Movie Review American Sniper

Clint Eastwood is a director I enjoyed as much as I did his acting chutzpah in his younger days. Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Gran Torino and Unforgiven are some of his best works. Mildly disappointing is his treatment of the rather incredible story of an ordinary human being caught up in extra ordinary events to become one of the most celebrated solders of one of the most celebrated special forces teams of the planet. Ironically what is jarring is not the violence and the killing but the transition from war time to peace time. The drums beating in the background of the killing scenes, Bradley Cooper’s over reliance on his eyes while mangling his otherwise perfect method acting routine- all take away points from the fact that Chris Kyle was both a great human and a great soldier. Some of the scenes seem quite implausible, but war is as implausible to us sitting in the arm chair as peace is to savages. Watch it for how horrible war is, without the expectations ofa genius. Keep your expectations low and this is a still a really good movie.

Turing Connection

I was born 23 years to the day Alan Turing died (gasps).
23 is a number that is considered magical in (older) hacker circles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma
I donot believe in magic though I loved Harry P. I was disappointed at the lack of diversity in Hogwarts. No brown wizards?
I write on cryptography sometimes when I am bored https://decisionstats.com/2013/12/14/play-color-cipher-and-visual-cryptography/ However I dont have the time , money or Christopher(ine) in my life to pursue it more.
I am hopeless in calculus though. I almost always need to visualize something ( sometimes with my eyes closed). Hence my focus on Graphical User (Interfaces).
Sometimes I slur my speech
I did long distance running during my army cadet days in NDA. I hated it though

AND

I think I really like this guy to win an Oscar and will forgive the insults to Gary Oldman over the years

Microsoft acquires leading vendor of enterprise R -Revolution Analytics

The news-

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/01/revolution-acquired.html

Revolution Analytics joins Microsoft

by David Smith, Chief Community Officer

On behalf of the entire Revolution Analytics team I am excited to announce that Revolution Analytics is joining forces with Microsoft to bring R to even more enterprises. Microsoft announced today that it will acquire Revolution Analytics.

and

http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/23/microsoft-acquire-revolution-analytics-help-customers-find-big-data-value-advanced-statistical-analysis/

Microsoft to acquire Revolution Analytics to help customers find big data value with advanced statistical analysis

Posted January 23, 2015 By Joseph Sirosh – Corporate Vice President, Machine Learning, Microsoft

I’m very pleased to announce that Microsoft has reached an agreement to acquire Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provider of software and services for R, the world’s most widely used programming language for statistical computing and predictive analytics. We are making this acquisition to help more companies use the power of R and data science to unlock big data insights with advanced analytics.

——-

Detailed Note to follow, but in the meantime.

Training in R on the WeekendR in February

I have agreed to teach R on the Weekend. As a change from my usual online trainings these will be in the class. I am collaborating with http://weekendr.in/r-training.html

For an initial price the cost is Rs 5500 (~100 USD) for 8 sessions of 3 hours each in the classroom. This is only for New Delhi, India as of now.

You can review the course here http://weekendr.in/r-training.html

Movie Review – Imitation Game

This is a brilliant movie by the talented Benedict Cumberbatch playing the genius Alan Turing and his war time adventures. It is also a tribute to the injustice served by gay people by then notions of British Justice and is a dramatized version of the actual true story of the pioneers of cryptology. Alas, their legacy is now in the hands of the GCHQ and NSA to establish digital tyranny and an empire in cyber-space.

Knowing Mr Turing ‘s standards , the world suffered when he was cut down in his prime by pressures brought by official governmental machinery after they had used him through for their own ends.

Watch it and admire the father of Computer Science.

Denial of Freedom to Laugh

What is common between somebody hacking a movie studio to stop the release of a critical movie and somebody killing some cartoonists in Paris. Both are examples of terrorism (one digital, the other physical)

Both deny your freedom to laugh at silly stuff.

This is the same reason I deplore denial of service attacks on websites that are critical to your ideas ( with the possible exception of paedophiles). Terror recruiting websites should be monitored by analytics not shut down by attacks.

The difference between the good guys and the bad guys is not just the reasons they do nasty stuff, it is also in their methods.

The internet needs more freedom not more regulation. Attempts to do so shall just cause activists to create technology that bypass future web anaytics in a more damaging way that current Tor projects do.

Creation of browsers that have both bit torrents and tor embedded by default could be one such example.