Vijay Narayanan on October 17th, 2010

Google announced “Priority Inbox” a few weeks ago. Roughly this is how it works. When an email arrives, the user can flag it as important or not-so-important. Gmail will use a learning algorithm that will try to mimic the user’s classification. So when you check your email in the morning and find that it has [...]

Continue reading about GMail Priority Inbox

Vijay Narayanan on October 12th, 2010

Anne Applebaum writes in The Washington Post about the slow death of meritocracy in American politics. At one level, the use of “elite” to describe the new meritocrats simply means that the word has lost its meaning. As Jacob Weisberg points out, when Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell or — bizarrely — Justice Thomas’s wife  fling [...]

Continue reading about The new ‘elite’

Vijay Narayanan on October 11th, 2010

Despite numerous recommendations, I have not watched Vinnaithaandi Varuvaayaa. For one simple reason — Aaromale. The song is so perfect that I cannot imagine how the movie would do justice to it, let alone improve on it. I first listened to this song about ten months ago while driving through the mountains of western Pennsylvania [...]

Continue reading about Aaromale