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 …
In 1890s, Emile Durkhiem, consistent with his ‘The rules of Sociological method’, began his work on Suicide. He was seeking to establish that suicide is explicable through the social structure and its ramifying functions. The conclusion drawn in this book are nowhere near to surprising for modern mind. But the methods used, classifications, and commentaries …
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 …
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 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 …
Recently, a friend taught me a simple game of bulls and cows. This game goes like this. There are two players, A and B. A thinks of a 4-letter word and asks B to guess it. Assume that A thought of “link” and B guesses “lean”. The bulls are the number of letters which are …
The game of “Bulls and Cows” : A python implementation Read More »
One of our national dailies reports that Madras High court has ordered a CBI inquiry into what is a quintessential internal affair of IIT Madras, namely the process of appointing faculty [1]. The process of selecting students and appointing faculty are vital to any university health and must be a prerogative of the university. It …
There is a growing tendency these days among intellectuals to attack secularism. In the past such attacks were indirect and covert somewhat similar to the attack on equality; they hesitated to attack it openly. They maintained since we can not define secularism in a strict sense, like equality, it will be good if we stop …