Early morning found me on a shuttle ride to the airport. After enduring an extremely grumpy driver, had to endure daylight robbery by United airlines for excess baggage(i.e. my backpack). A short two hour flight later, I landed in Vancouver airport. The immigration officer was more inquisitive than the Americans I have had to deal with. That too passed by without incident. Jammy arrived shortly and we picked up exactly from where we had left. Ferry tickets for the boat ride to Victoria were purchased. A bus took us to the harbour and then to our suprise also got into the ship! We moved to the upper decks which had overpriced food, thoroughly lacking in vegetarian options and walkways around the periphery from which one could get a good view of the ocean, the coasts and snow-capped mountains. I suspected we could see parts of the US as well, including the Cascade range. We would be hiking the coast the next day and a preview of the scenery to be seen in the next few days was exciting.

The bus then dropped us off quite close to the hostel we were staying at. This hostel, surprisingly, was full of old people. They were on a budget too, I suppose. We dropped our bags there and went around to explore. I think one of the first things that struck me about the city was the colonial hangover it had. The street we were staying on was Yates and there were restaurants called James Joyce Bistro and pubs called Sticky Wicket (a cricket themed pricey pub, in a country, in which only immigrants play cricket. Then again, weren't most people immigrants.). I am told that there is a town just outside Victoria called Oakbay in which the snooty people that live there think they are more English than English people. Their accents were completely confusing, with heavy British influence. We had to do a bit of last minute food shopping for our trip. We bought some freeze dried food and a dry sack to hang my food from. By this time, we thought Victoria was a swell place and we wanted to spend more time in it after we got back from our hike. I conjectured that after the hike, we wouldn't feel like walking for the next few days. It turns out I was more accurate than I could imagine. I was right about myself, at least. But more on that later.

We did another British activity, namely, drank tea in the evening. Bhayak landed from Seattle and with him, we went around some more. We choose an Asian bistro run by whities and were surprised by the good food. A celebratory beer was consumed, a toast to a meeting long overdue and an adventure waiting to happen. Bhayak feeling invincible asked for a suicidal level of spiciness in his food and that he got. Despite repeatedly insisting that the food was amazing he was not able to finish the meal. We wanted to call an early night, so we headed back to our hostel to pack our backpacks and hope that it wouldn't be too heavy. We colonized a common space and in full view of curious onlookers, started distributing common gear and sorting out the food. Never having done a trip of this length, we could only guesstimate the amount of food we would need. Much debate was done and a consensus was reached. We had tonnes of excess food. We had delightful company. A lady from Scotland originally, kept us amused with stories from her various travels abroad. She cycled all over the world for her honeymoon. See that's just it: every backpacker I meet has this wonderful story about how they climbed Kilimanjaro, or visited India(parts of India that I had never been to or even heard of), or some amazing tale about how they had the most incredible experience. Lots of people say they'd like to travel. If they had the time and money.

We went to bed hoping to catch some sleep.

This is one place in the world I had hoped to visit, to meet George Whitman, who sadly passed away last week. The book store was a haven for beatnik writers and lies just outside of Paris in an idyllic location. I first learned of him by watching More Shoes, a solo project of a man who decides to take Werner Herzog's advice for film makers and decides to walk 5000 kilometers between Madrid and Kiev. You can watch the movie here. Here is Herzog from Werner Herzog eats his shoe, a documentary by Les Blank in which he gives his famous beg, borrow or steal advice to wannabe filmmakers. The documentary is a wonderful watch. And yes, he does eat his shoe.

I have been looking for easily implementable ideas to compute the diagonal entries of the inverse of a sparse matrix approximately.

I stumbled upon this. This was published in the Journal of Dairy Science. Unfortunately, Stanford doesn't subscribe to this journal, so I don't have access to this paper. What this problem has to do with a bunch of cows, is beyond my imagination!

Steve jobs passed away unceremoniously, see for example. He no doubt was heavily involved in a revolution. And there has been no shortage of eulogies for him and everybody was reminded of his famous Stanford'd commencement address. His counter culture influenced, timeless and succinct advice to stay hungry and foolish is on everybody's mind. (On a bad side note: do super models and TV actresses take his advice a little too literally?).

