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Book now for the flight to nowhere

See this article from the times online:

AN INDIAN entrepreneur has given a new twist to the concept of low-cost airlines. The passengers boarding his Airbus 300 in Delhi do not expect to go anywhere because it never takes off.

All they want is the chance to know what it is like to sit on a plane, listen to announcements and be waited on by stewardesses bustling up and down the aisle.

In a country where 99% of the population have never experienced air travel, the “virtual journeys” of Bahadur Chand Gupta, a retired Indian Airlines engineer, have proved a roaring success.

See full article.

Why beautiful people have more daughters

The title of this post is the name of a book on “evolutionary psychology” written by two scientists trying to explain a lot of human behavior on the basis of evolutionary principles last seen in action during the stone age. This interview with one of the authors is rather interesting. The following excerpt explains the title of the book:

The basic idea is this: Whenever parents have genetic traits they can pass on to their children that are more valuable for boys than for girls, then they have more sons than daughters. Conversely, whenever parents have genetic traits they can pass on to their children that are more valuable for girls than for boys, then they have more daughters than sons. Physical attractiveness — being beautiful — is good for both boys and girls, but it’s much more advantageous for girls. Physical attractiveness of a woman is one of the most important considerations for men when they select both long-term and short-term mates, but a man’s physical attractiveness is important for women only when she’s looking for short-term mates. Women like to have affairs with good-looking men, but they don’t necessarily want to marry them, unless of course they are also rich and powerful.

So beautiful daughters will be more likely to take full advantage of their physical attractiveness than beautiful sons. Beautiful daughters are more likely to pass on their genes successfully to the next generation than beautiful sons, because they are more likely to find themselves in stable marriages to desirable spouses. In a representative sample of 3,000 young Americans, those who are “very attractive” had 36% greater odds of having a daughter compared to everyone else. Similarly, studies have found that big and tall parents are more likely to have sons, and short and thin parents are more likely to have daughters, because body size is more of an advantage to men than to women. Women are attracted to big and tall men much more than men are attracted to big and tall women.

See full article.

Ignoring Laws

Tim Wu has an interesting series of posts on how laws are quite different in theory and practice. Specifically, he talks about how lots of laws - important laws - are not enforced, resulting in a world that operates rather differently that what you would expect based on a strict reading of the existing laws. He takes some great examples from copyright law, pornography, legal (prescription) drugs, to argue that sometimes, it is not the congressmen and courts that are making the laws, but rather a de facto standard that emerges out of the actions of various public prosecutors, police, and juries that really determines what is “legal”. (Had you thought of the rule of law in this way? I hadn’t!)

Long, but definitely worth reading. Link.

Twitter Updates for 2007-10-19

• struggling to understand why some posts in http://wogma.com have funny characters in them (unicode, utf, windows-1252, oh my!) #

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Twitter Updates for 2007-10-18

• is thinking: There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at flood, leads to fortune… #
• is blogging: History of Religion in 90 seconds http://tinyurl.com/22k4ps #
• is blogging: Interesting website: Erowid Experience Vaults http://tinyurl.com/yu5w3a #

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Interesting website: Erowid Experience Vaults

Erowid.org is a website where people write about what they experience when they do drugs. If you ever wanted to do drugs vicariously, this is your chance. For example, this is an excerpt from a post on doing cocaine for the first time:

I sat there for a few minutes after my line. First thing I noticed was my front teeth being completely numb. I told the group that and they chuckled. After those first words, I didn’t shut up til I crashed. I felt complete euphoria. We did lines about every 15 minutes until the stash was gone. It was abosuletly phenomenal. When each line hit me, I just had another jolt of the feeling that everything was good. and i mean everything. and I just wanted to talk about it.

I just kept telling stories about my past and the emotions they brought up when I remembered things. I told my friends how much I loved them, what I loved about them, what I didn’t (and friendly advice on how to change), my memories of them.
I was in a state of calm, even though my body was uncontrollably jittery. But I didn’t care, in fact I loved it. Everything was just cool. I was the fonz.
Everybody else was real cool during the whole thing, even with me blabbering away like a fool most of the night.

We listened to a lot of music that night while stuffing our noses. We just kept playing songs from my roommate’s mp3 collection that had emotional connections for each of us. With each new one, we would point out the emotion connected to it and the lyrics we loved. Each story led to another and another and another. I have never had that much fun listening to music and talking. I’ve had good times doing it clean, but with the coke I just on top of the world.

The relentless pursuit of knowledge takes you to interesting places…

History of Religion in 90 seconds

See this page for a neat little video of how the major religions spread across the world from their beginnings until now.

Not only is the content interesting in itself, but I also think this is a great example of presenting data well. Think about it: if you were asked to present the information in 90 seconds, how would you have done it? Would it have been as effective?

Twitter Updates for 2007-10-17

• New blog post: Resisting one temptation makes you vulnerable to another http://tinyurl.com/2xz53l #

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Parent-child dancing shoes

These cute shoes from Finland are designed to be worn by a parent balancing a child on her/his toes while dancing.

Link. I found them on boing-boing.

Komli offers Rs. 2,00,000 for your algorithm

Pune based startup Komli (which recently introduced the very intriguing service PubMatic) has just announced an algorithm contest, with 2 Lakh Rupees as the prize. It’s certainly a very innovative way to get a solution to your business problems, and potential recruits too.

Details:

Komli lives in the world of online advertising, and online advertising is rife with opportunity with complex algorithms based on cutting edge topics such as machine learning, data mining, graph theory, etc. Online advertising is growing at a very fast pace, and the number of variables affecting the performance of an online ad has been growing at an even faster pace. Komli is devising methods for maximizing the yield of online advertising using advanced statistical machine learning methods over large-scale systems. This is a very interesting and complex algorithm problem.

Komli is currently using a set of algorithms for maximizing the yield of online ads, collectively called ‘Yin-Yang’. There are a lot of interesting alternative approaches to Yin-Yang that have yet to be tried. Komli is interested in determining if any of these alternative approaches can beat Yin-Yang by making better predictions.

Komli will provide participants with anonymous ad impression data and a prediction accuracy bar that is 50% better than what Yin-Yang can do on the same training data set. Participants’ solutions will be judged by ‘Time complexity’ and ‘Space complexity’ criteria. The participant whose solution works best will receive Rs. 2,00,000, bragging rights and an opportunity to work with Komli. Of course, participants have to share their method and code with Komli. Eager participants can signup for the contest by filling the form on the left.

See full article. Mukul who runs engineering for Komli is a friend of mine, and I had recently talked to him about their technology. I found it to be extremely interesting and it sounded quite challenging.