Colours and Biases

It has been a while since I talked about photography ‘properly’ on this blog. What with all the pandemics going around, who has the time to photograph anything pleasant. Apparently one of my brothers (cousins) does. He sent me a few photos of roses and a hibiscus with dew drops all over the place. They were nice photos but I felt that the colour profile of every photo could have been tweaked a little to make the colours pop. That would have given them a vivid, vibrant feel. (Some may have even benefitted from soft focus giving them a dreamy feel.) Let me demonstrate what I mean. Here’s the original photo of a hibiscus:

The colours in this photo feel flat and muted. The pink petals are borderline white and the background elements – dark green leaves and red flowers – appear to take over one’s attention that is intended for the main subject. To remedy some of these aspects, I fiddled with the colour warmth, saturation, highlights & shadows and contrast to get the following photo:

I was happy with how the pink and orange hues now attract one’s attention more than the background elements, which somehow don’t stand out too much. As is often said, it takes one flower to know another, so I asked my 3.3 years old daughter Sakura what does she think of the two photos. She at once picked the original photo! I was shocked, to say the least.

After regaining my composure, I asked her why did she pick the original? She said there are green leaves in the original. That is true, but that’s what I felt were the distracting elements. That's why I had ‘turned’ them to ‘black’ so as to be the background and the flower could be the center of attention (which every kid expects to be)! Not convinced by that reason alone, I asked her again for anything else she thinks is better in the original. She said there are red flowers [pointing at the background]. Again that is true and I felt those were distracting too (like bold and gold colours on kids’ garments)! I was really confused now and asked her explicitly about the flower in the center, “Don’t you like the pink and orange colours popping out in the center [pointing at the photo with my edits]?”. She answered, “No, the orange & pink are better here [pointing at the original one]!”. And made a face/gesture/pose that seemed to articulate: “Enough with the dumb questions; I like what I like! Why should there be any reasons for that?” and ran off to play Tic-Tac-Toe with her mother. [She figured out the 2-pronged tactic to win by her 5th game against Her! “Was that a fluke or deliberate?” is a question for another post.]

Let me also share some of the photos I clicked in recent times from the verandah. As you might expect, they have been tweaked a little to make the colours pop as I prefer:

Thus, it seems beauty is indeed in the eyes of the beholder. What felt distracting elements to me in a photo were the precise reasons for my daughter to like that photo. Or maybe, to her young eyes, the colours are already vibrant and don’t need help popping out unlike my decades old eyes that do. It sounds weird but that’s how life is: unpredictable at the best of times, and unprecedented pandemonium at the worst of times. With that thought, I leave you with

The Hibiscus Photographer

Post-20 World…

What would the post 2020 world look like? One might wonder at this point in time… But who knows? I mean, who really knows? Really, who at all?

Anyway, that’s not what the title of this post refers to. It refers to the fact that I crossed the 20 papers mark this month, last month, this year depending on how you count. But let’s keep it simple and count the entries on InspireHEP (20), subtract my thesis (-1) and add two papers from IITKGP that are not there (2) so we get a total of 21. And that’s definitely crossing the just-made-up-number-for-this-post of 20 last month.

Now one may be wondering: Am I proud of this “achievement”? Not really, but I am “proud” of the last few papers I’ve written. That sentence may sound like I’m suggesting am not proud of some papers written before those. Precisely, that’s what it rightly suggests as I’m indeed not proud of a couple of those papers. But that’s a story for another day, when I don’t have much better things to do than to reminisce about things that didn’t exceed my expectations.

Of course, no scientific activity is done in vacuum (in a metaphorical sense, I guess), it is a result of collaboration, knowingly or unknowingly. And talking of collaborations, I seem to have had only two long-time collaborators: Warren Siegel and Marcos Crichigno. Former for obvious reason and latter also for obvious reasons. On last count, I have 6 papers with both (no overlap). With every other collaborator (of whom there are many, which surprises me!) I have only a single paper (tons of overlap). That may change in near future but I like the numerology as of now.

Another interesting fact, one of my last year’s paper’s list of authors abbreviates to AB²J²M! For the unfamiliar ones, ABJM is another well-known (to those who know-it-well) abbreviation for authors of this paper: O. Aharony, O. Bergman, D. L. Jafferis, J. Maldacena. The ABJM theory is like a harmonic oscillator for 3d supersymmetric theories, just like N=4 super Yang-Mills is for 4d ones.

Talking about my papers, how can I not talk about my parody papers from yesteryears? These are the two: 2010 and 2014. You might find that the latter has some overlap with my newest paper, which is purely coincidental. (Ya, right!) I guess I’ll leave it at that for now with the interesting facts about my publication record.

Oh, you might have noticed that my site has got a new coat of paint. That’s because Google is transitioning people from the old Sites to new Sites so I had to do the transformation sooner or later. I think it looks all right and it displays nicely on all sorts of devices. But gone are the days when one could edit the HTML code directly. That’s why the font colour is just black and blue on the pages on this new site!

