Rule yourself

Anywhere you look around on the Internet, you see people having arguments, people trying to convince each other of their own viewpoints. There is the thought that if your opinion isn't the majority opinion, at least within circles you consider important, your opinion becomes invalid. So, people try hard, with logic, profanity and every weapon possible, to win these arguments.

On the other hand, a lot of these arguments can be stopped if the real experts stepped in, whatever the field of conflict is. So, why don't they do it? Some time back, I read an article on some controversial topic, and thought, "That is very good reasoning, but he hasn't presented it in a convincing way at all. Why has he missed this wonderful opportunity? Sad, perhaps he doesn't have the skills to do so."

Today, while reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", a thought sprang up: Why should he try to convince others of any viewpoint of others at all? May be he put it out just as a mental vent, to share his views with those who care. He doesn't need to persuade anybody, and whether or not they see the logic in it is their own problem, their own choice and wish.

In general, why should anyone care what anyone else thinks at all? After all, our life is our own to live, and we can adhere to our viewpoints and act according to them all we want. What base does this desire have, this desire to 'convert' the whole world into our point of view? It's pointless, meaningless, energy-sapping, idiotic endeavour. Most people who are really good at what they do, avoid this kind of argument. That is both partly the cause and partly the effect of them being an expert. They are intelligent enough to see that it's unnecessary, and hence they spend their time better, honing their skills and building their mental energy reserve.

So, I believe that all that time we spend arguing could better be spent in introspection, clarifying our own beliefs and reasoning to ourselves. This will give us a lot of confidence in our beliefs, after which we see more and more that the arguments are pointless - because, either the opponent really has a good point in which case it's time to re-evaluate your point of view, or the opponent refuses to think logically, in which case it's stupid to argue with him/her. There's the other case where your priorities are different, and hence different things are important to you both, in which case too an argument serves no purpose.

So, kindly let me suggest that it's better to seek to rule yourself, instead of trying to rule others' minds. There's a lot of 'you' to rule anyway, you're huge internally.

Thank you.

PS: This isn't an attempt to convince you of anything either. It's just a mental outpour. That's it. I'm not a hypocrite. Really. :)

Virtual suicide attempts and success

In the middle of the night, out of thin air, popped the desire to play Contra. For those who don't remember or know, Contra is an awesome game that was created for the consoles - for the common people, that means TV video games and such. I was going to play this in my laptop using the NES simulator I had gotten long back from Venki.

However, the simulator was not where I thought it would be, and even after a lot of search it didn't reveal itself (in the process, I realised Google Desktop search was good for nothing, and uninstalled it - it doesn't even have Advanced Search!). I gave up and started browsing. After some time, purely by chance, I came upon the folder that contained the games. Some wise guy rightly said "Stop seeking, and you will find", though he was probably talking about God, not Contra.

Anyway, as Providence would have it, by the time I found this folder, I had lost the interest in playing Contra, and instead wanted to play some Flash game. "Bow Man" caught my eye, and I started it up (here's an online version, but don't you run away from my blog or I'll find you and make you read it; and that won't be a pleasant experience). After a few games, it got quite repetitive - I had learnt to adjust the angle and force by reading the numbers, and was winning too easily.

It was then that I decided to play around with the settings to make things harder. Thee settings window had:

• Something called "show index", which probably referred to the angle and force being displayed near the player when we shoot an arrow (this is a bow-and-arrow shooting game by the way, in case you hadn't guessed). I turned this off to make the game a little difficult.
• An "add wall" option, which I enabled to make the game a little more difficult.
• An "add wind" option, which too I enabled, since "the game was too easy, right?"
• A "vitality" option, which I guess to be the number of arrows needed to kill someone. I increased this from 2 to 4. Don't ask me why.

And with these settings began the longest match I had ever played. Without the angle and force numbers to guide me, I was left to best-effort guesses, which led to arrows that kept landing either too near or too far. The presence of a wall that blocked more than 3/4ths of the screen vertically wasn't helping either. I mean, really? When I chose "add wall", I was expecting a wall that's maybe double the height of the men, or even half the screen. But this was too much!

And the hilarious part was how the opponent Computer player played. At first, he kept shooting as if the wall didn't exist, resulting in all his arrows getting stuck on the wall. Then, he realized the wall's presence, but still didn't realize that there was a wind, resulting in arrows landing far beyond me. After this, he kept alternating between these, resulting in an accumulation of arrows on the wall (I was actually hoping the wall would fall down from the weight of his arrows!) and in the space behind me. As for my part, I managed to create a minor injury on his leg, and that was it. None of his arrows even touched me.

