Humans are rare in having prominent female breasts. I think it was in the "Naked Ape" that I first read Desmond Morris suggestion that breasts mimicked the buttocks as humans walked straight and changed the way they copulate. According to his framework, breasts were primarily sexual signaling devices. Of course, Desmond Morris has been accused of story telling without any evidence, and will eventually get knocked on his head for his labor.

Nor does he manage to explain the point made: why in the absence of European morality, in a number of places across the world, an uncovered breast was not an aberration attracting undue attention.

Nor, do we have any way to explain why now in parts of the west, an unadorned breast doesn't necessarily signal anything; while on a recent visit to a beach in Goa I read a sign board informing me the law wouldn't look kindly upon breasts being exposed to the sun and the sand.

The truth is that I do not understand, nor have the will to investigate.

Most of the time, it is involuntary: just about not being able to tear off your eyes, and just sitting there gaping.

[This was leading somewhere, I just forgot where...]

[west civil kerela. would there have been this obsession with breasts without this education]

[more victorian than the victorians]

[what exactly were the norms - is art that survives an appropriate guide]

[what about the movies that get made ~ kama sutra, The cloud door]

[what about the portrayal in the west. Cashback - 100 girls. Cool casual nudity]

[what about Indian serial - do they portray the right image - afgan ban etc.]

[what were the norms again.]

I love sleeping on bean bags. There are two of them, and when I go off to sleep at night, I am usually lying on one of them - laid of almost flat, with my hips falling off the curve, and my legs plonked on the other. When morning comes, I find myself down on the floor, with my head on a bean bag, and my body nested between the bags.

I don't sleep still. As I sleep, I murmur (little dirty secrets and mad incoherent dreams), I fight (boxing demons in my dreams), and I move. I move when I sleep. Moving often like the hands of a clock, marking out the passage of the sleeping hours through the tight revolution in the bed. If I am sleeping on a mattress laid out on the floor, as I often do, I would roll the night through, and mornings would find me sleeping in some far off corner of the room.

I am fat and bits of me jiggle when I try to dance. If you need someone to put on a white beard and stand in for Santa at Christmas, you can call me.

I wish I could run. I wish I could work up the courage fast enough to do what I wanted to. So many things lost because I didn't get there fast enough.

I wish I didn't think about life with such a high discount factor, and hence, such a short termination period. I rarely think a day ahead at a time. I wish I didn't worry so much about the consequences of my actions. Life has been less than and more than what it could be because I wouldn't think right about the things coming up.

I am an alcoholic. I started drinking when I was doing my higher secondary studies, what others would call Junior college. I started drinking during those two years before I got into college proper. At least that is what I remember. I believe that memory could be wrong, I was, after all, a studious sincere student during those days, not the kind to get drunk. But, I think that was when I first did drink, a bottle of beer bought with coins borrowed from a dozen friends, split between, what was it, three, or four of us.

We were the king of the world.

In college I avoided drinking, for quite some time. Eventually during the second year, at blogglob's 'job treat', I split a beer with another friend. It was a hot day in the deccan, we were in the A/C Permit Room of the second best hotel in the town, and the two of us, after the beer split, were convinced that we were quite drunk.

I returned to the hotel for my next drink in college. I had won a few thousands in a series of quizes towards the end of the school year, and absolut69 and I went the 'garden restaurant' in the hotel to celebrate. The 'Garden Restaurant' was essentially the lawn at the back of the hotel, where plastic chairs and tables had been laid out in tightly packed files. This must have been in March, about the time when the temperature goes up from hot to murderous hot. In celebration of the heat that was, and to lure the students, and get back the drunks that had got on the wagon during the prohibition that had been in place till a couple of years before, the restaurants had began running 'buy 2, get 1' schemes. The scheme was so madly successful, that they had opened this, I suspect, illegal 'garden restaurant'.

