Update : My Year Off with Theoretical Physics in Canada :)

Hello Folks !

Its been ages since I last sent out an update mail, but that does not mean things have not been happening ! There have been many many months of desperate - and sometimes dangerous - hard work, much agonizing thought about the future, a satisfying amount of cricket, some heart burn some success and a few twists in the tale. Not to mention some inspirational teachers - maybe thats a tautology, anyone who's inspirational is automatically a teacher - and so many delightful friends it was an absolute privilege and pleasure to spend time with.

The upshot of it all is that after spending one year in Belgium sweating out some of the toughest coursework in Photonics along with the Belgians (even Caesar appreciated them - "Of all the Gauls, The Belgians are the bravest !") and one year in Scotland fretting about a singularly intractable and tedious masters thesis while chilling at the whey pat tavern with cheesy nachos after village cricket games, I have ended up in Canada at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics doing (yet another) masters degree (in Theoretical Physics, obly).

Before you ask "Why ??"  and "What ????", This is my year off. Other people travel and take it easy, I got a chance to fulfill a childhood dream. I am studying general relativity at the moment and before Im done at the end of 10 months, Ill have gone through cosmology, string theory, quantum gravity and most of the rest of physics - all at someone else's expense. Its a brilliantly conceived and intense course and if you're interested, take a look at it here. 

Im enjoying myself and learning a lot. What I will do after this ? Who knows. But I want to travel a lot, and I intend to settle down back in Aurangabad pretty soon. How Im goign to do that without simply abandoning all my random and fairly esoteric pursuits, I do not know, but Ill figure something out :)

Sincerely,
Prasanna

New Blog

This is where I blog now

see you there !

CLOSED DOWN

I will no longer post anything here.
This blog has served me for a long time, and I'm rather fond of it, but the past suffocates it now, I want to start afresh and write something different.

I'll put the new URL here as soon as there is one.

Thank you for coming !

Questions for a PGDM

why are food prices rising all over the world ? how is the price of oil determined ? what justification is given for the assertion that wealth trickles down ? what do consultants do after 5 years of consultancy ? what are they good at ? why do derivatives and other financial "products" exist ? what purpose to they serve ? why are the richest and most cash rich sectors (investment banks, consultants etc etc) the ones that create no wealth ? why do people with bad credit histories provide the major portion of bank profits ? why is fractional lending allowed at all ? what controls the amount of money in the economy ? what relation does amount of money in the economy have to real income ? what is real income ? why cant we have a fixed amount of money circulating ? does that even mean anything ? what percentage of consulting income is result dependent ? what percentage of consulting income in india is from family owned businesses and what percentage from government ? why do pgdm related jobs like investment banking and consulting tend to be so elitist and opulent ? why is the guy who makes a better chulha not rewarded more than a man who talks nebulous bullshit in the current economic system ? the pharma business is the most profitable in the world, followed by food, why are these not govt controlled to ensure food, medicine pricing and availability ? who controls commodity prices and availability and how ? who regulates them (both prices and people) ? what justification is given for the assertion that there will be less corruption if the private sector controls sectors that are currently govt controlled ? in a free market, what represents a person with no money ? where did the money lent out in the sub prime crisis go ? if it is circulating in the economy, some one must have it, so why is there economic slowdown in the US because of that ? what punishment has been meted out to the rating agencies who messed up on such a large scale ? why do IIMs need to have such ridiculous fees when they require no expensive labs, no special equipment apart from good class rooms ? do corporations HAVE to increase profits for shareholders ? cant the charter mandate instead a maximization salaries of employees or minimizing acres of rainforest cut ? why should corporations have the same rights as citizens ? why is no human liable for the misdeeds of a corporation ? how foolish is that ?

as more questions occur to me I'll put them in another post. Please feel free to comment and clarify, correct, explain any of the above, or connected things.

Chitrangada is Coming Back !

.

