Author: SK

Quizzing

Different quizmasters have different interests. However, there are a few things that a large number of quizmasters are interested in, and these form a dominant portion of most quizzes. There is some sort of a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop at play here.

And if you don’t share these “special interests”, then your average performance automatically gets capped.

Of course, this doesn’t apply in case you force yourself to develop new interests just for the sake of quizzing, but that, I think, defeats the whole purpose.

Indian editions

For the last one year or so, I’ve been relying on bloggers such as Tyler Cowen for my books recommendations. Basically I read about a book on a blog, or say Marginal Revolution does a book forum on the book, and I soon get interested in the book, and go out to buy it. And the fact that I’ve been fairly regularly winning book coupons at quizzes provides an easy financing for these books.

Some of the books that I have bought and read through these recommendations include Super Crunchers, The Black Swan and The Long Tail, all books that I have really enjoyed. Apart from this, I’ve bought and read books written by people whose blogs I read – and this includes Discover your inner economist and The Logic of Life. And I’ve noticed that in general, the books recommended in the blogs that I read are more enjoyable than the books writen by the bloggers themselves. Maybe this has to do with the fact that if I’m regularly reading someone’s blog, there isn’t that much value I can get from the book.

Now, my problem is that a large number of books that I want to read don’t have Indian editions. At least with “popular” books such as “Discover your .. ” the Indian edition came out in due course of time, and I was able to read them. Unfortunately, it seems like the market for a number of such books in India is so small that they don’t bother bringing out an Indian edition.

The gentleman at Gangaram’s book store told me that if I wanted, he would be able to procure the US editions of these books. However, the dollar rate, plus the $10 for shipping means that these books would cost me on an average, > Rs. 2000, which is much much higher than my willingness to pay which stands at Rs. 400. Again, given that US editions are typically much more expensive than Indian editions, asking a friend in the US to buy them (or ordering through Amazon) and sending it to me through another friend or something will again be too expensive. So I wonder what I could possibly do to read the books that I want to read.

Here are the books that are on my “want to read” list currently but I’m not able to procure them.

The Third Bangalore Photowalk

Just to remind you people, the third Bangalore Photo Walk will happen this Sunday, the 29th of June between 8 am and 10 am. We will start at the intersection of Brigade Road and Residency Road (in front of Rex). More details here: http://tinyurl.com/6ymzt8

Please bring along a camera. Any type will do. Even if you can’t bring one along, but just want to walk along you are welcome, but you should stick to the rest of the group. I would also recommend you to bring some drinking water, and maybe a cap.

The other day,

[info]harithekid

suggested that we move on to the Coffee House on M G Road for breakfast after the walk. We will keep this option open (officially, there’s no breakfast at the end of this walk). In case we decide to go to Coffee House, there will be a small change in the route. We won’t turn right from Museum Road on to Residency Road but instead walk on straight to hit M G Road. Anyway since we have agreed to keep the route of the walk uncertain, I’m sure we can live with this.

Going by my yahoo! inbox, the response to this photo walk has been fairly positive so far. Nevertheless, I request you to give further footage for the photowalk on your blogs, etc. Thanks to

[info]aneeta_04

for writing about it on her blog and Shande for putting it up on metblogs.

Favourite branch of mathematics

i’m suddenly reminded of my interviews during the summer internship selection interview process in IIMB in November 2004. This happened to me at more than one bank’s interview.

Interviewer: Do you like math?
Me: Yes
Interviewer: What is your favourite branch of math?
Me: Graph Theory
(interviewer looks confused for a few moments)
Interviewer: Oops. Can I ask you questions in probability?
Me: ok…

and the interview goes on…

More on studs and fighters

I was watching Wimbledon last night when I realized there aren’t too many pure serve-and-volley types around. Even the 5-time champion Federer plays mostly from the baseline. I don’t recall any pure serve-and-volley types after Sampras and Ivanisevic. Anyways, while watching Roddick play Schwank, I came up with the following hypothesis:

When a new field opens up, in the beginning, it is mostly dominated by studs. Soon, people start figuring out. Soon the code gets cracked, and a manual gets published. And the field becomes less and less stud as time goes on. And it gets dominated by fighters. The stud has no option but to do something and take things to a new level, or a new field, where the studness can be applied.

Let me know if this is true. Background reading about studs and fighters.

Sporting Lookalikes

Here are some pertinent observations made by my mother and I in the last few months.

