Economics #101: Strategy

Consider this: A friend scores 80% marks in an exam, and our first reaction usually is, "Ohh, I must study harder and score 85% next time."

This is relative thinking, it overlooks the fact that exam allows us to aim for *100%* marks. Even if we succeed in scoring 85% and overtaking our friend, we have still fallen short of 15% marks we could have aimed for, and potentially achieved.

There's another advantage. When we choose 100 marks as the new "rival" to compete against, our friend and we cease to become competitors and can instead become partners. We can study together, help each other to score more and in the overall process, lift both of us to a higher level than we could have achieved individually.

And this strategy is not limited to schools and exams; it can succeed in factories, offices, businesses, and every other field.

When PepsiCo entered the beverages market, they soon realized that their biggest competitor wasn't the current dominant player -- Coca Cola-- but it was something else: Drinking Water and fruit juices, which practically had a 100% 'market share'. So they targeted their marketing campaigns to replace these two drinks in the minds of people by a can of Pepsi. When Coca Cola perceived the importance of this strategy, they too soon followed suit. The result is for all to see.

Economics #101: Game Theory

Game Theory

Consider this game: There's a pair of two players A and B, and a moderator M. Two players together can hunt a deer and gain, say 100 points. Or, each player individually can hunt a rabbit and get, say 20 points.

Moderator calls each player aside separately and asks: Do you want to cooperate with the other player to hunt the deer, or would you rather hunt a rabbit individually?
If each player separately agrees to cooperate with the other, they can avail the deer. But if A choses to cooperate and B choses the rabbit, A is left with nothing.

Interestingly, although each player wants to cooperate with the other and hunt the deer, the fear and distrust ("the other player may ditch me") makes both of them choose the rabbit.

This is called the "deer hunt game" and it provides an insight into Game Theory, a mathematical tool to analyse what happens when people or corporations cooperate, compete or interact with each other.

Remember John Nash, the genius mathematician portrayed in the movie "A Beautiful Mind"? His Nobel prize for Economics was primarily for his work in the area of game theory.

Economics #101: Punishment Capital

Economics isn't always about money, cost and stock markets; it also provides good insights into other areas of our life, such as parenting.

As all parents are aware, getting young kids do the right thing is a tough job. Usually we have two options: Offering them a carrot ("if you complete your homework, i will take you to the park") or threatening them with a stick ("if you don't do your homework, papa will punish you"). Experimental research by behavioural economists shows that it is better to deny the carrot rather than picking up the stick.

From the kid's perspective, completing the work and earning the carrot boosts their self esteem. With proper choice of carrots - books, sports gear, musical instruments - it can turn out to be a win- win situation.

From the parents perspective too, it is less stressful to deny the carrot rather than meet out a punishment.

Note: This is relevant to young kids.. For the older ones, there are two more options available.

Economics #101: diminishing marginal utility and diminishing returns

Consider this: You buy a pair of jeans, your first one. You enjoy the experience, so you buy another. The utility of each one reduces by about half. The more pairs you buy, less chance for each pair to be worn and hence less the utility. 
This, is called diminishing marginal utility. 


In some cases, it can proceed to negative values. For example, the first cup of tea in the morning is invigorating, it has 100% utility. The next cup less so. And if you keep drinking more cups, at some point, it starts having a bad impact on health.

Now, consider this: The quality of a Rs. 500/- shirt is usually better than that of a Rs. 200/- one, and that of a Rs. 2000/- is much better than a 600/- one. But, there comes a price point, beyond which there is not much determinable difference in the quality of the product. 


This, is the law of diminishing returns. 


Cheap wine is said to taste not very good, and there's an appreciable improvement in the taste in proportion to its price. But beyond a certain price range, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish between the tastes of more costlier ones. 


At such point, the price becomes less of an indicator of quality and more about the brand and its positioning in the market.

