Just done a long overdue upgrade to WordPress 2.1. It was relatively painless but for some reason the theme I was using does not work properly with this new version. I am working on fixing that and till then the site will look pretty vanilla.
Update: Horray! Got the theme fixed. Most importantly the logo (of which I am rather proud). Now we are back in business.
All the issues related to development in India – expanding middle class, unplanned growth, too much congestion – and the usual chestnut of comparisons with China, in one short article. Does it paint an accurate picture? Annoying as it is to admit, it is also largely true. Single line comparisons with China, however, always irk me because the countries cannot be much different, both in terms of culture and their political edifice.
For the lovers of lists, here’s another one. A list of the 51 best magazines ever(!), as compiled by Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity fair. I have not read most of the magazines on the list, but I agree with a lot of them like the New Yorker (journalism at it’s very best), WIRED (the best of techno-porn), Playboy (I’m a guy, what else can I say!), MAD (my brother and I are forever on the hunt for MAD issues circa. 1970), and National Geographic (can anyone argue?). Also, watch this list being shredded here.
The latest program on In Our Time, the BBC Radio 4 series, has a discussion on the role and contribution of India to the history of mathematics. The program can be got here.
While on the topics of Mathematics, check out these links (Photos: Maths in Nature, NatureMaths and Fibonacci and finally Golden Section) which illustrate how some mathematical constructs appear in nature. Everything in nature is supported by some mathematical order. These constructs, among other, always seem to appear in nature underneath anything that we perceive to be beautiful. Beauty too, seems to be mathematical in nature!
Hi there. Major re-construction is underway at the moment. On acccount of a ~6 month anniversary of this site, I decided to completely re-do the backend and the layout! The very challenging tasks in progress is extracting posts from the previous platform and putting them under this new one. In any case, the work should be complete in a couple of days so be back after that time. See your around.
Careful now..you never know whose banana peel you might step on. The unintended consequences of the littlest of actions can take one by surprise – like the surprise I felt when I saw a pirated CD in the innards of Connaught Place’s Palika Bazaar. There it was, being all innocently round and shiny, with a little printout listing the names of all the songs it contained through a not-so-innocent process of illegal downloads and mass CD writing. The printout itself was not surprising either, but what was surprising, was the fact that it had a song by my band…
Didn’t know what to do, so I left the offending object there and moved on with life. What struck me was that a song that was created some random evening by two souls fed up with the scheme of things, inside a little hostel room with a 60 watt bulb and a day’s toil behind them would end up here. Funny. The songs can be accessed at:
http://www.jammag.com/rock/show_rock.php?article_id=66
(No prizes for guessing which one found it’s way into the CD)
Just got back from an insane two years at XLRI, Jamshedpur, one of India’s premier Business Schools. The pace of life in that environment is turbo charged, and returning and waiting for the appointment date from my company amounts to a lull in the proceedings. So one has to work that much harder to find things to do…and to make things interesting. Working on it.
If you have not heard of Sudoku in the past year, you have probably been living under a rock. For those not in the know, Sudoku is like a crossword puzzle but with numbers. Most of the ones I have seen, are in a 9×9 grid. The grid is populated with numbers ranging from 0 to 9. The objective of the game is simple. Fill in the grid in such a way that each row and each column has all the digits from 0 to 9. Bookstores are full of Sudoku puzzle books with titles such as “The Essential Book of Sudoku”, “Sudoku for beginners”, “Still more Sudoku”, “Sudoku while luching”, “Sudoku for the loo”. Ok I made the last few up. But there are hundreds of these puzzle books out there, each with pages full of puzzles. One of these that I own, has the whole book divided into 5 sections. The difficulty level of the puzzles increase as you go from 1 to 5, with the puzzles in section 1 being the easiest (I take about 9 minutes for each of these) while those in section 5 the hardest (the only one I tried here took me an hour or so!).
What is interesting is the question “How are these puzzles created and assigned a difficulty level?” Firstly, since there are 81 squares (it is a 9×9 grid) simple permutation dictates that there are 1.966270504e+77 (9^81) possible puzzles. That is a huge number so we can rule out the possibility of anybody feeling like they have seen one before. A possible method to generate one could work like this. Start with a fully populated grid. You can write a computer program to generate a fully populated grid, a solved Sudoku if you will. Numbers are then stripped from the grid at random till there are only X number of them (let’s call them seed numbers) left, enough to enable a person to solve the puzzle to reach a particular solution. None of these puzzles in the puzzle book has more than one possible solution. That is the intriguing part. How many and in what way do you put these seed numbers that will guarantee a unique solution to a puzzle? Intuitively, a 9×9 grid with just, say, 1 seed number would have more than one solution (and would make for a very poor puzzle). So there has to be a way to determine a minimum number of seed numbers to guarantee a unique solution. The other question is setting the difficulty level. How can you make a puzzle more difficult than the other? This might not be a hard thing to do. My guess is that once you have determined the minimum number of seed numbers, you just add more to the puzzle to decrease the difficulty level. But I am not exactly sure whether that is how it is done. Any maths wizs out there?
I’m bored. A joke. A Haiku?
standing on curb
vehicles are turning
waiting to get hit
My kicka$$ brother was featured in the April 2nd 2006 edition of The Asian Age. Here’s the article in full.
Disabled man’s grit wins him accolades
– By Sanjiv Das“Nothing is impossible to a willing mind,” believes Pranav Lal. Pranav, who was born blind, works at the Mahindra Special Services Group, Kandivali, as an information security consultant and has won the Best Blind Employee Award by the National Association for the Blind.
Pranav suffers from a condition known as retinopathy of prematurity. Though he started reading audio books at an early age, he never went to a school for the blind.
He explains, “At the time of my birth, the blood vessels at the back of my eyes increased rapidly, as a result of which the retina detached from the optic nerves.” He can only see a faint ray of light from his left eye.
Pranav, born in 1979, in Kuwait, was introduced to audio books at an early age, and he soon started learning Braille. When he was studying in Class 2, the Lal family shifted to Muscat. There he went to the Indian School from 1986 to 1994. After finishing school, he came back
to New Delhi where he joined the Apeejay School.Pranav completed his graduation in B.Com (H) from Shahid Bhagat Singh College, Delhi, in 1999. In 2002, he finished MBA from the Indian Management Institute.
“I have got accustomed to the fact that I am blind,” says Pranav adding, “During my schooldays, I used to take the help of flex curves which can be moulded into any shape. To draw geometrical figures, I used rulers with magnets. I even set-up a lab in my house to practice
the lessons that were taught in school.”Pranav does all his office work with the help of a laptop. The laptop and his PC at home are fed with a special software that combines speech and print to make the input audible. He can perceive images through sound. The special software called “The Voice” converts images
to sound. “The volume represents the object, the louder it is, the brighter the object,” explains Pranav.In 2000, Pranav visited the Czech Republic in Eastern Europe to represent India at the Ability Olympics, a special event to help the physically challenged show their skills. He bagged the Special Excellence Award. He is also a volunteer at the Daisy Consultants, a group that specialises in publishing talking books for the disabled.
“His parents,” he says, “helped him cope with all sorts of problems.” His father is a civil engineer based in New Delhi, and his mother is a homemaker.
Pranav is a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Blind, New Delhi.
When asked about eye surgeries that could enable him to see, Pranav says, “There is little research done on retinopathy optometry till date and doctors are facing a tough time in cracking the problem.
He says, “I face no problem and the main factor behind my success is my will power.”