It seems a lot of stuff is attributed to Gauss —
either he was really smart or he had a great press agent.
Maybe he just had a magnetic personality.
[Pg 7, Concrete Mathematics, Second Edition by Ronald L. Graham, Donald E. Knuth, and Oren Patashnik (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1994), xiii+657pp. ISBN 0-201-55802-5]
Now what ?
Yesterday, on the spur of a fancy, I decided to begin a 72-hour fast on all information consumption. (The “i” stands for information as well as for the pronoun for oneself.)
Exception: Google’s work-related reading.
The idea / motivation is to detox the system of the incessant need to consume, focus more on outputting than craving a steady stream of input dopamine signals disguised as intellectual stimulus. (Source: AoM/Brett McKay).
It’s been about 12 hours now and I am already suffering a strong withdrawal but I also have to concurrently admit that the sensation of space around me is unmistakable.
Amazon: (I do not get paid) | Hoopla
Read an appealing book this weekend. No pun intended.
Growing up in India, lawyers used to be largely thought of as a profession where you would have to submit your life to reading fine print and navigating labyrinths of bureaucracy and corruption. There was money to be made at the end of a long, dark tunnel but, you’d have to sell your soul to the devil first. At a discount.
This book changed my views.
Maybe I missed out on the memo, perhaps because no one in my immediate family was into jurisprudence, it never was apparent to me that the justice system could be one of the finest intellectual pursuits a man can aspire to. This book emboldened that imprint in me.
Prof. Dershowitz presents a selection of about a dozen cases from the last 100 years of American Law and lays out the crux of each case without going into irrelevant detail. He beautifully unfolds the complexities, arguments and counterpoints. He also offers some social and moral opinions from his vantage point – and is very forthright about annotating them as such.
Is it fair if a system punishes 10 innocent people to ensure that every guilty man faces consequences ? Or should a justice system be biased such that no innocent man is convicted even if that means a few guilty men go unpunished ? Why should lawyers defend criminals ? If a lawyer comes to know that her client has actually committed a murder (or lied under oath), what should she do ? Prof. Dershowitz offers some takes on these difficult questions, often highlighting opposing viewpoints and never really trying to “sell” his position too hard – which is refreshing.
This book is best consumed as an aural lecture (audiobook); the author, as narrator, does a beautiful job of speaking his heart. It is a pleasure to listen to and I would heartily recommend this to anyone who wants to indulge in a cerebral read.
I have not read any other book by the author, but I surely hope to. Which brings me to this brief review I spied on Amazon – which underlines the fundamental premise of jurisprudence – one that Prof. Dershowitz brings to the forefront with immaculate clarity – there is always more than one side to a trial.
It is one of those days. When I first looked at my watch, it said 3:17 am. I turned and tossed and tried to snuggle myself back to sleep. That plan came to naught. So here’s my half a page of scribbled lines.
A coffee and a Pantoprazole later, for a while I mulled whether I should do a paid upgrade to my WordPress account. The answer I received was, “maybe no”. Knowing myself, it is a fair indication that I probably I will.
Next came some family-finance stuff. The things that you don’t want to do, but have to. YNAB has made it less unbearable. It’s like a hammer. Everything’s not a nail and not everyone really likes hammers. But it’s a hammer. If you have a nail to drive, it does a pretty decent job.
Somewhere, in between all of this, I lost my way and ended up on Paul Graham’s website. I read Life is Short. A beautiful read. A paragraph stood out, which I quote here.
If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that’s bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people’s mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.
Perhaps because the song Ripple (this rendition brings tears) has been hovering in my head, this passage also felt comforting.
There has been a stream of people who opt out of the default grind and go live somewhere where opportunities are fewer in the conventional sense, but life feels more authentic.
Perhaps, I will bring myself to read more of his work. In parting, this hilarious yet poignant quote about Richard Feynman from his site.
“He begins working calculus problems in his head as soon as he awakens. He did calculus while driving in his car, while sitting in the living room, and while lying in bed at night.”
