Blog Post #37 - “A person is a person, no matter how small.” - Is it really true?

I consider myself more on the side of knowledge hunter gatherer. A tribe of my own with a sole and soul  purpose of accumulating knowledge and disseminating the same.

I try to gather as much as people want to give and give back as much as they can take ( believe me I can over stuff people with information that they stay away from me from weeks and ask me to write in blogs so they can read later..!!!)

One interesting observation was - when I was coming back from Bahamas we had a stop over in Atlanta. We had to grab dinner and had plenty of time.(3 hours)

When we stopped to eat in the food court a Nepali lady came close to us and asked if we needed help. Apparently Atlanta has  implemented a system where the food court is consistently cleaned up by paid staff who are paid by the food court restaurants. Interesting.!

So this lady wanted to know if our 2 year old needed a high chair and stayed close to us and didn't want to leave while watching skeptically if her supervisor was watching.

A few two pieces of information that we discussed

1. Being a South Indian she was surprised I didn't have a mustache
2.She mentioned all south Indian movies had god shown often and hero worshiping god more than Hindi films. It seems we show more god in south Indian movies than in North.
3. She was happy to drink her free 'hot chocolate'

Why am I telling you all this?

If I had replaced  the lady's name with some one famous Sachin,Clinton,Tiger Woods or Oprah you will sure be excited to know these details.

We teach our kids to learn the house keeper (Janitor's name) in their school . 

How many times have we taken the effort to know the Janitor's name in a mall or in office?

We value people based on IQ .

 Based on celebrity status.

 Based on position/office they hold.

What about the rest?

Do you ever think you are an average person or a normal person?

It is interesting to note no body considers themselves average.

I am sure you didn't think you are Einstein but neither did you think you were average.

 You were slightly above average.

Normal people spend a lot of time working for office and don't have a work life balance.

 But you believe you have a working work life balance (more on work but not as bad as the normal!).

Here is the key concept

When you meet someone more powerful than you we respect them.

When we meet someone not doing well in life we may not care about them as much as we care about the rich/powerful/famous/positional holding person.

Blog Post #36 - Vegetables and fruits - What you know, What you don't know ,what you know that you know and what you know you don't know.

You know the difference. It was in some biology class. Had great definition. Some thing about seeds something about part of plant. Something so basic our teachers ensured we knew the answer.

You know tomato is a vegetable while pear is a fruit. What about mushroom? Do you know what we call avocado?

These subtle knowledge differences Cheetah vs. Jaguar, Crocodile vs Alligator , Management vs leadership.

In the book   'Thinking Fast and Slow' the author talks about

1. What we know?
2. What we don't know?
3. Do we know if we know in memory? ( this category is ..that song lyric you know but you are not able to retrieve. the primary key is found the foreign key is lost)
4.Can we google?
5. Is it easy to ask some one else?
6. Is this worth knowing?
7. Will we remember this exercise of knowing about knowing?

The central idea I used to believe is ' Knowledge is power' . I believe now that 'Acted knowledge is more powerful'.

What use is the knowledge?

A central database of knowledge is now available at your finger tips.
Intelligence = information retrieval + applicability

Do you know that stuff? Have you seen it? Where did you hear/see/read about it?
Who know if you know? Who cares if you know? Should anyone care that you don't know?

With Wikipedia and Google we believe we don't need to learn number of countries in the world today. ( default answer before USSR was split i used to know now i dont know.. that should tell you how old my friend are)

When you watch Olympics next year in Brazil check how many countries participate?

Do you care? Should you?

When world soccer is played again in Brazil look for football players ( erase the word soccer for few days) and enjoy the world sport.?

How many countries will come? Why will they came? What dreams will they bring?

In short, learn how many countries are there in UN today and compare against how many come for Olympics. Check how many sports they play and brag to your friends about your intelligence (which in this case is knowledge!)

Blog Post #35 - Google and travel!! - On Road and On Space

Driver-less car : Google has been working with Stanford and won the 2 million prize set by DARPA.

Electric car: Other than Toyota Google has been one of the investors in Tesla .

Mundane cars: Google has been actively working on integrating Car GPS with their Google Maps service

Google cars already took images of my house, points to all the places where I get get my electric car charged.


Earlier I would to go to google to find address and then use car GPS.  In future ,I don't need to worry.

Gesture or speech or Thought control technology will let my electric driver less car know where to go and play my favorite songs from my playlist depending on the route and occasion.


NASA has been receiving a lot of Grant from Google and Google execs own a private parking spot in NASA because of their investment. Google Earth and Google Mars are both a reality now. On to Google Universe!

