Disney's Up -- a pot pourri of cliches

I wanted to watch this movie for a long time now. The date it was supposed to be released, 29th May, had got ingrained into my brain, and when I got up yesterday, the first thing I did was to bing for (I know, Microsoft's new search engine will never become a verb like "google", after all, "bing" stands for "but it's not google!") nearby theaters that ran this movie in 3D.
It was Disney's first movie to be made for 3D viewing, and the technology to generate 3D frames was claimed to be state-of-the-art, aimed at reducing the headache normally experienced while watching such movies.
Sure enough, my friend and I found the experience very smooth, often forgetting that we wore 3D glasses (we had the same comfortable feeling with Intel's new 3D technology used in the movie Monsters Vs Aliens). The difference was that Disney's glasses were uncolored and plain, just like ordinary glasses. I always wondered why a 3D projection (or a glass) should be in red and blue, and Disney has shown that it is not always necessary. Now the next step would be to eliminate the need to wear glasses, making the theater screen itself like a giant polarizing glass. After all, that was how the transition from bioscope to a projected screen was.

Pixar's movies are always screened along with a very short animated film. For Ratatouille it was Lifted, Wall-E, it was Presto, and for Up, it is Partly Cloudy. I should say that I was not at all impressed with this lastest short film. The other two were funny and witty, but this was neither. The characters (the clouds) were just cute and fluffy, nothing amazing happened in the film.

Coming to the main movie, I had huge expectations for it. As a hardcore Pixar fan, I was always blown away after watching their movies. Wall-E and Finding Nemo were just classics, and after reading raving reviews comparing Up with those, I had no doubt that I was going to witness something to the effect that of surpassing the unveiling of iPhone.
But no, that was not to be.

The movie starts off good, with a story of a couple, how they are happy with each other even though visibly they are far from being rich. Just like Wall-E had no dialogs in its first half hour, here there is a 15-minute "life sequence" involving only background music. The director, Pete Docter, shows once again that a picture is enough to express thousand dialogs. Nice work, but this form of story telling is not new; Charlie Chaplin was a master in this art, and Wall-E itself was a tribute to his masterpiece City Lights (the utmost love is understood by the woman only later, when the man seems to have gone away).

Then come the cliches. Much of the dialogs are predictable ("South America is just like America... but just a little south") and the events can be easily guessed. Not only can they be guessed, but many of them you would already have seen in other movies (one of the scenes was ditto of a comic scene from the Hindi movie Phir Hera Pheri). The story drags, and suddenly one realizes that there was nothing in the movie that got enhanced by the 3D. In fact, the screen was brighter and more colorful without the glasses on. But still, one should watch it in 3D just to experience a new technology.

One thing that was surprising was how the director managed to include blood, death and mis-carriage in a children's movie, in such a way that the children wouldn't notice.
As in Pixar's other movies, each character is a bundle of emotions. They make mistakes, they fail, they learn, and are faced with problems where they have to take hard decisions. They may not be believable, but they stay with you even long after the movie has ended.

Watch this short animation film called La Maison en Petits Cubes which was last year's Oscar winner, before you go for Up, and then decide for yourself if Pixar's new offering is to be called a classic.

Madison Student Optimizes Physics

N Orchard Street's greatest physicist, Dr Dchongesh, today accomplished an extraordinary thing that will surely change the way we think of the world (and of him).

Dchongesh after pwning Einstein's formula.

Dchongesh, an ardent fan of Djokovich and Deborah Djosheph, today proved that Einstein's mass-energy relation is sub-optimal. When our staff reporter asked him about his latest finding, he replied "When I first saw the equation E=mc², I was like, 'Dude, there has got to be a more efficient equation for this. Everybody know that quadratic running time won't scale for large c's. I then worked all night, constantly referring to my borrowed copy of 'Introduction to Algorithms', and finally derived my optimized equation E=mc*log(c) that would perform 30% better in parallel processors".
But when our unconvinced reporter asked if he could just optimize nature's laws just like that, he replied "Dude, who is taking CS587-Algorithms course, you or me?".

Meanwhile, Nature is unsure how to react to this sudden change in physical laws. But people in 45 N Orchard St are positive that the new optimized physics can help in reducing global warming, controlling weather, increasing TAships, getting dates, and decreasing the frequency of nature calls that they are experiencing now.

Irrational Interviewers

Sometimes knowing too much might be disadvantageous. This always seem to happen to me during interviews, where I almost always have heard of the problem and know the solution. Most of the times I would have solved the problem myself, but then, I cannot give a proof of that to the interviewer.
And most of the interviewers come prepared with only a bunch of questions, and when I tell them that I already know the solution, they are at a loss of what to do, and most of the times ask me to proceed with the solution I know (hoping that I will give a sub-optimal/inefficient solution, and they can take pleasure out of saying "is there a better way of doing this?").

This act of honesty from my part is rarely appreciated. Most of the times it is taken negatively, and I suppose in the feedback they would write "he already knew the solution, and only hence he could solve it" or "even though he knew the solution, his code contained a bug" etc.