Finally, I decided to take matters into hand and end the game. One obvious way is to close the window, but that is for sissies. Real men never quit a duel just like that. It's victory or valiant death. And so it was decided: I shall kill myself. But I immediately realized this wasn't such an easy job either, because of the presence of the wind. Without the wind, I could have shot straight up, and 4 such shots would probably have killed me. But with a wind blowing, I had to aim perfectly at an angle slightly less than (or more than, depending on the direction of the wind) 90 degrees. After many attempts, I managed to do this too. Here's part of the screenshot of the dead me, along with the arrows of my failed attempts at suicide:

Notice that one of the 'failed' arrows is behind me, which is because the wind suddenly started flowing from left to right before my final arrow. So, I had to shoot to my left for the arrow to reach me, and got it right only in the second attempt.

Also notice the small green leaves on the ground. They indicate the direction of the wind, by flying in that direction. The game designer could simply have used an indicator arrow or something to point to the direction of the wind, but chose to do it in this realistic manner, which impressed me.

Ok, that's all folks, you can now go play Bow Man yourself. Enjoy!

PS: A friend of mine recently wrote a post for the first birthday of her blog, which made me look back into my first post. And whoa, this blog too has had its first birthday come and go (it was on April 17th). Hey blog, I'm sorry for forgetting your birthday, here's a cake for you:

Happy now? Now don't eat all of it yourself, give some to these sweet guests.
And sweet guests, I have provided you the great opportunity to read these wonderful posts, without expecting anything in return. However, I know that many of you are itching to pay me back, so: I accept payments through cash, internet transfer, Mafia Wars reward points, and many other things. However, people sending in bounced cheques are advised to renew their life insurance policies immediately. Thank you.

That's all, this time for real,
Sundar

Welcome To The Internet

 I see you're new here. Look around. Get comfortable. It's a big place, but most of it is friendly. Actually, most of it is trying to sell you something, but much of the rest of it is friendly.

I've been assigned to fill you in on some of our literary conventions. You didn't think you could just spell words accurately and use correct grammar did you? Oh no, we have a different way of doing things here. We call it: illitracy. It's all the rage with the cool kids.

The first thing you should know is that if two words sound the same, they are interchangeable. No need to fret over homonyms around here, no sir! Feel free to mix words like “there” and “they're” and “their” randomly and inconsistently—none of us can tell them apart anyway. Such freedom, huh? I knew you'd like that. Soon you'll be checking out whether reports to see what you should where.

It gets better. The words don't even have to be true homonyms as long as they sound vaguely similar. To those of us who have embraced Internet illitracy, there is no difference between “then” and “than,” or between “accept” and “except.” If you can except that, than you'll do fine hear.

Pretty good so far, rite? Well their's more, and it's all about ease of use. Your convenience is paramount. For instance, throw out your capital letters because you won't need them any more. we're all about lowercase in these parts. the first letter of a sentence? lowercase. proper nouns? lowercase. see how easy it is?

However, don't go thinking you can do away with your shift key. It's important to type characters that require the shift key, like exclamation points (can't have enough of those!!!). That way your reader will know that you could capitalize letters, you're just choosing not to because you want to express your individual and unique style! And like everybody else, your individual and unique style is that of an asshat!!!

Speaking of exclamation points, that brings us to punctuation. The general rule for punctuation is an easy one: don't. That's right you can just leave it out altogether!!! Life is so good hear on the Internet. Remember the goal when you write on the Internet isn't to communicate it's to express. No need to fret over interpretation or specificity. Just embrace what is easiest for you. I'll tell you what: just b as lazy as possible and you'll fit in fine.

If you really must punctuate there are three things you can do to fit in. The first is to end your sentences with either two periods or at least four of them. Never use just one period, and never three.. Your individual and unique style calls for two periods at the end of a sentence.... Or four periods.. Or perhaps sixteen!!! My personal rule of thumb is to depress the period key and keep it held down whenever I pause while writing..........

The second of your individual and unique punctuation choices is to remember that on the Internet an apostrophe is used four too things only: first, the word “it's” should contain an apostrophe in all instances except when substituting for “it is”; second, an apostrophe indicates that a noun is plural. Thus: “the jogger's ran buy the car's while listening to there MP3's.” Their is a simple elegance to Internet punctuation.

Your third individual and unique punctuation choice concerns the comma. Oh how we love the comma. What's fun about the comma, is that it can be used anywhere. It is a meaningless mark and, that is the key, to its joy. Personally I like to finish, writing first, then go back to sprinkle fistfuls of commas liberally, and randomly about. I'm the Johnny Appleseed of punctuation.

