1273: Dedication

Dedication (2007) by  Justin Theroux.

I watched it around February probably, and keep going back to a few lines.. like "Life is a single skip for joy" or the interminable wale of grief which I used in Not. It i just a jumbled up story of a children's story book writer and an illustrator. I don't think the movie is that great at all.. except maybe a few moments.

Any ways.. these somehow struck a chord.

From

...
Lucy: I'll have a Caesar salad and a side of mashed potatoes.
Henry: Bulimia?
Lucy: No, hungry.
Henry: You're sure? That stuff comes back up pretty fast.
Lucy: Now that I'm in you're really gonna have to try harder to knock me off my game
Henry: You see our waitress over there. She wants to be an actress. She's got that air of entitlement mixed with desperation. She doesn't have the looks though. She doesn't even have the talent, but, like an old donkey she has been at it so long, she's not fit to try to do anything else. She lies to her mom. She's embarassed to tell her about losing the job for the big Palmolive commercial, but, fingers crossed, she's got an audition for Blockbuster Videos. She had an abortion once. She still cries about it sometimes eventhough she saved that thing from an agonizing life of eating leftover mashed potatoes and watching its mom lose jobs like Palmolive commercials. She's got about three ovarian eggs left.

In addition to being less interesting and much less attractive, you are also so much more pathetic.

You are not in.

and

to

Henry: I've spent my whole life... wanting something... and doing my very best not to find it. Never even going near the places it might be... And suddenly, I've got the goddamn thing practically chained around my neck.
Lucy: What are you talking about?
Henry: You. You. You're the, you're the... You're, you're- you're the goddamn thing. Ahhh, uh. I mean... You're, you're. I can't describe you... uhh, I don't, I don't write that kind of shit, I write... You know, the people who write, who write the real books, the love books, and the poems, and even those stupid little fucking novels with the hunky assholes on the cover...
Lucy: Stop...
Henry: You know it? You know what I'm talking about? You know - you're like Princess shit! You know? Fairytales. You know what I'm saying? The million guys are after and you're blinded by your beauty kind of shit. Real big stuff. You know, that just - even, we got the dick that kidnaps you and sticks you in a cave and you're guarded by a five-headed dragon, you know and the tales of your plight are spread throughout the land and all the guys go and put on their shoes so they can see what's up and none of them have the balls to save her except for me. I would go through anything... for you. And still, there I was looking for a way not to see it. Anything. Money...
Lucy: You stupid idiot.
Henry: Yeah.
Lucy: Yes.
Henry: Yeah... big fat stupid idiot.
Lucy: I hope you're better to the next one.
Henry: No - wait...
[he digs in his bag and decides not to give her the dedication to Simone, but grabs the pebble he had given her and then thrown back onto the beach and went back for later]
Henry: It was easy to find... it's the only one like it.
Lucy: You broke my heart, Henry. I don't think you can trust people. You always have to find something wrong. I'm just... I'm sorry. I'll miss you.

and later :)

Lucy: You'll never throw it away again?

1272: Diecimila

Finally, arduino is here after 15 days from the order( around 4 USD postal charge). Seems like postal service is not that bad after all .

For those who haven't yet been bored by my arduino references, well Diecimila is a microcontroller board with ATMega 168, and a USB Interface which makes microcontroller programming really easy. Effectively you can use Arduino as a small brain for anyTHING you want to build. The full set of functionality is available here . I hope to move on to/make Sanguino maybe in January 2009 ( around week 1285).
Though actual tinkering would require a bit of electronic minutiae purchase in my dear town. Just setting up basic infrastructure : avr-gcc , arduino ide ( :( a bit of java lurking around there, but not much of a direct issue i hope) USB Interfacing to electronic boards is really neat I guess, considering the fact that my laptop doesn't have a serial port. My megalith of a desktop does ( as an add-on), but in effect USB sounds like the future, or maybe I am already in the past with bluetooth and other wireless interfaces being the present.

For starters there is a whole set of interesting instructables at instructables.com . And well in the end there will always be reprap. But as you can see I am pretty far away from a self-replicating rapid prototyper.

If you think Diecimila sounds like a greek goddess or demon or something ( I thought so :P) well it is just 10k in Italian.

