Spot the comic genius

I love comic strips, and I observe that they come in two varieties. There are those that have well defined characters in well defined settings. Often there is a brief episode that pans out in subsequent strips, though each of the strips can be enjoyed independently. The second kind, although widely accepted as comic strips, stretch it's definition. They consist of stand alone caricatures and, for lack of better words, don't have a distinct character. xkcd, abstruse goose and savage chickens fall in this category. No doubt they're funny, but they're actually repositories of musings, anecdotes and jokes depicted through talking stick figures. xkcd can afford to have a "random" comic button on its website because the comic never runs an episode.

Basic Instructions falls somewhere in the middle. It's got characters in their settings, but it does not provide any depth to them. It lacks a sense of understanding or identifying with characters -- the way you do when you see something and imagine that it could well be straight out of that particular comic strip. I can observe something at office and call it a Dilbert moment. Characters make strips funnier, and some times they alone make the strip funny.


I doubt that the above strip would appear as funny if I came across it on xkdc. Watterson afforded himself so much breadth and depth within the boundaries of 6yr old that it boggles my mind. That's why I believe Calvin and Hobbes was the best comic strip ever created, yes better than Dilbert. Others tried to play in the similar setting of childhood and couldn't score at all. Dennis the menace often comes across as an adult's contrived view of a child's mind. Tiger hurts my brain. With his views on politics, society and science, with Spaceman Spiff, Stupendous Man, dinosaurs and scientific inventions, Calvin blazed a trail. There's no one else within miles of it.

The comic medium makes it possible to capture imagination and present allegories without sounding ludicrous or out of place. How can a necktie always point up? What's with the menagerie in the office? Few cartoonists grab this opportunity. Perhaps you can tell a comic genius by the way he/she creates an endless stream of ideas from a few drops of imagination. They think out of the box while staying within allotted rectangles.

This is a reason I believe Jorge Cham may be running out of ideas. It struck to me as odd when he compromised the first rule of comic strips (if there is such a rule): well defined characters and settings. With Tajel's wedding and Slackenerny's promotion to PostDoc, he seems to have resorted to a soap-operatic way of advancing the strip where interludes would have sufficed. This may serve as a bad precedent for his strip.

I don't think Dilbert will ever become a permanent manager. If Watterson were still drawing, Calvin would still be a 6yr old, and the comic would still rock.

Invalid module format

Invalid module format error occurs when you compile a kernel module and try to insert it using the insmod command. Now it's quite a paradox that the OS cribs about invalid format when, in fact, you just compiled it on the same machine. User Vlad-A describes the correct way to do the compilation, but I faced problems in spite of that. So I'll just dump my finding here for whatever it's worth.

First up, I needed kernel-devel and kernel-headers packages to compile kernel modules, which I (think I) chose while installing Fedora Core 8 on my machine.

I downloaded the source-code of the kernel module and tried to make it.

Error: /lib/modules/2.6.23.1-42.fc8/build -- no such file or directory.

Turns out that build is a soft link to one of the directories that came while installing kernel-devel pacakge: /usr/src/kernels/2.6.23.1-42.fc8-i586. But, as a result of FC8 installation, my /usr/src/kernels/ directory had fc8-i686. So I guessed that build is pointing to the wrong place and promptly soft-linked it to the i686 directory. make and make install went on fine but then when I tried to insmod the module, I got the "Invalid module format" error.

In the end, the solution lied in realizing that build was pointing to the correct place and I had the wrong kernel-devel installed to begin with. Was this a problem with FC8 installation? I don't know. The following worked for me:

yum remove kernel-devel

yum install kernel-devel.i586

Somewhere in the process I had removed my kernel-headers, which had removed gcc as well. Fixing that was simple:

yum install kernel-headers

yum install gcc

This summarizes three days of head-scratching.

Remember when you were a baby

I wish I could. Whatever I already remember from my childhood is like bliss. I still remember the moment my present day memory stretches to. It was an afternoon in my kindergarten days when I suddenly woke up from a catnap. I was in my bed with notebooks around me, apparently I had been studying. Even at that moment it had felt different, I didn't remember what had happened previously. As if some evil spirit cast a spell and locked my earlier memories forever.

