Lets keep it simple stupid!

The 52 weeks – 52 books challenge

Karthik — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 07:10:49 +0000

I have always found it hard to write on the blog. I find business writing and communication so much easier. I attribute this to lack of practice. I have never written anything, just for the fun of it. The other issue that I have with writing a blogpost, is not being sure who the audience is. It’s like standing on the stage giving a talk, in front of complete darkness. You are not sure who the audience is. Well, you do know there are family and friends among them, but they more or less know about your views. The darkness could work for someone who has stage fright ( I am not sure of this), but as a speaker I would love to see my audience reaction when I speak. For me, the person on the stage derives his energy from the reaction of the audience. Whether it’s a public speaker, performer, artist doesn’t really matter.

Now comes the next interesting aspect, your audience gets generated over a period of time. It’s like you start performing and the audience slowly starts building up depending on the quality of performance, which would then encourage you to perform better. So it’s an interesting chicken-and-egg kind of situation. A person like me needs to understand the audience to be able to act and react, but the audience will come in only over a period of time. The only way to get out of this is to keep writing for the love of it. And according to some of my friends who are prolific bloggers, apparently this is some sort of an acquired taste. You initially you keep pushing yourself to write, you are not satisfied by your initial work, but you keep writing, and in the end you find you can’t stop it.

I am pretty sure that to start on the path of being a good writer, one has to start writing and keep writing. But how does one write without knowing the audience? For e.g. I love math and music, and love the fact that there are commonalities between the two, which one starts learning when he dives in deeper into the two oceans. But what do I write about? Do I write about what differentiates music from noise, and derive some sort of an analogy to mathematical functions? Do I talk about intonation and number theory? Or do I talk about the various genres about music and how could we try and represent them mathematically? Or do I compare western classical to Carnatic, and do an analogous comparison of the mathematical styles of the two regions? Or do I talk about the wonderful music of Mozart and the soc-called “Mozart effect” ( or maybe a “Subbulakshmi effect” and the south Indian tradition of teaching carnatic music to kids)? Or could there be a Beethoven algorithm? Or the psychological comparison many have drawn between math and music? The fact is there is so much to talk about and share in just one topic, and the a possibilities start flooding one’s mind before even starting to write on the topic. The solution to this could be to take a small topic and write on it first, but I find it very difficult without understanding the audience (and their existing knowledge & interest on the topic).

So, dear reader, I am in a dilemma. My blogging muscle is pretty weak, and I need constant practice to strengthen this muscle. The good thing is my reading muscle is much better, and could aid in the process. So I have thought of an unique challenge to solve the problem. Read 52 books in the next 52 weeks over the year, and express my thoughts on each book. The audience would be the “future Karthik”. The idea is pretty simple, anyone who has read the awesome “Calvin and Hobbes” in their early teens, late teens and twenties, would have related to the book in a different manner, and would have had different thoughts on it. While growing up I though socialism was a great idea, when I went to college and learnt the economic theories, I realized the flaws in the socialistic way of doing things. Getting into real life, I realized the issues with capitalism (or rather the way it’s being practiced) and the economic theories that support capitalism (or rather the flawed economic policies of capitalistic countries). This led to a deeper understanding that economics is an evolving area, without a straight right or wrong.

Anyways let’s get back to the books, even though non-fiction would be preferred, I want to start reading fiction as well. The books have to be across topics. So here’s the list of some books that I would love to read in the next one year:

Surely You’re Joking, Mr.Feynman! – Richard Feynman
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Stranger – Albert Camus
1984 – George Orwell
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
GEB ( Godel, Escher, Bach ) – Douglas Hofstadter
A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
A History of Mathematics – Carl Boyer
A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking
The Elegant Universe – Brian Greene
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse
The Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D.Salinger
Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts
The Lord of the Rings (Trilogy) – J.R.R. Tolkien

That makes it 22! I would love to read some of the Hindi Classics as well, especially the ones by Munshi Premchand

23. Gaban
24. Godaan
25. Vardaan
26. His awesome short stories – I am sure there will be a book which contains some of the popular short stories written by Premchand

I guess the above list would be a good starting point. I can keep adding to the list, whenever I get a good recommendation ( Foundation series by Isaac Asimov?) .

