The life and times of Fodon

My Starcraft Experience

2006-12-31T08:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I played Starcraft with the Starcraft Guru ... Arun. We played several games at battle.net. It is so interesting that I didn't notice the phone ring right under my nose. I'm finally getting a hang of Starcraft but it will be ages before I get anywhere close to where Arun is at this game.

Arun has a good grasp of the strategies required to beat the computers at battle.net. The computer is pretty good at building an enormous army qickly. But, it sometimes leaves key installations unguarded. Each army is supported by a supply chain converts resources like minerals and vespene gas into firepower. It starts with gathering/building units that gather resources and build installations with them. These installations build mobile units that can be used to attack enemy units and installations and research technology that improves the army's capabilities. So, if one eliminates the support chain, it slows the enemy or dooms him. For example if the attacker takes out all the gathering units and the building that makes these gatherers, the defendant dies of starvation. Even if the annihilation is incomplete, it slows the defendant's building process down.

This is a pretty cool game. Looks like it is way more sophisticated and fun than chess.

My new web site is up

2006-08-14T08:16:00.000-07:00

I laboured all of Sunday to put up my new web site. I'm hoping to put up many interesting things to my website in the near future. But, for now, it is only the home page ... whith many links to other sites to support my claims. In the future, I hope to link my photo album, blog, resumes etc to it. But for now, it is just the first step.

The pond near my Dads house

2006-06-23T22:32:00.000-07:00

This is something like maps.google.com ... except that like a wiki you can name the places on the map. How cool. Now you can name every spot on the earth.

The Pond

2006-05-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

ഈപ്പൊ മലയാളത്തെല്യ്‌ ഇംഗ്ലീഷ്‌ എഴുതതാം. ഈതു സൌത്ത്‌ അഫ്രികന്നു ഇമ്പൊര്‍ട്‌ ചയുത്‌ ടെക്നോളജി.

2005-12-15T09:31:00.000-08:00

An update on the lambs at my uncle's: One of the lambs became dinner to a pack of wolves yesterday night. Looks like they took the weaker one of the two. Good luck to the survivor !

2005-12-15T09:17:00.000-08:00

Asha: My youngest cousin.

2005-12-14T22:36:00.000-08:00

Cyberian Girl: Imperfections probably make things more real. This is one of the finalists from the CG beauty contest. Check out the others at: wired CG contest

2005-12-14T21:03:00.000-08:00

I dug up this pearl of wisdom near Greenwitch village (London). It was in the hull of one of those old sea faring ships that marked the begining of the British Empire. Have things changed?

2005-12-14T07:57:00.000-08:00

Sooth Meyer's wedding: This was the coolest outfit in Sooth's wedding. Check out the waistband !

2005-12-14T07:55:00.000-08:00

Sooth Meyer's wedding. Lots of women were in the queue ahead of me ... apparently Sooth's father-in-Law is a big shot. He introduced me to him with a ... "For a change here is someone I'll have to introduce to you".

2005-12-13T17:37:00.000-08:00

This is one of the pictures from a new style of photography I am working on. At this point this is one of the best examples of this style. I framed the picture without looking into the camera.

2005-12-13T17:35:00.000-08:00

Great example of friends aping each other ... similar hair, the same skirt, bags of the same type in their right hands ... and the bags match their tops ... and the similarities dont end there.

2005-12-13T17:31:00.000-08:00

Can you believe that this is all vegetarian ? Singapore is one place where veganism is no constraint.

2005-12-13T17:29:00.000-08:00

The Durian : Did you know that there are protected fruits in Singapore. This is also the national fruit of Singapore. Exporting this fruit is apparently illegal and a heavy fine could be imposed on anyone who tries. Many people wonder why the government would bother since no one else seems to like the taste of the fruit anyway.

2005-12-13T09:23:00.000-08:00

The cow is eagar to help any way it can.

2005-12-13T09:21:00.000-08:00

These two were born yesterday. One of them is yet to figure out what mom tastes like

Healthcare in the US.

2004-08-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

I talked to Madhu ( a resident doctor in Philly) today. He works over 100hrs a week... and it is not uncommon to have to work 120hrs a week and is like a fish that has suddenly found itself in an aquarium that stinks. I asked him why healthcare is so expensive... and he described one of the most apalling waste of resources.

Hospitals usually have to provide for their own funding and government rules don't allow hospitals to refuse care to needy patients easily - thank God right? ... well the govenment does not pay the hospitals for all the patients who are not insured and can't pay. So, we are paying the price in terms of higher premiums - thanks to the law that equates work input to work output ... i.e. somebody pays for every free lunch. Personally I find this quite reasonable. But, it reminds me of something out of the communist manifesto : from everybody according to their capabilities and to everybody according to their needs ... nothing necessarily bad with that ... except that x million Americans people died to prevent the spread of communism!