Too bad, Charlie won't remember biting the finger when he grows up. He may be reminded by the video, but will have absolutely no memory. In general, I have happy memories from my childhood. They have the same charm every time I visit them. And I'm curious about how it'd be if I could go farther back. I believe world would be full of nicer people if everyone remembered how it was when they were infants. Imagine if we knew how an uninhibited chuckle felt. What a harmonious place this would be if everyone were convinced that all that matters is to be able to eat and poop properly, and sleep in a warm snug place.

Nature is cruel that ways. I also wish I could experience and remember how relaxed it feels when I'm asleep, especially on tiring days.

Happy headlines today

I was happy to look at The Hindu before I started for work today. The entire front page had something to feel good about. Although, in a strict sense the news was more about promises of good things in the future than about good things right now, I am willing to be pleased with promises. This is also because there is some track record behind these promises.

Ms. Sonia Gandhi wants to materialize the food securities act -- this holds credibility given the implementation of national rural job guarantee scheme and the right to information act.

Mr. Nandan Nilekani is all set to take charge of the unique identification project. "It is a new agency set up to provide unique identification numbers or UID numbers to all citizens for accessing various government services." This looks bright because of a number of reasons: one, the government has had success with online income tax processessing, two, Mr. Nilekani has burned his bridges by resigning from all offices he held with Infosys, and three, he will hold a position of authority -- that equivalent to a cabinet minister. The government chose the right man for the job and gave him the right means to work with.

HRD minister Mr. Kapil Sibal has proposed to enact the Right to Education bill of 2005. It is my general opinion that such bills are usually drafted by a competent set of bureaucrats and field experts, but unfortunately many of them are never enforced. I hope this is just the beginning of much needed improvements in our education system. I also hope the Mr. Sibal will also redeem the image of HRD ministry, whose name conjures up an uneasy picture no thanks to Mr. Arjun Singh. That would only require some meaningful and fruitful work. This may not involve a drastic shift from the reservation policy, that would be wishful thinking.

And the front page also had the picture of the completed first phase of Bandra-Worli sea link, long awaited.

I'm glad The Hindu decided to put all of these things together on today's front page.

Run for everything

Back in my college I had my hostel's sports secretary pleading me to participate in inter-hostel crossies. They are about 5-10km races; I don't remember exactly, and that's how deaf I was. My inspiration arrived late. But now I'm taking it more seriously than before. In parts, this is because of Ian, because of my increasing weight, and because of Nidhi's new work.

Last month I ran the 5km version of Bangalore Sunfeast 10k run. Hilarious as it may be, that was the first time I ran 5km without a break and I did it in about 35min. Just today I dropped Nidhi again for an 8km charity run she's participating in. I have an extra work day at office - and I feel deprived of the run, something I never thought I'd worry about.

Here's a cool thing I found out: music for endurance training. Given the sport-starved third world place I come from, please excuse me for getting excited about this discovery. Paying $5-$14 for 30-40min of training mixes is still steep for me but if I carry on with my motivation I might just get there.

But first, I must replace my torn, all purpose sports shoes and get a pair of running shoes.

Looking for some happy news

I figured out today how difficult it is to find happy news in the newspapers. I have spent almost 25min on it and I risk missing a bus that I need to take. I've tried looking at my usual online papers, google news, most popular google news, news feeds on my reader... but happy news is so damn elusive.

I'm not being choosy at all. I'm setting the bar so low that I can even accept slap-stick comical, like "Man harassing animals in zoo chased by chimps, suffers swollen nuts." But probably something more mundane will do it, like school kids raising money for neighborhood greenery.

I'll try to share as much of it as I can lay my hands on. For example, our President is trying to help a junior sportsman hailing from very poor family. That makes me happy.

Australian for hospitality

Get Lost, Mate

Star power

Scott Adams' email account with AOL stopped working. After trying to figure it out by himself and trying to get in touch with some kind of customer support (which I doubt any free email provider has), he just wrote on his blog:

Does anyone have a friend at AOL who can figure out why my account stopped working?... if I don't hear from someone at AOL by tomorrow I'll switch to another service.

I bet he had someone from AOL grovelling at his feet within an hour of posting that. Even a movie star, say Shahrukh Khan, may succeed in achieving the same end result, but there is a difference. It will not be before AajTak splashes it all over with cheesy catch-phrases, a re-enactment showing a Shahrukh Khan double pulling his hair out, and AOL flashing on TV in headache inducing ways. There is also a possibility of the question coming up in interviews with celebrity magazines and TV shows. That's too much attention just to get an email account fixed.

