Artic

I have been visiting the the Art Institute of Chicago for the last few weeks, for the most part because it is free on Thursdays and Fridays. It has been a fun learning experience.

I have come to be more open to different styles of painting. Its quite interesting to see the transformation of painting style from the precise and picture perfect in the 17th century to the increasingly stylized and abstract today.It is not so surprising that much of the move into abstract representations came with the influx of photography. The change in the end consumer of the art is also quite evident, from churches to rich old men to modern 20th century folks who need something to decorate their steel and glass homes.

However, what I don't get are those morons who do something inane (3 stripes green, blue and black or put a shark in a tank or mix random colors, splash and waste good canvas), throw a convoluted uber-intellectual spiel onto it and pass it off as art. To distinguish between skill and idiocy I propose a test. If a painting cannot be made by a 4 year old kid under instructions from his/her teacher or through complete randomness (splashing paint on canvass), it must be art.

In a museum there are 2 types of visitors, no make that 3. People who know nothing about art and would like to impress Uncle Silvio/Chen/Al Haj/Kumar back home. People who know nothing about art but find it interesting and a good substitute for staler forms of entertainment (e.g. movie at AMC Cinema), and those who know their art and actually have some artistic skill. Its quite easy to distinguish between varieties 1 and 3 though 2 is a tough one. Anyone belongs to category 1 if the first impulse on sighting a painting is to go as close up to it as possible and squint at it. Those in 3, first capture the overall effect of the painting from a healthy 10ft and then move in to take in the micro technique employed by the painter. The ones in 2 come in multiple hues, starting of as 1 and ending up somewhere close to 3. In any case, let me make my case why it is not beneficial to look at a painting as if one were examining a bacterial infection.

For example,
This conveys little or no information to you while this

is most striking. The shades of blue emphasize the sadness and loss felt by the old guitarist. This is especially true for impressionist paintings where the overall scene conveys a larger visual effect that one misses by close staring.

For e.g.,
The very specific effect of the light and the rustic coarseness of the scene comes to you only from a distance.

What I find most shocking about the Museum Shop, are not the prices which by the way are a complete rip-off. As a matter of fact, high prices are a good idea. It allows the re-distribution of capital from the inept to the deserving, from bone headed tourists to talented but impoverished artists. What I find shocking is the kind of material that the museum attempts to sell. The available prints are the same old set of "famous" paintings that have been publicized for eternity. For a museum with a most impressive impressionist collection, it really does not need to make one more copy of "Sunflowers" by Van Gogh which is not even part of the collection.Who really needs one more copy of Dali's melting timepiece?

There are a number of things I like as well - the breadth of the collection, the care that is taken to preserve and promote art, the ambience, the list goes on. It is a great way to spend an evening. Part meditation, part education.

Terrible Ditty for Dear Kitty

I know it has been quite long,
And you might think I am gone,
But it is just not true
I will be back to rescue you.

I shall bring you back once again,
Into a world full of double clicks,
You will be bombarded with comments,
And very numerous site hits.

Horrendous verse it is,
But little do I care,
My silly blog of 3 years,
You will not be left threadbare.

Visa Raj

An enlightening article on the new "visa raj" that has become fashionable in the US - a backlash against the shipping of US jobs to India and China. Little do they realize that this is going to add nitroglycerine to the fire :

1. Software companies will face an even more acute shortage of talent due to all the visa restrictions.
2. Pay will bloat in the US, making it even more un-economical to keep jobs in the US.
3. Go where the talent is. Lets go to India!

If things continue the way they are, all the H1B types are simply going to go to India and continue what they were doing in the US, for close to the same pay. Not a bad deal, I think.

I think..

I think that life is one process that is constantly reverting to -inf. In the sense, its a random walk where if you were to go down, you are more likely to go further down than go up (think about it, in the end you die, the boundary condition). Its also one you have no control over as there are too many free floating variables. You cannot control your birth, race, ability etc. etc. You cannot control many of the random events that come to affect you. You can only try, and that can only help so much. Its also memoryless. The future has no memory of your past successes. If you dont get through the next stage, you are basically back to where you started. It doesn't care how many stages you had made it past earlier. Interesting. Does anyone have a good model for this?

