The cheapest restaurant in JB Nagar charges Rs.10 for a kutti of puttu. Rice flour is Rs.22/kg. 1kg makes 6 kutti puttu. So that’s a running expense of 3 rupees 60 paise per day, ignoring the cost of cooking gas, salt and the 5 minutes it takes to cook and clean. I have a modest but functional kitchen. So a puttu kutti, which comes at Rs.170, would be the only initial investment. That means I can break even in under a month. Not a bad investment. So I went out and bought myself a puttu kutti. My roommate’s response was something along the lines of, “Hope you don’t try to fry fish in it.”
I haven’t gotten that far, yet. But being me, I couldn’t resist the temptation to improvise and experiment a little. Getting coconut scrapes was a bit of a problem, so I made puttu without coconut. Not too bad. Even tried to replace the coconut scrapes with sprouted green gram, a sort of puttu biryani. I found packaged puttu podi to be unreasonably priced, so I shifted to regular rice flour. Then came ragi puttu, wheat puttu, rava puttu, johar puttu, bajra putu, corn puttu. Checked out almost every kind of flour available in the market and various combinations. Surprisingly enough, johar turned out to be rather good for puttu. Bajra and corn didn’t come out so well, but corn did have a promising cheesy flavor to it. As for wheat, it seems a lot depends on the kind of the flour. Too much gluten and you could end up with gothampunda instead of puttu. Then I discovered bran. A 7:3 mixture of rice flour and wheat bran turned out to be pretty neat, so I’ve stuck to it for some time now. Unfortunately, couldn’t find rice bran anywhere. If anyone out there knows where to get rice bran in Banaglore, please do lemme know.
Future plans include ambitious research into things like puttu pulav, rainbow puttu, keema puttu and flavoured puttu along the lines of soy sauce, Maggie cubes, vanilla etc. Meanwhile, I’m also considering the possibility of using the puttu kutti to steam some sweet corn. Maybe I’ll try that out this weekend. And if it works, I might consider steaming a few sardines too.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
The Algorithms of Tom Sawyer
Remember Mark Twain's story about how Tom Sawyer got his friends to paint Aunt Polly's fence for him and even got them to pay for the privilege. It’s a good thing they still teach it in school.
Now imagine if Tom were a computer. A machine could use similar techniques to get people to do its work for it. If that sounds hard to believe, consider Luis von Ahn's ESP Game. It is an online game in which two randomly selected players are simultaneously shown an image and asked to list words that describe the image. The two players do not know each other and cannot communicate. For each word that the two users agree on, they gain points. Von Ahn later licensed the game to Google and Google uses it to improve the accuracy of Google Image Search. Like Tom Sawyer's fence painting, the ESP game is fun and players don’t mind that Luis and Google get to keep all the truck loads of money they make from the resulting intellectual property.
What should be noted here is that while Google's machines are very good at storing and processing more data than most people can even begin to imagine, they are not very good at understanding what is in a picture. So the machines get humans to do this work for them. Like von Ahn says in this talk at Google, it gives a much better reason for the machines in the Matrix to keep us humans around, unlike the machines in Terminator 3 who would rather just get rid of us.
For now though, it is a symbiotic relationship. Both parties benefit by bringing their relative strengths to the table. Humans are not just using machines anymore. It is nothing new really. We humans as a species have evolved to have a symbiotic relationship with machines much like any other symbiotic relationship in the natural world. Image, if one fine day, all the machines in the world disappeared into thin air. Again, not a pretty thought.
Although the relationship has been symbiotic for quite some time, it’s only now that we are beginning to come to terms with it. Thinking of humans a component of the system, rather than something above it, forms the basis of an emerging paradigm called Human-Based Computing. The key to designing a successful human based system is to figure out innovative ways to make people want to do something that they would otherwise consider a chore. And we have a lot to learn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Now imagine if Tom were a computer. A machine could use similar techniques to get people to do its work for it. If that sounds hard to believe, consider Luis von Ahn's ESP Game. It is an online game in which two randomly selected players are simultaneously shown an image and asked to list words that describe the image. The two players do not know each other and cannot communicate. For each word that the two users agree on, they gain points. Von Ahn later licensed the game to Google and Google uses it to improve the accuracy of Google Image Search. Like Tom Sawyer's fence painting, the ESP game is fun and players don’t mind that Luis and Google get to keep all the truck loads of money they make from the resulting intellectual property.
What should be noted here is that while Google's machines are very good at storing and processing more data than most people can even begin to imagine, they are not very good at understanding what is in a picture. So the machines get humans to do this work for them. Like von Ahn says in this talk at Google, it gives a much better reason for the machines in the Matrix to keep us humans around, unlike the machines in Terminator 3 who would rather just get rid of us.
For now though, it is a symbiotic relationship. Both parties benefit by bringing their relative strengths to the table. Humans are not just using machines anymore. It is nothing new really. We humans as a species have evolved to have a symbiotic relationship with machines much like any other symbiotic relationship in the natural world. Image, if one fine day, all the machines in the world disappeared into thin air. Again, not a pretty thought.
Although the relationship has been symbiotic for quite some time, it’s only now that we are beginning to come to terms with it. Thinking of humans a component of the system, rather than something above it, forms the basis of an emerging paradigm called Human-Based Computing. The key to designing a successful human based system is to figure out innovative ways to make people want to do something that they would otherwise consider a chore. And we have a lot to learn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
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