Sophisticated

Someone from India landed on my blog searching for “why life is so bad shayari”:

How ridiculous is that? (S)He should have searched for “why life is shayari”. An example sher to illustrate this point (have a look at the tab titled ‘Shayari’ above before reading further!):

तुम्हारी सोच के साँचे में ढल भी सकता था,
वो आदमी ही था इक दिन बदल भी सकता था।

Tumhari soch ke saanche mein dhal bhi sakta tha,
wo aadmi hi tha ik din badal bhi sakta tha.

Could have shaped in the mould of your thoughts,
Being a human, he could have been eventually cast.

-राजीव भरोल (Rajeev Bharol)

Sorry for pretending to be sophisticated. If you want to witness real sophistication, watch Sora as she teaches Natsumi what it means to be highly sophisticated!

HAHAHAHA

Volume 8

of Sketchbook is now in my possession. More specifically, Sketchbook 8 [Limited Edition] w/ Illustrated Tote. YOO0000000_{°°°°°……}

Let me take you through the unpacking of the package worth $(24.04 → 24.42 → 24.79 →)25.04, which arrived from Japan in 15 days:

I was expecting Kate to be on the cover of this volume and she indeed is! Next would be the President and then finally, we’ll see Ooba as the Cover-girl. Wait, the two Sensei’s could have their turn before her… Well, we’ll have to wait.

I was expecting the whole Art Club to be here… Oh well, next time!

Now let me take a sneak peek inside the volume. Since I don’t understand the script, I will have to wait (to fully understand the strips) till the Scanlators get started on this volume (or I could bug my Superpartner to translate for me… should definitely give it a try!). But the beauty of Sketchbook is its simplicity and all this ‘tension’ is almost unnecessary as the following pages illustrate:

Sora tries to suppress a whirlpool… Natsumi is confounded as usual.

Natsumi & Daichi let their Kuro & Inuo meet… and hilarity ensues?

Nagisa is trying macro photography… with not so great results!

Best of Luck to You, anyway!

Numbers, Numbers Everywhere!

Today, someone from Mexico landed on my blog after searching for… Wait for it:

Yes, can you believe that? Someone actually searched ‘solution for the sudoku from beelzebub’ and landed on this blog! Brilliant… I want to thank Ryuuhei Tamura for screwing up!

Coincidentally, I also saw a report in Nature on an article about the minimum number of entries required for a Sudoku to have a unique solution. The answer turns out to be 17 and a sample Sudoku is provided there. Guess what? A story similar to Beelzebub repeats here!

First of all, this Sudoku can not be solved logically:

Moreover, my Superpartner was able to fill-in the 16 red numbers on her own (as expected)! Second of all, it does not have a unique solution; it has a hell lot of solutions (>500!):

I feel a little bad that I’ve been giving her ‘invalid’ Sudokus to solve. Maybe I should give her a valid Sudoku for once like this one (taken from some YouTube video; don’t remember which one!):

Anyway, talking about traffic on my blog, this post has the highest number of hits; more than double the number of hits on the post below it:

Curiously, people do some quite explicit searches to end up here:

A New Year

So what?

Apparently, some people don’t say, “So What?” and go along with others to parties, uh… I don’t know what else they do. But another ridiculous thing they indulge in is making resolutions:

• Like eating less sweets or snacks or both as if that’ll save them from listening to others’ comments about their health;
• Like exercising as if there’s no next year;
• Like being polite as if the world-peace depended on just that;
• Like learning something new everyday as if that’ll make them more appealing to others;
• Like being more secretive as if people cared in the first place;
• Like being less secretive as if people cared in the first place;
• Like trying to overcome one’s phobias as if it were a life-or-death issue;
• Like ranting about day-to-day stuff as if that’ll increase blog traffic.

