469 days later, I am returning to the ring. It will take some getting used to though – blogging after such a long break – but for now the sabbatical is over.

I think this had to happen one day. At least once every while for the past few months I have asked myself why I have been blogging. And what would be of the several hours every week if there were no blogs to read or post to. Finally, about a week back I decided to find out.

I am going off on a blog-sabbatical (is there such a thing ?)– one that will last at least a year. I will be a different person a year from now (nothing portentous, we all will ) and not unlikely different enough to not return to blogging in its current form. In what will therefore be my last post for another year to come and maybe last ever on Epistles, I will briefly (we’ll see how brief it will end up) outline why.

Epistles was my fourth attempt at blogging. Or was it the fifth. I started this blog as somewhat of a countervailing/compensatory force against other developments in my life. This may have been what kept it going in its initial days when there were hardly any readers. Over the next months as activity picked up (which meant waking up on an occasional morning to see more comments on the blog than emails in my inbox and an average of 3200 page views per month), I spent more and more time posting material and generally thinking about what the blog should look like.

And then when I say blogging, I am also including the time devoted to regularly following the handful of blogs which I quite frequently also linked to. Following these blogs also meant I had, through their writing, access to some of the most brilliant, articulate and opinionated people in the blogosphere (and at large) – Tyler Cowen, Greg Mankiw, Megan Mccardle, Gary Becker, Richard Posner, Daniel Denette, Richard Dawkins, Bryan Kaplan, Arnold Kling and Robin Hanson to name only a few. And even if it would be hard to recall specific instances of inspiring prose (because there were many), it would be equally hard to deny that contemplating their writings motivated fundamental changes in my outlook on the world. Several years down the road if I have to pick two characteristic themes of my 2006-2007, my experience as a blogger would rank in there.

Of course, all this begs the question that if it was all this great then why stop ?

Well, all this also means that for over 22 months now, I have spent most of my leisure reading. And did so with little sense of direction. Much chaos and much clutter. I had a good idea of what subjects interested me and there were many and diverse. Given a choice between walking far and digging deep, I always chose the former. My sources were relatively few – a handful of blogs and news sites – but many of them were themselves producing heterogeneous content and in copious amounts. And so, month and month I followed commentary from famous blogs and bloggers and while I was at it, produced some of my own.

This kind of reading and this kind of blogging had become a way of life. I liked this model – it came naturally to me and went well with my intellectual restlessness and a general lack of time to pick up details with some exceptions. And I want to try and change this. It might appear to be (and it is) change for change’s sake but then its also true that there is only that much intellectual enrichment to be sought from reading yet another article on rise of this phenomena or that, influence of this person or that, or ponder over possibility of this event or that. This change is mostly about experiencing something different and new. And its also about a feeling that although it could have always been better, I am happy with this experience and its time to move on.

I don’t exactly know to what end how all the time spent blogging will be put to, but the bigger picture is that I am now looking at activities that are more focused in nature – learning some music, catching up on some photography and maybe, just maybe trying my hand at reading some fiction.

I thank my readers who gave me a chance to put down my many thoughts, and for having put up with my (pride and) prejudices . Through Epistles, I also met and came to know many individuals who I would otherwise have never known (and have not yet met) and then those that I may still not know. I am touched that many of you have been a part of this blog even in the absence of that vital connection that knowing the blogger personally brings.

Kinda funny sentence today from Alan Greenspan’s recent book which I found surprisingly un-putdownable :

I remember where I was on the day the Japanese attacked the Pearl Harbor: in my room practicising the clarinet. I turned on the radio and there was the announcement. I didn’t know where the Pearl harbor was – nobody did. I didn’t immediately think, Oh, we’re going to war. Instead, I hoped the calamity would just go away. When you’re a fifteen year old, you blank out a lot of things. You just focus on what you’re doing.

Greenspan also mentions his adolescent fascination for the morse code, which brought back in a flash long forgotten memories from over a decade ago.

The only time I ever maintained a diary of personal reflections was for a short period in the mid-90s. And in order to make the contents almost inaccessible to anyone who lays a quick hand on it, the entire diary was written in morse code !! To give you a sample, here is what it would have looked like – commas that separated letters and forward slash separating the words ( and two forward slashes between consecutive sentences )

// . , . _ _ . , . . , . . . , _ , . _ . . , _ , . . . / . . _ . , _ _ _ , . _ . / _ , . . . . , . / . _ . . , _ _ _ , . . . _ , . / _ _ _ , . . _ . / . _ . . , . , _ , _ , . , . _ . , . . . //

( “Epistles – For the love of letters ” )

Now imagine 109 pages of this .

