Journal entries

At 3pm today, Nevin Kapur gave a talk on random m-ary search trees and his work on bounding the variance of the space requirement to store n keys in such a tree. The talk was quite interesting as it introduced some new methods in finding variance -- using the l2 norm between two probability distributions and the contraction method to find the fixed point in a transformation from one distribution to another. Unfortunately, there was not enough time to present all his results. At 4pm Tracey Ho gave a talk on network coding which was quite fascinating. She spoke about some beautiful applications of network coding in Byzantine fault tolerance, randomised multicast and compression of sources with arbitrary correlation. Then, at 5pm Ian McEwan read out excerpts from the first chapter of his book "Enduring Love" after explaining what the book was all about. Mr McEwan is the first major author I have personally interacted with and I found him a rather down-to-earth person unaffected by all the attention he has been receiving (some of it albeit for the wrong reasons!) with a warm and refined sense of humour. I was most amazed by his voracious reading habit -- he had read some or all of every author's work the group discussed on the dinner table. He spoke with pain and anguish at how "Enduring Love" was being made into a movie and he remarked that film studios buy the movie rights to a book only to stray from it as much as possible. I thought it odd that a writer of his acclaim (He won the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam) was now so keen to assimilate pseudo-science fiction into his work. For instance, he mentioned that "Enduring Love" was based on a man's affliction with De Clarembault's Syndrome which is a condition in which a person is so obsessed with someone that he refuses to admit that the infatuation is not reciprocal and even interprets rejection or rebuke as a sign of self-imposed temperance on his lover's part. And Mr McEwan's current work has a neurosurgeon as the central protagonist. There were the usual questions about his writing habits and how much of himself was imbued in his characters that he answered in admirable detail and delightful wit. But, what a day!

More April Fool's jokes

I found some more April Fool's jokes from an unlikely but not totally unexpected source -- the BBC. In 1957, the BBC ran a hoax as part of a Panorama documentary about a bumper Spaghetti crop during the preceding winter in Switzerland. It sounded so credible that there were requests flooding into the BBC about how to grow spaghetti to which, yet again in typical British aristocratic humour, their suggestion was to "place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best". Original credits for the link go to Brad DeLong. This year, the BBC ran an article describing plans to control landmine temperatures by filling them with chickens though the joke was immediately apparent with a concocted denial that it was an April Fool's joke. The Onion of course has these epiphanies almost every day but their cover on Yahoo launching a soul-search engine was particularly witty though with Yahoo ringing in profits of $101 million this year, it is they who must be laughing hardest.

Nevin Kapur

Transfer theorems for m-ary Search trees

Tracey Ho

Network Coding webpage

Ian McEwan's website

Write fiction? Sorry, you cannot enter the United States.

Enduring Love

Spaghetti in the Winter of '56

Video broadcast of the Panorama documentary

The Spaghetti Harvest

Bombs go cold turkey, no chicken

Yahoo's Soul-Search Engine?