A Rant for a Rant

1:27 AM Posted by Krishna

One of my friends rant about Gandhi Jayanthi (Click here for the post) going unnoticed tickled my grey cells to write this post. The Question which came to my mind at the end of that post – Can I Afford to forget Gandhi Jayanthi or whatever Significant Date of national/International importance at the cost of something Personally significant?? The answer being Why NOT!! I really appreciate whatever the father of the nation has done to this country and I very well understand that the fruits of freedom, and the so called Fundamental Rights, which I am enjoying is attributed to the efforts of all those Freedom fighters over the past couple of centuries (Not Just Gandhi). At the same time I am aware of the fact that to have a stable future, to pay off my loans and to cater to the needs of the worldly compulsions, I need the so called VIT M. And one of the ways of earning that is by clearing those wonderful rounds of interviews and sealing the deal. Life is just about getting your priorities right, and I do not blame people if they have better things to do on D Day. It’s their life and it’s their choice. A person who cannot set his home right, who cannot be assured of the basic needs, cannot afford to think on lines of Self-Actualisation. The spirit of Freedom, our fathers and fore-fathers strived for, lies in the freedom of personal choice, in free country. And by exercising that spirit of My individual freedom, I paid my tribute to all those people who gave away their lives and soul fighting for it. I celebrate Gandhi Jayanthi not just on Oct 2, but all 365/366 days of year. My Case Rests…
KP – TheDevilzAdvocate.

An Aimless post at an Odd hour

2:06 PM Posted by Krishna

The time shows 3:36 AM and after a very long time, I thought lets write a blog. Watched a movie (The forbidden Kingdom) and then played for sometime on my system and then suddenly realized that my Second Sem exams are about to start in just a week. Like a studious geek, I opened my group mail, copy pasting the time-table and the chapters from book of a few subjects in the sticky notes, a feature which I always think of using as a reminder to study, but till date have (un)successfully implemented. The future what is bound to happen you never know. But I decided that for the very immediate future, the studies can wait until the late noon.(Again a big uncertainty).
MBA - Masters in Business Administration, so far has been a decent journey and a great learning experience (Absolutely nothing on the academic front, say for the exception of Economics, which i relished studying, thanks mainly to Mr. Chetan Chitre).
My 1 year or so in Nasik has led to "Many firsts" in my life. For the first time i was (and still am) staying away from my home for such a long duration. My first experience with something called as hostel life (Which I am thoroughly relishing, thanks to my roomies, and the entire 4th floor of BH1). If someone ever asked me an year back about dancing on a dance floor, or having an occasional peg of vodka, I would have replied "Noooooooo Never ;)". Now I am equally comfortable doing both (if I say occasional, it is occasional and it is just vodka - nothing else, for ppl out there in chennai, nothing to get hyper about! ;) ). My love for nature has increased since my amazing trek to Brahmagiri (again my first real trek), the feel of wind, hitting on our faces and trying to offset our balance after a hard trek up, gives me an refreshing feel even at this hour.
The most interesting thing, for the first time in life, I have developed an interest in observing my fellow beings. And this has been the most wonderful (and sometimes dangerous :P) experience/learning till date of my MBA life(and i guess the dangers and adventures will continue for another year). Even the likes of Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin and Wilhelm Wundt would be bamboozled and pleased to observe such a wonderful and dynamic ecosystem and Me being just another me in this system is no exception.
I have had a plethora of emotions, (some very refreshing and some emotionally sapping) during this wonderful voyage of learning and I am listing down a handful of inferences.
The manner in which people handle the most complex of issues in the most simplest manner leaves me in awe.
  • How the simplest and silliest of things are blown into the most complicated disasters is a bigger conundrum, for which I doubt, I will be able to zero in on a major reason.
  • People know a lot and yet love to be ignorant, which reminds me of an adage "Ignorance is bliss". But is this ignorance good? I am still pondering.
  • Humans love being praised and hate being criticized. Even if we realize we are wrong, it is sad to see that we love defending our wrongs, just because it is OURS. We just hate genuine critics and brand them as jobless, good for nothing a**h****.
  • And equally so, Humans love being critical. It is just so damn hard for us to praise others, even if it was the most amazing achievement. We have this typical attitude of "Oh thats nothing, Even I could have done that".
  • And talking about criticism, Most/Majority of these are doled out at the back of a person. We generally lack the guts to say on the face "a wrong as a wrong", Humans have this wonderful potential of smiling and saying to a person "Wow that was nice" and go behind his/her back and say "That was nothing".
  • We are brilliant at pointing problems and hardly try to zero in on solution, because we feel that finding problem is our only job and there is always another creature lurking round the corner to give out solutions. Or maybe we think that God will dole out solutions as a freebie for having created us!
  • We love taking things and people for granted. No explanation needed on that front i believe.
  • We are incapable of taking "No" for answer. We always need "YES" and love to force others to say YES and amazingly manage to do that and that is because people don't want to step up and say NO as an answer. In short we hate to listen to and say a "NO".
  • We are so diplomatic, that we can kill someone smiling on his/her face and he/she would feel like we are Gods granting them a boon.
  • And here goes the last one which i can state safely followed by one free advice. ;)
  • If we are angry at someone and try blasting him/her out, thats the only time, we really speak our minds out about the particular person.

