Surviving Quantum Entanglement...

At one hand side, you have logic. Solid, mathematical and objective. You know what you have done, doing or have to do. There's no denying of logic. Specially when you a student of science.

On the other hand, you have emotions. Abstract, conscience and mysterious. Sometimes, we call it instinct. We just know it is right, but have no proof of it. Most people didn't need any. Expect those, who fail to find the bridge between them.

I used to be one of those people in the later group. Scared of the logical outcome, refusing to take a leap of faith. Trusting my logic and logic only. Trying to deny the existence of instinct.....blindly.


At  the end of the day, I'm only a human being.



Praise to the Almighty, by whose grace I've found the missing key. The bridge between logic and instinct (read that as emotion). Ying and Yang. Harmony...Inner peace. I would also like to thank the people who have supported me so far. And a special credit goes to Larry Fleinhardt. With out his lecture Quantum Entanglement, this revelation would have been much more delayed.



Maisun Ibn Monowar.
7th December, 2013. 0215 hrs.
Original Article: "December 7th"

Surviving Over-Sharing

Hard to believe, but it is the truth. Social networks have made us socially isolated. Your world gets only smaller when you are a social network addict. Continuously making calculation of what others have and what you need, overlooking the most important calculation of all, what valuables do you already have.

In my opinion over-sharing can be rightfully tagged a mental disorder. And it seems, I have that disease.

Start Up Guide for EEE hobbyist

If you are new to EEE and eager to get started to build your own projects, here are two links/docs I created that might help you.

What to buy before starting?

Few Project Ideas for beginners.

Few more ideas for project

you may edit the doc as you see fit. However, I still own the rights.

Surviving Bangladesh

The difference between Bangladesh and any other country in the world is that, in Bangladesh the corrupt, unruly and criminals get to live a high standard of life. The prime minister gets to halt the entire city of the traffic to get to the office (which is about a kilometre). The pedestrian gets yelled by the police cause a politician is coming on his luxury SUV.

If you ask me, its futile to repair your old Mac. Better get a new Linux.

Surviving EEE

I bet you've seen those facebook memes on Engineers. Funny no doubt. During my second year of Engiiering studies, I though they were just exageration. Then, I went into my third year of studies and boy was I surprised!

I knew studying engineering would be though, but I had no idea EEE would be so deep. During the first two years, I had no problems finding the solutions to my problems. If I couldn't google my answer, I could generally find a suitablle solution by trial and error. I have notes containing keywords of all th e important concepts I learned in my first two years of studies. Whenever I need to revisit those lectures, I simply remember the keyword and google everything I need. Unfortunately, this process is not working anymore in my third year. So next time someone boasts infront of you being an engineer, please don't mind; if he has survived engineering, he has every rights too.

I'm not implying EEE is a super tough subjects and can only be taken by the gifted minds. But at the same time, not everyone can survive an engineering degree. Being where I am right now, I've a bit more understanding of the subject. In EEE, most of the explanations are done by equations only. Even in the exam halls, if you write only relevant eqations and relevant derivations, you would probably pass. Trust me, its all in the equations. Funny thing is, after a stage, teachers can no longer teach you. They will just show you an equation and you are required to magically understand everything from it. There are no other ways.

If your engineer friend cannot gossip, socialise, spend time with you or may not even dance, don't blame him. He never had the time to experience these.


(P.S. On the contrary, if he can do all of those; he is either born with the gifts or never took engineering seriously!)

Surviving Limitation of Innovation !!

I'm very sorry to say that, innovation in our country is limited by number of limiting factors. 

Scarcity of appropriate material is sure to be one of them. People in our country have lots of plans and dreams and most of the time their dreams shatter because of the limit imposed by few rusty government policies. We cannot import any gadgets from the abroad. If we request our relatives or friends living abroad, the item is simply 'LOST' in between the airports' conveyor belt. Some are 'LOST' in the customs department. Some of them simply can't be imported because the government is too busy to pay attention to our demands.

Encouragement is also a big factor. Some people are simply not motivated enough and it is not their fault. In leading universities around the world, they are not content by reading a book. They want to implement the knowledge of the book in a real world scenario. In our universities, students are only required to take a written test at the end of the semester. If the lab teacher is enthusiastic enough, he may give you a semester long project which is anything but challenging.

Had there been more challenging local competitions, I'm sure you would have seen a dramatic improvement of our countries engineering skills. Cricket fans will find it easier to relate. Had Sakib Al Hasan not participated in IPL, he might not have been so great in the subsequent games. I read this fact in some news paper article. Same applies for education. If we have our own world class competition, we will do much better in the international ones.

Recently, a search engine was launched in Bangla, called "Pipilika". A praise worthy effort. What hurts  me though is a quote from my favorite Professor, Dr. Md. Jafor Iqbal. He said the interaction of Public universities and IT companies are too low. With this search engine, it has been proved that our Public Universities students can do it too.

What really hurt me is that Jafor sir used the phrase "Public University" in his statement. As if those of us who are studying in so called "Private University" can do nothing. I don't really blame him. There are some fundamental differences in between Public and Private universities. The only way we can change this general outlook is by showing the world what we are capable of.

Surviving the Death of Google Reader

When google reader was there, (Google reader is scheduled for a shutdown!) I would subscribe all the blogs I found to be useful, but later on I would forget to log in to google reader and read all the new updates. Now that Google Reader is scheduled for a permanent shutdown I suddenly realised, I never came back to read the feeds.

