Ameet's blog

  and you never know what you're going to get (or meet)!  A new job in bay area, required me to commute and take Amtrak both ways. After two years of pandemic, that was a rare chance to see and meet diverse people from all walks of life. One such interaction stayed in my mind . Here is what happened.. I was trying to get work done on laptop at a lower level in the train, when in rolled a burly man, in his seventies, with a mask on, on a wheelchair. His cap said he was a vietnam war veteran. He parked the wheelchair next to a wide table and started talking on phone. From the sound of it, it was clear that he really enjoyed talking. It exuded eloquence, warmth, good humor and positive vibes in general. After the call, he looked at us fellow passengers and from the corner of my eyes, it was clear he was looking for some kind of connection as a pretext to talk. After some time, he broke the ice and started talking with me and another fellow passenger. It was mostly one-way as he c...

I work in renewable wind energy industry, and saying this fills me with pride and many many memories... Memories of a roller coaster ride over last 20 years, with ups and many downs.. Wanted to write these down for a long time.. because writing can help make sense of things, discover patterns in random draws of life and separate signal from the noise. So here it goes... In 2002, fresh out of college, I joined the world of serious work at GE research center in Bangalore. It was amazing.. The whole place was buzzing with passionate people from each walk of engineering, at desks and in labs, wanting to make their mark with their hardwork, ideas, working with each others and colleagues all over the world and creating a good reputation for Indian engineers.  In the same year, as Enron scandal unfolded all over the news, GE acquired the wind turbine business from Enron at a fire sale, and lot of work came to us to learn and contribute to the new business. A German engineer came to Banga...

call for help.. (and a long post) As Rob Pirsig had said, the mind is a bundle of ghosts, ideas that exist on their own accord, evolve over time and help or hurt us. Newton's laws, common sense, and the golden rule are some of the best. They are reinforced by the affirmation from repeated experiments or experiences and by the social rewards, cooperation they enable. But there are others.. the wretched ones.. which cause the mind to go out of balance and lose its connection with reality, to lose its calm and dive into spirals of anger, hatred, doubt, cynicism, conspiracy theory, prejudices, inferiority or supremacy complexes.. the list goes on. In some sense.. the mind can become infinitely more complex than the reality it deals with.. and therein lies the rub. To be effective, the mind needs a system to reign in or weed out undue complexity and biases and have a clear north star, or values in Pirsig's words that guides its quest to make sense and forge meaning ...

Just read about apple's research on autostereoscopic displays , which lets us see a 3D image, without needing to squint :) I have been thinking about a pet idea for a long time, which is half baked, and will probably remain so.. Hence I though it might be good idea to spell it out here, so that interested people can work on it/ evaluate it. (and if blog post has any legal validity as a prior art, at least people can't patent it :) I have heard enough brickbats about it from friends, but still it charms me to envision its implementation. Here it goes :( 1. Head tracking pointing : Human computer interface has been trying to replace mouse with gaze for a long time. Usual problems associated with such are distraction and confusion, as cursor follows gaze, and gaze follows moving cursor, which follows gaze and so on. Even gaze tracking is not that accurate yet/ cheap enough to be practical. My solution is head tracking. Head is easier to track approximately, as features/ silhouttes...

My hero :P I just love this guy! One more video . His quotes .. -I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something. -No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. -Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is. -If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize. -What do you care what other people think! (not exactly quote, but a pact between him and his wife)

A week back, I met a friend, who while reminiscing college days, said with dismay, "all is right now, but the innocence is lost." With this, I started thinking about innocence. What is it? Wikipedia articulates it so well. Innocence is a state of unknowing, where one's experience is lesser, in either a relative view to social peers, or by an absolute comparison to a more common normative scale. In contrast to ignorance, it is generally viewed as a positive term, connoting a blissfully positive view of the world, in particular one where the lack of knowledge stems from a lack of wrongdoing, whereas greater knowledge comes from doing wrong. This is so intriguing! We treasure innocence, not knowing. We yearn to keep inner child alive, reminder of times when we knew nothing, were cared for, were more full of love & joy, were not so judgmental. We censor our movies, we give spoiler alert before divulging a plot. This affinity of innocence, runs counter to t...