Free Advice : It is always wise to listen to an angry person, because thats the time, when he/she unknowingly speaks loads of truth (which is a summation of all the negative thoughts a person has in his/her mind about you) which would never come out.

I know a few people will read this and many will never accept it, saying what was written was a piece of bullshit, which after my list of inferences would be surprising only if "if this piece of essay was not termed bullshit ;)".
I would love to finish this post with a quote my friend and roomie (fortunately or unfortunately ;) ) Aniket here "I don't mind. You don't matter".
Till my next post, adieu.

KP - TheDevilzAdvocate

PS: If you think, that this article is based on you, then you may be absolutely right(PUN INTENDED)

Bored................A Mixed Masala POST

11:52 PM Posted by Krishna



Hi,
It has been quite a long time since I wrote anything and here I am sitting in my office, having no scripts to run/debug, BORED. Was reading about Swami Nityananda scandal, which is creating quite a buzz around. Yet another GODMAN falls and I firmly believe, it is people like us who are to be blamed for pumping so much money into these so called Godmen, who spend it on actresses and other women. A true saint is never after money nor any other materialistic possession. A true saint will never materialize ROLEX watches out of air, for industrialists and politicians. In short a true saint never advertises himself. So for people who still believe in such fake Men proclaiming to be Avatars of God, its high time you wake up.... JAGO RE. If you are gonna be blind even after all these things, if you refuse to see the truth which lies in front of your eyes and if you wish to live in ignorance, SO BE IT. Don't blame God for your ignorance.

For people who have not been in touch with me, here are some updates... Currently I am in the Garden city of Bengalooru. And have had quite a few experiences in this short stint of 20 odd days. First it was my experience hunting for houses. Man it's tough to get a decent place with a moderate rent and advance. And if you are a Bachelor, people take it for granted that you drink, bring home some gals and enjoy.... At last we got a home 15 mins walk from our office, the rent was hiked from a supposed 5k to 5.7k, the reason being we are bachelors(I am sick of this reason now), but given that we had no other go under given circumstances, like any other Indian, said OK. The concepts of fighting for justice, fighting for righteousness doesn't hold good, when you want things get done.

My second experience worth mentioning was I went by air for the first time in my life(All expenses paid from my VERY OWN POCKET....IT DID BURN QUITE A BIG HOLE ;)). Took a flight from Bengalooru international Airport to Pune. It was quite a hectic period from FEB 11 - FEB 19 2010. For a person who rarely travels, I visited 5 cities in the span of 8 days..... BLR -> PUNE, PUNE -> CHENNAI, CHENNAI->BLR, BLR->MUMBAI, MUMBAI->NASHIK, NASHIK->MUM, MUM->BLR. I also made a record of sorts sleeping for 18 hours in a single day. Slept at 12AM and woke up at Half past 6 PM.

How different is Banglore from chennai??
I see loads of differences, The climate is on the cooler side. I went to chennai last weekend and told my mom "Enna ma evalo suda eruke"(What mom, why is it so hot?). My mom retorted, "10 naal banglore la erundhutu vandhu 23 years chennai climate suda theridha? (Having stayed in Banglore for 10 days, Do you find 23 years of chennai climate so hot??)
Chicks out here in Banglore are quite HOT as well as SEXY. But intha figures laam vazhkaiku udhavathu. Semma Dhum adikaralunga. Pathu nanae Aditen(But these chicks won't suit if you are looking to spend the rest of your lives with them.(again depends on perception... This perception applies for me) They smoke like hell...) I saw the true meaning of women's equality out here. Women smoke as much as or more than men do;)

The prices out here are on the higher side, A floor mop which costs 50 bucks in chennai costs 75 bucks here, Only Dosas and Idlies are on par or a little less compared to chennai.

I don't think there is nothing else to type... I am now getting bored of typing this post ;) So let me end this post with one more news from my side. Got a call to join MBA in SIOM, Nashik(Operations) and SCIT, Pune(IT Management). So contemplating which one to join and which one to leave. So if you have any suggestions buzz me up. Guess this is the beginning of things to come.. Hoping things go good. Until my next post ADIEU.

