Some recent events have prompted me to revisit this uncomfortable topic — why do we grieve when someone dies?
Most religions tell us that the departed, if they were good in life, end up in a better place. So grieving doesn’t make sense. If the departed were bad, we wouldn’t grieve any way.
Even if you are not religious, and do not believe in an eternal soul, death cannot be a bad thing for the dead, for they feel nothing, because they do not exist, which is the definition of death.
Just read the news that Prof Maryam Mirzakhani won the prestigious Fields medal (the equivalent of Nobel prize in Mathematics). She is the first woman to ever win the prize. First of all, congratulations to her. Coming from an Iranian background, being a woman, I’m sure it must have been hard for her.
Women seem to have difficulties in quantitative fields — we see this everywhere. The general belief is that compared to men, women are more creative and intuitive, but less analytical. They take in the world as a whole. Theirs is a romantic understanding, concentrating on the immediate appearance and values of the objects around them. This mode of understanding is to be contrasted with the analytic, classical understanding of men, who seem to mentally divide things in smaller, manageable chunks and drill down to the underlying forms to come to grip with world around them. In giving this description, I’m trying to paraphrase what Richard Pirsig said in the opening chapters of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The analytic mode of understanding lends itself better to quantitative fields like mathematics, and hence the paucity of brilliance among female mathematicians.
Stating the reason that way doesn’t really explain anything. We have to wonder where this gender difference comes from. Continue reading
I was as shocked as everybody else when I heard the news of Robin Williams’s apparent suicide. I wanted to write something about it because I am ardent fan of his work. In fact, I’m a fan of all those talented people who can make others laugh, starting from Ted Danson of Cheers to Jon Stewart of the Daily Show, and all the f.r.i.e.n.d.s in between.
It also gets me thinking. Most of us want to be rich and famous. But money and fame don’t seem to be enough to keep anybody happy. Why is that? As usual, I have a theory about it. In fact, I have two. I will share both with you, but keep in mind that these are merely the theories of an unreal blogger, nothing more. The theories notwithstanding, right now, I just feel profoundly sad, almost as though Robin Williams was somebody I knew and cared about. It is silly, of course, but something about his age (and how uncomfortably close it is to mine), the suddenness of his death, and the fact that he made us laugh out loud, makes his parting something of a personal loss.
As you may have noticed, I haven’t been writing much in the last couple of months. It was because of one of my regularly scheduled writer’s blocks. When I’m blocked, I usually find other things to do, and convince myself that they are really important and urgent. One such thing this time around was a revamping of my blog backend. The original design was dated, and it really needed an upgrade. Or so I told myself and worked on it for a few weeks. If you are reading this post, you can see the fruits of my labor. And I hope you like it.
Once upon a time in India, there were three parrots. They were for sale. A prospective buyer was interested.
“How much is that parrot?” asked he, pointing to the first one.
“3000 rupees.”
“That’s pretty steep. What’s so special about it?”
“Well, it can speak Hindi.”
The prospective buyer was impressed, but wanted a better deal. So he probed, “How much for the second one?”
“5000 rupees.”
“What? Why?”
Do you have a website or a blog and feel that it is getting bogged down with heavy traffic? First of all, congratulations — it is one of those problems that webmasters and bloggers would love to have. But how would you solve it? The first thing to do is to enable PHP acceleration, if your site/blog is PHP based. Although it should be straightforward (in theory), it might take a while to get it right. You know what they say — In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not. Acceleration, however, is a low-hanging fruit, and will go a long way in solving your problems.
Once you have extracted all the mileage out of the accelerator solution, it is time to incorporate a Content Delivery Network or CDN. What a CDN does is to serve all your static files (images, style sheets, javascript files, and even cached blog pages) from a network of servers other than your own. These servers are strategically placed around the continent (and around the globe) so that your readers receive the content from a location geographically close to him. In addition to reducing the latency due to distance, CDN also helps you by reducing the load on your server.
Here is an online Blackjack game that will teach you how to play it. If you don’t know what to do, just ask the program! This post hopefully teaches you sound strategies in playing Blackjack. But you should know that even with the soundest of strategies, Blackjack is a losing game. The house always holds a small edge. The best any strategy can do for you is to increase your staying power — the time it takes you to lose your shirt.
My primary degree is in engineering of the electric/electronics variety, which is why I can fix LED lights, for instance. I suspect an engineering degree gives you more of a theoretical understanding rather than practical knowledge. I mean, I’m no electrician. At times, I take on projects where I may have been better advised to call an electrician.
Recently, our maid’s instant water heater died, and some action on my part was indicated. Though an engineer, I have been in the corporate scene long enough to know that the right response to any action item during a meeting is, “May be by next Tuesday.” So I asked the maid to use my mother-in-law’s bathroom, thinking that I could postpone this issue to one of the future Tuesdays. But the maid, probably bound by some sacred ethical covenants of her profession, refused to do that. At that point, I should have called the electrician. But I foolishly decided to take a look at the prima facie evidence. The switch looked fine, with its indicator light coming on as expected, but the water heater remained intransigent.
I found something weird. People seem to like sad movies — tear-jerkers. But nobody likes to be sad. I mean, you watch great tragedies with genuine sadness, and then go around saying, “What a great movie!” If whatever happened in the movie really happened to you or somebody you knew, you wouldn’t say, “Wow, great!” Why is that?
I think a good answer is that such depictions in movies let you experience the emotional intensity with no immediate physical (or even emotional) danger. If you were actually on the Titanic, you would at least have taken a cold dip even if you survived. But watching Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio battle for their lives probably lets you experience their fear and pain from the comfort of your armchair, with popcorn and soda to intensify the feeling.
In order to fully understand the problems related to sexism, you have to be a woman. As a man, it has always been difficult for me to appreciate all the nuances of everyday sexism, although I consider myself more sensitive than most. This video was a real eye-opener for me.
Photo by TheeErin 
