Where to invest your brain/goals of life.

Most difficult of philosophical questions.It seems many people have thought over this. In general I would say that goals are very much dependent on society you live in, and there can be no such globally(time/space) optimal goal.

Which means: the goals that human can go after are highly suited to their society. Society in turn changes with time. So, goals are ever changing entity which is dependent on a changing social variables.

The only fields that I think remain consistent over time are in general related to maths and science.Mostly maths. Addition cannot be replaced by something like it in near future and it will continue to remain as important as it was when it was invented for example. Same for 0.

In hindu texts, purushartha or the goals of masculine are given as dharma,artha,kama,moksha.

-dharma is dedicated to follow path of good, and build up good karma.

-Artha seems close to goals of modern society, and it relates to agglomerating wealth ,pursuit of meaning.

-Kama : sexual pleasure , this would probably be most important in ancient times.

-moksha: liberation from birth/death cycle... I am not sure about this one. as their are no means to know if it exsists.


One thing to notice here is , this arrangement is so broad that it can classify into one of 4 categories any of the goals of humans irrespective of time space. bravo for that.


This gives me an idea. Design a system that will given the amount of free time, and genericness or specialization of a particular goal, will provide the optimal goal. This can then be classified into global or local levels etc. I can think of 100k details of this now. Does anyone know if such system exsists ?

Foreign people pronouncing your name

Its often the case that people of a foreign land will probably pronounce your name in some other way. I think they try to relate it to their own speech/langauge. My name is Nikhil. During my univ stay , here at baltimore ,usa , I have found many different ways that I can pronounce my name.

One observation is , different groups in america will pronounce it differently, and all the people of that group will pronounce it in the same way. (Based on my observation, which is atleast 5 different people from same group).

I'll add new entries as I get to hear them. Also remember that they werent just given the name and told to speak. In each case I had pronounced my name loud-and-clear.


1. Arabs,irani,afgani,yemen,etc :
nikhil becomes ni-khai-el (to me this sounds kyrgiz or russian like mikhail)

2. mostly white of baltimore area(I dont know where they actually come from):
nikhil becomes nicole or ni-kh-ole (damn! I dont like this one bit...)

3. black of baltimore area(dont know where they come from,must admit this happend only 3times):
nikhil became nicolai? (I dont get the relation in this one).

4. chini people(dont know actual origin):
nikhil --> nikeel (no 'ha' sound at all)

so till now

pronounce={nikhil,nikeel,nicolai? ,nicole,nikhail}

[:D] I just think this is funny.


I think this is natural,but I would like to think that I would be able to pronounce foreign names more accurately in first try.


One indication is that this means usa is a diverse country , and if this continues , it will probably end up like India one day.

Pthreads

During my work on thesis, now I am in need of thread api. My default choice is pthread on C. Why? I know C since bachpan, and pthread seems to be the most matured of all the multithreading things present out there. Though its an overkill to actually understand everything in that posix thread standard. I think it'd be beneficial in long run. so, yeah ima sweating on pthreads...

heres a decent tutor for pthreads:
https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/pthreads/

ASM on 64 bit platform vs 8086 asm

Over some years ago, I had learned great deal of assembly, essentially the 8086 instruction set.
Part of the reason was, that I used in in my undergrad project.

Now,after like 4-5 yrs I am again trying to see the assembly code(thanks gcc for providing conversion) ,and MAN! that code I do not recognize, movl, movd, movq ,movzbl there are like a thousand variations of mov itself ...

although feels good to see at something you did long ago...

:)

My genetic journy (ripoff by natgeo)

It is said, since ancient times, that all brahmins belonging to our subcast are decendants of ancient vedic rishis. These rishis have gotras in their honor. I belong to Gotra of Vatsa (sometimes called Srivatsa).

