Chairs in our lives

Chairs in our lives
We all have chairs at our homes. Chairs serve as a tool to sit in a comfortable and socially acceptable manner. 

Even as you are reading this post, it is likely that you are sitting on a chair while doing so. There are several other alternatives for sitting but it is most common to sit on a chair, atleast in public. Chairs have influenced a lot of changes and development, for instance, if cars didn’t have chairs, it wouldn’t have gotten so popular.

Rich people spend a lot on chairs. Almost everyone wishes to display grand chairs for guest at home by spending heavily on furniture associated with a  chair such as a coffee table, a stool, a vase stand. 

Some of the most common appearances of chairs can be sofa chair, rocking chair, wheel chair, bean chair, chair with wheels like the ones used in office, chair in the dining room, chair in a park,  chair in a bus,  commodes are chair shaped toilets (~_^).

If you think about it, childern’s parks showcase several variations of chairs. Like the sitting facility on  see-saw, slide, swing... etc.

Chairs help us overcome the force of gravity by providing surfaces to dissipate the force from our bodies on to the surface of the chair. Chairs provide support to the back and act as means to maintain one position for a long time.

The letter ‘h’ in a chair looks like a chair (^_^), just like the word ‘bed’ which looks like a bed.

Chairs have been icon of power and luxury all through the ages. The emperors throne, the presidents seat, heir to the throne are common terms of use. Chairman is a term given to a person who is a deciding committee member.

Electric chairs were used to kill death sentenced prisoners soon after its invention.

At parties, there is a famous game called musical chair, in which people get eliminated if they are not able to acquire a seat fast enough. This game is an event based game where the event is indicated by start and stop of a certain music being played. Musical chair also significance of how you can get eliminated if you are not able to react to a certain situation well in time.

Chairs clearly define boundaries between you and the person next to you.

While sitting on a chair, the body is no longer required to concentrate on balance that is required while a person is standing. As humans, we tend to stand and walk seamlessly, but try to get the same from a dog and you will see my point. Yes the center of gravity itself is shifted while sitting (^_~).

The number of legs on a chair depends on its purpose, as in the case of a car seat where it has one support, in park seats it has 2 supports and in a table chair, it generally has 4 but the number really depends more or less on choice. Chairs have influenced the way we live and here is a video that summarizes it all.

I make pi look rational

I make pi look rational!

Finding a pattern in the word pi has been one of man’s most unsuccessful ventures. The accuracy of representing pi has been one of mans greatest struggle in his wish to express his views in the mathematical world that we live in. Pi is an irrational number, which we in our schools substitute by the number 22/7 but in reality it is not a rational number, i am sure most of you know that and it is a constant that one gets by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter (pi = 2*pi*r/(2*r)). Yes you can try this with a piece of string and let me know what turns up.

This was my Gmail status for some time... and people kept asking me what it meant and why nothing was turning up in Google search when they looked it up.

The fact is I just thought it up and put it up as my status. People who know me will definitely mention somewhere or the other that I am irrational. May be I am, may be I am not... however, I have come across many situations where I found myself thinking about circumstances differently.

I am fascinated by shortcuts. Whenever someone shows me that there is an easier way of doing things, I try to learn it as quick as possible so that there is lot of time to do other things. For example I found that while solving DSP assignment, it took tremendously less time if I sat and did it all at once, instead of doing say 2 problems each day. This was because most of the problems had repetitions in many calculations.

There have been occasions when my teachers have asked me to shut up whenever I asked some doubt because the teacher failed to see the problem in my way. This has not however deterred me. In maths especially, in my 7^th standard my teacher got annoyed that I was giving away the solutions to problems on simultaneous linear equations before the whole question was completed, and made sure that I gave away answers only after I had written down each and every step that led to the solutions.

I have had big dreams, have had my share of expectations from life. But somehow it always seems that i was surrounded by people who kept telling me that things in life are very difficult. If you ask me, I will say that i have not seen anything so absurd, its as if life runs on autopilot, as long as you perform your share of responsibilities.

Not just that, i have been fascinated by how a coin rolls over and finally decides to lie on one of its sides. I am fascinated by what caused water to turn like a whirlpool, at my home sink. I am sure one of you is going to paste links to convince me that there are theories behind all this yes, i have already looked up a few of them.

I would like to quote ,“don’t let the small minds around you fool you into believing that your goals are too big to reach”,  I dont know who said this, but think about the countless occasions where we have taken a lesser path just because someone told you that the other path was too difficult.

Why compare myself to pi?

I would say don’t, because this is just an analogy of what the world looks at you and thinks about you after having their share of experiences to judge you. Yes pi is definitely irrational, and may be i am also irrational, that does not mean that you start comparing.