Thinking back it was rather crazy, maybe the craziest thing I ever did. No, actually what was even more crazy of me was to destroy that diary in a fit of desperation – too many skeletons of too many people in one cupboard it was. Looking back though, it remains one of my bigger regrets.

I realize I have forgotten some of the confusing and infrequent letters like J and B, but am otherwise quite okay. But the memory refresh that followed looking at this, I am almost ready to start another one, save for the absence of skeletons and abundance of cupboards

I just read two articles from journalists that have known Benazir Bhutto personally – Shekhar Gupta during his many years of reporting and Karan Thapar from their college days. Both articles make for an engaging read and are replete with anecdotes from the yesteryears.

Reading some of these writings one wonders what must it be like to be a journalist – with close association, understanding and friendship with a country’s (and often international) ruling class. A journalist-friend of mine in the Indian Express says that is one of the main lures of the profession – the contacts you make. Understandable, but then again not all politicians are great human beings, the nice to know types. Some of them are not only miserable people themselves but are also liable for misery and bloodshed elsewhere, either willfully perpetrated or condoned or done in their name. [ More on politics ] What would it be like to have such people in your phone book and among your email contacts and vice-versa ? Also most people in power (or those that have been) have egos that need to be pandered to. Not my idea of a day job.

~~~

Talking of Shekhar Gupta, I have admired his writings for years now. And having watched/read him interviewing people, I almost feel like I can see inside his mind. He sets the stage gradually to extract that one headline, almost like the leg spinner who bowls four consecutive balls moving away from the right hander and finally nails the batsmen with the fifth that remains straight. If a potentially controversial question is evaded, he rephrases the question and as he does so, may even add a controversial statement that elicits a reaction from the interviewee. When the interviewee decides to react, the interviewer has won.

Yet, if there is one aspect of his writing that I am ambivalent about, its how he makes it clear to the reader that he is important, that he has been there and done that and that he is aware of his place in post-1975 Indian political reporting history. Or at least that he has one. For example, a number of times he writes in his newspaper columns that what he is about to tell us is something that he had originally reserved for his memoirs but will tell us right now anyway. Look Shekhar, I am starting to find this funny, maybe even condescending.

A simple search for (“Shekhar Gupta” “my memoirs) [ Retain the quotes, remove the parenthesis if you want to do the search yourself ] revealed at least 5 columns – 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 and 5. And the other day on a TV debate when he was asked to call what will happen to the Gujrat elections (before the results came in), while everyone else on the panel took a shot, Shekhar from atop his high horse went – “From my 27 years in journalism, one thing I have learnt is to never call an election….”. When pressed he said he would prefer to “respect the voter.” Really ? Or is it because if he were proved wrong, 20 years from now Vikram Chandra (who moderated the discussion) is going to keep this story for his memoirs ? All said and done, I will continue to follow him and read everything he writes. Putting up with some of the above is a small price to pay to get some insights and read some very interesting anecdotes.

~~~

Bhutto is gone. Sad and scary, not because she was a great leader of the peoples but given our reduced expectations of democracy from poor (and/or Islamic) countries, her absence is destabilizing for Pakistan and the region.

Thats one of those famous pictures (best size I could find ) from India-Pak history shot when Z. A. Bhutto was in Simla to negotiate the Simla agreement. (If Rajiv was in politics at the time (1972), he would have been in this picture too).

Read this interesting account of Benazir: the girl who mesmerised Shimla.

Much similarity there – I. Gandhi and Z. Bhutto on one hand and R. Gandhi and B. Bhutto on another. Father-Daughter/Mother-Son – all political assassinations [Details ]. In the latter case, both were assassinated during campaign rallies just days before the elections . Everybody in the picture faced unnatural and violent deaths.

Just realized that Z. A. Bhutto without the somewhat prominent hair on the behind of his head bears some resemblance to Nehru !

