I am mostly someone else to the world. I am not what others consider I am. This might be true with most of us, but what surprises/saddens/shocks/intrigues me is that I am mostly someone else to myself. A simple question settled my doubts on this regard. How many times have I told myself that I […]
A song is worth a thousand theories
I am listening to Tere Bina Zindagi Se Koyi Shikhwa Nahin from Andhi, sung by the I-can-so-imitate-him-but-he-still-remains-elusively-inimitable Kishore Kumar and Lata. It is so easy to lose myself in this song, in the lyrics, and in all those emotions and memories that take over and transport me someplace else. This particular song has a curious […]
the What?
I have never heard the Who’s music; and scientists have always wondered about the Why’s; Science mostly explains the How’s; Today’s question is the What. On first glance, the What appears to be tame compared to its illustrious peers. While beginning Jaynes’s tome on probability, I came across this quote said around 1948 and attributed […]
What started out as a blog….
ended up being this. Do check out Cosma Shalizi’s Notebooks. What amazes me is the amount of reading a person can do. And the diverse range of reading interests anyone can hold. This is by far the widest range of reading that I have seen anyone accomplish. I wonder where time passes us by. Passed […]
Manufacture of Consent?
Currently a very heated discussion is on in the IITB.general newsgroup here at IIT-Bombay. The topic is somewhat pertaining to the lack of academic and research interest of undergraduate (UG) students (as compared to postgraduate (PG)), and their building interest in extra-curricular activities. Replying to the “IIT-B.Tech-praised-by-press-across-the-world” comment by some UG, one of the professors […]
The Jackfruit Letter
The Indian Railways is so fascinating. Mesmerising legacy, mindboggling scale, unbelievable efficiency and of course, the romance of a train journey. My earliest memories of train fascination is that of Gopi: a very close friend from high school days. He used to rattle the starting and ending stations of _all_ train names from the Railway […]
Anchor Text and Focused Crawling
Its been a while since I have blogged anything technical. These days, I am working on the open source search engine, Nutch. Before I get into what I am doing, let me explain why, in the last sentence, I put the phrase “open source search engine” as a part of the href tag. Search engines […]
Nostalgia
While browsing through someone‘s website, I came across this thought provoking take on nostalgia – “I’ve always viewed nostalgia as a heresy, but it becomes increasingly harder to fight it off as one grows older. Perhaps it is part of the mechanism we use to cope with regret: when enough patina accumulates, mistakes can be […]
Blogger Help
I check around 4-5 different blogs a day, and all of them are on blogspot. But, I get kind of irritated each day because I have to remember all 5 of them, type in their URLs on the browser and check whether they have updated their blogs. I am wondering if blogspot has some feature […]
JEE, GMAT, CAT – Harnessing efforts
Here is my interpretation of one of Samba’s various bursts of inspiration. An abstract idea whose viability, logistics, implementation etc. need to be worked out. We know that a lot of effort goes into the preparation for these competitive exams; out of which only the top 2% or so make it in to IITs, IIMs […]