The disintegration of the Congress party over the last few decades is well-deserved. Many factors have contributed to this disintegration, including corruption, indiscipline, and the sheer ineptitude and lethargy of its aging leadership. Fortunately for the Congress, the old eventually die. The condition of Congress seems to be improving lately. In particular, its leadership’s paralysis …
I started running seriously on July 16, 2021, during the Covid lockdown. I had graduated, and I could no longer walk or cycle to the lab daily. And I was working full-time and very long sessions on my six-month-old startup, and these long programming sessions were taking a toll on my health. I needed a …
From Almost Zero To Five Kilometers (And A Half-Marathon) Read More »
Last December, I wrote a short piece for the Times of India (ToI) in a column called "Tech I’d Love to See". It took a while before the article was printed. On January 25, 2021, someone I know sent me a message on LinkedIn about it. I couldn’t find it online or with the search …
Tech I’d Like To See: Non-Newtonian Cognition For Machines Read More »
Install SoX. Relevant documentation (search for vad). Let’s say your vice file is a.wav. $ play ~/Downloads/a.wav vad norm /home/dilawars/Downloads/a.wav: File Size: 52.3k Bit Rate: 328k Encoding: Signed PCM Channels: 1 @ 16-bit Samplerate: 20500Hz Replaygain: off Duration: 00:00:01.27 In:100% 00:00:01.27 [00:00:00.00] Out:20.0k [ | ] Hd:0.0 Clip:0 Done. It is decent! You can play …
Fiber is just a thread implemented in user space. Fibers are easier to reason about and have perf advantage of much cheaper context switching. Fibers are very well suited for handling concurrent IO operations where a processor mostly wait for data to become available, and threads usually have pretty big context switching cost. So multiple …
Imagine yourself to be Krishna — he was fond of lifting mountains. You want to lift India on your fingertip. You have already sliced the country using a cosmic knife 1 km below sea level. Where would you keep your finger? Remember that it needs to be balanced. There is no perfect answer to this …
There have been disagreement on what constitutes the basis of Indian society: caste or class. Both caste and class are extremely important in our collective social life. But a large part of our private lives is governed neither by caste or class but faction. Factions are easily noticeable in the domain of politics: they are …
The speed of action potentials inside neurons is comparable to those of motorized two wheelers. The slowest of action potential lies in the range of 30-40 Km/hr while the fastest one is in the range of 400-500 Km/hr. The faster neurons are most likely to be mylienated. This cool figure from Wiki depicts the propagation …
What is the speed of action-potential propagation in neuron? Read More »
Some twelve inches below my lips The Human of my Person lives. It melts for strangers with meaningless smile. And indifferent to most other kind. Beware, O Stranger! Rudely crossing it. I have no gun, but I can spit. (Inspired by a poem "I have not gun but I can spit" by W H Auden).
In the classroom, I glance at the blackboard It inspires; and murmurs What is already known. In the classroom; Inspired! I gaze outside the window. And wonder, What may be unknown.