Carthik Sharma

A map of connections between the members of the #wordpress IRC channel, updated to the second. Neat, eh?

I have decided that everyday I will post the most interesting pages that I came across. Just once a day if possible, less frequently if not.

1. NASA’s Nose – an astronaut’s predilection
2. Accelerating History, a look at why some dates in history don’t make sense.
3. Mordechai Vanunu – A study in how the West betrayed its “principles” Or how the rewards of honesty and courage are relative.
4. All hail the monkeyThe monkey retires, the monkey who taught me how to be a web code monkey.
5. Hit the trailNew seekers on the Appalachian Trail. I will, someday, take a loooooong walk…
6. Playlist for the Mars Mission because nothing soothes like music. I love reading these articles that provide insight into the lives of scientists, who potter away at seemingly thankless jobs, for the benefit of the world at large.

My reading is mostly directed by some of the blogs I read, so I am sorry if there is some repetition and you have read these before. Lets say its my way of summarizing and indexing, for my own benefit.

I found Mycoted.com, a very interesting website that deals (almost entirely) with creativity.

There are these techniques to improve or promote creativity, and though I haven’t had time to read through all of it yet, I certainly know that I will keep going back to it, on bright sunny sundays like this day, when the mind feels invincible, and the body parks itself at one place, and lets the mind do the wandering. In other words, I am feeling lazy, warm and good today.

There are these puzzles and the list includes my current favourite, the coin balance problem, as they call it, or the counterfeit coin problem, as I would call it. The counterfeit coin problem is currently the focus of my research in evolutionary hardware. machine learning and genetic algorithms. Yes, thats right.

“Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist.”
– Thomas Disch

is just one of the quotes in the quotes page.
Was I surprised to see the Einstein quote I referenced in my last post? Not at all.

I have often noticed that a thing (it could be a quote, a book, a movie or a person) often keeps coming back to me, over a period of a few days, in different forms and through different channels, leaving me feeling amazed at how small the world is, and how strong a magnet my mind is. How else do you explain this? I am not even surprised when this happens nowadays, but I will keep track of them here.

The previous occurence of this phenomena was the movie A Clockwork Orange.
There was post by theuglyvolvo about it (damn livejournal doesnt allow me to search journals), the night before that I saw the movie itself, and a day after her post, I saw a copy of the book on a shelf in a lab at school, among someone’s personal belongings.

There are many more I cant remember. Oh yes, Led Zeppellin. I heard the same song on three different radio stations on the same day. I happened to be wearing the Led Zep t shirt on that day, and a bank clerk remarked that I certainly wasnt born when the concert took place (I was the wearing the 1977 concert shirt). I ran into the weblog AirBag on this very same day, by accident.

Nothing remarkable in these coincidences, perhaps, just my mind trying hard to find something to rationalize about.