Immortalized

Enclosure convection, caught on my home digital clock.



Now, if you're wondering how that happened, we forgot to take it off while conducting a yagya, and then it was just...
"Holy Smokes!" :-D

More than sometimes, a picture speaks a thousand words...

To Remember

And then (Spoiler), one Thursday, more two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one guy sitting on his own on a small bed in his room, recollected this poem he had learnt in a Hindi class in class VI.

Hum panchi unmukt gagan ke, We are the birds of the free skies,
Pinjar baddh na gaa paayenge, Caged, we won't be able to sing,
Kanak teeliyon se takraakar, Hitting against golden bars,
Pulkit pankh toot jaayenge... Our tender wings will be broken...

Hum behta jal peene waale, We used to drink flowing water,
Mar jaayenge bhooke pyaase, But we will die of hunger and thirst,
Kahin bhali hai katuk nibori, The bitter fruit of the neem is way better,
Kanak katori ki maida se... Than grain served in a golden vessel...

Svarn shrinkhla ke bandhan mein, In this prison behind golden bars,
Apni gati udaan sab bhoole, We forgot our days of flying and our speed,
Bas sapnon mein dekh rahe hain, Only in our dreams do we see,
Taru ki phungi par ke jhoole... how we swung on the branches of trees...

Aise the armaan ki udte, We used to wish that we'd fly,
Neel gagan ki seema paane, to reach the top of the blue sky,
Laal kiran si chonch khol, Open our beaks, red as sunrays,
Chugte taarak, anaar ke daane... and eat all kinds of seeds...

Hoti seemaheen kshitij se, With the endless horizon,
In pankhon ki hoda-hodi, would our wings take a challenge,
Ya to kshitij milan ban jaata, We'd either meet the horizon
Ya tanti saanson ki dori... or die trying...

Need na do, chaahe tehni ka, Don't give us a nest, (don't know the meaning)
Aashray chinn-bhinn kar daalo, Destroy all our support,
Lekin pankh diye hain to, But if we've been given wings,
Aakul udaan mein vighn na daalo. Please don't stop us from flying

Interestingly enough, when looking for lines that I didn't remember, I found the same poem posted in a totally different context, on another IITM fellow's blog...
Let me make it clear though, that the context for me is only pleasant memories and some nostalgia. Somehow reminds me of how rendition can make a difference...

I get pained with...

... these one-line blog posts I see all around ( :D Man, I just love this irony).

Of Food and Money

This is a recent decision I made - I don't want to take up a finance job whatsoever. The story is about 2 weeks old.

After a disaster-averted kind of GRE, I returned hurriedly to Madras (to avoid the bandh called regarding the Sethusamudram controversy). From my experience with the DMK's modus operandi, I wouldn't want to take a risk with them. Not more than a month and a half back, I was on my way home on train (going home for Onam, and that was something I was looking forward to very much). But to my utter misfortune, the DMK had called a railway block for Salem depot to be formed (and that too, to favor a decision that was in the personal interest of a minister, obviously, of the DMK). A set of highly uncivilized people blocked the train at six in the morning, held it there till 10, and then entered the train and forced us to exit. And then, they ask us to go find some other way of transportation, saying there's buses to Coimbatore, and that's all they can arrange. Thank god, the central government agreed (not exactly very positive, but at least it helped us get out of trouble) to the demands, and the train was released around 1 o'clock. The train was pretty much vandalized when some of us (who were left not taking the bus) re-entered the train. But since many people had indeed taken a bus, there were enough untampered seats left. After this incident, do you think I'd have the guts to be traveling on a day there's a bandh by these chaps? (Note: I don't support any political party. In fact, I'd like to oppose them all! I'm not venting my anger on a particular party alone. It's just the sick system of politics we have here)

