Random Thoughts
ayad |
AN OLD SUICIDE NOTE
Ayad Gharbawi
From my eye
That once
Used to win
And now
Getting to be
Upset
In my own blood
That is still
So unreal.
So goodnight to
all
Farewells!
Now I can gossip
About Death
That so far
May happen,
Just happen
Tonight.
...Why are you so insistent on the sweeping
Poetry of sky and sea? Are you, then, fonderOf the circumference of earth's impoundingThan of some sphere on which the mind might blunder,
If you, with irrepressible will, aboundingIn.. wish for revelation,Sought out the unknown new in your surrounding?
- Wallace Stevens, from "For an Old Woman in a Wig"
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payaljs |
Every now and then, someone invites me to join some social network, and the same thing usually happens: - I sign up, enter in some subset of the usual 'profile' questions (especially the personal section is worth looking out for) -I find a few people and become "friends" with them. Further ‘so-called’ dumb friends visit you and send friend requests and later are in no mood to communicate. - I don't visit the site for a few months - I get update email from the site encouraging me to find more friends - I delete my profile from that site (except for Linkedin')Orkut and Linkedin, too started on…
payaljs |
Sunshine smile is the most amazing expressions on a human face. Cheeky chuckles, blushing ones, blah, blah are the happy expressions on the human face. What happens when the sunshine smile is converted into ghastly graphics making pace in the normal communication across the internet. Yes, I am talking about the four letter word of the electronic world called smilies. It is not that I loathe at the techno smilies, but it is the techno smilies in the emails which is annoying. No matter how aggressive you can be---just be, since the smilies are there to cover it. Smilies are usedfor…
payaljs |
Bon Jour everyone. Recently, I attended a three day pharmaceutical conference at Ahmedabad. Conferences are events which always teach me about the venue rather than the scientific communication. During the meet, I met people of all shapes and sizes and established great rapport. After the conference there were excellent choices for the delegates to visit the city.
Ahmedabad is the city of bridges and considered as a pharmaceutical hub of India. During the visit, I reminisced apocryphal story which goes as— A teacher asked a student where he was born. The boy replied, "Vishakhapatnam". He was…
payaljs |
The deadlines for reports, projects, assignments make the students grumpy and tired. The pressure of preparing manuscripts and taking out those fine print make them work no end. However, little do they realize when the aspiring scientists had no access to online literature. Fortunately with Google, things are simpler today.
Internet is the greatest source of information, humans could ever create. It has taken over the university libraries wherein the thesis and the rare archives are gathering dust. It is not uncommon to observe graduate students completing their projects and assignments with…
calliope |
I've often run into the idea of 'realspace' (or 'meatspace') versus 'virtual reality' (or 'the Internet'). The concept is that they are two often separate worlds. I disagree with that, and feel there are three spaces. One has solid entities like people and rooms, and you interact with them noticeably. The second may be online or it may be solid, but the interactions are between individuals and kept private. The third is completely open, for many to access-- typically via online presence, because online lends permanence that the 'solid' world rarely has.
I call…
Well after all the alarmist talk about cell phone radiation causing brain tumors, now we have a new study that suggests that it may improve your memory.
Specifically there is a suggestion that it may prevent or even reverse Alzheimer's, at least in mice.
No doubt, anticipating what kind of commentary was sure to follow, the article clarified how the mice were using the cell phones.
The mice were not actually chatting on cell phone or even packing the devices.
Seems a shame, because THAT would've been a cool study.
There may remain theorems whose confirmation is technologically infeasible; thes can be assigned to the category of "harmless." Theorems for which confirmation is logically impossible should be discarded as meaningless.
- Foster Morrison, The Art of Modeling Dynamic Systems (2008), p. 19
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Most American dictionaries do not distinguish between dynamic and dynamical. There is good reason to do so, however. Dynamic means changing. Dynamical is what concerns change. The position of an artificial satellite changes rather rapidly by earthbound standards, so it is very dynamic. The orbital energy of the satellite changes very little - not at all to a certain level of approximation - so the orbital energy is a dynamical property.
Analyzing complicated systems need not require great mathematical sophistication or intellectual brilliance. But it does require clear thinking, the kind of…