And what a blessed neighborhood India once again finds itself in – Burma, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal – none of them even have a stable, functioning, democratic government. Sri Lanka is struggling big time. Is it just Maldives and Bhutan then ?

There is the popular CMU motto – work, sleep, social life – pick two.

Or as Dani talks of the impossibility theorem – “democracy/national sovereignty/global economic integration” – pick two.

Similarly, I think in much of the non-OECD world, you can’t have it all in one government- stable/democratic – pick one.

In South Asia, its more like “Unstable and malfunctioning – pick two”.

More Pakistani history pictures here.

 From a Times article on the Apple retail experience:

Two years ago, Isobella Jade was down on her luck, living on a friend’s couch and struggling to make it as a fashion model when she had the idea of writing a book about her experience as a short woman trying to break into the modeling business.

Unable to afford a computer, Ms. Jade, 25, began cadging time on a laptop at the Apple store in the SoHo section of Manhattan. Ms. Jade spent hours at a stretch standing in a discreet corner of the store, typing. Within a few months, she had written nearly 300 pages.

Not only did store employees not mind, but at closing time they often made certain to shut Ms. Jade’s computer down last, to give her a little extra time. A few months later, the store invited her to give an in-store reading from her manuscript.

Thats quoting Subash Chandra Bose. (who some believe is still alive.)

Anyway, this happened when I wasn’t watching. But all forgiven (!) – India Today, which to me is India’s best news magazine, is now available online for free !

Here is Sanjoy Narayan, Chief Operating Officer, India Today Group Digital.

…decided to change to a free access model for two reasons. The first says , “Our earlier subscription model found takers mainly among Indians living abroad or those who wanted information about India. Also, that was a time when Internet penetration was low and the user base was small. Now, with both of these increasing rapidly, particularly among the younger people, we want to tap this audience.”

The second reason is revenue. Online ad revenue is growing and the group feels as though they can attract an audience by keeping their readers engaged everyday instead of just periodically when their magazines are released.

Looks they are going the way of the NYTimes – generate revenue from advertising that comes from having a large readership than from subscription fees. I hate to call tipping-points but is this another statement about internet advertising in India ?

And yes, I will gobble anything that S. Prasannrajan writes, a favorite since the 90s.

Link.

That line there in the boxed part of the picture below. Read it once. Pause.

What does it mean ? Read it again. Does it mean something different ?

Maybe its too late in the night but the first two attempts I thought why would somewhat want resumes of missing people ? Finally I concluded that the word “resume” has a meaning I don’t know, which is that it can just mean the contact details of individuals so as to help them be located/identified, and not a job pitch.

Until that is I visited the page and found the real story. (And all this inspite of knowing the sense of the word that means “restart/continue”.)

P.S: I would be curious to see to which interpretation of the sentence would statistical parsers or/and language models give a higher probability. (Of course they are actually two different words rather than being homonyms, but most automatic Natural Language Processing systems disregard the “whatever” that appears above the letter ‘e’ and build consider the two words as being homonyms.

P.P.S: My post title is another deliberate attempt at misleading the reader. Is that v divided by n or resume as in verb or noun ? Now you know

I changed the title without realizing I did and ended up misleading you about having misled you already when I had only misled myself. Smart ass me.

From the NYTimes, a must-read and a must-watch (the inset video). Very moving.

G. P. Sawant entered the letter-writing trade in 1982 when he won a government contract for a coveted stall inside the post office headquarters. Before long, he earned a reputation among illiterate migrants as a gifted writer of letters.

But now the professional letter writer is confronting the fate of middlemen everywhere: to be cut out. In India, the world’s fastest-growing market for cellphones, calling the village or sending a text message has all but supplanted the practice of dictating intimacies to someone else.

And very positive.

He is happy, of course, because his four children, all of whom he sent to private school using the proceeds from letter writing, have pulled the family into the upper middle class. His son works at a bank; one daughter works as a civil engineer in Denmark; another daughter is studying computers in college; and there is Suchitra, who is currently in New Jersey on assignment for Infosys.

