Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

The science of sleep has been a bit intriguing for me in the recent past. Yawning may be contagious, but the biggest question is — why do we sleep? Is it just to rest our tired bodies? The latest research puts forward a totally new perspective to the mysterious science of sleep. Some excerpts:

Human beings spend on average one third of their lives asleep. … Every animal studied so far needs sleep, from the elephant right down to the fruit fly. But that’s as far as the similarities go. Some animals sleep 20 hours a day, others only two or three. And still others sleep with half their brains at a time, all making it hard to figure out what exactly it is about sleep that makes it so essential, and that, in terms of evolution, makes it worth the risks. You wonder why we developed this if survival is the whole point. Because you’re completely vulnerable when you’re lying there.

Whatever the function of sleep, or the functions of sleep are, they seem to be so important that evolution is willing to put us in that place of potential danger by losing consciousness. It would be the biggest evolutionary mistake if sleep does not serve some critical function.

Sleep, as its been found, actually can enhance your memories, so that you’ll come back the next day even better than where you were the day before. What kind of effect does just four hours a night have? Well, the first [stunning] finding, was there’s a cumulative impairment that develops in your ability to think fast, to react quickly, to remember things.

And, this affects everyone. Even those who say they’ve learned to live without sleep!

“Humans love to keep asking, ‘Can’t we just get rid of sleep?”, but the more frightening question is, “… that you take someone with a severe mental disorder and a person without that disorder, but deprive them of sleep, and the brain scan will look similar?”

Update (14th April): Yesterday night I was coding some stuff, and I was stuck on a trivial issue. I was clueless as to what could be causing the problem. I left it there, and went to sleep. Today morning when I woke up, the very first thought I had in my mind was infact the cause (and solution) of the problem I was facing yesterday night. It was really strange, but I guess the brain does do a fair bit of processing while we sleep. There’s been evidence that learning is consolidated during sleep. No wonder it’s said, “just sleep on it”. Research also suggests that during sleep, the brain processes the memory much faster. Sounds like a natural defragmentation process. Hmm, I’m feeling a bit sleep deprived (until I read the case of the great mathematician Norbert Wiener).

Ben Yoskovitz shares his experience with SaaS (Software as a Service), in which he suggests that vendors should charge their customers monthly, or offer discounts for longer term commitments. In my opinion, a more efficient option will be to offer a PAYG (pay as you go) model (with discount incentives), where-by customers should only pay for what they have consumed. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is a good example of this PAYG model.

SaaS is not an entirely new model to software application delivery. It earlier existed in the form of the Application Service Provider (ASP) model. But what’s different about SaaS is that its a platform to serve a proprietary application(s), not only providing a frontend access to the customers, but also providing a rich API for open integration.

SaaS doesn’t limit the customers to just being able to “rent” and run the application, but it also enables them to intergate the application with their business processes through web services. This multi-tenant model is also different in architectural terms, because the SaaS vendor implements a virtual environment with a central (shared) application server but separate (often isolated) databases for each tenant.

However, cluster reliability and performance are still crticial concerns for most SaaS vendors. Moreover, I think that SaaS is not for everyone. The infrastructure required for a robust SaaS platform is not an easy or inexpensive task.

Update (26th March): Martin LaMonica has written about the Cloud computing trend, that encapsulates SaaS.

The KISS principle (“keep it simple, stupid”) is not new to the tech world. It’s the basis of many successful innovations. The principle is somewhat similar to Occam’s razor (“entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”), and Albert Einstein’s maxim that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” But when I had a look at this example of simplicity, it made my head spin, retrospectively. Strangely, sometime back, there was a cosmetics advertisement on the telly, with the tagline “less is more”. Developers, keep away from the mascara!

For a long time I’ve been fascinated by a land called Tibet. Now, there’s a state of unrest is the most peaceful land of all. Buddhist monks, turning into freedom fighters, have been protesting against the Chinese rule for decades. And, Chinese security forces have since been abusing human rights for their own selfish interests.

In other words:

“As for Tibet, who cares: The Chinese have killed, directly or indirectly, a million Tibetans since they invaded it in the early ’50s. They have wiped out one of the most peaceful, one of the most lovable cultures in the world.

And they are quietly waiting for that wonderful icon of human courage and dignity, the Dalai Lama, to die, so that they can ‘find’ a puppet Dalai Lama and finish Tibet for ever. So the moral of the story is that it is a world upside down, where not everything that appears evident and true is necessarily noble.”

When I watched “Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion“, an incredible documentary about the state of Chinese occupied Tibet and its history of oppression and resistance, my desire to visit Tibet someday (while it lasts) has since grown beyond a mere fascination.

What have we done to the world.

Technology Review (published by MIT) presents a list of 10 technologies that they think are most likely to change the way we live. From Offline Web Applications to Graphene Transistors, most of the stuff is darn interesting.