the organization kid

From the organization kids being bred at Princeton -

[...]But nowhere did I find any real unhappiness with this state of affairs; nowhere did I find anybody who seriously considered living any other way. These super-accomplished kids aren't working so hard because they are compelled to. They are facing, it still appears, the sweetest job market in the nation's history. Investment banks flood the campus looking for hires. Princeton also offers a multitude of post-graduation service jobs in places like China and Africa. Everyone I spoke to felt confident that he or she could get a good job after graduation. Nor do these students seem driven by some Puritan work ethic deep in their cultural memory. It's not the stick that drives them on, it's the carrot. Opportunity lures them. And at a place like Princeton, in a rich information-age country like America, promises of enjoyable work abound—at least for people as smart and ambitious as these. "I want to be this busy," one young woman insisted, after she had described a daily schedule that would count as slave-driving if it were imposed on anyone.

[snip]

In short, at the top of the meritocratic ladder we have in America a generation of students who are extraordinarily bright, morally earnest, and incredibly industrious. They like to study and socialize in groups. They create and join organizations with great enthusiasm. They are responsible, safety-conscious, and mature. They feel no compelling need to rebel—not even a hint of one. They not only defer to authority; they admire it. "Alienation" is a word one almost never hears from them. They regard the universe as beneficent, orderly, and meaningful. At the schools and colleges where the next leadership class is being bred, one finds not angry revolutionaries, despondent slackers, or dark cynics but the Organization Kid.

[big snip]

Maybe the lives of the meritocrats are so crammed because the stakes are so small. All this ambition and aspiration is looking for new tests to ace, new clubs to be president of, new services to perform, but finding that none of these challenges is the ultimate challenge, and none of the rewards is the ultimate reward.

I am afraid students at IIMB (and at other elite institutes) more or less belong to the same class - self-imposed workaholism, no motivation to question authority (rational ignorance) and no motivation to get hands dirty (high opportunity costs). I am not sure where I belong, but it does sound disturbing. Something needs to change.

(Link from India Uncut)

new keyboard layout

While reading an article on slashdot, this idea struck me. Now I have a business plan, surely this product is going to be a huge success among the users who will be watching movies on windows :D

nobel or ignoble? (world is full of humour and stupidity too)

reasearch combined with humour, joblessness and queerness, gives birth to ig nobel prizes (yes, that is not misspelt, it is ig nobel, not ignobel, nor ignoble). Just like there are spoof academy awards - Golden Raspberry awards, or Pigasus awards given for extraordinary claims in para-psychology, there is an award spoofing the reverred nobel prizes. this is something which first makes you smile and then makes you think - the extraordinarily innovative research.

Scroll through the list and don't miss out on noticing how jobless these scholars are.
Here is a glimpse of what to expect - the list of research topics of this year's winners.

Ornithology(birds) - for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.
Nutrition - for showing that dung beetles are finicky eaters (gourmets!).
Peace - for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant — a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers. (checkout the teen buzz)
Acoustics - for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard.
Mathematics - for calculating how many photographs a person must take to almost ensure that no one in a group photograph will have their eyes closed: "Blink-Free Photos, Guaranteed." (this turned out to be elementary prob-stats, even i could have published this paper)
Literature - for report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly." (seems like the author was inspired for this prize beforehand)
Medicine - for medical case report "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage"; and for another subsequent medical case report also titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage." (what a coincidence... both ways)
Physics - for insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces: "Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half."
Chemistry - for study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature." (and did you know that an elephant cannot jump? i really wanted to know about such pieces of information)
Biology - for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet. (and i thought only i do something like writing blogs to get rid of joblessness)

and yes, before i forget, i should mention the cleverest lot amongst us, who eventually exited from the gene pool, winning themselves the darwin awards (so called because darwin talked about 'natural selection' as a consequence of 'survival of fittest'). this really made my day, combining the utmost stupidity and consequent humour.

The previous post talked about some intelligent people on a blue planet. This stuff is no less exquisite.

p.s. random wikipedia led me into this/previous post, but i've since improved from linking wikipedia directly to linking homepages of these stuff by scrolling down on those wikipedia pages - oh that lazy joblessness.

world is full of clever people

a world full of shrewdness - precisely defines internet and its growth. it has always been about money, traffic, ads, and hacking other's stuff to promote yours (exception may be like google, which was first about product then business model build around it. (btw, did you know that gmail does not support dot, kartik.rdburman@gmail.com is same as kartikrdburman@gmail.com or any other combination with more number of dots, but i can login only using kartik.rdburman as my id. (and did you notice how gtalk is now improved to support offliners? (and did you notice how orkut is now integrated with gtalk? (these days one part of my job has been a part-time google testing team member as they keep adding features, and another part being required to match parentheses))))).

