Book on Noetic Nought

Notes on "5 Love Languages"

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0530

I first heard of this book in a discussion on relationships amongst friends from RC. The discussion was quite interesting and the book received more than a couple of strong recommendations. So, I decided to pick it up.

Very simply, the book is codified common sense explaining what Love is. Gary Chapman, the author, started with the question “What makes you feel loved” and found that the answers could be grouped into the following 5 categories:

Words of affirmation
Quality time
Receiving gifts
Acts of service
Physical touch,

which he calls the languages of love. He also proposes that people have a primary language of love, and a failure to speak to a person in their primary language would make them feel unloved.

The book is filled with anecdotes to explain what each of these languages means and how to speak them, along with practical advice and exercises to learn to speak each of these languages. Though the book has been written with couples in mind, the fundamental ideas in this book can be applied to any relationships. I feel like it has been helping me connect a few dots, ever since I’ve started reading it.

It has been totally worth my time to read this book. A highly recommended read!

Below are some of my notes. Feel free to suggest improvements (for readability and otherwise) on the notes.

Pehli Nazar

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0530

This post is my attempt to start a travelogue. I hope to capture the “All India Tour” phase of my life (as people have started to call it). I’ll try to keep these posts from becoming travel guides. There are loads of them and I surely don’t need to increment count.

This post is after a trip to Kanpur, Agra and Sikri.

Trains are never on Time. The delay increases exponentially with your distance from the sourthern most tip of the country. Also, the confidence of the aam admi in this delay is proportional to the distance. Any delay less than an hour wasn’t considered to be a delay. Thanks to the fog, low visibility.
If you want to travel around India, all you need is an SLR. Additionally, if you are not of Indian origin, you’ll need the “India” guide. I got bored of seeing people poring over the pages of that “blue” India book or madly clicking away on their SLRs.
Whether or not you get food or water on a train, you are assured of enough “chilled” air from the slit under your window. Come what may, you shall not be deprived of this service.
The trust of a person in you is inversely proportional to the difference between your ages. It is inversely proportional to the 2.718th power of the difference if you are aged between 20 and 25. I only vaguely remember what the TTE told me in my sleep, while paying the fine for not carrying a print out of our e-ticket; but, it really was something sick and senseless.
The chill at a place, on the day you reach, is inversely proportional to how much people have scared/warned you. On the rest of the days, it is proportional to the square of the warm clothing you have on you. I thoroughly enjoyed the chill of Kanpur. Wonderful! The infrastructure, too good! Never expected a 50 year old campus to be so Awesome. [They have an air-strip too!]
The thrill of having an ice-cream is proportional to the square of difference between the ambient temperature and the standard room temperature.
Don’t ever think of celebrating your escape, without the Aalu encounter. Welcome to the land of Alu addicted men. You shall, surely, have your share. If not anything else, you shall be serverd a Capsicum or Brinjal stuffed with Aalu. Also, the quality and availability of leather seems to be proportional to the addiction to Aalu.
“hawker time” - the time you spend being followed by hawkers trying to convince you to buy whatever they have. “firang-ness” - difficult to predict; a parameter that depends on the amount of branded stuff on you, stylishness of your winter wear and other unknown variableness. Your hawker time is proportional to (firang-ness) \* abs(time of day in 24 hr clock - 1400) [when, 900 < time < 1800] I understand, that, they need to make ends meet; each day of their lives. I got followed a lot. I can’t help observing. Sometimes, enjoyed being followed too.

The Taj. Simply Awe-Inspiring. As Madhu put it, “the longer you keep watching it, the more it’s beauty overwhelms you”. But, I still think, the first time is the best time to see it. It’s simply mind blowing when you get the first glimpse, after entering from the West gate.

It’s time to stop writing when all you can see is proportionality between totally unrelated things. Here are a few pics

A Byte of Python

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0530

This post’s been inspired by a wonderful book, “A Byte of Python”¹ by Swaroop C H. The book has been revised after a gap of nearly 4 years and the wait is worth it! I thoroughly loved the book, and I’m happy to be accompanied by so many² others³. This book has filled me with a sense of joy and pride. The pride, of being part of such a wonderful community, a beautiful crowd. Further, it is a matter of pride, the book’s been authored by an Indian - its quite rare to find such books written by people in this part of the world.

I have loved python, the moment I started using it. There are quite a few occasions, where I did something, just because I had the power of Python with me. Python is undoubtedly amongst the best, not just as a first programming language, but to give the user a sense of “do-able-ity” and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren't special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!

A Byte of Python ↩︎
Python - Notes – Swaroop CH ↩︎
Book updated for Python 3000 – Swaroop CH ↩︎