Rainy Day

We're having some strange weather here today. Or perhaps it's just me that's feeling strange. New Haven is bathed in a delicate drizzle, casting everything in a subtle, eldritch light. There's a strange tingle in my skin, as if it's about to sweat. An anxious current dances across my palms, overstimulating the muscles underneath. I want to sit alone in a large squarish wooden veranda overlooking the Ganges with the rain around me and a fire within. I feel like something is happening, or is about to happen; every fight or flight response within me is singing. Jack London shouts quietly in my head - "I would rather be ashes than dust!". A poor man from rural Bengal gives lottery tickets worth 2.5 Lacs to someone who hadn't even paid for them - simply because he had given his word. Nalini Sengupta stands firm and refuses to give up his fury.

Like I said, strange.

I woke up pretty late this morning, having stayed up till three or four to catch a glimpse of the blood moon [link]. The cloudy sky waylaid my astronomical attempt, and the late night ensured a dilatory awakening - by the time I got out of bed, it was half past eleven. I would have sluggishly slithered back to sleep, but I suddenly remembered that I had to meet some students at noon, so instead, I had to take a quick shower and run to the department.

Went to Avi's class in the afternoon and then to the gym to box (had an excellent workout). Dinner was underwhelming - the dining hall had practically nothing vegetarian (as a friend put it, they need to learn the difference between having vegetables and having vegetarian food); I ended up eating some yogurt with honey. I was going to hang out with a friend in the rec. room, but he told me that a bunch of bio people were already there, and that they were drinking, being loud, etc. On a Tuesday. Ah well.

Today's Things:

• A lawsuit trying to remove a memorial to Korean "comfort women" in LA [link]
• Ukraine launches special ops against separatist militia [link]
• One year after the Boston Marathon bombing [link]
• Iraq shuts down Abu Gharib prison [link]
• Gmail adds to its ToS, saying that it scans all emails [link]
• The Indian Supreme Court officially recognizes transgender people as a third gender [link]

I've been listening to Ehren Starks on repeat; here's a little something to get you started...

The Modi Bandwagon

Modi, Modi, Modi.

My facebook wall is filled with Modi-related talk, as is almost every conversation I have with another Indian. While I haven't collected enough information to write a comprehensive, coherent post on the topic, I have been studying. Here are some articles and fact-compilations about Modi that I've found on the internet. The various court rulings (ref. the 2002 Gujarat riots) will be added to this list as soon as I find a good transcript; those will probably go under the pro section, since they found him innocent of any wrongdoing.

Anti-Modi:

1. Priyamvada Gopal (The Independent): link
2. Human Rights Watch: link
3. Economic and Political Weekly: link
4. Thane Richard (Quartz): link

Pro-Modi:

1. Amrit Hallan (Medium): link
2. Guruprasad: link
3. Swaminathan Aiyar (The Times of India): link
4. Kartikay Mehrotra (Bloomberg): link

I plan to analyze each of these articles in turn and carefully go over any citations. This post will be updated periodically with summarized analyses.

---

Analyses:

To be updated.

---

My Conclusions:

To be updated.

Spring is here

It's been a wonderful day here in New Haven. Woke up, lazed about, ate, worked and chilled in the courtyard, had some very spicy red curry delivered from Jeera Thai. All in all, not bad, not bad at all.

Noboborsher Agam Shubheccha

Yes, yes, I know it's not the new year yet, but since the world did not have enough sense to make the 15th of April fall on a weekend this year, we made do with the nearest one.

A bunch of us got together and made lunch; well, to be honest, it was 4:30~5pm by the time we finished, so it was nearer dinner than lunch, but we did quite a good job, methinks. The luchis were perhaps less than perfect, to say the least, and we forgot to add salt to the alu-chocchori (promptly rectified at the table), but overall, not a bad attempt. Ingredients were acquired yesterday at Bharat Bazaar and Stop & Shop - I bought myself some Chawanprash¹ and a bag of michri². In traditional Indian style, the shop closed 15-30 minutes before the listed 9pm closing time - apparently, when they said that they closed at 9pm, they meant that they expect to leave at 9pm, which meant that they started turning off the lights at about 20 minutes to 9.

Things I experienced today:

• This piece of Bhojpuri music: link
• An Indian rip-off of Thriller, phonetically subtitled in English: link
• Where do you go to my lovely (Sarstedt) - listened to it again after a long time: link

Also, YouTube ads suck. They need to target them better. I keep getting these ads for "Learn how to write HTML and CSS" -_-

References:
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chyawanprash
[2] Couldn't find a single definition anywhere. Will update with link / description.

