Intriguing question of the day

I walked into a most wonderful bookstore in Brigade Road, bangalore called Blossoms. They have both new and 2nd hand books, and the most important thing, they have almost any book u would want. Just ask the librarian, and they wil take you to the book you had been searching for eons.

I spent like 2 hours there, just browsing books, and trying to reach a decision on which books to select to fit my then limited budget. Im definitely going back there during my next bangalore trip, this time with a considerably fatter wallet. 

While i was looking thru the books, i came across this interesting book, the name of which i unfortunately don't remember, but whose summary, like of so many others, i read. It posed an interesting question:

What would be the one piece of wisdom/knowledge/contribution you would give to the world, if you knew these were your last few moments on earth ?

Happenings

This is gonna be just about anything that comes to my mind as i type at 4 am.

For starters, something that really set me off thinking, almost making a skeptic out of me regarding the apparent forward thinking mindset that's supposed to be a characteristic of the urban Indian. Im assuming of course, that fellow students of our so called well known institute constitute a fair representation of our urban youth. I was having a discussion with a group of friends who i just happened to cross on my way to the mess for snacks. Who they were, i don't really want to go into that, for reasons that will be fairly obvious in a while. The discussion as usual started off with the usual stuff about the college turning more into a prison sort of place and about the need for a student union that actually has the balls to do something, then launched off tangentially in the direction of jobs and salaries and future and all that stuff that we'v been hearing all too frequently lately. Someone then remarked Mr. X's gf would be earning more than him, and got a mortified reply that that wasn't the case and that he would be the one earning more, pointing out some things like cost to company and the like. What i really noticed was the fervor with which he replied, almost with a sign of triumph or relief, cant say which, that he was with the higher paying job. I casually remarked that i wouldn't really mind at all if it were the opposite in my case, only to get a curious, almost pitiful stare from everyone in the group. They were seeing me as if i had uttered something blasphemous, which is what set me off into a debate with the rest of the 5-odd people, all of whom were appalled by my stance. The debate was inconsequential in the end, each side sticking to their guns, although i was heavily outnumbered. I got the cup of tea which is just one of the extremely few things that i like in the mess just in time, and set off thinking about where was all the forward thinking that is so hyped in the papers? I just met a bunch of well read, young and brilliant students at a premier institute, all with good backgrounds and so called forwards thinking youth of the country appalled by the possibility of their better halves earning more than them. I was almost amused by the pettiness of their stand, then later dissapointed and disheartened that such things really matter to the educated youth. I'd like to think that such a stand is fairly uncommon and i just happened to cross a group of people who all thought this way, and that all the recent hubub about gender equality is not just plain empty talk.

In a more lighter vein, iv been playing more WoW than ever before lately, and the guilt of doing nothing better has been eating me from inside, so i thought i'd better post something here to take my mind off the guilt of having wasted the few hours that im awake, and am likely to waste in the future. Coming to this sem, its been awesomely (or awfully ) light, especially because i havnt taken any project. A little boring, compensated by the occasional thought of this being the last of its kind 'vacation', and the frequent 'house' episodes that i still havnt got remotely tired of. The college is at its notorious worst, reprimanding people in its usual manner for things as trivial as not opening the door when warden comes knocking and ur sleeping, dead tired, or playin loud music that no one in the corridor seems to mind. I'll be visiting Bangalore next week, so i guess that would be a break from the monotony. This post is looking more like a letter than a blog post, so i think i'll stop, and go to sleep, got work to do tomorrow, technically, today, that really can't afford to be procrastinated.
gg

House it possible ?

Time for a post :)

Been watching Gregory House MD, a series about an insanely gifted doctor who wants to be as miserable as life can make him, yet never runs short of a seemingly unending stream of sarcasm bordering on hurling insults at everyone and anyone who gets too close to him, both physically and not (at least till half of the second season, which is where i am right now, after a humungous marathon house-watching session was interrupted rudely by a much needed dose of sleep, followed by a not at all rude session of going and seeing what waves is all about this year, when im not associated with it at all, which makes me miss the running around-tackling unforseen problems which invariably creep up on you from behind whenever ur managing or organising or that sort of thing, while knowing that any screw up would directly affect the event or program or some such thing or person(s) or etc-etc-this-sentence-is-too-long-anyways-n-im-running-short-of-breath-phew! )
Well, the point is, the break from the house marathon got me out of my room, during a time when im not supposed to be in my room because a cultural festival with which i have been directly associated during its formative years is going on in my backyard (so to speak).
Well, i have been thinking for a long time as to what reason i have for completely divorcing my blog for such a long time, that would stand trial in any court (of my mind), and i have arrived at the conclusion after briefly being reminded during the waves-exploring session about the fact that my blog is miserable and lonely and iv got to make it up to her (i like to think its feminine), that i have nothing in my defense that would stand the test of trial, except that the net speed is crappy negated by the incriminating fact that im too damn lazy to go type in my username password in blogspot.com and just type a damn post.
Ok, back to house.
Oh my god its exactly what i needed. It felt like a splash of freshly bred sarcasm. After the months of boring monotonous existence that i lead, in which im including almost all of my bits years, and where i'd almost forgotten to read or write (or type), this was like rediscovering the joy of creative english speaking. The dialogue writers for the series 'house MD' are a bunch of geniuses. I would recommend the series to anyone who is not allergic to anything remotely connected with medicine. Now im transformed into the erupting volcano of sarcasm and anything i touch suddenly sprouts into a sarcasm spitting machine!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ok, im overplaying it, but you get the point. Watch it if its the last thing you do.

