Terence Tao has written about electoral polling in a very interesting article here. A non-technical gem from a genius….. 🙂
P.S.:
Try out the assembler game mentioned in the last post . Really interesting.
Added new links : This Week in Evolution which form interesting reading.
Sage - Open Source Mathematics Software
Sage is an open source mathematics software with a mission of creating an alternative to softwares like Mathematica,Maple,MATLAB,etc.
Sage can be used to study general and advanced, pure and applied mathematics. This includes a huge range of mathematics, including algebra, calculus, elementary to very advanced number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, commutative algebra, group theory, combinatorics, graph theory, exact linear algebra and much more.Â
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Will try it out and post on it later. The software along with the reviews look good for loads of my work .
No, this is not the program and has nothing to do with the language in any way. It is a very interesting game.Check it out.
Assembler is a new physics based wonder where you move some depository equipment to get your precious green crate in position. For what? No matter! Physics work perfect and the feel of grabbing and moving around things is just perfect. Don’t play too much or you’ll dream of dirty green crates flying around.
It is obvious that when the society is attacked, and we lose our near and dear ones, it causes a lot of sorrow. It also causes fear. But if we keep reeling in this sorrow and fear, and the anger that comes along with, then life moves towards the path to perdition. But suppose we want to channelize this energy and prepare to face this war bravely, we need to first calm the mind and come to a state of equanimity.
We need to become ‘Sam-darshi’ (One whose vision is equanimous). At this Priyadarshini Park, let’s all pray for those who have departed, and let’s take a pledge to be ‘Sam-Darshi’, the equanimous one.Â
Today we are all angry with the politicians, or with our system. Our police lack the necessary arms and ammunitions. We still find ourselves stuck with old outdated concepts. Entire Mumbai seems angry.  I would say in one way this is good, that we at least have woken up.  We are no longer ready to take the ‘Chalta Hain’ attitude. For so many years India has seen terrorist attacks in different places, but for the first- time the entire community, especially the youth, have woken up. But I would like to say that changing one person, trading one minister for another, is not the solution. A new minister swearing into some position would take 6 months just to understand the whole system. So we all need to think on how to make our system stronger.  Just by reacting out of anger, and targeting one community in our anger is fruitless.  We cannot blame an entire community for a wrong.
Firstly, we all need to come together and pledge that we shall work for protecting our country.  And let’s also resolve to first examine the qualifications of those who we elect.  We need social leaders who are ‘Satya-Darshi’ (Truthful), ‘Sam-Darshi’ (Equanimous), and ‘Door-Darshi’ (Farsighted).  We need to protect our country from those who manipulate issues for their personal gains and lead by playing ‘Vote-Bank’ politics.
Secondly, we will resolve to not act out of anger, but instead channelize our dynamic energy for the betterment of the society. We will also expose all those who are supporting violence, no matter what religion they belong to. We will get rid of the mentality which asks us to protect people from our own religion, or community, even if they are doing wrong. This is very important. Sometime we protect the faulty people in our families. We will not do this anymore.
I just returned from Arunachal Pradesh in the morning. We need to send this message to all our neighboring countries that India is ONE. China is asking for Arunachal Pradesh, I would like to tell them, “Why are you just asking for Arunachal Pradesh, ask for the whole of India! We consider the entire world ours, why are you stuck only with Arunachal Pradesh then?” We will never allow this separation to happen! We are not ready to cut one thumb out and give them, but we are ready to give our entire hand to shake! India is ONE and will remain ONE. We might have different religions, communities, languages and cultures, but underneath all this diversity, every Indian is ONE. We need to send this message to Pakistan, Bangladesh or any other nation. We will not allow them to play with us anymore.
Today when Mumbai is attacked we all have woken up, but you go to Assam and see the condition there.  5 districts there are suffering from continued violence. Lakhs of people had to flee from their houses and are living in camps. The situation in Assam is completely hand crafted by politicians. But we never get to see this in our news. Today, we shall pray for not just the victims of Mumbai alone, but for the victims of terror and extremism everywhere in India.
