Enjoying History

Recently, I am beginning to get more and more interested in History. I have found that I can spend hours reading Wikipedia and other historical websites. I am even bringing books on history back home from the library (which is a big deal for me)...

But what is most fascinating to me, is that I used to dislike history in high school. I found it so boring back then, that I could hardly read two pages of my history textbook without feeling sleepy. It usually happened like this: I started to read the book on my study table, but started getting sleepy, so I moved to my bed so that I could read comfortably there. Sitting on the bed soon changed into leaning, then reclining, then reading while lying down, and finally putting down the book and actually sleeping. :-)

Back then, history was about dates and a bunch of numbers which didn't mean anything. We had to remember these dates along with some events of the past, that had nothing to do with us. What does the story of some random king, in an unknown country in a remote part of the world (that I will probably never visit in my life), have to do with me? Who cares if people fought with swords or bows and arrows, or if they thought fighting on horseback was the cutting edge in military technology... It had nothing to do with me...

What changed? Am I reading a different history now from what I was reading back then? Maybe. But mainly, I think what changed was the way I looked at History. And the seed was planted by something that my father said to me long ago.

We were chatting about political history once, and I remarked how same things happen again and again. I said the history of the world is like a cycle. For eg. when rulers abuse their Dictatorial or Authoritarian rule, it always leads to revolt by the people and some form of Democracy is adopted. This has happened in ancient Greece, Rome, France and America (during revolutions), and freedom movements in many former colonies like India. But soon, democracy gets corrupted, where criminals, the rich and powerful and those who know how to manipulate the common people, rule. They don't allow capable and honest people to rise. Democracy then becomes an impediment, rather than a savior of the people. When this happens, usually a person with will and ambition emerges and starts fighting against the status quo. He takes the power in his hands, and then passes his judgment onto the society that is struggling to save itself. Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Mao Tse Tung and examples of such people. Their personal beliefs may be different, but they all represent the same will to gain power. After a while, this absolute power corrupts (as Lord Acton famously said) and again leads to Authoritarian rule that exploits people. So, is this a cycle that is deemed to repeat again and again?

My father asked me to take a closer look. He said that history is not exactly a cycle but a spiral. Things that happen in the past, affect those that happen in the future. Knowing past events affects the minds and the judgment of people making decisions in the present (even if to a small degree). So, even if flow of events looks similar on a large scale, they are actually different. So, to prevent the same things happening, we must understand history, and learn from it. But how do we understand history?

To truly understand history, and why people behaved the way they did, we have to get into the minds of these actors. What did these people see in the world around them? What were their choices? What was it that motivated them, and what was it that they lived for? What were the forces acting on them, and circumstances which they had to face?

When we start imagining history as something alive, as something that we can see and be part of, it suddenly becomes a whole lot exciting. We can be almost sure, that someone somewhere was faced with decisions similar to what we are faced with today. What did he/she choose, and why? What were the consequences? Were they in control of their destinies, or were they just pawns in the overall scheme of the world?

Imagine yourself in history, and history will tell you amazing things. It will tell you great stories of extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances, and also great stories of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. History is a chronicle of how people just like us lived, how they fought against a hostile world, how they molded their destinies, and how they died. Were they able to achieve anything? Were they happy in the end?

In the end, it is all so that we can answer our own questions... Will we be able to achieve anything? Will we be able to make the right decisions? How will others in the future look at our lives? What will our history be like?

Invention of Zero and Brahmagupta

I just found out that Zero was invented very close to my home town...

BrahmaGupta who was a great mathematician from Ujjain, an ancient city (est. 6th Century BC) about 40 miles from my hometown Indore (there was no Indore then). This is circa 600 AD.

Arabic scholars adopted Zero and its mathematics from texts written by Brahmagupta (mainly 'Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta' or the 'Corrected Treatise of Brahma'), and was later passed onto Europe through them. The Sanskrit word ‘Shunya’ meaning nothing, empty or void, became ‘Siphar’ (origin of the word Cipher) in Arabic, which became Italian ‘Zephiro’ and hence ‘Zero’ in French and English.

