Maths Puzzle - 15: Find The Next Number

My friend gave me this puzzle.

Find the number in the series below.

8, 13, 24, 47, 94, 189, 380, ?

Do Women Have More Affairs Than Men?

An opinion poll (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/debateshow/4963813.cms) on the TOI website: "Do women have more affairs than men". Women have won 86-14 in this poll as I write this.

And sure enough our people have plenty to say about it.

Apart from a few respondents who felt that the numbers had to be equal, the rest of the responses  were amusing to say the least.

The majority of the people had missed the issue by a mile. I wonder. If this is how they think about any open ended issue (which does not have previously proven answer), how do they manage?

One response was interesting: "Vikas, Mumbai, 23 November 2010, 01:53pm IST: this pol is biased, as more men are answering than women."

I had written about this earlier (http://vbala99.blogspot.com/2010/11/back-to-sex.html) but the subject (people's opinion on this subject actually) never ceases to amaze me.

Veiled Look

France has outlawed wearing Burka (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8442993/First-arrests-made-hours-after-French-Burka-ban-comes-into-force.html). Sure enough there will be a furore about it.

Now the questions is:

Is this a basic right that a person has? To dress as he wills? To cover his face as he wills? Is France violating a person's rights?

Where is the line between personal right and state decrees/rule/ordnance?

Does a person have right to carry a knife as Sikh men do? Inside aircrafts also?

Does a person have a right to cover her face? Even at an immigration counter in an airport?

Does a person have a right to smoke a cigarette? Even in public, in a non smoking zone?

There is a whole bunch of things we can do in the privacy of our homes. We could drive a car on the left side inside the house (while everyone drives on the right side on the highways). 

But when it comes to being in public there is a restraint imposed by the state on various things from how much dress (not too little like walking in the nude) we ought to wear to other stuff like parking / tailgating / drinking / smoking etc.

The idea of a religion being an obstacle to implementing or overruling the laws of the state seems very strange. And inappropriate.
Of course, had a religious institution stood in the way of implementation of the third Reich's rules it would have been great. As an exception.

The reason being that the state's lawmakers (hopefully) look at reason to set what is appropriate. How often do religion's lawmakers look at reason to do the same thing?

The question that remains unanswered in my mind is:

What is that thing in Jews, Muslims and Catholics that make them rally together no matter which country a person resides in? How did these 3 religious forge such a strong bond?  The bond that these religions have engendered is at least as strong as the bond that a person has towards his country.

The thought that my religion is the best and people following other religions are barbarians/infidels is no different from Hitler's belief about Aryans vis-a-vis Jews and Slavs. I find the words "We are the chosen people" in whatever form amazing.


Additional reading:

• http://terrorism.about.com/od/causes/a/causes_terror.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_fanaticism
• http://www.mgr.org/terrorist.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_violence: Quote: "Some critics of religion such as Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer argue that all monotheistic religions are inherently violent. For example, Nelson-Pallmeyer writes that "Judaism, Christianity and Islam will continue to contribute to the destruction of the world until and unless each challenges violence in "sacred texts" and until each affirms nonviolent power of God". The reason attributed in point above is exactly what a friend of mine and her husband said as the cause for such fanaticism. Interesting.
• http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071205072140AAAQ5cT: Look at the answer by Andrew.

Eloping With Performance Tuning

Today I met some old friends of mine. They were colleagues about 10 years back when I used to be in the performance management field. I was almost thrown into this field. The job was to benchmark the performance (response times) of web applications when they were used by hundreds (or thousands) of concurrent users.

Now the fun was to not only test the applications but also to tune the applications.

Now the applications were often slow, no matter how best of breed the hardware was, the software vendors were or the tools (like database) used were. And each one would point a finger at the other. A good performance tester would find out whether there was a problem and where the problem was and recommend what needed to be done to fix it. The most elementary recommendation would be to throw more RAM / processor / server into the configuration. In many cases this would not solve the problem.

And here I was asked to handle a project to test and tune the website of a well known bank in India. Sure, enough it was a disaster. Meaning I did not know how to tune it.

Finding out that the website was slow was easy enough. But I could not digest the fact that an external entity like my team (meaning people who had not written the software) could find out why the site was slow and what specifically needed to be done to fix the problem.