Star power should be like Scott's - subtle and no nonsense. Although that may not be enough to get him a seat on an overbooked flight, and neither can he overdo threats like these - "if I don't get a plumber by tomorrow I'm moving to another state," he can leverage it to make life easier without obstructing his daily routine or accruing too much moral burden. I mean even if he does decide to move to another state, there will be no McCains citing his plumbing breakdown as a proof of Obama's bad policies and no Thakreys calling for his blood for discriminating against plumbers of the state. I don't expect Shahrukh Khan to get such concessions.

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#Update: The AOL article is no longer present on Dilbert blog, but it still shows in my google reader. I'm looking forward to Scott's version of why it was pulled down.

Dream on

A month ago, Nidhi woke up one early Sunday morning and said, "I just had a dream that I'm telling some friends that we're going to Turkey for our Diwali holidays." It has to be something this exciting to get my out of my weekend slumber in a flash. We were planning to couple Gandhi Jayanti with Diwali holidays and take nearly two weeks off. This was a perfect idea. We spent half a day searching the internet for cheapest flights and hostels.

Next day I sent messages to possible HC hosts, and even received a couple of replies. We spoke to the visa agent and were nearly about to book our tickets when we realized that the cheap flight that we had found was grounding us in Sharjah for a day each during our to-fro journey. Now spending all that money and spending 2 out of 12 days on an airport wasn't fun. We tried delaying our visa process to find another cheap flight and a lot of mental torture and confusion followed. And the trip came crashing down.

The next thing we did was book our tickets on flights to Kolkata and started dreaming of trekking in Sikkim. It turned out that of all the friends we have just the two of us were willing to go with us. Anyway, the tour operator wanted to skin us alive so we decided to just go there and see.

So immediately after Kolkata, we're headed to Yuksom via Siliguri, and if all goes well we'll start our trek to Goecha-La on the next day. And if all goes well after that, we'll be back in Yuksom not before a week. Will stop over in Kolkata for a couple of days before heading back to Bangalore.

Fresh mountain breeze and momos by the stream in my dreams. Aaaahhh!!

CERN conspiracy

I see it clearly now, just as I hit publish on my previous post I figured out the naysayers I mentioned there. All these anti-LHC protestors either belong to the highest category of idiots or, in a more likely explanation, are on CERN’s payroll. Reason: a cheap publicity stunt. I will prove this by contradiction. Suppose you are one such person to whom neither of the above situations applies. That is, you have a genuine belief that LHC is going to produce a black hole that is going to destroy the world and you’re smart. Your smartness guarantees that your belief is backed up by some unquestionable evidence, of course.

What would be your course of action from there on? Launch a protest? Funding agencies that have pumped in 10 billion dollars are not going to stop because of a bunch of loudmouths, are they? Protestors are the least successful when it comes to achieving anything. I mean KFC is still the same despite PETA (and to appeal to your smartness, I’ll sure find some statistics about effectiveness of this kind of protests).

My guess is that right now you’d be out enjoying the remaining part of your life, vacationing and partying and doing whatever it is you’d rather be doing, and doing it real hard. Dilbert blog has some suggestions too. Bottom-line: you’re just too smart to be out protesting with a placard. 13yrs ago when the whole thing started? Maybe, but not now.

So who would go about doing that?

I know I know, all those people out there are not morons. So shame on you CERN!

My only conCERN

I’m neither a nuclear physicist, nor a philosopher. And I don’t understand what the naysayers are all so worked up about. The way I see it, no news from LHC can be bad news.

Scientists at CERN have put in a lot of effort in making absolutely sure that particles don’t veer off their trajectory. Because if they become unstable at these speeds, they could… umm well, let’s say we’re not sure what they could do. Nobody’s ever tried an experiment with particles at such speeds, let alone screw it up. Physicists have a theory of what might happen, and in all the experiments with high speed particles the theory has held up. As to whether or not there will be a lethal black hole when particles successfully collide, that we’ll know only when we know. Hopefully those guys at CERN did their homework right. But let’s still assume that, black hole or not, there are a million ways in which the LHC setup can go bad. It’s easy, especially if we don’t understand what went behind it.

