Sunday, May 29, 2005
Steven Weinberg on Religion
"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
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"Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
Food for thought
One of my profs in the college made an interesting remark today saying that frustration
is what results when there is a mismatch between a person's talent and his desires.
At the outset,his observation seems incontrovertible provided you don't bother to examine the premise more carefully. The premise ofcourse is that an individual's talents/capabilities remain invariant for most part of his adult life. Knowing his
potential, a prudent person would suitably tailor his desires so as to ensure that no frustration results. But What if the person is not aware of the true measure of his talent?If we tear down the assumption of talent being invariant,there is no way that a person can be expected to know when to stop pursuing an elusive dream because he could well be capable of realising it in distant future if not now.
So,what say,folks?Should we dare to think big inspite of all our limitations and run the risk of getting frustrated? Or should we adopt the more 'conservative' approach of being content with the talent that we have been endowed with and make no conscious effort to be good at things for which we have no intrinsic aptitude?
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One of my profs in the college made an interesting remark today saying that frustration
is what results when there is a mismatch between a person's talent and his desires.
At the outset,his observation seems incontrovertible provided you don't bother to examine the premise more carefully. The premise ofcourse is that an individual's talents/capabilities remain invariant for most part of his adult life. Knowing his
potential, a prudent person would suitably tailor his desires so as to ensure that no frustration results. But What if the person is not aware of the true measure of his talent?If we tear down the assumption of talent being invariant,there is no way that a person can be expected to know when to stop pursuing an elusive dream because he could well be capable of realising it in distant future if not now.
So,what say,folks?Should we dare to think big inspite of all our limitations and run the risk of getting frustrated? Or should we adopt the more 'conservative' approach of being content with the talent that we have been endowed with and make no conscious effort to be good at things for which we have no intrinsic aptitude?
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Ridiculously funny
Cut'n'pasted this from Anurag Jain's Blog :
"this question was asked by a pseud girl on the iim-a fresher e-group..look at the reply
Question : i need a cell cuz i want to stay in touch with my guy. also i may not be in my room/ be able to come to my room to make/take calls at all times, but i can always carry my cell with me anywhere!! ofcourse i will get std activated... but messagin u can do only thru a cell... i get teh point abt matchin networks to reduce cost... n here is my dilemma. my guy has an airtel connection my dad has a reliance phone my brother has idea and our home phone is a tata indicom. now what??? i need to have teh most cost effective way out... which wd be covenient fr my parents, bro and guy too!! help!!!
Answer: This is a very good query. I also faced a lot of problems when I came to IIMA because I wanted to stay in touch with my guy, bhains and bakri (If I had an elephant, it would have been a simple matter of making a trunk call). Considering the reverence that Indian culture accords to the bovine and the divine, staying in touch with cattle is a very important issue. One needs to only read the Hindi stories of Munshi Premchand, such as Heera Moti and Godaan to realize the deep bonds that people in the cowbelt have for their livestock. Of course, calling Munshi Premchand a Hindi writer is slightly misleading because his writings have a proliferation of Urdu words, reflecting the degree of intermixing between Urdu and Hindi in pre-independence Uttar Pradesh. The alphabet taught in schools during those days began with Aliph, which interestingly is a derivative of the Greek alpha, which had first made its presence felt in India during the times of Alexander and Selecus Nicator. And perhaps it is divine happenstance that Alexander the Great had to retreat from the Ganges, thereby completing the UP connection. However the Greek influence in India did not die out with him, his generals if you are still reading this then I can only wonder how exciting your work is established mini kingdoms from whatever they could salvage of his victories and particularly interesting is the case of the kingdom of Bactria (in present day Afghanistan), a Greek island in a South Asian sea. The great king Menander of Bactria is the same Milinda, the celebrated king who had a dialogue with the Buddhist sage Nagasena on the semantics of being.
But let me not digress from the core issue, which is your connectivity query. Well as you know, India has undergone a telecom revolution in the past 10 years or so. It all began with the reaking down of the monoploy of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the establishment of quasi-autonomous bodies like the MTNL and the VSNL. For the purpose of cellular communications, India is divided into a number of contiguous circles, which roughly correspond to the boundaries of the states (which is very convenient considering that the states of India were reorganized on a linguistic basis in the 1950s, thus going to ahow how farsighted our planners and statesmen were at the time). Initially, for reasons of viable competition, each circle could have 2 private operators and one network from either MTNL or BSNL. At the moment, I think 3 private operators are allowed and plans are to allow a further private player in a circle.
So what you need to do is, locate a map of India, find the telecom cirlces and identify the players operating there. Formulate a matrix to display this information and then apply the concepts of cost minimization (modified simplex method) to identify the optimal network combination for your needs.
Hope that helps.. "
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Cut'n'pasted this from Anurag Jain's Blog :
"this question was asked by a pseud girl on the iim-a fresher e-group..look at the reply
Question : i need a cell cuz i want to stay in touch with my guy. also i may not be in my room/ be able to come to my room to make/take calls at all times, but i can always carry my cell with me anywhere!! ofcourse i will get std activated... but messagin u can do only thru a cell... i get teh point abt matchin networks to reduce cost... n here is my dilemma. my guy has an airtel connection my dad has a reliance phone my brother has idea and our home phone is a tata indicom. now what??? i need to have teh most cost effective way out... which wd be covenient fr my parents, bro and guy too!! help!!!
Answer: This is a very good query. I also faced a lot of problems when I came to IIMA because I wanted to stay in touch with my guy, bhains and bakri (If I had an elephant, it would have been a simple matter of making a trunk call). Considering the reverence that Indian culture accords to the bovine and the divine, staying in touch with cattle is a very important issue. One needs to only read the Hindi stories of Munshi Premchand, such as Heera Moti and Godaan to realize the deep bonds that people in the cowbelt have for their livestock. Of course, calling Munshi Premchand a Hindi writer is slightly misleading because his writings have a proliferation of Urdu words, reflecting the degree of intermixing between Urdu and Hindi in pre-independence Uttar Pradesh. The alphabet taught in schools during those days began with Aliph, which interestingly is a derivative of the Greek alpha, which had first made its presence felt in India during the times of Alexander and Selecus Nicator. And perhaps it is divine happenstance that Alexander the Great had to retreat from the Ganges, thereby completing the UP connection. However the Greek influence in India did not die out with him, his generals if you are still reading this then I can only wonder how exciting your work is established mini kingdoms from whatever they could salvage of his victories and particularly interesting is the case of the kingdom of Bactria (in present day Afghanistan), a Greek island in a South Asian sea. The great king Menander of Bactria is the same Milinda, the celebrated king who had a dialogue with the Buddhist sage Nagasena on the semantics of being.
But let me not digress from the core issue, which is your connectivity query. Well as you know, India has undergone a telecom revolution in the past 10 years or so. It all began with the reaking down of the monoploy of the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the establishment of quasi-autonomous bodies like the MTNL and the VSNL. For the purpose of cellular communications, India is divided into a number of contiguous circles, which roughly correspond to the boundaries of the states (which is very convenient considering that the states of India were reorganized on a linguistic basis in the 1950s, thus going to ahow how farsighted our planners and statesmen were at the time). Initially, for reasons of viable competition, each circle could have 2 private operators and one network from either MTNL or BSNL. At the moment, I think 3 private operators are allowed and plans are to allow a further private player in a circle.
So what you need to do is, locate a map of India, find the telecom cirlces and identify the players operating there. Formulate a matrix to display this information and then apply the concepts of cost minimization (modified simplex method) to identify the optimal network combination for your needs.
Hope that helps.. "
Saturday, May 07, 2005
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