Yantrakaal

Facebook is the mythical 800-lb gorilla in the media world that, as the original joke goes, “sits down wherever it wants to”. With 1.2 billion pairs of eyeballs eyeing it every day, it has an audience greater than any American, European or Asian TV news network, newspaper or online news portal. This immense reach also makes it the most effective medium of entertainment. In societies where it has crossed a critical threshold of penetration, it has become the most potent mobilising force in politics and all this eventually translates into Facebook being one of the  most valuable companies in the world. image borrowed from https://mymuddledmind.blog / We know that information is power. We also know that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Should we be wary of Facebook? Consider the following ... In the Foundation series of iconic science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov, we have  the villain, a mutant psychopath called the Mule, using popular musical co...

As an erstwhile DBA, a long time user and a great admirer of the SQL language -- that has stood the test of time for the last 30 years -- I have always sought to use SQL in many useful ways. In an earlier post , I had shown how SQL can be used to solve a classic data science problem, namely Clustering, using the K-Means algorithm and today, I demonstrate how SQL can be used to process OLAP data cubes and generate the popular cross-tabs table. Data cubes, or OLAP cubes, are a way to store historic data using the dimensional model, as opposed to the relational or 3rd normal form model. These data cubes can be "sliced" and "diced" to reveal data relevant to particular dimensions. Because of the immense popularity and ubiquity of relational databases, like Oracle and MySQL, data in the dimensional model is routinely stored in relational tables and retrieved -- by slicing and dicing the cube -- using standard SQL constructs like the WHERE clause. This is called Relat...

Quantum mechanics is a subject that has the strange property of simultaneously being logically rigorous and yet completely counterintuitive. So much so, that even a towering intellect like Einstein could never bring himself to accept its principles even though products based on the same exist all around us. The earliest oddity, identified by Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics is about a hypothetical cat that is neither dead nor alive until someone actually observes it. A similar oddity is that of quantum entanglement, where the behaviour of one particle is instantly affected by the behaviour of another particle, however distant it may be -- an example of “spooky” action-at-a-distance. Explaining these phenomena is beyond the scope and temerity of this article and so the reader would have to accept them here in good, almost religious, faith and carry on with the belief that such phenomenon has been observed and explained by scientists under the most rigorous experime...

Global, national and local societies face many threats. We are threatened by enemies -- internal and external -- who want to destroy our way of life. We are plagued with environmental degradation as we quickly try to ramp up the economy and improve our living standards. Finally our own social systems are in tatters because efforts to mitigate the effects of the first two reasons are stymied by venal corruption and a cynical disregard for the rule of law. In fact the last reason is perhaps the most over arching reason, because it leads to the other two. image from 5rhythms We have solutions to most of our problems. Technology solutions are available to grow more food, generate more energy, combat disease and check crime. There are public structures like hospitals, schools, municipal, state and central governments, the legislature, each having its own set of rules and procedures, to guide and govern matters. There are commercial structures, like corporates, cooperatives and profess...

The ubiquity of computers and smartphones and the pervasive presence of digital technology means that everybody who is reading this article is familiar with hackers. Hackers, as we all believe, are evil people, who either create viruses that ruin our machines or access our computers to steal confidential information with the intention to cause harm. We also have ethical, or white-hat, hackers, the guards and policemen, who with the same level of skill, try to beat the evil black-hat hackers at their game and keep digital assets secure. But the original meaning of hacker was someone who is so intensely immersed in computer technology that he knows much more than what a normal, non-hacker,  user would ever know about what can be done with computers. The hacker was the uber-geek, in whose hands a computer could be stretched to perform tasks that it was never meant for and deliver unexpected results. The hacker was a genius, not necessarily the evil genius that he -- and it is general...

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to have been invited to speak at the PMI Regional conference where instead of the regular, and pointless, bouquet of flowers that is traditionally given to the keynote speaker, I was presented with the following certificate what this means is that PMI has paid Sankalptaru.org some money to plant 10 trees on my behalf and "my tree" is visible in at the URL indicated by the QRcode . Thank you PMI for this unusual gift