I put the same photo again, because I find it stunning. Take a look at this article from Tehelka which gives a good account of her history and the effect she had on people, including me. The article also talks about her upcoming movies and her own reasons for leaving when she did.

Finally, something positive happens to Bollywood !

The Greatest Ever

An article by Rohit Brijnath, this is a moving tribute to Dhyan Chand. It was part of India Today's 100 People who shaped India series of articles. This is the link to the whole article on the India Today website. Notice how shoddily we have always treated our heroes. We are a hugely callous country. We dont deserve our heroes. We certainly deserve our politicians. If you know what this article talks about, and if it does not move or sadden you in any way, chances are, you're Indian.

They say you can judge a man's legend by the quality of myths that surround him. By that measure itself Dhyan Chand was an extraordinary man. To hear tales of his craftsmanship was to wonder whether his stick was designed by Merlin himself. They broke his stick in Holland to check if there was a magnet inside; in Japan they decided it was glue; in Germany, Adolf Hitler even wanted to buy it................

..................................................................................................................................................

........When he fell ill, liver cancer it turned out, and came to Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences, they dumped him in the general ward. A journalist's article eventually got him moved to a special room, but that public memory had to be jogged tells its own story.

In Jhansi they had a funeral, not in the ghat, but on the ground he played on. Players came, but it seemed a little too late. It made it hard to forget the first few words of his autobiography Goal: "You are doubtless aware that I am a common man." He wasn't but he died like one

But we did not

India lost 2-0 and will not be playing at the Olympics in Beijing.

I want India to win . .

against Britain tomorrow in Santiago. India has played in every men's olympic hockey tournament since 1928 (and won 8 of them) and in order to play in Beijing, India need to beat Britain tomorrow in the final of the 6 nation qualifying tournament from which only one team will play in the olympics. India lost only one league match, and that was to Britain a couple of days ago, a very rough match in which 3 players were reprimanded for bad behaviour, and India lost in in the dying moments when Rob Moore scored for Britain to give them a 3-2 win. (bringing back memories of that last minute goal we let in against Poland in Sydney (to make it 1-1), we were 1 minute 41 seconds away from our first Olympic semi final in 25 years.) That was only Britain's 10th win over India ever.

China, Korea and Pakistan, South Africa, Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Australia have already qualified for the olympics. Belgium ? Korea ? and India is struggling ? This story goes back to the 2006 Doha Asian Games when for the first time ever India were ousted in the group stages due to a loss to China who are considered minnows in Hockey. India had won a medal in every previous edition of the Asian games, and apart from a Bronze in 1986, we won either gold or silver. That failure to qualify for the semis and win a medal at the Asian Games meant that India did not automatically qualify for the Olympics. And so here we are . . . Needing to beat Britain to get to the Olympics. and once upon a time Beating britain would have been no problem at all, Pakistan beat them 8-2 or something in the last olympic games, but they have a higher world ranking than us (they are 8th and we are 9th) and nothing can be said about the Indian Hockey team anymore. We lost the league game to them after all.

What happens to Indian Hockey if we dont qualify for the Olympics ? so much history, so much pride, and once upon a time so much glory went with the Indian team's exploits at the Olympics. The coverage in the Indian media (from what I could gauge over the internet) was desultory, and apart from one article on Indiatimes by the coach Joaquim Carvalho none of the articles went to the heart of the situation the Indian team finds itself in. There were no statistics anywhere, (I got a few numbers from a Pakistani newspaper, which sounded like it really wanted India to qualify, if only for the sake of tradition) no analysis, no recoup of the Indian team's recent results, no analysis of the system for qualification of the olympics (I had to go to the olympics website to check which teams had already qualified) nothing. The fate of Indian Hockey in the near future hangs in the balance, generations of pride and a splendid record hangs in the balance and the country refuses to notice ?

Its a shame. Shame on all those who call themselves sports fans and sports journalists in India and shame on the Indian public which obediently drinks whatever rot the BCCI dishes out and refuses to look around for itself - there is greatness and pride in all sport and very very few sporting teams in history have provided as much drama, brilliance, glory, and now tragedy as the Indian Men's Hockey Team.


