Football, wait, WTF?

Watch this viddy! Effing awesome!

CERN's magnets also quench!

A magnet quench, I mean a superconducting magnet quench (we do not give a shite about that silly room temp. stuff) is an avalanche process which starts with the superconducting coil jumping its critical temperature. At which it becomes resistive. Hence dissipating heat. Hence heating its liquid helium sheath. Hence becoming more resistive. Hence heating further. This is an avalanche process which culminates in the coil reaching room temperature and the helium boiling off. NMR rooms usually have helium vent lines in case of such quenches. Otherwise any occupants in the room would probably asphyxiate. This is a cool viddy of such a quench under controlled conditions. Magnets can be recovered after a quench, but it is a time consuming and expensive process (especially in the liquid helium it takes to cool the coils down again). Apparently this has happened at CERN. And they have hundreds of such magnets!

The wildlife photographer of the year!

read and watch here.

Oh this is funny! Hedge funds being dosed with their own medicine.

Let me summarize the matter: short selling is when you sell shares of a company that you don't own AT THIS POINT. Wait, what? Yeah, that can be done. As long as you buy the shares you sold later. Its complicated. Read here. So why do it? Because if you have some information about the company that indicates that the share prices are going to tumble tomorrow, then short sell today at high prices, and buy back tomorrow after the prices have dropped. That gives one a big profit. Hedge funds like to do this. That is why insider information is important. Also shady. Well, hedge funds and pirates frequently like to get together to drive prices down on a company. In that case, short selling will also garner massive profits. Also in the process devaluing the company and perhaps putting it through the wringer, but what do brokers care?

This week, hedge funds in NY and London tried pulling this on VW. Making it, for a short while, the largest capitalized company in the world. Except that it did not work. Thanks to VW, and also thanks to Porsche, a major shareholder. Read on here.

Vote!

Watch this viddy.. quite nicely made, exhorting you to get out and vote.. and even after all these years, Julia still rings the bells.

The purpose of television really comes down to whether the person is likable or not

The title is a direct quote from this NY Times article about a conservative school for grooming "experts" who will then share their opinions with you on prime time TV. Aah, the glories of the information age... aah, statesmanship!, aah journalistic ethics and integrity! aah, expertise!

Dynamic Image Resizing

Is now here! Watch this awesome viddy.

Webcomic

Nandi sent me this.. check out.. a good take on physicists..

Urban Planning, Money and some totally insane shite going on in Dubai.

Read this article, which is really mostly pictures, and tells how Dubai is transforming itself from a quite Emirate into a fookin' crazy place where (presumably) urban planner and bankers smoke random shite together and decide to build nutty things and actually finance them!

The last line of the article is quoted herein:

• "There are more construction workers in Dubai than there are actual citizens."

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON OVER THERE?

Yeah, my question exactly! The people involved in the actual construction of these magnificent monuments to Mammon ( I love alliteration) are an unfortunate lot. They work under harsh conditions. This article and this Human Rights Watch essay details what these migrant workers go through.

Music, cinema and emo's.

This song is beautiful. Listen to it here. This is Here is a sampling: Waqt ne Kiya, and the lyrics are posted below:

Movie Name: Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959)
Singer: Geeta Dutt
Music Director: Burman S D
Lyrics: Kaifi Azmi
Year: 1959
Producer: Guru Dutt Films
Director: Guru Dutt
Actors: Baby Naaz, Guru Dutt, Johny Walker, Mehmood, Pratima Devi, Waheeda Rehman
Theme: Art/Offbeat

Tum rahe na tum ham rahe na ham
Waqt ne kiya…

Waqt ne kiya kya haseen sitam

Beqaraar dil is tarha mile
jis tarha kabhi ham juda na the
Tum bhi kho gaye, ham bhi kho gaye
Ek raah par chalke do qadam
Waqt ne kiya…

Jaayenge kaha sujhta nahi
chal pade magar raasta nahi
Kya talaash hai kuchh pata nahi
Bun rahe hain dil khaab dam-ba-dam
Waqt ne kiya…

This song is fascinating as much for its poetry/music as for Geeta Dutt's voice and also for Guru Dutt's direction. But what really bugs me is the comments people leave on Youtube. Why does a lovely song have to bring out the emo in everyone?

