Cussin' takes the pain away

I fuckin' knew it. Now the BBC has backed me up.

Economic reality and the decline of machismo

One of my friends posted this article on FB today, which I think you should give a read. The main thrust is that the declining economics of today will herald an age where traditional 'manual labour' jobs will decline drastically, leading to massive societal upheaval. The model of the male breadwinner is going, fast. Will this lead to better equality for the genders? Or will this create a backlash which will only worsen things where they are already bad. Read on.

What happens to a society where the gender balance is disturbed? Some of those questions are addressed here, and here. India is particularly vulnerable to this. The gender ratio is 0.97 (ie. 970 females for 1000 males), which is disturbingly low. Further, India is split by a gender divide, where the Northern states have a shockingly low ratio of females to men. This does not correlate to education or prosperity, as some of our most prosperous states, such as Punjab and Gujrat are the worst offenders. But the implications are scary. Female abortions are the norm in modern India where a male child will bring 'happiness' to the family. We are heading for massive trouble.

Awesome women, chapter 1: Hedy Lamarr

This should become a recurring post.. about the most awesome wimmen who have ever lived. Yeah, the list is long and will have everyone from Enid Blyton to Rani Laxmibai to Marie Curie. But lets start off with Hedy Lamarr, possibly the only person ever to be described as a scientist-actress. Hedy was an actress who was not afraid to take up risque roles, very daring for someone of her Jewish Austro-Hungarian lineage. And then she co-invented the first form of frequency hopping, which was intended for homing torpedos, and is today seen in in most forms of radar guided interceptors. Pretty awesome, nein? Here, look at some pictures of her.

Need band members

We are looking for a couple of guitarists and a percussionist. The band is a spectroscopy themed band. Experience in spin physics is required. We welcome solution and solid state spectroscopists with open arms. Ability to write NMR themed songs is a plus. A few possible names for the band are below. Please contribute suggestions:

1. The Hard Pulse
2. The Hartmann Hahn Condition
3. Fermi's Golden rule
   

Drones for the PAF?

Such a bad idea!

UNIX, beer and photography

This last week has been lots of work. As, I have to do, if I am to publish, defend my thesis and graduate before the big crunch. But what if UM becomes creative and gives me more than just a PhD? Yes! Abstruse goose has the answer!!

In the middle of all this work, I have pretty much missed out on the summer festival. Such a phookin' loser. But, I legged it out late yesterday and found an old friend, who has moved on to awesomer things (a real job, a family, etc). So happy for him! And then Smith and Ronnie toddled along, and the evening was spent in some low light photography, the pursuit of beer and knowledge. Allow me to explain the last bit: Smith and I decided to ask people around us if they used UNIX. We got asked if we were engineers. (no). The most hilarious answer was from this huge heavily tattoed bloke... "UNICKS? What's that? I just like pu*sy"

Things to do at your thesis defense

This is the first of what will hopefully turn into a series and bring me the kind of fame which has so far eluded me, in spite of me being a fifty feet tall firebreathing dragon with an elven blade in my right hand, and a Shigemi tube in my left hand. Wearing RayBans. And a three wolf moon tee-shirt.

Anyhoo, the list follows: please add to it as you see fit.

1. Begin every third sentence with the phrase 'according to the prophecy'
2. Respond to questions with a full throated 'you want the truth? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!'
3. Rap out the thesis defence
4. Liberal use of jazz hands
5. Employ a mariachi band to provide accompaniment to the more intricate points of string theory/hard condensed matter/large protein studies
6. Invite Robert De Niro as your 'special friend'. Failing that, Jack Nicholson. NOT EDWARD NORTON. NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
7. Spike the coffee
8. Have a friend dressed in a dark suit sitting near the back of the room taking down the names of people who come to the defense. Start a rumour that he is from Homeland Security/MI5/IB/BfH/Mossad/FSB/whichever security-intelligence agency calls the shots in your part of the world
9. Reward your thesis committee members with candy for asking particularly tough questions
10. Ask Jon Stewart to introduce you
    

Summer festival at Ann Arbor

Website.. find out more!

More travels and travails.

After the Keystone experience, I found myself gallivanting around the NY area last week. Ok, not gallivanting. This was a rather important trip, careerwise, that is.. and I am glad that I was able to pack in some meeting old friends in that time as well. The people who came over to the US at roughly the same time as when I started my PhD are now finishing their postdocs and looking for jobs, any of them back home. But some of the people who stayed at home for their PhDs are now looking to come here for their postdoc work. Which is nice, from my point of view.. the North American continent can sometimes become a lonely place..

Important news vs not so important news.

Michael Jackson copped it last night. Today's CNN webpage looks like this:

Apparently twitter was overwhelmed by MJ's death and people tweeting abt it. Seriously.. wtf? In an alternate world (inhabited by the Onion), things could be like shown here. You tell me... do we have our priorities straight?

