Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

Would it be fair to say that more wealth makes us less spiritual. The “Wealth and Religiosity” graph seems to depict so. With the spread of freethought, scientific skepticism, and criticism of religion; secular theology has gathered a more specific meaning. What’s your say?

Chris Anderson has written a great article on the future of business — moving to freeconomics, a freemium business model. A must read!

The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

As much as we complain about how expensive things are getting, we’re surrounded by forces that are making them cheaper. Forty years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it’s obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort. Even cocaine has pretty much never been cheaper (globalization works in mysterious ways).

Well, the pyramids were built without money, (as far as we know,) yet we would consider the pharaohs very rich.

Update (27th Feb): ReadWriteWeb highlights two issues that make the “free” economic model rather worrisome: monopolistic markets and complex transactions.

Mark Twain once said “it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end.” He sure had something more to convey than what the casual eye might gather.

I often wonder why do we all fancy success? I don’t necessarily need to ask this question to the wealthy bloke at Wall Street, the startup hacker, a sensational porn star, or, Obama or Clinton for that matter. Why do we fancy winning over losing? It’s like skipping a step on the ladder, learning to walk before we learn to crawl. And I’m gradually starting to believe that its got nothing to do with a social propaganda, or a “that’s-how-it-is” sense of hibernation.

If success is so important to us then why do we take decisions that are fundamentally incorrect more than often. If success was so important to all of us, then a general sense of human behavor dictates that we all would be taking the best of the decisions without much contemplation. If success is what we all were destined to accomplish, all the time, then genetically we should have been smart enough to take the best decisions in order to succeed, all the time. Clearly, failure is the best option. Maybe the best option, to gain success. You lose, you learn, you gain.

In one of the scenes of the sci-fi movie “War of the Worlds”, when the aliens are investigating the junk in the basement, one of them intriguingly plays with a bicycle wheel. As per the book on which this film is based, it is tied to the fact that with all the advanced technology the aliens possess, they don’t use any wheels. The alien life form had skipped the invention of the wheel. What a failure for an advanced alien race to have skipped such a revolutionary invention. What next, skipping baked bread, or an umbrella.

As America’s finest news source reports:

In a stunning reversal of more than 200 years of conventional wisdom, failure — traditionally believed to be an unacceptable outcome for a wide range of tasks and goals — is now increasingly seen as a viable alternative to success …

I don’t feel like encashing my $10 lottery ticket anymore.

He was the creator of Yahoo Store, the first web-based application. Paul Graham, who now runs YCombinator – a seed funding for tech startups, released the Arc programming language, which is a new dialect of Lisp.

Since then, there’s been a low end of opinions and furor over Arc’s lofty goals as a programming language. In between the rants, a comment from a Hacker News user stuck in my head, because it answered a lot without much debate:

I read a book called “The 10 differences between the middle class and millionaires,” I think the first difference the author makes is that the middle class talks about people and millionaires talk about ideas. This has stuck with me and I generally try to avoid conversations that are about people …

Now that’s why the game of chess is played with a top-down view.

After a poised loss against Australia, this is what the skipper of the Indian cricket team Mahendra Singh Dhoni had to say:

“The crowd was noisy but I don’t think the boys were distracted by it. In smaller towns, you get nastier crowds than you get in international matches.”

Ask me about it Mr. Dhoni. Every ball making its way to Harbhajan Singh and Sreesanth raised an even lounder chant calling out “You are a winger”.

However, that same “noisy” crowd had a bunch of Indian fans, and we were all trying hard to make a statement that a country with a billion people “should” be represented by a team that can play it like its supposed to be played. But its no big deal. Beating the Oz’s is not what we want. They are wingers no less. Standing your ground is what I would like to see. And I hope you know the difference between a want and a need, by now. It’s just a sport anyways. Right.