In my very first job interview, I was asked the famous puzzle where one person always lies and the other always speak truth, and I politely let them know that I already knew the puzzle (but I dint tell them that I knew it since I was in 7th grade!). Two other interviewers laughed at the interviewer who asked the question, making him look like a village idiot! I don't know why they did this, but this made that interviewer a bit animus towards me from there on. Anyways, I was offered the job next day.

Again this happened to me last month also, and to make it worse, the interviewer did not come prepared with back-up questions (he asked the same question to my friends later in the day, and who, thanks to me, got it right). He then mailed me later, saying I was not technically qualified! If already knowing an answer makes one technically unqualified, then why do we even have exams!

One doesn't even get brownie points for being honest.

Needless to say, it again happened on an onsite interview last week. But this time, I did not remember the solution to the question asked, but I did remember that I had solved the problem before. There I made some mistakes while re-solving the problem (maybe because somehow I felt bored on tackling a tamed beast). Because of these small mistakes, the interviewer asked me to stop there and deviated to talk about, among other things, what I think of their competitor (as usual, I gave him my honest opinion, which immediately made him stamp a "unfit for this project" seal on my resume).

Not surprisingly, it happened yet again two days after the above incident, and here too, I cleanly told them that I already knew the question. This interviewer was well prepared. He had come with three backup questions.
And I knew all them before.

But this time, I was offered the job, and that too the very next day.

As an interviewer, I once interviewed an undergrad who knew the answers to all my questions (even the backups). The questions were very difficult (one that I remember asking is: to compute the Nth Fibonacci number in only log(N) steps), and I was impressed that he knew the solutions for these. This means that he has made an effort to learn more and has tackled hard problems. Doesn't matter if he already knew the answer, the questions were so hard and rare that only a true connoisseur of algorithmic problems would know these. I went one step further and made the problems even harder (like for the above problem, I modified it to find Nth number in a generalized linear recurrence in log(N) steps), and was satisfied that he could solve those even though he hadn't heard of these versions before.
I mentioned this in the 'candidate feedback', and after two days, got a mail from company's Vice President saying "if a candidate already knows an answer, ask a different question!", and the candidate was put on hold for further interviews.
I don't know what happened to him, sad that he was honest, and my bad that I tried to see how deep he understood that problem, instead of moving over to a new one.

Note: the labels for this post are not for stuffing keywords and increasing my pagerank. Those are the companies that interviewed me (or I have taken interviews for them) that are mentioned in this post. They are arranged in random order purposely.

Papers are People Too

This is the poster for a hypothetical movie called "Papers Are People Too"^* that I made for the Earth Day and sent to my friends to make them cautious about the overuse of paper generating machines (printers and photocopiers).
I also sent them a snippet of the story for the hypothetical movie. The response was pleasantly positive, they claim to have decreased the number of printouts they take, and it seems to have given them happiness also.
I am pasting the snippet below:

Papers Are People Too
The plot:
"Our hero GeeBee studies in a college where he is given unlimited supply of paper and free printouts.
So should he care whether all the 100 pages he is just going to print will be read by him later?
Should he strain his eyes to read a PDF instead of just hitting <Ctrl + P>?
He knows very well that decreasing the font size and removing images would print the html content in fewer pages, but is it worth all the hassle?
Why bother placing unwanted papers in the recycling tub when he can just throw them away with kitchen trash?"

The cast: You and me.
Releasing on the Earth Day next month.

One thing that I silently slipped in, in the poster, is the fact that we don't bother to give a name to a tree, even if we have been brought up seeing it in our yard all the years, but we tend to give a name to every other pet that we come across.
This was at the back of my mind, and that is the reason for the lines at the bottom of the poster (you may have to scroll to see them).

^* The title inspired from the blog Papayas are People Too.

The case of self-referring paper

I was just reading a technical paper for my mid-term exam. The image in the right is of the "References" section of that paper. The underlined sentence states that the papers numbered 4, 9 and 14 in the References section are not cited. But isn't this line itself a citation of these papers, making the statement contradict itself? Moreover, what if one of those referred papers is the main paper itself? The statement would mean that this paper doesn't refer itself, but saying so, it has referred itself!
Furthermore, if I write a paper having a list of all the papers that do not refer themselves, should I include this very paper in the list?
I should, because if I don't, then it doesn't refer itself, hence becomes eligible for entry.
But if I do, then I have referred it in itself. Hence I should remove it now... But then I can't because... so on.
Where is the paradox?

Local boy to change his name after shelving PhD plans

From our reporter in Madison, WI -
"I always dreamed of completing my PhD", reflects Sabareeshh, an ardent Himeshh Reshammiya fan and a long-term resident of 45 N Orchard Street. In his continued statement, he further revealed that he also always dreamed of people addressing him as "Doctor Sabareeshh", and plans to file a request with the Office of Name Changes to enable him achieve his aforementioned ambition since he no longer has hopes of completing his PhD and becoming eligible to be called with the aforementioned name. But is it a normal thing to do?