Oops, I'm digressing too much. Anyway, back to the "story". I came back to Madras, and fell terribly ill; so bad that I was completely bedridden for 3 days. In this state, I had a friend buy me some food. It was 7 in the evening. I was trying to get eating something. I hadn't eaten for 24 hours (my last meal was dinner on the train the previous day). So I was in this dazed state. I had been sleeping most of the day. And I dream very intensely. So there was this huge intersection set of dream and reality where the border was heavily blurred (or at least, appeared to be). I tried to get myself to eat a bun. As I slowly moved my hand toward the bun, I saw 2 guys enter my room, breaking the door. They had laptops, and were dressed in formals. Anyway, they began doing something on the computers, and they were intensely involved in it. It looked as though nothing could deter them from simultaneously observing my every move, and doing whatever it was that they were doing on the computers. At some point of time, I asked them and they told me they were "running an automaton to see how my eating/not eating would affect the market and the value of the rupee". At first, my attention was diverted to what they were doing. I saw the value of the rupee changing from lots of other things. The parameter being plotted had 8 digits of precision beyond the decimal place! Now who on earth had imagined that somebody is spending all their time on calculating the 8th digit after the decimal for the value of a currency? My pupils dilated at the thought (I was just awestruck, and I hadn't taken a dose of this, I was just dreaming!). I had to squint to avoid the light from my rooms fluorescent lamp for a moment. The effect subsided very quickly though. Soon, I found this 8th digit calculation very repulsive. It did remind me of what's happening in parts of computational engineering, but then I found this more repulsive. It even reminded me of a plot element in Ghost in the Shell: StandAlone Complex: 2nd GIG (which is something I like a lot - not necessarily the plot element). But somehow, I was being irked by merely the process. Things got worse - every single step towards eating that I took, seemed to make this calculation ever more complex. Further, the analysts were beginning to comment on whether or not I must eat. They began taking the food away from me. These experiences, contrary to most dreams, weren't time-stretched. Note that most dreams last mere seconds, although it might seem like a long time to us. But this was happening in realtime. There were bursts of determination telling me it's a dream, telling me to break out of it. But the visual and auditory signals were extremely compelling (then). This continued for a fairly long time. There was nothing more strenuous, especially when I hadn't eaten for quite a long time, and was weak and sick. The whole thing lasted 4 excruciatingly painful hours. It was 11 o'clock when I finally had a bite of the food.


I am very much into abrupt endings. So, this dream's why I decided that I don't want to take up a finance job.

PS: the days that followed were full of action. A recovery, Shaastra, TOEFL, an exam - man, it's been a roller-coaster ride!

... and thanks for all the facts

I don't want to be giving an impression that I'm closing the blog (and that's the title story). I've been tagged. Now why is this so much of a phenomenon on blogs? What more are you going to know with 8 random facts? About me!? Ah well, who cares? After all it's a meme, and let me not disrupt the progress of a (localized) internet phenomenon. But I'm rather sure I'm the last among my peer group to put a post on 8RF, so I have the right to brutally terminate the phenomenon by not tagging anyone! Ah, fatal hilarity :D (not from Batman)
Here goes:

1. I was one of the few kids in my kindergarten who didn't cry on the first day of LKG. I was rather dumbstruck thinking: "What are so many kids crying about?" But I did have reason for crying on the second day, as I left my water bottle there and got scolded a lot at home. To make things worse, when the water bottle was indeed found, and shown in class, I couldn't identify it as mine.
2. There is no photo of me showing the red eye effect. Man, have I got one good pair of eyes :O
3. I had a reputation for arguing with my teachers during my 11th & 12th. So much so, that I have skipped at least 10 lunches just for arguing with my teachers (and in the process, made them skip lunch too!). And with all due respect to them, these were only over subject doubts.
4. I have a thing for old clothes, and I've had luck with them. My 8th standard school uniform trousers still fit me, and I wore them here in my 1st & 2nd year (till my mother threatened to burn them if I wore them again). I have a shirt that I was gifted in 1997, and it too still fits me! Fancy clothes that have outgrown a full teenage! Or for a more imposing figure, 10 years - that's half my life!
5. I collect straws of Appy/Frooti. I have more than 400 now, and probably only 20% of that is what I really consumed. I want to make a Buckminster Fullerene model using the straws.
6. While in a Bangalore mall, many of my friends were drooling at the girls, and I was drooling at a Maisto remote controlled Ferrari F1 car model.
7. I am very obsessive-compulsive and have vague habits. I chew on my fingers, pull out my hair - as thought stimulants. So much, that I have a bald spot from it.
8. I have plans to learn skateboarding this semester. All the inspiration for this comes from ESPN X-games and Tony Hawk's game series.

So much for random facts. I'm sure my next post will be much better.

