Pluto (and Inzy) Under trial!
Pluto sentimentalists, guess what! Pluto is on the verge of demotion, and news reports indicate the likelihood of this happening is very high indeed! This is the subject of a ballot tomorrow, where democratically elected representatives of planet Earth (I am being sarcastic, if you didn't get it!) are going to determine whether Pluto is indeed worthy of its planetary appellation.

The story so far - Pluto was discovered in 1930 and hastily (as we know now) recorded as the 9th planet in our System. Mankind rejoiced in its brilliance and updated school books - which is what we read, and memorised.

All of that was, of course, premature - for a question bugged everyone in the know - how, goddamit, do you define a planet?

Pluto is extremely eccentric - if you follow the solar system radially outwards starting at Mercury, you come across rocky hard planets till you reach Mars and then you hit gassy giants Jupiter onwards, all with a large number of satellites and indeed, rings! And then you suddenly hit puny little Pluto - cold, tiny, hard, and with one solitary satellite, which, interestingly, is about the same size as Pluto itself (relatively speaking, on a galactic scale). And as if that were not enough, while the rest of the planets revolve around the Earth in one single plane, Pluto the deviant follows a completely different ellipse, at an angle to the rest (which has the interesting side effect that Neptune holds the record as the "farthest planet" for 20 years and then passes on the baton to Pluto for the next 200).

So Pluto is different. But is that enough to dethrone Pluto? Well, what do you know, two other bodies mysteriously appear in the Solar system, Xena and Ceres, which stake a planetary claim, similar to the irritating classmate who runs after the professor in the hope of getting an extra 0.5 marks simply because roll number 22 wrote exactly the same answer and scored more. And if you listen to Xena and Ceres' bickering, and include Charon (Pluto's mega satellite) in the bargain, then you actually have 12 planets in the system!

So, here is the conundrum - starting tomorrow, the solar system will possess 8 planets or 12 (maybe 11 - who knows?) . In either case, you will need to reorient the piece of information ingrained in your neurons for the past 25 years (estimate subject to your age) starting tomorrow, or run the risk of being labelled ignoramus.

Its your choice which way you want to go.

In the meantime, my complete support goes out to Inzamam - Darrel Hair should be fired or at least put on a performance improvement plan for the next one year.

And if you feel this post bears resemblance to this one from the NYtimes, well, I admit that was the inspiration - but this topic has been exciting me for a few days now, and so I claim this was long coming anyway!
- posted by Rallix @ 6:41 AM 1 comments

 
Good Pittance - Bonds Soar as weak data point to slowdown
Being a human, is clearly laden with a whole lot of pressure. For one, they live longer than
most other creatures on the planet. They are born completely useless, and remain so for
long. In fact, this phase of uselessness goes on for longer than most creatures care to
survive. And then, briefly, they are really useful to their species. That is, they are fit
to reproduce (after all, that is the aim of a species, is it not?). And how do they end up
utilising this phase?

For completely unfair reasons, humans have been provided with a brain way larger than is
actually good for them. And it is this brain that tells them that actually, this brief phase
should be utilised in other ways, like studying and working and conducting research and waging
wars and whatever, everything, but effectively reproducing. And then before they know it,
this phase is gone, and now their oversized brain makes them jealous and tells them that
they should advise the next generation to study and work and wage wars and whatever. And so
the cycle continues.

"If you ask me, humans should live in caves and die at the age of 23," FM had once remarked
to Hyper.

And so here, in the sewer world, Hyper met souls who had already been through the terrifying
human lifetime. And souls no longer had unnecessarily large congregations of proteins in
their heads. And because of this, Hyper and his friends could actually take an objective
view of things.

Consider Hyper's conversation with Over Engineering, who used to work in an investment bank
when he was human.

Hyper: Hey whats eating you, OE?

OE: Just recalling some of my days at the bank

Hyper: What about them?

OE: I used to be what most people would call a hardworker. We were growing double digit
every year, entering new markets, devising exotic options and I was managing the entire
backoffice operation

Hyper: Wow that sounds really cool and important!

OE: Yes, you are right - feeding so many people was not easy

Hyper: Huh? Feeding? I thought you were an I Banker?

OE: Oh yes, I used to work in an I Bank - I ran the cafeteria. Did I not tell you?

(monologue from OE follows)

I loved the challenge then - I was awarded at the I bankers guild for the most exotic option
ever created - the Triple Schezwan clam Pulao garnished with mildy smoked tarragon sauce.
Anyway, that was the good part. What bothers me today is how we ended up making everything
so complicated when really it should have been so much easier.

I remember the time we were trying to introduce a slice of tomato into the already popular
aaloo patty burger which we had been making for years (a quick insight - while the exotic
options sound nice, the real volumes are in the commoditised products - the tomato slice was
our way of providing value added service).

Well, the idea came from our client facing team, who quickly dumped it onto the
implementation team. The implementation team put a project team together. (A typical project
is conducted in three phases and we had a pretty robust approach to it - requirements
gathering, development, testing.) The team filled in the specifications template and
obtained approvals from Legal, tax, frying risk, industrial relations, production and so
on... Before we started, of course, we prepared the plan. And before we could deploy anyone
on the project, we had to create a project code and then upload the information in the
budgeting system, the revenue projection system and so on. And then we created the inventory
list which had to be approved by finance.

And then, well, the project had to stop because the appraisal cycle was drawing near and
everyone was busy conducting discussions, defining targets, and uploading information into
the Hr system. And when this got over, as luck would have it, a team leader put in his
papers (he had a lucrative offer from a rival i bank - we had a tough time safeguarding our
intellectual property, but we ensured he served adequate gardening leave). This obviously
put the project (and hence our revenues) at risk and so our team started working overtime.

We were in the process of developing a really stunning product, when the project blessings
committee decided we had actually overlooked three pieces in our project plan. They advised us
to involve the process quality, biochemistry and marketing departments before we could move
any further. This obviously threw the entire budget off track. So we all took massive
paycuts because we had to justify all the expenditure to the shareholders (who incidentally
had made a mere 2000% capital gain over the last 3 years).

Anyway, we worked harder than ever before - quality conducted a failure mode analysis, the
biochemist declared they were not satisfied that the EColi concentration in the tomatoes had
been tested by a dependable laboratory (and sent samples to a non profit organisation which
did not say anything about E Coli but said that pesticide levels were unacceptable), and
marketing decided that they needed more budgets for an effective launch campaign.

In the end, of course, the project did conclude and we did manage to add the slice of tomato
- but now I am royally depressed at how stupid we were.

(end of monologue)

Hyper: Yes I see what you mean - these corporate processes and departments really get to
me.. why were things so complicated I wonder..

OE: Oh no, thats not what I meant - i am depressed because we actually missed out on taking
approvals from the Pollution board - who promptly slapped a lawsuit on us.. I eventually
committed suicide which explains the bluish glow that you see on my now.. Pottasium Cyanide,
you see.. A bottle I had flicked from the lab of the non profit organisation when they were
giving us pain...
- posted by Rallix @ 3:22 AM 2 comments