Discovering Hamming Codes

July 18th, 2010 admin

Digital data, transmitted over a communication medium (wireless, optical fiber, copper wire), or stored in some storage medium (such as computer memory or hard disk), is prone to bit-flips and errors. For example, if the message “10110101000101010″ means “BILL JOHN” and communication channel noise flips a bit, the message received may be “10010101000101010″, meaning, “KILL JOHN”. Now, that could create a problem. The problem also exists in data that is sitting untouched on a digital storage medium. Have you ever noticed that if you open some photo file on your computer, after years of storage, they develop strange colors and often do not display fully? This could be due to some bit errors in the stored 1s and 0s that represent the image file data. Read the rest of this entry »

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Out-of-the-box thinking

May 1st, 2010 admin

At the beginning of the previous post I had included a set of slides which propose the 4 squares problem and teach us that we should always be ready to think of a simple solution whenever possible. This theme caused a flurry of emails among some of my family members, and I would like to present some of the interesting ideas that arose in that discussion. Read the rest of this entry »

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Anekantavada – Multiplicity of viewpoints

September 19th, 2008 admin

I opened wikipedia by chance this morning and the very first article I saw was on Anekantavada, a concept from Jain Philosophy, which observes and explains that there is always multiplicity of view points when trying to comprehend any truth. Limited, partial or conditional view points can lead to different interpretations of any truth. It is therefore important to respect the existance of other view points, while at the same time recognizing the fallibility of your own. Apparently the story of the blind men and the elephant is often used to explain this concept. This struck me as fascinating because only a few months back, I had used the same example to reach an almost identical philosophy! This philosophy may also help us understand the underlying meaning behind the millions of Gods that some religions accept – the acceptance of the existance of those millions of view points.

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