intel

interesting article. apparently there was this young black dude who came up with the first circuit diagrams for the 4004 (to the uninitiated, this was the father of a computer on a chip or processor as we call it now). below is a link to an interview of his.
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_14374.shtml

watched 2 more kurosawa movies as i promised myself. worth the time and the 5 dollars spent on rentals. watched sanjuro and hidden fortress. the first one is almost a sequel to yojimbo and is a non-subtle kurosawa. hidden fortress is almost an indian movie of the 60s. minus the songs. i recall watching at least 1 or 2 tamil movies with a similar storyline and feel to it.

a friend of mine in penn state told me something interesting. penn state has requested all its students to stop using IE and switch to firefox. the fox is after the microsoft sheep. so go get firefox.

kurosawa

Saw "yojimbo" by akira kurosawa. AWESOME. if you have seen and liked seven samurai (Shichinin no samurai) then you will like this too. if you havent seen either, you are missing something.
This is a beautifully made western that spawned a whole genre known as the spaghetti western. though in black and white, this movie has some stunning cinematography. Some scenes have directly been used in hollywood movies, most notably fistful of dollars and the horribly made last man standing. another stunning thing about the movie is the lead actor. Toshiro Mifune. This guy truly rocks. he is the cockiest bastard to ever have donned greasepaint. everything from his stride to his swordsmanship and humor have an edge of arrogance. he makes clint eastwood and other assorted hollywood cowboys look like a kids. planning to watch at least 3 more kurosawas over the next week. hope i lay my hands on them.

check this one out. you have to subscribe to new york times to read it. its free.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/16/garden/16FRID.html

this world is fucking nuts. while the poles melt, we are freezing more in our refrigerators. suv sized refrigerators for suv sized people.

i bled two years (masters research) trying to increase the efficiency of supermarket cooling systems. got a 5 to 10 percent improvement over existing values. nice. what to do with the increased efficiency. build bigger (-: good thing i moved to other things with absolutely no real-life applications!!!

no blogs for a while. breaking this hiatus to write an obit for 2 people. pantera's lead guitarist darrell abbott aka dimebag. he was shot down yesterday night in a club. may his soul rock heaven and hell. wonder why the good musicians meet an early death?? today is exactly 24 years to the day john lennon died. the real crappy ones live on and on and torture us.

second: donald rumsfeld's brain. " you go to war with the army you have". clap clap clap. wonder why he wasnt kicked in the ass by some GI. anywayz...mr rummy....you go to war against the army they have.

at last....something important

me and my laptop are now part of something very important.

http://user.tninet.se/~ecf599g/aardasnails/java/Monkey/webpages/

no rest for the wicked

try this ....

step 1:go to http://www.google.com.my/language_tools?hl=enstep

2:enter the following line into the translate textbox:
Sushmita's mom is nice and cool

3:translate from english to spanish.

step 4:copy the translated text, and translate it back from spanish to
english.

siriusly kidding

Shock jock Howard Stern distributed free sirius satellite radio sets to crowds in New York while chanting "Death to the FCC". He's got a valid point when he says that commercial radio and by extension the media is too tightly controlled by the government. The government has no business dictating public morality. If the public wants to listen to an aging asshole mouthing off like a sailor, its their choice. if u do not want to ....change the fucking channel.

The media going satellite is like Dems going to Canada after Kerry lost. Solves your problem, but leaves the mainstream at the hands of those you regard to be fucktards. I have a very Orwellian view of this issue. Already there are two americas: fox news america and new york times america. the two meet only if you read the times while watching fox news. Satellite and the blog world will only make this worse. The likes of Wonkette and Stern make news with their blogs and satellite radio. They cater to one section of the population. There will be others catering to the pinkos, the red states etc etc(wonder how pinko is communist and red states are conservative....which fucking moron came up with the nomenclature?) .

