Tag: greatest

Muhammad Ali is The Greatest in boxing and abundance of unique traits

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The Greatest was a name that Muhammad Ali gave to himself back in the days when he was a youthful and arrogant boxing world champion. Over the years he mellowed and matured as a human being but the people continued to call him The Greatest. They accepted the fact that there was nobody like him because he had several unique qualities that he had displayed both inside and outside the boxing ring.
For one thing, he was a man of great courage. That is not unusual because every boxer has to have courage. But Ali’s courage went far beyond the confines of a boxing ring. Imagine how much guts it needed for any man to take on the world’s most powerful government and openly say that he disagreed with the government’s policies. Very few sportsmen can do it. These words and this attitude coming from a black man made the whites furious. The US government too was determined to use its muscle against this rebellious black sportsman.
The US administration manipulated the rules and saw to it that Ali was stripped of his boxing title and sent to jail. But Ali refused to bow down before this tyranny. For five years he fought a lonely battle in the courts before finally winning his bout. Like he had knocked out his boxing rivals, he also knocked out the government of the USA. Then he climbed back into the ring to reclaim the crown that they had taken away from him.

His daughter Hana Ali has written a book wherein she has portrayed a side of the champ that was never visible to the public eye. What was Ali like a father and a husband?
She writes that Ali had a sweet tooth and would often come home with a huge bag of sweets. Popsicles were his favourites. He and his children would devour these sweets in no time. It was only when he had a competition coming up that Ali would force himself to live without sweets. Two or three months before the competition, he would stop eating sweets as he went into practice mode.
Ali was a very popular person and had a huge number of friends who would often drop in at his house. Many of them were well-known Hollywood celebrities. They included actors John Travolta, Sylvester Stallone, Clint Eastwood, Will Smith, singers Kris Kristofferson and Lionel Richie, and many others. There was not even a single day when Ali’s home did not have a visitor.
On top of that Ali would make new friends almost every day. As a way to pass the time, he would take the telephone directory and call any random number listed there. The person at the other end would pick up the phone and Ali would wish him good morning. The other person would be surprised and ask who was calling. To which Ali would reply that he was the world champion!
The other man wouldn’t believe it until Ali began reciting his rhymes in his well-known voice. He would convince the man that it was indeed Ali. It would be a telephone call that the unknown person would remember all his life. No wonder then that Ali was loved ardently by people from all classes. People in distant corners of the globe may not know who the President of the USA or Russia was, but they knew who Muhammad Ali was.

Once, when he was a young and proud man, he was traveling on a flight but he refused to wear a seat belt. When the air hostess instructed him to do so, he replied: “Superman doesn’t need a seat belt.” She retorted: “The real Superman doesn’t need an airplane to fly.” That quick repartee brought Ali to his senses and he quietly buckled on the belt.
Ali visited India twice. On one occasion he was invited to give away awards at a Bollywood function. He met Amitabh Bachchan, Rekha and several actors and directors.
Another time he made a trip to India and met Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. He has already heard about the Indian Prime Minister and was her admirer. He told her: “You are the Greatest.” He also took the liberty of hugging her and planting a loud kiss on her cheek. Mrs. Gandhi was unused to such impetuous greetings and she blushed deeply. But she managed to retain her smile and welcomed the champ to India.
But in later life, the dreaded Parkinson’s disease fastened Ali in its deadly grasp. This proved to be a fight that Ali could not win. He eventually succumbed on 3rd June 2016. His daughter has described the circumstances of his passing. “Daddy went to sleep in the afternoon like he always did. But at some point, his stressed-out organs began to fail and thereafter he awoke in heaven.”
After he passed away, the Janazah (the last prayer of a departed soul on earth) congregation was attended by several VIPs including Turkish President Erdogan. Politicians such as Barack Obama, Hilary and Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron all paid rich tributes. His numerous fans and friends including Hollywood actor Will Smith, boxers Lennox Lewis, Larry Holmes and Mike Tyson laid him to rest. Ali’s memorial was watched by an estimated 1 billion television viewers worldwide. It was truly the end of a glorious era.
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#Muhammad #Ali #Greatest #boxing #abundance #unique #traits
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

May 9, 2023
ChatGPT’s greatest win might just be its ability to make us think it is honest

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Toronto: In American writer Mark Twain’s autobiography, he quotes or perhaps misquotes former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as saying: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
In a marvellous leap forward, artificial intelligence combines all three in a tidy little package.
ChatGPT, and other generative AI chatbots like it, are trained on vast datasets from across the internet to produce the statistically most likely response to a prompt. Its answers are not based on any understanding of what makes something funny, meaningful or accurate, but rather, the phrasing, spelling, grammar and even style of other webpages.