We are proponents of Peace, but we also are the descendants of Guru Gobind Singh. Today, we need ‘Sant-Sipahi’ (The Saint who is a Soldier). We don’t need just saints, we don’t need just soldiers, but people who are both. Every human here shall be a Peace Messenger, and a Peace Soldier. Peace Soldiers are those who have dynamism and a will to stop the wrong. Peace Soldiers are those who expose the wrong deeds and doers in the society, and stand in protest.
Today is Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s anniversary. We all must remember the good work done by him in starting the movement against ‘Un-touchability’. Even today, some villages of India are practicing Un-touchability. This should be immediately curbed.  Nowhere in our scriptures has un-touchability been advocated. In India, we have a tradition of worshiping the feet (Paada-Pooja). In fact in the west the feet are considered low and un-holy. Washing the feet, worshiping the feet has always been a sign of reverence in our culture. Just like the body has different organs, the society has different castes philosophies and religions.  But all of them ultimately represent that One Divinity. Remember this fact. Never think that our scriptures, our religion is superficial. There is immense depth in our ‘Shastras’.  Sometimes we see that there is a huge valley between what is written in the scriptures and what is seen in our daily practice. Islam, what it actually says and the way it is practiced today is completely different. Same goes for the Vedic knowledge.  Our Vedas say that all humans are one, and yet we see casteism and un-touchability practiced in places. These practices have no religious significance whatsoever. This should be stopped.
So we need to bring a wave of social transformation, and each one of us here will need to take responsibility for the same. Can we all do it? Raise hands – all those who would like to join hands for this task. Yes, we all can do it. But one thing we need to remember again is that we should not act out of anger. When I went to Iraq and met some ministers there, and told them that by practicing meditation we can pacify our anger, they requested me to not pacify the anger of their people! They want their citizens to stay angry till they don’t take their revenge from America. I was shocked! Anger will always lead you to remorse.
Peace does not mean inaction. We want a revolution, but we want a Peace Revolution. Mahatma Gandhi advocated Peace, but he did not just sit back and let injustice happen. Out of peace, he took action.  The essence of entire Geeta is this – Fight with equanimity. Today, this message of Geeta is applicable to Mumbai. Mahabharata, which happened 5200 years ago, is now repeating itself again. We are again seeing a ‘Dharam-Yudha’ (A Battle for Religion). And in this battle, all the nations of the world, except a few, are with us! And even those nations, which are not with us, it’s only select people from those nations who are not with us.
Their own missiles are now shooting back at them. Let’s not make this mistake ourselves. Whenever I have traveled to Israel, I have been told by the Jewish leaders there that India is the only nation in the world where a Jew has never been attacked! India is known for its tolerance and peace. India is the only nation on the planet, which has advocated peace and welcomed people from all religions and countries with arms wide open. But what has happened this time has left us hurt and wounded. However, we shall not let this stain our spirits – We shall overcome. Are you all with me?
We will not let go of our culture, our nature – which is peace, which is non-violence. But with this philosophy of non-violence and peace, we shall teach such a lesson to all the terrorists, that they will not even know what hit them!
And I would like to ask all the media and the journalists to pay some attention towards the North East provinces of India. There is a lot of violence happening there. Our media does not show these incidents at all. Each state there is gripped with violence. People are living in fear. We have completely forgotten those people. They only see Mahatma Gandhi’s name in the currency bills, otherwise there is no reflection of his principles there.