A deeply haunting/cathartic experience. Geeta Dutt has brought the searing pain/longing/helplessness of kaifi's words to such melancholic intensity....that crying is a some sorta relief! Remarkably the song stunningly foretells the doomed real-life relationship of Gurudutt-peerless Waheeda! Tragedy of tragedy is Geeta Dutt has to undergo the trauma for no fault of hers.....isn't it a travesty that she sings for Waheeda. Great talents, human beings tragically lost early! All we can do is remember

Guru Dutt really lived cinema. It was tragic that this movie was a hit after his death. Great song. Lyrics, Music and the singer at their best.

I love geeta dutt's voice. Such intense
wish she had sung more songs :(

I never thought I will every cry watching this video.......May be a kid I never understood this song or this video....every emotion , every expression and every word is so true .....hatts off to Indian cinema....now days we are really deprived of good cinema. poor us...

Aaah too much! This song never used to bother me that much when I was a teenager, but now I'm much older and so have really loved it makes me cry :.(..

Makes me cry every time! Time has inflicted on us such a cruelty, you are no longer yourself , I am no longer myself.

The most important feature in any browser.

Happens to be the ability to symmetrically enlarge the font size without blowing up the web page asymmetrically and making all the links difficult to find. This is also true in another sense of any text editor. Why use a smaller font and strain your eyes, when you can have a nice large comfortably font size. 12 sucks. Use 16. Or larger.

Firefox 3 does this beautifully. Download it here. I don't have IE, so I don't know if it does.

Also, a note to webpage designers. Blogs/articles which have less than 10 words per line suck bitter lemons. Lemons shaped like dills. Do you know why I am using such a complex metaphor? because in the first draft, I tried to be explicitly rude and the fookin' blogger interface wouldn't fookin' let me!

Anyway, here I am.. so webmasters, .. dudes... design webpages in two formats. Letterbox/Normal and widescreen. We will all thank you.

Peeling tape emits X-rays!

Read about it here.

Young Sethu's research experience in haiku

I am a champ at PCR
My vision in science ranges far, really far.
RNA spectroscopy lies in the depths of my soul
While working late nights, I listen to rock and roll.

Update on Chandrayaan

So my father called me up late last night (while I was dividing my attention between my dinner and Donnie Brasco on the telly) to say that Baba Ramdev had been telling people about the awesomeness coming out of Sriharikota. So he managed to switch his telly on in time to see the launch live. Something to remember for generations with pride. Chandrayaan has made it successfully to parking orbit, with an apapsis/perapsis of 23000/250 km. That is a highly elliptical orbit. Successive engine burns will extend the orbit to lunar transfer and then the fun really begins. This project is a collaboration between many countries with a mixed science payload. The report on the launch is here. The ISRO rocks.

Aah, the trouble with Facebook...

is outlined here.

Just to put some things in perspective

Source: http://www.phdcomics.com/
All credits to Dr. Jorge Cham. The man rules.

Chandrayaan: Desi hardware going to the effing moon!!

Yeah, its here and its official. After decades of launching INSAT communication satellites and the occasional Israeli spysat, ISRO has finally decided to pop the big one. In a few short hours, Chandrayaan (literally means 'vehicle to the moon') will lift off from Sriharikota. The Chandrayaan rides atop a specially outfitted PSLV with mixed solid/liquid fuel stages, delivering a final payload of 1.3 tonnes into lunar orbit. The project carries a mix of remote sensing gadgetry with significant contributions from the ESA, and has a projected lifetime of 2 years. This is the most significant effort by the ISRO ever. Chandrayaan will ride to the heavens on a towering pillar of flame. I cannot help thinking that this is a fitting tribute to the genius of Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan.

And the other major elekshun issue is...

Cow abductions! Again, I have not heard anything from either of the two presidenshial candidates about their commitment to dealing with this issue. I mean, I understand that there is some governmental attenshun being focussed on this matter, but the people involved have their own issues to deal with...

