June 7th was Friedman Day

As you probably guess this day is named after Milton Friedman. But what exactly does this day signify? Trust me the answer is just as interesting as the question...

Friedman Day is the day in the year when Americans have earned enough money to pay the full costs of Government. This is calculated by the American Institute of Economic Research and will vary each year.
This year the Friedman Day was on the 7th of July.

This is not the Tax Foundation's Tax Freedom Day, when Americans' aggregate income collectively finances all municipal, state, and national taxes. And this is where the significance lies. Friedman Day includes not just the income from taxes but also other sources of Goverment income. It also includes the money government borrows to pay for spending that isn't covered by tax revenue. So Friedman day will be a few days after the Tax Freedom Day.
Both these could be on the same day when there is no deficit.
The larger the deficit the larger will be the gap between these 2 days. Interesting eh...

With over 1.8 trillion dollars in deficit.. expectedly the gap this year could be wider...

Here's an interesting link on Friedman: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard43.html

iPhone3GS is on its way!! Go sign up Now!!!

And Apple seems to have sealed every hole in the iPhone with the Apple 3GS.

Its got everything you always wanted:

1. Cut, Copy and Paste

2. Video Recording

3. 3 Megapixel Camera with Autofocus.

4. A search feature to search through everything on your phone: Apps, Contacts, Msgs and mails...

And its touted to be atleast 2.5 times faster. Get to you apple store before the queues get too long..

The Palm Pre is out

I wanted this phone to come out so badly, simply because the iPhone was locked to AT&T.
Thats not the case anymore, the iphone is available unlocked. But now the question is, is it good enough? Certainly Not!! is what the Palm pre would retort to that.

Palm has finally cracked open what has been Apple's exclusive domain for the last 2 years.
And they seem to have figured a way to do it all better, setting a whole new standard for touch phones.

Let me summarize the key pros and cons and leave you with cnn's detailed review of the product:

Pro's:
1) Multitasking : You can run more than one app simultaneously.
2) Physical full QWERTY Keyboard that slides out
3) Cut, Copy and Paste. It is rumoured that an Apple release this year will bring this feature to the iphone as well. But for now its something iphone users can only hope for.
4) Multi touch screen - You can pinch to zoom in and out just like the iphone. Its really amazing how its taken so long for others to catch with Apple. But they seem to have finally. It almost seemed like an impossible task at one point. :)
5) Search : For applications or contacts or mails. Thats a cool feature i wish the iphone also had.
6) Integrated GPS
7) You can use the phone as a usb device. This can be painful on the iphone.
to list a few...

Con's:
1) Battery life isn't the greatest
2) No Onscreen keyboard yet.
3) Application catalog is still in beta. Not comparable to iTunes.
4) No video recording. Not yet available on the iphone either.
5) No Support for flash yet.
6) Only 8Gb of storage at present.

Apple likes to place themselves way ahead of competition. So it will be interesting to see what they turn up with. For us its great news!! :)

Where 2 Tech waves in Google wave

Found this interesting link on the google blog from the brains behind google wave..
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html

Mashable also has a few interesting links on google wave.

Techcrunch has this exciting article as well.

Well.. atleast its creating a lotta noise.. enough to counter all the Bing noise i suppose..

Time for the next Wave..

If you did begin wondering why you need to have so many different logins for your email, web messenger, social networking, instant messaging, blogging, micro-blogging etc. I guess its time somebody wrapped all this up for you in a single login.

And who better than Google to do it for you. Welcome Google Wave!! Googles biggest launch in a long time.

Google wave is an open source based real-time communication platform, that will bring everything you will ever need onto a single platform from project management to micro-blogging.
Like facebook, it will allow users to develop their own applications which can be embedded freely on any page.
It will be real time, so you can see the message being typed by another user as he types it.
Sounds pretty exciting..
We will have to wait and see if Google will give us a radically new interface experience, getting rid of the "usual" google feel for once.

Carnatic Music : Understanding it

I have enjoyed carnatic classical music ever since i can remember. Having learnt both violin and vocal for several years it has always been something that has been close to heart and something that I have enjoyed immensely. Having learnt an instrument, decoding the music into its component swaras(musical notes) came naturally to me. And I never really did bother to learn the theory behind this form of music and how it has been structured.

When i was discussing this recently with a friend I realized how much more enjoyable it would be to listen to a concert, if one had the basic understanding even if one had not studied music.

So i decided to go one level deeper, and as i do so put my learnings down here for anyone interested in carnatic music. And hopefully I will learn a little more from some of you the more knowledgeable readers of this blog.

The Basics

The 2 main components of Carnatic music are the Raaga or Melody and the Thaala or the Rhythm/beat.

Raagas are built on top of the 7 basic swaras : Sa, Ri ,Ga, Ma, Pa, Da, Ni denoted in this article by S, R, G, M , P, D, N respectively. These are the western equivalents of Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La & Ti respectively.

S and P are prakruti swaras and have no variations.

The rest of the swaras have many variations, some overlapping over each other as shown below.

By comparison, using the common tonic "C" for a western musician

Carnatic		Hindustani	Western E.T.
Sa		Sa	"C"
Shuddha Ri	"Ri 1"	Komal Re	"D♭"
Chatusruti Ri	"Ri 2"	Shuddha Re	"D"
Shatsruti Ri	"Ri 3"	(Komal Ga)	"D♯"
Shuddha Ga	"Ga 1"	(Shuddha Re)	"D"
Sadharana Ga	"Ga 2"	Komal Ga	"E♭"
Antara Ga	"Ga 3"	Shuddha Ga	"E"
Shuddha Ma	"Ma 1"	Shuddha Ma	"F"
Prati Ma	"Ma 2"	Teevra Ma	"F♯"
Pa		Pa	"G"
Shuddha Dha	"Dha 1"	Komal Dha	"A♭"
Chatusruti Dha	"Dha 2"	Shuddha Dha	"A"
Shatsruti Dha	"Dha 3"	(Komal Ni)	"A♯"
Shuddha Ni	"Ni 1"	(Shuddha Dha)	"A"
Kaisika Ni	"Ni 2"	Komal Ni	"B♭"
Kakali Ni	"Ni 3"	Shuddha Ni	"B"

Source: Wikipedia

As shown above, the swaras R,G, D and N have 3 variations and the swara M has 2 variations.

Raagas are essentially combinations of these swaras and their variations. Each raaga is represented by an Aarohanam(ascending sequence) and Avarohanam(descending sequence).

There are 72 ragas where the Avarohanam when reversed will give us the Aarohanam. Or the Avarohanam traces the steps back from the Aarohanam.

For ex:

Aarohanam = SRGMPDNS

Avarohanam = SNDPMGRS

These 72 ragas are called Melakarta Ragas. I will explain how we arrive at this number 72 in my next post.