blog@Yantrajaal

Quantum mechanics is a subject that has the strange property of simultaneously being logically rigorous and yet completely counterintuitive. So much so, that even a towering intellect like Einstein could never bring himself to accept its principles even though products based on the same exist all around us. The earliest oddity, identified by Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics is about a hypothetical cat that is neither dead nor alive until someone actually observes it. A similar oddity is that of quantum entanglement, where the behaviour of one particle is instantly affected by the behaviour of another particle, however distant it may be -- an example of “spooky” action-at-a-distance. Explaining these phenomena is beyond the scope and temerity of this article and so the reader would have to accept them here in good, almost religious, faith and carry on with the belief that such phenomenon has been observed and explained by scientists under the most rigorous experime...

Global, national and local societies face many threats. We are threatened by enemies -- internal and external -- who want to destroy our way of life. We are plagued with environmental degradation as we quickly try to ramp up the economy and improve our living standards. Finally our own social systems are in tatters because efforts to mitigate the effects of the first two reasons are stymied by venal corruption and a cynical disregard for the rule of law. In fact the last reason is perhaps the most over arching reason, because it leads to the other two. image from 5rhythms We have solutions to most of our problems. Technology solutions are available to grow more food, generate more energy, combat disease and check crime. There are public structures like hospitals, schools, municipal, state and central governments, the legislature, each having its own set of rules and procedures, to guide and govern matters. There are commercial structures, like corporates, cooperatives and profess...

The ubiquity of computers and smartphones and the pervasive presence of digital technology means that everybody who is reading this article is familiar with hackers. Hackers, as we all believe, are evil people, who either create viruses that ruin our machines or access our computers to steal confidential information with the intention to cause harm. We also have ethical, or white-hat, hackers, the guards and policemen, who with the same level of skill, try to beat the evil black-hat hackers at their game and keep digital assets secure. But the original meaning of hacker was someone who is so intensely immersed in computer technology that he knows much more than what a normal, non-hacker,  user would ever know about what can be done with computers. The hacker was the uber-geek, in whose hands a computer could be stretched to perform tasks that it was never meant for and deliver unexpected results. The hacker was a genius, not necessarily the evil genius that he -- and it is general...

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to have been invited to speak at the PMI Regional conference where instead of the regular, and pointless, bouquet of flowers that is traditionally given to the keynote speaker, I was presented with the following certificate what this means is that PMI has paid Sankalptaru.org some money to plant 10 trees on my behalf and "my tree" is visible in at the URL indicated by the QRcode . Thank you PMI for this unusual gift

In the  previous post , we saw how to run a Spark - Python program in a Jupyter Notebook on a standalone EC2 instance on Amazon AWS, but the real interesting part would be to run the same program on genuine Spark Cluster consisting of one master and multiple slave machines. The process is explained pretty well in  Tom Zeng's blog post  and we follow the same strategy here. 1. Install AWS Command Line services by following these instructions . 2. Configure the AWS CLI with your AWS credentials using these instructions . in particular, the following is necessary $ aws configure AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE  AWS Secret Access Key [None]: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY Default region name [None]: us-east-1 Default output format [None]: ENTER you will have to use your own  AWS Access Key ID and  AWS Secret Access Key of course! 3. Execute the following command : aws emr create-cluster --release-label emr-5.2.0 \ ...

In an earlier post I have explained how to run Python+Spark program with Jupyter on local machine and in a subsequent post , I will explain how the same can be done an AWS EMR cluster of multiple machines. In this post, I explain how this can be done on a single EC2 machine instance running Ubuntu on Amazon AWS. The strategy described in this blog post is based on strategies described in posts written by Jose Marcial Portilla and Chris Albon . We assume that you have a basic familiarity with AWS services like EC2 machines, S3 data storage and concept of keypairs and an account with Amazon AWS. You may use your Amazon eCommerce account but you may also create one on the AWS login page . This tutorial is based on Ubuntu and assumes that  you have a basic familiarity with the SSH command and other general Linux file operation commands. 1. Login to AWS Go to the AWS console  ,login with userID and password, then go to the page with EC2 services. Unless you have used AWS ...

The origin of the Bengali calendar On Saturday, 15th April 2017 Common Era, Bengalis in India, especially in West Bengal, Assam and Tripura, will celebrate the 1st Baisakh, or “Poila Boisakh”, 1424 Bengal Era (BE) -- the start of the Bengali New Year. Most of us are aware that the globally used Common Era, or Christian Era, starts with the birth of Jesus Christ in 1 CE, but what exactly is commemorated by the start of the Bengal Era? What happened in 1 BE? There are two points of view. Raja Shashanka is the first universally accepted ruler of a major part of the land mass that is associated with Bengal -- West Bengal & East Bengal / Bangladesh -- today. His capital was at Gaud (current Murshidabad) and he was a contemporary of Raja Harshavardhana of Kannauj (near Lucknow) in the West and of Raja Bhaskar Varman of Kamarupa (Assam) in the East. These three persons were the three principal rulers of North India. While exact dates are not available, it is strongly believed th...

First we had computers, then we had the world wide web and now we are talking about IOT, the Internet of Things. Computers are now pervasive and have occupied every nook and corner of life. Artificial intelligence seems to be growing bigger, faster and smarter everyday. Science fiction writers have often spoken of machines taking over the world but is that pure fantasy or is it a matter of time before this fiction becomes synonymous with fact? In this article, we will explore the genesis of artificial intelligence, examine how fast these are mutating and morphing into more advanced levels and finally speculate on what this means in terms of employment and other key indices of human society. But first, let us see .. How machines learn When I was a member of the faculty at IIT Kharagpur, one of my senior colleagues had told me that we should not to teach students but instead, help them learn. Can this idea to extended to machines? Any spreadsheet user would know how to have a comput...