then again, I would posit that the last few decades have been an transitional anomaly as society shifted from mostly-isolated to mostly-connected to entirely-connected. As some may recall, the greatest artistic age on history was formed on the shoulders of penniless artists supported pro bono by money-laden noble houses. We owe the works of Michaelangelo and Da Vinci not just to these Titans, but to the Medici family as well.The world has moved back to a similar state, but for diametrically opposite reasons.

What has changed is the paradigm by which ‘creativity’ is defined. The quality of creativity is not strained, only its flavor. The internet does not foster creativity in the traditional arts, it fosters the creation of new forms of art itself. While traditional art has moved from penniless artists supported by patrons to super-rich artists supported by a pretentious neo-intellectual societal elite, the internet generation lives not for the fame or the money, but for the art. The internet has through universal and instant connectivity, done away with the need for economic sustenance -  patronage, art gallery, music label or otherwise. It is the purest form of a creative democracy, where circumstance of birth or location, networking or luck are zeroed out; where everyone is free to discover their own creativity, in whichever form they please and share it with the world. Instantly.

Mattepainting. Speedpainting. Dynamic typography. Virtual choirs. Microbloggging. Forget Impressionism and Realism. Forget Michael Jackson. This is the internet generation. This is art:

and this:

and this:

This is the internet. This is a wonderful place. Money? Fame? pfft. It’s on youtube.

(More once I read the book..including possible retractions with humility..)

In the name of the Planet Earth, watch this video:

You might just feel a little more in love with our very own mudball. I certainly do.

It sounds like the name of a cruise ship. Or some pedigreed Emir-owned Arabian superstallion racehorse.

It’s a bookstore. This bookstore:

The Ateneo Grand Splendid - Courtesy longhorndave on Flickr

Formerly a 1919-built theater and then cinema, it was turned into a bookstore. Good description from here:

The painted ceiling, detailed balconies, and stage are all intact. The private boxes are now small reading rooms. The stage is a café, where you can sit and peruse books you’re considering buying. And though it occupies three floors, there’s not an overwhelming selection — the shelves fit perfectly around the theater’s original shape, and comfortable chairs are scattered throughout.

Note to self: Visit Ateneo Grand Splendid before death.

More reading on reading vaults.

PS: More photos, including the ceiling and balconies:

Frontage

I was initially skeptical of Ryan Reynolds (he was Van Wilder) playing Hal Jordan, since I didn’t think even he had enough California braggadacio to play Hal Jordan.

Now looking at this picture, I’ll say this. He looks the part. I’m quite pleased with the faithfulness of the uniform to the ’60s original. The film is stated to be an ‘origin’ film, and the uniform is quite faithful to Hal Jordan’s uniform in GL V2 from the 60s (albeit with a little Kyle Rayner GL Ion inspired ‘modernization’).

Hal Jordan, back in the Day:

In Brightest Day!

Hal Jordan, Live!:

The GL uniform is quite central to the entire mythos, and jazzing it up would have had some implications for future appearance of Rayner, Ion, Parallax and even Guy Gardner. I’m personally quite glad they haven’t messed around too much with it.

Other much-awaited names appearing in the movie:

1. Abin Sur
2. Carol Ferris (of course. Played by the lovely Blake Lively, of course)
3. Tomar-Re (now this is going to be EPIC.)
4. KILLLOOOOOWWWWWOOOOOOGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!

Poozer!!

While mobiles and social media loudly revolutionize politics and disaster relief, there’s another relatively quiet revolution going on – healthcare.

More in this space soon.

Resident Evil. Umbrella Corporation and the t-virus. Zombies. First-person shooter.

You’ve heard all the cliches. Art imitates life. Fact is stranger than fiction.While we haven’t yet raised the dead or even killed people to raise them as zombies, we certainly are creating funky new ways to cure, well, everything.

To be used on prescription only

SEED Magazine has this cool article on the use of a relatively old medical technique to develop new cures for some very blue-chip diseases like malaria and anthrax.

Kary Mullis, a self-proclaimed non-specialist, won the Nobel Prize for developing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique that allows researchers to quickly and cheaply make many copies of single strands of DNA. For the past decade Mullis has been using PCR to create new types of drugs that could soon provide a cure for everything from malaria to anthrax.

What makes this technique so ‘special’ is the fact that it improves the ability of the body itself to ‘target’ infections. Basically giving the body an upgraded sniper scope:

My work with PCR allowed for the invention by Craig Tuerk of nucleic aptamers, which are tiny binding molecules that can be designed to attach themselves to harmful bacteria. However, instead of attaching a poison to the other end of the aptamer—as the silver-bullet strategy would call for—I put something on there that is a target for our immune system, a chemical compound with which the immune system is already familiar and to which it is very strongly immune. What you end up with is a drug that will drag this thing to which you are highly immune over to some bacteria you don’t want in your body. And your immune system will attack and kill it.

