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.

Henry Wadsworth... Longfellow

It has certainly been a long time since anyone saw this page. For the few who maintain RSS feeds to this page (I wonder why), it must have been that blip on your feed reader that led you here. I guess you’ll be seeing ample reason as to why you might give up on one of those, pretty soon. I’m not into public information and I don’t have the courtesy to inform any that this blog is closed (for heaven’s sake, it isn’t!). For once, I’d like to put a long, long post. This post has been pending for a full third of a year, from July. I wouldn’t be delaying it any longer. There are 2 parts – with a temporal separation, and possibly, an intellectual separation as well.

Caesarean Section

In the beginning, it is said, there was nothing. There is nothing throughout, for some. It is probable that this drives some to write, about this endless nothingness, this absurd null-potency, this negligible drop in a mighty ocean that one is. For some, there is no drive. Independence is farfetched. A slave to the unsurpassable, if it be called, one is to be. It is a mental block, a psychological and philosophical handicap. It transcends everything else, and arguably, this may as well be the reason for belief. This will just raise further questions – what is belief anyway? It is rather impractical to ponder about something abstract as this. To some, this naivety is a good curtain, or in certain cases, as may be, a shield. To be honest, in earnest, please do not read this. This may be comparable to sending a letter to someone in an envelope, with the contents of the letter being ‘Do not open this letter’¹; or comparably, as good as putting up an advertisement that reads ‘This is not an advertisement’. A ritual, it may be; so to be written, or typed. Convolution and complexity are beautiful, but not in a clear-cut sense. It is unnecessary to abstract the information that is predictably of no interest. July, August. It is rational to assume that a well-read person would either despise of the despicability and immaturity of the idea; or raise an eyebrow, for a thought.

This is not written in a pensive² mood. A quick look at some profiles on Orkut would tell you how often ‘pensive mood’ is the title of a number of photos in albums. I did not think before this. I am not a thinker. I am one among those with the philosophical handicap. But I dare not be proud of it. Ego, whose existence is irrefutable, yet unjust, refuses to think. A blog is not a place for such immaterial things – it is the place for reviewing movies and music, commenting on social issues, droning about how one is dissatisfied with anything and everything under the sun, advertising one’s proficiency in language etc. I don’t want to offend anyone by putting in references here. I am narrow-minded, stubborn, idiotic, but that is what everyone is. But knowing that I am idiotic is better. I wouldn’t claim this is existentialism and I wouldn’t be very hesitant to ignore a question.

As for what has happened, the times have been better than average. A well-deserved 2 weeks at home so that I could get some time to do nothing, it was nice. I fail to remember but someone has said that the best thing to do when you really need a break is nothing. It should clear your mind of all the other things in life. Once you have a clear and straight thought, things are just thrust wide open. I get a morbid urge to put reference to how things can be opened by sleeping³. I don’t think anyone unknown to me will be reading this, so the references make sense. I enjoy this needless idleness, knowing that you can leave open ends. And now, for something completely different⁴, the reason for the title of the previous post – I had got myself into anime. So I decided to put Japanese in the title. And the first letters of all the words together will read ‘Jap o Jap’. Abrupt end of part 1… I think I’ll soon be scaling new heights (read depths) in arbitrariness.

Plus Two

I figure out that, irrespective of how arbitrary and chaotic you can be, there should still be some order. Lots of examples come to my mind. One of them is how there is order in chaotic systems like turbulence⁵. It was all in a lecture. The second (to none⁶!) is saying that you can kiss goodbye to the chaos you thought existed, nature isn’t fractal anymore⁷. I have so many references here I can call this post Hash⁸-Bash. I would have loved to copy the Wiki symbol for references. When I make my webpage, I suppose I will use the Wiki template. As if, for as idle as I am, it’ll be done before you can say antidisestablishmentarianism⁹, wibble, charge etc. These types of references have been very useful in something I did, the Shaastra Main Quiz.

