Nice editorial in TOI

We often read books inspite of not understanding them. Reasons for doing so are varied. Todays TOI editorial carried an article on this. The reason: A briefer history of time by Stephen Hawking. Read on...


Stephen Hawking — claimed by some to be capable of understanding the mind of God — has published A Briefer History of Time, a shorter, simpler version of his landmark A Brief History of Time, which appeared in 1988 and is, in effect, a biography of the cosmos.

Reading about the new book, I rummaged through my book shelves to find A Brief History of Time, which I bought 10 years ago and started reading four times, and stopped reading four times when the physics and the mathematics got too complicated.

Anyway, I'm making a fifth attempt to read the book, and this time I've promised myself to read on till the end. If the man can take the trouble to write a book to explain the universe — and has now done a made-easy edition, for dullards like me — the least I can do is take the trouble to read it, even if it involves giving myself a headache.

It seems I'm not the only one who feels so duty-bound. Despite the fact that many scholars have confessed that they could not follow all its arguments, A Brief History of Time became an instant mega-seller.

What explains its huge success? Why do people buy books, or listen to lectures, on cosmic subjects which they are incapable of understanding? Is it intellectual snobbery or intellectual masochism?

Is it just fetishism, as if mere ownership of a book, without our reading it, enables us to somehow 'possess' its subject-matter? The subject-matter of A Brief History is infinity, the endless continuum of the very great and the very small. As Hawking says, the size of the observable universe alone (never mind the infinitely unobservable) is a million million million million (1 with 24 zeroes) miles, a macrocosmic infinity not reflected in but simultaneously one and the same (for how can there be two infinities?) as the microcosmic infinity of molecules. Giant stars and subatomic particles so small that they cannot be measured are one; Creator and created, one. That infinite oneness is the open secret of Hawking's popularity, the universal appeal of his meta-physics, his meta-mathics. And that's why I'm having another bash at reading him. For can his infinite understanding of the infinite mind of God (another word for the workings of the cosmos) be an infinity any other than the infinitude of my ignorance?

Source:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1246905.cms

Blog Updates

Fiddled around with the template.

Actually was going thru somanchi's blog when i realised that i really didnt like my visitor counter and shoutbox. So decided to get new stuff wtih similar functionality.

the result

My ShoutBox.com and

Rapid Counter

Both these sites offer huge number of fonts, colors and styles.

And also do comment on the look and feel of the newly added features :)

~sasank

Random ramblings on gmail

This was one of those discussions which started innocently but suddenly turned philosophical and that too unintentionally. Excerpts from the same,

sid

to airforce

Sep 28 (21 hours ago)

i can understand when you say...pending jobs! life in a b-school is all about rushing to meet one deadline after another. The moment one deadline is reached , there's an another one hanging the right next day or two! The sad part is that the road ahead is strewn with loads of deadlines and though u fininsh one its not the end of the road. Life goes on and on except for the quaint sunday evening when you are having a cup of chai , you realise that its been a week past by and there are more jobs left for the week ahead. Somewhere down the line you wish to give it all up and just sit back, but then a few seconds of doing that .............it strikes to you that the roomie next to you is burning the mid-night oil writing a paper/contest. its a dog-eat-dog world ,after all. So you are back on the chair ...... working!

Phew! whatta life. But i guess you start learning to love the running and you learn to take one thing at a time! And you are left to wishing that it would be nice if the rabbit won the race in the Tortoise and the Turtle story with just one burst of sprint rather than tortoise labouring and labouring to win it!

oops...realise its not my blog rather..gmail. Anyways....who cares!

---------

Sasank Venkata

to airforce

More options

Sep 28 (21 hours ago)

macha.. this time wen i went home.. i got into one of those discussion
me and abi hv...

i casually remarked tat once i get into a job, i will hv max fun.. and
he mentioned the dog eat dog part...

come to thnk of it, isnt it a choice we r making.. we cn mk the other
choice.. one of leading life in a much relaxed manner; watch movies,
go to the gym, do wat u like most, go for nature walks for instance..
but no, we choose the latter... knowing tat it is gonna be hectic with
no time to do all we want...

in spite of hving a choice, we choose teh wrong one.. becos of
societal/peer/family pressures/expectations and then we later crib abt
it.. not fair na...

we had a choice.. we jst couldnt choose wat we want... or is it tat
this is wat we want...

