Ever since my first club soccer game my dad told me to “keep my head in the game.” What? What does that even mean? Obviously I’m paying attention to the game, dad.

But recently his words have taken on whole new meaning.

While watching Pakistan play a Test match versus India recently I noticed something extremely important about the way the Pakistanis were playing. Always against the ropes, looking strained at best and ready to collapse at worst. Their batsmen, bowlers, fielders everyone seemed to be playing not to lose. Their heads weren’t in the game.

Being in the game is so much more than just running with the ball. It’s about actively thinking about what you need to do and how you’re going to do it. Taking time off mentally puts you at a huge disadvantage because it allows your opponent to get a step ahead of you. Keep yourself in the game at all times and it leaves your opponent with no room for error.

We’ve all heard Yogi Berra’s infamous quote that “90% of the game is half mental” and aside from some obvious delinquencies in fractions, he was on to something. Winning the game isn’t about just being physically superior, if it was Alex Rodriguez would have 5 titles by now, its about keeping yourself in a position to win.

The analogy works well in sports but how do you translate it to all other walks of life? School? Relationships?

Personally, I’ve always been afraid of failure. Opting to take the easy route (which most often means obscurity) in order to avoid criticism. But recently I’ve come to realize the limitations I impose on myself. My dad (yeah, he’s a smart guy) always told me to go and fail something. For most of my childhood I ignored that and instead protected myself from failure by keeping it simple - do well in school, avoid girls (so I don’t get rejected), and never really fully commit yourself so you always have a way out. But I don’t think I ever grew. If anything, college has given me ample opportunity to fail and I’ve accepted the invitation with open arms.

I’ve spent a lot of time this semester doing some self-reflection. Overall, the semester has been extremely inconsistent for me. One week I’m taking care of classes extremely well, the next I’m all about my friends. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to get all of my things taken care of at once. I feel as if I’ve fallen prey to the same defeatist attitude of Pakistani cricketers. I’m not playing to succeed but to just take care of what’s in front of me. If I have midterms coming up, that’s all I’m doing. If I feel alienated from friends, then thats where my attention goes. The problem is that it’s a rather circular process. As I compensate for last week, I’m setting myself up for a new round of issues for next week, and so on…

So if 90% of the game is half mental and I’m obviously thinking about things the wrong way, it can’t be going too well. But what is the right way? It always feels as if it’s easier to make the wrong decision because its the most appealing at the time. “Sleep in and skip lecture today? Sure, I’ll have more energy to work right after.” But it never seems to work quite how I planned.

I’ve talked about this off and on with a few friends, a lot of us seem to share the same sentiments but only a select few really know how to get things done. And I personally believe my troubles lie with how I view myself. After my first semester here I told myself it was okay not to do well because I’m an engineer and I’m taking hard classes. Holding myself to a lower standard has served to only limit the amount that I challenge myself. It’s given me the ability to tell myself to just play not to get out.

I think it’s time I got my head in the game.

Now this is going to read like some emo post from some random kid who just took a break from listening to avenged sevenfold and is about to go toke up. However that is not the intention.

I have always had random thoughts about why we are here, as I suppose everyone has because it is only natural to ask why. As a child, we grow up, wondering why plants grow, why things fall to the ground, or even why jadakiss is as hard as it gets(that just can’t be right…) But there are answers to all of those questions. Plants grow because of the sun, things fall because of gravity, and jada, we’ll he’s jada. But life has no answer. That is why religion was created, as an explanation of something that cannot be explained, as an answer to why.

However, that is not good enough for me. I can’t bring myself to believe that I should act only to attain heaven, when I can’t rationally confirm that there is a heaven there. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that those individuals who have this view on life are stupid or wrong, on the contrary, I envy them. If I could truly get myself to believe that when I died, I kept on going, I would have no worries in life. But I can’t. The rational part of my brain keeps denying it. So I search on.

If not religion and an afterlife, then what. What is left for all of the non-belivers out there in terms of life goals? If I do something brilliant, like creating a universal law or managing to beat that elusive pogo stick world record, won’t I still just die, and then I don’t care what I did, because I no longer am. So that can’t be it either, personal achievement can breed short term happiness, but cannot be valued as a life goal, because it is not transient, it simply dies with me.

I want something more. I want something that at the end of the day, lives on long beyond my dying breath. The only thing that then comes to mind, is to improve the world for future generations, so that they may one day find their own solution to life’s puzzle, and finally be able to answer the question of “why?” Even if I do not value life in the same way others might, at least I can give millions the chance to make up their own minds. So I guess my aim now, is to do something that helps everybody, to act towards a universal purpose, rather than a personal one. However, I am still not satisfied with this answer, and would greatly appreciate any thoughts.

I don’t think this post in any way does justice to my full range of thoughts, for I cannot seems to put into words the final conclusion which I have reached in my own brain. However for the time being, I might as we’ll just enjoy life to its fullest, try to improve it for others, and not really worry about if there is something beyond, because if there isn’t, then in the words of one famous pig, “thats all folks!”