Two of the colleagues I met today were people whom I had recruited. The first person was not employed when he had applied for a job. He was very talented, very quiet, very competent. I picked him up immediately.

The second person was a database specialist. He was also out of a job when he applied for a job. At that time we were going through a tricky performance problem in a database. I said he could have the job only if he could fix the problem. He took up the challenge, postponed his trip down south to the village to be with his family. And fixed our problem and got the job.

In the initial days, we were all learning how to tune a software. It's much like being a doctor or mechanic. You have to know what to look out for. And to be able to zoom into where the problem is. And find a solution to fix the problem.

Over a period of a year, I learnt what not to do. And that was to NEVER to give good practices as recommendations.

Let me explain.

When you go to a doctor and say you have cancer, would you like it if the doctor looked at all the reports and said "go eat an apple everyday"? Good practices are useful before a problem occurs. After a problem occurs you are interested in doing few specific things to fix the problem and not in following good practices.

A good doctor is one who conducts the fewest number of tests and fixes your problem fast. A bad doctor is one who gets umpteen tests done and finally tells you to pray.

These colleagues and others in the team and I got to be better over a period of a year by which time we were cocky enough to say that we could improve the performance of any application by 2x factor (meaning twice).

During that time another guy whom I met today was in love with a girl. The girl's parents were dead against him. We helped our colleague to go to the town where the girl was and pick her up and whisk her back to the big city. Even now I cannot believe it. It was almost like in a movie.

Today I asked him how the girl was whom he stole from her parents. He blushed and said she was going good and that they have a daughter. And that he keeps telling his daughter to not ever run away with a boy.

Yeah right.

Old memories.

Maths Puzzle - 14

The same friend sent me another maths puzzle.

If:

21, 23, 25 = 44236

29, 31, 33 = 60252

45, 47, 49 = 92284

What is the value of

37, 39, 41?

Note:

Find the pattern from the 1st set of equations and use the pattern to solve the problem.

Have fun.

Maths Puzzle - 13

A friend sent me this lovely puzzle.

If:

5, 3, 2 = 151022

9, 2, 4 = 183652

8, 6, 3 = 482466

5, 4, 5 = 202541

What is the value of

7, 2, 5?

Note:

Find the pattern from the 1st set of equations and use the pattern to solve the problem.

Have fun.


I couldn't solve this puzzle and I had to ask my friend for the solution.

Satyam and Tax

I read this (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/sc-orders-status-quo-on-rs-617-crore-tax-demand-from-satyam/articleshow/7883404.cms) today.

I could not understand the position of the income tax (IT) department. As I understand the company called Satyam Computers (Satyam for short) fudged its incomes and over reported (not understated) their income. Presumably the company paid income tax on the higher (fictitious) income reported.

Shouldn't Mahindra Satyam be filing a case for a refund of the tax paid on the difference between the higher income reported and the newly restated lower income?

Am I missing something here? Does the IT department feel that it is always owed money no matter which way the income was reported?

Updated on 12-Apr-2015:
http://www.financialexpress.com/article/companies/satyam-computers-rs-14000-cr-scam-full-text-of-b-ramalinga-rajus-letter-to-board/62101/

Emigration A Million Years Back To Chennai Or Thereabouts

I read an article (http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article1597038.ece) today. Apparently in an archaeological site called Attirambakkam about 60km from Chennai some tools have been excavated which are dated a million tears old. 

A million years? Yes. And not only that. A study of the tools has indicated that the tools were made elsewhere, perhaps Africa and finished here in the suburbs of Chennai (http://www.pasthorizons.com/index.php/archives/03/2011/stone-tools-reveal-indias-1-5-million-year-old-prehistory).

What do you say to that now? How did people travel from Africa to Chennai? Quite likely there ware no airlines, no ships, no roads. Were Africa and Asia connected by land (I don't mean like how Egypt and Saudi Arabia are connected now. That is a very long route). Perhaps Somalia Or Kenya were a few km away from, say, Goa?


Or maybe over a period of few hundred or thousand years, people kept moving eastwards from Africa with their tools that their ancestors owned and then one fine day they reached Chennai. And then may be like Hyundai or Nokia now, they found Chennai to be an ideal place where they could finally assemble / finish the product?