2 unrelated news

I read an article on how Goldman and other financial companies are struggling to get talent as Google,Facebook and other silicon valley are snatching the IVY league's towards them. Goldman has implemented a no saturday work policy. They check the logs and ensure new recruits don't work on Saturdays.

Do you work on Saturdays?  

For every android phone sold Microsoft gets $4-$8 to tallying $2 billion a year.

Yes you read it right. Android phones have patents that are owned by our dear MS.

Blog Post #34 - Sunni Web, Halal Internet and Great Firewall of China

As we progress in the world of internet it is interesting to note how new internet/parallel internet are being created by different countries.

The guardian article quoted here explains the concept

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/apr/23/web-censorship-net-closing-in

Pakistan has vowed to create its own internet just like Sunni web and Halal Internet.

Halal Internet is Iran's answer to providing an internet for its citizens.
At the end of the day Internet needs physical routers and servers which countries can control on their land.

The book The New Digital age keeps mentioning about this new concept of how there will be regional Internets and we may need visa to visit one from another in the future.
Even though the idea appears strange countries like North Korea, Belarus, Burma (Myanmar), Cuba, Iran, and Zimbabwe work closely for advanced technology transfer.

Peer to Peer technology is one alternative to using Internet for people in these regimes but the concept of middle man (faking and misidentifying as the recipient) is getting prevalent.

While people are mostly regional and consume news and information only local to each other the viewpoint about how political asylums may be provided in the virtual world first before giving in physical world is interesting.

From wikipedia
"Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) is a mechanism defined in 2003 for handling internationalized domain names containing non-ASCII characters. These names either are Latin letters with diacritics (ñ, é) or are written in languages or scripts which do not use the Latin alphabet: Arabic, Hangul, Hiragana and Kanji for instance"

Next time when you type webaddress in your favorite browser don't forget that a new world of Internets and new world of Domain Name Identification is already in works for people in different parts of the world. 

Blog Post #33 - Human body,Anaesthesia , Vestigal organs

206 Bones
650 muscles
Heart 3 billion time
Lungs that deliver 1500 miles of airwaves
Billions of Nerve cells
Billions of Genetic information in combinations that make everyone of us ( 7 billion now and including 60billion who died before us) unique.

100 Trillion cells = 1 Incredible

Our body also contains vestigial organs which has couple of definitions including not useful or once useful now diminishing in use once again proving Darwin.

So, yesterday I had a surgery to remove from tonsils and in the past Appendix and wisdom tooth ( I have gotten so much wisdom that the tooth is not needed anymore!)

Vestigial organ list from http://creation.com/do-any-vestigial-organs-exist-in-humans

Human body is an amazing thing.We are not our body. Even after organs or removed or cut off we still remain us. We are not the heart. Artificial heart and heartless people exist.
Brain damaged people and mindless people exist.

When I was in High school in India, I read in my science book that Anesthesia is one of the best medical miracles . My Anesthetist said I will not remember those times of my life while I was under the influence of Anesthesia . Wow,  sleep without pain while painful surgery is performed.

Chemicals work with our body to control  biological functions. Think Tylenol and how a chemical relieves body pain. Antibacterial pills kills live bacteria. A fight inside the body which kills the bacteria and is harmless to you.

We all start  as a cell. We have encoded information stored in this cell which how to multiply an delegate other cells what they should become. Stop.Pause. Think.

In the book

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

the author talks about how each cell stores this instruction manual for a human being.

Blueprints are in chromosomes which says this human will have black eys male 5feet 4inch 145 pounds ( I wish) and funny.. yes, we are talking about me!

4 letter alphabets A,C,G,T are in the human genome. Control the gene control the aging process.

 ACT G looks like Act of God To Me!

Mystery surrounds us and inside us.

God bless!

Blog Post #32 - Time again to read about time

Ever wonder where you spend your time every day ? What is a day?
Why is a day 24 hours ? Is it really 24 hours?

The fact that earth takes 24 hours is based off of earth's rotation. Do you believe earth is rotating? How do you know? Have you ever seen it rotate? Do you ever feel it rotate (unless you get 'new's that you didn't expect- ofcourse then the earth goes for a spin)

Do you know there are leap seconds? Do you know there is not exactly 24 hours in a day?

According to my friend Einstein ( any one who is famous and dead is my friend and you can ask them when you meet them!), the concept of time is an illusion and I agree. ( When was the last time you disagreed with Einstein and won?)

