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Category Archives: science

Thought’s on MITx’s pilot course — 6.002x Circuits and Electronics

I took this course to refresh some of my EE basics which, having moved from EE to CS, I had long forgotten. I’d also been dabbling with various online courses being offered by Stanford (Machine Learning and Databases) but although the content and teaching were excellent, I realized that unless I was really serious about […]

The Giants

Visited the Greek Sculptures exhibition at the National Museum recently. Truly artistic and a wonderful experience to look through the exhibits. What struck me most was the corner in which the busts of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle sat, seemingly mundane compared to the grandeur of the Aphrodites and Athenas (see more exhibition photos here). Isaac […]

Thinking outside the slice

So this morning I was told by someone that they had a slice of bread and half a slice of cheese for breakfast. Half a slice of cheese. I don’t know about you, but this novel idea left me dumbstruck. Maybe its because I’m a computer scientist and I tend to discretize everything; or maybe […]

Now we know

The Economist writes: Indeed, this is the nub of the nurturists’ argument. Natural selection should have pushed intelligence genes as far as they will go, so all variation should be environmental. That it is not suggests there is some unknown countervailing advantage—at least in reproductive terms—to being less than averagely bright.

Phantons in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee

This is a non-fiction book on neuroscience. I nearly got scared too, but on the back cover was a recommendation from The Economist and so I decided to pick it up and give it a try. Turns out to be a wonderfully written, eminently layman-readable and a very interesting book. The author examines a number […]

Greener computing

I recently came across the Greenpeace Apple mock site. Greenpeace claims that Apple is lagging behind the rest of the industry in terms of green policies – specifically, toxic elements in products and the lack of worldwide takeback programs for hardware. They have a series of requests for Apple and a set of actions that […]