Sometime back I came across promotions on Facebook for a new horror book called “The Mine” by Arnab Ray. For those who don’t know, Arnab writes the fabulous blog – “Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind” and has also authored the sublimely superb “May I Hebb Your Attention Pliss”.

Since Arnab or Great Bong (as he is more popularly known) usually writes humor and satire, a horror novel written by him seemed like a huge deviation from the usual fare. Besides this the general plot of the book – “Experts/ Team sent in to a remote expedition to find out what went/ is going wrong” is pretty much my favorite kind of plot. Variations of the plot have given us such superb pieces like Jurassic Park, Sphere, Deep Storm and movies like Alien. So with somewhat tempered expectations I started reading the book.

The book follows a group of experts that are assembled in a highly secret mining facility under the Thar desert. The mine has uncovered an ancient structure with some disturbing carvings, deep underground. The experts are called in to make sense of this and the many maladies afflicting the miners. As usual things go wrong shortly after and that’s when the fun starts.

The book is fairly well written and the pace picks up after the initial slow start. It builds quite nicely on the claustrophobia of being trapped several kilometers under the surface of the earth. While there are number of gory scenes in the book, regular horror fans might find them a bit pedestrian. In addition to this while there are a number of innovative twists and turns in the book, most of them seem a bit derivative (Either that or I’ve seen / read way too much in that genre). Fans of other horror series like Saw, Hostel etc may be left with a sense of deja vu. In spite of these (imagined ??) shortcomings though, the author manages to keep the plot fairly taut and interesting.

While personally I was a tad disappointed (mainly cause it had a “been there done that” kind of feel to it), I would think its an excellent stab at the horror genre. If nothing else, its a welcome relief from the legions of “Chetan Bhagat” clones that have popped up all over. Definitely worth a try.

The View from Mullyangiri

I’ve been wanting to do the Mullyangiri – Bababudangiri trek since I heard about this scenic route. I had initially planned to do this in mid-late November with some friends. However, as best laid plans go, this one kind of unravelled as the date drew near. However, when I learned that Bangalore Ascenders would be also attempting the trail (with the added incentive of trekking all the way to Kemmangundi), I quickly signed up for the trek. The weekend before the trek was spent in getting the necessary supplies (food, sleeping mats etc.) as I didn’t want to leave anything to the last minute.
Continue reading ‘Mullyangiri to Kemmangundi – A walk through heaven’ »

The Hills in Kudremukh National Park

In 2007 on my way to Kemmangundi, I happened to glance upon an oddly shaped peak. The peak resembled a horse’s face from afar and thats what it was called – Kudremukha (literally meaning “horse-face”). Sometime this year, I learned that it was possible to trek up to this peak passing through the wildlife sanctuary that the peak was situated in. So I added this peak to my list of treks to do this year and patiently waited for one of the many trekking groups to announce a trip to this peak.

Soon enough, Bangalore Ascenders announced a trek to this peak. After some confusion (and help from Girish) I finally managed to register for the trek. The meeting point this time round was Majestic, and roughly 12-13 of us gathered at the meeting spot on time. As per the plan we left Bangalore on Friday night and traveled to Kudremukh over the night.

Continue reading ‘Walking up the horse faced peak’ »

Before you think that I spent the last one month in Singapore, let me say upfront that this post is about a little big data thought experiment involving Singapore  and a whole lot of tweets.
Some time back Eric Fischer posted some amazing maps on Flickr and elsewhere on the web visualizing tweets from Twitter and Flickr. He basically plotted locations from where people tweeted and posted photos to Flickr from. The result – a beautiful map of the area which looks more like a night time view of the area from space!!
Seeing this I was inspired to try the same. Initially I thought of trying it for Indian cities, however it seems that geographic co-ordinates are hard to come by for tweets from India. So then I randomly chose Singapore for this little experiment.
I set up a small Ruby script that polled Twitter’s search API once every few minutes and pulled tweets from Singapore. These were then logged and stored onto simple text files. I ran this script for little over a month (August to September) and managed to collect about 225,000 tweets. Plotting them using R (without any projections) gave rise to this beautiful visualization.

Singapore Twitter Map

Some interesting features immediately come to light here. For instance the two huge vacant holes on the plot correspond to the two large national parks in Singapore. Concentration of tweets in other places also brings to light roads and other transportation conduits.

