About a week back I finished reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. It is a mish-mash of history/anthropology/biology/linguistics and basically tries to explain why different civilizations have developed differently, and stuff like why the Europeans were able to capture most of America and Africa, etc. It doesn’t delve much into modern or medieval [...]
Read this article about Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. Strong fundaes are there in there. Particularly amazing is the fact that he made 97% of his lifetime earnings on “black monday” (oct 19 1987) I’ve started reading “Traders, Guns and Money” by Satyajit Das. In the prologue, [...]
A large proportion of commentary about the US housing crisis considers it extremely unfortunate that a large number of people couldn’t refinance their Adjustable Rate Mortgages before the rate got reset to “normal levels”. I don’t know what these people were expecting it seems like a lot of these people were made to believe that [...]
At the KQA season ending quiz yesterday (done by kvk ), I cracked my third ever western music answer in my 14 year old quizzing career (I managed to work out Freddie Mercury from the “surname comes from ‘native of Valsad’” funda). Unfortunately I spoilt it all as I missed a sitter on Pink Floyd [...]
The Kannada phrase for Holi is “kaamana habba”, or Kama‘s festival. It is supposedly on this day that Kama, the Hindu god of love, danced in front of the meditating Shiva in order to gain his attention. Shiva got incensed and opened his third eye and burnt Kama down to ashes. This of course, is [...]
Contingent upon a favourable position of the moon, a unique alignment is going to happen this friday. Holi, Good Friday and Id Milad all occur on the same day. I’m not able to recall the last occasion when festivals of three very different religions, which follow vastly different calendars occur on the same day. I’m [...]
The basic premise of the theory is that intelligent girls who hope to make intelligent conversation shouldn’t display too much cleavage. One of the important conditions for good conversation is eye contact. If you want to make good conversation, you would rather that the other guy be looking at your face/eyes for most of the [...]
I’ll continue from where I left off yesterday. DelhiBib has put in a decent XI, except that there aren’t enough Indians in it. I think I’ll try to stick as much as possible to the XI I had mentioned a few weeks back. The only forced change is that Virat Kohli is not available. Either [...]
Before I could re-assess and make new starting line-ups for the eight teams following the second IPL auction and recruitment of locals and youngsters, cricinfo has done it’s own version. However, it seems like Bib had an extremely tough deadline to come up with this and most line-ups he has drawn up seem fairly random. [...]
I borrowed this book from sw_aadisht some six months back. It was only a month or so back that I finally started reading it. And after several false starts, and stoppages, I’m nearing the end. It’s a truly amazing book. Contains several insights about several seemingly unrelated things. And it’s extremely well-written and easy to [...]
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