Computer Gender

A SPANISH Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. 'House' for instance, is feminine: 'la casa.' 'Pencil,' however, is masculine: 'el lapiz.'

A student asked, 'What gender is 'computer'?' Instead of giving the answer, the teacher split the class into two groups - Male & Female, and asked them to decide for themselves whether computer' should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Each group was asked to give four reasons for its recommendation.

The men's group decided that 'computer' should definitely be of the feminine gender ('la computadora'), because:

1. No one but their creator understands their internal logic
   
2. The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else
3. Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later retrieval
4. As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheck on accessories for it.

The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be Masculine ('el computador'), because:

1. In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on
2. They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves
3. They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem
4. As soon as you commit to one, you realize that if you had waited a little longer, you could have gotten a better model.

The women won, of course!

Thank God I'm an atheist

Many a times, when I go to the temple and observe the pomp that goes around, I wish God says something to them - especially to the priests. When priesthood becomes a job or an occupation, it loses all the spiritual elements of facilitating a heavenly experience of God.

So, it was wonderful to read this little story sent by Nambi. Here it goes:

In a small town in Southern India, a person decided to open up his liquor business, which was right opposite to the Temple. The Temple & its congregation started a campaign to block the Bar from opening with petitions and prayed daily against his business.

Work progressed. However, when it was almost complete and was about to open a few days later, a strong lightning struck the Bar and it was burnt to the ground. The temple folks were rather smug in their outlook after that, till the Bar owner sued the Temple authorities.


He argued on the grounds that the Temple through its congregation & prayers was ultimately responsible for the demise of his bar shop, either through direct or indirect actions or means. In its reply to the court, the temple vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection that their prayers were reasons to the bar shop's demise.

As the case made its way into court, the judge looked over the paperwork at the hearing and commented: 'I don't know how I'm going to decide this case, but it appears from the papers that, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer and we have an entire temple and its devotees that doesn't.'

How do you like this?

Extreme Statistics

I love reading the commentary in Cricinfo. More than the actual proceedings on the ground, the comments by the many bloggers during the match and the heated discussions are wonderful to read. The sense of humour is also terrific.

One amazing thing is the kind of statistics guys roll out about cricket. Read the one given below by one fan after the last one day match on 21st February.

"This must be the only ODI innings in the history where Sachin has scored a single-digit while the rest of the team got away with double digits and no one scoring triple digits."

Can you believe it? How they think of such things! To answer this, another fan again from India posted this question.

Venu from India has a question to stump statsguru: "How many times did all batsmen in an innings become out by losing their wickets "inside 30 yards circle"."

Let me know if you have other such extreme statistics on cricket.

Creative Children

No matter how far our exams are dumbed down, it seems it's not far enough for today's pupils.

But rather than admit defeat in the face of tricky questions, some decide to take a more creative approach to their answers.

Here are a few samples :















Would you have come up with such brilliant answers, howmuchever wrong they are?

Who is my competitor tomorrow?

Nambi sent this wonderful article written by Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore . He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore. It is so brilliant that I thought it better to share it with everyone, instead of sending it by mail to only a few.

"Who sells the largest number of cameras in India ?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India ? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India . That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my competitor?"
Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India ? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. ( India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton 's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India . PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment) . Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!
"

Building a house

At last, we have launched this project of building a house for ourselves.

Of course, we barely manage to pay the monthly expenses to run the family; so to have money to build a house is out of the question. Parents gave the money and shamelessly I accepted it too!

Foundation was done last year, but the work picked up momentum after September or so. Walls are up now. As usual, it is entirely Durga's burden to get everything organised and she is doing a terrific job of getting things done. I am quite a moron / dumbo as far as such things are concerned. Even while designing the rooms etc., the only thing I could think of was 'where to put the computer?'.

If you ask me, house is a place where my computer can be protected from rain etc. and there will be a place to put the chair and to give the electricity connection for it. There may be other things, but this is the core of it! Given this outlook, it is better I don't suggest ways to build a better house! Vennila too is quite excited.

Will put up the photo of the house once it is done. But, wanted to show off the view just outside the house. Here is how it will look when we open the door (whenever there is a door there).

Don't you think it is gorgeous?