Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

Post HP5 thoughts: Harry Potter is arrogant, irresponsible and prone to acting on impulse without any thought to the consequences. I cannot identify with the character anymore.

What is Intelligence?

From what I can make out, intelligence is the knowledge of or the ability to use existing knowledge to comprehend a given situation.

If this is correct, then is the difference between an intelligent person and a non-intelligent (stupid, foolish) person merely the knowledge gap?

By extension, the difference between a quick-witted person and a dim-witted person is again only the knowledge gap?

And by further extrapolation, given that knowledge can be gained by means of experience, teaching or analysis, any dim-witted person is potentially a quick-witted, intelligent person?

In effect, the only difference between the two extremes is the ability to interpret (and not necessarily react to) a given situation right now, without time for preparation?

Your opinions please.

PS: I'm aware of the commonplace Intelligent Quotient tests whose representation as the statistical average of a broad sampling takes the shape of a bell curve. This is however not related to what I'm trying to understand above.

I relocated my bike from behind the car to its side and on proceeding back to the house, heard the sound of something being dragged on the ground. Turned around to see a snake barely two feet away from where I had been standing.

I couldn't decide its colour in the poor light but it appeared to be a shade of green all over. A grass snake? And yet it was maybe six feet long stretched out and about two inches thick at the middle. Do grass snakes get that big? Could it have been a cobra?

It slithered into the garage, hit the wall, considered scaling it, then changed course and disappeared into the drain. I've never seen a snake this large this close, and the few seconds with this one didn't allow for any display of impressive predatory tactics on the snake's part. It was gone before I could fully take in the sight.

The sound, though, was entirely unexpected. I always thought snakes were silent slitherers. This one sounded like a fat section of rope being dragged on the floor, except with varying intensity as it took each turn in its S-curve motion.

For later perusal: Divmod's Reverend implements Bayesian classification in Python with characteristic ease-of-use.

I feel like a high-end computer with a freshly installed operating system: brimming with capability, but of no good use unless additional software is installed.

So then, where are all the really smart people? Surely everyone around me can't be at the same stage or behind? Either they really don't exist, or they are right in front of me but I can't see them because (a) they are being really modest or (b) they have no means of expressing their capability to a lay audience. In either case, the silence is not good for the ego.

Something must be done to get them out of the woodwork.

My first scientific publication has turned up in PubMed.

X-Men 2 is better than the first. Much better. I wouldn't mind seeing it again.

It is settled. My new company will be called "Seacrow Labs". Provided nothing gets in the way, I'm going to formally register the company as a proprietorship this week.

I have created a new community seacrow where I will document what it takes to found and run a company, starting with the formal registration process and the thought process that led me to decide to startup. Hitch on to the community if you are interested. If you have any questions you want answered, ask now!

I hate television. Not the content, the medium itself.

BGE just sent me this bill:

Read on...

Two recent articles on entrepreneurship and the venture capital business make interesting reading. Joichi Ito of Neoteny wrote about his company's investment process nearly a month ago. Joi was previously chairman of Infoseek Japan. Earlier today, Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software posted his latest article on what is wrong with the venture capital process. Joel specifically quotes from Joi's posting to boost his argument on why entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have different, conflicting goals.

Both these are of particular interest to me because I intend to jump onto the entrepreneur ship next month. My employment with Johns Hopkins ends with this month and I intend to get into the business of managing how information is presented to consumers, be they human or machine. I'm looking at all the ground from the data access API on top of the database to the markup used for the final presentation. I know this sounds rather vague, but I think the market demand exists. I've seen too many good data repositories that are unusable because the interface limits the possibilities. If it doesn't work out like I planned, I suppose I will have to fallback on my former consulting work, but I'm not expecting that.

As for the references to Joi Ito and Joel Spolsky: I'm not expecting to be running a business needing venture capital anytime in the next few years. It's just good to know what to expect in the coming years.

Oh, and I need a name for my company. Anyone got ideas? I'm considering using the name "Seacrow" itself. It's meaningless and a little hard to pronounce (people keep saying "See Crow"), but in the written form it jolts people into taking notice, and that is a good thing.

Further to last week's post on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, here's Doc Searls's take on how to create a good presentation from back in 1998. Unlike Edward Tufte, Doc's piece is on how to make a good presentation. And for a practical example, here are slides from his 2002 Linux Lunacy keynote.

So I ventured out of home yesterday and discovered that both Bannerghatta Circle and Dairy Circle are closed to public due to flyover construction.

ukj and I were trying to get to Big Bazaar on Hosur road yesterday and what should have been a fifteen minute ride via the above-mentioned circles saw us spend over half an hour running into dead-ends and following diversions through narrow lanes. Basically to get to the section of Hosur Road where Christ College is, the choices are:

1. Get onto Double road at the Lalbagh North gate, onto the flyover to Richmond road, right turn on Laskar Hosur road at the crossing, back all the way to Koramangala, finally right turn into Hosur road.

2. Take the narrow lanes of BTM Layout to the Outer Ring road, get to the Ring road and Hosur road junction ("silk board"), turn left, straight up to the merging of Hosur road with Laskar Hosur road, take the left fork for Hosur road.

Coming back was worse. Since Hosur road at the Ring road crossing is a one-way due to another flyover under construction, we had to take a diversion leading almost half-way to Sarjapur road.

What a pain! Jayanagar and Banashankari seem to be the only places I can get to without too much of a hassle these days. Our roadways are all built wrong. We have main roads running several kilometres at a stretch without a crossing. If something blocks the road, the shortest alternative route is at least two or three times the length.

Even Jayanagar, which has a nice grid layout, is messed up in the 4th block area: there is no way to get from the north-eastern side (1st block) to the south-eastern side (9th block) without going through 4th block. If you want to skip 4th block, you have to go all the way up to Dairy circle and loop back on Bannerghatta road. Consequently, there is always more traffic than there should be around the Jayanagar shopping complex.

Whatever department is responsible for town-planning doesn't seem to be learning from all this yet. Witness the maze that the Sarakki layout area of J. P. Nagar is fast becoming. Anyone here ever been on the road to Puttenahalli?

I took a class on Linux for the second year MCA students at the Oxford college on Hosur road Saturday. This time I dispensed with the slideware entirely and went to the class empty-handed. I asked them what they wanted to learn about and noted the topics on board. Then for each, provided a brief explanation and got them to ask questions on what they really wanted to know.

My one hour session lasted one and a half hours. We spent less time on Linux and more on operating system theory: memory management, protected mode, filesystems, firewalls, security with ACLs vs Unix permissions, the "32" in FAT32, more...

Apparently, it went so well that the college management wants me back this week with a different bunch of students.

For my part, two things need working on:

1. My voice. I still can't get it suitably loud enough. The back of the class complained that they couldn't hear me clearly.

2. I could have done with some preparation. On Saturday I had no time and no idea what the aptitude level of the students was. Next time I should look at the MCA syllabus first so I have some idea what they are supposed to know.