We got drunk, I was for the first time in my life, wonderfully high. ab69 and I came back to college and proceeded to climb up to the top of the academic building, which had these huge concrete water tanks. We climbed on a couple of those tanks, and just lay there for a few hours.

Things changed after I came back from vacation at the end of the second year. We had the second year second semester exams. The semester before that had been tough on a lot of guys, and they had given an improvement - where along with the current semester's exams they could repeat the papers for the previous semester and try and improve their grades. When the grades came out, I found out that a) a lot of guys had managed to improve their grades b) I had flunked a paper. My ranking in class went down from a respectable one in the low teens down to being below 50 percentile. That turned into a liberating experience. I decided that a) fighting for tiny bits of advantage is way too much work, b) and thus, I might just concentrate on having a very good time in college.

During the third year at college, I was drinking more regularly. I shifted to white liquor (Gin and Vodka, because I got more alcohol per rupee, as compared to beer at the restaurants in the town.) I started occassionally smoking while drinking because I heard that the kick was better. It wasn't because of the academic disappointment. That didn't really pain me a lot, because a) I decided that I didn't need grades because I certainly wouldn't try to go to US for Post-Grad studies, b) I was fairly certain that I could get a job (IT sector boom was at its peak about then). It was partially because around then I was completely infatuated with someone who was in love with someone else. I didn't have the right tools to deal with something like that and I started depending on drinking to deal with it occasionally.

After that, except for the times I have been with my parents, I don't there has ever been a week when I haven't had a drink. But, then there have rarely been periods when I just drunk once a week. Over the seven years since the third year in college, I have averaged at least three drinking sessions a week. But, then my greatest problem is not how often I drink, it is a question of how much. I discovered binge drinking, drinking till I black out and end up doing embarrassing stuff. I discovered that I could drink to the point of blacking out, induce vomiting to purge my stomach, and begin drinking again. I discovered that I could drink through more than a bottle and half of whiskey, if I kept my hourly consumption to about two large pegs with loads of water. I found out that I could avoid hangover through the simple expedient of drinking a lot of water.

I have ventured this many summer on a sea of madness, far beyond my depth. This has to end. I do not propose to be a teetotaler, but I want to stop binging. To that end, I want to see how long I can manage to completely abstain from alcohol. I would like to believe that I can surprise myself.

After a hdd crash about two years ago, I haven't had any Shusheela Raman songs with me. Today Yesterday I collected a few albums from tandavdacer.

I am currently listening to the song 'Amba' from the album 'Love Trap'.

I used to listen to Shusheela Raman a lot during my days in Calcutta. After the extremely late night drinking session, after my fellow drunks had fallen asleep, in the early hours before the crows started cawing, in the early hours before the sun rose, in the heat and humidity that is Calcutta, or in the cold foggy Calcutta morning, I would listen to Shusheela Raman in a loop, smoking like they were about to ban tobacco, drinking the last dredges of liquor, surfing endlessly, or trying to write my pretentious lj pieces.

Listening to the song again after so long reminds me of that state of mind. Drunk out of my mind, not happy, just very very contended.

It feels like eating something really nice. Not too sweet, or hot. Just something with really deep flavour. Like a piece of fine bitter chocolate, or a warm croissant.

marut sent me a forward combining his two passions Photography and Chuck Norris Facts. It was about a photographer called Ken Rockwell, and as marut explains:

[Ken Rockwell] has a popular camera review and photography gyan website. Problem is he is extremely opinionated, and has a penchant for trashing expensive cameras in favor of cheap point and shoots...

beatzo

tandavdancer

tandavdancer

On the subject of Monopoly ... I quickly realized that playing by the official rule book made the game rather one-sided pretty quickly, sort of like how Tamil audiences in the 90s could predict, to the accurate nanosecond, when Goundamani was going to beat Senthil.

We went out for coffee at night, and as we were just getting back home, we saw a bunch of children - mid-teens - apparently dancing or practicing to dance. They were spread out about in small groups, discussing, performing - not quite pirouettes but - turning around in circles, etching out and feeling out small steps and movements, taking a break from a overall choreographed sequence to tighten out a few details.