What personally appals me is that some patients with absolutely no hope of surviving like the case of this one patient who had suffered a stroke and was in a coma - living the life of a vegetable. He even had a tumour in his lower spine. His wife put the guy on "full code" which in common terms is an order to do everything in the hospital's power to prevent the patient from dying. Now Madhu and many other doctors didn't expect this guy to ever get out of bed ... but the patient's wife had unrealistic expectations! This is in contrast to many other patients who prevent doctors from saving their lives in many ways like by preventing the use of drugs or by preventing the use of life support systems. When a patient who does not have insurance is on the verge of death, the hospitals may be forced to spend every last dime keeping them from the brink.

Many people don't see that their lives have bounds to their value. Somebody has to impose a cap on what a persons life is worth ... so that the living aren't wasting their resources keeping dead people from being pronounced dead.

Mmmmmm..... I wonder if there is a way to analytically arrive at bounds on the value of human life ... possibly as a function of what the person is capable of.

... more about the costs of life..

2004-08-06T18:11:00.000-07:00

TGIF!!

... and what do I do? It is 6.10pm and I'm writing to a blog at work, while talking to a machine at Sprint! Obviously there is something contorted about the way I evaluate the pleasures of life.

The cost of Life.

2004-07-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

I've often wondered how we make our choices or allocate resources to maximize our utility (or happiness). Money happens to be only one of our resources. Sometimes we give up money to buy something and at other times we get compensated to do something people would normally not do. We sometimes overlook the fact that there is a lot more to a transaction or activity than money ... risk of death is one of the other resources.

Steve asked me this interesting question ... would I take up the job of strapping myself in the Space Shuttle (SS) every day to go the the ISS ( say to maintain equipment there or to drum my fingers till my 8 hours are up).... and what I'd want for it? That made me go mmmmmm...

So far 113 SS flights have been made ... of which 2 didn't get back home. So, one's chances of burning along with the candle is about 2 in 113 or 17,700/million (just to use a uniform probability measure). Now assuming all flights are independant events (probability math jargon), the probablility of surviving a space flight is 111/113... quite good mmm?

Think about it again... the chances that the astronaut will live to collect his paycheck is: also the chance that he'd live till the end of the month ... say he worked on all the working days in the month ... then the probability he'll survive is (111/113)^22 => 0.67 ... i.e about 2/3 and in 39 days ... or a little under two months, odds are that he'll be more likely dead than alive!!!

So, what is a fair compensation for this job? Remember the risk of flying the space shuttle does not change with the number of flights he has made. So, why would he stop flying once he's decided to fly once?

We makes decisions like this quite often. For example, how risky it is to fly. It turns out that the chances of an average person dying over a year in a automobile accident is 172/million ... about twice as much as of dying in 100 commercial flights which is about 100/million!! Now remember that the number 172/million is for an average person ... who drives at about the speed limit and commutes for under 15 minutes a day.... my risks have to be higher. More reason to start using the Metro ... though now I wonder about similar numbers for the Metro.

http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/ozsvath/lectures/Chances.htm

So, there ... we are all really gamblers in life. Better be an educated gambler.

First speed bump on Picasa

2004-07-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

Picasa is good, but it doesn't allow one to caption images ... though it does allow keywords to describe images.

Organizing multimedia

2004-07-28T09:31:00.000-07:00

I have over a 1000 digital pictures, several movies and a couple of days worth of MP3 songs on my hard disk. I've not seen an easier cost efficient way of organizing stuff than Picasa. Check it out at http://www.picasa.com/picasa/.

Picasa allows different ways of viewing your pictures. The normal view lets you looks at a collection of albums. The other view is as a timeline - a sequence of pictures ordered by the time in which they were taken. It also tames information in the sense that it generates thumbnail pictues... tinier versions of the big image ... on the fly. Another cool feature of Picasa I hope to use is the facility to publish whole albums to websites.

I've been scared of opening my box of DV movies that I have collected over the past year, because of disk space concerns on my Mac ... Hopefully this will help me organize my movies as well.... I suspect I'll have to look for something to edit those movies.

Cheers.

Tracking blogs ... the nerdy way of passive attention.

2004-07-26T11:52:00.000-07:00

Very often, I care for what is on a blog but dont want to keep checking if something new has turned up. Here is site that does the tracking for you and sends you a message when something new appears.

http://blogarithm.com/

Cheers!

In the Begining...

2004-07-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

... there was time.
... and there was peer pressure ... friends, their grannies, and political parties started blogging.
... and a desire to get the kinks in my brain ironed out.

Since I don't really have an enormous fan following, this will probably remain a tool to organize my thoughts and discover how blogging can enrich me ... but in a while, it is certainly possible that our friendly neighborhood alien civilization that read my blog would see that human beings still need "Endangered Species" status ... and that would mean that we've saved the planet and our species from almost certain obliteration.

So here is a blog dedicated to to a saving the planet.

I'm really just fooling around with the features now.

Cheers!!