Warning: This is a technical post, and involves some code, etc. As I’ve ranted a fair bit on this blog over the last year, a lot of “machine learning” in the industry can be described as “stirring the pile”. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with this image from XKCD by now: Basically … Continue reading “Stirring the pile efficiently”
If my mother were to be alive at the time I got married, I’m not sure she would have been too happy that I was marrying someone named Pinky. At the least, she would have insisted that we call Priyanka by another name. The reason for this is that for my mother, the “default Pinky” … Continue reading “Chiltu”
It’s six years today since my mother passed away. She died in the early hours of Friday, 23rd October 2009 following a rather brief illness. The official death summary that the hospital issued reported the cause of her death as “sepsis”. She only officially died on the 23rd. As far as I’m concerned, I’d lost … Continue reading “Sudden death and the discount rate”
So it appears that my former neighbour Upendra’s new magnum opus Uppi2 is currently the top rated movie on IMDB, with a rating of 9.7/10.0. The Times of India is so surprised that it has done an entire story about it, which I’ve screenshot here: The story also mentions that another Kannada movie RangiTaranga (which … Continue reading “On Uppi2’s top rating”
In the light of a class 10 girl from National Public School HSR Layout committing suicide after being suspended from school, a debate has broken out on social media, mainstream media, online forums and mailing lists as to whether the school was right in suspending her for “befriending a boy”. A question that has popped … Continue reading “When National Public School suspended me”
I used to marvel about how whenever I was in the company of other people from IIT Madras, I would instinctively switch to speaking “IITese“. Words such as “slisha”, “peace”, “rod”, and all others that I would not normally use in normal English when speaking to normal people would suddenly appear in my vocabulary while … Continue reading “Switching languages”
About a month or so back I had a long telephonic conversation with this guy who runs an offshored analytics/data science company in Bangalore. Like most other companies that are being built in the field of analytics, this follows the software services model – a large team in an offshored location, providing long-term standardised data … Continue reading “Data Science is a Creative Profession”
I was introduced to Bayes’ Theorem of Conditional Probabilities in a rather innocuous manner back when I was in Standard 12. KVP Raghavan, our math teacher, talked about pulling black and white balls out of three different boxes. “If you select a box at random, draw two balls and find that both are black, what … Continue reading “Review: The Theory That Would Not Die”
I must state at the outset that this post is inspired by the second chapter of Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise. In that chapter, which is about election forecasting, Silver draws upon the old Russian parable of the hedgehog and the fox. According to that story, the fox knows several tricks while the … Continue reading “Hedgehogs and foxes: Or, a day in the life of a quant”
Last Sunday, I was having a discussion with my mother about my drinking – which has been sporadic at best and non-existent at worst. She said she had a probelm with even my sporadic ingestion of alcohol, and demanded that I completely give up drinking. I tried my best to draw it away from a … Continue reading “On Booze and Language of Thought”