Bookmarks

There was an old story of Google releasing the most popular search queries. Along the same lines, since I've been reading a little too much for that past 2 months, I decided to put up my Firefox bookmarks list online. This will give you a vague idea of a tiny, minuscule bit of what I've been reading. But I strongly want to recommend these books before going on to the bookmarks (I wouldn't recommend any of the bookmarks :P)

Phantoms in the Brain - V.S.Ramachandran
Collection of Sceptical Essays - Bertrand Russel
The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

And for bookmarks: (I would like to thank Sayan Ganguly for the idea of a CSV or a list representing a large turn of events) Let me remind you that most of these links are on Wikipedia, which has been my single most faithful companion during my internship :)

Bohemian Rhapsody (song by Queen), Boojum (superfluidity), The Hunting of the Snark (An Agony in 8 Fits) (a poem by Lewis Carroll!), Debye Model (lattice specific heat), Fresnel Lens, SnorriCam, Requiem for a Dream (the movie), Ampersand, Hyphen War, a picture on the mech2k4 Google group :D, Rom di Prisco's personal page, Area 404 (a collection of 404 error pages), Yahweh, Differential Geometry, Nash Equilibrium (Nash of 'A Beautiful Mind'), Hex (a board game developed by Nash), Godel Escher Bach, Molecular Borromean Rings (on nOnoscience), Board Crazy (a skateboarding site), MCPlus+ (a nerdcore rapper), Constellations in Popular culture, Psychoacoustics (see BOSE), Equalization, DirectX, Mellotron, Mondegreen (you have to read this!), Ich Hasse Musik (on Rammstein's page), Ma Baker (the song and the real story), Bonnie and Clyde (the fashion designer too!), Linux Audio software list, Hydrogen (drum machine for Linux), Tor (the famous anony - also Torpark, OperaTor), 0xDEADBEEF (the brilliant few among you will realize it's more than easy meat), Cult of the Dead Cow (now I'm giving it away), Tyrannosaurus, Dromaeosauridae, Yahoo (see Jonathan Swift), Batman: The Animated Series, Golden Raspberry Awards, The Elements (fanimutation of a song by Tom Lehrer), Audrey Munson (an actress), Fakelore (and similar portmanteaus), Science Park (read IT Park), And Then There Were None (novel by Agatha Christie, also a poem), American Serial Killers, Snowclone (see Mad lib), Powers of Ten, Simpsons Chalkboard Gags, Homer Simpson's jobs, Red Hot Chili Peppers (the homepage), It Must Be True! (an episode of Garfield and Friends, see also Wyoming), Capitalsaurus (see also List of US state dinosaurs), LMS colour space, Terratag (makers of the Laughing Man logo), Bible Black (see also Futanari), Bakunyuu, lonelygirl15 (meme), 120 Days of Sodom (book by Marquis de Sade), The Bus Uncle (video meme on YouTube), Blueprints database (an online database of actual blueprints), Nonogram (a puzzle/game), Tesseract (4D equivalent of a cube), RS232, Salvador Dali, Ambient Occlusion (a realistic reflection model), ContextFreeArt (this is an amazing crack of a software).

There are lots more, but this is just to give a flavour of the variety of stuff that I've been reading on.

h4x0r

To begin with, let me not go ahead with the formalities of it's-been-ages-since-I-posted and all that usual nonsense. I've done enough of that in previous posts!

The story I'm posting is from Slashdot, and you can read the original story here. It put me into a 5-minute laughing fit, so someone reading this blog might chuckle :P

Randall Munroe, the creator of XKCD, was recently invited to deliver a lecture at MIT. I badly want to read the transcript, so if someone has a link, please leave it as a comment!
Anyway, coming back to the lecture, do I even need to tell a word about XKCD and how simply brilliant it is? So, what did MIT have in store for Mr. Munroe?

One word - HACK

Part 1: "MIT hackers dropped hundreds of labelled playpen balls onto the audience from the hatches in the ceiling"



The image shows Randall Munro reading the contents of the labels on the balls - the XKCD logo and the 128-bit AACS key.
The key is one of the encryption keys required for HD-DVDs, It got leaked into the internet and has spawned a meme ever since. The leak would mean that one could easily play a licensed DVD on an unlicensed player, losses in millions. The key was spreading like wildfire over sites like Digg, and the controversy it created is in no way, small. The key (of which I shall not use the name, owing to fear of copyright allegations!) has spread a lot through things like T-shirts, songs, YouTube videos, tattoos, comic strips and what not! Here's an example from Wikipedia.

This is called the "Free-Speech-Flag". The idea is that the RGB code of the colours on the flag give away the code. But whoever created this, couldn't fit in the last part of the code, which is C0, which figures at the end of the flag :D

Here is a link to a T-shirt with the code on it. By the way, stop staring at the wearer, and look for the code!

Time for a PJ on this: Were the MIT guys trying to delete the code from their database by doing this?