If I could go back in time and choose a sport again, I'd choose to play Hockey.

Its gone too far

I, P B, hereby declare that I will not watch, read about, talk about, or in any way encourage the proliferation of any event, product, person or subject that has any connection to cricket in India.

Here's a story.

After much huffing and puffing and tension, my exams finally got over on the 28th of Jan 2008. and then, instead of breathing a sigh of relief and enjoying for a few days, I had a take home exam to do to be sumbitted on the 13th of february for a subject we freshers had been advised not to take on account of its advanced nature (and so of course, I went and took it. I insist on finding new instruments for my lazyness to torture me with). I had reconciled myself to my 10 day holiday being washed out in yet another tense period of wasted time and desperate concentrated work coupled with irritated house-hunting (the latter the courtesy of the VUB housing department), but my parents had other ideas. They had decided that I was working too much (hear ! hear !) and needed a vacation. They dint say it, but they clearly thought I was becoming(?) psycho, sitting in my room all day, eating by myself, not meeting people and generally brooding over a cold grey cityscape and inscrutable equations and growing slowly but surely fatter and balder. (all of which happens to be true) So, when my dad visited me on the 29th, he was quite insistent that I finish my paper before friday (thats today) and go meet some friends in Switzerland over the weekend. the more he spoke of it, the more inviting it seemed, and I promised that I'd do something about it. So, after I got back to my room before lunch on the 30th (I was in Brussels with dad) I promptly took my computer over to Aditya's place (apart from being a splendid chap with a large room, his landlord provides free, fast, unlimited download wifi access) and proceeded to watch some 10-15 episodes of the Xfiles well into the night.

I slept feeling quite guilty. So the next day (the 31st, yesterday) I woke up before lunch and found out that the housing problem had been kind of, more or less, solved, but my internet was not working and my phone was lost. Understandably, I thought myself exceptionally vulnerable to attacks by hi-tech psychopaths and alien abductions, so I spent most of the afternoon fixing my internet and finding my phone (which I had forgotten at Aditya's place obviously) and so on. I gave my nonlinear optics a cursory glance and in the night, settled down for another bout of the x files in my room. By the time I slept I had realized that the time had come for desperate measures.

I woke up today morning and decided that I must go to Switzerland and meet the few friends I had there and take a break (theres irony in there somewhere). I realized (admitted is a better word perhaps) that I'd never get down to work unless I gave myself a fixed inflexible deadline. So the obvious course of action was to book my tickets to switzerland and then make myself finish the needful before then. So I thought to myself - thursday I go to Switzerland, spend friday and saturday there, back on sunday, and next semester starts on monday, so by wednesday, I have to finish my exam, attend a meeting in brussels on monday, wind up my affairs in Gent, arrange for my luggage to be shifted to Brussels in my absence, and make arrangements for Aditya (who is staying in my room for a week because his contract expired in January).

Easy.

So I started looking at the various low cost airlines. I needed to go to Zurich, thats where the chaps are, but Zurich turns out to be an expensive place to fly to. So I was prepared to fly to anywhere in switzerland, and there were 10 open tabs with any number for airports and flights and few were affordable. Finally, I saw a list which read something like

Basel - EUR180
Bern - EUR132
Geneva - EUR156
Zurich - EUR1023
Nice - EUR3

AHA ! I said to myself ! finally ! So I clicked on the last dot, filled in my card details, paid, got my ticket in my mail and as I was about to print it out, I saw something that should have been horribly obvious right at the beginning - Nice is in FRANCE !!!!! its 600km from Zurich ! and the flight is on Tuesday !!

