Category: Personal

  • Nobody would spend on science if it did not spin-off technology

    Very few organisations in the world fund the fundamental sciences – astronomy, high energy physics or even certain strands of biology whose only intention is to know what the universe is about. In many science talks that I attend many scientists also try to focus on how this idea will help the common man rather than focus on how science would advance the knowledge of mankind, in particular. Schools are only now beginning to teach any amount on quantum physics which surpassed several boundaries in the 1970s. Science taught in the schools today are at least fifty to seventy years old. This creates a difference in the perception of science among the scientific community and that seen by common man.

    I’ve been spending the whole of last week watching videos related to Jaggi Vasudev of the Isha Foundation. One of his conversations is with American neuroscientist Dr. David Eagleman inserted below.

    In the video at about the 17 minute mark, he brings up the topic of how the science we do today is so influenced by funding which looks at how it is beneficial to man. Vasudev says that science would really be more effective if it is delinked from that objective and one does it purely with the curiosity to understand the world we live in. He suggests that technology should be given the responsibility of figuring out how the knowledge yearned from science be put to use in benefit of humankind. Currently, both are intertwined so tightly that science is funded on the basis of its application, technology spin-offs rather than the fact that it would further the boundaries of knowledge, per se.

    This is an interesting distinction that I had not been aware of despite my grounding in science and some time I spent working with technology as an engineer. I shared this because I think it is an interesting insight to work with.

  • Hello world!

    The United States is celebrating its independence day today. I am embarking on yet another blog. My first blog had my name on it and was on Blogspot. It was a Tibetan blog talking about alternative services to those provided by Google that first turned my attention to WordPress. I have since used Drupal, Tumblr, Vox, LiveJournal and the self-hosted WordPress. At the end I am back here again.

    It has been a journey where I have learnt a lot. In the meanwhile, I moved away from being a mechanical engineering undergrad to being a banker. No MBAs were involved. In the end, I use my most favourite of the names of blogs I have used thus far.

    Parallel Spirals is my imagination of how I see myself following these various parallel interests that I spiral down into once in a while.

  • Our Tulsi plant

    Our neighbours had lent out the flat for rent. The aunty staying there (Raji aunty) had given us her Tulsi plant when she moved to Chennai. Because of our constant care and attention, two out of the three shoots withered. We then went to Babu Anand Farms to ask what would have caused the shoots to wither. He said, it may be because of the lack of nitrogen in the ceramic pot in which we had kept the shoots. He suggested that we replace the soil along with some natural fertilizers like coco soil and manure.

    Tulsi

    Dhanya putting in the new soil along with the natural fertilizers
    Dhanya putting in the new soil along with the natural fertilizers

    We’re still trying to recover the last shoot although we have added a Rama Tulsi that we obtained from the farm along with the last shoot. Awaiting results.

  • Hobbies through the Ages

    As part of reducing focus that I carried out last year offline, I had listed through all the hobbies that I wanted to dabble in. They are, in no particular order:

    • cartographer
    • astronomer
    • ham (amateur radio)
    • robotics
    • collecting stamps
    • collecting coins
    • travelling – hiking
    • bicycling
    • amateur weather station
    • setting up a decimeter radio telescope
    • amateur rocketeer
    • writing a novel
    • contributing code to open source projects
    • blogging
    • playing the violin
    • religious philosophy
    • political sciences
    • data sciences
    • geographic information systems
    • minimalism
    • writing Malayalam
    • learning Sanskrit

    I have found in each case, that I have dabbled in it to some extent without going through with it completely and it seems like a nice list from which to begin working my way through. I still have the rest of my life to go through that list.

  • Diwali @ Work

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  • Cast my vote

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  • Life Essentials of the Future

    A growing fringe of people have begun adopting them – renewable sources of electricity and segregation of waste and other small contributions towards climate change. Many people still scoff at the idea, including my parents. These will be life essentials one day. Buy now so that you get them at a cheaper rate. Demand for these May send the prices sky rocketing in the future. Zenrainman says it too

  • My Experiences at BlogCamp Mumbai

    While Mumbai has had a fairly good frequency of BarCamps in the recent past, BlogCamps have been few and far between. I don’t even remember how many blogcamps there have been so far. I was happy to hear the announcement for the BlogCamp at the BarCamp I attended the week before last.

    Getting to the BlogCamp was an interesting task in itself. I turned to Google Maps to suggest me a good way to get to the venue at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology in Wadala. The route that it suggested took me via a bus route that left me at a place called Shanti Nagar and had me traversing through the slums of Wadala and along the outer boundary of the Institute to reach the venue. Hmm.

    The crowd wasn’t as big as BarCamp but more importantly, it was an interesting crowd! We started the morning with a session by Rakesh Kumar on content strategies for your blog. He suggested that there were more ways to add content than just text – images, slides, video, visualisations etc. were now possible and made content more interesting and easy to comprehend for an attention deficit audience. He suggested ideas for having a time table for what to write about in the coming days. He suggested doing guest posts on other people’s blogs and also inviting guest bloggers on your blog to encourage a more diverse set of opinions on your blog. He suggested having a tone for your blog would be worth considering and building on.

    Rakesh really got the audience involved and the audience did have many questions. I think this set the stage for a very interactive BlogCamp, overall. I’ve hardly seen audiences involved in the talk as much as in this BlogCamp. Quite different.

