Random thoughts: site for a new age adda

Most expensive free coffee

2011-11-16T11:35:00.001-08:00

is what we have at Trader joes. We go for coffee but always end up buying something or the other.

Who ate the apple?

2011-08-04T11:16:00.000-07:00

Here are some snippets of conversations with my 3 year old son:

Aaroosh: who ate the apple?
(looking at the apple logo)
++++++++

Me: We are going to Coconut hill to buy some coconuts (coconut hill is the name of an indian store)
Aaroosh: Are we going to climb the hill to get the coconuts?

+++++++++
while driving to his day care where a new building is being constructed
Sunita: Looks like the director is on top of things.
Aaroosh (looks up at the roof): Where is she? I dont see anyone on top.
Aaroosh: Dont laugh at me

Parking spot economics

2011-03-04T16:39:00.001-08:00

Here is an economics problem:
I live in a housing community with 70 houses with say 50 parking spots outside. The rule states every family needs to park their cars in their garage. It is a 2 car garage.
Reality: There is a huge parking problem. Since everybody parks maybe one car in their garage and parks their junk in the other spot in the garage. The car of course gets parked in the empty parking spots.
Here is the problem:
If everyone starts parking cars in their garage to start with following the rules, it will devolve into a chaotic state we are in now. This is because of the following:
1. Initially the parking spots are empty, since everybody is acting like good neighbors
2. I see the parking spot is empty and say hey, since nobody is utilizing it, let me just park there (no harm)
3. Next day someone else has the same thought.
4. Soon we are back to square one.

So I dont think the ideal goal of everyone parking in their garages will work.

So the economics problem is to come up with the right incentive to solve this problem. Any thoughts?

83 years 4 months

2011-01-14T08:43:00.000-08:00

There are lots of Amazon toys whose recommended maximum age is 83 years 4 months which seems to be Amazon's default value (1000 months). This must be really peeving the 84 years and older folks in this world :)

Things I have learned from my 1 year old

2010-10-06T02:59:00.001-07:00

I have traveled on a long distance flight a couple of times before going on one with my son. If you have been on one, you will know that they give you a toothbrush and toothpaste kit. The toothbrush is just the brush part on a 7 centimeter handle (too small to really hold with your hand). I had on all my previous flights used this small handle toothbrush for brushing and cursing the airline for bad design. And lo on my trip with my one year old, he instantly is attracted to the kit. He starts playing around with the brush and the toothpaste, putting them together in various combinations and finally hands me a regular size toothbrush. It turns out the kit was designed so that you could create a regular size toothbrush from the small handle part and the toothpaste part. Now, I know why they say kids are more creative. I was just intent on the criticism part and not being open to try different combinations.

Why offside in soccer?

2010-06-15T13:42:00.000-07:00

A discussion at work raised the topic: why is offside necessary in Soccer? I could not come up with a reason for it's existence. In my mind, it is not required. If you make offsides legal, then the defense strategy will morph accordingly. Teams will keep a defender behind at all times. Also, offside has been removed from field hockey as a precedence. So why not in soccer?

Lesson in writing cheques

2010-04-29T15:49:00.000-07:00

I learnt a lesson in writing cheques today. I noticed my bank account was debited in the amount of $2461 for a two hundred and forty dollar cheque I wrote up. The reason as you can see below was how I wrote the cheque amount..

New restaurant rating system

2010-04-20T08:48:00.000-07:00

I have an idea for a new rating system for restaurants. It is how many times in a month will you go back to eat at the restaurant. So the ratings would read like Restaurant A is once a month restaurant. So I will from now on provide my new rating for restaurants I visit. For starters, Anjappar restaurant in Milpitas gets a once in a month rating. I think there is only restaurant that comes close to a once every day rating: Komala vilas.

Unfair winter olympics rules

2010-02-24T12:08:00.000-08:00

There are a few sports in which athletes takes turn and go one after another. This is unfair in some sense. Since the athletes that go later have extra information about what happened earlier, times set, whether another athlete crashed out etc. For example, the athlete that goes first would have to push extra hard to get their best. In the process of doing so, they can crash for example in skiing. The athletes who follow may use this information to not push their limits since they may now know that they could still win without their best effort.

Vanpool attendance sheet app

2010-02-12T17:26:00.000-08:00

I built this vanpool attendance sheet application that automatically takes care of giving credits to the drivers based on this formula.

Min my colleague at work developed the Iphone app for this which is located here. Open it in Iphone safari browser.

Is this the start of biological computation?

