hi,
this might be highly unlikely that you haven't heard about it, but just for the sake of information, there is a Google Group for DA-IICT Alumni started by Ashish Kumar (B.Tech. 2002)
Currently there are 323 members.
So spread the word.
Note : There are few meetups (Bangalore, Delhi) in next week/10days. So if you are around, then make sure to check those out. Currently they expect the 2004 and 2005 ppl to join in too, so that all the juniors can take maximum from the community.
I'll be in Mumbai from 12th May to 22nd July. Redeye share your WoW account :X
Thursday, 1 May 2008
Friday, 25 April 2008
The Swan Song
I was recently told about the Black Swan Theory and the best way to describe a post on Swans is to use the greatest clichés of all… The Swan Song.
As humans we believe in a few assumptions. We believe that gravity exists and we believe that energy and mass can be converted into each other because Einstein said so. Of course, we also assume that Einstein was a genius and therefore he was right! But then there was also a time when we believed that the world was flat and the Earth was the center of the universe. I am quite sure that some real genius would have come up with that idea.
Reverting back to the original Black Swan Theory, people throughout the world used to believe that Swans were white. The assumption was so prevalent that we associated a sense of whiteness with Swans and a sense of Swanness with white. And then, people discovered Australia and to their utmost surprise, they also discovered Swans that were black.
Now the point that I am trying to make is probably so banal that you would want to kill me by the end of this post, but then somethings have to be done despite the banality of their occurrence. A black swan stands for everything that we haven’t anticipated, for things that we believe don’t exist and of course, for discoveries that we haven’t made. The great question is what if there is an Australia where the laws of gravity don’t apply? What if de Broglie hypothesis on the duality of matter falls flat if we account for more dimensions than the four that we know of?
The composition of our entire environment, religion, culture and technology is based on the inherent belief that we know. It assumes that earth was created to be ruled by homo sapiens. The assumption doesn’t stop here, we also believe that evolutionary cycle has stopped working after it created this species and there will be just minor modification where we will be taller and we will lose the appendix. We believe that that since humans differ so much from other species, that human future development may not be governed by the same principles as other animals. This belief is deeply embedded into our culture, with our own set of Creation Myths and Literature. In fact, we are so self-obsessed that we believe that one day we would either rule the universe and we would be able to terraform planets for our survival.
What if human intelligence is too over-rated and there is a subtle wisdom in the evolutionary cycle which has supported immense diversity of species for millions of years before we decided to be intelligent enough to take over. One of the primary advantage of diversity is an essential understanding the diversity promotes survival in extremities of atmospheric conditions. It is far easier to destroy a thousand species with an atmospheric change than to destroy a million species. We an intensive expansion of our species we are moving towards a world with an eventual set of thousand species!
Someday we will discover the black swan and we would end up realizing that our initial beliefs were wrong. The immensity of faith that we have on our intelligence, wherein we believe that we will eventually solve any problem that comes our way might be rendered ineffective against the larger wisdom of what we face! This is not an apocalypse that I am talking about… it’s just a discovery. A small event in the evolutionary lifecycle could have a large impact on our survival.
So the next time you see a langoor happily sitting on the branch of a tree, chewing away one of its branches, just don’t smile to yourself wondering about the purposelessness of his existence. Atleast, he knows that there is no black swan waiting for him at the end of the day.
As humans we believe in a few assumptions. We believe that gravity exists and we believe that energy and mass can be converted into each other because Einstein said so. Of course, we also assume that Einstein was a genius and therefore he was right! But then there was also a time when we believed that the world was flat and the Earth was the center of the universe. I am quite sure that some real genius would have come up with that idea.
Reverting back to the original Black Swan Theory, people throughout the world used to believe that Swans were white. The assumption was so prevalent that we associated a sense of whiteness with Swans and a sense of Swanness with white. And then, people discovered Australia and to their utmost surprise, they also discovered Swans that were black.
Now the point that I am trying to make is probably so banal that you would want to kill me by the end of this post, but then somethings have to be done despite the banality of their occurrence. A black swan stands for everything that we haven’t anticipated, for things that we believe don’t exist and of course, for discoveries that we haven’t made. The great question is what if there is an Australia where the laws of gravity don’t apply? What if de Broglie hypothesis on the duality of matter falls flat if we account for more dimensions than the four that we know of?
