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I loved this Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani scene where Ranveer asks, “Chinese ko Chinese bol satke hai?”

हम बहनदी भी नहीं बोल सकते?
आंटी, मैं दिल्ली से हूँ।
मैं कैसे नहीं बहनदी बोलूं बहनदी!?
कैसा जमाना आ गया है?
फैट-ों को फैट नहीं बोल सकते, ब्लैक-ों को ब्लैक नहीं बोल सकते,
ओल्ड-ों को ओल्ड नहीं बोल सकते,
मुँह खोलने से डर लगता है मुझे!
आप मुझे बताओ, चाइनीज़ को चाइनीज़ बोल सकते हैं?

Can’t we even curse “Damn it!”?
Aunty, I am from Delhi.
How can I not say, “Damn it”, damn it!?
What times are upon us?
You can’t call fat people fat, you can’t call black people black,
You can’t call old people old,
I am actually afraid to open my mouth!
Tell me, can you call Chinese people Chinese?

अगर मुझे चाइनीज़ आर्डर देना है तो क्या करूँ?
फ़ोन करूँ “हाँ भाईसाहब, वह हिमाचल से राइट जो जगह है,
हाँ हाँ पड़ोस वाला मुल्क, हाँ वही कोरोना वाला, हाँ,
वहां का एक क्रिस्पी चिकन लगा दो”
अब आप बोलोगे “कोरोना वाला” नहीं बोल सकते!

If I want to order Chinese, what should I do?
Should I call, “Yes bro, that place to the right of Himachal Pradesh.
Yes, yes, the neighboring country, yes, the one with Corona, yes.
Get me a crispy chicken from there”
Next, you’ll say, “You can’t say “Corona”‘!

बचपन से, बचपन से दादी कहती आ रही है, “चाय पीने से काले हो जाते हैं, चाय पीने से काले हो जाते हैं”।
अब पता चला है, ये रेसिस्ट है!

Since childhood, Grandma taught us, “Drinking tea turns you black. Drinking tea turns you black”.
Now I learn that’s racist!

किसी ने ये भी नहीं सिखाया कि कौन सी गाली देने से मिसोजनी हो जाती है।
यह भी नहीं बताया कि गोलू को गोलू बोलने से फैट शेमिंग हो जाती है।
हमको तो यह सब नॉर्मल लगता।
हमको तो कभी रॉन्ग लगा ही नहीं।
हमको पता ही नहीं यह बोलने से सामने वाले की फीलिंग्स हर्ट हो सकती हैं!

No one ever taught us which abuses become a “misogyny”.
No one ever told us that calling Chubby ‘Chubby’ is “fat-shaming”.
We all thought this was normal.
We never had an inkling it was wrong.
I didn’t know that saying this may hurt others’ feelings!

Beautifully worded. Lovely acting. Nothing I could add to it.

I just learned that any word made of just these letters beighlosz can be spelt on a calculator.

That includes Hobbes! 538804 upside-down looks like this:

I’m surprised I never knew that.

The longest, by far, appears to be hillbillies — 53177187714

This article on Using DuckDB for Embeddings and Vector Search by Sören Brunk shows a number of DuckDB features I wasn’t aware of.

• DuckDB can read directly from Huggingface datasets
• DuckDB can read just the parts of a .parquet file it needs, even over HTTP
• DuckDB lets you write custom functions in Python
• DuckDB now has a vector similarity search extension

I’ve recently become a DuckDB fan and continue to be impressed.

Contronyms are words that have two meanings that are the opposite of each other.

Sanction, for example, may mean restricting something (e.g. sanction against imports) or approving something (e.g. sanctioning imports).

Scan may mean to look at cursorily (e.g. scan a document) or look at in detail (e.g. scan an X-Ray)

Fine may mean excellent (e.g. fine wine) or average (e.g. the wine’s fine).

I enjoyed this list of 75 contronyms.

My cousin’s working on an interesting project at the Agastya Foundation. A group of scientifically inclined volunteers go around on a bike to schools, taking with them a science lab kit, and show children in rural schools a variety of experiments.

Google will award this and 3 other projects (out of 10) Rs 3 crores based on public votes. You can vote for and read more at https://impactchallenge.withgoogle.com/india2013#/agastya|vote

The following article appeared in The Times of India earlier this month.

The institute is struggling for funds. Please contribute, if you could, by calling +91 44 24985320 or via PayPal.

Sanskrit centre struggles to stay alive

The Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute attached to the Sanskrit College in Mylapore is in doldrums because of lack of government patronage.

The Institute, one of the three involved in Sanskrit research in the country, has been surviving on private donations. With not enough resources, the management is unable to pay the faculty the benefits of the sixth pay commission.

Institute director V Kameswari said the Union government stopped its financial support in 1995, after which it has been solely dependent on donations. “The institute has a trove of rare palm leaf manuscripts and books not just about Sanskrit literature but also on architecture, fine arts, geography, history and astronomy in Sanskrit,” says Kameswari.