I hated that scene, because it immediately put to my mind the thought that they were practicing either for a school cultural or a boogie-woogie style dance show.

'Bloody useless shit, this dancing,' marut said, and I pretty much agreed.

In college, I completely hated dancing, or may be I should say that I didn't care about dancing. The dance nights at the college cultural events were the most crowded nights at the Auditorium, but I don't think I ever went to any of those events. Most of the guys in my immediate circle at college were pretty similar, absolut69 was probably the only friend from college who would actually dance if you turned on the music.

I hated dancing, partially because I can't dance. I dance with all the grace of a rhino charging through the marshes. I was born with the awareness of my own inelegance and hence never, through till the end of my college days, ever danced of my own will.

But I don't hate it quite as much these days. Change started one day sometime after college, when drunk out of my mind and unbecomingly infatuated with someone, I stood up and danced, or at least tried to. Since then I have had that bit of nightmare repeat on a couple of occasion: I would drown a huge amount of whiskey in a very short period of time, stagger off to the dance floor, and stand there shaking my head to the music and moving my hands about wildly.

Dancing, if what I do can be described as dancing, makes me sweat. And it provides a huge physical release. For me that is Drunken Nirvana.

I don't hate dancing as much any more, but I still don't understand dancing as a spectator event. I don't understand why television has to be so full of dance competition shows. For me dancing is personal. It is the most personal of things. To watch someone dance, of and by itself is unimportant for me. A song and dance sequence in a movie is something that my mind would blank out. SRK doing the 'Dard-e-Disco' is just white noise.

The only time when dance works for me is on occasions when the pure physical joy of dance gets communicated from the dancer to me and I start thinking -wouldn't it just be lovely to be able to do that!

That is what I thought last night. I wasn't thinking of MJ while thinking about all that stuff I have put down here, but when I switched on the news today, MJ was dead. I should have thought about it. MJ carried off the energy like no other. I don't think I will miss you, but the moves were cool.

Note: Of course, the stuff I have written above is not strictly honest. The great transition for me when I really started loving music was when I broke the seal of the 'Roja' cassette and put it in the tape. The great transition for me when I really started paying attention to the dance bit that came with the song in a video was when I watched the 'Hips don't lie' video with morguefile.

Was it GB Shaw who said, "Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire"?
------------------------------
Once upon a time my favorite poem was 'The Emperor of Ice Cream' by Wallace Stevens. I love the last-but-one line in the first stanza, however, I remember that as 'Let be be the end of seem.'

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The ISP greeted me with a page that said:

DOT Regulation No. 820-1/2008-DS Pt.II, Dated. 23-02-2009

As per above DOT Regulation each of the subscriber has to fill this format. If subscriber is using WiFi router with his Internet connection and if not declared, Service Provider has right to Suspend / Terminate the said Internet Connection and Service.

Subscriber Id
E-Mail Id
Phone No. (Home) Phone No. (Mobile)

Whether using "WiFi" router with this Internet Connection Yes No
"WiFi" Router Make and Model Details

There are broadly speaking, three types of blogs that I watch. a) Those who post heavily (long dense posts or multiple posts daily) and hence manage to post something interesting at least a couple of times every week. b) Those who post rarely but with a high hit-rate of interesting posts. c) People I haven't got around to removing from my reading list.

Typically when I don't clean up the unread queue for a couple of days, when I return, I typically find 200+ posts, of which probably three quarters would be type (a), about three would be type (b), and the rest of type (c).

As an attention conservation device, I typically end up marking all type (c) posts as read, unless I am planning to maximize my procrastination time. Once these posts are out of the way, I am left with a terrible choice: do I plow through the hundreds of possibly interesting posts and save the almost certainly interesting posts for dessert, or do I hog on the almost certainly interesting posts and then stroll through the rest of the bulk in a post-meal walk.

