List of 10 things I love to do online

1. I recently came across a site goodreads.com; this site has a vast amount of books to read. I find it great to manage sometime to read other people’s mind; and the collection of quotes in this site is just awesome.
2. I seldom browse through Blogger’s blogs of note to get a peek into people’s creativity and indulgence in various aspects of life.
3. I seldom check the top trends in twitter (for the day) and click on the term that interests me to find out all the related opinions, comments and facts about the same.
4. I have fine tuned myself for using dropbox this year; and I found it a great way to keep my data stored (and shared, when I want) in a safe way.
5. I love to spur my mind by having a peek at the slideshow of the highest rated photos on flickr for past 1 week.
6. I love to send my colleagues e-cards. I have been using 123greetings for this ad infinitum.
7. I frequently surf scribd to find out ancient medical books and literature that is hard to find in paper prints these days. There are many such sites but I have found this one to be the best.
8. I frequently subscribe to the rss list of noteworthy medical journals and sites so that I get my daily dose in the inbox.
9. I love to check for the latest surgical techniques by absorbing the videos in youtube.
10. Facebook. The love of our lives. The affair continues, though the sheen has started to fade a bit.

Be in Elysium. Pack your bags.

Traveling is tantalizing. The crude joy of packing up your essentials and hitting the road with a broad grin on a sun-soaked morning has fewer matches. Some people revel at road-trips, other at planned vacations of snow-capped peaks. For me, the joy of unplanned voyage comes with biggest foudroyant. The primrose path of traveling is immune to comparisons; for some, it is therapeutic, and for others it is exploratory.

The sight of mud-coated sideways, the smell of pollens in the air, the sensation of having taken a new birth – traveling enriches your experience of life by studding it with much required indulgences. You travel to find new paths, to discover the places that have legends around them and to create some enriched infographics in the visual cortex of your brain. When you travel you seem to be the best choice for the practical illustration of theory of relativity, for time vapors away fast before you start appreciating the bubbles in your soul.

Traveling is the time tested turn-on for the hedonist. You get caught in a bundle of halcyon every time you come across a flock of sheep; you feel soaked in the divine titillation every time your gaze gets fixed on the sight of a solemn tree with ear-splitting twitter of birds. Traveling is such a teaser, with insane intensity. The hedonics of palmy days remains forever in the memory-centre of your brain; traveling comes with long-lasting effects. Give the primordial site of your personality a relish, fasten your boots and be a vagabond.

Six Degrees of Separation.

I have always been enthralled by the theory that any 2 people in the world are 6 steps away from being known to each other; and these 6 steps mean 6 people. The world is so small then; so beautifully small. And I must bow to my friends and superiors with enviable data analytical capabilities, with strong statistical abilities and with a pivotal passion for mathematics, that we have been given this social finding that sounds so spiritual in its face value. A beggar who is forced to share the pavement with the army of stray dogs is just 6 people away from knowing Bill Gates; does that causes ripples? Is this the ecstasy of hope or of disillusion?

In 2007 study was carried out by Microsoft employees, Jure Leskovec and Eric Horvitz, who examined a chain of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. They found the average path length among Microsoft Messenger users to be 6.6; pretty close to the theory of six degree of separation? Huh.

According to a study of 5.2 billion social media relationships in twitter, it was found that the average distance on Twitter is 4.67. On average, about 50% of people on Twitter are only four steps away from each other, while nearly everyone is five steps away.

In another work, researchers have shown that the average distance of 1,500 random users in Twitter is 3.435. They calculated the distance between each pair of users using all the active users in Twitter. It heralds an intellectual debate by galvanizing the thought that an unusually active person might be separated by a number less than 6 to any other person of the world. So, if you aim to make the world a close-knit family, start making the right noise, at the right time, to the right person.

The data team of Facebook data released two papers in November 2011 which document that amongst all facebook users at the time of research (they studied about 721 million users with 69 billion mutual friendships) there is an average distance of 4.74.

