Trivia-3

Here comes this week's trivia. Testing your knowledge in Hindu epics & philosophy?


1. What are the ten Avatars of Vishnu,aka Dashavatar?
2. Who wrote Mahabharatha?
3. How many "Kandas" is Ramayana split into?
4. What are the four different hindu scriptures or Vedas?
5. What does Advaita and Dvaita mean?

Trivia-2 answers

1. Hydrogen, Helium and Oxygen. Madmax scores on this one.

Here are the top ten. Nitrogen , which most of us would assume is actually the seventh most common element.
1 Hydrogen
2 Helium
3 Oxygen
4 Carbon
5 Neon
6 Iron
7 Nitrogen
8 Silicon
9 Magnesium
10 Sulfur


2.The Van Allen Radiation Belt is a torus of energetic charged particles (plasma) around Earth,trapped by Earth's magnetic field. Mano hit it right. Sdpal, that was a good one..:-)

3.The name `India’ is derived from the River Indus, the valleys around which were the home of the early settlers. The Aryan worshippers referred to the river Indus as the Sindhu.

Update: The name Indus Valley Civilization also referred to the Indus river, as Brainwaves,Saumya & Madmax rightfully assumed ..with special reference to Brainwaves:-)

4.When "Gandhi" won the Oscar. Madmax & Sdpal got it right.

5.That image is actually a volcano eruption under the sea. This happened very recently , couple of weeks back ,off the coast of Tonga in the south pacific ocean.
If you observe the image closely, you can see the water in the sea. Kudos to Sdpal & Mindframes.

Trivia-2

Kudos to Mano, Brainwaves and Mindframes for getting atleast one answer right. Collectively, the team got 3 answers right..Cool...Now , for trivia-2.

Questions for Trivia-2

1. What are the three most common elements in the Universe?
2. What is the Van Allen belt?
3. Where was the name India derived from?
4. What 1982 movie had critic Janet Maslin carp: "The Oscar seemed to have been mistaken for the Nobel Peace Prize"?
5. What do you think this image represents?



Answers for Trivia-1

1. Mindframes scores one on this. Yes, comets were referred to as "hairy stars", derived from the Greek.

2.Shoelace was invented in the eighteenth century. Fairly, a new one..Tying the shoelaces right might have been found in the last century..:-)

3. Mano hits it right. Haemophilia is called the royal disease as it was featured prominently among the European royals in history...

4. 1941,December 7 : The navy was playing the "Star Spangled Banner" when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Mindframes, Wish they had been playing "Nakka mukka"..The Japs would have run away instead of attacking..:-)

5. Washington!! Both Sri and Mindframes got it right.

Christian, the lion

Watch this movie...It is really moving..




I watched their interview this morning on the View.They were apparently very happy and Christian shooed away other lions when they tried to ambush the guys. If you search further in You Tube, there are related videos which shows a reunion between the lion's family and them. Just AMAZING!!

Trivia Time - 1

I have decided to post some trivia questions every week . No cheating or googling. Give your answers in the comment section.

1. What celestial objects were once referred to as "hairy stars"?
2. What century saw the invention of the shoelace?
3. What hereditary blood defect is known as "the royal disease"?
4. What song was the Navy band playing at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked?
5. Which northwestern state in U.S borders only two other states?

Answers will be posted next week along with Trivia-2.

Outliers

My takeout after reading the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is that no one is born a genius. Hardwork & training , from an young age is the key factor , added with a dose of luck by being at the right place at the right time. The magic number is 10,000 hours of practice at whatever one is good at, which makes them an outlier. I liked that concept as now I have an excuse of not being at the right place, not being born in a different household, not being in very conducive environment to further my talents etc..Well, you get the gist …

Last night, I was watching Chopped, followed by American Idol as they cater to my interests in cooking and music. And, obviously I was judging the contestants and my thoughts were echoed by the Idol and Chopped judges. That’s when I had an epiphany and I knew what I was an outlier at. Eureka!! I was very good at Judging. What contributed to my success at judging? As the book says, it involved lot of hard work and training, right from when I was a kid. I started judging my peers and made friends with a selected few. Being a virgo helped me to be a good/bad critic, depending on the perspective.Born into a society where every Tom, Dick and Harry judges others irrespective of his stature and skills, my judging skills have been refined over the years. My ethnicity of being an Indian, a culture imbibed with competitiveness and loose talk has honed it even further. 10,000 hours...Pphhtt..I am sure I have put more than that in judging/misjudging people.

I participated in Galaata Idol last weekend. I should have known better. No, I didn’t make it to the next round, in case you are wondering. To my friends’ amusement, who had judged me right as not being a good participant, I decided to test my singing skills in front of a limited audience and three judges. The first judge was an upcoming singer (according to reliable sources) and so was enthusiastic about being a judge. It was obvious that she wanted to contribute for the betterment of the singing society in the bay area and so was very liberal with her comments. We can call her the Paula Abdul of Galaata Idol. The second judge was another lady who had an amused expression on her face which said, “Whatever!! You guys are not that great, but I will anyway give my comments. I am here just because these fans asked me to”. The third judge, apparently has Sangeetham Gnyanam , though not a great singer himself. ( Again, the reliable source at task). He had a bored expression of “Been there, done that. Lets get it over with and select a few.” As you can see, I was sitting in a corner, too busy judging the judges’ comments as well as the participants. Here are some snippets for you..”Shruti konjam missing here and there…otherwise its OK.”, “ You got all the notes right, but you emoted a bit too much” resulting in a puzzled expression from a participant and a firm head shake from me. For the question ” In all the years that you have judged so far, have you met the ideal Idol yet?” Pat came the reply from the Gnyani, “No.” As I said, me being the outlier judge and all, I was thinking, "That’s not the right answer. If some one is that good, why would he or she be participating in Galaata idol". Following the book, if some one is very good, talented and had the right opportunities, he/she would have made it big in India by now.
Now, start thinking and find out your talent in which you have put atleast 10,000 hours...I am sure we can all be outliers...Just need to bring it out..:-)