So then it is inevitable that the world will end when LHC finally becomes functional. What I want to know is: Will it really be that bad? I don’t think so. Instead, it will be like a philosopher’s dream come true. Plus, imagine the amount of misery in the world that will come to an end, and then imagine the amount that will be preempted. No nuclear holocaust, no aftereffects of global warming, no deadly viruses, no wars for oil and water, nothing. If there’s anyone out there writing a galactic history, this is the only chance of redemption that mankind has. At least we would be martyrs to the cause of explaining life, universe, and everything. Because otherwise, we’re bound to go down as Agent Smith put to Morpheus, “A virus, a plague upon this planet.”

It’s just that the naysayers won’t be able to say, “See, we told you so,” and so their agitation is understandable.

Besides this, chances are that the scientists will indeed succeed. A massive victory! And then what? And then, my concern is that life will go on and the virus will continue to plague the planet.

P.S.: Layman's instant-guide to what's going on - Page I, Page II, Page III, Page IV, Page V.

What's evolution got for us?

There are about a dozen different things I want to change about the human body. My best hope is that evolution will take care of it; I won’t benefit from them for sure. On the top of my list is having many hearts – like squids and octopi. I’m not sure if they also lost a lot of great, great… ancestors to heart attacks. My motivation comes more from fitness and survival issues than from avoiding cholesterol related problems. At the same time it is true that distributing the workload of a vital function to multiple (near) identical units makes real world systems – including computer systems – more fault tolerant. If one fails, others share the additional load.

A single heart is like a bottleneck for oxygen supply to sustain all body functions especially if one area is fatigued and screaming for attention. For example, if I have a heart each for my lower and upper body I’d still be able to concentrate on writing this blog after a long jog. More of them can multiply our physical capabilities.

I was curious whether or not scientists also foresee such useful, although drastic, evolutionary changes. I didn’t dig through scholarly articles but found a news article instead, which I agree may not be a representative of current state of knowledge. Stuff over there doesn’t seem to be anything beyond bloated heads, sexier progeny, and near homogeneous skin colour. Their theory is not so much of natural selection as sexual selection, which given scientific advances, might be correct at some level.

Has the possibility of a completely different anatomy not occurred to anyone or is it an established understanding that it’s impossible? Either scientists are unimaginative or it is something that didn’t make past the Great Filter eons ago. But what did make past was many hearts for those deep sea creatures.

Calvin's got it right

In a strip that originally appeared in the newspapers in December 1995, Calvin said, “In the short term, it would make me happy to go play outside. In the long term, it would make me happier to do well at school and become successful. But in the very long term, I know which will make better memories.” Thirteen years later, researchers at Harvard Business School will take the credit of showing that being too virtuous and hard working is not such a good thing after all. A part of the title of the Harvard report goes, “Investing in future memories.” I believe that should be the general principle of life, except that it should not sound so salesmen-like.

In his speech when Robert Di Nero got the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award he said, “It’s been a good life...” I don't think it should be easy to reflect at life at age 60 and be able to say that. Most of us don’t even have a clear idea of what life is a good one. Before we go about seeking it, we think that we should buy a house first, then furnish it, then have a baby, then send it to school, then marry it off… by the time we might come to The Question our kids would have throw us in an old-age home.

I’ve seen a lot of the following question at go-get-your-dream-job discussions: What would you like to do if even if you were not to be paid for it? I think that’s naïve. Nidhi asked me another one recently, and I think The One will look a lot like it: What would you do if all your expenses and liabilities were taken care of?

I thought I’d vacation in Hawaii or swim in beer or play video games, but that is probably what I’d rather do immediately. Will I be at it even after a month or two or ten? All of this will not seem that much fun then. What would I do to occupy myself after the vacation? That is the thing I should try to do as much as I can. Starting now. People who get to that for a living are extremely lucky. While I hope to figure it out working a different job, I don’t want to start with paying off a huge home loan. I think I’ll go hike some mountains.

I say people who like to think long term don’t think long enough.

Problems with new Blogger

This blog has moved to the new blogger, something which I had been avoiding for a long time. One of the reasons was the inevitable pain of customizing the standard blogger template. After spending more than 3hrs, I'm still not done. The right hand side column is skewed, I'm unable to reproduce my custom bullets in archive animation, and the whole archive thingy keeps swinging wildly when clicked.