But the deed was done. The gods had spoken. there was no turning back. . . . . since then, I have bought myself a nice medium sized backpack and a good North Face jacket (my first major non food expenses in europe and they wiped out my savings for january) and helped Aditya move to my room and fixed an appointment to wind up my room contract on tuesday afternoon. I leave for Nice on tuesday night, reach there at 10. I'll spend a day or two around Nice I guess and then go to Switzerland either via Grenoble or Milan (I've been to north Italy, so Grenoble seems a more interesting but less convenient option) and my flight back from Geneva reaches Brussels at the exact time that the first class of my next semester is supposed to start. I dont know where I'll stay in Brussels when I get back and what I'll wear to college on the first day, but I dont care.

As usual, I'm in a tight corner, but I can assure you, its a lot better than being rooted in front of a flickering screen in a dark room feeding on cheap vicarious thrills ! I'm looking forward to wide landscapes, the sea, the mountains, the flavours of faraway cities and the winds of foreign lands :-) Should be fun, especially after 4 months of motionlessness :-)

And there is the small matter of doing 2 months worth of work in 2 days, but thats routine. Thats precisely what my Bachelors degree was about :-)

Thats Chitrangada Singh - for those of you unfortunate enough never to have seen her before. Her first movie was the superbly made "Hazaaron Khwaahishein Aisi" (2003) - a movie that lingers in the mind long long after its over. It is set in the 1970's in Calcutta and traces the stories of 3 characters who - in all their flawed tragedy - symbolize the spirit of those times. But the movie goes further than that, it makes the viewer ask himself fundamental questions about his own ideas of morality and idealism. It left me slightly disturbed and slightly sad. I watched it more than a year ago, and it still comes back to me sometimes, undiminished in its power, pain and the aftertaste of melancholy. And the most stunning performace in the movie belongs undoubtedly to Chitrangada Singh. 'The Lamp to the other characters Moths' as someone put it. She carries herself superbly, and is polished, understated, intelligent, sensual and flawed in her choice of men (in my opinion anyway :D ) Shiney Ahuja puts in a splendid performance in what is his debut movie as well, and his character provides the conscience for the movie, an upwardly mobile, ambitious and crude, but faithful and passionate counterpoint to the self righteous, misplaced and ultimately fickle idealism of the well heeled and well off. A movie well worth the time, surely one of the most remarkable movies ever made in Hindi.

Chitrangada acted in only one other movie called "Kal - Tomorrow and Yesterday" (2005) which was a well made thriller aimed at the so called multiplex audience. And then she got married to "ace golfer" Jyoti Randhawa and has never acted in a movie since. Mr. Randhawa had better be shaking up the golfing world in a big way soon, because he has taken away the lady who is Indian Cinema's best young actress by a long long way. Had she continued (and she still can come back) she could have been to our generation what Smita Patil was to the last. A beacon of intelligence and beauty in a world populated increasingly with 'item girls'.

She will be missed !

__________________________

ख्वाब तो मैंने बहुत देखे है, लेकिन दिल लगा कर खेले हुए बरसों बीत गए. शब्द बड़ी आसानी से निकलते है मुह से, मन मे महल बड़ी आसानी से बनते है, लेकिन डाव लगता नही है मुझसे, ज़ंग लड़ी नही जाती, मंजिल तै नही कर पता हूँ मैं - लाब्जों की दीवारों के पीछे छुपकर मुकर जाता हूँ मैं. हारना तो मैं जानता ही नही हूँ - मैंने खेलना ही कहाँ सीखा है ! ख़यालों मे खोया, फ़र्ज़ निभाना भूल चूका हूँ मै. बडे दिन हुए सिर उठाके चले हुए - हर मोड़ पे गलत रास्तों पर बिखर जाता हूँ मैं.

"हजारों ख्वाहिशें ऐसी
की हर ख्वाहिश पे दम निकले,
बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान
लेकिन फिर भी काम निकले . . "

I have seen the light

I write this to remind myself of that fact.