His statement is paraphrased ' When you are sitting near a pretty women and chatting with her (ofcourse you are married to her yet...) then each hour becomes a minute. If you are made to sit on a hot plate, each minute will feel like an hour'

What is interesting is the fact that there may be 24 hours a day in nature but you don't get 24 hours to experience and recollect every day.

Daniel Kahneman - a noble laureate points to the fact that the experiencing self is not the same as the recollecting self.

Think.. Some days are long, some are short, Years are short and minutes are long.

A week's vacation is worth 30seconds of memory in your head.

What is interesting is the fact that we all work with Time ,against time and along side time. The 4th dimension that Einstein tried to explain is not easy to comprehend for any mortal .

What time is it now? (Did you look for a clock?)

Blog Post #31- # - Sign or Symbol or tag?

What is a Sign?
What is a Symbol?
What is a tag?

Check here to open a Pandora of signs

Yesterday my son Arnav asked me a question why do we have * in the phone? Which he followed up promptly with why do we have # in the phone?

Ever since growing up (I used to grow vertical and after horizontal but in all directions making me round before I started running.. ok that is a whole another post) # was first introduced as British (Long live the Queen!) , then as a mechanism in phone to shut the annoying mechanical lady voice..it was always better to press # rather than 2 for Spanish.

Now # has become a great deal. # tag here, facebook supports #,Twitter supports # tag.. the beauty of adding data to data = metadata is a very cool way . The ability for user to tag data with # tag provides a system of meta tag authoring without really using one.

It made me think - we understand arab numberals (1-9), Hindu symbol (0) and now on to these weirdos in phone and 2nd row in the QWERTY keyboard. By the way how long do i have to live with his QWERTY keyboards? Will it change before I turn 70  ( so my age is .. in another post you can find that)?

Will my child have to learn typing with this weird ABCD pattern by the way why we do we think ABCD is the correct order? Who decided that order and who decided 26 characters?

Now back to symbols.. the way I used to look at my phone keypad is 4x3 symmetry with my favorite 0 to talk to the operator after pressing all other keys .. these days it wont work till you have pressed or tried shouting yes/no before finally it will let you press that key.

What does * do in the phone? Before smart phones I don't know what it did. Now I press *2 for customer service *4 for minutes and data remaining . Why did they put * there?

So what is !? Why did it become exclamation?
What is @ ?
We will cover ~,`,%,^,&(,),;,;,',/,\| in other posts . In the meantime when you read another post or look at your phone or your car dashboard remember signs are everywhere

Blog Post #30 - Who was Einstein's brother? Did Newton have a sister? What was Shakespeare's dad name?

Listening to a Ted talk from Sir Ken Robinson I was thinking about the question he posed 'Can you imagine Shakespeare going to an English class?' Do you know he did go to English class and English has been around even before Shakespeare. What did he study? How did his teacher teach him English?

Newton would have also studied Physics. He also studied Math(he is credited with creating calculus.. even though a German also claims the same credit. who cares there were one two folks responsible for this calamity. Do you think if Newton had a brother would he have been as smart as Newton. I can't imagine being Newton's dumb brother and every one else saying why aren't you as smart as your brother? Did Newton have a child? Were they as smart as him? Does it matter?

Coming to Einstein. I always wonder what he created that I use? E=mc^2 makes  sense to everyone as though they  created it but seriously what did he create? Think about it. The man who created dynamite got so much money and has a prize that his foundation awards every year and even Einstein got one. Yes Nobel was his name. Newton never got Nobel prize. Not because he was dumb or the committee was rigged but because he was born earlier than Newton. Think about every dynamite and the royalty. No wonder they even award peace prize from that foundation.

So - Do you know about Einstein? He looks nerdy cool and embodies nerd-ism.

What did Newton do that you use? The apple story is the only thing I remember along with some laws of motion.

Physics and Quantum Physics are interesting subjects which we will cover soon and in the meantime push someone (to their limits using email) and validate the third law..

Blog Post #29 - Robina courtin and Julian Assange - What does Wikileaks and a monk have in common?

I was listening to Robina sometime back and was amazed at a profound wisdom. She quotes Buddhish philosophy in Understanding

We don't get upset if we spill milk. We do get upset as we didn't expect or didn't want the milk to spill.

Notice the difference.

It is not what happened. It is just that you didn't expect it to happen.

Even Dalai Lama she says when his mom died. He knew she will die one day. He didn't expect her to die when she died.

When we think of Australia, we have been told it is a continent. Then we were clarified that Newzeland and other countries are also there in Australian continent. Then we came to know there is a new name 'Oceania' sometimes also called Australasia to include Newzeland and Australia. Like Eurasia..