Each thought has a special place in a person’s life. We define what we term as rational and what we don’t. Yes sometimes i irritate others in my class by asking too many doubts. I regret to inform you that i too would have felt the same way if i was in your place, but the truth is that i am not.

I am different, i cant keep some doubts just rambling up there in my head as the lecture in class goes on. There is a tremendous sense of satisfactions every time my teachers attempt to solve my doubts and I have got to say that they are getting a very good hang of it (^_~).

There is a very old movie named “Pi” some of you reading this might have seen the movie. It is about about the life of a genius who gets to know the secrets of pi, how ever the technology has moved much beyond just an IC and today we have technology that make it hard for us to believe how life was back then.

March 14^th, which happens to be my friend ashwin’s birthday, is internationally “pi day 3:14”, lol, but it's also Albert Einstein's birthday (^_^). Yes i have used Pi’s fame to attract audience to my blog and i wish to owe all this credit to pi, thank you.

Is truth an opinion?

Is truth just an opinion?

You might know the story of the 5 blind men and the elephant, where each person tells what he observed to the other and it turns out that they all are wrong in reality.

We come across several incidents in day to day life, and while we have our point of view, truth happens to underly reality. To be more clear, just as the saying goes, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, truth too has a framework of its own. Each person observes different things in his life, and it is the occurrence of this duality that makes us question truth.

So lets try to look at a link connecting opinion and truth.

We say seeing is believing. But in reality, truth tends to have its own limitations. This is exactly where religion fails. Each religion preaches some beliefs depending on the person who initially perceived it with his 5 senses. But when attempted to put the different views from different people together, we turn up with something that we turn up in the story of the “5 blind men and the elephant”, the resulting entity is nothing close to an elephant.

Sometimes truth changes over time. For example, the flat model of the earth and the theories like the geocentric theories have prevailed in society we had mathematically consistent models of motion and time. It took a change in mindset to accept that the earth is indeed round and of course the heliocentric theory and now we have bent the math around what we now believe as the truth. 

How truth is different from belief:

Most of us believe whatever we know as the truth. This kind of a mechanism helps us survive as individuals, because, if we really had to find out the truth all by ourselves, there would not be any time for the more important things in our lives. 

For instance we believe our parents that they really are our parents. We believe that our name is so and so and continue with that. We believe that the world was here before we were born and will continue after we are gone

When a teacher says things like electricity and magnetism, we believe our teachers, even though none of these phenomenon have been completely understood. We believe in mathematics and things like elementary particles and string theory even tough in reality we don’t have contemporary analogies. For that reason, we tend to rely on analogies more than reality while understanding the mechanism of most phenomenon (misuse of vocabulary).

As children we are taught to speak the truth and from experience we learn that good morals are indeed a pre-requisite for a good way of life. However some situations lead us to question the fundamental principles and when we don’t find answers to such situations, we tend to come up with our own ideas on what might have happened. At his point we see that truth can be made up just as easily as an opinion.

This is it true that truth is just an opinion?

No. Like most human behaviour, truth too is assimilated with a negative feedback attitude. We perform different experiments in real life which tells us how to react to different situations we come across, as we learn we label different things as true depending on reliability of the argument. Whereas opinion is just what we think at one specific moment in our lives. In a broader sense, opinions are the way we reach the truth or what we tend to conclude as the truth.

Does it really matter?

No. Like I initially argued, it does not matter, because whatever happens in reality we each find explanations and try to move on. We are so good at modeling things with mathematics that when we find mathematics showing results on extrapolation, we tend to come up with realities based on our observations; take string theory, chaos theory, extra dimensions for instance, where mathematics expalins everything perfectly but we are limited by our sense.

It is a common opinion that proverbs are universally applicable. However there are several proverbs which contradict each other! this clearly helps us to distinguish beliefs, opinion, truth and fact.

Do Exams Matter

Do Exams Matter?

I am going to start with a Yes for the time being, and as the page turns, different ideas will be discussed. The exam mentioned here refers to academic exams.

Yes, exams do matter for a number of reasons. As far as education system is concerned, to be consistent with the rest of the class, exams are conducted with a common syllabus in mind to check if a student has grasped the essential contents of the subject.

An exam helps a student make a self estimate of his knowledge in the subject. It gives a student a goal, without which he might as well spend his time reading random stuff for knowledge. It helps teachers analyze their teachings in class, and make appropriate changes in their future lectures and standard mark with which academics can be measured.

However, exams only represent the on spot knowledge presented by a student in an exam hall, and not the over-all knowledge of the student itself. Most content that appears in an exam has to be covered in the class and exams should not contain out of the blue seeming topics (which is unfortunately, these days a quite common practice in most engineering colleges). Students must be challenged based on what is taught, and not on what the lecturer considers difficult to understand. It is also fundamentally wrong to expect every student to be a copy of Albert Einstein!!!