Exams, Cricket etc

I've become very bored and too comfortable in the middle of the exams. I liked my subjects while I was studying them, I was excited, but now that the exams are here they have become a drag. I fail to see how performance in an exam can be a good criterion for judging a masters level student's aptitude for research, and they are certainly a HUGE waste of time for all concerned, so I'm very surprised to find the intense, lengthy exam periods these people in Belgium have. I am keen to get done with them as soon as possible and get on to the next semester of learning. I am quite disappointed to find that "careless mistakes" are still very much a part of me, and my math exam which could so easily have been a triumph has left me feeling quite disappointed and a little bit helpless. To be honest, at least some of the lack of focus that might have resulted in the mistakes I made will have to be attributed to my excessive involvement in the tumultuous exploits of the Indian Cricket Team.

There have been reams and reams written about the Sydney match, and I have soaked it all up. I have read every blog, every article and followed every comment and its aftermath. I have seen all the videos on youtube and I have reached the conclusion that the whole matter is too obvious to comment on, and that I have nothing to add to the huge body of material already published (and indeed, is still being published). But, I do support the Indian team, not just because they are the Indian team and the underdogs but because most of them are gentlemen worth emulating in many respects.

I do wish they'd come up with some steely performances and win though. I miss India !


Update (20-01-2008) - Yesterday, they did exactly that ! A magnificent win at Perth !

On Solitude

I have had unparalleled opportunity to be alone with myself and meditate, both upon my life and upon my subjects, and (I regret to say) after making a very promising start 3 months ago I rather tired of my quiet isolation and yearned for the company of old friends and the comfort of old haunts, the warmth of home and the careless lethargy of an unambitious life. The splendid solitude of the earnest savant that I so relished at the outset of this journey became a burden and slowly I wandered from the path of learning, maintaining enough of a hold to keep track but not enough to delight in it. As I have so many times before, I saw the light and somehow, I forgot. I have been competent all this semester, but there was the opportunity to be exceptional, to be inspired, and I squandered it in my indolence, my mind clouded by false concerns and intellectual diversions just engaging enough to hide the damage being done.

Just this afternoon while I mused upon life, I identified "a willingness to be alone" as the factor that separates the definitively ordinary from the potentially great. I then realized that in this semester, that was exactly where I was found wanting. I could, after a point, no longer sustain the mental focus that forms the basis of productive meditative solitude, and it became all too easy to find ways to be entertained and thus not have to think. Being alone induces a state of honesty and introspection that many people find abhorrent, and I - having conquered the daemons of self deceit - threw away for no reason the purity of mind earned over weeks of silent work and thought. I reached the very edge of genius and turned back, unable to maintain order and peace when they were most important.

Genius is a state of mind, and it is earned through sustained meditative work. If I dont get there in the next year or two, I will never get there. There is a definite window of opportunity, I know the path, I have but to walk it, my mind at peace and my voices silent.

I Sea.

The Giant Squid (genus Architeuthis) has been photographed alive in the wild only once (2004) and taken on video alive only once (2006), on both occasions by a Japanese expedition. Giant Squid are the stuff of countless maritime legends, but their existence has been scientifically confirmed only for a couple of centuries (in 1888 to be precise), and attempts to study them have been severely limited by their propensity to die as soon as they are captured. Most of the specimen studied are those that wash up on beaches and are thus in very bad shape. It was once thought that giant squid were primarily delicate drifters which just ate whatever happened to pass by. However, the photographs taken by the Japanese team (with the help of a baited hook) show much more robust and belligerent predatory behaviour.

To me, this raises some interesting issues. In any ecosystem predators tend to be more intelligent and capable of adaption than other animals. Surely, the fact that the Giant Squid is a predator (of a fairly aggressive sort too) means it might have a brain capacity greater than once thought. My speculation is of course, fueled by the fact that they have large and (even in death) disconcertingly conscious looking eyes, and their bodies look very much like the elongated shapes of super intelligent aliens one so often sees in charming sci-fi magazines (which seem to primarily come out of America. A population that has supported science fiction for 70 years cant be all bad !) and thus the whole effect begs the question, what sort of intelligence do Giant Squid possess ?

