Tactics of the leaves

While watering the plants, a cool insight of the plants came upon. The leaves starts from the stem and raises up in a slanting manner. They form v shaped pattern through out the stem. Having a flat structure, instead of v shape, might be more efficient to capture sun light. The advantage of v shape showed up while watering the plant. Water falling on the leaves rushed towards the stem and finally close to the root. Had it been a flat arrangement, water from the leaves might have splashed away from the root to the ground instead of towards the stem.

May be the plants have to form a strategic positioning for maximizing sunlight as well as rain water.

Freedom to mind

While going through the strange world, I got a light all of a sudden. What a freedom and relief we get once we are out of an issue. The issue may be minor, but we feel our mind relaxed and calm.

The problems and issues we face need not be a real challenge. They can be just a lack of knowledge about that particular system or situation. If we put some effort to understand the functionality of the system and behaviour, we may be through the difficult moments.

Strange world

When we reach an ideal point in life, we settle down happily. And then creeps bunch of issues here and there. That leads to the yearning of cleaning off such negative factors. We want those issues to vanish so that we can relish in our imaginative conditions we fantasized on the first place. Slowly the goodness of this experience drops off and only the bad thingy stick to our mind. If more and more such issues pile up, the particular point reached will itself be a burden. We start fantasizing for something else. Back to square one.

transparent editor

What if the text editors we use are transparent? Or transparentable? This occurred to be when I had to switch between different window, refer info at various source and come back to the editor to continue composing. Instead, if I have transparency, I will have focus on very few lines close to the current line I am editing. This patch of visible lines should be draggable/movable. Remaining area of the screen will be displaying the windows that are at the background. I can refer or even cut n paste from any of the available screen. With a snap of key or click, I should switch from transparent mode to opaque. Would be cool.

Follow British or American

While interacting with American colleagues, one of the confusing factor is the date format. Desis are used with dd/mm/yy and Americans insist on mm/dd/yy. Upon pondering on this conflict, interesting things surfaced. It is not only date format, there are many things Americans wanted to move off from British traditions. Here is a short list.

road side

Brits ride to the left side. Anyone following that convention will find it tough on American roads that drive on the right hand side. Car steering is also position in appropriate side of the car.

switch on/off

Simple light bulb switch. Do we pull the knob bottom to top or top to bottom for turning it on? Depends on the country.

Culture

Britons and I guess most of the European countries adhered strict hierarchical order in the society. The working place too followed such bureaucratic structure. Americans bent such rigid model and practice somewhat loose hierarchy.

Language

The formal British English had to give way to American slangish language.

Considering these factors, looks like such drastic change were taken upon themselves to symbolize their freedom from a former colony. They want to show their difference.
May be top to bottom writings of Chinese, right to left of Arabs could have originated out of similar identity establishment.

The power game

Recently Manipal University was derecognized as a quality medical college. The reason given by the government inspecting body is that the univ is lacking resources. Considering the recent past, where the institute is considered one among the best (to be precise, fourth best medical college in the country), such a lack of resource is a surprising findings. Are our institute adhere such a low standard?

Clearly the corrupt hands of the inspecting body wants to tamper into a resourceful setup.

A thought occurred to me. The state government is somewhat friendly towards MU. If a state government inspecting body could be floated, that would ease out the issue for now. Slowly the authenticity of such inspecting board can be popularized among other states.

This will bring down the power of the Central inspectors. However, the new setup will introduce few more flangs of its own.

Travel updater

Recently I happen to be on road and rails for four days. Just kept on moving from one city after another. Apart from the hackers, beggars, loud video player .. a new annoyer had joined .. it is the co passenger yelling at his/her mobile. Observed a pattern in this mobile usage. These people HAVE TO inform the other party about their exact longitude, latitude coordinates. Even if they don't know, they would wake the co passenger from sleep and question them with, "where r we now?" .. followed by ... "Aaang, I have crossed so-n-so place." As thou the listener is going to open up their GPS box and start monitoring the movement of this guy.

Wondering if we can have a personal mobile phone jammer.

rattled mind

In a volunteer mailing group, a small ripple will create a big wave of mails and an ultimate splash. One definite rocker is 'switch off lights' and 'save tissue papers'. What creative suggestions come out of these simple topics .. people get very unconventional and emotional about their ideas.

