blog@Yantrajaal

Generative AI as implemented in popular products like ChatGPT has significantly reduced the need for computer programming, unless of course one works with extremely new and complex problems. This means that most entry and middle level programming jobs will get eliminated. Those who are not programmers by profession but only write programs to facilitate their day to day work – like data collection, analysis and visualisation – will find that most of their tasks can be automated. Then why should business management students learn Python programming? Because programming is not just about making a computer work but about thinking of any problem in the abstract, decomposing a complex issue into a number of simple ones whose solutions are known and then integrating these partial solutions to address the goal. Young Bengali woman writing computer program under the close supervision of a generative AI system. pop art style The ability to write an effective program – in any modern language like...

  Bust of goddess Kali visualised as a young, beautiful Bengali woman, with her tongue stuck out in a mischievous manner. Her face is a clean geometric pattern of colours framed by her long, black, wavy hair. She has a seductive smile, with large sweeping eyes whose eyeballs are blazing gems of colour. In the background we see the skyline of Kolkata including the Howrah bridge. impressionist style, minimalist. Bust of goddess Kali visualised as a young, beautiful Bengali woman, with her tongue stuck out in a mischievous manner. Her face is a clean geometric pattern of colours framed by her long, black, wavy hair. She has a dark complexion, a seductive smile, with large sweeping eyes whose eyeballs are blazing gems of colour. In the background we see the skyline of Kolkata including the Howrah bridge and tall skyscrapers. Pop art style, minimalist. Bust of goddess Kali visualised as a young, beautiful Bengali woman, with her tongue stuck out in a mischievous manner. Her face is a cl...

  Face of goddess Kali, visualised as the face of a young bengali woman with her tongue stuck out in a mischievous manner. Her face is a pattern of multiple colours framed by her long, dark, wavy hair. She has a seductive smile, with large sweeping eyes whose eyeballs are blazing gems of colour. On her neck is a necklace that shows the Kolkata skyline with Howrah bridge. art deco style, minimalist. Face of goddess Kali, visualised as the face of a young bengali woman with her tongue stuck out in a mischievous manner. Her face is a riot of colours framed by her long, dark, wavy hair. She has a smiling visage, with large sweeping eyes whose eyeballs appears a jigsaw puzzle. On her neck is a necklace that shows the Kolkata skyline with howrah bridge. Impressionist style minimalist. Face of goddess Kali visualised as a young, beautiful Bengali woman with her tongue stuck out in a mischievous manner. Her face is a pattern of multiple colours framed by her long, black, wavy hair. She has...

 This is how much the sun moves North in one week 25th April 2024 19th April 2024

 Rabindra Sarobar, also known as Dhakuria Lake, or simply The Lake, is one of the most pleasant of all public spaces in Kolkata. But today, The Lakes are in a terrible shape because the water-level has been falling precipitously because (a) The construction of the Metro Rail had blocked a channel through which water from the Adi Ganga used to enter The Lakes (b) Rainfall has been low for the past couple of years and (c) Falling water table because of extensive withdrawal of ground water. One way to fix this problem is to build a pipeline and a pumphouse to carry Adi Ganga water and this is not very difficult at at all. The map below shows the shortest path -- approximately 900 m --  along which the pipeline can be laid, without trespassing on any private property, but only following the Eastern Railway lines. This idea along with this map has been repeatedly shared with KMDA, the public body responsible for the maintenance of The Lake but has elicited no response. Looks like w...

 Neosapience -- which is my word for artificial intelligence (AI) -- is obviously all over the news. From self driving cars to ChatGPT ( technically, large language models) this new 'technology' has not only taken the world by storm but threatens certain core financial and social constructs that define human society . There is however a counter-view that claims that neo sapiens (AI programs or silicon intelligence) can never supersede the original homo sapiens (carbon based humans and animals) because they are being 'programmed' or built by humans. Continuing on this theme, it is argued because neo sapiens are being built by homo sapiens, they are at best an imitation of the original creators and so cannot be anything new, different or superior to what the originals are. Hence, humanity is safe from a takeover by neosapience. In this article, we argue why this is not true. But to begin with what is intelligence? A simple, straightforward definition is unlikely to satisf...