And it turns out that the brain of the squid is very large and complex and it has a very highly developed nervous system. But what really intrigues me, is that they might posses that faculty to which might be attributed all of human progress - curiosity. Again and again through history sailors have reported squid checking their ships out, even attacking them, far outside their zone of comfort which is deep cold waters. In fact, coming to the surface leaves them very vulnerable to attack by sperm whales (who the squid can only beat by preventing them from coming to the surface to breathe). But squid, more than any other deep sea creature (save the sharks perhaps, who will attack anything that moves) seem to have a fascination for human craft. The encounters of giant squid and human vessels have been well documented in recent years, and even if one discounts the legends (though they were right about the existence of the giant squid after all) there is surely a case to investigate further the cognitive capabilities of the giant squid. Furthermore, if we can be offended by the killing of whales (and everyone here in europe seems to be absolutely outraged by japan killing whales) then surely surely, we ought to extend the same concern to a creature who is certainly a worthy adversary to the whale, and might be just as intelligent. I would love to know the results of any tests that might be conducted on Giant squid in the wild in the future, and their response to various stimuli.

Something in their eyes tells me they're smarter than we think :-) Wikipedia, Youtube and Google yeild some interesting results on them Squid. and the Giant Squid is not the end..apparently there is something called "Colossal Squid" ! :-) I love the deep seas almost as much as space and they are so much more accessible and plausible too !

Surely one of the most fascinating things to explore in the deep sea are the extremophilic lifeforms that live there (and they have been caught on film in a visually stunning but otherwise mediocre documentary. What a waste ! the possibilities for that documentary were immense), under incredible pressures and near hydrothermal vents with superboiled water that cant evaporate due to the pressure. They prove that complex life forms can arise even in areas devoid of sunlight, drawing their energy from deep sea vents that spew sulphur and other compounds that are harvested by sulphur eating bacteria (which are also fairly common near volcanic vents) as well as other larger lifeforms and they fuel a food chain based on sulphur instead of oxygen. A whole new biology which has evolved independently of the rest of the world. And the volcanic vents are many times widely seperated making biological exchange between them impossible, so there might be (and probably are) many independently evolving ecosystems (planets for all practical purposes) under the sea ! When a vent shuts down (as must happen every once in a while) so does one entire ecosystem around it. The sea floor must be littered with them. Arthur C. Clarke envisioned this kind of life on Europa (I dont know if he was the first one) and speculated as to the evolution of intelligence in such circumstances. Why not ? It is a challenging and constantly evolving environment. But of course, any given vent might not last long enough for intelligence to evolve (but then again, who is to give Nature a time limit ?) and it has been speculated that Sulphur based metabolism is not efficient enough to sustain intelligent brains (but maybe our brains are energy inefficient, spoilt by the abundance of oxygen). It is certainly possible.

One does not even need to go deep into the sea to find extremophiles and species evolving seperately from our ecosystem. They can be found in caves, and the way troglobites have evolved, very obviously from terrestrial creatures that went into the caves and stayed there, and how different they now are, is surely a brilliant and dramatically clear illustration of evolution at work ! and america has some of the most remarkable caves. Take the evangelicals to the caves I say, and maybe they will see the light. And their world view is as backward as cavemen anyway. (okay okay, sorry, but I could not resist that) In the deep caves too one sees sulphur eating bacteria and a food chain that has them at its base, though its not as dramatic as the sea based ones. Here too, one sees different species in every cave ! thats evolution.

All this of course, goes some way to reassuring us of the tenacity of the phenomenon we call life, and increases our hopes of finding it somewhere nearby. And if some signs of tool making and intelligence - however rudimentary - were to be found somewhere deep in the sea, it would change the way we look at ourselves, and remind us of our transience. We will be lucky if someone finds the shells of what we once considered our achievements and wonders if they are signs of intelligence.