~pandu

-----------

so junta out there reading this, wat do u think?

Sunderbans trip: Part I

Sunderbans trip

So, where do I start from? And how do I go about this? I somehow hv a feeling that given my writing skills, the trip account read here would make it feel less fun than we actually had. I will try and make this account useful for people who intend to visit Sunderbans

Firstly, we left for Canning from Sealdah station by a local train. By the way, unlike the Howrah station, Sealdah is much cleaner and better maintained. In fact, it has an air conditioned Subway as well. (now, given the general standards of Calcutta, this was something unthinkable :P). The train ticket costs 11 bucks and the journey is around an hour and half long. There are trains every one hour and the early morning trains and late night trains are less crowded. (Stating the obvious ()

At the Sealdah station, (yeah, the station has a Kwality Walls outlet as well. It is a different matter that the guy selling the stuff there has zilch idea about what he is selling (. All he knows is the price of the product)



The train journey was eventful, to say the least. With our court jester, Vinchi in full flow, it was fun. We had this session of rendering of songs in the typical train format and also filming a movie in documentary style on the handy cam we were carrying along. It somehow seemed pretty fun to all the onlookers. But soon, they joined in. So here we were singing gult songs at the top of our hoarse voices supported by the fellow travelers singing their bong songs (

This was also the time when Lanka who was in charge of the digi cam started showing his talent. Apparently, there was some mismatch between the clicking part and posing part. The result, our aakali rajyam photo :P



By the way, the rural Bengal is truly beautiful. Huge green fields on either side of the track make for a really cool view.



One and half hours later, we finally reach Canning. In fact, we were under the impression that the trip was a 4 hour long one and we braced ourselves up for the torture. It was a pleasant surprise that the trip was half the duration of what we thought it would be.

On the Canning Platform



~to be continued :)

Computer Woes :(((

The rebooting frequency has increased. So I decided to send the error report to M$ and after sending it directed me to some opc.microsoft.com. It is the Online Crash Analysis site of Microsoft and here I came to know that the re-booting is because of some “unknown and serious” error in my NVidia drivers. The link there directed me to an older version of the driver I am presently using. If Microsoft so vehemently believes that this is the right driver I ought to be using, I thought I would better give it a shot and the result: download in progress :)

Being the ‘explorer’ I am, I ended up visiting the FAQs on NVidia site and this led me to find out more about my motherboard and I figured out that it belongs to some ASRock (neither did I ever hear about that before :P). So the natural course of action is to go to their downloads section and the result: download in progress, yet again !!!

But if you think this is all, you are wrong. NVidia also suggested a few other sites like Mem Test, a memory testing cross platform tool and Mersenne Primes, a supposedly torture test for computers. I realized later that it is a distributed computing program and would like to use my computer resources for finding out some next Mersenne Prime. DUMB!!! And if you thought that was all, you are again wrong. It supposedly required one month to benchmark your computers performance. Now that is like contract labour. If you want to benchmark your computer, lease us memory and processor power for at least a month.

Anyway, I realized that by turning off Skype 1.4 Beta version and the NVidia program that was running, the computer has stayed stable. I guess my last one hour effort of downloading all these softwares is sheer waste. As I type this sentence, the monitor flickers. Is it God’s way of telling, “son, you think you can win over a computer problem by turning off a few running programs??”

Anyway, as I said earlier, everyday I start off with the intention to blog the Marico Workshop and it ends up being yet another crib post about my computer.

Damn!!! I want to buy that Apple MAC G5 asap. In case, you haven’t seen it yet, do visit Apple .