  Why is 42  a special number? The number 42 is, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything", calculated by an enormous supercomputer named Deep Thought over a period of 7.5 million years. This slide deck  (with 42 slides) demonstrates a wide variety of SQL statements that should meet almost every common requirement faced by data scientists. The accompanying Google Colab Notebook will allow the user to install Postgres in a free VM and explore variations of these commands. Here is the full course outline for my brand new RDBMS course, complete with all slide decks and notebooks.    Happy New Year 2024

While India celebrates the success of Chandrayaan-3 in safely delivering the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover to the surface of the Moon, it should not view this exercise as an end by itself but merely a means to an end. But what is that end goal that India should be looking for?  A lunar base of course, but first, why? History tells us that the famous Chinese mariner Zheng He carried out seven maritime missions (1405 - 1433) on behalf of the Ming emperor to different parts of East and South-East Asia right up to the Horn of Africa. The goal was to increase trade by 'showing the flag' and impressing the natives of distant lands with the maritime prowess of the Chinese navy and the wealth of products that were available in China. But the fatal flaw in this strategy was that he never established a Chinese colony anywhere. On the other hand, the European mariners who came a century later not only visited the same ports but immediately set up 'factories' or trading posts...

The stunning success of the Chandrayaan / Vikram / Pragyan mission opens up a world of possibilities for India on the Moon. The next logical step would be to set up a permanent base station - similar to Dakshin Gangotri in Antartica -- that would serve as a locus for the mining, manufacturing and other operations. The Indian engineering industry has extensive experience in these areas, but their expertise would have to be fine-tuned and optimised for the lunar environment. The single most significant difference from Earth bound operations would be the use of autonomous machines, or robots, to do most, if not all of the work. This is because supporting a human workforce in such a harsh environment would increase the cost of doing business to the point of becoming economically non-sustainable. But irrespective of what we mine, manufacture or otherwise process on an industrial scale on the Moon, what we would need first is a source of energy - abundant energy. While solar panels that trap...

Unlike Abrahamic religions, Sanatan Dharma is mature enough to handle both heresy and blasphemy, and this gives us the right and liberty to question certain perspectives that lie at the core of what is referred to as Hinduism. Of late, a certain minor operative of ISKCON has been very critical of Vivekananda and Ramakrishna but on enquiring further I realised the ISKCON boss himself, Prabhupada, had referred to both Vivekananda and Aurobindo as rascals. To understand this behaviour, I delved further and realised that what I was reading today was in fact bending back to what a school friend of mine had once told me: that the Bhagavad Gita reads like a marketing pitch -- believe in me or you are doomed. An image of a woman seen in the reflection on  the pupil of one eye of another woman. digital art. Many well-known and supposedly erudite people have sung paeans to the glory of the Gita that was delivered 'directly by God' on the battlefield of the Mahabharat. But it has some obv...

 

Nearly 100,000 years before the present era, when hominins (modern humans) were diverging away from hominids (the great apes) on the evolutionary graph, we come across multiple species of humans like neanderthal, cro magnon and denisovan sharing space on earth. But with the passage of time and changing circumstances,  all human species except cro magnon were eventually eliminated leaving only one species, now identified as  homo sapiens (latin : wise man) to inherit the planet. Closer in time, or just about 500 years ago, we observed how the arrival of European Christians in America eliminated the social and cultural constructs of the Inca / Maya civilisations that had existed there since the dawn of history.  In both cases, the coexistence of two competing societies resulted in either the extinction or a significant transformation of one and the eventual growth and dominance of the other. Where both have survived, one has become the dominant, as in the case of humans, wh...