Mostly it is the questions which really matter. Einstein said that if we ask the right questions, much of our work is done.

Not a while ago I did an interesting experiment. I wanted to see how much order can emerge from randomness.So I made these two computer programs.And the results suggested some powerful questions. (more…)

Tags: Giant Panda, Humour, Program stream, Randomness

SocialRank seemed like a brilliant idea. You get to the far flung niches and aggregate and rank the blogs in each niche.And you get a huge market of eyeballs. And not only our intuition but also a mathematical idea supported this assumption.That mathematical idea is called ‘The Long Tail‘, much popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name.I remember that this book was touted as the prime inspiration for the creation of SocialRank. When I first heard about it I was excited too. I was supposed to architect and program the algorithm which would do the job.And so I did.

As the work progressed, I took a peek into the book, which was the basis of the SocialRank marketing strategy. The more I thought about the idea the more it seemed dubious. And one of the major factors pointing towards the unsoundness of the idea was the mathematical giant named Benoit B.Mandelbrot(He invented Fractal Mathematics and he is called the father of Chaos Theory).He wrote in one of his papers (more…)

Tags: Anita Elberse, Chris Anderson, Education, Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business School, Long Tail, Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

I attended the recent barcamp in Joho Bahru, Malaysia(6-7th December). Barcamp is an open source , international network of user generated conference(or unconference as many like to call it).The first barcamp focused mainly on web applications and other related open source technologies. Later the concept spilled over to health care, political organization and so on.

It was amazing to find people coming together to unconference about things that they like, things that they think they like and things they don’t like but pretend to like it anyway.

I could sense a combined consciousness emerging from (more…)

Tags: BarCamp, Malaysia, Open source, opensource, Programming, Technology, Theory of Relativity, Unconference, Video game, Web application, World Wide Web

How much value you place on the next five years of your life?

I read a piece of news a few days ago about a person  falsely accused of sexual abuse. After spending five years in jail, it was found out  that actually he was innocent and the detective who investigated him was having an  affair with his wife.

The point which jumped out from the news article was that he got $16 millions over  the wrongful conviction. Note that the judge equalized the value of his lost five  years and harassment to $16 millions. The question I ask is  : How much value do  you place in the next five years of your life? Allow me to put an entrepreneurial twist  to the question: How much value do you think you can create in the next five years?  Is it more or less than the value placed on the life of a man who spent five years in  jail doing nothing? Can you at least aim for producing value worth $20 million  dollars in five years? Or $50 millions?

The problem with us is that (more…)

Tags: Gene, Human, Law, Mathematics, Nonlinear system, Physics