Trinbago Techie

Watching the TTIGF forum has become a yearly tradition for me. Somehow I did not keep myself in the loop and only realized this morning that this was happening this morning and yesterday. I normally blog about the forum ( 2021 , 2022 , 2023 ) and live tweet. I have always been pleased to participate in something that can only help the tech space and country move forward. I am relaxing this Friday morning in my quiet village in Trinidad and I have started this blog post. My mom made pigeon peas and chicken pelau for lunch today. Shortly I will fill my belly with a serving of that and then wait for the live stream to start. Meanwhile I will browse the TTIGF website. The theme this year is "the internet we want". I want an internet that is open. I want an internet that is affordable. For example, the 2GB mobile data I sometimes buy used to be valid for a month but is now only valid for a week. This came like a thief in the night without much warning or concern. Stuff like this s

It is early morning and I am having 3am thoughts. Like literally, it is around 3:14 am and my mind is circling. My last 5 blog posts were about pi (the ratio of circumference to diameter). But my mind this morning is thinking about how life for us is about getting our piece of the pie. There is only one pie where many get smaller and smaller pieces and some get huge slices. However, my friend Bard challenges me to see things differently: Instead of a single, finite pie, imagine a dynamic bakery constantly churning out new pies, each with unique ingredients and sizes. Maybe my focus right now has been on a pie that's nearing its end, but there are fresh ones emerging all the time, with flavors and opportunities tailored to my skills and passions. We can also think of the pie as growing, meaning we are able to get bigger pieces. As my friend Bard puts it so nicely, the pie doesn't have to be a static symbol of scarcity, it can be a dynamic symbol of growth and abundance. Bard wen

Continuing from my last blog post : Did you know that the 100-trillionth decimal place of π (pi) is 0? That is according to work done by Google in 2022. It took them 157 days to calculate 100 trillion digits of pi. It would be cool to know the 10 digits before and the 10 digits after. Numbers and patterns and coincidences and serendipity fascinates me. It was the usual quiet morning for me. I found that I could download the first 10 million digits of pi and I set out with the help of Bard and my curiousity to see what unusual, interesting or outstandish things I could find. Like how many times my birthday 2305 occurs or the the next 2 digits after the sequence formed with the last 3 play whe numbers. You can get pretty creative with what you look for in pi like in this youtubes - I found Amongi in the digits of pi Ha! I found the last 10 of the first 100 trillion digits of pi when I saw another video by the same guy. They are 3095295560. First glance and nothing stands out except t

Continuing from my last blog post : I watched this video called "Pi is beautiful" and it inspired me to create my own pi art. With the help of my friend Bard I was able to get python code (or should I write pithon code) to get the job done. I sort of see a 9 as highlighted in the image above with gray pen tool. I used pydroid on my mobile and I had to correct a few errors in the code with Bard. This was my prompt: Take the first 1000 pi digits and create x,y coordinates with the adjacent digits and create a colorful visualisation with the coordinates. Increment the size and color everytime we land on a coordinate. This was the code: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import math from PIL import Image import io # Get the first 1000 digits of pi pi_digits = "141592..." # Create coordinates and track frequencies coordinates = [] frequency_map = {}  # Use a dictionary to track frequencies efficiently for i in range(0, len(pi_digits) - 1, 2):     pair = (int(pi_digits[i])

Continuing from my last blog post : I have been reading and watching youtubes and chatting with Bard on the topics of pi. The more I pursue this topic the better my understanding gets but at the same time, the more questions I have. I like how I started in one topic of Math and I am having to explore the related topics and disciplines. How could we relate the saying that "information is never lost in the universe" to irrational numbers? Can I create a function that can produce a number from pi at a given position and for a given length? I like this article that shows that the universe is in pi. Comes from the fact that we can find any number within the decimal digits of pi as long as we go out far enough. Also this sum-of-three-cubes puzzle article was a fascinating read. Can every irrational number be expressed as the ratio derived from the measurements of a shape? Maybe even three dimensions and other dimensions. Is there a negative and positive zero, a sort of -00+? The