To finish this post, I will leave you with one Sher from the last Ghazal of Rahat Indori who passed away on 11 August:

वबा ने काश हमें भी बुला लिया होता
तो हम पे मौत का एहसान भी नहीं होता

Waba ne kaash hamein bhi bula liya hota
To ham pe maut ka ehsaan bhi nahin hota

How I wish the epidemic had claimed me
Death would not have then indebted me

– राहत इंदौरी (Rahat Indori)

Toddler Psychology

I wonder what goes in their teeny-weeny brains. When my daughter was in the womb, my friends and family requested me to listen to good music. They asked me to continue listening after she was born. I’m not sure what impact the music has had on her because I listen to random music – anything that I feel like. I somehow feel she is very kind and humble. Not sure again if that’s how all the toddlers are. The other day Sakura and I were in a close by market when she saw a man using crutches. A person like me is scared to watch a man holding crutches because it reminds me of pain. But Sakura, as her usual self, shouted ‘dada’ and then said a ‘hiii’. He smiled and waved a ‘hiii’ back when she told me ‘daaada’ by pointing fingers at him. Then she looked at him again when he had barely walked a few meters and said ‘tata dada’ (tata means bye and she uses these 2 words interchangeably).

A month or so back I bought her 5 pim-poms (candies) and she started to have one while we were returning from the market. When we reached our place, as soon as she saw the caretaker’s granddaughter in the parking area, she asked me to share one with her which I dutifully did. A few weeks later I was playing with her in the parking area as part of my everyday routine and Sakura saw that the granddaughter was holding a candy as well as a packet of chips in her hand. The girl first held the 2 items close to herself indicating her intention not to share and quickly found her way to hide the eatables under the sheet of the bed she was sitting on. Sakura looked at me trying to say something but did not. Instead she asked the girl to come play with her in a few words. I knew Sakura had connected the dots but she made me realize that it doesn’t matter. What people give back to you doesn’t matter. One needs to do things without expectations of something in return.

Things are not that rosy or enlightening all the time, though. She is quite passionate about teddies, to the extent that she is not willing to share the ones that are not even hers to begin with. We found that out recently while visiting a family gathering and she tried to monopolize a huge teddy at that house in the presence of (at least) two other kids. And witnessing such incidents – some sweet, some heart-warming, and some not so much – I have come to the end of 2019. So far, it has been a wonderful, wonderful experience watching Sakura grow. God bless her!

Final Year of the Poll…

If any of you ‘readers’ has noticed the poll on this blog, good for you and those who have actually voted on it: Thanks & Happy New Year.

There has been some glitch on Blogger’s server and 7 voters’ data disappeared sometime this year; only 2 remained as seen below:

The poll is a few years (3?) old and won’t be renewed for 2018 so here I publish the results as they should have been:

As can be clearly inferred, “Readers” want us to write more about Sher-o-Shayari! Followed by Travelogues, Photography and Humour. My personal favourites Manga/Anime and Programming are the least-favoured it seems. Though, they are not going anywhere, let me tell you… going nowhere.

Anyway, let me end this post by giving a detailed breakdown of the votes:

	Humour	Manga/Anime	Photography	Programming	Sher-o-Shayari	Travelogues
Us	√	√	√	√	√	√
3(N)	√	√	√	√	√	√
4(S)	×	×	×	×	√	×
5(R)	×	×	√	×	√	√
6	×	×	×	×	√	×
7(P)	×	×	×	×	×	√
8	√	×	√	×	√	√
9	×	×	×	×	√	×

That's all for this year.

See you next year!

Filler Posts - III

You must have guessed the drill by now. We’re back here after watching Jonathan Creek and what an episode it was! Quite simple yet riveting… But then maybe I just like Alan Davies talking like that.

In other para, I’ll just show you a chart and some numbers about my new SP4… taken with the help of MATLAB.☺

Quite good speed you’d say but does not feel that high compared to my ‘previous’ SP3 when considering the performance of SuDoKu Solver. The ‘hardest’ Sudoku now takes ~115s compared to ~150s earlier. I was hoping the upgrade from “i5” → “i7” might bring the time down to <90s. Anyway, I plan to study the time differences between SP3 & SP4 for solving the 10 or so ‘hardest’ Sudokus I have and post the analysis here on the blog sometime in the new year.

Polorama Generator & Keystone corrector are definitely faster, but I guess that’s mostly due to increased RAM (4GB → 8GB) and less so due to the increase in CPU speed, which reaches 3.3GHz compared to ‘just’ 2.5GHz on SP3. And ya, will share the updated Mathematica Benchmarks when they’re in (sometime in the new year one hopes). Till then, remember

2 more days to go…

More Errors in Translation

Let us continue lambasting Translator (see this post for our previous attempt). We are going to keep doing this till the camera translation for Japanese is released in the Win10 (mobile) app(s).

Now where to begin! These sentences are not even in the same equivalence class… The Hindi sentence (literally) means “I am very grateful to you?”. Yes, you must have noticed something. The sentence doesn’t have an interrogative word so how the hell can it be a question! The English sentence should actually translate to something like: मुझे आपको कितना चुकाना है?

After this, my Superpartner suggested we try translating our own sentences in the Translator to see how well it does instead of getting fired up at the stock phrases on the app’s live tile. I asked her to shoot off 10 random sentences at me; I typed them up in Translator and Translator did its job. Here are the results of that experiment:

1. Let us have a Skype call. ⇒ हमें एक Skype कॉल है।

Crap! Not a good start. It should have been something like: चलो हम एक Skype कॉल करते हैं।

2. This is very expensive. ⇒ यह बहुत महंगा है।

On the mark!

3. Can I bargain on this? ⇒ मैं इस पर सौदेबाजी कर सकते हैं?

Aaah… almost right but the Pronoun-Verb matching is not the Translator’s strong point as we already know! So the last two words should read: सकता हूँ and probably it is also better to add क्या in the front to make it a proper question.