It presents its responses through what’s called a “conversational interface”: it remembers what a user has said, and can have a conversation using context cues and clever gambits. It’s statistical pastiche plus statistical panache, and that’s where the trouble lies.
Unthinking, but convincing
When I talk to another human, it cues a lifetime of my experience in dealing with other people. So when a programme speaks like a person, it is very hard to not react as if one is engaging in an actual conversation taking something in, thinking about it, responding in the context of both of our ideas.
Yet, that’s not at all what is happening with an AI interlocutor. They cannot think and they do not have understanding or comprehension of any sort.
Presenting information to us as a human does, in conversation, makes AI more convincing than it should be. Software is pretending to be more reliable than it is, because it’s using human tricks of rhetoric to fake trustworthiness, competence and understanding far beyond its capabilities.

There are two issues here: is the output correct; and do people think that the output is correct?
The interface side of the software is promising more than the algorithm-side can deliver on, and the developers know it. Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, admits that “ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.”
That still hasn’t stopped a stampede of companies rushing to integrate the early-stage tool into their user-facing products (including Microsoft’s Bing search), in an effort not to be left out.
Fact and fiction
Sometimes the AI is going to be wrong, but the conversational interface produces outputs with the same confidence and polish as when it is correct. For example, as science-fiction writer Ted Chiang points out, the tool makes errors when doing addition with larger numbers, because it doesn’t actually have any logic for doing math.
It simply pattern-matches examples seen on the web that involve addition. And while it might find examples for more common math questions, it just hasn’t seen training text involving larger numbers.
It doesn’t “know’ the math rules a 10-year-old would be able to explicitly use. Yet the conversational interface presents its response as certain, no matter how wrong it is, as reflected in this exchange with ChatGPT.
User: What’s the capital of Malaysia?
ChatGPT: The capital of Malaysia is Kuala Lampur.
User: What is 27 * 7338?
ChatGPT: 27 * 7338 is 200,526.
It’s not.
Generative AI can blend actual facts with made-up ones in a biography of a public figure, or cite plausible scientific references for papers that were never written.
That makes sense: statistically, webpages note that famous people have often won awards, and papers usually have references. ChatGPT is just doing what it was built to do, and assembling content that could be likely, regardless of whether it’s true.
Computer scientists refer to this as AI hallucination. The rest of us might call it lying.
Intimidating outputs
When I teach my design students, I talk about the importance of matching output to the process. If an idea is at the conceptual stage, it shouldn’t be presented in a manner that makes it look more polished than it actually is they shouldn’t render it in 3D or print it on glossy cardstock. A pencil sketch makes clear that the idea is preliminary, easy to change and shouldn’t be expected to address every part of a problem.
The same thing is true of conversational interfaces: when tech “speaks” to us in well-crafted, grammatically correct or chatty tones, we tend to interpret it as having much more thoughtfulness and reasoning than is actually present. It’s a trick a con-artist should use, not a computer.
AI developers have a responsibility to manage user expectations, because we may already be primed to believe whatever the machine says. Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg describes a type of “algebraic intimidation” that can overwhelm our better judgement just by claiming there’s math involved.
AI, with hundreds of billions of parameters, can disarm us with a similar algorithmic intimidation.
While we’re making the algorithms produce better and better content, we need to make sure the interface itself doesn’t over-promise. Conversations in the tech world are already filled with overconfidence and arrogance maybe AI can have a little humility instead.
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#ChatGPTs #greatest #win #ability #honest
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

April 8, 2023
The Strokes’ 20 greatest songs – ranked!

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20. Meet Me in the Bathroom (2003)
The Strokes rushed their second album, Room on Fire, in the belief that their initial success would soon be over. The result frequently boasted song titles that were better than the songs – such as You Talk Way Too Much, but Meet Me in the Bathroom’s cocktail of lyrical ennui and a suitably wearier take on the sound of Is This It clicks perfectly.
19. Drag Queen (2016)
One of the more satisfying results of the group’s quest for a different musical direction, Drag Queen sounds like a homage to New Order, topped off with vocals that suddenly, and entirely unexpectedly, go into warped Auto-Tune overdrive even as they are delivering a despairing political message.
18. Machu Picchu (2011)