VW accounts for female drivers

Explaining the wurlde, one Venn diagram at a time: a Michael Bay film

Egg sketches and photos

Here. Enjoi

Me back

The last two weeks have been very exciting. Two weeks ago, I was at Keystone, Colorado, presenting our lab's research (on behalf of my boss, I should add, who was at a conference in Croatia). Presenting the whole lab's work, and not just my own was rather terrifying. It was very exciting to see that our work was very well received. Keystone itself is a wunnerful place to visit, with beautiful vistas and great hiking. After the morning of the talk, we (I was fortunate enough to become friends with a great group of peers) we drove up to the continental divide, which was at 11990 feet, and then legged it up to the nearest summit. That was lung-bustingly painful, but awesome. Then we drove back, at which point someone pointed out that I should have a poster. I was totally unaware that short talk presenters were also supposed to have posters. Who knew? Anyway, I slammed together something with a giant Post-it and a few marker pens. Which turned out to be quite a hit. The next day was even awesome-er, with more hiking. The conference ended with a party at which there was some dancing and cartwheeling. Yeah...

Life imitates art.. sort of.

The novel USS Seawolf, by Patrick Robertson has as a central plot theme, the USS Seawolf, a nuclear submarine colliding with the towed sonar array of a Chinese Navy (PLAN) destroyer. Today, I read on CNN that a Chinese submarine had collided with the towed array of a US navy destroyer. Hmmm...

Quantum LolCat

Back from Colorado

The conference was awesome. I had the opportunity to interact with some really great researchers, especially with this comp-bio group out of Pittsburgh. We (our lab's work) was very well received, and I got a lot of great personal feedback. The high point of the meeting though was making friends with a bunch of great people who will probably be members of the scientific cognoscenti (read: people who will review my future papers, [massive dose of optimism in that there will be some future papers]). Yeah, great time.

I was especially excited to see that progress in coarse grained modeling and elastic network studies on fairly large proteins. And this one talk on GroEL by Horovitz which blew me away with the coolest FRET experiment I have ever heard described.

Nepotism in America - gasp!

But it happens, apparently.

After the apocalypse

Is there a Malthusian limit to humanity? There might be.. there have been many Mad Max type speculations about a post apocalypse world. It won't take much - the breakdown of structured society will render life somewhat difficult for most of us. Do you wear spectacles? Goner. Contacts? Best of luck. Got cavities? Yeah, not much good for chewing antelope meat.

What, am I grossing you out? Well, go see Terminator Salvation and laugh at what they have managed. This movie sucks and is a waste of time and money. What always bugs me when I see something like this is where do their food supplies come from? I mean, are there these giant stores of canned food that they have tapped? A decade after Judgment Day, there has to be someone farming! Or else, where do they eat from? Unrealistic shite.

I do recommend seeing Children of Men, because it has a much more realistic portrayal of how society might endure, amidst breaking down in the face of an extinction level crisis. It certainly helps that it also works as a great metaphor for our fractured times. And that it was written by P D James and has Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. Speaking of Moore, she also starred in a very weird movie called Blindness, which is about.. .blindness. That is all I will say, because you should see it and form your own opinion. Ciao.

Of people nice and not so nice

There are those bus drivers who will accelerate away from a bus stop while you are wheezing your last 100 m dash to get there. Sometimes they will look at you, and then speed away. Sometimes, they will do this in the dead of Michigan winter. Coming from a mega-urban sprawl in India, I am used to dealing with a not-very-friendly public transport system, but some people deserve to be flogged for being socially evil.

Then, there are other people like the one bloke who was on his last run after midnight and actually went out of his way to drop me off (his was the last bus running, and it didn't quite go near where I lived). Yeah, we ended up chatting about his experiences growing up as a Midwestern farmboy. Nice person. Helps to keep your faith in humanity.

Oh shite! Aka biogas.

Crap is a great source of energy, if only we can get it out in a useful fashion. So, this article appeared recently which lists many measures in the US. Good reading. But, hang on, if you are Desi and about as old as me (pushing 30).. then surely, you remember the old "biogas lagwao re bhaiya.. biogas lagwao" viddys on Doordarshan..? Hmm, a quick search revealed this page. Yeah, I have some time on my hands right now to be thinking about random shite.

A beautiful example of time lapse photography

Time lapse is when you show a series of photos at a speed much faster than you took them. This can be done by simply "speeding up the reel" in old film video cameras, or by pasting photos taken with wait periods into a video. It is the opposite of high speed photography. Time lapse viddys of the night sky are particularly wonderful. Here, look at this one: tell mw what you think.

Some new pictures from California

Photographs taken with a Canon Rebel XTi. Lenses: Canon 28-135 IS, 70-300 and 18-55. Postprocessing on Gimp. Thanks to Krishnan for loaning me the camera.