Ladies and gentlemen,

I have ventured into blogging thanks to some inspiration from two friends, Akshay Krishnamurthy and Kevin Huynh. Akshay had been blogging for quite a while now, but only recently did I discover that Kevin has also been getting his feet wet in the world of internet expression. He took a DeCal, a student-run class at Berkeley, about blogging, in which all the students created their own blogs, which they may or may not update now. Regardless, it’s a great way to learn about basic website-building and coding, and Kevin recommends it to anyone interested in making his/her voice known.

Just over the past week I bought a domain and a hosting service, and I have churned out some very advanced HTML code. And by “advanced” I mean “not.” I’ve just been playing around with the features, and just kind of cherishing the fact that I have my own website to experiment with. The purpose is not only to express my deepest and darkest thoughts, but also eventually to learn Javascript and PHP.  After I put some random PHP and HTML code in there, I realized it looked a little dry, at which point I consulted the handy-dandy blogger.com. Clearly it does not take rocket science to realize that my site is still in its rudimentary stages. Please, don’t judge. You can do that after I put more offensive and confrontational posts on there. But in the meantime, please check out:

www.pavyedav.com

And of course, I give credit where credit is due. Please visit my inspirations’ sites as well:

www.kiwimonk.com/blog

www.akrish.net

Thanks everyone, and don’t think I won’t figure out if you’ve visited my site or not. I got some Google AdSense on there already. Yeah, impressive. I know. Man, what can I say, I’m kind of a big deal. Okay, enough patting on the back. I didn’t do anything of worth yet. Cheers.

So I’m waiting for Google to fix it’s maps service so that I can finish my CS project. My partner and his friends are playing games to kill the time and I thought I’d write something to kill the time. Since we all just got back to school after Thanksgiving, I figured that as I’m multi-tasking (as in waiting for my project to start working), I’d write about multi-tasking.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I read a interesting article about multitasking. It was in The Atlantic, which by the way is one of the greatest magazines I’ve ever read, and it provided a lot of insight to the whole concept of multitasking. It was great because the writer (Istvan Banyai) used a lot of different voices and brought in substantial data from psychology and biology, while also contributing his own personal anecdotes and observations. I also really enjoyed it because you could tell that the writer was fairly young (I expect in late twenties) and, as a result, I related a lot more to his anecdotes making for a better experience.

Biologically, he claims that multitasking actually makes humans less intelligent as it hinders our memory. Multitasking essentially limits how our brains develop (a process which proceeds until twenty-plus years of age) and makes us less capable of remembering things. Personally, I can see this happening to me as I’ll be working on one thing, shift my focus to something else, and then when I go return to the first activity, I’ll have to back track a little bit because I’ve forgotten what exactly I did. Maybe that’s not the same, but he cited some biological data to validate his facts. Banyai argues that we’re actually less efficient when we multitask because we, “chop competing tasks into pieces, set them in different piles, then hunt for the pile we’re interested in, pick up its pieces, review the rules for putting the pieces back together, and then attempt to do so, often quite awkwardly.”

Banyai used an interesting analogy about human brains. We use our brains as we use the most technologically advanced devices. Before the computer age, our brains were seen as beakers of chemicals (i.e. they worked relatively magically), then during the major physics discoveries our brains were very mechanical. Now we compare our brains to CPU’s and think that they should be able to work like CPU’s. Obviously our mental facilities are very different from computers and we shouldn’t think that we can think the same way that computers work.

And obviously multi-tasking can be dangerous. We all know that talking on the phone while driving significantly increases the chance of an accident and there are several other scenarios where this is true.

So am I going to stop? Probably not. I’ve grown up with multi-tasking; I listen to music while doing homework, I work on other assignments while waiting for my code to compile, I talk to my friends in between physics problems, and I’ve done all these things since middle school. It’s in most of our natures to multi-task but I think we should all be aware of it and try to take tasks one at a time.

If you have Atlantic online membership you can read the article here.

Fuel cell technology is still a long ways off. Honda’s fuel cell prototype will set you back over a million dollars - and it certainly doesn’t run like a similarly priced Ferrari.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks regarding fuel cell technology is the production and storage of hydrogen. Most people simply assume that you get hydrogen from water - put some electrodes in water, pass some current and you’ll see the hydrogen bubbling out. But that’s not where we get our hydrogen. Perhaps ironically (from a warming perspective), the hydrogen that is produced usually comes from the combustion of methane (CH4 + O2 –> CO2+2H2). And that’s assuming it’s complete combustion, incomplete combustion releases CO into the environment. Furthermore, consider that a sizable portion of our energy comes from coal plants (see CARMA) and if you have to get a lot of new electricity to produce the heat needed to make millions of tons of hydrogen to run all of our cars - the carbon pollution savings are not as great as you’d hope, if they even exist. (This by the way, is the same downfall as that for corn based ethanol. While the corn itself reduces the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, producing and burning ethanol puts carbon back into the atmosphere.)

