Blog Pongal – Fine servings of the past 2.5 years – part 2 – Year 2006

Updated Jan 16,2007: Wonderquest home page now features a link to the Inca wheel post and the bird intelligence post mentioned below. Thanks April.

Blog Pongal part 2, continuing from part 1 to cover the best posts of 2006:

1. Why didn’t the Incas invent the wheel? this question had been bothering me for a long time and I think this post finally puts it to rest. No. 2 on Google for “Incas Wheel”.

2. Bird Intelligence – can birds think like humans? No.1 on google for “can birds think”

3. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion a green energy technique that is becoming popular, originally imagined by Jules Verne in his famous “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea” in 1870 – F***ing brilliant. This post was featured in the Science Blog Carnival Scian Melt #19.

4. Why the WIMP Interface is Dead? My post on how search-based interfaces could replace complex WIMP UIs atleast for information retrieval. Nick Carr, Sadagopan linked to it. Sridhar Vembu, Zoho (Web 2.0 Office company)’s CEO commented on it. Also read the follow-on post if you have the time.

5. What makes something a classic? a brief post on why some music or movies or things like that becomes a classic.

6. Do leaders overcompensate for their strengths? my take on Brad Feld’s interesting post.

7. Could Apple mess up again? (with the iPod) my take on how Clayton Christensen’s theory doesn’t work in the computer industry. Nick Carr linked to it.

8. How the Pocket PC beat the Palm – I applied Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm theory to show Microsoft beat Palm in the handheld devices market. This post got lots of links and generated a lot of comments on tech forums.

9. Insomnia, Sleep Patterns and Coffee my post on how coffee was giving me insomnia. some people emailed me saying they have no such problems. But i received a few emails saying they stopped coffee after reading this post and it worked for them.

10. A case study in going back to India – it includes links to my other posts in the Back to India series. Many posts in this series were Desipundited as well as linked to by other bloggers.

11. Correlating the ABC theory of behavior with the human brain’s operations. Our friend April Holladay of Wonderquest reviewed it and linked to it.

12. The mystery behind the Kurinji flower that blooms once in 12 years. In the Top 10 for Kurinji or Plant Intelligence on Google. Linked to by Wonderquest and The Scientific Indian. Hope you found my Blog Pongal tasty enough. So long till the next edition of Blog Pongal in 2008.

Comments

  1. Anonymous said January 26, 2007, 10:38 am:

    Sukumar,

    I have always learnt a lot from your blogs and the amount of research that you do shows through. I particularly look forward to the management and technology related ones. I am glad that your postings are getting the visibility they deserve.

    Keep up the great work.

    Ganesh

  2. Anonymous said January 27, 2007, 9:59 pm:

    Thanks a lot Ganesh. If not for your encouragement, i would have never continued blogging and it would have been my loss.