4. Today is very humid. ⇒ आज बहुत उमस है।

Bingo!

5. I am looking for some cheap souvenirs. ⇒ मैं कुछ सस्ते स्मृति चिन्ह के लिए देख रहा हूँ।

Almost perfect. Just omit के लिए. And instead of देख, use खोज to show ‘better’ grasp of Hindi than just literal translation.

6. Is there a flat for rent here? ⇒ वहाँ एक फ्लैट यहाँ किराए के लिए है?

Not a great translation on the face of it because it took ‘there’ literally. The translation can easily be salvaged by just changing the first word (for 'there') to क्या and it sounds perfect!

7. Where is my next assignment? ⇒ मेरी अगली काम कहाँ है?

Dammit, get the genders right! काम is masculine so use मेरा अगला instead of मेरी अगली!

8. What is cooking in your mind? ⇒ क्या आपके मन में पक रहा है?

All the right words but sounds weird! I don’t even know how to translate the Hindi phrase back to English. The right sounding sentence just needs the first word moved to the fourth place: आपके मन में क्या पक रहा है?

9. Shall we go to the park today? ⇒ हम पार्क करने के लिए आज चलें?

This is about parking a car or what? How can one park a car today? It should be deducible that ‘park’ has another meaning here. The translation should be simply: क्या हम आज उद्यान (पार्क) चलें?

10. I am taking my baby for a ride. ⇒ मैं मेरे बच्चे एक सवारी के लिए ले जा रहा हूँ।

Almost there… Just need to insert को after बच्चे. (We are too familiar with both Hindi & English to explain why that simple insertion is needed for the sentence to make sense but it is!) A slighlty better translation would be: मैं अपने बच्चे को (एक सवारी पर)/ घुमाने ले जा रहा हूँ।

So there you have it… Judge Translator on your own time.

Hindi and/or Urdu

Right, but Wrong!

One of my pastimes is reading comments on absolutely anything as long as there is even a slight hint of ‘bickering’ expected to erupt. That means I also read reviews of things which have ratings ranging from 1 to 5 (stars) fully populated, especially the bottom half because they are the more fun to read. These constitute what David Gorman likes to call “Found Poems” (more here) in his comedy show “Modern Life is Good…ish”. I’ll leave the poetry part to my blog’s later half and get on with one small review for now:

The donuts had the disgusting consistency of porous styrofoam, and were similarly flavorless. The syrup was fine. – An Amazon Review

Let us dissect the above review of Rasagullas on Amazon.com (ignoring articles, verbs, prepositions, etc.):

Donuts – They are not!

Disgusting – Wrong qualifier for what’s to follow…

Consistency – A very high-level word used by very high-level connoisseurs like me to describe what does not need a description.

Porous – Right he is for once in this sentence.

Styrofoam – He’s getting the hold of it.

Similarly – hmmm⋯_mmm…

Flavorless – Sort of right again, but then what else do you expect from ‘denatured’ protein extracted out of milk.

Syrup – Yes, it is there to take the ‘less’ out of the above word and add more of the remaining word.

Fine – Finally something positive but it should have been the only word in the review!

Let’s have some sweets and forget the above (no hard feelings [pun intended]) while reading some serious poetry:

सफर के साथ सफर के नए मसाइल थे
घरों का ज़िक्र तो रस्ते में छुट जाता था

Safar ke saath safar ke naye masaail the
Gharon ka zikr to raste mein chhut jaata tha

The journeys had their own new problems
Thoughts of home just forgotten on the way

– वसीम बरेलवी (Waseem Barelvi)

Here’s the beautiful site, which hosts the full Ghazal containing the above Sher:

Rekhta

What if…

… our Calendars looked different?

2014 seems to be flying and we are already past 2 months. One of my friends tells me that all her weekends till the end of April are planned to which I jokingly reply “well that is taking you closer to turning 30”. No more gossips now, here is something you should read first to understand what I’m going to talk about in this post.

Let’s say we had such a simple way to remember the calendar for 2014, then how many people would be celebrating their birthdays on the same date and month? Obvious are the birthdays from the 1st to the 28th of January but then any others? The answer is none!

I have made a sample Moses’ Calendar using Excel.

How many would have a difference by a day? The answer is again none! But there would be 28 cases where people would be celebrating their birthdays two days before their actual dates. The following table shows the pattern of absolute differences from 0–9 days:

This shows that the birthdays within 0–4 days of the ‘current’ dates constitute a total of 140 out of 365 (40%) days. We stop there because no one can celebrate 5 days before or after. But the important point is that it would simplify things – 4 weekends every month, the first day of every month starting with the same day, etc. There wouldn’t be a need for dividing by a 28/30/31, it would be always 28 and the ‘Year day’ (also a ‘Leap Day’ in the case of a leap year) could be made Universal Holiday(s)!

Last, not the least!

Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them. ― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

As the year is coming to an end and the mood has already become festive, we have something here to liven up your mood too. Let’s look at some of the most-appearing themes on our blog this year (excluding the common ones such as TimePass, Reminiscences, Philosophy, Family, Comedy, etc.): Camera (12), Academia (9), Travel (9), Nature (8), Food (6), Nokia (5), Shayari (5), Music (4), Survey (4), Windows (4) and Sketchbook (3). So this last post of the year will be dedicated to reviewing some of these themes.

