Saving up for tomorrow is probably the worst thing you can do with your time. Just sleeping off is far better than that.
5 Jun 2011
4 Jun 2011
Results of two unscientific observations
It's a Saturday and I am kinda bored. So I thought I'd explain my tweet a few days ago.
- I was kicked to find out that the Atom chip my puny laptop has is a 64-bit processor. I wiped out the 32-bit Ubuntu I was running and installed 64-bit version of it. I don't know the internals of Linux, but it looked like the 64-bit kernel was swapping too much. My machine has 2GB RAM. Even when half of the physical RAM is free, the machine would be using around 0.5 to 1 GB of swap space. It was unusably slow, I reverted to 32-bit Kubuntu. It doesn't swap stupidly any more. (On the other hand, 64-bit kernel runs fine on my machines that have 8 or 12GB RAM. Maybe 64-bit works well on machines that have a lot of RAM.)
- I was cribbing about bad wireless performance of my Galaxy Tab, and someone suggested that I use the n channel of 802.11 on my home wireless router. I made the switch and the experience just got worse. Maybe it was the router's 802.11n implementation that sucked. After reverting to 802.11g, it's better now.
How I became so conceited
I read SRK's this blog post a few weeks ago and since then I have been thinking why I find it incorrect.
I just remembered something that happened 5 years ago. Someone was asking for some technical help on a mailing list of the Madurai Kamaraj University alumnus. Someone gave a blatantly wrong answer (that's what I thought back then) and I responded with a message that started with a "WTF". A senior of mine posted this response:
Fast forward a few years. The mailing list had become a place exclusively for "job openings" spam. It's not like people who are looking for a job have nowhere to find openings. It's not like recruiting is done only a few times a year. All companies are recruiting all the time, so I didn't find those "Company X is hiring" mails useful. I sent a mail to the list proposing that either people don't send such mails or they send them to a different mailing list. It wasn't very well received. A few weeks went and I unsubscribed from the mailing list. I am completely disconnected from the MKU community now.
All of these happened after I had joined Google. Madurai Kamaraj University is not one of those elite institutions where Google visits for campus recruitment, so one of the questions I frequently get asked by my juniors is "how can I get a job at Google?" In that regard, I am more privileged than most others from MKU. I am like those "rich people" SRK describes... I stay away from the rest of the crowd because I work at Google.
But the reality, at least my version of it, is different. People who have worked with me or studied with me would know this: even in schools and colleges I was like this. Two similar-looking girls were my classmates in MCA; it took me two or three semesters to get their names right. A big percentage of my class has never spoken to me (apart from maybe a hi when we happen to see on the hallway). It's very easy now to paint me "conceited Google employee" and add me to a "rich, so won't laugh at our jokes" bucket. But the reality is people are just different. Infinitely more different than we can define categories to put them in.
I just remembered something that happened 5 years ago. Someone was asking for some technical help on a mailing list of the Madurai Kamaraj University alumnus. Someone gave a blatantly wrong answer (that's what I thought back then) and I responded with a message that started with a "WTF". A senior of mine posted this response:
It does not behave well for any member of the group to use such unparliamentary terms in the mails sent to the group.I didn't like that at all and I stopped being active on the list. I was simply reading mails and when I wanted to help people, I mailed them privately. (I have always hated the "I am elder, respect me" attitude of many of my seniors. It badly hurt my ego to think that they scrutinise and criticise the mails I wrote.)
This is not a motley group of friends chit chatting amongst themselves through mails.It has members who are quite senior, having more than 10 years of experience in the Industry. So let the decorum of such an August group be preserved.
Fast forward a few years. The mailing list had become a place exclusively for "job openings" spam. It's not like people who are looking for a job have nowhere to find openings. It's not like recruiting is done only a few times a year. All companies are recruiting all the time, so I didn't find those "Company X is hiring" mails useful. I sent a mail to the list proposing that either people don't send such mails or they send them to a different mailing list. It wasn't very well received. A few weeks went and I unsubscribed from the mailing list. I am completely disconnected from the MKU community now.
All of these happened after I had joined Google. Madurai Kamaraj University is not one of those elite institutions where Google visits for campus recruitment, so one of the questions I frequently get asked by my juniors is "how can I get a job at Google?" In that regard, I am more privileged than most others from MKU. I am like those "rich people" SRK describes... I stay away from the rest of the crowd because I work at Google.
