October 13th Flurry

Whatever happened to Learning

A post on similar lines was intended for quite some time, but I could never really get myself to putting it down. Before entering NITK for a degree in Electrical Engineering, there was no clear idea as to what I wanted to do and what I needed to do. Like anyone else, most of the learning that happened involved gigantic tomes of pointless reactions and formulae. After all, it was sacrilege to not enrol yourself to a prestigious JEE coaching place. What was all the more disappointingly ironic was the fact that some of the finest ideas of science and mathematics were being introduced during this period, including calculus, linear algebra and quantum theory and the only thing that mattered was how an MCQ could be posed and what could be the best possible way to go about answering it. The most prime of time was lost in such meaningless exercises. So, for me the usual typical story followed - an almost worthless JEE rank and I had to 'compromise' with an EE seat at NITK Surathkal. Ah

Of Nikola's Vision

If magnetic lines circulate time varying electric currents, should I not say magnets are bunches of electric current thrown to distort Serenity. What I learn today is this - vector fields are of two kinds - one called solenoidal from the greek word for pipe-shaped and the other called irrotational field which means it is making itself to be represented as a dot product with any scalar field phi. We see these kind of measurements for example on images for analysis and processing and such. The solenoidal or if I may, the rotational fields are those which can be represented as a dot product with a Vector Potential A, such that the field v can be written as v = del X A. Therefore, the dot with a cross product is bound to be zero too. This seems to be the foundations for the need for differential calculas. We are highly indebted to Newton/Laplace for Calculas for they sat on shoulders of Giants then and today we on them! Coming back to Electromagnetism, Magnetic field lines compose are sole

One Man's Dream

Ever since the advent of Wikipedia, it's variants and more importantly the idea of Web 2.5ing, there was always this sub-conscious effort from my side to be relevant in the accumulation of the most obscure of facts about the most obscure of places and people. Not only has my active participation been a rather interesting phenomenon, but the idea of a person who I would never have even imagined that I would meet, hooks up and we end up spending hours fighting virtual Mafia wars, the concept kind of starts getting a little trippy. These phenomena no doubt exhibit characteristics that are so profoundly impacted by time - just like the supposed maturity of a person or the understanding of the world or the more and more compact stuffing of switches and devices in a tenth of a micron square. But this particular aim of 'world knowledge' and a 'single consciousness' no longer begs but commands our attention as more and more rapid progress is being made in all fields concern

Thought crucible

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