The composition of our entire environment, religion, culture and technology is based on the inherent belief that we know. It assumes that earth was created to be ruled by homo sapiens. The assumption doesn’t stop here, we also believe that evolutionary cycle has stopped working after it created this species and there will be just minor modification where we will be taller and we will lose the appendix. We believe that that since humans differ so much from other species, that human future development may not be governed by the same principles as other animals. This belief is deeply embedded into our culture, with our own set of Creation Myths and Literature. In fact, we are so self-obsessed that we believe that one day we would either rule the universe and we would be able to terraform planets for our survival.
What if human intelligence is too over-rated and there is a subtle wisdom in the evolutionary cycle which has supported immense diversity of species for millions of years before we decided to be intelligent enough to take over. One of the primary advantage of diversity is an essential understanding the diversity promotes survival in extremities of atmospheric conditions. It is far easier to destroy a thousand species with an atmospheric change than to destroy a million species. We an intensive expansion of our species we are moving towards a world with an eventual set of thousand species!
Someday we will discover the black swan and we would end up realizing that our initial beliefs were wrong. The immensity of faith that we have on our intelligence, wherein we believe that we will eventually solve any problem that comes our way might be rendered ineffective against the larger wisdom of what we face! This is not an apocalypse that I am talking about… it’s just a discovery. A small event in the evolutionary lifecycle could have a large impact on our survival.
So the next time you see a langoor happily sitting on the branch of a tree, chewing away one of its branches, just don’t smile to yourself wondering about the purposelessness of his existence. Atleast, he knows that there is no black swan waiting for him at the end of the day.
Saturday, 29 March 2008
Connect DA-IICT
Thought that this initiative should reach a larger audience
http://beingdesh.blogspot.com/2008/02/connect-da-iict.html
http://beingdesh.blogspot.com/2008/02/connect-da-iict.html
Saturday, 22 March 2008
DA-IICT Placements and Admission
This week, DA-IICT announced admission to all its programs. Seems like the process for placement fair too has started. This time, apparently, there will be two phases of placement. One for niche companies and the other for the normal ones (visit: http://placement.daiict.ac.in for more details). Something for the class of 2007, we are now part of the homepage of DA-IICT!
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
Synapse Day 3
Same disclaimer as before.
Ok, Day 3 (With all the spelling mistakes)
There was this DJ thing that took place in the FC, lots of dancing, sadly no girls this time, there was the DJ night on the 1st night itself that I think I forgot to mention. Yes, sad to say I did dance, both times, I was wearing black though so no one could see anthing other than jeans moving the 1st night- there were also GNLU girls dancing with us, the second time was in broad daylight - which I think I'll end up regretting for the rest of my life.
Jokes apart, I sat through one of the worst footloose competitions in the entire history of synapse, well -- worse than the last two years any ways. it was just the same set of guys doing the same set of things again and again and again and .... Our college won the group thing ... Dance coders were pretty decent ..., in the small duration between the end of the performances and the announcement of the results there was a short performance by these two kids (couldnt be older than 6 ?) to that aamir khan number from taare zamin par - those guys got the max amount of cheering from the audience. Annnd there was this girl from Nirma who had come a day late for naach so she performed but wasnt judged, she was in my opinion pretty good - could have given srujith and co# a run for their money, had she come in time.
Then at like 9 or so RagnaRok started, it was good !!! just on the wrong day. I wish that they had had ragna yesterday, and Cynosure right after that ? or Today. There were a total of 8 teams, the last one was HTB (the DAIICT team), or Hum toh Bajayenge ('We Will Play' in Hindi, or maybe 'We will Beat Up' it can mean both), they had their last time together , it was a laugh kind of. The Bands played Trivium (they messed that one up -Lights to Flies), and Pearl Jam (I forgot to mention that Black Played Pearl Jam as well - they played the song Black). The band that won it in the end was Manefus(it means royal eagle in egyption they claim) I think, and the Best Drummer went to Nephalim(means band from hell), the Best ohh forget it. Listen to them all at - tempostand Along with Black, all brought to you by Naman, Thakur, Ujjawal, and well I dunno. ...
Feel like dancing, they should have kept the DJ night tonight itself, too much unused energy need to burn it off, which is why this post.
Ok, Day 3 (With all the spelling mistakes)
There was this DJ thing that took place in the FC, lots of dancing, sadly no girls this time, there was the DJ night on the 1st night itself that I think I forgot to mention. Yes, sad to say I did dance, both times, I was wearing black though so no one could see anthing other than jeans moving the 1st night- there were also GNLU girls dancing with us, the second time was in broad daylight - which I think I'll end up regretting for the rest of my life.