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I really need to start coding on constraint satisfaction (brl-cad) more regularly. Very few changes since gsoc.

1272: V

(:D I am younger than I thought .. only 1272nd week going on instead of 1281 :P)

VO₂ Max

I am not exactly well built :D ( as is evident from my highly disproportionate body) and neither am i very physically fit (conisder uncommon sleeping cycle and eating habits). It takes me 25 minutes to run 5 km and thought it is ONLY twice the world record, I am pretty sure it is something to be a little bit unproud about :P

VO₂ max (also maximal oxygen consumption, maximal oxygen uptake or aerobic capacity) is the maximum capacity of an individual's body to transport and utilize oxygen during incremental exercise, which reflects the physical fitness of the individual. The name is derived from V̇ - volume per time, O₂ - oxygen, max - maximum.

My VO2 max is a measly 32-38 presently. Hopefully it improves after some training..IIT KGP 5000 m record is around 18:30 i think which is equivalent to around 54 or 60 or something. Ofcourse running has more to do than V02 max i guess.. I hope to reach 20:00 sometime. You can calculate miscellaneous info about ur running here.

Violin

finally started playing?? violin again. One of my favourite Violinists if I haven't mentioned it before somewhere is Samvel Yervinyan, whom many of you may remember from the Yanni concert. There is so much passion in the music when he plays it. I am unsure whether this is an Armenian influence. I tried out a few Armenian songs and if not passionate, they are definitely energetic enough. I do try listening to L. Subramaniam, but Indian classical music interestingly makes my brain warm up .. I mean it gets hotter.. not a head ache .. and ofcourse it cools down ...I even love the feeling.. but maybe my secondary auditory cortex is too much of a mess to properly process the sutleties of Indian classical music. I am completely in love with Subramaniam's Jai Hanuman btw.

update: broke one of the pegs .. need to get it repaired :(


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arduino still not here.. hope indian postal service is as good as it used to be ( assuming us postal service to be reliable)

1281 : No Promises

( Note: the following content includes some sexual references which might be inappropriate for children, persons below the age of 18, sissies of all ages, virgins upto the age of 30 (average indian man?) etc. Read at your own discretion)

According to this law, if you promise to marry someone, have sex with them, and later not marry them, then you can be charged with rape even if the sex was consensual (only in India ofcourse). Since I am a law-abiding citizen, this implies that if I am indeed considering having sex with someone before marriage, to be legally clear, I should atleast get a written consent that I did not promise marriage on a future date in return for intercourse ( As much as i would love the romaticism of not being legally safe, considering India is one of the gayest places in the world, I really don't want to get raped in prison). How can we as a nation be so stupid.

Inherently the law implies
1. Sex is bad, consensual or otherwise.
2. A woman will have sex with someone before marriage only if the guy promises to marry her, or additionally women are stupid enough to have sex with someone just because the guy gives her a verbal security of marriage.
3. Women are weak and thereby need protection under such law even if they have had consensual sex.

And ofcourse, the punishment under such circumstances is 7 years i think. I really think the feminists should address this issue which so clearly marginalizes them as a weaker and stupid sex. On a connected note, I think working towards the elimination of separate sports events for women should be another step in their fight for equality. I guess men will learn a lesson when women are able to beat guys/ equal them in each and every field ( ok maybe not tomorrow, but one day .. even if current athletic records show a wide gap, I am quite hopeful that at least in a few games maybe women will be the record holders rather than men.. I hope i get a few feminist friends thanks to this :P) I wonder whether we should have a similar law for the protection of men : I mean shouldnt there be some sort of legal fine if your girlfriend elopes and marries someone else. Just to clarify to my future feminist friends, who might read this, I am obviously not implying that women are not capable of luring men into having sex with them using the aforementioned method of promise of marriage, and in pure equality , there should also be a law protecting men from such powerful women.

I think India gives a completely new meaning to pre-nuptial agreement or should it be pre-coital agreement.

