Note to recruiters

Note to recruiters: We are quite aware that recruiters, interviewers, VCs and other professionals generally perform a Google Search before they interview someone, take a pitch from someone, et cetera. Please keep in mind that not everything put on the Internet must align directly to one's future career and/or one's future product portfolio. Sometimes, people do put things on the Internet just because. Just because. It may be out of their personal interests, which may have nothing to do with their professional interests. Or it may be for some other reason. Recruiters seem to have this wrong-headed notion that if somebody is not signalling their interests in a certain area online, then that means that they are not interested in that area at all. It is worth pointing out that economics pretty much underlies the areas of marketing, strategy, operations and finance. And this blog is about economics. With metta, let us. by all means, be reflective about this whole business of business. Also, see our post on "The Multi-faceted Identity Problem".

Friday, April 8, 2016

RESPONSE: another response to Manivannan

Some further comments from the intellectual collective James Bonilla.

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I have a bit more time this week, and I am going to be using my time to analyze Manivannan's paper in a bit more detail.

Here are some more comments on Manivannan's paper. I am going to go through just a few pages and analyze the sort of stuff I find problematic. Here goes.


  • Line from paper p. 208: "In this article, we will show that the genius of Tamil artists has created all possible shapes on top of the consonants with inherent a, to represent puLLi ( ளி, U+0BCD)." 
    • Comment from Anand M.: It is odd to characterize the drawing of a dot in a few different ways as genius.
    • Comment from James B.: The "genius of Tamil artists"? It is genius to draw a damn dot in five different ways? One with a circular shape, one in the shape of a dot, et cetera. This is what you callin' genius? Bro, you are tryin', you are tryin'. But, boy, you are really reachin'.
    • Comment from Donald Drumpf: This dot... it is a dot. It is a dot. Simple as that. It is not genius. I guarantee it. (We just made this up - Eds.)
  • Line from paper p. 209: "The sample glyph shows a circle above a character that it is to combine with. The annotation says it is not used in Tamil and an additional annotation saying that the “anusvara should not be confused with the use of a circular glyph for the pulli” has been recently added. In orthographic terms, anusvara belongs to Sanskrit language to represent a Sanskrit based sound using a written form that is characteristic of Devanagari or other scripts designed to represent Sanskrit and related languages. Tamil language does not use anusvara nor does it have a written form for the anusvara."

    • Comment from Anand. M.: There is no reason to say that the Tamil language cannot use the anusvara. I can use the anusvara even in English if I want. I would simply have to define what it means when the anusvara circle goes above a character. 
    • Comment from James B.:  Dude, Manivannan. Seriously? You can't be serious. You can't be serious. You are talking about drawing a circle on top of a p? You have issues with dat? You have some serious issues then, pal. Mah buddy here wants to draw a circle on top of a p. I mean - seriously? You are claiming to be serious about all dis, right? What's going on, man? What's going on? Next, you will have problems with me joke about how Chris Christie sat on an iPhone and turned into an iPad. Of course, it is very inappropriate. But it is a joke that is funny in its context. You need to chill out about what people are doing when they draw circles above characters.
  • Line from paper p. 210: "Usage of diacritics to render foreign sounds, loan words, academic notation, etc., is not a new idea. There have been other proposals to use diacritics to render Sanskrit (Sharma, L2/10256), Hindi (Manikutti, 2012) or other foreign sounds (Sevakumar, 2010) in Tamil using the Tamil character set. However, such usage in random proposals, printed texts or a few other non-standard sources needs to be weighed against standard practices of language community. A rational system of diacritics limited to specialist user groups has its merits as long as the orthographic principles of Tamil are not impacted."
    • Comment from Anand M.: Three comments: (1) there is no impact on said language community because they don't have to use it; (2) said language community cannot be taken to be a homogenous community that is in full agreement with Mr. Manivannan; Or any sort of agreement; (3) the use of diacritics is purely optional. And there are multiple solutions offered that are each quite elegant. (Mr. Sharma has done a good job with his proposal: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10256-extended-tamil.pdf)
    • Comment from James B.: Pretty much what Anand has said. Dude, Manivannan. You are simply refusing to listen to the ideas being expressed here.
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