Which brings me to the question, do you talk to yourself? Yes, im asking you , the occasional reader of this divorced blog.


Well, i do. A lot. Infact, more often than not, you can find me talking to myself in an animated manner, provided i think ur not looking. It might seem a bit boring, me talking continuously about myself like a self obsessed narcissist, but hey, if i am that, run away, shoo, before i nauseate you to death with my seemingly unending quips about myself, and if i am not that, you know i cant keep up with this myself for long.

More often than not, this self-talking-whenever-i-get-the-opportunity is mistaken for a classic case of a candidacy for a mental institution. Ok, its not the same positive self-talk crap that they try to teach us at the phonetics and english speaking class,
but it helps me pass the time, pretending im someone else having a conversation with an imaginary someone, who replies just as i want him/her to.

When i talk to myslf, most likely im anybody other than an engineer, talking something abstruse to someone who is just as intrigued in my imaginary ability to vomit out sentences that would make little sense were it made to a real person, as i am in my imaginary friend's reply.

Dont fret, im not schizopreniac or anythin, and i wont eat you. Its just sad that there's nothing half as interesting going on in my life as i would like it to be, and pretending is just a way of pepping it up a little.
Call me crazy. Are you ?

Funny prof quotes

I found this site that gives some assorted quotes from professors in premier higher degree educational institutes. (read: MIT, Stanford, Berkeley etc) I found some of them absolutely hilarious, and i daresay those who are goin abroad for higher studies can expect some really geeky humor. Here are some of the most hilarious ones:

“The best way to do that is with… reagents that probably don’t
exist, which is why that’s not such a great way to do that.”

(after finishing his presentation) “Why is everyone watching me?”

“He went to Switzerland and took injections of baboon prostates.
Then he wrote these poems.” on Wordsworth

“Titanic is just Romeo and Juliet. And an iceberg.”

“Even if we think ‘that man has a cork up his butt,’ we don’t _say_ it…”

Subject: 8.08 Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics
“There are (N + f - 1)! / [N! (f - 1)!] ways to permute my balls.”

Subject: 8.04 Quantum Mechanics
“By geometry, … [pause] … Well, just by looking at it actually.”

Subject: ASU CSC210 Data Structures
“We want to take these components and see if we can grope them–er,
group them into sets”.

Subject: 8.08 Statistical and Quantum Physics
“The partition function is an animal which was invented in chapter 6.
It is not a fundamental animal, but it is a convenient animal.”

“Tarzan knew E=3NkT even before Einstein. Jane didn’t know; he had to
tell her … that’s what marriage is all about.” (after a long discussion of how even in the jungle you need to know about specific heats so that you can warm up your coconut milk)

“The partition function has to be clear to you. . . like honey has to be
clear. Or maple syrup. It will work much better if you think of it as
maple syrup.”

“When multiple metal atoms get together, their valence electrons run
wild, like kids in a hippie commune.”

I won’t give you a transparent proof. I’ll give you the most obscure proof I can find.

That’s outside the scope of this course. That’s in the next course, which you won’t take.

This is a true fact, like all facts.

How many people don’t know omega is the cube-root of unity?
That’s a lie; I just told you.

When something is beautiful and elegant, it is of no help in actual computation.

“F” isn’t a function anymore. It’s just the letter that comes after “e”.

"A finite plane is a very good approximation to an infinite plane."

"My efforts to simplify it have led to complexifying it."

"OK. I'll work on it, and you'll work on it, and we'll discuss it when it's too late.''

"It looks like the hypothesis has nothing to do with the solution. That makes a good theorem."

"Where the pressure is a maximum, the displacement is zero. On the other hand, where the displacement is zero, the pressure is a maximum."