A Taxing Day

Finally sent in my tax return today. Unfortunately, for some idiotic reason, nonresident aliens in the US cannot file their taxes online. I have half a mind to charge the postage to the IRS.
The catharsis of finishing off my taxes was unfortunately interrupted by a rather annoying discussion at dinner - another instance of loud, emphatic ignorance confident about their knowledge of finance. "Bankers are evil.. they contribute nothing to society.. the whole of Wall Street is ethically wrong[sic]... they produce nothing.." - etc., etc., etc.

The exact workings of the financial crisis were then explained to me - it never ceases to amaze me that people are ready to believe that they have perfectly understood something that eluded some of the best minds in the world. Very, very few people can claim to understand the recent crisis - a few central bankers, a couple of professors and doctoral students at Yale and Chicago, and perhaps some people at the US Federal Reserve. That's it.

I, being the utter imbecile that I am, was foolish enough to argue. I should have known that this particular variety of self-assured ignorance comes accompanied - almost invariably - by an ego that is incapable of handling any opinion contrary to the first one that it accepts. Confronting such a person is a nuclear option; one must tell them that they are utterly and completely wrong. And doing so is difficult - one must decide to tear down someone else's ego in public. I quickly changed tack and started talking about something else. Phew.

I'm going to try and write a post describing the financial crisis in a couple of days. It will likely be an amateurish attempt, but I do want to put my ideas - rather, the ideas I have gleaned from my conversations with Andrew Sinclair - down on paper.

For now, Adios!

Stocks, luck, unscrupulousness, and taxes

Had some very heated discussions about the stock markets, morality, and taxation this afternoon.

I despise it when people who don't really understand something are so passionate in their beliefs on the issue. This seems to happen mostly because the person in question has some deep-seated beliefs that are strongly validated or rehashed by the argument. "Rich people are bad", or "making too much money is a sign that you're stealing from the poor" seemed to be the concepts that underlied most of the arguments today.

The stock market is not just a gambling house; if you want to describe it as "informed gambling" then almost anything is a gamble. If you enter any system (and actually put your hard-earned money into it) without understanding what you're doing, there's a good chance you're going to lose it. Stock market regulations are not perfect, just as legal systems are not perfect. Some people have gamed the system to make money in insidious ways that will soon (hopefully) be outlawed ¹. No doubt others will come up with even cleverer methods to make money. But that doesn't mean that the stock markets themselves are somehow morally wrong.

All of this seems to stem from a basic idea that (a) rich people are bad, and (b) rich people seem to make lots of money from the market: cue the "inequality is growing" tagline - which is something I'm not entirely sure of in any case ^2,3. Something, they say, must be wrong. Surely, the big, bad, rich people are using this corrupt system to make even more money. No.

Bad people may be rich, but if you make the argument in reverse, you are simply, logically, absolutely, thus congruently, wrong. Saying that some rich people make lots of money from the market is right; that's how many of them made their fortunes in the first place - they're rich because they're good at making money.

There was also a claim made that rich people are "bad" because the infrastructure that they stand on, that allows them to get rich, is inherently "bad" (and it influences said rich person), because it is (clearly) aimed at making money and nothing else. Note the implicit assumption that making money is automagically a bad thing. Don't even get me started.

There's a lot more I want to say about this, but I really should do more research before I do so.


References:
[1] http://www.reuters.com/video/2014/04/03/reuters-tv-breakingviews-michael-lewis-unplugged?videoId=303233495&videoChannel=117766
[2] http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3629
[3] http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/123566

Restart

It's been quite a while. I'd actually forgotten about my old blog.

A friend of mine told me he found it the other day. I don't suppose anyone else even looks at it anymore. Going through the posts, I can see how much and how little I've changed - I truly regret not keeping this blog updated - so many moments missed, soon to be forgotten. I suppose facebook took up that part of my life - when I wanted to say something, I just posted it there. But it's not quite the same. Not quite the same.

I'm going to try and update this blog every day from now on, even if it's a short, boring post. There are so many things I want to write about, so many wonderful memories I want to share - I'll see if I can do justice to the topics I choose.

I'm going to start with some events from last Friday and Saturday. Wish me luck!