For a change, let us be amazed by someone else's commencement speech, by none other than the Nobel laureate for Economics Tom Sargeant. The announcement was made today. Here is the speech. Life advice based on economic principles and extremely terse. NF, a recent Economics PhD convert, 4 time qualifying exam taker, I think would approve of this speech. NF also recently found himself in the news, interning for a company that was featured on the Daily Show.

From: Marginal Revolution.

This is an addendum to this post. Still eagerly waiting for the fourth part of the series by Jack Kirby! You can find the link to the first three in my post.

Meanwhile, I leave you with this

Everything Is A Remix: THE MATRIX from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

and this

Everything Is A Remix: KILL BILL from robgwilson.com on Vimeo.

The quizzer in me, would have tried to come up with at least two stage-2's

Hat tip to the usual suspects, BrainPickings, Open Culture and to the dude who posted these videos robgwilson.

The link is here. via Marginal Revolution.

From this graph, since Neal Stephenson's name repeatedly pops up in various sub-sub-genres, a trip shall be made to the nearest library to borrow his books.

except, perhaps, to give rich, white folks the illusion of a moral upper hand.

“So how should you eat as a responsible global citizen? Consume less meat and oppose Western farm-subsidy programs -- especially if they focus on livestock. Campaign against U.S. biofuel programs, which divert corn into grossly inefficient energy production. Embrace further testing and analysis of GM crops. Encourage public funding of research and intellectual property laws that ensure that poor farmers are not priced out of the potential benefits of GM seeds. Spend only on organic food that is as energy- and land-efficient as conventional production. And be a smart consumer: Local produce grown out of season and meat raised on imported feed isn't friendly to you, the environment, or the developing world.

Read the entire article here. Throughout the article, it focuses on how organic farming is inefficient compared to traditional farming, while it could have easily talked about how reducing meat consumption is so much better for the world. Still, I can't disagree with the conclusions.

To me it is absolutely amazing that people decide to simply abandon the comfort of familiarity and go around the world, with nothing in their pockets and not knowing anything about the world. I know it is possible but I don't know how to do it. I have always thought about trying to learn some useful skills such as emergency medical training, or I probably would try teaching English to be be able to travel. It seems that all I need to do is magic tricks:

1. Japanese guy, who has spent the last 10 years travelling, climbed Mt. Everest and Mont Blanc, hand-rowed across the Caspian sea all performing magic tricks. Used 5 bikes so far. NatGeo update update.

2. An Indian dude who has biked to 156 countries. His story is no less impressive.

At the very least, I would like to do walk from Madrid to Kiev and watch as my film making skills improve.

Oh, I can evoke lush cliches about the romanticism in the mystery of travelling, the journey of self-discovery while travelling, the same feeling of loneliness in every landscape, in every crowded place, how nothing ever is the same as home to which you were arbitrarily born into, how underneath it all all human beings are essentially the same, how we have the same hopes, wishes, fears and fantasies and how you strive to look for meaning in an empty, cruel, violent world that offers you none. The truth is that, a journey is more than just the sum of all experiences; it has no purpose, to travel is its own end goal.

1. Sympathy for lady vengeance - Chan-Wook Park.
2. The Twilight Samurai - Yoji Yamada
3. The Barbarian Invasions - Denys Arcand (possibly the greatest Quebecois movie)
4. That Obscure Object of Desire - Luis Bunuel

You may already know about my hero-worship about Nanga Fakir( read here). In his characteristic way, he casually mentioned that he would be visiting me and if I had the time to meet, if I wasn't too busy that we could meet up for a casual tete-a-tete. It didn't matter that he hadn't talked, conversed with or even written to me since the last time that I had visited him at Stony Brook. Here he had come out of his hermetic existence and reached out to humanity, akin to this. All was forgiven, though. I looked forward to a weekend of reminiscing and getting drunk. I wasn't disappointed.

Apart from watching that terrible movie, The Whistleblower, it was an amazing weekend. I can't remember the last time I had laughed so much. People on the street must have thought that we were high, but we weren't. Many stories involving Pandu(SatyaVrat) and Ra were told and retold. We called up Ra to learn of his new plans to take over the world, his grand realization that, and to quote him verbatim, "Education is not for me." and his suicidal plans to go biking in Iran. The highlight, however, was the re-reading and re-enactment, under sufficient inebriation, of Shandy's e-mail thread about his marriage and his replies to the sometimes, incriminating prodding from Subbu and Choukkar. Some gems from the thread:

Shandy:
I perceive that news of happenings in my life have forestalled my own poor pen. Although I do not quite understand the import of the statement Vivek has made, I am certain that what Tarun wrote leaves nought for me to elucidate – I am down, hook, line and sinker.

