blog@Yantrajaal

Science fiction writers and movie makers have long talked about robots evolving to the point of dominating the world and human society. Fortunately this has not yet happened and the possibility of it happening in the near future is quite low. On the other hand, machine generated mass mail -- spam -- has increased to a point where they constitute 98% of the total email ecosystem and can dominate and destroy this very useful service unless one takes special care to keep them at bay. Social bots are an emerging phenomenon that may climb out of the success seen with spams in email and reach out towards what what was considered impossible -- the domination of real human ecosystem. A bot by itself is no big news. Bot -- an abbreviation for a software robot -- is a computer program that imitates human behaviour in certain circumstances. For example you can create a bot, a searchbot, to search the web and report on the best prices for a particular product across various online stores. This...

Baul's are an integral part of the landscape of Birbhum and their haunting music lends enchantment to any evening. On the occasion of Dol Yatra ( or Holi -- for non Bengalis ) we had the pleasure of listening to Gautam Baul as he held forth with his mellifluous tunes under a full moon. What was even more remarkable was that the full moon on this date -- 19th March 2011 -- was also a supermoon, when the Moon is closest to the Earth. 

In the little town of Dubrajpur, near Shantiniketan, Birbhum, West Bengal, there is an area called the "Mama Bhagne Pahar" that is scattered with a large number of huge boulders. Obviously, these are very old rocks, most likely to be remnants of a basaltic pipe that would have pushed through some cracks on the surface of the earth many many years ago. Since then the ravages of time and weather have removed the softer soil leaving the hard rocks standing naked on the ground.  Subsequently aeons of heating and cooling have cracked the rocks leaving them in odd shapes for people like us see and wonder. Here are some pictures of the place Unfortunately, like most places of tourist interest, the entire area is dirty and ill-kept. There is garbage and rubbish everywhere though there has been some sporadic effort to create a park out of this natural bounty but the results are very disappointing.  One of these huge boulders has been sanctified as Lord Shiva -- in the avata...

Like the fifth postulate of Euclid, the twelfth chapter of this book has been a source of discomfort both for me as well as for some of my friends and readers. The need to introduce the Divine to plug a loophole in my logic – an inevitable loophole, given the limitations of the Gödel’s Theorem of Incompleteness – was rather irritating and yet it seemed that there is nothing I could do about it. Then I met a friend who alerted me to the existence of a very simple concept that was functionally analogous and one that would allow me to bridge the gap. But does it work ? and have I succeeded in doing so ? That question is best answered by the reader I suppose. Technology has moved significantly since the first edition and nowhere is this more evident than in the area of 3D displays. Direct connectivity between the human brain and a digital device has also improved dramatically but we are yet to reach the level of maturity that is necessary to blur the border between the real and illusor...

Thanks to 50+ batches of B.Tech engineers who have passed out through its portals -- and have subsequently percolated into every kind of business on the planet -- IIT Kharagpur is a fairly well known name in the literate parts of the world. Riding on the back of this illustrious tenant, the sleepy railway junction of Kharagpur has emerged from the obscurity of being another town in Midnapore and has also achieved the status of place that people actually go to, not just merely come from ! Those of us who have been to Kharagpur or  arestill there are also aware that the institute premises  include the famous Hijli Jail and is adjacent to the Salua Airforce base which was the home of the Very Heavy Bomber Squadron of the RAF during the Second World War. But what is origin of the name Kharagpur ? A quick search through Google reveals that there are quite a few stories about the place but the consensus is that it is named after the Khargeshwar Shiva temple that is located in the ...

Just 20 kms from IIT Kharagpur, on the banks of the Kangshabati River ( aka Kansai, Cossye ) are the 300 year old ruins of some beautiful terracotta temples that were built by Bidyananda Ghoshal, the revenue collector of Ratnachowk Pargana appointed by Alivardi Khan, one of the notorious Nawabs of Bengal [ The Telegraph ] People have known about the ruins for quite some time and they do get a small but steady stream of visitors but it is the untiring work of Mohammad Yeasin Pathan, a resident of a nearby village , that has really helped preserve what was left of a unique slice of the heritage of South Bengal.         The following pictures are of a second series of ruins that are located a little away from the main road. These temples are better preserved and have intact Shivalinga idols that are still worshipped by the locals. To reach Pathra, one goes North from the National Highway 6 [ Bombay Road ] towards Midnapore. At the Kangsaba...

Ever since I have had a chance to read the series of books on the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov I have had a great curiosity about and fascination for the imaginary science of psychohistory . But is psychohistory really imaginary ? Can we not use statistical simulation tools to model the behaviour of large human populations. Having toyed with this idea for a while, I thought of publishing it here [ since no journal will ever accept such heresy ]. Take a look  If anyone has an interest in this "science" let us collaborate !

Distance learning is a topic that excites all but remains a model that is yet to be cracked with any great degree of success. Mr Deepak Parekh, in his inaugural address at the CSI National Convention states that this market will be worth Rs 11 billion in 2012 but as of today will any company actually hire someone who has an MBA degree from an online program ? It is true that we have had correspondence courses from various open universities and of late many reputed universities like MIT and even our own IITs have come out with presentations and recorded videos that seek to distribute the wisdom of good teachers among students not enrolled with them. Video conferencing has also been tried but again, the fact that they are nowhere as popular as regular class room sessions means that there is something missing somewhere. But the fact remains that hunger for education – especially the kind of professional education that helps people get jobs – is immense. That is why private engineerin...

In an earlier post I had spoken about the nexus between college rankings and placement records and why this is not desirable but unfortunately inevitable. Here is a video where I reiterate the same.

The Kurumbhera Fort in West Midnapur, West Bengal -- that we had 'discovered' in my previous post -- holds interesting possibilities for the economic and cultural life of South Bengal. We are aware of the dance festivals at Konarak and Khajuraho so why can we not conceive of a similar cultural festival at Keshiary with the Kurumbhera Fort as the venue ? Located on almost one acre of enclosed space and with a ready made stage already built in -- as is evident in the picture of the North West corner shown above -- the fort will lend itself very readily to any kind of dance or dramatic performance with room to spare. Keshiary is located 30 km south of Kharagpur on perfectly motorable roads and there are enough bus routes that connect it not only to Kharagpur but also to traditional tourist spots like Digha in East Midnapur. However hotels or other forms of accomodation are hard to come by in this corner of the state that has missed the economic opportunities that have become a...