How do you want to live?

Finally got to see this movie, Lago Raho Munnabhai (Carry On Brother?)

There is a misintrepretation of Ghandi's principles. It does not mean non violence, neither does it mean, show your right cheek when someone slaps left.

It means, live sincerely.

It means; Don't lie and don't manipulate. And I wonder, how many times I have seen a letter signed off "yours sincerely" :-)

When you talk about this principle, the answer you hear is: In this world that we live in, it is not really possible to live with those principles. But the question is not whether you can live sincerely in this world? The question is:

"How do YOU want to live?"

I know a person who does live her life sincerely.

And I am married to her.

Arithmetic on Fpgas

http://www.klabs.org/DEI/Arithmetic/index.htm

Although, I was searching for something else....

IEEE computers

Issue: Software Engineering

Twisting the facts to match your plan of action used to be a bet tool for politicians. Well, now it also seem to work for technologist to publish articles in magzines as well.

Quoting a line from one of the article "In a retail survey, the number of digital cameras sold as part of mobile phones exceeded the sale of stand alone digital cameras sale"

Talk about apple to apple comparison!!!

Haggis - Source: Wikipedia.com

Haggis is a traditional Scottish dish. Although there are many recipes, it is normally made with the following ingredients: sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver, and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally boiled in the animal's stomach for approximately an hour. It somewhat resembles stuffed intestines (pig intestines otherwise known as chitterlings), sausages and savoury puddings of which it is among the largest types. Most modern commercial haggis is prepared in a casing rather than an actual stomach. There are also meat-free recipes specifically for vegetarians which supposedly taste similar to the meat-based recipes.

Everything Rambaldi

Rambaldi, a ficticious character, who lived 800 years back, somewhere in Europe? He invented a machine, which can alter the human neurology on a very massive scale. Today, the design of Rambaldi machine is extremely difficult to find, decrypt and it requires different artifacts which are extremely rare to find.

"Everything Rambaldi" implies all the artifacts and the decryption of the machine design. If everything is put together as described in the original design, the machine can make this world a very happy, although rathar dull place to live. On the other hand, this machine in the hands of a maniac, can make this world rathar over-stimulating, and will make it trip over the edge of chaos. The assumption here is, we are already on the edge.

A very interesting tale of love,betrayal, dedication and of course, fascination. Check it out.

Stretch of Imagination; source: An Indian Newspaper

Is Abhishek dating Nicole Kidman?

"The actor—one of the international brand ambassadors of Omega—shared a cosy corner with Nicole Kidman."

Oh yeah ...

GnH- Desolation Island

Located at 50'S and 70'E, Desolation Island (Kerguelen Islands) is a french territory in the southern hemisphere. Why is this island special today?

In a book written by Asimov (Science, Numbers and I), it is mentioned that this island is the closest land to the antipode of Canton, Illinois. Interestingly, the city got its name, because Issac-Swan, founder of the city in 1827, incorrectly assumed, the new town is an antipode to Canton, China and therefore, gave it the same name. The Kerguelen Islands, perhaps is the closest land-antipode to Canton, Illinois and as expected, lies in southern hemisphere.

So that was the history of why Kerguelen Islands is mentioned here. The island is inhabited by mostly scientist, and in an estimate, roughly 100 odd scientist are always present there at any time.

So, where in the world is "Canton China", now? Here is a picture of a nightline view of what it used to be Canton china!!

Thanks You for Smoking

I just read the reviews of this movie by Maxim mag...
"...just might make you laugh your head off".

I don't know (honestly), what does that mean...but it surely means something I don't know (since I did manage to finish this movie tonight). If anything, it is not a funny movie, it is an interesting pop-corn movie, at the best.

Semi Startup-III

Montalvo Systems. A fabless semiconductor startup...Product: low power media processor or something like that. The following link is funny and almost as clueless as me, as to what they are doing. Anyway, a good read.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/25/montalvo_nuova/

A Roman First and then an Enemy

Caesar arrived a short time afterwards. As a welcoming present he received Pompey's head and ring in a basket. However, he was not pleased in seeing his rival, once his ally and son-in-law, murdered by traitors. When a slave offered him Pompey's head, "he turned away from him with loathing, as from an assassin; and when he received Pompey's signet ring on which was engraved a lion holding a sword in his paws, he burst into tears" (Plutarch, Life of Pompey 80). He deposed Ptolemy XIII, executed his regent Pothinus, and elevated Ptolemy's sister Cleopatra VII to the throne of Egypt. Caesar gave Pompey's ashes and ring to Cornelia, who took them back to her estates in Italy.

