Books I plan to read in the following year..

Now that I'll have time, I plan to read the following titles in the coming year. This list consists of both technical (Computer Science) as well as non-technical books.

1. The Art of Computer Programming; Volume I, II and III by Donald Knuth
   
2. Graph Theory by Narsingh Deo
3. Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
4. Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows by J K Rowling
5. The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien
6. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
   

One reason to write this list on the blog is that I am hoping it'll serve as a constant reminder to me and I hope to add more books as I remember.

On my trip back from Seattle a few days back, I read "The Last Lecture" by Late Prof. Randy Paush; a very simple book with key lessons.

I am currently reading "A Champion's Mind" by Pete Sampras.

We tried a cookbook recipe!

Infact we (I and my roomie) tried two cook-book recipes. I bought a book called Joy of Cooking: All About Vegetarian Cooking from Barnes&Noble bookstores in March this year. I generally do not buy recipe books but this was available for a low price and looked interesting. This sat in my bookshelf for a long time before I thought that I should put the money I spent to some use.


We started with the dish called "Vegetarian Chilli" which had lots of beans and veggies as ingredients. Exactly, the kind of thing that I really like. The only problem was that the book didn't mention what it goes best with. So we tried it with rice once and the next time with bread and it was wonderful with both. Very spicy and delectable.

The other recipe was like something I had never tried before. It is called "Greek Cheese and Spinach Pie or Spanakopita". We had to get almost all the ingredients listed from the store which included feta cheese, parmesan cheese, nutmeg, phyllo dough etc. This was the first time I worked with phyllo sheets (click here for wiki entry on phyllo).

Both the recipes came out like shown in the book and they tasted pretty decent. I never really realized till this time that cook-book recipes can actually come out tasty.

The books that I have been reading.....

I am back to reading books other than the technical ones. I bought these long time ago, some of them in India but never really got to read them.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman
A very interesting and at times hilarious book. Anyone with a remote interest in science will like this.

Freakonomics
Interesting take on some interesting ordinary questions. Though in the beginning I found this book a little boring but was soon really liking the creativity showed in answering questions.


The Adventures of Sally
I am a big fan of P.G. Wodehouse.

Ever read an Art book?

Actually I recently did, not exactly the whole book but just a couple of pages of the introduction chapter. How did it happen?? Well, I was at the Wilson Library to read algorithms; though I usually try to study at home but for the past week or so, I am not that productive so a change of place was exactly what I needed. While I sat at the desk reading a chapter on graph algorithms, I noticed a book lying next to my desk. It was opened at a very colorful page revealing what appeared to be a beautiful painting. I ignored it for a while trying to concentrate on the job at hand but then I gave into it. I picked up the book and found out that the page had a picture of a glass painting taken at a cathedral. The book was about art; I felt kind of excited. Reading the preface (I always do!), I figured that the book was meant to be read at entry-level, so I decided to give it a try after I am done with my work. However, I started reading the introduction way before finishing my stuff.

The first thing that I noticed was the style of the book which was really different. What can I say, I cannot find a better word than 'artistic' :). Sentence formation was so different than what I had seen before. At times, it felt beautiful and at times I found the sentences difficult to understand at the first go; had to reread to get what the author is trying to say. I don't know if it was because of the way the book is written or a mere lack of subject knowledge on my part. One reason that I think the latter is true is my unfamiliarity with the words used in the passages. No wonder I didn't read more than two pages. However, it doesn't mean that I won't come back and continue from where I left. My interest is definitely piqued.

In just those two pages, I ended up learning something I never had in my agenda for the day. So what new do I know now? In short, a little bit about the basics of art and some very interesting views that the author expresses. Author talks about various dimensions to classify an art object such as time, place of origin, the artist, medium of expression and so forth. The interesting part was the way he justifies these dimensions; when you see an art object, it is in present and a viewer is free to interpret it in a way he/she pleases, why then does he need to know its time/place etc.. (My interpretation of) The idea conveyed by the author is that art is an expression of history and it communicates in an implicit language to the viewer. To understand that language, you really need to know the context else you are missing the point.

Well, to be specific, the book was "Gardner's Art Through The Ages"; definitely interesting. I think one of the advantages of sitting in a library is that you get exposed to a variety of other literature even when you don't go with such an intent. For me, its back to algorithms now!

p.s.: I never really noticed, I was sitting next to an aisle which houses art books.

Making all the difference in the world

Google is setting up their base in Kenya (read the full story here ). Now that's what is called making the real difference in the world. Really! They have money and so do others, but Google, so early in its life-span, is trying to change the world for better in its own innovative way.

One of my colleagues, a couple of years earlier had told me about this display in the Google reception office which had a 3-D globe on the screen and the small points of light that were blinking at various places. These light-points illuminated the places around the world where people were using Google search at that instant. I remember he told me what he was told about Africa looking at the display, it was indeed the dark continent with very little light emanating from it. When I saw this display myself, it was so surreal. With Internet penetration hardly anything, this was but natural to observe.

