Darth Chatri

 Got a new writing device. Did some new writing

 There comes a time in your life when you are at a restaurant and have struggled to finally finish your portion and are ready to wrap up and ask for the bill (or check as Americans call it), and your son orders the next instalment of his main course. Something changes at that moment. A transition from one era of your life into a new one.

 Is it a model of the United Nations Assembly or a model for the united nations assembly? I realised that me and the missus have had different understanding so far. It would seem a bit pretentious for a bunch of 13-18 year old kids to create a model for UNA. But then again …

 I take back my words. Doubles tennis can be a lot of fun. 

In any complex industrial undertaking, the chain of responsibility and authority is decomposed into a hierarchy. But this hierarchy of people has evolved to mirror the hierarchy of complexity in the problem space. Any complex problem is better solved by dividing into smaller parts and combining the results. And these are then broken into further smaller parts. Quickly, the breakdown of complex problems gets represented as a tree, and the mapping of the people responsible for each node in the tree becomes the organisation hierarchy. What does this have to do with AI? AI is yet another tool for automation of parts of this tree to make them more efficient and increase profit. In the early days of NASA there was a group of people, mostly women, whose role was called “computers”. In a matter of a few years, entire departments were replaced with machines. Some of them who understood the “what” and “why” behind the computations (as opposed to the “how”) kept their jobs and became operators of...

Affine Transform The affine transform is quite simply, a piece of art. Usually when you have a linear system with 2 dimensions,

I got this pretty cool firefox extension for blogging. It supports both LJ and blogger, so considering that I have been using various Google services now, I might just switch back to blogger. Provided this works, of course. powered by performancing firefox

I'm fed up with blogger! I have moved to LiveJournal. http://www.livejournal.com/users/adityag

The reason why I have written to this blog in some time is that the mailed blogs are not getting formatted correctly.<br> Lets see whether this one goes through!<br> Otherwise, I might as well switch to <B>LJ</B>. Coz the Blogger site is patheticly slow.

Weekends start with Friday evening. A chat with Himanshu inspired me to write down some things related to science and DSP that I had in my mind. I've started writing them. I'll post them here one by one as and when I'm through with them. I'm kind of stuck with some fundas of electromagnetic waves. Saturday and Sunday were spent at Mahabaleshwar with my family. Man, it was warm in the afternoons. I mean, its not supposed to be warm up there. Not even in the afternoons. Basically, walked around quite a bit, ate, slept and drove. I would have liked to walk a bit more actually. Everything else went like a typical Mahabalshwar trip with the expected dose of langurs, some animals you try hard to identify, red shoes and socks, etc. The trip back was not so memorable though, getting stuck in a traffic jam for 2 hours in the Katraj Ghat.

The google toolbar for firefox is quite amazing. The best part is that it has a gmail inbox notification and a single click takes you to the gmail inbox. Other google services are also at a clicks distance. Try it out, maybe its what you are looking for.

Something very interesting has happened. There is no petrol left in Pune :) It going to be fun to observe what happens for the next two days. -- A man may sometimes be forgiven the kiss to which he is not entitled, but never the kiss he has not the initiative to claim.

Xfce desktop 2 , originally uploaded by urwithaditya . Its the gdesklets that get you the nice eye candy actually. Xfce4 is a much improved version. Its almost revamped. I guess I'm going to be using it for quite some time to come.

Does the photo come above the text or below? And well ... I couldn't find any other image offhand.

I guess I have written about him already out here. But no amount of writing can do justice to the respect I have for this man. He is simply phenomenal. A PHD in Physical Chemistry, a great lover of hindi film music and english films, an experienced trekker (he knows the wester Ghats by heart I think), has a lot of knowledge of medicine, astronomy, astrophysics, astrology, philosophy (well, he is a PHD), electrical systems, electronics (I've learnt a thing or two about capacitors from him after getting my BE degree) and still going strong. And to top it all, a magnificent teacher. More than anything else, he taught me how to learn. Everytime I go to him, there is some surprise waiting for me. This time, it was set of astronomical diagrams showing the path of the sun across the sky at various places and at various times. Believe me, it once took me at least 24 hours to independently imagine and visualise the paths (I sat one whole day with a globe in my hand, looking at it from all p...

I was wandering around on Lakshmi road on Saturday on the hot afternoon sun looking for a particular set of headphones. The amount of specialisation you find there is amazing. In one lane you have shops selling electric cables and nothing but electric cables. Then there is another lane in which you get audio equipment, but only electronic equipment. Heaphones are not part of that. So I had to venture into another lane. This one had only electronic components transistors, capacitors and the like). After roaming around for what seemed to be eternity, I stumbled upon a group of shops that had speakers and only speakers. And here, I finally found my headphones. Its really amazing the way all the similar shops are clustered together. Also, if fortune pops up a nice cookie when I post these entries, I have decided to keep them intact from now on. -- When the bosses talk about improving productivity, they are never talking about themselves.

I saw the Fireox extension to work with Live Journal today. I'm seriously thinking of migrating to LJ now. Though one great advantage with blogger is that you can mail your posts.

I have started listening to the h2g2 radio series all over again. After listening to two episodes immediately one after the other, my head had started swimming now. Feels like I've had a pan-galactic gargle blaster. I need rehab. Time to go back to listening.

Wow! It was one the more beautiful sights I've seen in a long time. Rain pouring down so hard that you would get completely drenched in no more than two seconds. if you had the guts to go out there and brave the huge hailstones, that is. And this, bang in the middle of April! Its a wonderful world :)

I'm pondering on a question I've had for over 10 years now. The question is: does what we see, appear the same to everyone, with respect to colours. I'm thinking whether there is a way to test this out. Do all of us 'see' the colours the same way. I mean it's possible that the stimulus x gets on seeing green is what y gets on seeing blue. I mean, what appears to x as green, appears to y as what appears to x to be blue. Get it? Its a weird and scary concept. But the concept is not much of an issue (after all these years). Whats bothering me is that there doesn't seem to be any way of testing this out. This has directly got to do with the interpretation of signal from the eye by the brain. What do you mean by 'appear'? After all, the whole visual world is nothing but an abstract model that the brain has made for itself using electrical signals given by the eye in order to consistently and quickly interpret the future signals that the eye would give. T...