Recently such mail thread started with simple suggestions like:

Put some posters about power saving.

Encourage taking stairs as opposed to elevators.

Turn off lights in huddle rooms/conference rooms.

An engineer's response:

We are the engineers, we need to think of some innovative power saving
measures !

/What if there is sensing device at the entry of pantry as in one enters,
lights ON... and /

/as soon as one exists, lights OFF !! ( depending on the total number of
heads entered MINUS/

/total number of heads exited ) = 0 Implementation of this would cost intial
investment but would/

/save lots of power & power bills later.../

Someone started cribbing :

I do not see this poster idea is working, there are
posters just near the tissue paper in the toilets but people still use the
tissue paper. To my surprise even people stand and read this poster and use the
tissue paper as if the content is in French.

If we dont want people to use tissue, dont keep there! simple.

Followup ideas ...

On a related note, the quality of the tissue paper can be
improved.

Can someone tell this environmentalist that quality paper => cutting more trees

There were other suggestions like volunteers calling employees and advising them on tissue usage. People were going further to trace the origin of tissue, wondered if great grandfather and beyond used tissues etc.

What idle brain can do!

Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Remember reading this book during college days. Couldn't recollect much of the story thou. Yesterday I had to travel alone in a taxi for 2 hours. While looking around for a book, got this one. Suitable to spend 2 hrs or so.

The first part of the book talks about how general trend in people and what kind of inertia hold them back from moving out of the flock. Also the kind of struggle and hardship of successful people. Particularly the kind of changes they have to make and willing to go through tough time due to different life style.

Second section is quite heavy with meta-physics and after life stuff. The highest thing that to be worked out is - love. Guess westerners have the notion of seeing love as the ultimate thing to go for.

Last part was too much .. purposefully painting a messiah image to the hero. It was able to cure a bird whose wings were immobile. Lots of followers and enemy camp and so and so.

A nice inspirational book.

fluid containers

Ever wondered about the shape of the fluid containers? Most of them are cylindrical. The petrol, milk tank containers, milk can, over-head water tank, water heater, most of the kitchen utensils, pen, water pipe, ...

Any idea about the reason?

Helping tendency

Someone sent a technical query to our office internal mailing list. The query was kind of simple. In no time there were so many replies and suggestions. Some of the answers were repetitive. Even two people replied after two days .. which is rare considering that most mails in that forum dies out in couple of hours.
The reason behind the mails is .. the questioner is a girl, that too with an attractive name. Guess the guys didnt know her age or other details, if so they might not have bother to provide such help.

perception

Morning I was looking at small spiders, ants and lizards. The first instinct is to drive them off. I was also trying to see their perception about human. They might have an image of 'annoying monsters'. Always the monsters chase them away. At time spray chemicals or set hazardous mechanical, electrical devices on them. Doesn't allow them to lead a peaceful life, the nest they construct is destroyed in fraction of seconds.

If only we could listen to their conversation, it would be really interesting.

Voyage haiku

Planning travel across our galaxy
may be far beyond Andromeda or Triangulum
Packing two condoms for safety

passing the bug

I was observing the neighbouring construction work through the window. A worker found a small snake. He hit it with a stick still it fell unconscious or dead. Now he had to throw it out. He used the same stick to pry the snake across but it fell inside the construction area itself. This time he aimed for our garden! The snake fell on our car path inside the compound wall.

He was about to get back to his work. That is when I had to come out of the house and shout at him. Probably he thought the house was unoccupied as no one was living for a long time. Then he realized the situation and immediately came into my house to clear up the mess.

How human behave! We are ready to take any short-cut to cut short our work.

Space allocation

While traveling, my wife and myself were enjoying the landscape and the scenic beauty. She asked about the dimension of an acre of land. It is 66 feet by 660 feet. Quite odd shape to divide the farm land. A lengthy rectangular partition. She asked if there is any reason behind such division. It seems like an ancient practice. May be from the time man started cultivation as a part time apart from his full time hunting job.

While reflecting, suddenly a similarity appeared between this land dimension and a totally different system. It is agraharam.