Set theory is ... the kind of muddy water where logicians like to swim.

However, it's a very infinite set.

Well, let’s just defer that. Maybe we’ll defer that off to infinity.

But of course that takes some thinking. So let’s omit proving that.

“At certain critical values of b, something terrible is going to happen.”

“These are Maxwell’s equations, and you can find them on any MIT t-shirt.”

“We do what mathematicians always do: we assume all physical constants are equal to 1. Well, except maybe the square root of 2 pi, but I usually assume the square root of 2 pi is equal to 1, too.”

“Let’s take a tube of toilet paper without the ends — often called a cylinder.”

(Trying to derive as much as he could without any actual calculation:) “Of course, at some point we have to know SOMETHING.”

“There is no motivation for doing what we’re going to do.” -before giving some twisted derivation

“Riemann wrote this in an eight-page paper around 100 years ago, and mathematicians have been trying to understand it ever since. Of course, it _was_ written in German…”

"Notice the nonobvious insensitivity of the rhs to reciprocating Y.” - Referring to the method of computing the average value of a function over a closed interval by integration…

“This is one of those things which you probably already understand but won’t after I’m finished explaining it.”

“We’ll call this one mu. Do you all know what mu is? If nothing, higher education gives you a deeper understanding of greek”

“The sum of the heights of eight Canadians is close enough to infinity…”

While discussing multivariable max/min problems: “It’s obvious that there’s a maximum…it’s obvious to me, anyway, and I’m giving the lecture.”

“Oh my god, it’s working!”

“All I’ve done is shrink it from its former greatness.”

“This is the only time during a lecture that I am going to show off.”

“I would like to summarize a hundred years of statistics in the next ten minutes. It shouldn’t be too hard.”

“You can address each point separately byte by byte, er, bit by bit, by bytes…”

“logic programming: reducing programming to a previously unsolved problem.”

“I misunderstood your question, but it was a good one.”

“If not a biggest element, then certainly an element than which no other element is bigger.”

(clearly spoken by a computer science professor…) “In digital systems you have to take into account things that _almost_ work. And when I say `almost work’ I mean it doesn’t really work.”

This would be visible if it were visible, but it’s not.

“So a girl is like a system failure.” (while calculating the number of expected childern a couple would have before they had a girl)

Too much pipelineing is bad for the soul.

“There is a point I want to make.” *pause* “That was my point.”

“A linear cat is a cat that when you tug on this ear it says “meow,” and when you tug on the other ear it says “meow,” and when you tug on both ears it says it twice as loud. [...] There are no linear cats.”

“You may have noticed that I ran out of letters a while ago.”

“No hardcore math people here…?” “then I can get away with this.”

All of your hard work sometimes gets reduced to a good figure.

“Don’t worry, I can’t pass the exams either.”

“I’m not trying to say anything interesting.”

“Look - a review session is just like sex. You can tell me what you want, and I’ll give it to you, or you can not tell me what you want, and you’ll just get screwed.”

Yea, long post, but i loved it!