Economics #101: Hyperbolic discounting

Consider this: If asked what we would like to do over the next six months, most of us will talk of virtuous activities such as exercising, reducing intake of junk food, learning new skills. But if asked to pick up activities for today, we would be more inclined towards watching T.V., eating pizza or surfing the internets.


Perhaps this is basic human nature, but it's also got a swanky name: Hyperbolic discounting. 

Simply stated, it's our tendency to favour short-term instant gratification over long-term benefits. We keep putting off good things to tomorrow but when that "tomorrow" becomes "today", we are still stuck on those cakes, Coke and pizza.

Economics #101: Opportunity cost

Consider this: You're invited to a social event next week. You're in a dilemma: To accept, or to decline?

These decisions matter because of an important economic principal: Opportunity cost. Time is a limited commodity. When we agree to do one thing, it means less time or no time for many others.

Now, about the invitation... There are two approaches: 

One) Ask to yourself whether, assuming the event was *today* , would you really want to go? Based on your gut-feeling to this, you can respond.

Second) Don't respond, just accept the invitation non-commitedly, then analyse your priorities later and convey your acceptance.

Economics #101: Taleb distribution

Consider this: You are driving to office. You are getting late. So what do you do? You take your chances, jump the traffic signals and cut in front of other vehicles.
Sounds familiar? Well, this is an example of Taleb Distribution (named after Nasim Taleb, author of "Black Swan" and " Fooled by Randomness").


Taleb distribution indicates scenarios that contain high probability of small positive gains (with risky driving you may usually reach office on time), and low probability of huge negative losses ( a single bad judgement in rash driving can lead to accident).


Next time, before we press down on the accelerator looking at the watch, let's think if it's really worth the risk.

Apollo-11 Moon mission: Colossus 2A code

As the Project Apollo-enthusiasts and NASA-buffs would already be aware, the computer source code for Apollo-11 Moon mission is now available on GitHub. The software, code-named as "Colossus 2A" was already in public domain, courtesy of NASA, but now it would be more accessible to all the nerds, who have already started dissecting it.
Here's the URL:
https://github.com/chrislgarry/Apollo-11


A quick glance reveals that the programmers writing this historic piece of software had a great sense of humour. The program that controlled main rocket sequence was written in a file named as: BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.s

At another place, the code comments have a paragraph from Shakespeare. 
And, the line #666 is identified as “NUMERO MYSTERIOSO”.

Infographic: Branched antaakshari

Everyone of us has played 'antaakshari': The music game in which a team starts with a song, and, using its last letter, the other team begins with theirs.
This infographic takes this idea further. I started with a line of a song, and its every word (except the first) led to the next song, resulting in an exponentially branched-out structure. 

The songs were selected from memory, so there are gaps to be filled.

Infographic: Brand reality

We live in a brand-saturated world. No matter what we do, we are always interacting with some brand or the other.
So, I created this infographic, which shows the ones that I currently use. 

A few notes: 

• The brands depicted here are solely my personal choices, and do not represent that of my family members. 
• The list is not exhaustive, nor definitive; some brands may change over time. 
• And, the logos used here are only for informative purposes and their copyrights/trademarks belong to their owners.

Infographic: Decision flowchart

A flowchart is a visual representation of an algorithm, the logical flow of a computer program. The first flowchart I had created ages ago was rather primitive: It described the steps to receive a phone call. 

Well, this infographic is a bit more ambitious: It depicts the decision-making process that I plan to implement for my day to day activities going forward. 

Let us see. 

Infographic: Blood group distribution

Today, June 14, Google displayed a doodle in the honour of Karl Landsteiner, who identified the major blood groups. Today's infographic from me is also a tribute to the same man. 

The information is collected from web sites such as RedCrossBlood.Org.
The infographic is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as medical advice.

Infographic: Relativity Chart

Considering my immense difficulties in grasping and remembering the relationships, last weekend I created this quick infographic. The table should be self-explanatory enough: Each cell shows the relationship of person in each row with that of the person in the corresponding column.