Angles, the band’s fourth album, was the Strokes’ nadir: an album that sounded as if it were made by people who really didn’t want to make an album but had been herded into the studio at gunpoint. Still, it has scattered highlights: Machu Picchu’s interweaving, slightly reggae-influenced guitars have a buoyancy noticeable by its absence elsewhere.
17. Under Cover of Darkness (2011)
The Strokes: Under Cover of Darkness – video
The making of Angles was fraught, but Under Cover Of Darkness sounds like a genuine group effort, highlighting Albert Hammond Jr and Nick Valensi’s guitar interplay: they come up with unexpected little fills that drive the song along, while the brief solo is a lovely miniature take on Thin Lizzy’s harmonic twin guitar sound.
16. Not the Same Anymore (2020)
The curiously appealing sound of an older, smarter Strokes, wiser through bitter experience: “I didn’t know, I didn’t care … I fucked up,” sings Julian Casablancas, sounding as if he knows of what he speaks, “I couldn’t change, it’s too late”. The music fits perfectly, recasting their trademark approach to evoke melancholy.
15. Barely Legal (2001)
Casablancas later claimed Barely Legal made him “cringe”. But even if you wouldn’t use that title for a song in 2023, its depiction of a sleazy older man hitting on a teenager is grimly realistic, and lent a certain frisson by Casablancas’s model agent father’s documented penchant for teenage partners. It has super-tight guitars and an explosive chorus, too.
14. Juicebox (2005)
Chastened by the lukewarm response to their hurried second album, the Strokes clearly threw themselves into its successor: as a result, First Impressions of Earth was unwieldy. But Juicebox is a moment when its overstuffed approach works: pivoting away from a Peter Gunn-inspired bassline, its melody shoots off in unexpected directions.
13. Reptilia (2003)
The Strokes: Reptilia – video
In retrospect, the fact that the biggest track from the Strokes’ second album could have fitted perfectly on to their debut was a sign of trouble to come: a worrying suggestion that they might have already said all they had to say. That said, Reptilia is fantastic: urgent staccato guitars darting around a raw-throated vocal.
12. Ask Me Anything (2006)
In the middle of First Impressions of Earth, a song unlike anything the Strokes had tried before: there is nothing but a distorted Mellotron, a light dusting of strings and Casablancas’s vocal, dolefully insisting: “I’ve got nothing to say.” It sounds surprisingly like a less arch Magnetic Fields: sad but very pretty.
11. 12:51 (2003)
The Strokes: 12:51 – video
After Is This It, the degree of anticipation surrounding the band was, in some quarters at least, demented: the NME ran a news story when they played a solitary new song live. But their first post-Is This It single – poppier, catchier, synthier than before – suggested all would be fine. Erroneously, as it turned out.
10. The Modern Age (2001)
In 2001, the Strokes’ debut single sounded very direct and exciting: the point its tense opening minute gives way to the chorus – via Casablancas’s repeated cry of “go!” – suggested a band offering a kind of poise and cool that was in markedly short supply in the post-Britpop era.
9. Eternal Summer (2020)
On The New Abnormal, the Strokes finally did the thing most people had long given up on them doing: released a consistent album that reshaped their sound but retained their essence. Its pleasures are summed up by the lengthy Eternal Summer, layered with electronics and angsty falsetto vocals: fresh and fantastic.
The Strokes pictured in 2020 (from left): Nick Valensi, Julian Casablancas, Fabrizio Moretti, Albert Hammond Jr and Nikolai Fraiture. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian
8. Hard to Explain (2001)
On arrival, the Stokes understood the power of leaving audiences wanting more: short sets, no encores, a debut album that barely lasted half an hour. Hard to Explain, meanwhile, careers along, soaring vocals over metronomic drums, then – as you are anticipating a big finish – stops dead with a kind of implicit shrug.
7. Under Control (2003)
A lot of the best moments on Room on Fire were essentially an Is This It redux, but Under Control took the group into noticeably new territory: a languid, sad and rather beautiful breakup song, which allowed Casablancas, who always acknowledged his love of Frank Sinatra, to fully unleash his inner crooner.
The Strokes’ 20 greatest songs – ranked! Spotify
6. All the Time (2013)
Comedown Machine was another Strokes album that, as Casablancas delicately put it, suffered “some grey areas on control and quality”: the band declined to tour or promote it. But All the Time is the exception that proves the rule. It’s just a great song: concise, sharp, powerful yet poppy.
5. The Adults Are Talking (2020)
One striking thing about The New Abnormal was how contemporary it made The Strokes sound, 22 years into their career, a point proven when its fast-paced but marvellously understated opening track went viral on TikTok, adopted by users too young to have witnessed Last Nite or Is This It first-hand.
4. You Only Live Once (2006)
The Strokes: You Only Live Once – video
The highlight of First Impressions of Earth was its opening track, which super-sized the Strokes’ choppy, trebly sound into something that could – conceivably – fill arenas. That it didn’t is no reflection on the quality of the song, which might be the best thing the band recorded in their troubled middle years.
3. New York City Cops (2001)
Not really about policemen but an ill-advised one-night stand, New York City Cops is the Strokes at their most attitude-laden and snotty: “Kill me now ’cause I let you down,” Casablancas sneers. The brief drum break is fantastic, the gripping bursts of wiry lead guitar a nod to Television.
2. Someday (2001)
Someday seemed to encapsulate the Strokes’ early insouciance: an accusation of “lacking in depth” is breezily dismissed by a narrator who apparently doesn’t “have to try so hard”. The loosely strummed guitars and a killer melody only amp up the sense that it was all appealingly effortless.
1. Last Nite (2001)
The Strokes: Last Nite – video
Sometimes, a band’s most famous track is unrepresentative, but sometimes it perfectly encapsulates their appeal. The latter is true of Last Nite: frantic downstrokes on trebly guitars, roaring vocal, New York brashness to spare. It’s also a more complex song than its indie-disco anthem status might suggest, the lyric – in which the narrator responds to their partner’s expression of unhappiness by turning around and walking out with a parting “I don’t care” – is completely at odds with the messy joyousness of the music, which sounds like a party in the process of getting out of hand.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