Australia was supposed to be where all British criminals were sent . If British sent all criminals to Australia where will Australia send its criminals? You guessed it right. They send them right back to Britan. 

Take Julian Assange as the case study.

As a hacker he has setup this wide system where any whistle blower can send information to wikileaks. He gets to decide what to publish when to publish and which names he will hide from documents.

He also protects the whistle blower. If US has Snowden as a problem child he hooks him with China ,Russia, Venezuela and now Germany. 

I am sure for Russian and Iranian whistle blowers he can get help from Western countries.
The beauty is among all other issues he is in house arrest in .. yes you guessed it right ' Great Britain'

He is able to withstand pressure from US government in British soil.

I am amazed by the netflix program 'we steal secrets' and in the book ' The new Digital Age' the authors point to the fact that there may not be more than a few of these wikileaks type of organizations in the future because of the complexity and credibility.

These organizations must help the whistle blowers by buying them whistles (kidding), getting their information out out the world with a network of web address that cannot be brought down by DOS( Denial of Service).. read the case study on when they tried to bring down wikileaks.org they could come back with wikileaks.ca wikileads.fr and wikileaks.info. These portals or platforms also needs to work with other governments and provide them asylum. Think Snowden. He is giving so much information about German Chancellor and NSA that Germany is planning on giving him asylum. 

Information is power and passport.

In Short, today's topic of how 2 Australians have  made one American of Indian Origin (me) sleepless over the fact that it is not that information should not be leaked it is just that we dont expect them to be leaked.we expect them to be declassified by the government in a process we trust and served up in cnn. com and news.google.com.

Blog Post #28 - Longitude

I am reading this book called Longitude the story of Chronometer about John Harrison. For 400 years he solved the problem that Galileo and Newton couldn't solve.

What is that problem?

I will post the notes while I read this book but for now I am amazed by the fact that while Latitude , Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn were easily determined using Sun and other heavenly bodies (yes everything above us is Heaven) placing the zero degree latitude was always a political move. It had run through Azores,Cape Verde Island,Rome,Copenhagen,  St. Petersburg, Pisa,Paris and finally settled down at London.

The 360 degrees that these longtitude split from north to south poles varies in distance when they are close to pole vs in the equator (where they are about 68 miles)
15 degrees gives us 4 minutes. (Figure out this calculation.. )

London - the political power house which forever will hold our prime meridian.  Next time when you are talking to people about time in their place or using some drop down to say GMT -6 you are still singing the praise of the Queen.

Britain is one of the few countries which doesn't celebrate independence day as they are the ones who gave lot of countries Independence.

From this post written in English to the time your watch/iphone shows British decided these once and for all for the benefit of humanity.


Long Live the Queen!

Blog Post #27 - Can you read? I mean Algebric Notation and Music Sheet

Nobody knows what Algebra means but historians agree that this term came from Arab Al-Jabr and 'restoration'/'completion' are some of the words in Urban legend Wikipedia.

We learn to read a lot of stuff but some of us struggle to read the following two

1. Chess Algebric notation
2.Music Notation

Do you know to read both of these?

Chess Algebric notation. The wonderful thing about algebric notation is how we can replay any game that was played hundreds of years ago. It is like recording these games in a recorder.

Rank- Think of it as first ,second and that is what you see.. First rank second rank
File - a through h are the files

So every location in the chess board ( 64 of them) can be represented using this notation

What does this got with algebra?

Each piece except Pawn has a notation

K - King, Q- Queen,B- Bishop ,N (K is taken for king so N ) for knight and R for Rook

Kc6 in the board above explains which Knight moved

Always White pieces are written first and then black's move
1. Kc3 Kc6
Means white moved its Knight  to c3 and Black moved its night to c6


This is just to get you started. I hope can now look at a game  and understand some of these notations

 11. Nd5 Qxe4 12. Nc7+ Kd7 13. Nxa8 Qxc4 14. Nb6+ axb6 15. Nc3 Ra8 16. a4 Ne4 17. Nxe4 Qxe4 18. Qb3 f5 19. Bg5 Qb4 20. Qf7 Be5 21. h3 Rxa4 22. Rxa4 Qxa4 23. Qxh7 Bxb2 24. Qxg6 Qe4 25. Qf7 Bd4 26. Qb3 f4 27. Qf7 Be5 28. h4 b5 29. h5 Qc4 30. Qf5+ 


Now + means Check, x means capture = means pawn promoted to get a piece 
0-0 king side castling 0-0-0 Queen side castling
++ - check mate

Use this knowledge and check some of the world famous games. Read ,Write and Enjoy chess


2. Music

Every Since Pythagoras of Samos heard some hammers ( read that interesting story else where = google it) he came up with fractions to govern Music

All music sheets (we are talking western music here) has a number 3/4 or 4/4

It has 6 lines called staff

Treble clef - the one of top with a & sign has music notes that can be played by Guitar and other high pitched instruments

Bass Clef or F clep - the one on the bottom has a F written the other way.. use your imagination where you see the 2 dots and turn the face the other way..

