Research team

This is the team that I work with at the lab for advanced computing. From left: Sarah, Susanne, Mike, me, Dave. Dave and I work at UIC and the rest work at the computing institute at University of Chicago. The location of this pic is a restaurant on UofC campus.

The strangest secret!

Whats the strangest secret known to mankind? its this single sentence that can be interpreted in a zillion ways. It says:

"We become what we think about"

Thats the the powerful truth that separates the men from the boys; gods from the humans and humans from the demons and demons from the ... (there is ofcourse no end to the classification of all things that ever existed in the minds of men).

I had been reading James Allen's "As a man thinketh"; found it pretty interesting; its got the same things that today's personality dev gurus chatter about; Infact the book allegedly spun off the whole personality development industry. It is a very short volume (only 27 pages in all) and is available as a free e-book from http://www.asamanthinketh.net/index.html

The book talks about how our thoughts influence our actions and hence create "circumstances" which are the building blocks of life (as in life experience). It therefore follows that our thoughts dictate the quality of our lives; everyone thinks we get to choose what we think about.. well, no quite; do you really have control over what you want (or dont want) to think about? think again.

Google Spreadsheets!

Alrighty, I got an invitation to try out google spreadsheets (you can get it too if you sign up on their page spreadsheet.google.com), and lo and behold! here is an online spread sheet app with a loads of fun! The most striking feature is online-collaboration; ofcourse, an online spreadsheet must dedicate its life to collaboration. I guess thats the best use of this application; I wouldnt use an online-spreadsheet to store my company's financial figures; definitely not; but sure I'd like to collaborate with someone accross the world to get some figures right! and once that is figured out, I can download it as .xls (I wish they supported .sxc the oocalc format too). That wud be the primary use of an online spreadsheet.