Anyway, I ended up going for the cherry and cream when I noticed that after ages, Stephen Fry has posted another blog post. (

I realize that the word 'blog' is used by most people to refer to the 'blogging' site, as well as to the 'blog' entries posted on the site. However, I have this tendency, for some strange reason, to referring to the blog-entries as posts or blog posts. For example, I am currently blogging about irrelevant stuff on my livejournal blog, but I don't think too many people would actually read through the entire post.

) I must confess here that I haven't read through the Fry post, which is apparently a review of the iPhone 3GS, so I don't know whether the post is actually interesting.

However, midway through the second paragraph, while Fry was going on about how the App Store is the best, I realized something. Apps are like books. Like novels. Just like fifty thousand people I know now want to write a book, eventually in a decade or so I would probably know fifty thousand people who would want to write an App. If you have a completely uniform platform architecture, like if in five years everyone was using Android, or if Android and Apple and Nokia and Windows all supported a way through which Apps could be installed across all OSes, you would have literally billions of possible users for Apps, just like you have literally billions of people who could possibly buy your book. But like books there would be huge number of Apps, and your average App would probably be bought by only a couple of thousand people, but at the other end of the extreme you would have gaudy monstrosities of Dan Brownish Apps which would make millions of mobiles hum.

How do people think the world works? People don't seem to have a map for how things work, and they don't care.

I realize that I don't know how everything works. For instance, I don't know anything about Flash and Flex, and I am always unsure about how the first compression cycle in a Diesel motor is ensured or how exactly does telephone network switching works, or how creation of a multicellular organism is bootstrapped from a single cell. There are technologies that I don't understand and there are tons of things about basic sciences that I don't understand, but at the very least I am curious about it all. That might be my only virtue, though it is more of a pain than everything else. Any new thing that I see, I am likely to go all 'Oh! Shiny!' and just get stuck looking at it.

Remember the third Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Everything tomorrow could end up being replaced by actual living magic (or an entirely different paradigm of reality that changes every natural law while leaving the state of the world exactly the same) and most of the world would not care. They would not wonder. They would not investigate. They would not try to understand. They would just continue as they have always been because for them the world of now just as well might already have been running by magic.

Clarke's third Law has a problem with the phrase 'advanced technology'. As typically understood, for an average person from this current world, a clothes iron would not be 'advanced technology', while it is most certainly so for a New Guinea tribesman from 1920 who would most likely understand it as a magical artifact. But this typical understanding of the phrase 'advanced technology' in the context of Clarke's Third Law would imply that the 21st century person would be surprised if tomorrow the process by which the clothes iron works changes, while the New Guinea tribesman's understanding of the the clothes iron would not change. However, in reality a typical person's understanding of a clothes iron is not different from that of a New Guinea tribesman. The person from the current world would understand that 'electricity' from the mains flows into the iron and heats it up, but for all intent and purpose, the set up could be changed so that the iron become a device through which 'cold flux' is removed from the iron plate and sent down the electric mains supply and there would be no sense of wonder.

I therefore submit that for the New Guinea tribesman as for the person sitting next to me on the bus, a clothes iron is a magical device. I realize that eventually I don't have an absolutely clear idea about the way a clothes iron works, but I would like to believe that I at least try to understand. If the way an iron works suddenly changes tomorrow I would at least try to understand what the change is, and why the change occurred.

My point is the level of something that would be 'advanced technology' differs among people as it does among cultures. For most of the people in the video, Google could start using Pigeon's for their backend system and would just accept it. They do not have a capacity for being surprised by it, and hence it would be magic for them.

-
PS: Project Pigeon

Why, of course, people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war… That is understood. But it is the leaders of the country who determine policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along… The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

Re: this previous post on wanting to translate 'Tu raja ki raj dulari
Devanagari version taken from here. Translations picked up from here and here.

This is a very rough work, and is possibly plagued by errors. I could clean it up a lot more, but I am bored of it now.