Before I start to get self-aware, let me just wish you a very Happy New Year and point you to the photos of my recent

NYC trip

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

Scorebook

It’s for keeping scores obviously. But right now, I’m talking about Sketchbook’s author’s one volume endeavour: Scorebook. A new scanlator has appeared and its 6^th chapter has been uploaded here.

There is nothing much to say about this chapter. A new ‘rude’ guy appears, who also wants to be a baseball team manager but there’s no actual game of baseball to be seen anywhere. That’s because it has been already established that the author doesn’t know any rules of baseball! HaHa... hahaha… *cough*

Anyway, I just wanted to post my (5^th) new sketch of one of the Sketchbook characters. This time it’s Nagisa Kurihara with her cute cat-mouth-smile:

This sketch has been the most easiest to draw. It still took more than an hour, though! But somewhy I didn’t use the usual ‘Natural Pencil’ drawing tool in MS Paint as it didn’t feel right; instead I used the ‘Brush’ tool. That’s why the lines are much darker than earlier sketches  (search for them if you like by clicking on the ‘Sketchbook’ label below) and so overall this sketch has a different feel to it. A warm & fluffy feeling! Basically, the word / phrase Minamo uses to describe Sora’s sketches in 8th episode of the Anime. I’m definitely not claiming to be as good as Sora… When you start feeling inferior to fictional characters, you know you’ve hit rock-bottom! Anyway, find the original photo

here to compare.

Physics & Lyrics

How many times have you read a poem (or listened to a song) about Scientific terms and concepts? Maybe 2 or 3 or for some, it may even be a negative number. So, this post is dedicated to making that number increase by 1.

You must know about Initial Value Problems (IVP) & Boundary Value Problems (BVP), right? You don’t? Ohh… then the following sher will define these for you:

वो अंजाम की इब्तिदा चाहता है
मैं आग़ाज़ का इर्तिक़ा चाहता हूँ

Wo anjaam ki ibtida chaahata hai
Main aagaaz ka irtika chaahata hun

(S)He wants the beginning of the end
I want an evolution of the beginning

-शीन काफ़ 'निज़ाम' (Sheen Kaaf ‘Nizaam’)

For Urdu-illiterate people like me, the main four words appearing in the above sher need to be translated to simpler terms, which I do now:

अंजाम = अन्त (End)
इब्तिदा = प्रारम्भ (Beginning)
आग़ाज़ = प्रारम्भ (Beginning)
इर्तिक़ा = विकास, प्रगति (Development, Progress)

Everything above in Hindi is reproduced from the following book, which has inspired a few posts (actually, this cover image should have already appeared in earlier ones!):

Now it should be obvious that those two lines define IVP & BVP. IVP is defined by the second line, which basically means give me the initial conditions of the system and I’ll predict what happens next or in passive voice: how does a system evolve given its starting configuration? That means BVP is defined by the first line, which tells you to give me the initial and final conditions and I’ll find a ‘path’ which connects those two or in passive voice: how does a system go from a given starting configuration to a given final configuration?

Isn’t the sher beautiful & profoundly deep? Wait… What? You want real, physical examples of such problems now? Oh come on, don’t ask a theoretical physicist for physical examples, I’m not a phenomenologist! Anyway, that was just a joke I’ve been trying to get out of my system for a long time. Then, let me give a very simple example… IVP: You earn X amount of money, so what will you do with it? BVP: You earn X amount of money per unit time and you want to buy something that costs Y(~3X), so how’ll you go about the purchase? Hope that helps!

The eternal question a human faces over the duration of his lifetime (or even after-lifetime) is “What does one want?”. And in my view, the following (un-translate-able) sher captures that emotion very well:

दुआ को उठा तो दिये हाथ लेकिन
ख़ुदा जाने क्या मांगना चाहता हूँ
-शीन काफ़ 'निज़ाम'

The answer simply is “Nobody knows!”. If someone wants to give the above Sher’s translation a try, be my guest and comment. I leave you with another beautiful Ghazal regarding

Love, Pain & the Likes