Prices of Spices

I have to spend too much time during summer months in PathMark for grocery shopping because of Mall Route Bus’ reduced frequency. To pass the aforementioned ‘too much time’, I like reading the names & prices of spices. Here are some of the interesting stand-outs:

Which is the most expensive Spice?

If you thought ‘Saffron’, let the QI-style forfeit alarm go off! It cost something between $400-500 per pound sometime ago. I’ve not seen it in the aisle this summer, so can’t guarantee the price.

If you say ‘Turkish Bay Leaves’, you are close – It costs around $750/lb.

The winner is ‘Chopped Chives’. If you said this out loud, you are also eligible to shout out ‘Bingo’ right about now. It costs around $800/lb!

Which is the cheapest Spice?

If you said ‘Salt’, congratulate yourself. More specifically, it is ‘Sicilian Sea Salt’ ($17/lb!).

Now for some weird ones (all prices are $/lb if you’ve not gotten used to it by now!):

Ground Cumin (63) & Roasted Ground Cumin (53). Roasted one is cheaper? How the hell did they do that?

Ground Coriander (74) & Roasted Ground Coriander (76). Almost no price difference! OK!

Ground Ginger (72) & Roasted Ground Ginger (85). Roasted one is costlier, makes sense…

Ground Saigon Cinnamon (50) & Roasted Saigon Cinnamon (77). Roasted is way too costly, dammit!#%

Mediterranean Spiced Sea Salt (24) is the most weird one! Don’t you think so? Not because of its cost but because of its name! What the hell does one mean by spiced salt? Don’t you mean salted spices! Because all I see in the bottle are brownish, reddish flakes. I don’t see any white ‘particles’ in the bottle and trust me, I can compare ‘white’ with the bottle of ‘Sicilian Sea Salt’ kept next to it.

Spices

Too Much Sketchbook?

I skipped a couple of heartbeats when I saw this ‘photo’:

(Also Musashi Quality is still in business! YOOOO!!!)

This happened early morning today and then I took the bus to YITP. In the bus, I noticed dark clouds adorning the otherwise usual blue sky. This made me remember the fourth episode of Sketchbook ~Full Color’s~ titled A Sketch Competition between Three People. Specifically, the moment when Sora (the heroine) is sketching the cloudy skyline and it gets difficult for her to draw because of humidity. This leads her to think, “I can’t draw a distinct line, and the sky can’t distinctly rain. I feel like we are similar… not a bad feeling at all.”

Indeed, not a bad feeling at all. When you can’t distinctly accept or refuse; can’t distinctly agree or disagree; can’t distinctly cry or laugh; can’t distinctly feel happy or sad; can’t distinctly hate or love; can’t distinctly lose or win; …! Distinct lines are very rare, aren’t they? How do you draw a distinct line between chaos & randomness, collaborators & competitors, defense & offense, dream & reality, enemies & friends, following & stalking, …

It is as if a distinct line

never exists!

Search for Killer Baby…

As of now, people have arrived on my blog post titled Baby, Please Kill Me! from Australia(1), Germany(1), Malaysia(1), Singapore(1), UK(1) and US(2) by searching for or about it. I’m really happy about that! About both the facts that people want to read more of this manga and that they end up on my blog but have to leave in disappointment!

People are mostly led to my blog when they search for Khamakha Hyderabadi. It usually appears as the second (or third or fourth) search result depending on Google’s mood. These people come mostly from India, Middle East, Pakistan and US. In minority, people also end up here if they are searching about Saba Balrampuri. The ‘searchers’ for her have more or less the same demographics as earlier. Though, one difference is that people like to ‘listen’ to Him but ‘talk’ to Her!

Searches for the camera named Casio Exilim Z2000 have also brought some people to my exposition of that magnificent piece of technology! Recently, they have come from European countries such as Bulgaria, Finland & Germany!

However, some have come here searching for weird phrases like “funny botanists sampling” and “first sextubel”, go figure! I’m pretty sure these people did not find what they were looking for, here at my blog. In fact, I doubt the latter search (with that spelling for what I guess should be ‘sextuple’) did any good for the ‘researcher’ at all!

One guy (I’m pretty sure, it’s a guy!) even searched for

“jksmskj”…

How do you do?

