blog@Yantrajaal

A historical perspective “What is time?” Asks James Gleick, in this history of Time Travel. “We know that it is imperceptible. It is immaterial. We cannot see it, hear it or touch it. Time is what clocks measure. But what is a clock? An instrument for the measurement of time. The snake swallows its tail again!” This is the kind of circular logic that the author tries to break out of in this engaging foray into one of the most mysterious concepts that has intrigued man since the nineteenth century. Scholarly journal papers that announce new breakthroughs invariably begin with a review of past literature. Once in while, the literature review becomes bigger than any new concept that is being announced and in extreme cases, we end up with a what is known as review paper that merely surveys the subject without offering anything new. So is the case with this book. Rather than offering any new insight or even a clear exposition of any specific point of view, the author leads us through ...

Let us imagine a quaint little colony where you and I live in peace but this peace is very often disturbed by outsiders who come in and dump garbage or play loud, ear-splitting music. What do we do? We collect photographs of the items that have created a nuisance in the past -- garbage bins, sound systems --  and store them in a photo album. We hire guards and give them  copies of photographs from this photo-album and ask them to check each and every visitor if he is carrying any of these unwanted items. When he finds a visitor who is carrying anything that matches with a picture in the album, he simply destroys the item or might even shoot the visitor. If a new culprit enters the premises, with a new disturbing item and is somehow overpowered by the community, then a picture of the new item is added to the album so that, in future, the guards can identify, destroy or deactivate it, if it is brought back again! image from ScienceMag This dramatised scenario is based on ...

When I was a child, we used to spend Durga Puja at the foot of the Ayodhya Hills, Purulia where one of the fascinations was to spot artificial satellites, with our naked eyes, as they darted through the stars across the night sky. This Deepawali, parked in the pristine gardens of the Tumsong Tea Retreat near the dreamy town of Ghoom, Darjeeling, I was looking forward to a similar sky show when a thought struck me. Chinese fireworks may be out of favour this year, but right above me in the sky, was Tiangong 2, the Chinese permanent space station where two Chinese taikonauts had just arrived for their month long tour of duty. Living in space is tough and the technology necessary to make space habitable and safe for humans is very difficult and expensive to develop. Hence China’s Taikonauts@Tiangong is an impressive feat, but is it really necessary? Should India try to catch up? Or is there an alternate, inexpensive approach? The sci-fi stories of Isaac Asimov’s famous “positronic” ro...

I just read in the newspapers that Donald Trump has been sworn in as 45th President of the United States and so the world is about to come to an end. It is the end of globalisation and the beginning of new protectionist order where the new mantra is buy American and hire American. It is the end of liberal democracy and the beginning of a new Putin-style illiberal autocracy. Francis Fukuyama and his thesis of "end of history" is now history -- "communist" USSR, in its new avatar of plutocratic Russia has eventually triumphed over the Anglo American vision of a new world order. image footwearnews But should all this matter to me? Obviously it does, as otherwise why am I commenting on Trump's inauguration? Trump is now the key person in the world's richest and most powerful nation and he certainly has the capacity to both help and hurt me -- or rather my interests. My interests are of course related to Calcutta, India and of late, and still rather tangen...

If not on Earth, where else can humans beings be? Not as a traveller in a spacecraft or as a one-off tourist on the Moon but as an immigrant, or a colonizer who sets up a permanent residency for multiple generations. Given our current knowledge of physics and the state of propulsion technology, we really do not have the ability to travel to other stars in a reasonable amount of time, so our search for that second home for humanity is restricted to our own solar system. Where do we start? photo credit  Tittat427 There are two divergent points of view on where to locate such an extraterrestrial colony. Some believe that the colony should be located on a natural body like a planet, satellite or an asteroid while others think that the best bet would be an artificial structure in orbit around a planet or in space. There are pros and cons for both. What is common to both approaches is the realisation that any environment outside the terrestrial biosphere that we currently inh...