"Why not? If people can have names like 'Major Soundarrajann', 'Padmashrii Universal Hero Kamal Hassann' and 'Slave Mistress Vidhhya', whats wrong with changing my name to 'Doctor Sabareeshh'?", he logically argued his proposition before breaking away to check out the ladies section in Walmart.

Meanwhile another local boy DMaheshh, a fierce fan of both Djokovic and Himeshh, rechristened himself as Chongeshh to match with his Chinese girlfriend Chong, who unknowingly in parallel changed her name to Abhitagujalambal taking it to be a cool Indian name. When we last heard, he was in a dilemma on whether to change his name to Abhitagujalesh to match again or to change his girlfriend.

As per a latest update, an application by the Office of Name Changes to change its own name was rejected by the same office, as it would cause infinite recursion of name changes leading to a stack overflow condition.

Shiver me timbers

Noon in Madison, Midnight in ChennaiIt is inhumanely cold here in Madison. I began to appreciate the etymology of the phrases like "cold as hell" and "hell freezes over" only after experiencing the cold-blooded winter first-hand. My friend gave an interesting explanation that in our cultures we associate hell with a very hot place as we seldom encounter such fiendishly cold climate and are more accustomed to the extreme hot conditions.

After living in hot and humid Chennai for more than 18 years, I initially got cold feet on coming to Madison. But nevertheless I decided on coming because the university here is one of the best in the world, even though it had cold shouldered me two years back. Thankfully, the transition to such a stone cold place was very smooth with the help of three warm-hearted people: Siva, who gifted me all his winter wear starting from the woolen cap to the snow boots, Piramanayagam, who graciously hosted me in his place for more than two weeks, and the doctors at the University Health Clinic who made it mandatory for all students to take a flu-shot (injection for preventing cold and cough) without which we would have suffered from all sorts of diseases due to climate changes.

The picture to the right shows the temperatures of the cities when it was noon in Madison and midnight in Chennai. Madison is creeping cold by more than 40 degrees even during the coldest part of the day in Chennai. The symmetry in the date-time (21/12 - 12 pm) and the temperatures (-23° and 23°) is very striking. Also notice that the temperature is sub-zero in both F and C scales, and being able to endure extreme temperatures from +45° to -25° celcius give me more confidence in reacting to any cold calls from Mother Nature.

Losing Our Identity

Yesterday the Indian Students' Association of Madison organized a very beautiful event as a part of Diwali celebrations. It was very well conducted and almost all the Indian families in Madison attended and enjoyed thoroughly.

But one thought worried me and kept nagging me on the back of my head.

Are we losing our rich tradition?

How can we forget our past, ignore our traditions and curb our instincts just because we are in a foreign country!

Ok, coming to the point, I was very disappointed yesterday with my fellow citizens:
There was no breaking of queue, no elbow-pushing, nobody went for stealthy second servings (except my friend and me), no spilling of food on tables and carpet (and wiping hands on other person's shoulders when he is looking away) and above all, no spitting on corners of the wall!

Where have all our manners gone?
Why have we suddenly become cultured and well-mannered, like "them"?
We are losing our unique identity.
It isn't all fun when everybody behaves well, just like it is boring to be a gentleman all the time...

That living things...

That greenish-black lizard with no tail which hangs around in our pooja shelf,

the cockroaches that reside between my books, and which were at least as old as me, and would have chewed more information than I ever did,

those mice that always used to find our house even after letting off from the mousetrap near the railway tracks,

that squirrel which took its maternity leave on our paran and produced two more small ones along with the increase in decibels of noise,

that timid hutch dog, which went for its daily morning walk along my house,

those kittens which stayed in my garage till they realized that I don't stock milk in my house,

and me,

who never realized that there were more living beings which were part of my life, and how subconsciously I enjoyed living amongst them ...

Visa Experiences (Part Two)

This is the part two of the previous post on my Visa experiences.

Unfortunately I have forgotten most of what took place that day on my visa interview. But what I do remember is people who were extremely hesitant while answering, or who contradicted themselves, or who blabbered something irrelevant to the question asked were immediately rejected.

This does not mean that if you take your time to answer because you are not fluent in English, you will be rejected. No. To give an example, a student going for his MS found it difficult to speak without pausing because he was actually double checking if he heard the officer right, and translated the answer from his language to English. But seeing his face, body actions, and probably his eyes, the officer could very well judge that he was telling the truth.
When you tell the truth, you have nothing to remember and the mind is free of other things. But when you lie, you are preoccupied with the thought of getting caught. Agreed that some glib liars cannot be identified, but then, that is what the Visa officers are trained for. They (and we) can very well distinguish people who speak the truth and those who make up stories on the fly.

Appear confident even if you are not. Smile at them and keep eye contact. Do not revise your pre-prepared answers just before your turn. Let the answers come to you on their own.
This does not mean that you shouldn't be prepared. You should definitely do your homework, anticipate the questions and have an answer for them.
But do not memorize those answers like Kameshwaran does in Michael Madhana Kamarajan. Reply in your own words. Even if you are not fluent in English, its ok, even Rajinikanth is not fluent in Tamil.
Being earnest is more important than speaking fast.