I can talk geeky numbers too!

So I had this really chill conversation today with two very nice people. It started with the more elderly of the two asking me what I did for a living. Having acquired a bit of bluntness from the previous standoff a couple of days back, I said: 'I do quantitative analyses for a living.' And then I was asked about variance/standard deviation, was asked about central and non central moments, about kurtosis and skewness and about the expectation of exp{tX} and its role in calculating non central moments about the origin. [Yea I roughly pieced it all together. I rock]. I was asked to give the physical interpretation of the fourth moment about the origin. And I answered that too. Yay. So they then asked me my opinion on Guruji's return after the suspension of president's rule in Jharkhand, asked about the breaking up of Bihar and my opinion on it, discussed wholesale price index and consumer price index and its significance with regard to inflation overall, the value of inflation index right now and so on.

And then I was mostly in good stead, when they asked me, 'What books do you read, Hansraj.' Now I rarely read, and what I do, is mostly wiki and feedreaders and google news and stuff. And recently I did read a couple of books on India in general. But then I decided to name a partially read book which I could never make any head or tail of. I recently wrote a blog out of whatever I interpreted from it, called 'The Inconsistency'. What followed in the interview was an extension of what I wrote in that blog entry. So this is how the interview moved on from there on:

'So Sir I recently reached midway through this book called Godel Escher and Bach: The eternal golden braid. Its a 1979 Pulitzer winner.'

'What's it about?'

'Its about formal systems in mathematics, and how they relate to real-life implications of the philosophy behind the positioning of meaning. It essentially talks of where meaning lies, is it in the axioms of a formal system interpretation of a real-life entity or environ, or is it in the rules with which you construct the theorems. It argues whether meaning is implicated by the way the system behaves, or whether it depends on the genetic code cast in stone. Several arguments for and against it have been posed in the book. Its a very well elucidated literature.'

'Hmm. . So can you tell me the difference between indeterminate and infinite.'

'Certainly sir. Bla bla bla'.

'Any examples?'

'There is this famous summation, 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 + 1 ..... people have proved its either of zero or one or one fourth. No one has come up with a perfect proof. The sum is indeterminate.'

'Right... so...'

'There is another example sir... consider the function sine(1/x). The energies in the frequencies at lower domain values in x will gradually tend to indeterminacy, owing to the hyperbolic divergence of the oscillation parameter 1/x.'

'Hmm... what about division by zero?'

'So Sir, this is a classic question posed by ramanujan as a kid to his teacher... what if there are 5 oranges and no kids to take them. Who gets how many? The answer sir, according to my understanding is indeterminate.'

'So Hansraj can you tell me why does Nifty have only thirty shares?'

' Sir, I can't tell you that, since I am not at all into stocks. I guess its basically meant to create an index that is broadbased and gives a good reflection of the economy's health as a whole without biasedness etc. And sir, Nifty has fifty shares, not thirty. .

' Any other calls?'

'All save Bangalore and Shillong'

'Why not Shillong, with that percentile?'

'Wont know sir.'

'Where is Shillong?'

'Sir its in Sikkim?'

'Hahahaha.. which is why they didn't give you a call. Its in Meghalaya'

'I am sooo sorry sir'

'Hahaha... relax.'

'Thankyou sir'