Doublethink

Just began reading 1984 by Orwell...have been putting this in queue for a long long time....I love the whole concept of doublethink that he portrays in the book....one example:


"The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own
infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes."


Ingenious, eh? I love newspeak.

Which is heavier?

I did my monthly ablutions, and ended up doing my laundry today....Its always amazed me how heavy a month's load of clothes can be, and I began wondering which is heavier...the load of 'dirty' clothes you take to the washer, or the load of supposedly 'clean' clothes one brings back.

On the first pass, it seems obvious that the dirt, sweat and what not your clothes hold before you clean them off might imply that the load you take to the washer is heavier than what you carry back.

If you just look at the load you need to carry, though, you also know you are carrying more trapped 'air', between the threads, as well as the 'balooning' of the clothes.

Your clothes get oxidized a little each time you put them through the drier, adding a few electrons here and there each time, and its possible, nay probable, that you find the clothes heavier out of the drier than when they went in. Also, they are warmer, and from Einstein's "e equals m times c squared" implies that the raised thermal energy of the atoms in the 'clean' clothes might add some mass too...


But are these rather tiny molecular additions and bloated air in mass more than the few millilitres of sweat/dried salt on the clothes?? I dont know. I am gonna weigh them and find out someday :-)

Teen Spirit....Uncool!

In other news, it is weird how teen spirit was even created. Ol' Cobain style shit, had always left me wondering if it was all 'inspired' or just randomness at work.

Yeah, yeah....you are wondering now if I am plain stupid to slip all that shitty lyrics out at you, buy hey, in my boredom, I found the time to learn about what the song was all about, and how Cobain had misinterpreted the perfume 'Teen Spirit' for the [supposed] metaphor 'teen spirit'....surprising what boredom can feed you!

By the way, during my misadventures with the fracture, I learned that San Francisco downtown smells a lot like 'smells like teen spirit', too....especially if you stay out after midnight when the rather uncool crowd shows itself on the streets.
About that maybe sometime later!

Looking beyond the cast...

Aww, its actually gets cold here! Here I was, hoping that Northern Cali doesnt go below the 50s...

Six weeks having flown past that rather nice,warm, eventful twenty-ninth of October, the beauty of being twenty-two showed itself in the form of a tiny yet significant amount of growth hormone flowing down from my hypothalamus to assist the growth of 'new bone'....I was officially (i.e. by the KP orthopedic) declared fit to walk without support. Shows what mind[pituitary]-over-matter (and a general unscrupulous screw-y'all attitude) can achieve....I am gonna try skiing next time I break a bone. I promise.

Look at what I found in spam....

Someone was bored enough to type all of this and then send it in a mail with ye-old " bank-account-of-a-zillion-dollars-in-sierra-leone" pitch....reminds me of some vague memory of some phrase with finding a rose amidst thorns.....


1.. My husband and I divorced over religious differences. He thought he was God and I didn't.
2.. I don't suffer from insanity; I enjoy every minute of it.
3.. Some people are alive only because it's illegal to kill them.
4.. I used to have a handle on life, but it broke.
5.. Don't take life too seriously; No one gets out alive.
6.. You're just jealous because the voices only talk to me
7.. Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.
8.. Earth is the insane asylum for the universe.
9.. I'm not a complete idiot -- Some parts are just missing.
10.. Out of my mind. Back in five minutes.
11. NyQuil, the stuffy, sneezy, why-the-heck-is-the-room
-spinning medicine.
12.. God must love stupid people; He made so many.
13.. The gene pool could use a little chlorine.
14. Consciousness: That annoying time between naps.
15.. Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
16.. Being "over the hill" is much better than being under it!
17. Wrinkled Was Not One of the Things I Wanted to Be When I Grew up.
18.. Procrastinate Now!
19.. I Have a Degree in Liberal Arts; Do You Want Fries With That?
20.. A hangover is the wrath of grapes.
21.. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance
22.. Stupidity is not a handicap. Park elsewhere!
23.. They call it PMS because Mad Cow Disease was already taken.
24.. He who dies with the most toys is nonetheless DEAD.
25. A picture is worth a thousand words, but it uses up three Thousand times the memory.
26.. Ham and eggs? A day's work for a chicken, a lifetime commitment for a pig.
27.. The trouble with life is there's no background music.
28.. The original point and click interface was a Smith & Wesson.
29.. I smile because I don't know what the heck is going on.


Peace. And love.

Rock Band!

I hate posting again in so short a while but this had to be said.