And then again, cows are sacred to some people and lunch for others. Cows are important. As this video shows.

The elekshun and possibilities of a zombie apocalypse

The most important issue in this elekshun is being totally ignored. And that is making me angry. So, no beating about the bush...

SENATORS MCCAIN AND OBAMA, DO YOU HAVE A STRATEGY FOR DEALING WITH A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE?

Why don't people realize that this should be on everyone's mind? We need political leaders who can step up and keep a cool head in case of crises and I am not talking about something like a wimpy thermonuclear faceoff. What if, and no sniggers here, the dead come back to life and do a walkie? Are we prepared to deal with shite like that? Methinks, given our current state of preparedness, or lack thereof.. no. I mean, it could happen. Like, tonight. And if it did, then somethings would look different. Such as these.

But, the main thing is stay cool and elect leaders who will take us through without too much damage. Leaders like Shaun. Perhaps limited to a few melted Cornettos.

PS- thanks to people unknown for borrowed images.

Funny presidential candidates

Obama

McCain

Thanks to CNN

Explaining the wurlde, one Venn diagram at a time

Totally awesome shite!

The New Yorker faces off against XKCD in this epic, titanic, magnificent comic off!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fear.

Let us being by saying that I have not sat through reading any Stephen King. This is in spite of the fact that I consider myself a patient reader, and I am willing to give most things a chance.There is just something about King's writing that does not appeal to me. But some of his works have been translated into brilliant films. One of them is 'The Green Mile'. This was directed by Frank Darabont, and simply had to be awesome, with that cast.

Darabont came back to King with the 2007 film 'The Mist'. This is about people in a small (New England?) town trapped by a mist coming in from the mountains. They find themselves barricaded in a small supermarket.

Now as one person had long ago derisively captioned King's works as "IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY... AND THEN THE EVIL CAME!!!!!!!!"

True, sort of. But I don't know whether it was King, or the genius of the director who made this something else. Every good "scare" moment is better for the reflections seen in the faces and minds of people themselves. Every good SF work is ultimately an exploration of the human soul. The Mist went straight to that level. The way the group splintered into a small, rational group, struggling to convince a larger hysterical group was frightening. Even more so was the hold one deranged preacher had: who saw Armageddon in what lay outside. This was an illustration of the siege mentality at its very best. The Mist is mislabeled as a SciFi/Horror film.. it is an illustration in experimental psychology. The fundamental question it comes down to is "what will fear make you do?" In that scale it excels.

Liff, work and other things...

So, being guilty of drunk dialing people on (rare) occasion, I was at the receiving end of things for once. My friends at Chicago were all getting hilariously wasted and letting me know. While, of course, I was at lab working (Friday night, sigh).

Getting back home on Friday night can be a pain. The buses are full of partying (read drunk) undergrads. And if your luck truly runs out, you will be sitting or standing right next to a drunk who will then proceed to puke his/her guts out all over you.

The driver was a sport. The bus was kinda crowded. (When I say crowded, I mean US crowded, not Gariahat Jn on a weekday rush hour crowded.. that would simply kill people here.) He pulled over in front of the undergrad dorm and we hear his disembodied voice on the PA "Here we are. Home of fine living and elegant dining". That provoked a derisive roar from everyone.

Meanwhile, I was being eyeballed by this trio of kids, one desi, one Chinese and one American. And they wanted to know if I was drunk. And if not, what was I doing so late on campus. I told them that I was a grad student. They rolled their eyes and expressed deep sympathies. Then made some smart aleck comments about Maxwell's equations (they turned out to be engineers). I watched for a while as their conversation veered towards greater and greater inaccuracy and then gently stepped in, entirely in the interests of electrodynamics and straightened things out.

Finally, on the leg home, the bus mostly empty, the driver opined that 9 out of 10 times, it was some girl who hurled in his bus. He shook his head philosophically and said that in 35 years of his driving, that was the way it was. Words of wisdom.