P.S. I did notice the missing apostrophe in "it's" in many of my earlier posts. Don't know how that happened; I'll try to fix them as soon as I can.

UPDATE: Didn't even manage a week. Missed two days on the 9th and 10th. I'll keep recording days missed here to discourage laziness.

Real Estate Stuff

I'm building a website for a relative of mine, who runs a real estate business.

Check it out - raghav sen real estate (most of his work is in Kolkata).

I'm going to try and use some stuff from this article on design - hopefully, I won't make a mess of it.

Time's up !

Leaving for Yale tomorrow.

I started packing _today_.

I think I'm finished - which is not really an encouraging statement because I thought I had finished packing many times today.

My mother's sending lots of ready-to-eat food.. the customs people will probably think I'm trying to open a restaurant or something..

Wish me Luck ! (well, with 91CR on my side, luck is my lady.. hehe..)

Convert a character to hex using javascript

There are lots of massive solutions to this - here's a 0.2 second solution ( I am posting this because I saw this )

"x.charCodeAt(0).toString(16).toUpperCase()" is the hex of x. Use charCodeAt(i) for a full string (parseInt otherwise).

I realize that this is trivial. It is stupid. It can be done in many ways, most of which are ridiculously easy.

Unfortunately, people are failing to do even this. Meh, more proof for the FizzBuzz statistic.

The margin-top problem (and solution !)

This is one of the more irritating CSS errors* around - you put something inside a div - and the div takes on the margin-top of its child element.

(*This isn't really an error - it's technically the correct behaviour, but not what a programmer would expect.)

To illustrate - here's a page with multiple divs, with margin-top:0px specifically assigned for the divs.

The page looks like this : [link to page]

The margin-top problem

It should actually look like this : [link to page]

Solved margin-top

Here's an example of the CSS used:

body {
 margin:0;padding:0;text-align:center;background:#222;
 font-family:"Times New Roman", Times, serif;font-size:16px;
}

#box1,.other {
 width:1000px;
 margin:0px auto;
 background:#EEE;
 border-bottom:2px red solid;
}

#box1 {
 height:270px;
 margin-top:0px;
}

.other {
 height:150px;
 margin-top:0px!important;/*makes no difference*/
}

And some of the HTML :

<div id="box1">
 <h1>This h1 tag should have a margin-top. Instead, the div gets it.</h1>
</div>

<div class="other">
 <p style="margin-top:50px;">Text in a styled p tag with a margin-top : again, the parent div takes it.</p>
</div>

To solve this problem, just add a padding-top:1px or a border - any padding or border affecting the top of the parent element will resolve the issue.

As you can see, chrome has this problem. I have tested it on FF, Opera and IE8 with the exact same results.

Dead Code Olympics : Part 1 - Internet Explorer 6

The web has come a long way since the time of spacing gifs and tables inside tables inside tables (repeat ad nauseam) - however, a great many developers and users have not.

I'm going to list one of the most irksome practices of these curious creatures:

Internet Explorer 6

IE6 ! Gadzooks, forsooth ! Quite possibly the biggest burden on the internet right now. IE6 was provided for free with WinXP, and has cost developers and designers a fortune in antidepressants.

IE6 can change HTML when CSS is changed.. don't believe it ? See this :

In Chrome

In Internet Explorer 6

Notice the arrow ? Now, (Bruce Lee style) look at what its pointing to. "ct" ?? What's that ?

Well, "c" and "t" are the last two letters of "contact" - IE6 is simply repeating the end of the previous line.
If you hover over "ct", you get a hover effect on "contact".

However, you can stop this from happening - just change the width of the parent div, or the border, and the effect goes away.

Such is the power of IE6.

Kneel. Or you will be knelt.

- Debayan Gupta

Getting ready to move..

Spent the last few weeks finishing up all my projects (my backlog is always twice of what it should be).

Over the last two days I had to deal with no less than four FizzBuzz-challenged "developers" who mucked up my carefully optimized code by "removing obviously unnecessary lines" - I nearly ended their obviously unnecessary lives before my brain kicked in - at which point I simply decided to charge extra.

It really is rather sad to see the sheer number of programmers who, simply put, cannot code. This problem is compounded by the fact that most of these people are under the impression that they are experts.

Pooh.

I sense a Censor

Censorship: It tends to get irritating very, very quickly.

Indian censors really take the cake - they replace "hell" with "heck" in the subtitles. Which works in most movies, but not something like "Bedazzled".