And, apparently, it works:

Yes, we cured anthrax in mice. If you infect a mouse with anthrax and then wait 24 hours and treat it with a penicillin-type drug, you get about a 40 percent survival rate. But using our drug you get a 100 percent survival rate. Of course, it is unlikely that you are going to get anthrax, but that is sort of a model system.

In mice at least.

Question!

This technique puts ‘something’ that the body’s immune system is already ‘very strongly immune’. While I am not normally one to frown on cutting-edge science, this particular case seems to have eaten at the ‘too good to be true’ buffet. What especially is eyebrow-raising is that the article claims this is a methodology that can be applied to ‘any infectious disease’.

If it as brilliantly successful at stopping diseases at it promises, and it garners the healthy media hype that will result, I fear for the corners that will be cut in its next ‘deployment’. Let’s hope it does not come to that, and it really is a panacea.

Like him or hate him, i think its quite unarguable that pretty much every movie James Cameron makes merits the descriptive term EPIC.

The same goes for his latest EPIC epic – Avatar. I’m sure reams and e-tomes have been written about how awesome (or not) Avatar is, so I’m not going be excessively verbose. Suffice to say that I am a true believer (obscure literary reference – I wonder how many people would get that).

What I find much more interesting is what I presume to be a major inspiration for the movie.

***SPOILERS***

A central theme to Pandora is the interconnected biodiversity of the planet – Pandora. The ‘link’ between all life on Pandora forms the basis for the ‘why’ of the switching of sides, the transmigration of souls, and of course, the EPIC battle.

Well, here is something very interesting.

I came across Pando quite coincidentally while wikipedia-ing for largest organisms. (instigated by an argument of how much larger an elephant seal is compared to a Polar Bear).

Cool facts:

The clonal colony encompasses 43 hectares (107 acres) and has around 47,000 stems, which continually die and are renewed by its roots. Many of the stems are connected by its root system. The average age of Pando’s trunks (or technically, stems) is 130 years, as deciphered by tree rings.

The root system of Pando is claimed by some to be among the oldest known living organisms in existence at 80,000 years of age

In my humble opinion, it is quite incredible how James Cameron managed to go from this:

to THIS:

...ra!!

The greatest show on Earth. The show that never ends. The show with no encore for there is no curtain. The Show of Life. The great tour de force of each and every one of our lives. But only if we chose to make it so. In a personal context, the greatest show on earth is back, better than ever.

Recent news is that, a couple of weeks ago, I was offered admission to the Indian School of Business. After 5 years of battle, from bosses to cabs to Mumbai trains to battling the weather; after 5 years of nose to the grindstone, of going to sleep every night, living for the dream. Now, I live the dream.

This is about justice. This is not so much about new opportunities and glory and more about setting things right. This is about making up for having to close the previous show that was never supposed to end..

One of my future classmates is a product designer for Farmville. Another is a recruiter for Teach for India. Another is a former member of the Indian Counter-Terror Unit involved in 26/11. There are several lawyers, doctors and people working in climate change and sustainability. Everyone is larger than life. Everyone has multifaceted personalities. I shudder (in a good way) at the thought of sitting in a classroom, of being part of an environment where creativity is the norm, not the exception. An environment where bucking the trend is the trend. At last, this is the right arena.

If you change perceptions, if you rewrite the Days of Future Past, if you are the Breaker of Worlds and the Re-maker of a More Interesting Tomorrow, does that make you a God? Perhaps not in the traditional Creator-of-the-Universe kind, but certainly in the mold of the Jack Kirby definition? I would think so.

Every one of the people coming to ISB, is a person who (at the surface level at least) who lives at the very limit of their potential. These are people who will change the world. We will write not just our own destiny, but shape the nature of reality itself.

We are the soldiers of the Destiny. And the Show will never end.

Apologies for the weird moodswings.

Well, it’s true.

But not entirely.

Take a look at this infographic. Find the following countries in both feet:

1. USA
2. China
3. India
4. Australia
5. Japan

Now think about it. Cheers.

They make an interesting point about it’s accuracy, a topic I have fairly strong views on, and will expound further in this post.

But first, back to Babbage. A skill, which Babbage says is important to kids, but which I would posit that is important for everyone; is the ability to discern the quality of a source and the knowledge it attempts to impart. After all, garbage in – garbage out.

I have serious issues with academia’s odd boycott of wikipedia as a source in the classroom, which strikes me as downright peevish.

I would not say that Wikipedia should replace more formal academic / technical sources, but I do feel that it does have it’s place as at the very least, as an initial source of information, a starting point.