That was a whole episode of back-to-bed-is-something-you’ll-never-say-runs. The pay-off was just below the mark, thanks to an unnecessary interruption for an ethical (?) prank. If I ever finish making my webpage, I’d love to put up all the questions there; including the ones that couldn’t be asked. The other thing I truly enjoyed was the Ignobel. When you exercise your humour to try and make someone laugh, when all you normally do is give them neuralgia; you know there’s a spark of something new. All said and done, it came at a noticeably large cost. I have been watching xxxHolic, and some things I have seen reflect many of the realities I have come to appreciate. One episode¹⁰ seemed to show how the costs reflect on us. I don’t think the reference will tell you the entire story, but the idea (if you did read the page) is the high baby chair that Yuuko takes. It is the one that the woman’s baby sits on to eat. There! That’s the little spark, the subtle point in the episode. Looking a step further, does it even make sense getting inspiration for life from some work which is not even true? Why should you take ideas from something which is totally fictitious, let it be a book or a movie? I suppose once you start questioning your belief, you will never have enough answers.

Questions… and answers… solutions rather. The assignment was an exposure to how things happen at the last moment and still work. By the assignment, I mean the assignment we did in our Heat Transfer course. Making questions in Numerical methods in Conduction, and solving them. I succumbed to the work-at-the-last-moment policy for solving the problems. I must admit, it was my belief in the group that made me work. I guess it might pay off well. Num3rouno, we called ourselves. This is the group that we discuss in, the group that sits at a lunch table talking all kinds of esoteric issues, yet a lot of innovative and novel things. I bow to you.

Oh my god! I went so far forgetting what I began with – order. I was about to write the idea behind the title when I got started with it. This is where I have ended up. The idea is guessable. For the reason of order, I kept it the same. September, October - 2 more than their Roman numbers. I want to write about my Plus Two at school, since I mentioned it anyway. That was probably the last time I had done an assignment of that sort.

To wrap it up, these are my class photos in 2 years of Plus Two (11th and 12th obviously! I didn't have to repeat a year then) The photos are in chronological order.

Just another piece of Junk, Arbitrarily Pathetic

First of all, let me not write a word about Juno and the etymology of June. I'm bad at it, am I not? I already wrote already wrote about the etymology of June in that. Thanks to HTML, I have made that sentence contradict itself.
I'm doing what I do quite well here. Writing arbitrary things, related only in one way, that is to some of the events that happened in this month, however vague the connection be.

This month has been fairly a good one. First of all, it has been raining once in a while and the weather has been beautiful. I have finally learnt the art of swimming. Yes! I have mastered the art of swimming! I can now conquer the seven seas, the mightiest rivers! - Of course, this was inspired by

->this. Calvin and Hobbes is ultimate.





I have finished Ghost in the Shell : StandAlone Complex, 2nd Gig. Quite good, and some of the plots were better than the 1st. Only, the link to the Laughing Man wasn't as obvious as it was meant to be. And the view of my house is almost visible in GoogleMaps. I can also see my school. I'm too lazy to upload any images though.
The best thing about the month was a classmates reunion that was on 17th. I missed it though. School life is the most enjoyable part of life, and meeting my old classmates would certainly bring back such a flood of memories, not even Noah's Ark would be of any use. The changes that 2 years have brought are ground-breaking, earth-shattering - on many. But not to forget, we live in a world where some things never change. This brings me to a Petronas Ad, if I remember - of a few Tam guys dressed like rappers, and something nice happens. The catchphrase is different, but who cares!
The day after, one of my friends put photos of the reunion on his Orkut album. That day, I spent 200 freakin Rupees of talktime from my mobile calling up practically all of them. For a person notoriously stingy like me, that is a landmark.
Another thing that I cherished are the long fart(read 'useless chatting', for non-IITians) sessions with Bhaand and Chintu at Narmad mess, usually after breakfast. It gets so long at times, that I end up putting PJs to 3 batches of breakfasters, and sometimes also having breakfast with them. I am notorious among my peers for having huge breakfasts, I take atleast half an hour and I'm not very slow at eating. It is good to have a heavy breakfast, forget the adage anyway.
Like many people here, I have been following the World Cup, and I believe Germany has a very good chance to win it. The world cup has been very shady, though.
-Lots of obvious have-to-be-there-can't-play-without players not selected.
-Surprise goals by many of the so-called underdogs.
-Bad refereeing decisions, unwanted hussles.
-Pathetic performances by many players, especially the big names at the EPL.

