Never tell everything to _________

Secrets are important because

How do you like the new design?

This is what addictions look like.

Facebook is different afterall

When I feel particularly bad about my achievements, I remove them from my Facebook profile and feel good.

I wouldn't have cared what my profile on any other website would have said. But, Facebook has become my online identity without me realizing it.

Time to say goodbye to you, sneaky!!!

Whose fault was it at the New Delhi Railway Station?

I was pushed onto a lady yesterday at the crowded New Delhi Railway Station. She was angry at me. I apologized and moved on. That she was angry at me felt unfair to me when it was some other guy who pushed me. 

While that looked unfair, me being angry on the guy who pushed me looked completely fair until the absurdity of the whole thing hit me. It is highly likely that the guy who pushed me did so because someone else pushed him.

In other words, while punishing the messengers for the messages is something that comes naturally to us, it is probably not the right thing to do.

Computers, Thinkers and Feelers

Computers don't think or feel. They are computational devices. The basic building block of a computer's brain is a transistor. The transistor is packaged into either a NAND gate, a NOR gate or a NOT gate. These gates make up everything else in a computer. Mathematics is represented as a function of these three Boolean functions. That the three gates can represent mathematics is not an accident, but a conscious decision on the part of the developers. It was discovered that all basic mathematical operations were achievable through these three functions. It is no wonder then, a machine built with the help of these transistors would be good at computations or at using mathematics.

The way our brain thinks or feels is different from the way it does mathematics. In fact, our computers mimic the way do mathematics and that explains the existence of those gates. Computers have an upper hand over us, just because they carry out our methodology much quicker thanks to the function of gates being tied to the speed of inputs given to the transistors.

Thinking does not feel as stressful or unnatural as computing, and feeling even less so. This should indicate that we compute differently than we think or feel. So, to make a thinking machine, we need to break down the thinking process into its individual steps. If we can do that, we should start basic functions which can be used to represent the whole thinking/ feeling process. Once these functions are developed, we will have a hope of generating machines which think and feel the way we do. This, of course depends on we finding the processes of thinking, being able to represent them as a function of basic processes, being able to design components which replicate these processes and link them in a way that represents the human capabilities. We will also need a new system of 'somethings' (like binary, a system of numbers). Till that day, we will only have machines which fake thinking or feeling, not real Thinkers or Feelers.

We will have interesting situations when machines could think and/or feel. Given how we had to make a computer's computational processes on the lines of those used by humans, will we be able to make our thinkers or feelers very different from us?  Can we stop them from having needs and wants of their own? What do we do when this machine does not feel like working? How do you destroy such a machine which does not want to die?

Alienology Question Paper (Makeup)

Answer all the questions. All the questions carry equal marks.


Q.1. Businesspersons recognize this as a familiar scenario. 'How do you sell to someone who does not need something?' The case for businesspersons is simplified by the fact that they deal with humans, who have emotions, albeit to varying degrees, and these make it simpler to make them take decisions which don't gel with their logic.

How one can get something from an alien who has no need or desire. Do all aliens feel a need to connect to others? What if the aliens would rather remain aloof? How would you interact with such an alien?

How do you deal with an alien who is purely logical? How do you exchange something with it when you have nothing to exchange which it deems worthy? How do you deal with aliens who do not even subscribe to logic as we know it? Is logic universal? Is it tied to the mathematical system we use, which is incidentally based on a set of human made axioms? Is it tied to our senses? Had we accepted that sun moves around the earth and earth if flat (believing what we see) and tried to explain this world, would we probably have succeeded with a different set of theories, and probably a different logic?

Q.2. Imagine a planet with just one living being. Describe its life. Integrate insights from the previous answer into this.

Q.3. How is life different on planets with life form that live for hundreds of millions of years different from life on earth? How is it different from the planet in Q.2.? Would your answer have differed if you had not thought of the planet in Q.2?

Former MLA passes away

April 3, 2012

Staff Reporter

Hyderabad: Former MLA of Zindabad, Bacchabuddi (90) died after a brief illness in a hospital here on Sunday. Party leaders and supporters thronged the hospital on hearing the news and blocked the surrounding roads for 2 hrs before the police intervened. His son Bakkaabuddi, MP of Chippaluru, speaking to the media said that it would be difficult for anyone to fill the shoes of his visionary father. Party leaders, his friends and followers expressed condolences to the bereaved family. Party leaders remembered how Bacchabuddi, the first MLA to the Zindabad constituency after its formation in 1978 used to garner support cutting across party lines. His initiatives of getting a statue of a freedom fighter constructed in the Zindabad constituency was welcomed by all. Similar was the response, when he decided to rename all the schools of the constituency after the first Governor of the country. He never acted on anything that made anyone protest. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Personal and career highlights:

• Bacchabuddi got the construction of the 5000 MW Vidyutsagar dam stopped in 1978 to save 20 acres of land belonging to the downtrodden from being drowned.

• He was the chief accused in the Rs.6,50,000 crore Cowdung scam.

• He was also embroiled in the Cricket scam of the 90s.

• He was never convicted in any of the 316 pending criminal cases in which he was prime accused, for lack of evidence.

• Allegations of money distribution during elections against him were never conclusively proved.

• He was the founder of the 'Punyapurusha' party, which was set up on the plank of subsidised living, which later merged  with the Congress.

• He introduced the free petrol scheme in 1987, which still runs in the state.

• He was the first politician from the state to have been invited by the Oxford University to speak on 'How to subsidise during good times and suffer during bad times'

• 30 out of the 45 statues in the Zindabad constituency were dedicated to him.

• His son Bakkaabuddi, became the youngest MLA ever in the constituency in 1992 and later went on to become the MP of Chippaluru.

• Recently, he was in the news for his vocal support of 60% caste based reservation in posts of higher learning and research.