This one is in Marathi. I had also created one in English, but with all Kaka/ Mama named as Uncles and Aatya /Maushis as Aunts, it wasn't as much fun enough.

Infographic: Birthday Calendar

Today's infographic is based on calendar data type. For each month of the year, it shows the day of the week that a particular person was born on. 

MS-Excel is a pretty powerful tool, with a range and depth of functions that's quite mind-blowing. This infographic makes use of a nice little Excel function that allows you to convert any date (in this case, the birthdate available in Facebook profile information) into the respective weekday.

Infographic: Venn Diagram

When Pravin Concar sir introduced us to Venn Diagrams in standard V, it started a lifelong fascination for me. A Venn diagram is a simple yet effective visual tool to illustrate the inclusion, exclusion, union or intersection of two or more things.
This infographic uses Venn diagrams to depict the domains I worked on in IIPL and PSL, and my fellow team mates.

Infographic: Facebook

Although the profile was created in 2009, I only started using Facebook with full gusto from late 2010, after giving Google+ a fair shake. This infographic takes a quantitative look at my FB activities from 2011 to 2015. 

250+ photos, 300+ check-ins, 500+ friends and 950+ posts... Hard to believe I once disliked FB.

Infographic: Music

A graphical breakdown of my music collection, about 7400 tracks in all. This doesn't include music stored on the CDs and some of the old external hard drives.

Infographic: Books

One of the informative concepts that Tushar introduced me to, was mind-maps. Earlier, I did use some diagrams for brainstorming, but mind-mapping brought a structured approach to it. Mind maps is one of the easiest yet powerful tools you can use to organize your thoughts and ideas, and there are a number of free as well as proprietary tools available for it.
Here's a rudimentary mind-map created in 2010 for my favourite books, the list has changed quite a bit now.

Nasadiya Sukta

Who knows and who can say

From where all this came from, how this happened

The gods themselves are later than the creation

So who truly knows from where we have arisen?

Is there a Creator? Or is there none?

He who surveys all from the highest heaven

Whether He created this, or whether He didn't

He knows... Or perhaps He doesn't know even...

~Nasadiya sukta (Rig-Veda 10.129)

Nasadiya Sukta features as the title track and the end credits track of Bharat Ek Khoj TV series from the 1990s, which was based on the "Discovery of India" book by Pdt. Nehru. 
I loved the track for its tune and rhythm back then, now I love it for its meaning! 

The List: Movies

My favourite English movies... Need to fill up the gaps....
A Apollo-13
B Beautiful Mind
C Contact
D Dark Knight
E Ender's Game
F Forrest Gump
G Gladiator
I Interstellar
J Jurassic Park
K King's Speech
M Matrix
P Psycho
S Schindler's List
T Titanic
V Valkyrie
W Wall-E
Y You've Got Mail
Z Zero Dark 30


My favourite TV series/shows... Lots of gaps to fill here too...
A Agatha Christie's Poirot (ITV) 
B Big Bang Theory (CBS)
C Cosmos: A Space-time Odyssey (Nat Geo)
D Death Note 
F Friends (NBC)
G Game of Thrones (HBO)
H How Do They Do It? (Discovery Channel)
L Late Show with David Letterman (CBS)
M Mythbusters (Discovery Channel)
P Planet Earth (BBC)
S Sherlock (BBC)
T Two And A Half Men (CBS)
W When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions (Discovery Channel)

My favourite Hindi movies... Some gaps here too!
A Andaz Apna Apna
B Black Friday
C Chupke Chupke (Amitabh-Dharmendra)
D Dil Chahta Hai
F Fashion
G Gangs of Wasseypur
H Hera Pheri
I Iqbal
J Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron
K Kahaani
L Lagaan
M Mughal-E-Azam
O Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!
P Prahaar
Q Queen
R Raincoat (Ajay Devgan-Aishwarya Rai)
S Sholay
T Taarein Zameen Par
W Wednesday
Z Zanzeer

My favourite Marathi movies... Need to watch more...