Soon, I will be going home for a much-needed visit. That will be the topic for my next post. Some time, I have to write about some non-arbitrary things.

May it Be

It's the month of May, nothing else with the title. May is named after the Greek goddess Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades and the goddess of fields and fertility. As usual, Greek mythology is intimately connected with astronomy. Pleiades is a beautiful and probably the brightest open star cluster visible in the night sky. Maia is the brightest. The beauty of Pleiades also lies in some of the detailed features such as a Reflection Nebula, which is a cloud of dust appearing bright thanks to reflection of light from nearby bright stars. Edwin Hubble gave a simple formula that relates the angular size of the reflection nebula to the Apparent magnitude of the nearby star. The hi-res image of the reflection nebula was my wallpaper for quite some time.

This month has been moderately eventful. My results have not been something I can particularly write about, it's always better to pretend contentment and avoid cribs. I've been doing a lot of browsing, it has become my favourite pastime. My Schedule has been quite awkward, but I suppose I have been upto some creative work. I have also got in touch with many of my old classmates. It gives this goody feeling. Another good event is that I just finished watching Ghost in the Shell : StandAlone Complex and I'm quite impressed with the overall storyline, but not much with the individual episodes. The character/concept of The Laughing Man is just beautiful. The 2nd series, 2nd Gig, is better. Even better, I suppose are the movies, Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2 : Inocence. I was impressed by practically everything in the movies, the animation(the blending of CGI into the cel animation), the story, the quotes & references, the background music, subtleties in the plot, the list goes on. The only drawback I can say is the accentuated anatomy(to be euphemistic), which can be understood by the fact that the creator of the original Manga, Masamune Shirow is also a hentai artist.
I have been enjoying my extended stay in Madras, I suppose not many people miss me. It is great to live in neglect. Loneliness has its unique beauty(and I'm not a Narcissist - this is especially for POTA, if you're reading this post). I'm now looking forward to another month of joblessness, random thoughts and then the inevitable and all-important home visit. Which reminds me, I can't yet see my home in GoogleMaps, but I got this good a view. The black square is roughly where my house is.
The green patch near it is a ground adjacent to our street.

Happy Birthday to Me

I turned 19 four days ago, and I did escape without Birthday bumps(in other words, none had the enthusiasm to give me bumps).

After turning 19, I frankly have to say, I'm still a kid. I have learnt but a miniscule fraction of a drop in the mighty ocean.

My sincerest thanks to many many people for not killing me for my PJs which are getting ever so worse daily. Your cooperation in this regard was inevitably necessary for my survival in my 19th lap around the sun. Thanks also to the many who actually think I'm normal and support my views(the rest of the world may pity you, but you are seriously broadminded).
Finally, thanks to all who have wasted their precious time in reading this post and losing moments of their vanishing youth.

Previous Records

This is what was referred to by a person whose initials are inscribed in the minds of every Mech and Elec student.
The scene - F slot class, papers being distributed. I was nervous after hearing that LHS(Ayush), one of the most innocent people I know here, was given a zero over suspicion of copying. That's nerve. I am on my way to collect the paper and I accidentally(or was it an omen?) bump into the guy before me. I'm given my paper. And there's a pull from the other side when I'm taking my paper. I see my paper and to my horror, I see a petite '0' on the paper, for the first time in my life I'm seeing a zero not preceded by any other digit on a paper I've attempted.
I know precisely why the suspicion arose and why this was done. I simply didn't write ANY formulae on my paper. That was a serious backfire. I'm quite used to this way of answering. I had to go and ask for marks. What reason could I give? That I don't write formulae? Will any sensible person believe that? And what can I even tell him? Beats me.
I went and asked him for whatever I deserved, I was told :' I'm not convinced by any of your reasoning, or by a sad face that you can make. I checked your previous records, and just for that I give you marks for whatever you have written. Don't repeat this'.
Phew! No words left to say. All said and done(!) there's some places you may be remebered for something you have done, it may be in the most unexpected of circumstances, like this. More lessons learnt - what you write matters. No more papers without formulae for me again.

Reflecting on Shaastra - Good Heavens!

