Some embarrassing dumbness...

For last few days I am hooked up in the classical Programming Pearls. It's an amazing read. The author makes you feel programming so easy. Just now I have finished column 7 titled as The Back of the Envelope. After learning about various back of the envelope techniques given by the author I was reminded some of my estimations, where it reflected my sheer intelligence, really! After some hesitation, I was able to convince myself that it's okay to express some of my dumbness to the world. So here I go, bear with me.

Most embarrassing was while estimating how far is Kolkata from Chennai. I don't know exactly how I came up with the figure of 600 km! Later when I booked my ticket to my home town, I found the distance is 1662 km. OMG! It's almost 3 times than what I thought! And now after reading the book I apply the techniques, which makes lot more sense. On average Chennai Mail travels around 30 hours to reach Kolkata with average speed of 50 km, which makes the distance 1500 km. Lot better in deed, but [sigh...] too late. Another one happened in a beautiful night when, after a good dinner, I thought it'll be wonderful to spend some time in Besant Nagar beach beside the sea under the dreamy light of moon. I asked my friend let us go. He wondered and asked how far is it? [He was new in Chennai, that time] I was pretty convinced that it can't take more than 15 minutes. My calculation was... We walk 1 km/ 7 mins and Beach is hardly 2 km away from our room. To my wonder when we saw the water of Bay of Bengal, we had already walked for 40 mins. Okay I don't dare to find any excuse behind this, may be both of my assumptions (speed and distance) went terribly wrong :(. Yet on another occasion I turned out to be too dumb in this estimation business. While starting coding for our product my boss asked me "So sahid, what do you think? How much time will it take to finish this?" May be being over-enthusiastic, my confident response was "It should be complete within 4 months". And to my wonder it took more than a year for us to shape up our HRWorks.

If I dig deep may be some more will come out, but I don't really want to let that happen. In between why don't you try to estimate how much water flows out of the Ganga (if not Mississippi) per day. Don't expect me to guess. I've just finished the column. Answer is on my lip, "As much as flows in".