My Random Rants

In a nutshell A time travelling serial killer Harper Curtis is found by plucky Kirby who refused to die when killed. This is tightly written with great writing and an amazing eye for detail. The fascinating bit was how the time travel played out. It is amazing how much personality Lauren Beukes imbues in the prose and the characters. The victims are fleshed out with just the right amount of character development so that they further the plot rather than impede it. All in all a great read and a mystery I greatly enjoyed reading and unraveling. You can buy the Shining Girls here .

People talk a lot about how Sanskrit would make the perfect programming language. They claim its rigorousness and flexibility make it the ideal choice but everyone fails to grasp the implications. Mostly they speak as if they wish to make Sanskrit a programming language. If Sanskrit were a programming language back in the day its greatest feature would be the fact that everyone spoke it which meant that everyone was a programmer by default. There is no need to learn to code. However what this would imply would be the fact that the best talkers would be the best programmers and the best programmers would be wielders of power. This is of course why training Brahmins in the Vedas makes sense since childhood because every word they intone is potentially a program waiting to be executed. Let me give you an example of the power. There is this Shloka in Sanskrit which gives you the value of pi when looked at with a few substitutions. These substitutions of course can be expressed as Sanskr