Tips to remember

You get into trouble with your right hand and on your FACE.

If you are playing Piano the right hand plays trouble clef.

FACE are the 4 notes between the lines.
Every Good Boy Does Fine Always ( E G B D F A) are the notes on the Line

Armed with this information you have to now know how to find these notes A through G in any musical instrument. For the piano it is simple. Check for 3 black keys. The left of the first black key in the set of 2 keys is C. Once you find C you can find everything else.

For the Bass or F clef the second line from top is F. That is one way to remember.

The other way is All Cows Eat Grass. The gaps in Bass clef are A C E G.

Once you know A in the diagram you can use this knowledge to fill up B D E F etc.. the first line from the bottom is G.

Good Boys Do Fine Always(G B D F A).

Both notes are for boys. Girls were not represented in music notes.

If you own a  Guitar (or borrow a guitar) remember Easter Bunny Gets Drunk After Easter

Lowest string from Ground is E. Then B all the way close to your hand which is Also E.


If you have any interest in Chess or Music this should help. If you don't have any interest why not give it a shot?

With youtube,apps,courera and wikipedia you are covered .

Good luck.

Blog Post #26 - Luca Pacioli - Double Entry Accounting (Dont yawn..this is interesting)

NPR Pocast


Arabs as we know (if you don't know you will know now) invented as numbers we write in math from 1-9.
Zero came from Hindus.

Romans who had alphabets for numbers X,V ,C,N,I lost the game..

Venice which was part Manhattan and part silicon valley in 14th century was where this whole story starts.
In short with Luca Pacioli we wont have accounting and book keeping as he practically invented this concept.

What is the big deal?

For starters (we are all starters in one field or the other)

Double-entry means that money is never gained nor lost---it is always transferred from somewhere (a source account) to somewhere else (a destination account).

The fact that people started writing down helped them learn what is profitable .what is not.

Think.. Just writing down where you are in a numeric scale gives you a baseline to compare. i had 3 cows now 3. Where did the 3 cows go? Forget that, that is not the question - the question is i am 50% down .. so I need to get sheeps not cows...

Accounting is a boring subject to me. What is fascinating is the concept that there are people who invented this, who use this and make tons of money using this.

Next time you meet an accountant ask them who invented double entry accounting? (Don't forget these are accounts so they can cook up some facts for you!)

Blog Post #25 - 3-5 Business days to transfer money from one to another. Why?

I love NPR. Specifically planet money.(and of course wait wait don't tell me)

I was listening to their podcast on ACH and Double Entry accounting.

Here are some notes I gathered

ACH - Automated Clearing House. Here is an example that was given in the podcast which I liked. You can go to your chase bank ,withdraw $500. Go to your credit union and deposit the same say in a hour (if they both are near by). The process is pretty simple right? Use ATM card withdraw the money and deposit it in the other ATM or a teller.

In UK they implemented the system to overhaul  this problem (remember UK has around 200 banks and US 7000+). Now, you can transfer money in seconds from one bank to another in UK. Not in US.

Also it is always 3-5 business days. Why? The machines that process these batch files will be switched on and off only during regular banking hours. What? It was the state of the art technology in 1970 and we got frozen in time. No more upgrades. The voting to overhaul this system didn't get adequate vote few months ago. So .. there will be no change.

What is ACH anyways?...why do we need ACH? What are they clearing and who is clearing ?

Let us said I want to transfer money from my chase to citibank account.

They used to send the check from citibank to chase. Chase will send cash to citibank and send me the paid check.

They even arranged for parking lot swap in secure locations in NY where trucks will back up and transfer check bags... then they started overnighting it.

Finally they came up with an idea - every bank can send the check to a clearing house and they will contact banks and make sure there are funds and transfer them.

The main servers are located in 2 secret locations and one operated by Fed and other by banking industry.
It will be 3-5 business days for a very long foreseeable future.

It is amazing to think why?

Answer - dont forget that wire transfer is another line of revenue generating business ($30 a transfer) and bounced checks mean more fees..


The next time you see 3-5 business days for money transfer between banks you will know why.