Bheemboy's Beams

My Impromptu Blog

Has an ad followed you all thru your internet experience?

A couple of weeks ago, I clicked on a banner ad from zovi.com and checked out their website. Since that day, ads from zovi are constantly following me wherever I go on the internet. It felt invasive.

Starting then, if an ad looks interesting, I am simply typing it’s name in the address bar instead of clicking on the ad.

A tool milked too much, eh? web ads?

Event outcomes

How often is the outcome predictable before the event begins?

I think, mostly!

Now, does it change much if I re-word the question as “How often is the outcome decided before the event begins?”

Then, don’t wait for the event.

facebook updates

did facebook change it’s updates and notification system to make facebook quieter?

or

have all my friends become less active on facebook?

or 

have I become more jobless than usual, and check for updates too often?

Effort vs Outcome

As i’ve seen in the last few days -

By the people who are aware of both the effort that went behind the task and the outcome, usually the effort is evaluated.

Iradudara yedege todevude jeevana…

ಇರುವುದೆಲ್ಲವ ಬಿಟ್ಟು, ಇರದುದರ ಎಡೆಗೆ ತೊಡೆವುದೇ ಜೀವನ..

[To leave what you have got, and yearn for what you not have not got - is life]

—

Written by Gopalakrishna Adiga, this song (Yaava Mohana Murali) is one of my all time favourites! 

snippet of the song from Mysooru Mallige movie below - 

I was reminded today of this while reading my friend’s blog post (read this as the song plays) where she has beautifully explained the meaning of this song in English. 

Btw, she is entering into a wedlock tomorrow (iLife2 :D) with Dinesh.. Here’s wishing Sowmya hearty congratulations.. :)

India’s technological capabilities

There needs to be a source of constant motivation.

  1. Being around inspiring people is by far the best motivation I have seen. 
  2. Another is the success of your tribe. 

An example of the second point, for me, is the recent successful test of AGNI-V, India’s inter-continental ballistic missile. India will be entering the elite club of only 5 other nations - the US, UK, Russia, France and China - to have such capabilities. And these technologies are not shared by any country, so it is essential to re-invent them. 

Had a very fruitful discussion with Pramod today, that led to me understanding some of the intricacies in the research it takes to progress is such directions, and some of the capabilities India has developed in the recent past! Also saw some real neat infrastructure right here in Bangalore required for cutting edge research in nano sciences. Awesome stuff!

Another interesting call-out was for the need to work on, and highlight, such large achievements that would inspire people to do more, all the while working on scaling up capacity in necessities like universal education and other basic issues. 

Work hard. Party harder. Start with partying!

—me

Why write?

so there is record of what I think. else, like all other thoughts, ideas fade in memory. why not document it, so it’ll be a good record to review and understand how my ideas are changing over time?

any other benefit? sharing these ideas could instigate further ideas in others, some of whom might go ahead and implement some of their ideas. 

all this is in theory - show me the action - says the critic. 

I cannot do that right away. Also, everything improves by practice, cannot expect to have everything right the first time. And there is no reason to be perturbed, for the cost of writing is not high anyway - is my current best response. 

Any other reason why you write?

To evolve requires to fight

We all perhaps agree at some level that we are but a cog in the wheel of evolution. However, since the gene cannot learn by itself to evolve, and therefore something, however small, must happen in the course of our lives, consciously done by us using our minds, which is perhaps the only vehicle of free will, and therefore randomness in the system, now - what is it?

Have you ever noticed when you are in the process of adapting?

But you do remember putting up fights with our surroundings, right? These fights, small ones -  with our friends, colleagues, family, and society, and some large ones - again, with friends, colleagues, family and society, is the process of change, change in the direction of the perceived “better”. The other way to look at it is that the force causing adaptation, as per Newton’s second law of motion requires, is the fight we routinely put up.

If you do not need to fight, there is perhaps something you can do better. 

I was imagining a day when we do not have to fight, and everything will be abundant. I will have to revisit my plan, for perhaps it is not going to happen, for it is not in the nature of evolution to be content.

Torrent streaming

One of the disadvantages of downloading video via torrents is that you cannot watch a it until the download has completely finished - as the bits of the video clip are not downloaded in serial order. (unlike http downloads which you can view via a media player like vlc even as the file is downloading)

A quick fix for this is to let the torrent client know that as long as all the pieces are available, to choose pieces of the file in serial order starting from the beginning. Its not impossible but we’d have to dig into the code and make some changes in the torrent client, doing which will be extremely interesting, but unfortunately I do not have the bandwidth for that right now.

I am not sure of the consequences of scale if all torrent clients try this strategy, but it would be interesting to test it. The next step from there would be torrent tv!

(Writing this post as I wait for a download to complete. It just completed. gtg!)

btw, have you checked out the neat TED app for utorrent? It’s cool!

Liking bias

What was the last thing you liked? A toy, a game, a gadget, a movie, a car, a job? 

You didn’t like it the same amount a month hence, did you? You moved on. 

But why do we make decisions assuming we’d perpetually like what we are getting into?

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