Ok let me make one thing clear - a pun is intended on the title 'Good Heavens', which you may understand later. Writing on my experiences at Shaastra 2005 will take long. Shaastra 2004 was the start to it all. I will have to confine it to the event I volunteered for, and in 2005, was coordinator for.

My experiences at Astronomy Workshop Shaastra 2004 were strange. I was working under good old Loki, who inspired me quite a lot to participate in Literary activities. I got to know 2 amazing people - Ganesh and Aswin. Work was tedious with a lot of posters to make, 10 hours a day on computer, searching images and putting them on posters, making the template and what not. It was fun with Loki preparing for GRE right beside me. Then there was the putting up of IPs, xeroxing of the star maps - which could have been assigned to volunteers for IP and production (my thanks to all the other vols). The system is quite organized with work very well distributed. But sometimes things were very bad because of lack of manpower. Then when the event came, came the registration thing. 2 of us had to sit at the Hospitality giving the registrants star maps which were their tickets to the event. Along with that there was a problem with the title of a lecture in the schedule, which had to be changed by hand in hundreds of these sheets. The lectures arranged were excellent. Then it was food coupons being spent in the evening for dinner and off we go to terrace to set up the telescopes and stuff.
I should say, the one thing that spoiled all was that the skies were very cruel to us. Clouds everywhere making even the brightest of stars almost inivisible. Till around 30 deg altitude the sky was a shady red soil colour. Thanks to TIDEL park, there was a lot of background lighting. To add to all the trouble there was uncontrollable crowd trouble. We had to show them TIDEL park for showing them how to use a telescope... Well, all said and done, it was an experience never to forget.

Sem2 : Shaastra coord interviews in March. I don't know why I went for it. Still can't figure out why I took a lot of responsibility when I'm seriously bad at handling this. Anyways, I got selected and work began soon for Shaastra 2005. This time we had a lot of stuff done on the web including a pre- registration. That was supposed to make it all the more better(?). IPs and all software material was made well in advance. We got some videos to show the participants so as to keep them entertained if the sky were to be like 2004. I learned a lot from 2004. My extra thanks to the coordinators Loki, Debo and Devilal. The next issue was getting telescopes and lectures. Thanks be to my co-coord Prasad aka Rapdas, a lecture was arranged. Disappointingly we couldn't make that as good as 2004, but one professor who couldn't come that time came for a lecture this time for World Year of Physics and that got us lucky. I had to make a string of visits and calls to get telescopes from Birla planetarium. But in the end we got some very impressive stuff from them. But to get this, it was quite difficult as things were going wrong in the last minute. Lack of understanding among coords was taking its toll. We finally got that done too. Furthermore there was a problem of arranging a place to store these. Only a small enclosure was available and that did suffice.
Coming to the event days, the professor who was to deliver the lecture arrived on day1. A very nice person, who has a lot of u.s accent because of ~20 yrs there. Things beginning to work. But... Rapdas was writing GRE on exactly that day. Man was Murphy right! To add to the trouble there was a seriously killer problem. The event which was to begin at 11 was put in as 9 in the schedules. What bigger problem do you need. There was another registration problem, people expected the same as 2004. So we had to reintroduce that. People throng the terrace at 9, we are just getting started. What a shock it was for us! And then because of people thronging the hospitality desk, the hospitality head is totally pissed off(obviously). He comes atop and says - Astronomy Workshop Pack! and all Hindi abuses. I was beginning to count stars - pun again! It was a long quarrel with the core group that settled it. It was 4 mad men shouting at each other(incl me!). It was an effort to get it right. The telescopes arrived on time. We set all the equipment up including a computer and LCD projector (which initially was not sanctioned for us - so we had to put an effort there too). The vols were given the work of handling the scopes/binoculars during the session and 1 guy for the registration thing.

t = 11 pm, 06 Oct 2005. We have people coming in. Everyone up and going.
THE SKY IS CLEAR - GOOD HEAVENS! And so we started and it went very well. Participants were amazed at the software demonstrations we gave them. Many thanka to the vols, observations also went well. Ganesh and I were shouting the basic instructions, like
"There's 3 stars there, you can't see the 3rd" , "The big triangle right above your head" , "The blurred patch is a cluster" and what not...







