Month: March 2007

How to beat Jet Lag

I think I have finally figured it out. I have been doing it for a couple of times now, but I think it is time that I know for sure, because I consciously tested my principles this time during my recent trip from New Delhi (India) to San Francisco. Flight was from Delhi to Singapore, to Seoul, and then to San Francisco.

I would have wanted to say, it was a late night flight from there, but I have figured out that, this detail does not really matter.

  • People tell you to either ‘always sleep’ during flights when you lose time, and ‘always keep awake’ when you gain time etc. Believe nothing of it. Sleep when you feel sleepy and wake up when you feel fresh. Simple, but pretty logic defying. You make sure you mind does not fool you into thinking, it is not day time over the area on which you are flying etc, just sleep when your body is tired ! Thats it !
  • As for feeling jet lagged when you land, that is the problem of you having slept and woken up and spent 18 hours in an uncomfortable positioned seat. This in itself will bring upon a tiredness, and you will fall asleep automatically when you get to your hotel bed (or home whatever).
  • However bad and unrecognizable airline food maybe, eat all the stuff in the food tray. To follow point number, to sleep whenever you feel sleepy, you need to fool your stomach too. Eat regular food, and you will feel good, and fall asleep soon after.
  • Gross tip warning: If you are going to be eating regularly and sleeping regularly, you need to visit the crap tank regularly. Do not try and avoid the toilet during your 18 hour flight. This will make your stomach heavy and hence you will not feel hungry the next meal, and hence you will not sleep well, when your body is tired. The trick is to fool your body as though nothing happened.

Try these tips, and let me know if they worked. It sure worked like a charm for me.

Note1: I will try these tips again when I travel back to New Delhi

Note2: This is not an april fools post 🙂

Get into the Zone !

Awesome productivity blog thatvoodooyoudo.com 🙂 writes an indepth article on how to get into the zone at work. Some very good advise. Some exerpts:

Your ability to concentrate can be trained, just as your body can. It is a slow, incremental process, and just like with physical training, the real gains are made through consistency rather than occasional bursts.

The Nine Components of Flow

  • Clear goals.
  • A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention.
  • A loss of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.
  • Distorted sense of time. (he talks of power-of-48-minutes here)
  • Direct and immediate feedback; behaviour can be adjusted as needed.
  • Balance between ability level and challenge.
  • A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
  • Intrinsically rewarding action, so there is an effortlessness of action.
  • Focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself.

Read the full article here.

Fleeing Computer Science

We have been hearing for some time now about students not choosing computer science as a major in the United States. Now, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and IEEE-CS have teamed up to prepare a brochure aimed at high school students to gear them up and encourage them to take up Computer Science.

Two interesting points I saw in this article:

  • At Stanford, CS has dropped from being the second largest major to the seventh. Often they end up in the economics or biology departments instead, not necessarily because they want to become economists or biologists, but because they’re following the money. Finance and health care are seen as more cutting edge.
  • The work of computer scientists is highlighted as finding solutions to “real-world problems” in fields from robotics to digital forensics.

Does this study include only American citizens or does it involve the score of Indian students who go to the US of A for graduate studies. Also, it is very interesting to see the ‘booming’ of engineering colleges in India, and the number of CS majors in the country increasing.

Langar getting ‘worldchanging’ recognition

temple.jpg

A group of people from all over the world are at the Doors of Perception conference in India, where the theme is “Food and Juice”.

It’s an exploration of food systems worldwide, and the energy required to make them go.

A group went to the Langar in Bangla Saheb Gurudwara in Delhi to analyze the energy that goes in to the community service kitchen. Langar in punjabi means “Free kitchen”. I have been to this place, and it is impressive. The sikhs have this volunteer duty (or ‘seva’ as they call it) as part of their religious observance. It is very cool to see this noticed in the world media.

Check out the full article here.

Googlemaps and BMW

googlemaps-bmw

Two of my favourite brands have teamed up. This does sound pretty  intuitive, but no one had done this yet. For instance, BMW and Mercedes, have had on-star kind-of systems for ages. BMW even has an auto diagnostic system that transmits the system status of the car to the garage through satellite, so that the technician may arrive the right part, and fix it for you.

So this does not come as big as a surprise, that Google and BMW have teamed up to sync up googlemaps with the direction finder system in BMW cars, so that accurate directions can be linked from google maps to the car, and the car can assist you to get to your destination easier.

(courtesy : engadget)

No more TNPCEE

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam has given his assent to the Tamil Nadu Bill that seeks to abolish the common entrance test for admission to professional courses in the State. According to Higher Education Secretary K. Ganesan, the next step would be for the government to issue a gazette notification, which would contain the date from which the new Act would come into effect. For the past three years, the State government has been trying to abolish the the Tamil Nadu Professional Courses Entrance Examination (TNPCEE) on the ground that rural students found it difficult to cope with the test. They were unable to either pay for or compete with students in urban areas, who had easier access to coaching centres.

(excerpt from The Hindu)

The Tamil Nadu Government (India) has been pushing for abolishing the state wide entrance exam for engineering colleges in the state. Apparently a couple of days back, the President of India, gave his approval to this. So now what ?

The state of affairs in getting admission into engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu is screwed up enough already. Now nepotism and bribery will reign supreme. What is education going to these days ?

Two points I am ticked about:

  • Notice what the politician dude said, the next step is more of informing the press and a gazette notification etc. There is no mention of what the ‘real’ next step would be in, in terms of reform
  • The TNPCEE is based mostly out of the Class XII syllabus. I know, because I prepared for it. Why would someone have to ‘pay’ or ‘have access to tuition classes’ for this. Ideally, doing well in the XII boards in a state board school should qualify enough to get in.