Mobigloat period...

...The amount of time people keep the "Sent from my iPhone/Blackberry/Nokia Phone" email signature, before removing it for good.

Why are our Cricketers exhausted?

Exhaustion is being cited as the main reason for the Indian team's abysmal show at the World Cup. Personally, I'm not much of a cricket fan, so the loss didn't bother me that much - in fact, seeing how we were playing against England, we most definitely did not deserve to win that match.

But why exhaustion? How much cricket are these guys playing - about 5 or 6 matches in the World Cup, and before that, in April/May, about 12-15 matches. So that's 20 matches (of 4 hours each) over 3 months. Even given that each match is a highly physically taxing exercise, and there's net practice daily for a few hours, why is everyone that tired? Don't people work 60-70-80 hour weeks continuously for much less money/travel/comfort/fame/glamour?

To quote a blogpost from my ex-employer, The Times of India, "After six gruelling weeks, the IPL ended on May 24 in South Africa. Within a week, the team was playing practice games in London. Which is why the team looked jaded." Well, most people I know work 5-6 months straight before they can take a week off, and it's considered to be a decent break. Why is it so less for our exalted cricket team?

Other reports say that the team, after playing so much cricket continuously, had lost the will to win. Oh please. Pace bowlers citing physical exhaustion is one thing, but players saying "Sorry, playing for our country, earning all this money, getting all this exposure, traveling to all these places and staying at the best of hotels is not enough to make our job interesting. Please do something to spice it up a bit" is a bit much, isn't it? Why do we feel the need to blame extraneous factors for the team's lack of motivation? I can't ever recall a time when I was able to quote "Lack of sufficient motivation" as a reason for screwing up at work!

Once again - this is not a rant about the team's dismal performance at the World Cup. I haven't heard anyone in the team give this reason as an excuse for their failure. (Though obviously they wouldn't - they can't afford to be seen as critical of the IPL - but that's another story). This is merely befuddlement at all the people citing fatigue as the main reason for our exit!

The New Ten: Louder.

Pearl Jam's highly awaited reissue of Ten is out. And I have to say...I was hoping for better. 

The album mostly seems like Brendan O'Brien (the producer - though maybe the sound engineer is a more likely culprit) just boosted the master volume by compressing the audio, then boosted Vedder's vocals to make them stand out a bit more, and a slight increase in McCreedy's guitar - and that's it.

To quote Wikipedia:

The loudness war (or loudness race) is the music industry's tendency to record, produce, and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to attempt to create a sound that stands out from others.

This phenomenon can be observed in many areas of the music industry, particularly broadcasting and albums released on CD and DVD. In the case of CDs, the war stems from artists' and producers' desires to create CDs that sound as loud as possible, or louder than CDs from competing artists or recording labels.^[2]

However, as the maximum amplitude of a CD is at a fixed level, once that level has been reached, the overall loudness can only be increased by a combination ofdynamic range compression and make-up gain. This is done by applying an increasingly high ratio of compression to the dynamic range of the recording and then increasing the gain of the recording until the peaks have reached maximum. Certain extreme uses of dynamic range compression can introduce distortion or clipping to the waveform of the recording.

Seems like Pearl Jam's the latest to follow suit. Pity.

New use for refrigerators...

...as a unit of measurement.

Update: Everyone's doing it now. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,289961,00.html

Paul McCartney's Dance Tonight

Such a brilliant song...and mostly just a mandolin and a simple beat.

Wish I could compose like this.

The best Road Sign ever.

Spotted in Sikkim. 

Tip for McCain: How to become an expert on the economy

Quite simple, really: he should just buy a house next to Wall Street!

See? And I won't even charge as much as Steve Schmidt.

We also work at Night

Has anyone noticed the "Advocate" sticker on way too many cars in Delhi - possibly the one sticker more abused than even the "Press" sticker?

Well, it looks something like this:
Now apparently this is supposed to signify the robes that lawyers wear..but am I the only one that thinks that the logo looks like, um, pajamas hanging out to dry in the moonlight?

Don't answer that; it's rhetorical.

Atlas Shrugged...for real?

Check out Paulville.org - a community of Ron Paul supporters that aims to set up co-operatives full of libertarians:

"The process is forming a co-op of people buying shares in the community and these people would be granted land use at a minimum of 1 acre per share, for as long as they homesteaded the land. The community would be privately held by the co-op to establish private property for the general community thus preserving the community is 100% freedom and liberty lovers. The community votes on all community efforts, such as utilities etc. However no one is forced to consume these utilities and or pay for them, AKA people can be off grid on their share of land. This is in line with the ideals that you're free to live your life the way you want and not be forced to do or pay for other people's life styles you may not agree with."

Somehow I doubt the idea will last very long...but a worthy experiment indeed!

"If you can't control your things, then pls close your eyes"

The comments here ... are priceless.

Well, comments on Rediff forums are always good, but Mallika Sherawat seems to bring out the best in everyone. True princess, she is.