October 22, 2006

Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #7: Social grease in India and America

India's social grease—that is, anything that can be used to induce people to perform random acts of kindness not immediately beneficial to them—is respect towards family, people and institutions. America's is guilt.

Posted by Vishy at 01:13 AM | Comments (0)

August 07, 2006

Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #6: Why second best may not be that bad

A quip I just saw on a forum:

The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.

Pithiness incarnate.

Posted by Vishy at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)

June 07, 2005

Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #5: The Morning Theory of Relativity

"It always takes longer to do something in the morning than to do it the night before (relatively speaking)"

In my long *cough* wisdom-bestowing experience, I have found that I save what seem like ridiculous amounts of time if I do some of my morning chores the night before. Two quick examples: it seems to take longer for me to choose my outfit for the day or to shave the night before I go to work than in the morning, just before I go to work. In absolute terms, it probably takes the same amount of time irrespective of when I perform a task. It's just that in the morning, I am only half-awake and there's many more things to do, such as get ready, mentally prepare myself for early morning meetings, think of any errands I need to do on the way to work and so on.

In the vein of what a renowned physicist once said

When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours -- that's relativity.
this seems like a relativistic time contraction. Am I the only one who experiences this phenomenon?

To use a computer science analogy for this, CPU time for a task is probably the same regardless of when I am performing it, but real time for a task in the morning is longer. If we allot one thread per task, it would seem a lot more of my time is spent thread switching in the morning than the night before, which leads to the perception that I have less time. The perception of having less time is what makes it seem that tasks take longer to do (is this a whole different theory of time relativity in itself?)

Posted by Vishy at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)

April 30, 2005

Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #3

A pick up line for linguistics geeks:

"Would you like to conjugate or are you going to decline?"

Posted by Vishy at 09:08 PM | Comments (0)

March 19, 2005

Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #3: Meetings

A quip from a coworker who categorically wishes not to be named:

"In meetings, it is better to let people think you're stupid because you are silent, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Posted by Vishy at 11:07 PM | Comments (0)

January 24, 2005

Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #2

Who said they always had to be authored by me?

Perfection is attained not when there is nothing to add but when there is nothing to take away.
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Yes, that's the author of The Little Prince.

In the original:

La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever.

When I saw this quote somewhere on the Web, I was so floored I wanted to kiss my computer screen. An infinitely more poetic and palatable expression of Occam's Razor.

Posted by Vishy at 11:13 PM | Comments (1)

January 10, 2005

Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #1

It is a lot easier to fake knowing something than to fake not knowing it.

Posted by Vishy at 08:00 PM | Comments (0)