Now, I had this idea when I saw that natgeo is doing this genographic thing that could trace back my ancestors to a group, defined primarily by some thing called genetic marker. A marker is as they put it, a small mutation that occurs in this case, in the Y chromosome,and because this marker is passed unchanged from a man to his son, its perfect way to form trees such that the person at root is great ancestor of everyone of the leaves.

They lived in between pakistan afganistan border, between rivers of saraswati and sindhu(indus).


Ok, so after shelling out 110$ ,and after waiting for like 3/4 th of a year(ARRGH!) they finally posted my result. So, was it interesting ? Totally. Was it a rip off ? YES TOTALLY.

The thing is, the items that they promise on their webfront ,arent all delivered instead I got only one "online" page, that documented my dna as R1b1 p25(snp present) . And told me that these markers are found in abundance in Western europe and iberian region.I am supposed to be direct decendant of cromagnon.

But what i know : I am direct decendant of great rishis ?

Might it therefore be that cromagnons = great rishis ? [they are btw, always dipicted in coarse clothing and unshaved head tied into a knot, and unshaved beard].

THere is also some classification based on the way they tie the knot, (front,left,right,back).

So, finally I have decided to go further and get classified into one of the possible sub-clads of r1b1.(shelled out another 85$ ).

A quick search reveals that the tribe of Hazara and some people in iran seem to have this varity of r1b1, now I am hoping to be tested as one of them.

If at all, I belong to any other region , then it would for sure mean , that someone got scandalous...damn them whoever that is.

New Scientific language ?

I have been reading quite a lot of journal papers now a days, and I seem to waste most of my time in reading,and understanding what the author is trying to say. Once you understand it, the concept seems very simple. So simple that you are amazed at the time you wasted in trying to figure it out.

I believe this happens due to lack of current languages to "crisply" describe an idea. Languages that describe ideas are either way to bloated (background,premises etc,and finally the new concept), or way to short to intuitively understand stuff (eg. mathematical equations that describe principle. it could be as simple as ohms law , or as complicated as eg. maxwell's equations).


When I try to compare this with what happens in computers, it essentially reminds me of i/o transfer rates. Far far ago, there was a processor 8088 which had 16bit processor but 8bit data bus.
As a result of this, its processing speed would be handicapped by the transfer rate.


Human brain is a much more complicated structure,from my personal experiences, when this happens, ie. theres not enough input from matter at hand to brain, brain tends to occupy itself in other thoughts, which then will slowly kill your original thought, because its the new thought is already in process and does not need any new input from outside world.

If only there werent so many layers on human communication, we could have achieved some sort of efficiency in reading stuff.

I once had read that our ancestors separated from our primordial ape-races due to a mutated gene that caused the muscles of jaw to reduce, giving more space for brain to grow, and this made us capable of producing speech* or a scheme of conveying ideas/events.


Essentially the "overhead" as we call it in computer jargon , is far too much for current languages.

We cannot really distribute 6billion ideas of 6 billion people very quickly unless we try and get some mechanism like this in place.

In other words, we waste most of our capabilities due to a simple limitation that the languages put on us.

Progress iptables, mangling and all

As described in my last post, i have been trying to get a fully working twice-nat with dns-alg setup.

I finally chose lubuntu (LXDE ubuntu ) as the operating system. puppy is b.s ,so is dsl. both have major problems during installation and package updates.

So, finally after wasting like 2 days on getting the right distro, was on track. Then I shifted my focus to selecting the real platform which the experiments should be carried out on. I mailed two profs, and both of them seem to be more leaning towards the DETER testbed , it supports dynamic configuration of network ,measurements etc.

It appears to be a better lead then eg.planet lab.

Lets see, right now, this iptable,netfilter stuff seems incredibly vast, lets see if i get lucky and find a simple tut.

meanwhile ima already hittin on server fault and stackchange websites.



Lets see how it goes, I am planning to complete everything by April mid. So, if I get to defend by say eg. June, then Ima all set damit!.

Only two major things of my life remain ,and they choose where I go, lets see if given a choice as dire as this, am I able to propel myself to achieve it.

Dash!