That would be the end of an annoyingly long post, thanks for reading. Yes Mr. Feynman, I will be right there…

This is a test post using MS Word 2007

Karthik — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 04:12:29 +0000

Hi There,

Just testing out MS Word 2007 to publish on my blog. My blog url is:

http://letskiss.wordpress.com

And I love this pic from New Zealand:

AT&T Vs 4chan

Karthik — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:25:50 +0000

AT&T apparently is getting into the business of telling people what they can/can’t do on the internet. They have blocked some the site’s popular message boards (including /b/) in certain parts of US. Apart from the act being absolutely ridiculous, they have picked up the wrong guy.

The lines are drawn. Very excited about it, I hope AT&T doesn’t back out, More on this at:

Techcrunch

Project AT&T

Bill Gates puts Feyman Lectures Online

Karthik — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:15:47 +0000

Readers of this blog ( handful I know ) would invariably be big fans of Richard Feynman, so this might be something of interest to them, if they didn’t know it already (its a bit old news):

IE Vs Firefox – Microsoft getting desperate?

Karthik — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 03:07:29 +0000

I have been using Firefox for years now, and I absolutely love it! Plug-ins, addons, Greasemonkey etc. help you really customize your browsing experience. If you haven’t tried it out yet. here’s the link:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

Strongly recommend the browser, do give it a try if you haven’t already.

Anyways, Microsoft seems to be getting desperate in the browser war, they better be because I can do so much with my Firefox browser, which might seem like a far fetched dream with IE.

The most abused business term of this decade

Karthik — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:36:43 +0000

Innovation!

There is too much talk about innovation all around the place, but no action!

Mathematical Ideas should not be patented – Donald Knuth

Karthik — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 05:18:27 +0000

Donald Knuth, a distinguished computer scientist from Standford, and the author of “The art of programming” has submitted a letter to the European Patent office, questioning the act of granting patents to non-mathematical algorithms

Some snippets from Groklaw

I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and nonmathematical algorithms. To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be.

Some more interesting ones from an earlier letter,

Nor is it possible to distinguish between “numerical” and “nonnumerical” algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information. All data are numbers, and all numbers are data. Mathematicians work much more with symbolic entities than with numbers.
Therefore the idea of passing laws that say some kinds of algorithms belong to mathematics and some do not strikes me as absurd as the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416. It’s like the medieval church ruling that the sun revolves about the earth. Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.

Congress wisely decided long ago that mathematical things cannot be patented. Surely nobody could apply mathematics if it were necessary to pay a license fee whenever the theorem of Pythagoras is employed. The basic algorithmic ideas that people are now rushing to patent are so fundamental, the result threatens to be like what would happen if we allowed authors to have patents on individual words and concepts. Novelists or journalists would be unable to write stories unless their publishers had permission from the owners of the words. Algorithms are exactly as basic to software as words are to writers, because they are the fundamental building blocks needed to make interesting products.

I am not sure, where I lie in the patent – no patent argument. As an investor, I love patents, they are a great barrier to entry especially in technology/research driven areas of IT or Lifesciences. But as a mathematician-scientist-programmer, I think patents deter innovation more than promoting it.

I guess there is no black or white, but we certainly need to take a long hard look at the patent regime of today, or else entrepreneurial innovation would be the biggest loser.

Puzzle for the day

Karthik — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 06:35:45 +0000

From Feynman,

Find a set of digits which fit the pattern,

         * * A *
         —————
* A * ) * * * * A * *
          * * A A
——-
             * * * A
              * * A
               ——-
                * * * *
                * A * *
                ———
             * * * *
             * * * *
              ———-
                        0

Each of the dots represent some digit(any digit)

Each of the As represent the same digit(for example, a 3)

None of the dots are the same as the A (i.e. no dot can be 3 if A is 3)

Have fun!

Magnet falling through an Eddy current tube

Karthik — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:21:12 +0000

Nice video

Eddy Current Tubes

Enough of computerisation in the country

Karthik — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 04:48:58 +0000

Wow! Mr.Mulayam Singh Yadav has come up with an innovative solution to tackle unemployment in the country.

Addressing a press conference in Lucknow, he said

India is a country with millions of unemployed hands and if we go on computerising everything, we will soon have a bigger army of unemployed youth.Nothing should be allowed to go beyond certain limits. We have seen enough of computerisation and any further move in that direction would be detrimental to the overall growth of the nation.Even proliferation of management courses seemed to have only resulted in producing more and more unemployed MBAs. I have always been in favour of discouraging the use of machine in jobs that could be carried out easily by the human hand and mind.

I am so proud of our leaders today. But before you make any judgments, the entire outsourcing/offshoring issue which was played up during US elections, had a similar reasoning behind it.