RK's Musings

Innumeracy

When you ask someone "What time is it?", you rarely hear "one thirty three". But why? Perhaps they haven't spent the time needed to keep their watch accurate to the minute. And perhaps they judge that "one thirty" is all the precision you really care about.

Yet when introduced to the volume of a ball, one hears it is 4/3 pi r3, rather than it is "one half the volume of the box the ball came in" (1/2 d3). As with "one thirty", this simpler approximation is only off by 5%. But how often does one hear the simpler version? Often, it helps to get a simpler version of a lot of aspects we deal with , mainly to get the big picture, to recall at a later point of time and also to recount it effortlessly.

Most of the times we are so glued to the mathematical formulae and rote learning that goes along with a lot of stuff, that we miss the need to get estimation skills right and ultimately miss the learning .
To know more what I am talking about, one must read the book ' Innumeracy' by John Allen Paulos

Day Light Saving time

One of my Colleagues was asking me about Day Light saving time, and I immediately remembered Seth’s posts on the DST. To the people who do not know the history of DST, it is pretty interesting to get to know about the concept and its usage in the current era.The main purpose of Daylight Saving Time (called "Summer Time" in many places in the world) is to make better use of daylight. We change our clocks during the summer months to move an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening.During DST, clocks are turned forward an hour, effectively moving an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening.
Link : A wonderful piece of stuff explaining DST in detail

Computer Chips in Brain !

Neurological implantation by Robert Fischell envisions a future where chips can monitor and cure a lot of mental disorders ! . Looking at his history of inventions, he might really pull off this stuff in to a market which he estimates to be a multi-billion dollar business.

Einstein's 5 rev papers

Its 100 years since Einstein has published 5 papers which shook the Physics world.
They were:
1. Einstein's first paper, submitted in March, concerned quantum physics, the peculiar realm of the ultra-tiny in which certainties are replaced by fuzzy clouds of probability.Light was a particle as well as a wave

2. Einstein's second  paper comprised prediction that the size of molecules could be gauged by the effects of dissolving sugar in a liquid.

3. Einstein's third paper entailed the description of the mechanism underlying Brownian motion--a particle's small random movements named after botanist named Robert Brown who observed pollen grains jiggling in water.

4. Einstein's fourth paper simply did away with the idea of the ether and said light moves at the same speed--about 186,000 miles per second--regardless of the speed of the observer. The same beam of light will appear to be a different color to two observers moving at different speeds, but the beam will still be moving at the same speed compared with either of them

5. Einstein's fifth paper said Mass and energy are equivalent, and a change in a particle's mass is associated with a change in its energy.

Only a genius can make such a huge contribution in a year's time.

Time's Up, Einstein

Peter Lynds:

His controversial paper in 2003 has shook the world, and the coming few years will tell us whether he would be able to piece up a conclusive theory. His main premises are :

• There is no clock; "time" is an illusion
• Time has no indivisible unit.
• There is no "now," only sequences of events.