~ divorce complaint of Richard Feynman’s second wife
Tesla’s stock price has skyrocketed over the last few months, when arguably, not many people are buying or even contemplating new cars. Car manufacturers are making ventilators. The question then arises if this a sane investment and if the price of the stock going to rise further. If it does, what would be the ceiling ?
Laying those (very important) questions off to the side, I want to turn your attention to something technologically more important, that has perhaps not received appropriate spotlight. While the world has been rightfully busy with a pandemic, Tesla unveiled, without too much pomp and show, a new computer.
The FSD (Full Self-Driving) Computer promises a 21x performance improvement over current hardware and at a lower cost, with the capability to process up to 2300 frames per second. This changes the game for safety and autonomy and showcases a strong technological upper hand that Tesla can now claim over rivals. The new platform can be retrofitted onto any Tesla vehicle made since October 2016, and as engineers/scientists it is not hard to see the challenging constraints on form factor and thermal characteristics one would have to overcome to achieve that.
The FSD is purpose-built for autonomy, with 72 TOPS for deep learning inference and also includes a set of CPUs and GPUs and video encoders – all with a low TDP ceiling of 40W. The system is actually equipped with two of the FSD chips [260 -sq micrometer, 6B transistors, 14-nm FinFet by Samsung] running independent OS-s for safety and redundancy.
Tesla’s boutique Neural Network Accelerator (NNA) is optimized to detect a predefined set of road-relevant objects such as lane markers, pedestrians and other vehicles at a very high frame rate. The NNA speeds up various operations such as Convolutions and Pooling (in a very non-trivial way) while keeping the power requirements low by using a 32 MB Static RAM (instead of a DRAM) to store interim weights and activations.
What I really liked was that Tesla engineers published their efforts in IEEE Micro. Granted this is not a peer reviewed paper; still, the article is quite revelatory and is very well written – from an engineering viewpoint. I guess when you are far ahead of the pack, you do not worry too much about losing competitive advantage.
Technology in business is not fully manifested until it commands additional revenue (or productivity) and in this case it seems that Tesla will not have to wait too long. It has already increased the price of the fully self-driving option by a $1000 – to $8000. Difficult to say whether the chip is directly responsible but the correlation is not hard to see.
It has probably not escaped the readers’ radar that recently Apple has announced their plan to migrate, over the next two years, to Apple Silicon chips instead of Intel. Tesla’s game is also from the same playbook. Both Apple and Tesla are owning their supply chain and cementing their commanding role in the ecosystem.
As Jack Welch would say, “Control your destiny; or someone else will”. And that deserves a surge in the stock price.
One of the best documentaries I have seen this year. I am not what you’d call a fan of Sriracha, though I use it occasionally in my dishes (usually to cover a screw-up). But this movie is not just about the sauce, it is also about America in some sense.
Available on Amazon Prime and Youtube.
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be the blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
~ J.R.R Tolkien
Bon stacance ! This is the first whole week I have taken off this year; doing nothing, going nowhere. Being idle, and thus by principles of Zen, doing everything.
What a better way to start off a Saturday morning than a TED Video.
Here goes a nifty docker commit to introduce three scientists to the docker container name pool
Andrew Wiles, Thomas Edison, Florence Nightingale.
You should see the names of edison, nightingale, wiles come up in your containers (merged into docker:master but not sure which version release will have it)
I noticed:
kickass_nightingale
elegant_edison
furious_wiles
From the commit file,
—-
– Description for the changelog
Add Andrew Wiles, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Edison to container names
British mathematician Andrew Wiles is notable for solving Fermat’s Last
Theorem. Florence Nightingale was the first female inducted into the
Royal Statistical Society. Thomas Alva Edison was a prolific inventor,
noted for inventing the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph and the
motion picture camera (among many other).
Signed-off-by: Shourya Sarcar shourya.sarcar@gmail.com
—-
I have to say that this talk by Torvalds (see @ 16:24) and the recent Dockercon ’16 at Seattle were the prime motivators.
One of the sweetest moments I look forward to in my day is an email from my daughter. We have this contract – she needs to send me an email listing out top 3 things in school. The conversation that ensues is usually priceless. A screen-grab from yesterday.
Journey of the Journeyman 