lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

For the past few days, I have been making yogurt at my home. I love having curd and flattened rice (chudaa or poha) in the mornings. However, buying yogurt from the market was getting a bit troublesome, so I decided to make the curd at home itself.

I had 3 failed experiments before I finally got the process perfected (thanks to my mother for the tips). According to my mother, the cool weather at Bangalore is not conducive for the preparation of yogurt.

Here are the steps

• You will need milk and 2 spoonfuls of yogurt
• Boil the milk on a stove
• Remove the milk from the stove and let it cool down. However, you do not have to let it cool down to room temperature. The temperature should be such that when you put your finger in the milk you do not get burnt, but at the same time it is uncomfortable for you to leave the finger in the milk.
• add the 2 spoonfuls of yogurt into the milk
• Take the milk vessel and surround it on the sides with a piece of cloth.
• Put the milk vessel (togeter with the cloth) into another larger vessel (probably a hotcase or casserole) to keep the milk warm for as long as possible

In a few hours, you will have fresh, tasty yogurt. I usually put the yogurt into the milk at night and I have yogurt by next morning. Remember to put the yogurt into the refrigerator once it is set.

Today was a funky sort day. On the work front, I did not accomplish much. I had been following the GTD methodology, but I have become tacky in doing my reviews and followups. I will fix that.

In my personal life, I am going through a rough patch. Not much to talk about there, but let us just say that I am living through interesting times, I am sure I will be a better person after passing through this patch in life.

Let us see what else is happening around the world.

The old iphones seem to be more valuable than the newer and cheaper iphones (half the price at $199), as the older iphones are easier to crack.

In her blog titles "Readin', Ritin', and Rithmetic, by Rote" , Vicki mentions that rote memorization is useless. I am not sure if memorization can be dismissed easily. I think having the raw data in your memory helps in solving a problem at hand faster.

I came across this small story by Douglas Adams today - The Private Life of Genghis Khan.

Here are some interesting fractions I came across today.

• express 1/81 as a repeating decimal, you are in for a surprise! the surprise is that we get an answer as .012345679.
• express 1000/998999 as a repeating decimal. You will get 0.001 001 002 003 005 008 013 021 034 055 089 ... (fibonacci series, if you failed to spot it)

If you work on a Unix system, you can use bc to check this out

rshekhar|~$ bc
bc 1.06
scale=40
1/81
.0123456790123456790123456790123456790123
1000/998999
.0010010020030050080130210340550891442333

I came across 10 Lessons of an MIT Education, an interesting document on scribd. Some good parts

• Four courses in science and engineering each term is a heavy workload for anyone; very few students fail to learn, first and foremost, the discipline of intensive and constant work.
• Lesson Three: By and large, "knowing how" matters more than "knowing what." Half a century ago, the philosopher Gilbert Ryle discussed the difference between "knowing how" courses are those in mathematics, the exact sciences, engineering, playing a musical instrument, even sports. "Knowing what" courses are those in the social sciences, the creative arts, the humanities, and those aspects of a discipline that are described as having social value.
• Lesson seven: The world and your career are unpredictable, so you are better off learning subjects of permanent value.
• Lesson Ten: Mathematics is still the queen of the sciences. Alumni who return to visit invariably complain of not having taken enough math courses while they were undergraduates. It is a fact, confirmed by the history of science since Galileo and Newton, that the more theoretical and removed from immediate applications a scientific topic appears to be, the more likely it is to eventually find the most striking practical applications.

Links

• 10 Lessons of an MIT Education