Puerile Monk attains Nirvana at 140Kmph.

20/Apr/2005 I had to meet someone very important, the person was ill and needed medicine. So took a bottle of Gelusil and started for Mumbai from Pune at 5:00 reached just at about 6:55. Guess what I drove all the way in my Zen, just got a license some days back. 2 Hours full time radio mirchi, giving useless tips on how to stop people from snoring and help tips on love life.

The stretch from Dehu-road to khandala is amazingly spacious and you can have a good time racing your car to about whatever speed your car can go. I was pretty happy driving in the center lane at 80Kmph, until I saw a silver Skoda zooming pass me, I could not assay its speed at all. At times I am pretty cool, in the sense that I don’t indulge in aping somebody, BUT!!!!!!!! The Skoda just vanished. Radio Mirchi was then airing the song "Fana-from Yuva", then dunno why there was a sudden burst of adrenaline urging me to drive fast, very fast, very very fast, ofcourse only as fast as my car could go :), so i stepped up my accelerator, flashed my indicators & changed the lane, and slowly touched speed at 110Kmph. I had still not steeped the accelerator to the max, but at speed of 110 Kmph the power steering can be tough to handle give that you are just driving inches away from the road divider. But for once at least I wanted to see how far can the car be pushed, so I just kept on accelerating it takes some time to touch 140Kmph, that was it I had just reached 140Kmph a magic figure, I dunno why I felt happy about it - overall it was a dumb activity risking way to many things :). BUT FOR GOD SAKE DO IT ATLEAST ONCE IN YOUR LIFE you don’t want to die without attaining Nirvana right!! So take the advice from the monk himself. Neways there is no guarantee that if you drive slowly you wont be hit by fate's meteor.

One more thing, the toll plaza is fully computerized, and I am looking for a change, guess what I think I will apply for a position at the toll plaza :). Just out of curiosity I wanted to check what OS were they running and IT WAS >..................................................< WINDOWS, pretty obvious right you wont want these people configuring their X server each time it crashes. So the conclusion is windows suits the toll plaza because it would result in a complete failure if it fails, rather than Linux that will at least drop u in a shell, but what would they do with the shell anyways. Its like a feature targeted at the wrong audience. Ok Ok if you are thinking that I am backing the point Windows is a smart terminal for dumb people, so it is, so what heah !! Hail Windows Neways. Monk once used preaches for Linux until he did convert to Windows for good. "Mamu hawa ke saath ho liye"

I started my return journey at 00:30 and reached Pune back at 3:00 am, it was bore trip back so no blogging about it, full big trucks on the way and traffic jams at the khandala stretch, and I was feeling sleepy.

Overall it was a good learning experience so some tips in case you need them.
1. This is an important one, don’t follow the convoy effect blindly, there are instances where all vehicles do the same thing i.e. change lane for instance, you have to be careful while doing the same because someone behind you may also be trying to the same thing.
2. Don’t try to be extra helpful by changing lane for someone who seems to want to overtake you. If he needs you to move he will ask for it using an upper-dipper or by honking. Bottom line is delay the lane change until it’s absolutely necessary.
3. Use indicator for all lane changes.
4. Center lane 80 Kmph.
5. It’s easier than driving in Pune.
6. Once in the city put off your Formula 1 countenance. (It can be addictive)

Prodigies are Exception - Turing was my cousin.

Prodigies are exceptions! Also, history, beholds that most of the notable thinker, philosophers and others who have beneficently affected the cause of knowledge were not identified as prodigies. What goes to say is, almost all people are equally gifted when they enter this world. One of the gifts is our brain, the precious thing that makes us think, analyze and helps us be productive. The brain characterizes us "Humans: The thinking beings". Only a few things that humans know are limitless. So is our faculty of our cognitive services ( the brain).

With an equal start what makes a person more astute/wise than the others? It's his judicious decisions about what to retain and what to let go off, in the course of his life. Yes right, with an endless life and an endlessly extreme mental ability we can comprehend every single piece of knowledge ever published. Sadly, neither do we live an endless life nor are our mental powers so infinitely acute.

With the limited time and mental power supply, we need to carefully select what we study, even if this means that leaving out a vast variety of other interesting things. We need to do focused research, so that till the time we retire we make some remarkable contributions to the understandings of our posterity. I don’t want to diminish the importance of pure research, which is done only for the sake of learning(no application), it is equally important, but better left for privileged few who have all the monetary and other resources to do an open ended research.

Carefully selecting what to overlook, frees up more of our finite thinking powers to be concentrated on what (important information) that is needed to be saved and processed. This selection is all the more important in today’s competing world where research is no longer a single man's privilege. Many people are now doing research, so there is never ending demand for research funds. One of the ways to stay alive in this competition is to focus on only specific topics, and develop an expertise in that area.

As an general observation, i would like to quote that "The world is full of people trying to optimize/research the wrong thing at the wrong time". Man has taken the famous quote for Star trek "Space the new frontiers" a bit to seriously leading to following anachronism. At one place we are taking giant leaps into exploring the universe, but at the same time we are still not able to answer questions about our own brain, how do we think, no wonder artificial intelligence took so many years to develop. We should have focused more on understanding ourselves, than trying to answer all the needless unanswered questions in the world.

I would like to conclude with a metaphor that aptly compliments my stand. The computer's processor works at a faster rate than its memory, for this reason the processor caches the information that it’s currently dealing with for faster access. A good caching algorithm is the one that selects to cache the most relevant data and not any blindly selected data. Of course we are not machines like computers but the processor is the closest inanimate cousin of our brain.

Extreme Barter. Neo Going Bankrupt due to Google !!!!

Ignorance !!!!
Knowledge !!!
Barter ??

We all thrive on each others ignorance, the human brain could have been made complete in all respects like NEO, insert a digital drive and you know how to fly an chopper. Cool haan !

But a society like this can never exist, everytype of transaction in this world is based upon transfer of knowledge. You go to an doctor to get help when you are ill, he in turn is minting money due to your ignorance or lack of knowledge about medicine. Similary I write code and thrive on someone's inability to do so. This thriving on each other's naivete is what I term as Extreme Barter or barter in its purest form. Now with neo in the picture, we will have to do away with this scheme of exchanging stuff, because everyone will know everything. Or maybe there will be a system to collect information, .i.e you will be made to pay to learn how to be a doctor, but still you won't trust yourself more than an experienced doctor. This is somehow related to my understanding that no one can beat google in the long run, because google itself is acting as agent providing free information, the day google gets paid many neo's would have to go bankrupt.