Contribution To Humanity
Thursday, September 4th, 2008 (11:22 pm), under junk, personal.Yea, that’s the big Question: What’s your contribution to humanity?
There’s the ski gloves gig. It kills me to think that it’s not a contribution to anybody but myself whenever I do make it. Just because it can’t go into a hearing aid some day. Or on an android. Why would an android want it anyway? To communicate with human pals. That’s after my next contribution to myself: linguistic evolution in a petridish of core2quads.
Why it kills me is not because I’m unsure whether it can get into hearing aids some day; but rather that it is not elegant. It’s like solving the problem without actually solving it. A muP dedicated to separating out speech? Give me a break. So the reason it kills me is this: I don’t have a silver bullet. I didn’t do the Sherlock Holmes act. Or the ICA act. I never had the “aha” moment. Except in tzvi’s class, or prakash’s class, or mike, or karl or naveen or …
Yea, that’s right. A contribution to humanity is either an aha moment, or nothing. (In technology at least. Outside of technology, of course, we expect you to make your contribution to the world around you.)
I could write articles for wikipedia too, that’s not much of an aha, but you bet it’s a contribution.
Or label some places on wikimapia, yea, your paternal village and your maternal village and wherever you’ve been.
Or post pictures on mustseeindia.com, lol, hey, rana never paid me to publicize it! Of course, we don’t want to see you, you or you in front of the mona lisa, gawddd, we dont’ want to see even mona lisa herself. So post pictures for places that need the exposure.
Or set up an enterprise. It’s a line of thought, you see.
But I tell you, I’m just living for that one nasty aha moment. Something like “we know the pitch is throwing a spanner in the works, I’ve got a way to take the spanner and bolt the works tight.”
September 8th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Well, thats a good question to ask. But I guess you are being too harsh to yourself!
There are different ways to contribute to humanity and it need not always be curing cancer or world peace. I would be happy if I can bring a smile to a face every day. I am pretty sure you are doing that now, like you used to in “our” college days.
It’s good to see you write, even though I find it more abstract than Prof Amitabh Tripathy’s class :P
BTW, I saw your movie list (on your homepage) and I liked the list. May I recommend “The Motorcycle Diaries” – I am sure you’d like it (it’s somewhat connected to this post too :)
October 12th, 2008 at 4:41 am
> Yea, that’s right. A contribution to humanity is either an aha moment, or nothing. (In technology at least. Outside of technology, of course, we expect you to make your contribution to the world around you.)
I do not agree. To illustrate lets take the example of Google. While most people probably say they invented a great search technology, I think their technology was not the first, neither the best. Earlier text based approaches (like AltaVista) were augmented with link-based approaches (HITS, page-rank) around the time of Google. I think the main things that separated Google from others is
1. a pragmatic point of view – speed is needed, search should be free, searched text should appear in the output to provide feedback, search must be fast
2. _actual_ implementation – they implemented the system and set it for use, unlike other people who were too busy/unable to implement their papers around the time
3. continued improvement over months – they continually and painstakingly scaled their approach.
Finally, other (better) approaches were later included to increase google’s search scalability.