A billion mutinies now !

~~~

A MINT article on running :

The granddaddy of marathons Fauja Singh ran the London Marathon when he was 94. He not only finished the run but also improved his timing…. He ran his first marathon at 89 and since then has taken part in at least six, defying age and proving several armchair sceptics wrong about age, knees and long-distance running.

From the same article :

And then there is Dean Karnazes of San Francisco. Last year, between September and November, he ran 50 marathons in 50 states in the US in 50 consecutive days. He finished the New York City Marathon, his strongest finish, in three hours flat.

A while back I had though it would be cool to have a place where people submit pictures of their bookshelves; not of shelves themselves but of books in the shelves such that you can clearly read the title/author of each book. Turns out there is already one, or rather there is at least one. And its on Flickr. In the group description, they say :

This group was created so you could browse through the titles on other people’s shelves. Please submit pictures showing your books with readable titles, rather than pictures showing your entire bookshelf from a distance, or pictures of your cat/toys/candles/mugs/skulls/gear/etc on your bookshelf.

I spend little time on Flickr or any photo site for that matter and while I had long heard of this remarkable community thing Flickr has in comparison to other photo websites, only now got a chance to see an example. Those pictures are such a joy to go through, not just to see what books there are out there, but because viewed from a (mental, not spatial) distance, its some kind of collective art – non-mundane art out of things as mundane as a bookshelf.

Not wanting to burden the universe with yet another bookshelf group with members consisting of the founder and a handful of friends who “would-rather-not-be-but-will-be-for-our-friendship”, I got a few pictures of my bookshelf and added it to the group. Here are the pictures and I am mighty pleased about how they turned up. If you decide to put up some of your own, please leave a link in the comments section.

Here is one. This slideshow of all 6 pictures makes for better viewing.

This New Year here is a wish that may there be a bookshelf in everyone’s life. ( And may some of their pictures be up online )

Today’s dog bites man story :

After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against the al-Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over how the money was spent, and that funds were diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India.

Link.

Today’s man bites dog story :

Midas, the muffler company, in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, gave an award for America’s longest commute to an engineer at Cisco Systems, in California, who travels three hundred and seventy-two miles—seven hours—a day, from the Sierra foothills to San Jose and back. “It’s actually exhilarating,” the man said of his morning drive. “When I get in, I’m pumped up, ready to go.”

My commute is 1.1 miles, will shortly be truncated to 0.6 miles when my office moves even closer and yeah, “When I get on (the bike), I’m pumped up, ready to go.”

Every once a while at the freakonomics blog, Steve and Steve conduct informal polls, sometimes to get data for back of envelope calculations (see example) and sometimes just seeking advice from what one may expect to be a very intelligent and well-informed reader community (thats another of those nice things about top economics blogs). A while back Levitt went :

I’m a notoriously late adopter of technologies. It is not a conscious decision, and I don’t take any pride in it.

… As such, I need some advice from blog readers: what are some technologies I need the most that I’ve been slow to adopt?

I’ve been relatively slow myself. Cell phone in late 2003 that too because someone was selling it :p . Did not learn driving until I was way past 18.  And after 40 months in the US, have not got my license yet ( just use my international license ). I have not bought an ipod and may not in the foreseeable future primarily because I hate to carry around things that are really small and forget/lose and all that. And of course, not things that are too big either, simply because they are not meant to. [ Except a bicycle maybe ]. I did not buy a Mac either because back then I could not afford it, but now that I have one from work, I am so used to it that I am not that impressed any longer.

I have been a recent adopter of 2 technologies (if you can all them that) and I am loving it. Hold your breath for here it goes

• RSS reader
• Tabbed browsing in Firefox (I don’t use IE unless that is the only way out)

( So, if your blog stats have come crashing down, its because I am not showing up on your blog that often )

Just noticed this nice pattern on my blog stats page.

699 posts, 6999 spam comments – is that marketing dream come true or gone sour ?

That makes this post number 700. In 664 days since Feb 26th, 2006.

Woah !

A roundup of (some) Christmas holiday messages from presidential candidates.

• Rudy Guiliani is chatting with Santa.

• John Edwards refers to faith, has Christmas lighting in the background but does not go the whole nine yards.

• Ron Paul is apolitical and affable but has a family/Christmas season theme. (Digression: “I want the government out of my uterus, okay !”)

• Mike Hukkabee’s explicit reference to Christ.

• Obama has his wife starting the talking, his daughters chime in, does not mention Christmas and has no campaign positions in there either.

• Hillary subtle reference to holiday season as she gives away goodies (“Whose money is it anyway!” )

• McCain plays up his Vietnam times and a cross drawn on the sand.

When you mention “Christmas”, you are signaling. When you don’t, you are avoiding alienation and signaling to a different constituency. Just wonder how many “holiday seasons” would India have if all the (mostly religious) festival names were sanitized to just “holidays” in order to be more inclusive ? Truly, there are more tangible ways to separate church from the state, eh !

About a couple of months ago I wrote about my participation in Kiva, a micro-lending website through which I lent two amounts of $25 each to a Pham, a poultry farmer in Vietnam and Regina, a baker in Honduras. I had promised to provide an update which can be potentially reassuring to anyone who is waiting to see someone they personally know who has down this path before they themselves do. From my lender page, I see that both Regina and Pham are on track with respect to their commitments – Regina had repaid 25% of her total loan ($250 of which my contribution is $25), while Pham has repaid 8% already.

To repeat verbatim from my previous Kiva post : “If you are a US resident and willing to forego one dinner one time and save that $25, and don’t know what to do with that money, well, now you do !”