Though the fear of failure is a motivational drive for last minute studying students, it forms a definite goal for students who aim at topping the subject, because, in order to top an exam, the student tries to cover the entire syllabus well before the exam and this aspect alone can be the drive to gain more knowledge.

Scholarships and fee reduction for academically excelling students’ forms another motivational aspect while studying a particular subject.

How much do exam matter?

The answer to this question is purely dependent on an individual and depends on the scenario, on the individual’s motives and priorities in life. Additionally it also depends on an individual’s life experiences so this matter will not be addressed directly.

Before: an exam, it is the duty of the individual to make sure that he knows why he is writing an exam and has to know the syllabus of the exam. Make sure you study with an attitude of learning all that is recommended and aim for the top place.

During: an exam it is in the best interest of the student to be equipped with knowledge as well as accessories required for the exam. Punctuality for examination and carrying a wrist watch is recommended to make sure that the best use of the allotted time is made. For good recollection during an exam, a student has to make sure that he has reserved some time for a last minute revision just before the exam. And maintained all the required content of the exam in a well accessible format.

After: an exam the general tendency is to expect a very good result, regardless of the performance. However, ideally, it is best to get rid of all expectations and move on with another activity till the results arrive.

Effects of exam stress:

Exam stress can have several effects such as sleep deprival, nightmares, tension, under-esteem, lack of confidence, lack of concentration, poor recollection and other health issues.

Why are exams feared so much?

As children, parents tend to judge students based on their marks, and tend to compare with other children of that age or with a sibling. This is a very wrong practice and affects the students way of thinking as a whole.

Though failure at an exam is on top of the list of fears, the real fear of exam arises due to lack of effective preparation for the corresponding exam.

And the worst part is that the results of an exam is feared more than the exam itself. 

Experience:

During school, i have never been forced to study, and neither had i done very well in academics, I used to talk a lot and get punished regularly and did not know the importance of education. How ever much much later i began performing well and found out that if your grades are good enough, the other person usually gets the blame of talking. So I advice study you to study well, there are several little benefits apart from the major ones like job selections and scholarships and gold medals.

My advice:

Prepare well when you have time, because no one knows how tomorrow is going to be. It is better to start sharpening the sword during peace, rather than after a battle has begun, as an old story says.

Why Resistance halfens in parallel

Why Resistance halfens in parallel

A resistor offers resistance offers resistance to current. I have used the parallel resistance formula to solve an enormous number of problems in my B.E course on Electronics and Communication. However this question did not strike me back then; If a resistor offers a resistance R then why do 2 resistors in parallel offer lesser resistance? This question did not appeal to us probably because in most courses, resistors are learnt after capacitors and while learning, the teacher says that the two formulas (Resistors in series and capacitors in parallel) are similar and we buy it, and start applying it.

I was sitting in Udupi bus-stand waiting for my bus to Bangalore when this question struck me and it took some time for me to get the answers that night. I first tried approaching the problem in terms of the material used for the resistors, which according to me were both the same so it would not generally matter.

We learn in electronics that a voltage source appears to behave like a tank of water maintained at some potential.  The resistors in this case act like a pipe, whose diameter restricts the flow of water from the pipe to the ground.  So if 2 pipes are connected in parallel, then each pipe would still continue to offer the same resistance to the flow of water but would convey twice the amount of water to the other end. This realization was the key in understanding how resistors also appear to offer only half the amount of resistance to current in an electrical circuit. This can also be thought of as the cases where the two pipes are replaced by one thicker pipe to offers an equallent reduction in resistance.

In the case of Series circuits, however, the pipe would now be twice as long and the distance the water needs to flow doubles and hence the resistance offered by the effective pipe-chain, is twice as much. Hence resistors in series offer double the resistance.

This basic principle can be extended to any number of pipes in series or parallel and hence in resistors as well.

When I discussed this with my friend Ashish in Bangalore, he gave me his own point of view which was that each resistor continued to send the same amount of current across the circuit and hence the doubling of current meant a halfening of resistor value.

We can also look at the problem like a road. If there are parallel roads or one road with several lanes then the traffic can move faster and hence offers less resistance to movement. And if there is just one lane, then the traffic will be clogged and acts as series resistance.

To conclude, the behavior of resistors, pipes, traffic can be analyzed on similar grounds and it is important to know the significance, even though we can manage most situations in life continuing to be ignorant.

Note: We find a similar behavior in all places where networks are involved, such as human body circulatory system, water supply channels, road networks, truss networks, electrical networks, spider web, internet, structure of birds nest, etc. How ever I don't think it is necessary to discuss any of them in detail in this post.