according to me a country is not a geographical entity. its a land that shares a common past and works towards a common future. in other words, its a country that tunes into the same 60 channels to get its news and form its views. there is a serious danger that multiple parts of this country will document history differently and consequently work towards totally different futures. just like ptv (pakistan) and doordarshan (india) view the same issues from angles 180 degrees apart, we will have various segments of this country viewing things they want to. ptv and doordarshan belong to different countries. fox and nytimes dont. at least for now that is.

cant sleep? feeling overconfident about your "physic"al abilities? want to take vengeance on your right hemishphere? try this.
http://www.hep.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/
follow the links at the end of the page. the ones that work are interesting.

found that some of my college buddies are blogging. nari: dercosyst, rohan: appwiz, chinar: chinaclay all at blogspot. will have to to add links to their blogs.

mental torture of being in grad school. have to bear horrible jokes. blogs allow you to torture others.

1. which is the only animal with any attitude
ans. dog

2. all animals other than this one are listless
ans. dog

reason for 1. apparently dogs always have their heads at an angle. in engineerese...attitude. SHIT

reason for 2. same reason as above. listing to one side.

i want to break something. now

hmm...another month gone. i have found a direct correlation between the number of times i blog and my mental distress. directly proportional. had a nice month. dont know why it was nice. maybe because i did not work much or maybe because i was reading novel after novel. Dostoevsky rocks. heavy but nice. read brothers karamazov. now reading idiot.
new things in my life: trance music--> paul van dyk, aarmin van buuren, asian dub foundation, karsh kale, and the list goes on. my office mates seem to like it too. so can listen to it on the speaker instead of the headphones.
browser: mozilla. nice. really nice.

search: journal paper: ovid, scifinder scholar. never used ovid before. found lots of cool features on scifinder.
Another awesome find: End Note: helps arrange papers and other literature on ur hard disk and the internet in a very methodical manner.

GOOGLE DESKTOP SEARCH rocks. found a lot of long lost friends on my hard disk. searches within word documents, excel files, ppt files. The day they include pdf files, i pledge allegiance to google and maybe even send them a check for a couple of dollars.

Women: as usual, the end tally leaves me knowing more hot women than the other way round. damn, wonder whether i will ever go black. It will be BLACK BLACK day indeed when that happens.


what the hell is the meaning of
"a friend in need is not a friend, indeed" almost meaningless without the comma. but i guess the meaning is pretty strange with the comma. or is it?

next blog...when time permits: my favorite issue: religion and politics. separation of church and state. i am distressed by both bush and france. one wants the two to marry and the other wants them to lead equal but separate lives. slavery versus segregation according to me.

list of ways in which nader can become president
1. kerry and bush marry each other. edwards officiates. and dick cheney collapses listening to this news.
2. cant think of any other. well maybe if nader removes a face mask and shows he actually is elvis.

sell me your dreams

the inspiration for this post is in part one article published aeons ago in the times and in part a talk on mems technology in the ECE department at the university of illinois.

Why are the same VCs and individual investors who imploded along with the dotcom bubble ready to invest in nanotech. Why are they investing in MEMS? Are these fields so full of promise that it really is a different story? Why are so many graduate students ready to risk all and choose topics in these nascent areas for their doctoral thesis? And, why the hell do we have such a rosy picture of technology while having a cheneyesque vision about practically everything else...most of believe that the odds of seeing mutated mushrooms and/or radioactive mushroom clouds in our lifetimes are pretty high. Are we nuts?? The following post addreses these questions. The problem according to me is twofold: human psychology and the power of the new salesmen. BTW, if you are just interested in the answer to the last question, don' t read on. the answer is a firm yes.