I joined Insen, Whiplash, and Stewie, as stand-in vocals in Rock Band on Stewie's new Xbox 360... When Stewie was out bonding with his bro, Whiplash stepped into Stewie's role as drummer, leaving me to do the vocals....I did a fair job on about half my songs and sucked on the rest....I was thrust straight into medium difficulty, in my defense, without any idea of the tone or lyrics of the songs.

I agree that the drums are really hard, I could'nt get a beat going until my second song, but the guitar was ok....I look forward to my next jam session with them, and hope that we can find a second guitar somewhere to play bass with (the only position left open for poor me).

A happy side-effect from the jamming session was that I got a whole new bunch of awesome rock music to listen to, courtesy ye ol' bittorent...

I highly recommend the following songs from RB:

Queens of the Stone Age - Go with the Flow
The Killers - When you were young
Radiohead - Creep
Soundgarden - Black hole sun
Foo fighters - Learn to fly
Iron Maiden - Run to the hills
Weezer - Say it aint so


Cheerio.

Break a leg, por favor...

Well, yeah, its been a long hiatus from writing in general....my life's shifted into a different gear with work and stuff...I live in California now....need to work only about 10 hours a day ( a great drop from the heydays of graduate school )... I own a car, live by myself in a fancy little studio in a posh area, can actually afford to buy random electronic junk...Random sleep times, random lifestyle, and even more random friends, all ensconced in a happy secluded life living alone....ah!

Like all good things, all that blissful randomness came to screeching halt during a rather tumultuous [past] two months.... a rather weird accident to fracture the fibula on my left leg into two rather uncool pieces...Living alone then proved to be an arduous mental and physical task... with concerned parents calling all the time to make sure I was fine, and me having to limp around to do everything from throwing trash to driving myself to work [ oh, by the way, my claim to fame has changed to the rather insane masochistic act of driving yourself to the hospital with a broken leg... autographs available on Plaster of Paris material only].


I promised myself I would not let myself fall to gloom due to the pain, and did everything from climb stairs without crutches three days after the accident, go to a birthday party, watch about a dozen movies, jaywalk across an expressway, get five strikes bowling with a single shoe, lift foosball tables, survived an earthquake, play table tennis...I probably did more stuff than when I had two full legs to walk on!

Bacchus normal form

Awesome....I actually remember everything I said about 1 hour ago to a bunch of people who I knew well...It is rather weird that I actually had to outwardly pretend that I was totally 'out of it' to get to know some people better...lime juice and water has that effect on me! No one realized that it was lime and water all the time, and thought I was 'out as light' [ note all comments reporting otherwise shall be despatched to the trash can expeditiously ]...took my abuse and refused to give anything back to me...poor Raghu had to tolerate me asking him to ask him to keep his mouth open. I don't think he opened it though > (did he ?)

A few had to tolerate my verbal tirades, being tightly lipped about what cannot be said, and bunch of other friends allowed me to know what I wanted to know. Unfortunately, it was necessary ;-) Weird eh, that acting inebriated gets you people's compassion instantly, though I still could not get all the answers one often looks for. Damn it, that no one was 'knocked'....would have been a 'good will hunting' time, had people been less tight lipped...as a good friend Vizwaz acting such is definitely more fun :-)

Some people actually knew what state I was in ...I was surprised that the poor little Long Island Ice Teas had lost their effect on me, and were reduced, as Sumeet put it, to regular Ice Tea. From where I picked up this surprising tolerance, to get home, and then play counter-strike for an hour, call everyone to confirm that they got home just fine due to the time of the night, is just underscored by a 'lol'!

Always wanted to name something Bacchus Normal Form ( since I heard of the whole BNF thing), and this moment in time is suitable enough. Reminds me of Kurt Cobain's death for some reason... the whole choking-on-puke thing is rather weird eh ? Especially after lime juice and water???

Keerti's bday

Amidst all the post H1-B trauma, we managed to do some stuff for Keerti's birthday, friday and saturday nights. Yes, its the first time I went to more than one 'party' for a birthday.

The first one just had the usual butt-kicking and cake...the second one had a huge assortment of junta from the CS dept.......you could have called it the good ol' motley crew....

For the first time , I was at a party with people from Pakistan, Mexico and Burma...not exactly 'international' , but its a big leap forward from the usual hum-ho stuff. Sumeet actually got some champagne, to celebrate the silver jubilee of Keerti's existence as an individual...

I on the other hand, am much younger, and never fail to remind elderly people (>=25yrs) of that fact ;-)


And yeah, listen to the awesome OST "I'm Shipping up to Boston" by Dropkick Murphys, from 'The Departed'...(this btw plays on top of this page, if you havent disabled plugins @!#!@$$!! ).