Brahmabupta provided all the rules for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing positive and negative numbers. But he made one mistake: he said 0/0=0, which is wrong. As there was no concept of ‘limits’ and differentiation at that time (at least for Brahmagupta), he did not consider that
lim(x->0) x/x = 1. Though even now, mathematicians are unsure about what the value of 0/0 should be. In modern day computer programming languages, it is refered to as NaN or ‘Not A Number’, and dividing by zero is prohibited.

On Astronomy, Brahmagupta argued that the Earth was round and not flat, a point on which he was ridiculed by many Islamic scholars who read his work later.


Aryabhatta

Before Brahmagupta, around 500 AD, another Indian mathematician and astronomer Aryabhatta had said that

"Sthanam sthanam dasa gunam"

or 'place to place in ten times in value'. This might actually be the origin of our modern decimal-based place value notation!

Aryabhatta also influenced the birth of Trigonometry, and he was the first to describe sine's and cosine's, and prepared tables for them.

As with 'zero', the words 'sine' and 'cosine' are derived from what Aryabhatta called them: 'jiya' and 'kojiya'. Arabic scholars called it 'jiba' and 'kojiba'. They were then misinterpreted by Gerard of Cremona while translating an Arabic geometry text to Latin; he took 'jiba' to be the Arabic word 'jaib', which means "fold in a garment", and translated it into L. sinus.

Following Aryabhatta, another mathematician from Ujjain, Varahamira worked on Trigonometry in-depth. He is attributed with first developing basic rules like:

• sin(x) = cos(/2 - x)
• sin²(x) + cos²(x) = 1

But, even though Mathematics and Science were quite advanced in India at the time, this progress suddenly ground to a halt after 10th and 11th Centuries. This may be because India was under constant threat of attack from the North and West from descendants of Mongol warlords, and Islamic invaders. With the exception of Akbar, most Muslim rulers of India, favored Persian and Arabic knowledge and culture over traditional ancient Indian knowledge. Hence, such astronomers and mathematicians lost the patronage they used to get during the Gupta kings in the first millenium.

The Gupta period (between 300AD and 600AD) is considered as the 'Golden Age' for Indian science and mathematics. Kings like the legendary Chandragupta Vikramaditya were great patrons of science and art.

Research has always been heavily dependent on state support. Even now, the universities that get most government research grants are also the best in the world. See the earlier post on how Stanford University and the Silicon Valley prospered because of the funding they got for defense projects.

The Wikipedia entry on the history of zero is a good read.

BBC Radio 4 also covered the history of Zero here.

Emailing the link of the current page

Remember the times when you want to send an interesting link or URL to a friend, but the only way is Copying the URL from the browser's toolbar and then Pasting it into your email application. It is frustratingly tedious...

So, here is a link that opens the default email app and copies the URL of the current page to the email. We only need to Drag and Drop this link to the browser toolbar, and then use this as a button:

Email »

We can then edit the email and send the message...

Edit: Apparently 'dragging and dropping' works in Firefox but not in IE. In IE7, the link can be added as a Favorite into the 'Links' folder. It then appears in the Links Toolbar. When clicking on the page it does change the page, but we can go back using the 'Back' link. I suddenly like FF even more... :)

Path of an entrepreneur

I have been pursuing the path of an entrepreneur for a year and a half now. I had a dream of building my own intelligent search engine. I left a well settled job in India to come all the way to Scotland to learn more about how to do it. I think that was the best decision I made in my life.

Since then I studied, graduated, pitched, got funding, built my idea into a prototype and got people to use it. I learnt a lot of things along the way. I learnt that starting a company is like swimming upstream in a river. You can't wait and rest. You keep struggling against tremendous odds, and try to hold on to a few opportunities and fragile hope that you get in between. But then when you reach a point when you can think about where you are and what you have done, there is a sense of contentment and pride in you. It doesn't matter if you succeeded or failed, those times are never forgotten...

I still have a lot to learn, and a long way to go.

Microsoft + Yahoo = Microwho?

Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo, and that too for no less that $44.6 Billion. Yahoo had been posting bad results for a while now. There is news that Yahoo is about to layoff anywhere between 1000 and 2500 employees (7% of their employees). Former CEO Terry Semel who vacated his post for Jerry Yang, is also leaving his position as the Chairman of the Board.

What a day for Yahoo!!

Microsoft aims at gaining ground against Google by getting Yahoo into its fold. They have been trying to build MSN Live Search engine as a rival to Google, but with little success. On the surface, it looks like the MS/Yahoo merger might be beneficial to both of them. But that might not be so...

Microsoft's MSN and Yahoo are actually competitors in most of their application markets. Be it finance (Yahoo Finance vs MSN Finance/MSNBC/CNBC), email (Hotmail vs Yahoo Mail), web search (Live search vs Yahoo search), news, online games, maps or yellow pages, Yahoo and Microsoft are competitors.

So what will happen if they actually merge with each other. One of their two services will have to be let go. This is bad for competition and innovation. Also, many Yahoos have grown up hating anything to do with Microsoft. Some of these key people will leave Yahoo if a merger happens. And where will they go? Probably Google...

I think, if Microsoft really wants to compete with Google, they first need to shed their corporate (and bureaucratic) structure (atleast for their search division), and need to become more like a startup. Google has done very well by keeping the spirit of small teams and allowing individual innovation to prosper. I think Microsoft should also adopt the 20% time for personal projects idea (or something similar) that Google pioneered.

Instead of spending $45 billion in acquiring Yahoo they could use that money to foster a startup innovation culture within their own home.

Thanks to fauigerzigerk for suggesting the title in the YC News thread.

Secret history of silicon valley

Steven Blank, a serial entrepreneur and a lecturer at Stanford and Berkley talks about how collaboration with the govt on defence research and projects got the Silicon Valley and Stanford University going.

A very interesting talk...

Notes from Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Conference in London '07

I attended the FOWA conference for this week in London. I enjoyed the conference, and some of the talks were interesting. I'll post my notes from some of them in separate posts here.

The highlight of the conference turned out to be the filming of 'DiggNation', a podcast by the founders of Digg, Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht. Though most of it was childishness and how should I put it... bullshit, they managed to get the crowd really motivated and engaged. It was a great demonstration of marketing. While all they were doing was marketing their website, they managed to get the peoples' attention off that fact. They got girls proposing to them, which got other girls in the audience engaged. Talking about beer and booze, and cursing a lot, got the guys' attention. And giving free beer before and after, didn't hurt... In all it was a great performance.

From the talks, the common themes of the conference were:

1. Growth is essential, and the new social apps are well set for this. It must be made easy for the users' to invite their friends. Things like importing contacts from address books, sharing items with friends, newsfeeds (as in Facebook and Twitter) go a long way. People want to keep relationships with their friends and this should be made as easy and fun as possible.
   
2. Scaling is an important problem that all startups face once they start growing. Many developers mentioned services like Amazon EC2 and S3, which allow developers to quickly add or subtract servers/machines as the demand grows.
   Many founders/developers also mentioned the use of Memcached to cache objects in memory, and save the database from excess traffic.
3. About communities, most speakers rightly suggested that the startup founders should actively participate in their communities. They should be open and honest with them about the features that they are going to implement, and the decisions that they are taking. Any mistakes should be quickly owned up to and apologized for.
   Instead of hard-and-fast rules, there should be guidelines on how to use the product/community. Different and un-intented uses of the site should be allowed and learnt from.
4. About hiring, there were different opinions from different speakers. Some speakers like Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress encouraged hiring only when there are no red flags, and we are assured of the quality of the new hire. Some on the other hand, enumerated not hiring fast enough, as one of the mistakes they made.

In all it was a good conference, with lots of good speakers. From a point of view of a founder, it was interesting to see how other startups are dealing with the same problems that you are faced with. It also helps one's confidence to see other people who are achieving success, are actually not that different from you...

Update: Slides from some of the presentations are uploaded here - http://www.slideshare.net/group/future-of-web-applications/slideshows