Part 2: "Munroe was stalked by remote-controlled mechanical velociraptors"!!!
This is the part that made me go ROFLMAO.


What an absolute crack! I wonder how it would have been if he were wearing a "Say no to velociraptors (and all other members of the dromaeosaurid family) T-shirt. For all the mortal fear one should have for Velociraptors (and all other members of the dromaeosaurid family!), lady luck smiled on our man.

"He had been supplied with a squirt gun full of grape juice" - and is it a sad thing that MIT haven't yet uploaded an image of him using the gun on the vicious predatory attack on him.

Concluding Remarks:
I have one more nice image, of which I have analogy to show. The credits for the second image are to Mohan KV. The connect is "Conformal Mapping"

The story quoted most often, in a science/engineering class...

...just has to be 'The Blind Men and the Elephant'. The story, I must say, is of deep importance in understanding what the goals of science are. We are all but blind men, trying to understand what the elephant is. Each of us is at a different place/viewpoint, and hence, we all infer differently about it. But ultimately, we are just blind. It has to be made clear, though, that we aren't blind by choice, although some do choose to be, and I have no need to speak of them.



Ah, the arguments go on, and we still think the elephant is but a snake, a spear, a broom, a wall, a pillar, a winnow; and many of us would just have to stick to our opinion. Yet, it's fun being blind.

The other big-time story that is quoted just has to be Alice in Wonderland. Now, let me get to the point of why this is being written about. A few days back, we had our last lecture class of the course, 'Introduction to Turbulence'. The course was being taken by a new faculty, Dr. Prasad Patnaik. It used to be taken by Prof. N. R. Panchapakesan, a known god in the field. There was adequate mention of his work during the classes. Things went rather slow (probably, owing to the post-graduate audience), but there were many things in the course that I have enjoyed. The references in the course were just the thing in this semester's courses. We had ample links and book chapters to read, and not one source was boring. For what little we have learnt, there is still a long way to go - which is why I had to mention what he showed us in his last class.

There was the mention of the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. What each of us has learnt from the course largely depends on where we are looking. How very true. Alice in Wonderland hadn't figured yet. And then it happened. The reference was to a dialogue with the Cheshire Cat. It was intended to tell us about what to do with what has been taught in the course. It goes like this:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“As long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

The sheer brilliance of this statement just astounds me. I feel like reading the whole book all over again now. The beauty of Alice in Wonderland is in the fact that, as a kid, one would see the beautiful and fancy wonderland; and as an adult engineering/science/philosophy student, one sees the amazing references made to all kinds of scientific and philosophical concepts, controversies and things like that. So, as the Cheshire cat said, you're sure to get somewhere, if only you walk long enough.

A quick read through the Wikipedia page for the Cheshire cat, and I found this nice factoid. Cheshire cat is also a name used in C++ programming, for a data type that hides its implementation using a pointer. The amazing part is the example given, exactly in dedication to the Cheshire cat.

class Handle {
private:
struct CheshireCat;  // Not defined here
CheshireCat *smile;  // Handle

public:
Handle();            // Constructor
~Handle();           // Destructor
// Other operations...
};

and then, the implementation

#include "handle.hpp"

struct Handle::CheshireCat {
   ...     // The actual implementation can be anything
};

Handle::Handle() {
   smile = new CheshireCat;
}

Handle::~Handle() {
   delete smile;
}

Keep smiling, Cheshire cat!

Selfish Happiness

There are some times, some moments when you are happy that something happened to you. I remember examples not really worth quoting. In tenth class, we had a story in our English curriculum, by Anita Desai, called 'Games at Twilight'. The language, the imagery, the flow of the story can very well be described only by one word - shady. I shall not discuss about that much. The plot is something like this - a young boy among many other kids, plays hide and seek. In his desire to win, he hides in a rather obscure place, and in course of time, is practically forgotten by the rest of the crowd. There's a small amount of time for which the boy thinks he has won, defeated everyone. He then remembers such times of "private happiness" or "selfish happiness", like one when he ate a whole huge bar of chocolate(think like a kid, and you know what that means!). That's the moment I'm writing about here - the private happiness. My nomenclature is poor, but I can't find a better word, at least for the time being. So, there are times, some moments of private happiness. And the nice thing is, you won't find any of those on this blog! Am I selfish as ever.