From dhoom to doom
The semiconductor revolution started in the 40s and 50s. It was a full 20 to 25 years before anyone made anything tangible and 'saleable out of it. and a longer time before the companies involved turned the corner. But once they turned corner there has been no looking back. This not only changed the landscape of engineering and everyday life but also produced a whole new breed of dream merchants. Unlike the NASA labcoats who sold the moon and stars, these guys sold the public dreams of computing and later connectivity before moving on to MEMS and nanotech. Unlike the moonshot guys, the new salesmen were/are private enterprises and hence need to impress the market. not the electorate. there are big risks in this. a success translates into success for many (remember the nineties when my grandma could have got a job in a dotcom). a failure can push us all to desolation and doom (not doom but something similar to the years 2002-2003 when graduate school applications shot up). Here everyone doesnt have a vote; every dollar has its vote. a paper democracy. If the bosses decide to buy into dreams, the subordinates must work for it. its an economic monarchy which increasingly believes in employing foreign mercenaries for its battles. The only saving grace is that we the people get to choose our fucking country.

A Nation of Salesmen
Ever wondered why a Tide or Ariel detergent ad includes references to some scientific bullshit about deteregent composition or crap like dirt or stain molecules? Science has been and will remain the perfect sales vehicle for products. But what when science, new science is the product? You have to impress people with more experience. People who read journal articles (peers) and the people with the vote (dollar vote that is). The trick is two fold: speak about the current to your peers and speak about the future to the rest. (Unless you are a genius like Richard Feynman you cannot get a publication talking about the future). So we have publications dealing with the sweat and grime, mundane stuff like how to get a carbon nanotube of sizes large enough to be seen with the naked eye. While the news reports concentrate on how nanotubes could one day build elevators to the moon. Forget even that. Attend a technical presentation on nanotechnology and you will be surprised that the relevant length scales of most devices being presented are in the microns. Next time i see an SEM with microns in a talk about nanotech i plan to interrupt. Or maybe i will form a group called nanotechnologists for truth. The issue is not that the scientists and engineers are lying. They are not. In fact they tell the absolute truth to whoever listens. So who is lying. The media? The VCs who are investing money? The truth is i dont know. Maybe no one is.

Why are we buying it?
Human beings tend to overestimate the happiness or sadness that will be caused by a future event. We for example overestimate the happiness to be gained by buying a new car or marrying a hot person (it does feel old within a day or a month). We also overestimate the sadness part. We cannot imagine loosing someone close to us and think life will surely stop. But it does go on. This primary problem in human circuitry causes us to believe that a future technology can surely sell. We are sure that nanotech will solve all problems and are willing to buy into it. we are also sure that nanotech will one day go berserk and form grey goo. both the fear and the hope have absolutely no scientific backing. we buy a car to feel happy, then we get a hot girl to sit in it to feel happy......we overestimate happiness , but do not learn from one experience. We will work our asses off to realise what we think will make us happy. Only to start off again on something different. The happiness/sadness thing is not an adaptive mechanism. Its like life, whether a mistake or something beautiful it just goes on without pausing to ask for directions. The same logic goes as to why we fear things so much. We are ready to buy into the arguments of Cheney and company for the same reason.

Enough for this post. The last psychology part is in entirety inspired by this wonderful article on happiness in the new york times sometime in 2002 or 2003. the rest of the shit are my brain droppings.

here's a cool website calabashmusic dot com. if you are into world music/club stuff etc. basically hard to find things, go for it. nice site. charges money though and can be addictive.

imagine....
what the hell will happen if north korea tests a nuclear device a month before the election?? i can bet my bottom dollar that those bastards will time it devastatingly around the election in case they are interested in testing a device. talk about regime change (-;

