ankurb – Page 200 – Ankur Banerjee's personal blog

Gyaan.in

Coming soon…a forum for quizzers at Gyaan.in. To be accompanied by offline meets under the same group for encouraging and nurturing quizzing in Delhi. Expect this somewhere around the end of February. (Because I expect that by then the school exams would have finished, thus allowing more people to join this initiative.)

This has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time – something related to quizzing – and I’m happy to see Rishav and Prateek spur me on to do this, along with Karmanya who I roped in later. Full details would be up later when the site is launched so I’ll keep it hush-hush right now. I was pleasantly surprised to find such a ‘premium’ domain name hadn’t been snapped by anyone yet!

About the placeholder pic: No, that’s not our actual logo. That will be revealed later at the launch. This is just a placeholder. Had a tough time finding out a usable logo. Why is that even after being such a best-selling book, there are hardly any high-resolution Hogwarts logos available?! (To clarify further: No, the actual logo has nothing to do with Hogwarts. Although it’s kinda poetic that there are four ‘founding members’ as of now for this initiative. I wanna be the snake-guy.)

I’m leaving town for a cousin’s wedding today. Will be offline for a few days. For the ones who’ve their school exams coming up, wish you luck!

Digital Drugs

Hindustan Times writers continue with their sheep-like-astonishment-on-seeing-sunrise when it comes to computers. Honestly, this article was so lame that I had to mention it somehow even in this unrelated post. (I mention it because of that guy ranting about things getting digitized. That article is so nonsensical that I won’t even bother refuting it.)

OK, so we know that things are getting digitized. Everything from paperbacks to laundry lists. A quirky attempt in a similar vein has been to create ‘digital drugs’. Conceptually, has been around for a long time in the form of binaural beats. From the Free Encyclopedia we all love…

Binaural beats or binaural tones are auditory processing artifacts, or apparent sounds, the perception of which arises in the brain independent of physical stimuli. The brain produces a phenomenon resulting in low-frequency pulsations in the loudness of a perceived sound when two tones at slightly different frequencies are presented separately, one to each of a subject’s ears, using stereo headphones.

That’s a prerequisite – a stereo headphone (standard speakers won’t be able to recreate the effect properly). Binaural beats can be quite relaxing – in fact, I had tried them out earlier. I was intrigued, then, to come across this news story on ‘digital drugs’ being created using binaural beats. (I know. I’ve delayed this post a month too many, haven’t I?)

Could it actually be true? Can a ‘simple’ digital thingamjig mashup of sounds get you as high as Towelie? As it turns out, it can’t; although I’m damn sure the creators have been able to increase their sales exponentially simply by making this overstatement. It doesn’t take you nowhere as close to as being high, but it does put you into a deep, relaxed sleep. Handy for taking a break during exam prep, methinks. And the way it works, the final few minutes snap you out of it. You can also find many other tracks using binaural beats which can actually help you relax.