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Random Ramblings: Practical Implementation of Sharpening the Saw : One of the books that really influences my thinking is Stephen Covey's " The seven habits of highly effective people ". In th...

In my mother tongue Tamil, lot of boys and men use the word "machi" or "machaan" to address another guy in a friendly manner. The word "machaan" or "machi" means wife's brother. In Hindi too, there are slang words, "saalaa" or "saaley", which mean the same. I just want to present some scenarios where the usage of these slang words might be acceptable. Let's say an unmarried guy A calls another guy B "machi" (or its equivalent). This might be fine if any of the following are true: A is already married to B 's sister B doesn't have a sister for A to marry ( A can remain a bachelor then.) A intends to marry B 's sister and both B and one of B 's sisters are fine with that This might not be fine if A intends to marry B 's sister, but B or B 's sister don't like that idea. Then A , B and probably one of B 's sisters have a problem to sort out. But if a marrie...

Only people with conscience can feel guilt. (Note that conscience and consciousness both share the same root.) We have all done things in our past that we are not proud of. There are things that we did behind closed doors, when we thought no one else was watching. There are thoughts we thought that we wouldn't disclose even to our closest friends. There are things that we did to people who had nowhere else to go, because they were too young, or were too innocent, or were totally dependent on us. I am talking about things we wouldn't write in our autobiographies or memoirs. We could choose to hide such past mistakes under the carpet. Or worse, we could justify to ourselves that what we did was not all that bad, and tell ourselves that there are others who have done much worse. But let's not justify our past mistakes like that and cheat ourselves - that could lead us to disaster. Let's go one step further and see how to live a life of character . T...

These days, I work in the field of machine learning , which is a sub field of the field artificial intelligence . Today's hottest machine learning method is deep learning . Deep learning was known as neural networks when I grew up in the late 90's. The fundamental motivation of neural networks is to represent the human brain using computers (both hardware and software). The field has a long history, beginning in 1958 with Frank Rosenblatt's paper, " The Perceptron: A probabilistic  model for information storage and organization in the brain " ( PDF ). We have come a long way since then, thanks to people like Geoffrey Hinton and his deep learning progeny. The human brain can do about one quadrillion logical operations per second, which is known as a petaflop of computational ability (see Brains vs. Computers ). These days we have become smarter and don't try to build a single massive computer (called a super computer ). Instead, we connect a bunch of co...

Wanted to share an experience about compassion. I have been trying to increase my overall awareness these days. Just being aware of whatever is in front of me is not an easy exercise for me, because my mind likes to dwell in the past, or paint beautiful (or scary) pictures of the future. How does one live in the present? I did not know how, but I started looking into myself about things that are dearest to my heart. One of the foremost characters that I am imbibed with (mainly due to my parents) is compassion . A bit of background about my mother when it comes to compassion. I grew up in Chennai, India, which is a hot and humid city. Added to that is a poor storm water drain system, which is still a mess as of today (Oct 2018)! That basically means lots of mosquitoes (especially during the rainy season). When I grew up in the '80s and early '90s in Chennai, the thing that irritated me the most was power cuts in summers. If I happened to wake up in the middle of the night, ...