I also did some analysis around tweets by hour and day of week and kind of reverse geo-coded popular locations to figure out where people were tweeting from on weekends. The result of that exercise gave this interesting tag cloud

Popular Places on the weekend

I’ve put all this together in one gorgeous infographic which you can see here.
PS: Many Thanks to good pal Jayaram for helping me put the map together in R

After the last two treks, here is what I learned (which I hope to use by the next one):

1. My current bag needs to be retired. It’s no longer rigid and does not distribute load properly, which leads to the straps painfully digging into my shoulders (in spite of the padding). Might still use it, but just to carry a smaller day pack and a change of clothes.
2. Hydration packs help. Definitely will reduce the need to stop just to take a sip of water, once I get one
3. I also need a new camera bag, preferably one with an all weather cover (like the splendid Lowepro AW series). My current shoulder bag is brilliant for sight-seeing trips etc. but tends to put me off balance while trekking (not to mention the constant swinging of the bag). Also given that I generally take along just the 18-55mm lens while trekking, for now I think taking along a top loading “V-style” bag would do the trick. Should get one.
4. A trekking pole will definitely help. Need to get one to take the pressure off the knees while climbing down steep sections.
5. While trekking down in the dark, realised the utility of a head lamp. A head lamp definitely helps keep the hands free while climbing down.
6. A leech bite ain’t the worse thing, it’s the aftermath that is. The bite keeps oozing blood for hours thanks to anti-coagulant in the leech saliva. Messes up clothes, socks and everything. Need to figure out someway to counteract this.
7. And the bite itches like crazy while healing. Calamine lotion helps.
8. “Moov” spray (heat rub spray) is surprisingly effective in getting rid of climbing leeches. Must be the eucalyptus oil and other herbs in it, or the propellant used in the spray. Spraying shoes with “Moov” before trekking into leech infested areas (and re-spraying frequently) seems to deter leeches from climbing onto the shoes.
9. Need to figure out an effective way to pull out an attached leech. Read a lot of contradicting advice on the net, so still not sure if popping the leech’s sucker is a good idea or just using salt/ “Moov”.
10. Need to find me a pair of Anti-Leech Socks. (If anyone knows where I can find one in Bangalore, please let me know)
11. It’s possible to wash away blood stains almost completely with just a detergent soak and a hand wash.
12. Action Trekkers are by far the most brilliant (and need I say cheapest) trekking shoes I’ve used to date. Excellent grip on all surfaces and not too heavy and relatively leech proof to boot as well (hardly any leeches got into my shoes).

Taking a break at Kumara Parvatha

After the last quick day trek, I felt it was time to try something a bit longer. Luckily for me, Bangalore Mountaineering Club (BMC) was organizing a trek to Kumara Parvatha. Since this was a two day trek, the plan was to leave on Friday night. As usual, I joined up at my Domlur pick up point. This time round there were around 25 odd people on the trek. We started pretty much on time, for which I was glad, because it started pouring soon after. Thanks to the rains, two of our fellow adventurers who were to come from Mysore, had a mini-trek of their own before we picked them up. Finally at about midnight we left Bangalore.

But before I get into the rest of the story, here is a bit about the mountain. Kumara Parvatha is a mountain that is about 13-15 Km away from the town of Subramanya, which is about 230 km from Bangalore. Subramanya is situated at the foothills of western ghats in Dakshin Kannad district, famous for the Kukke Subramanya temple. Kumara Parvatha is considered (arguably, and I’ll come to that a bit later) by many to be one of the more strenuous treks in Karnataka. The mountain stands at about a height of 1732m and is one of the tallest peaks in the region. The mountain is situated in the Pushpagiri wildlife sanctuary and to trek there one needs to take permission from the forest department.

Continue reading ‘Trekking to Kumara Parvatha’ »

Maribetta

It’s been about six months since I last hit the trekking trail and I thought it was high time I got started again. Bangalore Mountaineering Club (BMC) was organizing a trek to a little known hill called Maribetta near Kanakpura, and I thought I’d join in. So last minute plans were made, bags dusted, camera charged and off I went at the crack of dawn.
I met up with the rest of my little group at the usual spot at Domlur. For a change we made fairly good progress and actually reached the start of the trail a good hour before time. There we hired a few locals to guide us to the top, made pals with the mandatory dog and set off to climb Maribetta.
My first thought on seeing the hill was – That’s not all that tall, shouldn’t take too long to climb. Little did I know how wrong I’d be.
We soon hit the trail that went over a small hill. It was all good until we crossed it and it was only after that did we realize why the organizer’s had asked people to wear full sleeves shirts. The rest of the trail weaved through forest, with thorny bushes on either side!!
The trail that we took, went kind of round the main hill and up a smaller one. From there the idea was to take the connecting ridge all the way to the top.
In spite of the thorns, we made good progress and were almost all the way to the top pretty soon. But that was almost because we soon hit a pretty steep section of rock. From then on for the next hundred odd meters it was climbing up on all fours to reach the top of the section. After that bit the going was easy and we soon reached the top of the hill.

View from the top

The view from the top of the hill was breathtaking, with clear views for miles around the hill.
We had a quick lunch and spent some time admiring the view from the top. While we had aimed at staying for a few hours at the summit, the sharp afternoon sun and lack of shelter forced us to begin the trip back much earlier than planned. Since we wanted to climb down the hill as soon as possible, our guides decided to take us down another route.
Initially the route seemed fine and went through some forest patches, but pretty soon it became quite steep. At one point we were actually climbing down a steep (60 degree ?) rock face, literally sliding down !!! The journey down took it’s toll on us – torn bags, scuffed/torn pants were the order of the day. Oh and somewhere along the way, we all ran out of water.
We eventually made it down and rushed to our transport and made a beeline for the nearest place where we could get some water. Our thirst satiated, we made our way back to Bangalore reaching back in the late evening. Overall, it was quite a decent trek and a great way to get back to trekking.

