Today, October 15th, is Blog Action Day: a day when thousands of bloggers around the world come together to write about a particular issue. This year, that issue is Poverty and according to site they “aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!” I am happy to play a small role in talking about this critical issue.

And more than 3 billion people - or half the world’s population - live on less than $2.50 a day.

Apathetic Perspective?

My perspective on poverty is obviously shaped by the environment in which I was raised and when you live and grow up in a country like India where unfortunately you stare poverty in the face every single day. The Atlas Of The Real World which contains maps of the world in which countries are shown not based on actual territorial sizes, but on different criteria like number of immigrants or wealth of its citizens, presents this altogether disheartening map of Poverty:

Map Of The World where each territory shows the number of people living on US$2 a day or less.

It leads to a kind of, for want of a better word, apathy. Seeing something everyday only makes you notice it less. It’s not that you don’t care, it’s that you are overwhelmed and that feeling gradually leads to despair, despondency and finally surrender. You roll down your car windows to drop a coin into the ever-waiting begging bowls at traffic signal after signal until you end up realizing: (1) “It’s too big for me alone to handle” and (2)”There is nothing I can do about it”.

(1) might be true. You “alone” probably cannot “solve” this problem in the standard definition of the word. But, (2) is certainly not true. At least, not anymore.

Think. Then Act Locally and Globally

You have always heard to “Think Globally, Act Locally” but with the Internet on your side you can act Globally at a fraction of the cost of what it would have been just a few years back. Just a few things to consider doing today (and always):

Act Locally:

1. Donate: Old clothes, books, toys.
2. Mentor: Education is a pet panacea of mine and my friends often tease on the extent to which I think it is the “one solution to all problems”. While I could rant endlessly on the various ways a sound education to every child until the age of 18 could reshape our entire planet and create a generation of smart, responsible citizens, I’ll check myself since I am talking about acting locally and just advocate mentoring or tutoring as a simple and effective way to make a positive difference in a child’s life.
3. Raise awareness: See poverty in your neighbourhood? Think you have a solution? Your local Representatives and Congressmen should hear about it. From you. Now.

Act Globally:

1. Visit The Hunger Site: You click on a button, the sponsors of the site give to charity. Simple and effective.
2. Play FreeRice: 20 grains of rice are donated everytime you answer questions on a variety of subjects. (I wrote about this site last Novemeber)
3. Setup a microloan on Kiva: Another concept virtually impossible without the Internet. You give a small loan (even as low as $25) to a needy person across the world and watch as it helps that person fulfill his/her dream of an enterprise. The entrepreneurs are pre-screened and commit to working hard to lift themselves out of poverty and pay back your loan which they indeed do (99.7% of the time!).

These are obviously just a few things you can do but for a lot more ways you can make a difference, check out these resources:

1. 88 Ways to Take Action Against Poverty Right Now
2. Make Poverty History
3. Oxfam International

Spread the word today by blogging or emailing your thoughts. Let’s Unite To Make Poverty History!

In answer to his question “Is it rational to vote?”, Norvig writes:

[...]We can estimate the total monetary value by noting that the current office holder presided over a $3 trillion war and at least a $1 trillion economic meltdown. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) estimated the cost of the Bush presidency at $7.7 trillion. Let’s compromise and call it $6 trillion, and assume that the other candidate would have been revenue neutral, so the net difference of the presidential choice is $6 trillion.

The value of not voting is that you save, say, an hour of your time. If you’re an average American wage-earner, that’s about $20. In contrast, the value of voting is the probability that your vote will decide the election (1 in 6 million) times the cost difference ($6 trillion). That means the expected value of your vote is $1,000,000. What else have you ever done in your life with an expected value of a million dollars per hour? Not even Warren Buffett makes that much.

[Is it rational to vote?]

The assumption behind this calculation stems from your being in a swing state, but if you are a citizen of the United States and if you lived through the tragicomedy that was the 2000 Presidential Election, then this might not be such a far-fetched valuation after all.

Let’s get it started!