    Ashutosh Bijoor was the second guy. He dazzled us with a beautiful set of pictures from forts and caves from near Mumbai. They travel to these places on their cycles beginning at Andheri or Thane. After breezing through Mumbai’s history and geography, Ashutosh told us a little about the group that he started. They call themselves the Mumbai Historical Sites Cycling Association (MuHiSiCA) and was started because the Archaeological Survey of India speaks only to organisations and not individuals. They research on places, cycle to forts and caves in and around Mumbai, clean them up, takes photos and then blog about it.

    We then had a talk on Video Blogging by Mihir Joshi. Mihir has a YouTube-based talk show called The M J Show where he talks to musicians and some Bollywood celebrities. He went to a digital content company called Ping Network to help produce the content for his shows. He suggests that companies exist that are looking for such content and are ready to provide help with production. He said that it was a route worth considering besides Doing It Yourself which always exists as an option if no one is willing to take you on.

    After a lunch consisting of Mountain Dew, rice, dal and potato curry, we went back in for a session on Indic blogging by Nikhilesh Ghushe.He started with getting the audience to get the Hindi equivalent word for words in English. Through the example, he sought to establish the nuances that one is able to achieve through the Indic languages. He said this provided the basis for some experiences and understanding that English gets rid of. He suggested that we miss a lot of this nuance even during consumption of English language news which does not understand nuance. He also says that not reading Hindi literature means we’re missing out on a large chunk of literature ourselves. Nikhilesh writes poetry on his blog and admits that Hindi is much better for poetry than prose. During a brief description of the history of Hindi literature, Nikhiles says that upto about the 1830s, Hindi did not have prose – only drama and poetry.

    The next session was by Alexander Gounder on SEO. In earlier BlogCamps, I have heard a hatred being expressed for people who do SEO for their blogs. Alex’s talk today seemed to suggest that the SEOers have adopted a more organic route on things now. The talk was way too technical for me for a nuanced reproduction here. I will link to any post that explains this better.

    The next session was by Mahafreed who did a session on Vine. Vine is a way to produce 6 second videos and upload them online. They’re like a Twitter for videos. Not interestingly, Twitter has acquired them. Placing a limitation on a technology helps bring out creativity and I think this is what makes Vine very interesting. We also co-developed the idea for a Vine.

    The last talk was by Anubha Bhat on why people should blog and on her own personal experiences of having kept a blog since about 2007.

     

  • My Experience at BarCamp Mumbai 13

    It’s been a long time since I enjoyed a barcamp so much and hence a write up. The event started at 9 AM and was located in Vile Parle. I’ve been to the same venue only once before and hence finding the location
    was a problem. A messup with a friend meant that I was left to fend for myself and depend on public transport. Sunday meant I did not want to depend on the train service because of a possible mega block anywhere along the line.

    I dropped in at 11 AM in the morning just in time for a talk by @anool on Maker’s Asylum. The talk was probably a good introduction to the arena of open hardware in Mumbai. People knew that there existed 3D printers and the concept but I think it was good that we saw some of the potential of what that could achieve. The guys there now have a small apartment in Bandra that offers some very basic tooling and are interested in growing a Maker community in Mumbai and growing their space. They are most likely to follow a subscription based model.

    From there I wandered around into a bitcoin storm that @oddtazz was brewing. I don’t know where he started but the people were interested more in how to get bitcoins and try to understand the concept. Perhaps a little bit of grounding in economics and a little more analogy would have helped the audience understand the talk but the questions showed the curiosity and fear that the Mumbai audience had for the topic of crypto-currencies.

    In all my previous barcamps, I have not had any luck with my lunches. I either binge and overeat or under-eat and get headaches. This barcamp was different. I had a sumptuous meal that satiated my hunger but didn’t make me groggy.

    After lunch, the first talk was by @henna_khan. It’s been good to finally get to meet her. I heard good things about the morning session and I could identify her instantly as she was busy explaining eclipses animatedly with someone when I walked in for @anool’s session in the morning. Her second talk for the day was on the question of whether aliens existed. Her talk went through the idea of how big our universe was, the basic requirements for life and then recent searches for life and why probably they haven’t detected alien life yet. The audience at the end of the talk voted that they did believe aliens existed.

    I spent the time after this talk meeting up with other barcampers I knew and met a few new ones. I discussed with @anool the possibility of doing cansats again. Launching is a challenge in India, since launching amateur rockets isn’t allowed in India. We’re left with satisfying ourselves with a balloon launch. The talks that I slipped through involved euthanasia, CPR and medical evidence’s role in sexual assault and rape. There were announcements for a Blogcamp on March 9, 2014 (I’m happy this has been re-started again) and WordCamp on the weekend of March 15-16. Both, that I am looking forward to.

    The other thing about this barcamp is because it re-ignited some old fires – being on the open-manufacturing list, being involved with SEDS and also contemporary situations like banking. It tingled many parts of my brain and I had good food to sustain me!

  • Hello World!

    A previous attempt to blog here was spoiled by crackers who defaced this website. I remained wary of returning here and in the meanwhile blogged on the wordpress.com service. I am not yet ready to move here completely and still feel insecure.

    The months of October, November and December seem to be the time that I start off my new projects and there has been something urging me to get back to a self-hosted WordPress blog. Hence, I am here, again.

    I have been blogging since 2006 and this constant moving around has been in evidence since I started. In each one of my “Hello World” postings before this I have expressed hope that I wouldn’t move again and will use each blog as my steady space for blogging. I’ve hence experimented with WordPress, WordPress.com, Blogger, Typepad, Vox and Tumblr. If I counted all of my blogs they should number anywhere between 10 and 20. So, let’s see what happens if I don’t make the promise of sticking to this space, for a change?