Science and Engineering

Blog post on Farnam Street with some excerpts from a book comparing Science and Engineering. This is the link.

Cattles Online

Cattles being sold online in India, reports Indian Express here. In my 3 year long stay in US Midwest, I am yet to see something similar. In an inter hostel debate I participated with Alok, we were given the topic of globalization and its effect on India. One of the examples we used to support our idea was that of Indian flavors included in McDonalds and Dominos menu. With selling of the cattle online, we see one more of such example. From weekly haats, where one would see colored cattle (to distinguish cattle from one owner to other), to online selling space is not natural. At least not now. Not to me. But then I guess I have very high opinion of me of knowing what goes on in India. I am surprised, in a happy way, to read this. I shall be returning to India next month, for good, with the hope that it will provide me with interesting problems. It will be very different from the textbook world I am used to and therefore solving problem will require something more than discretizing a grid and numerically solving a differential equation at grid points. With news like this, I am more hopeful to encounter new scenarios which are yet to be covered in textbooks from Wiley etc. 

Link: Web Bookmark

I made my first website when I was at IIT Bombay. It was hosted on institute server. I wrote bare basic html code and it was running in no time. Lately, I bought a domain and web space on Google sites. Now I am trying to learn how to code dynamic websites. After searching through the internet, I recently found a good tutorial website which serves me well. Tizag has tutorials on php, JavaScript, and MySQL. I have completed  tutorial on PHP and am midway into MySQL. While this is not new, I am constantly amazed with ease of finding information on internet. Yes there is lots of noise but its not an issue compared to difficulty in finding relevant information prior to it. I remember one of my Father’s friend asked him to bring for him a computer book from Bhopal because it was not available in Vidisha and when he finished reading it, he said it was useless.   

Quora

I have been on Quora for little less than an year. There are days when I spend more times reading answers on Quora than I spend on Facebook. There are other places on internet where people ask questions and other people answers them. I regularly post questions on Stack Overflow sites, and have posted questions rarely on Quora. Most of the time when I need to find an answer quickly, top links reported by Google are invariably from Yahoo answers. Then where does the utility of Quora lies in ? I think, in the space of web QnA sites, Quora has carved its own niche – Questions. Interesting questions, questions you never thought of and yet when you see them you start to think that knowing this will be good.

If I remember correctly, when I registered on Quora for first time it asked for some topics I would like to follow. I chose few and then I could see latest updates on those topics. It was fine for some days but then signal to noise ratio started to decrease. Or at least my perception of it started to go southward. I also started to notice that by following people, I was able to discover more interesting content than by following the topics. And this is when I decided to stop following all the topics and started to focus on finding people with interesting tastes. These may not be the people who ask lots of questions or write good answers. These are the people who have interest in things I have interest, and they read and up vote indicating me where the better stuff it. And by better stuff, I mean the interesting questions. If you know the question, finding an answer to that is easy on internet. Coming up with the question is difficult.