Wayfaring

A few days ago I ran into the word entitlement. And fortunately I looked up what it means. The context in which I found the word was “an individual with an exceptionally strong sense of entitlement”. This fed into a notion I have had for sometime now - Most pieces of fiction across the arts build upon characters which are centrally important. The focus on these characters imbues upon them a sense of importance, a centrality which otherwise is relatively rare in the real world. These characters do interesting, important things, and even their mundane tasks add to the “detail”. Growing up reading a truck load of books and not looking at life much otherwise, can nudge you into the direction of living in a tale, where your own actions hold centre. In my case, I think this holds true. Its a long held truth, I just ran into it now.
While were at books, the arts and characters, I long for a literary niche which writes about the mundane, and the current - which seeks no symbols, and romanticises little. Like life, the romance, and the drama should be left unto the reader. Will continue on this train of thought on another late night.

Its hard to imagine that till a month ago I was a slacker waking up at 10.

Hows this for a definition - the federal reserve - a random number generator that pulls a number out of their ass. Financial markets - the smoke and mirrors around the federal reserve.

Ive been largely successful in leaving the pathos and sadness behind. Today I ran into a movie review of this exquisite trilogy of films called “The Apu trilogy”. In an instant, I recalled the time when I had seen the films, and was reconnected to my old sensitive frayed self. Years rolled back, and the defenses Ive elaborately built, of being driven, having purpose and feeling achievement, melted away in an instant.

Everyone should see these three films once, they’re haunting and poignantly sad. They disarm you and  illuminate you on the acute sadness and futility of being human. Its going to be another long night of staring into the ceiling. They dont call them “moving images” for nothing.

I recently had the misfortune of downgrading to Windows Vista. I spent quite some time, unsuccessfully trying to find what the improvements are (besides the six pretty fonts). Did not find anything positive to report. Deleting 800 Mb takes over eight minutes. Before vista can delete files, it has to discover them ! (I have no idea what this means. My only insight into this is staring at a progress bar for five minutes while this nonsense unravelled itself). And the severe restrictions it places on playing video on large monitors makes me dread the DAY.the day when access to the programmability of computing devices will be taken away from the general public. Its a sickening feeling really.

The sun is shining,

and the weather is sweet.

Exceptional things rarely happen.

- Sublime observation from a statistics textbook

This crossed my mind recently:

The powers that be have gotten so used to scarcity based models as a means of making money that when they see a new pasture, even if it presents no innate scarcity , they race to introduce scarcity as a means towards making money.
Mohammed Yunus - the Bangladeshi Nobel Prize winner for Economics has an interesting take on things - the poorest people are held back by scarcity (of capital and of opportunity). The cost of providing them opportunity is so small , that it makes no sense to not do it. So he runs a micro credit bank for the extremely poor, promoting grass roots entrepreneurship. And it works well.

It ties in with some evolutionary computation related work I do. To find the global optimum of a function you need to allocate some resources for speculative exploration. Otherwise you settle down and live on the first (small) local peak that you run into. Encouraging exploration (even with low expectations of returns ) sometimes leads us to find dramatically larger peaks somewhere else , or even in the worst case it buys us a lot of confidence in the superiority of the peak that we  currently sit on.

If we dont get them, decadence will.

How many supermodels does the world need, and how many boring men in suits ?