The media coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela and retirement of Sachin Tendulkar brought back the memory of an old essay written ‘on charisma’ by German sociologist Max Weber. I asked a German colleague how many charismatic personalities he knows in politics in his country. He responded somewhat indirectly, "There are some, but usually …
Music Player Daemon (MPD) is a lightweight application. It hardly takes any cpu. Moreover it runs in background and does not clutter and workspace. If you dont use mouse frequently or wants to avoid it (programmers use keyboard), then mpd is for you. It is one of those applications which does one job at a …
Cheating is quite prevalent in Indian universities and IITs are no exception but they are very reluctant to admit it in open. Apparently it brings bad name to the institute. In this note, I dont want to discuss the social issues as I have done is somewhere else. As a teaching assistant, I wrote an …
Andrea: Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero. Galileo: No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero. — Life of Galilio, Bertolt Brecht The French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, a great observer of man’s affairs, while witnessing the birth of democracy in America, thought that the age of democracy will be …
As for the word race, it has so many different meanings, as to be useless in scientific discussion, to very useful for getting members of the same nation to hate one another. — JBS Haldane A resolution passed recently by European Parliament recognizing caste-based discrimination as a form of racial discrimination reminds one of an …
During the development of neural circuits, excessive synapses are formed in a genetically programmed manner. Neural circuits are refined by the experience dependent pruning of supernumerary imprecise connections and the strengthening of the functional synapses. The molecular mechanisms underlying this process remain largely unknown. In [1], authors describe the role of ephrin-A2 in regulating experience …
The idea behind literate programming, that a program can be a piece of literature, is due to Donald E. Knuth. Knuth is an extremely respected figure in programming community (and also among combinatorics and computer science people). In this paradigm, one does not write a program based on how computer would reason about it but …
‘I will pay my debt to society through research in my subject. And beyond this, I owe no other debt to society.’ Having resolved this, she went on. —Vidyadhar Pundalik (1970) on Irawati Karve It was my undergraduate when I had my first rigorous encounter with city-schooled boys and girls. I was fresh out of …
I wrote a Haskell implementation of a popular game Hangman. Hangman thinks of a word and tells you its length. You get that many chance to guess it. The procedure of guessing is following assuming length of the word is n. You guess a letter, if the word contains that letter, hangman reveals the location …
A program written in declarative paradigm does not specify "how to do it", at best, it tells the computer "what to do". The spice-netlist is one such example, here we tell ngspice or some other spice (circuit simulator), what to compute (like .OP, .DC, .AC etc.). To be sure, this distinction is rather based on …