Puttu it down!

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.

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.

Sambar for Techies

After my roommate who used to do all the cooking moved to his new flat last month, I decided to try my hand at cooking. It wasn't entirely out of necessity. I just didn't want to give up the opportunity to test my cooking skills on the remaining guys. I‘m not much of a vegetarian, so I had never cooked sambar before. So after checking out a few websites and blogs to get an idea of how it’s done, I finally went out and bought some sambar powder and vegetables. At first try, I put in too much sambar powder. Second time around, I forgot to precook the Muringaka and ended up burning the sambar while waiting for it to get cooked. As with software development, the best way to learn cooking is by trial and error. I had just learned two ways of how not to make sambar. Don't put in too much powder, you can always add more later if needed. Same goes for salt. And precook the tough vegetables in a pressure cooker along with the lentils. Having learnt these two lessons, I managed to get it right the third time.

So here is how I make sambar. Chop all the vegetables. Use whatever vegetables you can find. Cook the tough vegetables (basically everything except tomatoes and ladies finger) in a pressure cooker with a cup of lentils and sufficient water till the whistle blows once. Adjust the quantity of lentils depending on how thick you like your sambar. More lentils, thicker sambar. After that’s done, pour a few spoons of oil into a sufficiently sized cooking utensil. Crackle half a teaspoon of mustards. After the mustards stop crackling add the chopped tomatoes and ladies finger. Sauté over a low/medium flame till they start to turn soft. Add a few spoons of sambar powder. (Get a pack of sambar powder, no point trying to reinvent the wheel.) Add the precooked lentils and vegetables. Add tamarind paste and salt to taste. Mix everything together. Then taste to see if you need more salt or sambar powder. Finally add some curry leaves and let it simmer for a few minutes. The results shouldn’t be too bad.

From Sthreesamajam to Podhuyogam

After the Qurbana today, I was pleasantly surprised to hear Bava thiumeni's Kalpana(decree) allowing (if I understand it correctly) women to attend the Podhuyogam (administrative general body meeting of a local church), albeit without voting rights. Its a small step, but definitely one in the right direction. Well, actually, its a big step considering how difficult it is to introduce this sort of reform in a traditionalist community such as ours. For far too long, people have misquoted St.Paul and the Bible and Tradition to keep half the church from having any say in administrative matters. And the church has been deprived of the services of many capable individuals, just because they happened to be women.

My guess is that the churches in the diaspora that will be the first to welcome this move. I doubt if it really means much to the churches back home in Kerala. But the message is loud and clear. We, as Orthodox Christians, cannot condone discrimination. Eventually, I hope to see a day when women have full voting rights and actively participate in the management of churches and church institutions.

Je Twitter, donc je suis.

"Je pense, donc je suis", wrote René Descartes. In Latin, that would be "Cogito, ergo sum". In English, it translates to the famous quote "I think, therefore I am". (PS: Just trying to appear intelligent:) If only it were that simple.

What is more important though, is that others think of me. It would be nice if they thought good things about me, but far more imperative to my existence is that they think of me at all. Like the old saying goes, "Above all, one wishes to be loved. If not loved, then respected. If not respected, then feared. And if not feared, then atleast hated. But never to be forgotten". It’s no fun being the invisible boy.

This is where Twitter comes in. I’m not referring here to the particular service but to the phenomenon that it has spawned. People like to snack on info. And people need people. Put those two together and we what you get is something a lot like Twitter.

I don’t expect it to be the next killer app or anything like that, but it’s definitely not a passing fad. In fact, this article in Wired seems to suggest that Twitter could perhaps be a sneak preview of something totally new – a world where computers become an extension of the human mind – Augmented Cognition.

Seeyon Sanchari on the Autobahn

Imagine you are one of those NRIs driving down the Autobahn in your second hand Mercedes and all of a sudden you feel home sick. You need something that makes you feel like you're back home, on the sands of the Pampa accompanying grandma to the Maramon convention. So you say, "Edi, do you have any Maramon convention songs." Your Personal Computer, actually a software agent residing in what looks like a mobile phone, understands that you are talking to it because there is no body else in the car. The phone searches through your music collection but finds nothing because that’s not the kind of music you usually listen to. So it does a search of Internet radio stations and finds one that’s playing a song from last year's Maramon album. You are not wearing your wireless stereo headphones, so the phone routes the music to the car's music system instead. “Thanks”, you whisper. The phone feels happy.

Phones with feelings are a bit farfetched for now. The rest of it is on the drawing board and may happen in the foreseeable future. But you won't have to wait too long for Internet radio on the mobile. Infact, the technology is already here but adoption has been limited due to the high cost of mobile internet access in most parts of the world. Think about it. Listening to the radio is the most natural thing to do with a mobile device. Not reading the newspaper. Not even watching the latest video posted on YouTube. Audio is what the mobile phone was made for. And as mobile broadband technologies mature in the next few years, this is where a lot of the action is going to be.

A bit of satire and very little else

I was just going through my previous posts and realized that some people might possibly, probably, just maybe, find my blog too serious and boring. So here is a small story. It is meant to be funny.

Disclaimer: The following story is a work of fiction, et cetera.

Once upon a time, there lived a maharaja who had five elephants and a mahout to manage them. Then one day, after much deliberation and contemplation, this mahout decided to pursue opportunities outside the country. So the maharaja had to hire a new mahout. He called together the finest head hunters and sent them out on a mission to find a replacement. After searching far and wide, sifting through numerous applications and going through endless rounds of interviews, they offered the job to a candidate who had more than ten years of experience managing a much larger team consisting of fifty goats and thirty cows. The king was pleased, the head hunters were praised and the newly appointed mahout couldn't wait to start on his new job.

The new mahout started by briefing the elephants about his extensive experience, and how he planned to draw on it to bring in new processes to fix quality problems. To reduce costs, he moved the elephants to a cow shed and changed their diet to dry grass. Based on his previous experience he set up a biogas plant to convert the elephant dung to biofuel. He exhorted the elephants to take ownership of the project and produce more dung. The maharaja was pleased with the new process and honored the mahout for his achievements. But when it was time for the annual appraisal, the mahout gave the elephants a bad rating ostensibly because they did not produce any milk. To add insult to injury, he accused them of being too fat. Eventually, the elephants also decided to pursue opportunities outside the country

But the mahout wasn’t the least bit perturbed. He successfully managed attrition by hiring a few cows and goats. When it was time for the maharaja’s annual procession through the city, the mahout brought the meekest of the goats to the maharaja and managed to convince him that it was an elephant. The maharaja believed the mahout. After all, the mahout was supposed to be the expert on elephants and he should know. No one dared to tell the maharaja that he was being taken for a ride. A little boy tried but he was promptly exiled for his efforts. Halfway through the procession, the goat could not bear the weight any longer and collapsed. The maharaja fell down and broke his crown. And all the maharaja’s men couldn’t put it back together.

End of satirical rant.