SAST Wingees

Blog Pongal – Fine servings of the past 2.5 years – part 2 – Year 2006

Updated Jan 16,2007: Wonderquest home page now features a link to the Inca wheel post and the bird intelligence post mentioned below. Thanks April.

Blog Pongal part 2, continuing from part 1 to cover the best posts of 2006:

1. Why didn’t the Incas invent the wheel? this question had been bothering me for a long time and I think this post finally puts it to rest. No. 2 on Google for “Incas Wheel”.

2. Bird Intelligence – can birds think like humans? No.1 on google for “can birds think”

3. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion a green energy technique that is becoming popular, originally imagined by Jules Verne in his famous “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea” in 1870 – F***ing brilliant. This post was featured in the Science Blog Carnival Scian Melt #19.

4. Why the WIMP Interface is Dead? My post on how search-based interfaces could replace complex WIMP UIs atleast for information retrieval. Nick Carr, Sadagopan linked to it. Sridhar Vembu, Zoho (Web 2.0 Office company)’s CEO commented on it. Also read the follow-on post if you have the time.

5. What makes something a classic? a brief post on why some music or movies or things like that becomes a classic.

6. Do leaders overcompensate for their strengths? my take on Brad Feld’s interesting post.

7. Could Apple mess up again? (with the iPod) my take on how Clayton Christensen’s theory doesn’t work in the computer industry. Nick Carr linked to it.

8. How the Pocket PC beat the Palm – I applied Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm theory to show Microsoft beat Palm in the handheld devices market. This post got lots of links and generated a lot of comments on tech forums.

9. Insomnia, Sleep Patterns and Coffee my post on how coffee was giving me insomnia. some people emailed me saying they have no such problems. But i received a few emails saying they stopped coffee after reading this post and it worked for them.

10. A case study in going back to India – it includes links to my other posts in the Back to India series. Many posts in this series were Desipundited as well as linked to by other bloggers.

11. Correlating the ABC theory of behavior with the human brain’s operations. Our friend April Holladay of Wonderquest reviewed it and linked to it.

12. The mystery behind the Kurinji flower that blooms once in 12 years. In the Top 10 for Kurinji or Plant Intelligence on Google. Linked to by Wonderquest and The Scientific Indian. Hope you found my Blog Pongal tasty enough. So long till the next edition of Blog Pongal in 2008.

Blog Pongal – Fine Servings of the past 2.5 years – part 1 – Year 2004/2005

Updated Jan 16,2007: Wonderquest home page now features a link to the Non-Human Farmers post mentioned below. Thanks April.

As you all know, i have adopted an analogy to food for the theme of this blog with “Knowledge is Scrumptious” – knowledge as nourishment for the brain. That is also the reason i call my links of the week post – Fine Tastings of the Week or simply FTOTW. Today is Pongal, the tamil harvest festival and I decided to celebrate with my own harvest festival on this blog with a question – why not harvest the best posts that I have made over the past 2.5 years and do this every year on Pongal day? I am calling it Blog Pongal – Fine Servings of The Year, since these posts are dishes i have cooked for your as well as my brain’s pleasure. This blog gets between 50-70 visitors a day depending on what the Google god ordains (over 95% of non-subscription visits are referred by Google for the statistically minded). Given that meager traffic volume, i could not use the no. of visits to a post to pick the best ones. Instead, i decided to pick the best posts based on whether they appear in the first page of Google search results. Using that methodology, here are the finest servings on this blog for the past 2.5 years – part 1: [Note this is in regular chronological order, oldest first] :

1. Probably my earliest interesting posts – Ashta bil Asal – a lebanese sweet . Still generates traffic and is in the Top 5 for Lebanese Sweet and Ashta Recipe on Google.

2. Master of the “S” curve – this one caught the attention of Joe Kissell at ITOTD and led to my posts on ITOTD (see links on right hand column of the blog) including the one on Non-Human Farmers, which I consider to be my best post on Science till date.

3. Longtail business models – This is a top 3 on Google for “longtail business models”. This is not exactly a great post because i did not write any original content, but I included this here because this post marks a turning point in my blogging career – the point at which for me blogging started giving me learnings and true knowledge some of which i could apply back at my work.

4. My series on Microsoft Avalon – top 5 on google for “smart client avalon”.

5. iPod SD – My conceptualization of how Apple could attack the smart phone market. Now Apple is releasing a full-fledged iphone instead of a add-on strategy that i came up with. This post is my best work in the technology area till date and is the most popular post on this blog.

6. How the paleolithic technique Fermentation changed the world? I was inspired by Mark Kurlansky’s Cod and Salt to write this up. No.1 link on Google for “Paleolithic Fermentation”. Did you know that Fermentation was behind the founding of Israel? read the last link on this post for details.

7. Collective blogging wisdom from the unsung blogger series. This post was Desipundited.

8. A Question of Taste – is it 4 or 6? No.1 link on google for “4 tastes”. Another post inspired by Mark Kurlanksy. It was Desipundited.

9. 4 more types of peoples based on communication styles. This post was linked to by Communication Nation, the CEO of meetup.com, Vinnie Mirchandani and others.

10. New York Times linked to Sast Wingees – a proud moment for me.

11. My first moblog (mobile blogging) experience on my Italy trip. The posts from this series are in the Google Top 10 for many keywords. If you reached this far and you celebrate Pongal – Happy Pongal! Continued over to year 2006 in part 2. read on.

FTOTW ending Jan 13, 2007 (#15) – Prodigies, Procrastination, Movie Baran..