Enjoy the Shers by different poets first.

शायद डगर सरल हो, कुछ दूर चल के देखें
कुछ तुम बदल के देखो, कुछ हम बदल के देखें

Shaayad dagar saral ho kuch door chal ke dekhen
Kuch tum badal ke dekho, kuch ham badal ke dekhen

The path may be easier to tread, let’s walk along a bit
You change yourself a bit, I will change myself a bit

– डॉ. अनिल शर्मा (Dr. Anil Sharma)

उन्हे भूलना या उन्हे याद करना
वो बिछड़े है जब से यही मशगला है

Unhen bhoolna ya unhen yaad karna
Wo bichhde hain jab se yahi mashgala hai

To remember or to forget
Is the crisis since we parted

– ख़ुमार बाराबंकवी (Khumar Barabankvi)

बिछडते वक़्त उन आँखों में थी हमारी ग़ज़ल
ग़ज़ल भी वो जो कभी किसी को सुनाई न थी

Bichhadte waqt un aankhon mein thi hamaari ghazal
Ghazal bhi woh jo kabhi kisi ko sunaai na thi

There was my Ghazal in his eyes when he left
That too the Ghazal which was never recited

– नासीर तुराबी (Naseer Turabi)

कौन अपना या पराया नदीश छोड़ो भी
मिले इंसान जहाँ जब भी भले प्यार करें

Kaun apna ya paraaya Nadeesh chhodo bhi
Mile insaan jahan jab bhi bhale pyaar karen

Nadeesh, don’t worry about friends or strangers
Love those who seem to be benevolent characters

– लोकेश नदीश (Lokesh Nadeesh)

प्यार गर प्यार है तो उभरेगा
लाख उसके करो निशाँ गायब

Pyaar gar pyaar hai to ubhrega
Laakh uske karo nishaan gayab

Love, if it is true love, will persist and flourish
Even if its signs are erased a million times over

– सुल्तान अहमद (Sultan Ahmed)

Let me share some very old Sketchbook snippets next. These are amongst my favorite ones when I had just started reading Sketchbook. Enjoy while listening to this music.

Here Sora is trying to understand how a life event has changed the cat named ‘Grey’ and what are some of the characteristics of the cat ‘Mike’.Sora is feeling liberated by getting to use a Deskel in the following panels:

The following picture is one that my Superpartner made using ‘Photofunia’ app and her name is Kokage Kuga. The first time he asked me to guess, I called her Sora… He was disappointed! hehe

and this is her lovely and cute cat ‘Yutanpo’:

He has very recently bought a Panasonic’s GX7 and has finished reading its Manual (It was not a basic instruction manual, it was an advanced guide worth of 380 pages!). Who reads manuals, anyways? Somebody please explain that to him! If you wish to read a manual-like review of the camera, here is one. He kept talking about its weight, colour, body, design, art filters, lens, shutter button, manual focus adjustments, etc. almost everyday while reading that guide and some of those comments were:

• ‘GX7 did a great job at focusing on the right thing!’ (when a bird flew towards him out of nowhere and he blindly hit the shutter button!).
• ‘It's not heavier than E-PL1, maybe it's lighter. It feels solid too…’
• ‘Man, this camera gives hints to buttons or what could be next settings change... liking its attitude :)’ (Who says I’m the only funny person here? )

There was a time like this too before he bought the camera:

He: You're thinking of punching me, aren't you? :)

Me: I sure am, punches won’t suffice. I deserve more for hearing your camera stories everyday :P

But all the efforts seem worthwhile when I look at the pictures clicked from the camera. ‘All is well that ends well’.

People in Pilani taught me that confession sessions are a must before a new year starts. They say that it helps in having no regrets against someone. Should I be confessing then? O yes, I shouldn’t have gotten that passionate about a greeting card. I did not listen / watch closely to how he likes to keep things organized in the room and placed things in my own way. I did not catch the right train and was late for the trip to West Meadow Beach. I feel really sorry that I messed up with that plan. But at the end of the day, everything fitted perfectly like this fully solved crossword:

and it was all a lot of fun like this:

Or like this:

Keeping up with the program, here is something to cheer up this guy (have teased and laughed at him many times on the Blog, all for fun though).

Lastly, here’s the last ‘end-of-the-post-link’ for this year, which concerns photography from GX7

Merry Christmas and a very Happy new Year!!!

Have a Laugh

This post is just to fill the recent dearth of posts on this blog. So it’s about trivial stuff like comparing phones, none of which I own.

Reading the news about Nokia Lumia 1020, I landed up on this post titled “Nokia Lumia 1020 hardware 'lags behind'” and I laughed out loud even before noticing that it was on ‘AppleInsider’ or more aptly, reading the article. (Let’s ignore similar views / comments about software & apps as they are ‘beyond the scope’ of this post.)

