three wishes

three wishes for the day:
1. world peace.
2. a stable 20GHz cryomagnet with amazing field stability and some ultrafast electronics to go with it.
2a. a three qubit weakly coupled loheteronuclear labelled molecule.
3. ilish machh!!! lots of it! with shorshe baata!! and maybe posto to go with it. and shukto. on second thoughts, its probably more feasible to just wish for a cure to cancer.

yes, it been tooooooo long since i have had a proper bangali khawadawa, and that is just too bad. i would give quite a lot to be able to browse the garia bazaar right now instead of buying lousy frozen stuff from the supermarket. at a pinch, i would even settle for the yeshwantpur market on a sunday morning. even though i maintain that the southies have been long deprived of taste buds, they are being slowly educated in such matters by us bongs, and the current state of bangalore is a tribute to that. so there!!

its a beeeeautiful day

and it is indeed, the snow has politely stayed off for a while, the temp has climbed rather tentatively into the late thirties and the early forties(shit, i am going farenheit these days) and the windchill isnt bent on murdering me, atleast not just yet.. a wonderful day, and i am in the lab grading stuff. there is a deeper message here, but i am too tired to record it here....

bad movies

there are good movies, there are bad movies, and there are some movies which never should have seen the light of theday, but for some reason found there way out there. and there is a good reason why these movies exist. to create a baseline. everyone knows that for comparisons, we need a standard frame of reference. this reference frame is provided by such abysmal movies. so, we were tired and bored and decided to watch some tv(sound familiar?), and we ended up seeing a truly disgusting movie about a plane crashing in a swamp because some hijackers insisted that the pilot fly to their destination thru a storm, and the colpit wanted to be a hero, and got shot, and the bullet passed straight through him and messed up the cockpit console and then they crashed, and then they were chased by a bunch of angry crocodiles. meanwhile the boyfriend of one of the wimmen on the plane(i am not sure whether it was the blonde airhostess or the other one, cos they killed off all the other wimmen early on) gets into a rage at these random events which are keeping him from his girl, and hires a tracker who magiks a chopper from under the bar and they go tracking. we are treated to some scenes in which a clearly plastic croc is towed/pushed by extras(just out of the field of view of the camera) and at one point is "nuzzling" the bloke. the tracker is a typical wannabe Hemingwayish hero crossed with a special forces washout. the croc is plastic. the dialogues are braindead, the camera work is awful. as you observe, not the best of movies to see.

the mind of a grad student

disconnected thoughts of a grad student:
awful life... food.. food. report to boss..... homework.. HOMEWORK! teaching (wyaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!) cold .. blinking cold.... my friends have jobs.. regular jobs... paying jobs... i am a grad student.... food.... food.. food...... hate my life... beer beer BEER! friday night==beer. no... friday night==homework.... when was the last time i saw the inside of a movie theatre?.... the last ice age perhaps.... oh, check the simulation.. still crunching away? ok, keep at it. u and me, old boy (now talking to computer, coworkers observe subject mumbling, view this as a sign of mental disintegration, are somewhat correct)... just like the old times... imagine being good friends with a computer.. yech! density matrices playing kabbaddi with rotation matrices on a meadow with a river flowing thru it.. a river filled with katla, rui, ilish and other suchlike... naah, i should have got a callcentre job like every other arse back home.... on second thoughts... this is fun..

somewhere, half a world away
the darkness is lifting
as a reluctant january sun makes his way up
and yawns his way to work
sleeps mothers coming home,
their children, sleepier still,
herded into classrooms by their teachers,
the morning section at south point.
the rick-wallahs puffing away
the last beedi for a while
bhodroloks rubbing shoulders
minor skirmishes over the freshest katla
and the bhodromohilas win, as always
for a while yet, that rarest of sights:
gariahat junction, almost empty
doesn't last for long, though.
the city is waking up.