"Paragraph one states that I, the Devil, a not-for-profit cooperation, with offices in Purgatory, heck, and Los Angeles, will give you seven wishes to use as you see fit"

What the heck ?

Not only do they get stuff wrong all the time (it really is quite obvious that the people writing the subtitles have no knowledge of English), but I mean seriously ! Censoring SUBTITLES ?!! (and mixing up "lichen" and "lycan" )

They're been cutting out crucial scenes from movies for a long time (anything "too gory" or "showing too much skin") - but allowing shows like Splitsvilla to continue - which do you think is worse for our innocent, naive little minds ?

And you know what ? This is helping increase piracy. I watched this movie a couple of months ago - and I liked it, but it seemed that some scenes were cut off (there was an obvious break in continuity), so I went and bought a DVD. Guess what - that was censored too.

So I ended up having to download the bloody thing, just to watch the whole movie. Which I PAID for. And it wasn't a sex scene. It wasn't very gory (I've seen stuff a lot worse on TV). And it certainly should not have been censored.

So just for the heck of it, I decided to find out how many people ended up downloading/ buying from pirates even after they had bought the DVDs, or had decided not to buy originals because they would be incomplete.

I asked 16 of my friends - here are the results :

2 - usually buy

3 - always download because its cheaper, and easier to get.

11 - download pirated stuff because its better.

And guess why its better ? 

1. They're compressed to 700MB or so (not everyone wants to get a hi-def - they'd rather watch the movie first, see if they like it, and then maybe get a better resolution)
2. They're out first - movies are often released much, much later in India, so people who really, really, want to watch, people who can and will pay, people who are anxious for the film - will download a hall cam record.
3. They are complete ( Indian censors substituted "courtesan" for "whore" throughout the movie Original Sin - which is pretty funny, especially in places like "you liar ! Thief ! Courtesan !" )

But that's all right. We don't need FTV to spoil our minds. Or bad language (most parents would be quite.. surprised to know how many swearwords their children are aware of). Or words like "hell".

May you burn in heck.

How to survive interviews

My aunt came over to my house today, and I was subjected to over an hour of learned monologue (with my aunt, its always a monologue..). I had spent most of the time thinking about Elin Nordegren the Floyd-Warshall algorithm, but I noticed an ant on my wrist, and was startled into listening for over ten seconds.

Apparently, her daughter's college is having mock job interviews (conducted by their placement cell). They are to

• wear ironed clothing
• shave
• shun jeans
• wear pleated pants
• (girls) wear salwaar suits
• hold their noses up at a constant 30 degrees
• act in a manner expected of a dapper 70 year old Englishman in the 1830's
• generally, be a cowardly *&^$ with a bad attitude.

It is quite evident why these particular imbeciles are stuck with jobs at college placement cells (bad ones at that !) - they have no idea whatsoever of how to give an interview. ( and no, dear residents of America, its not "inner-view" )

An interview is your chance to give your employer a glimpse into the best of you. The best of you. Doing the same, stupid thing as the other four hundred candidates (who have all been to the same career counselling classes as you ) is not going to help.

A good haircut ? A good idea, especially if you're a hairdresser. But it is certainly not the main thing.

Ridiculously expensive clothes ? Again, missing the point.

Surprise surprise, there is no magic formula. No really, act surprised. Because there are lots of "institutes" which provide "personal interview consultancy services". And they earn a lot of money.

The only real way to give a good interview is, as clichéd as it sounds, is to be yourself. You would be surprised at the number of people who cannot do just that.

Most people are merely following the herd, with no idea of what they really want to do. They have no real plans for the future - this is not to say that they are not capable of intelligence. That is what's really sad - these people possess the capacity for thought, but are unable to utilize it because of a variety of reasons.

Can you think ? Would you get punched by Bruce Lee for looking at his finger instead of the Moon ?

What are you good at ? Can you lead a team ? Do you want to ?

Make sure you have the drive, the ambition, and the _power_ (for the lack of a better word) for it to make sense for them to hire you. You should add value to their organisation.

Remember - you are giving this interview to get into a job, where you will be expected to perform, and perform in a way that will do justice to the expectations that you have raised during your interview. Are you ready to do that ?

Be honest. Be intelligent. Know what you want.

Don't waste their - and what is infinitely worse - your time.

PS. I know where the extra "is" is. I put it there.