among other things, urbana has a pretty decent public transit system. i sometimes use this to get across campus. was doing just this a couple of days back. Given my sexual orientation, if i ever notice someone its some cute girl sitting beside me or within eye-shot. but for some reason couldnt help notice this young dude. must be around 20. looked 15. the thing that caught my attention was the fact that he was in uniform. military uniform. like other universities, this place has an army and air force ROTC. the place where young men and women are promised a life of honor and bravery and of course free tuition. (The average household income of an undergrad here is ......200 fucking thousand dollars. and this is a midwest public university!!). couldnt help thinking...is he going to be sent abroad to fight a current or some yet unknown war. couldnt help thinking that the rest of us on board this bus will carry on living our hollow lives.
if you know me....this must be a surprise. i am hell bent against the war in iraq. was since the day the good president said eye-rack. but still am not able to understand the difference in lives being lead by a few million versus the rest. the few million who have their lives or the love of their life at stake. sure....i am an indian and i did not ask them to be sent out to die. and i dont even expect gas to cost less than 3 dollars a gallon (current price in bombay 3.4 $ per gallon). but still, i have trouble accepting these man made differences.
While i am here worrying about whether i will ever start liking girls who like me (rather than those who dont), there is a dead man in iraq who was shot by a sniper while he was carting his dead donkey through najaf. who cares who the sniper was. immaterial. hes as dead as his donkey
in the beginning i used to think "how can bush sleep at night". now i am wondering how america can sleep at night while asking young chubby face to grow older so soon. asking young men and women to grow as old as they are ever going to. for you are always old when you die. as old as you will get.

i passed my qualifiers.

musings

isnt it true:
"love: all fall down
_____________


whether you fall in love or fail in love, you go down
you fail, you go down alone
you fall, you go down on each other

(-:


another product of a wasted mind: does religion/ thought of god trigger a certain portion of the brain. do other animals even have that part? is that part triggered by anything else? i have a feeling its heavy metal/hard rock. god and metal: two things that mankind invented to feel superior than other things.

other than these stupid thoughts creeping me out , leading the life of a student. i feel like i am back in SPCE with a "study holidays" going on.

heard obama speak on tv. man...does he captivate an audience.  this guy is going to be president one day.

Is Boston more than a feeling?? Is it going to be anything more than canned anger and canned rhetoric? is it going to signal the beginning of an unimaginative era for the Dems?

catch-22

if i realise that i am going nuts, i am not.
pause
relief.
pause
so i am not nuts. that means i am.

i am going nuts. period.

sunrise

watched the sun rise before i got to sleep last night. i am in one of those stretches (lasts for a few days every year) when i am at my anti-social best. i almost make efforts to keep away from people. especially people who know me and hence expect me to behave some particular way. its intensely relieving if no one around knows you. you are not expected to behave in a particular manner. almost as if you are in disguise. a quasi fresh start!
and amazingly easy to do to. go to a cafe you never been to and sit there. or maybe a part of town you never went to. many options...easier to do i guess if i were back in bombay or chennai.
this is what is happening over the last couple of days to me. and i am enjoying every bit of it. am awake all night. sleep after watching the sun rise. and when i mean watch...i actually mean watch. walk over to some vantage point on campus (none in urbana...so have to settle for open spaces) and watch another meaningless day dawn. another day on the fifth largest piece of rock circling a second grade star with a suspected history of scizhoprenia/multi-personality disorder.

problem with search engines: so apple things tiger can scare bill out of the gates with its new and powerful search feature. you know what these guys dont understand.half the people in trouble usually cannot phrase the proper question. once they do...they get the answer in any case. even if the search engine was made by genghis khan's grandma. its the question you senseless assholes, not the search algo. thats the case everywhere...search engines, research, life. the ones who ask the right question get the answer they want. wont it be nice if google or some wise guy could give 2 or 3 different sets of results (in different windows of course) based on various interpretations?? guys and gals...remember you read this here first.

this and that

slight change of fortune over the last few days. after almost 2 months, i feel totally like myself and for a change my doc agreed with me. dont have to see him again (-:
was on the floor reeling and laughing and wanting to puke all at the same time. ever heard about weasel coffee? trust me, you dont want to. as the name suggests...its coffee associated with a weasel and according to me coffee at its perfidious best. this coffee is actually made from beans that have been "regurgigated" (in layman's terms..pooed) by weasels in vietnam. its supposed to be a connoiseurs delight. i wonder what the hell they were smoking when they invented this. or maybe some american soldiers denied their daily caffeine during the war... (-:
either way...vietnam is apparently causing a coffee glut and bringing prices down. so dont be surprised to find vietnam coffee and weasel coffee added to the starbucks menu soon.
another thing that made me cry and laugh at the same time: fahrenheit 9/11. people leave the showing hall worried crazy that they are ruled by crazy ass loons and laughing about the whole thing. i guess most cant do much about it. there are times when i am happy that i dont have a vote here...i cannot be held responsible in any way for the mess created.

