January 2012
1 post
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This is a once-in-a-lifetime mind-boggling tale of...
Carl Zimmer has a mind-boggling post up on the Discover Magazine blog titled “The Human Lake”, talking about a unique “organ” that doesn’t show up in human anatomy diagrams - “The Microbiome”, an insanely vast collection of microbes that exist inside our body doing things that you couldn’t even have imagined yet have taken for granted so far.
...
August 2011
1 post
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Disruptive →
Yep, the biggest reason I wanted Apple to succeed back in 2007 was because I wanted someone to show the world that leapfrogging the competition with insanely great products is a much better and more profitable business strategy than the mindless cloning that the PC industry has been doing all along.
But… instead of Apple’s success spawning a 1000 Apples as I had so dearly hoped, it...
June 2011
1 post
5 tags
May 2011
1 post
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Actually, everything comes from just one thing
I was just reading this supremely interesting post on how all of nature, animals, plants, microbes, dinosaurs, birds etc are simply scaled up versions of a ‘master creature’, a ‘template’. The whole article is mighty interesting but here’s a relevant snippet:
What did we learn from scaling in biology? We not only learned the network theory, but we learned that...
April 2011
16 posts
3 tags
When someone stumbles onto the same idea you had...
Just saw hashify.me and realized it was basically the same service I built and been using since over a year ago. I call it ‘Wysp’ and it’s a simple notepad which stores the entire document in the URL. If you use Chrome, you can even use the ‘Add custom search engine’ feature in Chrome to enter your notebook data even before hitting the site like in this shot…
...
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What a revolution looks like
Absolutely amazing.
To start the original PC revolution and follow that up with the digital music, smartphone and tablet revolutions, Apple is truly the greatest company mankind has ever known.
And to get to see this ‘phenomenon’ unfold right in front of us… we are all the luckiest bastards ever.
[Graph from the inimitable asymco]
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Gyrotasking
Gyrotasking is an idea I had last year for a better way to switch between apps running on your iPhone. The current way to switch apps is to double-tap the home button, bring up the multitasking bar, scroll through and search the ‘icon soup’ for the icon of the app you want to switch to, and then click on the icon.
But it doesn’t have to be this tedious if we make use of the...
6 tags
Grab a chair, as the buttons are here to tell...
One of the things about closely following software UI changes is that, over time, they can give you hints about the thinking and planning that goes behind-the-scenes. As a UI enthusiast, I’ve been doing this for a long time and when I saw the latest Mac OS X Lion screenshots, it got me thinking and here is my theory…
The graphic says it all - as OS X gains market share and continues...
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It's time desktops caught up with smartphone...
If you look at the iPhone above (image via taptaptap)**, you’ll see a now familiar sight - a blob of selected text. But what I want to focus on, is something so subtle that we take it for granted, but is in fact highly useful and interesting - the edit handles at the ends of the selection.
We’ve been selecting stuff on our desktop machines for decades now, but after using my iPhone...
3 tags
A star half a million times the mass of our sun...
I just finished reading this piece that absolutely blew my mind by the scale of the events that happened. As an exercise, I made an attempt to visualize just how large a scale we are talking about here…
Each dot is the Sun and all the dots put together form the mass of the star that was torn apart by the black hole… dayum, that’s one hell of a black hole right there.
But...
7 tags
The future of social networks. The future of our...
This realization came to me sometime last year while I was talking about fractals and how the larger fractals are merely composed of scaled-rotated versions of itself (recursion). We can see this in our daily life - something as massive as our solar system is in fact, made of atoms that have the same structure as the solar system - bodies rotating and revolving around a central mass. In simple...
4 tags
“I’ve found that it is the humble who are the most stubborn of all.”
– - Me (@vjk2005).
Most famous examples would be Gandhi and MLK, but I first realized this from interactions with everyday people as well as from introspection/self-reflection and later found parallels among famous people.
Note: ‘Stubborn’ and ‘humble’ are used here without...
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Why every PC manufacturer wishes they 'lost' like...
As makers of products that change the world and re-invent entire industries , Apple deserve their ‘loss’.
via
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PageLeap - Google Chrome Extension W.I.P
PageLeap is an extension I made to scratch a personal itch and I use it heavily every day. I want to release it to the public, but the desire to add more features is so overwhelming that the extension has been on the back-burner for 6 months now, as I try to think up of what potential features users might want and how I should go about implementing them without adding bloat. Here’s...
4 tags
In the shit-pile that is the YouTube comments, you...
From the YouTube trailer for Cowboys & Aliens comes this gem of a comment…
A long time back I came across another comment that was just as hilarious, involving a Zune, squirting, and running away from the RIAA. Wish I had saved that video link then.
5 tags
NFS Shift: Terrific bg track
Love the game and the cars and the souped-up graphics, but the bg track rocks my boat the hardest. Terrific job.
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Stalking Horse Bid
On October 22, 2007, technology company SCO asked a bankruptcy court to approve a deal whereby a purchaser would acquire “substantially all assets used by the Company in connection with its SCO UNIX Business and certain related claims in litigation.” The agreement included a “stalking horse” provision: If the purchaser, York Capital Management, were to be designated as a...
6 tags
Sword & Sworcery EP: I want to live in this world
This game rocks like no other game does. Reminds me of Samurai Jack - simplified retro-ish art, amazing atmosphere built up and sustained by just the right mix of lights and sounds, terrific audio backgrounds and topped off with an incredible sense of scale between objects. So beautiful, so surreal.
What do you call this genre? Cyberpunk? In any case, this is beyond awesome and I want...
5 tags
Can these new payment services beat Paypal?
Recurly, Stripe, Chargify and 1000s more to come. Why will they succeed when Google Checkout, with all that Google-y muscle, hasn’t? Perhaps their ambition is to just carve out a niche for themselves instead of replacing Paypal as the dominant online payment solution. Now that makes sense.
Or perhaps they plan to be behind-the-scenes and do B2B (eg: power the Saas businesses) rather than...
December 2009
1 post
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Thoughts on 'I' (soul-body interface)
[ UPDATE: I’m wrong here and this whole post is now without merit, but I still keep this document up to show the trail that lead my present day findings ]
When I say ‘I’, it is not the mind that is me… it is the consciousness that is me. Both my mind and my body are tools that ‘I’ use to ‘do’ what I want to. People usually think that it is their...