My Favorite Characters

My Favorite Characters ( From Movies and Books)

Howard Roark - The Fountainhead (B)
Joker - The Dark Knight / Ellsworth Toohey - The Fountainhead (B)
John Galt - Atlas Shrugged (B)
Gordon Gekko  - Wall Street
Jack Sparrow - Pirates of The Caribbean
Tyler Durden - Fightclub
Tony stark  Ironman
Zobrist - inferno (B)
Neo - Matrix
Carlo Ventresca - Angels and Demons (B)

My Favorite Books

1) The Fountainhead and Atlas shrugged
    I would prefer Atlas shrugged to fountainhead in most parts,like i would prefer inception to dark knight , But again fountain head has a strong anagonist character Ellsworth Toohey which is not there in Atlas shrugged.Just like the Joker character in the dark knight.

2) "Phylosophy who needs it" and "The return of the primitive" ( and all the other non fiction books by aynrand)

3) Blogs of Mediacrooks

4) Outliers, Blink and The Tipping Point

5) Who moved my cheese

6) The Dilbert Principle (and the other books in the series)

7) The Alchemist

8) Angels and Demons and Inferno

9) Jonathan Livingstone seagull

10)  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and the other books in the series)

My Favorite Hollywood movies

I want to give a list of various favorites of mine in next few blogs..


Favorite Hollywood movies

1) The dark knight

2) Inception

     I like visuals and background score of inception more, but Joker character will take dark knight to a different league. And according to me it undoubtedly its the best movie character created

3) Fight club

4) 12 Angry Men

    Best movie to understand how different point of views and biases(hidden) will affect our judgements. Its the starting point for me in which i learned much , much more in this regard from Nassim Nicholas Taleb,Malcolm Gladwell books.

5) Pulp Fiction

6) Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and  On Stranger Tides

7) The Pursuit of Happyness

8) Wall street

    Gordon Gekko characterization is so great that we will not notice any flaws in the plot.After watching the movie you will remember any thing apart from Gekko.

9) Iron Man

     Introduction and first few scenes of Mandarin in Ironman-3 or so great , If they had not killed the character and made him a comic it would have been one of the favorite movie and the character but now Ironman-1 is much better on whole.And Tony stark is great.

10) The trueman show

    I watched the movie after reading a research paper on the new scientist article .This movie  reinforces the concept scarily and plesently.

            These are the other movies which i like but not been able to acomadate in top 10 The matrix, Groundhog day, Avatar,Intersteller,Batman Begins,Following, Se7en,Angels and Demons,A Beautiful Mind,Frost/Nixon,The Shawshank Redemption,Terminal,Jurasic park, Phoneboth,Cast away, Moneyball.

E-books v/s Books

     If you wonder why you are not able to complete reading even one e-book while you can comfortably complete many printed books (just like me) following idea (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb) may explain the reason.It may be right on target when it comes to PC's but may change when comes to Ipad or Galaxy tab in which we will get the same feel as reading a printed book.

     When people talk about e-books v/s books, they focus on SIMILARITIES between the two (they assumes book=information). I have never heard a user address the large differences between the two, like smell, texture, dimension (3D), color,haptic "feel", physicality of an object. When the same businessman compares his version of an e-reader to another one, he will invariably focus on the small minute DIFFERENCES.

     Information is to the reading experience what calories are to a meal. You should consider that you may want to maximize taste, and minimize information ingested (beyond a point), the exact opposite of what the E-reader offers.

     (This is the same mistake neophiliacs made when they imagined us ingesting pills in place of classical foods).

 Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Black or white

     How many of you think Blank money is bad ? Ok I think almost every one thinks it is bad and main reason for it is lack of honesty etc. Now think about the % of tax you honestly pay. I don't think any of us ready to pay even 50% of our income . I shocked when I first heard that in 1970's corporate tax is as high as 93.5% on the income + 8% tax on wealth of individuals (http://www.unescap.org/drpad/publication/journal_7_2/rao.pdf)  How can a person who is taking all the risk(considering the fact that 90% the businesses fail in first year of operation and 90% of the survivors fail within 5years of operation)  and building a business will pay that tax. The reason for Indians having huge black money in swiss bank is the effect that we were the stupidest country for 30-40 years. After learning this my admiration towards tata's and godrej's who built their business honestly even in that kind of environment got multiplied.
      If you read Ayn rand books you will understand that the concept of income tax itself is immoral. The Basic function of  income tax is taking money from competent people by force and distributing it to the  non-competent. Govt can reduce prices of almost everything by 30%(which is collected as tax) by simply removing the Income tax on those goods. Capitalism by Ayn rand a very interesting book , which will explain proper function of Govt. and the principles of laissez faire capitalisam etc.(http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=reg_ar_capitalism)

Inception

     Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke .
    
     When you watch a movie , even though it is just a seamless integration of the red, blue and green color pixels of different textures, we will perceive them with the characters of the movie and feel the emotions of the characters. The characters in the movies think and act rationally, emotionally still nothing of that was actual reality.
      Now take the same and apply it to the reality ,when I first read that Idea I thought it was a crazy and stupid Idea But after reading the following research from the Newscientist ( http://www.mindpowernews.com/Hologram.htm or  http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html (which needs subscription) ) now I think its only a crazy idea and may be not as stupid idea as i think it was. This research tells actually we may be some kind of projected holographic images which seems absurd .
     I first read this theory in different forms in Scott adams books, Douglas adams books and to some extent in Inception and matrix movies.Even though it looks impossible to believe , think if we are in 1500's and someone tells us that the earth is revolving around sun and we are attached to it by a fevicol called gravitational force we may think it as a stupid idea but it turned out to be truth , So I am just giving a benefit of doubt to this theory.
      After reading this I felt that reality it self is much more complicated than the inceptions shown in Inception or Matrix.

Democracy - Unplugged

Read the following blog carefully as it will save a lot of time for you in the future especially when you are involved in any arguments..
      Success of Democracy mainly depends on the people collectivity making  right choice as well as correcting the mistakes that were made. But when people have a wrong perception(ideology)  about  anything which is not based on facts . You expect them to change their mind when you bring on the facts to their notice . This is the main point for  any of us having a discussions with others.But the studies suggest that whenever you say any fact which contradicts the ideology of others, instead of changing their mind on that issue, it simply reinforces the belief they already have(which is wrong and contradicting to the fact you said) . I personally know so many people who believes Obama is a muslim and I can see that number of people who believe that is increasing even the facts suggest otherwise.now go through the following link, which explains the studies done on the same.http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080924-does-ideology-trump-facts-studies-say-it-often-does.html (Uffff I strengthened the belief of the people who think Obama is muslim by contradicting their views:().So next time when some one says the things which are rubbish, save your time by not arguing and reinforcing their beliefs.
      Second study is  also on the same lines. As I explained in one of my previous blog human beings take decision first and then try to find a reason for supporting the same.So they randomly choose to vote for someone ( or support something) and then  try  to  find a reason for the same . Once the people programmed to think in a particular way its almost impossible to change their thinking no matter how much irrational they are and how many facts you give to support your argument. Every day we see a lot of debates in news channels and even we involve in many discussions but I rarely see any of the participant agreeing to the opponents view. You may think the watchers may be benefiting from this but you will be disappointed even from that as mostly the audience take only the things to reinforce  the beliefs they already have(communist will read only communist literature and capitalist will read only capitalist literature etc or take the parts which are useful to them). So if any of you think that discussions on NEWS channels are useful (apart from making money to the the channel) for the country and watchers may be need to rethink. Also I think we can help ourself by  saving time on watching the discussions.Now go through the link below  http://www.salon.com/env/mind_reader/2008/09/22/voter_choice/index.html?site_design=grapenuts
     These studies conducted in US which is having better informed people so the results in India would have been much worse.

( The original blog from which, I inspired (ok copied :)) this is hidden some where in the blog find it to have more fun.)