On the other hand, what you must take care not to overuse—in fact, not to use at all—is the return key. Paragraphs are unwelcome on the Internet. Remember that the goal of your writing is expression without communication. Nothing forwards that goal so much as serving up your text in a giant homogeneous mass like something from a literary spittoon. If at first you still struggle with the urge to use paragraphing, you can always simply substitute a particularly long series of periods....................................................
Finally, a brief word about spelling. Remember the ease with which we delt with homonyms? Thats nothing when compared to the simplicity of Internet spelling!! First, you can just make up your own words. If it is even remotely possible to pronounce any given string of meaningless characters the weigh you intend, then thats good enuf. You can type “b” instead of “be.” U can type “do u c?” insted of “do you see?” U can type “i ownz j00! i am a haxx0r!” instead of “I live in my parents' basement and have never kissed a girl.”

If you do not know, how to spell a word, jus toss out a guess with as many letters doubled as possible, and then tack “(sp?)” after it. Embrace de delicious irony of riting sumthin on a computer attached to the world's largest system of information access and still not bein bothered to spel correctly!!! The purity of the scorn u can show for ur reader in such a simple action brings a tear to mye eye. I luv this place....

As always, the rule is that you matter but ur reader does not. Do not waste your own time whenever u can more conveniently leave the work 2 ur reader. You matter! You have things to do and places to go!!! Let the peons untangle your txt n puzzle over it's interpretation. Let their eyes squint and their brows arch. Their efforts r inconsequential. Meaning is meaningless. You have better things to do then 2 make urself clear.

Befuddle your reader, misleed your reader but, above all disdain, your reader. wellcome to the Internets!! pull up a keybored and jus start 2 bang away on it.
With ur face!!!!

[Originally by some genius on the Internet, with some editing by Sundar here :) ]

Why is spoken Tamil so different from written Tamil?

Why is spoken Tamil so different from written Tamil?
ரோட்டில் நடந்து கொண்டிருந்த சிறுவன் திடீரென நின்றான்.
ரோட்டுல நடந்துக்கிட்ருந்த பையன் திடீர்னு நின்னான்.

Take a look at http://ta.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%AE%AE%E0%AF%81%E0%AE%A4%E0%AE%B1%E0%AF%8D_%E0%AE%AA%E0%AE%95%E0%AF%8D%E0%AE%95%E0%AE%AE%E0%AF%8D : "விக்சனரிக்கு வருக! இது சொற்களின் பொருள், மூலம், பலுக்கல் அடங்கிய, கட்டற்ற பன்மொழி அகரமுதலியொன்றை உருவாக்கும் கூட்டு முயற்சி." What?
If someone spoke to you like that in real life, what would your reaction be?

Why do you think this difference exists so much in Tamil? English doesn't seem to have this much difference. If you know any other Indian language, does it have this difference too?

Being intelligent can be dangerous

Whenever I complained about the college 'system' and things, I knew deep in my heart that there must be something wrong in me too that makes it a problem - "it takes two hands for a clap" they say.

Today, I came across this page: Your high IQ will kill your startup
It explains at least part of (what was) my issue.

People who are born intelligent start off life with everything easy for them. They don't have to work hard to get good grades, they never really have to do much to get ahead. The major challenge of early life is school - and school is designed for average people. So intelligent people just breeze through.

But there is a point where every intelligent person faces something that requires more than intelligence. It requires hard work, it requires the ability to fail, it requires being able to do tough tasks, boring tasks. For the first time in their life, in spite of their intelligence, these intelligent people are challenged, and they start failing. Like when they first attempt to create a startup.

And that's where most of them retreat. They focus on things they can't fail on, and ignore the other important things. They start to blame other things (like the school system). They procrastinate. They refuse to face new problems because they know they will not be able to handle them, and this does not fit into their worldview that they are invincible.

Thankfully, the "things they can't fail on" I chose in college were things like programming competitions and 'robot' making experiments, which turned out to be a not-too-shabby choice. Still, it's good to be honest to ourselves and realize where we screwed up. I hope I've learnt to digest and climb over failures these days, or at least am learning to do that.

I also found a similar link meant as a letter to Linus as he was exhibiting the above syndrome: Curse of the Gifted. Try to generalize the things there while reading, instead of reading in Linux's context itself. I especially liked this part:

"there will come a time when your raw talent is not
enough.  What happens then will depend on how much discipline [...] you
developed *before* you needed it, back when your talent was sufficient
to let you get away without."

It would seem I did not develop much of that discipline, but I'm trying to make up now. It's never too late in life to do the Right Thing.