Amazon's Kindle a minor report

After nearly 1.5 years since the original Kindle was released, version 2 came out late last month and I plunged and got myself one of those. The device like its predecessor uses E-Ink -- A technology that is radically different from current LCD or CRT displays. Basically the display is a dull plastic like surface that has embedded in it millions of spherical bubbles. Each bubble has some colored particles (black and white to make this easy) and the two particles have opposite charges. The top and bottom of the plastic has circuitry that can induce a charge. So if you want to make the sphere look a certain color, you charge the circuit with a charge that will attract the color particles you want to the top. By doing this to each sphere (each represents a pixel), you have a page typeset with what you want. Also unlike regular displays, this display is not a light source... the reason your eyes smart at the end of a long work day in front of your computer.

There are a handful of different e-ink readers in the market and some precede the first generation Kindle. What sets them apart from the Kindle is mainly the content and access to it. Amazon setup the Kindle with a Sprint 3G chip built into the device. So you can pretty much buy an e-book from anywhere (without a computer) as long as you have Sprint coverage in your area. The cellular charge is hidden from you and as far as you are concerned you don't deal with Sprint. You bought the device from Amazon and you buy books from Amazon. Thats pretty much it-- Bingo! the first set of devices were sold out in 4 hours and took many months to come back in stock. One cannot be sure if this is due to the huge success of the device or because Amazon created an artificial shortage of Kindles. Either way, the orignal Kindle evoked a lot of passion among a lot of book readers. Almost everybody loved the e-ink display and almost everybody hated the 80s retro look that the Kindle sported. But function usurped form and people kept buying. Oprah endorsed the Kindle in own of her shows sometime late 2008 and sales practically exploded.

There were several things that were still problematic with the E-Ink technology. For one the display was slow, as a matter of fact it was so slow that the Kindle could not give you a cursor that could be moved by you across the screen to position on a word (for dictionary lookup or menu selection). Instead they had to create a LCD strip to the right of the e-ink display and you rolled a roller to move a highlight on the strip to correspond to the line on the e-ink display. Menu's worked the same way, selection was on the off-e-ink screen LCD. The original kindle also had long buttons on the edge of the device for the next/prev page, which made accidental page turns too frequent for the reader's comfort. As a matter of fact, many people complained that you couldn't pick up the kindle without turning the page.

With the Kindle 2 release last month, Amazon has pretty much addressed the most severe of the prior Kindle's shortcomings. The e-ink display is about 20% faster, so now you can move a curson on the display with a 5 way joystick thingy. Refresh is still slow, when moving the cursor fast, there are times the cursor shows up under 3 consecutive words (the prev two have still not refreshed out). but works okay enough for you to get the cursor where you want. The ergonomics are fabulous now, the buttons have been made smaller and they now click inwards. Accidental clicks- Ta Ta. Battery life has increased and internal memory increased to 2GB. With that comes the good old Apple strategy of non-removable batteries. You need to send the device to Amazon if you want the battery replaced (Boo hoo). The display also can now feature 16 shades of grey as opposed to 4.

These details apart, what does it actually feel to read from the Kindle? According to Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, the device should melt away in your hands only to leave you and the Author's words with you. I must say after finishing about two books on the device-- Yes. It certainly delivers a very pleasing reading experience and then some.

Some of the problems it solves for me are definitely peculiar to me and some of the problems are universal to books. Right from childhood, I have suffered from dust allergy- not just any dust, more specifically house dust. Of which the worst offenders are the fine particles that disintegrated paper leaves behind. The kind that most people would hardly sneeze at- would leave me doubled over. This pretty much ruled out most library books and the only books that I could reasonably read were new ones. If I wanted to read books from a library, a pretty elaborate setup was needed to filter the air between the book and my nose :)

The next problem is something we have learnt to work around-- holding a rather heavy paperback. Most of us have managed to convert this into an art that in itself would require a separate blog to ink out. Two handed grip is common too- but not for long bouts. You can all breathe easy- the Kindle is a joy to hold and its light. Its got enough heft to feel solid without bogging your hands down. When I first saw the Kindle (2), I wondered why there were thick plastic areas around the display. Now I know... to hold it. It works beautifully.

So its all rosy right? NO!

First obstacle is the rather high entry point. At $360, a price that can buy a lot of paper books, its not making it easy for people to jump into the Kindle band wagon. Second is DRM. DRM is a kludgy solution (in my opinion) to fight a real problem (piracy). The limits that E-Books you buy from Amazon has imposed upon it, border on being downright silly.

This is not a review of the Kindle, just a quick report about a device that uses a technology, which has the potential to be a rule changer. Now I look forward to rainy days, a cozy couch, a Kindle in hand and a hot cup of coffee in the other and a dust free reading experience.