Ubuntu Gutsy upgrade the best ever

I updated my Ubuntu Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon yesterday. It was the fastest and most hassle free OS upgrade I have ever done. Kudos to the developers. It took an hour to download and install the entire upgrade and all my personalized items (desktop, music etc.) were identical to how they were before the upgrade. Ubuntu even sensed all the third party software I had installed and upgraded them where necessary.

If you have not tried Ubuntu yet, try it. It is worth the effort.

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

One of the most inspirational talks I have ever heard. It is a long video and boy was it an hour well spent. Thanks Randy for sharing this with us.

Watch it here.

Cool Physics Videos

Can meat eaters be environmentalists?

Last week, I happened to go a vegan Korean restaurant in Chicago called Amitabul. Being a meat eater myself, I was a little skeptical about the food because in regular Korean restaurants, one does not find many vegetarian items. To my surprise the food was great. If you are ever in Chicago, do try it out (it is in Korea town).

I found an interesting pamphlet in the restaurant about the evils of non-vegetarian life style on the environment. I will list some of the details that shocked me:

• Pollution: The meat industry causes more water pollution in the United States than all other industried combined because animals raised for food produce 130 times more excrement than the entire human population.


• Land: More than 260 million acres of U.S. forest have been cleared to create cropland to grow grain to feed farmed animals.


• Water: It takes 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, but only 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat.

More information can be found at www.GoVeg.com

A must see video

Note the attention to detail in every frame of the video. So much detail is presented, yet not one frame is overcrowded. Thanks to Abi for pointing me to this video.

Fitting in . . .

Dennis M. Barden has a nice article (link) on the importance of ``fit'' in the hiring process in academia. Here is a sentence that I liked:

fit is the sine qua non, the factor that ultimately separates the well-suited candidate from the merely well prepared.

Replace Bar charts with Dot Plots

You rarely find bar charts in a science journal. This is mainly because it is not the best way for presenting most of the scientific data. Personally, I am not a big fan of bar charts. As Edward Tufte puts it

Bar charts have a very low data-ink ratio.

i.e., they waste a lot a ink without adding any information.

On rare occasions that I have been forced to use the bar chart, the result was disappointing. I found the dot plots to be much better in presenting the same data with less clutter. Dot plots also have high data-ink ratio, meaning every dot of ink adds value (information) to the plot. Take a look here.

Grant review

Ever wondered what goes on in a grant review meeting? See a NIH grant review meeting (video) that was filmed to help proposers write better proposals. There are many good pointers that you can pick up to write a good proposal.

"Jott" it down

Most part of the day I am in front of a computer and have enough paper with me but sans ideas to note down. On the rare occasion that an idea strikes me (that I would like to note down) I find myself with neither a computer nor paper. The days of forgotten ideas (and errands) are gone. Jott is a great website that provides a free transcription service. You can call a number and record your notes in jott. Jott will then transcribe your recorded message and send you an email. It recognized my south Indian accent perfectly well. To my surprise, it transcribed my Hindi message flawlessly! Here is the transcription of my Hindi message:

Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani.

Go ahead try it out (www.jott.com). It is a great and fun tool to use.

Scientific Images

Thanks to Abi for pointing me to this article.

Felice Frankel from MIT transforms the usually boring scientific images into breathtaking pictures. Take a look here and here.

Learn how to present your scientific data in a more captivating and engaging way in her book "Envisioning Science". A video of a lecture given by Felice Frankel can be viewed here.

Innovations in computing ...

Ted talks (link) has very nice videos about the innovations in computers which may soon be on our computers. Take a look at these videos.

Images, images and more images ...




Adding flare to desktops

Ramanujan: A mathematical legend

One of my friends forwarded me an interesting article on Ramanujan. Although I knew most of the facts in the article, it was nice to read it again. A sample passage from the article:

“I rode here today in taxicab number 1729,” Hardy told Ramanujan. “This seems to be a dull number and I hope it’s not an unfavorable omen.” To which Ramanujan replied, “No, it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”


The two ways 1729 can be expressed are :

1729 = 10^3 + 9^3

1729 = 12^3 + 1^3

The article can be found here : http://www.las.uiuc.edu/alumni/news/fall2006/06fall_lostnotebook.html

Ether vs Dark Matter

Ether was the favorite medium in the late 19th and early 20th century for scientists to describe many phenomena like light. Lorentz and later Einstein with his special theory of relativity stripped ether of all its qualities and left it with only one esoteric property; its immobilility. The special theory of relativity neither proves nor disproves the non-existence of ether. A nice talk given by Albert Einstein on this subject can be accessed here.

In a recent article published in Nature (in case you do not know, it is a highly reputed and sought after Journal), astronomers claim that they have found evidence that suggests dark matter is omnipresent. An article about this appeared in bbc a few days ago (link to bbc article). This article made me wonder whether we have moved at all from the yesteryear concept of ether. We have changed the name to "dark matter", but is our conception any different? I am not sure, but is sure interesting to think about.

Mathematics ... Myth or reality?

Galileo remarked - "Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean the universe - which stands continuously open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics... without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it. Without these one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth."

Think about it for a second. Is nature really written in the "language of mathematics"? A deeper question is whether mathematics is real or a figment of our imagination? I must confess that this line of thought is inspired by Robert Pirsig's famous book The zen and art of motorcycle maintenance (ZMM). Pirsig questions the very foundations of modern thought. I do not want to go as far as that. I am content meddling with something less deep (for now at least!).

To probe the reality (or the lack of it) of mathematics, let us take the simple mathematical concept : equality. Can two physical things (or quantities) ever be exactly equal? Note that the mathematical notion of equality is strict; there is no room for tolerance. If we do not allow for tolerance, (i.e., a little variation that we are willing to overlook) then no two things (or quantities) can be equal.

Did I make an audacious statement? Think about it. To say two things are equal, we should first have an accurate (no tolerance again) measure of the quantities in question. All current measurements are subject to error, it does not matter how small, but the error is always present. This violates our mathematical notion of equality. I can continue giving examples, however I think the point is made.

Now, please note that I am not trying to discredit mathematics. I like mathematics and love its beauty . In fact, I am trying to credit mathematicians for coming up (read imagine) with such a wonderful tool. The surprising (and beautiful) part is that the imagination works like a charm. It is so easy to describe nature in terms of mathematics. This ease has indeed made it the chosen language of scientists for generations and hence it seems natural to us. I do beleive that mathematics has evolved because people wanted to describe natural phenomena and Galelio's language (or rather the translation) seems to suggest that mathematics is eternal. How can it be eternal if it is a figment of our imagination?