Let there be Light

I dont know how else to put it - I have been taken over by science. Physics and mathematics are all I seem to be able to talk about, my thoughts revolve around questions as arcane and arbit to most other people as they are delightful to me - questions about everyday life, and the world around us.....a common one, "How is a rainbow made ?" the answer to that is surprisingly intricate and pretty and hides some nice complexities in a particularly beautiful phenomenon. (wikipedia is quite good on this check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow) Another one, seen as almost trivial by many people is "why is the sky blue ?" that deals with rayleigh scattering, which is the simplest type of scattering and if you want to look deeper into scattering you quickly get into Raman scattering and Brillouin scattering and nonlinear optics (which is my bane this semester).....and then there is the small (and some would say pressing) matter of increasing the efficiency of solar cells and that question takes you to quantum dots, Excitons, and a maze of quantum mechanical equations and greek letters one will despair of ever figuring out (if you have the heart to read them at all).....if you study the subject of light (as I happen to do), you will come across many wonderful phenomena, photonic crystals, mirrors that dont invert left to right, amplifiers that are based on light diffracting off a diffraction grating made by light ! or sound !!!

It is an interesting thing, to stay in "middle europe" - a prosperous and gray city, a class filled to the brim with geniuses as well as arbit characters, a foreign land with a different language and to study light. There is something about light. Not only to man and his mind which pines for it but also in nature. It has been the key to EVERY major theory advanced in the last two hundred years, from maxwell's electromagnetism (which first gave us a clue as to what light "actually was" (if there is such a thing as "actually being") ) through relativity (the postulate about the speed of light being constant along with the postulate of relativity of motion yeilds the whole theory ! ) (and I have always wondered, "why light ? whats so special about the speed of light ? why that number ? does it follow from somewhere else ? why cant gravitational waves, (which (at least so far, as far as I know) are not connected to light) have a speed greater or less than the speed of light ?" and the refinements in understanding make it even less comprehensible, apparently, phase fronts can and very commonly do travel faster than light, but 'information' or 'wave groups' cant ! why ? what is information exactly ? what is the relationship between information and "order" (because surely they are related, I have studied information theory at college and dealt with the concept of 'entropy' but I do not know enough thermodynamics to relate the information theoretical concept of entropy with the thermodynamic one) and what has any of that to do with fundamental limits to speed ? questions questions questions ! but they convince me that light is central to our understanding of the universe and will continue to be so for some time.) and then of course there is quantum mechanics and its connection to light is so well documented that I wont put it down. As a matter of fact, it is convoluted and complicated and dare I say it, "messy" and at the same time is wildly accurate. The universe is strange and and beautiful and unfathomable. It constantly challenges our limited brains (to be fair to them, they evolved to maximize procreation and food intake in a world where everything that mattered was macroscopic and moved slowly so its a little unfair to expect them to be naturals at relativistic and quantum mechanical phenomena, as it is, they dont do too bad - after years of frustration and training :D ) and fills our pitiful imaginations and puny hearts with awe.

Reality is the most wonderful thing we have, and we are given a staggeringly short time to contemplate it, and it pains me to think that the majority of people waste this time being scared of it and forcing themselves and their children to believe crude, simplistic, stupid and harmful stories written by the worst kind of people living in sick societies thousands of years ago. They are arrogant enough to claim that they can explain not just the origin and the present state of the universe, but also its 'purpose'. I am so stunned by the sheer arrogance of it, that I cannot think of a good enough repartee. Anyone who has studied science knows.

I am still a lazy man, and dont study as much as I should, but then there is the universe to think about ! and I miss India and its teeming millions. Europe is a very beautiful place to be lonely in. Very gray in winter, and somewhat similar to that Island mountain in another dimension in "Grimus" by Rushdie.....you can only survive if you are passionate or obsessed about something. Unfortunately in my case, being passionate about something does not imply I work terribly hard for it :D

A brilliant series from the BBC

http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=135
http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=136
http://freedocumentaries.org/film.php?id=137

These are links to episodes 1, 2, 3 respectively of a BBC documentary series called "The Power of Nightmares : Rise of the politics of fear". Wide ranging in scope and with some absolutely brilliant footage as well as superb and startling journalism, it surprises the viewer again and again with its calm maturity. It builds up slowly, and the three episodes really go together very closely, and it ends on an absolutely brilliant note. Made with passion and commitment, I take it to be the revenge of the BBC for the tamasha that started with Andrew Gilligan's report on a "sexed up dossier", reached its lowest, most disgraceful point with Dr. Kelly's "suicide", and ended with the recriminations that followed Lord Hutton's infamous whitewash.