Jokes apart, I sat through one of the worst footloose competitions in the entire history of synapse, well -- worse than the last two years any ways. it was just the same set of guys doing the same set of things again and again and again and .... Our college won the group thing ... Dance coders were pretty decent ..., in the small duration between the end of the performances and the announcement of the results there was a short performance by these two kids (couldnt be older than 6 ?) to that aamir khan number from taare zamin par - those guys got the max amount of cheering from the audience. Annnd there was this girl from Nirma who had come a day late for naach so she performed but wasnt judged, she was in my opinion pretty good - could have given srujith and co# a run for their money, had she come in time.
Then at like 9 or so RagnaRok started, it was good !!! just on the wrong day. I wish that they had had ragna yesterday, and Cynosure right after that ? or Today. There were a total of 8 teams, the last one was HTB (the DAIICT team), or Hum toh Bajayenge ('We Will Play' in Hindi, or maybe 'We will Beat Up' it can mean both), they had their last time together , it was a laugh kind of. The Bands played Trivium (they messed that one up -Lights to Flies), and Pearl Jam (I forgot to mention that Black Played Pearl Jam as well - they played the song Black). The band that won it in the end was Manefus(it means royal eagle in egyption they claim) I think, and the Best Drummer went to Nephalim(means band from hell), the Best ohh forget it. Listen to them all at - tempostand Along with Black, all brought to you by Naman, Thakur, Ujjawal, and well I dunno. ...
Feel like dancing, they should have kept the DJ night tonight itself, too much unused energy need to burn it off, which is why this post.
Synapse Day 2
I'm just mirroring what is on my blog, sorry but yet again no spell checks.
This one is about synapse day 2.
The previous post despite my crappy spellings did kind of give a rough idea of what happened on day 1 of synapse. Now, we move on to day 2. Day 2 had the following major events - cynosure, Raphsody (the Indian and the instrumentals) and Naach the 'classical/Indian' dance competition. Ok, so the Raphsody was ok, nooot all the great, the instrumentals were good, but the others were ok, Kiriti did a good job, I think most of the people did actually enjoy his version of the colonial cousins and A Band Of Boys - medely I think they did it pretty seemlessly. During some break in the performances Prof. Hrishikesh Venkatraman, was asked to sing, he was sporting enough to do so, though the crowd didn't seem to think much of it, in my opinion he was decent.
What else, let's see ... I think the only thing I remember about Naach was srujith's dance, which was the same thing he always does that Chandramukhi(Bhool Bhulaiya) one, it was good of course, don't remember the results.
There was procenium of course, I think our college did a decent job, the others were kind of saaad, corny jokes being repeated, and gags being shown jsut for the sake of getting a laugh without the story heading any where. Our's was first somthing about hostages being divided along religious lines, then there was Symbiosis which in my opinion was crap, then there was DEC, which again sucked, by the time ours (1st years I think)came again I deceided I wanted to eat so I left so I missed it but I think it would have been decent. Mica was good, seriously good.
Then came the event I think every one was waiting for, Cynosure was good , seriously good. There were two bands, Agnee and Black, Agni is the one that has done that theme song for MTV roadies. They had stage presence - Mohan, Koko, Arijit (Chinku), and the guy on the synth (can't remember his name), I met them all as well, but alas didn't go fanboy on them and didn't get photos with them, though I am sure I must be visible in some of the photos that all the girls had taken with them. Agnee was good, but Black was awesome, made staying back worth it. They did their originals and some seriously good covers (by good I mean the choice of songs, they claimed their covers sucked -- I couldn't notice any big messups). They did TOOLs sober, they did a very intersting version of Hotel California, they did some other stuff - one original was called field of thorns I think.
Then they left, well almost, Arijit from Agnee was up there on a chair (like 3 feet away from me and almost falling off on top of us), coordinating the crowds chants with a "get back" and etc. etc. ... Finally they did come back, but didn't know what to play (couldn't play snow patrol or RATM), so they played Led Zep- Stairway to Heaven. which was awesome. !!!
This was at like 3 or so at night ... so ... that was the end of Day 2.
This one is about synapse day 2.
The previous post despite my crappy spellings did kind of give a rough idea of what happened on day 1 of synapse. Now, we move on to day 2. Day 2 had the following major events - cynosure, Raphsody (the Indian and the instrumentals) and Naach the 'classical/Indian' dance competition. Ok, so the Raphsody was ok, nooot all the great, the instrumentals were good, but the others were ok, Kiriti did a good job, I think most of the people did actually enjoy his version of the colonial cousins and A Band Of Boys - medely I think they did it pretty seemlessly. During some break in the performances Prof. Hrishikesh Venkatraman, was asked to sing, he was sporting enough to do so, though the crowd didn't seem to think much of it, in my opinion he was decent.