After stopping myself from ROFL, I started reading the article. Mainly, its first section comprising of 7 paragraphs. And was disappointed to note that only the 2nd paragraph was relevant. It had a statement which again made me LOL: “… its "hardware features continue to lag behind some of the flagship devices like Samsung Galaxy S4," which is both lighter and thinner despite having a larger screen and faster processor.” (emphasis mine)

I guess you understand my issue with the word ‘continue’ but lets focus on the later part of the sentence. So, of all the possible hardware features that could be compared, they focus only on ‘light’ & ‘thin’. On top of that, they connect it to a ‘reason’ involving screen & processor with the word ‘despite’ as if the larger screen affects thickness or a faster processor affects lightness (or whatever the combination thereof they came up in their mind), conveniently forgetting that the slight differences (and yes, the differences are slight: 28g & 2.5mm) could be due to the massive camera sensor, lenses & OIS system packed in NL1020. Also, the larger screen is nothing to boast about as seen here:

To Lighten Things Up

So at the end of the day, the only real difference emerging from their ‘dumb analysis’  seems to be the dual-core 1.5GHz vs. Quad-core 1.9GHz, which is indeed something to boast about… Only technically, though! As long as the phones perform smoothly, this number doesn’t matter because one is not going to run MATLAB or Mathematica on them. And if IE10 & XBox games like Jetpack Joyride run smoothly on my NL620, NL1020 isn’t going to lag behind.

A much more interesting feature, they conveniently (again) forgot to mention, is that the NL1020 has a FM radio which SGS4 doesn’t. Now that is a real ‘lag’ in terms of hardware features! Anyway, since NL1020 is touting its camera (so much), how about comparing it on its own terms to something similar? Oh, but there’s not much (yet) to compare apart from this camera phone: ‘Galaxy S4 Zoom’. And you do quickly realize that it really ‘lags’ NL1020 in more than one way!

Enjoy forming your own opinions:

SGS4, SGS4Z, NL1020.

Evaluation

So my evaluation as a ‘teacher’ is out and “Oh boy, they don’t disappoint!”. This post provides a sneak peek (actually only 24 out of 89 people responded, so it’s all the view) at these funny comments. These comments are basically answers to ‘What did I do particularly well?’ and ‘What could I do better?’. No points for figuring out which sentences answer which question!

Just a reminder: This is not a ‘reply’ to students but an attempt to ‘document’ so do have a stomach-splitting laugh at our expense!

Let’s start with Section 4: The section which did the ‘best’ with a mean of 6/10. The maximum achieved being 9 by two students and curiously no one got 3! Let’s hear from them *a big round of applause*:

smart and rigorous, but his indian accent and scripted writing made him hard to understand sometimes. Sometimes he would use symbols that were unreadable or beyond the scope of the course [Point noted.]

Give easier quizzes. Write larger on the blackboard. [Ok.] 

Please go through the whole problem instead of just part of it. It makes it even more confusing when you stop halfway through the problem. Please look at the questions before hand and get an understanding. Don't spend the whole class period trying to figure out the questions yourself. [Which class did you attend?]

Not waste the classes time by doing the homework problems that most people have already done. [So… any suggestions?]

Not stand directly in front of the black board and stop finding the most complicated way to do every problem. The class has no [no what?] I don't think you could have made the class more dry or useless. The only reason I go is because there are graded quizzes. You grade the quizzes way too hard. Material not covered in class is often on the quizzes. [Great fictional summary of the class (apart from the dry bit)!]

stop teaching, hes [sic] not fit to be a teacher.

Takes time to teach background on questions before doing them. Needs to speak slower, assign quizzes more closely related to what we are doing in class. [Advice taken.]

Gets to the solutions of homework problems so they may be understood later with such a limited time for recitation. Write on the board clearer. [Good PoV!]

Tries to answer students' questions. Individual quizzes are way too hard. [Well…]

Section 7: The section which didn’t do well with a mean of just 4/10. The maximum achieved being 8 by two students and curiously no one got 7 (or 0 for that matter)! Let’s hear them *a small round of applause*:

He gives you the answers. He could go over what we learned. He gives really hard quizzes. [Hmmm…]

i only went to this recitation for hw answers and the quizzes which i always failed anyway since they were on topics we didnt know so i dont know why i bothered going no explanations no enthusiasm [Yooo!!!]

Speak clearer. WRITE ON THE BOARD CLEARER. [OK.]

Writing. Explaining. (I write well. I could explain better.) [Point taken.]

Not much besides the bare minimum of being TA for an hour. Actually interact and engage with the audience. We're not robots, we actually want to learn but it doesn't help if the instructor is monotonously talking to board. When I say "interact" that does not mean just ask students if they have any questions. As in explain how things work and even throw in a joke or interesting anecdote that pertains to the context. It's an hour of sit in the room and fail those horribly abstract quizzes. [Hahahaha… Good point, well-taken!]

Section 8: The section that I found the most interesting and sort of comforting to teach but sadly they didn’t do as well on quizzes as I expected. But everyone did well on the finals and they got a mean of 5/10 in the recitation, so all good! Also, only in this section did one student achieve the maximum of 10 but then nobody got 9! Everything balances out I guess. Without further ado, let’s hear from these students *a great round of applause*:

helped breakdown some concepts. give us quizzes on material we covered in class. the quiz effect my grade but recitation is designed for reinforcing concepts. it punishes me for not understanding. when I am their to understand. [Got it.]

Understands and explains the material well. Goes through homework problems and explains them quite thoroughly. Perhaps allow students to work on the quiz problems in small groups or pairs. I remember this working effectively in my recitation section last semester. Some people may understand certain topics better than others, so the collaborative method may be worth employing. The quizzes are often irrelevant to the current material being covered. [Will give it a thought.]

Th instructor helps students answer homework questions. the instructor could try to explain the work to the students while doing it. He could speak much louder and try to explain what is taught in class instead of just giving a quizz on something most people don't understand due to the horrible teacher during lecture. [Ok.]