I’ve been fascinated by the world of algorithmic trading, portfolio selection and the general use of computers and technology to make trading and investment decisions. Of late, I’ve also been dabbling with markets, and while my stock picking has been fairly decent – there have been some huge lemons picked up along the way as well. So I wondered if there was a way to systematically invest and diversify away the risk using historical data and trends.

Of course, investing in a  good mutual fund through a Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) is a no-brainer and I believe the corner stone of every portfolio (especially if you do not have the time to micro-manage your portfolio) should start there. However, I also believe it’s possible to augment returns from mutual funds through investing in stocks directly or through derivatives.

Which brings me back to the fundamental question – is there a fairly “sound” system for getting into the stock market and exiting profitably? From the little I know about the field, most academic research has been done in the “value investing” school of thought i.e. investing in stocks that are trading at less than their intrinsic values.

So I decided to investigate this further by building a “paper” portfolio of value stocks. I chose Benjamin Graham’s Net Current Asset Value (NCAV) per share as the criterion to filter stocks.  The NCAV per share is calculated as per the formula below:

What the NCAV per share effectively indicates, is a “realistic” cash value that may be available to the shareholder once all liabilities have been met.  Graham recommends buying stock that trades at approximately 67% or less of the NCAV per share. A study by the State University of New York has shown that investors could have earned an average return of 29.4% over a 20 year period, by picking stocks by this method and holding them for a year.
Once the filter criterion was decided on, I needed a universe of stocks to choose from. For the universe of stocks to choose from, I restricted myself to the stocks that compose the BSE SMALL CAP index (which also served as my benchmark). I then ran a series of scripts that I wrote in Ruby to pull the data needed to calculate NCAV from Yahoo Finance. Once I had all the data in a spreadsheet, I calculated the NCAV for all the stocks.
While Graham recommends only picking up stocks that trade at values significantly below their NCAV, I chose to go with stocks that were trading at prices that were at the NCAV or below it. Using this filter, I got a portfolio of about 17 stocks. The next step in my opinion should have been either of the following:

• Use the Markowitz optimum portfolio theory and allocate a fixed amount of capital among the stocks chosen so as to minimize portfolio risk OR
• Do further fundamental analysis (which most investment “gurus” recommend) and pick only those that are “fundamentally” strong

However, since I was pressed for time – I took the easy way out.

I just created a “paper” portfolio containing 100 shares of each stock. Slightly “unscientific” I know, but bear with me.
So with this small little NCAV portfolio – I began tracking the performance of the portfolio. And the results have been interesting, to say the least.

NCAV Portfolio Performance

The portfolio has significantly outperformed the benchmark over the last month. The returns from the benchmark BSE SMALL CAP index have been about -2.14% while the portfolio has returned about +9.09%.
While I agree that the time period is probably a bit short for significant analysis, I think the results warrant further investigation. Over the next few months, I will actively monitor my little test portfolio and update this blog. Lets see how it goes.

Google+ seems to have made a “splash” with the initial crazy insane response. However, thanks to Google’s measured response to sending out new invites, this seems to be slowing dying out. Both search and news volume trends for Google+ seem to be heading downwards. It seems to me that Google still hasn’t learned lessons from the Wave debacle – strike while the iron’s hot. Though whether this will sink the fledgling social network or not is something that time will tell…

I have been fascinated with Infographics of late, and decided to take a shot at creating my very own Infographic. The result is a short look at current e-book costs and revenue statistics for firms that sell e-books.

A few things about the data used in the Infographic:

• The average cost of an e-book today, was determined using the average cost of the Kindle editions of the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list.
• The 10 year average e-book price was computed by looking at the price of e-books on the bestsellers list at ebooks.com over the last 10 years
• The “payback” period was determined by using the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list. The average price of a hardcover on that list was $27.68
• The average price of both e-readers and tablets was based on the average cost of devices announced this year
• The graph shows the average cost of e-ink based e-readers only and does not take into account other devices like tablets.

Here is a couple of things I discovered while researching data for this Infographic:

• The average cost of e-books has been pretty much steady. As such $10.00 and below seems to be a sustainable market clearing price for e-books
• Selling e-books and digital content is highly profitable for publishers. Their profit share is much higher for e-books. Some publishers such as Simon & Schuster have posted record earnings in 2011 on the back of blistering growth in the digital segment. They reported almost double the revenue over the previous quarter. Part of this growth was attributed to  “lower shipping, production and returns costs”. Print sales fell across the board. All this leads me to believe that:
  • the benefits publishers gain by not having to print physical books is far more than they would like us to believe
  • there is still enormous scope for further reduction in prices of e-books or even scope for a new business model
• The sharp fall in e-reader prices over the last three odd years has resulted in sharp increases in overall sales. The data further lends credence to the theory that once e-reader price levels fall to below $100, the mass-adoption that will follow will give a huge boost to online e-book sales.