Continuing from my last blog post : There are proofs that show that pi is irrational. There are also admissions that it is very difficult to prove that pi is irrational. I have been thinking and watching youtube videos related to pi and infinity and even the number 69 (because my bill this morning came up to 69 dollars). I just want to share my thoughts on where I have reached with my thinking on this topic. Feel free to interject in the comments. My thinking is that just like infinity is a concept and not a number so it is that the irrationality of pi is a concept. And just like we have to use limits to show that any number divided by infinity is zero, I in my current thinking is saying that we have to treat irrational numbers the same way. It is said that "Infinity is a concept, not an actual number, so we can't just divide a number by infinity." If I take the base case 0.1111 and keep adding 1 to the end we can say that it is repeating. If we take another case 0.0101

I was thinking about pi last night and wondering if it really does have infinite decimal places that do not repeat. Then I came across this and this today that made me curious more and want to study pi some more. Basically this blog post is about me asking questions. Can I say that the topic is pi-quant. Interestingly enough the word piquant has two meanings 1. having a pleasantly sharp taste or appetizing flavor and 2. pleasantly stimulating or exciting to the mind. Is it a fact that pi has infinite decimals after the point that do not rep-eat? (I see what I did there). I must be thinking of f∞d. According to my friend Bard, the answer is yes and has been proven to be irrational. Is this true for all irrational numbers? Also yes. While chatting with Bard, I noticed a pattern that 1/17 has a 16 digit repeating pattern and 1/23 has a 22 digit repeating pattern and 1/97 has a 96 digit repeating pattern. An approximation to pi is 22/7 which involves 1/7 and this has a 6 digit repeating

It is an overcast and raining morning in Trinidad and I am here browsing the Internet Archive's wayback machine from around the year 2000 looking at some of the early websites from Trinidad. My morning started earlier when I emailed TSTT asking them what history they had for cell phones in Trinidad and also specifically the first cell phone used in Trinidad. In my search I was then reminded that we first had analog cell service. This was since December 1991 under the brand name Cellnet and was later upgraded to digital in 1999. The first phase of the upgrade cost 147 million dollars in those days. Then I ended up glancing at the history of bulletin boards in Trinidad and came across an early computer shop in Trinidad called Computerland (Trinidad Computers Limited). In trying to get more info about them I ended up on the list of eligible jurors from the year 2000 which listed profession and place of work. I searched for "computer" and came across a few more places like Co

I was scrolling through facebook and I came across the Islamic term "meezan" and it got me interested enough to want to learn more and even write a blog post. I slept on the idea and I woke up and remembered to do so. Wikipedia has it transliterated as mizan. The Arabic word meezan literally means balance. Meezan is the scale that will be used to weigh good and bad deeds on the day of judgment. Meezan is also used for the principle of the middle path, urging balance and avoiding extremes. Wikipedia also talks about "the overarching divine principle for organizing our universe". Those are three concepts and with the help of Bard I am going to explore them as best as we can. Feel free to correct us. Unpacking the Scales of Justice Imagine a colossal scale, suspended in the celestial realm, meticulously weighing every thought, word, and deed. This is Meezan, the divine scales of justice described in the Quran, symbolizing the absolute fairness awaiting us on the Day of

Former prime minister Basdeo Panday left us on January 1st 2024 and there has been an outpouring of love. There are people asking and suggesting ways to honor his legacy. I saw someone suggest we rename the highway the Panday and Manning highway in a show that will unite the country. Some think the airport should be named after him. Others think he should surely be awarded the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. In an interview, his daughter Mickela suggested that her father strongly believed in the need for constitutional reform and would have wanted to be honored in that way. What is constitutional reform? I asked my friend Bard this question and this was his reply, "Constitutional reform refers to the process of reviewing and potentially amending the country's supreme law, the Constitution of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, which came into effect in 1976. This process aims to adapt the Constitution to the changing needs and circumstances of the nation and its