~~~

During the same week, I decide to sponsor a child through “Save the Children”. Learn more about sponsorship here. (if you are considering sponsorship there are other organizations here along with ratings by the American Institute of Philanthropy)

My sponsor-child is Joce, a 7 year old girl from Haiti. The organization encourages sponsors and their sponsor-children to communicate with each other. A couple of weeks back Joce sent me a drawing. Photographs are below:

And my reply to Joce. (Warning : my handwriting is very neat and illegible.)

A friend sends me this video from IBN-live website. This is about the almost completed Golden Quadrilateral and how the changes it brings are far and wide. In his email he adds :

..in the entire program these ***kers have not mentioned whose dream project all this was !!

For a long time I thought that rediff has the worst online community in terms of the quality of the discussion forums/message boards. Turns out I forgot about the usual suspects – TOI. A member from the “Times of India sucks” orkut community sends me this link, while requesting me to take a stand on this issue. Visit the link and you will truly wonder if there are indeed so many people who will have spent so many hours writing/copy-pasting material.

What are these people like in real life I wonder (I know we are again revisiting topics we have in the past week, but let me use the occasion to make a related comment). I suspect a good number of them could be any of us, or our close friends and that won’t surprise me. Among two circumstances under which I don’t trust most people, even some of my good friends – anonymity and mob membership.

Mob is empowering ; its trading sovereignty for power. A mob accomplishes far more than the individual constituents can – not because of the larger physical presence, but its the alternate mental space that it inhabits. One of the most inhuman practices I have witnessed time and again (never been party to either way) was the manner in which the presumably happy occasion of one’s birthday is celebrated in most Indian colleges with lifting the person and handing him kicks on his bum – “Birthday Bumps”. Repeatedly kicking one person as hard as one possibly can, the whole occasion inviting even until now uninterested onlookers to contribute their kicks – some of who may not even know who the landing surface belongs to. I know people who will defend this practice (after all its consensual adult activity on a large scale with (almost) no victims). Yet, my point is that it brings out the most raw instincts and the worst in people and when it involves some of your good friends, its not a pretty sight.

This video here – where one of the kickers had planted 6 kicks so hard that he is almost limping by the end of the video.

Actually being in a group and anonymity are really much the same thing. In the end, its boils down to absence of accountability because of the aggregation, of becoming one among the many. A benign version of this is how as a child you are relieved to know that you are not the only one in class to have not completed your assignment.

History is interesting. Time yourself as you figure out A through I.

A is ruling over B. C wages war on B and D. C and E occupy I. C occupies A. C wages war on E. F wages war on G. G, E and A beat the shit out of C. G beats the shit out of F. H and D occupy A. A teams up with B to drive out H. H and D leave on the condition that B will leave A. A does not leave B. B breaks into B1 and B2. A leaves B1 and B2. G and B2 team up against B1 (and H). G loses to B1. B1 occupies B2 and together becomes B. And today G is the largest trading partner of I, B, H and F. A is the largest and G the second largest partner of C.

I think most people would figure out A to I, its about how many seconds (minutes??) it takes. Since I made it up, I have no idea how long it would have taken me.

Continue reading this post if your head is not spinning yet.