Copyright: Wikipedia

Semi-2

What in the world is this? "http://www.rapportincorporated.com/"

A working part, demonstrated at some conference, ultra low power and ultra high performamce!! Specific to control intensive designs. I need to dig more into it....Laters

Semiconductor Startup in Bay Area

Analogix Semiconductor:

I think it would be interesting to keep a log of emerging semi startups and look back after couple of years.

Company: Founded 2002. Recently went through a round of funding. They make analog and mixed signal devices for multimedia and other applications. I think one of the few companies in mixed signal area.

Product: A reasonably big line of products, basically in transmitter/receiver for high defination multimedia products. I guess, pretty good for a 4 years old company.

Careers: Always a thing to look at a startup website, to get an idea of what they are working on... Currently they need AEs/TME/Design Engineer. Typical hardware company profile.

Anyone knows more about it?

How would you intrepret this? (Another news gaffe)

From http://finance.yahoo.com today's edition:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Black and Hispanic home buyers pay more for their mortgages than do whites, according to a Federal Reserve report released Friday.

The Fed's analysis of 2005 home lending data found that 54.7 percent of black borrowers paid a higher interest rate on home mortgages. That was up sharply from 32.4 percent in 2004.

For Hispanics, 46.1 percent paid more for their mortgages last year -- more than double the 20.3 percent reported in 2004.

In contrast, only 17.2 percent of whites paid higher interest on their home mortgages last year. However, that was up considerably from 2004's 8.7 percent.

--All rights reserved by Yahoo..blah blah blah

News Headlines are misleading ...

I saw this headline on one of the premier newspaper in my area
"Valley execs more likely to add jobs than reduce"

I was quite pleased to see that, before I clicked on the article, went through 2 pages, until I reached, what someone calls *hard data*.

So the hard-data is "The survey also found 38 percent of Santa Clara County executives said they expect to increase their number of employees vs. 13 percent who plan decreases and 47 percent who anticipate no workforce changes."

So 13 + 47 = 60% of the companies are not going to hire (or even layofff people), and 2% have absolutely no idea!!! Does this translate to the headline "Valley execs are more likely to add jobs than reduce"? Perhaps yes ... nevertheless misleading.

If you cannot sell, give it for free?

Is this one of those things?

Jasper offers free verification planning tool
Dylan McGrath
EE Times (08/30/2006 5:54 PM EDT)
SAN FRANCISCO — Verification-focused EDA startup Jasper Design Automation is making available a free tool for tracking the progress of verification plans, the company said Wednesday (Aug. 30).

Torture

Article 5 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights states "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment". According to wikipedia, this was adopted by United Nations (a.k.a UN) in 1948. I guess, since the inception of Article-5, it has been violated by almost every country in the world....ok maybe Switzerland did not violate it, yet.


A friend of mine indirectly encouraged me to look for torture literature on wikipedia. Here is a line from wiki entry on torture which is very fascinating and to some extent I would believe in that....


" In the Roman Republic, for example, a slave's testimony was admissible only if it was extracted by torture, on the assumption that slaves could not be trusted to reveal the truth voluntarily."

Although, this one I found quite stupid..."In medieval Europe, Often, defendants sentenced to death would be tortured prior to execution, so as to have a last chance that they disclose the names of their accomplices."

This is a good website about different torture techniques used all over the world. The background color of this website make the reading a little exciting.
"http://www.angelfire.com/darkside/forgottendreams/Tools.html"

California

If you are not doing anything in your life and the weather itself is not changing..life would be so boring. Perhaps thats why, this state have some of the most dynamic people in the country; otherwise this unchanging weather will kill you.

A Clone of me, in a parallel universe

Here is an interesting argument to prove that, somewhere far, far away, there is a planet which has life. It has humans and animals just like they are on earth. Not just that, It further goes to argue that, in some other planet, somewhere far away, there is an exact replica of myself, writting this, right now!!

