Wedding Season

Three of my friends from IITKGP are getting married. These discrete events started yesterday and will end by the ninth day of next month. I thought of sending them a card (to each one not one for all!) but then decided against it. Though I did read a few cards available in Greeting Cards’ aisle at PathMark. Here is the proof:

Card J

Front: Listening, Caring, Loving, Supporting…

Inside: …Geez, People will do anything to stay together!!!

I guess I’ll dedicate this ‘card’ to JD… Happy (belated) Wedding to you and an enjoyable life ahead. OK, now I need to bring up two more cards for consistency… Here is one:

Card C

Front: Marriage is based on Compromise and Trust…

Inside: Compromise is when you drop whatever you are working on to help your partner hang up a picture on the wall… Trust is when you say, ‘I will hold the nail, you swing the hammer.’!

I guess this gets dedicated to CD… Happy Wedding to you too! Finally, the last one:

Card I

Front: Why should a physicist have both a wife and a mistress?

Inside: So that when your wife thinks you are with the mistress and the mistress believes you are with the wife, you can be happy in the lab, doing physics.

This one was not quite a card as you might have guessed, it’s picked from here such that it can be quite appropriately dedicated to ID… Happy (advanced) Wedding to you!!!

Lastly but not the leastly, I dedicate the following essay to all three of you which starts with the line, “Human is a marital animal”.

Wedding Invitation

How Many Triangles?

Here’s a question: Take an equilateral triangle ( △) and make 4 (and only 4; 5 or more should be impossible!) triangles out of it by drawing a few lines in its interior such that at least one edge is common to each pair of  these 4 triangles!

This problem has two solutions: One has a trick to it and the other one is straightforward. The tricky one is easy to find but finding the straightforward one requires thinking out of the box as one of my friends put it!

Here’s the thought process that leads to both of these solutions:

This video is ‘inspired’ by this video titled Metamorphosis of the Cube.

During the making of my ‘trigon’ video, I started thinking about 3D rotations and found a very concise (and hence, beautiful!) solution to a problem. A ‘problem’ which I had encountered while going through the chapter ‘Spinors’ in Misner, Thorne & Wheeler’s Gravitation about 3 years back! That chapter does have the solution but somewhy I never got comfortable with it! To get to know the problem and the solution, head to the post on my Physics’ blog:

3D Rotations

Baby, Please Kill Me!

If you don’t know what I’m going to talk about, keep on reading!

† Since scanlators at Musashi Quality are busy NOT working on Sketchbook, I instinctively got an urge to check out a new 4-panel style manga! And this manga came in the form of Baby, Please Kill Me! “It must be a romantic thriller comedy” is what I thought when I read the name of this manga but boy oh boy, was I Wrong or was I wrong! Here is the summary of BPKM from OneManga:

It's a 4-panel style manga that follows the comedic life of a typical school girl Yasuna and her assassin classmate Sonya. Sonya’s attempt to fit in often fails when her natural assassin instincts kick in and Yasuna’s attempt to be more friendly with Sonya often gets her hurt or intimidated.

“What the hell is this?” is what I thought when I finished reading the above paragraph. “But what the hell, I’ll read it anyway” is what I thought next! I’m glad that I read the couple of chapters available then and now that I’ve read the 14 chapters of Volume 1, I’m awaiting the second volume… :) Believe me, the humour in here is not as subtle (or abstract) as Sketchbook (as many people seem to believe!) so I guess people with much-less-refined senses will also be able to enjoy BPKM. Do check it out!

♫ I also started seeing Nodame Cantabile again. This is not a confession. I did not watch the episodes I had already watched. Apparently, there are 2 more seasons consisting of 11 episodes each about which I didn't know till a few weeks back! I had watched the first season consisting of 23 episodes during my stay at KGP. So, I was thrilled to know that there are 22 more episodes to go. Here is an abridged synopsis of NC taken from Wikipedia:

The series depicts the relationship between two aspiring classical musicians, Megumi "Nodame" Noda and Shinichi Chiaki, as university students and after graduation… Nodame is an extremely talented pianist who wants to be a preschool teacher… She is messy and disorganized, takes baths several days apart and loves to eat… Chiaki is talented in piano and violin and has secret ambitions to become a conductor. An arrogant multi-lingual perfectionist… They meet by accident. Nodame quickly falls in love, but it takes much longer for Chiaki to even begin to appreciate Nodame's unusual qualities.

This is one of the few animes whose manga I’ve not read (others being Samurai Deeper Kyo, etc!). One of the main reasons I’ve not read Nodame Cantabile is because this series is supposed to be about Music and you can’t hear this music while reading, now can you? You need to have a sound medium to hear music. That’s where anime comes, having the sight & sound advantage over manga! Also, words like Mukyaaaa & Gyaboooo make sense when you hear them… :) If you’ve ever wondered whether people with opposing personalities can interact favorably with each other or not and if yes, how would it look like to an outsider – this is the right anime (or manga) for you! That’s all I’ve to say to sell this anime…

⊛ During summer, there are not many ‘good’ TV shows around to watch. So, if you are looking around for a good show to watch during this summer, may I recommend  one of the best stories ever told in the form of a(n) manga(/anime) called Fullmetal Alchemist(: Brotherhood). When I first started the draft of this post last week, I had not included manga in the previous line. So you have the right to ask why did I change my mind in a span of less than 7 days. It may not be  that obvious, but FMA manga’s author has dropped the ‘THE END’ – Bomb on us! Before I rant a bit more, here is some info about FMA(:B) from YouTube:

Brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric’s reckless defiance of alchemy’s Law of Equivalent Exchange resulted in no miraculous reunion with their mother, but a hellish nightmare; half of Ed’s limbs were torn from his body, and Al awoke to discover his young soul transferred to a suit of armor…

If this short intro does not give you enough motivation to go find the anime / manga and watch / read them as fast as you can, I don’t know what will! Anyway, the anime is still going strong following the manga pretty close. As I said, the manga has ended this month, so the anime should also be over in 4-5 more episodes. The last chapter of FMA was more than 100 pages long and the end was quite good (at least I was satisfied!)… not those everyone-lived-happily-ever-after kind of endings but life-goes-on kind of endings where the sketch of what everyone is going to do about it is outlined! Thus, this manga has a slightly different ending (in spirit) than the other two mangas – Inuyasha & Elfen Lied, which also ended after I’d started reading them. I do not want to discuss the ending of FMA any more than what I’ve already said… :)

So, I will just leave you with a

List of Anime & Manga I’ve seen & read