Random conversations

Overheard on a bus returning from campus

A: What do you think about deer meat?
B: Deer meat is great. But I love beef jerky.
A: Yeah, I had this piece of deer meat that my friend gave me this summer. It's been sitting in the back of my freezer, wrapped in a newspaper or something.
B: You should marinate it. Or maybe cook a steak. But you know what tastes really great? Beef jerky.
A: What would you marinate it with?
B: Aaaah, barBQ sauce, I guess, maybe some herbs. But beef jerky tastes so much better. I have my own recipe for making beef jerky.

Aaahhhh.. Friday night

And here we are, still stuck in lab, looking at an evening and a weekend of work ahead. Not complaining, mind it. But surely there is an alternate reality where I would be going home at this time to nice food, pakodas' perhaps, maybe a hot cuppa Daarjeeling and a GoldFlake? Oh yeah, THAT reality. Never was going to work out, was it? I spent most of today at a protein sciences seminar, and then coding my way through some AA sequences. Someone must have done this, its just that I don't know where to find it. Did I mention that I dislike coding? There is sooo much more to life. Like reading HG Wells, for example. I finished his 'Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy' a few days ago. Amazing how he anticipated much of the EU today. Also Amitava Ghosh. 'Countdown' is well written.. but it is mostly a knee jerk Indian lefty intellectual turning a Nelsons' eye to larger realities. What was that shite about India and China never having any disputes? Has the man heard of Arunachal Pradesh?

Anyways, so me back again to work (and play), and this line cam to my attenshun which I decided to share with you...

Sometimes, though, late at night, I would think again of vim.

And since you obviously must read the article it came from, here it is.

And then for my "achiever" friends, the proponents of Dudeism, this discussion of how the Big Lebowski has transcended space and time to become something beyond mere cinema is worth checking out.

Email clients.. any suggestions?

I use pine. I am not afraid to admit it. It is not the snazziest interface around, in fact if it were less snazzy, it would be in direct competition with sending homing pigeons. But it never asks me to use a mouse and it never crashes. If my browser is slowed down by some junk piece of HTML on one tab, everything else might freeze. But pine, secure on its own desktop, never complains.

But there are problems:
1. attachments: they download on the IMAP server. that sucks.
2. address book implementations. not cross compatible with anything else.

So, I would like to ask the world for suggestions
I would like to email clients, for a Mac and for a RHEL desktop. Both should be free, interfaceable with Kerberos authenticated webmail, and lastly, both should have one click 'download all as a zip file'. Maybe two clicks .

Monuments are built on the backs of slaves...

Empire building usually happens when there is a large surplus of humanity willing to work for horribly low wages. As this article tells you, the wave of prosperity in Dubai, culminating in the most beautiful hotels in the world, is built on the backs of Indian/Pakistani/Afghan migrant workers who are made to work obscene hours for a pittance. Why do they keep coming in such large numbers? Simply because it is even more difficult to get any kind of job back home. In some cases, like those of Afghans, their homes, indeed their whole nation has been ravaged by war. What do people go back to?

One has to think about this: it has long been understood that all economic systems thrive on inequality: there is no way that the rich of the world, or even the not so rich, who shop at Saks cannot possibly maintain their own extravagant lifestyles if we were to provide free immunization against MMR to every child in the world. Or clean drinking water.

One of the fringe benefits of maintaining low intensity conflicts around the world is the constant availability of displaced people (refugees, we called them in a distant past) who will serve as willing (or coerced) warm bodies for labour when we erect our monuments to our own undisputed glory. There is the slight problem of some of tehse displaced people whose lives have been ravaged by conflicts set up and sustained by the great powers that they will turn so angry that some of them will insist on passing on their grief to as many people as possible. But hey, thats what the police state is for!

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.

Linus Torvalds' Blog?!?!?!?!

Dear me, is this just an elaborate hoax, or does Linus actually have a blog? If he does, then this is where it resides. My, oh my oh my.. this is wisdom straight from the curator of the kernel, the Gawd of all linux developers, the man who can, by uttering a single phrase unleash an army of unshaven hairy knuckled programmers who will happily storm the bastions of Seattle/Cupertino/Mountain View. The last time I was this excited about anyone blogging was when JKR started hers'. But then she became unutterably boring and old Dumbly suddenly became gay and that was the end of that.