According to my mother, one of my aunts (father’s cousin’s wife) looks like Lucas Leiva.

Now, I think the said aunt’s elder daughter looks like Mauro Camoranesi

And my mother says that this particular aunt’s younger daughter looks like Jelena Jankovic

So readers, is this consistent? We are yet to come up with a nice sporting look-alike for the father, but is it “consistent” that one girl looks like camoranesi, her sister looks like jankovic and their mother looks like lucas?

Carrot Halwa

Last night my mother was making carrot halwa. She called me and asked me to taste it and check if the sugar is right. After I’d done that and given my approval she said “now all that is left is to put in some cardamom and raisins and cashews”.

“Don’t put the cardamom”, I said. “its smell will dominate and spoil the taste”.

(my mother has the habit of putting? bucketloads of cardamom and saffron into any remotely sweet item she makes. the worst case is with the nimbu pani which has very little of the nimbu taste)

“No but if I don’t put cardomom then the halwa will get an extremely carroty smell. Do you want that?”

“But isn’t that the whole point of carrot halwa?”

Finally the compromise is that some halwa will be set aside for me and cardamom will be added to the rest of it.

A little more on public transport

There are three factors that affect the choice of mode of transport – cost, time and convenience. You usually make the decision regarding what mode to take by evaluating how much you are willing to “spend” in terms of each of these. For example, if you live in Mumbai, taking the local train would be the most effective in terms of cost and time, but not really so in terms of convenience. Hence, you may sometimes give up time and cost and invest in a taxi so that you travel in better convenience.

This needs to be kept in mind when trying to design an efficient public transport system – the combination of cost, time and convenience needs to be attractive for the user to abandon private transport in favour of public. One mistake that is commonly made is to forget the convenience part, which leads to a large number of people to stick to their private transport. In related stuff, in my first ever post on the IEB, I had argued for segmented public transport so that people can find their own combinations within the public transport system.

This post is about the time aspect. The thing with a system based on buses is that you can do little about the time factor – unless you decide to create specific bus lanes, which aren’t too feasible currently in a place like Bangalore, you need to use the general road space. However, this is only as far as traveling time goes. What can, and should, be improved is waiting time.

Last week, while I was on my way to the M G Road area to meet sudheernarayan for the unofficial photowalk, I purchased a daily pass (for Rs. 30 you can travel on any bus from anywhere to anywhere else on that day). Though there exist direct buses from my place to MG Road, I figured out that it would be faster if I changed buses. Basic assumption was monotonicity – if bus A and bus B both go from point X to point Y, and if A reaches X before B, then A will reach Y before B. And that every time I went forward a small distance, that would increase my chances of getting a bus to the final destination.

So I take a random bus from my place to Banashankari – which improves the chances of getting a bus to MG Road by a factor of three. Then another 2 buses to fourth block – increases probability of getting bus by about 50%. By probability I mean the expected value of getting a bus to your destination in the next one second (I mean, assume Poisson distribution, etc.). I took four buses to get to M G Road but spent a total of five minutes waiting.

Now that the story is out of the way, the key to a good bus system would be to decrease waiting time. Right now, it’s quite horrible in Bangalore on a number of routes, as frequency of direct buses is low and changing is also quite difficult. And as for changing buses, there should be a system which makes interchanges easier – typically you should be able to switch buses by standing at the same bus stop.

Right now I need to go down to watch football, so I’ll write the second part of this post tomorrow. In that I’ll talk about how the network can be redesigned so as to decrease average waiting time for commuters. Of course, given the volumes and the fleet in operation today, one will need to introduce several more buses before the “convenience” bit becomes better.

Water Privatization revisited

I first wrote about water privatization on this blog back in 2006. I had written that bit as part of a term paper for an infrastructure course at IIMB, and it seemed like we didn’t do too well as far as the term paper went.

I revisited the topic sometime last year when i talked about water privatization in Kundapur. I cross posted that on the Indian Economy Blog also.

My main argument there was that privatization of water would ensure an OPTION for everyone to access clean piped drinking water, and this option value would offset the higher prices faced by those who already have the connection – who are mainly the reasonably well to do.

The latest to comment on this matter is Tyler Cowen. Writing in the Forbes, he calls for unregulated privatization of water supply in developing countries. And he mentions precisely the same reasons as I did in my earlier posts.

I hope Prof. Ranga, who didn’t give us enough credit for our term paper back then, is reading this.