February 16, 2023
Lord Krishna, Hanuman greatest diplomats of world: EAM Jaishankar

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Pune: External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has said Lord Krishna and Lord Hanuman were the greatest diplomats of the world.
He was speaking on Saturday while interacting with the audience in Maharashtra’s Pune city in a question-answer session during the launch of ‘Bharat Marg’, the Marathi translation of his book ‘The India Way’.
Jaishankar said, “Lord Shri Krishna and Lord Hanuman were the greatest diplomats of the world. I am saying this very seriously.”
If one looks at them in the perspective of diplomacy, what situation they were in, what mission was given to them, how they had handled the situation, he said.
“Hanumanji, he had gone ahead of the mission, he had contacted Goddess Sita, burnt Lanka…he was a multi-purpose diplomat,” Jaishankar said.
The minister said for the world’s 10 big strategic concepts pertaining to international relations in today’s discourse, he could give an equivalent for every concept from the epic Mahabharat.
“If you say today it is a multi-polar world, at that time what was happening in Kurukshetra (the site of the battle of Mahabharat), that was multi-polar Bharat, where there were different rajya (kingdoms), they were told ‘you are with them, you are with me’…a couple of them were non-aligned…like Balram and Rukma.”
He said now people say it is a globalised world, there is interdependence, there is constraint.

“What was Arjuna’s dilemma, it was constraint, that he was emotionally interdependent…that how do I fight against my relatives. That was not material interdependence, but it was emotional interdependence,” he said.
“We sometimes say Pakistan did this or that, and we will show strategic patience. The best example of strategic patience is the way Lord Krishna handled Shishupal. He (Lord Krishna) forgave him 100 times,” he said.
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#Lord #Krishna #Hanuman #greatest #diplomats #world #EAM #Jaishankar
( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

January 29, 2023
From the Byrds to CPR: David Crosby’s 10 greatest recordings

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The Byrds – Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) (1965)
The Byrds: Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season) – video
Crosby co-founded the Byrds, cementing his place as a major architect of the 1960s folk-rock movement. The title track of the California group’s second LP – a Pete Seeger cover with lyrics largely plucked from the Book of Ecclesiastes – pleads for peace while meditating on the sometimes bittersweet cyclical nature of life. The song also shows off Crosby’s gift for musical subtlety: He starts the song with elegiac guitar marked by precise rhythmic movements and then demonstrates an almost supernatural ability to sing with his bandmates, finding the harmonic sweet spot like a magnet clicking into place.
The Byrds – Eight Miles High (1966)
The Byrds: Eight Miles High – video
In addition to transforming rock’n’roll by incorporating country and folk music, the Byrds released one of psychedelic rock’s greatest singles, Eight Miles High. Crosby co-wrote the song with Gene Clark and Roger McGuinn; depending on who you ask, the song was either inspired by the band’s first aeroplane ride or by taking drugs. Musically, however, Eight Miles High absorbed influences from John Coltrane and Ravi Shankar, creating a fusion of smouldering guitar jangle and jazz verve that suited Crosby’s rhythmic inventiveness. The Byrds’ vocal harmonies sound like those of a haunted church choir and tap into the disorientation and paranoia simmering just below the song’s surface.
The Byrds – Lady Friend (1967)

