1 – Suprabhata Coffee Kendra: This won’t get figured in any top-list (other than mine, of course). They serve the best coffee in town, and probably the best sambhar as well. It’s one of those pre-darshini-age standing hotels, and is very popular among our auto rickshaw drivers. It’s on the diagonal road connecting Sajjan Rao […]
Counter Example
Finding counter examples to conjectures can be notoriously hard (pun? I think not). This is an area of creativity that mostly goes unappreciated. Here’s a personal anecdote: my father once came up with an algorithm to solve a hugely constrained version of the traveling salesman problem. The greedy proof was slightly hand-wavy, and I felt […]
Are we blind?
Or is it just a dark room? The Nandigram SEZ was supposed to be developed by Indonesia’s Salim Group. Preliminary web searching indicates that Salim group has very close ties with Dow Chemical. And of course, Dow Chemical owns Union Carbide. It’s up to investigative journalism to figure out the extent to which Salim and […]
Method Living
Pre-Script: No spoilers ahead. In Christopher Nolan’s brilliant period sci-fi drama* The Prestige, an old Chinese magician lives his act. It means the following: He understands that his flagship magic trick, to look surreally magical, needs a heavy personality quirk. To ensure that he can pull this quirk on stage, he lives with that quirk […]
Bookie
No significant update. Just removing dead links. -Aside- Ages ago, the Intellectual Whores website (now a 404) had given me some solace; but not much hope though. The masterfully written Ladder Theory explains why things are so screwed up; but, yeah, but, so we (whores?) don’t lose hope, there are the ever so entertaining whore avoidance […]
Eigen
Jatin forced a comment which is worth expanding a little more. Ever since I found that the PageRank vector of the web-graph is the dominant eigenvector of its matrix representation, I have been meaning to get to the bottom of this eigenvector-eigenvalue concept. I am still snorkeling; long time to scuba dive. Most of us […]
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
It’s somewhat sad that the Autobiography of Malcolm X is also meant to be a specific political and social message, as well as serve as a brilliant account of the life of a thoughtful and brave leader. X thought he would be dead by the time the book came out, and was also probably a […]
Hardy Boys
From Tic-Tac-Terror (by a Franklin W. Dixon) to Lolita (Nabokov), I’ve collected more books than I have read. But I have read some. It started off with Hardy Boys; and I remember Fenton Hardy’s case always being connected in some way to the Boys’ case. So, during each book, I used to watch out for […]
Anand Marte Nahin
I have seen a few many times over; I have seen a few once; and have missed far too many of them. But with so much more to go, it makes me happy that I still have all the does-idealism-pay-off? thoughts from Satyakam due; can ponder about what triangles he explored in Jurmana and Bemisal; […]
Ruy Lopez – my variation.
Chess strategy insists that you develop your pieces, and make them take control of the four central squares of the board – either by occupying them, or by exerting control over them. This has to be done quickly, and with least loss of time/tempo. The question is why? Why should you develop pieces without there […]