Dear Reader, How do You do?

Lost in thoughts for a fitting reply, watch this tutorial(?) video:

QI: Series E; Episode 10

This video is a great segue to the fact that one of my friends here at SUNYSB (let’s call him MEI-G) is getting married today…

Happy (most probably belated) Wedding Day (and beyond) to him!!! (If you are MI-G, then replace ‘him’ with ‘you’.)

Here’s a ‘funny’ (It’s funny to those who find it funny!) card I’d like to dedicate to MI (read the earlier ones and the story behind these here):

Card M

1^st Page: Experts say that the key to a Happy Marriage is for each of the partners to clearly define and declare their roles in the relationship.

3^rd Page: ⇐ Hope this Helps.

2^nd Page (has two circular red stickers in a column):

I’m the BOSS around here.

I’m the BOSS around here when she’s not around.

Altogether four weddings have been the subject of two of my rather short posts recently. So in an attempt to make my posts feel rather lengthy, the most I could do is to give you some info about what the earlier three might have looked like…

…in general!

Magic: MATLAB® Makes Movies!

The Pledge: Let me say that ‘this is not a revelation’, so that we are on the same page. The exclamation mark(!) is present for entirely different reasons. For quite some time, I had been having some troubles making movies using 'getframe' & 'addframe' functions in MATLAB^®. The .avi file would have a botched up initial frame which would drag on forever, i.e. no changing frames and hence no movie! (Did you know that Pigeons would see our movies as a slideshow?)

The Turn: I realized that this has to be due to some conflict with the graphics renderer. So, I explicitly chose the 'zbuffer' renderer and the .avi file now actually contained changing frames and hence a movie. You might think it worked out but not so soon... (If it had, this would have been a pretty ‘lame’ post!) 'zbuffer' does not support transparency but I needed that as you will see below. After digging here & there for a while, I came to the conclusion that I needed to use 'OpenGL' renderer and this was also the cause of ‘improper’ movies being made till now! (OpenGL is chosen as the default renderer if available.)

The Prestige: Digging some more in MATLAB's Help (THE BEST HELP EVER WRITTEN, just wanted to get that off my chest ), I found the magic line: feature('UseGenericOpenGL',1); The problem was that OpenGL supports Hardware Acceleration and it is used by default when available but somehow MATLAB couldn't keep up(?)! So the above line forces OpenGL to use software acceleration instead, which as MATLAB's Help points out rarely causes problems. (If the problem still persists, just restart MATLAB^®!)

That did it for me and here are the proofs:

Umbilic Torus

Werner Boy’s Surface

Here are some more well-made animations in MATLAB^®:

Surfaces

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

Walking in the Footsteps of…

… Nagisa Kurihara (the Miracle Girl).

Before that, let me just say that I felt excited today while grocery shopping like Hazuki usually feels! Basically, my shopping cost exactly $\$35.00$ and I ‘saved’ exactly $\$3.50$ due to discounts on the prices of 3 items!

Anyway, let us get back to walking… So, if you read Sketchbook (which I seriously DOUBT!) then you know that Kurihara-Senpai is

An inquisitive but easy-going girl with keen biological interests. Kurihara's knowledge of this field is literally encyclopedic, in the sense that it is only limited by what appears in scientific encyclopedias. She identifies and interacts with a variety of plant and animal life, sharing some of their unique characteristics with other club members and with the audience. [copied from Wikipedia]

Last week, I had an opportunity to visit Ashley Schiff Park Preserve on-campus. It was a tour guided by a Botanist (Margarita, I guess) and Pat (not just a Botanist, I guess!). Learned (or rather got familiar with) a few things like the facts that:

• Leaves of some plants (like Sassafras) are highly fragrant;
• Certain plants (Moss) / insects (Gall Wasps) have weird life / reproduction (including alternating sexual & asexual generations) cycles;
• Leaves can also get bitten by insects in response to which they develop bumps (like us) called galls;
• Berries (red ones!) / Flowers (tulips) can be there where you don’t expect them to be;
• There are two types of Solomon Seal plants: True(?) & False(!);
• Insects camouflage themselves a little too well.

Anyway, that’s all I want to share about that trip for now. Check out the Preserve below:

ASPP