1st post in 2007

It's been some time since I posted anything here, as usual. I have been thinking of posting a lot of stuff, but then, it might as well become to long, like the last post. As they say, better late than never. And I wouldn't bother if it is boring for the reader, because I am sure the number of people who actually read this(thanks to RSS/Atom feeds), are less than countable on fingers. In that sense, I practically don't have to bother about the blog being public! Ah, the joy of solitude... By far, my writing style is something that can be translated into speech without having to change words, tone etc. I am hence, at a disadvantage. My written and spoken language have amazingly high correspondence. And I am sure that is a sign of lack of refinement. In my view, written language ought only to be read, preferably alone. Collective reading or reading aloud leaves the reader with a handicap. As said in the Mahabharata(if I remember it right),
"An arrow that just left the bow, and a word that just left the mouth, are similar - they can't be revoked"
There's no perfect return/review once spoken out, or interpreted jointly. That reminds me of the way learn to study(?). In the early years, reading aloud is the best way to read and study. In my estimate, by around 3rd-4th class, this should be done with. That's when one learns the amazing way of reading, learning and understanding without the necessity of a voice, so to speak. Still, there is an inner voice(I am not preaching religion here!). The brain is the most amazing thing I can think of(crazy enough making the brain think of itself, or there is a place in the brain which thinks about the brain!). It is amazing how the brain can recall images, voices, touch and even smell/taste; leave alone raw information. Of course, all these are ultimately just electric impulses - a lame excuse for us to make(?). Getting back to written language, for a moment, brackets are a powerful tool in written language(and I use them lavishly).

I always wanted to experiment with all the brain's abilities. Thanks to me being in engineering, I'm not making guinea pigs of people and playing with their minds(another arbitrary boast which is rather baseless - and for the record, who said an engineer can't play with minds?). From my simple experiments with my mind/brain/whatever-you'd-like-to-call-it, I find that the brain is more or less serial in processing. Of course, I am not intensive enough to do an exhaustive mathematical analysis of this. I'd be happy enough to get an idea. This might explain why it is rather difficult to do different things with either hand at the same time(for instance, musical instrument players, if you'd want to argue, are trained for only that specific purpose for the parallel processing. They can't mirror their skills, as in - exchange the functions of their left and right hands). It may probably also make one think that this is probably why many ambidextrous people are Mensa members. I remember a particular example of a friend of mine telling me about his school teacher who could write different languages with his 2 hands at the same time - now that's crazy! I had also recently read about an MRI/EEG-based program to learn how multilingual brains work. I'm rather sure that there was also a reference to a paper in Nature. The study showed that different parts of the brain were active when using different languages. I don't have the link with me now, sadly enough(I had got the link through StumbleUpon). In India, with the amazingly high number of languages we have, it is really hard to be monolingual. Again, going by classification, we can have more than one native language. There are quite a few communities which are inherently multilingual. I am from one such community, the Kerala Iyers(Palakkad Iyers). We speak both Malayalam and Tamil, and our language isn't really pure. It is very different from either language. Thankfully, most of us can speak enough Malayalam to live in Kerala, and enough Tamil to live in Tamil Nadu. Being the center of a linguistic confusion, Palakkad Iyers have been subject of many a comic character/story in TV soaps, movies etc(again, both in Malayalam and Tamil). So much for the Iyer connection.
Getting back to the multilingual brain, KV Mohan once asked me a very interesting question - what language do you think in? It would be of profound interest to a multilingual theorist. I think in almost all the languages I know, though I have not thought in Sanskrit yet(yeah, very funny). But another question would pop up again - which language do I think most often in? That's still a puzzling question. Anyway, thanks to the world being a smaller place, there are more and more multilingual people around, and the answer to these questions will be found. The other thing I found in my experiments is with our brain's ability to reproduce music. Our brain can reproduce music almost exactly. So good, that you can put in a playlist and let it play, let alone having an iPod do the job. But yet again, the serial processing(or so I call it, maybe wrongly) limits the exact reproduction of the music. There is a rough limit on the details that can be reproduced, as if the brain has some kind of polyphony limit or something. Yet, it is plainly amazing that the brain can merely reproduce sounds and images, and also create new sounds and images. That was one of the ways I used to learn songs. I used to remember the tune perfectly, the lyrics vaguely(as my brain interpreted them) and then fill in the gaps with new information(who knows where that came from!). I have also had songs running in my mind while writing exams, and I used to match my writing speed with the rhythm of the song.