But researches at Penn State were able to create hydrogen using bacteria. Essentially they utilized a bacterial fuel cell that performs electrolysis on a sample of organic matter (in the case of the research they used acetic acid). One of the biggest benefits is that with the help of the bacteria you don’t need to supply as much outside energy as you would otherwise, cutting down the amount of work we need to put in to produce hydrogen. And while other lingering technical hurdles are sure to keep fuel cells off of the mass market for quite some time this is definitely a step in the right direction.

Story from Wired

For anyone interested in examining the CO2 output of various power plants across the globe here’s a great site to check out: http://carma.org

Up until recently I think emissions from power plants were really overlooked. Everyone focuses on the effects of oil and the need to switch over to hybrids, plug-ins, and eventually fuel cells but if all the electricity we produce is powered by dirty plants then simply changing our automobile fuel won’t do much.

I for one hope we don’t add any new red dots onto the American map (note the concentration around the Eastern US and China).

After seeing what happened to ankit on Tuesday i decided i should get to the airport a bit early for my Thursday 8am flight and since everybody kept telling me that the airport was going to be packed at that time i decided to leave around 6ish. I somehow slept through all of my alarms and didn’t get up till 650, woke pav up and rushed to the airport. Luckily there was no traffic and security went by pretty fast so i actually ended up being on time. The moral of this is if you’re going to leave for the airport one hour before your flight, make sure its really early in the morning.

In other news i ended up watching Oprah on Thanksgiving because my parents were watching it and found some really interesting stories i wanted to share. The first is of an 11 year old girl who upon hearing about the aids crisis with children in Africa immediately took all of her own money and adopted a child with aids for a year. This girl was born with a rare liver disease and had to go through two liver transplants in the span of one year. Instead of accepting gifts like flowers from well wishers she asked them to donate to a foundation she created for the aids children. Imagine that, you’re on a hospital bed getting one liver after another and yet you’re thinking about helping others in any way that you can. Former President Clinton heard about this and personally went to her high school and brought her to the Oprah show. Some anonymous person who was traveling with Clinton donated half a million to this girls foundation. What really stood out to me was how unselfish this was on the part of the girl, she had no other motive but to help people in need.  I have always tried to think for the better of other people and not always about myself which is why i admire people like this little girl.

Another nice story i found from the show was of a website called www.kiva.org . Entrepreneurs in this country have all kinds of financial aid available to them to make their small company successful, but what about the entrepreneurs of third world countries? Thats where this website comes in, it provides a place where anybody can loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. The most amazing aspect of the site is the fact that 97% of the loans have been paid back, that is quite amazing considering people aren’t really sure of where they are loaning this money. Its people like the creators of this non profit company that show me how the web 2.0 generation can be used to help out people in need.

There was also a piece on the school Andre Agassi has created in Vegas which ill write about later. Check it out here if you want http://www.agassifoundation.org/ .

Hope everyone is having a good break.

-Saumil

I’m sitting at home watching the lakers game against the Bucks. Soon, I will recover my files from my network hard drive at home. My laptop still isn’t working, and I don’t think it will. I can’t get the hard drive slot to open now because one of the screws I put back in is broken and can’t open with a screwdriver. Sad story, but a good lesson -never ever play flip cup with vodka. Again sorry for keeping you awake so late spray I didn’t realize. Apologies to the house and chandani as well.

I’m using my mom’s laptop that she left at home before she went to India. I cleaned it up and it works pretty well, it’s the same fujitsu laptop I had but a different model, so I’ll probably just have this till December Break before i get a new laptop. Thinking about a mac. Also thinking about how etnanine is just turning into an open-ended chatroom for us in the house. I’m gonna peel to the couch with mah blanket to watch the rest of the game…

-Prashant

I got home for thanksgiving break a couple hours ago and I’m really excited for this break. It was really nice to see my brother again (I hadn’t seen him since May, 2007), and he actually came with my dad to pick me up and met some of my housemates which was pretty cool too. My mom baked some cake which is looking really good right now as I’m quite famished. But I’m just really excited to get a lot of sleep and recover from this stupid sickness that I have right now. Plus I’ll get to see all of my family and high school friends which is always good.

Unfortunately, there is a crap-load of work that I need to do during this break so I don’t really know if it will be all that relaxing. I have to catch up in all of my classes and I have a comp. sci. project due the Thursday after break. It’s going to be tough finding time for all my work when my mom has already scheduled like 3 things a day for the rest of the vacation. So I guess we’ll see how much I end up getting done.

Hope everyone has a great thanksgiving break, where ever you may be.

akshay

p.s. i just read a really interesting article about multi-tasking. I’ll try to write about it sometime soon (if i get around to it)

we have a beer pong table.