Anonymous

If Nature is not Supersymmetric, then it is not as elegant as it is made out to be. –(paraphrasing) PvN

Having found my Superpartner (glossary of this paper might help), wish my name started with ‘N’… Eh… I’ll have you know, on second thought, it sort of does: it’s the name that my father uses to call me. I also remember (one of) his elder brother(s) (he, my uncle, also has a son with the same name as mine!) once telling him to stop calling me that because I was (apparently) no longer a kid. So my father, for a while, started using my ‘official’ name, which sounded weird to both of us and so he’s back to using the N-word! Anyway, enough with such trivial personal stories, I do like my current name is the moral of the story.

So, what else can I rant about in this post? Let me remind myself of one of her Superpowers: She can solve Sudokus without needing a program. In other words, She is in very friendly terms with the numbers 1-9. You may ask: How is that a superpower? I may reply: (ignoring my first reaction – I can call it whatever I like!) I gave her a Sudoku from Beelzebub Chapter 135 to solve:

Between us, this Sudoku is invalid, i.e. it doesn’t have a solution as told me by my program :

After having a go at it, she claimed to have solved it and I (obviously) did NOT believe her. She elaborated then that the Sudoku as I gave her couldn’t be solved but if one changes just the number ‘9’ in Squ.[1,3] to ‘2’, it can be solved and she showed me her solution:

I checked her solution to the modified Sudoku in my program, which told me that this new Sudoku doesn’t have a unique solution due to 3 occurrences of a (1,9) doublet (which made me think it had 3 solutions):

So I told her that her solution is one of many (just to annoy her a bit; She was already annoyed when I ‘doubted’ her ability to solve a Sudoku!) and She replied: “Yes, there are two solutions, flip 1 ⇔ 9…”.

My jaws dropped:

Merry NEWTONmas

BeLIEve…

…has a lie in it!

This statement is inspired by the title of chapter 474 of Bleach. This chapter raises a lots of questions: When does a situation become too ridiculous even to witness? When does a question become irrelevant to answer? When does a person become immaterial to one’s existence? When does a cliché become too cliché to consider seriously?

“To be or not to be… That is the cliché.” -David Tenant

I’m not going to answer any of these questions but will urge you to read the above chapter of Bleach to get a glimpse of how people get excited over irrelevant, immaterial gobbledygook! If reading a manga is not your cup of tea, read this Soul Mate story for similar sentiments. This story leads to an additional question: When / Why does ‘love’ turn to ‘hate’ or more importantly, Did the author loose track of her thoughts as this story progressed? Anyway, not all of her stories are this ‘bad’! After all, she’s a publishing writer and I’m just an incoherent blogger. Here is one of her better stories: Outsourced.

IMM 6

I went to shopping today with a friend (let’s call him SM) believing in the weather forecast that Sunday will have sub-zero temperatures during the day. After I’d paid for my grocery, I stood near the gate waiting for SM to pay his grocery bill. While there, I noticed a sort of blue iridescence from the hairs of the ‘cashier’ at his check-out counter. Not having specs can fool the eyes (and brain) into believing anything but I realized after a moment that only the ends (~1-2") of her hairs were dyed blue (or dark blue) that blended ‘seamlessly’ into the blackness of the rest of her hairs. An interesting sight like this

Butterfly

Mass Photography

This is not a Physics post because if it were, it wouldn’t be here, it would be on WordPress. This is actually a photography post since I’ve not written any in quite a while. But first let me rant about the fact that I don’t like writing ‘E=mc²’; I prefer ‘E=γmc²’, where γ=1/√1-β² and β=v/c. Why so? You might ask… Read this expository article here.

Now, let me get back to photography. This post contains a few tricks that I’d like to learn myself! That statement doesn’t sound OK so let me rephrase it: What I want to learn is how to capture snapshots of things behind glass-panes or plastic-panes or any transparent material for that matter when there are a lot of bulbs / tube-lights being reflected in them (including me) such that these reflections are highly minimized. See for example the photo above! And here are some more (do learn about alt texts… that’ll make my posts more enjoyable!):

From what I can tell, choosing proper angle to take the photos and carefully placed flashes can do the trick. But I neither have extra flashes nor a 3D orientation sensor with ray-tracing capabilities so I’ve got to do with just one tiny flash on my E-PL1. Standing right next to the transparent material (Why the hell would I do that? You may ask after seeing that huge bright overexposed spot at the bottom center of the photo above… How the hell am I supposed to know about that beforehand? That’s how it happened… I even adjusted the flash strength to 1/4 or lower) and positioning the camera on the ledge to stabilize it, I took the 3 shots above and as you can see, the flash screwed up the white balance in the last one (could be corrected if I’d paid a bit more attention to whatever I needed to pay more attention). Though, it did decrease the brightness of the tube-lights a bit and the shadows / reflections are also less sharp, which is a nice thing. But still the ‘navel’ bit is irritating, isn’t it? So that’s a nice trick: to combat light with light! Who could’ve thought? Well, whatever… this post is getting too full of clichés! Let’s move on… before someone gets a split.

Some more Flash Photography:

What else can I share? Oh ya… the Moon-Shots: Check this tutorial and forget what it told you to do as that advice didn’t work for me. The shutter speed of 1/200 for ISO 200 at f/16 aperture gave an underexposed spot over a black background. What worked for me was:

Finally a photo not shot by me but it features my hand so I guess I can put it up here. It was shot by him (let’s call him SjD) with his iPhone 4S:

Care for some colourful photos of

Autumn