Anyway, I had to find alternative. So I immediately contacted Sadaf Noor, who redirected me to an article on lifehacker.com. There I found 5 alternative. Out of five I registered on 3 feed readers and been trying out for last 2/3 days. Here's what I make of it so far:


Feedly:

Incredibly simple user interface. It supposed to have a suggestive reading system, but I'm yet to figure that part out.

Pulse.me:

Amazing user interface. Arranges all your feeds according to date. Love that way they adopted windows 8 display concept.

Netvibes:

Absolutely amazing. Their feed is not so good as others, but the dashboard feature is on a new level that no one has ever gone before. I typed in "Renewable Energy" and the quality & quantity of the information present on the dashboard is mind bogling.


So far I'm yet to decide which is the best one.

Surviving Knowledge

It funny to me how people impose a price tag on knowledge now-a-days. Almost in every literary creation, you'll see the phases, "Illegal to reproduce without the permission of the author". The reason is not very clear to me.

What I feel, the warning should be like,"Feel free to use it as a reference to your document/book/article. Just make sure you cite it is my work and my creation. Unless you do that, I'll find you and I'll kill you".

In this context, I must mention that I'm a huge fan of Salman Khan, the creator of "Khan Academy". My friend Moeen thinks otherwise. He is infuriated by the fact that, "Khan Academy" make huge profit basing on voluntary work of the people. I think the opposite. I'm not sure whether or not "Khan Academy" makes a 'Huge' profit, I'm cool until and unless, the knowledge is provided for free to those who crave it; unlike sites like scribd.com, great resource but poor philosophy and more business involved.

Having said all of this, I've a plan to produce my own study material to be distributed for free. That is with collaboration of WNES.

Surviving JavaScripts!!!

JavaScripts. They are everywhere. Since my Desktop collapsed I'm using my Dad's old Laptop. In normal conditions, it does fine. But when I try to load multiple web pages at once, it dies on me. It just cannot take the load. I thought a 1 GHz processor and 256 RAM should get me through. As I discovered, the amount of script and the processing power these pages demand are enormous. Everyday I have to waste over an hour just to get these script processed.
Allah help me.

Why I Support WNES

Essa came to me one day and said, Shams is doing something new and I might like the idea. He was right. I was so irritated by our education system that I was tired of complaining about it. I really didn't get the point why I have to study so many subjects in my high school and public certification exam where I wasn't interested in them? Why waste so much time studying books I was eager to forget about them as soon as I was done with my exams? I could have learned more about a topic I loved.

What Shams told me that day is that, it is not only in Bangladesh even countries like USA couldn't fix a curriculum that is actually helpful. Scholars all around the world have time and again provided their opinion on how a curriculum can accelerate the learning process.

Think about it a moment, technology is at the peak now. Almost everyone has a cell phone and a TV in their home. Middle class families have access to the internet. Knowledge is more readily available than ever before. Take EEE for example. Now you don't need to graduate as a EEE to make something amazing. All you need to do is go on the internet and find out examples of electronic circuit and try it at home. So why haven't we got any new Einstein in the new century? Why there are so little people are successful in research and development. There should be more bright minds around?

I admit there are several factors why less number of people are actually bothered about pursuing knowledge. Without any doubt quality education is one of them. Think for a moment, when a kid is introduced to all the amazing things he could possibly be, he has his motivation level at the highest possible position. As the kid grows older, he is forced the study subjects he doesn't care about. As a result his GPA is low. As his GPA is low, he can't choose the subject of his choice, he is at the mercy of luck. Again, when you are growing up, responsibilities increase. You are forced to think about having good job and earn a good amount of money. As result, those dreams they used to have in their childhood diminishes and fades away. If there is no dream, there is no hope.

As Shams tells me, scholars have repeatedly suggested that we change our study system from "bottom -> top" to "top -> bottom" strategy. For example, if a kid wants to be an mechanical engineer, let him play and learn with amazing mechanical systems. As he grow more ambitious, then introduce him to calculus and higher mathematics. Teacher wouldn't need to put extra effort to make this kid understand calculus (which is very difficult math) rather the teacher would have problem keeping pace with the student.

I really would like to see this "top -> bottom" system being implied in our country. Of course, as any other system it needs to be thoroughly tested and improved in field level before deploying such revolutionary concept nationwide. That's what Shams is trying to do. He is trying to test all those theories in the practical world and figure out how practical all these papers/researches are. He is not going to start a rebel by trying to overthrow the existing curriculum but his work will indeed  move the scholars or the leaders who actually care about proper education. That's why I support WNES, Shams effort of testing this new kind of curriculum.

However, there is one big problem to it. To test the effectiveness we need students. In our country, there are 3 kinds of students. The rich kids, the average kids and the slum kids. Rich kids won't really bother about joining our experiments, average kids don't have any free time between their coaching classes, art classes, music classes, karate classes and so on. So we are only left with slum kids.

This is why we are teaching street kids at the moment. Many people don't really understand the full concept of WNES. They just assume it is just another initiative to educate the uneducated. We are working on how to clear the confusion among people.

With this comes another problem. It is not that easy to teach street kids. As many of you know, there are multiple difficulties to teach these kids. their parents want them to earn money or do something profitable. They don't want their kids to waste time on something which doesn't bring immediate change. Plus not all the kids are passionate about education. It takes a little time to get the flavor. Anyway we are working on this problems one by one.