Once you begin watching this, I challenge you to look away. Gary Vaynerchuk (of Wine Library TV) keeps you entertained and engaged with 15 rocking minutes of in-your-face “If you believe in it, go for it”:

[Via Waxy]

10 years, four employers, numerous clients, a software boom, a software bust, a little bit of Microsoft-hating, Java-loving, Microsoft-loving, Java-hating, Ruby-On-Rails-loving … if you think Software Engineering is just all about riding the next big wave (until the next big wave comes along), then you think right.

Meanwhile the more things change, the more they truly remain the same. My application server still spits out stack-traces expecting me to understand hundreds of lines of exceptions to figure out why it failed when it should have told me in plain English. Software still fails to work when you most expect it to (and worse, it sometimes works when you are confident it shouldn’t). Service-Oriented-Architecture, or SOA, is DOA. Amazon is still the only company that understands website-usability.

And, oh, real flesh-and-blood people are still needed to write software. Guess I’ll be shifting 0s and 1s around just a little while longer!

Well here are a few searches that recently brought people to this site …

1. “Temple in SPB Colony“
2. “Translation of Ninaithu”
3. “pronounce Narayanan“

I don’t want to mess with this kind of success in drawing the masses to this site, so look forward to more inane, keyword-poor posts in the near future!

Oh, and a new experiment begins.

Of course GPS devices were hot this Thanksgiving Day and I managed to snag a TomTom One for a steal. It works reasonably well and everything, but everytime I turn it off I am bewildered by the signoff screen. I mean, I am sure the kind folks at TomTom wanted to warn me about how I store this device after use, but I am not sure … here, take a looksee (sorry for the poor quality image - I had to photograph it myself within a couple of seconds of turning it off):

So let me see. I should always place it in a briefcase, but I should not put it in a cloth bag and sling it over my shoulder and carry it …. like they did … in …. the 12th Century ….?

Alright. Got it. I’ll take care about that. Thanks for the heads up!

Happy New Year folks!

But not today.

Because today is Customer Appreciation Day.

The store clerk continued to stare at my signed receipt. At first I thought there was something wrong with my signature - had this girl noticed how subtly it had changed over the years and no longer resembled the one on the card? What had been my initial and full first name now resembled the markings made by a chicken scratching away at the sand (so beautifully and succinctly described in Tamil as “kozhi-kirukkal”). But no, it wasn’t that - it was something more serious.

It was the first bead of sweat slowly trickling down the clerk’s forehead that gave it away: She was trying to pronounce my name.

“Mr. Na … Naaaryaa … Mr. Nnnnaa ….”

Heaven praise the person who came up the idea that store clerks should address customers by name on Customer Appreciation Day.

“Mr. Narayaaaaa …”

She was getting desperate and was looking around for any help she could get but the other clerks were fighting their own battles (”Mr. Venkatasuuuuu….”, “Mr. Gopa …” . If those were really the names I was almost sure they were, then Good Luck getting them right! I thought)

“Sir … Pra Praaaash ….” My first name was not of much help either ….

There were already more than ten people behind me now and one look at their ethnicities told me this was not my clerk’s day. By now her sweaty palms had rendered my receipt to an undecipherable mass of pulp and she was close to tears. I decided I had had enough fun for the day.

“Just call me Mr. N”, I said gleefully as I scraped the remains of the receipt off her hand and raced for the exit.

Only another month for the next Customer Appreciation Day.

I can’t wait!

Erez Lieberman, a specialist in evolutionary maths at Harvard University did a little research into this.

Lieberman was struck by this idea when he learned that the ten most common verbs in English (be, have, do, go, say, can, will, see, take, get) are all irregular. Instead of their past tenses ending in ‘-ed’, as do 97% of English verbs, they take the peculiar forms of was, had, did, went, said, could, would, saw, took and got.

He was even able to quantify his findings with an approximate mathematical rule: “The half-life of irregular verbs is proportional to the square root of their frequency”!

How ‘holp’ became ‘helped’ (Nature)

english language, past tense