You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2010.
Here’s a news piece :
I know what you’re thinking : It doesn’t make sense! The article merely says that whenever the Himalayas have received heavy snowfall, it has been followed by a drought the coming summer. ToI instead prefers to say that heavy snowfall causes drought.
Which brings me to another one of my pet peeves, confusing correlation with causation.
Correlation is — whenever event A happens, it is highly likely that event B happens.
Causation is — Event A happens because of event B.
At first glance, they might seem similar, but they are not. I was talking about this to a friend, who is far more sensitive to misplaced causations and correlations. He quoted a nice example to illustrate the difference :
Let’s say — since 2007, petrol consumption has increased and iPod sales have increased. Let’s assume the reason is just a boom in the economy. But someone might make a case that because of a new iPod, people like driving since they can enjoy all their songs in the car. They consequently drive more and longer, so petrol consumption has increased.
There could be many theories. The fact is — unless there is a strong and obvious cause-and-effect relationship, it is mere correlation.
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XKCD has a nice take on it, and illustrates it better than I did :
Link via Raghu.
I was forwarded this video yesterday, where Dhoni incorrectly uses the phrase ‘red light areas’ :
To me, it wasn’t funny. It seemed like an honest mistake, given that he couldn’t speak much English when he first appeared in the team. He has clearly worked hard to speak respectable English now — except for this slip. Cricket is his forte, not English, so I didn’t have a problem ignoring this.
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I am not a fan of Dhoni, though I respect him for his temperament. I could be hypocritical here, because there may be instances where I don’t think as much before mocking — but many times, I do.
Link via Nikhil A.
A case was filed against Sania Mirza and Shoaib Malik. Why, you ask ? Hurting sentiments of Muslims. Go figure.
“Initially Shoaib said he never married Ayesha, but later divorced her. There is no official divorce, but the 14 accused declared that divorce proceedings are over and got the public, particularly Muslims, confused and insulted their religious feelings,” Al-Kasary alleged.
Before a price rise rally :
After it :
Last week was the 200th episode of South Park, and it was worthy of the milestone.
The plot was clever in its satire : It revolved around antagonists (celebrities previously ridiculed on South Park) wanting a glimpse of Prophet Muhammad. The best scene of the episode — and one of the best of the series — was where Buddha snorted coke, but Muhammad’s form showed a Censored tag. Superb.
Eventually, Muhammad’s voice was heard and I wondered with the characters : Is that okay?
Then, to sidestep the problem of showing his form, the protagonists decide to put him in a bear costume. This, readers, is Muhammad from South Park :
The irony is that South Park has earlier run episodes showing Muhammad, but well before 9/11 and its related events. Radical voices got louder since then, to a point where Comedy Central refused to run a South Park episode featuring Muhammad in 2006 — years after running similar episodes.
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As expected, the creators have received threats from radical groups.
Tehelka has a Tehelka-esque piece (or one could say : Tehelka has a piece) on the underbelly of IPL (which makes me want to take a jab at Yuvraj Singh and his belly, but I’ll pass).
I don’t know how much of it is true, but it is cryptic — so it makes for an entertaining read.
So what made Lalit Modi suddenly twitter innocuously last weekend about Sunanda Pushkar and how Tharoor had allegedly asked him not to inquire into who she was — the kindle that lit the fire stack? It’s common knowledge that Modi and Tharoor are friends, so why this sudden and ugly fall out? (Friends of Tharoor say that Modi is misusing a bantering remark the minister had made to him over a drink. Tharoor is, indeed, set to marry Pushkar but is waiting for a divorce from his Canadian wife Christa Giles to come through and, therefore, has been loath to make his relationship public. This is why when Modi asked him in a nudge-nudge sort of way, “So, who is Sunanda Pushkar?” Tharoor had laughingly evaded the question saying, ‘Don’t ask me that as yet.’ So what made Modi turn that into something sinister?)
I don’t care much about the Tharoor-Modi-IPL-BCCI issue. What we will see is just the tip, and beyond some token sacrificial lamb, there won’t be much to it — to what we get to see, I mean. The backstage drama is movie material, no doubt.
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If you want a good view of the issue, chuck all news sources. Most don’t seem to know what they’re talking about. Instead, I’ll recommend Prem Panicker’s fabulous blog Smoke Signals. Do read through.
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On the other hand, if you just want to be entertained, Arnab Goswami is always around. I get a feeling that someday the guy is going to snap. He’ll probably pull a Travis Bickle and assassinate all the wrong-doers. Until then, he is ours.
I feel sorry too, that we have lost a minister who was more transparent than Mandakini. But that being said, I wouldn’t defend him or his role in the IPL saga without having even a quantum of information (take that, Dee-quack Chopra). I am amused by the online petitions and Facebook groups. Most individuals seem to have self-selected themselves as supporters because the guy is well-educated and uses Twitter.
Cybermedia has a story on the reaction of netizens to his sacking. (I don’t know what Cybermedia is, but bear with me for a moment.) One supporter who is very angry with the way things have turned out, says :
Mr. Tharoor….. We fall to rise…. And if falling makes you rise higher, I pray that you fall more often.
I mean, WTF ?
But to make up for it, the piece also says :
Interestingly, @flyyoufools has a different take on the issue. “Now that Tharoor is gone, all those news agency employees hired to keep a watch on Twitter will be fired.”
Except that I tweeted this, Saad re-tweeted it, but the folks at Cybermedia were clearly too tired to look through his tweet to see who wrote it.
Whatever.
(Cybermedia link via Saad Akhtar.)
For all the purity of cricket IPL seems to be destroying, they sure get brownie points for upholding culture and tradition.
Superstitious CSK take long route to Mumbai
[... an astrological advice took Chennai Super Kings (CSK) all the way from Dharamsala to Mumbai via Chennai for their semi-final in the Indian Premier League.
Heh !
The next time you see a CSK player sprints across for a single, don’t be surprised if he goes via silly mid-on.
Like, duh !
Remember the case where an author was dragged to court for using the word ghati in his book? The book where the word was used by a fictional character? The same case which I thought I wrote about but now cannot trace?
Well, the court threw it out.
Justice V M Kanade, himself a Maharashtrian, seemed to agree with the author. “Ghati is common slang word. For every community there are such words,” the judge observed.
“There are many such words for Parsis, but they don’t mind it. The unfortunate part is that our tolerance level has gone down,” Justice Kanade said.
Well, something there for freedom of expression, now that M.F. Hussain won’t paint nudes in India.
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Had Pu. La. Deshpande been around, I wonder if he too would’ve been dragged to court for the use of ghati in one of his essays.
