Why Indians do not Stand in Queues?

Indians just don’t like to wait patiently in a queue. Why? It took me years to figure out why, but now I am convinced that the reason has nothing to do with mutated genes or skewed education or indiscipline or lack of consideration for others. It is a cultural thing.

Cultural???

Come, let me take you back some 5000 years (give or take a few 1000 years, depending on who you believe). We are entering a very critical phase of an ongoing story. This is the bedroom of a person who has already been recognized as God. Krishna is sleeping. Duryodhana enters his bedroom. Looks around. There is only one seating place, near Krishna’s head. He sits there and patiently waits for Krishna to wake up. Shortly after Arjuna enters the chamber. He hesitates for a moment, Duryoshana, the person he hates, is in the bedroom before him. But he contains his anger and stands at the foot of the bed.

Shortly after Krishna wakes up. Who do you think he attends to first? Not the person who came first. But the person who Krishna sees first. So it is all about grabbing eye balls. Doesn’t matter who came in first. What matters is who the clerk / officer / babu / chaprasi decides to attend first.

There, you see why Indians do not like standing in the queue. As I said it is a cultural thingy.

Physics Can Be Fun Too

I wish I had this book when I was studying in 5th Standard. The Cartoon Guide to Physics is easily the best 'text book' on physics. The educators will disagree, of course. Education, for some strange reason, has turned out to be not-for-fun activity. Pity!

How deep is the Cartoon Guide?
Counter question: What do you know of Pseudo-forces? The first time when I understood this concept I was well into college. The Cartoon guide explains the concept in 11 sketches. And does a good job of it. The chapter is called "Some Forces are Fictitious".
And by the time you complete the chapters of Electricity and Magnetism, believe me, you will be ready to shred your child's prescribed text books.

This one gets to sit right next to the Feynman Lectures on Physics in my small library. Highly recommended!

Calculus of friendship

When you come across books that have titles such as this ... The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life while Corresponding about Math ... you wonder who would buy these. After all how popular could a book written by a maths professor be? But then you realize that good books transcend genres. Good books need to be promoted and so here's my attempt to boost its sales. Please click on this link and be prepare to be enthralled.

And oh! I almost forgot!
This one is no. 500 - my 500th post on this blog.

Education in United States

More than the book GEB, I find Douglas Hofstadter's description of his education more interesting that the book itself ...

[I]n late 1967 ... I dropped out of math grad school in Berkley and took up a new identity as physics grad student at the University of Oregon in Eugene. ... I was very discouraged with the way my physics studies and my life in general were going, so in July I packed my all my belongings into a dozen or so cardboard boxes and set out on an eastward trek across the vast American continent. ... From Boulder I headed further east, bouncing from one university town to another, and eventually, almost as if it had been beckoning me the whole time, New York City loomed as my ultimate goal. Indeed I wound up spending several months in Manhattan, taking graduate courses at City college ... but as 1973 rolled around, I faced the fact that despite loving New York in many ways, I was even more agitated than I had been in Eugene, and I decided it would be wiser to return to Oregon and to finish graduate school there. ... In 1974, I switched Ph.D. advisors for the fourth and final time ...

Wow!
Can you do that? I mean, switching subjects, schools & university, and professors at will?

Are you wasting your time in the city?

Do you go to see theaters?
Do you go for book reading sessions by popular authors?
Have you been inspired by a new artist when you visited that art gallery?
In the past 3 months, have you met some one interesting?
In the past 6 months, has someone visited your house for the first time?
Or have you visited someone for the first time?
Did you exchange your cell number with someone you met at a gettogether?
Did you go to a gettogether where there were more unknowns than knowns?

No?

Then what are you doing in a city? Go live in a suburb.


Picture courtesy: Raphael Castello

Summer Vacation is here again!

Most parents would swear to the contrary, but for me summer vacation is not for my children. It is for ME.

I look forward to summer vacation from January. And my end March my summer vacation starts. I no longer have to drop them of to school early mornings. I no longer have to run behind them ensuring that there school work is done. I no longer have to argue endlessly with them to explain why they need to sleep early. I no longer have to spend time in the mornings trying to wake them up ("Daddy! 5 more minute!")

I can now just be me ... cycling, reading and blogging. What fun!

Picture courtesy: abcdz2000

Advise that launched the 'Intel Inside' brand

This advise is too precious to remain buried in a tome.

Just a small preface: This advise came from Professor Henry Reiling of Harward Business School. This piece of advise led Dennis Carter to join Intel. Dennis Carter is primarily responsible for the 'Intel Inside' brand.

When you look for your first job find a job where nobody knows exactly what you're supposed to be doing. If they don't know what you're supposed to be doing, they won't know what you are not supposed to be doing. As a result, you can do anything you want, and you can take risks.

This is extracted from Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow.

Photo courtesy: Margarit Ralev

From the First Principles

Staying on with Feynman ...
Most of his biographers, editor, lecture notes compiler agree on two facts:

Feynman was a fantastic teacher
Feynman worked things out for himself, from the first principles.

So, working out concepts from the first principles helped Feynman to come up with unique perspective. On the other hand this amounts to reinventing the wheel.

What surprises me is that none of the 'Feynman authorities' made the logic leap from fact#2 to fact#1. It was because Feynman worked out things for himself that he was a fantastic teacher.

Here's a lesson for all teachers, lecturers, mentors and, most importantly, parents. You can teach best only when every aspect of what you are teaching is absolutely clear to you.

And here's a test for you to figure out if you have understood a topic well or not. If your student / child / subordinate asks you a dumb question - some would say, there are no dumb questions - and you get irritated at that so-called-dumb question, then you do not have mastery on that topic.

Actually the source of irritation is not that dumb question. It is your subconscious mind that is getting irritated at your inability to handle the question.

We can extrapolate this to our everyday situation.

If a situation is irritating you, and you feel inclined to shout out in frustration, then the source of the frustration, perhaps, is your inability to handle the situation; not the situation itself. Working out the solution to the situation from the first principles - it may not be possible to do it at the spur of the moment; could be done later - will let you handle the family of such problems when your encounter them next. (You will be surprised how apparently dissimilar problems, when shred of all externalities, are oh-so-similar.

Think about it.

Note: For a fantastic biography on Feynman read Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.

The picture used here belongs to Sarah Williams. Please visit her gallery to see more such pictures.

Learning Chess from Bobby Fischer Himself

As I encourage my sons to take up chess, I cannot think of any other book except Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. My friend, Ashish Balaya, introduced me to this when we were doing our masters together. And in all these years OI have not come across a more effective way of learning chess.

The book is as simple as it is effective. Perhaps that is the mark of the genius that Fisher was. Every concept is presented as a set problem-solution picture form. And it gradually takes you to ever increasing complexity. The best way to learn from this book is by recreating the pictures (even for the simplest ones) on the actual chessboard.

Surprisingly when I searched this book at Foyles I could not find it. I finally found it in Bangalore! Please buy this book and give to your kids. You will surely thank me.

This book will not make you a Grandmaster. But, it will definitely make you fall in love with chess. I recommend it very strongly.

Note: The photograph used belongs to Katia Stamenova. Please go here to see more such photographs.