On another note, Kerala a.k.a Malluland is a weird place indeed. Lesbianism and problems faced by homosexuals come up at 9.00 o clock on major mallu channels. There are programs about husbands being abused and tortured by there wives and to top it all, there was an article about Cybelianism in the Matrimonial section of Sunday Special this week ( :P just to be clear, I wasn't reading the matrimonial section) For the uninitiated, Cybelianism is a religious "faith" which proclaims the power of women (to the extent that the wife is expected to piss on the husband ( in his mouth in particular) everyday among other examples of various BDSM related practises). I felt odd even writing this here. But I feel my ethical publishing responsibility should only be reflective of the esteemed newspapers of the country . Talk about sexual liberation.

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The Fall by Tarsem Singh

I was truly blown away by this awesome movie. In addition to having an amazing (children?) story, Baraka-esque scenography, and lots of Indian locations, Catinca Untaru has made me speechless for quite sometime when it comes to acting. I had never heard of Tarsem Singh before, eventhough I had seen The Cell in 2002, which was probably impressive cinematographically, but not really a kick-ass so to speak.

It was so good , I started watching it again even before it finished the first time (ok. I know that sounds weird) and then once more with my family. I wonder how a 10 year old kid can pull this off . Eventhough there are people who graduate in physics by that time these days, this must surely be much harder. How do you make a ten year old kid act "acting as innocent"? I haven't seen the Piano, so not sure about Anna Paquin.

Life is going as per "plan": working on further development of my thesis, going to gym with my dad in the morning (purely out of good intentions concerning his diabetes rather than my tummy :P), reading mostly irrelevant stuff which has had the success of getting published and ofcourse awesome sleep and food.

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Still using pymol, thanks to Branden and Tooze (almost near ending beta structures) . Started Kandel's Principles of Neural Science ( Part 1 over) As a result dabbled with fsl a bit. Maybe bioimage suite and slicer would be more interesting. Only thing progressing at a good speed seems to be Let's Learn Japanese series. Kicad still stuck at the last exercise. Sparkfun has shipped my arduino. Hopefully it reaches in a week. Started a few Cambridge Companions ( Wittgenstein, Foucalt etc.) but don't think they would go much further. Doing Irodov again feels so easy - easy enough to make me wonder how it could have been so challenging a few years back. I guess kgp was not really as brain-dampening as people claim it to be or maybe growing up has its side-effects.

blah-006

Mankind is too fond of variety to be always pleased with the same decorations. We are alternatively pleased with the gay and the serious, and even with the pathetic, even the horror of a battle has its beauty, and out of fear springs pleasure.

Piranesi, Diverse maniere di adornare camini(1769)

blah-005

Nous parlons avec l'hémisphère gauche

Broca, 1864

1280

Workspace


Tibetan: Homework Day 1

Patronize

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Branden & Tooze going at a decent pace .. onto beta structures now. Proofs from the Book introduced me to Buffon's needle. Proving the trivial result is indeed a pleasure if you don't use calculus. Considering the fact that even something like throwing needles on a ruled page is intricately connected with pi (not to mention showing up at virtually any math whcih has got anything to do with anything) , I can say without the least bit of doubt

I believe in pi.

Nolli's ichnographic map was an eye-opener. Though a little bit shaken after Nolli, I still like the terrain view in Google maps. I have been trying out librarything and it has been an absolute pleasure. Completely non-intrusive and truly awesome web service. I wish it had some sort of reading progress for each book. Also if anybody is interested in Tibetan , I really found learntibetan.net a helpful tool if you already are following a book/schedule.

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The exhibition of unnecessary pictures is ofcourse a commonly observed symptom of newcameraowneria.

1279: Not

When the best things to sayare the things which cannot be said,
I wonder..

why I miss
the choices I never made,
the days I never spent,
the lives I never lived,
the dreams I never dreamt,
the memories I never had,
the pains which I never endured.

It is not that Life seems meaningless without you,
Or the world any less grotesque
Or science any less profound or art uninspiring and religion any less hypocritical
Or literature less intricate and philosophy any less boring.
It is not that Life is nothing but the occasional burst of laughter
rising above the interminable wail of grief[1]

Maybe,
It is just that we never met,
as if we somehow lost an era we never had.