Guess...

Guess who we had coming into work today - Barack Obama! As you all know he is running for president, and to be elected president you need to win the presidential elections (no kidding!), and to win the elections you need to campaign, and to campaign you need money to pay the bills, and what can be a better place to find funding than in a financial firm. It was the weird that I went. Firstly, I am not American so I cannot vote. Secondly, it is illegal for me to contribute to his campaign funds (do you know people what people who accept such funds are called - traitors!). In my company an easy 25% of the populace is non-American. Weird that everyone would go listen to him talk. He came in at about 4 in the evening, gave a short 30 minute speech and then took questions for another 30 minutes.

He comes across as a smart well educated guy. He a a Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and an editor or something of the Harvard Law Review. He is well poised, self-effacing and articulate, much unlike George Bush who has the grand prescence of a gerbil with a speech defect. I am pretty sure that 75% of the female population is going to vote for him. One manifestation of this fact was that I didn't hear him say anything that approximated to - "I am the President of the United States, my job is to help you so that you can do your job. If, I do my job well than you can do your job and I will save you from all the evil terrorists who want to drag your wife and children from your home and burn them at the stake. Bah. Bah. Bah.".

In America there are 3-4 main topics that get everyone heated up. Barak covered most of these topics , and proposed quite reasonable solutions I would think. In decreasing order of importance -

- Iraq War : Fund for now. Withdraw in a phased manner, without causing chaos. This is kind of the line that most Democrats tow now. Disagree with the whole war idea without alienating the troops.

- Social Security and Medicare i.e. entitlement programs : This a big problem in the Western world because the population is aging - this means you would need to pay increasing pensions and medical bills for the old people from money from a smaller working population. This is not as much of a problem in the US because the population is still relatively young. However, expenses have spiraled. Barak wants to trim the pork by streamlining the whole thing. Would be a hard thing to do. Historically success rates have been quite low. Lets see if he succeeds.

- Taxes ! He is going to pull out the freebies that Bush Jr. doled out to richest 5% of the population. Not surprisingly this 5% also pays 70% of all tax.

- Education. Wants to reform schools. Improve school teacher pay. Trim red-tape. Make the system more accountable and performance driven.

He has made the promised what every politician promises - change! Drastic change! A whole new world. Prosperity. Happiness. Lets see how much of it actually comes to fruition.

I know I keep repeating myself, and am running myself thin, but you know what - he comes across as a fresh open guy, practical, action oriented and free of ideological rhetoric. Has a natural sense of humor.

As you know April 17th is the day when all us humans need to pay our dues to the IRS. Not so shockingly, one of the first questions that came up was the changes he was going to make to the tax code. He said that he is going to roll back tax rates to Clinton administration levels (read increase taxes.) Then he said, "However, I am one of those unfortunate people. My book did well this year, and I earned just about enough to be at the highest tax rate, but not as much as K (the ultra big boss) to actually have fun with all the money." That broke the tension (and lost votes) from nervous professionals into a roll of laughter (and won votes + admiration.) Nice personal touch.

There were also some questions about the Iraq War (fielded by a veteran) and a couple of more mundane things I forget.

I feel that one of his biggest problems in getting elected is going to be the fact that he is too well educated and articulate. Will he be able to rouse the rural populace? Simple unadultrated emotion might go down better with them than sophisticated arguments. This is a problem that has plagued the Democrats in general I feel. By Democrats I mean, Hillary Clinton. Additionally, she appears to be a stuck up and I am not sure how many people want a re-run of the Clinton dynasty for another 4 years. She lacks the "breath of fresh air" factor.

Lets see what happens. I think he would make a nice President.

Vengaya Bajji

I have been reading a lot lately. No not anything that vaguely resembles good literature. After staring at a screen all day, the last thing you want to do when you come home is spend another 3 hours looking at some scrawl in size 9 font. However, its this new thing called "guilt adjusted relaxation" that I have begun to do at work. I feel too guilty to just slack off for a couple of hours and take a walk or get some coffee or something. So, I sit at my desk and visit random websites, that are sort of intellectually enlightening. So it is guilt adjusted. While I am wasting time in terms of adding to the codebase and coming up with well converging numerical solutions, I am growing in my knowledge of the universe.