Science:

1. Top 10 most beautiful physics experiments. My personal favorite is Eratosthenes measuring the earth’s circumference using just 2 sticks. F***ing brilliant. 
2.  Why do we procrastinate? 
   Piers Steel published his research after analyzing procrastrination
   studies from the 1920s to 2006. He concluded that impulsive people are
   likely to procrastinate more. His conclusions have strong ties to the ABC Theory that i have been evangelizing.

Leadership:

1. The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters – insightful article by Eric Wargo, includes a surprising demolition of Mozart’s genius by Malcolm Gladwell. <Via Kottke.org>
2. Bob Nardelli’s fall at Home Depot has kicked off a firestorm of sorts with management thinkers falling over themselves to theorize on what went wrong. Amidst this, Influx Insights wrote a short insightful article with 4 important lessons for leaders. With McNierney’s not-so-great stint at 3M coming to an end last year (he moved to Boeing),  it looks like Jack Welch’s  proteges are falling off the pedestal like nine pins. Additionally, we already noted that Jack Welch’s management playbook has been rendered obsolete.
3. Excellent interview with Daniel Goleman – the pioneering writer of the classic “Emotional Intelligence“.  <Via Sadagopan>

Entertainment:

• Priya Raju picked up the brilliant movie Baran by Iranian director Majid Majidi. Al though it has a very simple love story as its backbone, the movie is a melange of culture, problems that Afghan refugees face in Iran, poverty etc. In every frame, the actors seem to be just weaving in and out as if it were real life. Fantastic. Actors in Indian movies who think that exaggerated emotions are important for acting, could learn a thing or two from these actors.
• Since the story involves people speaking multiple languages (we watched with english sub titles), the director uses people from the different ethnic backgrounds in Iran to portray them accurately in the movie.
• The director’s delicate touches are visible throughout – for instance,
  where Lateef spots Baran’s hairpin with a strand of hair.  Majid Majidi shows that he really understands the medium extremely well with his absorbing visuals using a small amount of dialogue to pepper the movie.
• This is an outstanding movie but you may need to be an alternative movie lover to like this. Mainstream movie lovers may find it slow-moving.

FTOTW ending Jan 6 (#14) – Immaculate Conception in Komodos, Zorilla, Collapse..

Animal Watching – 

1. Immaculate conception in Komodo Dragons – In an amazing research report, scientists reported that Komodo Dragons have given birth to offspring using a rare asexual reproductive technique called Parthenogenesis. I recalled from the famous movie, Jurassic Park, they exclusively breed only female dinosaurs to prevent uncontrolled reproduction, but in one scene, the character played by Sam Neill spots a dinosaur egg in the wild and remarks – “nature has figured out a way to reproduce with only females”. I think the way must have been parthenogenesis.
2. What is the world’s most poisonous creature? Our friend April Holladay answers this question. It is not what you think. Read on.
3. The world’s smelliest animal Zorilla‘s stink can be detected as far as half-a-mile away!

4. Where was the world’s first museum founded? 5. NYT’s David Pogue’s list of brilliant ideas in 2006.  Must read. 6.  Scientists studied the geological records of monsoons over the past 16,000 years to show that a weak monsoon could have been the cause of the collapse of the Tang Dynasty in China and the Mayan civilization in South America. Studying monsoon records is the latest technique that got added to archaeology. See my post on Collapse for other techniques. This monsoon idea got me thinking – did the Indus Valley civilization collapse due to monsoons? The mystery of the Indus Valley Civilization is yet to be solved. 7. On the movies front, we watched “The First Great Train Robbery” written/directed by Michael Crichton starring Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland and Leslie Ann-Down. It is a 3.5 Star movie in my opinion.

FTOTW ending Dec 30(#13) – Leadership Development, Anatomy of Fear…

Have been taking it easy on the blogging front, thanks to the holiday mood and year-end wrap-ups, and skipped the FTOTW series. Will try to finish catching up this weekend. Here is the missing installment for the last week of last year. 1. Hay Group in its most recent study on leadership best practices reached the conclusion that Executive MBAs for senior managers is a least likely to develop leaders. <Via Practice of Leadership> 2. As you all know I am deeply into neuroscience these days mainly for change management reasons. I am currently looking at how fear works. Came across this brilliant article in Discover on Fear. If you can wait, i will be publishing the neuroscience of fear once i complete my research into it and i will be paraphrasing this article. 3. First world readers may be shocked by this – Trains plied by the Indian Railways empty the human excrement from the toilets straight on to the track even today – Yikes. It looks like this neanderthal practice may soon change thanks to a biodigester being piloted on some trains that treats the excrement using bacteria and lets only chlorinated water and some methane out. Indian Railways, welcome to the 21st century, at last! <Via The Hindu> 4. Anita Ratnam, the noted celebrity dancer, was kind enough to invite me to her dance concert titled “Neelam” at Krishna Gana Sabha (Dec 30th). I had gone early to get a good seat and there was another young performer who was just finishing up. She did a good job but couldn’t see much passion. In sharp contrast, eventhough she is a senior performer, Anita’s performance was passionate and one could see that she was totally into it and throughly enjoying doing her concert. The concert had dance routines featuring Vaishnavite (referring to Lord Vishnu) religious songs like the famous Gita Govinda by Jayadeva. The music had been scored by Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil C. Gurucharan (i had covered them earlier on this blog). I really enjoyed this concert. Well done Anita Ratnam. 5. Finally managed to watch Sideways – a neat movie. Paul Giamatti has done a good job.