Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda said: "" The term "Freedom Of Expression" is among the most misunderstood terms - especially so after the advent of Social Media. The problem is that people don't know where to draw the line for freedom of expression. This is true for a couple of other freedoms as well. Let's have a look at the most common example - Religion & God. The presence or absence of God cannot be proved or disproved conclusively, at least at this point of time. However, it is reasonable to say that we can prove or disprove what God has not done for sure. For example, you can say for sure that a particular disease is not because you didn't pray to God but rather because of a certain bacteria. However, there are so many things unexplained phenomena in this universe that have not yet been explained fully by science. It is, therefore, important to retain an open mind. Could it be done by God? Possible. Should we accept that as the answer and complacent...

Swami Gulagulaananda wondered: " Can we recreate evolution and the world programmatically? " Classes and Objects form the core of object oriented programming. A class is basically like the floor plan of a building, and an object is the instantiated version, a physical manifestation if you may, of the class - viz, an actual house. What's interesting is that with one class, you can have as many object instances as you want - one house floor plan, but multiple houses that have the same house floor plan. Now that we are clear with classes and objects, let's take a look at modifying the properties of objects. Two houses can look alike and have the same characteristics - that is, doors and windows in the same positions, etc. but can have different properties, such as paint colours - one might be red and another blue. Similarly, if you look at people, though we have the same general structure, we have different properties like skin tone, height, weight, eye colour etc....

Swami Gulagulaananda said : " The course of the law is the longest course in the world " Important Note -  This is just a thought experiment - I DO NOT endorse nor encourage anybody to take law into their hands and go around dispensing theirown brands of justice.  Not a single day goes by when we don't see the words 'scam' or 'rape' or pseudo-secular behaviour in the news. Everybody talks about how corruption is bringing ruin to the country. Some others talk about this as the reason for Indian brain-drain and talk about how the Satya Nadellas are leaving for the US because of transparency and openness. Fine, the need of  the hour is a political overhaul, they said, and at the risk of sounding like Rahul Gandhi, let's bring the youth into politics, they said... There was great rejoicing when AAP came to power in Delhi and people waved brooms, promising to sweep away the filth of corruption from within the system. We will punish the corrupt, they...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Uththishtata Bharatha... (Arise India) " [This post may seem to be mixing two issues - Deal with it :) ] " Take a twig and you can snap it between your fingers, take a bundle of sticks and you can't do anything to it " is the summary of the lesson imparted by the ailing old father to his bickering sons. We all know that. When Alexander the Great arrived at Takshashila (current Pakistan), and was all set to invade India, the entire sub continent was made up of numerous kingdoms. These kingdoms individually were relatively small, save Magadha which was larger. There was still a concept of Bharath, which is modern India, but then they were all individual kingdoms. Alexander was poised to defeat India and kings like Ambhi even sided with the foreigner in his quest to invade Bharath. Chanakya foresaw what would happen if Alexander continued on this path, as you might have too - Each twig could be easily snapped by Alexander. He de...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " The ability to handle rejection is an important quality to have " [I started reading this fantastic book called " Design Of Everyday Things " by Donald A. Norman. The book is highly recommended by the way. This post is inspired by the book. Let me start off by saying I am no expert - these are my opinions only] Systems and Designs seem to be very technical words. But, to me, they are more like common sense. These days, that is... Actually, from yesterday, because I started reading this book and now I have suddenly become an expert in the area. Driving in Bangalore is a pain, which most of you are aware of. But driving a car can get a little more annoying because of all the motorcycles that swarm around you. Motorcycles are inherently unstable and tend to move in unpredictable paths in excessive traffic. So a driver of a car has to be extra careful when he drives because he has to concentrate on a number of haphazardly moving vehi...

Baba Gyani Triviani said: " If you believe in fate and destiny, then the randomness in this world is pseudo-randomness " Random Number Seed I am sure most of you would have used a Random number generating piece of code in your program at some point of  time or another. And when you were looking up code, you would have noticed the word 'seed' but would have ignored it. Some of you would have even noticed a word called pseudo-random number generator. Well, I did. And I didn't know what this seed was until a few days back. Let's try out an experiment. I will use Python in this post, but you can use any other language - Java, Ruby and they will all behave in the exact same way. >>> import random >>> random.random() 0.23108685984562283 >>> random.random() 0.017276293409835386 If you try this piece of code on your machine, your results will be different from mine. Isn't that obvious? It IS a random number generator af...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " When in a game, play... " I have won several lotteries organised by Shell, Coca Cola and other companies. Each prize was no less than 500,000 GBP. And I have also been fortunate to share my surname with super rich heirless millionaires, facilitating unscrupulous lawyers to wire their enormous funds into my account so that I can send them their share for making it happen. Considering the number of lotteries I have won and number of inheritances in my name, I am richer than Bill Gates ten times over. But alas, we are aware of how scams work. Some of us, at least. So I continue to be penniless as before. Recently, I got an email - The brevity of which prompted me to reply, and then began an interesting conversation. from: Robert Adair to: r-adair@hotmail.co.uk date: 17 October 2013 21:29 subject: Your revert awaited having a proposal to discuss with you To which I replied, with equal conciseness... Regarding what And I got ...