The two other such institutes are the R G Bandarkar Sanskrit Institute in Pune and the Ganganath Jha Sanskrit Institute in Allahabad. “We have requested a onetime grant from the Union planning commission and also annual assistance from the Rashtriya Sanskrit Sansthan, but are yet to get any support,” says K S Balasubramanian, deputy director of the institute. The plan panel had given grants to the Mumbai Asiatic Society and Kolkata-based Asiatic Society.

The institute was getting about 10 lakh till 1995 but due to a misunderstanding between the government-appointed members of the governing committee and the management, the aid was stopped. Today, there are 24 scholars at the institute, most of them women doing their PhDs. “Scholars from across the country and world visit the institute. We send out publications to many foreign universities and they in turn send their publications which are preserved here,” says Kameswari.

The institute was started as a private non-profit organisation in 1944 in memory of Kuppuswami Sastri, a renowned Sanskrit scholar. It has a library with books on astronomy, architecture, fine arts, mathematics, Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads and various branches of science.

“A private entrepreneur made a donation with which we have air-conditioned the library. The palm-leaf manuscripts in the library are 600 to 1,000 years old. Many of them are in Grantha script. We also have books on Jainism that speak about solving mathematical equations and explain geographical concepts,” says Kameswari, who is worried about keeping the ancient language alive.

Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic are the 3 ‘R’s that are taught at school. I was thinking about their relevance today.

Reading continues to be relevant. The volume of information available today is more than before. So you need to read faster AND smarter. (If there was one good thing that came out of my IIM coaching classes, it was the ability to read fast, and making it subconscious.)

But I wouldn’t say the same of writing. In the last 10 years, I have typed several hundred more pages than I’ve written. So have all my friends.

Yesterday, I was at a bank with a relationship manager as he was taking notes in paper and pen. I do the same on occassion. I looked at his notes later. I could not understand a single word. “Don’t worry, sir, I can read it. I’ll type it out and mail you,” he said. And he did.

Writing seems to have become a device for personal memory, not communication. He’s faster at writing than typing, perhaps. Or note taking is more convenient on paper. But for communication, he still prefers a typed format. So do I, and most other people.

Perhaps writing will fade. Perhaps not. I don’t know. But what I do know is that typing has become more important than writing. Yet, writing is taught more at school than typing.

(A broader aspect of writing, though, is expressing oneself. That will remain important, of course.)

The third R is aRithmetic. When I was 12, I could multiply four-digit numbers in my head reasonably well. I could recite 50 digits of Pi. I could do long division. Today, I can’t. Nor can my friends. Nor have we needed to. A good feel for the numbers has helped, but not the actual mechanics of the calculations.

We had an undergraduate course in statistics that taught us how to solve a linear regression problem. That skill went completely unused. I’ve never since used regression without a computer. We had a graduate course in statistics that taught us how to INTERPRET the results of a linear regression. That was worth it’s weight in gold.

This is not a critique of the three Rs. Rather, an attempt to re-interpret them. It’s about comprehension, expression and computation. Two decades ago, it was reading, writing and arithmetic. Today, it’s reading, typing and computing.

Computers will grow more powerful. It may be worth planning for it. Teaching the ability to use them can go a long way. A tool like Excel for general purpose computing gives incredible power in the hands of people. It’s worth training children for that.

If I oversimplified, I’d say children must learn typing and Excel.

Over the next few years, this is something I plan to work on. Making sure schools and parents do this. Any suggestions or leads you may have are welcome!

That dip there in response time is thanks to WP-SuperCache. My average page load time has dropped from 1 second to 0.25 seconds.

I found this piece from “The Happiness Hypothesis” pretty interesting:

In the 1990s, Damasio found that when certain parts of the orbitofrontal cortex are damaged, patients lose most of their emotional lives. They report that when they ought to feel emotion, they feel nothing, and studies of their autonomic reactions (such as those used in lie detector tests) confirm that they lack the normal flashes of bodily reaction that the rest of us experience when observing scenes of horror or beauty. Yet their reasoning and logical abilities are intact. They perform normally on tests of intelligence and knowledge of social rules and moral principles.

So what happens when these people go out into the world? Now that they are free of the distractions of emotion, do they become hyperlogical, able to see through the haze of feelings that blinds the rest of us to the path of perfect rationality? Just the opposite. They find themselves unable to make simple decisions or to set goals, and their lives fall apart. When they look out at the world and think, “What should I do now?” they see dozens of choices but lack immediate internal feelings of like or dislike. They must examine the pros and cons of every choice with their reasoning, but in the absence of feeling they see little reason to pick one or the other. When the rest of us look out at the world, our emotional brains have instantly and automatically appraised the possibilities. One possibility usually jumps out at us as the obvious best one. We need only use reason to weigh the pros and cons when two or three possibilities seem equally good.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality.

Guess it shouldn’t be a surprise then that models based on rationality fail.