Simplified

When I was maybe eight or nine, my dad told me this story set in the early 1900s about his grandfather. They used to call him Lalaji.

One day, this man came by Lalaji’s shop and asked for a few minutes of his time. Lalaji had a stern personality but not one to turn away a request for help. He asked the man to come in and have a seat. In the span of the next 30 minutes, the conversation went into details of where this man had come from, the hardships he had faced and how he had become determined to prevent others from undergoing similar situations.

As heart wrenching as his story was, Lalaji needed to get on with the business of his day.

Lalaji: It is great that you have taken on this mission in life. How does it concern me?

The guy then opened up.

Having gone through all these troubled times, I have been gifted with the ability to catch glimpses of future mishaps that others are going to experience. I would be glad to help you avoid yours too, Lalaji.

I will not charge a single paisa, until you are convinced of my abilities. To prove my gift, I will tell you things about your life that only you should know. Even after you are convinced, I only ask for a nominal fee for my travels across the country.

(This conversation probably occurred in Multani. Lalaji lived in Lahore.)

Lalaji was of formidable stature. But I have heard that that his poker face was legendary and might have given Chris “Jesus” Ferguson a run for his chip stack. He calmly nodded and kept listening to this amazing offer. His interest had been piqued and he walked over to the man.

Not knowing what had just hit him, the man was down on the floor in a daze, Lalaji’s powerful figure towering over him. Lalaji then pointed towards the door,

No? You didn’t see this coming? If you couldn’t see barely seconds into your own future, how are you going to help me save mine?

True or not, this story left a mark. I grew up knowing that I had a cool great-grandfather.

Is mathematics the purest form of learning? Depending on your educational disposition, you might agree with XKCD or not. But I don’t think you will have problems accepting that a basic understanding of mathematics is necessary to navigate through and succeed against the complexities of life.

Image via Wikipedia

A new study conducted by World Bank economists pitted the Indian states of Orissa and Rajasthan against 51 countries of the world on their mathematics achievement in grade school [via]. The results show these states coming in at 42 and 46 respectively with 40 and 30 percent of students failing a low international benchmark. Sad, but not very surprising, given the state of public education in India.

The variance of the data, however, makes the story interesting. A large disparity exists between the worst and best performers.

“… the difference between the top 5 percent and bottom 5 percent in both states is among the highest in the world, next only to South Africa. Students at the bottom of the distribution in both states score similarly or worse than the bottom students in the three worst performing countries. At the same time, students at the top of the distribution score higher than the top students in other low performing countries, and higher than the median student in all but the best countries. The top 5 percent of students in Orissa, for example, score higher than the median student in more than 42 of 46 countries tested in 2003.”

The authors stress that those who defend the quality of Indian education by pointing to the number of Indians competitive in the global knowledge economy, might be way off the mark.

This is a beautiful example of how averages can sometimes be very misleading.

The conclusion is particularly insightful,

How this situation plays out over the next decade has much to do with how production technologies evolve in the labor market. If Indian firms manage to adopt “Ford Model-T” technologies that require a handful of highly skilled and educated workers to match with a large number of unskilled workers, India shining can act as a “rising tide that lifts all boats.” But if Indian firms adopt “McKinsey” technologies that require skilled workers and unskilled workers to match among themselves (as the IT consulting firms require, but not necessarily call-centers) it is likely that the country will be characterized by increasing inequalities; an enclave of a few privileged and self-perpetuating rich surrounded by a majority poor.

India shining and Bharat drowning: comparing two Indian states to the worldwide distribution in mathematics achievement, Jishnu Das and Tristan Zajonc [PDF].

Yes

If God is meant in the Christian/Judaic/Islamic/Bhramanic sense, science eliminates the need to invoke an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent being to understand the world around us.

and possibly, No.

Science answers questions that resolve the unknowns in the natural world. This body of knowledge grows to expose further areas of inquiry, leading to a potentially infinite amount of undiscovered information. Belief in God feeds on this unknown information and thus in my view will always find its followers.

[via]

This afternoon, I hopped from Amit Varma’s recent post on the IPL to a Deepak Shenoy’s page to the Moneyoga.com website. I found something there that made me smile.

They have a link in the header How do I use Moneyoga. Clicking through to it, the first tip you find is:

Everything in BLUE is a link to another page.

Seriously, is that the first tip you want to give me about your personal finance website?

In any case, looks like their designers didn’t bother to code the a:visited in the CSS – visited links actually become red.

Amit, I’m not getting your point around the luck thingy. Each game has a binary 0-1 result. A coin toss also gives you a 0-1 outcome. Why is it surprising that your table of coin tosses looks similar to the table generated with the IPL games?

Hmm… it has been a slow afternoon.