Closure for 2014 year

 Here comes the end of 2014, so this is the time to say good bye to it. Another year is completely spent. The journey of 365 day units traversed along the dimension of time posed new challenges, offered new learning, met several new milestones. All these encircle around just three aspects - Family, Work and Dreams.
  This year at work I took over new responsibilities which confronted me with new challenges. From the beginning of the year I worked to make Datoin real. This gave me an opportunity to involve and witness end to end product development. Though I always loved programming and making stuff, this task was more than that. Everything went fine and now I am super excited to see what is going to happen to Datoin in 2015.
 In the family and dream side, many plans came into execution. We rejuvenated our house which was built at the time of my birth. I convinced my parents about my dream to continue further studies. And then worked restlessly towards making my dreams to come true. No, its not just continuation of studies, rather I was and I am very specific about my studies. I want to study Artificial Intelligence, moreover I need to join place which has best researchers.  So, I calculated what is in the middle of me and my dream grad school.  I found that I need 3 years time - one year to prepare & two years to pursue,  need to qualify few exams and need to apply for a loan to pay college fee. Near the end of the year, I managed to take temporary leave from work to prepare for exams.
   During my holidays, I spent days and nights to crack GRE. I loved mathematics so I didnt do any preparations for GRE maths. I realized that the path to my new dream demands superlative language usage capability irrespective of GRE's score. English as a language made me uncomfortable ever since I started to learn at age 11.  Though I have learned grammar in high school and few vocabulary words later on, it is only less than quarter of required. I had known only two ways of making myself prepared : read books, watch movies. Later I appeared for GRE and I secured score of 300/340. I was bit disappointed. I retook and this time I scored 315/340.  After my holidays, I joined my team at Datoin to continue my work on infrastructure. Meanwhile I applied to my dream schools for grad school admit.

 I  With this my 2014 nicely ended by leaving hopes for 2015 regarding Datoin and my Graduate Studies.



  

The four patterns : a philosophy

You took birth as an Homo Sapiens. You have limited lifetime as a living creature. In the past couple of decades, you've probably grown up: physically your growth has been stalled; mentally not yet!. May be you have earned some resources and/or inherited some. May be you acquired some knowledge by your own and learned from others. Now, standing somewhere in this jumbled society, looking for the path ahead. In a nutshell, all the tangles gets reduced to these 4 patterns:

  1. You convert energy into capital. May be you do business or a day job to serve the needs of others. You boost your capital. You use a portion of it to buy comforts. The rest, you transfer as inheritance or as charity.

 2. You use your energy to acquire more knowledge.You transfer your knowledge to others : may be via writing, teaching, etc.,.

3. You absorb all you receive, consume all you have and leave no trace. May be you are under privileged or got reasons to tell why this is so.

4. May be you will find the right balance of above. The extent of each of them depends on your abilities and luck.

And finally you will die, after which you are not a living body. May be your life will be interrupted if some one or something doesn't like your actions and possessions.  

How did nature facilitate birth of intelligent species in finite amount of energy and time?

The question "How intelligent animals are came into existence in this planet?" was whirling in my mind. Such a question had arise when I was thinking what does it take to create a truly intelligent agent like human brain out of a finite amount of energy & time.
This is amazing - the answer I was seeking is finally here:
Vast amount of energy formed due to sudden burst(Big bang) resulted in formation of particles(such as quarks).  High temperature kicked these particles to move faster and faster, but expansion caused temperature to reduce and hence particles gradually slowed down. This resulted the formation of next order particles(such as electrons, protons, neutrons...). As the particles slowed down further due to dropping temperature, protons and neutrons accumulated into nuclei and hence atoms are formed. As the temperature further reduced and movement further slowed down, electrons gets attached to nuclei and relatively stable state is formed which resulted in formation of atoms. Till now atoms are of single atomic number (one proton, one electron) -  we call it as Hydrogen. These Hydrogen atoms with unit proton, neutron & electron then resulted in forming galaxies, stars, planets. Later on by addition/fusion of Hydrogen, higher elements with bulky atoms(more particles) formed. In that process an higher order atom with 6 protons and 6 electrons formed - we call it as Carbon.  And even an atom with 8 protons and 8 electrons also formed - we call it as Oxygen. After certain time when temperature dropped to a pleasant value,  in one of the revolving body (Earth),  these atoms of  Hydrogen, Carbon & Oxygen together created these wonders on this planet- Water(Hydrogen and Oxygen), organic matter(Carbon and Hydrogen) and combustion (Carbon & Oxygen).
 Now lets jump on to Darwin's theory - When water on this planet gets stagnated, Carbon and Hydrogen settled to form a cell of organic matter, it was later evolved to multi-cellular organisms such as algae, marine species including water plants, amphibians, land species, birds. Out of so many possible combinations, there also lies a combination which had natural intelligence, we call them humans.

Now the question is - these intelligent species are now trying to find out answer for the question - why is the universe the way it is?

A month ago, while I was surfing on an online store, there was a recommendation of book : 'Brief history of Time - Stephen Hawking'. I was aware of Professor Hawking, a famous physicist. Preface and short summary of it were interesting. I said myself - 'Its been long time you read physics, lets have a look'.

High school science text books introduced basic laws of science, which are then broadened during pre university studies. During undergrad freshman year had read physics again on few narrow topics such as quantum mechanics, optics,... (In fact, my all time high score in academics was achieved in physics - 99/100, during Bachelor degree!) But, somehow the topics read were so disconnected in mind. 'The brief history of Time' helped to link one with another to make real sense. Thank you author.

The Author starts with historical beliefs and theories about the world around us. Then takes readers into a journey alongside timeline in which he narrates how the beliefs gets revised as centuries rolled, from Greek Philosophers to Copernicus & Galileo to Newton to Einstein to Heisenberg & Bohr to contemporary physicists. Meanwhile, you will be given with thoughts and affirmations of improvement in accuracy of understanding of universe.

I enjoyed reading it end to end, completed today. I would greatly recommend it to anybody who is interested in physics. If you don't have time for going through works of several researchers & scientists of past two millenniums, Professor Hawking has summarized it for you in simple words! By the time you finish reading book, you will be more confident about basic concepts in science.

I was astonished, for the way Professor thinks. The way how he throws questions, and answers one by one. This book summarized many theories, out of which it developed deep interest in me to have a deeper look on Einstein's "General and Special theory of Relativity" and Darwin's "Evolution of species". Now, I know what to read next! 

Effort is necessary to make favorable events happen but unfavorable can happen themselves

Wondering why conscious effort is necessary to make right events to occur but wrong events can happen by themselves! Right events, I mean here, are favorable events.

Recalling Murphy's law

1. Anything CAN go wrong, WILL go wrong. (full of pessimism)
2. what ever can happen will happen if we make trials enough.(a little room for optimism).

Inferring from second law of thermo dynamics: Disorder tends to increase over the time. From observations "wrong" events must be due to disorder.

Photo Tagging : One of the abused feature of Facebook.

One of the exciting feature of facebook is that it allows users to upload images and tag those images to people. This photo tagging has now become one of the abused feature. Mostly newly joined users  abuses it by tagging friends to every photo they want to show no matter whether their friends related to it or not!

Dear friends, If you want to share some content with a set of users, create a group and share it in group. Try not to be aggressive in that, its up to our interests and time to view your content. If you don't know, facebook team has invested lots of effort in recommending posts. If your content likely interests to me, it will automatically come up in my timeline and if it is really interesting to me I will click Like. Please don't abuse photo tagging to get more Likes.