P.S: Some sentences give more information than others, but then you don’t know that before hand. Do sentences that have more actors (letters) give most information ? At what point did you become fully confident of your answer ?

~~~

My nomination for Foot in Mouth Award 2007.

“I promise that I will be with you, if you so wish, for as long as I feel that I can be useful — and if it is not decided by nature before — not a minute less and not a second more,” he said at the time. “Now I understand that it was not my destiny to rest at the end of my life.”

No, not quoting Joseph Heller. Thats Fidel Castro. Since 1959. ( Raymonds style )

Lets say you are in your early twenties, single and all that – now ask yourself which current head of state you think will remain head of state when your granddaughter is as old as you are now.

Some pattern there – Musharaff and Chavez seeking political immortality. (but where they have failed so far, Castro is going strong.) And why leave out LK Advani, MMS, and others except that people have a chance to vote them out through largely free and fair polls.

P.S: Oops, just as I wrote this I see it has already been awarded. Only if they waited a little longer.

~~~

In a comment to my post on why I am not too enthusiastic about anonymously authored blogs, Sudhir raises an interesting question, one that did not occur to me when I wrote the post. He asks:

I’m just left wondering if a persons identity has such an impact on a reader. I’ve never really given it any thought before! We probably cannot take anonymous bloggers too seriously because we cannot draw a mental picture of what they look like. Having said that I never seem to look for a journalists name in the newspaper even if i really enjoyed the content. Do you? just curious..

Yes, No and Sometimes.

“No” for news reports, “Yes” for analysis and opinion pieces that are either very moving or are on polarizing topics. And then there is an non-deterministic component that I will categorize under “sometimes” – where I look up for no particular reason. There are also times when it works the other way around – where you go scouting for articles by certain columnists and journalists. Too many to name they are, but as regular blog readers would know they are mostly from the NYTimes, Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Hindu, Slate, Outlook, Livemint and The Pioneer.

So yeah, the identity matters. Why ?

I don’t know if this has got to do something with spending some time in academia/grad school where you talk of research papers and results in terms of the authors and groups/labs/locations and often over 15% of the paper content is “saying who said what before you say what you intend to say.” Any serious, life long academics want to weigh in on that ?

What do you think ?

Esquire’s annual article on the “Best and the Brightest of 2007″ :

On Franziska Michor, Austrian prodigy and genius at baking cakes, driving 18-wheelers and math. Among other things :

a) twenty-five years old;

b) a slip of a thing, about a hundred pounds;

c) employed by the department of computational biology at Sloan-Kettering, the cancer hospital and research center in New York;

d) equipped with a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Harvard, which she earned at twenty-two;

e) determined to change the way modern medicine deals with cancer, so that it may truly be called modern;

Her area of work – bringing (more) math into biology, in particular into cancer fighting efforts. And why ?

And she thinks medicine is — though she would never use this word — dumb. Not doctors, not scientists, and certainly not the people she’s gotten to know at Princeton, where she was a theoretical biologist at the Institute for Advanced Study when she was nineteen, or at Harvard, or at Sloan. No, medicine — at least in comparison with cancer, at least in comparison with the blind god of evolution. And what she wants to do is make it smarter. What she wants to do is teach it math.

Read the whole article ; the article itself is well-written. You do get the impression that the Esquire journalist must have been totally floored by someone of this caliber. Look at this extract :

So yeah, Franziska Michor is pretty smart, but that’s not really the point, even though a certain amount of smarts helps, given what she’s setting out to do. She’s also pretty determined and pretty dedicated and pretty damn dauntless, but that’s not the point, either, any more than are her talents at cake baking or ballroom dancing or the fact that she speaks six languages. No, the point is this: Franziska is, in the statistical sense of the word, improbable. She’s to the general run of human capability what she is to truck driving in Austria. Her position on the bell curve of what people can and can’t do is so far-flung as to seem exotic, even impossible.

Genius is fascinating, scarce, inspiring and a real turn on – at the level of personality sure, even by its very nature. We are only beginning to understand the brain, and someday we will better understand genius, and many varieties of these.

I somehow think that one must engage in pursuit of excellence in a way to be really good at one kind of science, one kind of art and some sport. How do we define great ? Maybe say 99.5, 95 and 93 percentile in these 3 domains ? Of course, by definition (of percentile) we cannot all be in these percentile brackets, but wonder where the pursuit itself will take us.