SBNs and their numbers

Currency Notes in circulation.

As of March 2016, Rs. 1000 notes in value = 6326 Billion = 6326 Million pieces

As of March 2016, Rs. 1000 notes in value = 7854 Billion = 15708 Million pieces

Assuming all the notes were returned, total notes to be counted, 22034 Million pieces.

A good note counting machine like below can count 1800 notes per minute and can count 24x7 for multiple years. It costs $ 450.

Semacon S-1200 Premium Bank Grade CurrencyCounter

Let's do some math, with the machine above, it would require (22034*10^6)/(1800*60*24) Days for one machine to count all the notes. That is equal to 8501 days for a single machine to count. Given that this was a mammoth operation, and even a simple bank branch seems to have a couple of these machines, RBI could have easily arranged 100 machines and could have counted all the notes in 85 days.

Also given the fact that all the notes are printed by RBI and there would be data available on its weight and volume, they could have just weighed the notes and given an approximate figure. Nobody really cares about the last few hundred crores.

A story of Indian Masalas

As I woke up today, received a WhatsApp forward from one of my friends with following picture.

It just sounded bizarre. The very first things that I did was to search it myself and I found that the image is accurate. This is what Google returns. The first question that came to my mind, is it a problem with google's algorithm or there is something else. So just to be sure, I decided to do the same search in other search engines.

Bing

Bing

Duckduckgo

Duckduckgo

Yahoo

Yaho

It is clear, all the search engines, at least the prominent ones give out the same results. This seems to be the reality of the internet. This is the problem I have with proponents of things like AI. You can create an alternative reality if nobody is paying attention to.
Content available on the internet as it is crawled by all the search engines gives this impression. If you are looking at North Indian Masalas, it is predominantly showing you spices while when you look for South Indian masalas, it is showing pictures of ladies. Unfortunate but that's the problem with algorithms, it is so easy to mislead them and create an alternate reality for them.