Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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Two poems, yes I have read a few from the book, One Hundred and One Famous Poems by Roy J. Cook, with links to where I got them from on the web.
Not in Vain by Emily Dickinson

If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.

The Builders by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

All are architects of Fate,
Working in these walls of Time;
Some with massive deeds and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low;
Each thing in its place is best;
And what seems but idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well,
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house, where Gods may dwell,
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.

One of the first interesting experiences I had in this project at Princeton was meeting great men. I had never met very many great men before. But there was an evaluation committee that had to try to help us along, and help us ultimately decide which way we were going to separate the uranium. This committee had men like Compton and Tolman and Smyth and Urey and Rabi and Oppenheimer on it. I would sit in because I understood the theory of how our process of separating isotopes worked, and so they’d ask me questions and talk about it. In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there’s this other possibility we have to consider against it.

   So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn’t repeat and emphasize his point. Finally at the end, Tolman, who’s the chairman, would say, “Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it’s true that Compton’s argument is t he best of all, and now we have to go ahead.”

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best - summing it all up - without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.

Noted from the audio version of “Surely You are joking Mr. Feynman” by Richard P. Feynman, copied from this Russian website.

Epigrams on Programming by Alan Perlis are one liners on programming and Sutras mean thought threads, it is appropriate to call them Programming Sutras. The link to complete Epigrams on Programming by Alan Perlis and here are a selected few:

10. Get into a rut early: Do the same processes the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference (!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.

12. Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.

15. Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.

19. A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.

31. Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

43. In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

100. We will never run out of things to program as long as there is a single program around.
And immediately I made my peace with the fact that my career field is here to stay.

117. It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?

Wordle.net is a Java applet which creates a tag cloud based on input text, increasing the text size for more frequent words. The arrangement of the text is very appealing visually.

I gave Wordle this blog’s titles till date, finetuned a few setting and voila, a visualization of what the general focus of last 2-3 years of my writing\blogging has been about.

You can click on the above image for a large version

The Java applet with the above data
I would not get to use the Unicode “non-breaking space” character, so silicon and valley show up as two words above.
It is created by Jonathan Feinberg, who works at the Collaborative User Experience (CUE) group at IBM Research.

Thanks to Ned for pointing Wordle out.