AC/DC

OK, so this one is really weird but I can't hep myself from penning this, so here goes..

There are tons of analogies for men and women, Martian and Venusians being a very popular one. How about AC and DC?

Women are like AC with lows and highs, peaks and pits, men by comparison more like DC and less fluctuating and more constant.

Points to ponder
- Debate about what is better, AC or DC would never cease
- AC has alternating polarity while DC has constant polarity
- AC magnitude and direction is variable while both are constant for DC voltage
- AC is easy to easy to step up or down
- AC current is capable of transformation (due to induced emf) unlike DC current
- AC current has more losses compared to DC
- Nothing can stop the AC, not even a straight wall .. eh .. capacitor

The clinching evidence ..
- AC currents can be more dangerous than similar levels of DC current since the alternating fluctuations can cause the heart to lose coordination
- Analysis of AC system always involved complex numbers, while DC is only a real number

One of my favorite analogies

I find that one of the best analogies of all time is that of the six blind men and the elephant.

Blind men think of an elephant as a pillar, rope, tree branch, fan, wall or pipe depending on which part of the elephant they touched. Each is right and yet at the same time also wrong. The concept of right and wrong is very much entwined with the context of relativity. What is right for one isn't necessary so for the other. So often, a part truth is actually closer to falsehood and causes more harm than good.

I find this analogy also applicable in the context of my work.

Eachdomain (Dev, QA, Docs, Marketing, Sales, PM - etc.) happen to be the (not so blind) men looking at the product from their perspective alone. Losing sight of the whole picture, sometimes by choice, sometimes otherwise. Each concentrates in understanding their part of the picture and executing on it really well. Frequently there are disagreements between teams because each comes from a different perspective depending on the function they have touched. Each team needs to get deep into their stuff and make it strong. The executive team needs to take a whole picture view and delineate the elephant (product) for what it is, not a sum of its part but much more complete whole.

On a side note, when Sr. Management goes deep into one aspects, it does so at the risk of losing the complete picture

When the domain experts start looking too much at the big picture/top view, they do so at the risk of leaving one aspect weak.

Nothing has changed..

Its been a year since I moved to my new job and nothing has changed.

I continue to miss my old place and am still in love with my (not so) new job. The two places continue to be as diametrically opposite as ever.

Its been quite a ride and I have survived so far .. and look forward to another year of roller-coaster fun ..

Opposites attract?

Some people we like because they are so much like us,
Some people we like because they are so different from us?

And the other way round works just as well, I know of many people who are very similar to me and yet I don’t fancy them too much, as well as people quite the opposite of me and those who I hold high in my regard.

It is neither a straightforward case of likes attracting or opposites complementing each other.

I guess this has more to do with the inherent qualities of a person rather than likes attracting or repelling.

If people exhibit traits similar to ours, but those qualities that we don’t care too much about, it’s a case of similar people not getting along well.
If people embody traits that we look up to, even though we might lack them ourselves, it’s a case of opposites attracting

Generation Gap

I wonder often about generation gap, its origin and impact.

A generation gap exists when different people (due to age, circumstances etc) have a different sense of responsibilities, privileges, values and behavior, both for themselves and for others.

I believe that these differences in themselves are harmless and what causes the conflict is duplicity of standards and applying different parameters for self and others.

In the traditional parent-teenager conflict, the parents have a different sense of what is right for them vs the kids. Its OK for them to eat junk food, drink, smoke whatever but they recoil at the thought of their kids emulating them. Same goes the other way round, if parents start dressing/behaving the way the kids do, kids would find it very embarrassing. Between siblings,
the youngsters want to enjoy the privilege of being spoilt and pampered and yet they do not want it to come with any strings attached, with any list of dos-and-donts or I-told-you-so. Elders on the other hand want the younger siblings to listen to them and do as they are told without letting them experiment and learn on their own like they did years ago.

The conflict arises when each side has a distinct image of how the other should behave and yet oddly they do not want to conform to the same image themselves. This duplicity is what causes the conflict, not the differences.