Coming to music; there's always some of the music videos I wanted to write a lot to write about. The first music video that really caught my attention was 'Californication', by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I am rather sure that this is one of their most popular songs, despite never reaching great ratings; and it has a pretty well-made and most importantly, enjoyable video. And that was the first ever time I knew that there existed something called 3-D animation. That was in my 8th class. Pretty soon, I got my first computer, came to know of 3-D games, and played Road Rash for the first time. Around the same year, the series Starship Troopers premiered on TV. It was CG animated, and looked very realistic to the then me. Of course, I was well behind the times in knowledge of technology back then. Year 2000 also saw the release of Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, a game I still play(I've finished it a million times, but the game is too good). The game brought in too many new features into the Need for Speed series. The graphics was much much more realistic than any other game I had ever played, the car handling was just too realistic, the music was perfect for the game, and the game modes were just groundbreaking(read from the link!). I'd have been writing a 10 page review but for limitations of other things I am thinking of. So, since that year, I have had a fascination with Computer Graphics, Electronic Music, Racing Games and what not. The other thing I wanted to write about in this rather arbitrary stream of thoughts, is about the video of another RHCP song, The Zephyr Song. The video is a brilliantly made with (strangely enough) a psychedelic theme. But the theme just blends into the song like water in milk. There's a kind of beauty in the way it was made(not just the exotic dancer :D ). And it doesn't seem like psychedelic music either!

So much for all that multimedia. Quite a lot has happened in the months past. I'd better not be recollecting the results of my previous semester(yeah, it's the same old disappointment, nothing new). I should say, though, that there were a few courses I really liked and I haven't disappointed in those atleast. December was the month to be last year. After a quick week of stay in the campus, I returned home for what may well be my last full college vacation. And there was quite a lot to it than I expected. On Dec 23, around 20 of us batch-mates at school had a reunion in Cochin. It was quite the thing that I wanted in years. I met some of my classmates after something like 2-2½ years. That's a really long time, especially at this part of our life, when things change drastically almost every other second. Obviously, we had lots to talk about, and I'm sure none of us could finish talking. The humans that we are, the reunion would not be complete without food :). We had lunch together, and the fun just swept us all around the dining tables. Trust me, school life is something every person ought to have in life. It is probably one of the most important parts of our lives, and a lot of what we are, is built up at school. I miss those days as much as anyone else. Time's invisible hand can't be turned back, and the changes it brings upon us are as inevitable as time itself. After the reunion on 23rd, we also had a school alumni reunion on 26th. Since most of the publicity was through either word of mouth, or through orkut, we didn't have a really big turnout. Yet, it too gave us much to remember. And a concrete Alumni Association was formed at last. I did put up a handful of pictures of the reunions on my Flickr page. This time, I don't want to put it up here. The images are better viewed on the Flickr page.

Time to digress once again. I have got back to my thinking habit of late. I love thinking. At home, I was so much into thought that my mother thought there was something I was keeping from her. Well, after all, our mothers are so much the most understanding people in the whole universe, to us(atleast to me). The bond between parent and child is very intense. That's why blood relation matters. To quote in Sanskrit(I just love the language)

"yam mAtA-pitarou klEsham sahEtE sambhavE nruNAm
na tasya nishkrutihi: shakyA kartUm varshatairapi"

It translates to - "The suffering which the mother and father endure in bearing and bringing up a child, cannot be compensated, even in a hundred years."
Damn! I digressed too much once again! It was all for just some idea behind a question I put in a quiz I conducted in my hostel. The question I put in was - What are the colours used in colour printing, and why? And practically all the answers I received were unsatisfactory. The answer is CMYK(Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK) and it's quite elementary. In colours of light, the colour mixing is additive, and in mixing of paint, colour mixing is subtractive. As in, if I mix Red and Green light, I see both Red and Green light. But if I mix Red and Green paint, I see the colour that reflects both Red and Green. Simple enough. So for colours of light, I would be using Red, Green, Blue and of course, their sum, White. But for paint, I would be using their respective additive mixes - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. What a nice idea! And the beauty is that it can be worked out! Let me not be praising myself(though this question did come to me in a stream of wonderful thoughts). The other very interesting thing that has happened, that I read of, is this method in Computational Fluid Dynamics called MLPG(Meshless Local Petrov-Galerkin) method. In all computational methods in Fluid and Solid Dynamics, we(usually) inevitably have to use a mesh to discretize a volume of material into cells. But this method, amazingly is Mesh-free. Now that is some serious genius! I love engineering :D. Anyway, I don't know enough mathematics to understand and write an analysis of this absolute spark of brilliance(I leave that job to this guy). That makes my job easier all the way.

I shall preserve all the other things I consider sparks of brilliance for some quiz I may conduct, some time in the future. For now, I'm just enjoying thought.