And what language did they speak? Was there any language in the first place?

Big

I saw the movie Big (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big) some time back. I had earlier seen it about 20 years ago. It was a sweet movie about a 13 year old boy who is frequently told by people around him that he can't do this or that because he is not big (read: old) enough. So he goes to a fair in his town with his parents where he sees a machine (somewhat like a weighing machine where you drop a coin and out comes a card with your weight printed on it).

He is told that the machine will grant him whatever he wishes. He wishes that he becomes big. The machine grants him the wish. The boy goes home without thinking much more of it (he still remains "small").

Next morning he wakes up to find that he has indeed become big, so old that he (Tom Hanks) is now about 30 years old and the pants he was wearing the previous night is woefully short now.


Even his mom mistakes him for a burglar and shoos him away. There is a very funny scene where he enters the house and his mom looks at him and screams "Don't come, go away" (figuring he is a burglar) while Tom Hanks thinks that she is upset that he has come in wearing dirty shoes. So he goes back out, cleans himself and comes back in as he presumably used to do frequently.

Since him mom throws him out he finds his way to the city, a big man but a 13 year old in mind. He gets a job as a designer of children's toys where he becomes very successful. And then falls in love with a woman who can't resist his boyish smile and charm.

Cut to the end of the movie. Being big was a nice interlude but he misses his mom and wants to go back. The fair has now come to the big city and the same machine is there where he is about to make a wish, now to become small again.

His ladylove finally locates him standing in front of the machine. He tells her then that he really is a 13 year old boy who happened to become an adult overnight as a result of the wish he made. And that he wants to go back to his mom and his family that he has left behind. He asks her whether she would also like to become small and go back to being a 13 year old again. She shudders and says "No". 

The movie ends with Tom Hanks now back to being how he was and the lady after dropping him at his house drives back to her life in the city looking very sad.

I wonder. How was it for the woman to fall in love with a "man" for his boyish charms only to find that he was a boy after all. How is it to be so totally in love without an inkling that he was not an appropriate mate for reasons that she could never fathom earlier.

This was a lovely movie, very funny with an interesting story line and a poignant ending.

Bundle Of Joy

I was sitting in a bus, while traveling in Himachal Pradesh,a hilly region, when a man with a 6 month old baby climbed in. The bus was crowded, there were no empty seats. The man was struggling a little with the baby while the bus turned right and left frequently. I extended my arms towards the man, he gratefully handed the baby to me.

Now the baby was packaged well, head to toe completely covered. The baby was sitting on my right lap, so the baby's left flank was completely exposed to any onslaught. I lost no time in making a quick and sustained evaluation of the bundle. I found the package to be quite light weight, portable and very cute. (For more details see: https://picasaweb.google.com/114451897239202019349/BabyPhotosFromTrain_2011_Aug#5590236086899826690)

I wanted to smell the baby. So I poked my nose on the left side of the baby's cheek and head and rubbed my nose. The baby didn't tilt the head. He/She raised the left eyebrow, the pupils moved over to the top left corner of the eye and were looking at me sitting to the back and left. Almost as if telling me "I know you dunnit. I saw you". Well since the baby didn't say all this nor cry out aloud but communicated more through body language, I could continue my informal inspection.

Then I prepared for the sitzkrieg ("sitting war"). I sharpened the tip of my nose, rubbed the cheek of the baby gently and took a deep breath. Then I attacked. After I was done my nose was flattened and the baby's left cheek looked like a crater on the moon.

Then I put my forefinger near the baby's palm and sure enough the baby wrapped all its fingers around my finger. 

What surprised me was that there was not one little cry that emanated (from the baby I mean, not me). The baby was very comfortable looking everywhere and at me and at the man who presumably was the father.

All good things must come to an end. Soon a woman, who had been watching me and the baby amusedly, extended her arms and claimed the baby. Now the baby had no facial resemblance with that woman (the woman looked to be Nepali/Chinese while the baby looked Indian) but that didn't matter. The woman arrogated to herself the right to hold the baby and that was it. No questions.

Those minutes when I was holding the bundle were joyous.