Ever had the feeling that

you were in an argument in which the other person was such a buffoon that he/she/it could simply not get what you were trying to say? (If the reader is a woman who is in a relationship, then don't bother replying, of course you have!)... well.. this is exactly the kind of situation where you need a Point of View Gun. Click Here to read on.

For Olympus Users

Here is a nice resource for Olympus E System users.
http://www.wrotniak.net/photo/oly-e/

Here is a thought to ponder upon.. Olympus E System compatible Zuiko lenses use a fly-by-wire approach to manual focus: when you twist the manual focus ring, it drives the focus motor which moves lens elements. Is this better or worse than Sigma type lens manual focus rings which mechanically move lens elements?

Ann Arbor on Orkut

This community on Orkut has, at the moment of writing 972 members and is described as "Lovely college town in warm & sunny Michigan. Somewhat influenced by the local university."

The current temperature, according to weather.com is 3 degrees F. In Celsisus that is (3-32)*5/9=-16 degrees. Minus sixteen degrees. Warm and sunny; my left foot!!

Also, about somewhat influenced by the local university. I quote from Wikipedia here.. 'with a population of 114,024 as of the 2000 census, of which 36,892 (32%) are college or graduate students.' Yes, somewhat influenced by the local university, where every third person is a student at the aforementioned local university.. is something of an understatement. Anyway, I have to go now.

Secret Crush

Confession time people! I have had a soft crush on Tajel for a while now. Who is Tajel? Here is the answer from Wikipedia ...

• Tajel – Cecilia's roommate, Tajel, is an anthropologist and the lone social scientist in the main cast. This implies that Tajel is also the only one who has ever gotten to leave the school (or even the laboratory basement) for any academic reason. She is a dedicated activist who frequently attends or organizes rallies. Her frustration with U.S. politics is exacerbated by her not being a United States citizen.

We are, of course talking about PhD Comics, and while you might tell me that having a crush on a cartoon character is ridiculous, what about all those people who have crushes on film stars, pop stars, and so on. And I am not even talking about all those people who have crushes on Ceclia.

Anyway, this post appeared because I was tickled to see that Tajel uses a Macbook, as do I.

T3

I was watching Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines last night. Well, not really watching, more like glancing over while cooking. I remember this priceless scene when Arnie, playing the friendly Terminator is reprogrammed by the evil TX and then tried to the kill John Connor, the "hero". Connor tries to reason with him, and reminds him of his directive that he is to 'never kill humans'. Arnie manages (if that were possible) to look even more puzzled.. with corrugated forehead and all. He finally behaves like something halfway between a crashing Windows machine and a regular garden variety maniac. He proceeds to smash the bonnet of a pickup truck to smithereens and then his software hangs. Yes, definitely Evil Empire source code.

Fake gurus.

I like the box very much, thank you.

Every time I see/hear the slogan ‘thinking outside the box’, I am tempted to some act of wanton violence. I have here a link which leads to an allusion to what thinking outside the box might be all about. As it turns out, this concept implies the availability of resources outside the proverbial box. It implies reaching in ‘space’ outside the box, and not in thought. Hence, my dear friend you are forever trapped inside the box. But think of it this way, the box is quite a nice place to be.

Ground realities: by and large, the method of logical reductionism WORKS. This is why it happens to be the cornerstone of Occidental philosophy and science. The method of science known to every young student has everything to do with method and order. To begin with, we draw a ‘free body diagram’. This is a picture of the system in which we try to mark out each and every force acting on the object of interest. Once that is done., we proceed to find their total effect on the body. Epiphanies do not happen, for the most part. Every neophyte knows that method and diligence are what moves the world, not flashes of intuition. In other words, there are no shortcuts. You have to come up the ladder, you have to pay your dues to the Gods and Goddesses of your particular discipline.

This is not a policy favoured by gurus. Guru means ‘teacher’. The ancient Hindu word from which the current American word derives (not English, American) carries with the reverence which India and Indians have long accorded masters. There is another equivalent word, ‘Acharya’. Both words mean a whole lot more than just teacher. They are used for persons who have proved beyond doubt that they are extraordinarily competent in their chosen fields and ability of such magnitude is always deserving of the greatest respect. Hence, for most Indians (except for those sniveling brown nosing MTV loving bastards I see every so often), a teacher is a person to be venerated right after parents. The American meaning of ‘guru’ is an abomination, a perversion. Here, a guru is a charlatan, a trickster who flogs snake oil to the gullible. From time to time,, such guru’s hire smart marketing agents and then wear Armani’s and fly in private jets. These are the worst offenders of them all.

Edward de Bono invented lateral thinking. If you feel that your soul can withstand the shameless self adulation in his ‘authorized website’, please have a look here and here. This person comes up ‘messages’ to his followers. These messages are more self adulation and by and large little advertisements for his new books. If you are an eager middle management type, then you have probably read his books, trying to improve your lot. I seriously doubt that any improvement will come that way. It is probably a better idea to spend more time observing your most efficient competitor and taking notes.

Ok, so what is lateral thinking again? Apparently, it is the ability to stop thinking along the straight and narrow and make a jump over uncertainty and arrive at the right conclusions. De Bono invented it, they say. Now I have a word for the skill just described. It is ‘intuition’. So de Bono invented it, right. Which is much the same as saying that he invented …. Breathing? To be honest, I am not against the idea of lateral thinking. It solves problems! But it is not a substitute for the straight and narrow approach. It is an addition.. it is great when it is available.. but we should (and do) make do without it. The very idea that reading a book of ‘powerful mind techniques’ is a substitute for training and education is absurd. If that were so, then we would have Einstein’s in every household. But that is not so.