Before you see another news program, watch this.

In a beautiful country of chocolates, cobbled streets, waffles, civilized rivers and quaint buildings I sit in a room and feel time flow past me. I loose myself in the current, letting the past wash over me, knowing that its over and done with. I let visions of the future, multitudinous and fantastic stalk me enticingly, knowing full well how short lived, weak and pathetic they are ! The present ? the present is nothing ! it is a point where there is only awareness of its existence. Everything else is in the past or the future - unreal, immaterial, impotent. They are the imaginary winds of our creation, we unfurl imaginary sails and set forth on fantastic journeys, borne hither and thither by gusts from our pasts and our future. Pull the sails down, and not only does the wind disappear but also the sea. All one is left with is consciousness. The present. The one point, the only point at which we know we exist.

Big Jan and the TdF

Something I stumbled across -

Associated Press
July 11, 2007

Jan Ullrich criticized former teammates Rolf Aldag and Erik Zabel for "acting like saints" once they had admitting their doping past.

Ullrich, who won the Tour de France in 1997, was one of several riders kicked out on the eve of last year's race after being implicated in a Spanish doping investigation. A sample of Ullrich's DNA was later matched to one of the blood bags in the doping affair. Several former riders of Team Telekom, including Zabel and Aldag, recently admitted they used erythropoietin in the 1990s while riding with Ullrich, who has retired and denies any wrongdoing.

"To carry on working, they need to confess their error," Ullrich said in an interview with L'Équipe, the French daily. "It makes me laugh, because I know they spoke about my case while acting like saints."

Ullrich was particularly angry over Aldag.

"When I heard Aldag talking non-stop about me on radio or on television, I was really outraged by his attitude," Ullrich said. "He made a lot of money because of me. If he found it so dirty, why did he never give it back?"

The former Olympic champion says he just wants to be left alone. "I've nothing to say, my career is over." he said.

Ouch.

The emphasis is mine. Its an unfair unfair world.

Vino is riding with 60 stitches in his knees and elbow, and most people have written him off. Kloden ought to replace him as the team leader for Astana (if logic prevails), but then I dont think he will. When Vino rode with the T-Mobile team for Ullrich with Kloden, he was always a bit of a loose gun, especially in 2005. When there was bitterness in the German team, Vino was alone and understandably, Kloden was with Ullrich. Its a Kazakh team now (along with a Russian or two), people Vino rode with in his youth - for Kazakhistan and the USSR - and Kloden is the outsider. He is way ahead of Vino in the general classification, and surely surely with 60 stitches Vino cant now claw back eight and a half minutes over the yellow jersey in the Pyranese and the two big individual time trials ! and yet all his teammates are faithfully clustered around him while Kloden rides a lonely race. Kloden fractured his tail bone too on a crash on the same day mind you, but he seems to be in good form all the same, seems quite comfortable on his bike. Vino was with the race doctor during the flat 10th stage to Marseilles today, getting the dressing on his wounds changed while still on the bike, hanging precariously on to the doctors car, his leg off the pedal, in tremendous pain. He ended yesterdays big Alpine stage in tears of exhaustion and disappointment.

"I couldn't even feel my muscles," he said. "But the worst thing was to be left behind while there were still 60 guys in front of me... It was a humiliation. I have never liked showing that I was suffering, but there I just couldn't do anything else."

Tough guy. Proud man. 60 stitches.

Logic and Limits go flying out the window.