Silicon Valley Diary

The Highest-Income Counties in the United States

I thought this was pretty interesting. Santa Clara county is among the places where people earn a lot of money. (10th on the median household income list). Wikipedia gives a list of the highest-income counties and many of the counties around Bay Area figure prominently on the list. I've heard from a lot of friends that the county North of Golden Gate is extremely rich and guess what it tops the list. San Mateo, Santa Clara and Contra Costa counties close by also feature in the rankings. I guess having so many engineers around helps these numbers.

Ofcourse that doesn't mean that the median-income people like myself would ever be able to afford a half million dollar home here. This post on the Monster Blog talks about a similar problem in another affluent county.

A feeling called home

This weekend I went to this restaurant in Mountain View called Amber India Restaurant. In my honest opinion they have the best Indian lunch buffet in the Valley. Their selection includes pani-puri, bhel, kheer and many others. Everything tastes good despite their efforts to go easy on the greasy. It has been awarded an A grade by Zagat for the past many years and is consistently rated among the top 100 restaurants in the Bay Area. Amber even serves shevayachi-kheer like my mother and occassionally soft warm gulab jamuns with just the right amount of sugar.

And my favourite part about visiting Amber... hearing my mother tongue at every other table. :) What is home afterall? Is it hearing the language that your mom spoke to you when you didn't speak any? Not to get overly Freudian, but could that be why you one is attracted to women who have features similar to one's mother? We are all seeking a feeling called home and the power of imprinting that they sing so many paens about in every Biology textbook (and the odd Tom and Jerry cartoon) may encourage us to create a home similar to our first home.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

As a kid I wanted to become a physicist. I always picked the physics books from the library and read about relativity, quantum mecahnics and these other difficult sciences all the time. I breathed and ate physics and astronomy. I even propounded a theory that went against the Big Bang Theory in class 10.(totally dumb in retrospect) An uncle of mine convinced me of the futility of pursuing it as a career and how some of the best astrophysicists don't get tenure positions and some other scary stories. Beyond that point it didnt really matter what else I decided to do. Electronics and Telecommunication was just my way of following the herd and jumping into the well because everyone before me had done the same. It was a really good decision though, because a lot of the most interesting science that has come about recently has been in computing and it allowed me to be close to all the action.

Most people at the Quiz Club back at COEP used to know me as the guy who loved Richard Feynman. And I truly did... As a teenager I used to love watching this program called Horizon on BBC. One of the shows was an interview with Richard Feynman, which introduced me to his extrordinary genius. I was completely bowled over by an analogy he gave comparing science and chess. The connection he drew was comparing the scientific process to sitting beside a chess board and observing the pieces without knowing any rules and then figuring them out. The interview was eventually converted into a book titled "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". The book though doesn't seem half as interesting as the real Feynman.

Today though I chanced upon the same show on Google Video and couldn't believe my good fortune. If you love science, you'd love this show. Check it out here.

India Happening

My friend Vaibhav started a new venture online called India Happening recently. It is a social bookmarking site where you can share bookmarks about India. I have been visiting regularly and adding some bookmarks myself too, so do pay a visit and do the same as well.

My most recent bookmark was a recent article from Reuters about the recent rise of a coffee culture in India and how Starbucks probably missed out on a huge market that now has players like Barista and Cafe Coffee Day. You still cannot get Seattle's second best coffee in India. SBUX sucks! :)

Ofcourse there are other people who post some interesting bookmarks as well. One I liked was from Vaibhav... a story of an American born Indian girl's arranged marriage experiences from the New York Times. Also if you want to read more about American Born Desis you could try this other bookmark I posted a few weeks ago.

Do share some nice bookmarks with me soon... Happy Bookmarking! :)

Last weekend I went to the Exploratorium in San Francisco with some of my friends. Do check out pictures from that visit by clicking on the picture. The Exploratorium is among the best science musuems I have been to. Initially we didn't plan on staying there for more than 2 hours but we all got so engrossed in all the fun experiments there, that we ended up staying until closing time. It is housed in the Palace of Fine Arts complex, a sight you would recognize from the song "Chunari Chunar" from Biwi Number 1. I admit that was a totally forgettable Bollywood musical minus that one song for me.

Also went to Ghirardelli Square... I was under the impression that Cannery Row was Ghirardelli's. The chocolate brownie ice-cream sundae was phenomenally good. If you happen to go to the city, definitely pay them a visit and enjoy the pure decadent indulgence. Obviates all the exercise you did for a week, but it's still worth it.

Exposing the Wine Snobs

Although I stay an hour away from Napa, I've never gone wine tasting. (There are reasons for that but I won't go into that for now.) What really got me started on wine was "Sideways". The protagonist in the movie likens himself to a Pinot grape as opposed to a Merlot, because the Pinot needs tender care and a perfect mix of environmental conditions to grow, while the Merlot thrives no matter how harsh the conditions. In fact the two title characters in the movie are modeled after the two varieties of grapes. Guess what happened after the movie, the sales of Pinot Noir sky-rocketed.

I used to be a wannabe wine connoisseur. Something I read today though made me rethink my desire to join the club. So to the funny article that made me lose my religion... "The Wine Snob Scandal". It talks about a PhD student Brochet who wrote a thesis entitled "Taste: A Study in the Representation of Chemical Substances in the Arena of Consciousness." Brochet played a devious game with all these wine-tasters who are probably paid a lot of money to get drunk. One experiment he tried was to give the tasters a white wine which evoked the standard responses of "fresh, dry, honeyed, lively". When he served the very SAME wine colored with a red tasteless dye the usual adjectives "intense, spicy, supple, deep" for red wines showed up in their descriptions. The same wine served from different bottles also produced different responses, playing on the biases of the tasters. If you don't know what these adjectives stand for and couldn't really sense a hint of cheese in that last bottle of Chardonnay, don't worry most of the experts don't seem know a whole lot either. Just sip away and fake it! "I sense a touch of strawberry... exquisite!"