तू राजा की राज दुलारी मैं सिर्फ़ लंगोटे आला सुं भांग रगड़ के पिया करूँ मैं कुण्डी सोट्टे आला सुं	Tu raja ki raj dulari main sirf langote aala sun Bhang ragad ke piya kahun main kundi sotte aala sun	You are the light of the King’s eye, all I am is a fakir in a loincloth, I grind down bhang on a mortar and pestle, and the paste I drink
तू राजा की छोरी सै म्हारे एक भी दास्सी दास नहीं शौल (चल?) दुशाल्ले (तू शाल्ले?) ओढ़न आली म्हारे कम्बल तक भी पास नहीं	Tu Raja Ki Chhori Se, Mere (Mare) Ek Bhi Daasi Dost (Daas?) Nahi Chal Tu Shawl (shawle) Odhan Aali, Mare Kambal Tak Bhi Paas Nahi	You are the daughter of the King, while I don’t have servants or slaves, You walk around draped in shawl, while I don’t even own a warm rag
तू बागन की कोयल सै याडैय बर्फ पडे हरी घास नहीं [किस तरियां] जी लाग्गे तेरा शतरंज चौपड़ ताश नहीं किसी साहूकार सै ब्याह करवाले मैं खालिस टोटे आला सुं	Tu baagan Ki Koyal Se, barf pade Hari Ghaas Nahi [Kis tariya] dil Lage Tera, Satran Chaul Prakash Nahi Kise Saahukar Ke Byah Karwale, Main Khaali sote Aala Su	You are like a songbird in a garden far from these snowfield deserts You would never like in a place like this, forever stuck in the dark You should wed a rich merchant, while all that I own is a stick
[मैं] धूने में तप्या करूँ तू आग देख कै डर ज्यागी राख घोल कै पिया करूं मेरे भाग देख कै डर ज्यागी सौ सौ सांप पड़े रहें [गल] नाग देख कै डर ज्यागी तांडव नाच करे बन मैं रंग राग देख कै डर ज्यागी तन्नै जुल्फां आला छोरा चाहिए मैं लाम्बे चोट्टे आला सुं	[Main] dhuna me tapya karun, tu aag dekh ke darr jagi Rakh ghol ke Piyaa Karu Mera, Bhag Dekh Ke Dar Jaagi Sau Sau Saap pade reh [gale] me, Naag Dekh Ke Dar Jaagi Tandav naach kare ban main rang raag dekh ke dar jaagi Tane Julfo aala Chhora Chaiye, Main Lambe Chote aala Su	I meditate in the middle of smoke, if you saw the fire, you would be scared, I mix ash into my drink, if you knew my fate, you would be scared, Hundreds of serpents around my neck, if you saw a single snake, you would be scared In the wild, I dance the dance of death and destruction, if you heard the music, you would be scared You should be with a man with long hair, all I have is a head of matted dreadlocks

A Monday morning breakfast on a pint of cold beer and a plate of vada-sambar.

Sorry about this...

I don't know, but I've been told,
ICC is now BCCI's whore.

Sad and sweet and in-comp-lete,
ICC has become a neutered pig.

Lalit Modi is leading the cry,
IPL is gonna go biannual.

Thank you.

For those who came late, if you are wondering what this means and where the 'I don't know but I've been told' stuff came from, may I ask you to watch Full Metal Jacket. Another famous line from the movie, 'Me love you long time,' has now achieved notoriety by becoming a snigger-cue with the Messrs Bang Brothers and Milf Hunters sprouting the line whenever they manage to get a girl of east asian descent to

Very net-geeky
Two ways how web is going to change the way you work over the next five years.
Google wave demo on Youtube [Skip to 7 min 32 sec]
Cisco holographic telepresence

I am almost missing Delhi. If you wanted to dig into a Andhra Thali, Delhi at least had Andhra Bhavan to offer.