A अशी ही बनवाबनवी
B बालगंधर्व
C चौकट राजा
D डोम्बिवली फास्ट
E एक होता विदुषक
H हरीश्चंद्राची फेक्टरी
K कट्यार काळजात घुसली
M मी शिवाजी राजे भोसले बोलतोय
N नटरंग
P प्रकाश बाबा आमटे
S श्यामची आई
U उत्तरायण
V वास्तुपुरुष
Z झपाटलेला

Statistics

Statistics is a fascinating subject. There are many jokes about statisticians' obsession with numbers, but the subject is of vital importance in today's age of data mining. 
I often got confused between mean, median and mode, but learnt an interesting concept called correlation. Two properties are said to be correlated when they increase or decrease in tandem. Due to this, we often tend to confuse between correlation and causation. Correlated properties are indeed necessary for each other, but they may not just be sufficient.


Talking about Statistics, we had a section on Probability, Permutations and Combinations. The problems always involved real-life scenarios like getting Heads or Tails five times in a row of coin flip, or chances of seating next to your favourite (girl) friend in cinema. Solving such examples was superfun. 


And yet, I was dissatisfied with probability at a certain level. For example, they said chance of air crash is miniscule compared to car crash. But did this consider the fact that road traffic far outnumbers air traffic? And, even if air crash has 0.0001% chance, what was going to stop it from materializing for the flight I would be travelling on?
Of course, now I realize that mathematics doesn't work that way!

Aliens and Emotions

Most of the advanced species on Earth experience the same gamut of emotions: Anger, Fear, Jealousy, Lust, and so on. 

If there's an advanced alien civilization out there, would they have the same feelings, or would they be totally different altogether?


Reminds me of a beautiful short story of Isaac Asimov: "The Sixth Sense."

Graham's Number

When faced with too many objects, my daughter says 20, because that's the biggest number she knows. As we grow older, our scope of numbers increases to hundreds, thousands, and beyond. Today, we measure corruption in billions and not petty millions. 


Scientists have to deal with even huge numbers. There's Googol (based on which Google was named) and Googolplex. And the biggest number that's ever been used is the Graham's Number. It's unimaginably HUGE.


It's almost as if our knowledge of bigger and bigger numbers reflects the progress of our species.
What if there's an advanced alien civilisation out there, that treats Graham's number as we look at kids who think 20 is big...

Geometry and Topology

Geometry was always one of my favourite subjects in school, and the love affair continued with parabolas, hyperbolas, ellipsoids and such awesome stuff in the higher standards. But then, we parted ways, for more than a decade.
So, when Manuja taai showed me the book मला उत्तर हवंय - लेखक मोहन आपटे, I could barely wait to go home and start drawing these. Here are my initial attempts to draw some simple figures: an Astroid, a Moire pattern, a Sierpinsky fractal triangle and a parabola. More will come. You have been warned!

One area of geometry that we barely touched during our graduate course, and which I would have loved to learn more about, was topology, which is the study of surfaces and their transformations by bending, pressing or twisting. For example, consider 2D alphabets O and D- you can easily convert them into each other. Same goes for (A and R), (H and K),and (E, T and Y). But letters B and X are not topologically similar. 
This gets even more exciting when you go to 3D. A coffee mug and a donut may look totally different, but they are topologically similar.

We 3D creatures cast a 2 dimensional shadow. So if there's a 4D being out there, their shadow would be... 3D!
When a sphere (3D) passes through a paper (2D), the 2D folks would see that as a CIRCLE that grows bigger and then smaller. If a hypercube (4D cube) passed through our world (3D), we would see it as a cube that suddenly appeared, grew bigger, and then smaller before it vanished. 
Hypercubes, hyperspheres and hyperspaces... The 4D world is hyper-fascinating indeed!

If there exists a 4-dimensional being out there, it would be able to see inside us, as easily as we see inside a 2-dimensional figure like a circle, square or a triangle.
Obvious as a mathematical fact, but not so intuitive a a 'practical' reality.