The Brahmins had an upper hand over the society. Their contribution is reflected in many areas of Indian life in the past. They were also biased towards their own kith & kins, (like any other human being). So, if they were doing town planning, we could expect them to occupy prime locality. The center of the town had the temple. Brahmins lived close to the temple. The central land ratio should had been minuscule compared to town's total land size. Low availability and high demand plus compulsory allocations to Brahmins would have a driven towards optimal, compressed allocation algorithm.

Probably with the above constraints, they got houses with odd dimension. In a typical agraharam house, a corridor will start from the front door and run towards the end. Rooms will be placed one after another along with the corridor. A small garden or open space will be available at the end of the house. It is a lengthy house with narrow width; the width of the house is always 1 room wide and the length could be 5 rooms or more.

The reason for the odd dimension is the resource crunch. Here the sacred street is the resource, which ought to be shared by as many as possible.

Going back to the farm land, similar resource crunch and optimal allocation might have lead to such rectangular division. The resource could be the water body like river, or the resource can be the approach or reachable to the road.

Would like to see if these rectangular partitions are adapted at international level.

Aladdin Factor

Book is interesting. Authored by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. There are many things to learn from the book. A sudden awakening, that most of us don't know, is what to ask in life. The barriers in asking are discuss in detail with lots of samples.

Systematically analyzed fear and tips are provided to overcome. That part is very useful. The narration in the book is definitely positive and will help anyone to bring themselves up. Handling change, the beginner's difficulty are discussed well.

Lots of cartoons, quotes, life incidents all over the book made the reading live, easy and comfortable. However, the Aladdin story didn't stick together with the topic. Also I felt the later part of the book kind of redundant (the chapter from 'Ask at Home'). There are many narration from salespersons' diary. Talks about how they cracked some of the difficult deal or situation. Many seemed to be 'yuck' and beyond normal people; may be that is the extra skill acquired by salesmanship and the author suggest others to learn.


Can be read once.

Demystified the other road

Yesterday I went through the 'other road'. It was thrilling experience to go through it as I had created such a curiosity and hype in me. The other road had a big electrical transformer!

New place

I felt working from home causing some side effects. Wanted to have a office setup and worked towards it. Got it done after running around for office space, net, electrical equipments were challengeful tasks of their own. In spite of things going smooth, running around was stressful.

Felt wonderful once things were set and to relax comfortably.

Medical file

Branded, hi-fi, multi-functional corporate hospitals use file system. It is the physical file cover which holds all the patient records, results, observations. If a patient request for a treatment, his/her file is retrieved from the record storage room and passed to concerned dept. Depending on many factors, this process of moving the file takes a happy 30mins to 60mins. Sometimes the staff have a happy hours of playing 'treasure hunt' in order to trace the file.

The patient need to wait in a lengthy queue in the dept for some doctor to analyze. Then n number of tests are expected. Each test will be greeted by a lengthy queue again .. no, ur relative cannot reserve a seat for you in the next test room. If the number of tests tend towards one, then there is a hope for getting treated on the same day.

The big, posh hospitals that charge $$$ follow a different process. They create a five star environment for their A-class patients and take care well.

However, the branded hospital handling middle and lower group of people adapt the same process of file system we saw earlier. I was puzzled to notice the same process in these hospitals. The real surprise was that, why is that a hospital never learn from the bottle necks observed in another hospital system? Atleast the later hospitals could have written smart software to handle the crowd and manage better. Why they didn't?

Suddenly it struck! .. the sales guys!!

This could have been the conversation between the hospital management and sales guys from a software company.

HM: we would like to have an efficient system that would smoothen the process. It should help us keep track of records and refer back easily in a secure manner.
SG: Sure, sir. We will be able to do that. It would take 8 months to develop (and hospital wil have test it), and cost approx 2 million rupees. On the other hand, we have an industry tested solution, which costs 0.3M and can be installed within 2 weeks.
HM: oh, I guess we will go for your solution.



Such primitive system not only punishes the patients who are in the last rung of the ladder; but also the staff, the doctors and the management. Instead of having a smooth process and channeling the crowd thru time management, the current system opens the gate for chaos.

Overcoming Monday blues

It is Sunday early morning. I feel energetic and fresh. Going through the task list for Sunday, which will have special assignments like riding to scenic places.

I feel if we don't laze on Sunday, we will have a fresh Monday morning. See Sunday as any other day, Monday will also be like any other day.