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Book Review: Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

Astrophysics for People in a HurryAstrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I loved this book. This is a very short book, to the point, and explains the universe in simple terms. What I didn't expect and was a surprise to me was the Author's humorous anecdotes, completely relevant to the present day reader inserted between the concepts in the pages.

For e.g. It was funny to know that behind US Govt which consumes Helium for military and research, the next second highest consumer of "Helium" was Macy's for it's Macy's day parade.

It was startling to know that life as we understand in any form, the single-celled organism has started in existence only the last 2% of the history of the universe. The universe is very very old, very very big.

Often there is a question on "Is there life elsewhere in the universe?" - The more I read these kinds of books, the more I realize that "There is life elsewhere in the universe. Highly likely. It is inevitable that either Earthians discover the other life forms, and they discover the Earthians. Also, the timeline of advancement, the calamities that are possible in next thousand years, humankind will, of course, take the ship, explore, and start settling in various other parts of the universe. Thinking like this doesn't sound like fiction to me.

It was a great book. I will start looking out for Neil DeGrasse Tyson from now.

Here are some excerpts that I noted from the book. This one is about Einstein, and the kind of impact he had in our understanding of the universe.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/ua8m0eenypplx1j/astrophysics1.jpg?dl=0

And this one is about Spherical shape for any object that we may encounter in the universe.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/0k0q7hzaokuf63j/astrophysics2.jpg?dl=0

Being Right vs Being Less Wrong

In any decision making, being right, getting things right seems intimidating. For human decisions, being right is debatable too. Being less wrong appears desirable and achievable. If a person is committed to non-perfectionist philosophy, then being less wrong falls right into his stride.

I stumbled upon the phrase Less Wrong from the blog lesswrong.com. In the FAQ section I discovered some insight into what tries to achieve.

... even smart people can be completely wrong but that most people are not even wrong.
It teaches you to be careful in what you emit and to be skeptical of what you receive.
It doesn't tell you what is right, it teaches you how to think and to become less wrong.
And to do so is in your own self interest ...

Exercising restraint in online debates

I had a random thought when observing a social conflict. I think, people who have self-control or exercise restraint garner more respect than people who people argue, however logical, in social situations.

Project completion - Spastics Society of Karnataka website

I have been involved with Spastics Society Of Karnataka for more than 10 years. Today, we launched a new website for the organization. Please check this out http://spasticssocietyofkarnataka.org/

A bit of history

Let's use wayback machine to look at how this evolved.

  • When I inherited this project, the website looked like this in 2004. I don't remember the technology, but it was done by a volunteer by name Mr. Nagaraj. He transfered the hosting and domain from Net 4 India to us.

  • Then sometime in 2007 the website started looking like this - I don't remember the technology that I used. It seems I was using open source web design and looks like I hand-coded it.

  • In 2008, we moved entirely to Google Apps for Education - this was a great move. It facilitated online processing, official email ids, all our data in a single place. This was like migrating Spastics Society of Karnataka to the "Cloud". The website changed its look to this in 2008 using google sites.

  • The google sites website was not very pleasant looking. This time in 2013, I updated website to wordpress, and hosted on bluehost.com and our domains were migrated to Google Domains. The wordpress website also had accessibility features on changing font, style etc.

There was problem, wordpress is not the most secure of the software that is present today. We got hacked by chinese hackers who put up malware in our site. This wasn't good. I removed the phishing, and they could still get to us. This happened for 2 months and I felt a lack of control with wordpress.

  • We decided to shutdown and delete the wordpress site, and decided to rebuild it. For stop-gap, we directed people to Google Sites website

  • This stop gap solution lasted for more than a year because I did not want to rebuild it entirely with wordpress again.

  • In 2016, I decided to hand-code it using Bootstrap and Nikola and built this - This was hugely unappealing. It was extremely secure and trustworthy, but felt very unappealing to everyone.

  • In 2018, we decided to make a appealing website, and this time I went with a hosted service, wix.com. The result is what you see at http://spasticssocietyofkarnataka.org/

Features

This was a team effort. My friends Avinash and Nivedita got involved. We use Trello.com to track our tasks. From school Preethi, and Priya Madam and Sobha Madam got involved too. The website does not have bus-factor of 1 and this is an incredible feature.

The website was mostly done by Avinash. He cannot use his hands, and uses voice to operate his computer So this website was created using voice.

Simple theme, accessible on mobile and our google apps (cloud) still remain for forms, email and everything as it is convenient to manage.

I believe this change is going to help school further. Given what I have shared above, this project is a living entity, and will evolve with times.

Little Free Library

I set up a Little Free Library in front of my house. Excited to share the books with the San Ramon Community. I have to see how it plays out when the schools reopen.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/hpt3jmvzdlxq6n1/Screenshot%202018-06-18%2010.58.54.png?dl=0

Book Review: Chaos - Making a New Science

Chaos: Making a New ScienceChaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I got interested in reading this book after hearing about this from Robert Sapolsky in one of his lectures. He had a very high regard for this book and states it had a tremendous influence on him.

For me, I had to struggle reading this book. This introduces the field of Choas and presents the story and anecdotes of about 200 scientists who were involved with Choas. It's a challenge to present a cohesive story when someone is dealing with 200 investigators. I felt frequent disconnects between one paragraph after another. I could not follow the trail of the story, and in fact, I wondered if there is any story at all here.