He goes thoroughly over hw questions. Be more enthusiastic. [Will try!]

The instructor does a good job going over the homework problems during class. The instructor could do a better job of actually reviewing what we learned in class instead of just doing homework problems. [Fine point.]

He tries to explain the homework. He could have focused more on the physics than the homework problems themselves. [Hmm.]

Clarify the material, as opposed to simply solving problems on the board. Write legibly. [ok…]

Asks students for any specific problems help is required for. Could explain concepts better. [Ya.]

So the most persistent theme (apart from me not ‘explaining / reviewing’ concepts) seems to be (not just from the above evaluation but even during the classes): “I gave hard quizzes and they were not related to the material being taught in class.” How hard was it for these students to understand / figure out that the quiz was always based on the previous week’s HW? And if they can’t even remember what was covered in the previous HW, how would they be able to do a quiz based on this week’s HW? I’m sure these people have not yet got around to even glance at it! About the other issue, apart from the first 2 quizzes, the rest 5 were not at all hard (even that is not quite true but let’s cut them some slack, shouldn’t we?)! In fact they were picked from the previous HWs with only slight modifications. For some perspective, here is the last quiz that I gave them on ‘Electromagnetic Waves’:

A. Which of the following statements are correct? (Check all that apply.)
□ Electromagnetic waves have different frequencies.
□ Light propagates at different velocity depending on who’s watching.
□ Microwave ovens and some wireless routers emit radio waves in the same frequency band.
□ Rainbow colours require special crayons that are available only to horizon-dwellers.
□ Earth absorbs visible light and emits radiation with a longer wavelength.
□ Sun is described in scientific articles as a perfect White Balanced body.

B. What is the wavelength of the EM radiation with a frequency of 3×10¹⁵Hz? (Give answer in nm.)

C. In the above-mentioned EM wave, magnetic field has an rms value of 8×10⁻⁹T. Determine the rms value of its electric field. (Give proper units.)

More Funny Comments

Burning Suspense

This is a Forensic Sciences case narrated to me by my sister. She called it a complicated and yet an interesting one and you can frame your own opinions after reading it.

There was a person who no longer wished to live. He made a plan to commit suicide by jumping from the 10th floor. So it looks like a simple case of suicide at this point. But while he was preparing to jump, he was shot by a pistol fired from the 9th floor. There were repairs happening in the apartment during that time and a net was tied near one of the floors below so he fell on the net. Even though he fell on the net, he was already dead due to the gun shot. Well, now it looks like a case of murder.

Upon further investigation, it was discovered that there was a family staying in the 9th floor and the man inside the house was holding the pistol and ‘playfully’ threatening his wife at that time. Both the husband and the wife knew that the pistol was empty and the press of trigger was just another act they had played out many times before, in situations where he was annoyed by his wife or when he was drunk or some such stuff. It was definitely not the first time that he was playing with the pistol so he had basically tried to fire the gun at his wife but instead hit the falling man. Do you think it is still a case of murder? Well no, it becomes a case of suicide again.

The case moved at this stage towards identifying who loaded the pistol. The couple had a son who had some issues with his mother and so had actually loaded the pistol thinking it would kill his mother, when his father went berserk next time. Basically, he wished to use his father to do his bidding. But unfortunately, his father did not lift the pistol for a long time and he was getting frustrated. So instead of waiting, he planned to kill himself. That’s the circle closing in on itself.

Ironically, had the father not lifted the pistol at that moment, the son would not have died as he would have fallen on the net. Not digressing from what we were actually trying to figure out: it seems like a case of suicide, after all!

Dr. Don Harpermills

Surface

That’s all you have to say right now, and I’ll perk up and start listening to what you’ve to say. Not to learn about it obviously because I own one already and know what it’s like to stare at a screen with hell lots of smudges and fingerprints on it.

Anyway, here’s a photography lesson before we proceed. Trying to shoot photos under light-bulbs in a closed room at night is a daunting task for self-conscious, perfectionist amateurs. And since such people turn out to be great teachers, let me show you how it’s done step-by-step.

First, shoot in the Auto mode to figure out how bad the situation is really:

That’s horribly under-exposed so the first gut reaction is to turn on the flash. Full flash will horribly over-expose the scene and if you didn’t expect that, you need to spend some time with the camera in silence and contemplate the meaning of why you’re holding that brilliant piece of technology! While you’re changing flash settings, change white balance too (I changed it to custom WB for this shot):

Second, set the flash output to the minimum possible value (like 1/64 or –3.0 or whatever unit you think you are comfortable with) and lower the ISO if possible (like 400 → 200):

That’s almost good apart from the blue hue, which is due to the flash screwing up my custom WB setting. So change the WB setting to ‘Flash’ or ‘Incandescent Bulb’ or ‘7000 K’ or anything that removes that fake hue and you’ve got a photo as if it were shot in daylight with Auto mode without having any second thoughts:

Last, crop the photo if you want but that’s not quite the camera’s primary task so you’re on your own from here. That’s the end of the photography lesson. Let’s move on to the crux of this post and take the MS Surface Pro out of its box:

Finally, it’s here… And don’t bring that perfectionist aspect here; I had THE Surface in front of me! Who the hell cares about WB at that point? Not even E-PL1, that’s who! Anyway, here’s a favourable review of Surface Pro with some benchmark tests. You can get loads of unfavourable ones by just googling so help yourself with those.