master of my domain

ever lived alone? i mean alone alone? i am right now the master of well...a 2 bedroom apartment and without a room mate. have to get through summer this way. first few days, the empty room seemed to tease me. so i threw all my junk in there (robin ...if u are reading...ur rooms trash now..!!!)
then suddenly i realised...i am master of my domain. i cant recollect where the hell i got this catchy phrase from. (someone help). i think i heard this on some show or maybe one of george carlin's gems. either way...i am right now realising the fact that i partially control the destiny of a few square feet of real estate. its another matter that i pay through my nose to do it...but i wont realise it till ...maybe the end of the month, when the nose part comes into play. am making a list of things to do when i am alone: cook in the buff, maybe actually clean this damn dump, redecorate (haha..am losing my mind), invite strangers over, have a party and trash the place,....

heard the audio from the 9/11 commission. brought a chill to the spine. not that i am a very sensitive kind, but hearing a killer talking to his victims when he alone knows the crime to be brought upon them is ...well, fiendish. the first thing i remembered when i heard this tape was strangely thane in india. more specifically a sad bus stop that no longer exists. thats where i was when i heard the news.

wrote this blog over a few hours. kept the window open and typed in it on and off. might do this, much better than trying to cram in a day's memories in a few minutes.

btw...what do u get when you throw a grand piano on a) a army base b) mine
a) flat major b)a flat miner

one month one day

thats the time since i last blogged. sorry to say this...but it hasnt been an easy ride. i will get back with details soon. in short....i havent been the luckiest guy. fell ill, took some time to recover. not ill enough to be bedridden, but ill enough to suspend activities like blogging.
i am not too sure my lucks gotten better, so wont comment on it right now. will wait till i tide over things and then write an account.
Read lot many books over the last one month. the ones that struck me as being superb:
1. Fahrenheit 451: superb, awesome...if you haven't read this, i take the pleasure of being the one who introduced you to a good book. This one makes a lot of sense today. I feel the message is not against censorship by the government, but rather self-censorship by people in order to be politically correct and so that everyone is happy. share your thoughts.
2. galapagos: pretty good read. liked the satire.
3. life of pi: brilliant...but some parts of it were kind of stretched out. but yann martel does a good job of keeping us glued to the book.

saw quite a few decent movies too: one was catch-22. not as great as the book, but i loved the effect of the opening scene. something that the book couldnt do. another was "y tu mama tambien". HOT. saw the rated version, cant imagine what the unrated one is like. but i liked the presentation. so different from hollywood. an easy narrative style of presenting. liked it.

MOAW

the mother of all weeks just passed by. two sponsor reports, 2 finals. i survived. just. one final was ok, the other was an exercise in sadism. the instructor's sadism that is.
i seem to be on a campus discovery inititative of late. today, went roaming around the ultra cool Krannert Center for Performing arts here in Urbana. If u dont know what it is, check out their website....www.kcpa.uiuc.edu.
Was given a guided tour of the place. here are some cool things that i never knew about krannert center. before anything...i love this place and have seen some great performances here. one more reason why uiuc can be fun (-:
1. krannert was built at a cost of more than 20 million dollars with money from Krannert. it was designed by a u of i alum who also designed portions of the lincoln center. The place was completed in 1969 (whats with that year anyway....moonshot, krannert, woodstock...hmmm...coincidence or something to do with the number)
2. there are spiral staircases around 10 stories high. climbing them is a pain but worth it. nice dizzying view of the stage from up there.
3. most of the halls here have pits. unlike other places, the stage is really sturdy above the pits because they are on screw lifts instead of the leaky hydraulic lifts.
4. got to use a follow spot. these things can be really nasty to focus. the old ones come with these carbon rods that are intensely bright by burn out in 45 minutes. one good reason to have an intermission!! the newer ones come with electric stuff and can get nasty hot. they have these heavy duty fans to keep them cool
5. the heating and ventilating out here is a massive undertaking. each of the halls has its own heating and coooling subsystem.
6. the roofs: most are plaster based like in other places. but instead of patchworks to improve the acoustics (like at the met), these are continuous and provide one of the best listening experiences.
7. safety: sucks. one of these days someone is going to drop something or themseleves from above the stages and wop.... most of the lighting has to be focused after lowering oneself into a precarious position 3 or 4 storeys above the stage. not nice.
8. rappeling: some spots can and are used for rapeling(-:
9. props, costumes: name it ...they got it
10. steinways: there are loads of pianos. there are 3 concert grand newyork steinways. lots of dough!
thats all i remember. nice trip that lasted at least 2 hours.