The book tries to lay a case that even after understanding Classical physics, and Quantum physics, the scientists discovered new ways to reason about nature using non-linear equations which depended upon the initial conditions. The later part, the system of non-linear equations which depend upon the initial conditions is called as the Chaos Theory.

I noted down the following interesting quotes from this book.

“John Hubbard, exploring iterated functions and the infinite fractal wildness of the Mandelbrot set, considered chaos a poor name for his work, because it implied randomness. To him, the overriding message was that simple processes in nature could produce magnificent edifices of complexity without randomness. In nonlinearity and feedback lay all the necessary tools for encoding and then unfolding structures as rich as the human brain.”


“The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex.”

"Shallow ideas can be assimilated; ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility."


Masako Wakamiya, app developer of Hinadan

Interesting to watch this interview of 82 year old App Developer. She developed the app called Hinadan for people like her.

Here is her story.

Wakamiya asked software developers to step in to develop her app. Uninterested, they suggested she make a game herself. She took them up on the suggestion. Wakamiya soon bought programming books and learned Apple’s Swift programming language through lessons with a programmer, nearly 200 miles away from her home in Japan's Kanagawa Prefecture, via Facebook Messenger and Skype.

This wasn’t the first time that Wakamiya took on a challenge. She’s been dabbling in the tech field since the age of 60.

Upon retiring from a 43-year career as a bank clerk (she began at age 18), Wakamiya spent long hours caregiving for her then-90-year-old mother. Feeling isolated, and seeking connection with the outside world, Wakamiya bought her first computer, then moved on to a Microsoft PC, and later a Mac and iPhones. In between learning the piano, at age 75, Wakamiya eventually joined a computer club for seniors, Mellow Club, learning to create Excel art along the way. Then, this past year came Wakamiya’s focus on creating the game Hinadan.

The app, based on the annual Japanese doll festival of Hina Matsuri, invites players to arrange 12 ornamental dolls — representing the country’s emperor, family and guests — in a specific order. The game requires in-depth memorization of various arrangements, and has become especially popular with older women, who enjoy playing it with their grandchildren, Wakamiya said.

From - https://www.aarp.org/work/working-at-50-plus/info-2018/worlds-oldest-app-developer-fd.html

Book Review: Guns, Germs and Steel

It is hard for me write a review for as a great a book as "Guns, Germs and Steel". I had not read anything like that before. It just opened me up to a whole new level of experience, and new set of expectations from books.

I think, I picked it up after reading Bill Gates review about this.

"Like a lot of people, I was blown away by Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. I had never read anything that explained so much about human history." - Bill Gates, On Guns, Germs and Steel

I made copious notes while reading this book, I wanted to preserve it for my future reference. I looked up many different incidents in Wikipedia while reading this book. Every moment I spent was totally worth it. It will give a reader a whole new understanding of the world. This book feels like a Magnum Opus, an experience provided to the reader.

The first captive thing presented to me in this book was The Battle of Cajamarca which lead to the fall of the Inca Empire in South American Continent in 1500s.

Here is some data on this Battle. The left hand side is Spanish, and the right side is Inca Empire.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/u2l3qvbh759cnbk/Screenshot%202018-05-04%2002.03.12.png?dl=0

Isn't that startling? What happened? The reader is taken through the reasons for such decisive victory.

Then it steps back and goes the reason for why some developments took place at the places it took place. This flow-chart from the book conveys the reason in a comprehensive way.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/jo2c7hd29t9pg58/Screenshot%202018-05-04%2002.09.32.png?dl=0

Then, a chapter on writing gives a whole history of human writing system. Which itself is fascinating, and the next chapter was titled "Necessity's Mother".

This is an interesting twist on the commonly known proverb, "Necessity is the mother of all inventions". It just asks, who was "Necessity's Mother". The answer is simple, it is the idle brain, curiosity. The chapter gives so many details on the inventions that really took the world. I briefly wrote about it in this post Edison and his phonograph when I was reading that chapter.

Then it deals with the idea of how the concept society and a religion must have formed. In the final chapters, it goes into the fascinating story of China and Africa.

Here is one thing about China that amazed me.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/u8uejsmqffg7pol/Screenshot%202018-05-04%2002.20.09.png?dl=0

Think about it, China sent huge ships with lots of people to expeditions way before Columbus set his foot on America!

And the chapter on Africa, tells about the diversity of Africa, mentions about 1500 languages that originated in Africa. And shares something that is very interesting.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/wpd57lbf26fxo3t/Screenshot%202018-05-04%2002.22.02.png?dl=0

This just says two of modern religions of the world originated by the speakers of an African language.

This book is an answer from Jared Diamond to his friend from Papau New Guinea, on why westerners were more advanced than his tribe. It does a great job of giving that answer to Mr. Yali and rest of us.

Edison and his phonograph

Edison had invented phonograph, a precursor to modern day music player and phone, but he not could get the proper utility value of his invention immediately. I came across this paragraph in a book called, "Guns, Germs and Steel" and felt compelled to note it down.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/gnzzpjc9n82nfwp/Screenshot%202018-04-16%2013.57.59.png?dl=0