You can also listen to it on imeem

A ruse for sloth

One of my undergrad friends described this as the hedonist phase...where all the body seeks is overweighed by the need for the mind to cocoon itself in a shroud of sloth...Maybe a sea-change is in the offing, but who knows, what this leads to.

I have gone to the brink of total lethargy. All the vibrant energy I associated with myself, has been diminishing over the past month. Is this, as someone put it, the 'dog days' of graduation, where one goes panting to the finish line, out of breath, out of space and and out of one's mind?

I still somehow get assignments in on time, but do nothing else at all. No sports whatsoever. No social interaction.

Like Sourabh puts it, I am no longer 16... Alas, age does catch up, I guess...but this seems almost scary...It sure ain't depression...just something weird.

T'is described as 'la vie'...the ups go with the downs, but why ought there be downs at all? And is this a down at all? I suddenly prefer waking up at 1pm, barely missing my 930a Probability class all the time (The downer's that the mid-term's in a week, and desires my presence). Perhaps, I need a challenge...my thesis has been rather smooth, with just ALL the writing left to be done in about 20 days ( no biggie ).

The interiors of my living room's all I have seen in about 24 hours...with the only break to go get some milk, coz I ran out of it.

Some shit, huh ?

T Rajendar (TR)'s movie Veerasamy

Awesome fun! the best part is that TR actually thinks he's funny...wow...Thanks to the tamil cultural association, a bunch of us got to watch this movie...his dialogues are world famous, and his general great humor is evident throughout the movie...though no one had a clue what was the story....some weird stuff about his daughter running away with his sworn enemy's son, whereas our hero , TR , is himself in love with his servant-maid... Lots of corpulant dancing, weird brylcreem-ed hair-don'ts and allround fun...a must watch for every tamilian out there!

My all time favorite!

Enable download plugins in your browser, and reload this page, in case you have'nt already. You should see a song playing on top of this page.

Also, if interested, look this up :
Uyirin Uyire Live Mix

Its a score remix.

Cheers, and enjoy the rest of spring.

Reservation in India : The real source of brain-drain

For those not in the know, the recent announcements from the Ministry of
HRD,India have re-instated the provisions of the Mandal Commission
recommendations of 1980 of reserving 27% of all seats in institutes of
higher education being centrally funded for OBC's. In effect, this
alongwith the quota already administered for SC's and ST's ricochets
the quota to a staggering 49.5 %

This act will come into being in institutions such as Delhi
University, IIT's, IIM's and other prominent institutes on which India
prides itself. To create reservations for 49.% of the total seats
completely undermines every notion of the so called "equality" it
seeks to bring about.


Wikipedia tells me the following:

Reservation is a phenomenon unique to India and is different from affirmative action which is practiced in many other countries. The main difference between the two is that in affirmative action the amount of concessions to be made in order to increase representation in an underrepresented group is at the discretion of individual organizations, whereas the reservation system in India is based on statutory quota that must be met.

Affirmative action, by the way, is followed in the USA, particularly for Black and Hispanic minorities. In India, on the other hand, the whole system is lop-sided against the 'un-reserved' people...

Woefully, reservation was introduced to counter generations of partiality and prejudice adjudged to be due to the caste-system being in vogue, and, instead persecutes people of the un-reserved classes, which still account for 30-50% of the masses.

Under this pathetic system, the 'general quota' positions, are filled according to merit, and the people of the 'reserved classes' under those allocations, do not account towards the reserved vacancies.


Following is a view from an middle-class student from a high school in Chennai:

The concept of reservations in India has not worked for 50 years, and this guideline too is a more populist measure aimed at the "aam aadmi's" vote, while cutting away from the real reasons that foster an ever increasing urban-rural divide. Instead of focusing on increased infrastructure creation, strengthening the rural school systems and quality of education, creating trained manpower, cutting corruption and so on, the administration has instead played the reservation card yet again, screwing a sizeable section of the population.

Nice to see school kids knowing and acknowledging such things.


I, for one, felt an instant sense of alienation, due to extenuating differences in how my classmates and I, whom I had grown up with, were segregated, and differentially 'admitted' into institutions, based on accommodation into respective quotas (In case you are wondering, I fell into the general quota sometime back, which was filled up first, and hence, the consequent cribbing ;-) ).