2010-01-22T20:16:00.000-08:00

Very fascinating finding in Scientific american:Slime mold validates efficiency of Tokyo rail network

"A Japan-based research team found that if they placed bits of food (oat flakes) around a central Physarum in the same location as 36 outlying cities around Tokyo, the mold created a network connecting the food sources that looked rather like the existing rail system. And when comparable "topographical barriers" were introduced onto the experimental plane, the links were even more similar."

Well this might be the start of an era of biological computation? You can imagine people selling customized (ASIC style) organisms grown to solve certain problems. Maybe you could chain a few of them to make more complicated computations (i.e write programs). The time required for the above computation is 26 hours which is quite slow.

Green man

2010-01-12T16:23:00.000-08:00

My idea of a super man is a green man who can produce his own food by basking in the sun. The green man would have enough chlorophyll pigments in his skin to absorb solar energy and obtain enough nutrition for his day-to-day activity.
Now just imagine a world of green men. Starvation would be unknown in this world. The green man would eventually also get bored at doing nothing and basking in the sun and work on interesting ideas and discover new things (in this world, boredom might substitute necessity as the mother of invention).

But of course in case you are thinking in the back of your mind why a green man is not found on this earth here is a scientific explanation.
The Case Against Little Green Men

Update in 2010, a sea slug has been discovered that is half animal half plant. "The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they've eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out photosynthesis - the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy. "
Check the article here.

Vanpool math

2010-01-08T03:47:00.000-08:00

Question: How do you attribute appropriate credit to people in a vanpool in which the number of people riding the van keep varying every day?
Answer: For every ride you do not drive you incur a loan of -1/(N-1) turns of driving, where N > 0 is the number of eligible drivers in the van. For every ride in which you drive you receive a credit of 1 turn.
Eligible drivers are people who can drive (no medical conditions or other legal problems etc)

(Assumptions: the answer is to ensure fair sharing of credit among vanpool participants. It is possible to provide a bidding system too in the vanpool, in which each driver specifies a price for driving that day and the lowest bidder wins)
Let us take some examples to see if this works or not.
Carpool (2 people A, B)

Turn number	A	B
1	(Drives) +1	(Sits) -1
2	(Sits) -1	(Drives) +1
Sum credits	0	0

3 people vanpool (A, B, C)

Turn number	A	B	C
1	(Drives) +1	(Sits) -1/2	(Sits) -1/2
2	(Sits) -1/2	(Drives) +1	(Sits) -1/2
3	(Sits) -1/2	(Sits) -1/2	(Drives) +1
Sum credits	0	0	0

Snoring

2009-12-29T03:36:00.000-08:00

I wonder why people snore only when they are asleep and not when they are awake? Are there other things humans do only while asleep.

Free work?

2009-12-23T01:20:00.000-08:00

Let us consider Yelp. It feels strange to me that people do so much free work for them, but then the value of Yelp is in providing a forum (middle man) where I as a user can go and see what other people liked or recommended. So in a sense the value I get from Yelp is for free which is arguably offset by the free work I do for Yelp by writing reviews. Now that is a wonderful self sustaining model.

Middle man business plan

2009-12-23T01:06:00.000-08:00

I came across a great description of the utility of the middle man in the world.
"Famous 1945 article by R. A. Radford, "Economic Organization of a POW Camp." Prisoner of war camp, food and some necessities are provided by the "detaining power." Main thing that provided them with stuff was Red Cross packets. Everybody has the same endowments, but people had different tastes. Some people don't smoke, some don't eat beef. Talks about how institutions of trade emerge without any top-down supervision and with resentment of people participating in the trade: we each think that the exchanges we make are voluntary but have a sense that someone is exploiting me. Itinerant Padre, went around and made voluntary exchanges but after a day ended up with two packets plus a little more. Left every person better off; but he ended up with more than he started."
They essentially make arbitrage possible in many ways. (It is a very different view point from what I had of middle men. I always vilified the middle man.) I believe the internet makes it possible to make the middle man scale his reach way beyond what was possible before. So onto coming up with the next middle man web site.

Non-vegetarians actually save animals from extinction

2009-11-23T09:08:00.000-08:00

My hypothesis is that non-vegetarians actually save the animals they eat from becoming extinct. Take for example, chicken. Humans might eat chickens but they also breed them and feed them, allowing the chicken gene pool to survive and flourish. So from the chicken gene pool perspective, humans are making their life easier in some sense, by allowing them to keep passing on their genes to their descendants in a safe environment. Well the same argument can be made for the other animals that humans eat. It is no different than saying humans also enable the gene pool of rice plant or wheat plant to survive and flourish. Of course their survival is conditional on humans themselves surviving. So in some sense we are tying their survival chances to ours. Wonder what the vegetarians have to say?