well, most parts of the blog are my poor understanding to already known phenomena on the web, but i just could not skip the revelation - more about human nature than about these tricks.

while the viruses and trojans have been ubiquitous, techniques known as pharming (farming trojans by hacking onto a server) and phishing (fishing an unsuspecting user into a seemingly innocuous but specious webpage, and asking him to reveal personal information) have been being used for some time now. remember any page on geocities/members.tripod which asked for your respective domain id/password? remember mails in your mailbox seemingly sent by your friends (and also not reported as spam by the mail service) containing such traps? before you blast your friend, think about why your password still remained same (if it did) and coincidentally your friend got such spam.

based on the flaws of the hastily built software systems, the so called hackers have always exploited the web for their own welfare (fun, money, challenge). some have gone forward to such an extent that they target a particular service (similar to spear phishing). AOHell was targetted at AOL, with a goal to have "20,000+ idiots using AOHell to knock people offline, steal passwords and credit card information, and to basically annoy the hell out of everyone". see its features here and here, it included simple tricks like ghost , scroll, finger (feeding chat screen with multiple lines/ascii art, like seen on dc++ chat), some kewl tricks (like fake account creator, IM Bot), some nasty tricks (like mail-bomb), and some really specious (like credit card number simulator)...... mind you all this intelligent programming was done only to take revenge on AOL administrators who used to shut hacker chatrooms down, but not chatrooms like childporn/pedophiles.

does that sound something like a sunny deol movie, setting the world around him right in his own manner - "kanoon haath me lena"? let me remind you that this is www=wild wild web. and no one cares what goes inside out of another server as long as it does not bother your system.

i can't find any reason to blame them (hackers) if ordinary mortals find the trick too intelligent to evade. similar but relatively well-known practices have been being followed in "traditional" business, and many still keep falling prey to them. you don't blame these business savvies because they dupe people to make money. this is precisely like a nice soft voice on your phone telling you that you need to pay a small amount of money by creditcard in order to get double balance deposited in your bank account, or somewhat like politely saying "give me 5 bucks and i will (if i wish to) give you back ten thousand" forgetting that the wish is inherently biased and your expected return should be zero. to someone more stupid, i would rather say "f*@# you !"

clever has a shade of intelligent, and a shade of cunning. it's like a movie - the protagonist can be a criminal, or can be a gentleman, it only depends on what character YOU find a connection with.

my own digging the internet for miscelleny

if you are familiar with digg, you might find this blog pretty much plain.

it all started with wikipedia's today's article one day.

molecules with funny names - includes bastardane, miazole & urazole, arsole, DAMN, dUMP, ASS, SEX, erectone, megaphone, cummingtonite, moronic acid, fukalite, fucol, (broken) windowpane, the painful Antipain, penguinone, performic acid, diabolic acid, magic acid, lunatoic acid, erotic acid, small-breasted-dog.......
so much for someone who thought chemistry profs are not profane.

speaking of organic chemistry, there are some really "beautiful" molecules, such as cubane, tetrahedrane and dodecahedrane (platonic hydrocarbons), adamantane and other diamondoids, fullerenes, Mona Lisa of reaction chemistry

so much for chemistry, now mathematical beauty in the underlying geometry
platonic solids - the best part is when you see that a cube is a dual of octahedron and dodecahedron is a dual of icosahedron (and vise versa, of course)
archimedian solids - and their duals (catalan solids)
johnson solids (if you are too keen)
a nice java applet on this
(whatever, nothing beats fractals and conway's game of life in beauty in maths)

enough geeky matter, how about some humour, something new, if you were not happy with funny names of molecules?
apart from uncyclepedia and somethingawful, there are so many sources of hilarious articles on the internet such as
the discovery of a new element,
some stupid news on google,
hide and seek in spaceshuttle,
dinosaurs were no more impressive than ‘a collection of bored amoeba’

then there is something cute - cats

ok, enough arbit stuff now..... that proves i am mostly workless..... and reading h2g2 :)

update:
that also reminds me of a recent purchase of a book on Murphy's laws. You might have seen some of the corrollories of the ever-correct axiom of a developer's life as my recent status messages. This book is highly recommended to any smiling reader.

here are some of the classic quotes in the book -
"If anything can go wrong it will (at the worst possible time)"
and "If something cannot go wrong, it will."
"Murphy was an optimist."
"It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious."
"You may know where the market is going, but you can't possibly know where it is going after that."
"An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing."
"If mathematically you end up with the incorrect answer, try multiplying by the page number."
"Any attempt to print Murphy's laws will jam the printer."
"The day you wash your car, it will rain"
and "Washing your car to make it rain does not work."