2008

{yearly archives}

Newton’s Revenge

In recent years, particularly after the third Nobel prize, a lot of people have asked me about my first brush with Physics, and why I chose Physics over Priesthood. The following short note is an humble attempt at answering those curiosities.

If I said that I was one of those precocious child prodigies that people read about in dailies, then I would be understating the case.

By the age of six, I already knew the difference between a Monet and a Manet, and by the age of 10, I was translating Shakespeare into English in my spare time. In class four, when we were first introduced to Euclidean geometry, I gave four different (and new) proofs of the Pythagorean theorem within the first two months, and then proceeded to work out the theorems of “Elements” in the exact order in which they appear in the book. True, I never proved the Riemann Hypothesis and then lost the proof by reinventing paper-napkins as they tell in the anecdotes, but I came pretty close. The actual accounts can be found in the version of Einstein’s paper on General Relativity containing my margin notes, which will be published five years after my death. Advance bookings are already available in Amazon.

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Mumbai ki Bai

The day before yesterday we went out for a dinner in the evening.

I was depressed. The night before, I had watched this funky little movie called My Sassy Girl, which, too exaggerated to be interpreted even literally (it’s a bad old habit of mine, interpreting movies metaphorically, which once led me to state, to the great disapproval of my friends, that Gangster, King Kong and Silence of the Lambs shared the same thematic attraction dressed up differently), made me contemplative about my life nonetheless, and any time I think about my life, I get depressed.

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Creating God !

I was messing around in the GNU humour section when I came across the Unix Error Messages page, which is an inventive collection of funny error messages you can get in a Unix shell. A lot of them don’t work any more, but some do, and some do it in unexpected ways.

% ar m God
ar: God does not exist

That is what the page says I should get in a C shell. Here is what I got -

$ csh
% ar m God
ar: creating God

Now That was funny.

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On a Train to Mumbai

My frantic and tedious journey ended about two weeks back, but I had been either too tired or too busy with coding and gaming to take up blogging.

I got really pissed off in the mathematics camp I was attending (I would have written about that, but the place was ten kilometres away from civilisation in every direction and a computer with a decent internet connection was hard to find). I sent an SOS to Anshul, who said that I could finally come over and start my internship. I made a last minute booking and got on the first train available (it wasn’t actually available, but I got on it anyway, praying for a conformation).

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One Thousand Dollars

Sau Crore (1991) is directed by Dev Anand, and I don’t think any fan of Bollywood will need a longer introduction to the movie. I wouldn’t really have watched the movie, except that Naseeruddin Shah was in the lead, and Sunil Gavaskar was to make a special appearance along with his team.

Obviously I didn’t expect much from the movie, but it managed to surprise me. In spite of being devoid of any artistic merits, it offended my aesthetics. The movie can be seen as a forerunner to a whole generation of comedy bums that Bollywood is producing now.

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The field Lagrangian of Feng Shui

Much goes in the name of science in this country, and if I were to believe what I read, the rest of the world is not much different.

My personal favourite is Ravan and his Pushpak Viman (a flying machine that he used to kidnap women). Whenever priests, old men and the wise old men of the community described to me the greatness of the ancient Indian civilisation, all of them came to this inevitable conclusion - the western science is now trying to rediscover / reinvent / imitate what had been done in India 5000 years back (the number of years varies from person to person).

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Unix Millennium Bug

The Unix Millennium Bug started getting noticed (in 2006), exactly a billion seconds before its sceduled execution, after there were some mysterious crashes which were finally traced to the definition of time_t in unix-like operating systems (and more generally, in the ubiquitous C (the programming language)). From a thread in PIClist, I also found this webpage which claims to have been written in 2003 (in case the opening paragraph looks familiar to you, yes, the whole page is a mostly plagarised version of the programming challenge in the introduction to the excellent book Expert C Programming by Peter Van Der Linden, a book I would recommend to anyone).

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The Return of The Native

If somebody had told me five years ago that I would one day come back to this old place, I wouldn’t have believed him.

That is a bit of irony considering that ten years ago I wouldn’t have believed that I was going to be away for so long.

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  • Chrono Logic

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