Chronicles of Nikhil Baliga

Swami Gulagulaananda said: “ Teaching ethics to a human being is hard. I wonder if machines are easier " There is an old psychology question that we used to ask as kids: There is a railway track on which trains typically pass on, and another track on the side that is not supposed to be used. There is a sign that indicates walking on the main track is dangerous. Walking on the side track is not a problem because trains are not expected to pass on it. A group of ten young boys are playing on the main track while a lone boy is playing on the side track. You notice the train approaching rapidly and are standing beside a lever that can be used to control whether the train continues on the main track, or switch it to the alternate track. Assuming that the side track is not risky for the train and that you cannot shout to shoo the kids off the tracks because they are too far away from you or do anything else - and given only the two following choices, which would you go for? - ...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: “ (this quote has been censored) ” A couple of days back, the chairman of Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), Pahlaj Nihalani, was sacked and replaced by another person. It seems that a section of Indian film industry and media celebrated this fact. It turns out that Nihalani was branded ‘ Sanskaari ’, an of late derogatory word, often used to represent a person with a 'regressive mindset'. The reason? The official reason for his sacking was that he was muzzling the creative and artistic freedoms of cinema. Basically, he denied U/A certifications to movies that had scenes and language that was deemed inappropriate. The official reason mattered because the incumbent government formed by the BJP has been accused by leftist liberals and the so called intelligentia (I have lost respect for that word now because leftist liberals and intelligentia are associated together) of imposing Hindutva on ‘ minorities ’. While there is a lack of a shred of ev...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " You can always make a mundane problem interesting by thinking about scaling it " Tic Tac Toe used to be one of the standard games played by us in school along with Dots and Bingo. The problem with Tic Tac Toe is the frequent draws you end up with once you are familiar with the game. Eventually, it gets really boring and you stop playing the game. One day, I stumbled upon a blog post at Math With Bad Drawings, called Ultimate Tic Tac Toe . The post discusses this problem of Tic Tac Toe and comes up with a very interesting approach. In this post, I have provided an implementation of their idea for you guys to play. While you can read the entire content in that post, I will summarise it here. Rules: You are provided by a 3x3 board of Tic Tac Toe boards. That's 9 boards. The first player can make his move in any square. The next player has to make his move in the board depending on the square in which the previous player made his mar...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: “ Every person is the same from the outside, and the insides are merely implementation details " A long time ago, I was introduced to an interesting concept called The Black Box. A box that takes something in and gives something out - and what it did to convert the input to the output is not something that we are supposed to be concerned with… It is a black box, and its insides are opaque to us. The black box paradigm can be used in a multitude of places and is very useful to simplify flows of thought processes. You move away from the so called 'Implementation Details’, the nitty-gritty details, the brass tacks if you will and assume that whatever is inside performs its duty. In our electronics course, a cell was often connected to a load. The cell didn’t really care about the load - it’s job was to supply voltage and current. The consumption was the load’s job and not the headache of the cell. The load itself could have been a bulb that could glow, ...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: " Our short term memory is only as good as... uh oh, I think I lost my train of thought " We have two types of memory - Long Term Memory, which like our hard disks allow us to remember things for a longer duration, like names, faces, places and other memories; and Short Term Memory, which is like cache, used to remember things for a brief moment, like the OTP that we get on our phones. We remember that OTP long enough to enter into our computers and then a minute later - *poof* it's gone! This is a simple game that shows you a grid and highlights a bunch of squares randomly for a short period of time. You have to remember the highlighted squares and select them. See how far you can go! Click on Start Game  below You may also be interested in The Knight's Tour .

Swami Gulagulaananda said: “ I wonder how many things, among the ones that we say out loud vehemently, we truly believe in " A couple of days ago, a pro-Kannada activist group smeared paint over all Hindi sign-boards of all Bangalore Metro stations. They also insisted that Hindi messages should be eliminated from the Metro Trains. As of now, the announcements in Bangalore Metro trains are in three languages - Kannada, English and Hindi. Why do they have a problem with Hindi? The pro-Kannada supporters don’t hate Hindi - They oppose the choice of Hindi. They question “ Why Hindi specifically? Why not Telugu or Tamil? ” They feel that Hindi is being thrust on the locals. It would make sense, perhaps, if the Hindi population is large enough to warrant Hindi. However, it appears that the Telugu and Tamil populations outnumber the Hindi populace in Bangalore by a significant number. Ah, but isn’t Hindi the national language of India? It turns out that India has no official national lan...

Swami Gulagulaananda said: “ Learning from experiences is supervised learning… Guessing by yourself and being right is pure bliss " In an eCommerce company, a digital marketer typically creates ads on social media websites such as Facebook. These ads are paid, and the charges are based on the number of times ads are displayed to visitors (called impressions) or by the number of times that a user clicked on these ads (called clicks). Eventually, if I have to understand the performance of an ad, I will measure it against the total sales and revenue generated by that ad. While the social media website gives me metrics such as impressions and clicks, it cannot give me the sales and revenues realised because that is happening outside their realm (in my realm, my website). So, if I have to measure the true efficacy of a campaign, I have to collate data such as number of impressions and clicks from the social media website with data that I collect on my eCommerce website such as views of...