Thursday, July 30, 2009

Geopolitical butterflies

India and Pakistan have problems. Several.
Once again, they're trying to talk those problems out in the backdrop of India trying to shake off the rope of regional conflict holding it from really flying off into the progress statosphere, and Pakistan trying to recover from the monster within fed on 3 decades of zealotry and hate that now wants to swallow its own master.

Each attempt at conversation has its own hurdles. The court of public opinion is the one that really matters though.

Here's an NPR attempt to wrap people's mind around the geopolitical dimension to the India-Pak conflict in the form of an NPR program with three experts from India and Pakistan lending their perspective. The whole discussion is an hour long so listen at leisure.

For a lot of people around the world the so-called "war on terror" depends greatly on the India-Pak conflict and its possible resolution. Thats because as long as Pakistan wants to get at India (for whatever reason), they will continue to go soft on the jihaidis within their midst.

If you're passionate about cinema...

... Then Passion For Cinema or PFC is the place for you (see new feed on right as well). I've been a regular reader at PFC. Being a follower of independent Hindi cinema for the last many years and of movies and cinema from over the world in general, I've enjoyed the insights readers of and contributors to PFC have provided. The list of contributors include famous folks like Anupam Kher, Anurag Kashyap, KK, Khalid Mohammed, and several others. This is not just your regular movie review site, it's basically a site for cinema musings about people who are - as the name suggests - passionate about cinema. And if ever you considered yourself to be so passionate about Indian cinema, this site is going to introduce you to a whole new world.

As an example of the myriad cinema related stuff, Here's a loosely translated (from Hindi) interview of Anurag Kashyap (writer-filmmaker of recent movies like Dev D and Gulaal) in which he explains some of his early days as a filmmaker and the accompanying frustrations he faced. He also discusses how his initial setbacks at trying to make movies the way he wanted to, were compounded perhaps by his naive idealism borne out of a sense of sticking to the pure form of storytelling via movies. And he also talks about his growing realization that the same idealism also opened other doors for him and has played a part in creating an aura around him.

PFC also shows how much thought processes of and within Indian cinema have evolved and continue to do so. Suffice to say that meaningful cinema is here to stay and will continue to grow.


Also:
Some changes to the site with colors and backgrounds. Still learning and playing around with CSS. I guess I'm not done yet with the fooling around (i.e. experimentation) - so there will probably be more changes.

Monday, July 27, 2009

They're taking over!

In a world suffering from a severe recession (sounds like a movie trailer opening line that - "In a world where..." Ok. Ok. Moving on...), its probably not the thing you want to hear - that ultimately, one day, some machine is going to be doing your job. Thats because, as this this NYTimes articles says, the damn machines are going to become smarter than you. Knowing myself however, they don't have all that much of a distance to cover.

There's hardly anything new in the fear that machines will ultimately take over the world. They've taken over a lot of stuff anyways. Planes use computers to fly themselves between take offs and landings. Cars use an array of sensors managed by processors to ensure smooth running. The internet manages our money. And computers have abstracted the complexity of data communication from us to make everything appear as simple as possible. In fact, systems are increasingly designed to be as idiot-proof as possible. Which leaves us human users increasingly ignorant about how these things work in the first place. And since they're doing everything for you anyways, where's the incentive in learning what's really beneath the hood

The field of AI has dedicated considerable effort towards creating machines that behave and act autonomously like human beings supposedly do. One of the chief goals of such AI systems is successfully clearing the "Turing Test". In this test, a human judge has a conversation with another human and a computer, and the judge has to distinguish which of the two she's conversing with is the other human and which is the computer. If the judge can't tell who is which or which is what, then the computer has passed the "Turing Test".

Which brings us to this interesting video - also off the same NYTimes page - on Microsoft Research's attempt to make a more human-like expert system to guide human users who come to it in need of medical advice. In the video, we see two parents - one after another - coming up to a kiosk of some sort, with their child in tow, and talking to a computer-generated face on the computer screen about their children being sick, and we see the face then trying to help them diagnose their child's condition better and finally deliver some sort of advice.

The whole combination of expert system diagnosing capability, computer graphics, speech interface and natural language processing capabilities is mighty impressive. But, I did have one main problem with that video (and by extension the system being demonstrated). That is: at the end of the long conversation with the users - all the AI effectively does is it tells them to go see a doctor and schedules an appointment for them.

Now why would I waste my time conversing with it if that's all its going to do for me?

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Signs you're getting older: #117

You spend a little bit more time than you used to looking behind you - worrying about who's trying to screw you.

Call it a "Welcome to the real-world" realization or another little slip down that slide into paranoid schizophrenia. Take your pick.

Movie Roundup - Titan A.E. and "W"

Just finished watching Titan A.E. a little while ago - or at least I caught the second half of the movie. Been almost 10 years since the movie came out and I had been meaning to see it since it had released in 2000. For those who haven't seen Titan A.E., it is a science fiction movie set in the future when humans live in space and stuff. It's also an animation/animated movie combining traditional cel animation (the type you see in movies like The Lion King and Mulan), with 3D computer graphics (the Toy Story/Pixar sort).

Well. I thought the second half was fun. Now I've got to wait till they show it again so I can watch the first half. Some of the themes were somewhat similar to Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within, a full length 3D computer graphics animated movie with photorealistic human characters (in lay man terms - movies without real actors but actors generated by computer graphics to look and act like real people). FF didn't do too well at the box-office, but it wasn't a bad movie at all.

Also, saw "W" a couple of days ago. Josh Brolin plays the most famous Dubya of recent times - George W. Bush. Oliver Stone directs the story of Dubya: how and why he is who he is, what possibly may have been his motivation to go for the presidency, and what drove him to commit his country into the Iraq mess. I was expecting a Bush flogging, but it turned out to be a lot more nuanced than how supposedly stupid the man was (Michael Moore did that anyway with Fahrenheit 911). There's nothing too new in the hypotheses of the movie: The man seem to be guided by his urge to find his true calling and for his desperate need to emerge from out of his father's (ex-president George H. W. Bush) and his brother's (Jeb Bush) shadows. And that his simplistic belief system (there are good guys and there are bad guys - and we're the good guys), coupled with the advice of highly motivated neo-con scaremongers (Saddam is making nukes and will sell them to the Islamic terrorists) and opportunists (America needs oil - the Middle East has it), made him invade Iraq despite the lone dissenting voice of Colin Powell.

But what we didn't perhaps know all too well was how it all went down between: Bush and his father, Bush and his staff (Cheney, Rummy, Condi, Colin Powell and Karl Rove), Bush and Laura, etc. And how indeed did he get his act together after spending a good portion of his early life doing "jack sh*t"? Oliver Stone tries and answers some of those questions. Not all too successfully all the time though. Some segments just seemed to run on autopilot - like re-enactments on the History channel - mannerisms, accents and make-up. But Brolin does a pretty decent job, as does the supporting cast for the most part including Richard Dreyfuss (Cheney), and Thandie Newton (Condi) among the others.

The presidency of George W. Bush will perhaps go down as an era that transformed the world in several ways - many of which we will only learn decades from now.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Warning: Your next big mistake is just around the corner

Why?

Because:

"As we grow older and more experienced, we overrate the accuracy of our judgments." - (Malcolm Gladwell)


Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the "The Tipping Point", offers his insight into why people still manage to f*** up even after seemingly having everything under control - or more precisely why he thinks Bear Sterns went down in the New Yorker.

Also, on Bear Sterns, Vanity Fair has a take on how it all came crashing down for the giant. According to this piece - the main culprit ... a simple rumor.

The scary part. The rumor was false.

The result...

Wednesday, July 08, 2009