On work

A rather thought provoking talk on various aspects of work - type, meaning, motivation, end - by Alain de Botton. at the RSA (Royal Society for encouragement of Arts etc)

[The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work]

A story on Thinking that amused and inspired me

Some time ago I received a call from a colleague who asked if I would be the referee on the grading of an examination question. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed he should receive a perfect score and would if the system were not set up against the student. The instructor and the student agreed to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected.

I went to my colleague's office and read the examination question: 'Show how it is possible to determine the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer.'

The student had answered: 'Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it, lower the barometer to the street, and then bring it up, measuring the length of rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building.'

.. read the rest

Too Many Things To Do

I've been reading a bit the last few days and I am restless and eager to do a lot of things but there are just way too many things to be done ! I want to make the Kolam book for Amma. I bought sketch pen and realized that like a moron, I've forgotton to buy an empty notebook. Must do that in the afternoon tomorrow at lunch.

Then I have Jhumpa Lahiri's book - Interpreter of Maladies - to be read. I am overwhelmed with each story I read. Just get completely absorbed into one of the characters and feel happy, sad or in the same dilemma along with the character. Then I go lost in thought when the story ends. Keep thinking about the minds of each one in the story. Then I marvel at the author for having come up with this. Long after yesterday's play, I continued to think of Miss Manjula Nayak and her mind mixed up with victory, hate, fame, and vengeance, the silent Pramod Rao and the dead girl Malini. Oh, I still need to finish my Emotional Intelligence book, before I can go on to my next reading which is either Nehru's Glimpses of World History, a book I bought to teach my ignorant self about the world around or William (slurp).

An important agenda is to refresh my mathematics. Jayaram was making a presentation to the BA Twig, on internal audits. One of the methods to detect fraud in numbers was to use the Benford's Law. So its like this.

What's probability of the first digit of a number to be, say, 1? I would say 1/9. Well, I am so wrong! Apparently in nature, there is no such randomness. So if I study and arrive at a set of numbers, say the population of a country over a few years and list them, I'd find that 1 is the first digit of around 30% of the numbers. Surprising, right? The simple semi-mathematical explanation for this phenomenon is that for a number to start with 2 instead of 1, means that it has doubled. A 100% increase. But for a number that changes from say 9xx to 1xxx means that it has increased only slightly. So for any such data studied, the variations are not likely to be as much as double or triple. In more mathematical terms, the probability is a function of the logarithm of that number, n. More specifically, the probability is Log(1 + 1/n). So for the digit 1, it is Log(1+1/1). If I remember my college maths right, the logarithm of 2 is 0.3010. Hence the likelihood of 1 to be first digit is 30% ! I was all amazed and impressed and excited. So I called up Sreesh and told him about it!

Then, next thing on my mind is to learn a few of Ghalib's Ghazals. Harish Goel has given me a wonderful collection and I am always happy when I listen to them!

I also need to prepare for my presentation on Technical Writing and on South Indian Classical music.

Oh yea I know my mother is not going to be very pleased to know this - I have to throw out this cockroach that's been lying in the corner of the room the past week. I was hoping that at least the ants would come for it ..

Reading on Lateral Thinking

Quite by chance, I read The Leader's Guide To Lateral Thinking by Paul Sloane over the weekend. What stood out in that book for me is - you won't find anything new if you look hard in the same direction.

I thought the examples used in it were quite powerful, since I still remember them. One is the fish bowl example (separating the small fish from the one large fish that eats them with a glass partition) - that the brain becomes complacent after a while and stops questioning. The other one was that of Henry Ford - who fired a senior manager who salted his soup before tasting it. Ooh ! That was apparently because he "prejudged situations" and Ford didn't want someone like that. IMHO, it was very unfair on Ford's part - I might have also probably salted my soup, if I was familiar with the restaurant :-) but then, run the risk of being fired by someone like Ford! Well, I think that did happen in my job interview at ThinkPad when Salam asked me what Objects were. I had rattled off what I knew and then when quizzed more, got stuck for significant answers. So I said OOPS and got away with it!

Okay, now back to the book. There was also a list of quotes by famous people and how we've progressed so much more that such as why would anyone want a computer at home, and that TV has very little significance in one's life, and heavier-than-air flights were impractical, and one by Bill Gates in '81 where he said 640k would be more than enough for anyone. . While we are at it, I also remember Edward do Bono's thinking hats being used somewhere in the workplace too. Though this book didn't have any On a serious note, that book put me (back) on a higher frequency and I am all excited about reading books again. Now going back to where I left of from Emotional Intelligence

Mathematics and some progress

Came across a view that Mathematics is totally aesthetic. Beauty in numbers. True. Symmetry, patterns and relationships is what I can think of to elaborate on. As I kept reading, I came across various reminders that many of the mathematical concepts that are attributed to the Western scientists were actually commonly known to several Indian Mathematicians. While our text books read that Indians gave the numerical world the concept of zero and the decimal system, it is not a well known fact that concepts like the Fibonacci numbers, Pascal's Triangle, the value of Pi; why even Trigonometry, Algebra and Calculus had actually originated in India.

This is what I managed to remember,

• Aryabhata calculated the value for Pi and gave the world the Zero!
• Bhaskara wrote his mathematical work the Lilavati on Differential Calculus five centuries before Newton and Leibitz (Remember there was a long bitterness between these two over the invention of calculus) . It was written for his daughter and he named it after her. His book Bijaganita was on algebra. He also developed a proof on the Pythagoreas theorem
• Madhava was a Kerala mathematician who also made significant contribution to mathematical analysis or was it Calculus ?
• Panini - a grammarian whose rules of grammar relating transformation and recursion are now the basis of computing and programming
• Pingala, Panini's brother is another mathematician who outlined the ideas behind a numeral system and what we now know to be the Pascal's triangle and Fibonacci sequences.

Curious to know why India had been ignored and denied its due credit, I read on. And I found a site (created by scientists from all over the world) that explained reasons why the the whole mission of the West/Europe to colonize would be defeated if they admitted that India was far ahead even in the centuries B.C. although they found it very difficult to ignore it. Read in more detail here

Words, Puzzles and Programs

Am glad to be subscribing to The Hindu once again. The clue that I was a bit happy to solve was shop displays rope I am twisting. That translates to emporia. Was might pleased when the answer came to my head.

Nick Drew had told me about a word in English that is a term for all words that sound like what they mean. Like Splash, thud. I am scratching my brain for that word.

It seems that there is a Japanese number game called Sudoku, that is some kind of grid where you need to fill in numbers from 1 - 9 in some order and not repeat them so that it totals to something. Read that it is popular among england's rail commuters! Find more of those puzzles at Sudoku. This has been created by its British adopted parent, who has written some program that generates hundreds of such puzzles every day !

Speaking of Japan, here is what I read about this funky machinethat I read about that is supposed to translate baby babble into human understandable. Doh. I think that machine has previously acquired fame by translating animal noises for humans also !