Computer Woes :(((

The rebooting frequency has increased. So I decided to send the error report to M$ and after sending it directed me to some opc.microsoft.com. It is the Online Crash Analysis site of Microsoft and here I came to know that the re-booting is because of some “unknown and serious” error in my NVidia drivers. The link there directed me to an older version of the driver I am presently using. If Microsoft so vehemently believes that this is the right driver I ought to be using, I thought I would better give it a shot and the result: download in progress 

Being the ‘explorer’ I am, I ended up visiting the FAQs on NVidia site and this led me to find out more about my motherboard and I figured out that it belongs to some ASRock (neither did I ever hear about that before ). So the natural course of action is to go to their downloads section and the result: download in progress, yet again !!! 

But if you think this is all, you are wrong. NVidia also suggested a few other sites like Mem Test, a memory testing cross platform tool and Mersenne Primes, a supposedly torture test for computers. I realized later that it is a distributed computing program and would like to use my computer resources for finding out some next Mersenne Prime. DUMB!!! And if you thought that was all, you are again wrong. It supposedly required one month to benchmark your computers performance. Now that is like contract labour. If you want to benchmark your computer, lease us memory and processor power for at least a month. 

Anyway, I realized that by turning off Skype 1.4 Beta version and the NVidia program that was running, the computer has stayed stable. I guess my last one hour effort of downloading all these softwares is sheer waste. As I type this sentence, the monitor flickers. Is it God’s way of telling, “son, you think you can win over a computer problem by turning off a few running programs??” 

Anyway, as I said earlier, everyday I start off with the intention to blog the Marico Workshop and it ends up being yet another crib post about my computer.

Damn!!! I want to buy that Apple MAC G5 asap. In case, you haven’t seen it yet, do visit Apple .

Marico ... oops, it no longer is about it :(

Actually I started blogging about the Marico Workshop when my comp cranked, yet again !!!

There is sth wrong with sth in my comp. The monitor suddenly refuses to function and pooh, a few seconds later the comp restarts. The comp starts again with this dialog box showing that a serious error has occurred and that there is sth wrong with my driver for the graphics card and suggests using a different version than the one I am using right now.

My graphics card is GeForce FX 5200 and I am using the 78.01 version of the NVidia UDA driver for Windows XP.

I have recently replaced my 80GB HDD with a 120GB one and I am afraid that this constant rebooting might actually harm it. I don’t want to lose yet another hard disk. This is already the third one in less than 2 years and each time I lost around 80 GB of data. That SUCKS !!!

Song currently on: Feel my love from Aarya (Telugu movie)

Test message

Test message

Downloaded the blogger add-in for Word just now. So trying it out…… (

~sasank

a small request ...

... to junta who visit my blog....

can u leave a message in my shout box... so that i can atleast know who is visiting my blog and visit your blog in return :))

~u see, i am vella....

SPICMACAY Concert

This tuesday, Sep 17th, 2005, we have organized a SPICMACAY concert in our campus. We hosted Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia as a part of Virasat 2005.

The performance which started exactly at 6 in the evening, lasted for an hour and enthralled the capacity crowd at the MCHV Auditorium. Panditji fondly remembered the last time he performed at the campus in the Library Auditorium and had the crowds in splits with his humor. All in all, the event ended smoothly and was worth all our efforts.

Ameya, Hariharan and Chetan along with myself was the organizing team and it was real fun doing all the planning. The event was very small scale; but the level of planning that went into it was amazing. Particularly worth mentioning was Ameya who planned down to the minutest of details. Konda would be a better person to give you an account of that :)

The team

Hariharan, Myself and Ameya




All the four of us



The Event

Snapshots from the performance







The press coverage (pre-event).

The Telegraph

The post event press coverage is yet to be released.

Chalooz, shall update this post once the press coverage comes out... till then.. signing off...

~pandu

Hi all

Long time since i posted sth here... ok the updates first.

1. been home for 10 days or so. nth different frm any other time. ate, slept
and watched loads of tv.

2. and yeah, i hv put in a shout box and a visitor counter as well. laying
ground with an eye on future. who knows, the traffic might soon pick up and
junta will start commenting :)) :P

3.sm concert is on tuesday and marico thing is on
sat'day.  takign each one at a time though

4. hv been thinking abt quite a few things .. shall soon post them.

and yeah, tis post is only abt updates :)

this is a test post........... trying to post frm abilon... let us see if
this works out :)

~sasank