spaceships

lights and shadows danced solemnly across the fuselage of the giant.. pomfret. that was the only shape which came to mind when one looked at the 137. it was a source of tremendous personal pleasure to kranti that the russians who had designed it, the americans who had contracted it, the chinese who had actually won the outsourcing contract and had built most of it and the indians who had written the code(and painted the funky ethnic murals on the outside) could not agree on a common name for the greatest spaceship ever built, one that had ruined half the world's economy (of course the half of the worlds's economy belonged to the half which didn't sit in on economic summits, so it didn't matter anyway). anyway, the spaceship had been built in this last decade of the 21st century and had been sent onn a secret mission. so secret, in fact, that CNN gave it time on primetime news displacing the latest peccadilios of the chairman of the council of nations. (something to do with his secretary, an impossibly buxom lady of otherwise rather dubitable virtues, although the aforementioned chairman kept babbling about the coffee she made. aparently,, in this age, we still need ahem.. ladies, of, uh. impressive dimensions for making coffee..). where was I, ah,, yes, the mission. we had received a message, you see, on the Hydrogen line(1420.45 MHz). This message had come somewhat out of the blue one ordinary morning as an intense collimated beam aimed directly at earth. this beam had originated from somewhere in the vicinity of pluto. the message had, as per actual records caused one burnt egg(belonging to a grad student), a fantastic thesis(the same grad student) and a fatal heart attack(his advisor). it also caused the ship to be built, its rather controvorsial christening as the "137", its launch with the most highly trained crew of astronauts ever(not a single man amongst them) and now, four years and five billion kilometres later, here we were, loitering near the Lagrange point between pluto and his moon, the charon.

the preliminary exploration had gone well, so well, in fact that we had taken a short break just to sit back and let the bigwigs contemplate the magnitude of what we had achieved. the biggies did the sitting back, we scurried like so many ants across the ship and through the myriad service tunnels making sure that no AO unit gave out on us.


bridge:
"outlook 1 to bridge, outlook 1 to bridge, we found something". the watch cleared the hollywood breakup story she was immersed in as captains narya and mehak walked in. (detailed studies had shown that one male commander was 13.56 times more likely to do a harakiri with his ship than two female commanders, so.... incidentally, the results of tests with two male commanders were never made public.) "what is it, outlook?" mehak asked. amazing how she always managed to look like the uniform had been starched with her inside, the watch wondered as mehak slid quickly into the con seat. narya was viewing the tapes of the last half hour at 4X, a speed that made the wath slightly dizzy. "looks like a .. device ma'am". the screen filled with the image of the disc. "perfect". that was the thought that entered her head as she focussed on the pitograms. a man and a woman, side by side. and the man was .. perfect. ok, so was the woman. and those rulings by the side? what about them? mehak had fought long and hard for this job. and it finally looked like she had won.


earth:
"those numbers indicate the azimuthal angle, the perpendicular distance from the galactic plane and the radial distance from the perpendicular: in short the euclidean coordinates of planet earth, and those numbers indicate the same for what we think is the host planet. the numbers near the centre of the disc indicate a frequency, just slightly off the Hydrogen line and scheme of polarisation modulation, which we believe transmits data to the disc. Lights". the hall was illuminated with the harsh white fluoroscent lighting which universities seem to think promote learning as people came awake. the man from the council was almost aggressively awake:"so you are telling us that this .. disc is a .. communication device. a telephone?" Rafik, the astro man, typicaly in a coffee stained shirt and what looked like a secondhand jacket with crow goo n it looked up from his slides and said, "basically, yes. we can transmit voice data to the disc." the council man was not satisfied, "and how does the disc communicate with its home planet?" Rafik seemed embarassed at this point, "this we do not entirely know, but the experiments by Mahmud and Jogesh have proved the existance of Einstein Rosen bridges..."

Experiment, an out of order men's room in the basement of the Physics Dept. of a university which choses to remain anonymous:
the chairman, the deputy chairman of the council of nations(and their secretarys. these guys must love their coffee) and pretty much most of the inner chamber. also present were the scientific advisors to the council, a couple of grad students who came free with the electronics hijacked from EECS, fifteen religious leaders, seventy five politicians, five physicists and fifteen astro/phys grad students, two undrgrads who made out on wednesday nights in this room and had walked in hand in hand and had stayed to watch the fun and lastly, a pimply teenager of indeterminate gender who was hocking beer bottles and popcorn. finally, all the circuits had been checked for the seven thousand six hundred and fiftieth time, all the math had been checked by an underpaid, unshaven and unloved math grad who was just slightly less suicidal than his advisor and we were ready! a soft ping sounded as contact was made and the room waited in awed silence to hear the first sounds of life outside earth! a faint hiss sounded, followed by a loud warbling and then a deep resonant voice sounded. as i fell to my knees i thought "this is it, HIS voice!" "thank you for contacting Galactic Central. Congratulations, you are now a sentient civilisation. to continue registration, press 1. to speak to a customer care representative, press 2. this call may be monitered for quality and training purposes".

