Few random thoughts...

I am out of sync with blogging, and I am writing this cos I need a creative outlet for my forced (??) joblessness, which is making me obsessively, compulsively improve my G K by tracking world affairs,indian affairs, and state -of-the -art research findings, on google news, bbc, ibnlive, timesofindia, and samachar.com

Knowledge acquistion is primarily driven by insecurity. Before, I can convince myself that I just stumbled on the quotation of the month, arising out years of introspection-somebody came up with this before- "Ignorance is a bliss" . As I type this, I see in my mind'eye ,the scene in Matrix where the baldie(Joe ..) bites meat, and tells this, with a musical score in the background. (forget the instrument- tom plays it when he is on clouds enroute heaven,in numerous Tom and Jerry cartoons) That's what I define the ill-effects of movie watching and mindless youtubing. Rarely is anything purely literary-straight out of mind, and into paper / blog. Association of quotations has been pathetically trivialized.
If Ceaser had told "Veni, Vedi ,Veci " on youtube, would it got a thousand clicks?A hundred clicks? ten? Who knows? What I really have learnt from youtubing is this -people love bullshit, and crave for the worst bullshit. If you season bullshit with the right amount humour, wordings, and video eating, you could become immortalized in no time. Under these dynamics, I really wonder if Caesar 's words could have had pagerank detect a couple of links to his words!

Well... coming back to obsessively, compulsively improving my GK. It really affronts my intellect when I read arcticles like this -
1)Giant Rodent!

2)Dinosaur dung

1->How does humanity stand to gain by knowing how much a dead rat weighed? 2->I only wish I could time travel, have a pet dino, feed it tonnes of laxatives, and travel back to present ... I could be the next billionaire in town!!!

I must make a proper compilation of great news, and really inspire folks with insightful reflections.

Mediocrity rules. And Bigtime. We really get sadistic pleasure seeing people suck, and goofing up

Here are some of my top fav's, that an average youtuber should be aware of

1)Sam Anderson
2) If you come today
3) Captain Vijaykanth
4)I personally believe
5) Forgetting National anthem
6) William Bang
7)Kashif Memon
8)T R English
9)Americans are NOT stupid
10) Car race..almost there!



Remarkably, humanity has been pretty slow in monetizing mediocrity.
Somehow, education, common sense, reasoning, has been trained and led us to believe otherwise.

But there is a big,bright, future ahead.

"Are you smarter than a fifth grader? " has made it's debut in India, with Shah Rukh as the host. IPL has impacted it's ratings, but nevertheless.

I was just wondering about the next great web-based application, that exploits people 's attraction to mediocrity.

Because there is none,atleast so far. This definitely is round the corner. Something that would make people squirm. Imagine content-restriction on videos in youtube, which makes you answer a random General knowledge question with timeout, and blocks that video with your IP Address for a couple of days, if you fail.

Conversations might go like this in the conceivable future (among a coupla 14 year kids, say)
:-

A- Hey,did you see that video of Miss South carolina ?
B- Err.. could'nt go past 30 secs. some problem with my internet connecton
A- OK, so you couldnt answer a simple question on relative velocities? What question did you get?
B-To be honest, it was some thing related to trigonometry.. and I'm not partcularly good at it.
A-Okie, what was the question?
B- blah blah
A- Blah blah blah.. that's it.. that was an easy question!!
B-OK, I'll watch Miss South Carolina, after a couple of days!

Tada!!

Education interspersed with entertainment interspersed some ego maintenance . Everyone happy?


One bad effect of reading news online in different web portals like ibnlive , timesofindia ,cnn etc is that , over the long run, we will fail to correctly judge news-worthiness of articles.

And we become GIGO machines(Garbage In,Garbage out)

A video that conveys what I want to say :-

Frog n Water


Excessive youtubing has been mind-numbing and addictive, but amidst the trash that pollutes both conventional news sites, and youtube too, youtube atleast gives a chance for content to be judged on its merit, than by a random 'editor'.

Watch this video of Calpernia Addams

This video was listed on the first page of youtube, sometime back.
Calpernia Addams, a transsexual hollywood personality, with humour and sarcasm, speaks about issues sensitive to her.This video has been viewed 850,000 + times, as I write this blog.

This video and it's view count probably exemplifies the true power of youtube, and power of content- to evoke emotions, get people involved in heated discussions, albeit lil unparliamentary.

Contrast the knowledge, information (???)propagation in youtube, and conventional research publications in journals,or conferences. This latter is steeply entrenched in formalism, and restrictive of the target audience.

Though tutorials, Tech magazine articles and survey papers improve the visibility and comprehensibility to a wider and curious audience, there definitely needs to be bridge between the two approaches. For the sake of comprehensibility, tech videos spend more effort on making content less dense-the youtube way. This definitely does won't help the info seeker to know more beyond the prelimnary stuff.

Imagine as you view a tech video on youtube, with an immersive view, you able to access related content web-pages,articles, images, interviews with leaders in the field.

If you are a normal student, you would have encountered this situation before- you enter the examination hall, you realize that you haven't studied a specific area. You ask your friend to give you a gist, and you get the gist of content in ten minutes ( a trailer of the movie!)- and ace the related question that came!

Analogically, would content squeezing from webpages in a video, be practical , and have impact?

Anyway... enough of crazy ideas and thoughts for now

rest in next.

Somethin lil serious.....

