Weekend

I got back yesterday from Chicago. Where I had an absolutely uber time with S at the UIC Durga Pujo. Amongst other things to keep in mind, the UIC Pujo was a student affair, hence no evil ABCD influences. Quite surprisingly, my friend Ani was compering the show.. and he looked like he was at a White House briefing. We were quiz teammates while at Presi. A, old college batchmate turned up. A great time was had by all. Random people popped out of the woodwork and proceeded to become bosom buddies over a couple of smokes. There were some nice performances including a great ensemble of modern music which included Anjan, Suman, Mahiner Ghora Guli and to my delight, Chandrabindoo. Also a wunnerful play with some really

nice light work and fluent performances by all the participants. More will follow.

Back from Chicago, yet again....

Yes, I was in Chicago for the last week on a training symposium. I had an altogether great time, attended some great classes and met some nice people. They have a beautiful facility there.. with a 600, an 800 and a 900 MHz instrument, all with cryoprobes, all Brukers. Although, our lab uses a Varian 800, I have always had a sneaking admiration for Brukers, which allow for more flexibility (I think). The most important thing I learned at the workshop was to stop butting my head out wondering about the physics and to just grab a ubiquitin sample and start recording spectra. They let us play with the 600 MHz spectrometer, and we had lots of fun.

After the workshop, I spent a very boozy weekend with my friend in Evanston. He works for a SSNMR lab at Northwestern... their magnets are not the super high res contraptions we use.. these are physicists' devices with fifty random wire leads and soldering wire all over the place. Extremely radical hardcore experimental physics.

We went to attend a Latin music festival at Grant Park.. that was a total disaster... remind me to maintain a safe distance from Latin music in the future. Chicago offers open air movie screenings at sunset every Tuesday in summer. Love that city.

Back from Chicago.

Me back from Chicago. This time around, I was there for my cousin's graduation from business school. The weekend was quite enjoyable. The graduation ceremony was very impressive. There were close to 800 graduates in the 2007 class. Quite a large number of desi's, too. The school has a very beautiful campus right on the shores of Lake Michigan. It is a lovely, very green place. The arrangements were quite well thought out, all the way down to the little paper fans handed out to every visitor with the school's logo written on it. Functionality mixed with advertising. Very neat! The food was quite scrumptious.. and the crowd was pretty much like Ashtami at Gariahat. The one jarring note was the invited commencement speaker, some bigwig.. I believe he is the CEO of Wrigley. This bloke was not just singularly uninspiring, he just stood there mouthing platitudes and expecting people to applaud. One of his more ridiculous exhortations was to tell the graduating class that they were a force for promoting good in the world, because 'the only true path to fighting poverty is by transferring technology to the Third World.' I wonder if he really believes that? I wonder if people listening to him really believed that. I would be very surprised. However, this was a day to celebrate and celebrate we did. More later.

Panoramas.

The human eye is far greater an optical instrument than anything ever manufactured by Carl Zeiss, or anyone else. The Gods, and dear old Mother Nature are still far, far better engineers and physicists than we will ever be. There are few instruments which have the dynamic range, the sensitivity, the colour resolution of the human eye. And although, I particularly hate the word 'zoom', the human eye is an instrument with an amazing optical zoom. One of the beautiful things about the placement of the eyes on either side of the nose, is that they actually capture differing images on either side of the face, which are then stitched together by the brain to provide a seamless integrated image which compasses a huge incident solid angle at the centre of the brain. This is also why we can perceive depth, that is, have stereoscopic vision. Animals like crocodiles whose individual eye images do not overlap have had to develop other evolutionary tools to provide them with the sensation of depth. If one wishes to marvel at what miracles Nature has wrought, then think for a moment about the compound eyes of insects like flies. The image processing engine given to us at birth is something of astounding, perhaps incomprehensible elegance and efficiency. And yet, we stand beggared in what we can see as compared to, say, a household cat.

One of those things that cameras have some difficulty doing is capturing panoramic photographs. Panoramas are images which capture a large angle of view. They are the exact opposite of telephoto pictures. Panoramas come into their own when we stand before, say, a mountain range, when vision is not limited to a few tens of metres, and there is great detail before us.

Camera manufacturers and lensmen have experimented for decades to bring such visual treats to a postcard print. Techniques include multiple exposures of a single film, rotating the camera and many other innovations. Read this wikipedia entry.

Anyways, I have been interested in taking panoramic shots. Not that I really have the gear for landscape photography, but its always worth a try. Anyway, I ended up with these shots of the Chicago shoreline from a small launch in Lake Michigan which were not intended for a panorama stitch. Now what is a panorama stitch? These days, with digital cameras, one takes different shots of the same landscape, changing the azimuthal angle of the lens mount in each successive shot, while keeping some overlap between successive shots. In plain language, this means that you mount the camera on a tripod, keep speed and aperture constant and take a picture. Rotate the camera slightly and take another picture, etc. There are funky softwares like Canon Photostitch which will then process successive images, find overlaps digitally and integrate, or stitch them.

Well, I was not carrying a tripod, I was shooting from a fast moving launch in rather choppy waters, and I was shooting in the evening, with very uncertain light, in fact, after sundown. So please forgive, and kindly adjust. I used Double-Take which looks and handles like a native Mac app. The problem is that the freeware version leaves a huge watermark. Anyway, I will try harder next time.