Categories
Finance Science Social

Freakonomics

A summary of interesting collection of thoughts by two authors who co-relate economics with general things in life. “He determined that in spite of the cottage industry of parenting and the millions of how-to books on the subject sold every year, who you are matters much more than what you do.” – Hmm, not sure if I fully buy that! Thanks to Gaurav for the recommendation.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Summary

Categories
Business Innovation Social Technology

The Urban Vehicle Grid

I came across some exciting research work that the UCLA CS team are doing  around “the urban vehicle grid”, a vehicle-to-vehicle system (much like a peer-to-peer network), whereby vehicles may participate in opportunistic “Ad-Hoc” wireless networks and may produce data about its environment (pavement condition, weather data, physiological condition of passengers); act as an information gateway for such content; and collaborate with other vehicles (forward collision warning, intersection collision warning, ice on bridge…). Pretty cool.

Communication and Content sharing in the Urban Vehicle Grid (very detailed info)

Categories
Business India Technology

15 Most respected Indian companies

Most respected non-government India-based companies in my personal opinion are:

  1. Infosys
  2. Tata Group
  3. Reliance Group

Others alphabetically: Aditya Birla Group, Apollo Hospitals, Bharti, ICICI Bank, Jet Airways, Mindtree Consulting, NDTV, Oberoi and Taj Hotels, Ranbaxy, Rediff and Tally Solutions.

Categories
Business Technology

Why I would skip HD DVD and Blu-ray rubbish

HD DVD and Blu-ray format war for next-gen high definition content just doesn’t excite me at all. I don’t see a great need to choose between the two mediocre and confusing things; and the DRM obsession beyond reason in both is simply too much to accept. Add the price/performance factor, and you’ll quickly realise it’s simply a dumb idea to invest in these technologies. On the other hand, IPTV (and generally, convergence to IP) is amazingly cool and I’m really really looking forward to it in next 2 years or so.

10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed

Categories
Health India Social

Yoga and Pranayam re-invented

A lot of controversy surrounds Swami Ramdev, but there is no doubt that he has re-invented Yoga and Pranayam by bringing it to masses – no less than several million people! Personally, I fully concur with his critical views on soft drinks, in particular ones that contain aspartame, which can lead to several fatal diseases.

Re-inventing yoga for the masses

Categories
Science

Mysterious number 6174

The most beautiful piece of Mathematics is Euler’s identity, the equation e^(pi i) + 1 = 0 or its variant e^(pi i) = -1, where i is iota or sqrt(-1). 6174 is another beauty of Mathematics. I randomly selected 4644 as the test case, and reached 6174 in 4 steps. Via reddit. Duggmirror.

Mysterious number 6174

Categories
Productivity Technology

Best graphing/plotting tools

The best ones I’ve found so far. Any recommendations for better ones? Google directory has many more.

Categories
India Productivity Technology

Google now maps India

Google Maps now include Indian cities! Thanks to Navneet for the tip.

Categories
Innovation Technology

Insight into future of Computer Architecture

A very insightful interview by the legendary H&P. Summary: The future is parallelism and we don’t (yet) have a good programming abstraction for it. The most promising solutions IMHO thus far are STMs and some aspects of IBM X10 (ppt).

A Conversation with John Hennessy and David Patterson

Categories
History Social

Robert Fisk: Saddam takes his secrets to the grave

An intriguing account by Robert Fisk. “How the West armed Saddam, fed him intelligence on his ‘enemies’, equipped him for atrocities – and then made sure he wouldn’t squeal.”

Saddam takes his secrets to the grave