--
1.  Dedication(2007)

blah-004

The smaller the boat, the bigger the adventure

~Unknown

1279 : EDA & Molecular Visualization

Electronic Desgin Automation is indeed a vast and very fruitful field to say the least. Schematic diagram generation and PCB artwork forms a very small part of it. I was particularly impressed by the ease of use of kicad. Though I am practically more inclined towards Floorplanning ( considering my architectural backgrounds , interest in constraints, 2 gsocs in similar fields etc.) most aspects of EDA are quite inviting. Though i toyed with gEDA sometime back it never really went anywhere. Hopefully with the "more intuitive" kicad, maybe random walks would end somewhere. ( Don't laugh at the screenshot .. probably the most terrible rs232 :) and an example of a particularly large hole in the PCB :D )

Who doesn't like visualizing molecules ? If the representation looks artistically intricate like that of proteins, it hardly takes a push to try things out. I have always been impressed by the amount of open information availability in the field of genetic and protein related studies. So a book like Branden & Tooze + www = roaming around in the molecular world ( well an artistic representation of it .. blah) I have almost always used only rasmol. But I recently shifted pymol and it has been quite a wonderful experience. It is somehow much more intutive. In the picture above, the molecule on the left is Haemoglobin A ( with its characteristic Iron complexes) and the one on right is Seal Myoglobin.I have only reached Chapter 3 (alpha-domain protein structures) of B&T, but it seems like it is going to be on the top of my reading list. On a connected note , The crystal structure (3.2 A) of mammalian Fatty Acid Synthase is on Septemeber's Science cover.

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On a followup note seems like Techsouls is not working. So waiting to order arduino via sparkfun
as soon as gsoc money comes to the ge corporate card which i finally got unlocked today.

blah-003

Pain is temporary, Pride is for ever

~ Unknown

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athletically ofcourse :P

blah-002

Nature is a tinker and not an inventor

Jacob, F. 1977. Evolution and tinkering. Science 196:1161-1166

1278: Pondi and Tranquebar

Finally, back home.

What an amzing week this was. I am quite sure 1278 would be etched in my memory for quite some time. After finishing off gsoc, I figured i should take a short break ( sic. from what? ) and ease of a bit. My basic plan was to visit a few Pondi and Tranquebar and visit a few of the projects as well as the general work of INTACH or Indian National Trust for Architecture and Cultural Heritage. The plan started when a mail was forwarded regarding an opportunity to work with INTACH on the projects in Pondi and Tranquebar. Though not very financially rewarding considering their NGO-esque stature, the work description and information from the website seemed extremely satisfying and interesting. And after 5 days of being there, I am all the more impressed. I would be speaking about Intach Pondi in particular considering my lack of access to first hand information regarding other cells, but I am hopeful that if anything they must be as rigorous and refined in their approach.

Intach shatters conventional assumptions about "Conservation", "Restoration", "Heritage Architecture" and a host of similar words and ideas. They operate in a niche they have created for themselves, exemplifying the role that an architect or more so the practice of architecture could have in socio-economic dynamics. The basic idea of Intach ofcourse is to protect and conserve heritage structures. But at Pondicherry, I saw a passion towards focusing the same energy in a microcosm ( consider residential structures rather than forts and castles or a medium sized bungalow being converted into a hotel in a small panchayat) This increases public participation to a great extent and provides interesting models for captial generation as well as public private partnership. I was impressed by how Intach was able to break many barriers and reach the people with a medium like heritage conservation.

Pondicherry is definitely much more heard about that Tranquebar, a small panchayat around kms south of Pondi. It was a danish colony during the 17th, 18th and 19th century. More information is ofcourse available on the web. What was really impressive was that, there was so much employment generation simply due to the work being done by INTACH and in the next few years, the whole topography is going to change in this small village ( town? ) thanks to the Master's thesis of Asai, enthusiasm of INTACH and funding of Governement as well as Bestseller Foundation. I guess it is true that the world is indeed changed in small ways , somewhere every single moment.

Pictures from Pondi and Tranquebar at Picasa (Disclaimer: My first digicam and even otherwise suck at photography.. most of these taken due to severe power-battles with mom and sis after returning from Paris without pics)

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More details about INTACH Pondicherry is available at their website . For more general information regarding INTACH see this.