Bottom line: don’t fall for marketing nonsense. Think. But don’t let people tell you how to.

More bad physics.

People at the University of Calcutta, and its affiliated institutions, such as the venerated Presidency College (which is where the world began its so far unsuccessful attempts to teach my physics) sometimes mispronounce the Greek letter 'psi' as 'shy'. Just a matter of not pronouncing the sibilant correctly. But it so happens that if you are talking about the Schrodinger Wave Equation, and you happen to say 'del shy, del t', people will know for sure that you are from the University of Calcutta. Now that is not a bad thing, but I did get into an argument with one of our professors at the Institute where he kept saying 'doe psi, doe t', and I kept saying 'del shy, del t'. As it happens this professor (a person whom I regard with the greatest admiration) was right with the 'psi', and was dead wrong with the 'doe'.

Anyway, it is a matter of opinion, and my opinion is that 'shy', while carrying a nice touch of ethnicity.. as in if someone used that in a seminar and has a last name like Mukherjee or Ganguly or Das, I would go up to him afterward and chat.. is still wrong. It is 'psi'. P silent.

Now we come to 'doe'. The partial derivative (I am sorry that I do not have a symbol generator here to show it to you) is represented by the lowercase Greek delta. It can be referred to as 'delta' or 'del'. Not 'doe.' A doe is a female deer. As in...
Doe, a deer, a female deer
Ray, a drop of golden sun
Me, a name I call myself
Far, a long long way to run
Sew, a needle pulling thread
La, a note to follow sew
Tea, I drink with jam and bread
That will bring us back to do...oh oh oh

Any more mispronunciations will be dealt with with utmost strictness.

Poker

My friend Pradeep is a very enthusiastic (and also a VERY good) poker player. He is trying to bring me up to speed. The thing is that, I am, by nature, a cautious coward. So, is No Limit Hold 'em really the game for me?

Hollywood Physics

I came across this site that takes down movies which have depressingly bad physics.. which is to say, pretty much any action/adventure/thriller movie made in Hollywood. With the possible exception of Meg Ryan romantic comedies, this might extend to all movies. End of story. Here is the site. Check out.

Although I am not a Brit

and I have never played Rugby .. (to be completely honest, I suck at ALL sports.. something that makes me put my accumulated strengths into other fields... such as being an unmitigated arsehole from time to time, intimidating the hell of people for the heck of it, being a sarcastic, prick) but we deviate from the point. For reasons which I will not share with you, lowly reader, I feel compelled to add here, a link to Rugby Songs. Be warned, they are rather bawdy.

Don't watch KungFu Hustle

It is a contender for the title of worst movie of all time. I spent an hour or so watching it and the only reason I am spending two minutes writing this blog is because if you come across it, you will hopefully not see it and that will be my contribution to world peace for this week.
Do not see it if you love your neurons.

My friend sat around telling me that it is a cult movie. I suggested replacing the 'l' with an 'n'. He is full of shit.

Anand

The last lines from Anand were 'Anand mara nahin, Anand marte nahin'. Loosely translated, this comes to 'Anand did not die, the Anands (of this world) cannot die.'

What am I talking about now? Anand was a film starring Rajesh Khanna as Anand, a terminally ill, yet irrepressible bloke who has come to live with Bhaskar, a doctor, a role played to perfection by Amitabh Bachhan. Indeed, it is very difficult to imagine a situation in which Amitabh does not walk away with the audience in the palm of his hand. This is one of those rare films in which we see a very restrained side of Amitabh, who acts as the perfect foil to Rajesh Khanna's wholly over the top performance. But, there is no way that Anand could be anything but over the top. Faced with certain and inevitable death, Anand lives the only way he could.. and in his last days teaches Bhaskar and everyone around what it really means to be alive. There are few Hollywood which can touch the feel good factor of any Hrishikesh Mukherjee film. Anand is in a class totally by itself. See it to understand what I am talking about. For now, I am just going to attach the lyrics of Kahin Door Jab Din Dhal Jaye.

happy new year world

and may it do everyone a lot of good. a small amount of sarcasm here.

there are two kinds of people, they say.. the first kind walks into a room and says 'there you are!', and the second kind says 'here i am!'. i guess i belong to the third kind which walks into the room, groans loudly and collapses into the nearest chair.

for what it is worth (nothing), i am back from a brief trip over christmas week and new year to boston and new york. tired, both inside and out and back to work and studies. there are some good things to look forward to this semester.. a dynamics course with a very physics bent... something i have been wanting for a while.. and of course, the graduate school candidacy.. which means an independant proposal. hence, no time for laziness and self pity and all those beautiful flaws which make me such an interesting person.

if you feel so inclined, do visit my photographs page on flickr.. no login is required, unless, of course you find yourself galvanized into action and actually want to comment on my efforts. here are the links.

Boston Photographs.

New York by night.

New York by day.

The works of Julian May and Celtic Mythology.

I was not aware of this until recently, but the work of Julian May (The Plieocene Saga) mirrors and borrows quite a bit from Celtic/Irish mythology.

Stop the world!!!

Stop the world, I wanna get on!!

This absolutely lovely line is from Mel Brook's 'The Producers', which is a madcap ride on the amazing talents of Nathan Lane and Mathew Broderick. Ever get the feeling that this is exactly what you want to say? I was recently in NYC and Boston, and had a very good time thank you Akash, Smita, Praveen, Jayanta, Aswin, Yashveer, Minu, Toto, Biplab, Debashree, Shrestha, Susmita, Dhritiman, Tulasi, Dinesh and Soumita.