In my quest...

...to learn the meaning of freedom of expression, I have been further instructed. Torture authorizers and potential war criminals can gloat over their heinous acts, but there is an "outcry" over a rather dull Xmas address.

Will be interesting...

...to see what appropriate noises Mr. Obama will make about this latest massacre. Some indication can be had from here.

In a multi...

...culti environment, this is how banks may advertise themselves:

A snowstorm is...

...blowing across Toronto and Mississauga since the morning today. In my daily walk up north from Union Station through Toronto's downtown, I decided to walk on the road, and not take the underground PATH. It isn't perhaps too bad, if you are properly dressed up, though I guess it would depend on the intensity of the snow storm as well. Today's had winds which were strong enough to imbalance you at times, but the worst part is actually the snow hitting your eyes. That is really uncomfortable.

The best part of walking through the downtowm was watching at least two people riding their bicycles happily in the snowstorm :-) It is nice to see the spirit that I normally associate with my hometown Lahore.

I think one...

...has to admire the reflexes of this guy.

Two new books...

...are on the reading menu. One is "Reconciliation : Islam, democracy, and the West", by Benazir Bhutto, and the other "Jihad : the rise of militant Islam in Central Asia" by Ahmed Rashid, a prominent journalist based in Lahore.
I have started the latter one, though it is, at least till now, not the type of book that grasps you into not stopping to read. I hope it doesn't remain like that throughout its whole length.

A few weeks...

...back I finished a very interesting book, Predictably Irrational. To use a worn-out cliche, the book does strike a cord with you when you realize how predictably irrational your own behaviour is, without you realizing it. Overall a very interesting book, but I am not so sure about many of the experiments used to justify the claims in the book. The subjects of the experiments were students in almost all the cases, and I wonder how much their behaviour in the experiments matched to reality (i.e. in real situations). In the past 3 months I sat through a Financial Theory class at the University of Toronto, and the Professor teaching the course also raised his doubts at experiments done in the context of behvioural economics. When you know you are in a simulated environment, how real can you be?

There is something...

...attractive in mathematical certainity. Like, for instance, England's prime minister saying that "Three quarters of the most serious plots investigated by the British authorities have links to al-Qaida in Pakistan...". That is 75%, or 3 divided by 4 times 100. That is not 74%, or 75.6%, or, for that matter, about three quarters, it is three quarters, which is just 75%. Certain. No doubts. Of course, it cannot be your own chickens coming home to roost.

For another view on the mathematical certainity of 75% read here.