Someone should tell Mumbai that there is more to food from the south of India than the fare provided by the various descendants of A. Rama Nayak. I admit that the idli is good, and so is the thali, but I really would rather be eating an Andhra Thali with an omelet and a small plate of chicken curry.

I want to run off to Dadar and catch the next bus to Hyderabad.

The only way in which Mumbai trumps Delhi with something that I didn't get in Delhi is in terms of the Irani places - the chai, the pao and the omelet. [For malvan/ generic south Indian nonveg food Delhi offers Swagath and a lot of local places. I can always make a Samosa Pao/ Vada Pao on my own. I even found a place that offered a beautiful vindaloo.]

I think Delhi experiments more with food than Mumbai. Or possibly the problem for me is that Mumbai is primarily a vegetarian place - despite all the fishes that get sold and eaten in the city - whereas I am primarily a meat eater as is Delhi.

Sleep drunk, laid low by a evil spell of the runs, I am feeling lightheaded.

I have nothing to do. In the limited sense that the I don't have any pressing engagement or project demanding immediate attention.

I have been running with a bit in my mouth for so long that now I don't have a clue about what I should do. All those things I said I would, they all clamour for attention, and I don't want to do anything. If I could I would watch the sun set from 35,000 ft. But I don't really wish to move from my seat.

There just might be one thing I would like. I want to read English sentences thrown out by a Markov's generator set up to produce results that imitate English sentences. I want syntactically clean sentences that contain no meaning.

I want, "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously," but I would settle for DadaDodo. I want to watch Paprika.

If you knew me you would say that I spend the day hidden away from the blazing hot summer sun, that I spend the day in a quiet cubicle corner, that I spend the day surfing the net on a computer. If you knew me you could say that I spent my day shivering in a very cold room without proper ventilation, that I spend my day staring at a wall that is there a foot and a half in front of my face.

Longer, harder and deeper. IMF estimate for the state of the world economy has gone from bad to worse. The estimates for the growth rate of India's economy in 2009 and 2010 was put at 6.9% and 7.7% in October 2008, which was lowered to 5.1% and 6.5% in January 2009, and has now been further reduced to 4.5% and 5.6%.

Translation: So, unless you are in a place that is beating the market, expect low hike this year, next year and possibly the year after. So, all in all not the most profitable time to be highly productive, and obviously a horrible time to be out of work.

I think I will apply for some PG program at some place now. Or am I late for them all.

Fucking idiots. I am proof reading resumes. The most stupid stupidest of jobs.

Someone described a past project experience with the following words, "capturing AS–IS processess, capturing pain areas, capturing business requirements and design the TO-BE processes".

( possible dexter spoilers - Season 2, Episode 2/3 )

Flowingdata had a guest post on 'Visual representation of tabular information' by Martin Krzywinski, who has been developing a visualization tool called Circos . The article and Circos are motivated by the fact that in most of the case the information presented in a tabular form is unparsable, obscure, and noisy. The solution, is to choose a better representation system, which in this case is represented by Circos as "an information aesthetic for comparative genomics". The resultant diagrams produced are, I believe the operative word is, beautiful.

Consider for example this diagram of the relative reactivity of elements:

[Originally from Flowing Data: Visual Representation of Tabular information]

Flowing Data had also done a round up of the Best data visualization projects of 2008, something which also came up in the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog today. Someone asked Andrew Gelman whether these (meaning the visualization projects mentioned above) suck? Gelman believes that they do (for data display purpose).

And so do I. They are beautiful stunning bits of work. Something like wordle might actually be useful to get a quick flavour of a text. The Britain from above visualization would be useful in helping us comprehend the complexity involved. But for the most parts, Circos and Streamgraphs produce works that would possibly be better for printing out (or display on a monitor) and hung from a wall than for use in actually getting a feel for what the data is saying.

Form over function, never. Aesthetics is good, but that doesn't have to be at the cost of anything else. Unless, of course, the point is to create something that would look good on lobby monitors, or the Museum of Modern Art.