It means the nature wanted us all to remain accessible to each other. It is us who played the bad game and created rifts in between humans, social lives, nations etc. You must agree that six is a small number eventually; the onus on us is to break the bar of this number in the way that helps the society most. Do you find a possibility of six reducing to five or may be four in the coming years with the aggressive might of social media spectrums and easy availability of communication machines? Shouldn’t politicians or think tanks of the nations think laterally and use this information to develop a system where the underprivileged gets introduced to the person keen enough to help at that moment of time. At least in India, deserving people have to spend a lot of time in trying to get a break just because they don’t know the right person; can an algorithm be devised for the practical usages?

The world is a small space; let’s shrink it more by knowing everyone. And at the places when knowing everyone does not suffice, let’s help everyone to give the human relationship it’s real meaning back.

You can't censor my thoughts. Can you?

Why do people have to judge incessantly? Why do people have insecurities that drive them to think in egregiously biased manners? Why cant people just sit back and observe with an open mind?

Can you really imagine your posts, your pics being subjected to scrutiny before you are able to upload them? To me it sounds something bizarre to say the least, and I am sure most of the geeks out there would share an opinion like that. To deal with a small bunch of nuisance-makers, this would rather be a tough blow to the ordinary social media user.

Unpractical, flawed and undemocratic.

And I just read at one of the credible portals that Indian ministers want the scrutiny process to be done manually. So if that ever comes to see the light of the day, the honest taxpayer would be someone at highest loss. There are a lot of brighter ways to spend the national resources; invest in strengthening infrastructure, create more chances for the betterment of life-quality, make food cheaper and most widely available, check out the tentacles of corruption, fight inflation, give wings to the dreams of underprivileged and what not?

Our facebook profiles should not get unnecessarily poked; the right to express must not be compromised. More than 35 million tweets are sent by Indians per day and you want to scan those using human methods before they get posted. That typically mars the basic usability of such commendable web portal.

In the times of calamities, twitterati have used the site to provide commendable help resources in very short time. Facebook provides a working vent for all of us suffering with emotional fatigue. Now just imagine, can you really wait for your family album to get a nod from some of the authorities before you decide to share it with your close friends?

Please don’t snatch our rights of speaking and be heard to. It would not help to screen our social media content before we post them. Not only does it sound rude, it also defies some of the basic rights that we possess as humans.

A Doctor and A Tweet.

Twitter is something that always astonishes me. If facebook is akin to a coffee house, twitter is no less than a parliament. The joy is boundless the moment you come across 140 characters typed by someone you hold immense respect for. You get to know the real thing, no media manoeuvrings, no added floss or deprived gloss. You don’t have to gain the permission to get a glance over anybody’s view, except for the random souls who believe in ironies – being on twitter and keeping your tweets protected. There aren’t a lot of doctors that use twitter regularly; I have came across a lot of profiles that belong to the health care fraternity, but to my dismay, either the profiles were made in the quest to keep pace with the advancing social media engineering where the user had made little efforts to keep and stay updated, or the profiles were fake identities, created by marketing czars to advertise about the newest kid in the town of wonder diets.

If you want to be on twitter and make the most of it, you have to keep on tweeting. Tweeting is expressing your thoughts, ideas and observations in 140 characters or less at a time. The more you tweet, the more buzz you create and more credible your online presence becomes. Twitter is a practical and powerful tool as it gives you the power to express your thought and send it to any chosen user in a moment of time. You can retweet to spread the thoughts expressed by any other user as well; your timeline (the synagogue of facebook wall) gives you a compact view of all the tweets posted by people you choose to follow. Like a tweet? Now you have plenty of options; retweet it or put in a reply or type your views and send it to your choice of end listeners. However, things don’t work on auto-pilot mode all the time; you have the power to plan the delivery of your tweets but you have to browse every now and then to know about the twitter trends. What is a twitter trend? A twitter trend is a word or phrase that is been most talked about in the world of twitter. There are different twitter trends for various geographical locations and are hugely inspire by the events happening in various places. Did I hear someone say twitter is the public spittoon? It is indeed a myopic view. Twitter opens countless minds in front of you; the more you read, the more you learn.