What else, let's see ... I think the only thing I remember about Naach was srujith's dance, which was the same thing he always does that Chandramukhi(Bhool Bhulaiya) one, it was good of course, don't remember the results.
There was procenium of course, I think our college did a decent job, the others were kind of saaad, corny jokes being repeated, and gags being shown jsut for the sake of getting a laugh without the story heading any where. Our's was first somthing about hostages being divided along religious lines, then there was Symbiosis which in my opinion was crap, then there was DEC, which again sucked, by the time ours (1st years I think)came again I deceided I wanted to eat so I left so I missed it but I think it would have been decent. Mica was good, seriously good.
Then came the event I think every one was waiting for, Cynosure was good , seriously good. There were two bands, Agnee and Black, Agni is the one that has done that theme song for MTV roadies. They had stage presence - Mohan, Koko, Arijit (Chinku), and the guy on the synth (can't remember his name), I met them all as well, but alas didn't go fanboy on them and didn't get photos with them, though I am sure I must be visible in some of the photos that all the girls had taken with them. Agnee was good, but Black was awesome, made staying back worth it. They did their originals and some seriously good covers (by good I mean the choice of songs, they claimed their covers sucked -- I couldn't notice any big messups). They did TOOLs sober, they did a very intersting version of Hotel California, they did some other stuff - one original was called field of thorns I think.
Then they left, well almost, Arijit from Agnee was up there on a chair (like 3 feet away from me and almost falling off on top of us), coordinating the crowds chants with a "get back" and etc. etc. ... Finally they did come back, but didn't know what to play (couldn't play snow patrol or RATM), so they played Led Zep- Stairway to Heaven. which was awesome. !!!
This was at like 3 or so at night ... so ... that was the end of Day 2.
Sunday, 2 March 2008
Syanpse Day 1
Ok, so this is like a crappy account of what happened in Syanpse the 1st day ... I'm sure if some one else gets a better description they can put it up here .... instead of this one.
this one is about synapse day 1.
Ok, so this year(2008), Synapse was organised by our juniors. and personally I didnt expect them to do much of a job. I spent the whole day doing nothing of course, since I had decieded in my first year itself not to take part in any event that causes me to spend all three days working for said event rather than having fun. Any ways the day was a bore, it seems like hte juniors hadn't dont much with respect to the small events. Went to the SAC and there was hardly anything going on. I had a talk with harshal he was the one who told me that they were having small problems and would most probably sort them out by the next day.
Any ways, for the 1st day, the major events AFAIK were Raphsody and Rampage. Raphsoday went of decent, the third year guy once again decieded to murder pink floyd, Don't know how they let the guy in each year - dunno how he passes the prelims. There was this set of NID girls who were pretty decent, they seemed to be rather good friends as well. Karry played, and was of course good, they didnt win however. I went away for the results, and I was told that it was the girls from NID who won. There were people from GNLU as well but they were jsut O.K.
I have of course not forgotten about the streetplay but defered mention of it to a later time- namely now. Any ways, that was decent - I missed junoons performance but I heard they were good as always, I got the performance of that all girls team, they were pretty decent. Symbi sucked a lot, in the street play.
Rampage was the major event and it was of course what these guys had put majoriy of their effort in. I think they were pretty decent though. Two rounds the first one had the theme tribal - in which despite choosing 'models' that I would not have, they did pretty decent. The second theme was retro/rodeo, the first team did rodeo, they actually did look rather decent in their cowgirl outfits, every one else did retro. What is messed up is that our own team did god knows what with the theme they ended up seeming like some wiered, going-on-a-mario-electronica-LSD-Shroom-trip. NIFT won, they did their second theme well, I think we should have done decent, won it I guess.
this one is about synapse day 1.
Ok, so this year(2008), Synapse was organised by our juniors. and personally I didnt expect them to do much of a job. I spent the whole day doing nothing of course, since I had decieded in my first year itself not to take part in any event that causes me to spend all three days working for said event rather than having fun. Any ways the day was a bore, it seems like hte juniors hadn't dont much with respect to the small events. Went to the SAC and there was hardly anything going on. I had a talk with harshal he was the one who told me that they were having small problems and would most probably sort them out by the next day.
Any ways, for the 1st day, the major events AFAIK were Raphsody and Rampage. Raphsoday went of decent, the third year guy once again decieded to murder pink floyd, Don't know how they let the guy in each year - dunno how he passes the prelims. There was this set of NID girls who were pretty decent, they seemed to be rather good friends as well. Karry played, and was of course good, they didnt win however. I went away for the results, and I was told that it was the girls from NID who won. There were people from GNLU as well but they were jsut O.K.