flying colours

if you are an underachiever like me and if you are blessed, nay cursed with a large group of overachieving friends and relatives, also like me: then perhaps you have heard of the expression 'and she passed the exam with flying colours'. yes, flying colours. expressions like this are abused thoughtlessly by people happily ignorant of the physics and tha grammar of it. the grammar i leave to people who study english litt (not that they care), the physics we can discuss right now. ok, so someone is flying. i can live with that. and that someone is also colourul. sure! but which colours are we talking about? yellow! nay, green! nay, yonder yokel- blue! (i just love using anupras especially when its totally unnecessary!!) now did the above snipets make any sense. say yes, please... thank you! abolutely smashing.. she was flying towards us. this is the point i am trying to make. flying colours will be doppler shifted!!!!!!!

sorry toton, rooni

this one is a very special apology to toton. for those who dont know toton, she is an organic chemist. until recently, i pretended to be a physicist. i am not quite sure what i am these days, but lets just put it this way, if the schrodinger wave equation accosted me in a dark alley, i would run, instead of whipping out the appropriate basis set and bopping it on the head. if the last sentence didnt make sense, take heart, thats all the physics here. righto, so, apologies to toton. many has been the time i have dragged her out of the lab for a cuppa. many has been the time i have airily brushed away protests to the effect of 'i have been standing and running a column for ten hours, gimme a break'. apologies again. its not possible for someone to appreciate such things when that someone understands science as the kind which lives betwixt the dry pages of a notebook and can be postponed indefinitely by Ctrl-S or Esc-Shift-:wq if you belong to the civilised class of those who swear by the penguin. sorry toton. while i am at it, additional apologies to rooni, one preparative solid state chemist(i shudder to think i have referred to that science by the unflattering acronym of 'piss'). yes, rooni, many many apologies. again, dunderhead that i was, i never appreciated the fact that after eight straight hours of grinding a sample, life begins to look like a grind (there i go again, sorry for that one as well rooni), and one has a constitutional right to snap at anyone in the vicinity. a smartaleck trying angular momentum conservation experiments on the only revolving chair around and making smartalecky comments about the efficacy of fedora over windows deserves to have fedora stuffed down his ungrateful throat. you also, have earned yourself the right to bite and scratch.
now why this sudden burst of remorse? well, mainly because i have just started wet lab work today, and while what i did is pretty much nothing, just the mental effort involved in pippetting the right volume and not screwing up makes me appreciate how easy i have had it for so long. well, everything comes around, i am laughing out of the other side of my mouth while eating humble pie and regretting. yes, regretting.

nauko

aadorer nauko. mane ki? janina? ekta gaaner naam, nauko ta aadorer kikore hoye? kolkateye brishti porle to mone hoye je raastaye gari noye nauko'r dorkar. april maasher modhyey, na thik april noye.. ujo'r thk aage.. september maashe jokhun brishti porte shuru kore tokhun ei ek koti lokeder obosthya ta besh dekhar moton i hoye. amader first year e anjan dutta'r ekta programme schedule kore hoyechhilo derozio hall e. shei din brishti porlo.. brishti'r byapare amar obhigyota karor theke kom noye. panh bochhor shillong e chhilaam.. shillong er kaachhe ekta graam aache. naam 'mausinram'. shekhane shob theke beshi brishti hoye. shaara prithibi te. shilling shei jayega ta'r beh close competitor. jaggye, kothaye chhilaam? hyan kolkateye bishti.. to kolkateye brishi porle prothom prothom besh bhaalo laage. mane gorom te kete jaaye, besh shob kichhu porishkaar laage.. kintu.. tarpor.. jol jomte shuru kore.. kolkate ta jol joma ta etoi shabhabhik ekta ghotona je sheta niye lokera aar kicchu bhaabena ba bolena.. jeyi bochhor jol jomena,, shei bochhor kotha hona jaaye bote. ei jaa! jete hob.. update pore debo.

googlish

there is an interesting saying which tells us that it is bad to know what we want as we will never find it.. its is perhaps better to search aimlessly...
pebbles on the shore.. this will be the subject matter of a loooong post, but later..
spectroscopy is the one true science
know your god, know your wave equation.
have faith in maths...

new year

yes, yes its a new year...
i wonder whats the big deal with the new year.. i mean its not like the new year has any significance whatsoever.. look, thenew year is defined by an arbtit point in the earth's orbit around the sun, cos some bloke wanted it so... lets imagine that this is not the case.. well, its not as if the 31st of december coincides with either the apogee or the perigee of the earth's orbit, or with anything else of any significance.... so why the big deal? and all those silly picture postcards and greetings we send each other.. snow! snow at the time of the year which we call new year is a phe nomenon peculiar to the northern latitudes.. we honest south asians should have no part of it.. ok, so i have had a lousy new year.. and it shows..