YOURS
KP - DEVILZADVOCATE

DNA Computing - Thinking beyond Silicon

7:04 AM Posted by Krishna

Hi all,
This article was written by me during my college days. I was just goind through the folders in my system when I stumbled upon this article and thought can share this piece of information with ya. Hope you have a good read

KP - The DevilzAdvocate



DNA Computing
Human Cells – A predecessor or successor to silicon?


“Have you ever wondered as to how genetic information is transferred from one generation to another? Have you ever pondered over how the mutations and evolutions take place? And will you believe if it is said that all these activities are done by millions of supercomputers present inside living organisms? If not, welcome to the world of DNA Computers.”



DNA Computer- A stumper that intrigues us
A DNA computer is a molecular computer that works biochemically. DNA is modified bio-chemically by a variety of enzymes, which are tiny protein machines that read and process DNA according to nature's design. There is a wide variety and number of these "operational" proteins, which manipulate DNA on the molecular level. Many copies of the enzyme can work on many DNA molecules simultaneously. Thus we can say that a DNA computer works in a massively parallel fashion.

Computer with a Chemistry Lab Mien?

The basic notion of a computer, having various Input and output devices and software running them does not fit here. A DNA computer is nothing but a mixture of solution containing the DNA strands and the enzymes taken in a test tube coaxed to crunch algorithms and spit out data.


DNA VS SILICON
"The inside of a computer is as dumb as hell, but it goes like mad!" was a statement made by Richard Feynman with regards to the systems based on the Von Neumann architecture. DNA computers on the other hand are non von Neumann machines which are capable of massive parallel processing and hence the process of computation is approached from a different perspective. Typically, increasing performance of silicon computing means faster clock cycles, where the emphasis is on the speed of the CPU(increasing it will cost you more money :) ) and not on the size of the memory. For DNA computing, the power comes from the memory capacity and parallel processing.

PATRIARCH OF DNA COMPUTING:
In 1994, Leonard Adleman solved directed Hamiltonian path (HP) problem popularly known as the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) in seven days. It was a problem that an average desktop machine could solve in the blink of an eye. But what’s special about his work that we are talking about? It was a landmark demonstration of computing at molecular level. His work brought into limelight the power of DNA in computing. Adleman considered seven nodes each representing a city to solve the problem.
Steps involved in Adleman’s experiment:

  • Generate all possible routes.
  • Select itineraries that start with the proper city and end with the final city.
  • Select itineraries with the correct number of cities.
  • Select itineraries that contain each city only once.


All of the above steps were accomplished with standard molecular biology techniques.

APPLICATIONS – An Overview:
CRYPTOGRAPHY:
A field in which DNA computing appears to be particularly interesting is the cryptography. The DES is the Data Encryption Standard that is the IBM's widely used encryption procedure. It uses a 56 bit key to encrypt 64 bit messages. The encryption procedure is known, and the security is based only on the secret encryption key. In [Bon95a], a molecular program that breaks DES is proposed. That is, one (plain-text, cipher-text) pair is given, and the key that maps the plain-text into the cipher-text is found. Conventional (silicon based) computers - using brute force - would take 104 years to solve the same problem (finding the key that maps a particular pair).
SOLVING NP PROBLEMS:
NP problems are a class of problems which have an exponential increase in time complexity as the number of instances increase. DNA Computers can be used to solve NP class of problems in relatively lesser time because of the parallel processing ability. This is best illustrated by Adleman’s experiment.
BIOMEDICAL AND PHARMACEUTICAL FIELDS;
DNA Computers can monitor blood in vitro levels. If there are any chemical imbalances, the DNA would synthesize the needed replacement and release it into blood maintain equilibrium. Autonomous bio-molecular computers may work as doctors in a cell.

WILL DNA SUPPLANT SILICON??
DNA's key advantage is that it will make computers smaller than any computer that has come before them, while at the same time holding more data. One pound of DNA has the capacity to store more information than all the electronic computers ever built; and the computing power of a teardrop-sized DNA computer, using the DNA logic gates, will be more powerful than the world's most powerful supercomputer. More than 10 trillion DNA molecules can fit into an area no larger than 1 cubic centimeter (0.06 cubic inches). With this small amount of DNA, a computer would be able to hold 10 terabytes of data, and perform 10 trillion calculations at a time. By adding more DNA, more calculations could be performed.

However, setting up and extracting results from a DNA computer can take days and sometimes week. The fact that DNA doesn’t behave as expected makes things difficult to obtain accurate results. Human intervention is required in each step of result synthesis which brings in the drawbacks of human errors. Ehud Shapiro, whose team has the Guinness record for “the smallest biological computing device” says, “I think they will live together happily and be used for different applications”.