Changing demographies

A serious post, to show im not always clowning and bufooning around.
Someone asked me the other day, 'Which party do you support?'
On the surface, i might have replied with nonchalance 'i support no political party, they're all just the same - corrupt, selfish and without vision.' Later, on a closer inspection, however, i found that i do have a soft spot for the right wing parties like the BJP. This self realization somewhat disconcerted me for a moment, left me wondering whether there was inadvertently a touch of communalism in me. Almost immediately, i dismiss this notion. The reason why i support the right wing parties is because they are much more likely to follow an agenda of reforms and development than others. It is by this yardstick that governments are supposed to be measured, not according to the degree of appeasement of one community or section of people. Why should such a simple yardstick be colored with the muck of regional and communal politics ? Why do the governments that are supposed to be the torch wielders and initiators of progress need to be bogged down with the completely counterproductive acts of appeasing this section and that group ?
Coming to the recent developments, which started out as local, but unsurprisingly assumed national proportions, the arrest of Mr. Raj Thackeray of the MNS (in)fame.
Early next year, in all probability, i shall be exercising my right to vote. The trouble, however, is choosing whom to vote for. I have never been a supporter of strong-arm tactics of some political parties like the Shiv Sena. However, the current Maharashtra government is just a synonym for corruption and stagnancy. The way i see it, i have to choose the lesser of the two evils. Just about a few days ago, i thought i had almost decided that progress and development take precedence, even if marred by regional tirades. I still feel that the Shiv Sena and its allies in the state would be much better for overall development than the Democratic front govt. (whose dismal performance we have been seeing for the past 10 years).
However, the brazen sedition by Raj Thackeray and the unflinching claim of the Shiv Sena that it is actually responsible for the dastardly acts of urban terrorism, forces me to rethink my stand. Mr Raj Thackeray was born with a silver spoon, in the powerful house of the Thackerays. Not given the prominence that perhaps he desired, he left his uncle's party and formed his own. Hardly having known any privation, he perhaps does not realize the value of things he takes for granted. Sitting in his mansion, he dictates his minions to decimate the poor man's attempt at a decent living. His fanatical followers go on a rampage destroying taxis and busses and shops without realizing that entire lives have been spent in acquiring them. And what about all those who have sustained bodily harm? Will Mr. Raj Thackeray step forward and donate his eyes, arms and legs to those who have suffered at the hands of his minions for a crime that is no more than appearing for an exam ? What will he do if his son is beaten up in the US for snatching jobs of the locals ? Agreed, local youth are unemployed. Agreed, they are going through difficult times. But it is not that there is no level playing field. There is no reservation for north indians. Everyone can write the exam. And they get selected on their own merit. Moreover, this is Mumbai, Mr. Thackeray . Where else would people turn up for jobs, if not the commercial capital of India?
I regard Raj Thackeray as no more than a stray diseased dog whose brain is addled, and which goes about biting every other person it sets its eyes upon. Even now i have no doubt that the Democratic fron govt is still the worst bet for Maharashtra as far as development and progress are concerened. My frustration, however, is not that the 'dog catcher' Government is as indolent and stagnant as ever about this arrogant defiance of civil decorum, but the fact that once again, in the name of divisive politics, progress and development have been forced to take a backseat.
PS: I found there to be glaring similarities between Raj Thackeray and Hitler.
Just as Western powers during the 1930s let Hitler flourish hoping that he would destroy the soviet union and with it, the danger of communism, so too is this government giving MNS a free rein hoping it would divide the Shiv Sena's vote bank. Like Hitler at his time, Raj has a fanatical following in people blinded by mindless aggression . Violence, for both, has been the primary tool of expression. Both are characterized by inflammatory speeches demonizing other cultures. Things look really ominous from this perspective. Going by the current govt. response, however, one's best bet would be to hope the dog succumbs to its disease.

The (sc)roll out of the next big thing

When one is in college, especially one where attendance, classes etc are not mandatory, and where students spend their lives getting wasted away without gaining an ounce of knowledge, and where the internet speed is so brilliant that people eventually manage to live by without it, it is not surprising to find them completely weaning away from regular thinking. It is only when we step into the outside world, that we miss the comforts we so much took for granted.

To those of you who are currently in an office space of roughly 1000 sq feet, with people moving all around you whilst you pretend to be working on something in front of the computer that is so important that you can’t notice anything, while all you actually do is try and squeeze in a small period of time, say, at least a few seconds when there’s no one behind your back so you can sneak peek into sites as simple as Dilbert’s blog, which obviously won’t be taken in good humor by the office people if they catch you reading it, this will be a familiar feeling. However, since I know that I am not a world famous blogger, and that the handful of people who actually put up with all this nonsense are not likely to have experienced such situations, either because they are still in that abode of joblessness, college, or because their stations do not qualify within miles of the above mentioned criteria, this might not particularly qualify as a basic necessity. However, I suggest you hold on, because you never know, you might just be the next one!

After that massive preamble, lemme come to the point. Due to the above-mentioned extreme circumstances, I am unable to savor the use of net when I get it. Instead, I have to pretend to be extremely interested in some web pages pertaining to some arcane topic quite beyond my ability of comprehension in this environment.

So, I need an invention from you comp sci guys. Actually branch is no bar. Im just assuming that going by the average knowledge of CDCs among engineers, I reckon Comp sci ppl are best positioned to act upon this, although the difference is not much between them n other branches on how much they know about computers. Ok, so I need some sort of mechanism to scroll a web page that is in a tab not in front of you. The tab is in the background, while you are looking at some other page on your screen. I want to scroll up or down the page in the tab that’s next to it, without actually going to it. It could be through some shortcut keys, u know, like ctrl+tab+arrows or whatever. This is so that there is lesser chance of being caught when all you are doing is scrolling a webpage. OK, if youre reading it in front of everyone, then obviously ur a dumass. But getting busted because of a stupid scroll, that’s an insult to the entire generation of such sneak peekers. Think of this as a philanthropic act for the future generations. Or maybe if the idea sells, charge for the services. Just remember who the founding father of the idea was, and give it to me for free. Of course, if you become a billionaire or something in the process, generous donations are welcome.

so whoz up to it ?

:|