I felt, personally, that there was no role, that I should play, to accede to this system further, and decided, that further education was only possible at a place there was no such prejudice on where you were born into. Sure, I could afford traveling abroad to study, and sure, my parent's were'nt the poorest of the poor, but it shames me to see, other very smart people, being left in the dirt, simply because, they were'nt of the right class. One of my cousins, for example, cleared well over 99 percentile on both engineering and medical entrance exams after high school, and still could not get into the top three medical colleges in the state, simply because he was'nt of the right birth.


Super-smart, ( or super-rich) people do not feel this pinch, among the un-reserved classes, but the poor, and insufficiently educated lot, are certainly decimated by the system. People like me, who could afford to get out of the system, do so... And considering the opportunities vis-a-vis money and potential elsewhere, why is it then at all surprising, that there is so much brain drain?

Something must be done to rectify the situation, before the politicians in India accuse the smart people of bailing out.

India V Bangladesh, WC '07

India won!! Not!

For the first time in history, I feel like giving up on cricket...Losing, is all too common for India, but losing to B'desh, and that too in such a wimpy fashion, deserves a blog entry, nay, a whack-in-the-butt...The high and mighty attitude Team India carries is all too evident...They lost to Zimbabwe similarly in the 1999 World Cup, sealing their fate then ( though Zim were a better team then, and that result had a probability of say 20% ).

There seems to be a deep-rooted mentality amongst general cricket-watchers and cricketers alike to over-rate or under-rate India, based on current performance...Think of it this way, of the 30-odd matches India played against B'desh, India never lost...Probability finally caught up with it...lol.

Totally unremarkable spring break

Hi,

After much deliberation, me and a bunch of friends decided to go someplace. Well, in our rather extreme stupor, we decided to head to Dallas. Almost immediately, thanks mainly to Google, we discovered that there was practically nothing to see for a tourist at Dallas. But considering group politics and our total lethargy in planning anything else we settled for Dallas.

An early morning ( at about 1PM ) trip to Enterprise gave us a car, and the trip there was rather easy. We stayed at the DaysInn Plano, and went the next day to the Dallas Arboretum. That gave us a rather neat view of Dallas downtown, with its picturesque highrises and so on. Nothing out of the ordinary, except for seeing about a million flowers, all of whose genetic classification I have forgotten by now.

A rather uneventful trip to the Natural Science Exhibits ensued at Fairpark. Saw some really weird dead bodies enbalmed, preserved, and internal organs dyed and displayed in totally unorthodox positions. The term 'rigor mortis' kept popping into my head, as for some reason, the relative positions of the different 'specimens' was rather strange. We also saw a bunch of other things there, but nothing remarkable. Apparently one can donate one's body to this rather irreverant exhibition, though I have no clue why anyone would do that.

Sure, there were a number of other things to do, but we decided not to do them, for inexplicable reasons. Our drive back was far more eventful and lively, thanks to the torrential rainfall that accompanied us all the way from Waco(enroute) to Austin.

J.S. - B.E.; M.A.;

Yes...Its official.

" Jayesh Seshadri, of the University of Texas at Austin, shall end up with a M.A., courtesy his professional adventurism in attempting the impossible... trying to get a thesis done as part of his Master's. "

( And yes, its spelt Master's and not Masters you dope... And don't hate me for my punctilliousness :-))

Its remarkable that from a Bachelor of Engineering, in an Engineering school, I end up getting an (aaargh!) Arts degree from the College of Natural Sciences.

Personally I have nothing against the Natural Sciences bit, but getting an Arts degree, as Patton put it, is simply, a bridge too far.

My friends ( the 'Scientists' amongst us ) jokingly allude to the ludicrity with which it shall be viewed in my (possible, probably improbable) marriage invitations ( another bridge; perhaps too far! ).


p.s. No offence - I have nothing against Art-'ists' , but just my upbringing in a developing world, where traditionally the lowest ten percent end up going to schools of arts puts me in a weird mood... I understand completely that this could be read as bigotry, prejudice, etc...But I shall whole heartedly disclaim any version of this attributed to me in the future...I'll just claim this is a consequence of a MySpace attack ;-)

A Nomad's life

Aargh....damn these pesky bedbugs....Unfortunately, I have recently found out that bedbugs can exist without there being any beds too...On the stubborn refusal of my roommate to throw away his bed-linen, we have ended up with a rather sticky problem...I am unable to stay home past 10p.m. thanks to these nocturnal pests squiggling around to suck my blood...my roommate, however sees nothing wrong in "giving" away some of his blood...

As a consequence, I have been restricted to a nomad's life...roaming from location to location in seek of shelter. Lucky am I, to have some friends....