I'll iron out these things over the coming week, and will see what more I can do. Keeping my fingers crossed.

#Update, Sept 2: I guess this is it. I'm not so happy to say the least. The animated (toggle/untoggle) archive list is not working so I had to go with static list, would have preferred a yearly rather than a monthly list. I'm sure I can still tweak the css a little bit and achieve that but I've spent too much time and energy in trying to improve the indentation on the sidebar. Subscription and Blogroll are fine but the rest are too much to the right. Except, it's interesting that the text "read more..." in Shared Feed appears with correct indentation. I couldn't find any clues from there. I would appreciate all help to make the sidebar look better. Also, is there a way to choose the colour of the bullets in css' list-style-type?

#Update, Sept 5: Yet another template. At least the right hand side column is better. Let's see...

#Update (2), Sept 5: All's well that ends well.

'High and dry' is underrated

There are times that make us “Oh I nearly forgot how that feels,” and hope not to be subjected to these feelings too often. As I’ve written previously, I prefer riding my bike and especially to office. Last evening presented a serious downside of this preference – bike offers no protection from rain; cold, heavy rain. I don’t mind getting wet once in a while but last evening made me “Oh I nearly forgot how that felt,” and hoped not to be subjected to it too often.

Human body can tolerate cold and chill if hands, feet and head are warm. My hands and feet were ice-cold, facing up to 70km/h wind which is how fast I was driving. The helmet protected my head, and I had hopes of holding on to an ounce of warmth in my body against this cold siege. Then without warning, and quite unexpectedly, my defenses caved in. I felt drops of (what felt like ice-cold) water tricking slowly but surely inside my underwear. There, that’s the feeling I’m talking about.

Once the last line of defense was breached, enemy started rushing in from all sides until the fort was completely felled. I was helpless, shocked and awed. My heart sunk and brain froze, much to the surprise of my warm head. “Sitting cold in soaked underwear” easily has a shot at Top 10 Most Uncomfortable Situations to Be In. Unlike the other nine situations, this does not become uncomfortable only after one is caught doing something silly. This is an absolute.

If there is any such thing as rules of combat for Man vs. Elements of Nature, soaking opponent's underwear is “below the belt”. There I sat on my bike, victim of foul play.

Kerala seeks FDI in "Protest Outsourcing"

PNN August 20, 2008 (Thiruvananthapuram): Unable to compete with Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi in attracting IT investment, entrepreneurs in Kerala have come up with a unique model to attract foreign direct investment. In a recent press conference, Finance Minister of Kerala highlighted the steps the government will take towards providing an atmosphere conducive for outsourcing protests rallies and bandhs (shutdowns) to the state.

Totally by coincident, Kerala is observing its 80^th shutdown in last six months today. “This is a unique feature of Kerala economy that it continues to have one of the highest human development indices and standard of living in the country in spite of all of these protest related shutdowns,” said the finance minister. He added, “So far protests have been sponsored by various regional and national political parties, trader unions, and elements of separatist militia – domestic investment this. There are tremendous opportunities for attracting foreign capital by allowing them to outsource their protests in Kerala. We already have the infrastructure and trained workforce.”

Leading economists support this idea. Unemployment in Kerala is nearly 20% and this model is going to take care of that. 20% of the state’s GDP is in the form of foreign remittances and over 17% comes from agriculture and fishing industries. The former remains unaffected, and harvest seasons could be avoided for sake of the latter. Most protests will be unrelated to Kerala, and that's a good thing because they will not disrupt daily life and booming tourism industry.

“It actually depends upon the money invested. A platinum-category protest, for example, would be livelier with a lot stone pelting and glass shattering. Replacement glasses and windows will be provided by participating merchants. It will be an all-inclusive undertaking by the government and various private establishments,” quoted an adviser in the finance ministry.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that PETA will not be among targeted investors, probably because naked protests are a bit too extreme for India at the moment. “… and I don’t think that local population would be too happy about hordes of protesting Naga Sadhus either”, said one roadside fish vendor.

P.N.N. News stands for "Please, No Nonsense" News. It has nothing to do with Palestine News Network, or anything else you may find when you search google for PNN news, or anything true and logical for that matter.