Pandu:
Knuth doesn't use emails, Kripke doesn't use computers, & over a billion people don't use telephones. And they have retained the honour to remain, as ever.

With hardly any honour what-so-ever, Ankur.

Shandy, in response to the fact that he has bitten the marital bullet, when we all assumed that he'd be a life-long bachelor:
I think it only appropriate to observe first that rumours of my death have been grossly exaggerated. I was no Sir Lancelot to start with; more Sir Galahad, though by no means as high or as lofty. To those who would hark back to codes of chivalry, I would like to remind them that every knight is duty bound to fight his way from being knight-bachelor to knight-errant to knight-banneret.

Secondly, to those that suspect a fundamental change of heart or an abandonment of my “ferocious independence” and idiosyncrasy, I should declare that I would cease to live rather than not abide by Polonius’s advice to his son – “And this above all, to thine own self be true.” My decision to pledge my troth was after sound investigation of and deliberation upon the fact that the lady I was taking to heart would be a helpmeet who, far from thwarting me from my inclinations, would go so far as to add her mite, or at least countenance them with favour. “I am monarch of all I survey, my right there is none to dispute” as Cowper put it.

The Fortress of Solitude we share with brothers-in-arms until we find ourselves strong enough to sally forth to capture and hold, each a redoubt of his own. The day is not far when we who have held the fort, as our fathers before us since time immemorial, hand charge to yet another set of squires, ardent to win their spurs.


Shandy, on Wilbur Sargunaraj:
Unless that was intended to be a farcical critique of modern attitudes to life, I have to state perforce that that was the most sub-standard piece of thespian and artistic skill I have ever seen on display, and that the closest competitors I can imagine to Mr. Sargunaraj, are a pair of extremely talented chimpanzees in the Congo, or their more anthropoid second cousins and near neighbours.

Shandy, on Wagner:
Woody Allen might have his point; but personally speaking, when I hear one of Wagner’s compositions, the most it elicits is a commotion of the stomach serving as a prognostication of movements of an anti-peristaltic nature.


Shandy, on making a typo, writing complement instead of compliment:
If you thought that that was aught but a typographical error, I have none but myself to blame. I have a habit of typing in MS-Word, since it allows me to format my letters to my heart’s content, and Spell-Check, which I wish to God had never been invented, would have introduced a missed letter in my typing, without my having noticed. I usually re-read my drafts before sending them, but had an inordinate amount of E-mail to answer this afternoon, and sent several in quite a hurry, the three notes to Choukkar, Subramanian and yourself being amongst them. Having checked MS-Word since, I find that if one were to type complemnt, it automatically corrects it to complement; I leave it to you to check the veracity of that statement.

The Titans having reigned on Olympus were cast thence into Tartarus, once the younger gods had grown in stature, as you will remember from your Greek mythology. Far be it from me to state that I am infallible, but may it please the Lord God to still spare me what talents he has deemed meet to bestow upon me, for at least some more years to come. Had I committed such an error knowingly, I would not have been able to forgive myself for many years to come. I shall take this as an adequate indication of the inappropriateness of modern tools for one as antiquated as myself and de-activate Spell-Check forthwith on my computer.

Shandy on 18th century usage of "plere"
Further to my last note, and in keeping with something you had yourself suggested, I daresay I might be able to justify the usage, although not in the mid- to late-Victorian style that I employ as my standard. Both words are ultimately derived from the Latin verb plere, to fill, and were thus used indistinguishably until the mid-18th c. when their synonymity began to gradually vanish with the codification of the English language at that point, and the appearance of distinct differences in their usage, which have persisted down to this day. I hope that you will, at the very least, find this edifying.

Also, notable in this e-mail thread was my conspicuous absence, Subbu's hasty retreats on Shandy's rebuttals and the word 'aught'. Yes, Shandy is bat-shit crazy.