But the interesting part is not just observing and pondering but taking action. Setting up of a Kenyan office is indeed a concrete step toward making technology accessible to all, irrespective of geography, infrastructure, policy and various other kinds of issues. It strengthens my belief that technology (and especially Internet) is (and has the potential of) bridging numerous barriers that was not possible earlier.

Web Hoaxes and related thoughts....

I read an article on yahoo titled "Top 25 Web Hoaxes and Pranks". It is an interesting read though repetitive at places because it is highly unlikely that being on internet you have not seen one of such emails already. These hoaxes range from 'last picture taken before WTC collapse' to 'someone being terminally ill' email. Infact, I thought some of these mails to be true (though I never forwarded them) before I looked at this article, specially the ones that showed extraordinary pictures (like the iceberg one or the Africa one). These are just 25 and there are heck more that lot of us would have received and fortunately or unfortunately which are not as popular so that they make it to PC World's top 25 list :).

I remember when I used to receive such mails in India, they always used to end with some superstition advice. That leads me to the question whether the content of a web hoax exhibit some geographic locality? And by that, I mean: are the kind of hoaxes you receive in India different from the ones in United States? Yeah I agree some of them are global and have nothing to do with a particular location. But, it makes sort of intuitive sense that since the main reason behind sending such mails is to reach as many inboxes as possible, so exploiting the local culture (or beliefs) is the first (and easy) step towards accomplishing this goal. For example: in India, given the enormous belief in superstitions, you most likely would have seen something like the following at the end of the mail:

"If you send this now to 40 people, good luck will come to you now,
if you send it to 20 people, good luck will come to you tomorrow"

or some such stuff. Now this might not be happening in India alone, but I am just writing a personal experience.

Another surprising bit to this saga is that generally these mails are not from unknown users i.e. someone in your friend-list forwards them to you. So, although the content is spam but because of the ignorance of the sender, it doesn’t count as one. Even more surprising is the fact that young and educated people who look at these messages believe them enough to send it to their other 'n' friends, mostly without giving a thought about magnanimous amount of 'useless' network traffic these messages can generate. Strange Enough!!

A simple practice that can help curb such messages: even if the email content looks oh so real, the first thing to do before forwarding it to other people is to confirm the veracity of the message. This can be done by simple googling or better still checking at the Urban legends website, and if the mail is indeed a hoax (and you have truck loads of time) possibly replying the sender back. Lets be responsible on internet.....

ITs Google all the way!!

I had a chance to attend a computer science technical conference recently. Although topic of the conference was data mining and it is not my research area but I thought I will get good exposure to the way the conferences work in US, so I chose to attend. My main goal was to attend the keynote talks which I thought are very high-level and easy to absorb for an outsider. I was indeed correct at the end of the conference and I liked almost all the keynote addresses. I will not venture here into technicalities of the topics of various talks, but I want to share some observations I made, specially about the talk given by one of the Google's researchers.

The topic of this talk was "Next generation Algorithmic challenges in Google". This was an interesting talk, not that I got all the stuff that was said but overall it was interesting and not completely OHT. Cutting short the context and coming to the portion of the talk, I really wanted to talk about, starts at the beginning of Q n A session. Some of the questions being related to machine learning were really out of my grasp in their entirety, the questions not related to the talk (but which were asked) is the topic of interest in this post.

These questions were related to the Google's mission statement (which centers around providing universal access to information) that was read out by the speaker during the beginning of the talk. Someone questioned something to the effect of - will you make information in my wallet universally accessible. To this, speaker replied that they provide tools and the rest is upto the user. Attached was another question, which inevitably pointed towards Google's policies in China, though it was asked in a very indirect way. To this speaker replied, china is a big country and some presence is better than none at all. (Of course, what is the point of asking such a question, after all Google is a business and they have to make profits to stay alive and it was their business decision. The kind of work they are doing might have different political implications in different countries governed by the local laws and you have to abide by them.)

Anyhow, now picture this: a person from a research lab comes to a technical conference to talk about algorithmic challenges and is asked questions about Google's policies. My question is, first of all, does asking such questions make sense? specially when speaker just talked about algorithms for the last one hour. Its really not a press conference where a company spokesperson is briefing about company policies etc., in which case these questions might make perfect sense. This happened not only at this talk but various other Google talks in the past that I attended. It surprises me why people bring the same topic again and again even though the talk was about core computer science. A better way to put such questions might relate to addressing privacy/security/copyright concerns when making the information universally accessible but then again they have to somewhat relate to speaker's talk and not just appear out of the blue.

Nonetheless, I do not know why but after coming out of Google's talks, I always get a feeling that everyone wants to get in there (and of course why not). I might be generalizing a lot but the kind of questions asked by people (who might be from other companies :)) makes me feel that. Good for Google though.