Initial reaction before turning it on: <1 Kg in weight… feels so light – a welcome change from Fujitsu. As expected, it’s too damn thin (even my phone Nokia 5800 is thicker than it!) so am still not used to holding it like a notebook or folder for carrying it in one hand. But the build does feel very solid including the kickstand. One can press on the screen quite freely when needed (like when entering the picture password) and not worry about the Surface toppling over or the kickstand buckling.

Initial reaction after turning it on: Holy …! “Saying “The touch screen is highly responsive” is an understatement” is itself an understatement. It felt like using the Panasonic lens for the first time on my E-PL1 when focusing seemed to be happening even before I pressed the shutter button! The Surface Pen also works well. It feels a bit more smoother than its counterpart on Fujitsu. However, it doesn’t have the eraser button on its side (just the right-click button) which Fujitsu’s pen does have. That means having to turn the pen all the way upside down to use the eraser, which is quite a time-wasting job! The touch-screen calibration is well done by default (unlike Fujitsu) such that I could auto-hide the task bar and not worry about how to get it back. You can even get the task bar up by just tapping at the lower edge of the screen, similar to swiping on the right edge for the charms bar. Having talked about the screen let me talk about the Type Cover too. The keys are big enough and quite easy to type with. (This post is completely composed on the Surface!) The trackpad is a bit small but still good enough for basic pointing. Somehow, precision pointing is not its forté; use the pen instead. At first, I didn’t realize 2-finger gestures could be used for horizontal as well as vertical scrolling. But as you can guess the default direction of scrolling is opposite to what you’re used to doing with a mouse or usual trackpads with side scrolling enabled. That is, sliding fingers up makes the page scrolls up whereas if you emulated the scrollbar, the page should scroll down. If you can’t get used to this convention, either use this app to change the default setting or just use the touch-screen; it’s so close and inviting.

Later reactions: The screen has 10-point touch, which can be checked by installing the MS Touch Pack for Windows 7 and running the Lagoon Screensaver. It looks so much better than it looked on Fujitsu and yes, the screen on Surface is so high-res that the texts on my Fujitsu and Acer’s screens look blurry! That happens on Surface too for desktop versions of old app(lication)s (like that dumb Gtalkβ – forget about the fonts, its skeleton tries to fall apart while resizing! I never understood the need for designing a different window style for apprograms. Let Windows take care of that, you take care of what’s going on inside your app’s window! The same thing can be said about Olympus’ camera softwares and Mathematica just takes it to another stupid level altogether!), which don’t support sub-pixel rendering or whatever the hell Win8 is using / supporting / doing for the newer apps.

Using the MS account, it’s quite easy to install the modern / immersive apps and even Office. Downloading and installing other applications is also not a problem; just a little time-consuming. So as things were coming up to speed on the Surface, it was slowly warming up… and I mean that literally. It reaches something like ~60-65°C after prolonged, moderate usage. (I never really understood how can Fujitsu stay below 50°C even while running extensive computations!) Though the fans are running, they are not that audible and you can definitely touch the Surface safely. It’s not scorching after all but could be used as a lap-warmer in cold months surely.

There are two 720p HD  (whatever that means) cameras on it (front and rear) and people are quite impressed with the image quality they get on Skype calls. By people, I (obviously) just mean my parents and my superpartner, and their words are not to be trusted much in this context, anyway. One fun fact: Clicking on your own video in Skype app toggles the cameras! You can show what’s in front of you to others if such need ever arises. So these are a few hardware quirks and some time is required to get used to the Surface-y way of doing things. After all this, the one major thing that made me go, “Hell yeah… this is the system to work on!” was this:

My MATLAB programs (look at the first 3 tabs located above on this page) started on Surface in ~10s (the first start) whereas on other laptops, they take at least 60-90s. Also for subsequent starts, while the older ones still take 15-45s, the time required drops to ~5s on Surface. That’s some speed! Here is MATLAB’s benchmark info for Surface Pro:

The last column (3-D) above is noteworthy and the 4 figures around here are clickable so do click on them!

Just for completeness’ sake, here are Mathematica’s benchmark too (again, click on them…):

Here again, the Test 12 (which is ‘polynomial expansion’) column is hilariously noteworthy! That’s what is called

Surface Pro

Upgrades

I recently upgraded from Win7 to Win8. On both of my laptops (I’m going to point out what doesn’t work because they are more interesting to recount than saying that my MATLAB programs work without any fuss!):

Acer Aspire 5610Z

The ‘new’ apps Photos, Music, and Video don’t find files in the respective libraries, which they are supposed to do by default!

It’s not that these are the primary apps that I have to use so am not much bothered about their dis-functionality. But I liked the Music app in Win8’s Release Preview and if they worked in Win8RP, why the hell don’t they work in Win8?

The shutdown seems to proceed all right but a message always pops up on restart: “Your PC ran into a problem…”:

I just hit “Send Details” and get on with my life.

Fujitsu LifeBook T4410

Fujitsu Shock Sensor and OmniPass Fingerprint Reader are not compatible with Win8. Also mentioned on that page is the fact that the automatic rotation of screen from notebook to tablet mode won’t happen anymore due to Fujitsu (Tablet Controls) settings. That will be taken care by Win8… But in my case, it doesn’t and I have to hit the relevant physical button (see below) to change the screen orientation every time I change modes.

