This is a collection of my favorite workout references. Most of these are videos to a set of core exercises that constitute my workout. This is meant to act as a reference for my future self and anyone else out there.
This is a design of a hill house. The house follows the gradient of the hill. The main entrance of the house is at second level. From the street level at the entrance, only the modest two floors with their long window openings will be visible. The entire house is modeled to look at the view from the hill with large windows and a garden at the second level in the main bedroom balcony. The top most floor has two small bedrooms with extra space for a play. The lowest floor has a open kitchen, living room.
This morning I came across an article about a cheaper visa scheme for Indian citizens visiting Malaysia. The article refers to the United Nations World Tourism Organization’ estimate of 50 million outbound Indian tourists by 2020. The number is impressive in itself, and so is the spending estimate of more than $28 Billion by these tourists.
Here are the ramen places in the City of Boston/Cambridge.
My favorite ramen spot in Boston/Cambridge area is Santuko Ramem. There are two locations of Santuko in the area. By far the best ramen judged by consistency and flavor!
This is an analysis of patient data from watsi.org. watsi.org brings a kickstarter model to the healthcare needs of individuals from developing/under-developed countries. Users can fund a patient in any denomination, once a target for the funds needed is reached, funds gets transferred for treating the patient through a medical partner in the field. 100% of proceeds from the user go directly to the patient’s medical needs. Read more
Apart from winning the most innovative award during HackTrafficking4Good hackathon organized in Boston. I also received a “hacker choice” award. One of my teammates nominated me for the award. Thanks Hugo for nominating me. I was one of the three hackers who received a cool lenovo tablet :
Recently, Supreme Court of India reinstated Criminality of Homosexuality in India. Specifically the the ruling is about interpretation of section 377 of Indian Penal Code (IPC). This section is a remnant of the colonial era law, sadly still in effect. The impact of this on the LGBT community in India is pretty drastic. This is a huge step back from the 2009 Delhi high court’s progressive ruling in favor of LGBT groups. Apart from harassment of LGBT individuals by the police, this would put LGBT groups back underground and various public health initiatives(like HIV AIDS) at a disadvantage.
A few of us in Boston organized Boston’s Global Day of Rage.
The issue of bribery (in India) feels like an easy crime to point out, of course acting on it to resolve this issue is a difficult task. Pointing out the crime might be a big step in solving the problem. I am starting to believe that answer to the question on how to tackle bribery might get a huge helping hand with the use of technology and the Internet.
• Collecting data: Collecting data about incidents of bribery (claims) is very important. ipaidabribe.com is a good example in this direction. I believe that a mobile application would be a better tool for reporting bribery. One might be more likely to report a demand for bribe as soon as it occurs. Even a phone call to report a bribe ( 1-800-BRIBE-LINE) might be a good tool for addressing this issue. Bottom line is I would be more likely to report an incident as soon as it occurs.
• Can this data be used by the vigilance agencies to catch the offenders? How can one sell this idea to vigilance agencies? Probably only one way to know: try it out.
• Creating “cloud of shame”: People who demand bribes are usually chronic offenders. A govt. official who demands bribes is (mostly) stationed at a particular location of an office. Sot it should be easy to point out the sectors and more importantly the offices in each area. Based on the reports if one can effectively broadcast this information throughout the society (associating a number with a crime is always effective), then can one create a “cloud of shame” around offices where the number of incidents are high. Will this create pressure on the officials to be non-chronic about their habit?
I spent about 12 hours to finish an implementation of blackjack, mainly to design a library for card games. Writing blackjack using the classes helped me to refine the design from an earlier version. Wrote a server class(it doesn’t have any networking capabilities right now). Here is the design in rails style(ofcourse the code is in c++ but here just highlighting the design)
Just finished reading the book “On Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins(Palm Pilot fame) last night. It is a good read. The book is about understanding brain. Jeff’s fascination and interest in understanding the brain is awesome, the book maintains the curiosity though the end. I enjoyed reading it. Especially reading about invariant representations. How brain remembers patterns independent of which senses they were collected from. He gives a structure/model for explaining the invariant representation based on the findings on neocortex’s inter-connections .It also dwells into questions like consciousness, intelligence, which are a always fascination to most humans and argues that everything could be explained by the learning(pattern matching) algorithms of neocortex. The book is a nice read, will be great to follow Numenta, the product based on hierarchical temporal memory. I have seen the applications in computer vision to identify dogs on their website.