One of the finest expositions of the Indic School of Thought. Shivoham (शिवोऽहं ) by Adishankara - performed by John Scottus Students from Rutger Kortenhorst on Vimeo .

Elon Musk may have suddenly become the glamourous mascot of a new, post Apollo, space age but the fact remains that the destiny of mankind is among the stars. While many people will keep on trying to salvage what remains of spaceship Earth from the environmental, social and political scourges that threaten it, it is but inevitable that a significant, space faring community will emerge that will seek to live and work outside the planet -- like European emigrants going to America. Are we in India ready for this? Will we just watch and cheer while others depart? -- as it was in 1969 when man went to the Moon? Or should we as nation participate in these great voyages? credit : gwydion1982 Astronomers tell us that there must be, thousands of habitable, earthlike planets in orbit around various stars in our galaxy. Unfortunately, the distance between stars is so great that we have no means yet, not even theoretical ideas, on how to build spacecraft that will be fast enough to travel...

The demon of demonetisation has scared the living daylights out of India’s cash-based economy. Whether the aam-aadmi is indeed suffering or whether the quantity of black money unearthed justifies the collateral discomfort is best debated on the sterile but bloody timelines of social media, but what we need right now is a way to facilitate payments -- small, ad-hoc payments -- that keep the engines of commerce running. Can technology play a role here? It certainly can. Let us see how. First we need to popularise software, app-based wallets like SBI Buddy and PayTM with which people can transfer money to each other merely on the basis of their phone numbers. While prima facie these are good options there are some drawbacks. First these are closed-systems, which means that one can only transfer money to someone who already has an identical wallet software. This means, for example, that a person can transfer money from his SBI buddy to someone who has SBI Buddy but not to someon...

Ever since I started my career in software and IT as a database administrator, I have had a great fascination, if not love, for the SQL language. I also know that there are many in the software fraternity (and sorority) who share my comfort with using SQL. Even after moving into the current enthusiasm, or should I call it a fad, with data analytics, I see that there exists many who prefer the ease and convenience of SQL even in big data. For example, Hadoop had to hide the complexity of its Map-Reduce magic behind HIVE. Spark offers SparkSQL. In an earlier post, I had shown how SQL can be used for scoring Data Mining models developed with R through the PMML route. In this post, we show how K-means clustering, a very common and widely used data mining activity can be done with SQL, using a technique adopted from Joni Salonen's blog post . The following codes were executed in MySQL. First we create the tables : drop table if exists km_data; -- contains initial data, on...

As a long time foot-soldier in India’s software industry, I had often wondered why is it that India’s big brand IT companies with literally lakhs of software developers could never, ever come out with a single blockbuster product like Whatsapp, or Skype. It could not be that Indians were dumb -- after all our very own Sabeer Bhatia from BITS Pilani had created Hotmail, precursor to Yahoo and Gmail, but why was it that he had to go the Silicon Valley to be able to do it? What is there in the air and water of California that it causes products to sprout in every other company there? Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez (Penguin Randomhouse 2016) talks about the factors, the issues, that seethe in this cauldron of chaotic creativity -- issues that managers in Indian software companies, thrashing around in business-as-usual, BAU, challenges of bench, attrition and utilisation will never know. This 500 page corporate thriller takes the reader right into the frontlines of Silicon Vall...

Pokémon Go is a relatively new computer game that has, since July 2016, taken the world by storm. As far as its rules go, it is not really different from computer games that have been around for the last twenty years -- the player goes around locating and collecting objects of interest to earn game points. But the real impact is the introduction of an all new level of technology whose potential is yet to be understood by most of us. Unlike every other computer game that you can play from the comfort of a desk or a couch, Pokémon Go needs you to walk around the neighbourhood with your smartphone and “catch Pokémons”. The catch here is that the game merges the virtual reality of Pokémons with the physical reality of the neighbourhood Google Map. Since the game is aware of your location, you need to walk down actual roads, turn past, or enter, actual buildings and then, and only then, will you “see” the Pokémon in your smartphone. If you turn on the smartphone camera, the game cleverly ...