Signs Of Dictatorship

The tough economic conditions bring out the best in some CEOs --- those whose portrait is splashed across the front page of every issue of the company's newsletter, a-la Stalin.

Example: in such times these suddenly popular CEOs tend to receive "thousands of supportive messages" from employees. So many messages, in fact, that I tend to receive thousands of cries for help from poor postal workers who simply can't keep up with the load.

Another heart-warming phrase during recessons is "all for one and one for all". What these fake musketeers really mean is "all for me and we'll talk about the rest later".

Indeed, it takes a strong CEO to lead a company through crises: when the going gets tough the tough get going. A huge kick in their rear will help these CEOs go, and the farther the better.

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On Attitude

This morning I headed over to the dish trail in Palo Alto. What can I say, the weather in the bay area is fabulous. Half way along the trail a composition of the yellowish vegetation and the blue sky caught my eye.

Would this be a good picture? Hmm, perhaps... Actually, may be not. What if I shift a bit to the right? I'm not sure. You know what, it might. Perhaps it might not... Would shooting from a low angle improve the shot?

So I knelt down and accidentally glanced over to the right. And there, unanticipated, was my shot: a spider crouching in the vortex of its beautiful funnel-shaped web, waiting patiently for a pray:


This reminds me of my teen-age hiking trips to the desert. In the evenings we used to search for wood to feed a campfire. Alas, good fire wood is rare in the desert; all I could find were a few twigs not worthy of picking up. Yet somehow my friend Mickey always managed to return carrying some decent-sized dry branches, enough to keep us warm after sunset. When I finally asked him to reveal the secret of his serendipity he replied that the trick was to start by picking up the worthless twigs; only then one starts noticing the thick branches.

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Symptoms Of Deep Fatigue

In the last couple of weeks I've been living on Diet Coke.

It's one of those periods in which I seem to be chronically tired. Going to sleep too late and barely crawling out of bed in the morning. Rubbing the eyes before noon and being only semi-conscious after lunch. Dozing off throughout the afternoon and then, finally, heading over to the fridge to pick up a Diet Coke, which keeps me going till the evening.

This has become such a habit that I started to worry about developing a dependency on Coke. So this week a short and futile will-vs.-nature battle preceded the inevitable daily walk to the soda fridge.

Today was no exception. I somehow managed to scrape myself out of bed in the morning, rubbed my eyes throughout the morning, and sat like a zombie in front of the computer after lunch. A few hours later it became evident that I was on the verge of falling asleep in the middle of a meeting; I headed, defeated, towards the fridge and collected my daily dosage of Diet Coke.

About half an hour later, after finishing the can, I noticed that the Coke I had picked was decaffeinated.

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Creamy Peanut Butter, Chunky Peanut Butter

The current economic environment is very tough indeed. Companies are looking for ways to cut costs in order to make their numbers and remain profitable.

One large company I know announced to its employees last week that it was not going to lay off people (in this round); rather, it cut all the employees' salaries down by 5%. Uniformly. Across the board. No differentiation between the lean parts and the fat parts, between the money generating divisions and the money spending divisions. Flat rate.

For a society which advocates capitalism, large American corporations are surprisingly socialistic.

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Continuum Of Consciousness

Human beings like to think of themselves as being superior to (other) animals. How so? Some will say that we are blessed with consciousness whereas "lower" animals don't. I can't help settle this question: I've never been inside the mind of a cow. But it may be helpful to look at the evolutionary endpoints.

At the primitive endpoint of evolution we find single-cell bacteria; the thought that bacteria have consciousness is rather disturbing so let's assume that they don't. At the other endpoint, the sophisticated one, we find humans, who, in general, are endowed with consciousness. This begs the Darwinian question, at what point in the progression of evolution was consciousness introduced, and how exactly did that happen?

Or perhaps one of our assumptions is wrong?

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[Homage to the Intermediate Value Theorem]

Tricky Combinatorics

Some 14 years ago Professor Yum-Tong Siu taught a graduate Complex Analysis course at Harvard. In one of the lectures he wrote a theorem on the board, turned to the class, and asked, "how can we proof this?" The deafening silence and the blank stares on the students' faces seemed to have embarrassed Prof. Siu a bit. "Using the pigeonhole principle", he said shyly after a while, "After all there are only finitely many tricks in Mathematics".

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[The pigeonhole principle states that when more than n pigeons are placed into n pigeonholes, at least one pigeonhole hosts two or more pigeons.]

You Got Mail

Apparently modern life is not hectic enough; otherwise why would we keep inventing new ways to interrupt it? Cell phones. Pagers. One way, two way. IM... We are interrupt junkies. Managed to scrape some quiet time to read a book? No worries, mate, in a few seconds the phone will r-r-ring. Enjoying a moment of serenity? Don't panic, an SMS will take care of that soon.

Even email, which was polling-based initially, was turned into an interrupting medium. And nobody does it better than Microsoft Outlook, which launches a full scale attack on your senses as soon as a message lands in your inbox: an icon of an envelope pops up, the computer chimes, a translucent preview of the message fades in...

These notifications may be cool, but are they helpful? Interrupts improve latency, since they force you to drop what you're doing and pay attention to the arriving message. The associated context switch, however, takes its toll. Indeed, polling is better geared towards high throughput.

I wish that our communication schemes could distinguish between messages that are latency-sensitive and ones that are not. For now (most of) my notifications are turned off.

Want to comment about this snoozer? Send me a letter.

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