man...have i been busy (this understatement is my excuse to all those who were supposed to hear from me over the weekend but didnt)
i have been in front of my pc enough hours to give me a backache and the computer overheating. the thing just turned itself off last night.
btw...i have become one of those internet radio freeloaders. netscape, yahoo to name 2 threw me out. yahoo said i have listened to as many as i could in a month. netscape...said cool it..enough of led zep for the day. damn. first kazaa..then such restrictions...how the hell are poor indian graduate students like me going to listen to any music.
listening to: led zep, led zep and more led zep. this is month two of my fascination with this kickass group. favs...all their blues songs...levee breaks, gallows pole and their metal sounding numbers. guys...u got to listen to this.
Lastly...isnt ur day made when a cute girl smiles at u. well...she made me survive this rotten rotten weekend.

iraq

a short digest of news reported today:
1. we turn over power to a former baathist general who marches in his original uniform. just picture this after WWII in germany.
2. the photos of soldiers harrassing prisoners. hmm...this is going to define this war. vietnam had baby killers...this one...lady soldiers making fun of naked iraqis. man...i have a feeling this war was started for and by late nite comedians.
3. macedonia...police here staged a firefight and shot 12 pakistani illegal immigrants. these guys were not just shot by mistake...they were lured into a trap. Why?? well...they wanted to curry favor with Uncle Sam. I wonder whether Macedonia was mentioned by the president as one of his "allies".

Read this and u know why we are where we are. Folks, in this war we have lost their hearts and our minds.

Reading: Paris 1919, Guns of August. WWI books. Coincidence. But the first few pages of Guns of August scared the shit out of me. Reminded me of a few characters currently ruling certain parts of this crazy world. Paris 1919 is more like a textbook, but very detailed and nicely written.

my masters work might produce 2 papers. at least one got confirmed. good.
phd work: starting to look ominous. too much to know before i start. lets see how it goes

went to the main stacks of the library here. got completely lost till i found an elevator to get me out of there. this place rocks. 11 levels , all deserted. no sense of order anywhere. books lying on the floor. looks more like my apartment than an univ building. best part is the moving space saving shelves. the safety features on these are sketchy and non intuitive. i really believe it is possible for someone to get stuck between these (-:

another cool feature of use: there are small cubicles with doors that lock from the inside on all of these deserted floors. possible to sit here and go unnoticed for ages (-:

and the whole place is creepy. challenging someone to spend the night on one of the upper levels alone with scarce light will be a cool dare!

quote for the day: Medicine makes people ill, mathematics make them sad and theology makes them sinful.--attributed to martin luther

day 2

masters over. phd work begins. this promises to give me sleepless nights. more than the ms work.
btw ....heres a nice one i heard today:
"whats the speed limit of sex"
--68...at 69 u turn around

day 1
submitted my masters thesis today. so exhausted that i dont even feel like enjoying it. lessons learnt:
1. never ever try to fight the university bureaucracy. submit. resistance is useless
2. never underestimate humankind's potential to stay without sleep.

read an interesting quote today: if it aint broke, fix it till it is!! thats me (-:

first post just checking