Photo shows a vol and myself pointing at Cassiopeia






Aswin unfortunately couldn't be there for the event. We missed him a lot. Telescopes incl the huge Celestron reflector were excellent and people enjoyed working with them. The summer triangle was very dominant in the Western horizon. And of course we had Mars and Orion nebula, Andromeda galaxy and too many binary/double stars to show them.
Day2 and 3 went like it were pre-programmed. And the timing problem was almost clarified by huge IPs showing the timings. It was one heck of an October.





Photo shows almost the whole group of Astronomy Workshop 2005.
Me 3rd from left.

So much for the 4 continuous night outs and no more than 2 hrs of sleep per day. These days gave me a lot to write about, too much to remember. It's difficult to say whether time will wear this experience off me. Hope to keep the enthusiasm going. Cooperation kept everything going. Let me keep that in my mind, as the rig veda said:

Sam Gachhadhwam, Sam Vadadhwam, Sam Vo ManAmsi JAnatAm

Assemble, exchange ideas, know your minds together.

My December

Sort of escapes me why I give such shady names to my posts. Stereotypical nevertheless, for some people. The title is self explanatory.

This is one of my biggest problems, I often write so much that an introduction will take the space of a whole article. This time I'm glad it didn't go a hundredth as much. Precision and accuracy are key to an engineer's way of working, though we see that approximation to a certain practical extent makes up the modus operandi when approached with a problem. I give in to the scientist in me for some reasons may have to ask God to understand, sometimes.

Anyway it is some kind of weird month as was expected, December. Almost nothing to do, a lot of introversion, more sleep, more food, fattening and what not. Got nearly bored to death. I was kind of jobless, but for a few things. Weekends got wasted and I think it's been real bad of me not even giving notice to my old teachers that I was in town. Things keep bugging me at times. It was a dramatic turn of events at home, lots of drama on the phone, I was getting pained by some of the stupid things we were speaking about.
One of the nicest things I did was visit a really, really good friend and spend a day with him. True friends will never seem to cause any problem or even a hint of it, they will pull you from ones.
I pity the person who reads this, if ever there be one.

Is Spring far behind?

Machine Drawing - An Epsiode to Forget

Well, this is the story of my ordeal with Machine Drawing, one of the two courses I liked in the 3rd semester. I started off very well and I knew the concepts extremely well. I just loved the subject. But the way people took it changed my opinion about Mech in IITM. People bunked a lot of classes in the beginning and towards the end, they just started dweling in the CAD lab! They spent all their days there finishing their backlog and then doing something extra and that too in some very bad fashion which changed the impression of the professor who taught us. Man, these people just don't sport it! furthermore, after knowing everything and being quick and efficient in the software, I still managed to screw up everything by making the worst careless mistakes I've ever come across in my life!
This could be my worst ever score in a test on 50. I already made a landmark dark spot of 5.5/20 which hit me like the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving a gaping hole in my mind. I should try and get rid of this carelessness which was dominant before JEE, dormant during it and back with double the intensity after it.
Another thing that saddens me is that I've missed the 2nd wedding in a row this year. My absence was felt. I felt left alone and too much open to the subtle changes chance brings to me. My studies shouldn't go anywhere but up. And that's a long way to go starting with my carelessness that is sky high.
I believe that I can make it some time and that I will. There is a force inside me that keeps me going even in the worst of situautions and it has to grow. Faith and hope can lead me when coupled favourably with immense amount of hard work. I'd rather highlight that the work you have to put in does sometimes exceed very well, the goal you have to reach.

'Na me mrtyushanka Na me jaatinbhedah
Pita naiva me naiva maata na janma
Na bandhur na mitram gurur naiva shishyah
Chidaanandaroopah Shivoham shivoham'

I have no death or fear, I have no distinction by class or caste,
I have no father, or mother, or birth,
No friend, no kith or kin, no teacher or disciple,
I am the embodiment of knowledge and bliss-
I am Shiva, I am Shiva

From Nirvanashatkam of Sankaracharya.

What is Arabian Marasmus?

I am Mahesh Mahadevan, have finally created my blog!
For those who didn't understand what Arabian Marasmus is, it's just an anagram of my traditional Brahmin name.
I don't think anyone is interested about that.
Let me hope I can continue to blog.