Assumptions: The space is infinite, which has been proved to some extent by experimental data of cosmic rays detection.

Argument: The basic argument is, in an infinite space, anything is possible!!

In particular, what is the probability that life exists on another planet. It is some number which is not zero but infinitely small and very close to zero. But, since space is infinite, the probability of life in another planet approaches one. Another ways to see it, in a sample space where infinite number of events can happen, the probability of any arbitrary event happening, out of infinite events is "1". So If I pick that event to be, life exist somewhere else. In an infinite space, it surely is true.

Still not convinced, ok try this: Imagine in a bag, there are infinite number of balls with different weights. What is the probability that at least one ball in that bag weighs 1 pound?

Monte Carlo Methods

Monte Carlo simultion method is a technique to find numerical data for the behavior of a system (like variability, reliability, success rate, blah blah blah), where the exact computation of such data through analytical means is impossible. Such cases might arise in multi-variable equation, each with different probability distribution.

Now, from one of the best books on this method, this is what the author wrote on the first page.

"Monte Carlo is an extremely bad method, it should be used only when all alternate methods are worse"

Interesting, isn't it?

Time Travel Paradox

The twin brothers paradox is a favourite cocktail topic, when talking about time travel. The paradox is stated roughly like this.

There are twin brothers on earth, and one of them takes a flight in a rocket and travels close to the speed of light while the other one stays on earth. After 10 earth-years, when the travelling twin returns to earth, he will be much younger (physically) compared to his twin brother, who has aged 10 earth-years. The earth-years mentioned here is similar to years, but for the sake of correctness, it is termed as earth years.

Most of the explainations for this paradox of twin brothers on internet (including wikipedia) are decently complex for some not scieitific person, who just want to be amused. For thos amusing people, here is an alternate explaination.

Forget about time travel, and twin brothers for a moment (ding dong!!). Lets talk about something else...like

1. Nothing in this universe (or any other universe) can travel faster than light.
2. Nothing in this universe (or any other universe) can travel faster than light.
3. I just repeated the previous sentence, just to emphasize my point.
4. Even *TIME* cannot travel faster than light.
5. Therefore, TIME has a speed.

As a human being, when we move from Spain to Beijing, we are travelling in space. Since it takes us 16 hours to travel from Spain to Beijing, we are also travelling in TIME. We are doing a space-time travel. Everyone on this earth is travelling in time, and with the same speed. Right?

If there is a machine, that can be used to accelerate the velocity of time (as perceived one earth), One can travel 5 earth-days in 2 earth-days only. You got the point.

Once again, nothing can travel faster than light, even time cannot travel faster than light. Time as seen on earth has a finite speed. Therefore, a machine can travel faster than time and does time travel.

This can explain, time travel into future, how do I explain time travel into past? Slow down my Time-Car?

Software Piracy.. Did you know...?

It is quite well known that software piracy is one of the biggest problem faced by american companies in China. It is estimated that 96% of the software in China is pirated resulting in huge losses to american companies.

Humm....How much is really the loss?

From an articke in pcworld magzine, the software piracy in china cost united states roughly 1.19 billion dollars a year. Wow thats a huge number. It is alarming and everybody knows about it. We need to do something about it!!!

According to an article in Red Herring (July 31st issue), some 21% of all softwares in united states are unlicensed (a.k.a pirated, although unlicensed sounds better); and caused in $$ 6.6 Billion dollars losses in 2005, according to trade group Business Software Alliance. That is roughly 5 times 1.19.

Did you know..?

Stem Cell Research - Veto'ed

For starters, a brief introduction on Stem Cell Research can be found at this wikipedia link. Wikipedia is a very good source for general information, but that discussion is for some other post. In general, the information about arcane topics is easier found on wikipedia than using google or yahoo search.

It is believed that, Embryonic stem cell research can cure diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Doug Melton's specialty, type 1 diabetes. There is apparently no direct evidence to support data. However, the invonations in science does not come from the presence of direct evidence, instead from an investigative mind, a plausible theory and freedom to validate (or invalidate) that theory. .. to be continued...