But the reality, at least my version of it, is different. People who have worked with me or studied with me would know this: even in schools and colleges I was like this. Two similar-looking girls were my classmates in MCA; it took me two or three semesters to get their names right. A big percentage of my class has never spoken to me (apart from maybe a hi when we happen to see on the hallway). It's very easy now to paint me "conceited Google employee" and add me to a "rich, so won't laugh at our jokes" bucket. But the reality is people are just different. Infinitely more different than we can define categories to put them in.
2 Jun 2011
Why is it so hot in humid weather?
My favourite style is talking about seemingly unrelated things first and then answering the primary question at last. In that spirit, here goes the first unrelated question.
Why do we sweat?
Normal human body temperature is 98.6 °F. When the external temperature drops or increases, it changes our body temperature too (obviously), but our body works to bring it back to the normal temperature. When it's cold, our body shivers to generate heat; when it's hot, our body sweats to cool itself down.
How exactly does sweating help?
You need to know the physics of evaporation to understand that. Take a very hot metal plate and pour water on it. You'd see water boiling, and soon all of the poured water would disappear. If you measure the temperature of the plate now, you can see that it's become colder than before pouring water. What's really happened is, water took the heat energy from the plate and used it to become water vapour (which then mixed with air in the atmosphere).
Sweating is pretty much the same. Our body becomes hot because of the weather. As a response to it, we secrete sweat all over our body. Sweat then uses the heat from our body to evaporate. Since some body heat is expended on sweat evaporation, our body cools down. (In a way, we return the unwanted heat back to the environment.)
Humid weather
What happens in hot-humid weather? Because it's hot, our body secretes sweat to cool itself down. Now we get all sweaty, but nothing happens after that. Why? When a liquid becomes gaseous vapour, it needs someplace to go to: usually it mixes with the air in the atmosphere. But there's only so much air around us and only so much water vapour can mix with it. In dry weather, the air can take in a lot of water vapour because it doesn't have much in it already... it's dry. But in humid weather air is pretty much "full" so the vapour intake will be much less. The sweat stays on our body until we wipe it off. And our bodies remain hot.
In dry weather we probably sweat the same amount, but we don't notice it because the sweat evaporates pretty much immediately. Our bodies don't get too hot either.
Why do we sweat?
Normal human body temperature is 98.6 °F. When the external temperature drops or increases, it changes our body temperature too (obviously), but our body works to bring it back to the normal temperature. When it's cold, our body shivers to generate heat; when it's hot, our body sweats to cool itself down.
How exactly does sweating help?
You need to know the physics of evaporation to understand that. Take a very hot metal plate and pour water on it. You'd see water boiling, and soon all of the poured water would disappear. If you measure the temperature of the plate now, you can see that it's become colder than before pouring water. What's really happened is, water took the heat energy from the plate and used it to become water vapour (which then mixed with air in the atmosphere).
Sweating is pretty much the same. Our body becomes hot because of the weather. As a response to it, we secrete sweat all over our body. Sweat then uses the heat from our body to evaporate. Since some body heat is expended on sweat evaporation, our body cools down. (In a way, we return the unwanted heat back to the environment.)
Humid weather
What happens in hot-humid weather? Because it's hot, our body secretes sweat to cool itself down. Now we get all sweaty, but nothing happens after that. Why? When a liquid becomes gaseous vapour, it needs someplace to go to: usually it mixes with the air in the atmosphere. But there's only so much air around us and only so much water vapour can mix with it. In dry weather, the air can take in a lot of water vapour because it doesn't have much in it already... it's dry. But in humid weather air is pretty much "full" so the vapour intake will be much less. The sweat stays on our body until we wipe it off. And our bodies remain hot.
In dry weather we probably sweat the same amount, but we don't notice it because the sweat evaporates pretty much immediately. Our bodies don't get too hot either.
Add +1 buttons to your blog manually
Want +1 button on your Blogger blog, but you don’t want the full share widget? Here’s how you can manually add only the +1 button to your blog:
- Configure your +1 button and get the code from Google.
- Remove
hrefattribute of<g:plusone>starting tag; insertexpr:href='data:post.canonicalUrl'in its place. For example, the code on my blog is:<g:plusone expr:href="data:post.canonicalUrl" size="medium"/> - Insert the code in your blog’s template.
- Open Blogger > your blog > Design > Edit HTML.
- Check “Expand Widget Templates”.
- Look for
<div class="post-footer">
if you want to place the +1 button at the bottom of each post; look for<div class="post-header">if you want it at the top of each post. - Paste the +1 button’s code. View your blog to see if the button appears at the right place, and adjust the placing accordingly.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