Infographic: Shelfari

Among the many things that Tushar has introduced me to, one was Shelfari, a 'bookmarking' site for well, books.


I was reasonably active there, being ranked among top 15% of contributors and eventually being included in the Shelfari Librarians and Editors panel.


Last year, December 2015, Shelfari merged with another Amazon site, GoodReads. Before bidding a final adieu to Shelfari, thought of sharing some interesting stats.

Leap Year

Most of us are aware that the current year 2016 is completely divisible by 4, and hence is a "Leap Year".

Fun fact: The quotient of 2016/4 = 504 is ALSO divisible by 4, making 2016 a "Leap Leap Year"

Fun fun fact: The year 1984 was a "Leap Leap Leap Year".
Try it yourself.

Also:

Sorry to disappoint the folks claiming January 2016 to be special because it has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays, which supposedly happens only once every 823 years… This ain't true.

Just 6 years later, January 2021 will also have the same set of 5s.

A month with 5 Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays occurs almost every year. This is because the first three weekdays of any 31-day month are repeated 5 times in that month. So, any month that has 31 days and begins on a Friday will have 5 Fridays-Saturdays-Sundays.

LIGO

A gravitational wave, created during the merger of two black holes, passes through the Milky Way galaxy, our Solar system, the Earth. And, at about 3:30 PM IST on 14 September 2015, it passes through you and me and our cat, travelling at the speed of light. 


Not only could we detect it, but we can hear it… A 'sound' that originated 1.3 freaking billion years ago. 
Science is sexy.

I have been reading about gravitational waves in particular, and waves in general, and here's something that at least I wasn't aware earlier. 
We have seen tides rising up on a beach. In reality, a tidal 'wave' is nothing but a mass of water held in its place by the gravity of Moon (or Sun). The 'wave' stands still, and it's we standing on the ground are going towards it due to Earth's rotation.

People are mixing up ‘gravity waves’ and ‘gravitational waves’, assuming both to be the same. In fact, they aren’t. 
Gravity waves are ripples caused by gravity and are observed in a planetary environment, for example, atmosphere and water bodies. They are easy to observe... Just visit a nearby beach and observe the tides.
Gravitational waves, on the other hand, are ripples in gravity itself (or more precisely, ripples in the space-time). They propagate through *everything* and are very difficult to observe. 
The LIGO team observed gravitational waves.

The more I read about the LIGO experiment, the more intriguing it becomes. Consider the facts…
A pair of black holes; one 36 times massive as Sun, the other 29 times, are circling each other at 250 times a SECOND.
1.2 BILLION years ago, they merged, forming a black hole with mass 62 times as the Sun. The 3 solar masses lost in the process sent a ripple through space-time, in the form of gravitation waves.
The wave reached Earth on 14 September 2015. The impact it had: Displacing a 4-kilometer long mirror by 10^-18 meters, which is one-thousandth of the diameter of a PROTON.

And if you think THIS is amazing, consider that Einstein predicted this a HUNDRED years ago.

Periodic Table

Today, Google reminded all of us that February 8 is the birthday of Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of Periodic Table of Elements. It's been a decade since I last used this table, and yet it continues to fascinate. 


As on today, the Element 118, temporarily named Ununoctium, is currently the newest element in this table. 


Richard Feynman predicted that number 137 defines the table’s upper limit: Adding any more protons would produce an energy that can be measured only by an imaginary number, rendering element 138 and higher impossible.


We are yet to reach there… Let's see what happens.

Microsoft Outlook

As a regular user of Microsoft Outlook, it has always frustrated me that we cannot use the standard Ctrl + F key-combination to search through an email. This combination works with all other Microsoft products. 


I tried searching for the reason for this exception. It turns out that the Ctrl + F key-combination was REMOVED from Outlook because of a "bug report" submitted by a beta tester, who had become accustomed to using this key-combination for forwarding the email in an earlier email program he used. 


Name of that beta tester? 
William Henry Gates, III… More popularly known as Bill Gates. :)