I have of course not forgotten about the streetplay but defered mention of it to a later time- namely now. Any ways, that was decent - I missed junoons performance but I heard they were good as always, I got the performance of that all girls team, they were pretty decent. Symbi sucked a lot, in the street play.
Rampage was the major event and it was of course what these guys had put majoriy of their effort in. I think they were pretty decent though. Two rounds the first one had the theme tribal - in which despite choosing 'models' that I would not have, they did pretty decent. The second theme was retro/rodeo, the first team did rodeo, they actually did look rather decent in their cowgirl outfits, every one else did retro. What is messed up is that our own team did god knows what with the theme they ended up seeming like some wiered, going-on-a-mario-electronica-LSD-Shroom-trip. NIFT won, they did their second theme well, I think we should have done decent, won it I guess.
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
meta-bored
surf route -
start with aggregators [digg, reddit, slashdot]
then onto news [googlenews, nytimes, newsweek, etcetc]
the latest in gaming [bluesnews, rage3d boards, wowinsider, etcetc]
tech news [wired, engadget, gizmondo, ars technica]
blogs and shit [neatorama, boingboing, kottke, mentalfloss, gawker]
cesspools of the internets [fark.com, cracked.com, somethingawful.com]
by now its usually 5:00 (quitting time)...if not,
flashninjaclan.com
gamesforwork.com
kongregate.com
all this
+
a couple of coffee breaks, a longish lunch break
=
profit
suggest more sites :)
and if i see gurus.wordpress.com, im going to learn hacking and take down this blog and study nanotech in mit
start with aggregators [digg, reddit, slashdot]
then onto news [googlenews, nytimes, newsweek, etcetc]
the latest in gaming [bluesnews, rage3d boards, wowinsider, etcetc]
tech news [wired, engadget, gizmondo, ars technica]
blogs and shit [neatorama, boingboing, kottke, mentalfloss, gawker]
cesspools of the internets [fark.com, cracked.com, somethingawful.com]
by now its usually 5:00 (quitting time)...if not,
flashninjaclan.com
gamesforwork.com
kongregate.com
all this
+
a couple of coffee breaks, a longish lunch break
=
profit
suggest more sites :)
and if i see gurus.wordpress.com, im going to learn hacking and take down this blog and study nanotech in mit
Friday, 22 February 2008
Connect DA-IICT
As people who have gone through what you are going through today, we have learnt our lessons through our own share of success and failures. Now, we the Alumni of DA-IICT would like to extend our help and support to you guys in resolving your queries on career after graduation. With our friends and seniors in various sectors and walks of education ranging from Physics to Film Making, we look forward to help you guys to the best of our abilities. You can send in your queries on anything related to your career, be it Job, MBA, Internship, VLSI, Film Making and anything under the sun.
Shoot a mail to connect.daiict@gmail.com with an appropriate subject and we would find the right person among us to resolve it for you. Given our own commitments and constraints, it may sometimes take longer than what you expect to resolve a few typical queries, but we would make sure your queries are attended to.
We hope you put us to the best of your use...
Terms and Conditions:
1. You can ask us about your internships, but please refrain from sending us your CVs, SoPs etc...
2. Please use a proper subject line with the most appropriate key word in square braces. For eg, if you are asking something about a VLSI, please use [VLSI] in the subject so that it would facilitate us in our division of duties.
3. We are not legally liable to provide anybody with any assistance. We are just a voluntary helpdesk. We only facilitate people in making decisions, in as many cases as we can.
4. We have no legal hierarchy, and we represent no organisation or enterprise. The opinions expressed are entirely our own, and carry no affiliation whatsoever.
- DA-IICT Alumni
Shoot a mail to connect.daiict@gmail.com with an appropriate subject and we would find the right person among us to resolve it for you. Given our own commitments and constraints, it may sometimes take longer than what you expect to resolve a few typical queries, but we would make sure your queries are attended to.
We hope you put us to the best of your use...
Terms and Conditions:
1. You can ask us about your internships, but please refrain from sending us your CVs, SoPs etc...
2. Please use a proper subject line with the most appropriate key word in square braces. For eg, if you are asking something about a VLSI, please use [VLSI] in the subject so that it would facilitate us in our division of duties.
3. We are not legally liable to provide anybody with any assistance. We are just a voluntary helpdesk. We only facilitate people in making decisions, in as many cases as we can.
4. We have no legal hierarchy, and we represent no organisation or enterprise. The opinions expressed are entirely our own, and carry no affiliation whatsoever.
- DA-IICT Alumni
Saturday, 9 February 2008
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