All drivers work fine but the driver for Security Panel Buttons needed to be uninstalled & reinstalled while having UAC settings turned off for the buttons (incl. the one for changing screen orientation) to work. Also doing a few restarts may not hurt before you try to tweak the drivers.

Advice: Suspend BitLocker Encryption & Turn Off TPM before upgrading and be damn sure those panel buttons work after upgrade before you shut off the laptop or you could be in a hell lot of trouble.
Catch: TPM has to be turned on through BIOS after upgrade so if you’ve forgotten that password, leave it alone. It took me 7 tries to get the password right and you do know that the computer locks after 3 wrong tries, don’t you? Thankfully, the button panel was working and I could get on after entering the security code. Anyway, resuming encryption is no hassle after the TPM is turned on.

The webcam doesn’t work in the ‘Modern UI’ apps. It works fine on the Desktop apps. This is when you have Fj Camera (drivers provided by Fujitsu) installed. If you install Microsoft’s USB Video Device driver instead, the webcam works everywhere but the image is flipped! So back to square 1.

I like to think of these as ‘hardware’ issues… Nothing much Win8 can do about them but let me bring to your notice 3 ‘major’ Win8 dum-bass-ery:

1. Win8 sets the maximum brightness level of the screen depending on who knows what. That means you can’t increase the brightness if you want / need to but just decrease it, which is infuriating at times!

2. There is some issue with ‘Personalization’. First of all, the Bing Dynamic theme doesn’t ‘install’ properly. Secondly, the background chooser screen is too slow to load (it was so even in Win7) and then the ‘default’ Windows Desktop Background folder doesn’t show subfolders. [Well, these are issues related to restart I guess so your mileage may vary… as I can now see subfolders when choosing the WDB folder.]

3. The on-screen keyboard doesn’t appear on its own in desktop apps. Let me be precise: In Win7, when you clicked / focused on a text field, a small keyboard icon would pop up near the blinking cursor and you could bring forth the OSK by clicking on that icon. Even if there was no icon (like for gtalk), there would always be a floating edge of the keyboard at the screen’s edge that you could click and get the OSK back. But now in Win8 there are no such visual cues to make it appear on-screen. The keyboard’s icon just sits there on the taskbar and if you’re like me who likes to hide the taskbar to get more screen-space then it is frustrating to click on the text field, go to the task bar, and then click the keyboard icon to make it slide-up on the screen!

This is taking a step backward from the better functionality that was provided in the previous OS version, very much like the Live Mesh & SkyDrive debacle. I can not add much to whatever has been said about LM vs. SD already but let me rant away anyway. Why would you go from a ‘generic framework of sharing solutions’ (LM) to a ‘specific partial solution to a sharing problem, which was already taken care by the generic framework’ (SD)? In LM, arbitrary folders could be synced arbitrarily to arbitrary (compatible) devices (SD was just another ‘device’) and shared & synced with arbitrary (≤10) people. This is what I mean by ‘generic’. In SD, only folders in the SkyDrive folder can be synced to ‘arbitrary’ devices with SD now being a permanent device (not that it’s bad but let’s leave that for others to discuss) and they can be shared (just shared and not synced) with arbitrary (?) people. That’s all I have to say for someone to be able to compare what has happened during the transition from LM to SD. [Well… thanks for making things clear. (umm… ‘confusing’ really! )]

With the recent update to SD, now at least you can choose which folders (the folders still need to be in SkyDrive folder) sync to which devices (the web storage is still a permanent ‘device’ but that’s expected) but still no syncing of shared folders.

How can you write “Everything but files shared with you will sync” as an option and not have a thought: “You know what, there should be another option before this saying that Everything including files shared with you will sync”? Anyway, that’s that. [Yeah… and don’t worry if you did not get the head and tail of any of it, I did not either and after enjoying being called dum-bass by him, I figured out that he is trying to state the fact that only your folders are visible in the SD location. Makes complete sense, yes. But if he had shared 3 GB of data with me and I already had 2 GB, I would be losing 5 GB of the 25 GB available to me whereas currently it’s just 2 GB. It is meant to work in a more efficient way, or No? – No. Ideally (efficiently), the folder shared by me showing up in your SD would be more like a placeholder (that links to my SD) and so shouldn’t cost you any storage space. And on top of that, it gives you a choice to sync it to your laptop(s) too if you like (provided your HDD permits)!]

Happy Upgrading!

Kitchens from India

Remember that post I wrote ages ago? No, you say! I mean this one, where I reviewed Amy’s Mattar Paneer.

Well, I thought I’d do a similar thing for this week’s post! I had bought Bombay Kitchen’s Mattar Paneer a few weeks back. This (cheaper than Amy’s) product had the following packaging with a dumb serving suggestion:

Who the hell eats mattar paneer with rice and that also with the former just poured over the latter? Anyway, the actual setting of the material inside was more ridiculous:

Put some more rice in there, dammit! I had to slurp the gravy at the end of this meal with no rice left to soak in it! I didn’t count the pieces of paneer cubes this time but at least half a dozen should have been there. The dish overall was good, especially its smell but the taste was quite bland. Well, bland is a strong word so let me rephrase it to say that though it felt nice to eat, something felt amiss.

That’s all I want to rant right now… I mean what’s the point of life if your superpartner doesn’t eat paneer, anyway? So fast forwarding to ratings:

• Aroma – 1
• Flavour – ½
• Texture – 1
• Bliss – ½

I’d give it a rating of 4/5. Check out

another Kitchen