Potpourri

I saw this Nagesh Kukunoor movie, called Dor , couple of days back. The movie is about two women, one from Himachal Pradesh ( zeenat ) and the other from Rajasthan ( meera ). Their lives get entangled, through an interesting plot. ( Meera's husband dies in an accident and Zeenat's husband is held responsible for that. Zeenat comes in search of Meera because only Meera's letter of consent is going to save Zeenat's husband). What follows, is a search of goals. But as always, when one starts out to search something, tends to find something else on the way. What did I like about the movie? Movie is a visual treat, filled with the amazingly beautiful landscapes from Himachal Pradesh and Rajashtan . Also the narration is very well thought. No character is painted totally black or totally white, very rare for Indian cinema. I liked Meera's role played by Ayesha Takia . Also the small part played by Nagesh Kukunoor himself has come out quiet well. Whats mor...

Lance Fortnow has decided to quit blogging. His blog was the only complexity theorist's blog I read. Also among all the other blogs that I read this is/was my the most favorite. Many many informative posts and discussions will remain as archives online (thank you Lance). But I will miss reading his daily posts so much. This was really sudden, as all bad news are. Hope Lance starts a new blog soon.

Yao introduced a model for computing complexity of communication. Say Alice and Bob know two different parts of a story and they are trying to solve a mystery. The amount of talking they need to do is the complexity measure. If they need to exchange too much data to solve the mystery then the whole mystery is said to have high complexity, and low otherwise. At first this seems very natural. Uninteresting example: Alice and Bob each holds a list of numbers. Alice doesn't know Bob's list and vice-a- versa . Now they have to figure out which is the smallest number in the two lists put together. Well one way is, Alice tells all the numbers she has and Bob having listened to the whole story then declares the minimum. But the complexity of this communication is too much, because they talked too much. However, following communication has lower complexity than previous one: Alice first computes the minimum number in her list and tells only that to Bob. Bob in turn compares this mini...

In our institute, we have a week of institute seminars, where in you are expected to give a talk (20 minutes + 5 minutes questions) related to your work or your field to an audience comprising of physicist, mathematicians and computer scientists. So basically, you can not use some high-funda terms of your field. And you should be able to communicate with an audience completely unaware of even basics of you field. About 30-40 talks are scheduled on 5 working days of the week. Good Idea: 1. Evereybody in the institute gets to know what their collegues are working on. 2. One gets a nack of explaining their work to a lay man. (A big debate goes about need for doing this for later jobs in industry and funding for research in general). 3. Some times within the same field (say physics) the subareas are so different that a elimentary talk helps understanding better than a full length technical talk. 4. You get snacks and coffee for free. Bad Idea? 1. Some fields need a way too much technical ...