As an aside, for the ethical vegetarians here is an article you can read and ponder on?

Consciousness in babies

2009-11-09T15:54:00.001-08:00

I wonder at what point of time between conception and birth of the baby around 9 months after, that the baby develops consciousness. I am assuming the one cell conception stage does not have consciousness. It is fascinating for me to think that in this small 9 month period there is an instant in which the baby turns into a conscious being from a bunch of cells. Yes, I know I have not defined what consciousness means. I guess with whatever definition of consciousness the thought still holds.

I want new fruits

2009-11-09T09:08:00.000-08:00

Why do we not find any more new fruits? Is this an inevitable side effect of globalization? Just from a statistical point of view, I would think there are more plant species than animals, which would mean there must be new fruits out there to be discovered?

I did find a fruit that is new to me: persimmon. It is from the same family as sapota or chikku but tastes different. I dont think this has made its way to India yet. If you are in the bay area it is available in chinese stores like Ranch 99 or trader joes has it too.

Air bubbles in glass of water

2009-10-14T10:17:00.000-07:00

Why does a glass of water sitting around get filled with bubbles after a few days?

Dusshera and Durga puja

2009-09-29T01:58:00.000-07:00

Is it a coincidence or is there some connection between the two festivals Dusshera and Durga puja occuring around the same time frame? It is quite a coincidence that the time frame that Ram killed Ravana is also the time when Durga vanquished Mahishasura.

Addendum: Got a reply from Tapas Kanti Roy
Tapas Kanti Roy: but wait: they are indeed connected. According to legend, the first person to perform Durga Puja in Autumn (in the month of Ashwin) was Rama. That is why, sometimes in Bengali, it is also called 'Okal Bodhan' (untimely worship). He did that to pray for his victory over Ravana. On the Dashami (10th day after new moon) of Ashwin, he slayed Ravana: ... Read Morethat is why it is called VijayaDashami. Three weeks after VijayaDashami, Rama returned back to Ayodhya, which is Diwali.
Before that, Durga Puja used to happen in Spring.

And of course, don't forget the symbolism: of both the Puranas and the Ramayana :). You cannot bind the act slaying mahishasura by goddess durga in a time frame...

Usain bolt could do a Sergey bubka

2009-08-19T08:40:00.000-07:00

The way Usain bolt is running, maybe he should just follow in the footsteps of Sergey Bubka. He can shave off a few milli-seconds from the world record time in every big event he runs in. That way he can hold the most world records in the world in 100 meters.

Vanpool pattern

2009-08-19T08:38:00.000-07:00

Vanpooling is a great amortization pattern. It provides a way for people to amortize their commute cost (time and gas) and thus provide an alternative to living near your workplace. It is also a great example where a group of people can do far better than a single person. You can quantify your commute time in vanpool as (Actual_commute_time / number_of_people_in_the_vanpool) + extra_time_to_drive_to_vanpool_meeting_area. So for example, my round trip commute time is 90 minutes. My vanpool has 7 people. So my commute time now becomes approximately 13 minutes + 5 minutes to drive to the meeting area, which is as good as someone living close to my workplace. The disadvantages with this pattern is the rigidity of the start times of the commute. The other disadvantage is the huge penalty (in time) you pay if you miss your vanpool (by being late).
I wonder if this pattern can be applied as a solution to a software problem? I guess I have a solution waiting for a problem here...

Graph of life

2009-07-10T09:55:00.001-07:00

I was talking to my brother who turned the corner on 40 which to me sounds like an age threshold.. At some point of time, the age the person is and the age the person feels diverges. So, I have this idea of plotting a graph, in which x axis is time from birth in months or years and y axis is age. In the graph, I am going to plot the real age and the age felt by a person. It will be interesting to observe this graph for every person and how the age the person feels criss crosses the real age. I took a stab at drawing mine. Since I was the youngest in my class by one year I increased my felt age by one for my school days. I think I stabilized during my undergraduation days. Currently I do feel younger than my real age :)
I also drew Benjamin Button's graph just for comparison's sake.

Half dome

2009-06-25T13:12:00.000-07:00

Just noticed on a recent trip to yosemite that you can actually see an old man on the half dome when viewed from glacier point. I have attached the actual half dome and one with my impressions :)
p.s Interestingly, I subsequently checked wikipedia, and found the following:
"Half Dome was originally called "Tis-sa-ack," meaning Cleft Rock in the language of the local Native Americans. Tis-sa-ack is the name of a mother from a native legend. The face seen in Half Dome is supposed to be hers"