The Byrds: Lady Friend – video
One of Crosby’s final major contributions to the Byrds was penning the standalone single Lady Friend, a sorely underrated psychedelic pop gem. A song about steeling yourself for the solitude of a painful breakup – Crosby compares it to being overcome by a wave while being far offshore – it reveals his knack for vulnerable lyrics and memorable melodies. To this simple foundation the rest of the Byrds add coppery guitar riffs, jaunty horns and a chipper tempo, transforming something plaintive and vulnerable into a resilient song about keeping a stiff upper lip.
Crosby, Stills & Nash – Wooden Ships (1969)
Crosby, Stills & Nash: Wooden Ships – video
Two significant things Crosby did after being ousted from the Byrds: bought a schooner called the Mayan and started hanging out with Stephen Stills. On one occasion, the two men and Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner were in Florida on the boat and worked up Wooden Ships. The sprawling psychedelic rocker, a pointed anti-war song, describes the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse, where survivors are attempting to figure out where to go. Crosby’s liquid tenor takes centre stage on his solo verses, as if he’s a sage-like narrator describing the scene. However, his vocal harmonies with Stills set the blueprint for the greatness of Crosby, Stills & Nash.
Crosby, Stills & Nash – Guinnevere (1969)
Crosby, Stills & Nash: Guinnevere – video
Crosby contributed this elegant folk-rock highlight of Crosby, Stills & Nash’s self-titled 1969 debut album. Written about a trio of women in his life – Joni Mitchell; his late girlfriend Christine Hinton, who died in a car crash; and a mystery woman he declined to name during a 2008 Rolling Stone interview – Guinnevere demonstrates Crosby’s evolution into a more sophisticated songwriter. Lyrically, the interlocking stories of the three women contain moments of immense beauty and bewitching mystery. Musically, Crosby treats this narration with reverence, employing a restrained vocal delivery that matches the gorgeous, chiming guitar chords and harmonies.
John Sebastian, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell and David Crosby perform during the Big Sur folk festival in September 1969. Photograph: Robert Altman/Getty Images
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Ohio (1970)
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Ohio – video
Written by Neil Young after the shootings of four Kent State University students by the Ohio National Guard, the song was a pointed, angry indictment of not just the violent event, but also the Vietnam war and those abusing positions of power. Crosby especially expressed the anger and frustration of the time, crying out “How many more?” and “Why?” as the song comes to an end. He never lost that anguished feeling: in the years leading up to the pandemic, Crosby performed Ohio as the last song of his live sets, a stark reminder that neither the tragic event nor the lives of the students should be forgotten.
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Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young – Déjà Vu (1970)
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: Déjà Vu – video
The title track of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s second album is lyrically quite literal – Crosby said he wrote it after a sailing trip that felt over familiar. Déjà Vu’s music matches this disorienting thought: It’s circuitous and adventurous, with multiple movements that dabble in scat-singing, dizzying syncopation, temperate jazz, pastoral folk and psychedelia-tinged rock.
David Crosby – Laughing (1971)
David Crosby: Laughing – video
Crosby was dealing with dual traumas while making his 1971 solo album, If I Could Only Remember My Name: processing the breakup of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and navigating the grief from Hinton’s 1969 death. He wrote Laughing, however, to express gentle scepticism about George Harrison talking up the wisdom of a guru. “A child laughing in the sun knows more about God than I do,” he told Rolling Stone in 2021. The accompanying music is languid and introspective, internalising the guiding influence of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia (an integral part of the recording sessions) and a gentle psychedelic vibe.
CPR – Morrison (1998)
CPR: Morrison – video
Crosby’s career took him in all sorts of unexpected directions in the 80s and 90s, including singing backup for Indigo Girls and Phil Collins and forming the jazz trio Crosby, Pevar & Raymond. Known as CPR, the group included guitarist Jeff Pevar and Crosby’s son, the keyboardist James Raymond. The sleek, piano-driven tune Morrison isn’t about Crosby’s notorious dislike of the Doors, but the perceptive song stresses that Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie about the band didn’t match up with the Jim Morrison that Crosby knew – and serves as a sober cautionary tale about fame and legacy.
David Crosby – Rodriguez for a Night (2021)
David Crosby: Rodriguez for a Night – video
Crosby enjoyed a late-career burst of creativity, releasing multiple solo records in the 2010s and beyond that found him collaborating with Michael McDonald, the members of Snarky Puppy, and one of his avowed favourites: Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen. The latter wrote the lyrics for Rodriguez for a Night, about a man who can’t compete romantically with an impish Lothario. In turn, Crosby and his band cook up a very funky, very Steely Dan-esque song with sax, horns, stacks of keyboards and one of Croz’s smoothest, most enthusiastic vocal performances.
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#Byrds #CPR #David #Crosbys #greatest #recordings
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 20, 2023