I would like to say to all the families who have lost their dear ones that the soul never dies. Those who have departed us have merged with the divine, and their souls are still with you, with us, with the entire nation.  Hence we should not sit and shed tears for them, for they are martyrs. Everyone will die, including us. But they have sacrificed their lives to wake us up and make us realize that others should not need to suffer, that this should not happen again. Know that once you drop the body, there is no more suffering to the soul. However, people who are left behind on the planer suffer for their loss. Now this sorrow that you might feel should be channelized properly. Don’t go in depression. We are conducting Trauma Relief Workshops everywhere. All those who saw these attacks, and are suffering with the traumatic impressions it leaves in the mind, need to learn pranayams and meditation to flush this negativity out. So ensure all those who you know are feeling dejected and scared, even just by seeing these proceedings in TV, attend these Trauma Relief camps and learn meditation, so that they can once again be filled with hope, enthusiasm and happiness.
Fedora 10 was released a few days ago and since Fedora 9 for me was a bit of a dissapointment ,I hoped things would smoothen out in F10 .
The installation was smooth .A nice interface welcomes you at installation . I usually create 3 partitions alloting around 700MB for /boot , 1024MB for swap and remaining (around 40GB) for / .
Fedora 10 got widespread publicity and a number of market reviewers praised it for its server stability , faster boot loading ,etc. New users may be attracted to the distro and might be ready to give it a try without knowing Fedora’s and Red Hat’s aversion to proprietary formats like mp3,avi,flv,etc. That means when one first installs Fedora 10 none of ur mp3,avi,flv files will play.PackageKit will simply ignore these files and not bother to direct you to the suitable codec.
The solution for this is to install the necessary software from dedicated repositories which host these restricted drivers. RPM Fusion hosts a huge repository containing all these packages. To include RPM fusion packages in the software sources do the following.
su
Password: --- Your root password
rpm -ivh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
The rpm will install in a few seconds and will be added to your software source.
Now if the necessary codecs to run a file are not installed PackageKit will direct you to the appropriate source.
I use a Dell Vostro 1310 with a 2.1GHz Pentium core 2 duo processor , NVidia GeForce 8400 graphics card. For graphics on the system I downloaded the necessary drivers from here .
For installing these drivers you have to :
Kill the X server and then run the package.
For killing the X server boot into runlevel 3 .
To do so :
su
Password: -- Your root password
/*Open inittab in your favourite editor*/
emacs -nw /etc/inittab
/*and change the runlevel to 3 */
Reboot your system and as root run the package and your drivers will be installed.
GNOMEs latest version features nautilus with tabs a very handy hack.OpenOffice supports .docx ,etc formats (a huge sigh of relief).
Things I did not like:
KDE appearance sucks. GNOME rocks . However since I am a big fan of VLC and Amarok I was dissapointed with the window appearance for both their GUIs since both are coded in QT .
Mplayer and Rhythmbox might work out as good replacements.
Came across a nice site which serve as personal guides to fedora 9&10 .
Also tried Gnome Do . More on it later
Bye ,
Jai Gurudev.
Finally after 4.5 months of NITT I was in a dire need for a refreshing change from the college atmosphere ….. Sometimes u did love to escape from the place but not from the people there … thats precisely the feeling i went through . We(Neil , Save , Himanshu , Zaveri , Mayur, Khanjan, Amit , Shaunak ,Kshitiz and me) came home by rail .When Save’s around rarely is there a dull moment …. A lot happened during the journey to Chennai …. probably a bit more on that l8r ….
This sem was one of the most happening sems for me …. MGL started of with a bang and the entire team did a very good job …. this was follwed by 2 YES+ courses which rocked to the core.Its amazing to see Gurudev at work during these courses …. Things which seem impossible are taken care of with elegance and ease …. and the most amazing thing u witness as a volunteer and a participant is the transformation of the mind that takes place during the course….. words cant describe it …… This was followed by Navratri celebrations in the Ashram . A post on that l8r … definitely the most amazing time of the year ….. Then the sem exams …. and so on ……
Back home and well since no one s around during this time probably wont be as entertaining as summer hols…. Anyways
Bye c u l8r .
Jai gurudev
Iceman's Igloo 