I mostly to stick to Wikipedia, its an encyclopedia you know, lots of knowledge, which means it has the best "guilt adjustment characteristic". I know all about Nazi Germany. All the evil guys and all the stupid things they did. Its kind of funny how all these neo-Nazi white supremist groups use the ancient religious symbol (Swastika) of a bunch of brown guys. Then there is chaos theory. I know a bit in a fun anecdotal bullshit way. I even learnt some esoteric sounds like "diffeomorphism".

A month or so back I spent about 20 mins a day over a week tracking down Tam actors. "Kaptaaan" Vijay was the most fun. Must go to his website I say. It epitomises all the key things you should NOT do while putting up a bunch of pages. God knows how many tatas got coronaries looking at that stuff. Also, do you know that when MGR is almost 31 years older than JJ. So he basically married one of his daughters friends. It was also his 4th go at the marriage deal. Another intersting factoid is that he is not MGR but Dr. MGR. He got a Ph. D. from "The World University" in Arizona. Wonder what he got it for? Running around trees with sundry girls?

Another website thats got me is this blog called dealbreaker. It is to financial reporting what "The Sun" is to current affairs reporting. It is classy, well balanced and suave...NOT. Interesting gossip about payscales, who got hired and fired, and links to Craigs list profiles of well to do but super lonely i bankers. One of the funnest episodes was when some college kid came up with a 20 minute video of why he would make a great banker. Hilarious! I would be inclined to think that he didn't get so far with this particular self promotion technique.

I also read a lot of blogs. It is interesting to see how, like in real life, where similar people are more likely to hang out with each other, similar blogs link to each other.

Lame graduate students link to other graduate students.
Crazy ranting chicks (CRCs, different from Cyclic Redundancy Check) link to others CRCs , CWCs (Crazy Whining Chicks) and some CDOGs (Crazy Doped Out Guys).
Writers link to other writers.
Technojunkies link to other junkies.

The age group, region, language and background also remains quite consistent across all the blogs you click through too. Delhi types link to other delhi types. Bongs link to a bunch of other bongs. And of course, Tam Brahms link to other Tam Brahms. Sriram links to Sivaram. Debonita links to Purohita.

Another interesting phenomenon I see is in blog activity. All the blogs within a "click radius" tend to be active or in-active all together. A blog which is frequently updated and well commented upon is more likely to lead you to another active blog than a dead blog. Of course, this doesn't count those blogs that link to like 200000 blogs just to get a lot of hits. I can see it in my own set of blogs too. I started blogging kind of regularly in May '05 mostly because I was alone and quite bored during an internship. I become part of this community that had a round of posts coming up every week. Then it died. Now there are these synchronized bursts where 2-3 blogs put up a post in the span of a few days, and then it dies out again.

I can keep going on but one must stop somewhere. That kind of sums of my foray into "guilt adjusted relaxation". See, it has enabled me to present you with this fascinating information.

Snow

Its snowing in the middle of April. How messed up is that?

You should..

- See "The Namesake", its a great movie. If you have had family/friends who have lived in another country for a while you will know what I mean.
- Stop reading "current affairs" magazines and watching stupid news programs i.e. Time, Newsweek, CNN, CNBC etc. etc. . They are full of shit. The worst are the so called "city news" reporting, which can be simply summarized by "some stupid guy got shot on the south side." Without as much as a glance, it is possible to guess 80% of the content. Obama. Elections. War On Iraq. Weepy article on war widow. Some fantabulous article on the latest in cancer treatment. Any good exceptions you know of? Some people think the "New Yorker" rocks, but I don't think so. Its one of those cases where some so called smart guy said it was good, and everyone else had to agree to not look stupid.
- File taxes by April 17th. I filed mine today (prompt as ever).
- Check out You Tube. Its all about the right keyword. You can find pretty much anything there.
- Read about Paul Lauterbur. He died recently.