To require students to not refer to Wikipedia as a source at all, smacks of cranky behind-the-times professor would rather handicap students with unrealistic rules rather than update or revise the content in consideration of Internet 2.0.

The alternative to that proposition is even scarier. Professors that could not be bothered with the classroom.

It’s also, in my cynical eyes, all the more likely.

I’m normally not one to pay a lot of attention to lyrics of songs. I’m more for the instrumentals and energy (cliched as that sounds) that what people are trying to say.

Notable exceptions include Guns ‘N Roses, Pink Floyd and System of a Down. Only the first and last hold equivalent stature musically as lyrically.

A new band has recently come into my sphere of reality. Standing on par with the big 4 lyrically, and somewhere above Floyd on music. Their name is Porcupine Tree.

Steven Wilson is one of those incredibly talented people that makes other musicians look clumsy.

Enough talk, time to listen to stars die.

I’m going to be only a partial rebel. I’m going to go along with the crowd and make New Year’s resolutions. I’ll make the usual painful ones, but I am going to break with the self-flagellation and make some fun resolutions:

1. Get fatter: I love food. I love spicy food. I love seafood. I love eating a lot. Eating a lot of spicy seafood is 9th heaven. I vow to eat more, be happier more and enjoy guilt-free big eating more.

2. Play more video games: Video games are awesome, barring the awfully cliched names. They speed reflexes, they speed up thought processes, release endorphins, hit all the right psychological addiction-related neurons. The violence satisfies humanity’s inherent bloodlust of humanity. It eases the competitive urge, and unlike real life, there are do-overs. I’m going to spend more time inanely winning at video games.

3. Have more of a love life: Humanity bores me. Life moves in slow-motion. But there are special people out there. People who can keep up. People who can walk the spiral. I’m going to try and find them.

4. Be more of a loner: Humanity bores me. Life moves in slow motion. Most humans are intellectually flat and interaction with them is dull at best, distasteful and nauseating at worst. I’m going to avoid the idiot hordes and their social niceties a lot more.

5. Run more: Activation of pure exhilaration at a pure primal level. Caveman beating chest kind of primal. Note to self: Get more speed rush.

Footnote: Normal resolutions – buy a camera. Blog every day.

Painsta(c)king?

Yeah? riiite…

Yeah!! Right!!

Sure?

Sure.

Suure..

Creativity isn’t like that. It’s always nice. You can make the most epically dull clod on this mudball feel just a little bit more jolly by call him/her/it creative. Even if said dull clod can’t find a rational basis for being called creative..

Once upon a time, being creative also meant being broke. It meant being an artist, a writer, a musician or something equally ‘liberal’. Of course, since there can only be one Frank Sinatra in a century (and one Lady Gaga in a millenium), most Creatives didn’t hit Broadway.

Not any more. Now everyone can be creative. And with the internets, PROFIT. Now Creatives can make ipods, ads for ipods, apps for ipods, pods for ipods, … I can’t think of any more.

Oh wait, games for ipods. Which leads me to the point of this post.

Video games are awesome. and amazingly creative. Notably, of course is the epically awesome World of Goo.

But what the hell is up with the names. Do video game makers burn out all their creativity making the games and then just not have anything left when it’s time to name the game. What kind of name is World of Goo?

Don’t even get me started on the various military games. Call of Duty. Medal of Honor. Brothers in Arms. Black Ops. Gears of War. Defcon-something-or-the-other. Yes. We get it.

I’m positively biased towards RTS games, and considering that the most popular ones come from 2 franchises – Command and Conquer and Red Alert, it’s slightly lame to call them on repeating the names.

Prince of Persia. Dangerous Dave. Donkey Kong. ASTEROIDS. Even grandpappa DOOM. A little bit of mystery, a little bit of enticement. A lot of genius. Miss the days. Now I can hear the name of a game and say “its a <insert genre-defining game name here> clone. “

Anyway, Happy New Year, and here’s to hearing more creative game names this year.

I would hope for more creative games too, but I’ve given up now.

I’ve collected a few here from the slide-show which I thought were absolutely amazing:

1. The Wilderness Downtown: A chrome-optimized, CPU-intensive HTML5 video. (or videos. It opens many many windows. Don’t panic). Just sit back, don’t touch anything, wait, keep waiting, and then watch the video. Quite an interesting visual experience. The load time is mighty annoying (and ironic considering the soundtrack).

2. Singing Fingers:

3. You’ve probably heard of this – the Youtube Symphony Orchestra

4.Pixels – the movie. Very hilarious:

5. Remember those spheres from a couple of years ago showing the shrink in net worth of the largest banks? This is better.

6. Whoa.

7. Guess what this is. Brilliant. (This is cool too)

8. Mildly hypnotic. Very very cool:

9. WHOA.

Notable mention to the epic-in-scope life-in-a-day.