Its really intersting to observe the impact of TV on kids. More specifically, south indian tamilian kids and Sun,Jaya blah blah tv.
They are of a special,rare and distinct breed of people who, at the approximate age range of 7-13, can comphrehend and explain the complexities of martial and extra-martial relationships, jealousies, crushes, heart-breaks without any difficulty whatsoever.
Cartoons, of-course, are lil kids' affairs. These kids render the ultimate service to their parents-narating scene-by-scene an episode that fate made their parents miss. They are excellent debatists-can tear their elder counterpart's views to shreds by their rhetoric appeal,emotional outbursts and colourful metaphors.And they know instinctively how human(older ppl) psychology works.
I dont think many, atleast in TN, ever wonder about this. People are just far too much involved watchin these super-mega serials, than thinkin how it affects the psyche. These kids, more often than not ,aren't duds. They ll sizzle acadaemically-They are smart, confident and they know it.Therfore, they'll leave little scope for complaint and ofcource elicit no worthy behavioral observation.And thats bad.really bad.
Ofcource those not performing well acadaemically are soon dismissed as the after-effects of ' bad influence' of TV, 'bad influence' of friends,blah blah blah. My point of contention is that both categories are equally rotten, but only not equally bright.
There wont be any difference in the outlook , individually,among people. The word 'outlook' is ofcourse very generic-but this nevertheless it can be characterized by a certain trait, which in tamilian lingo , is called 'samarthyam'.
I wonder if there is a proper equivalent word in English. Shrewdness probably is the closest.
'samarthyam' is a fascinating abstraction of many traits: one can get selfish, one can become street-smart, one might be observant, one can be shrewd, and still posses 'samathyam' . This fuzziness of characteristics is rendered completely unambiguous by tamil TV serials. They boast of characters who are living examples of ' samarthyam' Scheming villainous vamps and their associates have it in abundance. The damsel-in-distress initially posseses little quantities of samathyam, but when she decides to get even with the vamp....lo behold! we have perfect samarthyam again.
This trait, though subtle, reflects a lot on a person. It provides justification to be stingy, manipulative, unheeding, and emotionally inert. It sort of permeates to the last cell in the body, and in the broader perspective become ingrained to one's culture.
So much on samarthyam.
Coming to another equally less observed area of inculcating the art of decision making... its really fascinating to think about what all goes through your mind before you decide about something. Personally,I lay no claim to be a good decision maker. Infact, I have faced accusations of being indecisive. My tryst with this topic owes to book called 'BLINK' ... a best-seller, which basically focusses on a kind of decision making called the 'snapshot judgement'. Its claim is that you neednt be aware of all dimensions of a given problem to reach a decision. Your brain,unconsciously, does most of the tasks of abstraction.
Yet ,the brain most certainly ,is trained in a way to identify the right abstractions.
Dependence on emotion to human reasoning is well known. The emotional response to a given scenario is based on previous experiences-basically what our subconscious mind tells us. If kids are trained how to respond emotionally to a particular situation by seeing TV, then wont it, somewhere down the line, reflect on the basis of decsion taking? The decision might be just about anything... family conflicts, proffessional problems and there are gospels enunciated about this in TV. Arent we encouraging a culture of homogeneous mentality?
Hmmm.... so much on seriousness. Me got to have lunch.
Ciya!

The day of the Jackal.....

Dont let the title bother you. Was just thinking of a title that would befit being a title. Analogically, like the debatable approach of fixing the movie title,and then building the story around it.
All things on Earth need a reason to exist, and so does my blog. I cannot claim to be aware of the " blogworld" since its inception and I certainly dont approve of torturing hapless people about the intricasies of daily life. Just like a good work of fiction that gives you an amalgam of sordid facts of life and its appealing fantasies, I intend to make you read really mundane,disgusting things,and actually make you say 'WOW! '.
As I said, just like good fiction. To elaborate on few things that remain still in the dark:
'arvacharya' is a distortion of dronacharya. (the name of the link) .I kept it because it was the first thing to flash across my mind.
"I am me,because I am me"
I have always believed that ambiguous sounding sentences have had the greatest philosophical impact on humanity. And on all inspirational articles. If that did make you introspect,then young lady/ lad , you are my subject! An ardent, honest, humble student of philosophy.I bow to you.
Else, my young lad/lady.... alas! you are a philosopher.
Philosophy is a catchy topic. Once you start talking or thinking about it, it never does leave you.
Surprisingly, so is sleep.
Friends,Romans,Indians, Countrymen, Continent-men, I come here not educate you but to kill my time!
Good night.

Gui Xian (Arvind) EEEEE :)

In case thou art wondering what thou art staring at, thou shalt not be constrained to wonderment.
"Gui Xian (Arvind) EEEEE :)" is no mumbo jumbo comin straight from my malfunctioning, often hypo- functioning neurons. Rather, it is something that probably emanated from the most fundamental of human desires- that of happiness. Think am conked off? Perhaps you arent wrong after all....
Gui Xian is a chinese mythological creature- a turtle which symbolises happiness.Its a bit of a paradox- why would anyone associate a turtle with happiness? They are probably the most dull, uninteresting lethargic of all creatures you could ever come across. Happiness could have been easily associated with some avian creature capable of producing recurrent, pleasant stuff for the ears. Or some cool carnivore that ambles around the jungle after a heavy meal.
But no. Its a turtle.
No majesty,no grace: but yeah, its a turtle for happiness.
Thats the food for thought folks!
(And no... am NOT talking of EATING turtles)