Re-inventing wheels is silly enough but re-inventing square wheels is whacky beyond belief. The smart way is to take what others have figured out and improve on it. Adopting the existing smart solution is the first step to successful innovation. The great thing about the world today is that the total number of human brains is huge — 6 billion plus — and if they are normally distributed, the number of brains at the extreme high end of the distribution, though vanishingly small in percentage, is pretty large in absolute numbers. So these tons of smart innovative brains have been coming up with all sorts of ingenious wheels. All we have to do is to check them out, understand how they work, and use our own smarts to figure out how to make those wheels better. One can be too stupid to smartly ape the smart.
Continue reading “Aping for fun and profit”
Author: Atanu Dey
Economist.
Back home in the Bay Area
To an essentially homeless person like me, the San Francisco Bay Area is as much home as any place ever gets to be. A few days ago when I arrived at the SFO immigration counter, the INS agent said, “Welcome back home.” Made me more acutely aware than ever before that I was a wanderer without a permanent home address. Not given to extended self-pity, I soon reminded myself of the advantages of not being rooted to a place.
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Thinking about education
To paraphrase one Nobel prize-winning economist, once you start thinking about Indian education, you cannot think of anything else. The subject fills you with awe, wonder, anger, disappointment, hope, despair, and immense sadness.
India has an astounding number of schools: more than one million by some estimates. But it is deeply disappointing that over ninety percent of India’s children drop out of school by the time they reach the 12th standard. Of the small percentage that actually go on to college, very few graduate as professionals.
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California Bound
Tonight I leave for California. For the next three weeks, I will once again call the San Francisco Bay Area home. Blogging will resume from there in the next couple of days. In the meanwhile, do check out the archives if the mood strikes you. I especially suggest the September 2005 archives.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
Google.org is Brilliant
Some news just give me the warm and fuzzies. Like this one about Google philanthropy as reported by the NYTimes. It is starting off with a billion dollars and (like the winner of a beauty pageant), aims to tackle poverty, disease, and global warming. Continue reading “Google.org is Brilliant”
Indian Censorship
I attempted to access the site http://www.hinduunity.org/ and could not do so from India. I then used a proxy script found here http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php and could access the site.
Land of the freedom of speech, eh? Land of secularism? Now, we cannot have Hindus uniting, can we? We owe our allegiance to the Pope, thank you very much.
Tell Me a Story
Tell me a good story and I will listen with wide-eyed childlike wonder. Tell me a good tale and I will learn the lessons that humanity has accumulated over the ages. Spin me a yarn and I will consider you my teacher. There is no more effective way to make me understand what the truth is about the world.
The stories we tell each other reaffirm to us our shared humanity. The best ones are the ones which have been told over millennia, have evolved organically, have encapsulated the wisdom of thousands of tellers of tales.
Continue reading “Tell Me a Story”
September 11th, 2006
“Where were you on Sept 11th?” is always going to be an easy question to answer for me, and I guess for a few hundred million others. Not only the day but the exact set of events that led up to the shock of learning that something extraordinary was happening would be forever remembered and often recalled.
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On the Road Again
My stay in Sydney ends tonight. I will be on the road and off the web. This is my final post from Sydney.
I leave you with a few quotes from Henry David Thoreau: Continue reading “On the Road Again”
Steve Irwin — RIP
Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin died in a freak accident.
Australian naturalist and television personality Steve Irwin has been killed by a stingray during a diving expedition off the Australian coast.
Mr Irwin, 44, died after being struck in the chest by the stingray’s barb while he was filming a documentary in Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.
. . . The stingray is a flat, triangular-shaped fish, commonly found in tropical waters.
It gets its name from the razor-sharp barb at the end of its tail, coated in toxic venom, which the animal uses to defend itself with when it feels threatened.
Attacks on humans are a rarity – only one other person is known to have died in Australia from a stingray attack, at St Kilda, Melbourne in 1945.
I enjoyed watching his show on TV and admired his commitment to the preservation of wildlife and his opposition to any kind of hunting.
It is one of those things that I am going to remember for a long while. My month long stay in Sydney is almost over. I had just finished dinner and switched on the TV and the channel that the TV was tuned on to was just getting started with the news headlines. I could hardly believe it. Life is a random draw and you never know when your number is up.
Steve will remain a great Australian hero.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 